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Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 102–105

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Emotion, Space and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/emospa

Cartographies of feeling: Another Tango in Paris

Anna Gibbs*

Writing and Society Research Group, College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences, Univeristy of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith South DC NSW 1797, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 4 November 2008Received in revised form11 February 2009Accepted 23 February 2009

Keywords:Affect theoryMimetic communicationSynchronyWriting

* Tel.: þ61 2 9772 6161; fax: þ61 2 9772 6733.E-mail address: a.gibbs@uws.edu.au

1 See Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans ElsiGloucester, Mass.,1962. I discuss Tarde’s use of thcontagion, mimesis and suggestion in the social fi14-2-09 (130–145).

2 My thanks to Victoria Henderson for these tranhelpful comments that greatly assisted the rewriting

1755-4586/$ – see front matter Crown Copyright � 2doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2009.02.003

a b s t r a c t

This paper uses the experience of watching tango in Paris to open questions about what might beinvolved in constructing a cartography of feeling for a practice such as tango. Tango involves place, spaceand bodies in the here and now, but it also has a history – inseparable from politics – preceding itscontemporary globalisation and commodification in ‘a political economy of passion’ (Saviliano, 1995),and images of this history continue to infuse the meaning of tango outside Argentina and Uruguay. Thewriting of such a multidimensional cartography also seems to demand a way of writing yet to beinvented.

Crown Copyright � 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Late on a sweltering summer night above Le Latin, an arthousecinema on the rue du Temple on Paris’ Right Bank, the rhythms ofAstor Piazzolla entrain a moving mass of silent bodies on the dancefloor. Here, now, I am a flaneuse by virtue both of vacation andvocation, drawn up from the street by the sound of the music andthe promise of a world of feeling. The dance floor where tango takesplace: locus of subdued excitement, of physical intimacy betweenlovers and strangers alike, of deep and wordless concentration, ofa music made visible by dancers and opening onto its own partic-ular world composed of musical tradition and intercultural musicalmix – of invention and imitation (to use Tarde’s terms1). Tango,tragedia, comedia, kilombo. This was Piazzolla’s list of essentialingredients for ‘Nuevo Tango’ – (kilombo means – strictly –‘bordello’ with all its connotations of sexual excitement, but in it isalso a slang term for ‘disorder’, ‘confusion’ or a ‘mixing of socialclasses’.2 What it suggests to me at this moment is the unpredict-able but nevertheless not unordered nature of flirtation – sexual,cultural – which keeps the future open by fending off finality).These are the genres of emotion which conjure a world of promiseout of affect.

Finding a table with my partner we sip our Ricards and settle into watch from the sidelines. I feel my sudden sharp regret at not

e Clews Parsons, Peter Smith,ese terms in ‘Panic! affect

eld’, Cultural Studies Review,

slations, and for other veryof this paper.

009 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All

having brought my black tango shoes on my travels dissolve intothe mood of the music, mirroring the absorption of the dancingcouples, heads close together as they move in intricate relationshipto each other, and to the other couples crowding the floor. Nomatter what the time, it is this intensity of concentration withoutconsciousness that makes the time of tango always la hora cero(‘Zero Hour’, the title of one of Piazzolla’s best known works). Thereis an atmosphere to tango that absorbs all else into itself so thatparticipants are relays in – rather than points of origin for – thetransduction of affect into movement. Tango gives the lie to AdamSmith when he writes that our feelings are ‘original sensations’ and,that because of this, we are more alive to them than to those ofother people, which are merely ‘sympathetic images’ of our ownsensations.3

Music creates certain dispositions as it engineers subtle shifts orsudden swings in mood and tone, both within and betweennumbers. But of course the emotional rhythms that traverse thecrowded dance floor and which organize it in time are alsodependent on bodies as transducers. Contact and copying: Taussiggives these as the two aspects of mimesis,4 that ‘a-parallel-evolu-tion’ which Deleuze and Guattari term ‘becoming’.5 Tango regulatescontact through the embrace since the dancers do actually hold

3 ‘Every man feels his own pleasures and his own pains more sensibly than thoseof other people. The former are the original sensations; the latter the reflected orsympathetic images of those sensations. The former may be said to be thesubstance; the latter the shadow’ (Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiment, LibertyFund Books, Indianapolis, 1984, p. 219).

