Doc & Art

Flying to Brussels to meet horses inregards of the Signal festival.

Judith Butler’s book Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015).

“The people” are not a given population, but are rather constituted by the lines of demarcation that we implicitly or explicitly establish.

If performativity has often been associated with individual performance, it may prove important to consider those forms of performativity that only operate through forms of coordinated action, whose condition and aim is the reconstitution of plural forms of agency​ and social practices of resistance. So this movement or stillness, this parking of my body in the middle of another’s action, is neither my own nor yours, but something that happens by virtue of the relation between us, arising from that relation, equivocating between the I and we, seeking at once to preserve and disseminate the generative value of that equivocation, an active and deliberately sustained relation, a collaboration distinct from hallucinatory merging or confusion.

[…] we have to ask whether​ it is right that verbalization remains the norm for thinking about expressive political action. Indeed, we need to rethink the speech act in order to understand what is made and what is done by certain kind of bodily enactments: the bodies assembled “say” we are not disposable, even if they stand silently.