[-empyre-] how to teach theory as a practice

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Ken wrote:

One question that hasn't come up yet, though, is pedagogy: how to
teach theory as a practice, in the schools as well as outside of it.
None of this will have happened unless somebody teaches it...

___________________
McKenzie Wark
http://www.ludiccrew.org


Yes, and actually, there are some posts on this from our discussion  
with documenta 12 magazine project on 'what is to be done?  
(education)' in the January archives for -empyre-, at
https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2007-January/


I mett Bojana  CvejiÄ last November in connection with the 'what is  
to be done' question for a documenta 12 workshop. Her writing on this  
very question of
how to teach theory as a practice, is extraordinary.  I just wrote to  
Bojana about this and she was kind enough to forward me this recent  
essay. It's so well argued that I chose not to excerpt from it.

-Christina
http://christinamcphee.net

------------------------------------------------


THEORY, POLICE, AND DISAGREEMENT*



Searching for the perspective in which I could understand why  
âeducationâ or âknowledge productionâ emerges as the new hot  
topic in contemporary choreography and performance in Europe, I  
decided to try out a game with myself. What if I were a stranger â a  
theoretician, innocent of dance â who was entering the field for the  
first time now after ten years of its expansion? And there have been  
one or two philosophers who have recently been called in by the  
performance scene to discover a new â for them â choreographic  
practice, as the last performance they saw couldâve been a dance by  
BÃjart or the theater of Peter Brook. Could we imagine what drew  
their attention to the practices of choreography and performance today?

The stranger-philosopher is delighted to discover a field teeming  
with problems â old and historically solved in the other arts â  
now posed with a promise of specific political significance: for  
example, how working method could be challenged by score, how  
sensations and affects relate to concepts, how institutional critique  
should go beyond a mere attitude of display â to name just a few.  
Whatâs especially attractive about dance is the softness of  
complicity with which criticism, artistsâ pro-theoretical speech and  
very little theory practiced around these practices, merge in their  
functions, serving each other without borders, where many  
participants occupy many roles. And how out of this blend, topics  
like events arise. You find yourself in the situation to wonder:  
âWait a minute, did I bring up collectivity out of the autonomous  
need to rethink it today, or was the topic fashioned for a moment to  
serve the claim of political and I identified with it without asking  
myself where it comes from?â There is a chain of such topics  
unfolding one after another: research, laboratory and process,  
collectivity and collaboration, and now, education and knowledge.

If the figure of the stranger is a conservative philosopher, s/he  
will turn the whole discovery into a romantic celebration of what s/ 
he envies dance for in difference to philosophy: dance is poetry that  
doesnât need to write itself, movement is a metaphor of thought. A  
great part of the dance scene would thank her/him for it, and the  
whole actuality of problematization would be lost. On the other hand,  
if s/he takes the field seriously, then s/he, of course, loses the  
initial enthusiasm about the innocence of a new field, and realizes  
there is hard work to do to separate theory (that proceeds from a  
viewpoint) from criticism (which hides its viewpoint in common  
sense). By common sense I mean, here, the residues of past  
intellectualizations which make up the beliefs about normality.  
Itâs ânormalâ that a choreographer wonât allow interpretation  
of a performance as if it were a work of music or literature once s/ 
he or any of the dancers of the piece are no longer there in the  
world to pass the knowledge, because itâs ânormalâ that the  
process carried on in the bodies of performers is indispensable from  
the product. Itâs ânormalâ for a critic to base his/her argument  
on âit either works or it doesnât workâ. Itâs ânormalâ for  
us to think and argue the work in these terms, if we agree with if it  
works or not according to what the critic says.

