exploring the edge where cultural transmission ends
and extracultural becoming of man begins
Postmodern humanities got used to such terms as deflation, deskilling, unlearning, and dememorization. Yet Agamben's postulate of creating an epistemology of ignorance, present since the late 1970s in his works on Hegel's return to Eleusis and culminating in a small volume, La ragazza indicibile: mito e mistero di Kore (2010) has remained without a significant posteriority. There is more and more talk about destroying, transgressing or transcending the cultural automatisms to which we are constantly nurtured. It is therefore time to pose a radical question about the human taken out of its cultural envelope, remaining - for one reason or another, even such a reason as an incurable disease or congenital defect - on the pre-cultural level. What about the human who refuses to bend down to culturally predetermined rules and patterns of behavior in madness? What about humanity confronted with an apocalyptic event, shattering all cultural norms and leaving the individual in a state of nakedness?
Deflation is initially an economic term, meaning a long-term decline in the average price level, which translates into an increase in the purchasing power of money. In the broader, metaphorical sense, deflation is a departure from a high level of cultural functioning, resignation from overload with excessively complex normative systems, return to the zero point, to the initial, base level, which is unrestrained, devoid of exuberant subjectivity (thus not tamed in the Foucaultian sense), human body. Ultimately, this may result in a peculiar "increase in purchasing power" not only in the bodily but also in the spiritual realm, leading to the opening of new insight. Deflationary in nature is also the question of humanity beyond culture, humanity devoid of cultural habits and competences, naked - in the sense of depriving a cultural envelope which, under ordinary conditions, protects against sharp collision with the world. This deflationary understanding of man is based on resignation, emptying, losing sophisticated competences, entering the realm of ignorance and darkness. In Christian terminology, this willingness to give up the temporal burden of culture would correspond to the kenosis concept of Paul to the Philippians (2,7), which says that Christ "emptied himself." Similar concepts can also be found in other religions of the world: it would be the concept of a fan of Muslim mystics or a figure of a hoopoe who flaunts its magnificent top and ends up losing feathers burnt in the fire of love. If, as it has been accepted to be the great philosophers of religions of the first half of the twentieth century, 1 mysticism is a universal sphere of human experience, the local, culturally specific translations of which tell one another to a large extent, then similar categories could also be found in the circle of Zen Buddhism, which importance for the further discussion. We will also see how, in the end, man is forced to deflation by universal determinants of his condition: madness, aging and death.
Since 2012, I have been working on an innovative theoretical approach concerning the relation between the notions of the human and the cultural, questioning the apparent obviousness of human condition treated as necessarily and exclusively cultured one. Existential circumstances such as madness, disease or decrepitude may be interpreted as events and circumstances that strip the human bare of his or her protective cultural integument, forcing him or her to experience the events in an extracultural manner, i.e. beyond the usual patterns and paradigms of reacting. Apocalyptic events, as the time of disruption of norms and rituals (kairos of Christian eschatology), may offer an insight into a sphere that cannot be explored at other times, when cultural transmission goes on unperturbed and uninterrupted. Novel outcomes of such disruptive events constantly become a part of the subsequent cultural transmission. Any invention of new forms attacks and undermines the frontiers of the culturally given, yet contributes to the expansion of the frontiers of culturally codified experience.
In my works in cultural theory, such as the collection of essays Humanistyka, która nadchodzi (The Coming Humanities, 2018), I treat culture as a phenomenon of transmission, a totality of whatever we learn from other human beings, and what we are invited to reproduce as faithfully as possible, at a minimal modification. This static and stabilising potential of the cultural requires critical vigilance. Also, culture is essentially a feature of a community determining, dominating, normalizing the individual. Having in mind this oppressive, stabilising, limiting and potentially destructive character of the cultural transmission, I am profoundly interested in exploring the elements that cultures marginalize, reject, disqualify, that accumulate at their silenced and forgotten frontiers.
Collectively and individually experienced time of exception, that may be defined as such in which the usually valid cultural paradigms and procedures lose their efficacy and validity, play a crucial role in such an extracultural growth as postulated above; it brings about the revelation of yet unexplored, uncharted modalities of human subjectivity. As I claim, it is possible to overcome culture understood as a totality of transmitted and automatized habits; cultural condition, although it seems inherent to every human being, may be transgressed; cultures may be unlearnt, de-essentialised, transformed from bulk identities into a filigree. Such a process of unlearning, de-automatising of the reactions that are usually channelled through culturally determined paradigms, may bring about progressive growth of the sphere of insight, awareness, autonomy and choice, forming positive legacies, although their transmission only partially enters the usual, cultured paradigms. Think about the silence of a zen master trying to indicate to his apprentice the way of illumination.
Nonetheless, the reflection on extracultural becoming of man implies a somehow pessimistic definition of culture that is implicit in my exploration of cultural frontiers; I assume that men, or at least some exceptional, maverick individuals, constantly clash against cultural limitation; a constant war is waged in the borderlands of culture. I try to show what motivates the necessity of such a radical criticism of the cultural and the search for extracultural modalities of being human. Yet how to get an insight into such an outer sphere of the extracultural and what I expect to find there? Cultural traditions are rich in traces of extracultural experiences of the past. Traces that are almost obliterated, hardly readable, yet possible to discover and interpret. Extracultural becoming may not be as novel, hypothetical and unexplored as we might be inclined to believe; on the contrary, it may be a regularly visited sphere, even a resource for individuals who chose to search for liberty, bliss, beauty, fulfilment or intimacy with God beyond what would be their culturally limited destiny.
It is not always easy to find an exemplification of the extracultural idea. Nonetheless, tentatives of exploring the edge of the cultural make the core of many artistic experiments. "I don't dance in a place, I dance in a place" is an excerpt from a poem which is the result of an unusual meeting. Félix Guattari, psychiatrist, collaborator of Gilles Deleuze in the groundbreaking, two-part project "Capitalism and Schizophrenia", the creator of schizoanalysis and ecosophy, summed up his meeting with the dancer Min Tanaka during one of his numerous trips to Japan that Guattari took place in the 1980s, when Europeans were very much interested in this country. Writings from this period, as it were, received a second life - as is often the case - after the publication of the English-language collection Machinic Eros in 2015. Guattari, a student of Lacan, became professionally involved in the experimental psychiatric clinic La Borde, where he died of a heart attack in 1992. Its director was another Lacan student, psychiatrist Jean Oury, and one of the most famous achievements of this institution was the departure from the individualistic approach of psychoanalysis (i.e. therapy leaving the patient on a couch alone with the doctor) in favor of a free, open confrontation in group therapy, where it was to be a richer, more diverse network of therapeutic interactions. On the other hand, Min Tanaka (or Tanaka Min, since the surname is usually placed first before the first name in Japan) is a dancer and actor born in 1945. Initially, he collaborated with Hijikata Tatsumi, who is considered to be the creator of buto, or "dance of darkness", one of the forms of contemporary Japanese dance that has developed since the late 1950s thanks to the collaboration of Tatsumi and Kazuo Ohno.
