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PARIP 2003

NATIONAL CONFERENCE: 11-14 September

CONTRIBUTORS

JONES: SIMON
department of drama: theatre, film, television
university of bristol

The Courage of Complementarity

© Simon Jones, 2003, simon.jones@bristol.ac.uk

On the phase-transitional problems of the paradigm shift in performance studies provoked by Practice-as-research.

I start by re-visiting The Con and the Text, a ten-minute paper I delivered to the 1993 SCUDD conference.  This provides a background to what I mean by phase-transitional problems.  Ten years ago, before the invention of the phrase P-A-R, the 1996 RAE still being some way off, I identified the tendency of what I then called

“critical texts”

to

“erase the differences between the textual practices of criticism of and of creativity in the theatre.”

I spoke of the then political necessity to align performance events in the academy with the

“always already self-authorizing critical texts.”

I concluded:

“In doing so, we have committed the theatre event to the logic of the critical text.  We have validated it on terms not its own.”

This would result in what I called then

“the creative event, under prevailing conditions, … remaining an aspect of or contextualizing prop for the critical text proper.”

I invoked the practical workshop as exemplar: a creative activity that is set up to demonstrate the validity of a certain critical proposition.  I called for a

“new epistemology”

a practice

“not grounded in texts and their translations, but bodies and their transformations.”

I thought the implications of this would change research out of all recognition:

“Research would take place in and through bodies.  It would transmit and proliferate between bodies, whose transformations would be irreducible, literally incomparable, eternally singular and irrevocable, un-write-down-able.”

“The history would take second place to the manifesto.”

“Events would happen as parts of/ part-objects circulating in/ a complex of bodies/ an academy of creativity, each activated by individual, idiosyncratic desires and transformations.  Places where knowledge that could not be written down/ translated down to the text would not be automatically condemned to the wilderness of the unrecognizable, the unmarkable, unmarketable.”

“We would have restored faith … in our own creativities, in the necessary bringing together of human flesh to the same place at the same time – both the theatre event and the event of the academy itself.”

“To pursue the metaphor through its creed, our faith should not be grounded upon bible-reading, but upon taking communion.  Our kinds of knowledge are to be lived through transubstantiation.  Our research task, indeed our teaching task, is to create the pragmatics through which this mystery of the theatre event can be revealed and made known, I mean, lived.”

If only I had some time-based documentation of my performance to that bemused audience of peers.  Then with that recording I could have performed here this morning my own little version of Krapp’s Last Tape – one of my favourites.  Like Krapp, I can’t believe now I sounded like that then; but unlike Krapp, not because of the evangelical mood, the assertion of belief-statements over truth-statements; but because what I proposed was not radical enough.  Having continued to work away since at the various unspeakable absurdities I alluded to then, I have come to realize that the challenges Practice-as-Research makes to the academy as a whole are much more profound, and are even more now a matter of faith.  Since the closer one gets to power, that is, the white-hot interstices through which capital circulates, the more volatile the environment becomes, the more attention one’s activities are subjected to by one’s paymasters.  Indeed, in this sense, and on today of all days, I would go as far as to say that the crisis of knowledge in performance studies is in some small way an inflection of the general crisis of capital.  Globally the political crisis is between libertarian advanced capitalist societies and their war-machines, and various kinds of fundamentalism working both within and without those societies.  The struggle between the totalising arbitrariness of value-systems necessary to optimise the global flows of capital and the various appeals to absolute and originary values finds strange echoes in the debates over practice-as-research.

Ten years ago the logic of studying performance within the academy seemed much simpler.  If a performing arts department were not to all intents and purposes to be literature studies, the formulating and analysis of all kinds of text had to be dependent upon the practising of theatre or dance or video or some combination.  [And at this point I should say that I speak as a theatre-maker, aware that many of my arguments may not work so well when applied to new media and screen studies.]  That was overwhelmingly self-evidently why huge numbers of the most intelligent and talented sixth-formers applied for our undergraduate programmes; and why many of them ended up in either influential and lucrative positions within the various cultural industries, or initiated and sustained a wide range of innovative and enriching cultural practices locally, nationally and globally.  The only glitch in the Matrix was that so few of the most talented opted for research and a career in the academy.  To me, then, the reason was clear: the logic of the subject was by and large adequately expressed in undergraduate programmes which combined variously practices of textual, historical and theoretical analysis with theatre- and video-making.  However, at postgraduate level and beyond, the logic faltered, and the hegemonic authority of the scriptural asserted itself.  To correct this illogicality and thence ameliorate the dysfunction at the heart of many performing arts departments, it was simply necessary to make the changes I proposed in 1993.

