Jon McKenzie

Laurie Anderson for Dummies

If language is a virus from outer space, performance is its downlink in the United States-and Laurie Anderson one of its most uncanny transmitters. Since the late I96os, Andersons homey yet alien work has been short-circuiting the often great divides between street talk and philosophy, popular culture and experimental art, everyday life and its electronic ghost. Her preferred medium: an electric body in which gestures, stories, and songs mix with synthesizers, video projections, printed matter, and, most recently, personal computers. Over the years, this electric body has grown in crystalline fashion, its fractal structure reiterating and recombining simple components into diversifying assemblages. In 1974, Anderson performed Duets on Ice on the streets of New York, standing in skates with blades frozen in ice and playing cowboy songs on the Self-Playing Violin-an instrument whose music unwinds from magnetic tape loops. Twenty years later, this small bit haunts the edges of her latest media blitz, a storm of coordinated releases that include a worldwide tour of The Nerve Bible, two music CDs, a retrospective book, a proposal for a

High Performance Schooling

As anthropologist Marilyn Strathern notes in her introduction to the collection Audit Cultures, the emergence of audit and assessment procedures that we see in academic practice ‘is part of a global phenomenon. Audit regimes accompany a specific epoch in Western international affairs’.2 The different evaluative procedures found in the US GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and the UK RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) are both culturally specific – and increasingly shared by people around the world. From individuals and small groups to larger institutions, governments and, of late, international and transnational organizations, we find a complex and growing regime of evaluative procedures that accompany, enable and, precisely, account for contemporary processes of globalization. Such procedures are in no way limited to academics, of course, but extend across every social sphere, including those of business, politics, healthcare, the military and even art and culture. Through initiatives such as the United Nation’s Global Compact, the entire world is becoming a giant test site, a colossal ‘audit-orium’ or space of auditing. Perhaps a more fitting punch line to my epigraph will soon be: ‘I’m an Earthling. I was born to be audited’.

Critical Art Ensemble, Tactical Media Practitioners

The Critical Acts Ensemble, CAE for short, is a tightly knit group of artists exploring intersection between art, technology, critical theory, and political activism. We have given CAE a big chunk of space to present and explain their work. Added to that is a critical essay by TDR Contributing Editor Rebecca Schneider.

Keep Your EYES on the FRONT and WATCH YOUR BACK

These are times marked and marred by Homeland Security measures, terrorist attacks, preemptive “just” wars, and non-denial denials regarding the legality of torture and unrecorded detentions. The most pressing question is perhaps not “Are you paranoid?” but rather, “Are you paranoid enough?” Concerned TDR readers may be interested in the case of Critical Art Ensemble cofounder Steve Kurtz, who gained national—and federal—attention earlier this past summer [2004]. To get our own bearings on the situation, we visited Mass MOCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) to view Free Range Grain, an aborted exhibition by CAE and Beatriz da Costa. The performative exhibit was to have been part of Mass MOCA’s show, The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere, which also included such artists as William Pope.L, subRosa, and The Yes Men. The show asked, in part: “How can artists and the public become engaged in complex sciences like biotechnology, sociology, and anthropology? Why would they want to? We think of science as a world unto itself, the realm of super-specialists, but is it a public sphere, too?” Mass MOCA’s questions seemed entirely appropriate, and yet...one of the exhibitions was aborted. Why? The reason appears to have everything to do with policing the boundaries of the public sphere. An aborted exhibition is an exhibition of what might have been, had there been an exhibition—that is, in this case, had CAE not been under criminal investigation. In the center of the abandoned exhibit was a sign:

Democracy's Performance

McKenzie asks, If the ancient Greeks invented democracy in the form of the city-state, and colonial North Americans reinvented it in the nation-state, what democratic forms might the world create in the age of global performance? He explores this question in relation to the thought of Nietzsche and Marcuseand in terms of dissatisfied democrats: people who strongly believe in democracy but are unhappy with its particular embodiments. Could it be that democracy is an inherently incomplete project, one that is always to come, always being invented, always being tested and contested, always being asked to perform? The Electronic Disturbance Theater demonstrates how the Internet can be used to facilitate social and political engagement and protest. Dubbed virtual Zapatistas because of its strong support for the liberation movement in Mexico and throughout Latin America, EDTs actions combine the political struggle for indigenous self-determination with a critique of neoliberalism aka globalization. In the articles and interview that follow, EDTs origins, development, and ongoing actions are examined. You are invited to participate.

What is Refugee

This collectively authored article is a curated response to a set of questions (or fragments of questions) derived from a year-long collaboration focused on the figure of the refugee. Delivered through mixed-media, the responses cover a vast range of territory, from the relation between refugees and global capitalism to the reign of bio- and necro-politics, from analytical philosophies of naming to continental philosophies of territorialized flows, and from conceptual mappings of interstitial space to concrete mappings of “refugee” movements across the globe. While the article addresses many different questions, the authors are concerned primarily with the following: How can performance philosophy conceptualize “crisis” in its methods and subjects of study? How is crisis organized, delivered and received in thought and performance? The form our response has taken is one of arranged fragments that speak to the “trailing off” of thought that so frequently occurs when faced with “big ideas.” Meanwhile, the content delivers multiple theses on the ways performance philosophy scholarship might grapple with the figure of the refugee, a figure that will surely dominate ethical discussions for years to come.

Ouisconsin Eidos, Wisconsin Idea, and the Closure of Ideation

“Ouisconsin Eidos” names the becoming other of ideational thought, the digitalization of a logocentric thinking intimately allied with the history of phonetic writing, the book, the archive, the university, protocols of academic publishing—and Western colonialism. If ideation makes possible modern research and knowledge, its displacement may oscillate between violence and hope, ignorance and wisdom. Since ideation unfolds through phonetic writing, post-ideational thought-action entails engagement with emerging digital forms, habits, and infrastructures. The smart media genres formalized at UW-Madison’s DesignLab function as experiments mounted amidst times of intense battles over the forms and functions of knowledge and higher education. The logic of Ouisconsin Eidos encourages other site-specific engagements.

Philosophical Interruptions and Post-Ideational Genres: Thinking Beyond Literacy

In this energetic exchange, McKenzie questions traditional forms of literacy by challenging their dependency upon the thinking subject as the ground of thought. Depicting philosophy as the great interrupter, shifting the show from storytelling to arguments, he accuses literacy of organizing the world into logocentric zones of colonialism. Promoting a new way of thinking via digitality, McKenzie launches his intervention by creating non-linear, multimedia, and transdisciplinary modes of thought, reinscribing conceptual arguments outside phonetic writing in surprisingly new architectures of ideation.

Introduction: Contesting Performance in an Age of Globalization

Performance research has gone global. By this we refer not so much to the cultural phenomena studied — which, it is clear, have long been located around the world — but to the locations of researchers themselves. These locations have steadily expanded over the past two decades, whether it be in terms of individual researchers working alone or in small groups on different continents. This expansion is mirrored by the emergence of performance research and study programs in different countries. While the United States continues to host many influential scholars and programs, the United Kingdom in particular has seen an increase in performance scholarship and in university courses of study that carry the term ‘performance’ in their names, and important research projects and academic departments have emerged in locales as diverse as Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Singapore, Slovenia, and South Africa. In addition, a number of transnational scholarly organizations have formed — some with a regional focus, notably the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and the Asian Performance Studies Research Group, and others with an international scope, such as Performance Studies international (PSi) and the performance-focused working groups of the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR).