Course Description

This course is a combined workshop and seminar devoted to an exploration of performativity.  Broadly understood, performativity provides an alternative to representation-based approaches.  It challenges some of the basic tenets of representationalism.  It is not about how things signify, but how they come to exist:  how they are enacted and sustained in practices.  It deals with the way that all kinds of actors -- objects, people, spaces -- enter the realm of the social.  

The seminar is not just for those who have a performance-based practice.  We will be concerned with all kinds of artistic practices -- whether based in media, computing, studio, or installation -- all of which can be understood to have a performative dimension.

The first three weeks of the course are devoted to establishing an analytical framework.  We will think about how things come to perform;  the multiple capacities in which things can perform; and the various forms that this performative activity can take.  We will understand these in terms of the various axes of engagement or identification in relation to whom (artist, viewer) this performative activity takes place -- axes that each have levels of intensity or investment.  

The next three weeks will be devoted to presentations and discussions of your own developing work, as influenced and organized by this analytical framework.  For this activity, you will choose a site other than the seminar room.  During these weeks, we will also think about how, when you speak about your work, you are also performing it, and performing for it.  This is not about "doing a performance" so much as calling attention to the ways that speaking about or for your existing work helps to enact it.  In this process, you will learn to pay attention not only to the work itself, but how you speak about it, as part of your overall artistic practice.  

The next four weeks will involve the planning and organization of a group project in collaboration with Jennifer's seminar.  We will also meet on two separate occasions outside of class time.

The analytical framework is not intended to be restrictive, forcing you to fit your work into its dictates.  Rather, it is intended to be a catalyst for discovery and creative thought, offering new ways of thinking about the work that you are doing in the Visual Arts program.  It is intended to enrich, broaden and deepen your existing work, offering new perspectives for you to engage and new concepts and connections for you to explore.  

For Jan 10, you are required to bring in one found object -- an object that you find compelling in some way, in the context of your own work and thought.  The object must be small enough to sit on the seminar table, without taking up too much space (we will want to have room for all objects, while still having room on the table to put our notebooks etc.).  We will think about the object as it sits there, and then also in the context of the kind of activity that it compels.

PART 1: ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK

JAN 10

How things come to perform.

Reading: Judith Butler, "Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street" 

Object-performance exercises.

Shifts from subjectivity to agency, production to performativity; incorporation of the affective or pre-cognitive; emphasis on practices: 

Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory, pp. 5-18. 

On affect and performativity:  
Jordan Crandall, An Actor Prepares and Something is Happening

Bruno Latour on black boxing:  
Graham Harman, Prince of Networks, pp. 33-55. 

JAN 17

The multiple capacities in which things can perform (agent, figure, character).

Reading: Slavoj Zizek, "The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime," pp. 17-26 (section 3, "Fantasy Decomposed" and section 4, "The Three Scenes").

Screening:  "The Three Scenes" of Lost Highway. Mr Eddy scene; Mystery Man scene.
Bobby Peru scene 1, 2; The Joker scene; Frank Booth scene.
Screening of final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni, L'Eclisse

Screening: Claire Denis, Beau Travail

Reading: Elena Rivero: "Performing the Narrative of Seduction" 

Optional screening outside of classtime: Pasolini, Salo.

JAN 24

The various forms that this performative activity can take (task, ritual, event (the Act!)).  

Screening: ending scenes from Rossellini, Stromboli and John Huston, The Dead.

Readings: Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 42-46.

Action in Homer:  Dreyfus and Kelly, All Things Shining, "Homer's Polytheism" pp. 58-87.

"Practical knowing", eventing-as-practice, and skill:  
Thrift, 121-5; Dreyfus and Kelly, 208-11.

Screening outside of classtime: Terence Malik, The Thin Red Line

PART 2: PRESENTATIONS AND DISCUSSIONS

JAN 31

site and supplemental readings/viewings to be determined

FEB 7

site and supplemental readings/viewings to be determined

FEB 14

site and supplemental readings/viewings to be determined

PART 3: ORGANIZATION OF GROUP PROJECT

FEB 10 (10am)  

Initial meeting with Jennifer's class
(general framework to be determined in advance of meeting)

FEB 21 and 28

Planning meetings / discussions

MAR 2 (12:00pm)    

Planning meeting with Jennifer's class

MAR 6 and 13

Working classes

Project opening dates to be determined.

Judith Butler notes

bodies congregate, they move and speak together, and they lay claim to a certain space as public space.

the collective actions collect the space itself, gather the pavement, and animate and organize the architecture.   

assembly and speech reconfigure the materiality of public space, and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment.

bodies in their plurality lay claim to the public, find and produce the public through seizing and reconfiguring the matter of material environments; 

at the same time, those material environments are part of the action, and they themselves act when they become the support for action.

our ideas of action, then, need to be rethought.  No one mobilizes a claim to move and assemble freely without moving and assembling together with others.  It is not individuals who act.  The square and the street are not only the material supports for action, but they themselves are part of any theory of public and corporeal action that we might propose.  