However, in the 1970s, Tanaka abandoned his formal career to develop a minimalistic improvisation developed in almost total nudity (except for a blindfold covering the genitals), in spaces devoid of institutional anointing, such as subway stations, parks, streets and private houses, which may be associated with the undertaken by many post-war Japanese art artists with the concept of anti- or non-art (han geijutsu), which was about negating codified forms and genres of art taken over from Western culture, as well as blurring the border between art and life. In the series of Hyperdance Tanaka performances held in natural settings throughout Japan, the place itself and its specificity were to be a specific theme dictating bodily expression, with an extremely restrained and minimalist character. Specific micro-movements of the body were to express its fragility, susceptibility to the world, and receptivity. As a consequence of these experiments, Tanaka created a separate aesthetic or aesthetic-philosophical line in which the human body becomes one of the atmospheric phenomena, referred to as Shintai kisho or Body Weather. It is treated as one of the forces that is influenced by external influences and interacts with them. In other words, it negates the clearly constituted self that acts out of the will. That is why Tanaka does not dance in a place, in a specific space that it occupies and appropriates, but it dances place as an abstract point of intersection of forces, a confluence of vectors, stresses, cosmic energies affecting the body. Hence the meteorological metaphor that appears in the title of the project: body - weather, body as an atmospheric state. In other words, the movement of such a body is not something wished, planned and played, but on the contrary, the resultant of the influences, elasticity, and flows, as if man were jellyfish or seaweed immersed in the original omnipotence. The sound background, resulting from cooperation with the creator of specific music, Minoru Noguchi, is often made of noises, crackles, an acoustic equivalent of the resultant chaotic interactions.
Although the Body Weather Laboratory was established in 1978 and Tanaka gradually returned to dance as an art separate from life, namely at festivals and art centers, the fundamental direction of this search for the body as flux remained the same. In experiments in the late 1980s, the dancer seems to float in the water, pushed in different directions by chaotic movements. A complementary element of this organic conception of the human and the human body living in conditions of immersion in an animated, non-hierarchical world was the creation of the Body Weather farm in 1985, where the cultivation of plants became a parallel and equivalent practice to dance. Several years later, Tanaka will return to the idea of art performed outside the formal context, for an audience without adequate preparation. He will be dancing in the villages of India and Indonesia for people who have never experienced either postmodern philosophy or any similar treatment of the body. It is in this context that Tanaka's experiment appears to be an event without a precedent embedded in culture, an action devoid of artistic tradition and ready-made reception paradigms. Tanaki's encounter with Guattari was certainly not accidental. Here we can clearly see the convergence and mutual influence of ideas, especially when we turn to Guattari's work from 1992, Chaosmose, where he proposes an analysis of subjectivity as the resultant of material, energetic and semiotic tides, fluxes, creating one of the most hermetic, most difficult to exegesis theories. human in contemporary humanities. And it is not about providing such an exhaustive exegesis here, but about showing what prompts us to continue reflection on the non-cultural dimension of humanity.
Well, the new view of subjectivity that emerges at the intersection of these experiments from the 1980s and early 1990s is aimed at the radical opening of the subject, unsealing its boundaries, liquidating its crystallized structures, such as formed identity, continuity, unchanging duration in time. Guattari develops a special language of concepts, the origin of which indicates a balancing on the border between what is human and other forms of life, what is cultural and what is non-cultural, but organic. Such a term is phylum (type) - a concept taken from the systematics of organisms, above the concepts of phylum and class in botanical and zoological classification, and below the concept of kingdom. Type defines, in a sense, the most general mechanism of functioning (a natural analogy here would be the division into self-nourishing organisms - plants, and hypernatural organisms - animals, and the category of fungi, which, in accordance with the current systematic approaches, create something separate from self-nourishing plants; however, the mechanism of decomposition of organic debris by fungi differs from animal digestive mechanism). The production of subjectivity is, according to Guattari, completely different than in the well-known view of Michel Foucault. The emphasis here is not on the categories of power and control (internalized in the cultural self-control of the subject who finally accepts self-mastery), but on the interaction of chaotic factors that affect a specific substrate, the source mechanism, which is phylum, ultimately not producing any a relationship of subordination or hierarchy. These are components that, with some approximation, we could call cultural, and therefore subject to semiotic mechanisms, based on the processes of transferring meanings. But at the same time Guattari - continuing Barthes' thought here - also speaks of an empty sign, something that is semiotic but does not convey meaning. Moreover, every sign, even one that carries a recognizable meaning, is immersed in "non-significant semiological dimensions" that exist and interact "either in parallel or independently" of the sign's significant function1. It is therefore a language of a complex humanistic topology, operating with a specific type of thinking about a multidimensional space, which also includes Guattarian virtual axiologies, ie potentially existing horizons of values, and "finite existential territories". There is therefore both a directly accessible, culturally developed area of existential possibilities, in which we exist and move, as well as a vast space of inaccessible or unused opportunities for experiencing, acting, and communicating meanings.
In this way, an opportunity arises to ask the question of how the concepts of culture and humanity relate to each other. Is there a humanity beyond culture that escapes the usual mechanisms of transferring and duplicating meanings that could be considered a semiological framework of culture? Is anything that goes beyond culture knowable? Does it lend itself to communication when language seems to be something completely immersed in culture, operating solely by means of duplication mechanisms which at the same time exclude absolute creativity and absolute accuracy of the message? Thus, the known problem of the inevitable gap separating words and things emerges, of their imperfect adherence to each other. Meanwhile, by dancing the ineffable, Tanaka at the same time achieves and communicates to the viewer what is sometimes referred to as Hegel's notion of "pure grasp", der reine Begriff, developed, among others, by by Giorgio Agamben in Il linguagio e la morte1. In a beautiful excursion that ends this book, Agamben uses the image of an evening walk in the woods, where each step is scared away by the animals that inhabit the bushes on either side of the path. "The same thing happens when we think: it is not our path in words that is important, but that vague rustling that merely touches us, like a fleeing animal or something awakened by the noise of our footsteps" 2. The Word is a distortion of the Voice, which only resounds in silence and nothingness, after finally realizing the deep aphony of man. And here we come back to dance and its anti-Wittgenstein dimension - perhaps what cannot be said can be danced, contradicting the thesis about the identity of the limits of language and the limits of our world. Carnality appears as a phylogenetic framework that enables communication beyond a crystallized sign, such as that we deal with in language, beyond the horizon of a consensual, culturally transmitted and shared axiology. An individual outside this cultural consensus could be, as I suggested at the outset, a mentally ill person. And here we come back to the La Borde clinic, where Min Tanaka dances, continuing his cooperation with Guattari3. The performance blurs the line between the dancer and the patients, some of whom suffer from neurological disorders. Tanaka's body moves awkwardly, in a manner that shows the collapse of hierarchical control: the limbs seem to be living their own uncoordinated life. The musical background is no longer concrete music, but an operatic aria, contrasting with its perfect organization and harmony with what is happening with the dancer's body. The spontaneous reactions of patients as an accidental triggering of something that is not a culturally crystallized script, but seems to flow from the depths of human spontaneity, are essential as an inalienable element of the event: without thinking about the difference between performance and life, they try to lift and save a falling dancer (while a culture that produces medicine and imposes hospital norms on even madmen, would leave the rescue to doctors and paramedics). This spontaneous reaction is suddenly cut short by the cultural script of laughter - a sign that makes the intervening person understand that his action is out of place, interferes with the planned and culturally embedded pattern, which is, after all, the Tanaki dance, considered by patients to be not -dance.
