The Faculty of the Arts at Tel Aviv University and the Institute of Theatre Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin have been cooperating on several projects for almost twenty years. Our meetings, most of which are documented in publications, have focused on the common past of Jews and Germans, a past culminating in the tragedy of the Shoah. This ongoing research on our common past has given rise to the firm conviction that the time has come to ask and search for our future. Consequently, we have designed a joint research project related to this question, entitled “Poetics and Politics of the Future: Reverberations and Continuations of Cultural Practices from Jewish/Israeli and German Perspectives”, and intended to reflect the complexities of this endeavour. The project aims to allow a group of young researchers from both institutions – doctoral students as well as postdoctoral fellows – to confront these obstacles in order to establish a coherent academic dialogue in this field, in collaboration with senior scholars. The project is funded by the German-Israeli Foundation.
At the time of conceiving the project, we focused on two questions that seemed to us of great relevance: first, how can we investigate and conceptualize the ‘future’ as a theoretical category and time dimension with regard to performances? And second, what are the themes and tools that can articulate the numerous directions in which political and poetic questions of identity, artistic creation, cultural transference and conceptions of the ‘other’ can be developed and negotiated in and through performances in and for the future?
In order to deal with these and related questions in a meaningful way, it seemed necessary to examine first the temporal dimension of performances; that is, their relation to the past and, in particular, to the future. We proceeded from the assumption that a performance comes into being as an autopoietic feedback loop. It unfolds out of the bodily copresence of different groups of participants and their confrontation and interaction. This basic condition applies to all kinds of performance, like a theatre performance in the late nineteenth century where one group of participants, the spectators, sat more or less still in a darkened auditorium and watched the plot unfold on stage, possibly with strong feelings of emotional involvement, empathy, or suspense, but without ever interfering; but it equally applies to performances in which actors and spectators freely exchange their roles. Whatever the reactions of those who prefer to watch, they are perceived by all other participants – sensed, heard or seen. Such responses in turn influence the further course of the performance. Whatever the performers do affects the spectators; whatever the spectators do elicits a response from the performers and other spectators. In this sense performances are generated and determined by the actions and behaviour of all participants, no matter whether they are performers or spectators. All participants act as ‘co-creators’ of the performance, which, in many respects, remains to a certain degree unpredictable and spontaneous.
Therefore, it is crucial to distinguish clearly between the concept of performance and that of the mise en scène or staging. The term mise en scène refers to an underlying outline and specific plan, devised by one or more individuals and evolving through the rehearsal process (as another, slightly different feedback loop). Moreover, the concept of mise en scène includes the result of this collaboration – the planned and intended performative process of bringing forth the materiality of a performance. Yet even if this plan is minutely adhered to in every single performance, each one will still differ from the next. Since a performance comes into being out of the interaction of all participants, it is inconceivable that its materiality appears exactly as planned, given that it also comprises the materiality of the perceptible spectator reactions. Performance and mise en scène are not identical. It might well be the case that the mise en scène employs certain strategies aiming at specific effects among the spectators. However, the actual reactions of the spectators are not predictable, let alone controllable. They vary from performance to performance. Nonetheless, as will be elaborated later, both mise en scène and performance are to be regarded as future-generating systems. While the mise en scéne is intended to bring about future performances, the particular future generated by performances cannot be foreseen.
We can conclude that a performance comes into being as an autopoietic feedback loop – it occurs as a process of self-generation. That is to say that all participants bring forth the performance together; however, no individual or group of people can completely plan its course and control it. All participants act as co-creators who, to different degrees and in different ways, are engaged in the process of generating and shaping the performance without anyone being able to determine its course by themselves. The performance comes into being by the interaction of actors and spectators, thus transforming them all into participants in the performance. In this sense, the performance ‘happens to’ the participants. It opens up the possibility for them to experience themselves as subjects who are able to co-determine the actions and behaviour of others and, at the same time, whose actions and behaviour are determined by others. They experience themselves neither as fully autonomous nor as wholly dependent subjects, but have taken upon themselves the responsibility for a situation which they did not plan but in which they are participating.
For these reasons it proves difficult, if not impossible, to deal with a performance from a hermeneutic perspective. This is not to say that it would be impossible to attribute meanings to single elements, sequences, devices or strategies. However, the performance can by no means be understood as an expression of a given sense or overarching meaning. Anything meaningful that might emerge in its course is due to unforeseeable turns which the performance takes as a result of the interactions between actor and spectator. It does not necessarily result from the intentions of one or several individuals. The nature of performance defies the control of the individual, thus emphasizing the involvement of all participants. It is impossible to plan a performance, per se contingent to a certain extent, because it is impossible to control the actions and behaviour of all participants. They are not predictable, even though they often appear plausible and logical in retrospect. There is an inextricable bond between performance and contingency. Their marriage constitutes reality by bringing forth something which is never exclusively due to the intentions of one or more of the participating subjects; they constitute it by allowing unforeseen and unplanned phenomena to emerge.Footnote 1
These characteristics entail certain assumptions with regard to the particular temporality of performances. First, it seems that performances are imbued with a particular presentness. They exist only at the place and time of their realization and do not aim at producing a lasting artefact. The process of performance produces no object other than the performance itself. Process and product coincide. They do not exist beyond the presence of their fleeting performance.
