Author Archives: leexie

Lee Xie

In a previous post, I wondered how we could approach Azoulay’s civil contract of photography through the digital era. After reading this week’s texts, perhaps Poster’s in particular, I realize that the question can and should be rethought on the basis that citizenship can no longer be formulated within the confines of the nation-state due to the deterritorializing force of globalization, and the contingent nature of the digital landscape. Poster questions the situatedness of the concept of “citizenship” in today’s world (both as conceptualized alongside the nation-state, and the claim of universality present in Balibar, even as it moves beyond the nation-state paradigm), aligning himself with critical discourse that “locates an antagonism between globalization and citizenship,” that “globalizing processes strips the citizen of power,” erasing borders and “rendering problematic the figure of the citizen as a member of a limited national community” (71). Critical here is also his observation that Western concepts and political principles “may not provide an adequate basis of critique in our current, increasingly global, condition” (72). Poster sees, here, a potential for a new form of power and association (71).

After all, the breakdown of borders does not only have to do with physical territory, but also with the previous separation of political activity from arenas such as consumption, either of media or not. Edwards’ article on Trump and the “Selfie-Determination of Nations” makes it abundantly clear, through the example of the Trump presidency, that pop culture is now a hallmark of American politics. Edwards proposes that digital technologies have created the “selfie” social form, a “digitally mediated, imagined community in which individual citizens, bots, and trolls exist side by side” (39). Edwards highlights the role of circulation, specifically the circulation of information, in this process, and how Trump has capitalized on it in the creation of his audience. The texts this week in general share a preoccupation for form, following the impulse in social theory to examine the often obscured construction of modern social practices. Drawing upon Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli’s privileging of form to content, Edwards argues for a focus on “what it is about the Trumpian Tweet itself––or the reality television format––that propels his message across the circulatory matrix…to understand how the form intersects with the rise of a new relationship of individuals to politics in the digital age” (30, emphasis mine). Like last week’s readings that pointed to the failure of merely attacking the content of Trump’s speech as lies, Edwards urges us to analyze how Trump strategizes circulation in order to understand the mechanisms driving his “success,” such as direct contact with his audience, or the calling into being of social groups based on social capital, competition, and temporary alliances (38). Edwards rightly observes that in the political transformation of the age of Trump, there is a “battle over the media themselves” (40). I would like to add that this does not just materialize upon the grounds of Trump’s denunciation of “fake news,” but also pertains to other shadowed and global players such as Russia and their influence on the U.S. elections, which predominantly played out in the digital sphere. Indeed, it is interesting to consider, within the intersections of globalization, capitalism, and imperialism, a “war of images that isn’t visible.”

Poster asks if in the contemporary situation, the media has the ability to create new subjects. These important questions are raised:

Can the new media promote the construction of new political forms not tied to historical, territorial powers?

What are the characteristics of new media that promote new political relations and new political subjects?

How can these be furthered or enhanced by political action?

(Poster 78).

Poster’s concept of the “netizen” is based upon the web’s decentralizing features that can escape the control of the nation-state due to its deterritorializing and contingent, unpredictable nature, one based on open exchange: “any point may establish exchanges with any other point or points” (78), although here it is important to note that in certain countries this “free exchange” is heavily policed and censored. However, I did find Poster’s examples of how media can supersede existing political structures (women mingling with men freely in chat rooms in the Arabic world, gay individuals socializing and organizing on the Internet in Singapore) to be compelling (82).

The Critical Art Ensemble’s piece on recombinant theatre gives us some other apertures to answering the questions posed by Poster. I found the idea of recombination as cosmology interesting: “a new way of understanding, ordering, valuing, and performing in the world” (151). The Ensemble discusses its view on street theatre as performances that “invent ephemeral, autonomous situations from which temporary public relationships emerge whereby the participants can engage in critical dialogue on a given issue” (157); again, there is an emphasis on the contingent nature of these gatherings as ephemeral, autonomous, and temporary, and the creation of a “loose-knit ephemeral public” (159). The conventions of recombinant theatre, based upon “participation, process, pedagogy, and experimentation” (158) and eliminating privileged positions such as that of the director, have to do with horizontalization, what CAE proposes as a digital move because the analogic is grounded in “one voice [that] speaks for the ‘betterment’ of all” (158). Interesting is how CAE suggests that strategies and tactics “will not come from the university or cultural industry centers; rather, it will emerge from the minor sectors and nomadic vectors” (157). As Deleuze and Guattari have noted, the planetary machine is paradoxical (mutational) in that it is precisely that which creates micro-assemblages; “Following André Gorz’s formula, the only remaining element of work left under world capitalism is the molecular, or molecularized, individual…a macropolitics of society by and for a micropolitics of insecurity” (215-6). Here, we may also consider how Trump has developed an anti-globalization rhetoric as a tempering of this insecurity.

