Author Archives: henrywilcox

The digital is no longer a pervasive part of our reality; no longer a frightening specter looming behind screens, trapped. Indeed, it is our reality; or, as Mark Hansen argues in his book Bodies in Code, our reality is now best thought of as “mixed reality.” As with mixtures of other types, the ingredients—the digital and the “real”—lose what clear separation or distinction they appeared to have before: they are blended to make something new.

Analyses of our mixed reality often find the most fertile soil for investigation in social media. Along these lines, social media, such as Twitter and Instagram, are most fruitfully approached not as isolatable or individuated bodies, but as networks in which a vast array of lifeforms and systems are deeply entangled: not just ‘the human’ and ‘the digital’ but a multiplicity of communities, ecosystems, belief systems, and so on and so forth. An analysis that exemplifies such an approach is found in Brian T. Edwards’ essay “Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, or the Selfie-Determination of Nations.” Here, Edwards demonstrates the entanglement between newly emerging technologies and the emergence of new social forms. Edwards shows us the mechanics of the movement of Trump’s boardroom from his reality TV show The Apprentice to the cabinet room and how this movement was facilitated through his social media campaign: “the simulacrum board room of The Apprentice anticipates the transformation of the White House Cabinet Room at the televised live sessions in the early months of 2018.” Social media were the means through which Trump’s campaign propagated the image of himself as a successful business tycoon, allowing him not only to move out of financial distress but to constitute a public for himself, providing analyses such as Edwards’ with a demonstration of the image economies and ‘common sense’ formations articulated by Ariella Azoulay and Jacques Ranciére.

As we begin to understand the mechanics—the logics of circulation, as Edwards would call it—of our mixed realities, we also begin to understand the instability of the concept of ‘citizen’ which we have long taken as political bedrock. Mark Poster, in the chapter titled “Citizens, Digital Media, and Globalization” from his book Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines problematizes the term ‘citizen’ in four ways: first, the principles of the term derive from the West, and the West is responsible for an imperialist and capitalist form of globalization; second, the principles (of natural rights), rooted in the Enlightenment, require one to extract oneself from the social in order to proclaim the universal as natural; third, the conditions of globalization are not only capitalism and imperialism, but also the coupling of human and machine, and we therefore may build new political structures outside of the nation-state only in collaboration with machines; fourth, linked with machines in a global network, the citizen has become something else. Poster proposes instead that we speak of netizens: the citizen of mixed reality.

This movement from citizen to netizen would certainly constitute the type of movement towards digital logics called for by the Critical Arts Ensemble (CAE). In their essay “Recombinant Theatre and Digital Resistance,” this type of movement is described as a surrendering of the values and certainties of analogic cosmology. Digital logics, according to the CAE, are those that offer an ongoing flow of sameness: order from order. Alongside analog logics, the CAE speaks of ‘hybridization’ in the Western style of marketing. This hybridization is an articulation of mixed reality applied specifically to marketing strategies, which, as we’ve seen, are invested not only in what we’ve traditionally thought of as ‘products’ of consumption, but also in people—in Presidents. Thus, the concept of hybridization is of crucial importance to our current understandings of political spectacle, and the CAE defines it by explain that “on the one hand, the consumer wants the assurance of reliability provided by digital replication, and on the other hand, desires to own a unique constellation of characteristics to signify he/r individuality.” I want to conclude with a couple questions with regard to what this concept of hybridization may imply about current social logics and organization in light of these essays, and to offer a possible problematic at work here in order to see where we might build on these analyses.

