Cull Laura

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Laura Cull is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Surrey, UK. She is author of ‘Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance’ (forthcoming with Palgrave in November 2012) and editor of ‘Deleuze and Performance’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Laura is also Chair of the Performance & Philosophy working group within Performance Studies international.

Affect in Deleuze, Hijikata and Coates: The Politics of Becoming-Animal in Performance

Laura Cull

IntroductionThis essay explores some of the implications for performance of philosopher

Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “affect,” which is not understood as emotion, but as a pre-personal process of “becoming,” change or variation caused by an encounter between bodies. In particular, I want to evaluate the politics of the affective process Deleuze calls “becoming-animal,” and to address the relationship between this process and the approach to the animal taken by Butoh cofounder, Hijikata Tatsumi (1928-1986) and UK-based contemporary artist, Marcus Coates (1968-). A good deal of text and practice based performance research has already engaged with Deleuzian affect and the notion of becoming-animal.1 However, one could argue that, in many of the texts at least, Deleuze and Guattari’s thought appears more as a passing reference than as a core resource, and in some cases, the notion of becoming-animal in particular, is defined in what I construe as misleading ways.

Here, I attempt to provide a clear exposition of Deleuze’s account of affect before moving on to address the particular mode of affect that Deleuze and Guattari call “becoming-animal.” I will then examine the ways in which Deleuze, Hijikata, and Coates present the relationship between affect (or becoming) and imitation, followed by an outline of the political and ethical implications that the performance of becoming-animal might be understood to have. At the same time, I acknowledge that Deleuze and Guattari themselves by no means have a straightforward relationship to animals; indeed, there would certainly be a tension involved in any co-option of the concept of becoming-animal to what they would consider the “molar” project of animal rights. Deleuze and Guattari examine the suffering of animals—a dying rat and a horse being beaten in the street, for instance—less from the point of view of the nonhuman animal and more from that of the human who enters a becoming-animal through the encounter with suffering. But we shall return to this problem at a later stage.2

For now, let me briefly introduce Hijikata and Coates. As is well known, Hijikata (along with his lifelong collaborator, Ohno Kazuo) is the cofounder of Butoh—a form of dance-art that emerged in Japan following the Second World

2 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

War and strove to create an alternative movement vocabulary for Japanese dance in relation to a dominant context defined both by Western forms and by Noh. Although many of the features of Butoh have perhaps subsequently sedimented into a recognizable “style” (bodies painted white against a black background, out-turned feet, slowed gestures and so forth), we might suggest that, in its emergence, Butoh presented its audience with strangeness and uncertainty: flinching and flowing bodies barely visible as they appear out of and retreat back into darkness, limbs like part-objects seemingly operating independently of other parts of the body, and an absolutely precise yet unrecognizable articulation of movement. Hijikata’s dances, in particular, elude any fixed identification of the performing body in terms of age, health, gender, sexuality, “animation,” or as I will focus on here, species.3 From early examples such as the 1960 film Heso to genbaku (Navel and A-Bomb)4 to Hijikata’s final solo, Leprosy within the piece Summer Storm (1973), what Hijikata called “the body that becomes” remained at the center of his work.5

Coates, in contrast, first came to prominence in the commercial art world about ten years ago, becoming increasingly well known both for his video installations and live performances (and for the videos and photographs that re-present those performances). The vast majority of these deal with notions of “the animal” in one form or another—from relatively early video works such as Stoat (1999), which shows Coates “attempting to walk wearing a pair of six inch stilts loosely bound to his feet,”6 to Intelligent Design (2009), a video of two giant tortoises mating that Coates produced during a residency on the Galapagos Islands.

Despite coming from and operating within very different contexts, Hijikata and Coates share an emphasis on becoming before being, metamorphosis before metaphor. Butoh expert Sondra Fraleigh, for instance, argues that metamorphosis “is the metaphysical method of Butoh, its alchemical aspect, and its shamanist basis.”7 And Hijikata specifically, uses dance not to represent the movement of other bodies, but to locate new and unfamiliar ways of moving evoked by an “imagistic process” that is, at the same time, always struggling to prevent the body from settling into a fixed image we might recognize. As Fraleigh summarizes, Hijikata “gave the dance world a profound lexicon of paradoxical imagery . . . images in states of becoming and only seldom in states of arrival.”8

