Category Archives: Week 6

The readings for this week focus on the technologies used to control and exercise power over populations. Taylor (1997) focuses on how systems of terror use the spectacle of violence to petrify people’s reaction. Taking the dictatorship in Argentina, Taylor analyzes the power dynamics between spectacle and spectatorship where seeing helps to construct the nation’s identity; “Complex exchange of look and gaze contribute to the simultaneous formation of the individual and social subject” (121).  Here, she uses the term “percepticide” which is the self-blinding of the population that, because of the fear imparted on them by the state, pulled back and did not react. The theatricality of terrorism has the effect of making people react in their minds, but not physically. With this split, populations are controlled to see torture but not react. Taylor sees the necessity of getting empowered by seeing and confronting the spectacle of terror, not as a way to find pleasure or to construct ourselves as moral subjects, but rather as to “confront the monster without turning into stone and being petrified” (137) Foucault (1975) analyzes the appearance/disappearance of the body in relation to penal repression. The abstraction of the law is necessary for the justice system not to be responsible for the physical pain that the body suffers when imprisoned. This system of punishment then is one that creates a relation of power and domination where knowledge and strategy are essential; “in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use ‘lenient’ methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue – they body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.” (25) Finally, Girard (1986) uses the image of the scapegoat of the nation to exemplify how the persecutors convince citizens that a small group signifies a big threat for the entire society, where minorities and the “abnormal” are used as the ones to be blamed and to exercise violence on.

Role of a condemned

Job Title: Actor for punishment spectacle. Role of a condemned.

Reports To: The actor will report to the casting director, scriptwriter, director of terror and the audience. 

Job Overview: Acting of punishment became easier than ever. Your body will not be torn apart and you will not be executed in front of the audience since “the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle” . “Punishment, if I may so put it, should strike the soul rather than the body”. The spectacle “has shifted to the trial, and to the sentence; the execution itself is like an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man”. Also, who knows, maybe the audience would intervene and set you free during a public execution. “Confronted with the reality of torture, tendency of audience is to identify with the victim”. We don’t want them to sympathize with you and change the focus of their anger on the executioner. So it is decided. You will play in the penal ritual and get a psychiatric examination. In the prison, you will get up “at the first drum-roll”, work “for nine hours a day throughout the year”, pray for less than an hour a day. Workshops, school, accommodation, and meals are provided.

Responsibilities and Duties: Although you won’t be publicly tortured in a court, you will participate in terror staging of real life. “Theatrical convention allows for splitting of mind from body, enabling the audience to respond either emotionally or intellectually to the action it sees on stage without responding physically”. We will reveal corpses, torture on streets, create own media narratives so that the audience will get blindfolded with their emotions and fear.

However, you must be noted that we have rivals in real theatres who “turn the gaze back onto the blinding apparatus itself”. They invite the audience “to transgress, to see that which should never be seen”. It reminds them that “terror deterritorializes” and they are all foreigners in their houses. But they “are not being victimized”; they “have a capacity for choice and for action”. For you, it means that your acting in terror and court structures must be flowless to make people feel powerless against them.

Qualifications: You will be accepted to the role based on the following stereotypes.

•           Stereotype of social crisis, moral causes or natural disaster. 14 “Rather than blame themselves, people inevitably blame either society as a whole which costs them nothing, or other people who seem particularly harmful for easily identifiable reasons.”

•           And “thanks to poison, it is possible to be persuaded that a small group, or even a single individual, can harm the whole society without being discovered”. So even you an individual can be blamed for society-wide harm.

•           You will get even more chances to be selected is you “belong to a class that is particularly susceptible to persecution rather than because of the crimes you have committed” . You are welcome to be condemned if you are an ethnic and religious minority.

•           But mainly you will be judged on whether you are as different as expected and blamed “in the end for not differing at all”.

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)

Wrested Rhythms of unpredictability

Look harder and longer. This simultaneity, up to a certain point, is only apparent: a surface, a spectacle. Go deeper, dig beneath the surface, listen attentively instead of simply looking, of reflecting the effects of a mirror. You thus perceive that each plant, each tree, has its rhythm, made up of several: the trees, the flowers, the seeds and fruits, each have their time. […] In place of a collection of fixed things, you will follow each being, each body, as having its own time above the whole. Each one therefore having its place, its rhythm, with its recent past, a foreseeable and a distant future.
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 41

I am interested in escaping anticipation and control (of individual reactions) of political strategies, by finding ways of becoming less predictable. “There is an inextricable link between power and rhythm. What power imposes in the first place is a rhythm (rhythm of everything – life, time, thought, discourse)”, Roland Barthes wrote. I am suggesting to rather consider the link between power and meter and to look at how meter emerged as a transversal concept across the arts, poetics, philosophy, and social science. For me, the meter subjugates, not rhythm, and I see the notion of polymeters and polyrhythms as a way to abolish the hegemony of meter that is imposed upon us as constraint and for becoming more unpredictable through that. It is important to first shortly explain the three basic modes of temporal organization in music – pulse, meter and rhythm and I mostly refer here to the important book The rhythmic structure of music by Cooper. Pulse is one of a series of regularly recurring, precisely equivalent stimuli. Like the ticks of a metronome or a watch, pulses mark off equal unites in the temporal continuum. Meter is the measurement of the number of pulses between regularly recurring accents. Within meter pulses become beats; accented beats are strong, unaccented beats are weak. Rhythm is the way in which one or more unaccented beats are grouped in relation to an accented one. In most compositions, we find a hierarchy of metric organization and some rhythmic groupings are more difficult to realize within a given meter. Aspects of temporal organization which measure are metric. And Foucault writes: “The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics include forecasts, statistical estimates and overall measures.”  Crucial is, that pulse is necessary for the existence of meter, bur rhythm can exist without meter! Rhythm is independent of meter and theoretically even of pulse, it can happen in any type of metric organization. Henri Meschonnic proposes to get back to the ancient meaning of rhythm: Rhutmos (rhéin to flow and –(th)mόs a way, a manner) is the pattern of a fluid element (a letter, a peplos, a mood), an improvised, changeable form.

Bojana Cvejic wrote a summary of our thoughts and discussions we had in her course at P.A.R.T.S., where I mentioned my ideas for the first time: “When rhythm is wrested from the established notion of measure in music, a perplexing diversity of terms, instruments and practices unfolds, situating it between a manner of flowing (ruthmos) and an order of movement, proportioned figure (metron), in “the gray gap between black beats” (Nabokov).” The consolidation of the bar line and therefore the introduction of the hegemonic meter seems to have become a part of music only during the 17th century. (Simultaneously with the emergence of capitalism especially in Holland and England?) For example, also the blues used to be an open form with the duration needed for the story a musician was about to tell and did not necessarily have the now common 12 bars. Composer Girard Grisey worked on the relationship between change, predictability, order and disorder. “One can also imagine an oscillating rhythm in which the meter itself would fluctuate constantly.” Link to Tempus ex Machina by Girard Grisey Grisey denies the periodic considered as an ideal point of reference, the basis of a hierarchy which is for him linked to “maximum predictability” and order. He refers to Abraham Moles that says “the notion of rhythm is linked to that of expectation (1966)” and I personally think that the fulfillment of the expectation is linked to metric control and metronomic pulse. (notes from a class with Bojana Cvejic). “Sunny Murray and Albert Ayler did not merely break through bar lines, they abolished them altogether.”,  John Litweiler. I had to think of Free Jazz and Swing while working on this paper. As written in the chapter 6 Innards of Time of the book “Flow, gesture, and spaces in free jazz : towards a theory of collaboration”: “The swing is one of those subcutaneous rebellions against the tyranny of the bar line.” To swing means to fluctuate between 2 and 3, to be in 2 and 3 at the same time. Breaking down all rhythmic elements into ‘twos and threes’ (8th notes, 16th notes and triplets) has its roots in nearly all folkloric traditions from Gnawa music of North Africa through the Balkan to Colombian Bata.  Drummer Milford Graves: “(…) but if you’re counting like a metronome and everything is like Bamp, Bamp, Bamp just like the second hand, that is extremely dangerous. That means your body is not responding. It must respond. You cannot walk across the street in military march, you know on the beat per second on a major highway where traffic is coming. (…) your tempo is going to change. That’s what the body expects. (…)“. I need to explain, that polymetrics, as I am using the term in this paper, allow not only for different simultaneous rhythms but for the possibility of shifting and changing time and restraints. I am not suggesting to get rid of meters as it is important for the possibility of communal organization and collectivity, but of its hegemony. We do not need one meter that keeps a measured amount of beats controlled, but to share a pulse that allows for interdependency through the possible plurality of polyrhythmic shared within polymetric space and time.* To this thought I want to add beautiful quotation of Osip Mandelstam (“Government and Rhythm” 1920): “Solidarity and rhythm are the quantity and quality of social energy. Only the collective can have rhythm. (…) Rhythm demands a synthesis, a synthesis of the spirit and the body, a synthesis of work and play.(…)” I wonder- how do we free ourselves from the prison of meter opposed on us in order to be more easily controlled through the therefore established possibility of expectancy? What would it mean to live in a polymetric society? On a society based on polymetrics and the resulting less predictable poly-dictability? How would it influence the power of dictator’s unpredictable acts upon us? Would it? “The dictator must never be predictable“, Sue Prideaux in Dictators: the great performers. We still are. But we can start forgiving.
I want to end this paper with another quotation of the book “Flow, gesture, and spaces in free jazz : towards a theory of collaboration” of page 52. Guerino B.Mazzola and Moreno Andreatta conclude the first part of chapter 6 with the following: “So the new thing about time was that it made the move from facticity to the level of making: time became a thing to be construed from scratch. No more tyrannic clocks, no more eternal lines, no lines at all. We make time, we are the new hands, and the clock, and the gestures, which mold time. Not surprisingly, such expressive making also changed the time’s stature: physics’ anorexic timeline was transmuted into a voluminous body of time as shaped by the powerful hands of working musicians.“

“These intimate and predatory forms of exploitation are introducing calculation through rhythms into new arenas of every day life. The question is therefore how to bridge—analytically and politically—the relationship between newer and older(re)configurations of rhythm, power, and everyday life.” Intersectional rhythmanalysis: Power, rhythm, and everyday life by Emily Reid-Musson.


*I very clearly make a differentiation between polymeters and polyrhythms, which in music is not always the case, and not in this way as I am doing it for this paper.

Swinging Max Roach

2 and 3 at the same time- swinging La Réunion!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOm3lqhvvRI

Archie Shepp – Free jazz                 

Ari Hoenig- Polymetrics / Polyrhythms

Conlon Nancarrow born in the US, lived most of his life in Mexico. He is one of the most important composers of our time and forerunner of contemporary music, but somehow strangely unknown. He mostly composed music for player piano. “One reason for working with the player piano was my interest in temporally dissonant relationships. Temporal dissonance is as hard to define as tonal dissonance.”

