repeat conference proposing: a (re)draft

Music: Cliff Martinez: Kafka: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1992)

Panel Proposal for the Performance Studies Division of the Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, Chicago, 2007

Panel Title: Re-communicating (Re)views: Using Intellect to Faithfully Create Sites of Disciplined and Ethical Health Through Acting, Connecting, Looking Back, Moving Forward, and Most Especially Reaching Around: Repetition-Yet-Again, Five Years Later: A Retrospective

I. DESCRIPTION OF PANEL

In the spirit of interdisciplinarity, this panel articulates performance to recent theoretical developments in cultural and rhetorical studies through the concept of repetition, and in this repetition of the panel, more specifically in the idiom of "retrospective." More than a mere idiom (philosophical or otherwise), repetition captures a central, neurotic movement in the ideational (or discursive) histories of both bodily (e.g., performance studies, theatre) and more somatophobic (e.g., philosophy, rhetoric) disciplines. In her own way, each panelist will explore how mimesis and imitation continue to haunt innovations in performance and rhetorical theory, and how a return or a "reaching in" to our own repetition compulsion helps to unravel the coherence of (our academic) identity in two important senses: (1) identity as it is constituted in "subjectivity" (e.g., Butler's notion of performativity as the essential precondition for all politics); and (2) identity as it is debated in object theory (e.g., descriptivism vs. anti-descriptivism). In order to underscore the anxieties of/about repetition, and in particular in order to do so in relation to the economic mandate to "perform—or else!" (McKenzie), the object under investigation is the convention panel itself—currently in its fifth iteration—understood as a repetitive, performative pedagogy of academic identity.

II. BACKGROUND

In his Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze framed the problem of repetition as a problem of representation. Because of various Western conceits, which we can trace back to Plato's condemnation of mimesis in both its poetic (rhetorical) and performative (theatre) modes, repetition has been construed as a relationship between two similar, equal, or identical forms. Deleuze suggests that we treat repetition as "difference without concept," meaning that repetition becomes absorbed into the same and similar instead of being understood as a distinct (viz., "different") iteration (xv-xvii). Yet, in our contemporary age of "cynical ideology" (Sloterdijk), people know very well that there is no pure or absolute form of repetition—that, in fact, each iteration is different if only for temporality and therefore quantitude—yet we continue to behave as if repetition were of the same. Consequently, Deleuze argues that any variation in repetition leads to a suspicion, that something is being hidden or covered over in the iteration. Although Deleuze's insights are primarily philosophical, we believe that this "suspicious sense," as it were, goes directly to the heart of our collective scholarly performance.

At issue, then, is a performative misrecognition of the different (or pure difference). Slajov Zizek suggests that the "suspicious sense" is the symptom of misrecognition, and that combined they sustain an "ideological fantasy": "What [people] overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring the reality, their social activity. They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know" (32). In the last twenty years, this kind of perserveration or seemingly autonomic "doing" of bodies has become deeply wed to an ideological fantasy of scholarly life, and our suspicion has been grafted onto the reality of what Jon McKenzie has characterized as an organizational, cultural, and technological performativity increasingly governed by the instrumental logics of Capital.

Translated into the more mundane project of the panel itself, we contend that professional performances have become increasingly "survivalist" or "apocalyptic" in tone, and that the suspicious sense is being grafted on everything from tenure standards to the death of disciplines (e.g., the eclipse of performance studies by rise of theory in theatre departments; the murder of rhetoric by cultural studies, and so on). One consequence of this mania is that alternative forms of scholarly presentation have been rigorously excluded in most NCA divisions, excepting those more open to performative alternatives (e.g., the Performance Studies Division and the Ethnography Division). Indeed, it is this policing of performance that routinely arouses the suspicion that a given conference panel will be "more of the same old thing," and it is precisely the suspicious sense that continues to sustain "more of the same old thing." By exploring the repetition dynamic, this panel promises to be very different.