Since then, thinking ecologically for a moment, the larger political and thence funding environment has changed to being relatively benign from being relatively hostile, in that performance studies had been considered the flakier end of literature studies within a broadly less economically useful grouping of humanities.  However, the current government has, on the one hand, sought to encourage stronger links between the academy and industry, stressing the mutual benefits of technological enterprise.  In this respect, performance studies, especially with the recent academizing of actor- and related skills-based training, has been able to demonstrate clear links with the so-called “cultural industries”, identified as major-players in the “Cool Britannia” export success of the 90s.  Furthermore, as a “laboratory-based” subject, it was able to command enhanced fees for teaching and targeted grant schemes for research.  And on the other hand, the government, through a series of re-organizations of The Arts Council, has required artists, in schemes such as Creative Partnerships, to work more intimately with educational institutions, as a means of increasing the social impact of the arts, and exacting further value from each lottery-pound.  In effect, this is eroding the once comfortably mutually exclusive boundaries between artists and academics; and more significantly, between those who make art professionally and those who do not.

This double-sided attack on the logic of separating academy and profession has created the opportunity for performance studies to make the necessary paradigm shift to an activity predicated on making rather than writing, by filling in the gap between practice-based undergraduate programmes and practice that happens in both the academic and the industrial environments.  The candidates most sought after for posts in performance studies in the rather buoyant jobs market fall into two clear categories.  Those young academics emerging from practice-based doctoral work, whose experience has been within the logic of performance studies; whose natural and reasonable ambition is to research and teach through practice.  Or artists who are entirely at home with submitting their practice to the reflective and critical discourses at work in the academy; and who see their art-making at least partly in the context of pedagogy, that is, the way of developing and indeed disseminating their work is through teaching, through the embodied experience and thinking of others.  [Here I am not meaning a masterclass, where a set of knowledges is transferred from he who knows to them who are ignorant; but an on-going, open-ended set of practices, within which the artist’s knowing is potentially subject to as much transformation as the student’s.]

However, an anxiety over this increased fluidity of artistic activity still courses through both academy and industry.  Why is the inclusion of artists still so problematic for the academy?  Why is research so apologetically configured?  Especially when one considers that there has never been a separation of performative and textual practices in any event.  As Ben Jonson himself complained at the beginning of the 17th century -

Application is now grown a trade with many.

So, I am by no means suggesting that the two can or ought to be considered separately of each other, quite the contrary.  Their inter-relationship in the academy is what is in question for me.  And, in our particular political crisis of will, what is needed is not so much the courage of one’s convictions, but the courage of the lack of one’s convictions.  The absurd temerity of their fragility; the robustness of their timidity.  Performance has the potential to become a play of weakness at the very heart of the academy; to seek out those very anomalies that threaten constantly to disrupt the strong lines of force that mark the flows of capital conducted by certain kinds of scriptural practice: namely, of naming, of judging, of mastering, in the precise sense of coming to know a practice once and for all time.  And it is courage that emerges from this day-to-day experience of working between masteries, that of traditional scholarship with its logocentricism and that of the profession with its paying public.

Heretofore, broadly speaking, a symbiotic relationship has existed between these two fields, allowing each to re-inscribe their logic of particular mastery, over the nature of the theatre-event as object of scrutiny, that is, over the past, and over the theatre-event as procedures of making, that is, over the future.  All through mutually assured ontological difference.

