As embodied minds; reenchantment of the world

In her book: The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (2008) Fischer-Lichte concludes that the performance as event achieves a certain “reenchantment of the world”⁶¹, by transforming its participants and enabling them to act as embodied minds. It is through the performers’ presence that the spectators are able to experience themselves and the performers as embodied minds in a constant process of becoming. But Fischer-Lichte is not giving explicit examples of what she means by reenchantment, besides pointing to how a performative aesthetics marks the limits of the Enlightenment’s disenchantment and reliance on binary oppositions to describe the world. Instead she suggests a “new” enlightenment by pointing to a collapse of these binaries from an either/or to an “as well as” where participants are able to experience a

“threshold space,” a threshold where participants are both experiencing themselves and others, actors and spectators, bodies and minds as particularly present embodied minds that seem to invite such a passage for crossovers as transformation. Fischer-Lichte argues, “When spectators sense the performers’ presence and simultaneously bring themselves forth as embodied minds, they experience a moment of happiness which cannot be recreated in daily life. (…) Presence does not make something extraordinary appear. Instead, it marks the emergence of something very ordinary and develops it into an event: the nature of man as embodied mind. To experience the other and oneself as present means to experience them as embodied minds; thus, ordinary existence is experienced as extraordinary – as transformed and even transfigured” (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 99).

Reenchantment as “art of passage”: from borders to threshold spaces

Fischer-Lichte reflects on the qualities of enchantment as threshold spaces of the

61 Original in German: die Wiederverzauberung der Welt

possible, thresholds that rather seem to invite crossovers, instead of borders that seek to prevent one from crossing. She states: “While borders are thought of as partitionary lines which include something and exclude the rest, the threshold is imagined as a liminal space in which anything is possible. While borders create clear divisions, thresholds mark a space of possibilities,

empowerment and metamorphosis” (ibid: 205). Fischer-Lichte further explains how (re)enchantment is like an “art of passage” that allows for a deeper experience of being in the world and also of becoming newly conscious of that being or becoming in the world: “When I claimed that the aesthetics of the performative aims at a border-crossing art, this means that it transforms borders into thresholds. The aesthetics of the performative allows for an art of passage” (ibid: 205).

If we project this to co-design, it could relate to how a civil servant or a private service provider could experience themselves as “reenchanted”, due to a process exploring different threshold grades or alternative versions of rehearsing and performing as a civil servant, or a service provider offering new services and therefore transformed service relations. The threshold space allows them to explore different version (from Schechner’s ‘me’ to ‘not-not me’ to ‘not me’

and back again) or between her ordinary civil servant role, herself and towards a slightly altered position of a new civil servant position. The reenchantment could be an experience where the civil servant realises that she is able to engage as a civil servant in other modes or positions than she might have been performing in the past. She is not going to cross a border to become a ‘new’

civil servant, but rather can explore a threshold space transitioning and transforming her practices and relations.

Fischer-Lichte explains the human condition of thresholds as an art of passage:

“Humans require the sense of thresholds in the act of distancing themselves from themselves.

Humans must cross thresholds to (re)turn to themselves as another. As living organisms endowed with a consciousness, as embodied minds, they can become themselves only by permanently bringing themselves forth anew, constantly transforming themselves and continuing to cross thresholds. Performance allows or forces them to do so. In a way, performance can be thought of both as life itself and as its model. It is life itself because it takes up the real time of the

participants’ lives and offers them the possibility to constantly bring themselves forth anew. It is life’s model because these processes occur with a particular intensity and conspicuousness that focuses the participants’ attention. Our lives are given appearance in performance – they become present and past” (ibid: 205).

Reenchantment and defamiliarization

In introducing Fischer-Lichte’s book: The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, Marvin Carlson points to how Fischer-Lichte´s basic concept of enchantment has some similarities with the Russian theorist and writer, Victor Schklovsky’s concepts of defamiliarization

and renowned definition of ‘art as technique’: “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important” (Schklovsky, quoted by Carlson in Fischer-Lichte 2008: 7).

One fundamental difference is that Schklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization related to art objects (art as work/works of art), whereas Fischer-Lichte’s reenchantment addresses art as events. The difference between relating sensuousness to an object with fresh eyes or relating to a situation/event in which we have an experience which causes us to gain a new, refreshed comprehension of our own situation of being in the world, is very different, like the difference between traditional aesthetics and a new performative and transformative aesthetics. Schklovsky’s concepts of defamiliarization relate to our semiotic or ‘intellectual’ understating of “having-a-body” and with refreshed eyes “sensing” an object. Fischer-Lichte’s concepts of reenchantment address the relations of both our phenomenological “being-a-body” and semiotically “having-a-body” which appeal to our whole embodied minds. If Fischer-Lichte’s reenchantment were to be more closely related to defamiliarization, the focus should be changed from artfulness to

“lifefulness,” not as dichotomies but as two sides of the same coin or in-between the Möbius strip. Viewing Fischer-Lichte´s reenchantments in this light one could suggest a reinstatement of Schklovsky’s explanations of defamiliarization and instead suggest that performance is a way of experiencing the lifefulness of ‘art as event’; the art (event) is not important.

