Jan 13, 2014 - Judith Butler, I show how limitations within the metaphor of culture- ...... Ezra Pound and the Imagists, too, appear to have adopted an anti-perfor ...
Why Performance? Why Now? Textuality and the Rearticulation of Human Presence Julia A. Walker
The Yale Journal of Criticism, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2003, pp. 149-175 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/yale.2003.0011
For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/yale/summary/v016/16.1walker.html
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Julia A.Walker Why Performance? Why Now? Textuality and the Rearticulation of Human Presence
At a time when so many scholars in so many disciplines have invoked the terms “performance” and/or “performativity,” we may wish to consider why these particular terms have been uttered with such critical force. From J.L. Austin’s delineation of performative speech acts, to Erving Goffman’s metaphorization of performance as a mode of intersubjectivity, to Victor Turner’s investigation of ritual as social drama and drama as social ritual, to Judith Butler’s more recent theorization of gender performativity, performance has been a dominant trope in late-th century critical discourse. Indeed, it has appeared with such prodigious frequency over the last fifty years that critics such as Marvin Carlson have come to identify it with the postmodern turn.1 But while this periodization acknowledges the term’s currency in contemporary literary and cultural studies, it nonetheless begs the questions: Why performance? Why now? To answer the first question, I propose to return to the origin of the text/performance split that first situated performance in opposition to literature, language, and/or textuality. Paying particular attention to the way this split was effected within and by the American university system, I revisit an earlier and now forgotten site of critical contest over the place of performance within the study of literature to show how both terms bear within them the trace of their repressed other. To answer the second question, I propose to consider why the specific formation of literary modernism that grew out of this text/performance split has now been deemed at an end. Analyzing the assumptions at work in the post-structuralist theories of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, I show how limitations within the metaphor of cultureas-text have necessitated a turn to the metaphor of performance in order to address the problematic role of individual agency within contemporary social and cultural theory. I argue that the current critical interest in the metaphor of performance—with its emphasis upon actors acting upon the world—reveals not only a perceived loss of individual agency, but a desire to imaginatively recuperate a sense of agency that would allow for the possibility of resisting the otherwise deterministic structures of social and political relations. The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume , number (): 149–175 © by Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press
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I.Why Performance? The Modern Formation of the Text/Performance Split Sometime on or about November , dramatic character changed. Which is to say that it became “dramatic” as opposed to “theatrical,” marking an epistemological break known thereafter as the text/performance split. This is not to say that an anti-theatrical prejudice originated in ; as Jonas Barish has noted, such a bias goes back at least to Plato’s time and has reemerged during the past two millennia during periods of great theatrical activity and social influence. But is the year when this anti-theatrical prejudice resurfaced in a historically specific form, one that situated literary texts in opposition to performance, necessitating the institutionalization of separate fields of study. In German theatre historian Max Hermann declared that the study of theatre should be independent from the study of dramatic literature.2 That same year, in the United States, teachers of “Oral English” declared their professional independence from departments of English literature, paving the way for departments of theatre and speech.3 As my nod to Virginia Woolf is meant to suggest, that this split was effected in the very moment when literary modernism was being born is no mere coincidence. Simply put, the text/performance split produced the category of the “literary” in a way that enabled the production of literary modernism. Astradur Eysteinsson has suggested just such a link between the institutionalization of literary study and the development of literary modernism, noting a dialectical relationship between the formalism of the New Critics and modernist experimentation.4 The missing term in his dialectical triangle, however, is the antithesis of performance. For, as I wish to demonstrate here, the modernist category of the “literary” that grew out of the text/performance split bore within it an explicitly anti-performative bias. In order to understand how literature and performance were conceived as oppositional, we need to revisit the debates surrounding the institutionalization of the text/performance split at the turn of the last century. As Gerald Graff has recounted, American universities, in an attempt to model themselves along the lines of German research institutions, began to reassess their core requirements at the end of the th century and reconfigure them as more “scientific” modes of knowledge.5 For those disciplines found to be lacking in intellectual rigor, one of two fates awaited: either they were overhauled and/or absorbed into other disciplines, or they were demoted to elective or extra-curricular status. In the case of oratory, for example, both fates were cast as rhetoric was variously assigned to English or political philosophy departments while elocution was designated first an elective and later an extra-curricular activity.6 This trend to discredit what were considered more subjective and less turgid forms of knowledge meant that “merely imitative skills” such as elocution or acting would
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have a difficult time reentering the new research academy. A wellknown case in point is that of Harvard professor George Pierce Baker who, in the early nineteen-teens, sought to garner academic credit for the workshop component of his influential English playwriting course; while Baker argued for the instructive value of allowing students to test the stage-worthiness of their ideas, the Harvard administration concluded that the workshop was not intellectually demanding enough to merit credit toward a degree.7 With performative skills thus deemed unfit for the new research academy, oratory—once considered central to a university education—faced its own imminent demise unless it could reinvent itself as a science and shore up its intellectual foundations. This is exactly what Boston University professor of oratory Lewis B. Monroe set out to do. Shifting the discipline’s emphasis away from matters of declamation toward the expression of ideas, Monroe drew upon the theories of French vocal instructor François Delsarte to expand the category of speech to include all forms of communication issuing from the body. Although little more than a footnote in theatre scholarship today, the Delsarte method was an enormously influential system of actor and speaker training at the turn of the th century. Premised upon the idea that every bodily movement yielded a universal signification, it analyzed the body into three zones—the head, the torso, the limbs— each of which allowed for three types of movement and three attitudinal variations for a total of expressive possibilities.8 Like the neoclassical system of rhetorical gesture, the Delsarte method assigned a specific meaning to each inflection, stance and gesture; unlike neoclassical decorum, however, it held that its significations were discovered in nature rather than produced by convention, having been based upon Delsarte’s own empirical observations. Thus, by applying Delsarte’s principles to oratorical training, Monroe could claim to have redefined oratory as a “science.” Lacking only a theory by which to justify the intellectual credentials of his newly rehabilitated field, Monroe turned to American Transcendentalism to suggest that the proper exercise of oratorical skills facilitated not only the communication between orator and auditor, but their collective communion with the spiritual forces of the universe. Before he could put his theories into writing, Monroe died, but not before exerting a tremendous influence upon the teaching of speech in the United States. Among his most celebrated students was S. S. Curry, who not only recorded Monroe’s ideas in print but expanded upon them in a series of widely-adopted and influential textbooks. In fact, Curry’s work so thoroughly redefined the field of study that he rechristened it “expression” in order to distinguish it from “elocution,” its discredited forebearer.9 And, to further establish expression as an intellectual course of study, Curry shifted the emphasis once again, j u l i a a . wa l k e r