But the stranger is too much of a stranger yet to complain cynically.  
S/he is curious, and s/he asks:

How did it occur that theory became something like a toolmachine for  
a practice of discourse constitutive of choreography? Why only ten  
years ago or so? How did it happen that contemporary dance schools  
like PARTS included as one of the subjects in the curriculum  
âtheoryâ? Is it that historically happens only now that a  
contemporary dance school should model itself after Academy, the  
renaissance model of inducting art candidates into philosophy apart  
from technical instruction? What role did theory play for  
choreography which sought a specific difference from dance? What does  
this role mean for the development of theory as a discipline in  
itself? Why did deconstruction become a common word, almost a  
technical term on the lips of technicians as well as programmers? And  
why does this all happen in the 90s and not before?

Let me begin with the story about theory, the path it had to go to  
find its extension towards choreographic practice. How do we come to  
use âtheoryâ as an absolute noun - needless to specify what this  
theory is the theory of? For instance, I teach âtheoryâ to dancers  
and choreographers, and the bodies of theory belong to the post- 
Kantian period of aesthetics, but I rarely need to specify the second  
degree of application: theory of performing arts, or better to say,  
theory â in experimental transferences into â the performing arts.  
Theory begins to supplant philosophy at the moment it is realized  
that thought is linguistic or material and that concepts canât exist  
independently of their linguistic expression. Fine enough, but then  
this is also to say that theoryâas the coming to terms with  
materialist languageâwill involve something like a language police,  
a search and destroy mission targeting the inevitable ideological  
implications of our language practices. And the only common interest  
between theory and dance in order for theory to access dance was that  
they both operate linguistically. But for dance, it was a hard task  
to prove that dance operates with language, at least, in a  
conditional, modernist understanding of it that even the most theory- 
resistant dance practitioners will agree with: the language of  
movement forms, its syntax or grammar.

The process of the expansion of theory could be described in figures  
of war and domination and imperialism because theory is of course  
also yet another super-structural development of late capitalism.  
What happens during the period in which theory spreadsâand the  
classical story is well known: first anthropology borrows its  
fundamental principles from linguistics, then literary criticism  
develops the formerâs implications in a range of new practices,  
which are adapted to psychoanalysis and the social sciences and  
especially cultural studiesâwhat happens in this process of transfer  
is what I would characterize (keeping to a linguistic mode) as  
wholesale translation, the supplanting of one language by another or,  
better still, by one kind of language by a whole range of very  
different ones. The logic of theoryâs Empire is appropriation by  
translation into or for this or that disciplinary area. Whatâs  
interesting is that modernism exits the arts to lend its dynamic and  
telos to theory; in other words the dynamic of theory has been the  
pursuit of the new and, if not a belief in progress, then at least a  
confidence that there always will be something new to replace the  
various older theories that have been absorbed into and domesticated  
by the canon.[1]

Does the resistance to theory today still have anything to do with  
how skeptically philosophers look down on it? In 1912 the philosopher  
Ralph Barton Perry published a book called âPresent Philosophical  
Tendenciesâ; it was subtitled âA Critical Survey of Naturalism,  
Idealism, Pragmatism, and Realism, Together with a Synopsis of the  
Philosophy of William Jamesâ. In the first chapter Perry  
distinguished between belief and theory, evidently because he thought  
his colleagues were confusing those terms in the zeal with which they  
pursued them. According to Perry, belief, or rather âestablished  
beliefâ, denotes faith, in the sense of âconviction favorable to  
action.â He regarded theory as an altogether smaller consideration,  
mainly because it should not â or at least not immediately â issue  
in action or otherwise change oneâs life. He deemed a theory to be  
experimental, a notion to be taken up or put down as it proved useful  
or not to a particular task. The theorist, he said, can enjoy the  
experiences of doubt, interrogation, irresponsibility, âa certain  
oscillation of mind between hypothetical alternatives.â

Old-fashioned and erroneous though this view is, because it assigns  
philosophy the truth-procedure while it doesnât see that if theory  
is experimental then it has potentially an empirical, active life- 
value practice, that theory is able to change your life, the  
distinction he made explains how theory substituted for the  
metaphysical horizon in choreography.

