 of our event today. My name is Jean Graham Jones. I'm a professor in the PhD program in theater and performance studies. And I want to, many of you have already heard some of the things I'm going to say. But since we've opened this up to the public and have more people, I'm going to repeat myself a bit. So bear with me there. But I'm very pleased to be here in my capacity, not only as a faculty member, but the mentor for this year's student conference. And it's been created and organized by the student members of the Doctoral Theater Studies Association here at the Graduate Center. This year's conference, and it's the second one, we've had conferences over the year, but this is the second one in a row. So this is quite wonderful. This year's conference theme is objects of study, methods and materiality in theater and performance studies. And before I say a little bit about what people have been up to, although some of it's been behind closed doors, and I too am unaware of what's been going on, I want to officially acknowledge the support we've received from the PhD program in theater and performance and the Cohn, Lortel and Roberts chairs from the Graduate Center, the Doctoral Students Council, the Center for the Humanities and the Martini Siegel Theater Center. So thank you to all of those entities that supported this year's conference. And that's important also because one of the things that's quite wonderful about this conference is that it is free. It's free to all participants, and that is very much in the keeping with the history of CUNY, which began as a free university. This is one of the very few things left that's free, so we should be very happy and the students are to be commended for pursuing this such a rare open academic encounter. The conference is entirely student-run, and from everything from the selection of the theme to the design, the contents of the conference, the configuration of the rooms, the selection of the rooms, where your chairs are at this very moment. The format is quite unusual and creative, and I'm very curious to see where we end up today. The organizers, I believe, have sought to create a structure that resonates with the theme. So really making changes to what we might consider to be a traditional conference structure. So we've had a provocative day already of intellectual engagement. Four groups broke into sessions. There were papers exchanged and commented, and I think I was the only person who dropped in on all four, so that was a lot of fun to see. Each of the members, well, four of the members of the organizing committee paired themselves with four invited scholars who will be introduced momentarily, and the two of them ran each session. There was a lunch break provided by the students, and in the afternoon from two to four, these groups met again without the invited scholar and have created, it was a session called Manufacture, and they did manufacture something, which will be revealed to us very soon, and I can't say anything more about it because I don't know anything more about it. I'm very excited to see that. So I'm going to introduce the five organizers of this year's conference, and they're going to in turn introduce our invited scholars and the rest of the afternoon's activities. So Elu Akinsi, Mir Fajun, Sarah Lucy, Christine Snyder. Christine? She's busy organizing. She's the one who's actually making all of this happen, and Corey Tamler. So I would like to give a round of applause for all five of them for a day. And thank all of you for being here with us. It's wonderful to have this turnout, so thank you, and I think we're going to have some fun. Thank you, Jean, and I will add to the thanks, thank you, to Jean Graham Jones, who was our faculty mentor. So on behalf of the conference committee, I would like to welcome and introduce you to the four invited scholars who led our morning working sessions and will soon be featured in our evening discussion in these chairs you see before you. So without further ado, and in alphabetical order, Catherine Behar. She is an interdisciplinary media and performance artist. She's also editor of object-oriented feminism, co-editor of And Another Thing, Non-Anthropocentrism in Art, and author of Bigger Than You, Big Data and Obesity. She's also an associate professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College CUNY. There you are, I see. Yes, round of applause. We also have Micah Bleaker, who is a theater studies professor, a dramaturg, and a translator at Utrecht. She is author of Visuality in the Theater and co-edited several volumes, including Anatomy Live, Performance and the Operating Theater, and Performance and Phenomenology, Traditions and Transformations, to name a few. We also have Rebecca Schneider, who is professor of theater arts and performance studies at Brown University with affiliate positions in the history of art and architecture, and the Department of Modern Culture and Media. She is author of Theater and History, Performing Remains, and the Explicit Body and Performance, and she has edited multiple special issues of TDR, including one on new materialism and performance in 2015. And last but not least is Soyoung Yoon, who is assistant professor and program director of art history and visual studies at the New School. She's also visiting faculty of critical theory at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She is at work on two book projects around the redefinition of the document and the shift in its performative claims to the real. So thank you to all of you. If you'd like to come join us up here, while I explain what's gonna happen next. Oh, everyone is so excited. So we will... Thank you. So as was mentioned, in our afternoon working sessions, we manufactured objects. And so what will happen next is we will turn to each student facilitator with the help of their working group to present our object to our scholar, who we were paired with earlier in the day. And we'll also have to draw connections to each scholar's work by way of a little bit more of an introduction. And this will then be followed by an open discussion between our invited scholars, moderated by one of our facilitators, Corey Tamler. And just so you have a full outline of what is to come, we'll then conclude that discussion with breakout sessions, rather than a more traditional Q and A so that everyone will break up into four breakout sessions so that we can have discussions with our scholars. And each will be able to talk to two people. So there'll be two sessions of 15 minutes each. Logistics, right? Exactly, exactly. So further instructions about that will come. But in the meantime, let's get started with the working group A and A Lul, presenting the object from Catherine Behar's working group. Hello, everybody. So our morning discussion focused on the question of agency and it was an unresolvable question for us. And we just like danced around it, so to speak. And so we wanted to tackle a little bit more with that concept because one of the doubts we had about the concept was that it's actually very in productive tension with the question of objectivity. And as scholars, that's something that we are very concerned with, so to speak, because we want to take care of our objects and describe it faithfully, so to speak. But does it give more agency to the objects, in this case, performance, or takes agency out of it? So I think that's a concern draw us to develop statements about agency and affect and memory and objecthood. So agency was our center and everything else became a orbited around it, so to speak. And Catherine's, one of Catherine's work texts actually touches upon how we dealt with it. So I want to present a quote before we present objects. Object-oriented feminism is on track for being beyond untrue in an erotic sense, in excess of singular truth. So it strives to be wrong, but not in the sense of being incorrect. Its promise is to be wrong as in being botched, as in girl, that's all wrong. Flat indifference to correctness. Being