moving it away from the training of voice and gesture onto the training of the speaker’s mind. Curry’s “think-the-thought” method taught students to analyze a written work and communicate its meanings through the use of voice and gesture. Typically beginning with a work of literature, Curry’s student was asked to focus upon the subjective impressions it evoked within his or her mind.10 Then, after conceptualizing the meaning of the work as a whole, the student was asked to concentrate upon the various figures and devices which produced that conception by attending to features such as figurative language, meter, and the significance of line length (utilizing a method of close reading that clearly anticipates the New Critics). Finally, using the expressive means of his or her entire body, the student was taught to communicate that meaning to the audience. These expressive means included the three primary “languages” of the body: verbal (i.e., the conventionalized symbols of language), vocal (e.g., tone-color and inflection which register emotion), and pantomimic (e.g., gesture and bodily comportment). Through the unified and effective use of these three languages, Curry held, the oral performer could arouse the sympathetic identification of the audience so as to make the conceptualization that had manifested itself to him or her manifest itself to them. By the turn of the century, Curry’s textbooks were being used in English classrooms across the United States, schools of expression had been founded in nearly every major city, and oral interpreters were fast becoming a popular attraction at Chautauqua events and local talent shows. In this way, “expression” became the “expressive culture movement,” a broad-based program advocating the performing arts as a means of personal and social reform. In fact, expression (and the expressive culture movement more generally) was so popular at the turn of the century that its sheer pervasiveness and generic name have often made its influence difficult for scholars to detect. Yet, I believe, it is the cultural and critical context that prompted philosopher George Santayana to write Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (). As Santayana once explained to his assistant Daniel Cory, the issues that motivated his investigations into poetic theory “were very much ‘in the air’ at the turn of the century.”11 Identifying expression by name, Santayana goes on to explain that the problem with this method of interpretation is its vulnerability to the pathetic fallacy, that tendency to attribute human emotion to insensate things (not to mention the asyet-unnamed “affective fallacy” whereby one projects one’s own emotion onto a work of art rather than responding to the emotion expressed by the work itself). In his essay “The Elements and Function of Poetry,” Santayana acknowledges that emotions are the stuff out of which poetry is made, but goes on to insist that poetry does not present us with an unmediated experience of them; rather, it presents us
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with emotions that have been transformed first within the poet’s imagination. The key to the poet’s success, Santayana avers, lies in his or her ability to find the “correlative object” by which that emotion may be expressed. Expression, on the other hand, misattributes to the poem the poet’s skill, effectively denying poetic agency by suggesting that the poet is simply a conduit of some larger universal truth that he or she merely inscribes upon the page.12 As many scholars have observed, Santayana’s notion of a “correlative object” is the probable source of T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative.” Eliot was, after all, a student of Santayana at Harvard. Thus, the cultural and critical context of expression was thus “very much ‘in the air’” for him, too. With this in mind, then, I suggest we rethink Eliot’s formulation in light of Curry’s emphasis upon the speaker and the performative features of language as a source of poetic meaning. Eliot’s influential critical term first appears, of course, in his essay, “Hamlet and His Problems” in which he, like Nietzsche, criticizes Shakespeare’s play for Hamlet’s inability to give adequate expression to the emotion that propels him to speak. But where Nietzsche diagnosed the play’s “problem” as an overemphasis upon language (where Apollonian reason was no longer counterbalanced by Dionysion music), Eliot saw it as quite the opposite. Criticizing Shakespeare for inadequately objectifying in language Hamlet’s correlating emotion, Eliot famously explains, “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”13 Note that it is not a matter of the actor’s interpretation of Hamlet’s emotional expressivity that is the problem; rather it is the author’s construction of his character in words.Thus, like his mentor, Eliot appears to affirm the importance of the poet (not the speaker) in shaping the text’s meanings. What is more, he seems to want to affirm the importance of verbal signification per se. What I take Eliot to be arguing is that writing alone has the ability to stimulate the reader’s imagination and evoke in him or her a state of sympathy not unlike that claimed by Curry as the special function of oral expression. In other words, Eliot seems to assert—as Derrida will later—that writing differs only from speech in terms of its reach or extension when he speaks of giving “the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience” via the formula of the objective correlative. But, as I wish to demonstrate here, this seeming affirmation of similarity between speech and writing actually works to subordinate not so much speech to writing as performance to text. Indeed, it seems to me that, in much of Eliot’s early critical writing, there is an unmistakable antipathy toward the performative features of j u l i a a . wa l k e r
poetic expression. When speaking of the difficulty of creating a poetic drama, for example, Eliot identifies the fact of performance as its greatest obstacle.14 Although later in his career Eliot appears to assume a more ambivalent stance toward performance, writing several fulllength dramas himself, his early critical writings helped to define the category of the literary in specifically anti-performative terms.15 The fact that his later plays were critically acclaimed for their “literary” qualities speaks as much to the way that category came to be defined by his early critical writings as to their ability to conform to that definition. Canonized within the Anglo-American university through the work of I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis, as well as New Critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman, this influential model of literary high modernism thus bore within it a bias against explicitly performative genres that, as Susan Harris Smith has cogently argued, made much of drama a “bastard art.”16 “Emphasizing the self-sufficiency of a work of art, New Criticism, by definition, had to struggle against the drama, the least autonomous and most contextual of literary forms,” Smith explains.17 Indeed, even in Understanding Drama (), their New Critical primer on analyzing drama as a literary genre, Brooks and Heilman are at pains to locate the expressive qualities of a dramatic work in its language and not its performative features: “language is perhaps our richest and most subtle means of significant expression. Gesture, though it goes hand and hand with dramatic dialogue . . . is highly limited . . . [and] the more subtle aspects of facial expression . . . tend to be lost on most of the audience, who sit too far back from the stage to be able to see it clearly . . . . It is the word which is primary here; and this fact may explain why a good play retains so much of its dramatic power even when merely read in the study or the classroom.”18 Attempting to exclude performative modes of communication from their consideration, they nonetheless find that language alone cannot fully account for a work’s overall meaning(s). Thus they turn to the metaphor of performance, such as when Brooks explains in The Well Wrought Urn () that the form of a poem is like dramatic action in that through it, the work’s meaning(s) unfold.19 In this way, performative modes of communication were, if not completely excluded from the category of the literary, at least safely metaphorized into linguistic form. Once the category of the literary was defined in this way and departments of English had invested themselves fully in it, there seemed little choice for advocates of performance but to formalize this text/performance split through the founding of a separate department and/or school. Which brings me back to —the year that an insurgent faction of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) broke away to form the National Association of Teachers of Speech (NATS).20 For this was also the year that courses in play pro
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duction were first officially offered at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Nebraska, Drake University, and the University of Oregon. And it was also the year that the first autonomous department of drama was founded at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. After , other colleges and universities followed suit, with Yale University offering the deanship of its new School of Drama to Harvard’s long-suffering George Pierce Baker in .21 Even so, anxieties over the intellectual merits of performance had not abated; they were simply lessened by the fact that theatre had also recast itself as a “science” (complete with practicum and lab). To this day, textual and performance studies have managed to coexist relatively peacefully within the university structure. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that their separate disciplinarity was founded upon an arbitrary distinction between words and the bodies that give them voice.22 II.Why Now? Performance as Modernism’s Return of the Repressed It is against this background of the text/performance split that I wish to understand the past fifty years’ renewed interest in “performance” as a term of critical analysis. For if, as I’ve argued, the performative dimension of language was repressed by a certain influential strain of literary modernism, then perhaps this postmodern turn to performance is simply a case of modernism’s return of the repressed. Think, for example, of Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Absurdism, Artaudian cruelty, Happenings, Body Art, Fluxus, political street theatre, feminist performance art, and the experimental “theatre of images” where performance has often been the avant garde’s favorite mode of resisting the status quo. Whether understood as abstract reason, the law, the law of the father, narrative logic, or conventional forms of representation, that status quo has often been figured as language—the defining limitation that performance strains against and seeks to explode. Consider, for instance, the linguistic referent implicit in the following avant-garde performances: F.T. Marinetti’s “onomatopoetic artillery,” Hugo Ball’s “sound poems,” Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault’s “automatic writing,” Antonin Artaud’s “animated hieroglyphs,” Carolee Schneemann’s “Interior Scroll,” Yvonne Rainer’s “non-verbal theatre,” Ntozake Shange’s “choreopoem,” or Richard Foreman’s “aural tableaux.”23 While this clearly demonstrates that there has been a century of performance activity within the avant-garde—suggesting perhaps a comodernism rather than a postmodernism, as Andreas Huyssen proposes—it has been only within the last years that art historians have begun to recount this alternative history and account for its cultural significance.24 The fact that the past years have marked the ascendance of “postmodernism” as both a periodizing term for our own j u l i a a . wa l k e r
