thinking otherwise

Thinking Otherwise Ron Broglio Waking up and stepping into the world is a performance art. The flesh of the body meets the flesh of space, the flesh of the world. Moving in space-time, we balance between automated gesture which our organs have assimilated through digestion of cultural forms and freedom of action in which the body becomes an ever changing organ of possibilities re-organ-izing itself for each moment of performance. Perhaps the 'per' in performance is not quite correct here since it is the past habits, gesture, and recordings which are under question in improvisational performance. Now, at this moment, improvisation seeks to fold the past into a future that is not the same as it ever was but, rather, the ability to think and act otherwise.		"Thought thinks its own history (the past), but in order to free itself from what it thinks (the present) and be able finally to 'think otherwise' (the future)." Michel Foucault
	"If the doors of perception are opened, everything shall appear as it is--infinite" William Blake.
	Improvisation is the liminal space for the body which seeks out its own limit. There at the horizon we leave behind the redundancy of identity and the logic of self-similarity (I = I & not you). At the horizon, the organs of the body are not a closed set, the set of a self. Rather, in this space-time performance selfhood dissipates as the flesh of the body and flesh of the world become open sets of mutually exchangeable components. The horizon enables a new logic, nomad thought which in body, mind, and gesture wanders, garners, and (re)assembles. Roaming and vagrancy remind us that the Nation State of our mind and body are artificial representational limits. By improvisational performance we cross these lines without valid passport. Instead, we assemble transports, crossings that bite at the heels of automated gesture and boundaries of identity.
In wandering we are reminded that every "now" is a tentative formation, chancy, without grounding other than in itself. The "now" could have been otherwise and otherwise could also have been other than itself. From any number of possible presences we give birth to only one--a gesture, an act, an assemblage. It is a closing, a loss, and death of the possible that like a ghost haunts the birth of the actual and gives it the aura of its (hyper)reality. In gestures that wander at the limit, we recognize what we could not see in the logic of identity: that things could have been different. Our performance gives us one actuality from many mutually possible worlds. Yet unlike the same ol' same ol', this actuality recognizes the scares of its birth and the death of its neighboring gestures. So that in the improvisation, the real pays homage (at what cost?) to the ghosts of the unactualized. (This essay could have been otherwise . . . an-other future). The improvised now recognizes its own tentativeness, its own impending death to be reassembled in response to new and different surroundings of the next impinging "now." Improvisation teaches us that we are not ourselves nor is the present without its possibilities.	It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act. Nomad thought replaces the closed equation of representation, x = x not y (I = I not you) with an open equation: . . . y + z + a + . . . ( . . . arm + brick + window = . . . ). Rather than analyzing the world into discrete components, reducing their manyness to the One (=Two) of self-reflection, and ordering them by rank, it sums up a set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthesizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging." Brian Massumi.