square white world

It is still flattering to be misquoted, but when it is an answer to a question, and when it is the questioner who misquotes, one ought to be forgiven for thinking that the question was less leading than that the answer was altogether beside the point. ‘Simon Taylor’ does not give his description of performance, extrapolating to the suddenly ‘perplexed-me-on’ Herbert Blau. See here. … What ‘Simon Taylor’ describes in a comment which became a post, here, is in what manner performance picks up momentum from critical theory and how these reflective intricacies affect performance. In a second post, here, ‘Simon Taylor,’ realising he has not been clear resumes his response both in order to clarify and to address the second part of the question: Is performance an extrapolation, an advocation of those intricacies? Such intricacies are a matter of inference, if not interpellation, on Uri Khein’s part. However, ‘Simon Taylor’ suggests that they might already reside with the affect and be in turn effected in performance. So forming a feedback loop in representation, the image of thought: whereby, to start with, we observe performance picking up momentum from critical theory; spreading its surface as if in immanence… hence the surface without a ripple, and so on. As for how things really are: suggestion is made that they present themselves differently on Blau’s side of the curtain to how they appear to thought – or language – on the other side, where performance is not epiphenomenal, and being is said of the simulacra it gives rise to in the pure play of theatricality in the same sense as it is said of real models and actual people and events. And the shadows do not play false, that mislead.

…which is further to say that such momentum as performance picks up from critical theory is fixed at the subrepresentational stage of performance itself, theatre always being first and foremost its own best diagnostician. (This is why bad theatre really tells you how bad things can get, that they can get worse, i.e. ATC’s production of God of Carnage.) Theatre’s power as metaphor, its virtual immanence derives from theatricality and the Kantian theatricalised conscience of the image of thought, its moral huing and crying, gives rise to a critique which however solid and stately cannot get behind the curtain. Hence, a critical theory exacerbating a movement already incepted, intercepting it with a shrill scepticism, like a whistle on the sideline. If the performance is already the diagnostic, these ‘reflective intricacies’ are already in its affect, made mobile in the fix of it, affixed or inflected, and ‘those intricacies’ effect performance such that the image of thought is the extrapolation, makes representation. So the theatricalisation of everyday life may be the sum effect of the sinking of every metanarrative – even to and including that of the transcendental subject – below the surface of representation, with its critique. I.e. the critique is not critical enough.

‘Please return me to context,’ you say.

‘OK.’

…the unleashing of all manner of miniature egos across the various divides, figuring large, the subject/object divide, the slippages of shifters, signifiers, I’s and You’s, and ‘its;’ the latter in place as if placed there, staged, as contemplative souls of the matters in hand, passing hand to hand, hand to mouth, mouth to … and so on… Blau’s viewpoint here is of one across the theatrical divide contemplating the metaphoricity of theatre. It is a theatrical one. And as you can see, the body swells; the performance is all inside; there is no leverage against the slippage, the selvedge; the outside escapes without comment. The surface is unharmed… not a ripple.

‘Please return me to context,’ you say.

‘OK.’

– Condom Alley, 13.8.09

With an autonomy of its own, performance spreads by deconstruction not only from theatre to other disciplines but across the binaries of art and life, picking up momentum from critical theory – obsessed as it is with the “overflows, leaks, shifts, slips” and eroticised staging of dispersion itself, which cancels aesthetic distance. As we may gather from the Image-repertoire of Roland Barthes, spectacle seems to have become, with the body as irreducible difference, “the universal category in whose aspect the world is seen.”

– Herbert Blau, The Audience (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society), John Hopkins University Press, 1990, p. 2

I don’t even know if I am here, today. I’m staring into space, trying to summon up the energy to leave the sun on the step behind and come inside and write this. I’m thinking about these things, my mind sliding from one to the other and finding no purchase

on the garden
those plants I cleared and kept to replant need to be put in;
that garden needs building up, with mulch, before I replant it;
should I go and buy some mulch?
and some English lavender? allegedly the variety more commonly found in the South Island…

on the thesis,
the fact that I need to sell it to the Department;
and how to get from Deleuze and Badiou, a theatricalisation of their encounter – their encounter having ontological and philosophical implications – to a ‘revolutionary’ practice;
the latter seems today to be what I’m driving at – and that drive exists in spite of turning away from the hope of working in a rehearsal room again; a turning away driven in turn by lack of money to indulge in experimentation;
how to justify…?
how to sell to the Department?
the two – theory / practice – have developed with their backs to each other. Practice was what I was getting at with T-Cell… how to sell the idea that really appeals to me, of forming a performance group or cell in the university…?

(which gives the significance of the inverted commas around ‘revolutionary’ … a Theatre / T(error) Cell, ‘revolutionary’ invoking both a practical critique of representation and Nietzsche’s Great Health…)

on the shopping
whether to go now or later;
and what to buy?

Briefly, it’s all about buying and selling.

Better to sit out here in the sun, on the stoop

not knowing.