Like Poster, the Ensemble locates the radical nature of its model within its potentiality and the creation of new possibilities within the mutational possibilities of today, although here there is a more concrete practice of the work, which occurs around the axis of invention and unpredictability. While failure can be a real result, so can “the possibility of an emergent discourse of liberation” (159), as seen in such interventions as The International Campaign for Free Alcohol and Tobacco for the Unemployed (1998), which materialized the possibility of open exchange in a space reserved exclusively for consumption (159). Globalization also figures as a problematic in this text, as the Ensemble acknowledges that due to it, “a new theatre that bursts the boundaries of the theatre of everyday life” has been created (161). From here, CAE suggests the use of technology, the “emerging theatre of information” (161), as a tool, an “information organizer” (163). Perhaps Poster enters here when he suggests that even the borders between the natural and science and technology have dissolved: “The conditions of globalization are not only capitalism and imperialism: they include the coupling of human and machine” (72). In arguing for the building of a new political structure outside the nation-state, Poster posits that this will only be possible through the “coupling of human and machine…the new ‘community’…will be mediated by information machines” (72). Similarly, I think the observation from CAE that information and communication technology (ICT) will mediate but is “not going to provide community, democracy, expanded consciousness, or interactive theatre” (163) is a smart demarcation; too often the discourse on technology and its “progressive” potential endows it with a utopian promise. Technology can act as a facilitator, such as in the case of Flesh Machine (1997), but we still need to put the responsibility for the work and process, thinking and doing, on ourselves.

Lee Xie

In many ways, the readings this week continue our conversations from last class around the construction of belief. In the short video “Make Believe and Make Belief,” Richard Schechner suggests that the practice of “making belief” creates a meaning that is “not endowed”; “in actually performing the rituals…these actions, these performances create the belief, a reality that people live for, celebrate, murder for…” In Elizabeth Kolbert’s article, the ritualistic, repetitive nature of this practice becomes tied to human evolution. Following the experts interviewed for the piece, Kolbert writes, “Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.” Confirmation bias is cited as one of the examples of this phenomenon; according to the Gormans, the experience is physiological; “suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure––a rush of dopamine––when processing information that supports their beliefs.” This is an interesting perspective to establish a dialogue with in terms of our ideas about politics and the mobilization of affect.

Indeed, the political trajectory of our country is enough cause to make one question the limits of reason. Blindness once again comes into play; Kolbert’s article discusses “myside bias,” which suggests that we are adept at spotting the weaknesses in other’s arguments, but that “the positions we’re blind about are our own.” In Mercier and Sperber’s terms, this does not have to do so much with percepticide –an active disavowal– but rather how we are inherently socially wired, “[it] reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group”; significantly, there is still an effacement of recognition on the part of the subject, that has been tied to a lack of acknowledgment of complicity and responsibility in our previous conversations (later on, Sloman and Fernbach do point to blindness’ extreme manifestation that does include active disavowal, stating “If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration”). Mercier and Sperber trace the first instance of this blind behavior from the time in which humans lived in hunter-gatherer formations, suggesting that reason often seems to fail us because “the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.” I would contest this conception of belatedness because reason has evolved with changing historical circumstances; take Foucault’s tracing of the development of a neoliberal reason for example, based on homo economicus as an entrepreneur of himself. While Foucault saw, through neoliberal governmentality, the possibility for an increased individual autonomy, in the contemporary situation we see how this reason has mutated further into one that champions self-sufficiency and competition above all else, eroding relational bonds and communitarian values such as care in the establishment of social relations. This too has a connection to the original concern of not “getting screwed by the other members of our group.”