However, practice-as-research potentially invokes a very different model of knowing, that moves outwards in two opposing directions simultaneously, towards the interior void of the soul and the exterior void of absolute possibility, rather than inwards towards a common ground or sense of knowing.  Profoundly wayward rather than utilitarian, wasteful rather than conserving, fanciful rather than solemn, performance itself re-minds us in the academy that objects, even those of study, do not really exist, what we call things being relatively slower events than what we call events, hence empiric reality is an illusion, hence also the objects called into being by its measurements and standards, hence the overarching operation of commodification.  Furthermore, this problematizing goes on to challenge the concepts that underpin both the academy and authority in general: namely the integrity of the body.  What is a body of work?  Of knowledge?  What characterizes one body as opposed to a series?  Who is the author?  Who owns the intellectual property emerging from the collaboration?  Who shall be praised?  And more significantly to the operation of terror within the academy and further a field, who shall be held to account?

What defines thought in its three great forms — art, science, and philosophy — is always confronting chaos, laying out a plane, throwing a plane over chaos. … Art wants to create the finite that restores the infinite: it lays out a plane of composition that, in turn, through the action of aesthetic figures, bears monuments or composite sensations.

(Gilles DELEUZE & Félix GUATTARI, What is Philosophy? Verso, London, 1994, p.197)

Pause

Generally speaking, an event in the world is that which is or is subsequently recognized as phrased.  From the outside or before the event, performance is in this commonsense way recognized as separate from other known events in the world.  However, during performance, that which most affects us about performance is precisely that which we do not recognize and cannot phrase, that which can only be felt uncannily.

The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. … This state is signalled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling. … A lot of searching must be done to find new rules for forming and linking phrases that are able to express the differend disclosed by the feeling, unless one wants this differend to be smothered right away in a litigation and for the alarm sounded by the feeling to have been useless.

(Jean-François LYOTARD, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988, p.13)

After the performance, when we have returned to the everyday world of events, we can write it up as event by phrasing it.  This incorporates the experience into discourse and allows that which was felt uncannily to be addressed indirectly.  In effect, we write cannily about the uncanny.  We come to know performance by way of not knowing.  What remains un-phraseable of the performance is essentially a non-event and continues to work uncannily and can only be known by what it is not and only approached as if one were approaching a miracle.

[The Bachelor] produces this production of intensive quantities directly on the social body, in the social field itself.  A single, unified process.  The highest desire desires both to be alone and to be connected to all the machines of desire.

(Gilles DELEUZE & Félix GUATTARI, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986, p.71)

The politics of performance is that of Deleuze & Guattari’s Bachelor – they who do not reproduce, founded upon the decidedly uncertain ground of the knowing of the non-knower, the doing of Beckett’s no-can-doer, who reaches beyond their competence, their what-is-known, to perform, that is, literally, to give shape to, to make an event out of, precisely, contingently and locally, what they do not know, and about which they cannot directly speak.

That’s an excellent definition of good training – in philosophy and elsewhere!  To start by being familiar with everything, then to start forgetting everything.

(Michel SERRES with Bruno LATOUR, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, p.22)

This is a special kind of ethical challenge in the age of the commodity and the marketplace, in which, as Lyotard pointed out in his Report on Knowledge – The Postmodern Condition – way back in 1984,

The legitimization of power is based in optimitizing the system’s performance – efficiency.  The application of this criterion to all our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear.

(The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984, xxiv)

How aptly this describes the colonizing zest of the late-capital war-machine with respect to all knowledges circulating within the academy, most pertinently the operations of tenure elsewhere and of the RAE here.  As the product of the processes of research is both objectified and fetishized, so the academic performs or disappears.  However, in effect, the practitioner-as-researcher has both to perform AND disappear.  They have nothing to show for their work the morning after the performance.  This disappearance of the research output, its co-called ephemerality, so beautifully described in the writings of Peggy Phelan, is compensated for by a perceived need to be constantly active, constantly performing.  As memories are short, the practitioner-as-researcher must constantly perform their own disappearance within the academy.

An agent who possesses a practical mastery, an art, whatever it may be, is capable of applying in his action the disposition which appears to him only in action, in the relationship with a situation. … And there is every reason to think that as soon as he reflects on his practice, adapting a quasi-theoretical posture, the agent loses any chance of expressing the truth of his practice, and especially the truth of the practical relation to the practice.

(Pierre BOURDIEU, The Logic of Practice, Polity,
Oxford, 1990, p.90/1)

Coming to know performance through writing about performance is only ever a writing alongside, as Matthew Goulish pointed out about his own formulations in

39 Microlectures: in proximity of performance

                  (Routledge, London, 2000)

He evokes the analogy of the leper’s window in the side of the Viennese cathedral that permitted the outcast a squinted glimpse of the most holy event of transubstantiation.  Denied the thing itself, having committed the most terrible sin possible to performance – missing the show, one’s attempt to know it by way of writing is doomed to failure, the leper’s window is as close as this proxemics will admit one.  This writing alongside is then only ever a drawing attention to, a pointing towards, or a projecting away from.  Within and without and between these prepositions happens the place where we have not yet taken a place [to reference Kristeva].  Writing then takes a particular relation to

Wrighting

in the performing arts, analogous to, but in at least one key respect, quite different from the scientist who writes up their experiment.  There a general rule is extrapolated from the particulars of a set of experiments, the key point being their reproducibility elsewhere.  The writing-up provides the blueprint for the verification of the rule by means of re-enactment.  However, the writing-alongside is only a singularity that draws attention to another kind of singularity about which it can say nothing.  It is a particular form of explicating, what the physicist David Bohm called, the Explicate Order.

In the implicate order we have to say that mind enfolds matter in general and therefore the body in particular. … We do not say that mind and body causally affect each other, but rather the movements of both are the outcome of related projections of a common higher-dimensional ground.

(David BOHM, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980, p.209)

Pause

Out of his work with quantum physicist Niels Bohr on the Principle of Uncertainty and the theory of complementarity AND his experience of Native American gatherings, Bohm expounded a notion of social exchange and political decision-making, which he called dialogue.

The basic idea of this dialogue is to be able to talk while suspending your opinions, holding them in front of you, while neither suppressing them nor insisting upon them.  Not trying to convince, but simply to understand. … That will create a new frame of mind in which there is a common consciousness.  It is a kind of implicate order, where each one enfolds the whole consciousness.  With the common consciousness we then have something new – a new kind of intelligence.

(David BOHM, On Creativity, Routledge, London, 1998, p.118)

I’m proposing that this is particularly useful for us today working in performance studies as both practitioners and writers, artists and scholars.  For the duration of the event of the gathering, judgement is suspended.  Argument is not undertaken as a set of propositions, each of which has to be either attacked or defended.  Neither is it a list of competing demands that can be bartered and compromised over.  In a sense, the whole set of activity is held in the mind simultaneously, holistically as a total expression.  Here artists make work and scholars write alongside; and persons shape-shift more easily and fluidly between these twinned poles of artist—philosopher than is permissible or possible in other kinds of institutions or in everyday life.  The pursuit of the subject as a whole is necessarily compossible, which, therefore, requires the suspension of judgement and extension of dialogue, in order for its strangely fragile and yet robust compossibility to persist.

So, any performance studies academy would then be a gathering of practitioner-researchers, artist-scholars, philosopher-teachers; a bundling of the different times of history, of training, of speculation, of exploration, of the body and of the mind.  In effect, it works as a halfway house, occupied by intermediaries with a range of technical intuitions and idiosyncratic attentions, particularly sensitised to the activity of exploring the consequences, effects and possibilities occasioned by performing, its apparitions, incarnations and suppositions.

Biology makes its distinctions and invents a science which is precise, effective, general and dead; in their intermingling the doctor treats the whole as living individuals.  I am tempted to give a name to this alloy – both fused and discrete as it is, an unknown terrain for experts and an everyday reality for practitioners: I would call it flesh.  No knowledge without incarnation.

(Michel SERRES, Angels: a Modern Myth, Flammarion, Paris, 1995, p.255)

The more open, leaky and osmotic this gathering the better, the more it itself embodies the possibilities of what it practices.  Paradoxically the more dilated and the more intensive the constellating and the mixing of bodies, the closer this unholy miscegenation approaches an actually realizing model of what happens in performance itself: that is, an intense circulation of libidinal energies and concepts conducting through the materialization and disorganization of this profound encounter of flesh and text.

