ABSTRACT
There has been extensive attention to the personal and social process of identification in the field of Performance Studies, especially based on widely held assumptions that performance is first and foremost a form of self-expression. The intention behind performance is often to raise questions or make statements about what it means to identify both individually and socially. But, because identification generally takes the form of negation, its process strips self-expression down to a process of revealing a “true” self or accessing a unique core of selfhood that arrests the potential to change. In this case social change has little room to negotiate territory that has not yet been imagined. As the last of the Burning Man Principles that invoke the term “radical,” I again turn to this as a caveat to suggest that traditional self-expression often reinforces difference, while radical self-expression opens it out. Both case studies that I analyze in this chapter invoke some sense of sacrifice, whether it is artists performing symbolic sacrifice, or selves making an actual sacrifice in the form of sacrificing the ego. To admit that burning the central sculpture of Black Rock city is more of a release than a loss is to acknowledge that sacrificing the ego releases the self into being rather than appearing.