Yet, while performances coincide with their fleeting presence, they refer to the past in multiple ways. The formulaic performative utterances of baptisms, weddings, blessings, curses and so on are spoken as quasi-citations which recall the past context in which they originated. Their performance brings to mind former utterances, maybe even the very first time this formula was used, recalling the ‘situation of origin’. The present performative utterance thus turns into a mnemonic act. A similar logic applies to performances. The performance of a ritual, for instance, usually occurs as a re-performance. In the past, the ritual has been performed several times. This fact alone secures its reference to the past. Moreover, many rituals perform a special past, a first act or myth of origin, so that the ritual itself is performed as an act of commemoration. Even if it is not as evident as in rituals, the reference to the past and to former performances is characteristic of all genres of performance. Every theatre performance refers to performances of the past and is haunted by associations, memories, allusions, hidden or open links and contradictions to or quotations from past performances.Footnote 2 A twofold resonance of the past exists within performances: on the one hand, they assimilate the repeating echo of past performances; on the other, they refer to the future by resonating past performances to allow something new to emerge.
Therefore performances very determinedly point to the future. Performative utterances such as promises, threats, curses and blessings are certainly performed in the present. However, they unmistakably point to a future that they are meant to bring about. Insofar as performative acts and processes constitute reality, they aim at the future and the coming into being of something that does not yet exist, something new. The performative act of a baptism or wedding, for instance, constitutes a social reality that determines the future.
This holds true not just for rituals involving performative utterances but for all rituals, particularly rites of passage, which are meant to secure a safe passage from a present state, identity or social situation to another, new one. In this sense, rituals always aim at and bring forth a particular future. The same can be said about other genres of cultural performance. A festival aims either at affirming and thus renewing an existing community, or at bringing about a new one. A sports competition aims at generating winners and losers; a political assembly is supposed to legitimize claims to power or to establish a particular social bond. Even if theatre and other artistic performances do not pursue such a distinct goal to be realized as a particular change in status or identity, they nonetheless allow for and enable transformations of various kinds in individuals and groups. Although such transformations, in contrast to the changes named above, are usually not irreversible and do not demand social acceptance, they generate a future. Whatever the case might be, performances always bring about a particular future.
To sum up: performances are realized in the present by referencing the past and bringing forth the future. Austin's concept of illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts also addresses such a future. Performative processes, including repetitions, re-enactments, and re-performances, extend beyond the present. They possess a dimension of effect that points to the future. The above analysis of the constitutive features of performances, in particular their unpredictability and temporal dimension, allows us to conclude that the concept of emergence proves crucial with regard to the future brought about by performances.
The term ‘emergence’ was coined in the first decades of the twentieth century in the context of evolutionary cosmologies. Today it is used in the natural and social sciences as well as in philosophy. It has proven to be a key concept in the philosophy of mind, in theories of self-organization, in connectionism, in synergetics and in chaos theory. However, the term has not yet gained a strong foothold in cultural or aesthetic theory. Yet it seems indispensable when exploring the temporality of performances and, in particular, their relation to the future. For, as already stated, performances predominantly realize themselves as an interplay of intended action and emergence, planning and contingency. Therefore their effect on the participants cannot be completely steered and controlled by a single individual. While a particular effect might coincide with the intentions of the artists, leading to a particular future that was envisaged beforehand, effect and future ultimately remain elusive in the performative process. Emergent phenomena at least partly take the performance in a different direction, although they might lead to the failure of the performative act as a whole. The future brought about by this performative act is predictable only to a limited degree. In this respect, exploring the future-generating potential of performances implies introducing a kind of futurological perspective to the research of performance.
Futurology has so far been the domain of the social sciences and of economics, even if this research brings together multiple disciplines. These efforts are focused on conducting studies and projects to determine what the future will or should look like. Futurology expressly demarcates itself from ‘prophecy’, ‘science fiction’ and ‘trend research’, in spite, or perhaps because, of the fact that it works with creative and partly even fantastical images and designs of the future, which are inconceivable without normative and prospective elements. In the last years, futurology has also begun to consider developments and events that are characterized by disorder, multiplicity, differentiation, indeterminacy, instability and interdependency with turbulent fields. When basing our explorations on the assumption that performances come into being as autopoietic feedback loops, we share some points of contact with the above-mentioned fields of research in futurology; however, they deal with different problems and follow different methodologies.
In contrast to the different branches of futurology, our research on the coming into being of the future is based on perspectives and methodologies deriving from studies in the arts and culture. This is why we can do away with the normative, prospective, or even prognostic elements. Our interest does not focus on what type of future comes or is intended to come into being out of any given performative process – even if this question will be considered as a matter of course. Instead, we focus on how the future emerges, because we are interested in the trace and promise of the future in the present, which manifests itself as a reverse causality whereby the future seemingly generates its effects already in the present.
The following fourteen essays, by analysing or referring to performances – and in some cases also to other artistic expressions – focus on particular future-oriented or even future-generating qualities such as potentiality, expectation, anticipation, vision, utopia, risk, genealogy and narration. They present a variety of possibilities for how the future emerges in performance, allowing for a meaningful discussion of the first question posed; they apply and test various ways of conceptualizing and investigating the future as a theoretical category and a temporal dimension. This variety will serve as the basis for further research that will be geared towards the goal of finding suitable answers to the second question, referring to the political and poetic issues of identity, artistic creation, cultural transference and conceptions of the ‘other’ negotiated through performances in terms of the future. We hope that our methodological choice to use performance as model for exploring the coming into being of the future will subsequently allow for more general answers to the two questions, even beyond the realm of performance.
