History of the Human Sciences

24(4) 97–112
Archaeological ª The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
choreographic sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0952695111412446

practices: Foucault hhs.sagepub.com

and Forsythe

Mark Franko
University of California Santa Cruz, USA

Abstract
Although Michel Foucault never wrote of dance as an example of a bodily discipline in the
classical age, he did affect the art of contemporary ballet through his influence on the
work of William Forsythe. This article interprets Foucault’s influence on Forsythe up
until the early 1990s and also examines how Forsythe’s choreography ‘responded’ to
issues of agency, inscription and discipline that characterize Foucault’s thought on
corporeality. Ultimately, it asks whether Forsythe’s use of Foucauldian theory leads to a
reinterpretation of inscription in Foucault.

Keywords
ballet, choreography, discipline, document, William Forsythe, improvisation, inscription

The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body
was born . . . (Foucault, 1979a: 137–8)

I
The notion of discipline in Foucault, as is well known, extends from the techniques of
physical training in activities such as writing to the human sciences as institutionalized
disciplinary spaces inhabited by discourses. Foucault defines discipline as ‘a relation of

Corresponding author:
Professor Mark Franko, Theater Arts Department, Theater Arts Center, University of California Santa Cruz,
1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA
Email: markfranko@earthlink.net
98 History of the Human Sciences 24(4)

docility–utility’ imposed on the body’s forces (Foucault, 1979a: 137). When harnessed
to knowledge the body’s forces engender a discipline. Despite myriad existing
disciplines the ‘historical moment of the disciplines’ in the classical age is contempora-
neous for Foucault with the birth of an ‘art of the human body’, which gains thereby an
important symbolic value. This art is never named.
I discuss Foucault and dance in this article, and more specifically Foucault’s influence
on the contemporary American ballet choreographer William Forsythe who has been
working in Germany for the last three decades, first with Ballet Frankfurt (1984–
2004), and now with the Forsythe Company, based in Dresden. Forsythe has been since
the 1980s a serious reader of Foucault, and his body of choreographic work, as German
dance critic Gerald Siegmund has pointed out, is a ‘productive argument’ (ein Ausein-
dersetzung) with dance history (Siegmund, 2004: 33).
What can Foucault’s influence on Forsythe tell us about Foucault’s relation (or
absence of relation) to a body that performs? How, in other terms, has Foucault’s thought
been adaptable to choreographic practice? And what can Forsythe’s choreographic
practice and the theory of that practice tell us about Foucault’s virtual silence relative
to choreography? To think Foucault through Forsythe is neither to see Forsythe as the
dutiful illustrator of Foucault’s thought in performative terms, nor to imagine what
Foucault might have done had he choreographed himself. Instead, it is to read the
choreographic discourse into the theoretical one and vice versa.
Historically, ballet is (a) discipline in the sense Foucault intended when he linked the
advent of disciplines in the 18th century to the birth of an ‘art of the body’ (Hammond,
2007). Ballet is a field of knowledge existent since the 17th century (connaissance), a
technique that is still evolving today (savoir), and an embodied practice that shapes the
subject both by imposing operational laws of movement and enabling the corporeal dis-
play of meaning. Ballet is, in other terms, both a discourse and a discursive formation.
Discourse, from the archaeological perspective, is something done: it is fundamentally
performative. Although discourse is manifested in statements, Foucault does not under-
stand discourse as language from any traditional perspective, e.g. envelope of meaning,
instrument of expression, etc. Like gesture, discourse for Foucault is a positivity.
Forsythe has the disciplinary aspect of ballet to consist in the dancer’s relation to the
choreographer. He has integrated commentary on and resistance to this disciplinarity in
his work as early as Gänge (1983), in which his dancers described in words what they
were doing on stage (Siegmund, 2004: 15), and he has sensibly extended this research
into the area of movement generation by dancers through improvisation. Yet, beyond
this, Forsythe has worked with and through the principles and ‘axioms’ of ballet; that
is, he accepts the disciplinary status of ballet. ‘I see ballet’, Forsythe said, ‘as a point
of departure – it’s a body of knowledge, not an ideology’ (Sulcas, 1995: 9).1 Hence,
ballet practised with historical self-consciousness offers the dual prospect of contracting
and expanding the dancer’s autonomy as an artist and a human being. Dance in the
classical western context gives new life and meaning to the Foucauldian term discipline.
Ballet, indeed, is that art of the body whose historical advent in the classical age is a
model for all the others, and which Foucault passes over in silence.
Foucault often describes the effects of discipline in terms of inscription. The body is
the sign of duress under which most cultural transactions take place:
Franko 99

But the body is directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold
upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform
ceremonies, to emit signs. (Foucault, 1979a: 25)

