Ethical Durations, Opening to Other Times: Returning to Goat Island with Wilson

Abstract

The last chapter raised many questions that deserve fuller responses than those we have provided thus far: for instance, we need to go further to explain the nature of ‘the whole’ of which we have said that all things, including theatres of immanence and this book as an account of theatres of immanence, are a part. That is, we must continue to pursue this question of the relationship between the whole and the parts, or the One and the Many, within our account of immanence, as well as addressing the aesthetic and ethical question of how different performances or different experiences of participation might be valued with respect to immanence. After all, given that ethics has been a concern from the start, surely the issue of value must be paramount to our investigation as it comes to its conclusion. How can we measure the value or ‘success’ of the various theatres of immanence that we have articulated here (or are they all on a par, laid out on a plane of immanence with equal value)? Moreover, how do we measure (if we can) the value of a theatre of immanence over other theatres in general, theatres outside of immanence, whatever they might be? Or is there no outside to immanence — as has often seemed to be the case — such that all theatrical forms lie on the one continuum between the ideal poles of pure immanence and pure transcendence, only tending to either one end or the other without ever being at one or the other.