Inasmuch as it is already animal, human and angelic, flesh is the language of the divine.

(Michel SERRES, Angels: a Modern Myth, Flammarion, Paris, 1995, p.185)

So, is it possible to conceive of an academy as a gathering of bodies and a bundling of times, with Bohmian dialogue dilating and suspending the need to judge throughout the entire constellation?  Would this disintegrating body spread itselves easily across the cost-centres and budget-headings of different institutions?  Then any review of research would itself have to be a dialogue conducted by and through the whole community of gatherings of performance studies.  And from the aggregated activity of these sites of intensity will emerge the values by which they will be judged.  The complexity and intensity, the richness and variety of the events and documents that appear will be potentially infinitely greater than any single artist or scholar.  And not incidental to our struggle to resist the hegemonic forces of late-capital and turn them to our advantage, they will be not only more “productive” in our paymaster’s terms, but much less anxious and much greater joy than any factory of ideas, riven with standards and patrolled by guardians of knowledge, themselves terrorized in turn by their paymasters – the funding councils.  At best, our academy should be the halfway house between one’s home and the playhouse.

Another pause

Whilst, strictly speaking, the artist and the scholar cannot agree with each other, even if embodied by the same person, since their primary activities are essentially compossible, they nevertheless perceive benefits from working the one alongside the other.  The fact that translation is not possible and approximations abound is far from an indication of the failure of any project to bring together artists and scholars.  It registers that that compossibility is at work.

However irreducible and radical may be the ruptures it can and sometimes must effect, complementarity is also a massive interconnectivity.  As such it entails a multiple interplay — multiple parallel processing — of models and regimes, standard and non-standard, or models and non-models, regimes and non-regimes, closures and un-closures; or still other economies, names, unnameables, or that which can be neither named nor claimed to be unnameable.

(Arkady PLOTNITSKY, Complementarity: anti-epistemology
after Bohr and Derrida
, Duke University Press,
Durham, 1994, p.269)

The toolkit metaphor is a useful way of conceiving of the performance studies academy, in that a reflective practitioner working with others brings to bear a series of related knowledges to the problem at hand – the particular research project - itself an enfolding of a number of problems, which are best addressed using the appropriate range of knowledges, techne, techniques, technologies.  In effect, they are all technical problems of one sort or another.  This word

Technical

replaces a variety of words associated with different knowledge regimes and repertoires, from traditional forms of scholarship to skills needed in various aspects of production.  It erases, for the purpose of collaborating better, the complex hidden and overt value-judgements inherent in the general use of terms such as scholar and technician.  Furthermore, it accentuates the over-determining utility-value of any particular technical or expert repertoire in working on the problem at hand.  These collaborations can be seen as technical constellations, organized by their informing passions, and limited only by the extent of their courage or dare.

As anti-epistemology, complementarity is defined by the irreducible mutual and, as Bohr grasped, ‘uncontrollable’ interactions, between physis and tekne — between physical processes and the technologies of experiment.

(Arkady PLOTNITSKY, Complementarity: anti-epistemology
after Bohr and Derrida
, Duke University Press,
Durham, 1994, p.60)

Our greatest challenge is to find ways, and I stress here the plural, as there may well be as many ways as there are bodies or combinations of bodies active within the institution, of housing the mix of performative and textual practices alongside each other.  As performance as a research activity must work at the limits of any known field, where the risk of disintegration and disorganization is greatest, so the incorporating of this within the academy threatens the very regulations that permit that institution to persist, namely to determine what is proper to it, what shall be admitted and what must remain outside.  And all of this, of course, if one jumps a scale or two of observation, is only ever a passing through the academy.  Performance, therefore, exacerbates the central problem of the academy, of any body: that it must change in order to remain; it must be open to exchange in order to keep close those attributes that characterize its being in the world.  It must risk what it is, in order to remain itself.

It seems clear that the creative development of science depends quite generally on the perception of the irrelevance of an already known set of fundamental differences and similarities.  Psychologically speaking, this is the hardest step of all.  But once it has taken place, it frees the mind to be attentive, alert, aware, and sensitive so it can discover a new order and thus create new structures of ideas and concepts.

