My paper
entitled ‘Kairos Time: The Performativity of Timing and Timeliness … or;
Between Biding One’s Time and Knowing When to Act’ has been accepted for
inclusion in the 1st PARSE Biennial Research Conference
on TIME at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing
Arts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden (4 – 6 November 2015).
About
the conference: Time
arguably has always been at the center of the research initiatives of the
natural sciences, of philosophy and of the many different practices of history
and social criticism. However, time also occupies a central place for the
curiosity and attention of artist researchers across all the arts. The intensification
of the question of time has, in recent years, prompted some to speak of a
“temporal turn” across the disciplines. This conference seeks to bring together
a range of researchers, drawn mainly from the artistic fields but also inviting
researchers from across all disciplines to consider questions with respect to
the practices, processes and perturbations of time. Possible topics include,
but are not limited to: constructions of contemporaneity; time and the
aesthetic; time and affect; gendered time; queer times; chronophobia;
chronopolitics; chronotopes; durational practices; public time; network time;
the time of the gift; globalization, instantaneity and temporal collapse; the
nostalgia of capital; the time thinking of sustainability; temporal imaginaries
and ecological practices; the time of the political; labour time and forms of
life; the time of the poem; afternarrative time; empire time; revolutionary
time; dead-time; end-time; out-of-time; behind-the-times, and again next time.
Abstract:
‘Kairos Time: The Performativity of Timing and Timeliness … or; Between
Biding One’s Time and Knowing When to Act’: This paper investigates
contemporary performance & artistic practice through the prism of kairos,
a concept that in spite of the ‘temporal turn’ within arts/humanities -
& its familiarity within literary/rhetorical studies - has remained
relatively under-interrogated in relation to artistic processes of
making/thinking. Drawing Antonio Negri’s writing on the ‘revolutionary time’
of kairos (alongside Henri Bergson’s concept of the ‘gap’ or interval)
into dialogue with Ancient Greek rhetoric, my intent is to elaborate the
significance of kairos to contemporary art practice and critical
imagination, identifying various artistic practices (including ‘live notation’,
‘live coding’, performative drawing) that operate as contemporary
manifestations of Ancient technē, or analogously to Negri’s ‘poet’: practices
alert/attentive to the live circumstances or ‘occasionality’ of their own
making, based on kairotic principles of immanence, intervention
& invention-in-the-middle.
