Their affirmation of excess/reversibility/etc. is an underperformative aesthetics of apprehension, an affective orientation that produces passivity, a form of nihilism

But underperformativity, like passive aggression and other problematically evental modes of relating, sneaks around the codes of sincerity and intelligibility that make possible normative social trust and trust in the social. Abjuring the inevitability of or self-evident value in the dramatic, its gestural style destabilizes the conventional relation between high intensity and importance. It is also a disturbance in the promise of confirmation that structures sentimental esthetics. In the sentimental scene where we presume emotional universality and an ethics of emotional intelligibility, manners and manner are pathways to the confirmation of mutuality and collective belongingd. The recessive esthetic does not promise sentimental participation in a world’s worldness, for it cannot rely on the transparency of performance. At the same time, it is not merely ironic, paranoid, or untrusting in relation to surfaces. Thus it cannot rely on the self-evidence of “excess.” A concept oft-invoked but rarely conceptualized, “excess” points to an intensity that, encountered in relation to an action or an atmosphere, is irrational, outside of ratio. But the recessive style always ports with it the potential for denial, disavowal, and foreclosed experience. It might genuinely represent a big emotion under the discipline of comportment and crisis. Or, it might actually be expressive of a non-, or a light-touch, or a diffused experience. But it might also not be hiding anything. In the underperformative scene, one can always say nothing happened, because little happens and when it does, it can point at once in many directions. The nothing might mask an event, or not. In other words, this mode of encounter is less an esthetics of expression than of apprehension. It foregrounds modes of reception that dilate or suspend the becominggenre of events as we conventionally understand them. Things happen, but the event finds its genre through measured action and often kinds of recursive distribution. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call the dynamic matter of these activities “percepts and affects”: figurations derived from a world’s atmosphere that register the impacts continuously unfolding in subjects and appearing in their concepts of the contemporary situation. The first impact of an encounter does not constitute the event: it is just a disturbance that sets off a process. This is why apprehension matters dramatically more than expression in these texts and scenes: in the realm of underperformed emotion, incidents are sensed, and it remains to find a form for the disturbance, which might include its extension or renovation (comedy) or not (tragedy). In the timing of the effect of an impact, a causal trajectory forces on the present a sense of itself as unfinished business without constituting the present as congealed or already playing out a fate. It is always the case that the event remains to be sensed. Recession induces a sense of interregnum. A style that seems casual, therefore, can point to something stuck, neutral, or withheld in relationality, a hesitation or a defense against presence. It can point to the overcloseness of the world, and be a distancing mechanism. Or, sometimes a space of recessive action can be both a defense and a scene of appeal for help in shifting the way things are. It is open to ambivalent, incoherent, or enigmatic aims. Indeed, it can involve a performative insistence that the connective encounter is unfinished, is being handed off to waiting and seeing, which involves a social, public, or collective component that has not been eventilized from the beginning. Interpassivity is Slavoj Žižek’s term for the practice of a disavowed delegation of feeling to others.9 In his view of mass mediated affectivity and emotion, what looks interactive often really involves the handing off to others of affective responsibility through esthetic or social forms that do the feeling for the subjects who invest them with sensation. What appears as action is passivity in action’s drag. But Žižek’s concept could be more robust: less about emotion owned and disowned and more about processes of allocation that may not at all involve self-negation.