Reenchantment and Utopian Performatives

Carlson also points to a more current relationship between Fischer-Lichte’s description of reenchantment and Jill Dolan’s term Utopian Performatives. Carlson is here citing Dolan (2005):

“Utopian performatives is the term Dolan applies to those “small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense.

These “small but profound moments” are clearly the moments that Fischer-Lichte would call moments of enchantment, resulting in a sudden deeper insight into the shared process of being in the world” (Carlson in Fischer-Lichte 2008: 9).

Jill Dolan adapts her term Utopian Performatives from linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin’s notion of the performative, where ‘a performative’ like a performance itself becomes a ‘doing’. That in its enunciation acts and performs an action as tangible and as effective as the marrying couple’s exclamation “I do” in Austin’s famous example of a wedding ceremony. Dolan’s utopian

performatives propose in ‘their doing’: a making tangible and palpable, an affective vision of how the world might become better (Dolan 2005: 5-6). Dolan traces the sense of visceral and social connection that we experience as Erlebnis like Fischer-Lichte’s moments of reenchantment of the world, social connections that allow us to feel for a moment not what a better world might look like, but what it might feel like, and how that hopeful utopic sentiment might become a motivation for social change. Fischer-Lichte also addresses Austin’s performatives when tracing the aesthetics of the performative.

“The aesthetics of the performative, however, concerns itself with the appearances of people and things, not with illusion; it concerns itself with the ephemerality of their appearance and not with life’s transience. It identifies performances not as the allegory and image of human life but both as human life in itself and simultaneously as its model. The lives of all participants are entwined in performance, not just metaphorically but in actual fact. Art could hardly get more deeply involved with life or approximate it more closely than in performance. The reenchantment of the world is accomplished through this linkage of art and life, which is the aim of the aesthetics of the performative” (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 205-206).

Reenchantment as PRESENCE

A central part of Fischer-Lichte’s concept of reenchantment is her investigation into the reciprocity of bodily co-presence of audience and performers, their experiences of presence. This phenomenon has been described by many researchers, for instance Auslander’s liveness (1999) and Sauter’s eventness (2008). Fischer-Lichte distinguishes between different grades of presence. A weak concept of presence as “the type of presentness given by the sheer presence of the actor's phenomenal body” (2008: 94), a strong concept of presence based on “the actor's ability of commanding space and holding attention” (ibid: 96) and a radical concept of presence (PRESENCE), when “the spectator experiences the performer and himself as embodied mind in the constant process of becoming – he perceives the circulating energy as a transformative and vital energy” (ibid: 99)

It is especially the radical concept of PRESENCE that describes the intense sensation of transformation of how the extraordinary enchantment emerges from the ordinary perception of the world.

Fischer-Lichte exemplifies reenchantment with John Cage’s silent piece entitled 4’33”, where a 4 minutes and 33 seconds-long “concert” of “silence” was enacted in an orchestra hall filled with an audience62. The ordinary “silence” thus became extraordinary and (some of the audience/the “composer” himself) started to notice the accidental noises such as the sounds of

62 A description of Cage’s Silent Piece entitled 4’33 is found in the footnote (⁶⁰) in section 2.2.2.1

the wind, rain and fellow audience members. The act of the musician not playing the piano created a certain intense presence

Fischer-Lichte leans on Lehman’s definition of presence: “‘Presence is an “untimely”

process of consciousness – located simultaneously within and without the passage of time’

(Lehmann 1999: 13). I agree with the definition of presence as a process of consciousness – but one insofar as it is articulated through the body and sensed by the spectators through their bodies.

For, in my view, presence is to be regarded as a phenomenon that cannot be grasped by such a dichotomy as body versus mind or consciousness. In fact, presence collapses such a dichotomy”

(Fischer-Lichte in Giannachi et al. 2012: 115).

Fischer-Lichte explains the radical concept of PRESENCE as: “When the actor brings forth his body as an energetic body and thus generates presence, he appears and is perceived as embodied mind. The actor exemplifies that body and mind cannot be separated from each other.

Each is always already implied in the other. (…) Through the performer’s presence, the spectator experiences the performer and himself as embodied mind in a constant process of becoming – he perceives the circulating energy as a transformative and vital energy. This I call the radical concept of presence, written as PRESENCE: PRESENCE means appearing and being perceived as embodied mind; perceiving the PRESENCE of another means to also experience oneself as embodied mind” (ibid: 115).

Fischer-Lichte describes an affect of PRESENCE as the experience of an event like when we perceive ourselves as embodied minds: “Presence does not make something

extraordinary appear. Instead, it marks the emergence of something very ordinary and develops it into an event: the nature of man as embodied mind. To experience the other and oneself as present means to experience them as embodied minds; thus, ordinary existence is experienced as extraordinary – as transformed and even transfigured. (…) The philosopher Arthur Danto explains art as the 'transfiguration of the commonplace' (Danto 1981). In PRESENCE, the human commonplace of being embodied mind is transfigured. In perceiving it, we experience ourselves as embodied mind” (ibid: 115).