One of my critiques of Kolbert’s article is its focus on a scientific-rational ordering of the world; “Science moves forward,” “the goal [is] promoting sound science,” which undermines other knowledges and possible solutions for the contemporary reality. Charles Blow raises a smart counterpoint to the strategy of calling Trump a liar (one that obviously has not yielded much success) because “the rules don’t apply to the folk hero.” In fact, many times, breaking the rules is positively reappropriated into challenging the establishment in Trump’s rhetoric; he plays the role of the “powerful stranger” (24) in Machiavellian terms and is able to make a practical use of his bad behavior; “It is essential…for a Prince…to have learned how to be other than good, and to use or not to use his goodness as necessity requires” (Machiavelli 79). Blow argues that the opposition’s focus should rather be on dismantling Trump’s figure as such a “hero”: “the great miscalculation people make in trying to understand Donald Trump and the cultlike devotion of the people who follow him is that they continue to apply the standard rules of analysis…How does one fight a fiction, a fantasy?” Blow’s article allows us to perceive how Trump has effectively mobilized the strategies of persuasion and perception present in Machiavelli’s text. He emphasizes how “the only vulnerability the folk hero has is an exposed betrayal of the folk”; Trump realizes the importance of keeping his base’s support; he “fawns” over them, and they reciprocate. Trump also demands loyalty of his “court”; the musical-chairs like turbulence that his Cabinet and key White House posts have experienced through constant resignations and replacements clearly speaks to how “the choice of Ministers is a matter of no small moment to a Prince” (Machiavelli 116).

Machiavelli argues that the attainment of a Civil Princedom lies in the fortunate astuteness of the leader; fortunate, because the circumstances have to be right, but astuteness, because the leader needs to secure the “favour of the people or of the nobles” (52). Machiavelli bases the relationship between ruler and subject on favour, affect, stating that the Prince’s subjects should, at all times, “feel the need of the State and of him, and then they will always be faithful to him” (56). Trump’s self-centeredness, and how he performs it in an “I/me”-based discourse and rhetoric through the repetition of his own accomplishments, is then a mobilization of this performance that seeks to maintain the loyalty of his following, and consequently, his own power.

Lee Xie

The readings this week explore how civil relations are mediated. Ariella Azoulay, following Hannah Arendt, suggests that photography resembles action because the photographic act, when reaching its final product, “is in fact a new beginning that lacks any predictable end” (129). By making others act in unpredictable ways, a photo’s afterlives continue to create its real world effects. In exploring the “civil contract of photography,” Azoulay makes many important observations. One is that while not everyone is considered a “citizen” in State terms, we are all a part of this contract; “in the citizenry of photography, one is a citizen” (134). This citizenship, like the photographic event, is always an “unfinished task” (157). In discussing the photograph of the dead Palestinian, Azoulay notes the “present absentees of this photograph,” the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in their homes just a few meters away (132). Photographs, while drawing our attention to what is represented in image form, can also cause us to note what is missing from the frame.

Oftentimes, we approach an artistic intervention by considering the artist’s proposals, goals, and actions. Azoulay makes the significant claim that the addresser in a photograph is not necessarily the photographer, but rather the subject represented who is making a civil address: “the presentation of a grievance” (135). Thus, the spectator is called to action because, as a citizen of photography, “she has a responsibility toward what she sees” (135); we can qualify the existence of this responsibility within the context of Taylor’s text, which explores how certain citizens actively disavow their spectatorship in acts of percepticide. Rancière also grapples with the question of recognition, complicity, and responsibility, positing that “for the image to produce its political effect, the spectator…must already feel guilty about viewing the image that is to create the feeling of guilt” (85). This guilt is tied to the construction of the image, which is always already implicated in “a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid” (93), a dispositif of visibility (102) that make image construction an exercise of power. By acknowledging how the image comes into being through a mediated process, Rancière argues that this is why interventions such as Alfredo Jaar’s are so political, because they disturb the “ordinary regime…employed in the official system of information” (95): they question the ways we receive information, what kind of information we are receiving, and what lies outside these frames of visibility. Is this not the political action that DREAM activists are engaging in in Christina Beltrán’s piece, using social media as a “strategy of visibility” to contest the construction of citizenship and “transform (rather than simply join) the current political system”? (80). It is interesting to consider Beltrán’s focus on the digital arena. If Azoulay argues that the “civil contract of photography” was established when “photography became a tool available to the masses” (134), what kind of civil contract does the digital era create? Beltrán touches on the rise of open-source/content sites for instance and how activists have used them to create alternative public spheres (81). Within the digital context, more questions around transparency, authority, surveillance, accountability, information, and collective action are formed.

