Is phenomenology passé? I swear this is what I'm thinking during our class and so it's relevant.

Performances are powerful tools for social change and any given performance has the potential to twist the very fabric of our understanding. This does not necessarily mean that performances can change the world; “the world” is any number of different things to any number of different people. For some people “the world” is limited to their perceptions of objects bound in space and time. In that case performance is nothing more than the manipulations of said objects and nothing but perhaps a new manipulation is manifest in performance. However, in such a case one’s understanding of what they know to be “the world” is changed. For others “the world” may be understood as a structure of hierarchy which coordinates or organizes human life according to power, dominance, subjugation, and cyclical patterns of liberation and oppression. To such a perspective a performance would support the structure as a tool for subversion or reification of the status quo. To answer a comment on an earlier blog of mine: The situation within the structure is manipulated perhaps even altered completely, and perhaps there are winners and losers but such a judgment is merely conjecture. Performances are significant not because they create winners and losers but because they frame our understanding of victory and loss. This, however, is not to play down the importance of our understanding as that which constitutes social change.

Aside from the first two perspectives of what “the world” is if we consider attitudes to be stuff of earth then I could very well argue that performances change the world. If the world is nothing more than objects then performances cannot change the world because performance cannot change objects, only our view of them. If the world is a social structure performances cannot change the world only our understanding of those things still bound within the structure. However, if the world is attitude then performances may cause change. This alters my former understanding of social change from a certain system of organization to a state of mind. All a performance must do to change the world is cause a mind to shift from one attitude to another.