ABSTRACT:

The performativity of absence or: how things may emerge from nothing.

What does it mean to think the performativity not of an action but of its omission? Does it make sense to talk of the performativity of failure or of absence? This project seeks to examine the "other side" of performance. Can the performative be presented in a way that highlights the reverse side of action, i.e. something undergone, the reverse side of doing, which has to do with "receiving", and the boundary of a performance, i.e. revocation? Two concrete aspects, silence and the figure zero, are drawn upon to investigate these questions.

Subproject 1: The performativity of silence. Or: How to Do Things with Nothing (Alice Lagaay, EA)

This project builds on the results of a previous project which was dedicated to the human voice and sought to emphasise the sounding materiality, physicality and musicality of spoken language. This focus on the question of voice sharpened our senses not only to the sounding voice which, in speaking, reveals more than it says, but also to the voice that "gets stuck" in one's throat, to the voice that falls silent, to a speech that is not carried out but withdrawn in silence.
Particularly in the analytical (Searle) and universal pragmatist (Habermas) traditions of thought associated with John Austin's speech act theory, silence, the reverse side of the "positive" act of speaking, has largely been ignored (this is evident for example in the fact that these theories overlook the significance of the hearer, who in order to hear must remain silent). The purpose of this project is to rehabilitate silence as a significant phenomenon for the philosophy of language and to make it fruitful for an expanded theory of "negative performance". The driving hypothesis is that the absence of an utterance is not just "nothing", but that, in a variety of complex ways, silence can be meaningful and therefore shed an interesting light on the constitution of linguistic meaning.

Subproject 2: On the performance of zero or: how a sign that once stood for the absence of a number became a sign for a very particular number. An investigation into the productivity of blanks. (Jan Janzen, EA)

This project seeks to investigate the new orientation that came about through the introduction of the concept of zero into arithmetic understanding and its theoretical reflection in the realm of science. Of particular relevance here is not only the time period in early modernity during which the value of nought was slowly established. For the effects of this profound change in arithmetic language can be seen to reach at least up to the time of the last major crisis that related to the foundations of mathematics at the beginning of the last century. Even then, such rigorous thinkers as Frege and Russell found themselves hard pushed to find a satisfactory explanation for the "essence of nought" – as it was then often referred to – or for the notion of an empty quantity.
Judging by the length and depth of this crisis in mathematics, the problems relating to introduction of zero point less to the marginal expansion of mathematics than to a profound structural change. This can to some extent be explained as follows: Up until the introduction of zero it was relatively easy to maintain the traditional idea that numbers are ultimately to be understood as abstractions of concrete quantities; everyone agreed on this view. But the introduction of zero rendered this conception impossible, for there was no way that zero could be deduced from a sensually perceivable quantity. Due to the difficulty of the problem no attempts were made to clarify the relationship between zero and other numbers; instead, as so often, a host of new practical possibilities that the decimal system allowed were engaged in, without there ever being a satisfactory foundation. Only very gradually did the desire emerge to explain the nature of this curious sign which had originally merely been invented to mark the absence of other signs. The purpose of this project is trace and attempt to clarify the confusing elements of this (hi)story.

Subproject 3: On the productivity of blanks and the aisthetic of the absent or: performativity under a "negative sign" and the "other side" of performance. (Sybille Krämer, GA)

The aim of this project, which relates to both projects on silence and zero, is to continue to develop a concept and theory of performativity which considers the other side of the phenomena that are usually taken to be the proper objects of performance. In other words: not action, but refrainment from action, not the mode of carrying something out, but that of withdrawal (Entzug), not presence but absence are the objects of reflection here. It is our intuition that consideration of this "negative" mode of occurrence presents an interesting challenge to performative thinking. This project thus deals with the (philosophic) question of how something can emerge from nothing. The proposal to be investigated is that (from a performative perspective) what connects nothing and something is the blank space which we work with and relate to. Indeed, cultural practices can be seen to encompass to a large degree empty spaces, gaps, breaks, pauses, interruptions, place-keepers….. The purpose of this project is to reveal the ways in which we use blank spaces. The concept of "trace" plays a significant role in this.


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