Rhythm Study No. 1 (1951) is a polyrhythmic composition with over 200 changes of meter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mKfQYzfduY

Eva M. Reyes

On December 4th, weeks after the 2016 Presidential election, Edgar Madison Welch entered a Washington D.C. pizzeria armed with an AR-15 rifle and fired multiple times (Fisher et al., 2016). After being detained Welch told officers he “read online the restaurant was harboring child sex slaves and that he wanted to see for himself if they were there” adding that he was armed to help rescue them” (Fisher et al., par. 62, 2016). Beginning with a Wikileaks rumor which claimed to publish the content of Hillary Clinton’s emails, users speculated the words “sauce” and “pizza” were codes used in a sex trafficking and pedophilia ring harbored in the pizzeria basement (Groth, 2019). However bizarre, the rumor went from hashtag, to “pizzagate,” to gunshots after the story gained traction online when former national security advisor, Michael Flynn and international news outlets shared the conspiracy online (Robb, 2017; Groth, 2019). Though “pizzagate” is an extreme example, the scandal functions to provide insights on the intricacies of the political narrative. As political strategist James Carville has noted, “a narrative is the key to everything” (Poletta, p.1, 2008). Therefore, it is crucial to understand how complex political processes can be stripped down to stories.

Political narratives organize the story by providing a clear distinction of who is good or bad and/or who just or corrupt (Maclaughlin & Velez, 2019). Take for example,Trump’s 2016 campaign video of “Two America’s” (Dumenco, 2016). In the advertisement, the narrator asks viewers to envision “Hillary Clinton’s America,” a land where crime is rampant and jobs are dwindling. This is shown parallel to “Donald Trump’s America,” where families are secure and business thrives. By creating this binary, the narrative format functions to reinforce worldviews of those who agree with their message. Polletta (2008) explains though individuals typically process messages with intense scrutiny, there is a tendency to immerse oneself in the story. Be it for entertainment or political purposes, people strive to vicariously live out the emotions and events of the character’s experience (Maclaughlin & Velez, 2019). The narrative works to captivate the audience who are encouraged to view themselves as the central character in the story.

Narratives are powerfully transportive forces. Research explains, this transportation is possible because from a young age people learn to rely on imagination to make sense of their social worlds by gathering information and creating representations of their surroundings (Green & Brook, 2000; Maclaughlin & Velez, 2019). Essentially, because humans learn to imagine in the mind, they can picture themselves taking certain actions or views in reality. Hence, when people confront a political narrative they create a “mental model” to understand that narrative world (Maclaughlin & Velez, p.24, 2019). Take for example a presidential race. In this case, a citizen will create a character representation (the candidate), assess their motivations, and create assumptions for how certain actions (voting for someone) can affect their reality and the larger political realm (Maclaughlin & Velez, p.24, 2019). When individuals engage with mediated political narratives, they (re)construct the model provided by the narrative.

One key to the narrative in the current digital age is its ability to spread online (Maclaughlin & Velez, 2019). Much of the narrative’s force is in how it can get someone who agrees with it to act, or in the online case, how it can get someone to “share”. The more a story is disseminated, the more people try to make sense of it in computer mediated and face-to-face communication. Further, the more frequent a message is seen, the more likely someone is to believe the information is true (Pennycook & Rand, 2019). Simply put, people aren’t likely to believe a false narrative because they are particularly gullible, rather it is how often they are inundated with a message and how open minded they are to receiving it. As Groth (2019) highlights, this is especially problematic as “in its most radical form the motivation to act can take the shape of a shooter intruding into the alleged sex traficking headquarters in the basement of the pizzeria with an assault rifle, seeking to directly fight the conspiracy” (p.2).

Liberal and conservative voters are both vulnerable to a good story (Pennycook & Rand, 2019; Harper & Baguley, 2019). Generally, people are more likely to believe narratives they are familiar with (Harper & Baguley, 2019; Polletta, 2008). When individuals are transported into a story they don’t concern themselves with critically evaluating beliefs rather, they are focused on the transportive experience; Instead they ask, “Can I picture myself in this narrative?” (Maclaughlin & Velez, 2019; Polletta, 2008). Liberals and conservatives approach political narratives similarly. Harper and Baguley (2019) find people on both sides of the traditional right-left divide are equally likely to believe political stories that are in line with their current ideologies, and cast aside narratives that are inconsistent with their views. In either case, narcissism plays a pivotal role in whether or not someone will initially choose to believe and be transported into the narratives presented; there is a stronghold on political beliefs (Harper & Baguley, 2019). When someone can envision themselves in a narrative the more successful the story becomes as a strategy for engaging in politics.

 As audience members feel like they are directly experiencing an unfolding story that speaks to their ideology, they are prone to welcome and internalize the views of reality offered by the narrative. Rather than engaging in a critical evaluation of information, transported individuals tend to readily adopt the depicted attitudes and experiences as their own (Maclaughlin & Velez, 2019). That is, immersed partisans internalize the story line, characters, and causal relationships as an accurate reflection of their own reality. As the American Presidential race is underway, it is crucial that we (re)examine the stories deeply embedded in US politics. Groth (2019) points out, “great writers don’t write simple stories. They write stories that tap into our expectations and defy them.” (p. 30). This election season, political writers continue to construct narrative models in an attempt to reel in potential voters. While storytelling remains at the helm American politics it is crucial to ask, what would happen if the fights seen in the political arena were based on real action instead of character narratives? What would happen if we refuse to tell stories at all?

Keywords: Action, Narrative, Storytelling, Imagination, Transportation

Work Cited 

Dumenco, S. (2016, August). New Trump TV ad: ‘In Hillary Clinton’s America, hundreds of thousands of jobs disappear. Advertising Age. Retrieved from http://adage.com/article/campaign-trail/trump-tv-ad-clinton-samerica-jobs-disappear/305640/

Fisher, M., Woodrow Cox, J., Hermann, P. (2016). From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in DC, Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pizzagate-from-rumor-to-hashtag-to-gunfire-in-dc/2016/12/06/4c7def50-bbd4-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html

Green, M. C., Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 701–721. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701

Groth, S. (2019). Political Narratives/Narrations of the Political, Narrative Culture. (6)1, 1-18, doi: 128.122.149.96

Harper, C., Baguley, T. (2019). You are fake news: Ideological (A)symmetries in Perceptions of Media Legitimacy. Doi: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ym6t5

Maclaughlin B., Velez, J.A. (2019) Imagined politics: How different media platforms transport citizens into political narratives. Social Science Computer Review, (37)1, 22-37. Doi: 10.1177/0894439317746327

Pennycook, G., Rand., D. (2019). Who falls for fake news? The roles of bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking. Journal of Personality. 1-64. Doi: 10.1111/jopy12476

Robb, A. (2017). Anatomy of a fake news scandal, Rolling Stone. Retrieved from  https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877/

Prelude

The backs curve, the knees bend, and the footwork shuffles to the swaying melody of the accordion. The hands twist into sharp and angular signs representing la cruz de sus parroquias: M for Monterrey, I for Colonia Independencia, V for Villanitas. In el baile de gavilán, whether your hands show affiliation to the city, a neighborhood, or a gang, you will be moving to the right, pasito a pasito, following the footsteps of other Colombias, while others follow you. One after the other we shuffle to the right, led by the chik-chika-chik-chika-chik of the guacharaca, creating a large circle of bodies in motion. The dance floor is now an ocean, and at the center, like a school of fish, bodies are gracefully tossing, turning, and shuffling in unison riding the slow tumbado of the cumbia rebajada. If for Hannah Arendt the political realm where power and the space of appearance come into being, rises directly out of the “sharing of words and deeds” for the Colombia’s it rises out of communing in motion, out of the collective pride de ser colombia.

I.
In the 1950’s Colombian cumbia and vallenato music landed in Monterrey, Nuevo León via Mexico City. Due to Monterrey’s geographic position which marks it as a crucial migratory point, mas pa’ allá que pa’ acá, the afro-caribbean rhythm found a home on its way to Houston, Texas, and other U.S. border cities. Rapidly, Sonidero’s popularized hits such as La Cumbia Sampuesana and La Pollera Colorá. The popularity of colombian cumbia and vallenato music led to the formation of a subculture that prevailed for decades and eventually became an essential part of the cultural makeup of the Northeastern of Mexico. 

Socio-economic inequality is particularly palpable in the industrial city of Monterrey given that it houses Mexico’s largest multinational companies, as well as the richest neighborhood in Latin America: the luxurious and conservative San Pedro Garza. This stark disparity, combined with the city’s proximity to the United States, its violent history as a Drug War epicenter, and its position as a migration point, has made of Monterrey a place rife with racial and economic disparity, discrimination, and segregation. Given that the Colombia movement is mostly integrated by impoverished and working class people who live in precarious conditions within Monterrey, classist and racist policies and social norms have attacked Colombia culture since its inception. In these conditions of marginalization, Colombia culture has created a social practices and actions that battle isolation: “Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act (Arendt, 188).” Thus, the ser Colombia, translated to “being Colombia” became not only a  crucial cultural identity formation, but an important source of power for working class regiomontanos. 

In the early 2000’s Colombia culture went through a crucial aesthetic transformation. Young Colombia’s created a new form of sartorial expression which mixed Cholo aesthetics, DIY garments, religious accessories, gel-heavy hairstyles, and the Regio-Colombia musical tradition. This aesthetic expression was quickly rejected by the dominant Regio culture, which criminalized and thus further marginalized Colombia youth. Colombias aesthetic and cultural actions have solidified an important cultural political practice within the city of Monterrey. By the late 2010’s, the aesthetic phenomenon within Colombia’s, known by foreign entities as Cholombianos, had been “eradicated” thanks to the lethal combination of criminalization, marginalization, and violence. 

Although it is rare to find the youth of Colonia independencia flaunting the looks that brought them together in the early 2000’s, Colombia culture is still thriving. Thus, I wonder, what is the political significance of popular cultural practices? In this particular case, how can we understand the political power within manifestations such as the Colombia’s in Monterrey? What does it mean to gather in motion and in music in a city which is constantly seeking your eradication? Or to echoe Judith Butler, “What does it mean to act together when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away? (Butler, 23).”

According to Etienne Balibar political action must be understood in terms of strategies (Balibar, 16). Thus, I’d like to break down two of the main strategies which conform the political spectacle which makes the Colombia’s  phenomenon possible. For the purpose of this short essay I will briefly focus on the aesthetic and the choreographic, which can be understood in terms of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly respectively. 

“If we consider why freedom of assembly is separate from freedom of expression, it is precisely because the power that people have to gather together is itself an important political prerogative, quite distinct from the right to say whatever they have to say once people have gathered. The gathering signifies in excess of what is said, and that mode of signification is a concerted bodily enactment, a plural form of performativity. (Butler, 8).”

To powerfully assert one’s identity by claiming prideful ownership of aesthetic preferences which have been classified as “tacky”, “poor”, “vulgar”  is to appropriate the assertion and delineation of one’s difference. The understanding of identity I posit here aligns with Etienne Balibar’s understanding of identity as a transindividual formation, meaning its construction depends on both the individual and the collective (Balibar, 27). These practices, which are always profoundly bound to practices of resistance and politics of excess, tend to be originated within communities which have historically created culture that is first rejected and then appropriated by hegemonic cultural producers. The aesthetic choices of the Colombia’s, which I understand mainly as their sartorial practice, have facilitated the creation of an alternative polis. “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).” This process of identification and recognition must be understood as a fundamental political practice of marginalized communities which use their self-fashioning as a form of claiming visibility and occupying public space which is often denied from them.

