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Gay McAuley's talk at the TFTS Department in Aberystwyth yesterday made me wonder about the worth of words. She spoke of a 'wave of official apologies' that were happening across the globe and - if I remember correctly - that she deemed 'necessary'. Perhaps my issue is as much with the politics of such a gesture - the official apology - as with the word 'necessary'. Necessity indicates need, at least to me, especially since it stems from Latin, 'indispensable'. Is there a need for an absorption of historical (and in some cases still ongoing) trauma into the discourse of…

Upon reading Pavis' 'Analyzing Performance' (p. 24: "theater lovers capable of feeling and understanding the sensations and movements of their own bodies, [...] the bodies of performers [...] as an auto-bio-graphy in its true sense..."; italics not mine) I wonder: How do we get there? Is practice (i.e. constant exposure to various forms of performance) enough? Do you need to train yourself to "perceiv[e] 'thought-in-action'"? It cannot depend upon the often referred to suspension of disbelief for as soon as one is aware of it, one does not employ it anymore and yet I can consciously enjoy a performance, whole-heartedly…

Rogue Event Agency: Teh blog that does not take (a) place. I have just submitted my Practice Research PhD (on the 31st August) and I am fortunate to be a long-standing Senior Lecturer in the Performing Arts Department at the University Of Chichester since 2003. I am also fortunate to be part of the ASTR 2012 Bio-politics and Performance working group and before my attentions turn to my first post-thesis paper, I thought I would set-up what will be an infrequent but themed blog as host some larval and labile post-thesis thinking. For over ten years I've been researching and writing on…

I have been reading "The Normal and the Pathological" by Georges Canguilhem. Epistemological understanding of norms that direct the everyday perceptions, stemming from scientific authorities, empiria and theoretical delienations (those that make theories logical) is more than desirable if we do not want those rigid formations to direct our sense of the real  via unconscious belives, and sublimated aesthetic ideals. At least I find that these theoretical ghosts and visual landmarks combining positivist ideas of good, healthy and beautiful can gain almost religious authority in the society where the God is proclaimed dead (Nietzche) but humans cannot cease to  embody gods, and to reintroduce deus ex machina, whenever there is a potential for slowing down,with danger of representaional…

“The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses ‘the means at hand,’ that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous – and so forth. There is therefor a critique of language in the form of…

"It’s in the suburbs that there is vitality, deception, depression, energy, utopia, autonomy, craziness, creativity, destruction, ideas, young people, hope, fights to be fought, audaciousness, disagreements, problems, and dreams. It’s in the suburbs that today’s big issues are written on the building facades. It’s in the suburbs that today’s reality can be grasped, and it’s in the suburbs that the pulse of vitality hurts." Thomas Hirschhorn

I am waiting in Euston Station to catch a train to Manchester to go to the SEP-FEP conference: the joint conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy where John Mullarkey and I are going to give a joint presentation on Laruelle and Kaprow, non-philosophy meets nonart and the nonhuman.   And I am having, again, a bout of interdisciplinary anxiety.   In part, this follows some very interesting discussions on an earlier train with two colleagues Tony Fisher and Amanda Stuart-Fisher about the inevitable issues and questions surrounding any interdisciplinary project, such as Performance…

Indefinite Futures (broken already) : Possibly Coming Soon. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N2nzdGKWUI&feature=share&list=PL982430B4D1B10769

Hi there, Glad to be part of this new association.  I started a blog last year after disbanding Apocryphal Theatre that was meant to be about that transition, but has turned out to be about many more.  I am working now on plans to make it into a durational performance - embracing the fact that it has many aspects from very personal to more critical/professional - like a 'common place'...wanting to allow it as a document in the rough of real-time (or close thereto...) living-thinking-becoming.... The link is: http://julialebarclay.blogspot.com Other than that, working on a book that may be a…

There are many admirable bloggers in contemporary philosophy - John Protevi and Levi Bryant among them. I am starting my own with considerable trepidation and expecting that I may not be able to stick it out for long. I suspect I may lack the confidence, and be generally too self-doubting for this particular form. I spend a lot of time worrying - productively and unproductively - about the words I put into print and those I deliver in public forums. Whereas the blog seems to require a certain abandon, a willingness to share and a belief in the value of…