wrong in this way is radical, political work. It means setting aside truth and correctness in favor of being artificial and botched, all to make room for a neurotics of generative thinking and doing. The underlying wager is that right thinking gets worked out in the doing of the making. Only in willingness to be all kinds of wrong can we arrive at being in the right, in the ethical sense. So we want to produce our objects that touch upon this method of being wrong and the question of agency. So this is our statements in a bottle because we wanted to make use of the bottles because we are green, right? Like, Anthropocene guys. So on each scrolls we have statements about agency. So if you can pick one and just open it, that would be cool. But if you don't want to do it, that's also fine. It's a big message. So this object says there is treatment. Treatment is a relationship, parenthetically, perhaps influenced by memory. Care occurs in time. It is performed and performative. Respectful attention is a per form of care. I just want to show the, okay. Interpretation or inter-pretation is care. Equals activating, over-creating. Memory, and then there's an algorithmic formula. That says something, FR, is to take hold and enter is to hold between. Cruelty is a relationship, care, above care. Cruelty is a relationship above care. So a message on care. This was one of the main points of discussion today. Hi. Hi. I feel like this is a game show. We're trying things out, you know. Bear with us. But I agree that objects are a bit clumsy. Should I sit? So, Mike, thank you very much for coming. Don't worry, I won't embarrass you so much. I guess in our group, there was, you got to help me out. We were kind of fumbling for a sense of what do we want by objects. And it goes, for us it's kind of clear that when we talk about objects, we don't necessarily talk about material stuff and that we can offer something that's not there in a material sense, tangible material sense. And, but the discussion, I think, really kind of hit attraction point when we introduced the connections of two objects and an objective. And so, as objects, as things that are activating relations of effective, caring interests between two different things. So, a certain sense of intensities between those that constitute an object. And while an object doesn't have to be material, it is in this time, so I'm just gonna bring it. So, the way that this happened is that we began to talk about arrows, but there was a misunderstanding and somebody heard arrow. And exactly, an arrow is an arrow. And from that slip, the object of an arrow as something that penetrates, moves in space, connects things, makes love, kills. That happened. This is made out of the folders that held the program of our day and of our own papers. And you will also find that it's a double-spirit arrow for, I hope, kind of obvious and maybe also good reasons. Thank you. I don't have an introduction, so everyone can just join me up here. We're relating the relationships between toothbrush and men. The toothbrush inserted itself in the scene points to its own vibrancy. Orange is my name. While I identify the chair as an object rather than as various pieces of wood and metal, why should the chair identify itself the same way? Perhaps the strong beasts will wander on Dutch beaches long after humans have disappeared from the planet. That is precisely what makes them critical as an act of performative speculation, alien emoji. The presence of the camera does not erase the physicality of the body. Both the camera and the body coexist in the somatic place of the dancing body, crown emoji. Ecology as ontology, in which individual causal agency is muddied in the Tangled relational field. Barat asks how the indeterminacy and contingency of bodies requires the Sino-evil monkey emoji. Emotional affective manipulation. In the text, the affective tug is just as effective as logic itself. Transmedial praxis of managing bodies, space and rhythm produced an aesthetic defined by the empathetic animation and deactivation of energy, affect and motion. Animal performance then has the capacity to facilitate human recognition of logic and value systems that do not place humanity at the center, frog emoji. Paper is made from the cellulose fibers that are present in hardwood and softwood trees. Whether using wood or recovered paper, the first step is to dissolve the material into pulp. Regardless of the type of pulping process used, the wood or recovered wood is broken down into component elements so that the fibers can be separated. Pulping results in a mass of individual fibers being produced. The fibers are then washed and screened to remove any remaining fiber bundles. The water is then pressed out and the residue is dried. I'm gonna let you hold that. So, by way of explanation, we chose quotes from each other's papers and arranged them temporarily by how we experienced them during the day. But in our working group, we were really inspired by questions that were coming up about an object's existence depending on its relationship to time, an object only existing in time. As well as thinking about the potential of performance to materially rehearse or embody or envision different relationships between human and non-human objects. So, we turn to you again. So, in your discussion in the article, Objects in Our Hands, in the Performance Philosophy Journal, you discussed how the interval entangles us cross-temporally in human and non-human relationships. And so, a question to you that we pose for when we open up the discussion is, if we are hailed by recycled gestures and material relationships from history, can speculative performance materialize the future in any way? And what would that performance actually want from us? So, thank you. Hi, so can I ask my working group to come up and help unfold our object? And it may be a little fragile. I don't, it may come apart a little bit. So, oh, it held up pretty well. It can go multiple ways. So hopefully you'll have a chance to look at this a little bit closer. Maybe we can pull it closer to, so young. And you'll all have a chance to look at it a little bit more closely when we break out into groups. But basically, in our morning discussion, we all felt really challenged by and excited by and provoked by some of the questions that, so young, you raised for us, for all of the papers about the connection between language and communication and thinking about language as more than communication, going beyond communication. And also, all of the papers in our working group evidenced some kind of interest in archives or in memory or future archives in the sort of relationship between object and memory and the archive and futurity. And so, and then we also talked a lot about and you brought in some of your own work with over-determined objects and that was a discussion that we had. So we sort of combined all of these ideas and created an archive of over-determined words. And the process by which we created this was we started by just writing down as many of these over-determined words as we could think of, so I can just read out a couple of them. Aporia. Ah. Flesh. Object. Genealogy. Hegelian. Sign. Index. And so we wrote down first sort of as many as we could think of and then we spread out this piece of paper and we started to arrange them in clusters, so instead of giving ourselves a structure, a pre-determined structure for how the archive would look, we let the words tell us where they wanted to be in relationship to one another. Some of them got moved, that's where these lines are. And we also, it was a very associative and very affective exercise for us, so we continued to write words as we went along and this archive could of course extend indefinitely. And one thing that I wanted to pull out then from our discussion sort of after we created this archive was that we all sort of realized and agreed that A, this sort of brought home to us the materiality of these words, these words as objects. And