Fraleigh’s emphasis on Butoh as a kind of shamanist activity generates an interesting point of resonance with Coates’s work (that I will not be able to examine in sufficient depth here), given the latter’s engagement with a contemporary, Western mode of shamanism in projects such as Journey to the Lower World (2004) and Mouth of God (2006). Here, Coates is not concerned to reproduce some sort of “authentic” shamanic ritual (whatever we might understand that to be), but neither are his projects ironic or flippant.9 Indeed, I would argue that what Hijikata and Coates also have in common is their seriousness, not in relation to themselves in an egoistic fashion, but with respect to the reality of metamorphosis and becoming; their work is conducted with a diligence and care that seems to resist

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the conventional dismissal of the desire to really enter into a becoming-animal as sheer naivety.10

Fig. 1, Marcus Coates Goshawk (Self Portrait), 1999. Image Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery. In this image, Coates is suspended twenty feet up a Spruce tree in Grizedale Forest in the Lake District in order to see the landscape from a goshawk’s point of view.

With this brief introduction in place, let us now turn to Deleuze’s concept of affect. Deleuze defines affect in varying ways across his oeuvre: including in very early works such as Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953); in his two books on Spinoza, Expressionism in Philosophy (1968) and Spinoza, Practical Philosophy (1970/1981); and in the collaborative works with Guattari such as A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and What is Philosophy? (1994). But rather than getting into too


much technical detail about the nuances that differentiate these multiple definitions, I outline here four key, interrelated elements of Deleuze’s conception of affect.

What is Affect for Deleuze? Firstly, Deleuze posits a distinction between affect and emotion based on their

differing relations to the “self.” As Brian Massumi suggests, Deleuze conceives of emotion as “a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal,” whereas he insists that “affect is not a personal feeling.”11 Or again, while Deleuze relates emotion to the formation of subjects, he says that affect “throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel.”12 In the process of identification that Deleuze links to emotions, the subject enfolds the threatening outside into its own internal world (as “introjection”), whereas affect acts upon the self like an arrow (or “projectile”), forcing us to relate to the forces of chaotic materiality that surround us, rather than suppressing their heterogeneity through identification.13

Secondly, affect is not a “thing” in Deleuze; rather, affect is the name given to a particular kind of “encounter” between bodies. Bear in mind that, for Deleuze, “A body can be anything . . . it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity.”14 As encounter, affect does not involve the recognition of some “thing” by consciousness—which, for Deleuze, does not count as an instance of genuine creative thought. It is, instead, an instance of contact that “forces us to think” insofar as the affective encounter “defies consciousness, recognition and representation.”15 To link these first and second elements of Deleuzian affect to performance, we might suggest that there would be a difference for Deleuze, between the audience’s recognition of an actor’s representation of “a familiar, easily recognizable emotion” and the “unfamiliar affect” of a performance that unsettles but also fascinates us in its power to resist identification.16

Thirdly, Deleuze and Guattari draw from Spinoza in defining affect as what a body can do, what is in its power, or what it is capable of in relation to other bodies.17 The affects or powers of a body are not fixed though, for Deleuze, rather, they are constantly increasing and decreasing depending on to what extent the other bodies we encounter “agree” or “disagree” with us, to what extent they bring us “joy” or “sadness.” What I can do is extended or expanded when I encounter a body that brings me joy; joy is not an emotion, it is an increase of my power to act and an extension of what I can do. As Deleuze puts it “the affects of joy are like a springboard, they make us pass through something that we would never have been able to pass if there had only been sadnesses.”18 In turn, just as the affects of any given body are always varying, it is also the case that those affects or encounters that produce relatively joyful or sad affects will be different for every body. There cannot be one evaluation of a body as good or bad that stands for all. The heat of the

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sun, for example, affects my body in a more enabling, joyful fashion than it does a photosensitive body; likewise, Deleuze notes, “a fly will perceive the sun in another fashion.” Affect is not just a category of human experience, in Deleuze. And what is good for me, or for humans, is not “inevitably good” for others, including nonhuman animals.19 Given this objection to the imposition of any transcendent or universal value of “the good,” Deleuze and Guattari also embrace Spinoza’s unconventional definition of ethics as an affect-oriented study of bodies. Breaking away from the conventional definition of ethics as “systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior,”20 they join Spinoza in insisting that a body should be defined by and studied according to its affects qua what it can do, rather than “by its organs and functions” or “Species or Genus characteristics.”21

Fourthly, and finally for now, Deleuze and Guattari define affect as the kind of thinking done by art. In What is Philosophy?, they contend that whereas philosophy thinks by creating concepts, and science by inventing functions, art—including performance—thinks by creating affects, such as the vibrations, harmonies and dissonances of literary words, musical tones, or painterly colors.22 Whether or not we approve of this reintroduction of distinctions between art and philosophy (that seem so thoroughly undone elsewhere in their work), What is Philosophy? is of interest here insofar as it explicitly states that the role of artists is to stage affects as encounters that exceed “those who undergo them”; they must invent affective works that “make us become with them.”23 In turn, we can say that the work of the performer is not to represent emotion or to represent other bodies in the world, but to devise a procedure to extract the affects of bodies, to somehow reconstruct in performance the power of another body to pierce us like an arrow, force us to think, and enable us to act in new ways.