As long as the paradigm of dance is kept Romanticist or Modernist â  
dance as the formal or representational self-expression in bodily  
movement â its transfer in learning and making, where making is  
learning, will be based in belief. So theory enters dance, where the  
purpose or necessity of the innate expression (self-expression)  
exits. And where the hierarchical authority of the author as a  
producer=master of knowledge in work is challenged. Or, better still,  
theory doesnât only enter, it remains still productive there where  
it meets resistance. And this is the third answer to the question why  
theory was so powerful for the definition of choreography in the 90s.

For the last time: letâs go back again to the theoretical invasion.  
It is in the 90s that we hear the first objections to something like  
a hegemony of poststructuralism. The complaints are issued from those  
who identify themselves as the guardians of the holy impenetrable  
essence of art: literary critics, for instance, who want to save  
literature from theory robbing it, or cognitivist approaches who are  
rescuing the essence of art by psychology of perception.[2] Among  
other things, they say, theory legitimates itself by consistency, but  
the approach of social constructionism makes the work of theory  
arbitrary, because theories are mutually interchangeable and  
operations are predictable. Theory produces knowledge circularly, for  
any artwork can accommodate or be accommodated for any theory for  
theoryâs success. Plus theory becomes a risky business in  
performance as it promotes and follows trendy and ephemeral figures,  
star-lecturers who in their lectures exercise rhetorics.

I agree with none of that, as I see the march of theory through the  
humanities only helped the arts to acquire self-reflexiveness, and to  
found themselves as theoretical disciplines. The only doubt I have  
today after theory had been institutionalized in both academia and  
art schools concerns a certain arrogance of claim that not to think  
theoretically is not to think at all; so I would only object to  
theory acting juridically in relation to knowledge.

interpretations as it fanciesâ

This opinion, often imparted on students by dance teachers, only  
shows that knowledge in dance is still understood according to the  
18th century separation of special areas of expertise. In the light  
of this fact, the poststructuralist theories in the 90s did for dance  
what dance was asking for: deterritorialization. Leave the territory  
of specialisation as technical expertise and step in many other  
territories, which enable choreographers to observe dance from the  
outside and thereby, construct specificity multiple.

Is this a contradiction: specificity without specialization, and  
specificness conceived in plural? How the understanding of  
specificness in dance changed could be observed from the new  
approaches to technique. Instead of pondering whether to take a  
ballet or modern dance class as a general warm-up before the  
rehearsal, some choreographers think they should rethink their  
training more specific. Each project develops its own technical  
procedures and the body specializes accordingly. The other approach  
is: what kind of body practice should I set up from the concept Iâm  
developing in parallel so that such a body practice will provide  
conditions or a longer-term process for something like an event to  
emerge and challenge the concept and the thinking I started with. So,  
two ways we could see this development are: either dancers have also  
become pragmatic and opportunistic to fully accept that their body  
intelligence is instrumental for particular tasks and, therefore,  
relative, or they invest in searching for means without ends in order  
to prevent themselves from reasserting the knowledge they had before  
they formulated their concept. In both cases, they give up the trust  
in the organic wholesome curriculum diet.

Dance schools are like parents: they want their dancing children  
fully equipped and fit for GWWDD, the global world-wide dance diversity.

Why did the European dance in the 90s need theory in the quest of  
specificity and specificity for what? In the jargons of a number of  
choreographers today you can hear choreography and specificity more  
often referred than dance. Perhaps the distinction between  
choreography and dance in this case means the separation of  
choreographing as the writing from dancing as the speaking. All that  
was until recently called conceptual dance was based on such a  
Derridian turn: let's prove that writing may precede, maybe even, in  
some cases, substitute for dancing. By choreography as writing / 
Ãcriture/ I don't mean dance notation â so not the writing which  
follows, resembles, represents the speech of dance, like the written  
following the spoken word. I mean the writing as the language  
practice which includes and reflects its own rules and values of  
formation. So only by deconstructing the assumptions behind the  
language for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness,  
unconsciousness, experience and affectivity, could the art of  
choreography acquire a theoretical knowledge to merit the status of a  
discipline, like visual art, music, or film.

