This article was downloaded by: [Concordia University Libraries]On: 14 November 2013, At: 05:14Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing ArtsPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20

On Falling IIIArseli DokumaciPublished online: 01 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Arseli Dokumaci (2013) On Falling III, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 18:4, 107-115,DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.814334

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.814334

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in thepublications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations orwarranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of orendorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independentlyverified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arisingdirectly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

107

On Falling IllA R S E L I D O K U M A C I

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 18 ·4 : pp .107-115ht tp : / /dx .do i .o rg /10 .1080/13528165 .2013 .814334

This is a meditation on falling: falling as a shift in awareness towards the materiality of the body and its environment; falling as a disruption of the habitual; falling as a negotiation of physical obstacles, such as the ones described in the quotes below – one on disease and the other on site-specific performance.

A landscape is viewed not as a field of possibility but of difficulties to negotiate. The ordinary sense of free and spontaneous movement is now replaced by calculated effort.… Etymologically, ‘ease’ comes from the French word aise, originally meaning ‘elbow room’ or ‘opportunity’. This experience of world-as-opportunity is precisely what dis-ease calls into question. (Leder 1990: 81)1

[The site] is inescapably of and in the real world but it is visited in the extra daily guise of performance.… Performers may be ill equipped or differentially prepared to deal with conditions in comparison to those who usually occupy the place … literally battling with the elements, trying to maintain coherence.… Audiences witness the impact of real phenomena, albeit in a work of invention. (Pearson 2010: 171–2)2

In this essay, I seek to explore falling through the metaphor of falling ill. Drawing on my own medical condition, I focus on a chronic disabling disease,3 rheumatoid arthritis (RA), which is characterized by pain on movement and at rest. Throughout the text, I shall use visual materials from my PhD research in which I followed twenty-three individuals with RA living in Québec, Canada, and İstanbul, Turkey, throughout their everyday lives and created a two-hour ethnographic documentary on invisible disabilities.

My exploration of falling ill draws upon a theory that, despite its potential for understanding performance, has not much been used in the field. This is James Gibson’s theory of affordances (1986) and I begin the essay by explaining what an ‘affordance’ is.

W H A T I S A N ‘A F F O R D A N C E ’ ?

The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. (Gibson 1986: 127)

The notion of affordance is an extension of Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and therefore can be better understood with a brief introduction. Perceptual information, Gibson says, is a pole between the body and its exterior, specifying both ends at the same time (126). The information that an organism detects about its exterior comes together with its relation to that exterior. This way, the organism actively orients itself to the stimulus information by acting in a complementary fashion.

Perception, in Gibson’s account, is inextricable from acting and it occurs as a ‘function of the environment’, primarily because this environment is not an abstract space but a locale dense with matter (Mace 1977: 45). This locale is made up of three components: the medium, substances and surfaces. The medium (water and air) is homogenous in structure and affords perception and locomotion by allowing bodies, light, heat, sound and volatile particles to travel through it. Substances, on the other hand, resist locomotion; however,

1 Drew Leder is alluding to Herbert Plügge’s descriptions of cardiac patients’ sense of space pursuant to a heart attack.

2 Mike Pearson is writing about the site-specific performances of Brith Gof.

3 The concept of disease is often used to denote pathologies and abnormalities whereas illness is used to refer to an individual’s experience of disease or of poor health (for further discussion, see Young 1982). This is rather a medically driven distinction. In the essay, I prefer to use the terms interchangeably.

I SSN 1352-8165 p r in t /1469-9990 on l ine© 2013 TAYLOR & FRANCIS

PR 18.4 On Falling.indd 107 16/10/2013 07:23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Con

cord

ia U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

5:14

14

Nov

embe

r 20

13

108

they offer a ground to stand upon and allow manipulation depending on their rigidity, viscosity, plasticity and composition (Gibson 1986: 20). The surfaces are what separate the medium from substances. They are ‘where most of the action is’ because light, energy, vibrations and vaporization are given their paths through surfaces and it is the properties of a surface (for example, its texture, layout) that reveals what it affords (23).

