Abstract
The work of performers is to experience their self changing and becoming different, and to engage audiences in the embodiment of the change so that audience members open to the political potential of their own change. Making performance politically or making political performance will involve different strategies and structures, depending on the sociohistorical context in which the performer is working. Performers can develop practices that are more likely than not to generate a sociosituated positionality on the basis of alongside processes for becoming, knowing and valuing. These positionalities can drift into setting these alongside activities into a discursive field so they emerge into sociocultural articulation. Both are helpful, but without positionality, the set towards discourse can quickly become habit. To sustain the processual, performers need to foster practices of co-labouring rather than goal-oriented collectivity.
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Notes
- 1.
gage: OED n. 1a. Something of value deposited to ensure the performance of some action; hence to en-gage, to take up the gage, the value of the performance.
- 2.
I draw here specifically on daoist philosophy. There are also distinct parallels here with Erin Manning (2013), especially pages 16–30.
- 3.
For example, Giorgio Agamben (2005) ties ‘crisis’ centrally to his theorising of the ‘state of exception’.
- 4.
Lynette Hunter (2003).
- 5.
But see Doreen Massey on ‘constellation’ for a use close to heteroglossia (Massey, 130) .
- 6.
I realise that for Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, ‘transcendental’ may well be more ‘material’ than many readers take it to be, but make the distinction here to insist on the materiality.
- 7.
Derrida’s logic completes as: we recognise the friend only when the process ceases at their death, at which time we recognise in our self the cessation of change and an embodied felt sense of the changes that person has initiated in our self. It is as if we carry the body of our friend in our own body, only becoming aware of it when the friend is no longer there to change with us.
- 8.
- 9.
I would like to suggest that Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of the ‘undercommons’ is a possible version of a positionality alongside discourse, although I would not presume to be able to feel whether this makes sense to them (Harney and Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013)).
- 10.
For example, women in Canada were re-classified as ‘human’ in 1929.
- 11.
The closer these groups are to discursive power, the more quickly they drift into corporate organisations. The process through which this happens is an area of sociology that is not being pursued in this book.
- 12.
See Levinas (1974/1998, 159–60), and the translator’s introduction, xli–xlii.
- 13.
This distinction draws from the rhetorical definition of ‘topical’ as ‘related to content’ (for example, a simile) and ‘schematic’ as ‘related to structure’ (for example, a chiasmus, or: part A, part B, part B, part A).
- 14.
For commentary on the interplay of genre and allegory, see Hunter (1989).
- 15.
Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, posits an argument for affective rather than effective revolution in his discussion of the ‘woodcutter’ (Barthes 1957, 219–20). Barthes is often criticised for this passage partly because the initial most widely distributed translation into English does not underline the difference he makes between the intransitive sense of ‘agir’ which is related to behaviour and having ‘efficaciousness over’ [http://www.larousse.com/en/dictionaries/french/agir/1663?q=agir#1667] another person or thing, and the transitive sense ‘faire agir’ [http://www.larousse.com/en/dictionaries/french/agir/1664?q=agir#750011] which is to animate or enact a person or thing (Hunter and Schubert 2013).
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Hunter, L. (2019). Sustaining Sociosituated Performativity with Collaboration. In: Politics of Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14019-9_4
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