A Good Catch: Practicing generosity

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Notes

¹ I would like to thank the editors Paul Rae and Martin Welton for practicing the generosity that I preach.

² Since as practitioner and scholar my methodology includes thinking through the body, I find the earthy suggestion of ‘between’ more useful here than the term dialectic. While dialectic produces excellent and interesting thinking in its own right, and has been used to effect in diagnosing the political and cultural condition, between offers me the sense of moving bodies amending and adjusting themselves to the space between each other, the shifting changing the location of the between as well as the location of the ideas.

³ At the Performance Studies Conference in June 2006, I ‘ate’ the words of several of those I heard at the conference and one of the nutritious ones was Agamben. Having not read a thing by Giorgio Agamben, I had the receiver's intrigue and skepticism simultaneously: would this food nourish, would I have a bursting net wiggling about or was this a commercial item, trendy and ultimately stale? Agamben's work circulated into my life as a gift, as a new and moving understanding that those politicians who most pedantically insisted upon ‘teaching democracy’ to the world were those who had by actions justified through a state of exception ‘lost the canon’ of the very democracy they would teach, and lost it much earlier in the twentieth century than I had realized. The risk, of course, to the skeptic and the scoffing is that now my adoption of Agamben begins to establish a fixation on one set of philosophical work; and thus must we keep meandering and fishing and acting.

⁴ The Western tradition of theatre adds to this obsession, the one about eating each other, from the Greeks to Shakespeare to Kane. Could we be curious about what it would mean to circulate as gift to such an extreme? Early modern scholars like Anthony Dawson understand theatrical transformation and the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation to be linked. But the ‘play’ of showing cannibalism on the stage – what one might not be able to resist calling primal dinner theatre – suggests we are curious as a species about essential modes of consumption, not necessarily in order to practice it but perhaps in order to imagine it. That racial stereotypes of barbarism and primitivism have traditionally danced around the cooking pot only shows a collective need to deflect the discomfort of the desire.

⁵ The subject of how performance works in the making and reception in terms of gift exchange could comprise another article. I began to theorize gift and performance in terms of early modern works in my Introduction (see Skantze 2003), and I am at present working on an extension of the theory for contemporary performance studies and performance practice.

⁶ Pedagogical examples are notoriously humble in that they tend to come as apology or are shunted off to the pedagogical section behind the more respected theory or the essay. But the concept of a gift commodity aids me in thinking about how a student's recent question during a meeting, ‘Why should we attend lectures if the topic of the last three lectures won't appear on an exam or in an essay question’, struck at the heart of the incalculable to a generation fed learning as a consumer relation between client and supplier.

⁷ That distraction can work to sustain a hierarchy based in bureaucracy at the University has been clear to me during the three-hour workshop/seminars I run for my students. If I am distracted by administrative burdens or sudden conflicts over deadlines and unfinished business, I notice how I lose minutes of what my students are doing in front of me while my mind wanders to what I should have accomplished and what forms I should have finished. While I would not go so far as to say this was a plot to keep staff distracted, I would say that a distracted staff, like a distracted citizenry, finds it harder to organize their ideas or a revolution.