The whole point of this triad is, as Tim Ingold interprets it, to highlight the fact that surfaces do not cut off ‘materiality from immateriality’ but only separate ‘one kind of material (such as stone) from another (such as air)’ (2007: 6). That is, the medium is not the empty space of physics where any of its points is identical with another but a close-packed continuity of matter where each ‘point of observation’ has its own optical, chemical, acoustic and thermal structure (Gibson 1986: 17). As such, these structures can change from one point to another as does the stimulus information that emanates from them (17). Yet a certain kind of essential structure begins to emerge within this changing flow of information because all these changes (in energy levels, radiant light, and so forth) are given a structure by the surfaces and persisting features of the environment that underlie them (Gibson 1966: 3). What an organism perceives, then, is this ‘invariant structure’ and it is capable of detecting the invariance precisely because it is itself part of that environment, that is, its ‘egoreception’ is inextricable from its ‘exteroception’ (Gibson 1986: 116). This way the organism resonates to the incoming information and perception occurs as ‘an act of attention … an achievement’ (149).

It is in this regard that Gibson proposes the notion of affordances: If the complementarity of the information about the self and the environment leads to perception, then there is no reason why, he says, that the same complementarity should not lead to the perception of more complex interactions (141). Upon seeing a flat, rigid and knee-high surface, I do not only see the surface but also the possibility of sitting, which is embodied in

its material. Affordances are these possibilities for action, the actualization of which depends upon the reciprocity between the properties of an organism and the environment. For a good hitter in baseball, for instance, a pitch affords a wide range of movement possibilities that are not otherwise available in the absence of such visual, postural and sensori-motor skills (Noë 2004: 106).

An affordance is material and relational at the same time, and those relations not only shape the possibility of an action but also the different modalities in which that action is executed. When passing through an aperture, I may ‘maintain a frontal walking gait’, rotate my body or take an indirect route depending on, among other factors, the ratio between the width of my shoulders and that of the aperture (Warren and Whang 1987: 372).

An affordance, Gibson adds, is also ‘neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like’ (Gibson 1986: 129). Thus devout people may experience different affordances when they kneel, bow and prostrate during prayer according to the presence or lack of presence of physical impairments. Or a person with perfect abilities and in good health may still fail to perform an action under ideal conditions (Chemero 2003: 190).

Ultimately the affordances of the environment are inexhaustible (Stoffregen 2003: 120). These offerings, while existing independently of individuals, only occur as ‘properties [of things] taken with reference to the observer’ (Gibson 1986: 143). At the core of the notion lies this ‘apparently contradictory’ character (Heft 2001: 132). Before going into how this contradiction unfolds, I shall turn to the process of falling ill.

H E A L T H A N D T H E H A B I T U A L

I do not notice my body, but neither do I, for the most part, notice the bed on which I sleep, the clothes I wear, the chair in which I sit down to breakfast, the car I drive to work.… As such, it is not simply my surface that disappears but entire regions with which I dwell in intimacy. (Leder 1990: 35)

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 18 ·4 : ON FALL ING

PR 18.4 On Falling.indd 108 16/10/2013 07:23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Con

cord

ia U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

5:14

14

Nov

embe

r 20

13

109D O K U M A C I : O N F A L L I N G I L L

Health is ‘life lived in the silence of the organs’ (Leriche 1936 cited in Canguilhem 1989: 91). Feeling well, we hardly ever think of our bodies, the visceral operations they achieve and the movements that they make. In good health, both the physicality of the body and the places that it inhabits tend to fall into silence. In other words, health is present when the two poles of an affordance and, of course, the very affordances themselves (for example, sleeping, wearing, sitting and driving) are absent from one’s awareness. Unconsciously engaged and repeatedly performed, everyday affordances become socialized (see Costall 1995: 471) and fall into routine. The point is, even when ‘there is a range of affordances potentially available to be engaged in any given environment’, habituation begins to blind us to them (Heft 2001: 132). ‘One sits on a chair; … one does this, not that, with this particular object’ (Costall 2006: 24). But a subject has ‘no need to invent a [new] world to extend himself out into’ as long as there is an ‘inevitable bonding of his own interior states with companion objects in the outside world and he easily locates himself in that external world’ (Scarry 1985: 162). In the silence of things, the action possibilities offered by the environment remain buried under what appears to be its fixed furnishings.