In our mixed realities, these hybridized Western marketing strategies are seemingly ubiquitous. I am interested in the implications of the definition of the ‘digital logics’ at work here—that is, the assurance of reliability provided by digital replication. Recalling George H. Bush’s invocation of Clint Eastwood’s “Make my day” line in his 1988 presidential debate with Michael Dukakis (examined in Edwards’ essay), we ask how this invocation carried with it a summoning of racist logics of Eastwood’s film. This “make my day” line can be seen as one such “assurance of reliability provided by digital replication,” as it signifies a carrying over of racist logics without needing to explicitly lay them out. Digital logics, then, cannot just be thought of as being confined to digital coding of 0’s and 1’s, but is also coded into the languages we are speaking in our conversations every day. Therefore, coding is not only about digital replication—a form of replication that is treated in these essays as recently emergent—but the replication of logics that have been in operation for centuries. Can we, then, approach ‘coding’ as a means of anticipating social organizations and ‘mobilizations’ of affects in marketing (/presidential) campaigns? If so, then I think it is important to problematize the ‘netizen’ invested in these campaigns. The netizen, though it offers a means of understanding mixed reality, forgets the social foundation of the Internet (which, I believe, is also the social foundation of mixed reality more generally): it is about networks, not individuals. The netizen thus seems to carry with it the Enlightenment illusion of individuality—that compulsion to “extract oneself from the social order to proclaim the universal as natural.” I think that this concept may reinscribe this Enlightenment (i.e., Western) tradition that has given ‘individuality’ and ‘body’ to persons so selectively throughout our history if we are not careful to avoid such pitfalls. Thus, we ask: Where might explorations of hybridization and mixed reality lead us if we let go of this individual?

“The photo… is the outcome of focus, excision and framing. Yet the image retains a direct connection with the depicted object, because it was written by the object’s own reflected light, by its aura” (Azoulay, 149).

Ariella Azoulay’s theorizing of the “horror photo,” which, in the work of Jacques Rancière, is called “the intolerable image,” is caught up in an institutional complex–of “structures, mechanisms, and positions”–that is prepared to manage it at any time and place. The “horror photo” must be more shocking every time we see it, if we are to be reconciled with death, so as not to be insensitive to it (155). This line of thinking is positioned as a point of departure for Azoulay, who, in her book chapter “The Spectator Is Called to Take Part,” orients her theory of the civil contract of photography towards the act of prolonged observation, telling us that this act by “the observer as spectator” has the power to “turn a still photo into a theater stage upon which what has been frozen comes to life” (159). Thus, following her statement quoted at this essay’s opening, we see that it is not always only the photo that is the outcome of “focus, excision and framing,” but also the “coming to life” of that which “has been frozen.” It is interesting to interpret these two outcomes as ‘photos’ and ‘figures’ (respectively), performing in various unpredictable ways, resting on the hinge of the image–that is, the futurism of the ‘world picture’, which was “photography’s vision from the very beginning” (Azoulay, 138).

According to Azoulay, the object of photography, present in the world of experience, “imprints an image on the emulsion that… always contains an element that exceeds the world of experience, thus exceeding interference” (149). I think what Azoulay is getting at here is of tremendous gravity: it is both similar and different that the transcendent experience sought after in Kant’s aesthetics, and that aesthetic experience sought after by Barthes. Here is where we begin to understand her theory of the civil contract of photography as a theory of image economy: a circulation of meaning, affect, figuration, coalescing time and time again in unpredictable ways in multitudes of performative contexts, exceeding the world of experience, bringing life to the frozen, turning observers to spectators. Her theory is of excess, surplus production, even while protecting the negative (death; dead object, addressee). It is deterritorialization: “the photo acts, thus making others act…oriented toward the future” (129).

Thus, the connection between the “horror photo” and the “horror figure” are clear. But what do some of these “horror figures” look like? Christina Beltrán, in her essay “Undocumented, Unafraid, and Unapologetic,” provides us with an account of the figure of “the foreigner” as the “truest citizen,” noting the harm this has done in public discourse as well as in its manifestations in immigration policy: “… the very attributions used to make immigrants attractive (they work hard; they value family and tradition) can easily become the same qualities that make them threatening (they take our jobs; their patriarchal and homophobic traditions threaten our capacity for progress). Rendering immigrants as forever foreign, the logic of xenophilia feeds into the xenophobia that pro-immigrant advocates are trying to overcome” (86). I am recalling here Balibar’s statement in his essay “Politics and the Other Scene” that all protest can turn into legitimation (Balibar, 7). This goes both ways and in various other unpredictable directions too though, as we return our thoughts to Azoulay’s assertion that “photography functions on a horizontal plane”: it is a tool of the masses (134, 138).

