Paulo Leminski, Inutensilio, 1986, trans. Juan Schulz and published in Altura desprendida, August 24, 2025, ➝.
“Dance, in other words, enables us to rediscover and rework the plural, performative skills of the city, stimulating both a greater sense of extant situations, and a glimpse of new styles of urban living which might simultaneously produce new senses of how the world is.” Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 145.
“Gentleness summons the body” writes Anne Dufourmantelle; it is “an occasion for sensory celebration.” Sweetness draws from potency {puissance} and resistance to call upon the body, and the body reciprocates fully, as if life itself depended on this exchange. “Gentleness is primarily an intelligence, one that carries life, that saves and enhances it. Because it demonstrates a relationship to the world that sublimates astonishment, possible violence, capture, and pure compliance out of fear, it may alter everything and every being. It is an understanding of the relationship with the other, and tenderness is the epitome of this relationship.” Anne Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living, trans. Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 7, 14.
Deleuze and Guattari think that “the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates … to a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society.” This precise state, in the context of bodies, necessarily corresponds to a precise moment. This moment becomes precious when the participants realize they are part of something—or, rather, feel it. Here it is, complete, the Spinozian ability to affect and be affected. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 90.
Although I reference mimesis only this once, the concept and its function are of the highest importance for this essay. The inspiration comes from Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses by Michael Taussig, who in turn dialogues with Walter Benjamin. I seek the achievement of the ethnographer who “concentrates on image-ful particularity in such a way that … creates like a magical reproduction itself, a sensuous sense of the real, mimetically at one with what she attempts to represent. In other words, can’t we say that to give an example, to instantiate, to be concrete, are all examples of the magic of mimesis wherein the replication, the copy, acquires the power of the represented?”. I am interested in the “corporeal understanding” offered by the mimetic faculty, and in providing yet another example of its current resurgence, which relies on a “palpable, sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived.” An ancient, primitive, and almost extinct act for Benjamin, and concomitantly modern for Taussig. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 16, 21.
In his text “The Politics and Aesthetics of Attraction in the Gran Poder Festival: Reflections on a ‘Methodology of Affect’” and with greater detail in his book Cuando el baile mueve montañas: Religión y economía cholo-mestizas en La Paz, Bolivia, Nico Tassi argues that affect, derived from the abundance of sensory stimulation in folkloric festivities, is the privileged domain for “redressing the conflict,” and “reciprocal corporeal understanding.” It is in that place of emotion and attraction, in that “unacknowledged zone of shared pleasure,” where negotiations with the Other take place, from which new meanings and identities result. His “methodology of affect” challenges the ethnographer “to figure out a mode of giving voice to the force and intent of embodied meanings.” Fortunately, I can rely on Lalo, the leader of Club del Montón, to help me verbalize these understandings through hours-long conversations that span every possible theme and produce numerous poetic and mimetic proclamations. Nico Tassi, “The Politics and Aesthetics of Attraction in the Gran Poder Festival: Reflections on a ‘Methodology of Affect’,” Anthropology Matters Journal 9, no. 1 (2007), ➝.
In “The Event in Deleuze,” Alain Badiou extracts four Deleuzean axioms from The Logic of Sense. I’d like to bring forth the first axiom, as I think it is on par with this essay’s intent: “Unlimited becoming becomes the events itself”. Badiou adds: “The event is the ontological realisation of the eternal truth of the One, the infinite power {puissance} of Life. It is in no way a void, or a stupor, separated from what becomes. To the contrary, it is the concentration of the continuity of life, its intensification. The event is that which donates the One to the concatenation of multiplicities. We could advance the following formula: in becomings, the event is the proof of the One of which these becomings are the expression. This is why there is no contradiction between the limitless of becoming and the singularity of the event. The event reveals in an immanent way the One of becomings, it makes becoming this One. The event is the becoming of becoming: the becoming(-One) of (unlimited) becoming.” Alain Badiou, “The Event in Deleuze,” trans. John Roffe, Parrhesia, no. 2 (2007): 38, ➝.
Brian Massumi defines affect as “synesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other: the measure of a living thing’s potential interactions is its ability to transform the effects of one sensory mode into those of another.” I extend this concept to its maximum effect: in dance, the culmination of all these interactions is relish. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 35.
Decree declaring “Cultura sonidera” as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Mexico City, Official Gazette of Mexico City, October 6, 2023, ➝.
Again, Dufourmantelle: “Refinement coincides with gentleness, particularly in craftsmanship… Gentleness seems to be inlaid with the gesture, joined to it within the material.” Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness, 36.