By provoking an oscillation on the border between performance and what is happening "really", Tanaka impersonates a form of humanity balancing on the border of culture - such a culture that would give the body normalization, hierarchy, and ultimately efficiency in dealing with the world. After all, the cultural way of human existence is an evolutionarily developed survival strategy that has given the species Homo sapiens such an advantage over other life forms that it has managed to reproduce, conquer and transform the entire planet. Culture is a collection of learned and ready to duplicate scores that we activate in response to circumstances in order to better cope with the task of existence. The madman whom he dances - and becomes - Min Tanaka lacks the culturally transmitted proficiency of using his body. Perhaps, for organic (e.g. neurological) reasons, he failed to develop his culture, or perhaps he rejected it, refused to accept it as a form of body control imposed by the self-replicating cultural mechanism that constantly keeps man in check. Here we see a man that has fallen out of control, disintegrates and melts, perhaps he has been influenced by intoxicating or hallucinogenic substances which he has inadvertently absorbed, or perhaps he shows his atmospheric essence as a place of uncoordinated, non-hierarchical, turbulent interaction of many random forces. It is impossible to present here all of Mina Tanaka's experiments, often going in the opposite direction to the one outlined here, for example, in the departure from passivity and receptivity of the body towards violent expression, including the face, this most specialized organ of interpersonal communication, necessary for our social and cultural existence. , how different from the emotionless face of the animal (and the stiff face characteristic of some psychiatric patients). However, the common denominator that interests me especially in this essay is primarily the game with cultural inscription and, on the contrary, cultural decontextualization. An example is the Goya (2000-2002) collective project led by Tanaka, where the canvas was a series of Los Caprichos graphics depicting various forms of human madness. The paradigmatic figures captured by Goya were here isolated from their original context and presented not so much as cross-cultural universals, but as madness reaching beyond culture, into the darkness of unrecognized and unrecognized humanity.
A man on the brink of culture is not only a madman, but also an old man. Old age is also a stage of humanity, at which the disengagement of this specialized organ of culture, which is the brain, may occur. There is a loss of the efficiency and efficiency resulting from the ability to play learned scores; the hierarchical co-ordination of the body is decoupled, as a result of which the individual inevitably shifts to the cultural margin. We can accept it as the inevitable end, the fundamental tragedy of humanity. But it is also possible to differently treat old age as a rapprochement and solidarity with what is outside of culture. There is a non-human, i.e. non-cultural, non-domestication animal, as well as a plant and other, inanimate forms of being, such as rock, and finally space itself, an atmospheric place, in the very turbulence of air atoms, and even in instability quantum technology that fills a complete void in which, according to physicists, virtual particles are constantly born and lost. A continuum of existence thus emerges, in which subjectivity, also - and perhaps especially - that subjectivity of the human being subject to decoupling at the edge of culture, can find its seat and discover ultimate unity with the universe. Here we come to the dance of the old Tanaka in the garden surrounding the Shintoist Koshikiiwa temple in the city of Nishinomiya in 2015 (so we are watching a dancer almost seventy years old) 1. The central element of the sanctuary is the megalith, a ten-meter-high rock that is precisely named Koshikiiwa because of its shape resembling a traditional rice steaming vessel. In the usual order of ritual embedded in the culture, the temple is the site of the ceremonial kagura dance associated with the agricultural calendar. Both people and the spirits of vegetation are allegedly taking part in it. There is no formal similarity between Tanaka's performance and this traditional dance, which is extremely colorful, dynamic, perfectly coordinated, and also semiotically rich - full of masks and attributes with a strictly codified meaning. The action taken by Tanaka is clearly something else that appears in place of the kagura. Once again, just like during an incoherent dance in a psychiatric clinic, accompanied by a perfectly harmonious operatic aria, this time also a body that eludes culture is inscribed in the space with an almost saturated culture. Each of the elements of the natural world in the temple circle has an overridden meaning. Rock is not any rock from outside the world appropriated by man, but on the contrary, a rock built into the symbolic tissue of the sanctuary, a rock endowed with a name, rank, and specific meaning. Also typically Japanese, traditional clogs on legs, kimono tied with a rope, all this contrasts with the nudity with which Tanaka experimented at the beginning of his career. Even more so, it is precisely the "body on the edge" embedded in this clearly accentuated cultural envelope that reveals its non-cultural dimension, it dances non-kagura.