I am interested in what this all means when the “emulsion” upon which the “object of photography…imprints an image” (Azoulay, 149) is the body; when the body is also the “horror figure,” formed through an image economy of “horror photos.” In the surplus production of the image, how are bodies transformed? How do ‘we’ participate directly in image economies in ways that meaningfully address and radically transform scenes and spacetimes of horror without reinscribing or reifying it? As Jacques Rancière tells us in his book chapter “The Intolerable Image” that “there are images in language as well. They consist in all those figures that replace one expression by another, in order to make us experience the sensible texture of an event better than the ‘proper’ words would” (94). Rancière’s attention to the experience of the sensible texture of an event certainly rooted in his theory of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, but I think there is much more here. I’ll say first that my interest in the “horror figure” as it develops through economies of “horror photos” (both discursive and photographic images) stem from an interest in the genre studies that have been done within Black studies, trans studies, disability studies, and queer theory that have provided close readings and rich accounts of figures attached to bodies. For example, discourses around social death and the figuration of the living dead, the zombie; or, the trans body as a body always in transition, neither here nor there, real nor fake, like a ghost. In connecting Azoulay, Beltràn and Rancière to these discussions, I think the turning of the observer to spectator blossoms into a yet deeper investment in transforming the very process of figuration that turns a still photo into a theater stage, that brings to life that which has been frozen.

“The treatment of the intolerable is thus a matter of dispotif of visibility. What is called an image is an element in a system that creates a certain sense of reality, a certain common sense. A ‘common sense’ is, in the first instance, a community of sensible data: things whose visibility is supposed to be sharable to all, modes of perception of these things, and the equally sharable meanings that are conferred on them. Next, it is the form of being together that binds individuals or groups on the basis of this initial community between words and things. The system of information is a ‘common sense’ of this kind: a spatiotemporal system in which words and visible forms are assembled into shared data, shared ways of perceiving, being affected and imparting meaning. The point is not to counterpose reality to its appearances. It is to construct different realities, different forms of common sense–that is to say, different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meanings” (Rancière, 102). *For an example of this in action, see the queering of immigration politics in the cyber-testemonios of undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic youth on social media (Beltràn).

(Who wrote this? Enter name here.)

In his chapter “Stereotypes of Persecution” in The Scapegoat, Rene Girard discusses a form of targeting or, further, mobilization of the affects; specifically, the mechanism of the accusation and the interaction between representation and acts of persecution. Focusing on a process of creating uniformity through negative reciprocity, especially in time of crisis (which is spoken of in this essay along similar lines of Habermas’ “legitimation crisis”), Girard details the movement from the identification of a particular group or individual as a threat, based on appearance, to the stereotypical accusation which circulates through crowds, in the form of “They are going to harm our society!”. Girard’s concern is to show that the pattern of collective violence crosses cultures and that its broad contours are easily defines; his shows this through an enumeration of the qualities that tend to polarize violent crowds against those who possess them.

Michel Foucault, in his investigation of torture as a mechanism of punishment in Discipline and Punish, expounds upon this interaction between stereotypical accusation (representation) and acts of punishment (persecution). Foucault positions the body in direct involvement with the political field: power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carryout tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. In line with Girard, Foucault sees the body (although Girard speaks not so much of ‘the body’) as bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations (where Girard focuses exclusively on negative reciprocation). Foucault extends this idea of the body–the ‘body-politic’–to the mechanisms of interrogative torture, where the body constitutes the point of application of the punishment and the locus of extortion of the truth.

In his genealogy of the penal spectacle, Foucault demonstrates the movement from the theatrical public execution to the tendency of punishment to become the most hidden part of the penal process. A few consequences of this movement are that it leaves the domain of the “more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime.