4 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, NY and London: Routledge, 1993, p.5 I discuss mimesis as becoming at more length in ‘After Affect’, The Affect Reader,

eds Greg Siegworth and Melissa Gregg, Duke University Press, forthcoming 2009.

rights reserved.

7 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 1973, p. 24.8

A. Gibbs / Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 102–105 103

each other so that the bodies of the couples communicate throughthe arms, through the upper torso (especially in social dancing) andthrough the heads, which are held close even when the embrace isopen (which means that the torsos are held apart to allow room forthe performance of complex figures). One might imagine – espe-cially having taken lessons in ballroom dancing where backseatdriving by the follower (normatively a woman) is a cardinal sin –that transmission through contact is unidirectional, from leader tofollower, but in this respect tango makes a better model for themore complex ways of the actual, rather than chauvinisticallyimagined, way of the world. Or, at least, tango as it has been taughtto me by various classes in Sydney – for there are many tangos –something to which I will return. But in tango as I have been taughtto think of it, the leader must be responsive to what the followercan pick up, and the follower can modulate the lead by means ofgolpes (sharp toe taps on the floor in which the heel rebounds ina kick); golpecitos (toe taps in which the kick is abbreviated); car-icias (a caress of leader’s leg by the leg or foot of the follower);amagues (the follower kicks one foot in front of the other in a feintor threat); and boleos (the follower’s foot wraps around her leg atthe knee). These standard moves can all take on a sexual character,signifying flirtation, resistance, aggression, or desire: a nip standingin for a bite. Then again, they might not – it depends on who isdancing with whom. The tango, then, is a space of complex nego-tiations between bodies. It is a play of synchrony and its interrup-tion, much like those conversations which mix harmony betweeninterlocutors with sudden sharp disagreement and a change inaffective climate until mutuality resumes. Always a singular event,it is a dance of improvisation in which there are no basic steps orinviolable sequences – like turn-taking in conversation, whichmight be symmetrical, but which also might not, depending bothon the dispositions and social positions of the participants.

For this reason ‘copying’, as Taussig has it, may not seem anapposite term for the tango, where bodies communicatethrough the almost imperceptible process of entrainmentwhich brings them provisionally into synch with each other sothat they move together in organizations of change con-founding cause and effect, origin and end, action and passion.Caught up in the dance, they are traversed by rhythms whichabstract from them and organize them, and yet which are alsoorganized by the bodies which actualise them. Rhythms sweepup bodies into new trajectories, leaving human form as a tracein their wake.6 Perhaps, though, of all dance forms it is ballet,with its emphasis on the creation of ‘line’ whether this involvesa single body, a couple momentarily conjoined in a pas de deux,or the entire corps de ballet, that makes this most apparent.Here it’s the play of the expressivity of dancers as individualcharacters – Giselle, Odette – in the classical ballets and thecreation of more formal and perhaps more abstract composi-tions out of bodies in space that might be conceived as anothermeans of affective expression, though it need not be conceivedas captive to it, that makes for interest. In ballet certain kindsof bodies are better able to produce the desired composition oflines than others, but in tango the rhythm can be realized – andtransformed – by any body. Here it is rhythm that rendersa body, making it what it is at the same time as the bodyrenders the rhythm it makes visible and palpable.