moment and a means of reassessing modernism’s legacy is no coincidence, especially since that reassessment has often involved a recuperation of repressed representations of modernity associated with women, blackness, mass culture, and—I would add—performance. Nor, then, is it a coincidence that the past years have also seen the inception of performance studies programs within the academy, beginning with New York University’s program in and Northwestern’s in .25 While this may help explain a renewed critical attention to the performing arts, it cannot account for the force with which the metaphor of performance has been applied to the field of social and cultural theory. Or can it? Given that the past century has seen a general trend toward the textualization of culture, it may be that the assumptions underlying the metaphor of culture-as-text include an anti-performative bias. Consider, for example, the ethnographic inscription of Native oral cultures by folklorists at the turn of the twentieth century. As Michael Elliott argues in his recent book, scientific ethnographers such as Franz Boas and James Mooney who documented the languages and customs of Native American peoples believed to be on the verge of extinction, shared much in common with literary Realists such as Hamlin Garland and Mark Twain, who also rendered regional dialects and folk customs in textual form. Though one group sought to create a scientific record and the other an aesthetic object, both based their work upon positivist assumptions about the world and Realist assumptions about the ability of language to reflect it.26 Consider, too, that these same positivist and Realist assumptions are at the heart of the analytic philosophy of Bertrand Russell and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein. Seeking to regulate the truth value of any statement made about the world, they drew upon Gottlob Frege’s notion of formalized—as opposed to ordinary—language which distinguished “conceptual content” from the ways that content could be shaped rhetorically “for the hearer to grasp.”27 Finally, consider the Saussurean assumptions underlying the structuralist model by which Claude Levi-Strauss metaphorized culture as text. Distinguishing between langue and parole, both Levi-Strauss and linguist Roman Jakobson, from whom he borrows his structuralist methodology, posit meaning as a function of the relationality of elements within the deep structure of language (or culture) rather than any individual utterance or act of speaking (or living). Considering that it was this structuralist paradigm that Louis Althusser applied to ideology, Michel Foucault to epistemology, and Roland Barthes to myth, we should not be surprised that the poststructuralist model of culture-as-text appears likewise to have been premised upon an anti-performative bias. Yet, in each of these three cases, there has been a gradual unworking of this bias within the academy over the course of the past fifty
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years. For example, in at the American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium, folklorist Richard Baumann called for greater attention to the dynamics of “performance” in the transcription and analysis of folklore “texts.”28 In , analytic philosopher J.L. Austin delivered his William James lectures (later published as How To Do Things With Words) in which he first identified a type of statement—the “performative”—whose truth value was a function of the fact and the conditions of its utterance rather than its conceptual content alone. What I would like to suggest is that the repeated trope of “performance” as it appears in contemporary social and cultural theory reveals an increasing awareness of the limitations of the metaphor of culture as text. Which is to say that it reveals a growing recognition of the fact that what these theories seek to model actually exceeds the model in its residual modernist configuration. Thus, what we are seeing when social and cultural theorists repeatedly invoke this term is an attempt to divest ourselves of an outdated model for understanding social, cultural, and political relations while working to create a new model that can represent the actual dynamism of these relations. Curiously, however, structuralism and poststructuralism have lagged behind; in them, the anti-performative bias has been somewhat slower to unwork. Take, for example, the deconstructive practice of Jacques Derrida. Christopher Norris suggests that Derrida was greatly influenced by the work of Paul Valéry, whom he saw as “a deconstructionist avant la lettre,” but I would like to suggest that he was just as strongly influenced—if negatively so—by the work of Antonin Artaud.29 When Derrida published “The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation” in , Artaud’s ideas had been especially well received by performance practitioners such as the Living Theatre (known in France as “Le Living”) as well as students, audiences, and social theorists with a decidedly utopian bent. Of special interest was Artaud’s notion of cruelty—the state in which one is stripped of everything except the awareness of being in a body, the state in which one is reduced to the condition of a quivering nerve, jagged and exposed to the raw yet invigorating winds of life. Such an awareness of life at its most precarious yet full was unavailable, according to Artaud, except in the most harrowing of conditions such as war or the plague. Indeed, the plague was Artaud’s favorite metaphor for what the theatre should be like: an all-out sensory assault upon spectators, awakening them from the stultification induced by the comforts of modern society. Part of what was keeping his audience from this pure, unmediated experience of life was—for Artaud, the former surrealist—reason and its handmaiden, language.30 In the midst of the excitement attending the (re)discovery and popularization of Artaud’s ideas in the mid-s, Derrida set out to correct what he saw as a j u l i a a . wa l k e r
fundamental flaw in Artaud’s thinking. Faulting him for believing that he could go beyond language to a form of representation that is somehow more immediate, Derrida points out that representation is, by definition, a form of mediation. Thus, he pronounces Artaud guilty of invoking that age-old prejudice that subordinates writing to a “metaphysics of presence.” For years now, Derrida has played bogeyman to a generation of scholars who fear to disturb the crypt in which this age-old prejudice is now presumably buried. Nonetheless, I would like to reexamine Derrida’s polemic against J.L. Austin’s theory of performative speech acts, “Signature, Event, Context,” because I believe it has delayed poststructuralism’s unworking of the anti-performative bias.31 As you may recall, Derrida’s problem with Austin’s theory has to do with the fact that, after outlining the general conditions by which an utterance may performatively enact a new state of affairs, Austin excepts from his consideration certain utterances that are “parasitic” upon normal language use. For example, those “said by an actor on a stage, or . . . introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy.” Derrida points out that socalled “etiolations of language” are not exceptions to the rule; rather, they reveal the general condition of all forms of communication. Austin wants to assume that every utterance is unique to the conditions of its specific moment and, in its enunciation, calls into being a new state of affairs. As Derrida points out, every utterance may indeed be unique to the conditions of its specific moment, but that to mean, it must be recognized as calling upon an already authorized meaning. That is to say that it must be a repeatable formulation which, in being repeated, calls upon a prior authorized usage. This is the principle of iterability; in order to be understood, the utterance has to be recognizable. That Austin spends much of the rest of his book delineating the conditions under which that formula becomes infelicitous or misfires is beside the point; context is unregulatable, and the possibility for an intended meaning to misfire is a structural condition of all communication. This is the principle of citationality; because language is iterable, it has a tendency to deposit associative debris from other contexts into every new context in which it appears. Of course, Derrida is right to call these assumptions into question. They are part of the positivist baggage from the analytic tradition that Austin brings to his study. Nonetheless, Derrida admires Austin for having discovered at least one instance in which language has no referent outside of itself.32 What Austin calls a “performative” does not so much name something that exists outside of language as call it into being as such—a condition that Derrida takes to be true of language more generally. Indeed, this is one of the purposes of his article—to show how what we take to be true of spoken language is true of writ-
