�Alive� Performance: Toward an Immersive Activist Philosophy

Abstract

This paper proposes to analyse the �virtual,� unsighted potentials of the artistic and critical practice of performance through abstraction, deconstruction and remediation of its �body.� It argues that the ontological distinction between material and immaterial representation can be dislodged by the proposition of? an ontogenesis of emergence of the dynamic dimension of affect. Such self-organising, recursive system of forces and energies elicits change and transformation expanding the sensual and aesthetic practice of performance as alive art.These arguments connect concepts from aesthetic and political theory with philosophical ideas of virtual multiplicity, relationality, counter/intuition and (dis)individuation passing via the work of Brian Massumi, Teresa Brennan, as well as other theorists. The approach intersects methodologies and epistemologies from activist philosophy, science and art with the radical contingencies implicit in performance as a �technology of existence� (in)formed by tendencies of distribution of affective intensities and temporal (re)modulation of shared perception.Ultimately, I propose to imagine performance as a vital archive of perceptive experience marked by a representational impossibility, a failure to appear fully. This actual condition of emergent abstraction enables however a bodily state of intensity and emergency to flesh out an experiential, visceral field of affective modes of becoming and becoming-other in related mo(ve)ments of aliveness traversed by the ungrasped pulse of a past yet to be/come.