On Affective Objects: Martyro, Veronique Doisneau, and the Production of (im)Material Objects

Differing perspectives on the ephemerality of performance have led to debates since the 1980s regarding its ontology. Sondra Fraleigh and Peggy Phelan, for example, believe that performance’s ‘only life is in the present’. Others have disagreed. For example, Rebecca Schneider believes that performance remains in the body of the spectator in a complicated manner and Miranda Joseph, drawing on Marxist theory, argues that performance is in fact material because it produces social relations which have material effects: they affect our thinking and behaviour. In alignment with Joseph, this text begins with the presupposition that performance, and, specific to this text, the object we might call dance performance—the dance performance event and its particular contours, in other words, the performance event as an entity which emerges in the space-time where/when the onlooker and the work meet—is material because it is social. I discuss two dance performance objects, my work Martyro (2011) and Jérôme Bel’s (2005) Veronique Doisneau, as (im)material affective objects. I examine each work individually, providing first a thick description of each in order to communicate how they used affect to connect to their spectators and to critique the contexts of their presentation, the worlds in which the Subject in each of these performances worked. Drawing on understandings and theories of affect (from Deleuze and Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, and Brian Massumi to Lauren Berlant) and political economy (including David Harvey, Cedric Robinson, Jeremy Gilbert, Ashok Kumar, and Katerina Paramana), I then argue that both works used affect to remind their audiences, their witnesses, of the power of revealing one own’s experience of ‘suffering’ as Subjects, whilst simultaneously critiquing the wider economies in which these works, these affective objects and their Subjects, are embedded. It is this production of affect, I suggest, that potentiated action for change, by affecting others’ perspectives and behaviours.