Isnât it too late (compared to the other arts) and yet so timely (as  
modernism coinciding within postmodernity) that the authors whom we  
would call choreographers but not, never call dancers claim and  
establish choreography by critiquing the institution of authorship?  
Authors become auteurs on the condition that they problematize  
authorship. Does the establishment of choreography â in the sense of  
self-reflexive theoretical knowledge - have to arise from  
deconstruction? Specificity arises first with the semiotic turn â  
and however that seems so historically late, as we speculate that  
pieces like âThe last performanceâ or âGiszelleâ could have  
been made from the point of their possible theorization â Roland  
Barthes or Julia Kristeva â 40 years ago, they couldnât have. The  
dance world wasnât ready for them; in other words, in dance, back  
then in the 70s, there was no theoretical atmosphere, no knowledge of  
history and theory which would inform such work and make it possible.  
This work happens only 10 years ago or so, in the 90s, and at an  
accelerating pace of appropriation and short-circuiting all that it  
catches up on the way: society of spectacle, pop culture, the  
neoavantgarde of the 60s, conceptualism in visual art. First it was  
Barthes, then Deleuze, and recently Luhmann, and now the theoretical  
names proliferate and contemporanize as we feel more confident on the  
ground of that specific otherness we declare as choreography.

âWhat are you working on?â

âWell, Iâm interested in the cinematic technologies, so Iâm  
reading Deleuze on cinema and you?â

âIâm figuring out what Massumi meant with the analog of the  
digital.â

âGreat!â

Whatâs great is that now there isnât even time for such exchange  
of references. Theory has resumed use value again after the initial  
promotional period when it had the form of exchange value, when we  
were competing who read Massumi first. This means that we have to  
thank the first rough period of conceptual methodology for the use of  
theory now becoming more smooth, seamless, more experimental and less  
demonstrative.

Talking to dance historians, and dance artists, you get a sense they  
have rather rude bottomline conclusions about dance being somehow a  
subaltern discipline, where subaltern equals inferior in rank.[3]  To  
say that dance is subaltern isnât victimization.Dance historians  
claim that dance both in the tradition and in contemporary practice  
has a dubious relation to its own history, methodology, theory and  
epistemology. Ramsay Burt wants to undo dance history in so far as  
dance is obsessed with presence as the trace of body and as the  
present or contemporariness. Underlying this 'presentism'  is a  
dialectic of exhaustion and reaction whereby dancers, having found an  
older style saturating and unfulfilling, turn instead to something  
new. So saturation, exhaustion, reaction and then replacement â this  
is the logic of dance undermining its own historization. The same  
goes for methodology.

Letâs say I take a contemporary dance class. I hope I will be  
introduced to an array of contemporary approaches, methods and  
conceptual frameworks. Instead of that, the choreographer introduces  
me to his method with the naÃve essentialism of a master-craftsman.  
âThis is how I do it. My relation is only to my work. My  
greatgrandfather is still Kant who enlightened me with the view that  
best knowledge is innate, acquired by intuition and not  
observation.â Says my teacher. And me, the student, what is left for  
me to do? To desire to only have more money to be able to afford more  
workshops of many more choreographers so as to get further into, if  
not by an overview of, a plurality in the field.

So who is doing theory in/for dance? The critics and the dramaturges,  
and occasionally a few theoreticians originally coming from other  
disciplines. In other words, thereâs not much going on there. The  
critics are busy with rationalizing their judgments made for the  
consuming audiences, and every once in a while they alarm us with  
âdance is in a crisisâ which is always just a symptom of criticism  
being in crisis. And the dramaturges are too close and complicit with  
the dance they are collaborating with in order to be interested in  
developping a theory with autonomy. There is no dance theory apart  
from the close loyalty of writers in the service of promoting certain  
authors, and there is a small part of academic, not so much related  
to the actual practice, study. It is also the dispositif of  
performance makes dance (even more than the theater that  
traditionally leaves the text behind) unavailable for discussion from  
the very simple reason that there can be no live comment made about  
what is seen â for what we have plenty of time and space to do in  
exhibition. The discussion time in theater is put off until after the  
show, when it happens in the bar around the drinks in the vicinity of  
the author whose presence makes him not dead enough to discuss the  
work with. And the artistsâ talks after the show they are â at  
best â promotions upgraded into a clarification where authors under  
the tyranny of the democratic dialogue are supposed to explain what  
they meant.