Lastly, and more importantly we must focus on the choreographic assembly of the Colombias. Because as Judith Butler notes, “forms of assembly already signify prior to, and apart from, any particular demands they make. (Butler, 8).” The assembly of marginalized youth which identifies with Colombia culture has a noteworthy choreographic strategy which consists in forming a large circle when they’re dancing. Unlike other forms of popular dance, where the circle is formed in order to provide space for a moving body which will occupy the center, this circle does not prioritize the space at the center. The purpose of the circle is not the centering of an individual but the circumference itself. This choreographic action embodies a collective political practice. It is a choreographic structure which allows everybody to claim individual identification, which is expressed via hand signs and shout-outs, while remaining within a collective structure. This choreographic practice reminds us that: “No one body establishes the space of appearance, but this action, this performative exercise, happens only “between” bodies, in a space that constitutes the gap between my own body and another’s. In this way, my body does not act alone when it acts politically. Indeed, the action emerges from the “between,” a spatial figure for a relation that both binds and differentiates (Butler, 76).” 

It is important to conclude with a reminder that the Colombia practice of the early 2000’s which I speak off was quickly eradicated by the lethal combination of local criminalization and the violence of the Drug War that profoundly attacked the social fabric of Monterrey.  Today, the Colombia’s have found new forms of expression. Like many cultural practices, its survival has depended on its ability to transform. I end on this note to remind the reader that historically cultural and aesthetic practices which have been targeted in this way present a danger to the state of domination of the status quo. Therefore, it is a civil duty to protect and respect practices like the Colombia’s, as in doing so we will be protecting political practices which are essential to the social fabric. We will be protecting those bodies that “dance on the line.” We will be protecting the Colombia assembly which enacts “by the embodied form of the gathering, a claim to the political (18).”

Key Words
1. Assembly
2. Precarity
3. Choreography

Video:

1. Colombias:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9gXXysH3_Y&list=PL4xdu6yKN6IoJvx2-ToE7kDurK0YQ_6CV&index=8&t=0s

2. Angélica Rivera, Declaración Casa Blanca EPN:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4_Tk9wtDQ

jonathancoker

Fashion Week has an interesting history with political spectacle as some shows send garments down the runway conscious of their cultural critique, while other shows are infiltrated by spect-actors in protest. Just this season, model Ayesha Tan Jones, staged a protest against Gucci’s straight-jacket inspired collection as they walked down the catwalk, hands held eye-level, with “mental health is not fashion” scrawled on their outward-facing palms in pen. The same London Fashion Week was commemorated by a staged die-in by climate campaign group Extinction Rebellion outside its venue, thrashing about in buckets of fake blood to symbolize the fashion industry’s role in the deterioration of life on earth as well as its negligent accountability towards a more sustainable model. And elsewhere, during Paris Fashion Week, comedian and performance artist Marie S’Infiltre crashed Chanel’s latest show in a vintage Chanel outfit (her grandmother’s), as a means to not only enliven the infamously serious affair, but also partake in a spectacle that promises glory, basking in the eternity of the Chanel brand.  These examples act as critiques of an industry whose preservation depends on the constant reiteration and belief in itself. 

All of the mentioned spect-actors take on the role of party crasher, breaching an assembly by satirizing the imaginary borders installed around the spectacle. However, my interest is in Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty Show, a political spectacle in its own right that did not seek to exclude, but instead invited all of us to crash the esteemed party of Fashion Week. 

If fashion shows hope to inspire possibilities in its spect-actors, then one that strives for inclusivity should facilitate an entrance point of empathy everyone can align themselves with. Rather than encouraging a prohibited breach of spectacle, it encourages self-actualization through socialization; it is equity in action, spilling off the catwalk and into the capacities of the individual. 

Art executed through performance is innately political for it displays the potential for radical transformation. Boal contends that if art is to be sovereign, then it should deal with all humans, their actions (or inactions), as well as what is done to them. Performance spectacle accomplishes this through a catharsis of the senses that depicts a correction of humanity; in a purposeful alteration, a new way of orienting the body is enacted and there is potential for the viewer to find emancipation. 

Performatic theatre is often called an artistic form of coercion. The spectacle of Fashion Week is a great example of placing commodities on display in artistic sequence. This is essential if we are to agree with Brecht that theatre in the scientific age should strive for the joys of liberation; liberation from the confines of history; liberation from present conformities of daily life; liberation from precarious potentials of the future. Thus, theatre begs its actors to move in the style of a man who wonders as opposed to the man who knows the truth. Judging performance through issues of true/false or those of being/pretend becomes futile; what gives these mediated acts their effectiveness is in their affectations, or even more precisely, the inspiring potential in the emotional weight of their movements. 

That being said, Brecht would not want us to ignore the contradictions of our given world when tempting this intersection. This season’s Savage x Fenty is cognizant of Brecht’s appeal, so, unlike the initial acts of protest described here, this political spectacle strives to deconstruct the fashion show format rather than puncture its beloved iterations. In this way, it establishes a new world of expression that is not totally dismissive of the power structures it critiques, but instead works within its bounds of artifice, simultaneously challenging its norms and expectations. 

The show introduces new performatic possibilities for a fashion show by highlighting the brand’s inclusive ambitions and blowing them up in a colorful display of lingerie, sleepwear, dance, and song. Interestingly, the audacity of this political spectacle makes each choreographed song or dance number seem more like performance of protest, seamlessly oriented around a multiplicity of body types and gender identities marching before a fashion world that does not typically champion their body or existence. Thus, Fenty x Savage reasons with the idea of fashion as a protection from human nature’s more restrictive tendencies in an attempt to promote modern nature (and all its inconsistencies) at its most cathartic.

If we consider Arendt, political action can only take place on the condition that the human body makes an appearance. In being witnessed, various perspectives concerning the body depend on such displacement in order to establish coherence. Butler contends that this is how political action persists- the space in between actors. The emancipation we feel does not emit from the individual, but the relation among individuals. Thus, political revolution by way of spectacle cannot be commenced by a single instance, but by the radical solidarity of the “us.” Both Arendt and Butler concur that human dignity is championed by social relations that strive towards acceptance in the name of equality. 

Butler adds that, “The claim of equality…is made precisely when bodies appear together, or, rather, when, through their action, they bring the space of appearance into being. This space is a feature and effect of action, and it works, according to Arendt, only when relations of equality are maintained” (Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 88-89). The life that emits from a body, although it may not be as readily apparent as a garment, must still seek out means of perseverance, especially when it is at odds with a domineering hegemony. Such queered conditions of perseverance inevitably depend on sociality, and in turn, ask for radical reorganization of established mores in order to carve out space to thrive. In light of this, I ask: If fashion has become a means of simultaneous protection and expression, notably for minoritarian subjects who are disenfranchised by the industries’ historicized limitations, then it is in turn a political sphere where we should not only make room for such bodies to exist, but also make this a paramount objective, in the name of equality for all.

By opening up the fashion discourse to include traditionally excluded bodies in a realm that champions political post-structuralism, Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty Show aims to provide a forgotten (or disposable) population within the confines of fashion a right to be seen. This generosity of the human spirit is exemplified by the opening moments of the show, where the pop star and mogul takes center stage on a platform surrounded by other dancers; she is not alone, even though her larger than life persona almost calls for her alienation. Instead, she concedes to the role of conductor, facilitating an assembly that is not all about her, but in fact all about us. 

Keywords: “Equity,” “Aesthetics,” “Empathy”

Democratic Primary Debate: Crowley and AOC

Maria Paz Almenara

In The Distribution of the Sensible, Rancière claims that “politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (Rancière 2004, 13). It is through a metaphor of visibility, what is “seen”, that he defines the realm of the political. In Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler considers and extends Arendt’s idea of the space/field of appearance as the political realm where humans recognize one another as such and take action. She significantly emphasizes the fact that not all human subjects are equally recognizable and, hence, the differential conditions of appearance which govern the political. For both theorists, the space of appearance or the realm of the political is exclusive (for Ranciére because of the particular demands on the working class and for Butler given the historical systems of colonial and patriarchal power that govern it) but their aspirations are ultimately oriented towards their expansion not their dissolution.

The benefits of visibility, of recognition, of representation can easily be taken for granted. Social justice discourses regularly deploy these terms as a way to expand the “protection” of the State (i.e. the legal system) or to alter the political sphere through the introduction of new actors. Many of the established discourses and conventional practices of resistance within neoliberal democracies today rely on the visible intervention onto “public space”. While theorists consider the significance of a space of appearance and recognition, activists consistently rely on protests, occupations, strikes, boycotts, or other interventions on public space to act and intervene on unjust social/legal formations. The current dynamics surrounding migration, particularly the precarious conditions faced by undocumented immigrants in the US, however, might force us towards alternative theorizations of the visible and its politics.

The legal charging document that initiates the removal proceedings against undocumented immigrants in the United States is called a “Notice to Appear” (NTA). The document specifies one of three reasons for the initiation of deportation proceedings: being an “arriving alien” stopped at a port of entry, an immigrant already in the US who has not been formally admitted or an immigrant who was formally admitted but is now deemed deportable. Receiving an NTA means that one must appear at Immigration Court on the date specified, it represents the enactment of “due process” where migrants have the right to have their cases heard before a decision is made. This appearance, or making visible, of the undocumented migrant before the legal system might be considered an instance of recognition (or misrecognition) within the public sphere. It can be considered in terms of potential for action or an otherwise political encounter, but would those migrants not be better served by a claim to the right not to appear? While being undocumented clearly represents a precarious existence, isn’t it so partly because of the persistent threat of exposure, the threat of being forced to “appear”?

In March 1997, Balibar delivered a speech in solidarity with the Sans-Papiers of Saint-Bernard, a group of around 300 African migrants who in June 1996 occupied the Saint-Bernard Church in Paris to demand legal residency. He begins by saying that the French are “greatly indebted to the ‘sans-papiers’ who, refusing the ‘clandestineness’ ascribed to them, have forcefully posed the question of the right to stay”. Through the organization of the movement and their appearance within the political sphere, the sans-papiers were able to make the claim to the right to legal residency as well as the right to have rights. Balibar further emphasizes that this is revealing of the nature of democracy as “an institution of collective debate, whose conditions are never imposed from above” where “people must always conquer the right to speak, their visibility and credibility, running the risk of repression.” The risk of repression, however, proved to be a significant one given the turn of events for the sans-papier movement and the occupation of the church. Towards the end of August 1996, the French police brutally evicted the sans-papiers from the church. Many of them were subsequently deported from France.

What, then, does visibility actually do?

These examples do not seek to discount the political potential of resistance based on visibility. They do, however, raise questions about the necessity for alternative conceptualizations of resistance through “clandestineness”, deliberate invisibility or a rejection of appearance. Considering the contemporary conditions of state (and corporate) surveillance, as well as the history of policing which defines their logic, how can we consider the limits of visibility as emancipatory? How can visibility itself produce precarity? Can performances of resistance be fragmented? Can they resist their own impulse to monopolize the gaze?

While I question Balibar’s premise of an absolute democratic benefit to visibility (Were the sans-papiers not already forced into a kind of new legal visibility by the enactment of Pasqua laws in 1993?), his speech further gives us a foundation for alternatively conceptualizing resistance. From these events, Balibar theorizes the concept of citizenship, not as an institution or as a status, but rather as “collective practice”. This concept is also briefly pointed to in his essay Three Concepts of Politics in an account of the concept of equal liberty:

[Rights] cannot be granted, they have to be won, and they can only be won collectively. It is of their essence to be rights individuals confer upon each other, guarantee to one another…There is autonomy of politics only to the extent that subjects are the source of ultimate reference of emancipation for each other. (Balibar 2002, 4)

I am interested particularly in the latter part of this claim – the recognition of rights between individuals. Subjects as the reference of emancipation for each other. Rather than performing resistance through action in public space, through protests or strikes which reinforce the State as the entity capable of granting or recognizing rights, how can we resist differential governance by protecting, shielding or hiding our neighbours from the threat of visibility, of a necessarily exclusive (legal) public sphere? How do we reimagine solidarity so that precarity is not further reproduced and intensified towards those most vulnerable? What tactics of resistance should we adopt to face a State which demands formal appearance and visibility?