For Foucault, power inscribes its effects on the body, and for dance scholars
influenced by Foucault, choreography (and, to a lesser degree, technique) is the proto-
type of that inscription. Forsythe’s innovative uses of improvisation in the light of ballet
technique and the choreographic repertory take Foucault’s vision of inscription into
account (I explain how later) while not entirely accepting it: ‘The purpose of improvisa-
tion is to defeat choreography, to get back to what is primarily dancing. I consider
choreography to be a secondary result of dancing’ (Forsythe and Kaiser, 1999: 14). Part
of this effort on Forsythe’s part was to counteract the very authority of the choreogra-
pher, which he re-envisioned as curating the dancer’s collaborative freedom on stage.
‘Choreography’, said Forsythe, ‘should serve as a channel for the desire to dance.’2 This
desire, although still marked by technical training, is not clearly the result of power
relations and hence does not present the dancer’s body as a table of the law.
The term ‘inscription’, in addition to its compulsory aspect that should be resisted,
introduces a complex set of parallels between writing, language and movement,
which have been quite productive for Forsythe who sees ballet in general as an art of
geometrical inscription. Forsythe’s interest in extending techniques of inscription
beyond the place at which they become objects of examination to a place where they
constitute a model for thinking makes his exploration of the ballet tradition ultimately
quite un-Foucauldian.3 The concept of inscription is, nevertheless, one that links writing
to other forms of visibility such as drawing. The tracing or drawing of lines with the body
in space is what links the classical dance tradition to writing and, more particularly, to
the letter or written character as a motif of the danced figure (Franko, 1993).
Ballet has a long and intricate relation to text understood both as choreography (the
writing of the dance), the extension of writing into three-dimensional space, and the idea
of the codex that underlies the discipline of classical movement. The connection of dance
to power also leads to the figure of inscription. The spectacle of dance – in 17th-century
court ballet – wed physical training to the display of state power (Franko, 1993; Franko,
2000: 35–51). Hence inscription is at least as important a critical and historical concept
as discipline in the classical ballet tradition. Inscription, however, has proven to be a con-
troversial term in Foucault, and Forsythe’s use of it, as already indicated, contains a
dimension implicitly critical of Foucault.
One instance in which Foucault speaks of the performing body conjoins perceptions
of discipline and inscription. In Discipline and Punish Foucault establishes a choreo-
graphic framework for the description of writing as an act of inscription where the
‘correlation of the body and the gesture’ is paramount (Foucault, 1979a: 152). In the act
of writing, ‘[D]isciplinary control does not consist simply in teaching or imposing a
series of particular gestures; it imposes the best relation between a gesture and the overall
position of the body, which is its condition of efficiency and speed’ (ibid.: 152). With the
act of writing ‘a well-disciplined body forms the operational context of the slightest
gesture’ (ibid.: 152). This analysis of the act of writing provides insight into dance where
the body itself is the disciplinary subject, and its gesture the apparatus of production, an
100 History of the Human Sciences 24(4)

idea that is already implicit in the relationship Foucault evokes between the body and
its gesture as definitive for a ‘well-disciplined body’ in the act of writing.4 The body
is gesture’s host, as it were, so that an art of the body would require a stabilizing
platform or stage for gesture’s emergence. The figure–ground concept that emerges
from Foucault’s account of writing as a physical discipline is entirely in line with the
system of classical ballet aesthetics in which every gesture and movement is measured
against a vertical and balanced posture. Georges Vigarello has studied the verticality
of the human posture in the western tradition through the notion of training or
‘dressage’ in historical context. ‘The body is the first space in which social and
psychological limits are imposed on conduct. It is the emblem where culture
inscribes or emblazons its signs’ (Vigarello, 1978: 9; my translation). It is clear
in Vigarello that what is given to be seen in and on the body as the law is both the
result of a training process in which the body’s actions are stylized and a visual
reminder of how to interpret that stylization. But, for Vigarello, this ‘trained’ body
not merely is one example of a disciplinary process that imposes docility and
utlility, but also, and more importantly, links aesthetics to an ethics.
Attentive to actual historical physical techniques of movement as they relate to the
vertical posture, Vigarello’s work provides a causeway toward Forsythe’s ethical
concerns. Forsythe’s ‘area of research’ is ‘the organization of the human body as an art
form’ – the positivity of that particular form of knowledge as the organization of the
body and of bodies: technique and choreography (Foucault, 1979a: 137; Siegmund,
2004: 29). To explore the body of knowledge that is ballet, Forsythe chose to work with
dancers who were/are ballet-trained: they are the most complete specimens of what
Foucault might call ‘political anatomy’ (Foucault, 1979a: 28). ‘I analyze what they know
about space and their bodies from their intensive ballet training’, explains Forsythe in
discussing the CD ROM Improvisation Technologies.5 ‘I’ve realized that in essence
ballet dancers are taught to match lines and forms in space’ (Forsythe and Kaiser,
1999: 64). The system of Forsythe’s improvisation technologies ‘is basically a manipu-
lation of their [the dancers’] existent knowledge’ which is ‘thinking in circles and lines
and planes and points’ (Forsythe, 1999: 18). This is precisely the starting point for
Forsythe’s improvisation technologies: ‘It’s saying you can use these ideas of geometric
inscription just as rigorously all over the room and all over your body. Normally you do
circles with your legs and arms – so maybe now you do circles with your shoulder etc.
. . . ’ (ibid.). Forsythe is not concerned with inscription on the body, but with inscription
of the body in space. As these skilled ballet dancers are subjects of self-knowledge rea-
lized in/as the technology of disciplined movement, they are also Foucauldian subjects in
the most fraught sense. That is, their knowledge is inscribed in their bodies, yet they are
also led to take their own bodies as objects of transformable knowledge and language as
material for different arrangements of corporeality. This is properly the (new) role of the
choreographer, and the new shape of choreography. Forsythe’s curation of the dancer’s
body takes that body out of the carceral condition of discipline and into a culturally gen-
erative field of creative activity. While discipline remains at the base of this activity, dis-
cipline itself can no longer be regarded as, in Foucault’s terms, ‘the specific techniques
of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of exercise’
(Foucault, 1979a: 170).
Franko 101