Affect & the Reality of Becoming-Animal: Philosophy Meets PerformanceIn the next section of this article, I focus on how our understanding of affect

is extended by Deleuze’s suggestion that affect is synonymous with what he calls “becoming” and, in particular, the implications of looking at “becoming-animal” as a type of affect. For Deleuze, becomings, including becomings-animal, (but also becoming-woman, becoming-minor, becoming-imperceptible) involve affects. Indeed, he says that affects are “becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them (thereby becoming someone else).”24 As is often repeated in the secondary literature, Deleuze and Guattari also insist that becoming does not involve a process of bare imitation, identification, or reproduction (of “animals”, or “women”). “Becoming is never imitating,” they argue; it is a creation of the new rather than a repetition of the same.25 In this sense, Deleuze’s philosophy of difference is “essentially anti-mimetic”; it is defined by its attempt to overturn Platonism—as the philosophical tradition associated with subordination of difference to identity and with the failure to conceive difference-in-itself as anything


but a mere deviation from the same.26 Here, then, the term “mimesis” (and indeed the term “mimicry”) tends to be associated with the Platonic demotion of imitation, as the production of an impoverished copy of a fixed and self-present original.27

In turn, Coates (who we know is aware of Deleuze and Guattari), has expressed an interest in the strategies artists might employ to “overcome mimicry” and enter becoming.28 Likewise, in a 1968 interview, Hijikata also emphasizes a distinction between imitation and becoming in relation to the animal. In the process of performing a Butoh dance work, Hijikata states

HIJIKATA: . . . I don’t merely imitate the animal. What I want are the movements an animal shows to a child, not the ones it shows to an adult. Take a dog, for instance. How it moves when playing with a child is totally unlike how it moves when playing with grown-ups like us. To get to that point you’ve got to become a single piece of bone.SHIBUSAWA: That’s a fundamental desire for transformation. HIJIKATA: That’s it. Besides, I’ve often had the experience of becoming other than myself.29

Rephrased, we might say that Hijikata’s creation of movement is explicitly caused by an affective encounter with a dog’s way of moving, rather than by treating the dog as an object of recognition (like the stereotypical picture I might conjure up when I want to pretend to be a dog). What is a dog? Hijikata replies: the dog is how it can move and, in particular, it is how it can move (differently) in connection with a child’s body. Hijikata then seems to ask: what do I need to do to “get to that point” where my body can do what the dog’s body can do; how do I “enter into composition” with the affects of the dog as it encounters the child? Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion is that affect might be achieved, and imitation avoided, by the inclusion of an “aggregate” in the encounter: a third body added to you and the dog.30 And perhaps for Hijikata it is the image of the body as “a single piece of bone” that serves this aggregate function—an image that, in its seeming impossibility, resists reproduction (I cannot really become a bone) and invites affective experiment (Can I enter into a becoming-dog if I use the image of my body as a bone as the stimulus for inventing movement?).

At the same time though, one could argue that any complete disassociation of becoming from imitation is somewhat misleading, both ontologically and from the perspective of performance practice. What is more important is that we note Deleuze and Guattari’s refusal of any being/mimesis opposition: “We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are.”31 In contrast to such dualism, they offer a thoroughly processual ontology in which self-sameness and

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difference might be construed as tendencies or different speeds of movement, rather than as two discrete and fixed states. As such, all actual activities—including performance—can be understood as varying mixtures of both tendencies, operating along a kind of continuum, with some tending further towards mimesis (at times) and others, like Hijikata’s and Coates’s here, tending towards becoming.32