In fact, from the very beginning of his experiments, Tanaka dealt with the opposition of a typically human figure upright and the consequences of adopting a horizontal attitude, reminiscent of the existence of an animal. Contrasting with the verticality of the human body is also becoming rock, and ultimately becoming non-alive. In a way, one might say that rock provides a paradigm absent from culture, as it never provides an exhaustive answer to the question of dying and being dead. He only lists scores on the occasion of someone else's death: funeral or mourning rituals. Here, tanaka plays the grave in a perspective absent in culture: in the first person, not in the third person, as it were. However, this is not the final chord of the performance. The finale is reaching the end of the garden surrounding the sanctuary and looking beyond the fence - which can be read as a symbol of looking beyond culture, which is fulfilled precisely in old age and death. This approach to the "border fence of culture" may take various forms in artistic practices aimed at seeking or exploring the non-cultural dimension of humanity. In one of my earlier publications1, I interpreted in a similar way a series of over 800 very bold erotic photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki entitled Tokyo Lucky Hole. A series of photos documenting the life of Shinjuku, Tokyo's promiscuous neighborhood, ends with a shot of a completely empty pavement. Meetings with prostitutes, which Araki documented in an almost naturalistic way, are devoid of true spontaneity, they are only playing a ritual, which is presented here as a specific quintessence of culture, a denial of transgressive and thus liberating eroticism in the sense that he tried to capture, among others, Georges Bataille (a man immersed in the experience of pleasure would be another example of bodily dereliction, like a madman and an old man). However, Shinjuku's life leads to liberation from culture in a completely different way: by becoming completely exhausted. This eroticism is treated as an expansion of what is cultural, if I am allowed to quote my own words, "an afterimage of the body, a suspension between a body that has not yet existed and a body that is no longer there" 2. Araki's photographs, and in particular the shot of the pavement, which crowns the entire cycle, are images of a void, which is reached by an explorer of the edge of culture, also using the body, but in a completely different dance. The factor that deserves comment is the mutual location and connection of what is cultural and what goes beyond culture. On the surface, what Tanaka does is very clearly embedded in a specific culture, namely Japanese, with its spiritual traditions such as Shintoism and Zen Buddhism, with the characteristic of Japan overriding cultural meanings over elements of the natural landscape, such as the boulder found in the sanctuary. . However, the element of key importance is what I called in the above-mentioned work "transcultural aspiration". It is about the readiness to cultural transgression, to accept one's own culture as a point of resistance to overcome, about the conscious striving of man to cross paradigms, even if the cultural limitations of humanity in the vast majority of cases triumph over this temptation of transgression. However, a searching individual, such as the dancer in this essay, defines himself as a being constantly struggling with culture for liberation, authenticity, expression beyond the paradigm. It chooses existence on the edge of culture, solidarity with animal, plant and even inanimate existence, limiting expression in favor of receptivity, avoiding - through direct communication of the body - embedded in culture, and thus limited and insufficient language.
Hence the search for non-culturally conditioned expression in silence. In almost all mystical schools, the communication between the master and the student takes place largely through meaningful silence. Min Tanaka's dance minimalism can also be considered an experiment very similar to the techniques used by Zen masters. Characteristically, the master cannot "offer" or "guarantee" the student enlightenment (or the satori experience) as something that can be interpreted in terms of the experience of going beyond the cultural paradigms of response. It only communicates to him the "transcultural aspiration", that is, the very idea that through certain practices one can achieve the state of illumination, non-cultural insight that it is possible and that it is worth pursuing. So the non-cultural ideal is the object of cultural communication. And this fundamental aporia is constantly emphasized by the masters of many spiritual traditions: cultural communication only allows one to reach a specific threshold at which it is possible to go beyond the ordinary state of human culture. However, the very experience, fanāʾ, satori, kenosis, or whatever it may be called, can only be achieved by individual effort, apart from transmission as teaching specific attitudes, ways of thinking, and behavior. The only way is to unlearn, the deskilling mentioned at the beginning, present as a constantly present postulate in traditional systems of knowledge and spiritual practice. Whether they are facing the prospect of becoming closer to or merging with a deity, or merely attaining a special state in a belief system essentially devoid of an absolute deity, such as Zen Buddhism, the offered path of development is to seek an experience beyond cultural codification. It is somewhat surprising that the transgression of culture does not necessarily look like a state close to angels, detached from temporal existence. On the contrary, the humility that entails the transgression of humanity as a species norm, and perhaps even a Guattarian phylum, is fully shown here. Therefore, in conclusion, it would be quite appropriate to quote, next to Giorgio Agamben, another essayist of Italian or Italian-French origin. It is Emanuele Coccia, author of the 2016 essay La Vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange1. Within the plant studies trend, it is no coincidence that it refers to Japan, as its idea was born in another temple dedicated to the deity of rice, Fushimi Inari. The call to leave humanity is associated not only with an opening towards animals (as in Agamben's essay Aperto2), but also towards such a form of being as the plant, its physiology, its way of creating the world different from the human one. Today, the Anthropocene is referred to as the geological age in which humanity became a key factor in the transformation of the planet. Coccia recalls that one might as well speak of the phytocene as an era in which plants significantly transformed the planet, giving it an oxygen-rich atmosphere. At the same time, it shows how the plant produces rather than takes up space, creating a permeable tangle of shoots, leaves and runners. It lives on the surface, which is required by the gas exchange that determines the physiology of the leaf, and not inside the digestive body, in the intestines, which appear to be the quintessence of human physiology. As the plant grows, it forms filigree structures, grows and intertwines with a foreign organism, creating trans-phyletic synergies, such as a lichen that is a symbiosis of a fungus and an algae (i.e. beyond the phylum limit of a type characterized by a specific physiology). Min Tanaka dancing in the temple garden - and as a gardener growing his own vegetables - communicates a similar kind of trans-phyletic message. Crossing its own physiology, it grows with the ground, rebuilds the relationship with other forms of being interrupted by culture. As mentioned above, the dancer works on a farm, dealing with the organic cultivation of plants and thus combining the philosophy expressed in dance with the realities of everyday life. The American theater scientist and dance researcher John (Zack) Fuller claims that "cultivating a wide variety of small crops exposes the body to a multitude of stimulation and physical influences, acting as dance training unrelated to any specific cultural context. The use of cultivation as a dance exercise means decodification of dance practice, related to a way of using space that reverses the usual hierarchical relationship between a place suitable for dance practice and the dancers who undertake it ”3. In other words, dancers conform to the requirements of the place where their bodies are occupied with the care of plants. They dance the place that other forms of being have created for them, bending to their shapes and penetrating the void left by vegetation.
Min Tanaka, as Guattari writes in a poem devoted to him, quoted at the beginning, fits beyond "narrative programs" and "industrial identities". His "animal horizontality" creates "intensity diagrams" at the confluence of all possible choreographies1. The dance appears, Guattari continues, as a "haiku-event", the equivalent of a poetic record of the state of the world in a fleeting moment. The key to transcending the localization of the human body is momentum, anchoring in the present, being in the gap that exists here and now. The atmospheric condition of the body is also its aerobic character, its being in terms of gas exchange, which is the common denominator of plant and human physiology. Interestingly, almost all of the spiritual traditions I have mentioned, from Zen Buddhism to Muslim Sufism2, use breathing exercises in their practices, often combined with the emission of a voice that goes beyond the articulated language. The range of bodily practices that can open the way to transcend the experience embedded in culture is therefore wide; dancing is only one of them. Undoubtedly, they all have their own cultural roots, they are practices passed down from generation to generation in a typically cultural way. However, their content is the aspiration to transcend the cultural condition that characterizes man as a being separate from the rest of the world. Through culture, man breaks away from the natural world. Moreover, being stuck in their culture on the level of rituals, liturgy, automatic, repetitive practices, man also detaches himself from the Absolute. Hence, complex motivations, desires or projects to overcome one's own cultural condition are born. Their common denominator is the achievement of a specific state, experience, insight, as well as opening up special communication possibilities that go beyond what can be expressed in ordinary, culture-determined language. Ultimately, however, it is about rebuilding unity with the universe that has been shattered by culture as a distinctive defensive strategy towards the world.
