Taking inspiration from dance and its place in the work of Giorgio Agamben and other contemporary theorists, I present a reformulation of familiar sites of politics such as parliaments, social movements, and bureaucratic procedures as dance in my paper. The aim of these analyses is to elucidate how the process of dance potentially clarifies the scope and meaning of politics in general, and to spur further discussion on how the dynamics of dance connects to the specific thematic of biopolitics as elaborated by Agamben and others.
Aligned with an Arendtian conception of politics as pure process (praxis), dance can be argued to coincide with this definition of the political - dance is a process that leaves no ‘work’ behind. Starting from this puzzling similarity between dance and Arendtian politics, I further explore how dance figures as one of Giorgio Agamben’s many examples of modes of action where the potentiality not-to-be survives in the act itself. The conventional function of movement – the journey from A to B – is, in Agamben’s terms, ‘rendered inoperative’ in the process of dance. At first glance, then, dance seems to correspond to a praxis-oriented definition of politics; dance is a process where the ‘product’ is embedded.
Elaborating on Agamben’s thoughts on dance, I introduce the argument that although dance may manifest a process where the end is embedded, dance is itself often controlled by the external forces of choreographic design or other types of movement convention. Further arguing that the interplay between predetermination (choreography) and spontaneity (improvisation) are central characteristics of dance, I ‘test’ whether or how the tension between the two may be applied in the context politics. For example, a re-description of the Serbian anti-Milošević movement Otpor! as a certain type of choreography interwoven with improvisatory tactics will help explicate precisely how politics can be argued to ‘dance’. How choreographies arise and establish orders, how improvisatory modes of action try to flee or open up these orders, and how these two modes connect with each other are core questions animating my inquiry. On the other hand, the interplay between choreography and improvisation may itself be conditioned by other elements. Do for example the contexts or formats of dance such as stage, performance, ritual, social gathering or jam session relocate, disperse or amplify the ‘technologies’ at work in the interplay between choreography and improvisation? And if dance is itself a paradigmatic case of politics, how are these issues present in the analysed cases? These are questions addressed in my paper.
The objective of my doctoral dissertation, of which the above mentioned analysis of traditional politics forms a part, is both to clarify the scope and meaning of politics by analysing its proximity to dance, and to reconsider some of the standard ways of viewing the relation between art and politics. The purpose of this paper in turn is to further stimulate discussion on whether dance may or may not be connected to the problematic of biopolitics.