Since Discipline and Punish, when the body and power became Foucault’s central
focuses, thinking on Foucault and the body has centered perhaps excessively on issues
of inscription. As Judith Butler has written of Foucault: ‘The prohibitive law is not taken
into the body, internalized or incorporated, but rather is written on the body, the structur-
ing principle of its very shape, style, and exterior signification’ (Butler, 1989: 605).6 This
idea of writing on the body’s surface in order to engender a style of movement and of
being has tended to dominate the way we read Foucault on embodiment – the problem
of discipline and agency. It seems a given, in fact, that the discipline of ballet ‘produces
subjected and practiced bodies, ‘‘docile’’ bodies’ (Foucault, 1979a: 138).7 It is thus
helpful to distance ourselves from the mesmerizing issue of discipline and focus initially
on archaeology as the concept which initially drew Forsythe’s attention to Foucault.
In this article I examine Forsythe’s relation to the disciplinary heritage of the ballet
tradition, and the inspiration Forsythe drew from Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge.
I also look at Foucault’s brief treatment of dance in a 1966 radio talk – ‘Le corps utopi-
que’ – and discuss how a rereading of corporeal inscription in Foucault may be possible
on the basis of what Forsythe’s practice tells us about it.

II
Forsythe’s relation to the history of ballet, as Gerald Siegmund has pointed out, is a
genealogical one.8 In the 1980s, Forsythe became inspired by Foucault’s critique of the
document in The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault, 1972). Part of the Introduction
(ibid.: 3–15) could be found for some time on the Ballet Frankfurt website. It becomes
clear in The Archaeology of Knowledge that the thesis of historical discontinuity and the
critique of the historical document as a repository of unified intention is also an
anti-phenomenological critique of the unified subject (Ness, 2011). The document is
an early figure of knowledge in Foucault. Forsythe’s interest in Foucault’s critique of the
document in the historical discipline reveals the (dis)continuity of the subject to be a
central concern of Forsythe’s choreography.
In the Introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault states that traditional
or total history memorizes documents as monuments of the past whereas general history
or genealogy ‘transforms documents into monuments’.9 The spatializing metaphor for
the document – the document as monument – opens onto the notion of dispersion
(Lemert and Gillan, 1982: 59). Dispersion in The Archaeology of Knowledge is another
term for the spatialization of discourses, and monumentality attributes materiality and
space/time to documents, which also exist themselves in material dispersion. These ideas
resonated with Forsythe in the 1980s and early 1990s as he was attempting to radically
reconfigure the most disciplinary movement codex of the West: classical ballet. In
discussing classical traditions of movement, Sally Ness notes: ‘a dancer’s body appears
as something very much like a living monument to a given technical ‘‘discourse’’’ (Ness,
2008: 22). Forsythe mobilizes these procedures, however, against themselves,
introducing the dancer’s tactical decision-making process into the execution of
movement and the creation of choreography. Ballet is a discipline unrecognized by the
human sciences, and perhaps the discipline as an art of the body par excellence, and also
as a discursive practice whose ‘scientific’ principles were first developed in the late 16th
102 History of the Human Sciences 24(4)

century and significantly elaborated in the 17th and 18th centuries.10 The body of the
Forsythe dancer obeys, reanimates, reinflects, and ultimately rewrites this codex.
Forsythe aimed to reintroduce discontinuity into both technical performance and choreo-
graphy, exactly those qualities which Foucault reintroduced into historiography, mindful
as was Foucault that ‘[D]iscontinuity was the stigma of temporal dislocation that it was
the historian’s task to remove from history’ (Foucault, 1972: 8). Forsythe was received in
the USA in the 1980s as a destroyer of ballet just as traditional historians in the USA
vehemently rejected Foucault in the early 1970s as having compromised the discipline
of history, which contributed to the claim that he was a structuralist (Franko, 2011a). For
Forsythe, it is a question of the willful dispersion of what, on the one hand, is called
ballet ‘technique’, and of what, on the other hand, was considered proper syntax
and spatialization in the ballet idiom. This dispersion is accomplished through a
concerted analysis of ballet rather than through a rejection of or disregard for its axioms.
But, the analysis is conducted as a kind of archaeology.