So who could theorize dance if not the choreographers themselves, by  
making the leap out of the conventional wisdom of dance forms,  
styles, narratives and self-expression, into other areas of  
theoretical knowledge, taking for their model art theory?  
Contemporary art theory becomes the example to look upon to for  
contemporary choreography. It serves as a paradigm of transfer from  
the theories after philosophy into the visual art theory. What makes  
the art theoryâs influence in choreography contemporary is that it  
is necessarily critical of the institution (theater) and it is  
political inasmuch as it is aesthetical.

Here are two unrelated points intertwined: the institutional critique  
(a concept advanced by the conceptual art in the 70s) and what the  
French philosopher Jacques RanciÃre recently coined as âthe  
politics of aestheticsâ.[4] Done with the utopian politics of  
conflict in favor of everyday micro-utopias, that is, singular  
strategies and tactics of flight, movement, negotiation, the  
choreographer seeks for a procedure which will produce an operation  
in the medium for a specific context. An operation is, what MÃrten  
SpÃngberg argued recently, a singular event of procedureâs  
implementation to a singular situation. I would add, the possible,  
and desirable political effect of an operation is to destabilize,  
disrupt or even redistribute the order of whatâs perceptible and  
thinkable.

RanciÃre makes a careful and important distinction between politics  
and police. Police, according to RanciÃre, is the general law that  
determines the distribution of parts and roles in a community as well  
as its forms of exclusion. The distribution applies to everything,  
for instance, it is the city or your TV, or your food diet or your  
choreographic regime. Police is the distribution of what can be seen,  
heard, said and thought. It means that not everything is political as  
we like to say. Politics is only there ââ where the laws, rules,  
habits, values, mechanisms and protocols for perception and cognition  
are disrupted. The political is the dispute that challenges the  
established framework of identification and classification, for  
instance, what dance is or could be or isnât allowed to be. So, the  
political are the acts that operate by disagreement.

In the field of choreography, theory contributed to putting  
representation in the brackets in the 90s. The police was the organic  
order of bodies, movements, objects, space, time, sound, gaze of the  
spectator, the order of representation and even the representation of  
expression. The political were the acts which displayed or  
transformed the representational apparatus of performance. The  
effects of this rupture we now recognize as the new law: performances  
which necessarily look back at you. The logic underlying the  
procedures of readymade and appropriation from non-dance or non-art  
into choreography is the self-referential performative or the  
demonstrativeness of acts looking back at the spectators looking at  
them. This is, perhaps, the most recognizable overall effect of  
theoryâs contribution to institutional critique in the 90s, which  
has now almost established itself as a new police order. The  
performance is watching you, and itâs like the police interrogating  
you in your role of the spectator: reflect upon your history, your  
taste, your capacity to perceive, your knowledge that you bring to  
the performance.

How does something that was once political turn into police? Hereby,  
a sample of thinking from a young choreographer reflecting her  
working approach.


âImagine that you are going to make a performance and that you are  
just in the beginning of the process. You are currently confronted  
with shit loads of different choices and decisions to make. It all  
seems more or less arbitrary, as you still havenât had the ultimate  
moment of inspiration.

Remembering that the âworkingâ of a Work is always related to the  
frame of reception, the expectation of the audience and the context  
in which the work is presented, you ask yourself:

-        but what is the frame really? Is it the theater, the body,  
the topic, the mode of production, the economic limitations, the  
distribution of the work or something entirely different? Or maybe  
more importantly, how do I set up a frame, knowing that the frame  
will highly influence if not determine the outcome of the Work I am  
about to make. How do I value WORKING and what is more important, the  
process or the product?

