ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses choreographic investments in thingliness by the works in reveal why this particular paradox need not be a dead-end or source of blockage, but might instead be capable of energizing the links between art and politics, subjectivity and object hood, thingly performances and their effects. This activation is nothing else than the political effect that a choreographic critique of the object can create: the formation of an "impersonal movement that at the same time displaces the other from himself and allows him in his turn to give himself as thing and to take me as thing". The choreographic and performative program that Rainer describes as the need to "move or be moved by something rather than oneself", is also a way to provoke objects and selves to step out of their zones of conformity and alliance to the cliche that is humanity, to escape from the dyadic object-subject embrace that conforms and pre-forms both terms.