III
To man’s experience a body has been given, a body which is his body – a fragment of
ambiguous space . . . (Foucault, 1973: 314)

Toward the end of The Archaeology of Knowledge Michel Foucault asks whether
archaeology can, or should, be applied to the sciences alone, and he ventures a few
comments on painting in relation to archaeology. He offers the following proposal: the
positivity of art might be thought to inhere in ‘the very gestures of the painter’ (Foucault,
1972: 194). The body’s movement in the act of painting, unlike the static image pro-
duced on a flat surface of which that movement is the result, constitutes the positivity
of art.11 This movement is the ‘place’ where the practice(s) of art exist(s) as both subject
and object of knowledge. Yet, this relationship is an uncertain one. As positivity arises
on the basis of human finitude – Foucault describes the body, desire and language as ‘the
positive forms in which man can learn that he is finite’ (Foucault, 1973: 314) – art is one
of the forms finitude takes.12 Or, rather, the process of making art itself is a practice
whereas its outcome may be considered a document. Foucault suggests that painting
is a discursive practice ‘that is embodied [qui prend corps] in techniques and effects’
(Foucault, 1972: 194).13 Positivity brings corporeality (embodiment) and knowledge
(savoir) into alignment. This discussion of the painter’s gesture recalls Merleau-Ponty’s
treatment of the painter’s body in L’oeil et l’esprit. ‘In lending his body to the world the
painter is able to change the world into painting [C’est en prêtant son corps au monde
que le peintre change le monde en peinture]’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 16; my translation).
The exchange between movement and vision Merleau-Ponty locates in the act of paint-
ing assumes a creative agency that is foreign to Foucault’s account of inscription
(Soussloff, 2009).
To perform discursive practice is to exercise the techniques and effects of a savoir,
which is in actuality a savoir faire, a knowing how to do, or a technique.14 The discourse
of techne is manifested in/as gesture.15 Techniques and effects are the ground of what
Foucault calls ‘practice’. The gestures producing art (painting or dance) embody
Franko 103

discursive practice as ‘techniques and effects’. Embodiment is apprehended here as the

performance of a discursive practice with and through the body rather than as the
effect of that discourse’s inscription on the same body. Foucault’s discussion of art
may offer an alternative to inscription as the only possible relation of the body to
knowledge.
Foucault described some dynamic aspects of corporeality in phenomenological terms
in a radio talk broadcast by France Culture in 1966, ‘Le corps utopique’.16 The text of
this talk is unusual in that Foucault treats embodiment as a phenomenon rather than
as an effect of discipline. His oral rather than written performance suggests the influence
of both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It is also the only text in which Foucault comments (if
only once) directly on dance. ‘Le corps utopique’ explores alternative scenarios of the
personal experience of bodyliness. The entire talk is, in fact, a meditation on the body
as a medium of movement in relation to desire as a transcendence of place (lieu) to which
our bodies condemn us. Foucault calls the body at first a ‘topie impitoyable’ (pitiless
topos). The body is in a place determined by my consciousness, and therefore condemns
me to be irremediably co-located with it. ‘My body is the place without respite to which
I am condemned [c’est le lieu sans recours auquel je suis condamne´] ’ (Foucault, 2009:
10). The strongest images of such incarceration as an existential condition are the mirror
(Foucault spends much of the essay observing the effects of self-observation) and the
cadaver in which the body is inert and hence also wholly visible. Foucault’s use of the
evidence of corporeality as captured in the mirror has the effect of making his own body
the object of the other’s gaze. The body is always there where I find myself, and is
therefore ‘the opposite of a utopia’ (ibid.: 9). In fact, the most persistent utopia is that
of a ‘corps incorporel [disembodied body]’ (ibid.: 10). My body cannot travel without
me and I cannot travel without it: ‘It is the absolute place, the little fragment of space
with which, properly speaking, I am conjoined [Il est le lieu absolu, le petit fragment
d’espace avec lequel, au sens strict, je fais corps]’ (ibid.: 9). The image of ‘the little
fragment of space’ is one that Foucault had used in The Archaeology of Knowledge
(1972); see the quotation that opens this section. Foucault speaks directly against
Merleau-Ponty who wrote of the painting body not as ‘un morceau d’espace’ but as
an interaction between vision and movement (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 16). Even Sartre’s
conception of facticity contains more agency than Foucault’s. As Carrie Noland remarks
of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: ‘Implicitly in Sartre’s discussion, kinesis and the
sensations it engenders are also a source of possibilities offering freedom from
situational constraints’ (Noland, 2009: 203).
The body seems to condemn humankind to finitude in that it imposes an existential
awareness of the limitations of human consciousness in a regime of unremitting
visibility. My body seals me into space, marks me with the limits of my consciousness.
It is perhaps here that we find the basis for the demonization of the gaze that typifies his
The Birth of the Clinic. In The Order of Things Foucault pointed out the basis of the
incarceration of the self in the body ‘when the attempt was made to make the empirical
in man, stand for the transcendental’ (Foucault, 1973: 321). The strict limitations of the
body as a medium of knowledge with creative agency correspond to the absolute
visibility of the body itself and its occupation of the here and now, which constricts
consciousness to one’s immediate situation. While this physical situatedness, if properly
104 History of the Human Sciences 24(4)

interpreted, is a key to freedom in Sartre and creative activity in Merleau-Ponty, it spells