In turn, in practice, this becoming-animal may well begin with some kind of imitation, albeit one that leaves neither imitator nor imitated untouched: “You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog.”33 The critique of imitation, in other words, concerns the imitation of the “molar” animal, namely: the dog defined as an organism or a fixed form viewed from a position of subjective detachment, rather than as a set of relations, a field of forces, or as a complex of powers to affect and be affected. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the artist will be affected and transformed by the encounter with the animal whether or not this is something that they intend; we cannot simply imitate or repeat even if we try. Affect reveals that the real qua ceaseless becomings is immanent to what appears as imitation: “Imitation self-destructs, since the imitator unknowingly enters into a becoming that conjugates with the unknowing becoming of that which he or she imitates.”34

Clearly, both Hijikata and Coates adopt imitation as a practical strategy, as the starting point for becoming-animal. For instance, in recalling his childhood, Hijikata writes:

Because this was the kind of boyhood I had, and because there was nothing else to play at, like a thief I studied the gestures and manners of the neighborhood aunties, my mom and dad, and of course all my other family members. Then I put them all inside my body. Take the neighbor’s dog, for instance. Fragmented within my body, its movements and actions became floating rafts. But sometimes these rafts get together and say something, there inside my body.35

The human body learns to move differently through an encounter with animal affects, the gestural relation of the dog to its world is stolen but clearly metamorphosed into something new, that is neither “dog” nor “boy” (indeed, Hijikata also links his dance practice to the experience of the wolf boy of Avignon, made famous by the 1969 film Truffaut, The Wild Child).36 By focusing on movement—as a key aspect of what a body can do—Hijikata’s imitation resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s position of the animal as a verb rather than a noun: “The wolf is not fundamentally a characteristic or a certain number of characteristics; it is a wolfing. The louse is a lousing, and so on.”37


So what can this equation of affect and becoming(-animal) add to exposition of Deleuzian affect we developed earlier? Well, I would argue that an exploration of becoming allows us to say at least two more key things about the ontology of affect. In the first instance, it enables us to emphasize that affect, qua becoming, is accorded ontological primacy in Deleuze. Becoming (or relationality) comes first and is not dependent upon a fixed identity or “thing” that becomes and likewise, then, affect has its own reality that comes prior to and produces affected bodies. Secondly, the equation of affect and becoming helps us to secure affect as an immanent, rather than transcendent phenomenon. That is, the idea of affect as an excess that goes beyond the subject and as an external projectile coming from the “outside” that we invoked above, (not to mention Massumi’s emphasis on “the autonomy of affect”), might mislead us into thinking that affect is somehow an otherworldly event. But understanding affect as becoming makes clear that this is not the case. Becoming is not product or goal oriented, constantly aiming to arrive at some imagined endpoint; rather, Deleuze and Guattari insist that “becoming produces nothing other than itself” or again, that “there is nothing outside of becoming to become.”38 Likewise, through the exposition of specific affects such as becoming-animal, it is evident that affect is accessible to thought and experience, albeit not to conscious thought or recognition.

And it is this ontological status of affect or becoming that allows Deleuze and Guattari to maintain that becoming-animal “does not occur in the imagination,” arguing instead that we would do better to question the reality of the “supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes.”39 Terms such as “human” and “animal” and the discrete categories of being such terms are understood to describe according to transcendent ways of thinking. They clarify that “If becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is [also] clear that the human being does not ‘really’ become an animal any more than the animal ‘really’ becomes something else.”40 But this is not to say that becoming-animal is metaphorical (as Marla Carlson has recently suggested).41 Rather, “What is real is the becoming itself . . . not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes.”42 Coates does not become “a bird” in any “molar” image of that animal, but there is, nevertheless, “a reality of becoming-animal,” in terms of the affective experiences of the bodies that express it.43 “Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies,” as they have been represented by psychoanalysis.44 Rather, becoming-animal is a real, affective experience of relationality which occurs within a “zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other.”45

In these ways, both the concepts of affect and becoming are central to Deleuze and Guattari’s responses to the mind-body problem; neither affect nor becoming involve dematerialized thought (as Peter Hallward might have us believe) or

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thoughtless materiality.46 As such, it is misleading to construe becoming-animal as does Carlson, as “a politically strategic mental operation, a way to imagine” alternative ways of being.47 Or again, it is less that “[b]ecoming-animal is a human being’s creative opportunity to think themselves other-than-in-identity,” as Steve Baker once suggested.48 At least, this is not the case if by “thinking” we mean something distinct and separate from affect or embodied change, or akin to some kind of representational “seeing as”—a key distinction that we must bear in mind as we move to the next section of this article that addresses affect in relation to perception, and specifically the temporality of perception.