Key terms: Migration, Law, (In)visibility

Example of political spectacle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ8gHreLdgg

Works Cited
Balibar, Etienne. 1996. “What we owe to the Sans-papiers” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0313/balibar/en.html

Balibar, Etienne. 2002. “Three Concepts of Politics: Emancipation, Transformation, Civility” In Politics and the Other Scene, 1-39. London: Verso Books.

Butler, Judith. 2018. Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. New York: Continuum.

by Desiree Fernandez

Since ancient to postmodern theatre, we, as theatre scholars and artists, have been striving to improve what theatre is and what theatre should be and do. Theatre was recognized as ritual, as a practice for change, or celebration, or even advocacy for something, whether that be resources or action. In a postmodern era, we are still fighting for rights of people who have been colonized and oppressed by those who still benefit from their ancestor’s actions. Beyond being a tool to entertain or to teach, theatre should be a vessel, an “incubator” (Parks 4) to create new perspective, alternate histories, and allow bodies to decolonize and recover from trauma within their ancestral memory stored in DNA. By looking at performances from Guillermo Gomez Peña, we can then discuss how performance can be used as a way to decolonize and create new history, a reclaimed self. I am interested in body politics and how through political protest, bodies transform from objects to subjects and back again.  

Peña’s Mapa/Corpo 2 is an example of how theatre is being used as an incubator to change our society’s opinions and functions of diverse bodies based on ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, ability, and size. A new truth is being created on stage and actors are standing in for characters who aren’t actually there, the post-colonial subject stands in for the colonized, a person who has been oppressed or discriminated based on race, gender, ability, or even size.  

Audience members in Mapa/Corpo 2 becoming involved in the performance piece. Audience members used bodies of performers as canvases as well as helped them relieve pain and to even move. Seda and Patrick 2009.

This is exactly what is occurring during Guillermo Peña’s Mapa/Corpo 2: Interactive Rituals for the New Millennium, a performance piece that allows the participation of the audience to help those characters emancipate from colonization, trauma, and violence. ​

When both bodies have been decolonized with the audience’s help, the performers look each other in the eyes, as if recognizing and acknowledging each other. The performers’ bodies in Mapa/Corpo 2 become La Pocha Nostra’s artistic canvas. They function as intentional instruments of artistic agency that display the effects of colonization and violence. Thus, the bodies represent the memory of violence against the Other; they create a narrative of resistance to violence and colonization. This resistance can be understood from the multiple perspectives of gender, ethnicity, and nationality. If, as Richard Schechner has argued, “There are no clear boundaries separating everyday life from family and social roles or social roles from job roles, church ritual from trance, acting onstage from acting offstage, and so on, ‘the per formers’ genders and multiethnic backgrounds also contribute to the overall meaning of Mapa/ Corpo 2’. Thus, the individual body becomes emblematic of everybody that has endured pain, violence, discrimination, and colonization. In other words, the performers’ bodies play a vital role in this cross-cultural analysis of violence and colonization in which art becomes a holistic weapon aimed at decolonizing the body politic. Seda and Patrick 139

In this performance, bodies become objects that represent subjects that need to be decolonized. Peña is making a comment that by witnessing, you are taking responsibility to what has and will happen to these people. Therefore, it is only with action by those who have power (the audience) that these people can be relieved of oppression, trauma, and colonization. Though not to forget, these decolonized people will remember a new version of their existence henceforth. This memory and experience will rewrite what is their past history. 

In Guillermo Peña’s Mapa/Corpo 2: Interactive Rituals for the New Millennium, everyone in the performance space is involved in creating a new history for the artists and the people the artists represent. “This is evident from the moment the audience enters the performance space and sees two bodies lying motionless on gurneys. These are part of a visual code that refers to pain and, simultaneously, to healing. The actions throughout the performance unfold as a metaphorical healing ritual enacting the decolonization of the bodies lying on gurneys” (Seda and Patrick 135). 

When the acupuncturist begins to insert needles topped with small flags of occupier countries, the woman’s body on the other gurney becomes a metaphor for colonized and occupied territories. [I]t becomes clear that the fear and pain caused by colonization and the violenced inflicted on the bodies by means of the weapons has left on them without verbal language. The performance aims to restore voice and agency to the suffering, colonized bodies through the audience, as they help to heal the bodies by writing on them and removing the needles… By removing the needles from the woman’s body and writing on the man, the audience engages in a personal and communal act of ritualistic healing of the body politic, empowering themselves. Seda and Patrick 136-139

 Through witnessing the trauma and harm of bodies, audience members are more likely to carry that empathy they feel within their own bodies to the outside world. New stories and perspective of both the performing and the witnessing will help rewrite the cultural memory of these diverse bodies in society.  The audience member was an observer, never immersed, blinded to the suffering in order to feel relief and comfort. Colonization occurs when there is a restriction on the body, an inability to look or act a specific way according to the rule or conformities set on by society or the colonizer itself. Therefore, decolonization is a political movement allowing the individual agency and citizenship, these bodies are no longer objects but subjects of society.

Works Cited

Parks, Suzan Lori. “Elements of Style.” The America Play and Other Works. Theatre Communications Group, 1995. 6-18.

Seda, Laurietz, and Brian D. Patrick. “Decolonizing the Body Politic: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s ‘Mapa/Corpo 2: Interactive Rituals for the New Millennium.’” TDR (1988-), vol. 53, no. 1, 2009, pp. 136–141. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25599456.

3 Key Terms: 

Make Believe vs Make Belief

Archive (what is remembered in the body and in “history”)

Emancipation

• key concepts: spectator/spect-actor, censorship/civility, identification

In the year of 2017, a contemporary art piece called Dragonfly Eyes made its debut and led to heated discussion. Dragonfly Eyes is an eighty-minute indie film created by a New York City based Chinese artist Xu Bing and his team. Xu Bing has worked decades with visual art and installations and had developed a rather intriguing approach towards symbols and representations, while this is the first time that he ever makes an attempt to involve human beings and real bodies in his artistic work. The film focuses on the tragic life story of a woman who lived a marginal life. She endured great precarity, from poverty, betrayal of love, to sexual harassment, body shaming and sexism. After several plastic surgeries, she ended up being a cyber star selling her sexuality. However, things went downhill quickly and the story ends where she vanishes suddenly, leaving no trace at all.

Although this is a film, I still consider it a performance — mediated performance might be more precise — due to its content of bodily actions and nature of liveness. Xu Bing’s studio made a straight forward statement at the very beginning of the video, clarifying that “this is a film without actors or camera crews. All the visual materials has been taken from public surveillance videos” (Dragonfly Eyes trailer, 2017). Statistic shows that up until the year of 2017, over 17 million surveillance cameras have been installed and actively working throughout China, and the number may accelerate to 45 million by 2020, making China the country with the highest density of CCTV and least privacy. Xu Bing’s team had no professional photographer but the whole country’s cameras working 24-7 for them. This is a unique film where all 11000 hours long footages come from “live records” of daily human performance captured by CCTV. It is also made through an utterly reversed filmmaking process, as the team first collected the footages of surveillance security cameras all over China, examined closely and categorized them, then developed a script based on what they have seen. Finally the selected recordings were edited into a narrative and also fictional film tinged with absurdity. 

Dragonfly Eyes is neither a conventional film made for movie theatres, nor a film that can be approved by Chinese National Radio and Television Administration under current censorship because of its graphic representation of sensitive subjects. However, Xu Bing chose to add a logo of dragon on a grass green background to the beginning himself, which is the symbol that would be given to all films if they are approved by Chinese government for public release. This is a clear irony of censorship with in a cultural context, but it also refers to political civility in universality. Censorship in a way is enforced to make sure that all conversations happen in the social political environment subject to what is considered correct by the established dominion or authority. The surveillance cameras are installed initially to serve a similar purpose, to secure the dominance of a governing system and a common (or greater) good. However, its appliance are not always upright. It is disturbing to see them turning into apparatus of violence that constantly intrude privacy of people, recording images of nudity and intimacy.

In the book 1984, George Orwell warned about the terrifying violence censorship can cause. He depict a world of worst scenario, where every single person’s behaviors are kept under Surveillance “for the benefit of the country”. People spy on other’s daily performance, pry into their privacy, and turn those misbehaved in. There is a clear and absolute subject when it comes to censorship and surveillance, excluding enemies as well as the disqualified. This is an action bonded by so called civility, the hegemonic social settings that limits and rules the public, bonding citizens to its strict contract under penalty. Its initial intention is to sustain the very condition of  democratic politics for mutual respect and thus equal conversation. But with time it associates with identification, advocating “an identity totally exclusive of any other, one which imperiously commands its self-realization through the elimination of any trace of otherness in the ‘we’ and in the ‘self’” . Thus civility is turned into a a filter on the path to political privilege. This is also why as soon as these images and videos are taken outside the context, people are instantly aware of its absurdity. All images seem inappropriate and become real matters of delicacy. Looking closer, a power transfer would emerge, as the power hold by authorities took a unwitting but also problematic shift into the hands of artist, leaving behind the question whether it is legit for art to go far beyond the its artistic realm and mold the truth or reality as it wishes. The both political and ethnic question of how shall art interfere the world and people’s life needs to be deliberated. When an artist take advantage of private/personal actions to pose against the authorities, he might also be using his privileges to deprive the inherent power of people. This is probably where identification comes in a draw its line.

Whether a political art work is intruding inherent right of people partially depends on where identification is oriented. Identification possess the power to alienate or align, and it projects through performance through the relationship between actors and spectators. Editing raw materials excerpted from documentary videos into a narrative film is an act that alters the idea of contemporary performance and spectatorship. Boal believed that spectatorship restrict people in a passive position that is at a higher risk to be oppressed. He proposed the idea of spect-actor in stead of spectator to encourage participation from the context of performance to daily political scenes. While Xu Bing took a step further, turning every single person into a complex combination of both actor and spectator. Consciously or not, our bodies are conducting actions throughout life. People live as live performances. On the flip side, people also live as spectators all the time. As Taylor inferred, “the debates about what can and cannot be known through vision, and how spectators evaluate what they experience, continue into the present and are now further complicated by the prevalence of mediated spectacles and interactive digital technologies” (Taylor, 75). Bodies are manipulated into spectacles that appeal to the public eyes and minds, and because of its kinship with feelings and emotions, opinions opposed to truth can be projected and inserted all the way through, making the identification dangerously political.

With the advent of Dragonfly Eyes, the power retained within seeing has never been so amplified. “Dangerous seeing, seeing that which was not meant to be seen, puts people at risk in a society that polices the look. The mutuality and reciprocity of the look, which allows people to connect with others, gives way to unauthorized seeing” . Similar things happened during our workshop of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, where several actors chose to gain more power by positioning themselves in certain distance, as witnesses or commenters. When surveillance cameras are installed across the country, or even all over the world, the slightest trivia can be exposed to certain eyes — eyes of the authorities. Then the inevitable but problematic question of who is allowed to see and who should be seen follows. The ability to see empowers the spect-actors by creating a distance while at the same time offering them the opportunity to deliberate, report, discuss and comment, or even interpret or distort the fact as they wish. It then leads to an ethical aspect of truth and lie.

