Jon McKenzie

What is the future of performance?

Democratizing Torture – Three Scenarios
Presentation (English)

We currently use the word “performance” to mean many things. Firstly, it refers to a performance in which the actor embodies roles, a representation of music or dance, or what is specifically called performance art: the performance of actions which allows acting itself – the various forms, rhythms and contexts of the action – to become the subject of aesthetic recognition and reflection.

But nowadays we also speak of an employee’s performance in a company, the performance of a share, the performance of a computer, the performance of an ecosystem. These uses obviously refer to the ability to perform – not merely as present ”output”, however, but to a potential, something in the future, which is always balanced against the here and now in the evaluation of performance.

The American performance theorist Jon McKenzie has proposed relating the different uses of “performance” to each other. In his book Perform or Else, he analyzes the new discipline of “performance studies” and its field of cultural performances in relation to other performances, especially technological and organizational, but also economic, social, political, and ecological—and in relation to a historical formation he calls the “performance stratum.”

Performance and power

McKenzie claims that performance is the central deployment of power/knowledge in our time. “Performance,” he says, “will be for the 20th and 21st century what discipline was for the 18th and 19th century.”

In a society dictated by performance, people are judged, not on whether their life and actions correspond to the norm or deviate from it. Rather, their social acceptance, influence and prestige are calculated based on the extent to which their actions can be presented as performance attaining the state of the art.

In the place of set responsibilities and formal qualifications, flexible competencies requiring constant reassertion appear. Ethical criteria give way to those of efficacy, effectiveness and efficiency. Generally-valid methods and standards used in measuring performance dissolve into a number of dynamic evaluation practices, whose standards are almost as singular and situation-specific as the things they measure.

This means, first of all, breaking down the boundaries and liberating practice – the emergence of new freedoms in a largely undetermined field, in which the performative force, fields of people, things, institutions and processes overlap and interpenetrate.

On the other hand, it establishes a new type of rule in which everything and everybody is judged on their potential, and we can even now envisage the new performative hierarchies that are beginning to be created.

The performance of prognoses of performance

For all these performances, in which the potential is counted as a chief part of the present condition, prognoses play an indispensable role. No measurement or evaluation of performance can really be made independently of predictions as to how it will develop in future, the opportunities it offers and the risks attendant on it.

On the other hand, performance also means an assessment of forecasting methods, many of which compete on all important markets: how good is the performance of a forecasting method? That not only means how reliable are the predictions that they make about the future, but also, how effectively do they intervene in their subject – to what extent do they positively affect the goal?

A performance researcher’s performance

When we ask Jon McKenzie about the future of performance, we will ask him to reflect on how performance and prognosis interact. What can be inferred from one about the other? To what extent do these terms and the variables they signify change each other? How are they united in this change?

In this context, we hope that McKenzie will follow his own proposal and include artistic performance in his reflection. Prognoses on Movement consciously unites performance artists and scientists, mobilising the stage as a space for their common responses, movements and actions. The question to Jon McKenzie quite specifically is: how does a performance expert stage a lecture performance?

Jon McKenzie announces his presentation Democratizing Torture: Three Scenarios:

»What is the prognosis of our torturous future? Is a world without torture even possible? Drawing on the methods of scenario planning, I will lead an exploration of three future scenarios of democracy and torture.

The first simply extends the present by continuing the decades-long run of a theater of clean torture (sensory deprivation, stress positions, stun guns—techniques which leave no marks) that has been produced in secrecy by democracies in the 20th century, right alongside highly publicized human rights initiatives. We might call this “Torture as Usual.”

In the second scenario, this theater of torture goes public as security-obsessed politicians and citizens openly support “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a development now being rehearsed in US presidential campaigns and popular TV shows,
such as 24 and Lost. Here we glimpse a “Society of the Spectacle of the Scaffold.”

Lastly, we shall address “A World without Torture,” exploring the avenues and obstacles to abolishing torture on a global scale. One obstacle: the most obvious means of countering torture—international monitoring of human rights—has arguably contributed to the development of clean torture techniques so pervasive in the early 21st century.

While traditional scenario planning begins with variables or “drivers” and works toward scenarios, I will work backward, outlining three distinct scenarios and then asking participants to explore which factors are necessary for producing
specific futures.«