Abstract
Interacting with McKenzie’s text, this article emphasizes the speculation at the conjunction of economic patterns and knowledge practices. Indeed, by sharing the common principle of unfettered circulation, the free exchange of currencies and ideas has always been instrumental in opening new sites/sights of knowledge. Moreover, current speculative practices are particularly well-symbolized by the transparency of interactive screens which have now become the interfaces of knowledge production and circulation. With the rise of the World Wide Web and smart media, our theaters of learning have become places of seeing, where virtually anyone can instantly find themselves face to face with previously invisible subjects of knowledge. As an alternative to mapping the world by way of opaque boundaries, Street evokes the work of French artist JR and his creative exposition of individual faces in promoting a cartography that transgresses attempts to build barriers. Challenging the demarcations between the seen and the unseen, Performance Philosophy may serve as an interface for the inviable and the invisible in these speculative times, working to turn spectacle and surveillance inside out.
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Notes
- 1.
See François Cusset, French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis, (Paris: La Découverte/Poche, 2003), 88–117.
- 2.
For a fascinating study of these tensions within the American university context, see Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010).
- 3.
Market metaphors for free thought span the centuries, from works by John Milton (“Aeropagitica” in 1644) and John Stuart Mill (On Liberty in 1859) to decisions by the US Supreme Court (United States vs. Rumely in 1953).
- 4.
This is true of site-specific art installations as well. See Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (Spring, 1997), 85–110: “Going against the grain of institutional habits and desires, and continuing to resist the commodification of art in/for the market place, site-specific art adopts strategies that are either aggressively antivisualinformational, textual, expositional, didactic-or immaterial altogether-gestures, events, or performances bracketed by temporal boundaries. The ‘work no longer seeks to be a noun/object but a verb/process, provoking the viewers’ critical (not just physical) acuity regarding the ideological conditions of that viewing’” (91).
- 5.
Jon McKenzie, “Ouisconsin Eidos, Wisconsin Idea, and the Closure of Ideation,” in Anna Street, Julien Alliot, and Magnolia Pauker, Eds. Inter Views in Performance Philosophy: Crossings and Conversations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 84.
- 6.
I suppose the most obvious examples of these failed experiments would be the Crusades and colonialism, among countless others.
- 7.
See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
- 8.
See Catherine Malabou, L’Avenir de Hegel. Plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (Paris: J. Vrin, 1994); La Plasticité au soir de l’écriture. Dialectique, destruction, déconstruction (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2004); Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience, avec Adrian Johnston, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
- 9.
See Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001).
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
An important corollary can be drawn with Hille Koskela’s research on the empowerment potential of self-surveillance: “In contrast of being targets of the ever-increasing surveillance, people seek to play an active role in the endless production of visual representations. Their shows include a ‘notion of self-ownership’ (Mann, 2002: 533). They seek to be subjects rather than objects. In other words, it can be claimed that what they actually do is reclaim the copyright of their own lives.” “Webcams, TV Shows and Mobile phones: Empowering Exhibitionism,” Surveillance & Society, CCTV Special (ed. Norris, McCahill and Wood) Vol. 2, No. 2/3 (2004): 206. https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3374
- 12.
For a thorough report on the history of theories of vision in philosophy and culture, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
- 13.
Surveillance scholar Hannah Cameron notes that the use of sight just as frequently blinds: “human visual perception, despite its pretensions to be objective, expels information and structures the visual field so as to make certain things visible and push others into invisibility.” “CCTV and (In)dividuation,” Surveillance & Society, CCTV Special (eds. Norris, McCahill and Wood) Vol. 2, No. 2/3 (2004): 138. https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3370
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Street, A. (2017). Inter Faces: Remapping Sights of Knowledge. In: Street, A., Alliot, J., Pauker, M. (eds) Inter Views in Performance Philosophy. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95192-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95192-5_8
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