Between Participation and Non-Participation: The Generative Potential of Slow Performance and Slow Scholarship

Abstract

In this paper I entangle my fascination for “slow performances” – performances in which not much, or almost nothing happens, or those with a slow pace – with my own experiences with slow scholarship (Mountz et. al. 2015). In three case studies – respectively Ivana Müller’s While We Were Holding It Together (2006), Kris Verdonck’s End (2008), and my reflections upon and experiences with slow scholarship – I see into the temperament of slowness and consider its corresponding political and ethical significance in today’s accelerating Western society. I argue that insistence is a crucial element of slowness generating the potential of suspension, subversion, and confrontation. For example and as Birgit Kaiser in Figures of Simplicity (2011, 90-96) emphasises, key to the power of Bartleby the Scrivener’s non-participation is his insistence upon slowly uttering the same phrase over and over and over again.

Studying the slowness of/in Müller’s and Verdonck’s performances and of/in my own practice as a newly disabled performance scholar I come to an understanding of the generating potential of slowness and its political and ethical importance. With amongst others the work of Birgit Kaiser (2011), Gilles Deleuze (1998), and Walter Benjamin (2003-2006, 2002), I consider how slowness and its temperamental insistence creates a paradox of movement and stillness, and one of participation and non-participation, and I examine matters of representation and presentation. In doing so I consider how slowness and non-participation can lead not only to time and space for critical thought and reflection, but also to the emergence of an inherent embodied and performative thinking in itself.