Deflation is initially an economic term, meaning a long-term decline in the average price level, which translates into an increase in the purchasing power of money. In the broader, metaphorical sense, deflation is a departure from a high level of cultural functioning, resignation from overload with excessively complex normative systems, return to the zero point, to the initial, base level, which is unrestrained, devoid of exuberant subjectivity (thus not tamed in the Foucaultian sense), human body. Ultimately, this may result in a peculiar "increase in purchasing power" not only in the bodily but also in the spiritual realm, leading to the opening of new insight. Deflationary in nature is also the question of humanity beyond culture, humanity devoid of cultural habits and competences, naked - in the sense of depriving a cultural envelope which, under ordinary conditions, protects against sharp collision with the world. This deflationary understanding of man is based on resignation, emptying, losing sophisticated competences, entering the realm of ignorance and darkness. In Christian terminology, this willingness to give up the temporal burden of culture would correspond to the kenosis concept of Paul to the Philippians (2,7), which says that Christ "emptied himself." Similar concepts can also be found in other religions of the world: it would be the concept of a fan of Muslim mystics or a figure of a hoopoe who flaunts its magnificent top and ends up losing feathers burnt in the fire of love. If, as it has been accepted to be the great philosophers of religions of the first half of the twentieth century, 1 mysticism is a universal sphere of human experience, the local, culturally specific translations of which tell one another to a large extent, then similar categories could also be found in the circle of Zen Buddhism, which importance for the further discussion. We will also see how, in the end, man is forced to deflation by universal determinants of his condition: madness, aging and death.
Since 2012, I have been working on an innovative theoretical approach concerning the relation between the notions of the human and the cultural, questioning the apparent obviousness of human condition treated as necessarily and exclusively cultured one. Existential circumstances such as madness, disease or decrepitude may be interpreted as events and circumstances that strip the human bare of his or her protective cultural integument, forcing him or her to experience the events in an extracultural manner, i.e. beyond the usual patterns and paradigms of reacting. Apocalyptic events, as the time of disruption of norms and rituals (kairos of Christian eschatology), may offer an insight into a sphere that cannot be explored at other times, when cultural transmission goes on unperturbed and uninterrupted. Novel outcomes of such disruptive events constantly become a part of the subsequent cultural transmission. Any invention of new forms attacks and undermines the frontiers of the culturally given, yet contributes to the expansion of the frontiers of culturally codified experience.
In my works in cultural theory, such as the collection of essays Humanistyka, która nadchodzi (The Coming Humanities, 2018), I treat culture as a phenomenon of transmission, a totality of whatever we learn from other human beings, and what we are invited to reproduce as faithfully as possible, at a minimal modification. This static and stabilising potential of the cultural requires critical vigilance. Also, culture is essentially a feature of a community determining, dominating, normalizing the individual. Having in mind this oppressive, stabilising, limiting and potentially destructive character of the cultural transmission, I am profoundly interested in exploring the elements that cultures marginalize, reject, disqualify, that accumulate at their silenced and forgotten frontiers.
Collectively and individually experienced time of exception, that may be defined as such in which the usually valid cultural paradigms and procedures lose their efficacy and validity, play a crucial role in such an extracultural growth as postulated above; it brings about the revelation of yet unexplored, uncharted modalities of human subjectivity. As I claim, it is possible to overcome culture understood as a totality of transmitted and automatized habits; cultural condition, although it seems inherent to every human being, may be transgressed; cultures may be unlearnt, de-essentialised, transformed from bulk identities into a filigree. Such a process of unlearning, de-automatising of the reactions that are usually channelled through culturally determined paradigms, may bring about progressive growth of the sphere of insight, awareness, autonomy and choice, forming positive legacies, although their transmission only partially enters the usual, cultured paradigms. Think about the silence of a zen master trying to indicate to his apprentice the way of illumination.
Nonetheless, the reflection on extracultural becoming of man implies a somehow pessimistic definition of culture that is implicit in my exploration of cultural frontiers; I assume that men, or at least some exceptional, maverick individuals, constantly clash against cultural limitation; a constant war is waged in the borderlands of culture. I try to show what motivates the necessity of such a radical criticism of the cultural and the search for extracultural modalities of being human. Yet how to get an insight into such an outer sphere of the extracultural and what I expect to find there? Cultural traditions are rich in traces of extracultural experiences of the past. Traces that are almost obliterated, hardly readable, yet possible to discover and interpret. Extracultural becoming may not be as novel, hypothetical and unexplored as we might be inclined to believe; on the contrary, it may be a regularly visited sphere, even a resource for individuals who chose to search for liberty, bliss, beauty, fulfilment or intimacy with God beyond what would be their culturally limited destiny.
It is not always easy to find an exemplification of the extracultural idea. Nonetheless, tentatives of exploring the edge of the cultural make the core of many artistic experiments. "I don't dance in a place, I dance in a place" is an excerpt from a poem which is the result of an unusual meeting. Félix Guattari, psychiatrist, collaborator of Gilles Deleuze in the groundbreaking, two-part project "Capitalism and Schizophrenia", the creator of schizoanalysis and ecosophy, summed up his meeting with the dancer Min Tanaka during one of his numerous trips to Japan that Guattari took place in the 1980s, when Europeans were very much interested in this country. Writings from this period, as it were, received a second life - as is often the case - after the publication of the English-language collection Machinic Eros in 2015. Guattari, a student of Lacan, became professionally involved in the experimental psychiatric clinic La Borde, where he died of a heart attack in 1992. Its director was another Lacan student, psychiatrist Jean Oury, and one of the most famous achievements of this institution was the departure from the individualistic approach of psychoanalysis (i.e. therapy leaving the patient on a couch alone with the doctor) in favor of a free, open confrontation in group therapy, where it was to be a richer, more diverse network of therapeutic interactions. On the other hand, Min Tanaka (or Tanaka Min, since the surname is usually placed first before the first name in Japan) is a dancer and actor born in 1945. Initially, he collaborated with Hijikata Tatsumi, who is considered to be the creator of buto, or "dance of darkness", one of the forms of contemporary Japanese dance that has developed since the late 1950s thanks to the collaboration of Tatsumi and Kazuo Ohno.