Diana Taylor, in her essay titled “Percepticide,” extends some aspects of Foucault’s arguments and challenges others. Like Foucault, Taylor also regards punishment as a political tactic, a complex social function. She agrees with Foucault that everyday perception enters abstract conscious, but challenges it by positioning this ‘percepticide’ as existing also as a survival strategy. She agrees effectiveness is connected to perceived inevitability, but challenges Foucault’s assertion that this perceived inevitability is not always lacking in visual intensity, positing instead that the theatrical visual demonstration of power (public arrests rather than public executions) give weight and force to that invisible penal process which dances around our anxious imaginations. Further, it is this argument of Taylor’s that gives added support to Foucault’s argument that it is the certainty of being punished and not the spectacle that must discourage crime. Though this seems hard to fully grasp, I think what is being argued is that, in the theater of penality, it is not that the public spectacle of execution has been removed from the plot, but that the public spectacle has been demoted to the role of support for the new mechanism of punishment: that which is invisible. Are we more afraid of a terror we can’t see or a terror we can see?

henry wilcox

keywords: duality, coalescence/dissipation, performance/politics, cyberobjects, trans-spacetime

Working from Jacques Rancière’s description of what constitutes politics proper, Étienne Balibar, in his book Politics and the Other Scene, argues that there is a paradox inherent in the predication of politics on “the part of no part.” The part of no part can neither be a subject in nor of politics; therefore, the part of no parts, the ‘have-nots’, existence, which is the condition of the possibility of politics, is at the same time the condition of its impossibility. Using Rancière’s formulation as a point of departure, Balibar advances three theses: all identity is fundamentally transindividual (it is a bond validated among individual imaginations); rather than identities, we should speak of identifications (no identity is ‘once and for all’); every identity is ambiguous (no individual has a singular identity). Interpreting the title of Balibar’s essay along these lines, I believe that what Balibar was getting at was a formulation of ‘politics’ and the ‘other scene’ as mutually constitutive and codependently materializing economies: the ‘other scene’ is distinctly named apart from ‘politics’ and simultaneously its conditions of emergence. They are not isolated events, strung together by narrative threads, one acting and the other reacting: endlessly. They are circulations of energies, coalescences and dissipations, cool fogs and hot, dense balls of gas. We cannot mean politics without also meaning performance; we cannot mean appearance without also meaning disappearance—what we have, then, is surplus rather than positive and negative; duality rather than binary.

My reference to ‘duality’ is based on the quantum-mechanical property of being regardable as both a wave and a particle. There is much more we can do with more recent quantum theory concepts, but this early-discovered property made a significant impact on the field of physics, and I think it can have similar effects on understandings of politics and performance in discussions of the digital (and the posthuman in general, but that’s for another essay). Using ‘duality’ as an anti-binary framework, it is interesting to discuss politics and performance as two different measurements of the circulation of power, of the economy of affects and the sensory, of the coalescence and dissipation of bodies oriented towards desires.

Jacques Rancière, in his book titled Politics of Aesthetics, introduces us to his concept of ‘the distribution of the sensible’: the system of divisions and that define, among other things, what is visible and audible within a particular aesthetico-political regime. For Rancière, the essence of politics consists in the distribution of the sensible, asserting that these aesthetic regimes are simultaneously theoretical discourses—that is, sensible reconfigurations of the facts they are arguing about. The distribution of the sensible is one interesting articulation of the energy circulations and materializations of politics and performance, which demonstrates the systematic definition of divisions and boundaries, rather than its predication on ever-fixed divisions and boundaries. The essence of politics (performance) is, then, perception, which we feel as excitations of senses and affects—not isolatable phenomena, but economies, series of practices (Balibar here, again). To move against a distributive understanding of performance (politics) is to contribute to the maintenance of what Diana Taylor calls ‘percepticide’: The American Way.

Chantal Mouffe, in her book titled Agonistics: Thinking about the World Politically, refers to ‘politics’ as the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seeks to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence in conditions which are always potentially conflicting—there is a reduction of passions and a distillation of identities. It is not, for Mouffe, the prime task of democratic politics to eliminate passions or to relegate them to the private sphere in order to establish a rational consensus in the public sphere. Rather, it is to sublimate those passions by mobilizing them towards democratic designs, by creating collective forms of identification around democratic objectives. The celebration of politics of disturbance, according to Mouffe, ignores the “other side of the struggle” (another scene; and, another duality). What Mouffe wants to get across, then, is that to predicate an articulation of politics (performance) on disappearance, absence, nothingness; or, to conjecture that politics and performance (often assumed to be a regime vs. a resistance), appearance and disappearance, power and powerlessness, operate as binaries is to “eliminate the passions,” to define borders between bodies, ignoring any leakage, any transference, any bleeding. Those passions, rather, demand our orientation towards them, as an assembly, as a collective body.

