Intermediality, Infelicity, and Scholarship on the Slip

Abstract

I am happy to take up this request to speak to the state of the field of performance studies, though I will be arguing here against the felicity of such a project. Performance studies, to my mind, is less “a thing done” than a set of questions asked, and the more performance studies keeps on the slip, remains diffuse, and resists congealing within delimited boundaries, the greater service it provides to our collective inquiries in the academy. This may be, oddly and even disturbingly, to argue for performance studies’ hollowness, its (in)capacity, its necessary infelicity—even, dare I suggest, its theatricality.