The Peripatetic Deleuze: Biological Flow and Walking as Knowing

(submitted by sean smith and barbara fornssler to the 3rd international deleuze studies conference in amsterdam)

We approach as if wasps forming a rhizome with the orchids of Deleuzian thought. Or, we thank you in advance for legitimating our presence and granting us the power of voice. Nomads or agents of the state, we are not certain as to whom we should address our conference submission, but we shall initiate a politics of approach that errs on the side of the former. And is this not to a certain degree the politics Deleuze and Guattari advance in their admittedly undertheorized concept of holey space: the ability to surf at the threshold between the ever-contingent striations of state authority and the myriad subjectivities and contexts we may understand as nomadic?

Perhaps this offers us a metaphor for our ability to move through public and quasi-public corporatized spaces: the surfer who rides at the break-point between the wave's signal and its becoming-noise, who stays slightly ahead of the movement in order to glide stylishly to the beach. Located in the urban context at the threshold between surveillant optics and smoothing gestural haptics, we will present three artworks from our program of research-creation — Gait Surfing, Kino-Gait, and Natality (Ingrid) — and discuss them with reference to work from Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Massumi, Manning, and Agamben.

inhale
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I N H A L E . . .
EX(in)EX(in)EX(in)EX(in)
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E X H A L E . . .
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Department of Biological Flow, December 2008:

Once again, an over-reliance on the visual bias stymied attempts to fully get into the flow of the gait surfing exercise. Originally it was suggested that the surfing subject should direct one’s gaze about 45 degrees below horizontal and abstract the focus of the gaze to about 5-6 feet in front of one’s face. But this still made the exercise too visually-oriented: even if the flow of traffic was moving beyond the abstracted focal point, it was enough to stimulate the eye into refocusing, locating and tracking particular moving objects, thereby reducing any sort of dependence on the strictly haptic and proprioceptive aspects of negotiation and navigation.

Instead, Sean suggested to direct the gaze to 75 degrees from horizontal, such that the visual was deferred for as long as possible before encroaching upon the body’s ability to move affectively through the flow. This definitely worked better for track five, but the continual struggle against the visual remained poignant for both participants.

different types of bows in eastern orthodoxy (wikipedia)
the initial gait surfing study would have had the head bowed slightly lower than position no.1

Can we understand gait surfing as a bowing and act of reverence to the other-in-flux? Can we suggest that it is an act of gratitude for the relation that allows one to be liquid and surf? Can we consider such bowing to be free (at least right now) of the protocol we find, for example, with a bow to the deity or royal figure? Can we imagine this as an Agambenian gesture, or a "means without end"?

The traditional forms of bowing are gestural in quality but are also intensely optic in nature, at least insofar as averting one's gaze denies the optic. Can we further suggest, then, that such a gait surfing bow exists at the threshold between gesture and the optical qualities of language, and as such emerges inherently as an act of politics?