III. THE DIFFERNCES

In the 2005 and 2006 repetitions of the panel, we introduced the video "remix" work of Dr. Patricia Suchy, which was shown in tandem with the panel itself. For the fifth anniversary of this panel, in the spirit of an anniversarial reunion, Dr. Suchy will assist in isolating the greatest moments of past iterations which she has captured on video. Panelists will be asked to reflect on these moments, discussing their feelings as well as the invention process behind their conference papers. Audience members will also be asked to reflect on their past experiences with the panel and share their feelings as well. We have contacted two well known television hosts and psychologists, Drs. Keith Ablow and Phil McGraw, in the hope that either would be willing to help moderate our retrospective. If they cannot commit, Dr. Stormer has agreed to host and moderate our retrospective.

Finally, our fifth year anniversary will be the debut of the "Repetition-Yet-Again" franchise. During, before, and after the retrospective audience members will be encouraged to buy commemorative t-shirts and autographed glossies from our merchandise booth. Additionally, CD-ROMs will available for purchase that contain a Repetition-Yet-Again Panel kit, on which franchisees will find the complete text of all the panels papers, the panel proposals, and other documents so that the panel can be presented at regional communication conferences across the country.

IV. PANELISTS

Host: Nathan Stormer, University of Maine

Retrospective One: "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, or, Drunk with Posts" Aric Putnam, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
1. The Dada Version: Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post. Post.
2. And for the Suspicious: This essay sympathetically explores the recurrence of the prefix “post” in performances of academic identity. “Post” has done exemplary duty modifying “fordist,” “modern,” “structural,” “national,” “feminist,” and “Marxist” and in so doing served as the vessel in which we’ve bottled our conversations about disciplinary identity. Will there always be another “post” on the shelf, or is it time for harder stuff?

Retrospective Two: "Repetition, Rinse, Repeat: On Wooden Paneling," Joshua Gunn, University of Texas at Austin
According to Freud, repetition compulsion is governed by something "beyond" the Pleasure Principle—namely, the death drive. Combining ethnography, auto-ethnography and a smidgen of self-critique, this essay examines the plight of the typical panel-goer at an academic convention, particularly in relation to the following question: If the practice of panel-going is not governed by pleasure, then what performance of death are we repeating? The answer, I suggest—with a nod to object-relations theory—is an unseeming religiosity of surplus, an encounter with a strangely wooden "objet (petit) a" unique to NCA.

Retrospective Three: "Ms. Pacman and the Vagina Dentata" Chani Marchiselli, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
In addition to frustration and privation, castration is one of the three forms of "lack of object" identified in Lacanian psychoanalysis. This paper examines how frustration (the imaginary lack of a real object) and privation (the real lack of a symbolic object) are repeatedly eclipsed during academic panel sessions by a symbolic lack of the imaginary object of communication. As a fundamentally monological--and therefore homosocial--forum, the panel form encourages endless phallic resurrections—ghosts of what is not, ghosts of the previous convention, ghosts of the illusion of mastery, knowledge, and the rest of it. This paper argues for an embrace of "lack" and the promotion of universal rountabling.

Retrospective Four: "The Interminable Return of," Christopher Swift, Northwestern University.
Repeating the insight associated by numerous scholars with the early writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, namely that all language is "rhetorical," has come to occupy the status of a confirmation of faith in our discipline. But even this thinker of the eternal return of the same developed beyond such an abstraction, already tired in the nineteenth century, much more quickly than we have. The very discourse of the eternal return performs a transfiguration of discourse rather than simply writing about it. This paper attempts to follow Nietzsche's model.

Respondent: Michael S. Bowman, Louisiana State University

Repeat Attendees: Jake Simmons, University of Southern Illinois, Naida Zukic, University of Southern Illinois

Stunt Doubles: David Terry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Michael LeVan, University of Southern Florida

Videographer, Gaffer, and Key Grip: Patricia Suchy, Louisiana State University

References Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Seid, Michael and Dave Thomas. Franchising for Dummies. New York: For Dummies, 2000.
Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1988.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.