As soon as I was old enough to travel downtown on the bus by myself, I would go to the Portland downtown library, a graceful and impressive building, and ascend up the echoing broad marble staircase to the third floor where the fine arts books were kept. I'd stop to look at what I now know was a Beaux Arts bronze of Pan and then I’d go to where the ballet books were shelved. Some of them were in French. I’d take them down and run my eyes through the sentences though I didn’t understand French and only recognized a word here and there.
I did this in part because I loved ballet (What girl doesn’t? Or do they all love soccer now?) and in part because that’s how I had learned to read English and hoped it would work on French. It didn’t (I didn’t realize you had to speak the language before you could read it), but I love that feeling of being on the brink of understanding, fiddling with the doorknob and catches of a passage into a new world. I thought, on some level, that if I could learn to read French, I would be able to dance ballet.
So far as I know, there is no computer game, no virtual reality situation, that allows a person to learn ballet or at least to experience it in some second-hand way beyond watching a movie. This might be because girls don’t do computer stuff. Or maybe simply no one has thought about it yet, but an article I ran across, an interview of Toni Dove by Brian Massumi, has been suggestive. It is about the sense of one's own “body” that a video gamer experiences. The reference is to an interactive game called “Artificial Changelings” about compulsive shopping in the 19th century. http://www.tonidove.com/af_overview_hold.html I hasten to say that I know nothing about this game or any other game. I tried playing Pacman and Whack a Gopher once. That’s about it. But I do understand a little of what gaming is about.
And I’ve thought quite a bit about bodies: how they know where they are, how they picture themselves, how muscles record the idea of movement even when they aren’t moving and other philosophical thoughts (by a person lying on a couch because they had an impulse to exercise and are waiting for it to go away). Dove in this article talks about how one experiences movement prompted by what one is seeing, as when one gets seasick watching a movie of a pitching boat. But she’s on a much more subtle level, like varying the speed of movement slightly to control what the viewer internalizes. Massumi suggests: “It’s based on rhythm. You have to sense an unpredictable rhythm and try to unite your movement with it, it’s not on an object basis, where movement begins and ends in a particular place, and has a destination ‘out there.’ It’s an open-ended rhythmic space that’s neither here nor there.”
Dove says: “It’s like a trance, the desire to maintain a connection even when it can’t be kept and it’s quite easy to get it back. It’s not frustrating. It doesn’t go away for so long that it’s irritating.” They speak about a kind of partner-dance between the experience on the screen and the internal experience of the viewer and talk about how the uncanny is the backside of the ordinary and vice versa.
Then Dove springs this idea that “uncanny experience” has split, back there somewhere (the 19th century?), into the idea of the unconscious (the unseen uncanny) and genre fiction (the formula uncanny, the ordinary but unpredictable horrible and unscientific happening that can be commodified as pulp fiction). It becomes what she calls “the unconscious of consumer economies.” (I’d suggest this is now joined by the craze for “spirituality,” which is nearly a reinstatement of the supernatural, but displaced to a protected place not quite in the unconscious. It’s supposed to be in the “soul.” Yet available for marketing.)
Again I’m surprised, by an idea entirely new to me but instantly recognizable: “the theater of commerce.” (Oh, me and my high-end slick shelter mags and my love of haute couture!) But this twist on it is “kleptomania.” It’s interesting, she says, “because it’s a pathology that gets codified in the 1860’s when the department store emerges and becomes a theatre of commerce, a site of incredible spectacle of advertising and seduction. Upper- and middle-class women started stealing things from stores. . . apparently either the pillars of society were corruptible or the forces of merchandizing were problematic. Neither position was acceptable, so they pathologized their behavior. The women were no longer responsible for their actions. Commerce could march on.”
I was never corruptible enough to steal from Meier & Frank, but how intensely I recall a few ceremonial low-level seductions (paid for in full). I bought my mother a Sheaffer white-dot fountain pen, ivory with gold lengthwise grooves. She used it all her life and at her death my brother asked for it. With some of my first teaching money, I bought myself a compact of custom-mixed pressed powder at The Paris. Perhaps one of the most potent experiences was buying high-end leather gloves in the days when they were fitted as carefully as by a corsetier. (Oh, echoes of the Store -- er, Story -- of O!) Shopping at Target doesn’t even come close. “Madame’s fingers . . . in the tight little lambskin sheaths!”
Massumi says, “There’s a slipperiness to consumerism. You can connect with an object and buy it or steal it, but that’s never enough. There’s so much more that you could have . . . the purchase is just another step towards the next purchase. There’s a perpetual promise mediated by a very abstract technology -- money.” Money, which was silver dollars when I came to Montana, is no longer even bills or a check book. It’s a plastic rectangle “swiped” by a machine. Shoplifters are no longer the captive upper class women who are only free when shopping -- now they may be boys in search of the electronic threshold to the world.
Dove responds, “I’m thinking about the installment plan and the credit explosion, how it was contradictory to the notion of thrift that was so important to the personality structure that was part of the original building block of capitalism.” (Quick! Call Nassim Taleb!!)
Massumi says, “It puts individual lives in movement, following the movement of deferral. Money is the motor for a perpetual motion machine.” (Life as a great lay-a-way.)
When these two inevitably talk about whether this change is modern, post-modern or post-post-modern, Massumi surprisingly suggests that Dove’s line of thought is outside that sequence. “Because postmodernism was either this terrible nostalgia for the plenitude promised by modernity, or a celebration of its impossibility, with a sense of emptiness, as if nothing would come after it -- the whole rhetoric of the end of history . . . It’s not after something, after the end. It’s revisiting continuity.” The choices are not “rich or not rich”. Life is a process of going along without those labels.
Dove suggests that the ruptures between cuts or steps can join into a kind of fluid continuum of narrative, (maybe become a stairway, a hallway that is in fact a long threshold?) and, indeed, the whole principle of movies is that one individual frame after another will be melded in the mind to unified motion. I sure could get into that. I’m tired of modern, post-modern, post-post-modern. Around here, posts are to support a line of fencing.
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