Etymologies (2006)

Collaboration with Ang Song Ming (http://www.circadiansongs.com/) and Donna Ong (http://www.donnaong.com/). Real-time digital manipulation of audio samples of Chinese dialect radio news broadcast. Performed live in April, 2006 at The Substation (http://www.substation.org/). ----- My grasp of the thematic underlying the performance project Etymologies is about an aim to (re)trace the loss found in the normal state of language, i.e. the pragmatic usage of words and such like. And how, in conveying that normal state is at once illuminating and illusory in the process of determining social/political/personal identities. It led me to question: What does language want of me? What is my experience of language? Can that experience of language be intelligible through language itself? How do I share that intelligibility? Who is in need of that intelligibility? Who wants to be understood? Indeed, what is to be understood, and by what means, to what ends? Alongside these thoughts, I pondered on a speculation from Judith Butler, in the introduction, “Acting in Concert” (p.3) to her recent book Undoing Gender (2004, published by Routledge): “There are advantages to remaining less than intelligible, if intelligibility is understood as that which is produced as a consequence of recognition according to prevailing social norms. Indeed, if my options are loathsome, if I have no desire to be recognised within a certain set of norms, then it follows that my sense of survival depends upon escaping the clutch of those norms by which recognition is conferred. It may well be that my sense of social belonging is impaired by the distance I take, but surely that estrangement is preferable to gaining a sense of intelligibility by virtue of norms that will only do me in from another direction. Indeed, the capacity to develop a critical relation to these norms presupposes a distance from them, an ability to suspend or defer the need for them, even as there is a desire for norms that might let one live. The critical relation depends as well on a capacity, invariably collective, to articulate an alternative, minority version of sustaining norms or ideals that enable me to act. If I am someone who cannot be without doing, then the conditions of my doing are, in part, the conditions of my existence. If my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by norms, then the possibility of my persistence as an “I” depends upon my being able to do something with what is done with me. This does not mean that I can remake the world so that I become its maker.”