The Agonistic Objectification: Choreography as a play between abundance and lack

Abstract

If a game refers to the contest between differential positions mobilized by contrasting interests, can we envisage a work of art in relation to a game structure? The answer is yes. All art is structured by the principles of game. All art is always about contesting one idea embodied in representation by another one that is excluded from it. This operation is reflected in the various ways that artistic practices—including performing arts—perceive and articulate everyday objects and the diverse ways that art theory tries to explain the being of these objects. But, to clarify this answer, let me explain what is at stake here. First, by offering a glimpse on Mette Edvardsen's choreographic work that examines the play between ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ of objects. And, second, by envisaging how contemporary performances contribute to the development of theory that reflects this play in the form of a game structured by means of contestation between philosophical trajectories of immanence and transcendence. What I am suggesting is that the insight into these theories and performance practices from the point of view of game structure will allow us to understand the political dimension of all social practice, including art and theory. In this regard, I will try to show that the political dimension of artistic practices is constituted in the eternal interplay, or encounter, of the two differential aspirations: one directed towards the ultimate grounding of the being of objects, and another directed towards the revelation of the historical, contingent and constructed nature of the being of objects. This view opens up the space for understanding the object in terms of agonistic rather than objective relations. The goal is to demonstrate that to acknowledge agonistic objectifications is to invigorate democracy.

Notes

1 In The Quest for Meaning, Tariq Ramadan wrote that both twelve and thirteen century scholars, Abû Hâmid al-Ghazâli and Thomas Aquinas, inspired by different theological and philosophical traditions - Muslim and Christian - ‘tried to reconcile these two aspects of the universal: that of the transcendent Being and that of immanent reason’ (2010: 53).

2 For the expanded analysis of the distinction between the philosophical trajectories of immanence and quasi-transcendence check my text ‘The political dimension of dance: Mouffe’s theory of agonism and choreography’ (Petrović Lotina 2016).

3 The real is here used in Lacan’s sense.

4 More on concepts and the critic of representation is to be found in Deleuze and Guattari (1984: 33).

5 Slavoj Žižek offers an interesting observation of the abstract denominator on the example of ‘Uncle Sam’ (Žižek 2008).

6  More on the difference between mediation and articulation is to be found in Laclau and Mouffe (2001 [1985]: 93–7).

7 Both subjects and objects are always represented. They do not unfold their potential of being out of nowhere. Their beings are always already situated within a particular relational context and thus may not be integrated one into another. Therefore, the actions are neither properties of subjects nor objects; they are properties of politics, a set of institutions and sedimented social practices within which they are situated. It is in this context that I am referring to Donna Haraway’s writing on the situated knowledge (Haraway 1988).

8 For the expanded analysis of the being of objects check my text ‘The political dimension of dance: Mouffe’s theory of agonism and choreography’ (Petrović Lotina 2016).