While Xu Bing took a step further, turning every single person into a complex combination of both actor and spectator. Consciously or not, our bodies are conducting actions throughout life. People live as live performances. On the flip side, people also live as spectators all the time. The power retained within seeing has never been so amplified. “Dangerous seeing, seeing that which was not meant to be seen, puts people at risk in a society that polices the look. The mutuality and reciprocity of the look, which allows people to connect with others, gives way to unauthorized seeing” . Similar things happened during our workshop of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, where several actors chose to gain more power by positioning themselves in certain distance, as witnesses or commenters. When surveillance cameras are installed across the country, or even all over the world, the slightest trivia can be exposed to certain eyes — eyes of the authorities. Xu Bing was the first to try and break down that one-way round routine. His work activated the power of seeing the unseen through a peeking hole that he created. Therefore, empowered and affected by the bodily storytelling, audience naturally align with him. Then the newly born spect-actors would have the opportunity (or capability) to further deliberate, report, discuss and comment, or even interpret the fact as they wish, as in a spiral circle.

Bibliography:

1. Balibar, Étienne. 2002. Politics and the Other Scene. New York: Verso.
2. Taylor, Diana. 2016. Performance. North Carolina: Duke University Press. 
3. Boal, Augusto. 2006. The Aesthetics of the Oppressed. Florence: Routledge.
4. Xu Bing’s Studio. 2017. Dragonfly Eyes. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkzz8TzYjrk.
5. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
6. Rebecca Schneider.2001. Performance Remains. Performance Research, 6:2, 100-108, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2001.10871792

Case Study of Activism in Kazakhstan in Spring 2019

Preface

7 pm, March 19, 2019. Nursultan Nazarbayev made an urgent announcement on national channel saying that he resigned after 30 years of presidency.At that moment, phone lines and messengers collapsed from people discussing the long-awaited political change in Kazakhstan, sharing hopes and fears about the future. Within the next few days, the government made statements about the status of the first president as a military leader and “the father of the nation”, about K. Tokayev temporally (later officially) taking the place of the second president, about Nazarbayev’s elder daughter becoming the government spokesperson.That news brought the population back to reality where the replacement of roles didn’t change the structure of power. 

Stage Directions

Local activists decided to act upon expected presidential elections and influence what Ranciere called “the distribution of the sensible” .“The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed.” The time choice for the acts was undoubtedly significant, but so were the spaces for expression or, to be precise, their absence. Although “freedom of speech and art is guaranteed, and censorship is prohibited”under the constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan, “any form of protest, picket, demonstration or march that expresses social, group or individual opinion must get a permission of government 10 days prior of the act if it wants to be legal.” The regulations might remind those of Greek polis for citizens: “before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place.” However, the modern Kazakhstani limitations do not secure space, hardly ever permitting sanctioned protests. Arendt stated that “to be deprived of it[space] means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance.”With their appearance, the activists took back the power to create own reality because, as Butler formed it, plural actions allow to “rethink the space of appearance”. Let’s look at those actions.   

Act I

The first activists in the Spring 2019 banner series got a 15 days’ detention for “carrying out a public action without agreement of permission from the local authorities to express their interests”.Asya Tulesova and Beibarys Tolymbekov’s personal and civil interests were fair elections. They named their act ‘peaceful flash mob’ (the term “flash mob” is not mentioned in the legal restriction). They made a sign “You can’t run away from the truth” with the hashtag “#AdilSailayUshin” (Kazakh: #ForFairElections) and put it along the Almaty marathon on April 21, 2019.Other participants, who weren’t sentenced but fined, captured the moment on cameras. Thanks to them, we can see images of people running along and away from the call for truth. 

Discussing the effect of the statement I cannot ignore Austin’s performative utterances because it induced the action claimed with the words.Asya and Beibarys were detained but the case and the photos were all over the internet under #AdilSailayUshin. Within a month, more activists spoke up in ‘the banner manner’, which I will discuss later, resulting in a similar police reaction. Collectively those events got into international press and archived in so much digital and printed evidence that they cannot disappear. Indeed, no one could run away from the truth, that Asya and Beibarys stated: fair elections were wanted in Kazakhstan. Therefore, they made their “happy” performative sentence – the action that was done.

Act II

The same cannot be said about the next act/sign I want to mention (there were other detained activists between two events). On April 29, Roman Zakharov hoisted a sign with a direct quote from the Constitution of Kazakhstan: “The people shall be the only source of governmental power.”His performative utterance was “unhappy” as it did not make the action true.Instead, he was jailed for 5 days for “intentionally littering the city’s public places” (this accusation deserves a whole independent essay).Both banners (by Asya&Beybarys and Roman) oppose the function of writing and painting defined by Plato. For him, “writing and painting were equivalent surfaces of mute signs, deprived of the breath that animates and transports living speech. The mute surface of depicted signs stand in opposition to the act of ‘living’ speech, which is guided by the speaker towards its appropriate addressee.”In the reality of art within legal limitations, signs become vocal and stand ‘instead of’ living speech, which is muted. Ranciere claimed that “politics revolve around what is seen what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”The Kazakhstani acts reversed politics towards themselves taking on the visual, vocal, temporal and spatial potential of people that realized them. 

Act III

I also cannot ignore the pure aesthetics of Kazakhstani activists. “Aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense – re-examined perhaps by Foucault – as the system of a priopri forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible.” I’ve already discussed space and time in two acts. For visibility and invisibility, I would like to introduce another activist who wanted “to test the limits of his right to peacefully demonstrate” after the previous events. On May 6, Aslan Sagutdinov “stood in a public square holding a blank sign, predicting he would be detained. He was right.”With his act, he pushed the aesthetics of activism and “forms of visibility” even further.He decided “to depict and portray instead of instruct”, his image was blank but understandable for people.What was wanted the whole time were not statements but a right to make them. The blank sign that has a space for expression. This potentiality of space, which was not sanctioned by law, led to the reaction of the police. So the invisible hopes and fears of all participants became visible with the blankness. 

I state the police as the participants of the acts because without their reaction there would be no creation of “the space of appearance”. None of those bodies, individuals, could establish that space alone, it happened “only ‘between’ bodies.” Each act led to the reaction of police, attracted supportive bodies to the courts, created virtual bodies discussing the events online. I discussed those acts together because one body “does not act alone when it acts politically”. As Butler stated: “Indeed, the action emerges from the “between”, a spatial figure for a relation that both binds and differentiates.” 

Epilogue

The space of appearance that was created over this summer hasn’t been destroyed as Arendt would predict. She said that “unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands”, those created by action “do not survive the actuality of the movement which brought them into being, but disappear not only with the dispersal of men” “but with the disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves.”  Kazakhstani activists prove the irrelevance of that limitation. They not only made statements but also fueled collective actions among citizens who gathered for public talks, became observers at the election, three times got a sanctioned physical space for protests and created civil rights organizations. The elections were still highly violated, and people get detained for non-sanctioned protests these days. A preliminary conclusion might not be ‘happy’ but now the potential space of appearance seems real for people as it has been repetitively activated. So words, signs, and blankness create spaces as long as they are created between bodies. “A space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action.”

Key terms: sanctioned, protest, space of appearance, aesthetics, speech

Dis/Identification: as a general tendency in the readings, for there to be politics, there needs to be an us and a them. The various forms of identification coalesce large populations into electoral groups: these can be either agonistic or antagonistic, depending on how closed the us is and how dangerous or undesirable the them is conceived. I add the dis- prefix to allude to José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification to underscore how marginalized populations take hegemonic symbols and queer them to their will and for their own benefit and/or transgression.

Spectatorship: politics, like theater and performance, would not be possible without a spectator. Active versus passive spectatorship seems to be a critical point of influence, like all audiences can be. Understanding what politicians want of their spectators, therefore, is crucial.

Power: it has been defined and re-defined in so many ways. Where does power really reside, in what instances, under what conditions? How does power shift from the head of state to the assembling populations? How can popular power be cemented in the same way state governments centralize power through institutions?

Resistance: Balibar defines resistance as the limit to power, that is, the force which resists power at its margins. However, what if power resides in the people: is government the resistance? I believe we should define resistance more thoroughly if we are to consider power as an indispensable concept.

Emancipation: the great take-away from modern liberal politics. Though a vast concept, we should be able to come up with a working definition for emancipation that encompasses the concept both as an embodied practice and as an inalienable right.

Both videos (the one on the left shorter, the one on the right queer-er) showcase the moment of perreo combativo (a rebellious/transgressive/combative twerk-a-thon) held in Old San Juan on 24 July 19, the night former governor Rosselló resigned after fifteen days of intense protests.

Menghang Wu

Keywords: Spectator, Spect-Actor, feminism, Activism, assembly

When I walked from school to home at 7 pm everyday in Beijing, I always saw several groups of middle-aged or senior women dance together on the street, square and other public spaces gracefully. They worked very organized with creativity. They are so disciplined –look like professional dance artists. They were so concentrating on what they are doing. I can clearly see an order among them. This is “Square Dance” in China, which becomes a very universal cultural phenomenon in the mainland China especially.

Firstly, Square Dance can be seen as a form of rebelling and feeding back of the elite culture due to its resource and presenting result. As Ranciere said: “These forms define the way in which works of art or performances are ‘involved in politics’, whatever may otherwise be the guiding intentions, artists’ social modes of integration, or the manner in which artistic forms reflect social structures or movements.” The square dance can be seen as a potential politics voice as they create assembly together on the street. The elements of the square dance come from the classical dance and folk dance repertoire/elements from Beijing Dance Academy(BDA), which represents the highest dance education hierarchy and elite dance taste in China. In the country. In the process of urbanization, the indigenous folk dance has disappeared in the urban area for a long time. Square dance people absorbed the dance from BDA, and merge their own understanding, favor and movements, to form a novel ‘folk dance’, which is a rebelling of upper structural culture in my perspective. They simplified the original elite dance with an unspeakable logic, and other laws have been added to form a new and completely different style. For example, they simplify the technique of Silk Belt Dance and reconstruct it into Yangko rhythm to form a novel aesthetics. As a result, sometimes, the elements of square dance are also absorbed by the elite dance education institution. Therefore, there is an interesting wave: when the government is promoting ballet to penetrate the ideology to the grassroots, Square Dance People`s changing elite concert dance elements is a form of agonistic and redefining the power.

