dance #142, exuberant milieu

Tuesday May 12, 2009

Exuberant milieu

Text from Joe

“To act on a living thing, it is not enough that physical stimuli be produced; they must also be noticed. As a result, to the extent that a stimulus acts on the living, it presupposes an orientation of its interest. The stimulus does not proceed from the object, but from this interest. It is necessary, in other words, for the stimulus to be effective, that it be anticipated by the subject’s attitude. If the living does not go looking for something, it gets nothing. A living thing is not a machine that responds by movement to stimuli, it is a machinist who responds to signals by operations. The question is rather to be found in the fact that out of the exuberance of the physical milieu, as a producer of stimuli whose number is theoretically unlimited, the animal retains only a few signals.” (Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu” Grey Room 03, Spring 2001, pp. 19-20)

11:00 p.m. A ten minute dance in the study playing through some of the milieux I live in and through. Listening to the exuberance. One of the milieu present is social. Full of intra-actions, entanglements. Propagating affects.  A milieu that is peopled with things, and thronged with people.  The dance that plays out is an accompaniment to the loud world that is a list of things to do, people to talk to, emails to write, places to go, ideas to propagate. Alice is staying elsewhere. She’s missed — the dances are missing their participant witness. It was a gorgeous day today. It’s a late night.

~ by nmyers on May 12, 2009.