Loughborough University
Institutional Repository
Unfolding space: an
allotropic dance in three
parts for two players
This item was submitted to Loughborough University's Institutional Repository
by the/an author.
Citation: MESKIMMON, M. and SAWDON, P., 2010. Unfolding space: an
allotropic dance in three parts for two players. Articulations, Amsterdam School
of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) annual conference, Amsterdam, 22 - 24 March
2010.
Additional Information:
• Unfolding Space: An Allotropic Dance in Three Parts for Two Play-
ers is a paper/project of fragmentary visions that explore the interactions (in)between articulation and unfolding space, as might be congured through process, uidity and our resonant, generative awareness
of the creative and seductive potential of ambiguous and elusive coordinates. The paper/project was presented at Articulations, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) annual conference, Amsterdam,
March 2010. In the authors' original version the paper contained hyperlinks to a series of audio and video les to create a multimedia document. However in this version you are requested to open the audio or
video le listed in the Repository `les associated with this item' at the
appropriate prompt contained in the body of the PDF text. The conference website is at: http://www.hum.uva.nl/asca-nw-newsandeventsconferences/archive.cfm/F45D5441-C2B6-4778-9D5B8EAFAB12193F
Metadata Record:
Version:
Accepted for publication
Publisher:
thors
https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/9902
c the auThe Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) Please cite the published version.
This item was submitted to Loughborough’s Institutional Repository
(https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/) by the author and is made available under the
following Creative Commons Licence conditions.
For the full text of this licence, please go to:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/
Unfolding Space
An Allotropic Dance in Three Parts, for Two Players
Marsha Meskimmon, Phil Sawdon
Abstract
We propose an Allotropic Dance as a paper/project of fragmentary visions to explore the
interactions (in)between articulation and unfolding space, as might be configured
through process, fluidity and our resonant, generative awareness of the creative and
seductive potential of ambiguous and elusive coordinates. Adapting some steps from
Haraway and Butler1, the project stretches ‘articulation’ and ‘materialisation’ beyond
representational stasis, toward contingency, connection and desiring agency/desirous
verve – the very possibility of an open-ended future. From our sense (following our
senses) we will suggest that articulate spaces are not so much defined as they are
unfolding, emergent, perhaps hidden, and becoming2
Our careful expression refocuses defining space from the identification and description
of boundaries, to an attentive engagement with how those boundaries have been made,
and how we might articulate them ‘otherwise’ in future. The project is an aesthetic
intervention through this territory, bringing art, theory, subjects and politics into a dialogic
dance.
We introduce allotropism (‘other manner’) to our dance, as the manifestation of multiple
modes of a single element at one and the same moment (diamonds, graphite).3
As Donna Haraway put it: ‘To articulate is to signify. It is to put things together, scary things, risky things,
contingent things. I want to live in an articulate world.’ (from ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative
Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’ reprinted in The Haraway Reader, London, NY: Routledge, 2004, pp p.63
– 124, p. 106). Attentive to corporeality, Judith Butler further argued in spatial terms for materialization, thus:
‘I would propose […] a return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of
materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface we call matter.’
(italics in original: Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London and NY: Routledge, 1993, p.
9).
2
On the fold, we take our lead from approaches to Leibniz in the work of Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz
and the Baroque, foreword and trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 and,
for example, on the implications of the fold for time, space and aesthetics, Mieke Bal’s eloquent formulation
in Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999. On emergence, becoming and the power of poetic ‘figurations’ and art practices, we are tracing the
steps of Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti and Yve Lomax through, for example: Grosz (ed). Becomings:
Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999; Braidotti,
Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006; Lomax, Sounding the Event:
Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time, London: I.B.Tauris, 2004.
3
The significance of allotropism to our dance, gestures toward the recent encounter with Spinoza staged by
Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present, London and New
1
1
The dance is drawn through multifaceted encounters that endeavour to materialise
spatial unfolding. Its methods, outcomes and theoretical consequences are wholly and
intricately intertwined; in this dance/drawing of two players, varied modes of text, moving
image and performance are simultaneously brought together, yet held, suspended, so
that they cannot resolve as one.
Following Irigaray’s point that ‘(d)rawing near necessitates allying two intimacies, not
submitting one to the other’,4 the spaces we articulate make possible an intersubjective
alliance that enables difference to be materialised, however ethereally, through an
ethical and aesthetic commitment to ‘corporeal generosity’ and the logic of the gift.5 The
spaces we explore are collaborative, multiple, fluid, lyrical and engaged; spaces offering
to transform the subjects with whom they are mutually constituted as they unfold their
creative ambiguity.
York: Routledge, 1999, where Spinoza’s monism is at the heart of imaginative, ethical encounters with
difference (beyond dualism).
4
Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhacek, London and NY: Continuum,
2002, p.151.
5
There are various lines of thought that converge with our project here; on notions of space that enable
difference and movement (and are attendant to the ethical/political dynamics inherent in such thinking), see
Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castaneda, Anne Marie Fortier, Mimi Schiller, (eds.), Uprootings/Regroundings:
Questions of Home and Migration, New York and Oxford: Berg, 2003, and Doreen Massey, For Space, Los
Angles, London, New Delhi, Singapore: Sage Publications, 2005. On the articulation of space as a dynamic,
poetic practice, the ideas of Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 1997 (originally published in French 1990); Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from
the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001 and Jane
Rendell, especially her concept of ‘site/writing’, are resonant: Critical Architecture (cf. section ArchitectureWriting), eds. Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian, London and NY: Routledge,
2007. Rosalyn Diprose’s figure of ‘corporeal generosity’ choreographs for us the transformative power of the
gift as: ‘… being given to others without deliberation in a field of intercorporeality, a being given that
constitutes the self as affective and being affected, that constitutes social relations and that which is given in
relation.’ Cf. Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas,
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002, p. 5
2