Kone Foundation, Sep 2017–Aug 2020
Kone Foundation, 2020–2023
According to the anthropologist Tim Ingold, Western modernity is characterized by a “logic of inversion,” by means of which the plurality of life is systematically reduced to internal structures of identity, place, and power. In a time when both the climate crisis and the refugee ‘crisis’ are met with ever more introversive politics, the logic of inversion is itself in crisis and the quest for alternatives is ever more urgent. The aim of this postdoctoral project is to contribute, theoretically, in undoing settled inversions of identity, power, narrative, and history, in eight case studies mostly of theatre prac-tices from the Renaissance to the present. The theatre, here, works as a compact mod-el both for the work of inversion – the very framing of a world on stage – and for the plural backstage practices that the logic of inversion needs to conceal.
Through different models of complexity, the key objective of the project is to develop an ethically and politically sustainable theory of plural performativity that could pro-ductively account for the internal tensions of the concept, as it has historically drifted between conflicting values of novelty and normativity, doing and dissimulation: the heroic extraversion of ‘performance’ and the docile incorporation of social discipline.
The planned case studies come in four thematic clusters:
1. Modern models of identity and humanity
Renaissance humanism: Baroque theatre
Psychological interiority: Franz Kafka
2. Creativity, agency, and power relations
The theatre director: Gordon Craig to Tadeusz Kantor
The puppet metaphor: doing in undergoing
3. Space and time
Scenography: Eimuntas Nekrošius
Dramaturgy: Ingmar Bergman and Paavo Haavikko
4. History and ethics
The Holocaust and historical conscience: Our Class (Słobodzianek)
Magnitudes of twenty-first century performance (cf. Schechner): Here, the “inver-sion” of neoliberal doctrine – the economic rationalism that currently sets the en-trepeneurial individual against a world reduced to resource – is contradicted by global warming as the ultimate human performance that however necessarily escapes human perception. Insofar as the utter blindness of these phenomena to one another (the cli-mate does not care, but neither does the capitalist) has to do with their theorization in terms of “direct” and “systemic causation,” respectively, it is this conflict of perspec-tives, first and foremost, that sets the ethical imperative on exploring such systemic models of human action as this project proposes to call plural performativity.
Teemu Paavolainen
teemu.paavolainen @ tuni.fi