However, in the 1970s, Tanaka abandoned his formal career to develop a minimalistic improvisation developed in almost total nudity (except for a blindfold covering the genitals), in spaces devoid of institutional anointing, such as subway stations, parks, streets and private houses, which may be associated with the undertaken by many post-war Japanese art artists with the concept of anti- or non-art (han geijutsu), which was about negating codified forms and genres of art taken over from Western culture, as well as blurring the border between art and life. In the series of Hyperdance Tanaka performances held in natural settings throughout Japan, the place itself and its specificity were to be a specific theme dictating bodily expression, with an extremely restrained and minimalist character. Specific micro-movements of the body were to express its fragility, susceptibility to the world, and receptivity. As a consequence of these experiments, Tanaka created a separate aesthetic or aesthetic-philosophical line in which the human body becomes one of the atmospheric phenomena, referred to as Shintai kisho or Body Weather. It is treated as one of the forces that is influenced by external influences and interacts with them. In other words, it negates the clearly constituted self that acts out of the will. That is why Tanaka does not dance in a place, in a specific space that it occupies and appropriates, but it dances place as an abstract point of intersection of forces, a confluence of vectors, stresses, cosmic energies affecting the body. Hence the meteorological metaphor that appears in the title of the project: body - weather, body as an atmospheric state. In other words, the movement of such a body is not something wished, planned and played, but on the contrary, the resultant of the influences, elasticity, and flows, as if man were jellyfish or seaweed immersed in the original omnipotence. The sound background, resulting from cooperation with the creator of specific music, Minoru Noguchi, is often made of noises, crackles, an acoustic equivalent of the resultant chaotic interactions.
Although the Body Weather Laboratory was established in 1978 and Tanaka gradually returned to dance as an art separate from life, namely at festivals and art centers, the fundamental direction of this search for the body as flux remained the same. In experiments in the late 1980s, the dancer seems to float in the water, pushed in different directions by chaotic movements. A complementary element of this organic conception of the human and the human body living in conditions of immersion in an animated, non-hierarchical world was the creation of the Body Weather farm in 1985, where the cultivation of plants became a parallel and equivalent practice to dance. Several years later, Tanaka will return to the idea of art performed outside the formal context, for an audience without adequate preparation. He will be dancing in the villages of India and Indonesia for people who have never experienced either postmodern philosophy or any similar treatment of the body. It is in this context that Tanaka's experiment appears to be an event without a precedent embedded in culture, an action devoid of artistic tradition and ready-made reception paradigms. Tanaki's encounter with Guattari was certainly not accidental. Here we can clearly see the convergence and mutual influence of ideas, especially when we turn to Guattari's work from 1992, Chaosmose, where he proposes an analysis of subjectivity as the resultant of material, energetic and semiotic tides, fluxes, creating one of the most hermetic, most difficult to exegesis theories. human in contemporary humanities. And it is not about providing such an exhaustive exegesis here, but about showing what prompts us to continue reflection on the non-cultural dimension of humanity.
Well, the new view of subjectivity that emerges at the intersection of these experiments from the 1980s and early 1990s is aimed at the radical opening of the subject, unsealing its boundaries, liquidating its crystallized structures, such as formed identity, continuity, unchanging duration in time. Guattari develops a special language of concepts, the origin of which indicates a balancing on the border between what is human and other forms of life, what is cultural and what is non-cultural, but organic. Such a term is phylum (type) - a concept taken from the systematics of organisms, above the concepts of phylum and class in botanical and zoological classification, and below the concept of kingdom. Type defines, in a sense, the most general mechanism of functioning (a natural analogy here would be the division into self-nourishing organisms - plants, and hypernatural organisms - animals, and the category of fungi, which, in accordance with the current systematic approaches, create something separate from self-nourishing plants; however, the mechanism of decomposition of organic debris by fungi differs from animal digestive mechanism). The production of subjectivity is, according to Guattari, completely different than in the well-known view of Michel Foucault. The emphasis here is not on the categories of power and control (internalized in the cultural self-control of the subject who finally accepts self-mastery), but on the interaction of chaotic factors that affect a specific substrate, the source mechanism, which is phylum, ultimately not producing any a relationship of subordination or hierarchy. These are components that, with some approximation, we could call cultural, and therefore subject to semiotic mechanisms, based on the processes of transferring meanings. But at the same time Guattari - continuing Barthes' thought here - also speaks of an empty sign, something that is semiotic but does not convey meaning. Moreover, every sign, even one that carries a recognizable meaning, is immersed in "non-significant semiological dimensions" that exist and interact "either in parallel or independently" of the sign's significant function1. It is therefore a language of a complex humanistic topology, operating with a specific type of thinking about a multidimensional space, which also includes Guattarian virtual axiologies, ie potentially existing horizons of values, and "finite existential territories". There is therefore both a directly accessible, culturally developed area of existential possibilities, in which we exist and move, as well as a vast space of inaccessible or unused opportunities for experiencing, acting, and communicating meanings.
In this way, an opportunity arises to ask the question of how the concepts of culture and humanity relate to each other. Is there a humanity beyond culture that escapes the usual mechanisms of transferring and duplicating meanings that could be considered a semiological framework of culture? Is anything that goes beyond culture knowable? Does it lend itself to communication when language seems to be something completely immersed in culture, operating solely by means of duplication mechanisms which at the same time exclude absolute creativity and absolute accuracy of the message? Thus, the known problem of the inevitable gap separating words and things emerges, of their imperfect adherence to each other. Meanwhile, by dancing the ineffable, Tanaka at the same time achieves and communicates to the viewer what is sometimes referred to as Hegel's notion of "pure grasp", der reine Begriff, developed, among others, by by Giorgio Agamben in Il linguagio e la morte1. In a beautiful excursion that ends this book, Agamben uses the image of an evening walk in the woods, where each step is scared away by the animals that inhabit the bushes on either side of the path. "The same thing happens when we think: it is not our path in words that is important, but that vague rustling that merely touches us, like a fleeing animal or something awakened by the noise of our footsteps" 2. The Word is a distortion of the Voice, which only resounds in silence and nothingness, after finally realizing the deep aphony of man. And here we come back to dance and its anti-Wittgenstein dimension - perhaps what cannot be said can be danced, contradicting the thesis about the identity of the limits of language and the limits of our world. Carnality appears as a phylogenetic framework that enables communication beyond a crystallized sign, such as that we deal with in language, beyond the horizon of a consensual, culturally transmitted and shared axiology. An individual outside this cultural consensus could be, as I suggested at the outset, a mentally ill person. And here we come back to the La Borde clinic, where Min Tanaka dances, continuing his cooperation with Guattari3. The performance blurs the line between the dancer and the patients, some of whom suffer from neurological disorders. Tanaka's body moves awkwardly, in a manner that shows the collapse of hierarchical control: the limbs seem to be living their own uncoordinated life. The musical background is no longer concrete music, but an operatic aria, contrasting with its perfect organization and harmony with what is happening with the dancer's body. The spontaneous reactions of patients as an accidental triggering of something that is not a culturally crystallized script, but seems to flow from the depths of human spontaneity, are essential as an inalienable element of the event: without thinking about the difference between performance and life, they try to lift and save a falling dancer (while a culture that produces medicine and imposes hospital norms on even madmen, would leave the rescue to doctors and paramedics). This spontaneous reaction is suddenly cut short by the cultural script of laughter - a sign that makes the intervening person understand that his action is out of place, interferes with the planned and culturally embedded pattern, which is, after all, the Tanaki dance, considered by patients to be not -dance.
