Mark Fleishman

Beyond Capture

Chantal Mouffe (1992) argues for a ‘radical and plural’ idea of democracy in which the principles of equality and justice are extended ‘to the widest set of social relations’ (14).  It is not clear to me what she understands the exact parameters of ‘social relations’ to be, but if we were to accept the view of Bruno Latour (2005), we would need to expand the social to include ‘as full-blown actors entities that were explicitly excluded from collective existence by more than one hundred years of social explanation’ (69, emphasis in original); ‘entities which are in no way recognizable as being social in the ordinary manner’. In other words the social involves the ‘momentary association’ of human and other-than-human actors ‘into new shapes’, new forms of assembly (65) that Latour suggests be called ‘not a society but a collective’ (14, emphasis in original).

A.N. Whitehead seems to echo this sentiment when he writes that ‘we find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures’ (1978: 50). In this paper I wish to explore whether a research output/process (in our case a performance-as-research output/process) might be an actant in its own right; might be understood to be a ‘fellow creature’ within an expanded conception of democracy. And if so, is it possible to move beyond an anthropocentric paradigm in which human actants always determine the terms of engagement or perspective? Can we move beyond ideas of capture, of hunters and prey and all the power relations this implies, to another kind of relation? And is this what Baz Kershaw means when he argues that ‘the foundational principles of practice-as-research work to a democratically deconstructive and decentring agenda’ (2009: 15, emphasis in original)?

Mark Fleishman 

University of Cape Town

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