In her book, Performance, Diana Taylor argues that “people absorb behaviors by doing, rehearsing, and performing them” (13). Performances “operate as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and sense of identity through reiterated actions” (25). Taylor advocates for what I’ll refer to as ‘trans-spacetime’ in her engagement with the digital, explaining that “the digital has become an extension of the human body”: we all have ‘data-bodies’ (108). Taylor concludes that “Experience can no longer be limited to living bodies understood as pulsing biological organisms. Embodiment, understood as the politics, awareness, and strategies of living in one’s body, can be distanced from the physical body” (138).

Working through these theories in constellation, I want to introduce stimulating concepts from Stephen Hartman’s essay “The Poetic Timestamp of Digital Erotic Objects.” In this essay, Hartman describes ‘cyberobjects’ and ‘technogenesis’ as constitutive elements (performances) of ‘screen relations’ in what I’ll name ‘cyberspacetime’. Objects in cyberspacetime are ‘introjected’ by someone—that is, one comes to identify with a cyberobject and takes it into oneself—and, as groups interact with these cyberobjects, these objects become ‘groupal objects’. In other words, these cyberobjects become the basis of a ‘technogenesis’: what Mouffe would see as a mobilization of passions. In the spirit of Butler’s acknowledgement of vigils as performative assemblies, I want to look at two performative assemblies in cyberspacetime, which mobilized affects and passions towards a democratic design (specifically, mutual support and interdependence).

The SayTheirNames Movement and the MeToo Movement are examples of performative assembly/collective politics which grew in the soil of cyberspacetime to spread roots in what I’ll name ‘trans-spacetime’. SayTheirNames was borne from The Social Justice Sewing Academy, performed in the sewing and embroidering of a quilt with the names of Black people who have lost their lives unjustly, often as “invisible victims of police brutality” (artist: Sara Trail 2017). The idea was inspired by the social media hashtag #sayhername; likewise, MeToo blossomed from the viral #metoo hashtag which brought a vital conversation about sexual violence to national attention. In circulations of affective economies in cyberspacetime, performative assemblies formed which were oriented towards democratic designs.

In her articulation of this process of orienting our body, Sara Ahmed comes to define a larger picture of Queer Phenomenology. She tells us that the queer was always already in the phenomenology; it is a matter of orienting ourselves towards it. For Fred Moten, the queer in the phenomenology is the dialect in the dialectic; for Diana Taylor, it is the ‘spect-actor’ in the spectacle; for Bertolt Brecht, it is the pleasurable and entertaining in the terrible and never-ending labor which should ensure one’s maintenance. Orienting towards these things, we create those ‘desire lines’, which Ahmed borrows from landscape architecture to describe the formation of new norms.

These repeated behaviors, these performances, are found in Hannah Arendt’s theorizing of actions in the ‘space of appearance’ in her book The Human Condition. Judith Butler, in Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, rethinks ‘action’ as well as the discursive and performative practices shaping subjecthood as spaces of appearance, where assemblies come to materialize both matter and meaning, which are always performative. Butler engages with Arendt’s theory, acknowledging that she shows that “the body or, rather, concerted bodily action—gathering, gesturing, standing still, all of the component parts of ‘assembly’ that are not quickly assimilated to verbal speech—can signify principles of freedom and equality” (48). Both Arendt and Butler use the language of a kind of thermodynamics in describing ‘power’ and ‘popular assemblies’ (respectively), highlighting their understanding of the experimental nature of concerted action as well as their understanding of the role of environment in the process of meaning, mattering, materialization. The environment, the space of appearance, is historicized, and is a coalescence of historicized bodies in concerted, historicized action, predicated on the mobilization of the passions, the orientation towards collective identifications and desires.

