The Troubles with Temporality

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between contemporary performance, temporality, and politics. In recent decades, this relationship has mostly been analyzed through different approaches to the ontology of performance. On one hand, the political strength of performance is strongly related to the specific temporal constellation of its present; on the other, the disappearing presence is continuously challenged with the ways in which performance remains, and how its politics are intrinsically bounded to the traces and documents of the past that performances produce. In this essay, I would like to add an additional insight into the temporal dynamics of the performance, which critically stresses a specific temporal aspect of performance as a political and emancipatory practice. My goal is to show how such an understanding can also divide the temporal aspect of the performance from the materiality of its own event, turning it into an abstract and immaterial political potential, which can also be described as the process of dis-eventualization.