Secondly, Square dance make middle-age women to be visible. There are very few people who really watch at Square Dance. Who are they dancing to? If it is just a practice, why do they have clothing requirements occasionally? Why does the managing of dance groups is so organized? I thought that It is more than “just a dance”, it silently calls the idea that “everyone is an artist”. Square Dance is always related to the spectacle, they hope to be seen by society. In the Aesthetics of the Oppressed, Boal states: “Spectacle is not confined to a fifteenth birthday party at which the young woman dances her first waltz with her father, or the dance of the commoner Angelica with the Prince in Visconti’s The Leopard, which opens the doors of nobility to her, or the marriage ceremony of a bride all dressed in white; nor is it only when the president of the Republic lays wreaths on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or a new road is officially opened. Spectacle is not just these moments of extravagance and pomp; it also embraces the hearty family Sunday lunch, where people eat and talk according to established rules, as in any piece of theatre. Spectacle has the function of revealing who is who, as if planting a legend on the brow of each protagonist or supernumerary”. These women want to be identified. Today’s China society gradually becomes an individualized society. Even the living conditions of young in the big cities have begun to “atomize”. They have a very high sense of borders and strong self-awareness. However, In the process of the growth of the “square dance generation”, the collective personality was shaped very strongly. Thus, when they retire or are at the age of retirement their focus shifted from family or profession to the blank, they lose the mental support of the relationship of their children’s family and profession, their time-consuming blanks will come out. The ideas of the previous generation and the new generation are almost faulty, and there are very few ways to provide such people with a spiritual world, so they are more willing to find their own sense of presence and importance through collective activities. Most importantly, from a social perspective, these “square dance” people are mainly the 50s and 60s, they have experienced a profound social structural change in their life. Therefore, they need to be in groups, they need their music, they need to stand in the square/stage that everyone can see, remind themselves and others, they can still adapt to today’s society and have not been thrown away. As Ranciere pointed out: “It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time”.

Finally, Square Dance is also a form of feminism activism in my opinion. Chinese scholar Zhang Zhaoxuan has summed up the three common experiences of the participants of the square dance: from the individual point of view, these women are mainly the middle-aged or older who have withdrawn or are about to withdraw from the professional field; from the perspective of family life, these women are mainly during the separation for intergenerational relationship and decreasing the expectation of sexual experience and marriage life. In some sense, women are re-establishing their own presence in an open traditional way. The former female sexual identity and even the maternal sexuality are no longer important. They begin to establish a special female social identity.

Can Square Dance be a tool of challenging public order? Chantal Mouffe thinks everything related to politics and is always relevant. Art practice also shows its radical potential to influence social and political connections from the inside. Jacques Rancière redefined the politics and aesthetics by the distribution of sensible—Through the involvement of perceptual images, those invisible people obscured by power can emerge and get more possibilities, thus challenging the original public order. The distribution of sensible is also a division between visible and invisible, arguable and incomprehensible, understandable and incomprehensible. Ranciere suggests that: “Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility”.

Reference:

Étienne Balibar, “Three Concepts of Politics: Emancipation, Transformation, Civility”
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics
Chantal Mouffe, “What is Agonistic Politics?” and “Agonistic Politics and Artistic Practice”

Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed

José Gabriel

Crear espacios de visibilidad, seguridad y resistencia es sumamente importante. La revolución es queer.

@tacha-rola,
Queer Puerto Rican (Drag) Performer and Promoter

Summer of ’19 in Puerto Rico was spectacular for all the right and all the wrong reasons. After a contentious, storm-laden quadrennium; and after 889 pages of private (and unencrypted) text messages between former governor Rosselló and his closest political allies were leaked, the entire Puerto Rican community (insular and diasporic) was racked by two weeks of protests and police clashes centered on the governor’s mansions, La Fortaleza, in Old San Juan. The end result: the first ousting of a head of state in Puerto Rican history, without a single death. Both an achievement widely considered unlikely (if not inaudito or insólito) for any country in Latin America, let alone a US colony that has never once been a modern, independent nation state; and an exemplary feat of participatory democracy and political spectacle–from above and from below.

For our purposes, I would rather hone in on the bottom-up (no pun intended) queer spectacles unleashed by the youthful resistance, and how a queer subject (usually out of time, out of place) occupies public spaces in protest and in solidarity with the larger normative cisgender community. The most marginalized and downtrodden communities on the island banded together for an ephemeral moment of plurality, of absolute power, in a frontal assault against tyranny. By creating for themselves a space of appearance in an Arendtian sense, they lay a claim for futurity by speculating over and embodying a new island they demand for themselves and for future generations–decidedly anti-neoliberal, anti-racist-misogynistic-homophobic, and anti-Rosselló. In the following three instances of queer resistance, the frame is occupied front and center by queer subjects, but gradually pans out to encompass, I dare say, every Puerto Rican on Earth.

La Resistencia Ball

Queer balls are spectacles in and of themselves, the campiest of gender performances steeped in traditions of queer resistance and creative expression, that is, critical art in how balls challenge the constitution and maintenance of a symbolic order (Mouffe 91). We could digress into the racial and gendered systems of oppression that pushed LGBT communities (particularly Puerto Ricans) to establish balls in the first place, but I would rather concentrate on the fact that the ball was not held underground, isolated from mainstream society. Through La Resistencia Ball, this young group of queers dared to create an agonistic public space in the heart of it all, in broad daylight, surrounded by a sea of protesters: they wished to, first and foremost, make people (muggles, rather) uncomfortable; to bring to the fore “conflicting points of view” concerning gender expression and transgressive sexuality (92); to expose “alternatives to the current political order” and add their voices to the maelstrom of creative protests and public demonstrations (93).

By naming themselves collectively as the Haus of Resistance, they are establishing for themselves parameters for open agonistic dialogue, inaugurating a space of queer appearance to disclose a futurizing discourse, speculating amongst the masses a possible nation, a different nation, in which systemic corruption is extirpated and queer bodies are celebrated. By naming themselves the resistance, they create an Us that exists in contraposition to a Them: the heads of the Puerto Rican colonial government. These queer youths embody the future they want to see and live, and by establishing this moment of appearance, they perform the equality and the respect they exige not only from the government against which they protest, but also from the popular masses protesting in tandem (and not in opposition, as would happen any other day, probably) with them.

Ricky Martin Leads the National Strike

pic.twitter.com/KVF3yGkIVO

— Seyer III (@JJReyesIII) July 23, 2019

On 22 July 19, the entire island shut down. The closest guestimates count over half a million islanders congregating on a huge twelve-lane highway in front of the largest mall in the Caribbean bopping rain or shine to the beat of #RickyRenuncia. With Ricky Martin spearheading the movement, the symbols have changed. After being mentioned by name in homophobic comments in Rosselló and friends’ leaked messages, he and other prominent members of the Puerto Rican artistic class, including rappers Bad Bunny and Residente, took on a protagonist role and convened the country’s most multitudinous political protest in its history. Furthermore, in a similar manifestation of critical art, Bad Bunny, Residente, and iLe released “Afilando cuchillos”, which calls for outright revolution and public displays of violence against La Fortaleza. Despite both Ricky Martin’s homonormativity and Bad Bunny’s consumer-friendly gender-bending deserve their own tangents–not to mention the despicable misogynistic (yet seductively rhythmic) reggeatón lyrics that Residente and others are known for–I would like to rescue that fact that thousands upon thousands of Puerto Ricans cheered (and not jeered) at a gay man waving a pride flag together with a Puerto Rican flag, two overtly political symbols of resistance unfurling proudly in the hopes of effectuating revolutionary change in our colonial administration.

Plurality has never been more closely achieved for the Puerto Rican community. Every single Puerto Rican living off the island would have wanted to be there–yet still made their presence known on social media, adding to the foray. At this point, Rosselló had been rejected by the highest members of his political parties, the calls for his resignation have turned unanimous, and he still holds steadfastly to his seat, unflinching and unwilling to become the Rosselló that failed (unlike his father, who was governor for two consecutive terms in the neoliberal nineties). Protected by the police force in La Fortaleza, utterly powerless in his isolation, he has become a tyrant: when the National Strike occurs, the power has shifted to the people–a plural mix of every social strata imaginable, of members of his own political party as well as his political antagonists, cheering and raging for his resignation. For Arendt, power in a political sense surges forth from the people when they are united for a common cause; public assemblies are powerful in that individuals make their senses and subjectivities known in a way that seems boundless, limitless, infinitely potential.

In a country wracked by homophobic and transphobic violence, in a colony steeped in political inertia if not indifference, the resistance is suddenly led by a light-skinned cis gay male and his allies. Under the ephemeral veil of public assembly, under the inebriating allure of infinity, queers and muggles walked as equals. For Butler, equality has to do with how we treat each other, and power comes from the bond. Equality does not come from The Rights of Man, but “from what is between us, from the bond we make at the moment in  which we exercise freedom together, a bond without which there is no freedom at all” (52). Therefore, the political of equality (like emancipation) is different from the daily practice of equality; therefore, equality is an embodied practice, a performative. When Ricky Martin jumps on top of the 18-wheeler and waves the rainbow pride flag together with the Puerto Rican, a new nation is suddenly possible right then and there. If over half a million Puerto Ricans (and even more abroad) can all unite under the double banner of a gay (queer, rather) Puerto Rico, then Rosselló has lost all his power: his adversaries, united, have made a spectacle of themselves, and call for bloody justice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ia84oaEHnI

Queers Host ‘Twerk-A-Thon’ on San Juan Cathedral Steps

In a truly Caribbean spectacle, the masses were convened to Old San Juan for a twerk-a-thon event on 24 July 19, the fifteenth day of massive protests. This mingling of participatory democracy and cheerful festivities is in no way contradictory: when bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other forms of public space (including virtual ones), they are exercising a plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political field, and which, in its expressive and signifying function, delivers a bodily demand for a more livable set of economic, social, and political conditions no longer afflicted by induced forms of precarity (Butler 11). If action (in Arendtian terms) occurs whenever humans come together in a concerted effort to appear to each other and to discuss the terms of a possible shared future, and if polis is not a localizable place but a queer spacetime phenomenon in which unequal bodies assemble to propose an embodiment of political equality, then it should be no surprise that a convocation for un perreo combativo (that is, a combative twerk-a-thon) would sprout various parallel manifestations all across Old San Juan. Including a queer one held on the steps of the Metropolitan Cathedral Basilica of Saint John the Baptist, the second oldest cathedral in the Americas, originally constructed in wood in 1521.

Butler claims that actions are invariably bodily, and needs supports to lay a claim at all: at this point, in neoliberal times, these supports are what we are all fighting for. The fortnight of protests were initially sparked by the leaked text messages, but it was the final straw in a long line of injustices committed against the population–which we will not get into for sake of time and space, but which also galvanized the people in opposition to the neoliberal precarity that Rosselló’s political maneuvering had caused on the island. Therefore, to understand political demonstrations, we need to better understand the bodily dimensions of action–what the body requires, what the body is allowed (or not) to do in public and in private. Puerto Rican queers, especially (queer) femmes, share with the rest of the population (though obviously in relative terms) precarity as a galvanizing force, as well as a penchant for perreo‘s power of convocation. Faced with generations of violence, the most precarious of bodies invite their fellow protestors to join them in dance, to break down the barriers that divide us usually and to bring down Rosselló once and for all. For the first time, all sectors of society can come as one plurality.

But the most spectacular and transgressive of the cuir interventions in Puerto Rico’s fortnight of protest was El Perreo Intenso, a kind of competitive dance-off that featured twerking contestants unashamedly flaunting their assets on the steps of Old San Juan’s most cherished Catholic cathedral. They left no doubt that Puerto Rico’s new political freedom could not happen without free sexual expression.

Ed Morales for The Nation

Perreo combativo is but another example of the creative power (that is, their potentiality for political action) that Puerto Ricans outraged are capable of summoning and utilizing: crisis breeds creativity. En masse, Puerto Ricans speculated over the meaning of political agency, of resistance, of national unity, and broke off into so many groups to establish their own spaces of appearance, spreading Arendtian action in its wake–jet skis, horse rides, queer balls, yoga classes, motorcycles and banshees, even twerk-a-thons. Every act was suddenly and unmistakably an act of resistance, every meeting a polis embodied. Power undulated all about us–even about those of stuck on the continent staring into their phones for live updates.