Affect as Duration: Coates and the Relativity of Human PerceptionMight it be that we move furthest away from the pole of imitation and toward

affect, when we approach becoming-animal as a specifically durational process? In what follows, I want to explore this question by looking at the relation between affect and time (or duration), bearing in mind Henri Bergson’s argument that there is not only one time (one “Now”, or one present), but several—indeed, that there are as many presents as there are ways of living. From this perspective, the reality of affects such as becoming-animal is the reality of an encounter with the “co-existence of very different ‘durations,’” including nonhuman durations.49 Different animals have different ways of being in time which produce what lies above and below their threshold of perception. Or as Deleuze and Guattari put it: “Doubtless, thresholds of perception are relative; there is always a threshold capable of grasping what eludes another: the eagle’s eye . . . . ”50 Likewise, perhaps it is this same awareness of the relativity of human perception that motivated Hijikata to argue that humans should “learn to see things from the perspective of an animal, an insect, or even inanimate objects” in a manner that affirms a distinction between looking like an animal (to an outside observer), and trying to see the world from an animal point of view51.

And yet, the idea of Hijikata as concerned with the perspective and lived experience of animals may seem bizarre given the sacrifice of a live chicken that is said to have occurred in his infamous performance, Kinjiki (“Forbidden Colours”)—the first performance of Butoh, which took place in Tokyo in 1959. Loosely based on the novel by Mishima Yukio (1951) and on Hijikata’s readings of Jean Genet, Bruce Baird describes the basic plotline of Kinjiki as follows: “man meets boy, gives boy chicken, supervises boy killing chicken, sodomizes boy, someone comes back for the chicken.”52 And from Baird’s description, it seems that Hijikata was largely unconcerned with the welfare of the chicken in the performance—insofar as the boy (played by Yoshito Ohno) “scissored the chicken between his legs and sank to the ground suffocating it.”53 However, for Hijikata’s willingness to inflict suffering upon the bird in this performance, seems to run counter to the respectful attitude to the animal he articulates elsewhere. For instance, Hijikata wrote:


For days I slept holding a chicken and taking care not to eat it . . . I slept with the chicken the night before my performance with other new dancers. This chicken which laid an egg in the green room played a vital part in my initiation into love. . . . Over and over I apologized to the chicken I held while dancing.54

At the very least, here, Hijikata seems to demonstrate an awareness of the differences and tensions between his own aims and desires in relation to the performance and the experience of his nonhuman collaborator. The chicken may play a “vital part” in Hijikata’s desire to be initiated into a more respectful cohabitation of human and nonhuman animals, but what part did Hijikata play for the chicken? How can he experience the proximity of the human and nonhuman if he still has to “take care” not to see the chicken as meat rather than as a living, affected, and affecting body?

Fig. 2. Coates’s “Dawn Chorus” [view 3], Image Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery. “Dawn Chorus” is a multi-screen video installation showing nineteen human performers apparently imitating the sound of a chorus of birds singing to one another at dawn.

Arguably, then, Coates’s work goes further to foreground the relativity of human perception. In particular, Coates’s descriptions of the process of making his 2007 video installation Dawn Chorus, expose the key role that technology can play in both exposing the relative nature of human perception and in extending or expanding that perception. For instance, having set up an elaborate microphone network to record a dawn chorus in a Northumberland wood, Coates describes how

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he and his collaborator—the sound recorder Geoff Sample—“took the recording of bird songs back to the studio and slowed them down about 20 times.” Whereas, Coates notes, “a bird song at normal speed could contain 4 or 5 notes” (or we might say, better, could appear to contain 4 or 5 notes to a human listener), “slowed down it could reveal up to 40 notes offering a different level of complexity to the listener.”55 Thanks to a technological prosthesis, a moment of melody appears to contain ten times more internal differentiation; what a human ear can hear (the affects of the ear as a body) is extended or intensified.

However, for Coates, the key factor was that this deceleration also allowed the birdsong to “come into the pitch range of the human voice” and, in turn, for human performers—mostly amateur singers in local choirs—to mimic this slowed-down song.56 Critically though, this process of productive repetition or becoming began with a casting process based on seeking out what we might call (after Deleuze and Guattari) “zones of imperceptibility” between the human and bird performers; areas of affective overlap, that is, between what these human and nonhuman performing bodies can do. As Coates describes:

We . . . had to choose our singers according to the original range presented by the birds. So for a Robin we had to choose a young person that was able to go very high and very low. The robin really takes big breaths and does not breath for a long while so the person singing its song has to do the same.57