But for all we know, actions do not always fall into routine. Nor does the body keep its silence on all occasions. There are times when things literally fall onto the ground; times when they, as the etymology of the word suggests, ‘fail’. The metaphor of falling ill obviously owes its meaning to this sense of the word. Illness is, as Michael Bury puts it, ‘a form of biographical disruption’ where ‘the structures of everyday life and the forms of knowledge which underpin them are disrupted’ (1982: 169). It is this very interruption made to the habitual, which shifts one’s attention to the very physicality of the body itself, which characterizes the process of falling ill.

In order to explore this disruption further, I would like to focus on the special case of what René Leriche calls ‘pain-disease’ (Leriche 1937 cited in Canguilhem 1989: 96). This is because

pain-disease, unlike other forms of disease where disruption is anatomical or physiological, involves an individual’s awareness of the disturbance (98). In this regard, it bears a special relation to the idea of affordances.

‘ P A I N - D I S E A S E ’ A N D B O D I L Y

A W A R E N E S S

You touch on, you are tired of or hungry for something, but pain, as described in Scarry’s seminal work, ‘is not “of” or “for” anything – it is itself alone’ (1985: 162). Being in a state of ‘objectlessness’, it resists being materialized in a representational form or being communicated (162). There are no words, no tools, no symbols or events in the world outside that can match the state of the individual experiencing it. It is a unique somatic event without a readily available environmental counterpart. Now if Gibson’s theories were to be revisited in light of this description, it would appear that pain-disease takes on a special status within the context of affordances.

To recall: ‘The awareness of the world and of one’s complementary relations to the world are not separable’ and an affordance ‘points two ways, to the environment and to the observer’ (Gibson 1986: 141). Pain-disease, however, fits neither of these specifications. In the face of pain-disease, the habitual world narrows down and there remains no complementary relations that can be occupied in a routine manner. Characterized by utter ‘objectlessness’, pain lacks one of the two poles that, in their complementarity, give rise to the actualization of affordances. Pain and the limitations it imposes force a redefinition of affordances and the creation of a new one out of an apparently hostile environment.

That said, it is important to add a few comments on the ontological nature of pain in general. Pain, in its transient occurrences, is a necessity for an organism’s survival, warning it against potential injury or danger (see Melzack 2001). This is also the reason why, first, pain receptors ‘adapt either little or not at all’ (Leder 1990: 72) and, second, pain is always

PR 18.4 On Falling.indd 109 16/10/2013 07:23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Con

cord

ia U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

5:14

14

Nov

embe

r 20

13

110

■■ Subject without health problems (left). Subject with RA (right) describing her movements: ‘When I was very ill, I grasped my hair and bent my head down towards the brush without lifting my arm but using it as a support instead. I brushed my hair like this.’

■■ Subject with RA: ‘First, I do two or three buttons and leave the rest unbuttoned. Then I wear the shirt like a pullover from the top….I prefer this method because it saves time. I can do it the other way too (buttoning one by one). But practically speaking, why should I? Also when I take it out like a pullover, I can use both hands at the same time.’

■■ Subject with RA describing his movements: ‘If I do not bring that elbow the same level as the table, see it is going to drop like this.’

■■ ‘So I got to bring down the elbow to put the cup on the table.’

■■ Subject without health problems (left). Subject with RA (right)

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 18 ·4 : ON FALL ING

PR 18.4 On Falling.indd 110 16/10/2013 07:23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Con

cord

ia U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

5:14

14

Nov

embe

r 20

13

111

■■ ‘The other day, my both knees were painful. I tried holding onto the armrest like this....But with the armrest, you need to force with the wrist and my wrist was in pain.’

■■ ‘I did like this (leaning on the armrest with her upper body), then it didn't work.’