You think about the frame and the format as two important factors.  
The difference between predetermined formats that think for you and  
the possibility to think these formats differently.

How can I WORK with

-the frontality of the stage

-the demand for minimally 50-70min long performances

-the difficulty of having less than 100 audience members

-the body as the medium of dance

-dance technique as a precondition for dance making

-the mode of production, following proposal-application-research- 
production-presentation.

-the product valued higher than the process'' Mette Ingvartsen wrote.[5]

Do you find this checklist as a set of limitations imprisoning? Or,  
thinking it through may enable one to fold it in?

So, in order to answer the question why âknowledge productionâ  
arises as a topic today, letâs take the conclusion from this  
discussion: theory brings to choreography a practice of discourse  
which separates it from dance by the discipline of self-reflection.  
It was the theoretical knowledge, which choreography operated with,  
in the critique of the institution. Like authorship establishing  
itself in deconstruction and poststructuralist death of author, so do  
institutions arise in their own criticism. Institutional structures  
in dance expand parallel with choreographers performing their  
critique. It seems as if the logic of development of the theater  
institution today, and more specifically, venues showing dance, is  
how to invite, host and subsume self-criticism as a distinct part in  
its diversity management. An emerging institution will measure its  
success by the discipline of self-reflexivity, which is as valued as  
an R&D department: how it can think critically of itself for itself.  
Here lies the politics of a double-binding relationship - of  
constituting and being constituted, of being governed and trying to  
transform governance â in which both the artist and the curator are  
caught. If we tackle the vogue of  âknowledge  
productionâ (education and all related terms), we are forced to  
analyze a complex of interests, advantages and limitations, which we  
cannot simply blame on a win-win reason of free-market capitalism. It  
would be too easy to reduce it to just a new marketing-curatorial  
strategy. The situation is more interesting and complicated:

A performance is deemed too âdifficultâ â in other words, the  
programmer knows in advance that it will not have a full theater, but  
s/he nevertheless finds it important. He canât convince his superior  
general/financial director that the audience figures donât matter if  
the piece represents an evidence, albeit undesirable, of  
contemporaneity. The general director makes a calculation: according  
to the already diminished budget of this production, divided by  
audience figures, each spectator doesnât make theater earn but s/he  
actually costs the theater from 300 to 1000 euros. Not only does it  
bring no profit, such a production requires that the state invests  
high amounts in a select members of elite which are delegated as what  
was historically known, and here used as technical term,  
âavantgardeâ. Itâs the state and the private money that pay this  
sum for every privileged spectator of such work. To survive the  
pressure of neoliberal economy and make such work survive, a new  
argument is needed. It wonât work to play out the significance of  
art-for-artâs-sake autonomy and development. Instead, art needs to  
be proclaimed as a special form of knowledge production. The success  
of such a nomination is that it can include the two traditional post- 
Enlightenment types of knowledge complementing each other: the  
disinterested, so-called pure knowledge (aesthetical, philosophical)  
and the knowledge of the emancipation âfor the peopleâ (audience  
as members of society).

Mika Hannula, a Finnish expert and Art Academy director made a few  
statements that echoed even in daily press bombastically: art is a  
source of knowledge because artistic research is transdisciplinary,  
discursive, creative, experimental, critical, open in approach. The  
artist has developped the skills of a knowledge-pirate, a  
methodological omnivore who can churp from as many areas of knowledge  
as the occasion suits him, the same Dutch daily reports.[6] Apart  
from the surplus value claimed in defense of a lack of popularity and  
profit, I would argue that there are two more interests for the  
âknowledge productionâ vogue. Knowledge has become an  
informational commodity whose exchange value not only represents the  
principle force of production today, but it also has a major stake in  
the competition for power. In the well-known phenomenon of economy  
going more immaterial with services and IT, art behaves as the  
teacherâs pet in the society classroom. Itâs supposed to be the  
first one to have the answer on the topic. For performing arts this  
means claiming to produce knowledge, not just entertainment. And  
second, as a good deal of especially performing arts production is  
doing the politics of aesthetics more than the politics of engagement  
with social reality, knowledge is argued as a new link between the  
arts and society, the magical copula which will reinforce a new  
political role of art in society.

How else should we understand the recent boom of academies and  
educational programmes that substitute for exhibitions all over?  
Manifesta 6 is titled Art School and will consist of lectures,  
debates, presentations and workshops taking place in Nicosia.  
Documenta 12 will transform one of its chief venues Fridericianum  
into an Academy. Even more curious is the information that a number  
of renowned art curators are becoming heads of art departments at  
university, Ute Meta Bauer in the Visual Art Program of MIT, Saskia  
Bos in the Cooper Union, Okwui Enwezor in the San Francisco Art  
Institute.

Is this good or bad news for the artists? By no means is this a  
question. If we switch back to the choreography and performance  
field, we witness again how the theme  âknowledge productionâ  
jumps from the visual art context into choreography: there is a  
significant number of educational programmes, debates on education,  
initiatives to found education in performance going on at the moment  
in Europe.[7] But it is also that with research, process and  
laboratory already 5-6 years ago the notion of Ãducation permanente  
was ushered, perhaps out of the real need of choreography and dance  
to establish other than existing educational models. The only  
difference in comparison with the newly waged âknowledge  
productionâ is that research involved a contract for residency: a  
room of artistâs own with little discourse and methodology and a lot  
of aestheticization of research in effect.

However critical we are about the institutionalization and the  
current fashion of the concepts, research and knowledge production  
stay valid concepts, and their validness depends on how artists  
practice them. More precisely: not how they produce new problems in  
the same contexts, but how they transform the contexts for a  
problematic. Strangely enough, speaking to choreographers, dancers  
and performance makers from the age of 30 to 40, one gets the sense  
that everybody wants to learn. To learn rather than produce. And this  
also involves to extend the knowledge from performance to other  
formats of presentation and work, for instance, to thinking  
performativity without performance, to conceiving of performance  
without its medium. And Iâm not only talking about knowledge  
production modes sought by choreographers complaining about the  
existing educational programmes for choreography, I am talking about  
something larger that we have in common. The practice of an intellect  
in general: the faculty of language, the inclination to learn,  
memory, the ability to correlate, the inclination toward self- 
reflection.[8]

The fact that we produce constantly outside of the labor-time. A  
great number of independent freelance workers in this field are  
considering performativity, in the biopolitical sense, as an activity  
without end-product. Of course, there is the performance as the  
product and commodity which circulates on the institutional market.  
However, its labor-time is characterized by a non-calculated  
productivity, the learning process. This non-calculated productivity  
could become a productive force for a process of individuation  
artists can radicalize in cooperation.

In jargons about choreography individuation is popping up as the term  
to supplant individualism, as a lot of value is given to the notions  
of singularity and heterogeneity. The thinking on the specificity as  
the multiplicity of knowledge in choreography and performance strives  
to bypass individualism as the brand-making logic which forces  
authors to homogenize and reproduce the same work over and again. A  
young dancer formulated this problem in a story about âopening  
doorsâ: âIt seems to me that Choreography will be problematic as  
long as it is about finding a new territory as such. There is no  
territory without an exit from it.â[9] Manon Santkin also said, I  
paraphrase here: Opening doors rather than making rooms for  
exhibition is to claim that making work is about a process of  
becoming and change. What is the new role of theory in that?