(David BOHM, On Creativity, Routledge, London, 1998, p.13)

In the current economy of rampant commodification, theatre-making always runs the risk of remaining proper to writing, playing support to the production and handling of texts of one sort or another.  This making will always emerge from an established matrix of scriptural practices with their own evolutionary logic; and serve the purpose of exploring, refreshing and eventually embedding a tradition of scriptural enterprise.  What the paradigm shift requires is a writing proper to making.  It requires of making that it flee writing, that which can be written, phrased, known.  The purpose of such making being to leap into the void of not-knowing.  Hence, practice-as-research is that which flees scriptural practices.  And if it does so, ontologically it is also outside of judgement.  Since the laws, rules and standards by which one judges must themselves have been phrased out of some scriptural practice that attempted to come to know performances through phrasing them as events.  However, if performance flees the known, no phrasing of judgement will recognize those aspects of the performance that make it worthwhile, that is, those aspects that escape phrasing.

We could think of the epistemological difficulties inherent in the phrasing of a judgement of practice-as-research as analogous to those encountered by physicists in their own attempts to measure the world of quantum mechanics using the experimental machinery developed to demonstrate Classical or Newtonian mechanics.  The apora between these realities – the everyday and the quantum – challenged the belief that systems could be finally known through measurement.  Classical mechanics became applicable only in certain and limited cases.  The uncertainty principle proposed that at the quantum level, classical causality did not hold: one could not predict the behaviour of individual electrons; only aggregates over periods of time.  Furthermore, what was considered anomalous to the system, and thereby dismissible - the rogue experimental result - has now been shown to be the zone of determinate indeterminacy where any system encounters its environment, the point where it is at its most creative.  And in terms of phrasing the quantum world, further anomalies emerge which suggest even deeper worlds.  It was Nietzsche who declaimed that empiric reality was the last great illusion humankind had to see beyond.

So, whilst many academics find it acceptable to incorporate certain notions from quantum mechanics, such as the proposition that no observer can stand outside of the event they are observing, that they who only sit and watch affect what’s happening on stage; it is interesting to follow the implications of complementarity a little further.  The wave-particle experiment demonstrated that light behaves either as a wave or as a particle depending on the kind of recording device the scientist chooses to use.  One ramification here is that human agency affects the way that natural laws appear to us: that is, that natural laws could no longer be said to pre-exist the scientist who attempts to demonstrate them.  Another more pertinent is that, according to the theories, light cannot behave as both a particle and a wave; the two realities, according to physicists who know, are mutually exclusive.  Hence the phrasing of complementarity, that potentially light is both particle and wave, until the scientist, through his choice of measuring device, that is, a particular technology that couples a particular theory with a particular know-how, chooses which reality to materialize.  Bohm described this as explicating a particular order from the total potentiality of the implicate order.  In suspending choice, the complementarity of the implicate remains in its totality.  However, in the dynamic rush that is nature, choice cannot be suspended except in very special circumstances.

At the quantum level, the most general physical properties of any system must be expressed in terms of complementary pairs of variables [e.g. momentum & position; energy & time; continuity and discontinuity], each of which can be better defined only at the expense of a corresponding loss in the degree of definition of the other.

(David BOHM, Quantum Theory, Prentice Hall, London, 1960, p.160)

In our largely politically expedient need as academics working within what is broadly called the humanities to ape the knowledge practices of the exact sciences, this argument, predicated on a lay-person’s grasp of notions of complementarity and paradigms, runs the risk of short-circuiting.  If I want two mutually exclusive practices to co-exist in performance studies, why should I seek to argue that on the basis of an analogy with the exact sciences that in its very rhetorical strategy intends to elide the key differences between those knowledge-practices, an elision that undermines the case for complementarity?  Maybe the clearest lesson we can learn from scientists is the oldest lesson of all taken from humankind’s first known phrasings of its encounter with nature – that of hubris.  In this delicate phase-transitional time, poised between two paradigms of performance studies, we should take courage from this lesson.  It may well be the case that practitioner-researchers have no coherent epistemology upon which to ground their multifarious activities.  Theory cannot save us, despite all its leanings to the future of performance, to possible theatres, as it remains yet another scriptural enterprise.  It may well be that the experiential outcomes of that activity are haphazardly archived, so-called anecdotal and ephemeral, marginal and minor.