■■ ‘Then I tried first like this (putting her right knee on the sofa) but, just couldn't turn my knee around (toward the front).

■■ ‘You have to go up. It is complicated, hard to do and especially when I am using a small handle like this.’

■■ Subject with RA describing his actions: ‘It is hard because it is a complicated movement. You do two or three combinations of movement at the same time. You have to grip.’

■■ ‘You have to twist.’

■■ ‘At last, I used my right knee to move (taking support from her right knee and push her body up) and I was then able to stand up.’

■■ ‘So this is why I went like this.’

(All images © Arseli Dokumacı, 2013)

D O K U M A C I : O N F A L L I N G I L L

PR 18.4 On Falling.indd 111 16/10/2013 07:23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Con

cord

ia U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

5:14

14

Nov

embe

r 20

13

112

perceived as a state that needs to be ended (so that the approaching danger can be avoided or the injury repaired) (Scarry 1985). This means that one’s bodily awareness persists as long as pain persists and pain is perceived not only as ‘an actuality’ but also as ‘an alteration of that actuality’ (289).

This description of pain is now followed by a series of stills captured from my ethnographic film where daily task performances of subjects with RA are documented. In some stills, these performances are compared with those of subjects without any known health problems – the aim of the comparison being to emphasize how the experience of pain-disease may affect the movement possibilities perceived by individuals.4

P E R F O R M A N C E A S A F F O R D A N C E

C R E A T I O N

It may be that pain-disease happens at the extremities of existing affordances but, as the above documented improvisations suggest, at such moments of excessive constraint something else happens. Whenever we are bereft of any means, any tools and ways of articulating ourselves, then we resort to our – in the seminal phrase of Mauss – ‘first and most natural technical object, and … technical means’, that is, our bodies (2006: 83).

Referring to an actual tool, Scarry writes that the connection between an act and its object remains almost invisible in situations other than when a tool is being used. But in work, this bonding ‘becomes for the first time palpable and concrete in the tool’ and as such becomes ‘subject to direction and control’, about to create many other offerings to sentience (Scarry 1985: 176). Similar fluidity between the interior and the exterior occurs in the explicit use of the body as a tool in pain-disease.

Disabled subjects whose performances are documented above, begin choreographing new ways of moving within, to borrow Ingold’s term, everyday ‘taskscapes’ (2000: 154) in order to avert and accommodate pain. They author such techniques of movement that embody the

properties of a surface that are complementary to their pains – properties that, in an ideal world, should have been embodied within the built forms of the everyday. They also invent behavioural tactics that are not habitual automated responses to quotidian surfaces but are the result of a careful attentiveness to their substantial properties like their viscosity, plasticity and rigidity (such as using a piece of plastic to grip a cap, running hot water over the cap, inserting a table knife under the cap or using pliers when trying to open a jar).

The experience of a state that is only characterized by its lack of a world-counterpart forces people to use the environment they find themselves in in unexpected and unpredictable ways and these ways, as seen above, come to represent ‘new’ affordances. That is to say, latent affordances of the environment become actualized in everyday performances of disabled subjects and it is precisely during these ephemeral creations that the ‘contradiction’ lying at the core of affordances is resolved. In these performances as affordance creation, bodies move and make at the same time and, in and through these everyday choreographies, they disinter opportunities for action that would otherwise remain unexplored in the environment. To explore this further, I shall turn to another aspect of affordances, that is, their historicity.

P E R F O R M A N C E S O F T H E E V E R Y D A Y

A N D ‘ W O R L D - I N - F O R M A T I O N ’ 5

Gibson’s term ‘niche’ refers to an array of affordances actualized in the environment in its own process of evolution (Gibson 1986: 128). For example, a knee-high rock surface that is sat upon would be followed by the first chairs invented, which would then be followed by rocking, and revolving mechanisms, folding or reclining chairs, chairs for hairdressers, wheelchairs, or chairs with adjustable armrests, lumbar supports and seat depths – culminating in an epoch where the increasing number of lower back pain complaints, as Galen Cranz suggests (1998), is only matched by the rapid-

4 Needless to say everybody has their own unique techniques and ‘tactics’ of performing daily tasks. In comparing performances of ‘healthy’ subjects with those of subjects with RA, I do not intend to suggest two groups of individuals performing in two distinct ways but to highlight how the experience of a disease may force people to go beyond the limits of the bodily notations inscribed in the design of objects.