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ten language as well (and vice versa). Let’s look again at how Derrida elaborates his theory of general communication. He begins his essay with three conditional statements that lay the foundation of his argument. The first concerns writing as a specific means of communication, one that he distinguishes from vocal or gestural communication but only in terms of its reach. He writes:“If we take the notion of writing in its currently accepted sense . . . , it can only be seen as a means of communication. Indeed, one is compelled to regard it as an especially potent means of communication, extending enormously, if not infinitely, the domain of oral or gestural communication . . . .”33 In other words, speech and writing are essentially the same except in their extension in space and time. The second and third conditionals concern the assumption that language is ideational; that is, we understand it to call an idea to mind, to make conceptually present that which may be materially absent. But, as Derrida points out, this assumption is usually attributed to writing alone. For example, he refers to the work of eighteenth-century French philosophe Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, which posits the absence of the addressee to be the chief difference between writing and speech. Derrida says:“If we now ask ourselves what, in this analysis, is the essential predicate of this specific difference, we rediscover absence.” But this absence, he maintains, “will have to be of an original type if one intends to grant any specificity whatsoever to the written sign.” Thus, if the absence one usually attributes to writing were found to be no less true of “every species of sign and of communication, [then] . . . writing would no longer be one species of communication.” In other words, every sign—whether written or spoken—automatically undergoes a process of dehiscence or self-alienation; that is, insofar as it introduces a rupture between itself and the idea it names, it cannot be completely present to itself. Once we recognize that this type of absence is common to both writing and speech (and to all forms of communication, according to Derrida), then not only is writing not inferior to speech, it may be taken as a representative instance of general communication. But what if we don’t accept this understanding of general communication? What if we don’t limit the difference between writing and speech to that theorized by Condillac? What if we theorize that difference differently? And what if that difference opens up new registers of meaning that writing cannot address? By reintroducing a distinction between writing and speech, I do not wish to reinscribe the hostility toward writing that Derrida detects in the Western philosophical tradition and so thoroughly deconstructs. Rather, I wish to attend to such a distinction with a sensitivity to the similarities between writing and speech that Derrida lays out. Those
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similarities, it turns out, have to do with the fact that both writing and speech can be analyzed as modes of verbal signification. Both relay ideational content through the transmission of signs, both speak to a conceptual register of meaning, and both are subject to iterability, citationality, and dehiscence.The difference, however, lies in the fact that speech, unlike writing, is additionally characterized by voice and gesture. Unlike verbal signification, vocal signification can create, augment and/or reverse the presumed meaning of words by using pronunciation, tone coloration, and inflectional variation to speak to an emotional as well as conceptual register of “meaning.” Similarly, pantomimic signification can create, augment, and/or reverse the presumed meaning of words by calling upon bodily comportment, gesture, and affect to speak to a spatio-temporal register of “meaning” as well. Of course, one could argue that italics, quotation marks, and even capitalization and spacing may be deployed in writing to accomplish these same effects. One could argue that sound recordings and film function as “written” transcriptions of vocal and pantomimic signification, subjecting them to the conditions of iterability and citationality that Derrida ascribes to writing.34 Indeed, in the body of a skillful mimic, vocal and gestural qualities may be rendered iterable. Similarly, a regional dialect or way of demarcating personal space may be subject to citationality when prior associations are imposed onto a “reading” of them. Even so, neither voice nor gesture is subject to dehiscence. They are what they are. Or, rather, they both are and are not subject to dehiscence, depending upon how one views them. If, for example, we ascribe a certain meaning to a certain inflection or gesture (as did Delsarte), then, of course, vocality and pantomime may be subject to dehiscence. But if we consider them as pure sound or movement, they are not subject to dehiscence in that they do not function as arbitrary signs within a system of difference. This is why any attempt to analogize vocality or gesture to language is ultimately limited.“Meaning,” in other words, is self-present. But, by “meaning,” I do not mean a significance that is registered within the conceptual bandwidth of the brain. Rather, I mean a “significance” that is registered within the body’s viscera, as emotional or experiential “knowledge.” The fact that I have to keep using quotation marks to make myself understood points to the fact that, to be understood—conceptually speaking—I have to recur to the metaphors of “meaning,”“significance,” and “knowledge” in order to approximate in verbal form the types of knowledge these modes of communication relay. Thus, the chief difference between writing and speech lies in the fact that the conceptual register is not the only one to which speech speaks. Upon making such a statement, however, I find I must immediately qualify it. Because, as the recent work of cognitive neurologist Antonio Damasio has proved, reason—as posited within the Western philo
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sophical tradition—does not exist as such. Understood as a distinct process of conceptual cognition, it is in fact integrally related to other bodily processes. According to Damasio’s studies, magnetic resonance imaging shows that those parts of the brain associated with reason are also responsible for processing the feelings that we register as emotion. Furthermore, he theorizes that an organism’s experience of its own internal processes in relation to its environment—an experience that he refers to as “homeostasis”—leads to the development of core consciousness where reason, emotion and, indeed, experience itself can be known as such. Thus, “reason,” “emotion,” and “experience” do not refer to separate brain functions or states of consciousness; they are merely terms that have heuristic value in enabling us to analyze various aspects of human consciousness. Their referents do not exist in isolation; each presupposes the other two.35 What this means is that the different registers of knowledge I’ve thus posited are likewise heuristic devices designed to make us aware of the limitations at work in Derrida’s understanding of writing (and speech) as a mode of conceptual transmission. But, as I hope my analysis of the non-dehiscent nature of voice and gesture and my summary of Damasio’s research make clear, there are other ways in which “meaning” is produced and other ways in which it is understood. Although much of the recent theoretical activity done in the name of performance and performativity has yet to fully acknowledge the significance of these findings, it nonetheless reveals an incipient desire to bring them to bear upon our current understanding of culture as text. For example, in her early work on poetic language, Julia Kristeva posits a type of pre-symbolic utterance capable of erupting into and disrupting the structures of patriarchal discourse. Similarly, in her work on gender performativity, Judith Butler uses drag as an example of a type of gesture capable of revealing and potentially resisting the discursive mechanisms that constitute us as sexed and gendered subjects. In both of these cases and more, the notion of performance is functioning to signal a tentative break with a historically-specific understanding of language as a mode of verbal signification alone. I have identified this understanding with modernism, and thus see postmodernism’s turn to performance as a way of rearticulating human presence to the “textuality” of contemporary social relations. III.The Example of Butler’s Theory of Performativity Thus far, I have attempted to account for the past fifty years’ critical interest in the trope of performance by suggesting that it signals an implicit dismantling of the anti-performative bias upon which a certain modernist understanding of textuality is based. Furthermore, I have suggested that, as applied to the study of culture, this model of j u l i a a . wa l k e r
textuality is felt to be inadequate to a full description of cultural experience. But this alone is not enough to account for the profound resonance that the trope of performance has had in explaining the structure of feeling associated with the postmodern condition. In what follows, I take Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity as an especially powerful example of the turn to performance in contemporary cultural criticism, demonstrating that, for all of its interest in recuperating non-verbal modes of communication, Butler’s theory persists in utilizing methodologies that derive from and are specific to modernist analyses of verbal signification. Analyzing the philosophical assumptions that prohibit her from divesting completely in a textbased model of culture, I show how they lead to the problems in her much-criticized account of agency. In my conclusion, I read such problems symptomatically, showing how they reveal contemporary anxieties regarding a transition into a postmodern era of late capitalism. In her theory of gender performativity, Butler argues, in effect, that gender is a type of “speech act” whereby bodies performatively enact sexed or gendered identities according to socially sanctioned codes. Butler maintains, however, that these compelled performances may be disrupted by the parodic repetition of such codes.36 Her example par excellance, of course, is drag, a type of pantomimic signification. Not only does it allow a body that is biologically sexed as “male” to resignify itself as “female” by performing the social codes and conventions regulating femininity (or, theoretically, “female” as “male” by performing masculinity), but, in doing so, drag reveals the mechanisms by which gender is socially produced. Thus, in the face of compulsory sexual identification, drag allows for the possibility of resistance by exposing the uncertain authority behind the process of gender inscription that necessitates the repetition of its law. But what is most promising about Butler’s theory is also what is most troubling. By opening up Austin’s speech-act theory to include non-verbal modes of communication, Butler nonetheless persists in understanding acts of nonverbal signification as if they were verbal utterances. This leads to two important problems with her theory, each of which reveals an incomplete divestment in the anti-performative model of textuality associated with modernism. The first problem with Butler’s theory, as an initial wave of critics pointed out, is that it appears to be premised upon a contradictory model of agency; it presupposes both a limited subject, constrained by the discursive networks that hail it into being, and a voluntarist subject capable of exerting a parodistic will.37 Attempting to answer such critics, Butler elaborated the account of agency implicit in Gender Trouble in Bodies That Matter, Excitable Speech, and subsequent essays in which she describes it as a temporal dimension of subjectivity. She argues that, though the subject is fully constituted by the discursive