[A minor literature is] an expression machine capable of disorganizing its own forms, and disorganizing its forms of contents, in order to liberate pure contents that mix with expressions in a single intense matter.

(Gilles DELEUZE & Félix GUATTARI,
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986, p.28)

But, the hegemonic power-relation that is the force of logocentricism in the academy is probably subject to the same hubris that has led to the overthrow of many previous terrorizing knowledge-practices.  If this is so, then the weakness of our practices is their strength.  Our parasitic position in relation to the host of the Text encourages us to stay cleverer, behave more artfully.  Whilst not yet ahead of the game - the struggle for funding and resource, it puts us in the perfect position to pounce when the conditions are just so.  Eventually the production of texts from the academy will overwhelm it from within: the attention to and energy conducted through this production will put a tremendous strain on the coherence of the institution as a whole.  It will drain other areas of activity, such as teaching.  It will exhaust those persons who daily have to perform the complex interstices of these forces.  Since the will-to-produce is limitless in late-capital, profoundly inhuman and totally remorseless, this anomaly alone will lead to the catastrophic disorganization of the academy; and thence the political opportunity to make the shift.  At the moment, we must each in our own ways make idiosyncratic leaps of faith into the void of practice, indefensible in their unintelligibility, their current unphraseability, their refusal to “perform” in Lyotard’s terms – “be commensurate”, literally “measure up to” – the overweening logic of the Text.  Each in our own way, characterized collectively only by our courage.

A unique style comes from the gesture, the project, the itinerary, the risk – indeed, from the acceptance of a specific solitude. … Repetition of content or method entails no risk, whereas style reflects in its mirror the nature of danger.  In venturing as far as possible toward non-recognition, style runs the risk even of autism.

(Michel SERRES with Bruno LATOUR, Conversations
on Science, Culture and Time
, University of Michigan Press,
Ann Arbor, 1995, p.94)

In our dialogue we must also have the courage to suspend judgement: to refuse to make the declaration -

You have passed.

in effect means a refusal to say -

I pass.

Clearly to refuse to judge invites a judgement upon oneself, and cuts to the quick of the primary function of the academy – the passing through and out, the achieving of a certain standard, the maintenance of certain values, and for late-capital that means a growing requirement for technocrats to staff the war-machine and reproduce its values globally.

I imagine that in the future artist-philosophers or reflective-practitioners, in any event, those who find themselves amongst the technical constellations known generally as performance studies, will look back at our endeavours and identify a crucial political moment within the academy.  Hopefully, they will be able to review our particular inflection of the crisis of capital as a phase-transition between two paradigms of knowledge in performance studies: from research output of whatever form predicated upon text-derived scholarship, to performance-making activity variously aggregating and disseminating numerous kinds of knowing through numerous kinds of bodies of knowledge.  They will see, with the benefit of hindsight, that the fetish for the single-authored monograph amongst so many possible outcomes, and the anxiety over the setting of standards for PhDs through practice, are but the last desperately illogical repairs to the woefully anomalous paradigm that was performance studies.  And again hopefully, they may honour our collective courage in realizing the anti-logic of a performance studies excited by and through making to challenge the academy and the world beyond.

Now, philosophy is an anticipation of future thoughts and practices.  If not, it would be reduced to commentary — to a subcategory of history, and not the best one either. … Not only must philosophy invent, but it invents the common ground for future inventions.  Its function is to invent the conditions of invention.

(Michel SERRES with Bruno LATOUR, Conversations
on Science, Culture and Time
, University of
Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, p.86.)

By replacing the word “philosophy” with the word “performance”, we can glimpse the potential of all our futures.

Now, performance is an anticipation of future thoughts and practices.  If not, it would be reduced to commentary — to a subcategory of history, and not the best one either. … Not only must performance invent, but it invents the common ground for future inventions.

PERFORMANCE’s function is to invent the conditions of invention.

For us today, the readiness is all.

 

 

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