also that they were heavy objects, I think as Z put it, that we had this experience when one of us would place a word and say, because we would read the words aloud as we place them. Oh, identity and place it next to queer and epistemology and heteronormative and everyone else would go, ah, yes, the word would sort of land with that weight. So that is our archive of over-determined words and thank you for being such a generous discussant this morning. And I'm already up here, so round of applause for all of the groups for being such good sports. And I am, I think I have my questions with me, I'm gonna grab water. So I'm gonna sit up here and be the physical stand-in for all of us as student facilitators, yeah, that's great. And so I will moderate the discussion and help move it along, but I have questions that all four of us have written together. But we also don't have to get to them, we'd love to just start with any responses that the four of you have to the objects. Don't feel pressure to respond, it is not a game show despite appearances. But we'd love to hear any responses that you do have either to the objects or how they resonate with your own work and how you think about the focus of this conference. I'm quite a, I think it's an incredible object that you created out of our discussions and I think it's very accurate actually representing what we've been talking about, quite amazed by that because we talked a lot about objects in terms of relations or how objects could maybe only be understood in terms of relations, relations between objects, but maybe also objects who as a set of relations, now that objects are not necessarily physical also, they're not necessarily there. And I really like the kind of undecidability of these objects, where is the relation going or is it going that way or that way or is it holding together something that tries to go in both directions? And I think that was, yeah, that was something that kept coming back and also in a way I think it was very interesting to see that from that perspective we could relate so many different objects and also think about objects as something that is co-produced by people thinking about objects or by doing research, by looking at things. So it was also about ourselves as part of the kind of cutouts that then become objects. And I mean, I think in a way you could also even see it as a, it's kind of a double-edged sword, but it's also, you could also think about the kind of, the love for the object, the little cupidot, but then with the arrow. So I think I'm kind of amazing how you made a summary of a discussion in the terms of an object. I mean, that's really taking the theme seriously. Maybe I'll pick up on that then that I feel like if this is about relationality, these, these messages in bottles that are left, all but the one, are left unread, are maybe about the separateness of objects and their non-relationality, that in the sense that an object might be contained in what Grimharman would call a black box, right, that does not readily yield to interpretation, which was one of the themes that we were talking about. I think it's really humorous to me that these black boxes are actually transparent. So I think one of the things that we were talking about was, I think we were very undecided on this question of access and of interpretation and the sort of hermeneutic relation of the object. And I think that the, there's also something about this excess, right, that there's more, there's more objects than I am able to read in the time that I have, right? So that there's something about the communicative potential of the object being sort of a reserve, a surplus that's held in reserve. In terms, now I feel that I have to respond to the being wrong of these objects. So I will just respond with an anecdote that when we were just at our coffee break, I was told that these objects would be phallically vertical. And yet when they were laid at the feet of the feminist, somehow they went horizontal. So I'll just leave it at that. Today was just a real pleasure and a real joy, fabulous conversation around and about fabulous papers. There was, you know, we asked everyone to sort of host their paper into the space and kind of talk about what they wanted to bring out of the paper. And so many really interesting ideas kind of came out of the paper and then circulated among us. And, you know, we sort of breathed the collective air of these papers and let the ideas commingle, you know. And thinking about lots of different things, lots of different questions that were brought up by the papers, like why performance in relationship to what could be said to be the pressure to unthink or think ourselves out of, if not demolish the kind of killing or at least deeply constricting habit of constantly distinguishing subject and object. The habits which maybe, you know, theater and our different media in different ways have been scripting us along for many years. The habit of falling into comfortable except deeply uncomfortable habits of subjects in relations to objects, objects in relation to so-called subjects. And we talked about scrambling those that we talked about both kind of the issues of the autonomies of the object, but also the inscrutabilities of the object, but also the impossibility of autonomy and the ways in which objects request us to come undone in relationship to them. And one of the ways that we might come undone in relationship to them is to stop thinking of ourselves as subjects. But on the other hand, there's a sort of pressure to stop thinking of objects as objects and the tension about whether we want a subjectful world or an objectful world, or if the question are about, as Ashon Crawley talks about, the aesthetics of possibility for thinking otherwise and how we think otherwise. So I find, we also talked about history in relationship to that, as was said. I love it that the object that you presented for me was really a performance. And there is a residue here of performance, but it's a residue of a performance that contains also your papers and our discussions in a very literal way, because we talked about literalization. There are the papers returned to me and requesting of me, if objects quote, hail us, as we talked about, I know what to do. We said, you know what to do with the object. And you've presented me with an object about which I know what to do. I am to drink the contents. And yet, right? And yet. So, I'm not sure I will be performing that with us here today. On the other hand, it also really suggests that we always already do ingest each other's thoughts and ideas and papers, and that the best kinds of things happen through that sort of digestion. We talked about air that we breathe collectively and the sort of coming inside and outside of our bodies in relation and objects in relation. So, I just want to thank you for this extremely, yeah, you did it with this object. And I feel challenged by it. And I'm grateful to you all for the great discussion today. So, thank you. To follow up on that briefly, I mean, I love that point about the weight of these words and how it lands, and then there's this collective are. And what does it mean to share in that moment of a very embodied thought? Where these words that I mean, I was practically mindful of reading these papers that were shared with me beforehand that a lot of these students, that it was from the position of a student of someone who is studying and trying to define what that object of study is, naming the conference, but also within a graduate program. And I should just mention that, I've just come from a campus where our student workers are on strike. I'm at the new school. So the condition of learning is very, very, very, we are negotiating that as we speak. And it creates a kind of proliferation of words, what it means to even bring that condition forward. So I was particularly mindful of that question of study. And it's really wonderful to come right after also this performance where like there's