Abstract
This chapter focuses on the rhetorical term ‘embodiment’ and the figure of anecdote—a performance with no audience. Caro Novella is a performance artist from Barcelona, currently living in California. She works on rehearsal strategies in two productions, parèntesi and Resistencias Sonoras, both of which centre around performances of the somatic complexity of breast cancer. Here, the artmaker collaborates with people on a performativity that yields a performance that the activism may or may not choose to make public. The movement from (rest to form to embodiment generates a medium for the performer participants that is not only potentially an ongoing rehearsal, but also a performance of anecdotal (unpublished) knowing, and questions whether the collaborators are on the cusp of collectivity, directing the audience not to the affective but the effective politics of medicine, and how to invent strategies that would guard against this.
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Notes
- 1.
The ‘nonautonomous’ is to push Bergson’s concept of singularity past the idea of a definable self outside of hegemony, into a more fluid state that melds with the ecology of the moment.
- 2.
Any daoist energy practice, by which I mean any of the vast range of combinations of alignment, breathing and different kinds of energy work it teaches.
- 3.
Caro Novella offered me three conversations, which—with her permission—we recorded and had transcribed as Conversations 1, 2 and 3. They are referenced in the text of this chapter with the number of the conversation followed by the number of the page from which a quotation comes. So, for example, ‘Conversation 2, page 26’ = (2:26).
- 4.
Marisa Paituví had previously written a short article which touched upon issues of control and feminisation of the bodies of people with breast cancer, 31/10/14. http://hysteria.mx/oncogrrrls-cancer-de-mama-en-cuerpos-disidentes/
- 5.
This use of ‘form’ is specifically Novella’s. It is curiously similar to the idea of form in the critical vocabulary I am using in this book, but is isolated from the process of (rest that precedes it and the embodiment into which it grows with repetition.
- 6.
There are ongoing oncogrrrls projects about which this chapter does not write, for example, the multiply-interconnected 2–3 day projects taking place in Madrid, Barcelona, Saragoza and Grenada during December 2016.
- 7.
- 8.
This unusual use of ‘thrive’ as a noun rather than a verb may be related to Massumi’s inclusion of ‘thriving’ in his theory of relational non-relational activism outlined in ‘Introduction’ (2011, 1–28).
- 9.
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Hunter, L. (2019). Caro Novella’s parèntesi and Resistencias Sonoras. In: Politics of Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14019-9_8
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