It is clear that theory can no longer play a role of providing a  
poststructuralist text-model of performance made to fit its critique  
in the same production and presentation models. Why not, for the  
simple reason that textuality not just as a structural or  
poststructuralist regime of signification, but in a broader sense, a  
mindset with which we write concepts for applications for subsidy,  
our programme notes and reviews, in which we present and produce  
ourselves - aims at a critique by interpretation, or by a proposition  
which critically rereads, reinterprets, poses itself against the  
essentialist heritage: it says, it utters this is, this could be  
choreography as a contingent statement. It seems that the 90s were  
for the choreography and performance practices a period of the  
belated modernist logic, of the insistence on definition by  
declaration whereby the work satisfied itself to be a âsum of  
judgmentsâ historical, aesthetical, intertextual, interdiscursive,  
culturally implicated in a speech act (Thierry De Duve).  
Poststructuralism and contemporary art theory were instrumental in  
conceiving of dance as an open concept, and the evidence that their  
mission is accomplished are the niche-markets, specialized target  
group audiences, special contexts in which these practices are  
presented, and thus marginalized and tolerated.

That displaying the theater dispositif and undoing spectatorship  
produced spectacular effects of recognition and reification of the  
audiences could be explained by the inherent capacity of capitalism  
to abolish and melt down outdated institutions. So it is ânormalâ  
that not with disciplinary, but with self-reflexive and critical  
practices institutions have to respond advancing towards the  
freemarket. The consensus is in the internalization of this type of  
criticism as long as the general form of authority â that of  
capital â isnât threatened, as long as we agree and accept that  
institutions are primarily economic even if theyâre not profitable,  
they have to be subjected to the law of the market.

Until now, the operations theory undertook in the institutional  
framework werenât evident enough for us to rethink its role. To  
reorient theory from interpretative and critical to experimental and  
inventive practices â this means to invest in searching for the  
conditions in which new theorizations, new practices, new forms of  
work and life can possibly emerge. By new, I mean something which  
comes out of not obliging oneself with the protocol of departure from  
the negative assumption that there is always already that which needs  
to be undone,the spectator or the dispositif of the performance, as  
this protocol has proven to be ineffective, a protocol which proceeds  
only by exhausting itself in the object of critique. New would be the  
effort at transforming contexts of problematization, producing  
situations from the assumption that the capacity to act is larger  
than the means to realize it, that the potentiality is really  
different than the possibility understood as opportunity. There are  
simply too many opportunities and too little potentiality when each  
opportunity is negotiated as a possibility for actualization.

In the search of new conditions rather than new types or topics of  
criticism I see concrete procedures such as organizing oneâs own  
working conditions, exploring and exchanging knowledge without  
ownership, thinking postproductional performativity without  
performance. These are all tactics of self-organization which imply  
that artists and theoreticians make work an open process of knowledge  
production without immediate, pragmatic instrumentalization. Autonomy  
appears not from isolation or subversion, but from the force of  
experimentation - a fact capitalism makes us forget.


Bojana CvejiÄ



* This text is a transcript of the lecture Bojana CvejiÄ presented on  
February 20 2006, in the frame of Context #3, Hebbel-am-Ufer, at the  
invitation of Bettina Masuch.

[1] I owe these observations to Frederic Jameson, ''Symptoms of  
Theory or Symptoms for Theory?'', manuscript.
[2] Cf. Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (ed.), Theory's Empire. An  
Anthology of Dissent, Columbia University Press, New York, 2005.
[3] In the South Asian context, âsubalternâ is very broadly  
defined as comprising all those groups that have been made  
subordinate in terms of class, caste, age, gender, profession or âin  
any other wayâ.
[4] Cf. Jacques RanciÃre, The Politics of Aesthetics: The  
Distribution of the Sensible, (tr.) Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum,  
London-New York, 2004.
[5] Excerpt from Mette Ingvartsen, ÂWORK, Work and workÂ,  
manuscript, forthcoming in Etcetera, vol. 102.
[6] Domeniek Ruyters, ''Er zal geleerd worden!'', Volkskrant, January  
12, 2006.
[7] The notable one is the German Tanzplan, initiated by Bundes  
Kulturstiftung, the Federal Foundation for Culture, which finances  
initiatives of research and establishment of dance education.
[8] This is the definition of multitude and its contemporary forms of  
life from Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), New  
York, 2003.
[9] Manon Santkin, âOpening Doorsâ, manuscript produced in the  
workshop I held in P.A.R.T.S. in 2004.