the pulping and then there's this explosion. There's a wonderful resonance here. I mean, in our discussion, while I was reading and there was a really interesting thread that kept on running throughout the participants' papers on one level, this question of what it means to queer or decolonize the archive, but the archive itself as a stand-in, as a representation for the body of the state, what does it mean to have a mimetic relationship to that archive, one in which we don't, we speak to the logics of inclusion but don't try to then repeat like the inclusion of the excluded object, like just by repeating that logic of inclusion and exclusion again. And then also to move from that this question of what it means to set up a relationship between the actual and the virtual, which itself seemed to overlap with other kinds of dichotomies that go on top of the actual versus the material, like the actual versus the virtual, the index versus the indexical versus the digital. So what does it mean to be in a media environment or a media ecology in which the so-called object has more felt like presence, like materiality or urgency than perhaps more previous forms of accounting for our state of being. And so in this way, I'm continuing some of this discussion, I think, in our panel, one of the questions that came up was at least for me, what I found very interesting is if we on one level this question about mymesis, like is that what does it mean as a writer, as a student, as one who tries to write about, like write about these objects in a way that gives attention to or an extra attunement to its materiality? How does that change our writing? And what does it mean to not then last into theoretical conceits or analytical traits or interpretive habits that put, like that establish a distance with that object? Like as a study, what does it mean to be performative? Not just talk about the performativity of the object, but actually to perform that relationship in the act of writing itself, right? So the position of the reader. Like that also meant that, and I think for me, my own interest was I come out of my own work, deals a lot with leftist discourse in which one of the key conventions was a notion of a subject of history. But so if we are going to momentarily suspend these notions of a subject of history that is coming to redeem us, like then what kind of verbs, tenses, like sentence structure will be used to speak to our moment? And I felt that this conference in part was about maybe questioning some of the habits, like in which we talk about subjects of history, like in a very redemptive or in the stance of a critical stance, and how do we change that mode of critique and also change our habits of writing in which we, well, we, I, like cross the I, cross the we, so that we are less in the position of maybe interpretation of an expression, but almost a kind of possession like with the object. So I could speak more, but it was a wonderful morning session and it was really wonderful to think through. And this is amazing, yes. I'm glad you think so. Thank you all for the, for those lovely responses to the objects. I have some more sort of general broadening questions now. So we can sort of, I mean, we can always return to the objects, they'll be here with us. But we can also leave them behind and sort of broaden the discussion a little bit more. And you can go wherever you want to with these questions. But the first one is from Sarah. So, so Sarah would like to know. What are the tensions? What are, what are the tensions between thinking the human as objects versus the human as matter or material and are these designations irreconcilable? That's Sarah's question. Yeah, absolutely. So the question is, what I do, I feel like I'm saying this like we're on a game show. I don't know what's happened. I'll try to stop. So, so the question is what are the tensions? You should do that every time. What are the tensions between thinking the human as object versus thinking the human as matter or material and are these two designations able to be reconciled? Are they irreconcilable? Does it make sense? Well, I think there's a lot that you could say about it. I mean, there's a lot of different places you could take that. I mean, I would have to sort of ask you, what is at stake in the question for you? But what comes up for me would be our sort of habits of the way that we think about object as a sort of passive or a non-agentual. Obviously, I suggest with many others that we overcome our habits of that. And we think of material as sort of given to be created into something else. So material habitually we think of as components, as a component part of some other future being. Or given to alteration in some way. So in a way you're asking what is it to mean to think of the human as the conventional object which is passive or given to be non-agentual versus thinking about human as material which is given to change to become or to in some other way become a component of something else. So I think even in phrasing the question that way, it would seem to be that we might prefer to think of the human as material. But I don't know, I myself am not 100% convinced that thinking in terms of objects is, yeah, that's sort of what we're supposed to do at this conference. But I'd like to undo the statisticity in a sense of that. But you may have something to say to that. Go ahead. Yeah, maybe I would offer. So first of all, I don't think that these things are incompatible. I just wanna say that upfront. I think that actually the challenge is to hold all of these ideas together. But if I had to, in our game show, stake a position, I would say that it is my, what I find more useful in my thinking is to think about the human as object. And part of that is a way of, I mean this is a huge part of the discussion that we were having this morning and I wanna take a moment to thank my group because we had a really wonderful and productive morning session. But part of that is to help to undermine this conceit of agency. That I think we want to question, or I want to question, I want to question the extent to which humans are actually agents with volition today. And one of the things that we were just talking about was this shift in from oof to oof, right? The o that's dropped and replaced with the f is the o for ontology. So for me this is really specifically historical, right? It's specifically about context. I'm not trying to make an ontological claim when I say that humans are objects. I'm saying that this is a historical context in which yes, I think humans are objects. And I think that in order to do politics now, we need to understand and actually embrace and embody performatively that object hood. Well, maybe also in line with that, I think my question, I don't respond with a question probably like what, if you say conceiving humans as object, what kind of object hood do you think? I think it makes more sense to think about if in what situation do we conceive humans as object and what kind of object hood is that? And in what way does the human matter or how does the human matter materialize in certain situations? So I'd like to make it more an active gesture than because object and material matter, it suggests if these are given, whereas we're also always implicated in that and they change in different situations. And then I think they can be very crucial questions. How are humans objects in certain situations? What is their object hood and how do they matter and materialize in certain situations? Well, okay, I think it's not as though humans have not been objects obviously. And as we sort of think about the foundation of the human, which if we are reminded by Sadia Hartman for instance, or that the mobility of the human is founded on in terms of the liberal subject position of man and manhood is founded on the rendering of black objects. And so the question is what is the answer to that? To sort of liberate everybody into human hood that is not an object or the becoming object