ABSTRACT
Wodiczko's comment calls attention to the importance for liberal forms of governance of securitizing the beliefs of a public through the instrumentalization of memory. Performance describes a mode of address expressed through the situational nature of the veteran's body, voice, and mobility, elements which are interlocked in the durational gesture of a subject category excluded from the anonymity of democratic life by way of war's complex ethical status. Precarity is twofold, and perhaps this reveals something about its potential/danger; on one hand is Fanon's argument in Black Skin, White Masks on the unavailability of recognition and thus the degradation of the human in colonial contexts. Rather than being structured along the expectations of colonial-postcolonial limitations, performance raises the potential of the impossible. The power in the destructiveness of plasticity, or time, must be performed as "a power that forms" and not a domination over the forms of being public.
