Elizabeth Grosz writes, “Thought confronts us necessarily from the outside, from outside the concepts we already have, from outside the subjectivities we already are, from outside the material reality we already know” (61). Confrontation from the outside is an encounter. I express the concept of encounter agonistically more because of our resistance to it than by its imposition on us. What Raikes’ fluid performances and Schutzman’s fluidizing Joker do are to force an encounter, to confront us with different modes of perception and different possibilities for subjectivity. They are necessarily confrontational since we tend not to welcome difference, transformation, and change into the habitation of our habits. But what if we try, rather, to inhabit our encounters and sustain their intensities?

An encounter is rapt with joy and wonder; it is an opening of and an openness to potentiality and the virtual. Performance, in this sense, is pragmatically and inherently virtual. It is through encounters with its own virtuality that performance gets its power as doing, as creative force, as burning fire of liminality. This notion of virtuality is ontological, and refers to something much different than new media (though, an encounter with new media can often be teeming with the virtual). As I am employing it here, the virtual is a figure of creativity, an openness to the future. It is the condition of the possibility of change and movement, the form of fluidity. As Grosz puts it, “The relationship between the virtual and the actual is one of surprise, for the virtual promises something different to the actual that it produces, and always contains in it the potential from something other than the actual” (12). The goal of performance is to force an encounter with the virtual: to surprise. To bring it on. To open it up. To orient us to the future precisely by dis-orienting us from our habits and complacencies. As we inhabit our habits, we close ourselves off to encounters by constructing impermeable spaces: psychic and material bunkers to protect us from the imperturbable rush of movement, change, transformation . . . life.