Performativity and the Altermodernities: Occupy, Bodies and Time-Spaces
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Performativity and the Altermodernities: Occupy, Bodies and Time-Spaces A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Department of Philosophy and Humanities of Freie Universität Berlin by Iman Ganji Berlin, 2018 Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Erika Fischer-Lichte Second Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Matthias Warstat Date of defense: 25.02.2019 Grade: Summa Cum Laude Selbstständigkeitserklärung Hiermit bestätige ich, dass ich die vorliegende Arbeit selbstständig und unter Zuhilfenahme der angegebenen Literatur erstellt habe. Berlin, den 27.01.2021 Iman Ganji (Unterschrift) Acknowledgment This project would not have been possible without the support of many people. Special thanks to Professor Erika Fischer-Lichte and Professor Matthias Warstat, my supervisors, who patiently helped me to make sense out of what was originally confusion, and also Dr. Sruti Bala, who never stopped supporting me, even in my most difficult times. Many thanks to InterArt fellows and staff, for creating a community in which all ideas of the following dissertation have been produced in many collective debates. Thanks to German Research Foundation (DFG) for awarding me the scholarship and providing me with the financial means necessary to complete this project. And finally, thanks to all my past and future comrades in struggles for a better world, especially to my colleague and partner in life, Mohadeseh Zareh; and to the comrades in our anonymous collective back in Tehran, who cannot even leave Iran because of senseless prosecution of their thinking; and finally to dear friends, Sarah Ibrahim, Omid Montazeri, Ozgur Bahceci, Anirban Kumar, Yasmin Salimi, and many others. Abstract In the final months of 2010, a new global cycle of protests and social movements emerged that, as the following text will argue, has forced us to critically interrogate and transform the accepted ways in which theorists and researchers perceive the relation between aesthetics and politics, performativity and critical practice, modernity and its presupposed mimetic dynamics between the Global North and the Global South. These protest movements will be examined as various instances of the general category that we can call “the Occupy form.” The following research begins with an overview of the cycle of struggles and protest that were born out of the global revolutions in 1968. After having provided the salient features of this moment of recent political history, this text moves on to considerations of the performative turn in both the arts as well as in politics, thereby allowing for a broader critique of Modernity and for a conceptualization of what one could call as altermodernities. — a category, which obliges the theorist-researcher to reconceive of the very notion of performativity in the process. The research also defines performative event and its aesthetics in contrast to other existing literature such as social performance theory, and it goes on to argue for an aesthetics whose function is to create the conditions for alternative subjectifications. As performative politics works on the social relations to envision and enact a future society in the present, the transformations in dominant spatio- temporality – a constituent part of relationality – as well as bodies – in-between which the social relationality emerges – will be examined. The processes and mechanisms of constructing and imagining collective bodies at the national level, and how performative politics disrupts such processes of homogenization will be also an important part of evaluating the impacts and effects of occupy movements as well as how these performative movements re-appropriated time and space; creating spatio-temporalities different from the established colonial and authoritarian linear progress-centered ones reproduced by the nation-state apparatuses, particularly in the West Asia and North Africa. It will be also argued that a paradigm of imitation and mimesis will come short of explaining the communication and dissemination of protests movement from Cairo to New York, from Istanbul to Madrid, thus proposing the idea of performative contagion as a model to rethink this communication. Although this research makes use of case studies, archived material, and author led interviews with artist-activists, all of which are related to the 5 main subject of this thesis the occupy form of protests and its predecessors, it largely remains a theoretical endeavor to use performance and theatre studies in the socio-political field, drawing its insights from the tradition of the philosophers of immanence and the thinkers of community in 20th century. 