Deadtime. A Hypothesis of Resistance

Cally Spooner's practice-based PhD takes her art practice as an object of study to explore ‘performance' as a negative, empirical symptom of neoliberalism and its creation of human capital (Brown, Harvey, Foucault) and second, what she coins as ‘neoliberal time’ (Crary, Freeman, Kornbluh). In her thesis Spooner argues that performance, neoliberalism and its temporal counterpart are man-made environments that were deliberately created to harbinger capital. In response, she asks how these environments have ‘performatively’ (Lazarrato) affected her own ‘dance exhibitions’ (Bishop).
She then hypothesises that these environments can be resisted both inside and outside of art by ushering in an alternative temporal imaginary coined as Deadtime. Building up this hypothesis using cultural examples (de Brugerolle, Fraser, Ginzburg and Winnicott), the thesis draws from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of a ‘true’ non-empirical history, to propose that Deadtime manifests as states of asynchronicity, rehearsal, the present tense, undetectability, and duration, all of which can resist performance through their undoing of ‘neoliberal time’ and by means of documenting everyday life, as a ‘microhistory’ (Carson/Ginzburg).