Post-Semantic Performativity

I want to write something without thinking about it too much to catch up (though, technically I am now two weeks behind, as it’s Wednesday). I want to give myself space for thought, which I am hoping I will have soon, but for now I feel like I might as well push through some smaller ideas to potentially generate some more weight.

I often assemble instagram posts using a combination of recently saved images, random quotations I find on my tablet, and recent self-portraits/fit-pics that I feel do more than just simply show what I’m wearing: the way I shape these often disparate elements allows the coalescence of something bigger than the individual parts, and while I can’t say it necessarily pushes towards a single, definable point, there is generally something interesting that happens.

This is, of course, the main principle of collage, and it is the way that I almost always work, across all media. But, I would be potentially amiss to call myself a collage artist, as I think collage is more of a method for me than a medium. But: one of the first places that I feel like I really understood this principle of addressing the caprice of the universe was when facing the films of Marc Hurtado: I emailed him, and asked him some questions about his astounding films which he was kind enough to answer. He pointed out that the sound was never intentionally shaped over the images: it was also music that had been made apart from the film thrust upon it. If you’ve ever seen one of Hurtado’s films this probably comes as a shock, as there are moments of absolute impossibility where sound and image are married in such a sublime way. But, of course, this isn’t just collage, this is magic in itself.

In today’s work of magic, assembling an instagram post lead to re-encountering the following quotation, of which I have lost the source (a regular occurrence, which, a propos last week’s small essay here, this is maybe a working method in itself, or maybe it’s just me being disorganized and lazy):

But the preliminary training is not simply a preparation of the physical body, i.e., a toning-up or warm-up of the body to engage in a sports activity. It is the beginning of a process of discovering an alternative bodymind which is then attuned. This is the psychophysical body as a gestalt of mind and body as one. Japanese philosopher Ickikawa describes this as the ‘subject-body’ … that body ‘not capable of reduction to either the physical or the mental.’

This is something that, reading it out, feels so appropriate in a sense that I don’t think it resonated in whatever context I originally encountered it. In my continuing engagement with ideas around “performativity” I have always held onto an idea of a performativity that is not a sort of “mask” in front of the self, rather the doing of the self, itself. Or, as in the quote above, “the psychophysical body as a gestalt of mind and body as one.” Not performativity as “presentation” or “re-presentation,” but rather something inherently in the present. Continuity.

But, for me there is something else that has become a more active part of my life over the last year. My continuing engagement with garments, clothing, fashion, whatever, has less to do with some sort of pretension, rather it’s always a push for an aesthetic elaboration of the self. And sometimes it’s a push for something beyond the self, something sovereign. I don’t think it always works, but there’s something very satisfying when it feels like it does. Instead of being mere signification of an idea, the outfit (the self, the “body”) performs something outside of semantic insistence. The trail of thought goes deeper, but I want to leave this someone open for now.