To twerk in front of a trans flag duct taped to the entrance of the oldest cathedral in the United States embodies a plural performativity which “seeks to produce a rift within the sphere of appearance, exposing the contradiction by which its claim to universality is posited and nullified. There can be no entry into the sphere of appearance without a critique of the differential forms of power by which that sphere is constituted, and without a critical alliance formed among the discounted, the ineligible–the precarious–to establish new forms of appearance that seek to overcome that differential form of power” (Butler 50-1). Arendt claims that politics requires a space of appearance, the very space which makes politics possible. Therefore, plural action creates space for dialogue. To paraphrase a common queer chant, “La revolución será afro-trans-cuir-feminista, o no será“. Queer bodies force the muggle masses to face their difference, to watch them create an agonistic public space of the very space which rejects and condemns them, the seat of power upon which La Fortaleza founds its paternalistic authority. In the whirlwind of twerk-a-thons, feminists took to the streets with trans and queer activists, queer bodies touted their difference with showmanship, and the spectators embodied a newfound equality which–despite being later rejected because of the the supposed desecration of religious symbols–was nonetheless celebrated as a spectacle of the bodies coming together for a common purpose.

Needless to say, the governor resigned that same night. Perhaps twerking has more political power than it ever could have anticipated.

The Im/Possibility of a (New?) Nation

The Boricua Summer of ’19 is a prime example of the spectacle of emancipation. And here spectacle takes on its ultimate performativity as an ephemeral performance of national sovereignty by a nonsovereign nonnation. After the governor resigned, his cabinet pretty much stayed the same. Instead of open elections, Rosselló’s same political party (pro-statehood) suddenly turned constitutionalist and vied to activate the constitution’s line of succession (yes, line of succession) in order for the highest seat on the island to stay within the same party. There was never a complete shift of circumstances, no relief to the precarity: it was three-hundred and sixty degrees of revolution in fifteen days.

Despite this, a substantial percentage of the population waded in the life-giving spring of emancipation, an explosive first step towards liberation of the island and the subjects who inhabit it from the shackles of neocolonial neoliberalism. Even though the main goal of the protests was to oust Rosselló himself and his closest allies (some of whom have not resigned to this day), the leaked messages were the final drop in a generation’s-worth of neoliberal policies and criminal public debt and austerity. In the meanwhile, the entire population (not just the queers) managed to recover the smallest glimpse of the prideful nationality that they were denied, which according to Fanon is at the root of colonialism. This possible new island already feels a lot more open than the one depicted by the former governors’ leaked messages. These images of a burgeoning queer emancipation are revolutionary spectacles in and of themselves, and will be studied and remembered for a long time. As Butler mentions, power can spring forth at any moment, at any time, from the people. It’s only a matter of time.

(As an extra, I attached a video of former governor Rosselló just before midnight on 24 July 19. Notice how many bullets he sweats. You can almost hear, in your heart, the crowd scream to the heavens when he announces his resignation.)

https://www.facebook.com/fortalezaproficial/videos/400356000592699/

Xiao

Keywords: Fiction; Reiteration; Action

Actors in the factory:

In his video installation Disguise[i] (Yang，2015), Chinese artist Yang Zhenzhong scans the faces of 50 workers with 3D technology and asks the workers to wear masks while working. In the video, each worker still has his/her own face, but their expressions freeze as they are working on the assembly line as usual. Facial expression is the main method for human beings to disclose their feelings and desire, either on stage or in daily life. As the faces are hidden behind the masks, the working bodies of those workers are signified.

The artist also uses a high-speed camera to enhance the theatrical sense of this video by presenting these workers’ daily life in slow motion. This technique adds a dignified and solemn attitude to the labors as if they were actors with Noh masks. Furthermore, the live sound has also been distorted into the effect of echo in the nightmare because of the speed change. The solid perception of the labor scene, combined with these simple artistic treatments, presents a limited absurdity and strangeness, therefore an uncanny sensation. This also constitutes the tone of many of Yang’s works: both witty and humorous which shows a streetwise of contemporary art.

I find this work interesting because it is ambiguous in the ways how it can be interpreted: On the one hand, the application of masks has made the workers more thinglike, as Merleau-Ponty calls “objet historique”,[ii](Pietz, 14)On the other hand, the mask they have is individualized, because each of them has a mask with his/her own characteristics, and they act in passive yet active ways like they do in real life.

The paradox lies behind these two interpretations are obvious: The labors in the production mode are oblivious and are considered to be subversive bodies, they are silent and have been hidden behind certain masks like in this video. In meanwhile, as China steps into late capitalism, the mobilization of labor -like other advanced capitalist countries-has made the labor process more performative.[iii](Mouffe,86) Contemporary production has made productive labor in its totality similar to performing artists like is shown in the video.

It is hard to tell if the masks of these workers are a satire on the alienation of laborers by capitalist machines, or a reminder of workers as performers.

Who is watching?

It is worth mentioning that Yang’s sponsor is an art fund of an international enterprise, which produces kitchen utensils, and Yang’s project is completed under the support of this Italian company, furthermore, the video is taped in the Chinese factory of this company. The exhibition of Yang’s Disguise is divided into three parts: the 3D mask exhibition; a 30-minute video; and a photo exhibition about the production process of the video, which all belong to this art fund, and stored in three different galleries in Shanghai and Italy. After the 30-minute video is completed, the artwork was sent to the company’s exhibition hall in Italy and was to be exhibited with the products produced by these workers to advertise for the company. As it was strongly opposed by the artist, the art fund agreed to package the product with plastic wraps, “camouflage “it into a static sculpture to match the exhibition of the video.

What happened in this exhibition venue can be viewed as the reiteration of “Disguise”: The products are concealed in a deliberately wrapped way to highlight the scene of the workers working on line, which is a dramatic perversion of daily life. In advanced capitalism, the products are everywhere, while the workers who made them are oblivious. Arendt makes distinctions between work, labor, and action, and believes that homo faber is the only kind of laborer who can take action and get power through laboring because they communicate with each other through their labor,[iv](Arendt, 208) in other circumstances, the labors in the society are merely making a living because they are far away from what they are fabricating. In the exhibition process of Disguise, the artist makes this absurdity more obvious by juxtaposing the products and the workers in the same space.

The actions of the workers, even though represented through the media, have also occupied this joint venue through this exhibition, therefore, make their appearance in the social space, which has been neglecting them purposefully. And this kind of appearance has not been less powerful because of the mediation. Judith Butler believes that when the body enters a certain place, even if there is no violent resistance, the appearance itself is an action.[v](Butler,74-75) From this point of view, whether the viewer is a retailer preparing to buy Italian kitchen utensils or an audience who is ready to enjoy the high art, Yang has helped the workers to take action and complete a certain degree of presence. Nevertheless, like many of Yang’s works, a relaxed subversion and a tease of the public seem to strengthen the performance of these producers and in turn their resistance.

Labors in performance

When putting the artwork into the context of his career, we will find that Yang’s works have similar deep thoughts about people or laborers in plural forms. The Story of Spring[vi] is an early work of Yang’s made in 2003. He divides Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour speech[vii] into countless pieces, and asks each of the people who worked in Shenzhen Siemens AG at that time to speak out one word, and in turn, reconstitutes the speech through the editing. The reinterpretation of the speech is also a reinterpretation of political performance. Unlike the empty propaganda of the politician, the laborers change the political gene of speech in the form of individuals; by reiterating the performer from singular to plural, they make a solid action, without being silenced. When putting these two art pieces together, the development of China’s economy in the past two decades is clear: labor-intensive production mode remains the same but as the capitalist form continues to develop, the totality of workers has changed dramatically.

From the semi-underground state to the display of works in dozens of countries, Yang has been using labor to make his art for decades. A Chinese critic Lu Mingjun calls Yang’s works ” illusions of revolution”[viii] because Yang seems to avoid weighty expressions by being playful. To some extent, Yang’s artworks are political and revolutionary because politics and performance are connected after all. By forming “fictions”, politics and performance produce symbols to rearrange what is seen and said, between what is done and what can be done.[ix](Rancière,35-36) Performance and politics are both iteration and repetition of certain modes[x](Schechner,33) and performance can also be a kind of preparation for politics[xi].( Taylor, 3) (Boal, 20)

 Although being witty and sometimes cynical, Yang’s works should be considered as political spectacle for sure.

Political spectacle recommendation：Exam and other video installations which appear at Yang’s personal exhibition called Still life and Scenery provoked Hutong Rectification in Beijing, which makes another perfect example of Yang’s artworks as political spectacles.[xii]

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[i] Yang zhenzhong.com. Disguise. last modified in May 2015

[ii] Pietz, William. 1985. The Problem of the Fetish, I. Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (2): 5–17.

[iii] Chantal Mouffe. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso.

[iv] Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Edited by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

[v] Butler, Judith. 2018. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.Santiago: Pléyade.

[vi] Yang zhenzhong.com. The story of spring. last modified in March 2008http://www.yangzhenzhong.com/?p=250&lang=zh-cn

[vii] Dengxiaoping’s speech in his southern tour is a milestone for China’s economic reform and opening, Shenzhen is the harbor of economic reform.

[viii]artron.net. Panorama: Vision – the politics of theater and surveillance

 last modified on September 2018 https://news.artron.net/20180904/n1021426.html

[ix] Rancière, Jacque. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. Gariel Roc. New York.

[x] Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between theatre and anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia. 

[xi] Taylor, Diana. 2003. The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas. Duke University Press Durham, NC.

On another level, performance also constitutes the methodological lens that enables scholars to analyze events as performance. Civic obedience, resistance, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity, for example, are rehearsed and performed daily in the public sphere. (p. 3)

Boal, Augusto. 1998. Legislative theatre.  A. Jackson, Trans. London: Routledge .