Azoulay further discusses the idea of agency within the staging of the photograph. Consider the actions of Mrs. Abu-Zohir, who “[demands] her photo be taken” and “frames the injury” (139-40), or how in Agassiz’s daguerreotypes, the imposed similarity of the slaves is “disrupted by the different looks in the eyes of each subject” (172), contesting their existence as stationary objects “accessible to immediate and exhaustive viewing” (159), a colonized gaze; interesting here to consider how “injury” dialogues with the prick of the punctum that Barthes describes as what “wounds” the spectator (152) and calls to her attention what lies outside of the studium, or context, of the frame. I found Azoulay’s critique of Barthes to be fascinating, specifically how the concept of, or rather, the expectation for, a punctum can be depoliticizing; Rancière also argues that the political potential of images of art relies on “condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated” (103). Azoulay argues that Barthes depoliticizes the punctum by establishing it as a “stable characteristic” of the photograph (153), although I would argue for its contingent nature, as that which unexpectedly pricks, and does not affect all spectators (I believe it has to do with one’s individual experience with the photograph). Still, it is true that sometimes we, considering ourselves to be engaging with the photograph through acts of looking and perception, expect or anticipate a reaction, to be pricked, thus “[transferring] the weight from the visible event that makes one shudder to merely the possibility that one might shudder” (154). Is this merely another form of percepticide? Where one is looking, but towards a certain end?

Azoulay makes the significant observation that “the photograph does not speak for itself…its meaning must be constructed and agreed upon” (143). The element of consensus in political relations here is hegemonically structured; Azoulay introduces the term “conquest of the world as picture” (143) to elucidate the expectation for the photograph to be “true,” to be an accurate representation “based on limited epistemological criteria of identification” (143) (a representative regime, perhaps, in Rancierian terms). Thus, the spectator is called to action again, not only by a responsibility towards what is seen, but returning to what is absent in the frame: she is called to “reconstruct” the image (149-50).

Lee Xie

Concepts: Transformation, Embodiment, Migration, Resistance, Responsibility

“Transformation” is a word that has accompanied the texts we have read and our own discussions from week 1, from Rancière’s disturbance of the sensible (63) to Mouffe’s call for an agnostic politics that constructs new “articulations” and “institutions” (11), Taylor’s text which shows us the many ways in which performance “allows us to see” that change is possible (6, 21), and Arendt and Butler’s emphasis on the importance of appearance. For our final endeavor, I would love to collaborate on a project that explores how resilient bodies make themselves present in acts of political spectacle that challenge existing “modes of visibility” that leave certain subjects outside of the frames of recognition. This is evidently a very Butlerian enterprise, however it also traces a line of continuation among our readings as a whole in terms of the acknowledgment of how politics excludes as much as it includes; as Mouffe argues, “every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities” (2), or, as Rancière proposes, recognition is differentially distributed through hierarchies; or frames, according to Butler. But, instead of focusing on collective forms of assembly as a way to contest the hegemonic distribution of recognition, I would like to explore how individual bodies can also assert themselves and their histories through performance.

In my own work, I investigate cross-cultural transmissions between China and Latin America, and Chinese migration to countries like Mexico, migratory patterns that were primarily formed around the need for cheap labor. I would like to frame my contribution to our final project through the work of the Cuban, Chinese, and Nigerian artist María Magdalena Campos Pons, who I very recently discovered, and I believe will allow me to consider some intersections in experience that I had not previously investigated. In her diverse artistic practice, which spans photography, performance, and painting, to only name a few, Campos-Pons draws upon her multicultural background (her Nigerian ancestors were brought to Cuba as slaves in the 19th century, the Chinese side of her family worked as indentured servants in sugar mills) that is cut by intersecting histories of displacement, survival, defiance, and celebration, narratives that she seeks to preserve in her works which engage in the labor of memory.

“When I first started doing public performances in the 1990s, I wanted to express something I couldn’t express in my paintings and sculpture. I wanted to put my body in a particular space in a particular moment.”

