Generation

Abstract

The essay ‘Generation’ by Rebecca Schneider considers this key word in relationship to performance, performance theory, repetition, temporality, genetic inheritance, mimesis and alterity, and the gift.

Notes

1 Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), generating work at the intersections of theatre/performance/music, wrote that jazz ‘remains’ the ‘changing same’ – an idea fertile in its implications for the ways performance re/generates by means of difference (1968: 232). This idea, resonant in black music and the black radical tradition, challenges orientations to preservation that privilege ideals of identicality over time. As Michael McMillan wrote in his contribution to the Performance Research issue on ‘Generation’,’From generation to generation means conflict, not smooth dialogue’ (2004: 57).

2 See Mitchell (2005: 167) on the ‘modernity’ of fossils.

3 Marx writes: ‘The capitalist process of production … seen as a total connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself’ (1977: 724).