6 Table of Content: 1 Introduction iii 1-1 The First Global Cycle in 21st Century: Politics Performative viii 1-2 Performative Altermodernities: Toward New Socialities xiii 2 Chapter One: Altermodernity Performativized 3 2-1 Alternative Modern: Creating the Alter- 3 2-1-1 A Modernity with Capital M 4 2-1-2 Modernism 6 2-1-2-1 Anti-Modern critique of the Nation-State: the ambiguity of the Minoritarian 9 2-1-2-2 Anti-Modern Critique of Progress 15 2-1-2-3 Modernity as a Power Relation 17 2-1-3 “Alter-”: The significance of the prefixes 20 2-2 A Discussion on the Methodology 31 2-2-1 Dramatization 34 2-2-2 Performativization 44 2-3 A Geography of Intensities 55 2-3-1 The Drama of Communicating Intensities 56 3 Chapter Two: The Performative Event 62 3.1 A Liminal Agency toward the Performative Event 62 3.1.2 A Shortcut to the Social Context 64 3.2 Performativierung/Aufführung – Ereignis/Event 65 3.3 Territories of Performance: Delimiting the Performative 69 3.3.1 The Performative at Work 70 3.3.2 Territorialized Arts: The Creative and Culture Industries 72 3.3.3 Art’s Territory for Aufführung 74 3.3.4 Politics’ Territory for Aufführung 79 3.3.4.1 Against the Vanguardist Trap 79 3.3.4.2 The Spectacle and its Political Performance 87 3.3.4.3 Dispossession, the Poor and the Inner Borders of Publikum 91 3.4 Aesthetics and the Performative Event 97 3.4.1 Event as Aesthetic Dislocation 98 3.4.2 The Aesthetic Production of the Creation 103 7 3.4.3 Arts-Politics: Machinic Assemblages 105 3.4.4 Limits and Transgression: the Performativization of Deterritorialization 112 3.4.5 Autopoiesis and Allopoiesis 117 3.4.6 In/corporeal Transformations 120 4 Chapter Three: From the POV of Bodies 129 4.1 An Introduction 129 4.2 The Body as Battleground 133 4.2.1 What is there to see in a body? 134 4.2.2 The Nietzschean Body 137 4.2.2.1 Nietzsche and the Impulsive Organization of the Body 139 4.2.2.2 The Survival of Organism 145 4.2.2.3 Imagination and the Nietzschean Body 147 4.2.3 Affect and the Body 153 4.2.4 Recording and Inscription: the Machinic Function of the Code 158 4.3 The Biopolitical Body 168 4.3.1 The Technos-Body 174 4.3.2 The Government of Things 178 4.4 The Patchwork Body: the Machinic Function of “and” 180 4.5 The State and the Body 199 4.5.1 Imitation, Nationalism and the Colonial Divide 202 4.5.1.1 “Volk vor dem Tor” 202 4.5.1.2 The War and the Nation 208 4.5.1.3 The Resentful West, the Resentful East: A Tale of Twins 209 4.5.1.4 Whose Nationalism, whose subjectivity? 212 4.5.2 Nations to the East 219 4.5.2.1 “The Successors”: From Greek Nationalism to a National Collective Body 223 4.5.2.1.1 From Enlightened Individual to True Volk 224 4.5.2.2 A Volk’s Renaissance in Iraq and Syria 227 4.5.2.3 The Happy Turk 232 4.6 The Performative Disruption of the Encoded Organism 234 4.6.1 The Stateless Monsters Rallying on the Street? 240 4.6.2 The Monstrous Threat against the Natural-Identical 250 4.6.3 Political Monster: A Case of Fascination 259 8 4.6.4 The Kurdish Stateless Monstrosity 263 4.7 A Conclusion: Contagion 266 5 Chapter Four: Time-Spaces of the Performative Event 290 5.1 The POV of Time-Spaces 290 5.2 Time Wars 292 5.2.1 Dominant Temporality 293 5.2.2 Time of the Performative Event: A Return to the Future 300 5.2.2.1 Multiplicity without One 303 5.2.2.2 The Multiple One 303 5.2.2.3 Kairos 305 5.2.2.4 Kairos and The Open Future 307 5.2.2.5 Kairos and Hiatus 310 5.2.2.6 Kairos and Everyday 314 5.2.2.7 A Return to the Future? 320 5.2.3 Kairoi and Occupy Movements 322 5.2.3.1 A New Machinic Assemblage of Revolutionary Temporalities 325 5.2.3.1.1 Insurrection 325 5.2.3.1.2 Resistance 326 5.2.3.1.3 Revolutionary Ascetism 327 5.2.3.2 The Three-Fold Temporal Assemblage 331 5.2.3.3 Reinventing the (post-)colonial Temporality 338 5.3 From time to space: Kairotope 343 5.4 Site in the Performative Event 346 5.4.1 Space as social positioning 346 5.4.2 Space as Enclosure 348 5.4.3 Space and Sociality 349 5.4.4 Philosophers of Spatial Relation 352 5.4.5 Smooth Space: Contemporary Capitalism’s Spatiality 355 5.4.6 The Occupy Form: Immanent Striation of the Contemporary Smooth Space 364 5.4.7 OWS and its Spatialities 365 5.4.8 Reclaiming the Space from the Post-Colonial Authoritarianism 372 6 Conclusion 379 6.1 Performative Knowledge Production 380 9 6.2 The Affective Solidarity 382 6.3 The Performative Realism 384 6.4 Aesthetics, an Altermodern Perspective 386 6.5 The Occupation Performative Dynamics, Summarized 392 6.6 Art: The Continuation of Politics by Other Means 395 Table of Tables 398 Bibliography 399 10 11 Introduction i ii 1 Introduction 2011 was a year that came bearing gifts, but of a kind that would come to be recognized as less of a present and more of a Pandora’s box.