Over the course of the term, the binaries between success and failure have been problematized, politicized, and pluralized through the rhizomatic exploration of failure. Given this breakdown of binaries, I aim to disrupt the distinctions between a paper and performance by creating connections towards a rhizomatic relationship between performing a paper and a paper on performance. A rhizomatic model of failure parallels Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis (13), in that both deviate from hegemonic structures towards the multiplicities of the unknown. In refusing hegemonic structures within failure, schizoanalytic performance becomes a means to embody multiplicities in bodies that are silenced and marginalized as failures in a global capitalist context.

Borrowing from Elston’s observation of Kent Monkman’s work “interjecting a prosopopeiac stand-in” (188) for Indigenous bodies in 19th century landscape paintings, the performance serves to mediate the different voices and subjectivities that are denied within global capitalist failure. In working through ambiguous multiplicity, the performance aims eludes the othering gaze and disrupt the voyeurism implicit in the spectator-performer dynamic. The performance takes inspiration from Monkman’s work in the way that live drawing is incorporated into performance. The act of writing over the performer’s body with the use of projection represents the external forces exerting power over the speaking body, filtering its physicality through layers of projections that aim to overwrite or erase the body from visibility and existence.

Aside from the live drawing, the performance interacts with the notion of multiple voices projected through a single embodiment. Braidotti illustrates the reconstruction of the dividing line between masculine and feminine as the hybridity that exists within constitutive boundaries (102) and the performance mobilizes the idea of hybridity in the multivocal nature of the performance. The performance quotes contemporary pop music, Western existential maxims, and quotations from sourced readings, which are interwoven throughout the performance text. This juxtaposition of ideas problematizes the constitutive boundaries that surround (asserting) subjectivity, as well as to what extent certain bodies are allowed a claim to subjectivity.

The polyvocal nature of the performer on stage parallels the different intersecting strata within diasporic and foreign worker bodies as well as the displacement in the sense of home and belonging within the transnational labor market (Tiatco 437). The sense of self does not appear rooted in a specific space, but is aware of the surrounding circumstances of global capitalism. Much like sound, the bodies are present aurally but not visually/physically. The performance does not precisely offer these bodies to the audience for their schizoanalytic engagement, in a way denying the audience access to exploit their subjectivities.

In their collaborative approach to writing, Wyatt et al takes inspiration from Deleuze to create a space of hearing/seeing/breathing in relation in order to know our own selves differently (408). The performance provides a hearing/seeing/breathing environment but the audience is met with a mediation, pointing to the impasse in trying to know the other through a distanced gaze. The performance illustrates the process by which an insular West knows the other through representations in media. The allusion to Pizza Hut demanding applicants to have university degrees (Peterson 602) draws out a cross-cultural understanding that attempts to make the socioeconomic climate relatable, but still foreign to the audience. Other references to socioeconomic circumstances within the global capitalist context frames the bodies for the audience; these references opt to provide traces or hints for understanding, as well as shifting the labor of meaning making onto the audience.

Wyatt et al notes that the challenge lies in speaking and hearing the intensities and multiple specificities of the other (408). The performance engages in the speaking-hearing dynamic while negotiating the denial of subjectivity within global capitalism. The multiplicities within the spoken word pluralizes the other, and through layers of live drawing, the body becomes multifaceted vis a vis a monolithic Western imaginary. With the failure of global capitalism, the position as object can prove to be fruitful through Spivak’s Deleuzian encounter, illuminating binary oppositions and imagining the blank certitude of the future anterior (Wyatt et al 414), where failure can be a site of beginning, of emerging, of becoming.