Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

Arlanc 1.05

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. ­ William James

Integral to understanding changes in both ourselves and our world, ‘the event’ is a concept attracting increased critical attention. Described as “a difference that makes a difference”, an event may happen, or be
manufactured, affect us and be effected by us, and thus emerges from the impossible cusp between contingency and necessity.

Eventfulness: the inocular grasp between idiocy and clemency

In my paper I propose to investigate the dependency of the event on hegemonic structures and social normative parameters. Since the advent of modernity the event has been marginalised through legislative and executive monopolisation of eventfulness. The media controls and domesticates events for the purposes of population control. Yet, the event holds an explosive and messianic promise, since its boundaries easily and unpredictably overflow the frames of control exerted. It can transgress reason, power, order and the reality principle. Thus the event is the other side of the coin of sovereignty and as such ought to be accorded theoretical recognition.
As an example of this challenge to sovereignty I will discuss the recent democratic revolution in Ukraine as the re-entry (in Spencer-Brown's and Luhmann's sense of the word) of the included excluded subject of modernity.

Dirty Dancing, Footloose and Porno Karaoke - On the margins of Event-representation
Of the different cultural forms of the Event dance and voice performance are the most radical. Dance and voice performance effect, in Bakhtin's terms, a diachronic carnivalesque suspension of the interpellative force of normalcy. That is to say that the event-full-ness of dance and voice as they traverse the moment of the performance cannot in their momentariness and momentum be invaded by the power/knowledge nexus and its panoptic technologies. This has been the case at least since the French Revolution, which, after all, began through the unvoidable speech of Mirabeau before parliament and the King's bailiff. At that time Mirabeau, as Kleist would have it, perfected 'the gradual completion of thought during speech'. Currently dance and the voice are the cultural forms that can operate outside order(s), while they produce their own, temporal and spatial inside(s).
In my paper I will demonstrate this argument by reading the films Dirty Dancing and Footloose in relation to dance, and the phenomenon of Porno Karaoke in relation to voice.

posted by Geist @ 11:23 am