In any case the dance as singular event – here, now – composesand distributes energies and bodies: that is, arms, hands, feet, legs,heads, trunks are all disposed in relation to each other across bothspace and time by means of movement, and rest or stillness, inwhich synchrony and rhythm are binding. At moments the couple

6 Brian Massumi, ‘The Archive of Experience’, 2003, p. 148.

moves as one – and the rhythm of dance can also link dancersacross couples. Perhaps this is more obvious with dances – like thePride of Erin or New Vogue ballroom dances – where couplesperform the same movement at the same time: ‘like synchronisedswimming’, a friend watching it said once. But it’s also true in tango,even the improvised, Argentine tango I watch now. The tanguerosmaintain a line of dance that sometimes renders it visible –producing a relation between things in ‘which, like a flash, simi-larity appears’.7 A particular line will appear, as if a gesture weretransmitted from body to body, like a Mexican wave in a sportsstadium crowd which makes singular bodies momentarily find newform in relation to a larger organization. At moments like these,pulse and impulse seem to combine, so that subjectively, one mighthave the feeling of being in the flow of the moment, of whatevermood it is that pervades the floor then and there.

There’s an awareness of other couples around, but it’s only semi-conscious, inchoate, having little to do with vision per se. It’s notthat on the dance floor you watch the other couples to avoidcollision or cutting some one off, though some one learning to leadmay have to do this consciously at first. It’s more that you developa sixth sense, a feel for where the other couples are around you.You’re guided by proprioception rather than actual seeing. It’sa little like blindsight, in which a blind person can point accuratelyto a dot she cannot actually see – at least, not consciously. Butalthough she can’t form an image of the dot, she can neverthelesslocate it in space when the message which is unable to be receivedby the visual cortex is sent anyway via the optic nerves to thesuperior colliculus which in turn relays it to the parietal lobes thatguide the pointing finger. When the subject finds she can pointaccurately to the dot, she is as surprised as the experimenter.8

Proprioception is unconscious – that is, procedural and effortless.But to be able to trust yourself to it means acquiring a level of skillon the dance floor that allows certain things to become, as they say,second nature.

It’s the same with following. If you think about it you lose the‘being in the moment’ necessary to do it well. (Try walking inextreme slow motion and watch yourself become too conscious andyour motion awkward and ungainly as a result.) When you lose themoment you get ahead of yourself and you anticipate the leader –often wrongly. It’s not at all a matter of mind-reading, as if theleader had formed a conscious plan for a sequence of steps andmapped out a route across the floor in advance. The possibilities formovement are immanent in the couple relation and are con-strained by the actual conditions on the floor, so that to dance withsome partners is to increase the body’s powers of movement andaffect, while other combinations seem only to diminish them. But‘fit’ between partners, while it always has to be negotiated in themoment, is also to some extent learned, a habit forged from repe-tition and a kind of imitation (or transmission, as if by the contagionof contact and proximity).9

Habits may activate or entrain affects; they allow some things tobecome procedural so that a space may be opened for novelty andinvention. This is the whole secret of improvisation, in which habitcan be seen as a technology for the production of powers for thedancers, while for onlookers, the charm of watching may beprecisely the opposite: an interruption to the bodily ‘hexis’ habitcomposes.

Vilayanur Ramachandran, The Emerging Mind, BBC Reith Lectures, London:Profile Books, 2003, pp. 32–33.

9 cf Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, pp.73–74.

A. Gibbs / Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 102–105104

This is because we respond sympathetically to what we watch,and especially to other human actions, as the recent discovery ofthe mirror neuron system makes clear. Charles Darwin commentson the way spectators’ bodies strain as they watch some oneattempting to jump,10 as if we are with them in their efforts, orperhaps as if our bodies are rehearsing the possibility of an actionwhose possibility was hitherto unsuspected by the body itself.Neuroscientists term this incipient translation from seeing to doing‘embodied simulation’, and it in perception and movement forma confound in which the way we see profoundly affects how wemove, and how we move is imbricated in what we see, a processwhich takes place without the mediation of representation. Ratherthan ‘knowing’ what it’s like to something in an abstract way, wesense and feel it in our bodies. We can also apprehend intention inthe same way (for example, when some one tries to do somethingbut fails), so that we can learn by this method – too clumsily called‘imitation’ – even from an arthritic teacher who cannot fullydemonstrate the dance move she wants to convey. We learn all thetime from embodied simulation without perhaps being aware of it– as when years of watching tango produces a certain facility inpeople who have also imbibed the social milieu and its genderedgestural routines when they begin to dance.

