Performance studies is not only about performance but also about what happens before the performance and what happens afterward. This book is concerned with the political affects of what happens during the making of the performanceāwith its performativity. Letās begin with the distinction made by several commentators in the discipline, between performance and performativity. The pursuit of the elusiveness of performativity is a thread running through the texture of performance studies.1 At times, it is used to separate between pre-production and production/post-production, but in my opinion, this is because performativity is always about the quality of not-knowing that occurs in performance, the moments at which something happens that leads to ungovernable change, and this is often associated more firmly with preparation than public performance. From my perspective, performativity can happen in rehearsal, workshop, studio or lab, as much as in the performance occurring as a production in different kinds of public spacesāand, I would suggest, as much as in the post-production social performances of the audience participants.
If political effects result from doing political performances, they are usually preceded by political affects that result from doing performance politically and reaching for the conditions in which performativity can happenāa process of rehearsal. These distinctions are theoretical forays into a complex environment which I recognise is not as simple as the distinctions here might imply. Nevertheless, I would like to clarify that this book is mainly concerned with the performativity of making performance, with the political affects that occur, and with the tasks involved in sustaining those affects over time. Part I of this book lays out the theoretical terrain of much contemporary sociopolitical critique relevant to performance studies as a discipline and introduces a range of challenges to its pursuit of effective responses to neo/liberal politics. It then turns to the affective processes of performance to suggest ways that performativity can offer radically alterior approaches to political activism. Part II addresses four case studies of performers who make work that encourages affective political engagement. It also highlights the way that critics can in turn make affective critical documenting, as well as more discursively recognisable articulations, of the rhetorical work of this kind of performativity.
I am interested in the temporal sustaining of affect because the focus of the studies made here is on the use of the present, in-person somatic body interacting with materials to make a medium for performance. This includes considering how the performerās body and the audience memberās body can repeat performance without the replication that hammers performativity into product. Affect turning into effect changes the energy of performativity from one in which things can happen to one in which something can result. Political effectiveness is central to the development of nation state society, and I have spent many years analysing the rhetorical impact of actions as effective or not. This is a field of critical study that is being expanded by others in intensely interesting ways.2 In contrast, what this book attempts to do is a tentative exploration of the energy of performativity that generates political affect and permeates attempts at social justice so often alterior to discourse.
To do so, the landscape has to include not only a recognition of liberal nation state ideology and an understanding of the discursive structures of neoliberal hegemony, but also awareness of the alongside world of singularity, intersectionality, positionality, situated knowing and fungibility.3 The political affect of performativity that occurs alongside can be directed immediately at the discourses of neo/liberal states,4 but it often happens in a completely alterior way, in other words, outwith the comprehension, recognition or even awareness of those discourses .5 On one hand, performativity may lead to sociocultural performance that satisfies or fits within state structures, or uses those structures to aim toward an affect that opposes or resists or otherwise reacts to neoliberalism. On another, it may want to disrupt, transgress or transcend national cultures. Or indeed, it may need to generate sociosituated ways of becoming, knowing and valuing that are simply not concerned with being responsive to a hegemonic worldview. These are packed statements that I will attempt to open up in the four chapters of Part I through a discussion, first, of global and nation state structures and the differences between the representative and discursive sociocultures they support, and then, by turning attention to the landscape that is continually being presenced outwith those cultures in the processes of performativity. This Part I is concerned with sketching various critical and philosophical attentions to the alongside, and in particular, with articulating the contribution of situated knowing into the sociosituated groupings of alongside performance.
In many ways, this book is a response to the academic and public perspective on performance and performance studies as apolitical. It asserts that performers train in practices that encourage them to co-labour with materials they do not know, and that not-knowing is a political activity central to their performativity and the changes it affects and puts into effect. It directly addresses current concerns with the dominant neoliberal perspective based on a belief that culture and society are discursively determined and nothing can exist outside these parameters, and that any disruptions or eruptions occur in response to discursive constraints. This assumptive logic informs an extraordinarily self-regarding stance that sets up a tautological structure in which nothing can happen outside its parameters, so that it cannot recognise things that do happen outside those parameters. Performance may of course be attempting to be non-political, but that is a naĆÆve assumption since any action in the geohistorical ecologies of the world will have political impact. It may also be trying to be political performance, to send a message or, for example, to react against oppression. But for it to be repeatable and therefore carry energy, rather than be simply replicable, it may also be trying to do performance politically, to collaborate on ways of generating positionalities that are founded on particular needs.
Hence, Part I makes a philosophical case for the lives lived and work done alongside discourse. āAlongsideā becomes a key word (expanding on other uses of it in performance studies more generally) in this exploration of the politics of non-discursive social locations, which I define as āsociosituatedā in contrast to the normative sociocultural spaces of hegemonic discourse. In doing so, it draws on decolonising theory, on critical approaches from gender studies and feminism and from traditional indigenous knowledge. The argument develops into making a case for performativity as a location for discussion of the practicalities of generating alongside political action. Central to this action is the willingness to work with materials that we do not know, that we not-know as a condition for we can never know them. The context for the argument is performativity and performance, based on an assertion that most people engage in the changes brought about by not-known materials, but that performers do this every day as their job. A better understanding of what performers do when practicing with a not-known offers insight into the kinds of political work being done not only in performance, but also in daily life.
Part I introduces a tentative vocabulary for working through the rhetorical stance of performativity through the terms (rest (the ā(ābefore the word ārestā is a typographic rendering of a concept key to the rhetoric of performativity being suggestedāfor more details, see the following paragraph, Chap. 4 first section and Chap. 6), form, embodiment and medium. It also introduces a number of rhetorical terms that in Anglo-European history have consistently been associated with ways of making present not the resistance of thingsāfor this precludes the possibility that things may not even have a concept of resistanceābut rather, their elusive, enigmatic and allegorical density. Both the critical vocabulary for the rhetorical stance of affective performativity and the rhetorical terms around which such performativity can coalesce are explored in sequence through the case studies of performers in Part II.
Part II works through four case studies, and the structure of the four chapters suggests a movement from practice, through performativity, to performance. This movement, which is suggestive rather than descriptive or definitive, begins with the moment of (rest when a performer recognises the feeling of the not-known in their materials. Through their training in practice, forms are generated that carry that felt sense, and if these forms can be repeated (with constant variationāthe heart of improvisation) and still carry that sensibility, the performer can begin to embody the fel...