ABSTRACT
In his book You Must Change Your Life, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk offers a glimpse of another life, one that mixes the contemplative and active lives. ‘What was once called the vita contemplativa to contrast it with the vita activa is, in fact, a vita performativa. In its own way, it is as active as the most active life’. Today, he writes, ‘all powers flow into the intensification of the practising subject, which progresses to ever higher levels of a purely performative mode of being in the course of the exercises’ (2013). Sloterdijk’s provocative term resonates in a complementary way with the vita performactiva which Serbian performance theorist Ana Vujanović describes as rare historical moments in which ‘public/political practice and artistic performance constituted the continuum of civil life’ (2012). This powerful hybrid practice, the ‘vita performactiva, was dialectically realised, but without any antagonism or binarism whatsoever’ in 6th-century BC Athens and 18th-century Europe. Neoliberalism and the crisis of representative democracy, Vujanović states, effectively forecloses contemporary practices of the vita performactiva.
Drawing on Sloterdijk and Vujanović, we can approach the vita performativa as emerging life forms that mix performance practices, digital media, and design processes in creating modes of processual, non-substantive thought and action. Such modes can best be described as post-conceptual and post-dramatic personae whose existential function overlaps and in the long run subsumes oneself. With respect to the general theory of performance, the vita performativa asks: how is your subject, your research performing at the level of life, work, and history in this age of global performativity? The vita performativa is thus to global performativity – the generalised demand to perform or else – what Nietzsche’s gay science is to Descartes’s scientific method: an embodied challenge to one’s very sense of being. The vita performativa entails new ways of living in the world, new modes of social organisation and subject formation, and new spatiotemporal architectures for work and life, patterns all associated in intimate and sometimes terrifying ways.
