A Culture of Revolt: Misreading laughter's revenge?

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Notes

¹This ‘is a matter of pushing the need for a universal and the need for singularity to the limit in each individual, making this simultaneous movement the source of both thought and language. “There is meaning”: this will be my universal. And “I” use the words of the tribe to inscribe my singularity’ (Kristeva 2000: 19).

²‘[A]n aesthetic recovery of the “non-aesthetic” (finding the extraordinary within the ordinary) is at the same time an insistence on the non-identity and multiplicity of the everyday as that which escapes codification’ (Clucas 2004: 25–6).

³A more detailed description of this event can be found at <www.spoonfed.co.uk/.../lecture-violence-toendurance-extremecurating-at-the-ica-495/> or in the confessional description ‘In the Event of Laughter’ (Fox 2010).

⁴‘A slow down… “Micro” resistance is necessary to combat the expansion of capitalist instincts and orders in every direction, every place, all bodies, all discourses, all objects. Struggle at the level of elementary particles of thoughts and activities. Start with yourself, with your own context, your professional field. Re-view theoretical approaches; give up using current discourses, contemporary formulas, fashionable technologies. Speed, imposed by modern culture, is just the speed of capital’ (Brenner and Shurz: 2000).

⁵It is necessary to carry out what Foucault called a return to: ‘If we return, it is because of a basic and constructive omission, an omission that is not the result of accident or incomprehension … This non-accidental omission must be regulated by precise operations that can be situated, analyzed and reduced in a return to the act of initiation. Both the cause of the barrier and the means for its removal … can only be resolved by return … It follows naturally that this return is not a historical supplement that would come to fix itself upon the primary discursivity and redouble it in the form of an ornament … Rather, it is an effective and necessary means of transforming discursive practice’ (Foucault, What is an Author?, quoted inBrenner and Shurtz 2000).

⁶‘having nevertheless become aware of the point of disgust that these residues of tangible thought are the true roots of his isolation, he makes it a rebellious attitude that… announces itself as a perseverance in strangeness and refusal’ (Kristeva 2000: 169–70).

⁷This refers to certain interruptive moments in two of my performance works: ‘Itinerary, part 2’ (Riverside Studios, 2002) and ‘Trifle’ (Café Gallery Projects, 2005).

⁸As Debord claims: ‘détournement, by contrast, is a fluid language of anti-ideology. It occurs within a type of communication aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty …. The fact that the violence of détournement itself mobilizes an action capable of disturbing or overthrowing any existing order is a reminder that the existence of the theoretical domain is nothing in itself, that it can only come to self-knowledge in conjunction with historical action’ (Debord 1995: 146).