-Campos-Pons

In the project, I’d like to specifically explore how we can approach Campos-Pons’ performances through Taylor’s concept of “performance as ontology.” My preliminary thoughts are that this operates on many levels in Campos-Pons’ work. First, the level of the autobiographical: the artist’s oeuvre is shaped by her own experience and the histories of her ancestors, it expands past her personal identity to the collective memory of the communities of the African diaspora. But, as Taylor, following Gómez-Peña, asserts, performance does not merely indicate the act or action; it is an existential condition (3), it is an ontology. In this way, by putting her body forward, Campos-Pons performs a subjectivity-in-flux, she answers the revelatory question “Who are you?” not in Arendtian terms, through speech, but rather using her body.

Campos-Pons aspires to bring us closer, not to the recovery of something pure or essential, but rather to the circumstances and adaptations shaped by the hybrid spaces of the cultures that she brings into her work, which are, in turn, the result of the separation, memory, and fragmentation produced by her upbringing in Cuba and her relocation to and residence in the United States.

-Octavio Zaya, “Becoming FeFa”

I follow this quote to underline how the primary question, “Who are you?”, cannot have one answer. Campos-Pons’ grappling with the question, a process characterized by tension and negotiation in her performances, through which she participates in continual self-transformation, brings me to a note on ambivalence that I draw from Taylor and Gómez-Peña once again, that “For [Gómez-Peña] performance art is a conceptual ‘territory’ with fluctuating weather and borders; a place where contradiction, ambiguity, and paradox are not only tolerated, but also encouraged” (3). Campos-Pons’ work allows us to approach performance as territory in one sense, as process, but also in a spatial sense; the open borders in her performances are often inscribed on her spectacularized body, as she wears traditional Chinese dress while holding a long sugar cane in hand, or her movement between these territories is performed as she physically weaves between performance spaces with a history of racial violence while soliciting personal narratives from her audience.

One of the questions I will seek to address is how Campos-Pons does not merely present her body discursively. Rather, she activates its transformative potential in acts of doing that reconfigure the materiality of hegemonic spaces and relationships between actor and spect-actors. As in Poetformance mentioned above, Campos-Pons regularly adopts the character of FeFa in her performances, a mother figure whose name stands for “familiares en el estranjero” (Fe) and “family abroad” (Fa). I call FeFa’s body transformative not only because of what it represents, a gendered body bearing the legacies of colonialism and global labor, but because of what it does in the performance space, which is “to re-establish a connection—not merely in order to seek a different intellectual commitment, but in order to…encounter a new way of imagining the world” (Zaya). I believe Campos-Pons –and FeFa– illustrate beautifully the responsibility behind political work (of identity, appearance, memory, to name a few), and the relationality inherent in it, that we discussed last class. Having just discussed Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason in another class, the idea of the importance of humanity in the work is on my mind– this is something I’d like to further think with in the project.

Campos-Pons also frames her own body as spectacle in relation to the spaces she installs herself in. In her 2014 intervention “Habla la madre”, performed at The Guggenheim, she dressed herself as the institution itself, donning a white hooped dress and leading a procession through the building while shouting incantations and accompanied by an Afro-Cuban band. I believe that performances such as this do the political work Mouffe calls for; by taking on the institution, Campos-Pons engages in an activism that confronts the “always striated and hegemonically structured” public space (Mouffe 91). This is the video of political spectacle that I’d like to share, in which a “bodily demand” (Butler 11) is being made in relation to its own portrayal (or absence) in the museum space, at the same time that the performing body is creating new relationships through the spiritual and the festive.

Lee Xie

In exploring the question of how spaces of appearance are generated, Hannah Arendt first connects action and speech in the natal scene, proposing action as that which brings the subject into existence anew and speech as what allows this subject to establish itself as a distinct individual in a plural world: “If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals” (178). Interestingly, by tying speech to the revelatory question “Who are you?” –that is to say, speech signifies–, Arendt further establishes a link between speech, action (which is necessarily meaningful), and subject, when she states that without speech, action “would not only lose its revelatory character…it would lose its subject” (178). Arendt takes up as one of her main stakes, the human relevance of action, action as being, speaking, and acting together. Her reading of the Greek polis establishes the political realm as “the ‘sharing of words and deeds’” in which action constitutes the public (198). Thus, as she elucidates below, the space of appearance is not limited to a physical location, rather, it is the materialization of the organization of people who act and speak to one another and together, always a potential space that has no guarantees of permanency, but rather is always on the verge of dispersal and disappearance.