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structures that hail it into being, and though it is compelled by those structures to act—specifically, to reiterate cultural norms—its reiteration of those norms is enabled (or disabled) through the unfolding of time. Butler borrows this emphasis on temporality from Derrida, Althusser, and Foucault, each of whom sought to introduce a temporal dimension to the initially synchronic paradigm of structuralism. Conjoining Derrida’s notions of iteration and citation with Althusser’s theory of interpellation and Foucault’s postulate that power creates the conditions of its own resistance, Butler arrives at her theory of agency as that moment when an interpellated subject may fail to reproduce itself as such. Yet Butler’s account of “agency” here does not correspond to a conventional usage of the term. It does not properly belong to the subject as an expression of that subject’s will; rather, it belongs to the discursive structures that hail that subject into being. Or, more exactly, it appears as an inadvertent by-product of the temporal processes by which those structures reproduce themselves. In Bodies That Matter, for example, Butler explains that “the call by the law which seeks to produce a lawful subject, produces a set of consequences that exceed and confound what appears to be the disciplining intention motivating the law.”38 Thus, insofar as agency “belongs” to the subject, it does so only provisionally and as an unintended consequence of power’s need to reproduce itself. Understood in another way, agency, for Butler, is like the moment when a cell undergoes the process of mitosis; although the genetic code “compels” it to reproduce itself, the cell may “resist” such compulsion by failing to divide properly or at all, thus allowing for the possibility of mutation and/or death. According to this analogy, Butler’s theory suggests that the prognosis for the body politic isn’t very good. Indeed, this is the point on which Butler’s critics focus their harshest criticism. Martha Nussbaum, for example, charges her with “moral passivity” and a “dangerous quietism” for implying that resistance is possible only symbolically and only as a series of individual refusals.39 Even if we accept Butler’s account of agency as not properly belonging to the subject but as an unintended consequence of the need for interpellating structures to reproduce themselves, it seems fair to ask—as many of her critics have—under what conditions does the subject find itself free to act, and under what conditions does it remain constrained?40 Alas, Butler dodges such questions, insisting that the specificities of each situation preclude theorization. In an interview with Vicki Bell, Butler remarked: “[T]his probably seems really odd considering the level of abstraction at which I work [but . . . ] I actually believe that politics has a character of contingency and context to it that cannot be predicted at the level of theory. And that when theory starts becoming programmatic [ . . . ] it pre-empts the whole j u l i a a . wa l k e r
problem of context and contingency, and I do think that political decisions are made in that lived moment and they can’t be predicted from the level of theory . . . .”41 Even on the level of theory, though, Butler’s notion of agency as a temporal dimension of subjectivity is problematic. Though it would seem to clear her of the charge that she has posited a contradictory model of the subject, it doesn’t resolve that contradiction so much as occlude it by slipping between two different fields of analysis. One field operates according to a metaphor of space, where the subject is constrained within a synchronic structure of discursive relations; the other operates according to a metaphor of time, where the subject is potentially free to resist those structures within a diachronicallymarked moment in the process of their reproduction. This would suggest that, insofar as Butler’s subject exists in space, it is always constrained, yet insofar as it exists in time, it is always potentially free. But synchrony and diachrony are merely heuristic modes of analysis used to bracket space apart from time in order to conceptualize them as separable entities; under the ordinary conditions of lived experience, of course, space and time are fused. Thus, Butler’s model only works without contradiction in theory, where time can function as a theoretical “outside” from which her subject may resist the determining structures of discourse “inside” which it otherwise exists. By positing a temporal “outside” that is separable from her spatial “inside,” Butler is able to ascribe a theoretical freedom taken from one level of analysis to a subject that she posits in another. Thus, far from disproving her critics’ earlier charge that her theory is premised upon a contradictory model of the subject, Butler appears to have further substantiated it. This “inside/outside” opposition is not limited to Butler’s theory of the subject, however. Indeed, what I have diagnosed here is merely a local manifestation of a much larger problem that permeates her entire theory of performativity. In short, it is a problem of competing assumptions having to do with language and its relationship to reality, and it results from the curious double legacy she inherits from Austin and Derrida. From Austin, she borrows the notion of a “performative,” a linguistic formula which, in being uttered by the proper authority under the right conditions, effects a change in the condition or status of reality. This, of course, presumes that the speaker exists outside the realm of language and literally invokes it into the material realm of which he or she is a part.Yet, because Butler rethinks Austin’s performative through the lens of Derrida’s critique, it is also an utterance that locates its speaker within a chain of significations from which the authority to effect such change is derived. This presumes that the speaker is not only inside the system of language, but, as further elaborated by Butler, is both constrained by that system and compelled by it to speak. Thus, building her theory on the analytic tradi
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tion’s crumbling foundation of linguistic mimeticism, Butler attempts to shore it up with insights gained from post-structuralism. The problem is that the assumptions of these two different philosophical traditions are basically incommensurable. What allows her to suture them together is a fundamental assumption both traditions have in common. Though it is almost too obvious to bear mentioning, that commonality is the centrality of language and the concomitant assumption that meaning is a function of verbal signification alone. Which brings me to my second point of critique: by drawing upon analytic and deconstructive methods of understanding verbal signification, Butler generalizes from the particular when she applies them to her analysis of non-verbal modes of communication such as those associated with drag (e.g., dress, comportment, gesticulation, and vocality). As we’ve seen, non-verbal modes of communication do not operate in the exact same way verbal signification does. They do not, for example, make their primary appeal to a conceptual register of meaning. Rather, I have argued, they make their appeal to what might be referred to as affective and experiential registers of meaning. This is important because, in her focus on the disruptive power of gender performativity, Butler analyzes the act of parodic resignification solely in terms of ideation. Furthermore, she seems to abide by the modernist assumption that meaning resides within language itself, even if she rethinks it through the poststructuralist notion of an endless chain of signification. For example, in Gender Trouble she notoriously claims that “drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity.”42 Note that it is a conceptual distinction that is being subverted and a conceptual model that is being mocked; note, too, that it is the drag “utterance” and not the drag performer that is doing the subverting and the mocking. Similarly, in Bodies That Matter she suggests that a parodic reiteration of the term “queer” can unseat the term’s derogatory meaning and potentially invest it with new meanings: “This kind of citation will emerge as theatrical to the extent that it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses. The hyperbolic gesture is crucial to the exposure of the homophobic ‘law’ that can no longer control the terms of its own abjecting strategies.”43 Note that resistance is imagined only in terms of resignifying the ideational content of the term “queer”; note, too, that it is the citation and not the citing subject that exposes the homophobic law.44 Of course, Butler’s goal is not simply to resignify gender or the term “queer.” It is, by changing the meanings of these terms, to change our sense of the realities they name. The problem is that the theoretical strategy she chooses locks her hopelessly into a nominalist position, j u l i a a . wa l k e r
