...For example, Judith Butler uses the term "performativity" to describe the material presence of abstract discourses. For Butler, a subject is never performing his or herself, but rather enacting certain discourses.
..."The primary fundamental of performance studies is that there is no fixed canon of works, ideas, practices or anything else that defines or limits the field."
...Performance Studies as an academic field has multiple origin narratives. Wallace Bacon (1914-2001), considered by many the father of Performance theory, taught performance of literature as the ultimate act of humility. In his defining statement of performance theory Bacon writes "Our center is in the interaction between readers and texts which enriches , extends, clarifies, and (yes) alters the interior and even the exterior lives of students [and performers and audiences] through the power of texts" (Literature in Performance, Vol 5 No 1, 1984; p. 84).
...Other accounts of the discipline's roots stress the research collaborations of director Richard Schechner and anthropologist Victor Turner. This origin narrative emphasizes a definition of performance as being "between theatre and anthropology" and often stresses the importance of intercultural performances as an alternative to either traditional proscenium theatre or traditional anthropological fieldwork. Dwight Conquergood developed a branch of performance ethnography that centered the political nature of the practice and advocated for methodological dialogism from the point of encounter to the practices of research reporting. Bryan Reynolds has developed a combined performance theory and critical methodology known as “transversal poetics” to bring historical analysis in conversation with current research in a number of fields, from social semiotics to cognitive neuroscience, the effect of which has been to expand the relevancy of performance studies across academic disciplines. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has contributed an interest in tourist productions and ethnographic showmanship to the field, Judd Case has adapted performance to the study of media and religion, Diana Taylor has brought a hemispheric perspective on Latin American performance and theorized the relationship between the archive and the performance repertoire, while Corinne Kratz developed a mode of performance analysis that emphasizes the role of multimedia communication in performance.
An alternative origin narrative stresses the development of speech-act theory by philosophers J.L. Austin and Judith Butler, literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and also Shoshana Felman. The theory proposed by Austin in How To Do Things With Words states that “to say something is to do something, or in saying something we do something, and even by saying something we do something.” the most illustrative example being "I do," as part of a marriage ceremony. For any of these performative utterances to be felicitous, per Austin, they must be true, appropriate and conventional according to those with the proper authority: a priest, a judge, or the scholar, for instance. Austin accounts for the infelicitous by noting that “there will always occur difficult or marginal cases where nothing in the previous history of a conventional procedure will decide conclusively whether such a procedure is or is not correctly applied to such a case.”The possibility of failure in performatives (utterances made with language and the body) is taken up by Butler and is understood as the “political promise of the performative.” Her argument is that because the performative needs to maintain conventional power, convention itself has to be reiterated, and in this reiteration it can be expropriated by the unauthorized usage and thus create new futures. She cites Rosa Parks as an example:
When Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, she had no prior right to do so guaranteed by any…conventions of the South. And yet, in laying claim to the right for which she had no prior authorization, she endowed a certain authority on the act, and began the insurrectionary process of overthrowing those established codes of legitimacy.
The question of the infelicitous utterance (the misfire)is also taken up by
Shoshana Felman when she states "Infelicity, or failure, is not for Austin an
accident of the performative, it is inherent in it, essential to it. In other words
Austin conceives of failure not as external but as internal to the promise,
as what actually constitutes it.”
Performance studies has also had a strong relationship to the fields of feminism, psychoanalysis, critical race theory and queer theory. Theorists like Peggy Phelan, José Esteban Muñoz, E. Patrick Johnson, Rebecca Schneider, and André Lepecki have been equally influential in both performance studies and these related fields.Performance studies incorporates theories of drama, dance, art, anthropology, folkloristics, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, comparative literature, and more and more, music performance.
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Judith Butler wiki
Bodies That Matter seeks to clear up readings and misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice. To do this, Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, a form of citationality, to work out a theory of performativity in terms of iterability:Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.
Iterability, in its endless undeterminedness as to-be-determinedness, is thus precisely that aspect of performativity that makes the production of the "natural" sexed, gendered, heterosexual subject possible, while also and at the same time opening that subject up to the possibility of its incoherence and contestation.
...Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse.
Deploying Foucault’s argument from The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid. As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality it sought to control. Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic “I” is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech".
Butler also questions the efficacy of censorship on the grounds that hate speech is context-dependent. Citing J.L. Austin's concept of the performative utterance, Butler notes that words’ ability to “do things” makes hate speech possible but also at the same time dependent on its specific embodied context.
