ABSTRACT
Thank you for sharing your chapter and its engaging discussion of a difficult ‘&’ – that of performance studies and political philosophy. There are a couple of points in particular that prompted further thinking for me. Let me start with the notion of the subject, for example. The second definition of the subject you provide refers to experts engaging in a disciplinary act (analysing or effecting performance, for example). I wonder what other categories could be productive in discussing their practices. Focusing on the person, the doer, for a moment, a couple of other terms, with different genealogies and resonances, come to mind: the individual and the self. Juxtapositions with ‘the subject’ might be of use in interdisciplinary exchange, specifically because they reveal the histories, assumptions and values each term connotes, in other words, specifically because they shift the emphasis from knowledge-as-object to knowledge-as-practice. When a ‘performer’ is (seen, understood, discussed, trained as) an individual, I sense an underlying opposition at play; the performer is an individual rather than part of a collective or ensemble, or is idiosyncratic, distinctive within the marketplace of performance. The performer as self comes with the tools and concepts of psychoanalysis; what shapes the self as an artist? What hinders the expression of ‘the true self’? How does the performer find their self? On the other hand, the performer as subject, to my eyes, partakes in the nexus of ideology; the term or appellation refers to what the performer believes is performance, how it should be practised, for what reasons and for whom (in accordance with a set of generally accepted values).