The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.

(Arendt 198)

Like Arendt, Butler does not presuppose that public space is given; rather, these spaces are produced through political action, one of which can be acts of assembly that “reconfigure the materiality of public space and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment” (71), a proper transformation of space. But while Arendt closely links speech to action, Butler argues that embodied practices can also signify meaning and provide the potential for and actualization of political action. Butler also concerns herself with questioning the unequal conditions of emergence of “beings disaggregated from the plural” (77). She posits the question, “who really are ‘the people’?” (3), from the perspective of the present.

This inquiry is situated within a historical time in which the question emerges: How is precarity enacted and opposed in sudden assemblies?

(Butler 22)

Within the context of the contemporary neoliberal reality in which certain populations are framed as “nongrievable lives” or “disposable,” that is, in which precarity is differentially distributed and often through biopolitical strategies (15), Butler focuses exactly on how those bodies who are excluded gather to contest a false notion of equality –here, the “indexical force of the body” (9) is what signifies– and, crucially, to argue that when bodies assemble (either bodily or virtually), they can do so as a form of resistance against State strategies of erasure and disappearance; a “bodily demand” is made (11). Butler also follows Arendt in that freedom happens as a relational act (88); she proposes a performative theory of assembly that moves beyond the individual to the collective, a move she argues is all the more important considering the ways in which capitalism is built upon the facets of individual self-sufficiency and competition, eroding communitarian values such as care. Butler takes as one of her stakes, the renewal of the meaning of “responsibility” in ethical terms and within the context of collective forms of assembly (14), a responsibility that is accompanied by a recognition: that we are always already implicated in relationships with others. I find her body of work on relationality to be extremely important to thinking about political work in our time.

Lee Xie

• 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

Lee Xie

Last week, we discussed the political horizon of performance as that which proposes new possibilities of being and orderings of the world. This week’s readings further the conversation on performance and politics; while the Brecht and Boal texts take theater as their focus, Taylor’s text addresses the multivalent ways in which performance, through acts of doing, “allows us to see” (6); thus one of the ways in which performance labors can be “showing that change is possible” (20). I found her use of the concept of “frames” to be productive in considering the contexts in which performance lives and would like to discuss the other texts through this notion.

Brecht critiques the theater that represents life “according to the old recipes” (183) due to its inadequacy to “make sense” of the time period he concerns himself with in this text, which is the scientific age. Instead, he argues for the constant evolution of theater as “an art fit for the times” (186), the connection between “art” and the “times” as having a pedagogical purpose: to “awaken” its spectators from the illusion of a consistent world and make possible the recognition of a contradictory one. I understood Brecht’s text to be operating within the frame of historical condition and possibility of action, which he negotiates through a proposal of “new alienations” that work precisely towards “alienating the familiar” (192) through a materialist dialectic (193) that unveils the contradictions/inconsistencies of productive life. The politically activating potential in Brecht’s text finds itself in the transformation from “passive acceptance” to “suspicious inquiry” on the part of the audience; the techniques mentioned, from the actor who is a “character rather than a caricature” (196), to a story that is “knotted together” (201), all seek to mobilize a “higher pleasure” of performance that produces life itself.

Boal’s text invokes Brecht’s work but makes the challenge that Brecht presents the subject as “objeto de fuerzas sociales, no ya de los valores de las superestructuras” (12). His contribution is to frame political theater in the Latin American context, as that which labors towards “la destrucción de las barreras creadas por las clases dominantes” (12), whether it be between actor/spectator, protagonist/chorus, or the theatrical means of production. It is in this way that Boal presents theater as a “liberatory weapon” (11), as that which has the potential to dehierarchize and promote participation when it is in the hands of the people. Embodiment, which is central to the techniques Boal proposes, also finds its way “front and center” (Taylor 1), in Taylor’s text. I’d like to discuss this idea of performance as ontology (Taylor 3) more in class as I find it very productive to think with in terms of durations and becomings.