‘Alive’ Performance: Toward an Immersive Activist Philosophy
Keywords:
activist philosophy, embodied knowledge, affect theoryAbstract
This article proposes to reanalyse the artistic and critical practice of performance through the deconstruction and remediation of its ‘virtual,’ unsighted potentials. It argues that the ontological distinction between material and immaterial representation can be dislodged by the proposition of an ontogenenic dimension of affective transmission and recreation. Such recursive system of forces and energies elicits change and transformation expanding the sensual and aesthetic practice of performance as alive art.
These arguments connect concepts from aesthetic and political theory with philosophical ideas of virtual multiplicity, relationality, counter/intuition and (dis)individuation passing via the work of Brian Massumi and Teresa Brennan as well as other theorists. The approach intersects methodologies and epistemologies from activist philosophy, science and art with the radical contingencies implicit in performance as a ‘technology of aliveness’ (in)formed by tendencies of distribution of affective intensities and temporal (re)modulation of shared perception.
Ultimately, these formulations propose to reimagine performance as a synaesthetic archive of perceptive experience marked by a representational impossibility; a failure to appear fully. This actual condition of recurrent abstraction enables however a processual state of becoming, becoming-other, and being-becoming in related mo(ve)ments of pure aliveness.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness. London: Routledge.
Barthes, Roland. (1979) 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Castellucci, Claudia, et al. 2007. The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. London: Routledge.
Clough, Patricia, et al. 2007. ‘Notes towards a theory of affect-itself.’ Ephemera 7: 60–77.
Cohen, Leonard. 1992. Anthem. CD. New York: Columbia Records.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hillaert, Wouter and Thomas Crombez. 2005. ‘Cruelty in the Theatre of The Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio.’ Accessed 25 May 2017. http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~rgeerts/inlthewet/castelluci.pdf
Horvath, R.J., and K.D. Gibson. 1984. ‘Abstraction in Marx’s method.’ Antipode 16 (1): 12–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1984.tb00060.x
Lefebvre, Henri. 1972. The Sociology of Marx. London: Penguin.
Manning, Erin. 2013. Always More than One. Durham: Duke University Press.
Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital, Volume I. Translated by B. Fowkes. New York: Penguin.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for The Virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Massumi, Brian. 2003. ‘The Archive of Experience.’ http://www.brianmassumi.com/textes/Archive%20of%20Experience.pdf
Massumi, Brian. 2011. Semblance and Event. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomonology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge.
Morson, Gary Saul. 1998. ‘Sideshadowing and Tempics.’ New Literary History 29 (4): 599–624. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.1998.0043
Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked. London: Routledge.
Phelan, Peggy. 2003. ‘Performance, Live Culture and Things of The Heart.’ Journal of Visual Culture 2 (3): 291–302. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412903002003002
Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus. Translated by Steve Corcoran. London: Continuum.
Read, Alan. 2009. Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sack, Daniel. 2009. ‘Tragedia Endogonidia, and The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (Review).’ TDR: The Drama Review 53 (1): 147–51. https://doi.org/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.147
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Seltzer, Mark. 1997. ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in The Pathological Public Sphere.’ October 80: 3–26. https://doi.org/10.2307/778805
Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge.
Toscano, Alberto. 2008. ‘The open secret of real abstraction.’ Rethinking Marxism 20 (2): 273–287. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935690801917304
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal, provided it is for non-commercial uses; and that lets others excerpt, translate, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