The space of appearance is a new spacetime (which is also cyberspacetime): one that is inherently a trans-spacetime (in the sense of the ‘trans-‘ prefix, meaning ‘across’, ‘beyond’, ‘changing thoroughly’, and also in the sense of my own personal orientation towards inscribing the trans body with power). This trans-spacetime is seen in Arendt’s “Irreversibility and the Power to Forgive” and “Unpredictability and the Power of Promise.” It is also seen in Balibar’s assertion that all identity is trans-individual, and in Diana Taylor’s “acts of transfer.” SayTheirNames and MeToo show that the space of appearance also must acknowledge a cyberspace of appearance with ‘actions’ or ‘performances’ mobilized around cyberobjects. These introjections of cyberobjects by groups is also performative assembly, orientation of a collective body, mobilization towards democratic designs. To conclude, I would like to reintroduce ‘duality,’ as my central thesis is that performative assemblies, in our time, are not constituted separately in the cyberspace of appearance and the space of appearance, but that these are actually just different measurements of a trans-spacetime, and are mutually constitutive and deeply entangled: like politics and performance, like appearance and disappearance, like coalescence and dissipation, like matter and energy.

• Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” in GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
• Fred Moten, Black and Blur
• Diana Taylor, Performance
• Diana Taylor, “Acts of Transference” in The Archive and the Repertoire
• Etienne Balibar, “Three Concepts of Politics: Emancipation, Transformation, Civility” in Politics and the Other Scene
• Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics
• Chantal Mouffe, “What Is Agonistic Politics?” and “Agonistic Politics and Artistic Practice” in Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically
• Bertolt Brecht, “Short Organum for the Theatre” in Brecht on theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic
• Hannah Arendt, “Action” in The Human Condition
• Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly
• https://metoomvmt.org/about/#history (MeToo History & Vision)
• https://metoomvmt.org/media/ (MeToo Media)

Action, for Hannah Arendt, which is never possible in isolation, generates the emergence of a neo-nascence, a new birth, for the actor, constituting and composing their subjectivity. It is in these actions, which are always interactions, that the subject emerges, using speech to construct their distinctness as well as their identifications with collectives. Judith Butler, in Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, rethinks ‘action’ as well as the discursive and performative practices shaping subjecthood as spaces of appearance, where assemblies come to materialize both matter and meaning, and which are always performative. She expands her theorizing of performativity, specifically how it is related to gender, drawing on Arendt, but also pushing back against her, noting that the ‘in-betweeness’ of subjects formulated by Arendt still carries Arendt’s own gender and racial politics, and questioning Arendt’s presupposition that the body does not enter the speech act and that the public and private spheres are always already separated. Despite this, Butler engages with Arendt’s theory, acknowledging that she shows that “the body or, rather, concerted bodily action–gathering, gesturing, standing still, all of the component parts of ‘assembly’ that are not quickly assimilated to verbal speech–can signify principles of freedom and equality” (Butler, 48).

Butler articulates this becoming part of “collective or concerted action” as being synonymous with becoming a participant in politics (maybe we could consider this as one of the points of our main project?). In this ‘becoming’ (Arendt would say ‘birth’), one needs to make a claim for equality as an actor on equal standing with others. This making of a claim is part of the performativity of the assembly, and the root of its power–it is interesting to note that Arendt described ‘power’ and Butler described ‘popular assemblies’ in the language of a kind of thermodynamics or electromagnetism, highlighting their understanding of the experimental nature of concerted action as well as their understanding of the role of environment in the process of meaning, mattering, materialization (see Arendt p. 200 and Butler p. 7). This ‘environment’ was articulated by Arendt and drawn on by Butler as the ‘space of appearance’. For Arendt, to be excluded from the space of appearance was to be denied the right to have rights, and, as Butler tells us, “the people” are not just produced by their vocal claims, but also “by the conditions of possibility of their appearance… and by their actions” (Butler, 19). Butler elaborates this to be true not just of “the people” but of “the person,” positing the entanglement and mutual constitution of these bodies–indeed, Butler goes on to tell us that “the body is less an entity than a living set of relations; the body cannot be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living and acting” (Butler, 65).