Our mandate’s project is to bring into the centre of political action—the centre of decisions—by making theatre as politics rather than merely making political theatre. In the latter case, the theatre makes comments on politics; in the former, the theatre is, in itself, one of the ways in which political activity can be conducted. (p. 20)

[xii] Panorama: Vision – the politics of theater and surveillance

Yang zhenzhong.com. Exam. last modified in August 2012 http://www.yangzhenzhong.com/?p=2237&lang=zh-cn

Michel Nieva

Video: Mientras en la ciudad de La Plata ocurría el Encuentro Plurinacional de Mujeres y Disidencias al que concurrieron medio millón de personas reclamando por la legalización del aborto y el fin de los femicidios y los travesticidios, los cinco candidatos presidenciales de Argentina (todos hombres y varones) discutían en un debate televisivo, entre otros temas, sobre diversidad y género. La opinión de uno de los candidatos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbek_6p_CX4

Keywords: Performing the archive- Race and gender AS/IS a performance- performance as a political tool to re-read norms and conventions

1000-word synthesis: The couple in the cage, una performance del archivo colonial

I          

            Entre los textos teóricos leídos, a los fines de analizar la obra escogida (The couple in the cage, de Coco Fusco y Guillermo Gómez-Peña), me resultaron particularmente significativas las siguientes propuestas del libro de Taylor: por un lado, la potencia de pensar como una performance las tecnologías (raza, género) que se introducen al cuerpo como si fueran verdades biológicas, ya que esta forma de leer dichas prácticas permite revelar su carácter contingente e históricamente situado (Taylor, 13); por otro, en relación a esa propuesta, concebir las exhibiciones de indígenas en parques antropozoológicos y ferias universales como las primeras prácticas performáticas de los países coloniales (Taylor, 34); por último, la posibilidades de hacer del archivo (científico y artístico) una performance como manera de impugnar sus verdades y democratizar la discusión de su contenido (Taylor, 189). En cuanto al texto de Rancière, me parece relevante la noción de “distribución de lo sensible”, es decir, una legalidad estética que divide lo visible de lo invisible, lo decible de lo indecible, y cómo la esencia de toda práctica política es interrumpir ese límite poniendo en evidencia aquello que fue omitido de las coordinadas perceptuales de la comunidad (Rancière, 3). De las prácticas en clase me interesa la reflexión que mantuvimos sobre el cuerpo como un vehículo de memoria, conocimiento, y prácticas de poder incorporadas a la que la reflexión teórica solo puede acceder a partir del ejercicio corporal

En el año 1992, con motivo de los 500 años de la conquista de América, Coco Fusco y Guillermo Gómez-Peña realizan The couple in the cage, una performance en la que interpretaron, dentro de una jaula de oro, la supuesta cotidianeidad de una comunidad indígena apócrifa llamada Guatinaui. Fueron exhibidos por Museos de Ciencias Naturales de Europa y Estados Unidos, con el fin de proponer, según declara Coco Fusco, una “intervención satírica sobre el concepto Occidental del Otro exótico y primitivo” (Coco Fusco,143). La obra buscaba, por un lado, revisar un fenómeno de masiva popularidad en el siglo XIX, que fueron los zoológicos en los cuales se exhibían como animales personas de las colonias europeas, y por otro, indagar cuántos de los prejuicios visuales instalados por el discurso científico decimonónico sobre los indígenas y lo latinoamericano aún pervivían en la “distribución de lo sensible” de lxs ciudadanxs estadounidenses y europexs.

Performance de Coco Fusco y Gómez-Peña

Mapuches en el Jardin de Plantes de París, 1883.

El archivo que Coco Fusco y Gómez-Peña recuperan traza, de alguna forma, dos maneras de entender la raza, en tensión y casi en contradicción entre sí. Por un lado, la “raza” como identidad biológica y tecnología disciplinaria reconocible en valores visuales y métricos, que los antropólogos que atendían a las exposiciones establecían a partir de prácticas avaladas científicamente.  Por otro, la “raza” entendida como una puesta de escena teatral, ya que los organizadores de los zoológicos humanos montaban enormes escenarios que supuestamente figuraban las condiciones de vida en lejanas e imaginarias geografías, pero que en realidad sólo reforzaban los estereotipos europeos sobre lo que era el “salvajismo”. Les performers operan sobre estas dos nociones de “raza” del archivo, ya que hacen una performance de las supuestas verdades biológicas para revelar su carácter pseudocientífico y contingente, al mismo tiempo que parodian las puestas escénicas de estos parques, que grotescamente hacían del salvajismo racial indígena una teatralidad farsesca.

Las anteriores imágenes eran unas tarjetas que se entregaban a los asistentes a la performance, que describían las características físicas de la tribu apócrifa Guatinaui, y que parodian la tesis de que las medidas anatómicas sean una verdad biológica que determina la identidad y la raza de un individuo. Valores absurdos como la irrupción del número PI en la circunferencia de la cabeza, el torso y la cintura de Coco Fusco, y el ángulo formado por su cuerpo al flexionarse, eran mostrados a los visitantes como evidencias métricas de que las personas exhibidas efectivamente pertenecían a la raza Guatinaui.

Cuadro cromático de pieles diseñado por el antropólogo alemán Félix Von Luschan

Caja cromática de iris diseñada por el antropólogo suizo Rudolf Martin

Caja cromática de cabello diseñada por el antropólogo alemán Franz Rosset

Las exhibiciones de humanos durante el siglo XIX y comienzos del XX eran ante todo espectáculos con fines de lucro, y por eso un fenómeno común era que los visitantes, por un pago extra, tuvieran acceso a otro tipo de interacción con las personas exhibidas. Es famoso el caso de Sarah Baartman, a quien unos antropólogos raptaron de Sudáfrica en 1810, a los 21 años, y exhibieron en shows de circo y cabaret por Inglaterra y Francia. Los eventos en los que Sarah Baartman era exhibida reunían masivas convocatorias porque los asistentes, por un dinero adicional al de la entrada, podían tocar sus genitales y glúteos. Tan atroces eran las condiciones de cautiverio de Baartman, totalmente normales en la época para una mujer indígena, que murió apenas 3 años después de llegar a París, a los 24 años, tras sufrir múltiples violaciones y golpizas.

La performance de Coco Fusco y Gómez Peña repitió estas terribles experiencias en la posibilidad que tenían los asistentes, por el pago de un dólar extra, de dar de comer bananas a los Guatinaui, sacarse fotos con ellos, y observar sus genitales. La obra, de esta manera, denunciaba la participación activa de los visitantes europeos en esas prácticas de deshumanización,  ya que así como la mayoría de los participantes tomaron con naturalidad la presencia de los Guatinaui en una jaula, también pagaron para verlos desnudos o darles de comer.

En cuanto a la crítica al papel cómplice de la ciencia en este fenómeno masivo que atravesó el siglo XIX, no es un tema menor que la performance haya tenido lugar en Museos de Ciencias Naturales, espacios que ocuparon un lugar fundamental en la narración de las identidades colonizadas como razas biológicamente inferiores al europeo. En ese sentido, la performance, que quizás en otros espacios hubiera revelado su carácter ficcional y paródico, en el contexto de un museo de ciencias naturales se volvía verosímil para los espectadores. Es esa verosimilitud, la de humanos encerrados en jaulas, que una institución científica posibilita y avala, la que Coco Fusco y Gómez Peña pretendían denunciar.

Con motivo de los 500 años de la Conquista de América, Coco Fusco y Gómez-Peña convierten el material de archivo de las exhibiciones de indígenas del siglo XIX en performance. Por un lado, para denunciar y conservar memoria de las atrocidades cometidas por el imperialismo europeo en sus colonias. Por otro, para indagar cómo los prejuicios visuales instalados por ese imperialismo, aún pasados siglos, todavía perviven en la “distribución de lo sensible” occidental. La obra trabaja con la tensión de dos maneras de entender la raza: como puesta en escena teatral de los prejuicios europeos sobre el salvajismo, y como identidad biológica reconocible en valores visuales y métricos. Mediante la parodia y la exageración performática de esas dos nociones de raza, The couple in the cage revela que todo discurso racial, siempre, encubre arbitrariedades e intereses políticos.

Bibliografía

Fusco, Coco. “The Other History of Intellectual Performance”. TDR (1988-), Vol. 38, No. 1. (Spring, 1994), pp. 143-167.

 Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Continuum, Great Britain, 2006.

Taylor, Diana. Performance. Duke University Press, London, 2016.

Jose Alba

Keywords: Spectator, Spect-Actor, Instrumentalization, Activism, Betweenness

The dramatic arts have been an important avenue for self-expression, discovery, and creativity. The art of storytelling introduces us to history that relates to the present. Shakespeare, for example, helped us understand love, family drama, tragedy, and the universals of life by presenting us the romantic and tragic story of Romeo and Juliet. As a society, we also need creativity and the dramatic arts are instruments that gives us a voice and platform to perform and preserve our histories, whether it is through playwriting or poetry. Additionally, theater, music, and the other performing arts can inspire people to express themselves and mobilize politically and culturally. For example, in the musical Spring Awakening, touches on subjects of rape, abortion, and homosexuality, it relays an important message about the consequences of restricting access to information to young people; the characters in Spring Awakening are repressed teenagers trying to explore and figure out who they are in a strict and prudish yet authoritarian society. In my own work, I explore the way that dramaturgical theories intersect with activism, that is, I am analyzing how dramatists use theater as a means of mobilizing, communicating, and spreading of critical thought through dramatic writing. Furthermore, I seek to ask, is political theater an avenue for social change that provides the audience with tools to feel empowered in taking collective or individual action towards social change?

In class, we have touched on the condition of the possibility of politics and its definition to go back to “betweenness,” to those who have rights and those who think they have rights, but they have been constituted by the “not has.” It’s the consternation of the exclusivity of the has. The universality of the emancipation of the model “impossible.” If the world emancipated, we would not have the struggles. For example, being a felon, you are being deprived of rights, who can take away rights? This question is part of the “political spectacle” and a constant struggle. The whole history of emancipation is not so much beyond demanding human rights as of the real struggle to enjoy the rights that have already been declared, theoretically, we should be able to enjoy these rights. Who declares these rights? An example is migrants, they do not exist within the realm of rights, and under the United States, they are declared as criminals, it’s always an open struggle and an open debate. Resistance is a way of becoming contingent, it is opportunistic, you have to find the way to crash and push the limits and pick up on something towards as if it seems it can’t happen where you need to push and make cracks (the role of the spect-actor changing the scene in a theatrical piece) Without politics there would be no “us vs them” so, there would be no performance with no spectator. As spectators, when we watch a ‘theater piece” we give the protagonists the role, where as the spect-actors, we feel empowered to act and change the ending of a scene. Therefore, performances are neither true or false, they are either effective or not effective. In the final project, I would like to explore art as a practice for freedom, how can one bring the theatricality of politics that influence voters to engage in presidential elections to the relationship between political theater and audiences, can a theatrical performance persuade, motivate, or influence to change the spectators consciousness and act? 

Following my interests for the final project. In conversation with human rights and art, I seek to ask the following questions: who constitutes these rights? who has the right to speak? With these questions in mind, art then becomes a medium that challenges us to research, to answer questions of aesthetics and actions, and provides us with the knowledge and responsibility to act for our freedoms, “we” are responsible for our own freedom and it does not depend on an ideology or institution to liberate ourselves. In conversation with Arendt in her topic of Action, she says “with the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world itself, which, of course, is only another way of saying that the principle of freedom was created when man was created but not before.” With this in mind, I would like to present a documentary by Juliano Mer Khamis a Palestanian peace activist and theater director in Jenin. Arna’s Children, directed by Juliano Mer Khamis and Danniel Danniel, is a film detailing the Israeli Occupation that centers around a children’s theater group founded by Arna Mer-Khamis, a legendary activist against the Israeli Occupation. Arna spent her life campaigning for justice and human rights in her homeland and founded an alternative education system for Palestinian children whose lives had been disrupted by Israeli occupation. In the Jenin refugee camp, Arna opened a theatre group where she taught the children to express anger, bitterness and fear through acting and art. In the first 20 minutes of the film we see how these children, through theater, are being trained to hate and are told what to say to the camera rather than giving them a free voice, there are questions like “what would you like to do to the Army?” and one child answers “Kill them.” In class, we have discussed art as a mode of connection and, as a vehicle that mobilizes communities towards social justice. An example we looked at was The Art Space by Alfredo Jaar, where he asked the community to build a space out of paper and he eventually burned it down, claiming that it was not his place to impose something on people. Based on this example, we see an act of transformation, art as a mode of connection, and transformation of the political as new possibilities. I encourage for this film to be watched and contextualized, I think it’s a perfect example that slightly answers my statement of art as a practice for freedom with activists resisting the Israeli Occupation. Below is a link to the entire film, the first 20 minutes provides with enough context. Trigger warning! Please be advised there is a lot of violence shown.

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.