By Richard Schechner
PERFORMATIVITY
Performativity and Performative- noun and adjective
Variety of key terms:
1) Austin’s performative:
J.L Austin- linguistic philosopher
Utterances, infelicitous/unhappy
To say is to do.
Bets, contracts, promises
He didn’t understand the performative utterances in Theatre and said they were ‘unhappy’ (performatives uttered under false circumstances). “But what happens on stage has emotional and ideological consequences of performer and spectator”. The characters are real in the domain of that liminal, maya-lila time-space realm. Exchange between two domains.
Meaning is not fixed and all utterances are infelicitous as they are a repetition. In theatre its general iterability is modified.
2) Searle’s speech acts
Communicating realities through speech acts
Speech acts: uttering of sounds forming a word/sentence; words/sentences referring to an event; words/sentences that command, promise, question, state
Artists were interested in the “erosion of the real-fictional boundary”
Eg. Luigi Pirandello, John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Nikolai Evreinov : dissolving the separation between stage and audience
3) Reality Tv and beyond
The blurring of the lines between private and public and real and staged starts with the increase of reality tv and shows that gain revenue on the voyeurism.
The “it could be me” factor gets audience popularity
Reality duplicity- its not real and its not improvised theatre
Eg. Truman Show, The Blair Witch Project, survivor etc
With this one can also question if the presence of a camera changes behaviour or change the venue from “real life” to “theatre” ?
4) Postmodernism
Condradiction and eclecticism
Undermining basic traditional(bourgeois liberalism) principles (value, order, meaning, control and identity) and subverting instead.
Began in 1960’s : attacks on nation state, natural law, rational logic, patriarchal authority, mandatory coherence, structure stories.
Compressions and fragmentation; recognizing, analysing and theorising the convergence and collapse of clearly demarcated realities, hierarchies and categories.
Use of photography, film and digital media
Authority of the object is questioned.
Time and space is given importance
Making distinctions between “nature” and “art” , “original” and “copy” gets difficult.
5) Simulation
Representation ends and reproduction begins
Cloning
Simulations are performatives because they are neither a pretense nor an imitation it’s a replication.
Baudrillard- the phases of imaging:reflection of reality, masks and perverts reality, masks the absence of reality, pure simulacrum (no relation to reality)
Presence of an appearance (where there is no original) or a replication so perfect that you cannot distinguish it from an original.
Threatens the difference between “true” and “false” and “real” and “imaginary”.
The cyclical process: Real life ---> pretending ---> acting on stage ---> simulating---> real life
Simulating situations to train the FBI ,quantico, scientific experiments, corporate operations
Waterboarding- from torture (simulating the near death experiences as a form of torture which will eventually lead to death, used by the military, simulated drowning, its controlled death) to art (waterboarding is highly performative.
Hyperrealism- cinema verite (“true film”)
6) Poststructuralism/deconstruction
Postmodernism: practice in visual arts, architecture and performance art
Poststructuralism : “deconstruction” is an academic response to postmodernism; discourse in cultural, linguistic and philosophical circles,1960’s
Anti-authoritarian, subverting the established order of things.
Poststructuralists against the universalisation of structuralists and “original” or “firsts” because every act, every utterance, every idea is a performative.
Levi strauss- unconscious structure underlying each institution and custom.
Ehrmann- method of analysis: method to studying language problems and problems of language.
“Author” and “Authority”: all writing enact agendas of power.
“inscribed power”: laws, rituals, traditions, hierarchies, politics, economic relations, science, the military, and arts.
Derrida: Iterability- communication must be repeatable
History and power, through writing its ownership over what happened; aporia- open spaces, absences, nothing can be totally erased.
Derrida: differance- difference + deferral- otherness plus a lack of fixed meaning.
Brecht: Verfremdungseffekt – alienation effect.
Art is not a mirror but a hammer to shape reality(Brecht)
Decentering
Problems with postructuralism: contact with the mass decreases; performative replaced performance (because of internet as the global forum), 60-70’s brought lots of bodies on the street through protests and activism and freedom but now its all through digital imaging, internet and cloning.
Community-based performance
7) Constructions of gender
Gender is an act which has been rehearsed
One’s biological sex is raw material shaped through practice into the socially constructed performance that is gender.
One learns “gender markings”: inflections, gestures, body language, clothing, scent, body shapes
“One is not born but rather becomes a woman”
Butler: Heterosexuality plays role in enforcing patriarchal orders. She thus “politicizes non-heterosexuality and positioning it in opposition to the hegemonic order”.
“The personal is the political”
Putting reproduction as the reason for marriage is in opposition to gay families.
Choosing a gay “lifestyle” or having the “gay gene”
8) Constructions of race
Race/ethinicity is a human cultural feature that may not be true scientifically but is strongly operative culturally.
Changing terminology eg. From “brown” to “Indian or South Asian”, “black” to African-American (pointing to culture and geography rather than colour).
Race is a performative as through a particular presentation of the self one can represent a race. Eg. Eminem is visibly white but his self presentation is black.
Cultural-racial mixing: music, “black style” into American pop music, “white culture”.
Adrian Pipers’ performances focus on racism, racial stereotyping, xenophobia. Work : Cornered (1988)- speech act video and installation.
9) During, before and after performance art
Theme: construction of identities.
The personal is the political
Artist as a person and not a character. Even though personas can be taken.
Carol Hanisch, feminist, Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968, miss America pageant protest( instruments of female torture thrown into the freedom trash can)bra-burning : going against societies organised ways of disempowering women.
Site of the work shifted form “object” to “space between object and maker”, space between viewer and viewed.
The solo artist took the place of the object: and through the unrepeatable nature of performance has claimed back “originality” and “authenticity”.
Feminist performance art (60’s-70’s): personal, political and sexual
The investigation of the self and the identification with other women helped gain support between the first women performers and the audience.
The site of performance changed: beaches, street corners, storefronts, galleries, roofs etc
Artists using themselves-psyche, body, experiences-as material.
Critical Art Ensemble: group of 5 artists exploring intersection between art, technology, politics and theory, biology, sociology, anthropology. “how can the artist and public get more involved in these sciences.
“Life-like art” replaces “mimesis”. Not naturalism but art that looked at ordinary life.
Postmodern dance: taking from ordinary life/movements, movement regarded as movement for its own sake, breaking down the distinction between art and life
Happenings: Allan Kaprow
- An act consists of : to do (physical attributes), to act (social aspects), to perform (theatrical qualities)
- Restored behaviour not acted on stage but in real life is a performative (poststructuralists).
- In theatre,”as if”:characters, places, actions and narratives. In performativity, “as if”: constructed social realities-gender, race. “made up”.
ARTISTS:
Luigi Pirandello
John Cage
Nikolai Evreinov
Allan Kaprow
Adrian Piper
Carolee Schneemann
Laurie Anderson
Critical Art Ensemble
Marina Abramovic
Andy Warhol
Marcel Duchamp
Martha Wilson
THEORISTS/PHILOSOPHER:
J.L. Austin
Jacques Derrida
John R. Searle
Frederick Jameson
Linda Hutcheon
Walter Benjamin
Jean Baudrillard
Levi-Strauss
Ferdinand de Saussure
Roman Jakobson
Jacques Ehrmann
Michael Foucault
Judith Butler
Simone de Beauvoir
Immanuel Kant
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