Abstract
Political affects result from doing performance politically, rather than doing political performance. These practices are explored through the study of four contemporary performers, to suggest a tentative rhetoric of performativity generating political affect and permeating attempts at social justice that are often alterior to discourse. The first three chapters lay out key rhetorical structures for grasping a politics of affect, and their argument makes a case for the political work done alongside discourse by performers practising with materials that are not-known, in ways that are directly relevant to people carrying out their daily lives. The four case study chapters circle around figures of irresolvable paradox—hendiadys, enthymeme, anecdote, allegory—that gesture to what is not-known and presence processes of becoming, knowing and valuing. These figures also shape some elements of the rhetorical stance of the performativity of the case study performances—(rest, form embodiment and medium—elements that are elaborated with detailed material from conversations with the performers.
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Notes
- 1.
J. L. Austin initiates a widespread use of the word ‘performative’ in the 1950s lectures published in 1962 (Austin), which became profoundly more processual in Jacques Derrida’s 1972 ‘Signature, Event, Context’ (Derrida 1988).
- 2.
For an excellent example of this kind of critical work in performance studies, see Lateral: Leveraging Justice, eds Janelle Reinelt and María Estrada Fuentes, 5:2 (Fall 2016).
- 3.
Critiques of Sara Ahmed’s work on ‘orientation’ are a case in point of critical writers finding it difficult to imagine the concept of a self that is not tied to the formation of a subject, a difficulty rooted in a logic that assumes that there can be nothing alongside discourse, nothing that is not determined by it. See, for example, Dai Kojima, ‘A Review of Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology’, in Phenomenology & Practice, 2:1 (2008), especially 91.
- 4.
For example, this frequently occurs in ‘experimental’ theatre (Fuchs 1996).
- 5.
For a discussion of ‘outwith’, which is a word in English with a long history and enjoys currency in several places in the English-speaking world, such as Scotland—where I lived for many years—see Part I: Chap. 3.
- 6.
For Wittgenstein and Levinas on ‘saying’ and the ‘said’, see Overgaard (2007); for an extension of what is ‘not yet said’, see Lynette Hunter, Disunified Aesthetics, 16ff.
References
Fuchs, Elinor. 1996. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre after Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Overgaard, Søren. 2007. The Ethical Residue of Language in Levinas and Early Wittgenstein. Philosophy and Social Criticism 33 (2): 223–249.
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Hunter, L. (2019). Introduction. In: Politics of Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14019-9_1
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