This is learning by imitation – but not only by the consciousimitation proper to the dance class, which is just as likely to revivesomatic memories of childhood ballet classes, as I discovered, to mypuzzlement: it seemed my body remembered – inappropriately –what I had considered long forgotten, and all it took was a danceclass, any kind of dance class, to revive it. PhenomenologistAlphonso Lingis describes this kind learning by more or lessunconscious imitation, which I would call ‘mimesis’, as research, asa form of knowledge of the other which redoubles proprioceptiveknowledge of one’s own body. He figures the body as the ‘locus ofa primary reflexive circuit, doubling up into inner motor diagramand externally observable thing, each inscribing itself in the other’and producing a ‘primary correspondence between posturalschema and body image’ so that our ‘inner sense of our posture,gesture, gait and our sense of the shape we fill out in any givenspace translate for us into something visible, audible, andtangible’.11 We feel the form of ourselves as we inhabit and navigatespace in the world. Similarly, our observations of the world takeshape not as perception in a cognitive sense, but rather as response,in the form of a felt sense or ‘motor diagram’ by which human andnon-human others are captured in a ‘reflexive circuit’ which is the‘wider arc’ of our own primary reflexive circuit.12 But the process ofthis kind of empathic learning is not only more widespread thanthis: it is foundational to human culture,13 and it suggests that it isintersubjectivity rather than subjectivity which is primary inhuman beings. In this optic the self is an emergent phenomenonwhich functions both as a repository of habit (procedural

10 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London:Harper Collins, 1998), p. 334.

11 Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies, NY and London: Routledge, 1994, p. 11.12 As Lingis puts it: ‘In perceiving the outer forms of the others, we capture in our

postural schema the corresponding inner lines of their postures and movements.And, in contracting inner motor diagrams we quasi-perceive the correspondingvisible, tangible and audible outer form of ourselves turned to the distance whereothers stand (11:94).

13 Or, as Merlin Donald writes, on ‘a brain capacity that allows us to map ourelementary event perceptions to action, thus creating, at a single stroke, the possi-bility of action, metaphor, gesture, pantomime, re-enactive play, self-reminding,imitative diffusion of skills, and proto-pedagogy, among other things’ (Merlin Don-ald, ‘The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution: a reflection on the myth ofthe ‘isolated mind’. Culture, Thought and Development. Eds.: Larry, P. Nucci; GeoffreyB. Saxe and Elliot Turiel. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000, p. 33.

knowledge and social and familial tradition) and an ever-involvingsocial interface born of the in-between and contingency ofrelationality.14

This interplay of habit and contingency is made manifest on thedance floor. And things also play a part in it. The floor itself has itsown specificity as a physical space with which the dancers remainin close contact through the balls of the feet as they move on it – butthe dance makes this not so much a stable topology as a constantlyshifting field of relations in which the temporal component is asimportant as the spatial, and the two are intimately interconnected,as a place on the floor that is available one moment is occupied thenext. Tango takes place in space but this is not simply a matter ofextension: the space of the dance floor also enfolds the space of thesocial. The entrainments produced by tango give rise on the onehand to a reinscription of gendered social relations – for althoughthe ‘follower’, normatively a woman as the ‘leader’ is normativelya man – is far from passive, the relations between them areasymmetrical and their attitudes in the dance give rise to displaysof various configurations of masculinity and femininity, to enact-ments of gendered social relations. Yet these are potentiallycomplicated by the way social life is suffused with affects whichgive birth to unexpected desires as they redistribute relationsbetween bodies, rearrange distinctions between the public and theprivate and complicate the relationship between the local and theglobal, the ‘authentic’ and the imported.

