On July 23, 2019, we presented a new lecture performance as part of a lecture performance festival at the International Congress of Aesthetics in Belgrade.
TAF #17: Happy Perfumatives
What to make of weddings? Who (or what) can follow their performance?
The wedding scene is a tableau of philosophic thought-action, one staged by various figures. For J.L. Austin, wedding vows provide a paradigm of performative speech, of doing things with words. Eve Sedgwick subsequently critiques the heteronormativity of this wedding scene, and over the past twenty years, queer theorists have allied with activists to help transform it worldwide. Theory’s success in supporting gay marriage legalization constitutes a meta-performativity or a happy performative of performative theory itself, of doing things with theory, much like a lecture performance. Such happy performatives, however, can themselves generate unhappy effects, what’s known as counter-performativity.
As Judith Butler figured it, performative queering can turn on itself. Gay marriage has elicited critiques as constituting a form of neoliberal governance that expands the institution of heteronormative marriage. Here we find wedding figures installed in input/output loops of Lyotardian performativity and its legitimation of knowledge and social bonds. Optimize your life: get married or else. The ethico-aesthetics of wedding figures can thus suddenly flip, doing things undecidability with words and images. A medical researcher finds gay and lesbian wedding photos reveal the misalignment of social expectations of sex, gender, and sexuality. Another theorist finds queer ways of doing hetereosexuality in “unhappy” wedding performances. Gay and lesbian couples embrace on The Knot,the world’s largest wedding site, founded by a performance studies graduate. Networked meta-performativity with alternating circuits of performativity and counter-performativity What to make of a wedding? What are their futures? Following Jacques Derrida, we approach them through perfumance as the pharmakological dimension of any and all performances, their iterabilty or other-ability, their undecidable passage. Derrida likewise speculates on hymenas wedding and membrane in Mallarmé and hears the perfumative in Nietzsche’s double affirmation, the “yes, yes” of Dionysus and Ariadne echoing in the labyrinth of an ear. The arbor, the couple, the reverend, the vows, the ring, the dance with the devil—how to say and do wedding theory otherwise, having one’s cake and eating it too?
The wedding scene is a tableau of philosophic thought-action, one staged by various figures. For J.L. Austin, wedding vows provide a paradigm of performative speech, of doing things with words. Eve Sedgwick subsequently critiques the heteronormativity of this wedding scene, and over the past twenty years, queer theorists have allied with activists to help transform it worldwide. Theory’s success in supporting gay marriage legalization constitutes a meta-performativity or a happy performative of performative theory itself, of doing things with theory, much like a lecture performance. Such happy performatives, however, can themselves generate unhappy effects, what’s known as counter-performativity. As Judith Butler figured it, performative queering can turn on itself.
Gay marriage has elicited critiques as constituting a form of neoliberal governance that expands the institution of heteronormative marriage. Here we find wedding figures installed in input/output loops of Lyotardian performativity and its legitimation of knowledge and social bonds. Optimize your life: get married or else. The ethico-aesthetics of wedding figures can thus suddenly flip, doing things undecidability with words and images. A medical researcher finds gay and lesbian wedding photos reveal the misalignment of social expectations of sex, gender, and sexuality. Another theorist finds queer ways of doing hetereosexuality in “unhappy” wedding performances. Gay and lesbian couples embrace on The Knot,the world’s largest wedding site, founded by a performance studies graduate. Networked meta- performativity with alternating circuits of performativity and counter-performativity What to make of a wedding? What are their futures? Following Jacques Derrida, we approach them through perfumance as the pharmakological dimension of any and all performances, their iterabilty or other-ability, their undecidable passage. Derrida likewise speculates on hymenas wedding and membrane in Mallarmé and hears the perfumative in Nietzsche’s double affirmation, the “yes, yes” of Dionysus and Ariadne echoing in the labyrinth of an ear. The arbor, the couple, the reverend, the vows, the ring, the dance with the devil—how to say and do wedding theory otherwise, having one’s cake and eating it too?
