ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with performance studies, performance, and the ‘subject’. While there are differing understandings of ‘the subject’, I am beginning here with the understanding offered by Foucault: ‘there are two meanings of the word “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his [her] own identity by a conscience of self-knowledge’ (Foucault 2002: 331). Following this I look at the ‘subject’ of Performance Studies, not specifically in terms of a disciplinary field of study – i.e. the field of performance, but the scholar subject. And in turn, the performance I am interested in here is not the ‘performance’ event as the subject (or indeed we could say the object) of analysis, rather it is the performance of the scholar, i.e. the practice of their practice.