ABSTRACT
Ontroerend Goed’s Fight Night is a performance of distorted democracy. The piece seems to be a parody of contemporary democratic processes, at their most personality-driven and performative, but also of those who would like to keep a sceptical distance from democracy’s promises. The moment when the non-voters make a choice about whether to do as they are instructed seems to the author a moment of particularly embodied decision-making. Evan Thompson draws on a ‘neurodynamical model’ consisting of a set of ‘circular causal loops’ where ‘emotion, intention and consciousness emerge from and are embodied in the self-organising dynamics of these nested loops’. The questions of agency that arise from a body that reacts without conscious thought, and that creates and asserts the context out of which conscious thought arises, must also be seen in relation to a body that is socially conditioned so that it is disposed towards certain kinds of response and towards certain kinds of grounding for conscious thought.