project, but either way one has to think oneself outside of that subject-object relation, which maybe this material versus object is masquerading as. And if it's masquerading as another way to think subject-object, I think we have to not do it. And again, have to think otherwise, have to think to the side or slant in some way of that equation. And I'm more interested in the sort of, I guess, intra-agentiality, somebody like what Bharat is thinking about about intra-objects or objects always in a relation of co-becoming, that I guess you could say that makes humans objects. But you could just as well say that makes objects subjects. I mean, let's find another way to sort of think about this. And I think that's why making objects or writing poems or some other kind of formation like the literalization that we talked about in our group is interesting and compelling. So yeah, that's my answer to that or further complication of that problem. I'm not sure I can add more to what's already been said other than the fact that just in my own practices, I've never particularly found ontological questions, like a good place to, I mean, there is a way in which when we talk, so a different way of saying this is that I found in particularly regarding this human as objects with human as material and matter, I'm not quite sure I've ever thought about in quite those terms, but I would find the latter more productive or useful, just in my own writing. I think part of it is is that, and this is, in one level is that often in our discussion, this would of course be changing the conventions about the way we talk about objects is that often discussing subjects, often get into questions about agency and what it means to problematize those notions of agency. I think there's so many of our discussions are, but we still pivot around agency. So I would love to just suspend questions about agency like for a while. And one way to suspend and slow that down is actually to start talking about what we mean by human, like the components, the matter, the material, to break it down, what does it do? And that's where I find the material question more interesting, not that I'm trying to avoid, but it's just that the question about agency already locks us into a certain kind of, or it tends to certain kind of debates about politics and economy. And if that's the debate we're having, fantastic. But then we start to have to talk about what kind of categories of human have been distinguished by objects and so question exactly. So in that sense, adding on to the answers that came before, the one way to ultimately enter into that question is maybe having to go through the matter, the material of the human to actually finally get to a different notion of objected. We also, we kind of wanted to push on actually these questions about what are the implications of some of these designations for doing politics, sort of the political implications of, so the things you started to bring up, Catherine, and you, so young. So, and this question comes from Aylul, but the political, she's asking about the political implications of designating the human as object or as material in a time when the paradigm of production is more, is increasingly more immaterial and human bodies in life worlds are increasingly disposable. So the designations we were just talking about what does that mean for then politically? And yeah, well, there's a second part to the question but that might be enough to start with. Can anyone hear the second part of the question? Sure, can we hear the whole thing? Absolutely, yeah, the second part is, or it's maybe just an elaboration of the first part, but the second part is what's the relation between Marxist historical materialism and new materialism in the context of aesthetics and politics of performance? Simple, easy question. Okay, can we go back to the first part? Okay, maybe, okay, maybe I will start by addressing the first part. I guess, I think that, well, I think that actually this question about like the immaterial labor is actually key because to me, you know, coming, we also discussed this in my group, I'm sorry, I feel like I'm repeating things for my group, so, but for me, coming as a performance practitioner but not necessarily a scholar of performance studies, right? I have a whole slew of disciplinary questions about methodologies, about disciplinary perspectives, but one thing that I latch onto is this kind of performance of work, the performance of labor, and that's one way for me in. And I think that this kind of the so-called immaterial labor question, I think this ends up, for me, this is part of why this is, I think, coming up now historically. And again, for me, this is, I mean, I do want to have that conversation, you know, about politics because I think that the ontological idea of this is the way the world is, kind of like this is the state of being that's trans-historic to me, this doesn't make any sense to me, but I do think that this sort of, I mean, we've seen across multiple fields an interest in objects, an interest in material, and I think it's because these things feel like they're slipping away in our lives, even things like identity, right? We were talking about this during the break. So I think that as these things that once maybe were more concrete start to feel more remixable and more immaterial and more slippery, I think that there is this interest in understanding what is the object? And I think that that has to do with our conditions of labor and our conditions of capitalist circulation of self. I'm not sure we can be done with a question of agentiality if we are going to really take seriously the quote, old materialism in relationship to the quote, new materialism. I'm not a fan of newness. I think it's really been to the service of a kind of particular trajectory of development that the progress idea that the new materialism will get us out of the problem that the old materialism couldn't and we have to just jettison that as well, I think. Because of course, I think it's possible to read Marx as incredibly important in terms of the question of the agencies of objects in relationship to the sort of de-agentification in some ways of humans or their inter-agential relations. In other words that there's the idea that an object in a commodity relation is it takes over from, I mean becomes the human in a sense stands in for the human relation and the human is the sort of servant in a sense of the object and flips that equation of passivity and agentiality where the humans are actually in the position of being subservient to a kind of phantasmagoria of object orientation. So I also think that thinking a little bit about this component issue which really is about an intra-inanimation of objects and humans in assemblages is key and I think one can read Marx that way that Marx is really thinking about, if you're reading closely, how many times Marx will write about objects moving hand to hand to hand and there's a question of objects in circulation with hands, with manual, which are not humans and are not necessarily, but there's a real invitation I think to think closely with that. I've been thinking a lot about, we talked about it in our group a little bit, about the problem I recently read about it through Juicy Perica's Geology of Media. He picks up from Benjamin Bratton about the idea of the little piece of coltan that's in the middle of everybody's iPhone that we carry in around in our hands, an object in our hands, or called a handy in Germany, right? But the point is that this allows Perica to make the argument that media is a billion years old because that bit of mineral is in the phone. But it also reminds us I think that like Toni Morrison said, it's in your hands. So there's that and the passing that happens of between objects and humans. But it also reminds us that that coltan comes to us through the labor of miners in Africa. And I think it's a very important question as to what remains of the handedness of the miners, right? In