Abstract
Many disciplinary areas since the middle of the twentieth century have attempted to articulate alongside worlds of the sociosituated. Decolonial critics, writers on feminist and gender studies, and speakers from traditions of indigenous knowledge have offered some of the approaches that have been developing concepts for recognising the many ways of living alterior to discourse. These theorists have much to offer to performers and performance, as well as to performance studies. The emphases in these approaches on the way that difference happens or is made rather than found, and on the radical not-knowing involved in people’s relations with things in the world, have coalesced around philosophies of process, and contributed to the ways that critics also sustain sociosituated performativity in their critical writing through both documenting and articulation.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout my recent publications, I have consistently rendered this moment with the internal bracket, as ‘a(rest’ (Hunter 2011), because it is not a halting, or a stasis—as ‘arrest’ might indicate. Instead, it is a performative rest within a moment that tries to articulate something previously unsaid before necessarily moving on because the moment it is articulated, it changes. Yet ‘a(rest’ cannot ignore ‘arrest’, so I have moved to ‘(rest’.
- 2.
These are quite precisely the elements in negative rhetoric; in other words, the rhetoric of coercion and manipulation rather than persuasion, see L. Hunter (1984, chapter 1).
- 3.
Situated knowing theory is partly embedded into early-twentieth-century process philosophies articulated by Husserl, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Deleuze and Guattari, but key to the politics of situated knowing and the sociosituated is the 1930–50 research on working-class artmaking that derives from Michael Bakhtin, W. E. B. DuBois, György Lukács, Richard Hoggart, Henri Lefevre, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall. All of these writers were trying to account for the lack of political theory relevant to those who had not held power before the enfranchisements of the twentieth century. Similar theoretical quests can be found in the work of Simone de Beauvoir, but records of other quests are hard to come by until the 1960s because by definition people not belonging to socioculturally recognised groups did not get formally educated to produce published academic work.
- 4.
In the 1950s, John von Neuman took up the word ‘singularity’ to describe the moment at which artificial intelligence becomes a super-intelligence that can control people. Ray Kurzweil presents a more recent version of this (Kurzweil 2005).
- 5.
Quoted by Povinelli (2011, 33), from J. Butler, ‘What is Critique?’, in ed. David Ingram, The Political: Blackwell Readings in Continental Philosophy (London: Basil Blackwell, 212–226).
- 6.
In an article specifically replying to Stengers, from an indigenous perspective, Marisol de la Cadena outlines an alterior politics (2010).
- 7.
A ‘set toward’ is a concept introduced by French theorists in the 1970s, and brought into discourse theory by a number of writers in English in the 1980s such as Diane Macdonell (1986). It indicates an ethos position that a group takes up with regards to a specific aspect of hegemonic power that it has decided to address. Sara Ahmed’s concept (2006) of ‘orientation’ is a current delineation with much to add to the critical concept, although it also includes strategies for positionality in her expansion of ‘contingency’.
- 8.
For example, Michel Serres uses ‘fuzzy set’ to distinguish from ‘concept’ (Serres 1982, 9 + 56ff and 147ff).
- 9.
Deleuze brings Foucault’s ‘dispositif’ or disposition and ‘agencement’ closely together in something like the use of ‘positionality’ here (Legg 2011, 128).
- 10.
In suggesting this I am drawing on Brian Massumi’s explication of the co-composition of qualitative-relationality (Massumi 2011, introduction).
- 11.
One of the initial writings considers the practices of a dancer and of a musician (Hunter 2016a).
- 12.
These like-minded groups are more in tune with Dorothy Smith’s concept of communities based on ‘particularised ties’ (Smith 1987, 3) than Hans-Georg Gadamer’s small groups who practice consensual reasoning within their community, something he refers to as ‘solidarity’ (Gadamer 1976, 87). The former is collaborative; the latter, collective.
- 13.
This is a distinction to which Povinelli may gesture in her comments on ‘chosen’ and ‘involuntary’ alternative publics (Povinelli 2011, 8); in any event, I have a number of concerns with placing the ‘Australian aboriginal’ as involuntarily alternative to ‘choice’.
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Hunter, L. (2019). The Alongside. In: Politics of Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14019-9_3
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