incarceration to Foucault.
Yet, there is another possibility that emerges in ‘Le corps utopique’ where the body is
recognized to have potentials for invisibility, which make it paradoxically the ‘principal
actor of all utopias, of unlimited travel’ (Foucault, 2009: 15). Utopia, it would seem, is
founded on the possibility of an incorporeal body, ‘un corps sans corps’ (ibid.: 10) and
hence of the possibility of the body to travel beyond the physical limits of the self; the
possibility for performing non-empirical knowledge. One discovers the incorporeal body
upon the realization that there are parts of the body one cannot see. This very invisibility
signifies its otherness to carceral experience. Escape from finitude is based on the
detachment and separation of proprioception from vision. The fact that there are areas
of my own body that I know through proprioception, but which cannot be the objects
of my own gaze, opens the way to a displacement of the body. Inasmuch as my own body
can escape my immediate consciousness and self-awareness, it becomes unknown to me,
creating a utopian anxiety about location. The body is transformed from a fragment of
‘ambiguous space’ in which a body is my body to ‘an imaginary space that communi-
cates with the universe of divinities or with the universe of others’. It is a space that can
be where ‘I’ am not, consciously. Foucault further locates this ability of the body to
occupy a transcendental dimension with theatrical techniques: masks, make-up and
tattoos. ‘Masks, tattoos, and makeup place the body in another space [Le masque, le
tatouage, le fard placent le corps dans un autre espace]’ (ibid.: 15). Foucault considers
this masking as proper to dance. It is also a space of seduction of the other. Interestingly,
Foucault reduces this seductive capacity of disguise or ornamentation down to the body’s
materiality – in its flesh – through which it becomes the product of its own fantasms.
This return to corporeality and physicality suggests the artistic positivity with which
we began. Dance is the techne that exercises this savoir: ‘After all, is not the dancer’s
body a body dilated according to a space that is simultaneously inside and outside of
it? [Apre`s tout, le corps du danseur n’est-il pas justement un corps dilate´ selon tout
un espace qui lui est inte´rieur et exte´rieur à la fois?]’ (2009: 17). In this brief evocation
of dance, Foucault poses the possibility that dance is a particular ‘voyage’ of the body
through which it takes leave of itself to become ‘the product of its own fantasms (le pro-
duit de ses propre fantasmes)’ (ibid.: 17). This so-called dilation would make the dan-
cing body both fleshly and incorporeal, both defined by place and beyond or outside
of any such definition. The dancing body is spread or dilated across the dimensions of
the visible and the invisible, the here and the elsewhere. This double articulation depends
on proprioception and spectacle: movement for the self and movement for the other.17
For Foucault, dance might be that art practice that resolves the contradiction of ‘the
transcendental/empirical double’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: 34). Dilating the trapped
empirical self with forces outside itself, the dancing body makes space move, hence
entering a modality of positivity that links desire and language to the body as medium.
Yet, the results remain unreal: they exist as forces outside of our control. In this text, it is
only the act of love-making that realizes the body as both utopian and concretely present
(ici).
Ultimately, the anti-utopian and pro-utopian aspects of embodiment that Foucault
analyses in ‘Le corps utopique’ – where he appears to say that dance ‘dilates’ them,
Franko 105

creating a body whose here is not here, and whose not-here is here – can be neatly
subsumed within the idea of heterotopia. In ‘Other Spaces’, a talk given in 1967,
heterotopia is linked to those spaces a society establishes as real, yet which ‘contest’
or ‘reverse’ the reality of ‘real emplacements’. They are ‘outside all places, although
they are actually localizable’ (Foucault, 1998: 178). Although the subject in ‘Other
Spaces’ is not the body per se, but constructed place, the two texts should be read
together, particularly with respect to the description of the role of the mirror as a
transitional figure.18 In Les corps utopiques the mirror is witness to the condemnation
of the self to a body: ‘Every morning, the same présence, the same wound; my eyes
encounter the inevitable image imposed by the mirror [Mais tous les matins, même
presence, même blessure; sous mes yeux se dessine l’ine´vitable image qu’impose le
mirroir]’ (Foucault, 2009: 10). In ‘Other Spaces’ Foucault describes the mirror as an
instrument of utopia: ‘The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In
the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up
behind the surface’ (Foucault, 1986: 24). Yet, the mirror also becomes in this text a tran-
sitional object toward heterotopia: ‘But it [the mirror] is also a heterotopia in so far as the
mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that
I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where
I am since I see myself over there’ (ibid.: 24). The effect of heterotopias is to render what
takes us out of ordinary existence absent as well as present. As Peter Johnson remarks:
‘Like utopias, these sites relate to other sites by both representing and at the same time
inverting them; unlike utopias, however, they are localized and real. In some ways they
are like utopias that are practiced or enacted’ (Johnson, 2006: 78). Rather than being a
placeless place, the image of the body in the mirror (not the mirror itself) does exist in
reality, not through visual emplacement, but through proprioception. As such, heteroto-
pia can be read back onto those parts of the body whose material existence eludes vis-
ibility, and therefore which escape the intentionally expressive and regulating
function. The shoulder blade, for example, is a site of the body that is heterotopic: it
is ‘actually localizable’ because I can touch it but it is ‘outside all places’ in that I cannot
see it. A subtle but crucial point emerges at the core of this discussion. What escapes
visibility (our own or other’s) in Foucault escapes discipline, but also opens onto
imagination. Forsythe adds to this that what escapes visibility is still present as conscious
perception through touch or sensation, in sum, proprioception. What Foucault refers to as
the dancer’s ‘dilating’ action is the production of the medium of dance as such as a
heterotopic activity, a mutual contamination of the categories of materiality and the
imaginary. There is hence a reflexivity built into dance that is more complex than the
phenomenon of inscription that usually dominates discussions of power and agency with
respect to the body in his work.