5 Tim Ingold’s phrase (Ingold 2007:11).

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 18 ·4 : ON FALL ING

PR 18.4 On Falling.indd 112 16/10/2013 07:23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Con

cord

ia U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

5:14

14

Nov

embe

r 20

13

113

growing market for ergonomic office furniture.As this rather graphical sequence suggests,

‘matter … is historical’ (Duden 1991: 7) and within this historicity, activities of living beings do not take place on one strand; the evolution of environmental surfaces, materials, artefacts, tools and technologies on another. Instead, they all are enmeshed in one single becoming where ‘the world itself takes on the character of an organism’ (Lovelock 1979 cited in Ingold 2000: 200). The liveliness of this organism resides exactly in the co-constitutive materializations of the body and its environment – a materialization that has already begun and to which there is no closure, because affordances, to the extent that they emerge in relation to a specific organism, at the same time exist independently of organisms, leaving some niche always not-yet-occupied. But how do these not-yet-occupied parts unfold in the world’s becoming?

Elaine Scarry writes that the act of making, driven by imagination, transforms the world outside from an ‘inanimate’ space ignorant of human ‘hurtability’ into a place that can respond to that vulnerability by ‘quite literally, “making it” as knowledgeable about human pain as if it were itself animate and in pain’ (1985: 288–9). In order to elucidate her words, she then gives the example of a man making a chair. The man, upon seeing his pregnant wife uncomfortable with her body weight, not only feels her discomfort but at the same time – due to pain’s aversive nature – wishes that it were gone. He then starts making a chair in an attempt at transforming his awareness of pain into something more tangible and shareable. In the process of making, his compassion becomes gradually externalized. This happens first, in the form of ephemeral movements – in a dance entitled ‘body weight begone’ – where he, when visualized without his tools, is ‘standing in one place, moving away, coming back, lifting then letting fall his arm, kneeling than standing, kneeling, half-kneeling, stooping, looking, extending his arm, pulling it back’ (290) and, second, in the emerging shape, layout and texture of the artefact where these movements

are being durably materialized. In the end, the chair made becomes not so much ‘mimetic of the spine’ or ‘mimetic of body weight’ as it is ‘mimetic of sentient awareness’, and its shape functions as ‘the shape of perceived-pain-wished-gone’ (289–90). Just as are the physical properties of a button hook, a pencil gripper, a long-handled comb, an adjustable chair (illustration above) or as are the movements of a hand cutting food on behalf of his friend with arthritic hands or the gesture of an arm extended to a passer-by who has fallen on the ground.

Throughout the series of translations involved in the act of making – from invisible feelings of compassion to ‘visible but disappearing’ (290) movements and then to concrete documents of those movements that can keep occasioning the created affordances even in the absence of their creators – there remains a most decisive moment: a moment that we yet do not see in Scarry’s elaborate account. These series of translations were possible only because what a chair affords has first been actualized in and through the body techniques of the person-in-pain (the pregnant woman in this case). When building an artefact, a fellow being only dances ‘the body weight be gone’ (290) in order to respond to that dance being performed by the body in pain itself.

This comes down to claiming that pain, despite its utter incommunicability, becomes exteriorized in performances of the body in pain. As the body tries to find an accommodating counterpart for its pain in the materiality of the environment, it finds new affordances and in the (real or implied)

■■ Action possibilities explored by disabled subjects in performance and those action possibilities given a durable form in actual tools. Photo Arseli Dokumacı

D O K U M A C I : O N F A L L I N G I L L

PR 18.4 On Falling.indd 113 16/10/2013 07:23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Con

cord

ia U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

5:14

14

Nov

embe

r 20

13

114

presence of the other, these affordances take on an illocutionary force. Daily task-performances of the body in pain are its pain given a form. They are new ways of living the everyday being exposed in their creation. They are, at the same time, demands put on others present in those scenes of utterance – a demand that reads: How can we renegotiate the terms of sharing the same environment that no longer lets me live in it with ease?

