Great questions Kris and Cynthia, thank you both. I guess you are right, Kris, that I would locate the biogrammatic possibilities in the permutations of the landscape and the (t)angled bodies in the orgy scene rather more so than in the bodies of the “main” characters although Karin may have something quite different to say about this.  Having said that, I think it is interesting that the configuration of the bodies of James/Jamie/Ceth in our clip almost replicates an earlier scene in which the three are blowing each other and rotate (as Ben Woodard has pointed out to me there is an interesting narrativization of sex which runs throughout the film). But what is perhaps more intriguing is that Caleb is added to the tangle in this final scene and that doesn’t seem to me to be either normative or a pair of couplings but rather an assemblage of James/Jamie/Ceth/Caleb.  The model, Ceth, says at one point that it is all about “geometry” and “lines and angles” and this seems to me to be a good description of the way bodies get figured in the denouement of the film. Erin Manning might put it this way: “Sensing bodies in movement are open systems that reach-toward one another sensingly, becoming through these relational matrices. As these bodies individuate relationally, they evolve beyond their ontological status, becoming ontogenetic. Technogenesis is the dynamic becoming of the sensing body in movement” (66) and this reads like an equally good description of the sex bomb room with its buffet of “vibrant bodies” and also the closing orgy scene with its “gravity defying re-revectorization[s]” (70) of sensing bodies.  Further, this alerts us to how the orgy scene with its tactile reverberations technogenetically alters the room and the cityscape beyond it: “To sense—to experience the world amodally—is a key way to activate the body’s relation to the world and open the body to its technogenetic potential. This already occurs in the dancing body when the movement causes the room to space differently through an accumulation of tactile sensations coursing through the air” (72).  The Shortbus is not a bus stop but rather a non-transportational vector “intertwined with [the] transportability” (75) of sensing bodies.

But, let me say a bit more about why Manning’s biogram (here is one definition of it which makes clear how it is folded in and through both body and world and potentializes topological transformations: ““Through the biogram, we experience...tangles, not limbs. We feel the quality of elasticity before we experience form. The biogram is the becoming-body’s intensive edge that makes bodyness felt at the conjunction of image and movement”(124))  is locatable in the “emergent environment” and in the “machinic phylum”—we are borrowing Guattari’s phrase here—of the body-city-room.  Early on in Relationscapes she writes (and of course, as you saw, she is taking up the biogram from Massumi) that “The not-yet takes form through the intensities of preacceleration that compel recompositions at the level of both strata, the body and the room. What this means is that body and space are experienced as alive with potential movement” (15) So, the bodies of the characters- the shortbus salon-the city become this membraneous (I’m taking this word from Karin) machinic phylum where a series of potential velocities, and as you say, “new futurities” is possibilized.  Manning calls attention to a very interesting futurist called Umberto Boccioni for whom, she tells us, “space moves” (16). And this is how she talks about the way body and world become series and activate a thick affective politics:

“It is to make movement felt in the recreation of new body-world series [And we might note that Justin Bond tells Sofia that the Shortbus is a magical circuitboard, a motherboard filled with desire that travels all over the world that “connects you, me, everybody that connects everybody trying to find the right connection”]. This sculptural ambition is political. Through it, the political achieves a thickness, a volume. The immobile silhouette of the stable subject is usurped by a recomposing body that ‘seeks complete fusion of environment and object by means of the interpenetration of planes’”(16)

She goes on: “inframodal vitality propels the dancers [but we might replace dancers with characters] to become more than, to embody more than the strict envelopes of their individual bodies” (16).  Why Boccioini is interesting to me is that he suggests that  “what seems immobile [like a block of marble for example]may instead be engaged in a kind of absolute movement, a virtual becoming that has its own velocity” (128) like Cameron Mitchell’s skyscrapers, bridges, buildings.  Boccioni “calls this physical transcendentalism”. The living relationscape, I would argue, is created in a “becoming-sky”, as Manning says about Leni Riefenstahl’s biograms.  So, it doesn’t necessarily, for me, have to be located in the main characters per se because biograms do “not individualize” (141). It is the transmutation from the grey stone of the city’s skyscrapers to the colored lights and the way bodies spin which particularly interests me as the space where electrically unpredictable futures emerge.  Manning, I feel, gets at exactly what Mitchell is trying to do in this movie as she marks the shift from biopolitics to the biogram: “Biogrammatic politics are affective politics, operating at the cusp of divergent series, creating not a body as such but an affective tone of a becoming-body, a plastic rhythm, a transcendent materiality, a topological surface, a physically transcendent asignifying materiality” (141).

Cynthia: thanks for calling attention to the ways in which Mitchell is referencing the post 9/11 topo-political landscape. It reminded me of one particularly telling moment during our clip. After the lights black out we hear a radio broadcast during which the announcer (and this reminded me in turn of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, an altogether different celebration of multitudinous flesh) assures listeners that “there is no reason to believe this is a terrorist act”. And yes, I do see a connection between our propulsive bodies and Hardt and Negri’s multitude. I’m thinking particularly of the moment, which strangely hasn’t impacted much on either queer or crip thinking, where they describe the shift from queer bodies to queer flesh. Here is Manning talking about her bodies in Relationscapes: “I refer to bodies as pure plastic rhythm. I propose that we move toward a notion of a becoming-body that is a sensing body in movement, a body that resists predefinition in terms of [sexual/gendered]subjectivity or [sexual/gendered] identity, a body that is involved in a reciprocal reaching-toward that in-gathers the world even as it worlds”(6). And here is that key moment from Hardt and Negri in their Multitude: “Queer politics is an excellent example of such a performative collective project of rebellion and creation. It is not really an affirmation of homosexual identities but a subversion of the logics of identity in general. There are no queer bodies, only queer flesh that resides in the communication and colloboration of social conduct” (200).

MOR