By provoking an oscillation on the border between performance and what is happening "really", Tanaka impersonates a form of humanity balancing on the border of culture - such a culture that would give the body normalization, hierarchy, and ultimately efficiency in dealing with the world. After all, the cultural way of human existence is an evolutionarily developed survival strategy that has given the species Homo sapiens such an advantage over other life forms that it has managed to reproduce, conquer and transform the entire planet. Culture is a collection of learned and ready to duplicate scores that we activate in response to circumstances in order to better cope with the task of existence. The madman whom he dances - and becomes - Min Tanaka lacks the culturally transmitted proficiency of using his body. Perhaps, for organic (e.g. neurological) reasons, he failed to develop his culture, or perhaps he rejected it, refused to accept it as a form of body control imposed by the self-replicating cultural mechanism that constantly keeps man in check. Here we see a man that has fallen out of control, disintegrates and melts, perhaps he has been influenced by intoxicating or hallucinogenic substances which he has inadvertently absorbed, or perhaps he shows his atmospheric essence as a place of uncoordinated, non-hierarchical, turbulent interaction of many random forces. It is impossible to present here all of Mina Tanaka's experiments, often going in the opposite direction to the one outlined here, for example, in the departure from passivity and receptivity of the body towards violent expression, including the face, this most specialized organ of interpersonal communication, necessary for our social and cultural existence. , how different from the emotionless face of the animal (and the stiff face characteristic of some psychiatric patients). However, the common denominator that interests me especially in this essay is primarily the game with cultural inscription and, on the contrary, cultural decontextualization. An example is the Goya (2000-2002) collective project led by Tanaka, where the canvas was a series of Los Caprichos graphics depicting various forms of human madness. The paradigmatic figures captured by Goya were here isolated from their original context and presented not so much as cross-cultural universals, but as madness reaching beyond culture, into the darkness of unrecognized and unrecognized humanity.
A man on the brink of culture is not only a madman, but also an old man. Old age is also a stage of humanity, at which the disengagement of this specialized organ of culture, which is the brain, may occur. There is a loss of the efficiency and efficiency resulting from the ability to play learned scores; the hierarchical co-ordination of the body is decoupled, as a result of which the individual inevitably shifts to the cultural margin. We can accept it as the inevitable end, the fundamental tragedy of humanity. But it is also possible to differently treat old age as a rapprochement and solidarity with what is outside of culture. There is a non-human, i.e. non-cultural, non-domestication animal, as well as a plant and other, inanimate forms of being, such as rock, and finally space itself, an atmospheric place, in the very turbulence of air atoms, and even in instability quantum technology that fills a complete void in which, according to physicists, virtual particles are constantly born and lost. A continuum of existence thus emerges, in which subjectivity, also - and perhaps especially - that subjectivity of the human being subject to decoupling at the edge of culture, can find its seat and discover ultimate unity with the universe. Here we come to the dance of the old Tanaka in the garden surrounding the Shintoist Koshikiiwa temple in the city of Nishinomiya in 2015 (so we are watching a dancer almost seventy years old) 1. The central element of the sanctuary is the megalith, a ten-meter-high rock that is precisely named Koshikiiwa because of its shape resembling a traditional rice steaming vessel. In the usual order of ritual embedded in the culture, the temple is the site of the ceremonial kagura dance associated with the agricultural calendar. Both people and the spirits of vegetation are allegedly taking part in it. There is no formal similarity between Tanaka's performance and this traditional dance, which is extremely colorful, dynamic, perfectly coordinated, and also semiotically rich - full of masks and attributes with a strictly codified meaning. The action taken by Tanaka is clearly something else that appears in place of the kagura. Once again, just like during an incoherent dance in a psychiatric clinic, accompanied by a perfectly harmonious operatic aria, this time also a body that eludes culture is inscribed in the space with an almost saturated culture. Each of the elements of the natural world in the temple circle has an overridden meaning. Rock is not any rock from outside the world appropriated by man, but on the contrary, a rock built into the symbolic tissue of the sanctuary, a rock endowed with a name, rank, and specific meaning. Also typically Japanese, traditional clogs on legs, kimono tied with a rope, all this contrasts with the nudity with which Tanaka experimented at the beginning of his career. Even more so, it is precisely the "body on the edge" embedded in this clearly accentuated cultural envelope that reveals its non-cultural dimension, it dances non-kagura.
In fact, from the very beginning of his experiments, Tanaka dealt with the opposition of a typically human figure upright and the consequences of adopting a horizontal attitude, reminiscent of the existence of an animal. Contrasting with the verticality of the human body is also becoming rock, and ultimately becoming non-alive. In a way, one might say that rock provides a paradigm absent from culture, as it never provides an exhaustive answer to the question of dying and being dead. He only lists scores on the occasion of someone else's death: funeral or mourning rituals. Here, tanaka plays the grave in a perspective absent in culture: in the first person, not in the third person, as it were. However, this is not the final chord of the performance. The finale is reaching the end of the garden surrounding the sanctuary and looking beyond the fence - which can be read as a symbol of looking beyond culture, which is fulfilled precisely in old age and death. This approach to the "border fence of culture" may take various forms in artistic practices aimed at seeking or exploring the non-cultural dimension of humanity. In one of my earlier publications1, I interpreted in a similar way a series of over 800 very bold erotic photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki entitled Tokyo Lucky Hole. A series of photos documenting the life of Shinjuku, Tokyo's promiscuous neighborhood, ends with a shot of a completely empty pavement. Meetings with prostitutes, which Araki documented in an almost naturalistic way, are devoid of true spontaneity, they are only playing a ritual, which is presented here as a specific quintessence of culture, a denial of transgressive and thus liberating eroticism in the sense that he tried to capture, among others, Georges Bataille (a man immersed in the experience of pleasure would be another example of bodily dereliction, like a madman and an old man). However, Shinjuku's life leads to liberation from culture in a completely different way: by becoming completely exhausted. This eroticism is treated as an expansion of what is cultural, if I am allowed to quote my own words, "an afterimage of the body, a suspension between a body that has not yet existed and a body that is no longer there" 2. Araki's photographs, and in particular the shot of the pavement, which crowns the entire cycle, are images of a void, which is reached by an explorer of the edge of culture, also using the body, but in a completely different dance. The factor that deserves comment is the mutual location and connection of what is cultural and what goes beyond culture. On the surface, what Tanaka does is very clearly embedded in a specific culture, namely Japanese, with its spiritual traditions such as Shintoism and Zen Buddhism, with the characteristic of Japan overriding cultural meanings over elements of the natural landscape, such as the boulder found in the sanctuary. . However, the element of key importance is what I called in the above-mentioned work "transcultural aspiration". It is about the readiness to cultural transgression, to accept one's own culture as a point of resistance to overcome, about the conscious striving of man to cross paradigms, even if the cultural limitations of humanity in the vast majority of cases triumph over this temptation of transgression. However, a searching individual, such as the dancer in this essay, defines himself as a being constantly struggling with culture for liberation, authenticity, expression beyond the paradigm. It chooses existence on the edge of culture, solidarity with animal, plant and even inanimate existence, limiting expression in favor of receptivity, avoiding - through direct communication of the body - embedded in culture, and thus limited and insufficient language.