IV
In turning now to Forsythe, we are justified in asking how inscription fares in the
generation of movement whose qualities deviate from those of the conventional ballet
discipline. How, in other words, the work of improvisation generates ‘other’ spaces.
Certain exercises for the generation of movement in Improvisation Technologies
106 History of the Human Sciences 24(4)

summon forth the figure of writing. One of the recurrent motifs deployed in these
exercises is not, as one might expect, the word, but the alphabet. Words are metaphors
for the analogy that exists between dance and language: both are structured on
grammars. The gramma is a figure whose manipulation in/as the human body creates
a transactional relation between dance and text to be seen and further reflected on in and
through choreography. Their relevance to the ballet tradition resides, as explained
earlier, in the ballet dancer’s particular ability to ‘match lines and forms in space’
(Forsythe and Kaiser, 1999: 64). ‘There is something extremely alphabetical about
traditional ballet figures and positions: they resemble glyphs’ (ibid.: 66). For example, the
technique of rotating inscription, one of many illustrated in Improvisation Technologies
under the general rubric of writing, demonstrates ‘the ability to write with virtually any
part of the body’ (Forsythe, 1999: 59). Forsythe explains in the CD’s brief lecture formats
that rotating inscription is the body’s ability to make trace marks through space that are not
dictated by the body’s extremities (as in the historical practice of writing as penmanship)
but with the torso, the hips, or any other part of the body that is able to rotate around its axis
in three-dimensional space. Trace marks follow the movements Forsythe executes during
this lecture segment in order to make obvious how a movement is discovered by, and
ultimately determined as, inscription. Forsythe develops a procedure called ‘universal
writing’, which ‘uses a set group of givens, which is letters done in cursive script, and
letters in block form, which are split open, and described as exploded into the room’ (ibid.:
60). In these and similar exercises Forsythe seeks, in his words, ‘a continual reassignment
of effort and shape; a loss of strict categorization in which desired randomness, with
residual aesthetic logic, allows any form – like the linear components of a letter of the
alphabet, for example – to be written prepositionally, in, on, with any part of the body’.19
Dancing as writing, in other terms, is a bodily activity, and despite the tendency to
liken ballet as a grammar with the existence of word sequencing, what is really
sequenced and explored as such are letters or the trace marks letters constitute. We notice
here an appeal to the notion of the figure as a body whose position is the idea of the letter
(the character) not as a static form but as an action. Movements occur around and about
the ballet Gestalt and their connection to the historical form of ballet is one of a ‘residual
aesthetic logic’. The lexicon is an-atomized down to the level of the alphabet, and it is
done as an improvisation.
The alphabetic figure is operationally a drawn line whose existence remains
exclusively at the level of visual trace that follows the perception of movement as with
a drawn line whose trajectory through space in the act of drawing determines a shape.
Given the many procedures designed to enable these figures to be differentiated and
stored by memory in the very process of improvisation, the movement in question is
itself an element of vocabulary. Forsythe describes what he calls ‘movement alphabets’
to suggest the ordering and encoding of a set of procedures to generate movements that
themselves have no explicit relation to lexicalization. That is, we never arrive at the word
itself, which remains at the level of a metaphor or figure of grammar as organization.
In the Thematic Variations that accompany the DVD of One Flat Thing Reproduced
one has perhaps what are some of the most compelling examples of how different
procedures inspired by writing themselves suggest writing without becoming writing.
From one to three dancers work simultaneously on or around a table and a double shot
Franko 107

enables us to see that table both from floor level and from a plunging perspective. In
these activities of inscription, the body can actually appear to be a letter, but the point
is neither such a symbolic representation nor the hint of the semanticization of move-
ment. The presence of the industrially produced table over and under which the dancer
slithers, rolls and climbs, occasionally disappearing from view, creates the constant
suggestion of a writing tablet in three dimensions across which the dancer’s body
forcibly becomes the figure of the written character. It is perhaps closest to what
Foucault describes in the fiction of Raymond Roussel:

They do not speak; they work serenely in a gestural circularity in which the silent glory of
their automatism is affirmed. Not one symbol, not one proper hieroglyph in all this minuscule,
measured agitation, prolix with details but sparing of adornments. Not a hidden meaning, but
a secret form. (Foucault, 1998: 25)

The body as an inscribing machine makes us mindful of the state of language since the
classical era as presented in Foucault’s analysis in The Order of Things. Language (more
particularly discourse) as a spatializing analytics, according to Foucault, calls of
necessity for ‘alphabetic writing’:

[A]lphabetic writing, by abandoning the attempt to draw the representation, transposes into
its analysis of sounds the rules that are valid for reason itself. So that it does not matter that
letters do not represent ideas, since they can be combined together in the same way as ideas,
and ideas can be linked together and disjoined just like the letters of the alphabet. (Foucault,
1973: 112)

Once language is acknowledged to exist in space, then the word diminishes in expressive
value in favor of its tropological value: the word becomes tantamount to a letter.
And, Foucault continues, ‘exactly in that fold of words where analysis and space
meet’ we come upon ‘the fundamental relation between space and language’ (1973:
112–13). This is not properly an ‘expressive’ but a discursive relation. It exists in a
primary relation to the external (space) and to communication with the other. Discursiv-
ity renders language’s ‘body’ visible as a materiality. Foucault almost erases the expres-
sive dimension of the classical sign. ‘For classical thought, language begins not with
expression but with discourse’ (ibid.: 92).20 It is here that we encounter for the third time
in this exploration the figure of the body as ambiguous space. Foucault refers to the
alphabetical material of the signifier as a ‘fragment of ambiguous space (fragment
d’espace ambigu)’ (ibid.: 314). It is on the ambiguity of this common terrain that the
body and language meet in the postmodern world.

V
This may be precisely where Forsythe’s work contributes to a rereading of Foucault. The
critique of a lack of political agency in Foucault’s work is related precisely to this
positioning of the body as unable to improvise, unable to explore and refashion its own
disciplinary self-awareness.21 Forsythe works on disciplined bodies both to extend them
108 History of the Human Sciences 24(4)

to unexpected limits, and to undo the expectations of their disciplinary past. The study of
the history of the body’s disciplines in Foucault is the study of the performativity of
power, whereas Forsythe is attempting to reharness that power toward the dancer’s ‘visc-
eral thinking’.22
When we ask what performs in Foucault, the question is where does Foucault
touch upon a comparable ability to improvise? The performance of power and the per-
formativity of the body are only possible in Foucault on condition that identity
become radically separate from bodies as a phenomenon imposed upon them. Yet, the
body as a natural entity pre-exists this scene of the historical inscription of identity
with its ‘organs, appetites, and biological functions’.23 Foucault has been criticized for
positioning the body at once as a pre-discursive biological given and a site of histor-
ical inscription. I am asking whether an exploration of the body’s movement, and
hence an acknowledgement of the body as medium, might allow us to see beyond this
perceived impasse in Foucault’s treatment of the body. Is there an argument for the
body as medium in Foucault that might open ‘the political technology of the body’
(Foucault, 1979a: 26) to a less ‘diffuse’ scene than that which is habitually attributed
to him?24 In other terms, I am asking whether Forsythe’s rechoreographing –
corporeal rewriting – of power’s inscription on the body resolves the incompatibility
of the bodies invoked by Foucault’s prose. Put differently, is Forsythe’s choreographic
practice a site where dualist and social inscription views of bodies merge produc-
tively? Does Forsythe’s re-envisioning of classical ballet in the light of Foucault’s
biopolitics necessarily inhabit the domain of a choreopolitics: the care of the dancer
by aesthetic police? What we need to seek in Foucault is how or where ‘the body
[which] is directly involved in the political field’ becomes a body-as-medium, not
in the sense of a passive medium, but in the sense of an artistic medium, which is
also a medium of pleasure (Foucault, 1979b: 25).
In The Use of Pleasure Foucault evokes an ‘aesthetics of existence’ understood as ‘a
way of life whose moral value did not depend either on one’s being in conformity with a
code of behavior, or on an effort of purification, but on certain formal principles in the
use of pleasures’ (1979b: 89). The aesthetics of existence in the use of pleasures is synon-
ymous with a ‘stylization of attitudes’ (ibid.: 92) that are also ‘to stylize a freedom’
(ibid.: 97). This pertains to the classical Greek practice of forming oneself as ‘an ethical
subject in the use of pleasures’ (ibid.: 86). The body as medium emerges here as an aes-
thetic positivity or sensuous practice. Certainly, Forsythe’s curation of the dancer’s free-
dom in what is otherwise an ‘art of command’ is an ethical use of choreographic
movement. Artistic practice – and dance in particular – may occupy a more integral place
in Foucault’s thinking than is usually acknowledged either by Foucault or by his critics.
Once we think of discipline and inscription in the context of archaeological choreo-
graphic practices, objections to the absence of a theory of embodiment in Foucault may
be subject to revision.

