From 8 through 10 July 2010, the Collaborative Research Centre “Performing Cultures” will be hosting its concluding conference in collaboration with the House of World Cultures, Berlin, after eleven and a half years of sponsorship by the German Research Foundation.
The aim of our conference, called “Performing the Future”, is twofold: to examine the scope for expanding existing theories on performativity on the one hand, and, on the other, to investigate the generation of future as a particular dimension of performative processes.
In developing new theories over a substantial period of time, the Collaborative Research Centre has delved into a variety of different fields of study which has required that we remain flexible in adopting new approaches and fresh perspectives. Thus, the different research areas within the Collaborate Research Centre – philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, theatre studies, literary studies, media studies, theology (to name just a few) – have explored their own diverse concepts of the performative and not been forced into a pre-existent or fixed mold. Indeed, from the outset, the Collaborative Research Centre consciously decided not to aspire to a unifying theory. Instead, we wanted to give each research area the space to explore its specific manifestations that would capture the concept of the performative in all its peculiarities. Our final conference now seeks to ask, in what ways these diverse approaches can be developed further? What is their potential? What are their limitations? Does the concept of the performative have a future at all? And how might this future manifest itself with regard to the different disciplines?
Over the course of our research on performativity, one aspect clearly emerged as pivotal to our work: performative processes describe transformative processes that, in principal, cannot be fully planned or controlled. The interplay of intended action and emergence, of planning and contingency, gives rise to the unplanned and unpredictable, which fundamentally co-determines the transformative process. Performative processes constitute reality, and simultaneously dissolve in the moment of their ephemeral present; and yet, by aiming to induce change, they also generate future. These performative acts take effect only once they are (regularly) performed. Thus, we are not asking what kind of future emerges or should emerge from performative processes, but rather how and in what way these processes generate future. What constitutes the transformative power, the particular energeia of the performative, and how can it be described and understood in more depth? What moments and factors are capable of giving performative processes a new orientation, of leading them in unplanned – perhaps unexpected – directions?
Given the close connection between representation and production, the dual formula in our title, “Performing the Future,” refers to these two questions raised by our conference.