Patterns are everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere. Patterns are in between, ephemeral yet real. They exist in parallel to what we commonly call reality. We can only perceive them if we are precisely tuned in to their wavelength. They only become visible to us under certain specific conditions. But these absently present patterns govern our lives. Work routines, planetary systems, ordinary life, and daily conversations are all governed by the subtle framing of patterns. As the scientist-philosopher Gregory Bateson reminds us, it is the supremacy of patterns “that connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose, and all of them to me and me to you.” What Bateson foresaw in his seminal work was the initiation of a shared collective project of friends to imagine and bring about through social choreography a vivid awareness of the profound structures and dynamics that underlie the true realities of nature and human existence. Patterns are flexible and ambivalent. They are fluid constellations, continuously appearing and disappearing, crystallizing and dissolving, being born and dying. They are an ongoing dance of creation and de-creation in our environmental habitat and our species-being. They provide an elegant frame to guide our becoming airborne and our flight. Surrounding this dance is a world full of interactions, arrangements, relationships, instantiations, dependencies, and ecologies. To enquire into this world of ever-changing patterns and spirited forces at play is to explore the choreography of life, to interrogate what it is that makes us dance and why.
Patterns can grow, learn, evolve, become livelier, and propagate. In a media-theatrical context, we might identify these patterns as an idea light bulb, the prop of a beer mug, an animated character, a cartoon speech bubble, or the volleyball named Wilson with which Tom Hanks converses while stranded on his Desert Island in Steven Spielberg’s film “Castaway.” Yet such patterns are merely discrete systemic terms conceptually capturing only one level of analysis and approximation. The beer mug, Wilson, and the electric incandescent brainchild are also moveable components of other patterns, or macro patterns of patterns. We ourselves are constituents of larger social-psychological choreographies. Our acts are often unaware interventions in these wider dramaturgies. What is really required to act more effectively is an original creativity embedded in a sense of material historical processes and ethical responsibilities. What is needed is a thoroughgoing yet simple rational investigation into the general grammatology of patterns, and into their twists and paradoxes, in order to discover the frames that bind us together and which render possible the jigs that we dance.
With advancing knowledge in the arts and critical social sciences arise doubts, making plain the obsolescence of static frameworks, questioning the validity and exposing the limitations of existing frames as woefully inadequate for achieving the goal of “wider knowing.” There must be an active rebuilding and re-framing of subjectivity. We must fundamentally transform the ways that we conduct our lives, interact, love, consume and relate to the social, libidinal, and territorial spheres. We have acquired the super-powers to bring about fantastic changes. This is a given of our radical rewiring of our rich cultural heritage. We will create conducive and conductive conditions to make things happen, for local-global patterning and re-patterning. This is the work of the choreographer of everyday life. She is the negotiator, navigator, provider and architect of the flowing economy in which we are swimming. “Western morality says: the good is the true, the true is the real, and the real is substantial. The Nietzschean child replies: your truth doesn’t interest me, I know nothing of substance, and I am stumped by what you call reality.” (Caroline Heinrich, “In Search of the Child’s Innocence”)
I, the untimely timeless Nietzschean child-choreographer for whom sequential-chronological “stages of life” have no meaning, whose Self evanesces into the Unity of the Whole, am not interested in the least in your Business-as-Usual notions of pre-scripted choreography, those configurations of fixed relations that belong to the classical Euclidean geometric world of rock solid distinctions. My playful Klein-bottle topographical choreography is not about the disciplinary arrangement of inanimate objects, nor is it about determining the fate of human beings within the four-dimensionality of classified space-time as we have known it until now. Such traditional dance-work is as far removed from patterns of truthful creation as it possibly could be. This conventional stuff is rather engineered for instant digestion and assimilation. There is no challenge and nothing at stake in designing for the affirmation and reproduction of the established order of things. I shout an emphatic “no” to the imperative to choreograph the becoming-concrete of social institutions. The hardening foundations of the dominant social are poured during the sleep-walk of our multitudes of reductionist thinkers, who bury fruitful uncertainty and complexity beneath the mass-produced grave markers of their false assumptions. The physical universe as I know it is a thirteen-dimensional hyper-space of contingency and free-floating forces. I conduct the orchestra of phantom fragments of naked time, eating my naked lunch as I herd endless nows safely back into the makeshift shelters of my spitfire ideas and actions, an endless cycle of fusional patterning and releasing outwards to chaos. These protecting containers are temporarily erected, transformed, and then actively forgotten. They might resurface or be rediscovered at a later date-and-time-stamp, when the white hole end of the tunnel into which they entered via the black hole finally re-hits the fanned open air of space. The choreographed collapsing and spiraling of the fall from grace into the heart of darkness is the prequel to metamorphosis into the posthuman. Like dust from the feet of the traveler at the end of his journey, it is from the dug out dirty ground of being that super-charged anti-matter is brought back to terrestrial contact. Life blossoms. Vitality is realized in its full potentiality and capacity. The true stability of this pataphysical architecture embraces ebbs and flows, and flirts with infinity. As systems architect of the invisible buzzings of the emergence of consciousness, I set entities into relationship to one another. Sometimes this is no more than the re-shuffling of the deck of a game-of-life context. I introduce enough “re-framing” into the situation for the idea-body to get unstuck from its orbital patterns of circumstance and repetition.
Read the complete text (4100 words, published under the title “Dear Grace: Patterns Are Everywhere Remix”) at choreograph.net.
