Conclusion: Let them slide

Abstract

In Chapter 5 I argued that performance’s ephemeral nature was perhaps asserted too quickly. This was not to deny that the material object of performance slips from view, but to argue that art’s capacity to sustain sensation beyond an initial moment (to paraphrase Deleuze) offers a stretched field of enquiry. Performance affects linger in such a way as to create a terrain or, particularly in the case of process-based projects, a shifting patch of sensation deserving of analysis. This is necessary if the various political implications of the play of affect are to be understood. Examining this terrain of the sensible, and seeing how aesthetic-political action is orientated to maintain or interrupt a certain distribution of ‘who can dance, speak and play’, are a priority for assessing the politics of performance practice. When Scarry wrote that ‘beautiful things […] act like small tears in the surface of the world’ (1999, p. 112) or Kristeva asked for a ‘burst of beauty’ (1982, p. 210), we can see demands for actions within Ranciè re’s sensible fabric. But we now need to ask: what is the optimum intervention that we can hope for? Do we stitch or do we tear?