the coltan is there, but is the labor there as well? That congealed labor, which is what Marx gives us. So I think, yeah, old, new, let's still think with Marx too. I was thinking, but I'm not quite sure if I can phrase it as kind of, yeah, well elaborated as how you just expressed also the relationship to the very concrete materiality and the importance to take that also. I was wondering about the immateriality. I'm not sure. It's how we like to think about a lot of things, or it's a tendency to think that a lot of things are immaterial, but they're the result of very material kind of practices. And I think what you just pointed out in Perica's geology is also pointing to that. And there is, I think what we maybe are facing is that there is a lot of very material communications going on to which we don't have access. But it's not immaterial. It's very material. But it is, and it requires even more taking into account how different objects, humans included, how they can communicate and what their possibilities of sensing are, what their possibilities of relating are. And to be aware that we're not the center from which everything is visible or from which we have the overview. And maybe that is something that was not so much part at that time of Marx's perspective, but it's just also related to a time and technological transformations since then. It is not a discontinuity, but it is a new take on it, I think, in several ways. Do you wanna, I've... No, no, no, no. I just, I feel like I want to implicate myself in saying that I am, you know, I ascribe very much to the commodity fetish read from Marx, but I also think that it's really important to recognize how the idea of labor congealed in objects does not take into account slave labor. And that this, you know, that's not accounted for by the commodity fetish idea. And that slave labor of humans literally being objects, being commodities is also what founds the idea of the human, right? It's concurrent with the idea of the human, this transatlantic slave trade, which I just heard someone brilliantly saying, we need to use different language because the ocean was not trading in slaves. Select European nations were trading in slaves, right? So this, I think that it's really important to also recognize that legacy when we're talking about the human and the non-human and the object of materiality. Perhaps on that, I think it's discussions about racial capitalism have been, especially the return, I think in the last decade, like a return to, with a renewed historical focus on the absolute necessary relationship between transatlantic slavery and industrial capitalism, I think some of the works like, like a book like Saltwater Slavery, for example, that very specifically marks that our imagination of mechanical labor is a bit problematic because the assembly line cuts too short. Like is that it's not just the alienation and exploitation that's happening within the Manchester factories, but they are directly connected to the exploitation that's happening in the plantations. And I think part of the implication is that, and this is absolutely in Marx, that capitalism cannot function like without a certain kind of presumption of cheap nature to exploit. So there's a difference between labor and value, like, and I think one of the, so this is in relationship to our discussion right now. I'm trying to, like the, I'm, maybe I'll, yes, I was trying to think about the political question and it's something that I find myself constantly shifting a wearing two hats and it's hard for me to actually reconcile. Like one is, and this somewhat tracks like which Marx I'm reading, like am I reading Marx of the Communist Manifestors or the Marx of class struggle where we are talking about subjects of history and we are talking about the proletariat or are we reading Marx of capital where the term proletariat does not really appear? And so there's a position of like Marx after that the Paris commune, like, and we talking about from the position of class struggle and resistance or are we talking about the position of the system? Like, and there are two very different kinds of political narrativization that takes place if you're focusing on the dynamism, like, of a struggle, like, as opposed to the seeming permanence, like the object nature of a system. And it seems that in, at least in the discussions that I had with my group this morning, we were talking not so much about from the position of class struggle, like, but actually what does it mean to talk from within the system through the logic of the system and how do you give form to the system? Like, and in a sense, what is the kind of strategy at work or rhetorical strategy at work even in the writing of Marxist capital where he's shifting gears, like even the discussion about commodity finishes and what does it mean to take very seriously capital self representation of itself because these representations are never just neutral or are they just ineffective? Like, so for me, that's why they are, they're, like, it's not an aporia, like, and I think I do believe in the dialectic, but that there are two very different positions, like, in which we engage the political, like, and I have not found a way to reconcile them in one essay, so I wear two different hats and it also means my writing style changes, like my voice changes, and like, it's just, it's just, there's no consistency, like, from the two modes, so, yes. And there is that question of refusal in a sense, like what is, what is, is, is refusal and can one even refuse the topic of politics in some way? Like, I think you can't refuse that, but refusal itself as a very, and the question of the resistance of the object, and one can think about that in terms of something like Fred Moten's work on resistance of the object, but also somebody like Louis Irigarai, who writes about commodities amongst themselves, who quote, refuse to go to market, and that is obviously a political refusal, and whether it's possible or not is another question, but also Irigarai is old too, with the new feminist materialism, but nevertheless there's that, that, that definite kind of objects amongst themselves, i.e. prostitutes or women refusing a certain object relation. Yeah. Well, our intention was to move, I mean, the discussion is, in some ways feels like it's just getting started, so we could continue for the rest of our time, or we could move into these breakout sessions, which was our replacement for an audience, for an open audience question. So, I think we might want to, yeah, I think we'll move to, sorry, we're mid-figuring out with a limited amount of time, but great. The good thing about the breakout sessions is that everyone can choose to ask and speak directly with one, two, actually, scholars of whose work you are interested in, that was the thought behind that, but there's also force, I guess, in unity, and that tensions of, you know, as thoughts progress, so that's why we were kind of steering last moment to say, let's continue. Is there any consensus in the room, one way or the other? All you objects want to do. Should we take some, maybe there are questions from the audience? We can take some questions from the audience. Does someone want to? Interesting conversation here. I've been, I'm a documentary filmmaker and I've been doing a documentary on the state of empathy and one of the things I've been thinking about and talking to people about is about objectification, how they're talking about objects and how people objectify themselves and how they objectify each other. And in thinking and listening to your conversation, I kept on thinking about what makes us human and from objects is our empathy. When we infuse empathy into something, it then all of a sudden becomes alive, otherwise it's just a thing, a material thing. I just wonder what your thoughts are on that. I guess your observation points to the sense of relationality that is required to understand how, if we want a different way of thinking about objects, that it's not only a matter of things over there, but that we take more into account how we cannot think what, how objects appear, what their objecthood is independent from ourselves being involved with these objects and how there is a deep relationality. And in that sense, how the questions about objects that we have been addressing here, kind of automatically imply rethinking subjects and imply rethinking relationships between them and question the giveness of objects. I think that's a very fundamental thing that we were constantly observing that it's not a redefinition of a thing over there, but it is a redefinition of whole ecologies in which things emerge as objects and emerge in relations to observers, to other objects, to situations. I wanna make sure we also should take some more questions from the audience, but I actually wanted to make sure we address one of the questions that is coming from our groups about theater and performance, because this is a theater and performance conference, surprisingly enough, who knew. And you're not all explicitly theater and performance scholars, but much of the work that's been brought here today that you've been asked to look at has to do explicitly with theater and performance. So we had some questions about, about, well, A, what can some of these questions, what can new materialism do for theater and performance studies? How can it specifically enrich conversations about performance and scholarship about performance and about theater? And then also, how can we make sure that it's not just a trend to, it's something trendy to talk about new materialism or talk about objects in theater? Or is it important to make sure that it's not a trend? Is it fine if it's a trend? And yeah, I think it's fine if it's a trend. Everything should be rethought. So we think ourselves through this and hopefully we keep thinking something new and different after that. So I have no problem with a trend. I think the question of why theater, why performance is a really key one. We talked about that in our group a little bit. I don't know if someone else from the group can maybe even say some of the things that we came up with or should I just go for it? I mean, we talked about the problem of, I mean, one thing was simply that one of the media, one of the, you know, the medium of theater, one of the mediums of theater is time. And certainly the question, one of the questions about, that I mean, new materialism surfaces in great deal of conversation with the sort of tripartite movements of post-humanism, non-humanism and inhumanism. Those attempts to rethink humanism are deeply related to the problem of the Anthropocene and the question of an imperiled planet that due to human and humans' relation to objects or the sort of extraction machine of capitalism. So one of the kind of tropes of the Anthropocene is that well now humans are a geologic medium, right? Humans have moved, are now in geologic time. And so the question of kind of human time and earth time is changing. And so theater is certainly, is one medium that with time as one of its kind of key components, a manipulating time, asking questions about time, moving time, questions of duration, that these seem to be kind of key questions for these sort of planetary issues. I mean empathy is the one that's sort of commonly associated with theater. I think empathy, you could also see a lot of problems with empathy, the projecting of the, you know, the anthropomorphizing problem that is another kind of mode of humanism that doesn't allow I guess for differences, for not possessible differences. It's a kind of possession, ability to possess through an idea of an ownership of self projected onto an ownership of another. But theater also has, knit within it, something that performance studies scholars have called like liminality, right? So it already has within it a kind of question of relation and relationality. And if, which is your response to the empathy question. So maybe theater and performance are good places to think with questions of object relations and subject relations because they can, we can experiment with otherwise ways of being in relation. Yeah, maybe to follow on that, I think theater, one of the, there are many ways I think in which theater and new or materialism can be productively thought together. But one way that I want to bring up is also the practice of creating theater as a fantastic model of thinking through matter. Where you, the practice of composing of a process with usually many people involved and how new thoughts can happen through manipulating material, through interacting with material and also through letting materials have their own position in that. So I think actually there is a lot that new materialism could learn from theater. I think also to me something that, so young you were talking about a lot in our group this morning about the performativity of writing and how what it does for your writing as a scholar to be more performative is maybe really appropriate to talk about here. I wonder if you wanna bring that to the whole group a little bit. Well, maybe I can answer that in two ways. I mean, one, that question came from a very practical concern that I felt that there was so many claims for performativity and I wasn't quite sure what people meant. Like so I wanted people to unpack it and describe and involve and engage and also that means actually breaking out out of certain kind of analytical models. So there was a very practical concern there. But on a different relationship, maybe a different way to answer that is that I come to performance by film, by cinema. And I find myself very, it's interesting that especially in the last few years that as a scholar of film and video, I've been consistently asked to like be on performance panels and now dance panels. And so there's this whole question about the particular material of the live body and there are people I share on this floor with. I mean, there's so many complex and theoretical approaches to this question but I was very struck by the fact that I'm asked to speak and to these questions. And one way to and in part I've understood that as in part speaking to the fact that the more dominant convention of the theater with its stable configuration, its black box model, itself is no longer dominant. We are in a model where screens proliferate and screens have a different materiality as well as a different relationship to the spectator. So that compels, I think it compels a different analysis of what we mean by I say like the spectacle or being in the spectacle. I mean, I'm a little bit digressing here but there's often when there's a kind of critique of cinema as this like mass medium of ideological manipulation. We have that classic cover of a givable in a society spectacle and everybody watching a 3D like film and with their glasses all looking in the same direction. And what's interesting is that that cover only came in the 80s. And the previous works were at the previous covers actually if there was a cover image was actually of people in their apartment like isolated like looking at their TV screens. So the emphasis was actually much more architectural and a question about isolation and what does it mean to be isolated together. So just to, I'm kind of digressing I've lost my train of thought but thought I've completely lost my train of thought. I'll get back to that later. Yes. I also wanted to ask about and then maybe we will open it up to the audience for the last five minutes or so. But I wanted to ask about to bring us sort of to this question of knowledge and objects of study. I'm curious about I'm curious about forms of argumentation and what the form of an argument does to the kind of knowledge that you're able to produce or share. And I'm wondering if any of you can speak to the forms of argument making that you are maybe most drawn to or forms that scare you the most or that you found most productive that you're experimenting with because I think the form in which we choose to argue and set up our statements of course impacts then the statements that we're actually able to make. I remember my train of thought which actually connects because you were asking about the writing and the study. And I think what I was trying to connect in too many things was that if the maybe if we have a new dominant media situation in which we are surrounded like and the idea of the sovereign spectator is no longer like one that is quite as dominant. Like what does it mean to be surrounded by the image to have a position where we not so much own an image but we are bombarded like enveloped like immersed by an image. Can we rather than resist that in the sense of so do we then return to notions of shall we make impose a linear configuration so that we can master the chaos or give form to that immersion? How can we extract a different kind of ethics or aesthetics from that immersive relationship? And that's where I was thinking about in the writing itself as much as we are talking about a more palpable sense of the materiality or the object hood of the object how can that change like in our writing too? I want that emphasizes the act of writing the performance of also reading. And maybe going back to this final question about analysis and logic and argumentation. I mean, I love the word study. Like I want to bring that back like in the title and I'm struck by there's a quote somewhere in Walter Benjamin where he talks about the student like in the figure of the student it's an essay on Kafka. And he talks about the student as someone who is not so much about what they're studying but they are always studying. So they're always looking at a book their face is buried in a book. So it's a certain kind of attentiveness which in which one is beholden to the book or beholden to the library like but and one is somewhat indeed buried within it but but he but he claims a certain kind of quote unquote redemptive potential in the student who is always awake like an always alert like and that particular kind of attentiveness like of always reading is maybe something that I would I'll put on the table and perhaps return to later. That's terrifying to me but I love Benjamin. So I conversely I really I like the idea of attention although attention is of course what we're quote paying all the time we were talking about that earlier some in some conversation I was having here and obviously we are being what's being extracted from us as consumers is our attention. One is purchased right for one's attention to the video we were that's what we were talking about the videos that you have to watch if you're in the middle of something if you stop on a game or on a phone pay attention to a video you're you're anyway and now I'm losing my train of thought but I was gonna say to this question of writing I've been I've been thinking a lot about gesture as a way to think maybe out from under the clearly delineated so-called subject so-called object problematic and gesture is that which moves off of a body or an object in a hail sort of toward another and so I've been trying to think about the gesture and the gestic in terms of also writing and so I think of my writing is my writing gesturing is it making a gesture or is it is it also composed in responsibility so you know response hyphen ability what is the responsibility of the writing but in terms of kind of call and response so wanting to think with Antiphany wanting to think with call and response which also and think historically about call and response as with Tommy de France and Anita Gonzalez a diasporic a black cultural diasporic mode of knowing to name it with that and to try to think with that yes there's Antiphany in Greek theater what became of Antiphany is an interesting thing like why did Western Civ stop the Antiphonal what happens if we bring the Antiphonal in so trying to think of that with writing what is Antiphonic writing, what is gestic writing and so making calls and responses yeah that's what I'm trying to do with my writing. I was yeah I think in your call and response you're already bringing both sides but when thinking about this question of different ways maybe of writing or arguing or I brought it yeah my tendency would be say but maybe we should also learn to read differently and I think much of our questions also in relation to objects are also a question of our capacity to develop different relationships towards that what we encounter so I think it's both sides because in these ways of writing or gesturing they invite ways of responding but we could also start from the other side and I think that's also things like these suggestions for example to think of certain objects as theoretical objects as objects that one can make productive for an argument and not in terms of writing objects differently or creating them but also developing ways of responding to them that become part of producing thoughts and producing ideas so I guess it's maybe useful also to look at the other side and not only at the writing or producing arguments but also at the openness and the possibilities to interpret and read in new ways. I guess to follow on some of this I think for myself and my own practice I've sort of had a split because I'm both making objects and making art installations and art objects and writing and I think what I've been trying to do is sort of bring those two a little bit closer which for a long time I was really trying to keep very separate. I think that for me the way that I see those things working in a sort of complimentary way is that in my art my work with objects in art is I'm really trying to let those objects do the argumentation in a way. I'm trying to create some kind of an experience in which viewers have some kind of a relationship to objects that I can allow that to unfold without my presence and then the flip side of that I think is in the writing because I think that what I'm trying to do with writing is sort of right from the perspective of being an object. So this change what is the first person in that kind of argumentation I guess. I mean even within the writing I'm a little bit more wary of even that term about having an argument but I think for me this really ties in with what you're saying about reading. About having a different kind of orientation toward these text objects I guess. I think that's gonna be the note that we end on. I wanna thank you all so much for just so gamely responding to our ambitious questions. And also just for being with us all today it's really the curtain. Right there's one more giant object to present to you. There is cheese. Happy birthday. Yeah but no I really thank you all from all of us from all the conference participants who have all been so wonderful and generous and Sarah will tell us what's behind the curtain. I wanna thank you too. There's nothing behind the curtain. Thank you Corey and thank you so much for this rich discussion. I think we all have a lot to go think about but before that I would just like to thank again thank you to not only our invited scholars who were incredible today but also to every one of our conference participants. This has been an incredibly rich discussion for me and so I hope that it was for you. And also for everyone who is here in the room right now thank you for your attention and for your bodies. And of course also thank you to the Siegel Center and to Frank Henscher and for the team for hosting us here today. We're really grateful for you. So we hope that everyone is planning to stay. We have a performance this evening that is kind of the end cap to today's festivities. The performance is by Larissa Vela's Jackson. It's called Star Crap Method for Dancers Healing Edition and that's at 730 back in this room. But until then we invite people who are staying to join us upstairs in the, it's room 3111. And it's the one that our theater program fondly calls our green room. And so we invite you there for a little reception and to continue the discussion there. Thank you. Thank you.