Human action depends upon all sorts of supports – it is always supported action.  Bodies can only persist and act when they are supported, by environments, by nutrition, by work, by modes of sociality and belonging, by networks of interdependency and care.

Bodies are themselves modalities of power. On the one hand, they are productive and performative. On the other hand, they can only persist and act when they are supported.

The material supports for action are not only part of action, but they are also what is being fought about, especially in those cases when the political struggle is about food, employment, mobility, and access to institutions.

this produces a quandary. We cannot act without supports, and yet we must struggle for the supports that allow us to act.

when the body “speaks” politically, it is not only in vocal or written language.  It happens through a performativity of the body that crosses language without ever quite reducing to language. 

we need to understand the bodily dimensions of action, what a body requires, and what a body can do, especially when we must think about bodies together, what holds them there, their conditions of persistence and of power.

this acting together opens up time and space outside and against the temporality and established architecture of the dominant regime, lays claim to materiality, leans into its supports, draws from its supports, in order to rework their functions.  Such an action reconfigures what will be public, and what will be the space of politics.

Thrift/Latour notes

ACTOR.  

What counts as 'me' and 'we' are being redefined by a range of transhuman approaches.

Spinoza's body:  'there is no longer a subject, but only individuating affective states of an anonymous force.  The plane is concerned only with movements and rests, with dynamic affective changes…

Shift focus away from human individual subject. 

Pre-individual:  modes of apprehension/existence that are not subject-based.  

Gap of subject/object replaced by a horizontal realm of dueling/cooperating entities.

Rendered mobile, stable, combinable

'we must live surrounded by an ocean of hybrids whose nature we do not know or at best imperfectly understand because we bleed into them in so many odd ways' … you can see it as a problem or as an opportunity.

Mediation -- to Negotiation -- we even negotiate time

For Latour, an actor is not a substance but a kind of explorer, testing what can and cannot be withstood.  (for Thrift, the metaphor is 'rehearsing')

There is no other way to define an actor but through its action, and there is no other way to define an action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, and created by the entity that is the focus of attention.  It becomes more real by the more allies it has.

Spinoza: everything is a part of thinking and doing simultaneously - they are aspects of the same thing expressed in two registers. Knowing proceeds in parallel with the body's physical encounters.

PRECOGNITIVE/AFFECTIVE

The precognitive as more than an addendum to the cognitive.  Affect.  Just as important as signs and signification. Body expressive without being a signifier. (imitation, modulation)

New relational modes.

Distributed cognition and distributed pre-cognition.

PRACTICES

Again, there is no other way to define an actor but through its action, and there is no other way to define an action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, and created by the entity that is the focus of attention.

The world is made up of all kinds of things brought in to relation with one another by many and various spaces through a continuous and largely involuntary process of encounter, and the training that such encounter enforces.

practices:  material bodies of work or styles that have gained enough stability over time -- through, for example, the establishment of corporeal routines and specialized devices -- to reproduce themselves.  

The stability is a result of schooling in these practices, of each actor holding the others to them, and of the brute 'natural' fact that the default is going to continue on in most circumstances. 

Practices are productive concatenations that have been constructed out of all manner of resources and which provide the basic intelligibility of the world.  Actions presuppose practices.

WHAT OF THE HUMAN BODY?

The human body is what it is because of its unparalleled ability to co-evolve with things, taking them in and adding them to different parts of the biological body to produce something which, if we could see it, would resemble a constantly evolving distribution of different hybrids with different reaches.  

WHAT OF THE SITE?  

An active an always incomplete incarnation of events, an actualization of times and spaces that uses the fluctuating conditions to assemble itself.  Not so much a result of punctual, external causes as it is an insertion into (and negotation of) multiple flows.

EVENT.  What constitutes an event?  What forces trigger it?

AN ETHIC OF EVENT-ING

A generalized ethic of out-of-jointness within which 'every familiar is ultimately strange and… indeed, I am even in a crucial sense a stranger to myself.'  It can be thought of as an opportunity to build new forms of life in which strangeness itself is the locus of new forms of relationship, neighborliness, community.  It suggests a particular form of boosting aliveness, one that opens us to our being in the midst of life through a thoroughly ontological involvement.  'Everyday life includes possibilities for withdrawing from, defending against, its own aliveness to the world, possibilities of, as it were, not really being there, of dying to the other's presence. The energies that constitute our aliveness to the world are subject to multiple modifications and transformations. CRAFTSMANSHIP, SKILL - working as part of a community of ability.  

A poetics of mundane space and time.  A politics of what happens.  A permanent supplement to the ordinary.

The assembling of more performative political ecologies. (after Butler)  Making more room in the world for new political forms, which at the same time, produces new excitations of power.  

SPACE

How do spaces resonate, obtain their particular 'atmosphere'?

Actors continually change size, scale up and down.  A multiplicity of scales is always present in interactions.  How do actors negotiate and assemble across scales?