Courtney's questions (as I understand them)
As the title of Courtney's blog suggests, "shock" and the performance of affect is the primary, thematic frame for her posts. At her blog's inception, Courtney is very clear about her intellectual interests and questions. How can we, as an audience in an epoch of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, bombarded with violent and shocking imagery, better understand our spectatorial positionalities in relation to those artistic mediums (film, video, photography, etc.) that indexically (claim to) assert the Real in "real-time"? Furthermore, as Courtney writes, what is the difference between a shocking video--like the disseminated videos of Budd Dwyer's live, on-air (unscripted?) suicide or the UCLA police tasering of a student--which stands as an index of a "real world"and those surprising or shocking images conjured on stage for artistic purposes? What do our reactions of shock and disgust suggest about our privileged, though precarious, positions as a subjectivated/subjected audience in/to the violent Real/Reel? Are we all, like the victimized UCLA student, being inhumanely, relentlessly, and metaphorically tasered?
From here, Courtney cites and posts from various sources and mediums. With Brecht and Artaud, Courtney focuses on the place of violence in the theatre. As Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty attempts to wholly break from the tradition of mimesis, violence in theatre or art becomes "necessary" so that the audience can distinguish "the real world" from the "representative world" and, therefore, make sure that these violent acts in art are not "reintegrated into real life." Finding this break with mimesis to be impractical, Brecht would seem to argue that violence on stage/in art incites violence in the real world since the theatre is culinary--like food, we consume and integrate the theatre into our body and being.
Scriptive "things" in Courtney's blog
Interestingly enough, Courtney quotes Bill Brown's take on Thing Theory: "The suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power: you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut. These are occasions outside the scene of phenomenological attention that nonetheless teach you that you’re ‘caught up in things’ and that the ‘body is a thing among things.’ They are occasions of contingency-the chance interruption-that disclose a physicality of things" (http://courtneyfosterblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/the-suddenness-with-whi/). In terms of Courtney's interests in the phenomenology and epistemology of shock and disgust, this quote, in fact, fits well with another posted quote from Kristeva's Powers of Horror, which highlights Kristeva's theory regarding the ontologically centrifugal consequences of being confronted by the abject. The "thing"--for Brown, a piece of paper, a toy, a nut; for Kristeva, a cadaver, blood, milk, egesta, etc.--forces itself upon us, makes us aware of our thingness, of our fragility. More importantly, things incite specific reactions. And, for Courtney's purposes, these offensive videos and shocking or strange photos become scriptive insofar as they incite us to respond and act a certain way. We become dizzy, we gag or choke, our stomaches convulse, our organs shrivel, we vomit; we scream in terror, drop our mouths in shock or disbelief, cover our eyes in horror. Accordingly, even though Courtney doesn't focus on performance in a conventional manner, her blog is all about the performance of objects and things, media ephemera and art and, more importantly, how these performatives perform on us.
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