Having recorded the human performer singing, Coates then speeds up the film to what he calls “the original bird speed” with the result that “you get a very accurate human rendition of birdsong and coincidently bird like movements.”58 As much as this film produces a contagious picture of “becoming-animal,” what is also of interest is the “education of attention” that Coates’s project offered its participants as well as subsequent gallery viewers. For example, as Coates has discussed in interviews, each of the individual singers had to perform their song for “up to 2 hours (resulting in 8 minutes when sped up).” As Coates notes, “the concentration and endurance required for mimicking the bird sounds over this period meant the singers could not mentally sustain a conscious interpretation, it became very instinctive.”59 This altered encounter with time is a key element in an experience of a genuinely alternative, embodied point of view—albeit one that is an expanded human perspective rather than a bare repetition of what it is like to be a bird.

Conclusions: The Politics of Affect Since at least 2003, Una Chaudhuri has been developing an articulation of

“zooësis”—a term she coined, firstly, to designate a broad range of activities


undertaken in a variety of modes at the intersection of performance and animal studies.60 Chaudhuri states that, for her, zooësis “includes the myriad performative and semiotic elements involved in the vast range of cultural animal practices,” including both literary and dramatic representations of animals, performances by animals, and social practices involving animals. As such, plays like Edward Albee’s Zoo Story constitute zooësis, but so does “pet-keeping” and “meat-eating.”61 However, it soon becomes clear that Chaudhuri has a particular understanding of how such activities operate when she concludes that: “Comprising both our actual and imaginative interactions with non-human animals, zooësis is the discourse of animality in human life, and its effects permeate our social, psychological and material existence.”62 Activity has become discursive; zooësis may be anthropomorphic or proanimal, but it is always an “ideological discourse.” In this sense, a distinction between Chaudhuri’s and Deleuze’s approaches, between zooësis and becoming-animal, becomes apparent; that is, where Chaudhuri seems primarily concerned with “social construction and cultural meaning” and the role of animal practices in the production of discursive categories, Deleuze and Guattari affirm the nonhuman animal as that which permeates the human not only discursively, but affectively. But this should not be understood as some kind of naïve appeal to simple presence; the encounter between human and animal bodies is an instance of what I have described elsewhere as “differential presence.”63 That is, Deleuze’s position suggests that bodies (and what Chaudhuri calls “activities” or “practices”) participate in other forms of differentiation that are irreducible to discourse. Bodies are not just differentiated or changed by (and at the speed of) human discourses, but have their own processes of difference, namely affect.

Whether located in Deleuze, Hijikata or Coates, the political dimensions of becoming-animal lie in their resistance to an ontological distinction, and therefore to any hierarchy between human and nonhuman animals. Further, aspects of the work of both Hijikata and Coates acknowledge and respond to “the need to open ourselves affectively to the actuality of others”—and especially, to animal affects.64 As I have tried to show, two ways of performing this opening are: 1) to affirm the immanence of becoming to imitation, and 2) to explore affect as a durational or temporal relation. And yet, as we noted at the start, Deleuze’s thought does not have a straightforward relationship to animal affects. On the one hand, as John Protevi has argued, we could suggest that “Deleuze’s most basic philosophical instinct is against anthropomorphism” and against the subordination of the world to consciousness and common sense.65 In turn, with respect to animal suffering, Deleuze’s emphasis on affect invites us to break with the condescension of pity, in favor of “unnatural participations”: a “strictly affective” relation concerning not pity, but “forces, or degrees of motion and rest.”66

But on the other hand, we might remain suspicious as to how reciprocal

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becomings-animal really are, whether the affects of Hijikata’s becoming-animal would always take priority, for Deleuze and Guattari, over the chicken’s own affective experience (would it matter, for them, for instance, whether the chicken was killed or not?). And indeed, this is the critique that John Mullarkey has recently proposed, arguing that in a Deleuzian becoming-animal

what should be (at least) a two-sided process involving healthy, active becomings for all participants, invariably only profits the human . . . There seems little place for the animal’s own genuine “becomings” in the alter (animal)-side of a human becoming-animal. What of its or their “becoming-human”?67

How are we to prevent the experimental ethics of affect from becoming one that is indifferent to suffering, without going back to the reactive morality of ressentiment? Perhaps it is that becomings-animal through performance, particularly when they involve live animals, must be evaluated (rather than judged) according to the extent to which they increase or decrease the nonhuman animal’s power of acting as much as the human’s. That is, an ethico-political performance of becoming-animal must be one that empowers both nonhuman and human bodies to act at the limit of what they can do. We do need to open ourselves to the affects and durations of animals, but with the care and caution implied by the fact that we do not know what nonhuman bodies can do, nor how they can be affected by our experimental acts.

