Gil on rhythm, exfoliation and abstract form

Bodily movement puts a continuous space into a certain form: "The body "lives" in space, but not like a sphere with a closed continuous surface. On the contrary, its movements, limbs, and organs determine that it has singular relations with things in space, relations that are individually integrated ... These relations imply exfoliations of the space of the body ... Relations to a tree, a prey, a star, an enemy, a loved object, or desired nourishment set into motion certain privileged organs inducing precise spaces of the body. Exfoliation is the essential way the body "turns onto" things, onto objective space, onto living things. Here there is a type of communication that is always present, but only makes itself really visible in pathological or magical experiences ... Between the body (and the organs in use) and the thing is established a connection that immediately affects the form and space of the body; between the one and the other a privileged spatial relation emerges that defines the space uniting them as "near" or "far," resistant, thick, wavy, vertiginous, smooth, prickly."
The space of the body is composed of a multiplicity of these exfoliations, which create volumes, polymorphous spaces, leaves, and which on their turn presuppose a series of relations with things. "The space of the body is made of plates, exfoliations, surfaces, and volumes that underpin the perception of things. These spaces "contain" the relations of the body to things, insofar as they are integrated in the body itself and insofar as they are translated among themselves."

Each exfoliation is connectable to others, according to the laws of a mechanism, allowing a translation and a production of symbolic substitutions. Two leaves of space can become contiguous (as in a dream, or a metaphor), while the body 'moves without any problem' from the one to the other.
Because the body space is made up of exfoliations, the relations of the body to things are inscribed in forms, not the perceived forms of objects but the form of the spaces that support those relations. Analogy or opposition are therefore only given in the forms of the space of the body, before becoming thought as concepts.
With its malleable biological, anatomical and sensori-motor structure, the body acts thus like a de-coder, allowing for symbolic thought (codification and de-codification): "The exfoliations of the space of the body, as abstract forms, integrate the information coming from a perceivable body and make possible its translation into a different object belonging to a different sensual sphere."

Exfoliations are thus the objects of a topological study of bodily space. "The forms that the spaces of the body take are not perceivable forms." This formal constitution of body space integrates information (about the body's relations) at a high level of abstraction, at an energetic level, and creates concrete configurations after 'abstract figures of relations', forms of relations between forms, or abstract forms. This abstract form, or figure, is not to be intended as a gestalt, because it appears as the result of a disappearance of the form as figure.

The rhythm of a form is the articulation of its implied time, i.e. of its process of appearance. The rhythm of plastic forms introduces time into space. The space of the body, like the surface of a canvas, is a 'rhythming' space, a space which rhythms the things that are on it. If the body molds space (as a canvas), exfoliation (like a painting) is carried out according to a certain rhythm, the rhythm of emergence of the form.

With its de-coding action, the abstract form allows to move from one figure to the other, from one posture to the other, from one sound to the other, and this continuous passage (and re-emergence) constitutes rhythm.

"This exfoliation is a rhytmed space that results from two forms being placed in an energy-based relationship." For this process to happen, the elimination of superfluous and unnecessary detail (de-coding, abstraction, de-stratification) is fundamental, in order to realise a direct connection between the body and an object, point of space or inanimate thing, through an exfoliation of the space of the body. A de-squamation is necessary for exfoliation to take place.

"The infralanguage is the abstract body. We have seen that it translates codes or contexts. In the same way that an abstract posture allows the passage from one point to another, the abstract body, capable of elaborating abstract rhythms or figures from different contexts, allows the translation of one context into another. And this, in an even easier way than the condensation of energy on an exfoliated surface, brings about the extreme abstraction of form."

"Gil, using the term exfoliation, describes the way in which 'the body opens into the spaces it can occupy or articulate with'. Through exfoliations the body is diversified as a volume in perpetual state of disintegration and reconstitution." (Murphy)