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Moving without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts By Stamatia Portanova MIT Press, 2013 179 pp./$30.00 (hb)
Stamatia Portanova has taken what would be a bare technical datum for many-the digitalization through various means of choreography and dance performance-and used it as a wide-ranging platform for a rethinking of nearly all the terms involved with any digital philosophy. What is at stake for Portanova is nothing less than a renewed philosophy of movement and overcoming of mind/ body dualism that continues to crop up in interpretations of dance and the digital. Interrogating the early history of cinema with Loie Fuller and Dziga Vertov as well as iconic and digitally enabled dance breakthroughs by Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, and William Forsythe, Portanova reveals how aesthetic and post-aesthetic practices, in conjunction with digital technologies, can help us reexamine and sometimes revise a long philosophical history of movement: from the swerving "clinamen" (the deviation of falling atoms) in Lucretius, to Benedict de Spinoza in the seventeenth century and Antonin Artaud in the twentieth, to how Alfred North Whitehead can aid us today in moving past formulations from Cilles Deleuze. In painstakingly examining what is involved in the desubjectifying and dehumanizing (or posthuman) abstracting operations of digital technology, exemplified in its choreographic uses, Portanova is anxious to restore a certain constructivism to the discussion:
even the concept of infinity, or virtuality, a potent detonator since the days of the pre-Socratic clinamen, and especially since its systematization by Nietzsche and Deleuze, seems to have lost some of its urgency. One cannot simply continue detonating or hammering systems, if one does not want to end up with sheer chaos. (136)
The key to Portanova's project is her particular use of "abstraction," which, here, is "everything that can be 'abstracted' from the palpable materiality of the real" (2). This carries an obvious relation to the numerical or computational operations of the digital, without being identical to it. Portanova is making a strenuous effort not to prioritize either "abstract" mental operations or embodied movement. These double senses of the digital, referring, on the one hand, to the technological property or machine or application and, on the other, to a kind or mode...