The action of the body is always conditioned action (twice behaved behavior!), which marks part of the historical character of the body. The coalescence of historicized bodies into a historically and future transformation–that is, an assembly–is an interesting play with our naturalized invention of time. It seems that in an assembly, where one must make a claim for equality as an actor on equal standing with others, one must also make a claim for a new temporality and spatiality: a spatiality and temporality which, because of its orientation in relation to the naturalized spatiality and temporality, is inherently queer (and I would add also ‘trans-‘ in the sense of the prefix–meaning ‘across’, ‘beyond’, ‘changing thoroughly’–but also in order to inscribe the trans body with power in the ‘space of appearance’). This queer spacetime is seen in Arendt’s “Irreversibility and the Power to Forgive” and “Unpredictability and the Power of Promise” though it is not articulated. As bodies–through identifications and disidentifications, through orientations and disorientations–we are already assemblies, and, as assemblies, we persist. In this way, ‘assemblies’ are flows and coalescences of energy, creating and conditioned by location, historically rooted and oriented toward the future; in this way, assemblies are performative/political.

Whereas the focus of last week’s readings seemed to have resided in an articulation of what ‘politics’ is in terms of what it does, this week’s readings of Brecht, Boal and Taylor aim to articulate what ‘performance’ is in terms of what it does, offering a sort of meta-analysis of the questions of sameness between these two concepts.

If this is the case, then the main arguments of Brecht, Boal and Taylor are located in their articulations of how, as Boal puts it, “… all theatre is necessarily political, because all the activities of man are political, and theatre is one of them” (ix). Boal describes Brecht’s poetics as “those of the enlightened vanguard” (155)—his poetics are Marxist, as they assert that social being determines social thought— ‘man’ is an object of social forces; he sees the theatre as a place for entertainment, with ‘productivity’ being the main source of entertainment (186); he wants the theatrical spectacle to be the beginning of action (106).

Boal, in many ways, picks up where Brecht left off. He points out that Brecht’s position is clear: the character is not free to act at all (92) and uses this as a launching pad in a movement that transforms the spectator into an actor. This movement, accompanied by the abolition of the private property of the characters, constitutes Boal’s proposed “poetics of the oppressed” (122).

Taylor moves us forward from this in a tremendous leap, maintaining the structure of the central theory present in Boal’s poetics—that “people absorb behaviors by doing, rehearsing, and performing them…”—while incorporating important questions pertaining to the body from the perspectives of critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and post-humanist theory (13). This leads us to a more nuanced discussion of ‘transforming the spectator to actor’—what Taylor calls the ‘spect-actors’: people capable of acting and interrupting the performance or changing their roles they’ve been assigned (80).

Rather than getting stuck in the tussle between the Hegelian absolute subject and the Brechtian formulation of the character as the object of economic and social forces, Taylor marks the body as both the consuming subject and the object of consumption (97). This understanding of the body, which Taylor takes through complex rethinkings of experience, ‘scenarios’, and context, enables us to engage with a politics/performance that is not anti-history, anti-memory, and oriented towards percepticide, as has been the “American” way (172).

As we have entered a world beyond the limit of structural violence, Balibar wonders whether our politics can be thought of as heteronomy of heteronomy, constituted by the fusion of the problem of violence and the problem of identity. The politics which takes as its object the violence of identities he terms ‘civility’, and he posits three theorems on identity in response: all identity is transindividual; we should speak of identifications rather than identity; and, every identity is ambiguous.

I’m curious about the potential connections to be made between these three theorems relating to identity and the three ways of distributing the sensible as forms of art and forms that inscribe a sense of community—the surface of depicted signs, the split reality of the theater, and the rhythm of a dancing chorus—posited by Rancière. The transindividuality of identity positions it in bonds validated among individual imaginations: is this like a sort of economy of ‘depicted’ (or, ‘embodied’) signs? “The aesthetic regime disrupts the apportionment of spaces in favor of immanence of thought in sensible matter”: as the apportionment of spaces makes “double beings” out of the worker, could ‘identifications’ be a pathway towards a disruption of current modes of doing and making? How is the rhythm of a dancing chorus bolstered by the ambiguity of individual identity? Mouffe posits that artistic and cultural practices can offer spaces of resistance: can the connections between identity and the distribution of the sensible be articulated as agonistic interventions within the context of counter-hegemonic struggle?