[...]s, for all the good that does them. They feel affected, and have a vague and almost unwilling sense of being touched at a certain emotional depth, but are unable to interpret these feelings (isn't that the case with most art performances?). Beuys celebrates complex and incomprehensible rituals before an astonished audience. He subjects his person to difficult tasks and appears to be making some kind of sacrifice in doing so. Beuys, after all, wishes to heal. To judge by his statements, he wishes to redeem the German people and indeed all of humankind from their social evils, their petrifaction and impotence. In this sense, he transcends the role of the artist. He sees his audience not, in the traditional sense, as a free counterpart to whom he presents a work (as form and expression of his own self), but as a material to be formed. He appears as the people's tribune, as teacher, seer, healer and prophet, transforming the role of the artist into that of the shaman. Kohut stresses that the effect of messianic and charismatic personalities is not necessarily detrimental under all circumstances. At times of severe crisis, it is not the modestly self-doubting type of personality that is needed (who generally makes up the leading stratum in calmer times). In times of fear, the masses turn to a messianic or charismatic personality, not because above all they have recognized his abilities and competence, but because they feel that this leader will satisfy their need to be imperturbably convinced of being right, or because they want to identify with his strength and security.
(caution criticizing beuys and abramovic, you don't know all about them. your criticism is certain aspect of their persona and performance face, in order to make your own point and argument. it is not to understand their works. is this ok?)

when ideas fail, words come in very handy. (Goethe?)

all serious thinking is interpersonal? it is the key to how we think by challenging each other with our ideas.

this is early, i should really give lectures in 20 years.

intimacy: first talking than thinking (maybe even taking it back), feeling an idiot afterward. When the saying is taken over by rhetoric or maneuvering or calculation then the problem is persuading or proving, not intimacy. (intimate thoughts in Shakespear). running with strategy in conversing and conversation (winning a round or winning an argument) is traceable back to power and coercion and its discomforts and anxieties. the art that i am talking about should not win the conversation. (but why intimacy in the art project at all?) by intimacy i find a route to my true consciousness. in intimacy only there is the possibility for love. not making the other/audience to think in a certain way, but exactly the opposite, the performer has to loose the game of convincement or wit (in her work/form/performance).

shyness: not the clinical term. i am talking about a shyness that is deep in the character, a kind of trembling before the other.

the ethical relation to the other, as always important, stakes are higher in performance? the proximity of the art object, the relation of the face to face relationship between the speaker and the listener, is the later container of ethical stake?

not audience attention, but audience imagination. not their reaction, but their response. Usually a response is a reply to a query not the result of a stimulus. Stimulus is an urgent vital process that acts to arouse action in shortest time. that time that is the price for thinking.

shakespear, the Everest of acting. Why performance/theater is not related to thinking and is always setup for acting and action? need for drama.

the event has happened off stage, now we talk about it. Macbeth, unlike tarantino!

violence is symbolized in many good old art. karaoke, etc.
violence is art-performance is exhibited...

the power of voice in islam, taboo of body.
no one is beheaded in the history of islam. (read tarikhe sakhtkoshi) contrast to French revolution.
i am not going to critique islam, i don't know what it is, just let me perform it.

who performs? someone doing something?
what is the cure for shyness.
‘performing for the other’

silent coming and going of the feminine, (form of shyness?)

when we send the shyest as an ambassador to represent us.

It is a self-defining system of signs referring to signs.

a quiet listener. we have yet no idea what is speak. how taking transforms the mind that talks. conditions of thinking in relation to talking, before or after the mouth that talks. thinking in other languages. if intimacy is saying before thinking, how fits the acts of maulwurfe?

work on shyness, I have to start (slowly) with what i (kind of) know.

“...Nudged on the scene as a kind of shivering being, anxious and shy,..” (kafka, test)

There is the suggestion here, as in Holderlin, that timidity might be a dialect of stupidity. (Finding no way of testing out of these subtle complicities, one falls asleep, exhausted by the distress of proving one's most minimal merit.) (Avital Ronell, The Veils of Servility)

According to Silvan Tomkins, “shame operates only after interest or enjoyment has been activated.”

as Sedgwick has argued, for some people, and most often queer subjects, “shame is simply the first, and remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity: one that ... has its own, powerfully productive and powerfully social metaphoric possibilities.

the idea is that the performance that avows its performanceness acknowledges the difficulty of fitting into roles, finding identities, and managing a self, especially a self vulnerable to the effects of stigma.

is there a queerness in me and my performance? is shyness, they way i do it, queer?

turn the spectator to the reader.

does shame intertwines with queer?
this affect and mode of performance (which normative euro American culture would rather eradicate) can be queered, twisted and turned into endless artful enactments.
queer, as experimental linguistic representational and political artistic performance.

shameless in my shyness. (at the level of affect theory?)

shyness: looking otherwise and feeling differently

to act shamed of exactly that which he is excited. (is this a queer subject?)

queer is not isomorphic with gay or lesbian or any other fixed identity, rather, queerness undoes all identities into an endless multiplicity and unbecoming. (liquefaction of any solidification)
queer seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception on a filiations.
Indeed, the performativity of both queer and shame can be reiterated differently; the subject can disidentify from such interpolations and re-deploy the abjecting and/or disciplining of the terms in unforeseen ways, which Warhol did.

In surrender the head bends and meets the heart. The head that does not bend has no value, and the head that is stiff will have to bend sometime, either in surrender or in shame. The head that bends in surrender will never have to bend in shame. Shame accompanies arrogance. Shyness accompanies Love. See how children are endowed with shyness, that is natural. Shyness is inherent. Shame is inflicted by society and is acquired. Shame brings guilt and shyness adds to one? beauty. Retain your shyness and drop your shame. (?)

shame is simply the first and remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity: one that has its own, powerfully productive and powerfully social metaphoric possibilities.

deciding not to care how people thing (or feel?), because those are the things i don't want to change! (or i don't think i should want to change) (warhol)
what do i want to change? just having fun with my stuff. can i decide not to care what people think? shyness...

in shame i wish to continue to look (or talk, or make or perform) and be looked at (or spoken to or seen in my performing of myself), but i also do not wish to do so. (Silvan Tomkins)

i am embarrassed to show the shy singing.

chronically embarrassing my self. (Aula presentation, shy singing, ...)

on passivity, note for the reader: not to mistake it for endurance in this discourse. here we are talking about a philosophical term, in relation to the “being” and the “other”...

an architecture that tries to be modest, a performance that tries to be intimidating as much <[...]