M I S F I R E S T H A T M A T T E R

As in the example of a chair being made, this question may be heard and responded to or, as is often the case with many forms of invisible diseases and impairments (some of which are exemplified here), the question may well misfire. Or worse, as various forms of oppression and exclusion in history have shown, it may be heard but deliberately ignored. Yet, in either case, the other is there and his or her demand is still posed and will continue to be posed because the world – in the margins of its ongoing becoming – would continue to afford less to some than others whether because they fall ill, or because they fall outside of what currently defines the norm, or because they are deliberately deprived of the ‘supports’ necessary to sustain a life (see Butler 2011). It is precisely within these very extremities of ‘world-in-formation’ or at its, to borrow the saying from Derrida, closure ‘as playing space’, the significance of performance becomes clearer (Derrida 2001: 316). Between the tension of what is already and what is yet-to-be materialized, between what is and what has not been recognized, it is the temporality of performance that provides a possible venue for improvising different ways of affording a life than the dominant discourse. If the body is our ‘first and most natural instrument’, I may then venture to say that performance is our first and foremost affordance creation (Mauss 2006: 83). Because, when the possibilities of the environment turn to obstacles and when all other possibilities for articulation shrink to zero, the process of performance itself gives a possible place of utterance where one can take

a stand on life against limitations and current norms of the everyday, and there occurs, to use Judith Butler’s words, ‘a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of living that count as “life”’ within that environment (1993: 16).

F A L L I N G A S C O - C R E A T I O N

When the environment is seen not as a fixed entity but in its own becoming, as I have tried to do here, then it becomes impossible to sustain a moral boundary that presents health and illness in opposition. For when life is not considered as ‘a principle that is separately installed inside individual organisms’ but as ‘what is going on in the generative field’ – a field that is ‘constituted by the totality of organism-environment relations’ (Ingold 2000: 200) – illness does not stand for something ‘below’ or ‘fallen’. Instead ‘the possible abuse of health’, as Canguilhem says in alluding to Valery, appears as ‘part of health’ (1989: 200).

In the environment’s historically extended becoming, health reads as ‘a margin of tolerance for’ this ongoing formation (197) and disease as ‘a reduction’ in this margin where ‘reduction consists in being able to live only in another environment and not merely in some parts of the previous one’ (199). That is, disease occurs when the environment, as the niche that it has historically become, no longer affords, in the social and physiological and even in the biological sense (see 126). Occurring on the extremities of organism and environment interactions, dis-ease asks for a reshaping of these relations so that life can continue to take its course over history because:

Man feels in good health – which is health itself – only when he feels more than normal – that is, adapted to the environment and its demands – but normative, capable of following new norms of life. (Canguilhem 1989: 200)

The word ‘normative’ here denotes something that not only imposes already established norms but at the same time calls for the creation of new ones: a normative with a mutational function.6 This call for

6 This is certainly not to claim that individuals, when experiencing pain-disease or any other form of illness, suddenly start creating things that they would not otherwise have. Needless to say, suffering does not necessarily generate the same responses in each person. Nor is it to claim that there is something uniquely subversive, emancipating or repressive in such states – as some disability studies’ scholars have claimed contemporary theorists on the body have done so (see Siebers 2006: 177 and Wendell 1996: 169 for criticisms of Butler and Haraway). It goes without saying that pain is physically debilitating rather than anything else. That said, I shall also add that pain and illness experience cannot be explained away by this individualizing aspect of suffering, especially when the techniques of survival that disabled subjects invent on a day-to-day basis are taken into consideration.

