• Statecraft as Spectacle
How does the State use political spectacle and performance to achieve its own ends: maintain authority, discipline and control bodies, create boundaries between us/them, and victimize certain populations?
• Affective politics
What are the dangers and potentialities in a politics that is always affective? How are our passions mobilized against us, and how can performance, art, a politics of resistance activate passions in the pursuit of other ends? Should we reject identification?
• Performing truth, making belief
What is truth and how is it performed? Does truth exist? Why do we believe the things we do or align ourselves with certain politics? How do we negotiate contradiction?
• Political performance & resistance
What are the possibilities for political performance in our time? How does resistance include and extend past artistic practice, protest, and performance?
• Spec-actors
How do we move from spectators to spec-actors? What is a participatory politics? Where does embodiment come into play?
• Assembling Together
How do we overcome the binary of us/them in order to be together? Do gatherings have political power? How can we reclaim/transform/create space? What can bodies achieve together?
• Performance as ontology
Following Taylor, how can performance transcend action and be “an existential condition,” an ontology? (3). How is performance a process of becoming and subjectivization? Does this performance have a duration? In the contemporary condition of extreme precarity/precariousness, how does sustaining, following Joshua Chambers-Letson, become a practice of survival?
• Transformative potentialities
How can we re-imagine the spatial, epistemological, and other orderings of the world? What alternative worlds are possible to make? Following Rancière, how can we change how we see to work towards new modes of visibility?
• Civility & Citizenship
How do we preserve both civility and debate in a democratic (agonistic?) politics? How does citizenship both include and exclude? What are the limits of civility and citizenship? What makes a good citizen?
• The Work is Never Done
What is the horizon of an emancipatory politics? What are its temporalities? How do we work between the liminality of performance, its lives, and its afterlives?
The work is never done; sanctuary always needed.
Steve Paxton