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Aesthetic Encounters of a Collective Consciousness

This is a revisionist essay of contemporary aesthetic theory in relation to performance. It is part of a book collection of essays with Palgrave and is the first collection published in the field of collective consciousness and performance studies. In this chapter, I present and interrogate aesthetic positions in an attempt to investigate the purpose of the aesthetic both as an artistic practice and a critical category. As I aim to demonstrate, the condition of simulation has invalidated the typical categorisation of performance art into committed - autonomous aesthetics and has shifted such a demarcation into a radically new aesthetic realisation that relegates the opposition of this dichotomy into a curiously new and, somehow, perverse tautology. To be more precise, I argue for the position of a radically new aesthetic that possesses a collective consciousness which is inherent in any performance work that has been produced and conditioned by the principle of simulation, or what Baudrillard refers to as "simulacra," in postmodern culture. This is the type of an aesthetic that exhibits an "unconscious" (Rancière 2010) quality yet behaves, I submit, as a kind of collective consciousness inscribed in a piece of performance work itself which is as much autonomous as it is heteronymous.