On Performing Publics

Fugitive publics do not need to be restored. They need to be conserved, which is to say moved, hidden, restarted with the same joke, the same story, always elsewhere than where the long arm of the creditor seeks them, conserved from restoration, beyond justice, beyond law. (Harney and Moten Citation2013: 63)

Nearly ten years ago uprisings, occupations, self-organized platforms, demonstrations, public assemblies contested smooth operations of dominant machines. Such events began sketching new socio-political horizons, producing forms of public refusal that as Judith Butler argues ‘lay claim to the public and produce the public through seizing and reconfiguring the matter of material environments’ (2015: 71).

This article rethinks relations between publics and performance at this moment in time and returns to questions posed by the editors of the special issue of Performance Research on ‘Performing Publics’ published in 2011. Examining if and in what conditions may performance practices, structures and machines function as experiments of public forms of life inseparable from processes of social improvisation this article attempts to theorise on potential and functional forms of Performing Publics in the current turbid times.