preventing her from speaking to the ways in which these terms are lived within the material conditions of reality. Rather than rethink this strategy, Butler retreats to her theoretical trenches, insisting that knowledge of the real is always mediated through the symbolic. While this is certainly true of conceptual knowledge, it denies the possibility that there are other ways of knowing reality, such as affectively and experientially. What is strange is that Butler comes tantalizingly close to acknowledging these other ways of knowing through the examples she chooses to illustrate her theory (e.g., drag), and indeed, through her repeated use of theatrical metaphor (e.g., “theatrical,” “mimes,” and “hyperbolic gesture” in the quote above). Stranger still is the vehemence with which she refuses to consider theatricality on its own terms, insisting upon a fundamental distinction between performativity and performance.45 Like Austin, it would seem, Butler excludes theatrical performance from her analytical purview only to have that exclusion become the defining condition of her theory. As I’m suggesting, her theory of performativity would be much more practicable if it expanded its analytical focus to include nonverbal modes of communication, and adapted its method accordingly. In this way, we might better understand and perhaps predict the potential efficacy of an act of performative resignification—whether on the stage or in the street—according to the number and use of communicative modes it employs. Butler stops just short of arriving at this idea when, in speaking of a parodic resignification of the term “queer,” she puts an emphasis upon the idea of excess. But what is excess? Extra significatory work done on the verbal level? What would this be? Paraphrastic qualification upon qualification in the style of Henry James (or Eve Sedgwick)? Unfortunately, Butler does not explicitly identify what form such excess would take, turning instead to theatrical metaphor to make her point for her. But if we unpack that metaphor, we see that the sort of excess needed to disrupt the authorizing laws of discourse would have to include these other modes of communication. After all, if language is an ideational medium, as Butler, following Derrida, presumes, then words alone cannot torque or “queer” their own meanings (except in the case of oxymorons). Of course, they can and do when some sort of defamiliarizing strategy is employed, such as irony or ambiguity. Such defamiliarization is necessary to pull the word apart from the idea it presumably names and, in doing so, expose the inability of that idea to adequately describe reality. But to speak of irony and ambiguity—two terms not insignificantly associated with New Criticism—is to speak of vocality and gesture, albeit in metaphorical terms. After all, irony is a “tone” that reverses the presumed meaning otherwise signified, while ambiguity is a “stance” that locates meaning in two places at once. Thus, it turns out that the defamiliarizing strategies needed to torque a word’s
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meaning are dependent—even if within the reader’s imagination— upon voice and gesture. This would suggest that language is not simply an ideational medium, but “speaks” to the heart and the gut as well as the head. I think Artaud had it right after all: only by appealing to all of our senses could something be “known” in a way that surpasses merely conceptual cognition. If the goal of performativity is not simply to resignify words but to change the way they organize social and political relations and structure the material conditions of our lives, we will have to expand Butler’s model to take these other modes of communication and these other ways of understanding into account. Of course, we would have to bear in mind that there is no guarantee that a meaning unseated in any one level of semiosis would necessarily be unseated in another, or wouldn’t be prevented from being reconsolidated in another. What this points to is the fact that what is queered or torqued in performativity is not meaning per se but the use to which such meanings are put. In speaking of use, I refer to the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein who, practically at the same moment J.L. Austin was discovering the performative exception to the analytic tradition’s rule, had already made a similar but thorough-going critique of the mimetic assumptions underlying the analytic tradition. The problem was that Wittgenstein’s critique was relatively unknown and existed primarily as a set of notes his disciples published as the Philosophical Investigations two years after his death.That Austin did not know Wittgenstein’s work is one thing; that many of us in the field of literary and cultural criticism largely persist in ignoring the implications it holds for the core assumptions we hold about language is another. Butler, as her critics have pointed out, pushes the issues of context and reception to the margins of her theory.46 Yet, if we were to rethink her theory of performativity through Wittgenstein’s understanding of language as use (opening up “language” to include nonverbal modes of communication), we could resolve the contradiction that inheres within her model of the subject. That is, if language is a “game,” ordered by a set of rules to which the communicant-players agree, and if one game varies from another, then the subject is both bound by the rules within any one discursive context and free to exit out of and enter into others, potentially contributing rules or otherwise modifying those of the game(s) he or she is in. What this means is that there is no necessary contradiction between being inside or outside of language. To illustrate, we need only return to the example of the theatre. On its stage, we are presented with the ontological reality of an actor’s body and asked to understand that body in terms of both fictional and social realms of meaning. Megan Terry’s play Viet Rock, for example, brilliantly exploits this feature of performance by having her actors assume multiple roles within the course of a single scene. We j u l i a a . wa l k e r
see, for instance, actors portraying an American mother attending to her son who lies dying in an Army hospital immediately transform into a Vietnamese mother grieving over the body of her dead son as a Buddhist priest administers funeral rites.47 Here we see various fictional identities ostended to any one actor’s body, suggesting that that body can be known through many different language games. Terry’s point, of course, is that for all the various ways in which we may conceptualize these bodies, we nonetheless experience an affective continuity among them. The sympathy elicited by the first Pietà and maintained by the next is generated by our recognition that life and death are part of a universal human experience. The universality of that experience—at once represented and instantiated by the actor’s own living, breathing, corporeal body—exceeds any attempt to particularize it through language, an idea that Terry explicitly stages at the end of her play. From within a performance space that has been literally defined by the language of war (with placards posted on the walls), Terry’s actors break the narrative bounds of the play by dropping their fictional identities as they walk through the audience space, enacting her theme of a shared common humanity by touching the hands, heads, faces, and hair of individual audience members as they leave. In this way, audiences are made to recognize that a single body can be comprehended through multiple discursive frames, a recognition that, significantly, comes to them through conceptual, affective, and experiential registers of “knowledge.” Of course, Terry’s play is formally experimental, using a sort of Brechtian Verfremdungeffekt to foreground the process by which her actors shift between identities. But this oscillation between identities is a structural part of all theatre, even that which utilizes a Realist aesthetic. Even as the Realist actor consistently assumes a fictional identity throughout the play, such an actor nonetheless shifts back into his or her own social identity to take a bow. Where the theatre derives its power to thrill, I would argue, is in its ability to shift its audience between fictional and social frames, simultaneously placing the actor inside and outside one or the other discursive field. What this points to, then, is that when we speak of being “inside” language, what we mean is that we are inside a particular discursive game constituted by a particular discursive community which, as a social formation, is constantly being reconfigured and reproduced through processes of social change in which subjects have real—if often limited—agency. This is not to say that subjects within such discursive communities are “free” in the sense that they are somehow outside the ideology implied by that particular game of discourse. Nor is this to say that they are “free” from the regulatory laws of oppressive vocal and gestural regimes. Indeed, it may be that the sexed and gendered subject positions that Butler sets out to investigate are even more forcefully regu
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lated by laws enforcing vocal and gestural norms. But in identifying them as hitherto unidentified factors in her analysis, I hope to expand and complicate her theory of performativity by identifying ways that subject positions are lived in the body. Though our conceptual knowledge of that body may be restricted to epistemological categories that are created in and through verbal language, there are other modes of “knowledge” that may be able to disrupt those epistemological categories. We must learn to take them into account. Such an expanded model of performativity would, I believe, allow us to address not only the many “languages” a subject speaks, but the many uses to which those languages may be put within the field of social and political relations. Although we can never predict the political efficacy that a performative act may have, we can theorize the complexity of the meanings it deploys with a greater sensitivity to the way such meanings are not only conceptualized but lived. IV. Conclusion For all my criticism of Butler, I believe she nonetheless points the way toward a more thorough understanding of how meanings shape and are shaped by a fully embodied experience of the world. After all, her unexamined assumptions about language are not original to her theory of performativity but derive from the model of culture-as-text that she inherits from her structuralist and post-structuralist forebearers. Imagining language as a system in which we are trapped, unable to wholly escape or subvert its control, this model posits culture as a discursive structure wherein measures of social control have the syntactical function of regulating political/grammatical subjects. Although Butler accepts the assumptions of this model, she begins to move us toward the necessary reassertion of human presence in this field of meaning hitherto understood to be authorized by and circumscribed in texts alone. Suggesting that cultural authority may be resisted with pre-symbolic utterance or parodied with gesture, theorists such as Kristeva and Butler effectively recuperate Curry’s vocal and pantomimic “languages” as alternative systems of meaning. Thus, the turn to performance reminds us that resistance may very well lie in the power of voices to shout and bodies to stand forth. That such a reminder is necessary, however, is somewhat odd. After all, the past fifty years in which we’ve seen this critical turn to the metaphor of performance has been the same period in which popular protest movements led to the enactment of Civil Rights legislation, the end of the Vietnam War, broader access to a university education, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, divestment in South African apartheid, and the overthrow of repressive regimes around the world. Nonetheless, the reminder does seem necessary, given the way j u l i a a . wa l k e r
