Vocabularies of Assembly, Assembling Vocabulary is a talk by Shannon Jackson that was delivered on 2017-11-17 during the 2017 PARSE Conference on EXCLUSION.
This lecture considers the poetics and politics of “assembly,” exploring how linguistic and performative conventions both welcome and exclude. It draws from an ongoing research project on the use of the “keyword” to create online conversation on performance experiment: http://intermsofperformance.site/ It then sets this linguistic assembly inside a larger conversation about the political, aesthetic, and educational stakes of “assembly” in a 21st century landscape, including contexts where the ‘right to free speech’ is paradoxically appropriated to perpetuate conditions of exclusion. Throughout, Jackson considers how artists and critics address these changing conditions with alternative experiments in re-assembly.