What a body can become: cartography between dance and philosophy

Potrović, Laura. (2017). What a body can become: cartography between dance and philosophy. PhD Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Comparative Literature.
(Međunarodni dvojni doktorat znanosti (COTUTELLE). Poslijediplomski doktorski studij književnosti, izvedbenih umjetnosti, filma i kulture na FFZG.) [mentor Petlevski, Sibila and Féral, Josette].

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Abstract

This thesis does not explore what body is, but what a body can become. It explores the body as event-in-making throughout the concepts such as Body without Organs (Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), bodying (Erin Manning), body-in-making (Erin Manning). What all of those concepts have in common is the same state - a state of becoming. Here, body becomes, and as such - it is a verb, an activity, a force. This thesis does not only explore the body as a force of becoming, but it also explores the becoming of that force - at the molecular, experiential and relational level. As Manning says, a body is always more-than one. Here, we are trying to approach the physical, experiential and relational becomings of a body in movement. That which moves the body from the state of being into the state of becoming is movement. This thesis is trying to show how movement never stops. We always move, therefore, there is a continuity of becoming. A body is never just a form, but a force-form. Movement is that which opens the body toward its becoming of force(s). A moving body is not a form of expression, but a forcefield of expressivity. Movement connects the body to its very field of expressivity where the body starts to dance its capacities to do, produce and become. The body is never predetermined or finished - at the physical, experiential or relational level - but it is an ongoing movement. Movement makes the body, therefore, the body itself is a movement. We are not dancing with the body, we are dancing the body itself. The body is a score, a body-score, of its own becoming. We are not interested in what, for example, a heart is, but we are interested in molecular, experiential and relational becomings of a heart; we are interested in what a heart can become. Organs are not expressions, but flows, intensities, fields of expressivity. This thesis is an attempt to map those flows - performative and conceptual ones - and to redirect them toward new becomings.

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