Hence the search for non-culturally conditioned expression in silence. In almost all mystical schools, the communication between the master and the student takes place largely through meaningful silence. Min Tanaka's dance minimalism can also be considered an experiment very similar to the techniques used by Zen masters. Characteristically, the master cannot "offer" or "guarantee" the student enlightenment (or the satori experience) as something that can be interpreted in terms of the experience of going beyond the cultural paradigms of response. It only communicates to him the "transcultural aspiration", that is, the very idea that through certain practices one can achieve the state of illumination, non-cultural insight that it is possible and that it is worth pursuing. So the non-cultural ideal is the object of cultural communication. And this fundamental aporia is constantly emphasized by the masters of many spiritual traditions: cultural communication only allows one to reach a specific threshold at which it is possible to go beyond the ordinary state of human culture. However, the very experience, fanāʾ, satori, kenosis, or whatever it may be called, can only be achieved by individual effort, apart from transmission as teaching specific attitudes, ways of thinking, and behavior. The only way is to unlearn, the deskilling mentioned at the beginning, present as a constantly present postulate in traditional systems of knowledge and spiritual practice. Whether they are facing the prospect of becoming closer to or merging with a deity, or merely attaining a special state in a belief system essentially devoid of an absolute deity, such as Zen Buddhism, the offered path of development is to seek an experience beyond cultural codification. It is somewhat surprising that the transgression of culture does not necessarily look like a state close to angels, detached from temporal existence. On the contrary, the humility that entails the transgression of humanity as a species norm, and perhaps even a Guattarian phylum, is fully shown here. Therefore, in conclusion, it would be quite appropriate to quote, next to Giorgio Agamben, another essayist of Italian or Italian-French origin. It is Emanuele Coccia, author of the 2016 essay La Vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange1. Within the plant studies trend, it is no coincidence that it refers to Japan, as its idea was born in another temple dedicated to the deity of rice, Fushimi Inari. The call to leave humanity is associated not only with an opening towards animals (as in Agamben's essay Aperto2), but also towards such a form of being as the plant, its physiology, its way of creating the world different from the human one. Today, the Anthropocene is referred to as the geological age in which humanity became a key factor in the transformation of the planet. Coccia recalls that one might as well speak of the phytocene as an era in which plants significantly transformed the planet, giving it an oxygen-rich atmosphere. At the same time, it shows how the plant produces rather than takes up space, creating a permeable tangle of shoots, leaves and runners. It lives on the surface, which is required by the gas exchange that determines the physiology of the leaf, and not inside the digestive body, in the intestines, which appear to be the quintessence of human physiology. As the plant grows, it forms filigree structures, grows and intertwines with a foreign organism, creating trans-phyletic synergies, such as a lichen that is a symbiosis of a fungus and an algae (i.e. beyond the phylum limit of a type characterized by a specific physiology). Min Tanaka dancing in the temple garden - and as a gardener growing his own vegetables - communicates a similar kind of trans-phyletic message. Crossing its own physiology, it grows with the ground, rebuilds the relationship with other forms of being interrupted by culture. As mentioned above, the dancer works on a farm, dealing with the organic cultivation of plants and thus combining the philosophy expressed in dance with the realities of everyday life. The American theater scientist and dance researcher John (Zack) Fuller claims that "cultivating a wide variety of small crops exposes the body to a multitude of stimulation and physical influences, acting as dance training unrelated to any specific cultural context. The use of cultivation as a dance exercise means decodification of dance practice, related to a way of using space that reverses the usual hierarchical relationship between a place suitable for dance practice and the dancers who undertake it ”3. In other words, dancers conform to the requirements of the place where their bodies are occupied with the care of plants. They dance the place that other forms of being have created for them, bending to their shapes and penetrating the void left by vegetation.
Min Tanaka, as Guattari writes in a poem devoted to him, quoted at the beginning, fits beyond "narrative programs" and "industrial identities". His "animal horizontality" creates "intensity diagrams" at the confluence of all possible choreographies1. The dance appears, Guattari continues, as a "haiku-event", the equivalent of a poetic record of the state of the world in a fleeting moment. The key to transcending the localization of the human body is momentum, anchoring in the present, being in the gap that exists here and now. The atmospheric condition of the body is also its aerobic character, its being in terms of gas exchange, which is the common denominator of plant and human physiology. Interestingly, almost all of the spiritual traditions I have mentioned, from Zen Buddhism to Muslim Sufism2, use breathing exercises in their practices, often combined with the emission of a voice that goes beyond the articulated language. The range of bodily practices that can open the way to transcend the experience embedded in culture is therefore wide; dancing is only one of them. Undoubtedly, they all have their own cultural roots, they are practices passed down from generation to generation in a typically cultural way. However, their content is the aspiration to transcend the cultural condition that characterizes man as a being separate from the rest of the world. Through culture, man breaks away from the natural world. Moreover, being stuck in their culture on the level of rituals, liturgy, automatic, repetitive practices, man also detaches himself from the Absolute. Hence, complex motivations, desires or projects to overcome one's own cultural condition are born. Their common denominator is the achievement of a specific state, experience, insight, as well as opening up special communication possibilities that go beyond what can be expressed in ordinary, culture-determined language. Ultimately, however, it is about rebuilding unity with the universe that has been shattered by culture as a distinctive defensive strategy towards the world.