Butler discusses how gender is performed without one being conscious of it, but says that it does not mean this performativity is "automatic or mechanical". She argues that we have desires that do not originate from our personhood, but rather, from social norms. The writer also debates our notions of "human" and "less-than-human" and how these culturally imposed ideas can keep one from having a "viable life" as the biggest concerns are usually about whether a person will be accepted if his or her desires differ from normality. She states that one may feel the need of being recognized in order to live, but that at the same time, the conditions to be recognized make life "unlivable". The writer proposes an interrogation of such conditions so that people who resist them may have more possibilities of living.
...Others are more critical. Susan Bordo has chastised Butler for reducing gender to language, arguing that the body is a major part of gender, thus implicitly opposing her conception of gender as performed.
...Peter Digeser argues that Butler’s idea of performativity is too pure to account for identity. Digeser doubts that pure performativity is possible, suggesting that in viewing the gendered individual as purely performed, Butler ignores the gendered body, which Bordo also argues is extremely important. He also argues that neither an essentialist nor a performative notion of gender should be used in the political sphere, as both simplify gender too much.
...Finally, Nancy Fraser argued that Butler’s focus on performativity has distanced her from “everyday ways of talking and thinking about ourselves … Why should we use such a self-distancing idiom?”
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Illocutionary act wiki
Classes of illocutionary acts
- assertives = speech acts that commit a speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition
- directives = speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a particular action, e.g. requests, commands and advice
- commissives = speech acts that commit a speaker to some future action, e.g. promises and oaths
- expressives = speech acts that express on the speaker's attitudes and emotions towards the proposition, e.g. congratulations, excuses and thanks
- declarations = speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration, e.g. baptisms, pronouncing someone guilty or pronouncing someone husband and wife
Austin found great difficulty in drawing a completely clear distinction between "performatives" and "constatives"; among other things he came to the conclusion that to state something is to perform an illocutionary act, which renders all constatives as performatives; for reasons like these, he eventually suggested abandoning the dichotomy, replacing it by a trichotomy of speech acts, namely, the so-called "locutionary", "illocutionary" and "perlocutionary acts".
Constatives
Constative utterances describe states of affairs which are either true or false. They are utterances which describe the world and in so doing ascertain or state something. Constatives mostly (though not necessarily) have the form of declarative sentences, they refer to the act of saying something, and, as mentioned above, they are truth-evaluable or at least purport to describe reality (cf. Petrey 1990:4).
Performatives
Performative utterances often take the form of declarative sentences with which the speaker performs the action denoted by some performative verb (e.g. promise, declare etc.). In so doing, the speaker does not describe the world but changes it. Austin claims about performatives that
- “they do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, are not ‘true or false’; and the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just’, saying something” (Austin 1976:5).
- By uttering (i) the speaker actually makes an apology, he does not describe himself apologizing for his behaviour.
- ( i ) I apologize for my behaviour
Performative Verbs
The type of verbs used to make performative utterances are called performatives or performative verbs. Examples are: promise, name, bet, agree, swear, declare, order, predict, warn, insist, declare or refuse. The propositional content of the utterance functions as a complement of the performative verb. Characteristics of performative verbs are:
- Performative verbs are verbs that describe actions carried out by speakers.
- They are used in 1st person singular, simple present, indicative, active.
- They can be combined with hereby
X "One of the things I most admire about Richard's directing is the way he frees himself from the common assumptions of what theater 'must have' or 'must be,'" said McGinley. "He questions every convention, every choice that many directors or actors or scholars never think about. And although he is a very good and important scholar, he does not allow an intellectual approach to constrain the play. He approaches the play viscerally -- as music, as playing."
and how performance art somehow could've initiated such a debate etc..
"The assertion is that performance, that is, how people behave and display their behavior, is a fundamental category of human life," Schechner said. "I don't know whether it's exactly the same as Shakespeare's 'all the world's a stage,' but it's in the same ball park." ..."The domination of theory for its own sake is coming to an end in academia," Schechner said. "Theory is secondary to something one does based on experience, on data, on fieldwork and on experiment. Performance studies as an academic discipline is extremely open to new theoretical constructs that try to bridge and narrow or eliminate the gap between theory and practice."
...social sciences, humanities and the creative arts all ask basically the same question: what is it to be human? Schechner also asks these questions and bridges those different areas with adamant and lively discussion," said Ascher. "He's also one of the few people working in Western theater who has the experience and knowledge of theater in (non-Western) cultures and can make connections between cultures from all over the world."