dominant interests appear to have subsequently co-opted and contained such strategies of resistance in the wake of their success. We need only think of the “popular” demonstrations orchestrated by totalitarian states, the use of mass culture to popularize official party lines, the architectural redesign of buildings limiting public access, or state control of media coverage during “events” such as the Gulf War or the War on Terrorism. Perhaps this is why Butler’s work has had such a profound impact upon contemporary social and cultural theory: by assuming constraints upon individual agency at the same time she insists upon its possibility, Butler seems to have identified a crucial point of anxiety in contemporary culture that invites us to read her work symptomatically. To do so, I briefly turn for example to the argument George Lukács makes in “The Sociology of Modern Drama” () where he claims that, unlike drama of other periods in which conflict appears as an external force to the protagonist, modern drama features a conflict that is internalized. Its intense concentration on the individual as a site of emotional, psychological, or moral conflict signals, for Lukács, a crisis within the culture at large in which the individual has suddenly come under siege by forces that impinge upon the individual’s freedom. For Lukács, in this early moment of his engagement with Marxist thought, those forces have a lot to do with capitalism and its mounting control of modern life. If postmodernism is, as Fredric Jameson has argued, the cultural expression of late capitalism, then perhaps the intense concentration on individual agency that we see in Butler’s work (and in her critics’ response to it) is a logical extension of what Lukács observed of modern drama nearly years ago. As I read it, Butler’s anxious insistence upon positing some kind of individual agency in her theory points to an overwhelming sense of its diminishing possibility within late capitalist culture. Considering that this latest stage in capitalism’s history has been marked by the substitution of a service economy for an industrial one, we might wish to consider how this has changed both our sense of the commodity and of the laborer’s relationship to it. In a late-capitalist service economy, where the primary commodity of exchange is labor power itself, the very act of serving, doing, making becomes itself fetishized. In such an economy, the act of serving, doing, making—in short, the act of acting—not only becomes a thing, but in its newly intensified form of alienation threatens to erase the actor whose labor it is. Although numerous instances abound, the scripting of telephone solicitation, restaurant service protocol, and the “spontaneous” banter of radio and television hosts provide several obvious examples. With this as the cultural-historical backdrop against which to read Butler’s work, we should not be surprised to find that, at the same time she tortuously seeks to posit a conditional model of agency, she herself tends to erase
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the parodically performing subject of her theory by locating meaning in the utterance alone. In answer to my questions “Why Performance? Why Now?” I would like to suggest that this return to the notion of performance over the course of the past fifty years reveals a desire to recognize the ways in which our very language has erased the material conditions of our existence. Dance theorist Randy Martin has made a similar analysis, arguing that the material body has all but disappeared from official cultural discourse—a result of the mind/body split that he traces against capitalism’s historical emergence. But this disappearance, Martin suggests, may be our own best hope. While capitalism’s everexpanding logic of rationalization seeks to colonize the mind, the actual material body remains largely outside that logic, offering itself up as a kinetic force of political resistance.48 Insofar as voice, too, is provisionally “outside” that logic, the turn to performance in contemporary social and cultural theory would suggest that recent attempts to reassert the body’s materiality in fact reveal a desire to recover a lost sense of agency in this, our postmodern moment. Notes
This paper was presented to the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory’s faculty colloquium series and the Sociocultural Anthropology Workshop, both at the University of Illinois. I would like to thank my respondents Ann Haugo, Debra Hawhee, and Brenda Farnell, as well as Joe Valente, Jed Esty, Matti Bunzl, and—as ever—William J. Maxwell for their thoughtful readings and suggestions. Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, ), , . Jiri Veltrusky,“Drama as Literature and Performance,” Das Drama und seine Inszenierung, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, ), –. See Frank M. Rarig and Halbert S. Greaves,“National Speech Organizations and Speech Education,” The History of Speech Education in America, ed. Karl Wallace (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, ), . They recount the events leading up to the meeting on November , , when the Public Speaking Section of the English Council voted to affiliate as the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking, later to become known as the National Association of Teachers of Speech (NATS). Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature, An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Mary Margaret Robb, “The Elocutionary Movement and Its Chief Figures,” The History of Speech Education in America, . Bernard Beckerman, “The University Accepts the Theatre: –,” American Theatre: A Sum of Its Parts (New York: Samuel French, Inc. ), . E. T. Kirby,“The Delsarte Method: Three Frontiers of Actor Training,” The Drama Review . (March ): . But see also Ted Shawn, Every Little Movement: A Book About Françoise Delsarte, (New York: Dance Horizons, ), . He cites Alfred Giraudet who claimed to map expressive possibilities. Robb, . For the widespread adoption of Curry’s theory of “expression” as well as his textbooks, see Clifford Eugene Hamar,“College and University Theatre Instruction in the Early Twentieth Century,” The History of Speech Education in America, . Robb, .
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See Danial Cory, Santayana:The Later Years. A Portrait with Letters (NY: George Braziller, ), ; also quoted in Joel Porte, introduction, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, by George Santayana ([] Cambridge: MIT Press, ), xxv. George Santayana,“The Elements and Function of Poetry,” Interpretations of Poetry and Religion ([] Cambridge: MIT Press, ). T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” Selected Essays: – (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., ), . See, for example,“The Possibility of a Poetic Drama,” The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, ), . However instrumental, Eliot was certainly not alone in defining the category of the literary in this way. Ezra Pound and the Imagists, too, appear to have adopted an anti-performative bias in the creation of their poetry. Reading the Imagist manifesto (; ) in light of the expressive culture movement, we see that their call for the “exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word” evokes the same imperative that Eliot would make several years later in “Hamlet and His Problems.” And, though their interest in the image is somewhat evocative of Curry’s method, it is nonetheless declared in explicit opposition to “the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his [sic] art.” Thus, it would appear that a new generation of poets developed their craft in response to disciplinary debates between oral and textual interpretation at the turn of the century. And, it would appear that, in doing so, they, too, helped define literary high modernism in anti-performative terms. See Preface to Some Imagist Poets, in Modernism, An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, et. al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . See, also Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” Susan Harris Smith, American Drama:The Bastard Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, ). Ibid., . Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman, Understanding Drama (New York: Henry Holt & Co., ), –. For more on the New Critics’ metaphorization of performative modes of communication, see my discussion of irony and ambiguity below. For Brooks’s metaphorization of drama to describe poetic form, see “The Heresy of Paraphrase” where he writes: The essential structure of a poem (as distinguished from the rational or logical structure of the ‘statement’ which we abstract from it) resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or, to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme. Or, to move still closer to poetry, the structure of a poem resembles that of a play. This last example, of course, risks introducing once more the distracting element, since drama, like poetry, makes use of words. Yet, on the whole, most of us are less inclined to force the concept of ‘statement’ on drama than on a lyric poem; for the very nature of drama is that of something ‘acted out’—something which arrives at its conclusion through conflict— something which builds conflict into its very being. The dynamic nature of drama, in short, allows us to regard it as an action rather than as a formula for action or as a statement about action. For this reason, therefore, perhaps the most helpful analogy by which to suggest the structure of poetry is that of the drama, and for many readers at least, the least confusing way in which to approach a poem is think of it as a drama (–). Here Brooks uses drama metaphorically: he describes poetic form as if it were dramatic action, conveying meaning not simply in its words but in the very structure of its unfolding. But note how this metaphor almost immediately breaks down. Where the tenor (poetic form) is supposed to derive only part of its meaning from a perceived affinity with the vehicle (drama), here both terms appear to share too much to allow the metaphor to work properly, necessitating Brooks’s complaint that drama, unlike architecture or ballet, introduces the “distracting element” of words. While poetic form borrows the notion of action from drama, the dramatic action Brooks invokes here is one that is curiously disembodied. With wave after wave of qualification, Brooks speaks of drama as an indefinable “something”—“something ‘acted out’”—but he does not address who it is that does the