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 18 ·4 : ON FALL ING

PR 18.4 On Falling.indd 114 16/10/2013 07:23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Con

cord

ia U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

5:14

14

Nov

embe

r 20

13

115

a renegotiation of the terms of everyday living, which dis-ease brings along, suggests another way of reading falling used in the metaphor of ‘falling ill’ than the one defined by a value-ridden vertical axis: falling as a path to creation, or to be more accurate, to co-creation.

That being said, I shall refer back to the beginning – to the quote on the site-specific performances of Brith Gof (Pearson 2010) – and conclude this meditation on falling with a broader question: Considering that artistic performance is often characterized by an interruption made to the habitual and that it is constituted by ‘a first philosophy’, that is,‘[t]he question of how one conducts oneself in relation to the other’ (Read 1993: 93), can the concept of performance as affordance creation then provide us with new ways of thinking about aesthetic performance as well?

R E F E R E N C E S

Bury, Michael (1982) ‘Chronic illness as biographical disruption’, Sociology of Health and Illness 4(2): 167–82.

Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’, London and New York, NY: Routledge.

Butler, Judith (2011) Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street, presented in Venice, Italy, 7 September, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en, accessed 15 January 2013.

Canguilhem, Georges (1989 [1966]) The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett, New York, NY: Zone Books.

Chemero, Anthony (2003) ‘An outline of a theory of affordances’, Ecological Psychology 15(2): 181–95.

Costall, Alan (1995) ‘Socializing affordances’, Theory and Psychology 5(4): 467–81.

Costall, Alan (2006) ‘On being the right size: Affordances and the meaning of scale’, in Gary Lock and Brian Molyneaux (eds) Confronting Scale in Archaeology: Issues of theory and practice, New York, NY: Springer, pp. 15–26.

Cranz, Galen (1998) The Chair: Rethinking culture, body, and design, New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company.

Derrida, Jacques (2001 [1967]) ‘The theater of cruelty and the closure of representation’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 292–316.

Duden, Barbara (1991) The Woman beneath the Skin: A doctor’s patients in eighteenth-century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gibson, James (1983 [1966]) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Gibson, James (1986 [1979]) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Heft, Harry (2001) Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the legacy of William James’s radical empiricism, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Ingold, Tim (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill, London and New York, NY: Routledge.

Ingold, Tim (2007) ‘Materials against materiality’, Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 1–16.

Leder, Drew (1990) The Absent Body, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Mace, William (1977) ‘James J. Gibson’s strategy for perceiving: Ask not what’s inside your head, but what your head is inside of’, in Robert Shaw and John Bransford (eds) Perceiving, Acting and Knowing: Towards an ecological psychology, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 43–65.

Mauss, Marcel (2006 [1935]) ‘Techniques of the body’, in Nathan Schlanger (ed.) Techniques, Technology and Civilization, trans. Ben Brewster, New York, NY: Berghahn, pp. 77–96.

Melzack, Ronald (2001) ‘Pain and the neuromatrix in the brain’, Journal of Dental Education 65(12): 1,378–82.

Noë, Alva (2004) Action in Perception, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Read, Alan (1993) Theatre and Everyday Life: An ethics of performance, London: Routledge.

Scarry, Elaine (1985) The Body in Pain: The making and unmaking of the world, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Siebers, Tobin (2006) ‘Disability in theory: From social constructionism to the new realism of the body’, in Lennard Davis (ed.) The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd edn, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 173–83.

Stoffregen, Thomas (2003) ‘Affordances as properties of the animal–environment system’, Ecological Psychology 15(2): 115–34.

Warren, William and Whang, Suzanne (1987) ‘Visual guidance of walking through apertures: Body-scaled information for affordances’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human perception and performance, 13(3): 371–83.

Wendell, Susan (1996) The Rejected Body: Feminist philosophical reflections on disability, New York, NY: Routledge.

Young, Allan (1982) ‘The anthropologies of illness and sickness’, Annual Review of Anthropology 11: 257–85.

D O K U M A C I : O N F A L L I N G I L L

PR 18.4 On Falling.indd 115 16/10/2013 07:23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Con

cord

ia U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 0

5:14

14

Nov

embe

r 20

13