Notes
1. Forsythe interviewed by Roslyn Sulcas (Sulcas, 1995: 9). See also Franko (2011a).
2. Forsythe in Sulcas (1995), cited in S. Spier (1998: 143).
Franko 109

3. I understand ‘examination’ here as a model for the gaze in Foucault: ‘It establishes over individuals
a visibility, through which one differentiates them and judges them’ (Foucault, 1979b: 184).
4. Writing as an act is the most interesting example of what is meant by discursive practice: it
includes the act of inscription, the positivity of gesture and the existence of discourse.
5. In 1999 Forsythe created the CD Rom Improvisation Technologies to store and display the
techniques he uses with his dancers in engendering movement.
6. Inscription as a structuring principle of movement rather than merely shape would beg a more
nuanced description. See Ness (2008: 1–30).
7. Discipline signifies here ‘increased aptitude and an increased domination’.
8. ‘Mit Michel Foucault kann man Forsythes Haltung gengenüber dem Ballett als die eines
Genealogen bezeichnen. Nicht mehr die Frage nach dem Ursprung bestimmter Phänomene steht
im Zentrum der Untersuchung, sondern die Frage nach den ‘‘unza¨hligen Anfängen’’, die die Iden-
tita¨t des Pha¨nomens fraglich machen [With Michel Foucault one can see that Forsythe’s attitude
to ballet is a genealogical one. The question of the origin of particular phenomena is no longer at
the center of his research, but instead that of ‘‘countless beginnings’’, which put the identity of the
phenomena into question]’ (Siegmund, 2004: 30).
9. In the first case, archaeology would aspire to be history whereas in the second history aspires
to be archaeology (Foucault, 1972: 7).
10. For a fuller discussion of the relationship between movement and notational systems, see
Franko (2011b).
11. Foucault’s interest in the painter’s gesture seems to be the imaginative extension of a hypothe-
tical inquiry into the way ‘space, distance, depth, color, light, proportions, volumes, and con-
tours’ in painting might be conceptualized in a ‘discursive practice’ at particular historical
moments (Foucault, 1972: 193–4). Techniques themselves can be considered discursive
practices, and hence the painter’s gesture enters the realm of archaeology.
12. ‘[Finitude] is not the most completely purified essence of positivity, but that upon the basis of
which it is possible for positivity to arise’ (Foucault, 1973: 314). See the discussion of
Foucault’s analytic of finitude in Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982: 26–32).
13. Art is a technique the knowledge of which is itself a positivity. ‘It [painting] is shot through –
and independently of scientific knowledge (connaissance) and philosophical themes – with
the positivity of a knowledge (savoir)’ (Foucault, 1972: 194). We might surmise then that art
so defined is the most proper field of inquiry for archaeology: ‘What archaeology tries to
describe’, writes Foucault, ‘is not the specific structure of science, but the very different
domain of knowledge (savoir)’ (ibid.: 195).
14. Ars is techne: ‘The term ars is the Latin equivalent of the Greek techne – a systematic and
complete body of knowledge deriving from a clear beginning point (or principle)’ (Morrison,
1983: 32).
15. Foucault intentionally avoids the traditional sense of gesture as a movement endowed with
meaning.
16. ‘Le corps utopique’ was broadcast on France Culture, 21 December 1966. I thank Arnold
Davidson for calling my attention to this broadcast, and Isabelle Launay for sharing her
transcription of it with me before it was published in 2009.
17. Sally A. Ness asserts that the topic of gestural inscription ‘demands a reassessment of the
relative significance of the technical/inward and spectatorial/outward dimensions of dance
practice’ (Ness, 2008: 25).
110 History of the Human Sciences 24(4)

18. ‘Des Espaces Autres [Other Spaces]’, written in 1967, was an elaboration of another France
Culture radio talk, ‘Les Hétérotopies’, aired on 21 December 1966, which was a companion
broadcast to ‘Le corps utopique’. For a discussion of the connection between these texts,
utopia and heterotopia, see Johnson (2006).
19. Ballet Frankfurt website.
20. Foucault defines discourse in these terms: ‘language in so far as it represents – language that
names, patterns, combines and connects and disconnects things as it makes them visible in the
transparency of words. In this role, language transforms the sequence of perceptions into a
table, and cuts up the continuum of beings into a pattern of characters’ (Foucault, 1973:
311). For more on Foucault’s treatment of 17th-century linguistic theory see Franko (2010).
21. Michael S. Roth broadens this question to issues of de-legitimation (Roth, 1992).
22. There is not space here to develop the relation of improvisation technologies to thinking or the
decision-making process. Suffice it to mention here that this process has much to do with
Foucault’s concept of heterotopia.
23. See McLaren (2002: 82).
24. ‘Of course’, writes Foucault, ‘this technology is diffuse, rarely formulated in continuous,
systematic discourse’ (Foucault, 1979a: 26). It is certainly not diffuse in 18th-century ballet
treatises.

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Biographical note
Mark Franko, professor of Dance and Performance Studies and director of the Center for Visual
and Performance Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, is editor of Dance Research
112 History of the Human Sciences 24(4)

Journal and founding editor of the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory book series. His books have
been translated into French, Italian and Slovenian; they include Dance as Text: Ideologies of the
Baroque Body (1993), Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (1995) and The Work of Dance:
Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s (2002). He edited Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives (2007) and coedited Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disci-
plines (2000). His choreography has been produced at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival,
Berlin Werkstatt Festival, Getty Center, Montpellier Opera, Toulon Art Museum, Haggerty Art
Museum (Milwaukee), Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Mozarteum (Salzburg), and many New
York and San Francisco venues.