Plugging Performance Arts into the Revolutionary Machine: Alter-modernities and the Coming Spatiotemporal Body Relations

Abstract: the following research project would examine the alter-modernities expressed and produced through the war machine of performance. Starting from the concept of Modernity (with capital m), the research will discuss the Eurocentric character of Modernity, the negative force of anti-modernity, and the differences of Modernity and modernism as western created concepts. Applying Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of war machine and revolutionary machine in the territory of radical performance, the characteristics of possible machinic assemblages between radical performance art and revolutionary machines will be discussed; assemblages which reveal the alter-modernities produced through them. The analysis would traverse a constellation of issues such as representation, organization, immaterial labour, globalization, cultural and creative industries (as a product of neoliberalism) and bodies and their spatiotemporal relations. In addition, it would provide a critique of Nicolas Bourriaud’s alter-modernism and set its distance and differences from it. In order to show the process of making time and space autonomous in radical performance, the following research would examine case studies from three distinct periods: 60s and 70s, first global cycle of anti-globalization movement from 90s to the beginning of post 9/11 era, and finally the most recent cycle of global protests from 2009 to 2012. Through this research that should be carried out on a local as well as global level, it would be found out how radical performance art contributed to a perspective on alter-modernity which is non-hierarchical, non-representational, transversal, and network-based and provides a different set of relations between bodies themselves as well as bodies and their social context.