Notes

1. For discussions of performance in the light of Deleuze’s specific definition of affect, interested readers might look to Anthony Uhlmann, “Expression and Affect in Kleist, Beckett and Deleuze,” Deleuze and Performance, ed. Laura Cull (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) 54-70; Laura Cull, “How do you make yourself a theatre without organs?: Deleuze, Artaud and the concept of differential presence” Theatre Research International 34 (2009): 243–255; James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. Basingstoke (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2009). For discussions of “becoming-animal” in relation to theatre and performance, see David Williams, “Performing Animal, becoming animal,” Body Show: Australian Viewings of Live Performance, ed. Peta Tait (Amsterdam: Rodophi, 2000) 44-59; Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, “Becoming-Animate: On the Performed Limits of ‘Human.’” Theatre Journal 58 (2006): 649–668; Una Chaudhuri and Shonni Enelow, “Animalizing Performance, Becoming-Theatre: Inside Zooësis with The Animal Project at NYU” Theatre Topics 16 (2006): 1-17; Una Chaudhuri, “(De)Facing the Animals Zooësis and Performance” TDR 51 (2007): 8-20; Marla Carlson, “Furry Cartography: Performing Species” Theatre Journal 63 (2011): 191-208. In terms of practice-based research explicitly engaging with the concept of becoming-animal, one might cite The Salon of Becoming-Animal (2005) by Edwina Ashton and Steve Baker; The Animal Project (2004) initiated by Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl and Steven Druckman; and the work of the UK-based practitioner Paul Hurley, among others.

2. I am thinking here of the references in A Thousand Plateaus to Little Hans’ becoming-horse in response to the sight of a horse being beaten in the street, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos’s “fascination with a ‘people’ of dying rats.” Gilles Deleuze and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988) 240.


3. I use the term “animation” here to evoke Hijikata and indeed Ohno’s interest in the transfor-mation of the body in relation to so-called “inanimate” matter like stones or wind. We could also note both practitioners insistence on the lack of a fixed distinction between the living and the dead. Sondra Fraleigh, Butoh: Metaphoric Dance and Global Alchemy (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2010) 13.

4. Navel and A-Bomb was a collaboration between Hijikata and photographer Eikoh Hosoe. Ac-cording to Chris MaGee, “The film took its inspiration from a poem by Abstract Expressionist painter Taro Yamamoto and was shot on a beach at Cape Taitozaki near the town of Ohara in Chiba Prefecture. Hijikata choreographed Yoshito Ohno, four local fishermen, and six village boys in a modern spin on the Adam and Eve story. After the dancers are expelled from Eden by a nuclear explosion a chaotic spirit from the sea, played by Hijikata, threatens another apocalypse by stealing the forbidden fruit of a boy’s navel, the symbolic ‘pushing of the button’ that would herald World War 3.” Chris MaGee, “Criminal Dance: The Early Films of Butoh Master Tatsumi Hijikata,” Midnight Eye 2010, 9 Dec. 2011 <http://www.midnighteye.com/features/criminal-dance-the-early-films-of-Butoh-master-tatsumi-hijikata.shtml>.

5. Fraleigh, Butoh: Metaphoric Dance and Global Alchemy 55.6. Alastair J. Levy, “Marcus Coates at Whitechapel,” Artvehicle 20 (2007), 9 Dec. 2011 <http://

www.artvehicle.com/events/94>.7. Fraleigh, Butoh 13.8. 43.9. In her review of a 2010 show of the materials used in Coates’s shamanic performances at

the Kate McGarry gallery, Hannah Forbes Black begins by arguing, “The big question about Marcus Coates is: Are you kidding, or what?.” She goes on: “His performances . . . always have the appear-ance of sincerity. But it’s unclear if the straight face is for real, or part of the game.” Hannah Forbes Black, “Marcus Coates at Kate McGarry,” murmurART 2010, 9 Dec. 2011 <http://www.murmurart.com/dialogue/marcus-coates-at-kate-mcgarry>.

10. In contrast, Jonathan Griffin argues that the humor of works such as Coates’s Goshawk (1999) is the result of “the naivety of the desires they embody.” Jonathan Griffin, “Marcus Coates—Focus,” frieze magazine, Issue 108 Jun-Aug 2007, 9 Dec. 2001 <http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/focus_marcus_coates/>.

11. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 28; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 240. Emphasis added.

12. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 240.13. 400.14. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza, Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City

Lights Books,1988) 127.15. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994) 139;

Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Routledge, 1989) 78.16. Uhlmann, “Expression and Affect in Kleist, Beckett and Deleuze” 61. 17. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 256-7.18. Gilles Deleuze, “Transcripts on Spinoza’s concept of affect—Cours Vincennes—24/01/1978.”

Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze n.d., Web Deleuze, 9 Dec. 2011 <http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2>.

19. Deleuze, “Transcripts on Spinoza’s concept of affect—Cours Vincennes—24/01/1978.”20. James Fieser, “Ethics,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003, 9 Dec. 2011 <http://

www.utm.edu/research/iep/e/ethics.htm>.21. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 257.22. Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh

Tomlinson (New York: Verso, 1994) 164.23. 175.24. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1995) 137.25. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 305.26. Ronald Bogue, “Word, Image and Sound: The Non-Representational Semiotics of Gilles

Deleuze,” Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Volume 2: Mimesis, Semiosis and Power, ed. Ronald Bogue (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991) 77.

27. Here though, Deleuze and Guattari seem to equate mimesis, mimicry [mimétisme], reproduc-tion and imitation in ways that are likely to jar for Theatre and Performance Studies scholars familiar with the important work that has subsequently been done by scholars such as Elin Diamond and Homi Bhabha, who particularly emphasise a distinction between mimesis and mimicry. See Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997) and Homi Bhabha,

Spring 2012 15

The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) 85-92.28. Marcus Coates, qtd. in Giovanni Aloi, “Marcus Coates—Becoming Animal” Antennae 4

(2007): 19. 29. Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, and Tatsumi Hijikata, “Hijikata Tatsumi: Plucking off

the Darkness of the Flesh” TDR 44 (2000): 53-4. 30. We are reminded of the shoes that Vladimir Slepian’s character puts on his hands or the

iron that the performer Lolito chews in their effort to encounter dog affects in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 258-9, 274.

31. 238.32. John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (New York: Continuum 2006) 23.33. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 275.34. 304-5.35. Tatsumi Hijikata and Nanako Kurihara, “Wind Daruma” TDR 44 (2000): 76.36. “HIJIKATA: . . . I think I’ve always been mad about implements. I love it when a human being

almost becomes a thing or part of a human completely turns into a thing, for example, an artificial leg. My intuition tells me that the wolf boy was the same.” Shibusawa and Hijikata, “Hijikata Tatsumi” 53-4.

37. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 239. 38. 238; John Mullarkey, “Animals Spirits: Philosomorphism and the Background Revolts of

Cinema” Angelaki (forthcoming 2012): n.p.39. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 238.40. 238.41. Marla Carlson, “Furry Cartography: Performing Species” Theatre Journal 63.2 (2011):

191-208. 42. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 238.43. 273.44. 283.45. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 109. 46. See Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London/

New York: Verso, 2006).47. Carlson, “Furry Cartography” 206. Emphasis added. 48. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000) 125.49. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 238.50. 280.51. Hijikata in Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins, Women’s Intercultural Performance (New

York/London: Routledge, 2000) 138.52. Bruce Baird, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 23. 53. 20.54. Hijikata, Tatsumi. “Inner Material/Material,” TDR 44 (2000): 39.55. Coates quoted in Aloi, “Marcus Coates—Becoming Animal” 20.56. In the same way, the composer Olivier Messiaen found it necessary to “transcribe the bird’s

song in a slower tempo if it is to be played at all.” See Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) 29.

57. Coates quoted in Aloi, “Marcus Coates—Becoming Animal” 20.58. Coates quoted in Giovanni Aloi, “In Conversation with Marcus Coates.” Antennae 4 (2007): 33.59. 34.60. Una Chaudhuri, “Animal Geographies: Zooësis and the Space of Modern Drama,” Perform-

ing Nature: explorations in ecology and the arts. Ed. Gabriella Giannachi and Nigel Stewart (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005) 103.

61. 104.62. 104. Emphasis original.63. Laura Cull, “How do you make yourself a theatre without organs?: Deleuze, Artaud and the

concept of differential presence,” Theatre Research International 34 (2009): 243–255.64. John Mullarkey, “Forget the virtual: Bergson, actualism and the refraction of reality,” Con-

tinental Philosophy Review 37 (2004): 488.65. John Protevi, A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 2005) 132.66. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 240; John Mullarkey, “Animals Spirits” n.p.67. John Mullarkey, “Animals Spirits” n.p.

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