technomadic
notes from the ever-emerging field
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Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow(For Thine is the Kingdom)
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow(Life is very long)
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow(For Thine is the Kingdom)
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is theThis is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. -
What about a poetique (a “way of making”) and a politique (a “way of living-together”) for the “permanent TAZ (or “PAZ”)? What about the actual relation between temporariness and permanence? And how can the PAZ renew and refresh itself periodically with the “festival” aspect of the TAZ?
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Despite this very liminality - this playing at the borderlines of our experience - commemoration by ritualistic action and commemoration via identification accomplish for their respective objects an ‘immortality,’ or at least an abiding perdurance. If it is indeed true that ‘the memory of the first act of sacrifice thus proved indestructible, in spite of every effort to forget it’ - the memory surviving as ritualized commemoration - the memory of others we once loved also proves indestructible: in spite of every effort to forget them, we commemorate them within our psyche by means of intrapsychic memorialization.
— Edward Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, p. 243. -
A performance studies agenda should collapse this divide and revitalize the connections between artistic accomplishment, analysis, and articulations with communities; between practical knowledge (knowing how), propositional knowledge (knowing that), and political savvy (knowing who, when, and where). This epistemological connection between creativity, critique, and civic engagement is mutually replenishing, and pedagogically powerful. Very bright, talented students are attracted to programs that combine intellectual rigor with artistic excellence that is critically engaged, where they do not have to banish their artistic spirit in order to become a critical thinker, or repress their intellectual self or political passion to explore their artistic side. Particularly at the PhD level, original scholarship in culture and the arts is enhanced, complemented, and complicated in deeply meaningful ways by the participatory understanding and community involvement of the researcher. This experiential and engaged model of inquiry is coextensive with the participant-observation methods of ethnographic research.
The ongoing challenge of performance studies is to refuse and supercede this deeply entrenched division of labor, apartheid of knowledges, that plays out inside the academy as the difference between thinking and doing, interpreting and making, conceptualizing and creating. The division of labor between theory and practice, abstraction and embodiment, is an arbitrary and rigged choice, and, like all binarisms, it is booby-trapped. It’s a Faustian bargain. If we go the one-way street of abstraction, then we cut ourselves off from the nourishing ground of participatory experience. If we go the one-way street of practice, then we drive ourselves into an isolated cul-de-sac, a practitioner’s workshop or artist’s colony. Our radical move is to turn, and return, insistently, to the crossroads.
— Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” 153-4. -
Contestation does not imply a generalized negation, but an affirmation that affirms nothing, a radical break of transitivity. Rather than being a process of thought for denying existences or values, contestation is the act that carries them all to their limits and, from there, to the Limit where an ontological decision achieves its end; to contest is to proceed until one reaches the empty core where being achieves its limit and where the limit defines being. There, at the transgressed limit, the ‘yes’ of contestation reverberates, leaving without echo the hee-haw of Nietzsche’s braying ass.
— Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression
