P L A N T A R C H Y 2 - Critical Documents

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Editor’s Note:
Why Performance & Performativity when [insert glocal-economic-blatthat-makes-u-wanna-yatch-marrow-on-th-nearest-ATM-lobby-zombiewhenever-you-hear-about-it
here]?
To motor works with an expectation of liquidating and localizing a permanent
revolution spun as performable or already-performing to get the you and whose
who’re me’d between us and them on the go and snapped spinning towards
inevitable topple, be it enviable or viable; ether. When a constellation of
persons & objects is rung into a field of performativity, a resonance calibrates
in the spaces between said personas’ & objectives’ utility. But it’s too often
par for the course that our esoteric references to sparks are (by dint of
tempo-static loops) merely internalized — signed off into the invisible. A
movement from private to public [as a] central concern and a political action (1) & an
active dramatization of this socialization. (2)
The works published here range from writing produced through uncommon
modes of practice (live public talk — cheek; video capture — Yandrich;
xerograghy — Strauss; digital-to-print remediations of e-textual noise — PB;
serial/procedural composition — Hugill), documentation of live performance
(PTRS, Strauss), scores (Basinski, Iijima, Topel), scripts (Elrick, Perkins,
Mendoza, MacLeod), responses to poetry readings (Critchley), writing in
demand of opportunities for being thought through any number of possible
frames (Levy, Wallace-Hadrill, -3415, Wallace, Slosek), discourse on various
modes of performativity spanning the gap between the how-to-perform and
the what-can-it-perform (Basinski, Royer, Goodland, Tuma), to solicited
work made in response to the issue’s theme (Calton). The performativity of the
experiment is the insurance that the...community will trust the results enough to work
with them. (3)
The works have been selected on the grounds that they underwrite the kinds
of reorganizations of political will that come when our ideal breeder lifts hir
head for a break and the scroll ticking along the bottom of the screen in The
Situation Room states in less than ten words that Angelina Jolie’s structural
readjustment plans are more closely read than any post-textuality we could
literally bind. (4) Performance is a test of the reading community’s responses that
leads to further adjustments and new areas of inquiry. (5)