Callaloo

Callaloo 26.1 (2003) 109-111

Magic of Objects

Fred Moten

Performance Studies is a very young discipline, but its youth hasn't stopped some of its founders from characterizing the discipline as post-disciplinary. For me, this characterization is troubling since the terms "performance" and "performativity"—in the promiscuity of their applications and in the very indefinition of their own specific concept of an object of study—often threaten to assert themselves as the ground of every possible area of study. When faced with the conflict between global desire and an objectless locality where disciplinarity and discipline are eclipsed, one is called upon to ask certain questions that converged with the theme of our gathering in Cuba. Is the post-discipline a good model for the changing U.S. academy and, more broadly, for the forging of a new and liberatory understanding of the relation between humanity and the humanities?

Permit me, and please forgive, a long quotation from Randy Martin's brilliant book, Critical Moves, wherein Martin begins to address some of these issues:

. . . insofar as structure and agency retain the discrete separation of object and subject, practice emerges instead as the already amalgamated process of these last two terms. From the perspective of practice, it is no longer possible to insert human activity into a fixed landscape of social structure; both moments are formed in perpetual motion.

Where this insight has its immediate political application is to the series of practices articulated through race, class, gender and sexuality. Each of these words points to a systematic structuration that appropriates different forms of surplus through racism, exploitation, sexism and homophobia. By extending a productionist model to domains not generally associated with an economy oriented toward exchange, I want to take seriously Marx's understanding of capitalism. He treats it as forcibly constituting, by the very organizing boundaries it erects and then transgresses, in pursuit of increasing magnitudes of surplus, the global collectivity, the "combination, due to association," that he understood as the socialization of labor. . . . That race, class, gender, and sexuality, as the very materiality of social identity, are also produced in the process indicates the practical generativity—the ongoing social capacity to render life as history—necessary for any cultural product. Therefore, it is not that a productionist approach assigns race, class, gender, and sexuality the same history, political effects, or practical means. Instead, this approach is intended to imagine the context for critical analysis that would grant these four articulating structures historicity, politics, [End Page 109] and practice in relation to one another, that is, in a manner that is mutually recognizable.

To speak of practices rather than objects of knowledge as what disciplines serve privileges the capacity for production over the already given product-object as a founding epistemological premise. The focus on practices also allows production to be named historically so as to situate it with respect to existing political mobilizations. (Martin 205-6)

I would briefly add a couple of formulations: 1. The epistemological shift that Marx allows—wherein practices are thought as if for the first time, as if in eclipse of objects—can itself be thought as an irruption of or into the sciences of value. I study black performances which are anticipatory manifestations of that irruptive shift. 2. Afro-diasporic performances work the second "as if" above in a specific way. The eclipse of objects by practices is a head, a necessary opening, that vanishes in the improvisatory work of those who are not but nothing other than objects themselves. (Afro-diasporic) performances are resistances of the object and the object is in that it resists, is in that it is always the practice of resistance. And if we understand race, class, gender and sexuality as the materiality of social identity, as the surplus effect and condition of possibility of production, then we can also understand the ongoing, resistive force of such materiality as it plays itself out in and as the work of art. This is to say that these four articulating structures must not only be granted historicity, politics and practice but aesthesis as well. This...