15 October 2018
Decolonial Theories & Practices
Professor Diana Taylor
Group Members: Susana Costa Amaral, Lee Xie,
Ricardo Duarte Filho, Annie Seminara, Kristen Holfeuer
Proposal: Being With
Introduction
A giant white sheet floats around the city. The fabric is punctuated by heads from the participants of this collective performance. Their bodies are hidden under the cloth. To accomplish movement, these strangers must try to synchronize their steps and, together, they must find a common direction. This image is from a performance of Lygia Pape’s Divisor. The Divisor creates a mutant collective being, but also maintains the individuality of its participants: one can decide to dance, to jump, or leave and be substituted by another. It is from this initial image that we head towards the goal of our collaborative project: to propose a few possibilities of “Being With,” how we can be together, knowing that there are many more and that the project in mind will always be a work-in-progress.
Vulnerability (Susana)
In rethinking the ethics of “Being with” and how it relates to questions of vulnerability, we intend to demonstrate how the body plays a pivotal role in contemporary post/de/anti-colonial debates, especially in regards to the affective dimension of our political lives in the Americas. When the ethical dimension of embodiment is taken into account, the permeable character of ethical-political subjectivity arises in response to the heritage of violent, colonial and dictatorship-driven oppression. This permeability, as it has been mobilized in the work of the Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça, often takes the shape of an open wound, a scar that exposes the ongoing effect of colonization, and at the same time asserts itself as a shared, borderless and impossible to erase form of vulnerability. As a condition that imposes itself to the world, implicating it through an open wound, we would like to demonstrate how vulnerability can signal a new terrain of relations between the aesthetic and the political, from which new alliances are possible and displaced towards new organizations of the sensible. By approaching the politics of vulnerability as an ontological question that points to the emergence of ethical responsiveness in-between bodies, we also intend to address which alliances are possible (and which are not) in the quest for what could be considered an “ethical alliance” in our historical present.
The Pack (Ricardo)
Pape’s Divisor reminded us of the discussion proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in their A Thousand Plateaus of the pack. In a wolf pack there is also no homogeneity: the pack is nomadic, it is always moving. Its hierarchies can always be changed: the leader is not a definitive position, but it is always gambling everything it has. It is not necessarily always peaceful among its members, since they can fight among themselves, or even create other packs. There is always movement, always the risk of failure. Discussing a dream she had of a crowd at a desert, Fanny Deleuze describes a feeling of unease when faced with the uncertain movement of this crowd in a way that is closely related to Pape’s Divisor: “it is even very difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant motion and their movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm. They swirl, go north, then suddenly east; none of the individuals in the crowd remains in the same place in relation to the others. So I too am in perpetual motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of violent, almost vertiginous, happiness” (Deleuze; Guattari, 1987, p.29). Can we learn something about this embracing of uncertainty? Can this perpetual and nomadic movement, these frail alliances, allow us to think of new ways of being together with the other, while also trying to leave the constraints of thinking this “being with” as only related with other human beings? How can we be open to this “violent, almost vertiginous, happiness” and to try to build alliances based on it?
Relationality (Lee)
How can we move from the individual “I” that capitalism privileges in the spirit of competition and profit to a collective “we” bound by mutual respect and based on our inherent relationality? Central to this piece is the realization of the distances that exist between us in the current neoliberal order and the importance of closing these distances –epistemological or otherwise– before we can truly “be with.” What will be the consequences of this action? For one, we will have to address the question of difference, for even if we share a common precariousness, in coming together, we must do so in a way that does not involve erasure. If we follow Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ conceptualization of solidarity as “the recognition of the other both as an equal, whenever difference makes him or her inferior, and as different, whenever equality jeopardizes his or her identity” (156), we can trace, here, the emergence of a heterogeneous relationality.
Implicating ourselves in relationships of responsibility is not easy. We would like to examine the common traps it entails and propose some ways to break free of them through discussions of race and hybridity (incorporation of difference vs. erasure; mestizaje and its violences will be key here), trauma and guilt (Los rendidos is an interesting book/testimony written by a son wrestling with his parents’ history as members of the Shining Path), and other examples as they arise.
Response (Kristen)
Central to performance studies is Richard Schechner’s theory of twice behaved behavior (that performance is behavior that has been performed at least twice). Fred Moten expands that idea proposing that perhaps it is in the space between those moments of behavior that performance or art occurs, that the space shares a kinship with Kaprow’s art-life blur, and that the blur is a double-shadow, a disruption of a boundary. How does performance studies enter into the space of that blur with precision? How do we respond to one another and to performance in our PS scholarship as well as practices of “being with”? Responding with precision is an ethical imperative that manifests as a practice. We propose to examine “The Book of Jessica” as a case study of decolonial practice that captures methodologies of responsiveness. Created by Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell, “The Book of Jessica” is an unflinching record of the creation process of one of the most significant pieces of Indigenous theatre created in Canada. It highlights the difficulty of creating alliances, experimentation and improvisation as programs of creating new subjectivities, responding as recognition of the other without requirement of their reduction (precision), and the pain of failure that exists alongside creating dangerously.
Pact (Annie)
And finally, could we also speak about pacts as strategies for being with, as possible means of doing ethical alliances? A pact has to be entered into and inhabited. Although entering into a pact often involves a mutual crossing of the threshold between informal and formal alliance, this process is never complete since formality requires the kind of shape and definition that essentializes and reduces. A pact is performative in the Austinian sense. It is beyond the noun, a formal document of the archive – it is an ongoing series of actions, the continual embodiment of an alliance. We could say that it is one movement in the repertoire of an alliance. A pact is a decision, but one that must be renewed over and over and over again at every juncture and crossroads or else it becomes a doing to rather than a doing with. A doing to is not a pact. Because a pact never stops being reborn in this way, a pact is not a static entity but rather performs the precarious space between humans and their needs and desires. In our exploration of “being with” and what it means to form alliances, the concept of the pact considers the structures that bind people under a common need and/or desire. Can these structures be both binding and flexible, architectural and fluid?
Appendix
Working Bibliography
“The Book of Jessica” by Maria Campbell & Linda Griffiths
“God, Beauty, Justice, Love: Four Little Dialogues” by Jean-Luc Nancy
“Between Theatre & Anthropology” by Richard Schechner & Victor Turner
“Essays On the Blurring of Art and Life” by Allan Kaprow
“A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guatari
“Using People: Kant With Winnicott” by Barbara Johnson
“Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture” by Yvette Nolan
“Toward a Global Idea of Race” by Denise Ferreira da Silva
“Giving an Account of Oneself” by Judith Butler
“Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization” by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
“Epistemologies from the South” by Boaventura de Sousa Santos
“Los rendidos” by José Carlos Agüero
“The Archive and the Repertoire” by Diana Taylor
Working Questions
What is ethics? What is an alliance? What is an ethical alliance?
What is the difference between a political alliance and an ethical alliance? How can a political alliance be an ethical alliance? Can an ethical alliance form a political alliance?
What is morality? Can morals be relative? Can ethics be relative?
How can we create ethical alliances? How can we create a heterogeneous “we”?
Can we live a life less cruel?
Figure 1
https://diadeldolorcolonial.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/216.jpg
