There is no need to invoke hidden structures

When thinking about dance dramaturgy, one might think at some black-boxed process happening in some transcendental space.

I think dramaturgy is nothing but practice. Entering the dramaturgical process is entering what Karen Knorr Cetina calls “lack of completeness”, referring to research objects. Our research object in the dance and dramaturgical practice is constantly unfolding before and within us. This quotation by Karen Knorr Cetina lit my understanding of the immanence of research in dance:

From a theoretical point of view, the defining characteristic of an epistemic object is this changing, unfolding character – or its lack of ‘object-ivity’ and completeness of being, and its nonidentity with itself. The lack in completeness of being is crucial: objects of knowledge in many fields have material instantiations, but they must simultaneously be conceived of as unfolding structures of absences: as things that continually ‘explode’ and ‘mutate’ into something else, and that are as much defined by what they are not (but will, at some point have become) than by what they are.

Knorr-Cetina, K. D. (2001). Objectual practice, The practice turn in contemporary theory, 182.

*the title of this post is taken from: Pickering, A. (2001). Practice and posthumanism: Social theory and a history of agency. The practice turn in contemporary theory, 163-74.

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