Dionysus in 69 video clip X
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X Turner noted that in liminality, the transitional state between two phases, individuals were "betwixt and between": they did not belong to the society that they previously were a part of and they were not yet reincorporated into that society. Liminality is a limbo, an ambiguous period characterized by humility, seclusion, tests, sexual ambiguity, and communitas. Communitas is defined as an unstructured community where all members are equal.
...Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion (2004) have suggested that the work has rendered pilgrimage neglected as an area of anthropological study, due to Turner's assertion that pilgrimage was, by its liminal nature, extraordinary and not part of daily life (and therefore not a part of the make up of everyday society).
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Experimental theatre wiki
a play: Tom Stoppard's Travesties (a line: as an experience it fees like sharing a cell with a fanatic in search of a mania
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Steven Conor Postmodern performance (from Analysing performance, 702.8112/CAM)
p.108...The closeness of the word 'perform' to the word 'act', however, may alert us to a certain trvo of equivocation in the word. For, if perform means to act, make or do something, it also means to dissimulate or to pretend t act, to feign action.
The word 'performance' therefore points simultaneously towards immediate, spontaneous and ungoverned action on the one hand, and the ac of doubling, and he doubling of action, in imitation, repetition or citation on the other.
p.109...it has becme difficult t say when action ends and erformance begins
chk p.118
time, space and then 'we are not pretending that u don't exist,'..
essay 7
.126...In postmodern context, everything sems to be constructed. The meaning, the erformance, the performers and the audience are all constructed.
p.127 good
p.154 'Nietzche's task, that is the overturning of Platonism'. ...relationship between experience andinterpretation..
p.157...When dancing, we subject our boduily movements to musical rules (we are less free thn when we walk) an yet inour very self-consciousness we seem to reveal more clearly our physicl sense f the selves: we are hus more self expressive.
p.158...adding music to a scene, then , gives all the movements in it an implied intention: babble becomes speech, a walk becomes a dance,even if we do not understad it.
dance as a movement which draws attention to itself..
p.163...yvonne riner 'social interaction seems to b mostly abourt seduction'
when
“The game of seduction is a complex one: you have to make the other believe that you have what s/he needs without rousing her/his suspicion of your personal motives. Or, maybe, you just need to be the most desirable object playing hard to get. Seduction then can be seen to aim at finding a connection by means of mutual deception.” X
One can generalize from this: in the performing arts, there is a continua exchange -depending on which way the gaze is operating- of identity and distance, of mind and body, of thought and non thought. And this is the mode of atention foregrounded in popuar culture: flickering concentration spans, emphasis on discrete moments (not depth or flow), a play of separation and involvement.
- Snow is white. (true)
- Snow is red. (false)
Rainer 'the personal and the politicl are not synonymous. They overlap and intertwine. And one must struggle constantly to assess one's power, or the lack of it, in every spher of one's life.'
'everything is about seduction or death'
'Emotional relationships of desire, tainted by coersion and constraint.'
Essay 10, p.179-180
'there is nothing more illusory in performance than the illusion of the unmediated'
there is something written in the very nature of performance which 'seems embedded in the conservatism of the instincts and the linguistic operations of the unconscious.
p.221... arthur danto,, he suggests that not only each performance, but also each reception of it constitutes a new work.
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from The performance studies reader 702.8112/BIA
p.60...It is probably no mere historical accident that hte word person in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rther the recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a roleö..it is in thee roles hat we know society, it is in these roles that we know ourselves.
p.103...In brief, a play keys life, a ceremonial keys an event.... Once it is seen that cermonials have a consequencet that scripted dramas and even contests do not, it is necessary to admit that the engrossment and awe generated by the occasions vary greatly among spectators.
p.105... The self cannot, therefore be treated as a thing among thinghs;it is the function of our involvment with others and in a world of diverse and ever altering interests and situations.
p.112...Few images force us to lose our eyes: death, suffering, the opening of the body... Here the etyes become black holes in which the image is absorbed willingly or by force. There images plunge in and strike directly where it hurts without passing through the habitual filters, as if the yes no longer had any connection with the brain.
p.115 'one definition of performance might be: ritualized behavior conditioned/permeated by play'
conversation with Brendan: painting becoming a gateaway, holiday, relaxation from sth that one is involved in. The significance of release and distance from one's own interest. we need space, air to propagate. It's , in a way, a way to diminish tension. by making it even to all directions, what remains is only a feeling of general expansion.
