Performing Deception

In Performing Deception, Brian Rappert reconstructs the practice of entertainment magic by analysing it through the lens of perception, deception and learning, as he goes about studying conjuring himself. Through this novel meditation on reasoning and skill, Rappert elevates magic from the undertaking of mere trickery to an art that offers the basis for rethinking our possibilities for acting in the modern world. Performing Deception covers a wide range of theories in sociology, philosophy, psychology and elsewhere in order to offer a striking assessment of the way secrecy and deception are woven into social interactions, as well as the illusionary and paradoxical status of expertise

Chapter 3: Dissenting Voices

Chapter 3 of Procreation, Power, and Personal Autonomy: Feminist Perspective

Of Virtuoso Cynics: Plays on Language, Sleights of Hand, and Moving with Music

Of Virtuoso Cynics: Plays on Language, Sleights of Hand, & Moving with Music analyzes the ludic elements of colloquial language, fútbol criollo, and communal music in Latin America as a possibility of acknowledging collective experiences that offer alternatives to dominant cultural patterns and practices. This dissertation proposes to critique standards of language, football, and music that consider language as immaterial, football a mechanism for social discipline and gentlemanly conduct, and music being a higher art form not to be carried out in the street. By putting into dialogue the everyday of Henri Lefebvre and Julia Kristeva’s poetic, I articulate the material elements of popular manifestations of language, football, and music in Latin America, to express the symbolic weight they carry in popular cultures. Popular peoples’ inscriptions into the world are made through the knowledges of experiencing the actual conflicts of society. Drawing from Johan Huizinga’s notion of sacred play, and Alenka Zupančič’s short-circuit, I make a move to say that true play involves an actual virtuosic handling of symbols in their materiality in the day to day as a praxis. The handling being informed by a cynical out view of life, understanding it as having multiple lenses of interpretation, and openly questioning the dominant one by signaling its faults. I articulate the value in playing with colloquial language by emphasizing the poetic as a praxis in Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes, where the poetic is found in the materiality of language. I look at Diego Maradona and fútbol criollo as expressing an alternate way of playing the world’s sport that undermines the discriminatory standards that wish to universalize the sport. Later, I explore the participatory and agency creating communal music, candombe, and how that reading of the Afrouruguayan musical tradition informs and gives a democratic perspective to Jorge Drexler’s music application, “N”. I wish to highlight the social and cultural functions of colloquial language, fútbol criollo, and communal music because as platforms of the commons in Latin America, they are widely felt, not only making them apt to express a collective grievance but also be an expressive force for existence in the world

Green Colonialism: Conceptualizing Contemporary Sami Struggles for Life and Land

The goal of this thesis is to contribute to the conceptualization of the contemporary Sami struggles for life and land. In doing so, I conduct a philosophical investigation of the emerging concept of “green colonialism.” The former president of the Sami parliament in Norway, Aili Keskitalo, has in multiple occasions invoked the term “green colonialism” to describe the contemporary implementation of wind power plants on Sami reindeer herding land. When considering Sami narratives and lived experiences and processes of meaning making among Sami reindeer herders affected by the implementation of green energy in Norway, the Sami express that their voices are not being heard and that they are not taken equally into account in the decision-making processes concerning the parks. In this thesis, I answer two questions: “What is green colonialism?” and “What is wrong with green colonialism?” I argue that green colonialism is colonialism

Works for Works, Book 1

Works for Works, Book 1: Useless Beauty tackles “legacy” issues of intellectual property rights (IPR) in artistic production and academic scholarship and proposes a category or class of works that has no relation to IPR nor to proprietary regimes of copyright and academic privilege. Keeney’s book is a structuralist argument for establishing new forms of artistic scholarship that operate in direct opposition to established norms in both the art world and neoliberal academia, and is also rigorously contextualized within past and present-day arguments for and against patrimonial and paternalistic, avant-garde and normative, forms of censure and conformity across cultural production. Works for Works, Book 1: Useless Beauty privileges an iterative, generative, and aleatory methodology for artistic scholarship, with transmedia proposed as a “tutelary form” of editioning works against the dictates of the art-academic complex. This focus on generativity also invokes the dialectical operations historically associated with past avant-gardes as they have negotiated an elective nihilism as an avenue for exiting established and authorized forms of conceptual and intellectual inquiry in the Arts and Humanities

The Apothecary's Tales: a game of language in a language of games

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Writing)The thesis shows how the novel The Apothecary's Tales manipulates narrative frames to create a 'simulachron', an unreliable virtual world, which problematises the reader's conceptions of the past. The novel transgresses the generic rules of 'historical fiction' to create a quality of 'historicity' located in the affect of alterity. This is argued to be a somatic response to peril deferred. The novel seeks to evoke alterity by defamiliarising linguistic norms. It does this principally through the use of 'diachronic polysemia' (lexical 'false friends') and intertexts to syncopate the reader continually between the disparate sensibilities of the 1ih and 21 st centuries. These sensibilities are simulated in the novel by the imbedment of sociolects and 'hypomemes', the tacit thoughtways supposed peculiar to a given milieu. To self-authenticate its fictions, the novel employs the 'parafictive' devices of a testamentary found artifact, an unreliable narrator and editor, plausible sociologuemes (social conventions) and ideologuemes (ideologies that inform behaviour), along with a density of period minutiae putatively grounded in the record. Any truth effects achieved are then ludically subverted by a process of critique in which structural units of the novel systematically parody the other. The novel is patterned in the structure of a nested diptych, of expositions contra posed in a mutual commentary, which extends from the defining templates of plot and episode to the micro levels of morphemes in polysemic wordplay. The tropes of nested framing and repetition of form and syntagm are defined in the thesis, respectively, as encubi/atio and 'emblematic resonance'. It is argued that these tropes, encoded in a fictive discourse that defies closure, provide a simulation of hermetic form that -when mapped upon the aleatory life world -can be productive of aesthetic affect. The agonistic elements of plot and incident in the novel are figured within the tapas of theatre, foregrounded by the duplicitous self-fashioning of the characters, and by the continual metaleptic shifts or 'frame syncopation' of narrative viewpoint, both intra and extra-diegetic. Frame syncopation is used advisedly to dilemmatise significations at both the structural and syntagmatic levels. The thesis contends that such contrived collisions of narrative interpretation may be the dynamic of affectivity in all aesthetic discourse

The effect of electronically mediated sound on group musical interaction: A case study of the practice and development of the Automatic Writing Circle

The interaction between musicians has been one of the traditional strengths of music: it stretches to include an audience and ritual participants but has its origins in group activity, the interpersonal responses of one musician to another. This thesis examines the way that electronic media have transformed the interactions between musicians, particularly in the context of live performance. A central theme is the way in which mediatisation creates new splits within previously integrated musical situations and also merges differences usually defined by physical boundaries. The theories of Gregory Bateson on schizophrenia and Irving Goffman on Situationism are brought together to create a new understanding of the term "schizophonia". This rehabilitated concept is proposed as the key to a creative exploration of new situations and discontinuities which make up group performance in a mediatised environment. In practical terms the exploration of new musical situations is documented in the following projects: the material created for the group "Automatic Writing Circle" during its evolution over a period of six years (compositions, software, instruments), development of the Ouija Board and accompanying software, composition of the piece Lipsync and the earlier piece I slept by numbers for flute and live electronics