The experience of ‘something’ in performance

Abstract

This paper regards the notion of ‘something’ in the context of performance and performative speech-acts. ‘Something’ is a crisis, an element of systemic cycles: it distorts both as a signal and terminal crisis for any system or standards of thought or practice. My aim is to consider this crisis in loose connection with performativity, economy, and philosophy – or through a broad articulation of ‘performance with something’. We can question why there is a notion of experiencing ‘something’, which does not signify anything but only ‘something.’ Is ‘something’ something else when the quotation marks are left out, when ‘something’ or “something” becomes something? Is something then the act of becoming, eluding us as it moves, escaping its inverted commas? Many concepts can be used to approach this issue, such as Gilles Deleuze’s construction of the terms ‘aliquid’ and ‘sense’. We can regard how decisionality, the term that François Laruelle has proposed as a decisive element for all philosophical inquiries, might cut off something and slice it into pieces. Or we can consider whether something is simply gnosis, an expression of the mystical and mystifying experience of the Gnostics – an approach that recognizes our epoch’s search for a correlation with the paranormal. Still, is something the thing-in-itself, which we may not ever possess except as a correlation with consciousness? We might even ask if something is the foreclosed Real, something that cannot be captured with a noun, something that cannot, in the nature of things – the nature of somethings – be captured at all.