Marta Saviliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion15

methodically unpicks this complex tangle of relations as she anal-yses in detail the process of appropriation and commodification oftango by a colonizing capitalism from the nineteenth andthroughout the twentieth century. Examining the way tango comeshistorically to embody a series of specific and conflictual relationsof race, ethnicity, class and sex, she describes it as both a ‘ritual anda spectacle of traumatic encounters’.16 The incorporation of tangointo a global ‘economy of passion’17 is evident in the number ofclasses on offer in countless cities, in the popularity of the spate offilms especially of the nineties in which tango features (Wong KarWai’s Happy Together (1997), Carlos Saura’s Tango (1998), or SallyPotter’s The Tango Lesson (1997) spring immediately to mind), orthe market in tango music made obvious by even the most cursoryglance in music stores. If this incorporation seems to efface theoften traumatic conflicts historically and sometimes spectacularlystaged by tango, it also makes tango available as a space for theacting out of others, even if less spectacularly.

My gaze catches on a couple identically dressed in black pants,black singlets and dance sneakers – about the same height, bothhave short hair: one grey, the other a dark brown. They’re too faraway across the room for me to see their faces, and the light is dimenough for their bodies to remain relatively indistinct. Watchingthem, I see the dark-haired one is leading and as they move a littlecloser I note the way light picks up the contours of his muscles –and hers, for she has almost as much definition. They turn towardsme and as they do they swap the lead and I see that in fact both are

14 As Moshe Feldenkrais long ago observed, the ‘capacity to make personalnervous and muscular patterns is associated with the fact that innervations con-cerned with voluntary movements grow while the control of action is beinglearned. All new responses [the human being] acquires are integrated into a vastbackground of vegetative and reflex activity. He [sic] learns to speak, to walk, toadjust himself to his parents, and to other members of his society all at once’(Moshe Feldenkrais, Body and Mature Behaviour: a study of anxiety, sex, gravitationand learning, Oxford: International Universities Press, 1949, p. 127).

15 Marta Saviliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder: West-view, 1995).

16 Saviliano, p. 73.17 Saviliano, p. 82.

A. Gibbs / Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 102–105 105

women. I wonder whether the other couples on the floor above thiscinema in rue du Temple, right in the heart of the Marais, a formerlyJewish, now gay area, albeit in the process of being replaced byexpensive boutiques as it becomes a centre of the Paris touristiquewhich is all but oblivious to the profound gender conservatism ofthe culture that hosts it. Conservative relative at least to Sydney,where it’s not so unusual to see same sex couples on otherwisestraight dance floors. I wonder if these other couples have evennoticed, or would care if they did.

These women embody – by their posture and movement, theintensity of their concentration – an image of tango, and as suchtheir appearance represents a demonstration of the way in whichthe affective dispositions of tango and the social world it impliesbecame embodied in its earlier incarnations, and of the way inwhich affects trouble this order as they render incarnate newdesires and new dispositions of social relations.

Including in writing. For knowing my desire for my ownpartner to learn to tango (reawakened by being here with her

now, watching these women) will never be realised (it’s just nother thing), I turn to wondering how on earth I will move fromanonymous anthropologist of this scene in Paris to responsiveinterpreter of it by way of writing. The question then becomeshow to write (about) dance, how to write about tango in partic-ular. For tango, as Saviliano amply demonstrates, resists a-histor-ical generalisations about its form or its meaning in any giventime and place. And then there are the challenges here and nowalways presents to the sequential medium of language as it triesby way of ekphrasis to create something adequate to the all-at-once apprehension of the scene which is not simply watched atthe remove of surveillance but rather imbibed in the very fibres ofthe muscles and nerves, absorbed by the skin, swallowed by theears and inundating vision with a moving field from which detailsstruggle to emerge. This will always be the challenge of writingspace: to do justice to the specificity of place while understandingthat the space in which it is made is always something other thanEuclidean.