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acting nor how that action is conveyed. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt Brace, ). Donald K. Smith,“Origin and Development of Departments of Speech,” History of Speech Education in America, . Smith, notes, however that the impulse to form this new association was felt a year earlier when discontented members passed a resolution calling for the separation of Public Speaking from English departments at a regional meeting in New England. The new organization’s name reflected this orientation—the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking (NAATPS). It was later shortened to the National Association of Teachers of Speech (NATS). Hamar cites – as the first year a course in play production was offered (at Pacific University in Oregon), but the trend seems to begin in (). See also Beckerman, –. Similar developments were occurring in Germany during the Weimar period with the discipline of “Theaterwissenschaft” (the science of theater) being founded out of an older “Germanistik” (German literary studies) tradition. A condensed version of this history appears in my essay “Bodies, Voices, Words: Modern Drama and the Problem of the Literary,” in, Modernism, Inc., eds. Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston (New York: New York University Press, ). For fuller details, see RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present ([] New York: Harry N. Abrams, ). Besides Goldberg, see Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance:The American Avant-Garde since (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Kristine Stiles,“Performance Art” in Stiles and Peter Selz, eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, “Introduction” in Jones and Stephenson, eds. Performing the Body/Performing the Text (London and New York: Routledge Press, ). Note that Jones and Stephenson basically adopt Sayre’s deconstructive methodology, while Stiles insists upon the need to develop a methodology based upon performance art itself and the artists’ own statements about it which would take into account the social, cultural, political, and historical context in which the performance occurred. The motive force behind NYU’s program was Richard Schechner, whose collaborations with anthropologist Victor Turner in the s redefined theatre studies by expanding its analytical purview from conventional theatre to include all forms of cultural ritual. While Turner allowed for a certain dynamism in his methodology, he nonetheless understood cultural ritual as having a narrative form. As we’ll see, the interpretative model of culture as text was also important to structural anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss. Michael A. Elliott, “Culture and the Making of Native American Literature,” invited talk delivered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April . See The Culture Concept:Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). See Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, eds. P. Geach and M. Black (New York: Philosophical Library, ), –. As José Limon and Marilyn Young note, Bauman’s call was meant to consolidate the energies generated by a number of books and articles appearing throughout the s which proposed ways of expanding text-based methodologies to include broader socio-cultural and processual dynamics. See “Frontiers, Settlements, and Development in Folklore Studies, –,” Annual Review of Anthropology (): –. For examples of transcription methodologies that are sensitive to performance dynamics, see Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, ) and Dell Hymes, “Breakthrough Into Performance,” in Dan Ben-Amos and K. S. Goldstein, eds. Folklore: Performance and Communication (The Hague: Mouton, ). But see also Robert Dale Parker,“Text, Lines, and Videotape,” Arizona Quarterly . (Autumn ): – for a critique of Tedlock’s and Hymes’s methodologies. Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), . Derrida’s essay on Valery appears in Margins of Philosophy ()—five years after his essay on Artaud is published in Writing and Difference (). Although I’m not making a case of necessary influence, it is worth noting that the Living Theatre’s Mysteries and Smaller Pieces—based, in part, on Artaud’s writings—took Paris by storm when first produced in the fall of . It
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was, thus, part of the general cultural milieu in which Derrida wrote Writing and Difference. John Tytell, The Living Theatre:Art, Exile, and Outrage (New York: Grove Press, ), –. As Susan Sontag observes in her introduction to Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings,“Thinking and using language [for Artaud] become a perpetual calvary” ([] Berkeley: University of California Press, ), xx. Indeed, early in his career, Artaud was frustrated by his inability to express himself in his poetry. Attempting to find more accurate means by which to express his inner thoughts and feelings, Artaud turned next to theatre and film (where he sought to develop a new language of bodies in space), then to magic (where language took on a merely incantatory function), and finally to schizophrenia (where Artaud resigned himself to a state of existence beyond language). Paradoxically, his schizophrenic phase also marked the period of his greatest productivity as a writer. What is important about these four stages of Artaud’s thought is that, taken together, they reflect a changing sense of how language works to create meaning. Derrida, by contrast, treats Artaud’s work synchronically and assumes a consistent prejudice against language per se. Significantly, he gets the date of Artaud’s essay “Theatre and Cruelty” wrong, attributing it to the latter part of Artaud’s career. See “The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . My critique of Derrida’s response to Austin is aimed at the arbitrary and historicallyspecific assumptions underlying the distinction he makes between speech and writing (which he implicitly acknowledges in his identification of them with Condillac). I do not wish to suggest that these assumptions are necessarily at work in the corpus of his work; nor do I wish to suggest that Derrida does not elsewhere allow for such things as the materiality of voice. My primary interest here is in the way his critique of speech-act theory has been implemented within the academy to reinforce and prolong what I have identified here as the anti-performative bias within a certain understanding of textuality. Jacques Derrida,“Signature, Event, Context,” Glyph (): . Ibid., . The historical specificity of this fact is worth noting, however. Without the communication technologies of the past years, such analogies could not be made. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, ). In Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, ), Herbert Marcuse similarly speaks of compulsion as a feature of what he—not insignificantly—refers to as the “performance principle.” Here he updates Freud’s notion of the “reality principle” to take into account the structures of late-capitalist productive relations which compel us not only to sublimate our libidinal energies but to do so in a way that results in “surplus repression.” As Molly Anne Rothenberg and Joe Valente point out,“Butler relies on a volitional politics even as she disavows volitionality in her model of subjectivity.” Furthermore, they find her guilty of an “intentionalism” which presumes that the intent behind any act of signification will necessarily be received as such. See “Performative Chic: The Fantasy of a Performative Politics,” College Literature (February ): . Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, ), . Martha Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody,” The New Republic (February ): –. See Lois McNay, “Subject, Psyche and Agency: The Work of Judith Butler,” and Moya Lloyd,“Performativity, Parody, Politics,” both in Theory, Culture & Society . (April ). Even sympathetic critics such as McNay and Lloyd fault Butler for her inattention to the specificities of context: McNay says that her theory lacks an account of how “performative aspects of gender identity are lived by individuals in relation to the web of social practices in which they are enmeshed” (), while Lloyd maintains, “It is not the sign per se that compels us to renegotiate our reading practices but rather the sign in its historical present” (). Less sympathetic critics point to the lack of empirical evidence to support her claims. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, accuses Butler of “preferring to remain on the high plane of metaphysical abstraction” rather than take into account empirical evidence that might challenge, complicate, or even support her theory of gender inscription ().
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Vicki Bell,“On Speech, Race and Melancholia: An Interview with Judith Butler,” Theory, Culture & Society . (April ): –. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, ), . Butler, Bodies That Matter, . See Butler’s introduction to Bodies That Matter where she insists upon understanding agency in terms of regimes of discursive power rather than individual will (). Butler’s distinction between performativity and performance, of course, has to do with individual agency (where performativity is defined by interpellative constraints and performance by willed participation). However problematic such a distinction may be, it is not what I take issue with here. Rather, I’m concerned with her overdetermined refusal to consider that performance—with its extra-textual modes of communication—may have something to offer her analysis of social performativity. Rothenberg and Valente, . Megan Terry, “Viet Rock,” Four Plays by Megan Terry (New York: Simon & Schuster ), . Randy Martin, Performance as a Political Act (New York: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, ).
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