Performance Analysis
1. DECODING THE ARTEFACT
The first chapter speaks about decoding the artefact with the
help of the Sign, Myth, Structure and the Frame. The common ground
for the 20th century theories thought is trying to figure out the
distance between the material world and our perception. I would
like to present the theories of Sigmund Freud, Saussure, Einstein,
and Friedrich in my understanding with an example.
Example: I am dancing.
Sigmund Freud says My unconscious experiences would affect my
performance.
Saussure says I am never seen as the real me. But perceived by
the way I do (with the help of signs)
Einstein says I am understood by the audience according to their
relative position with me.
Friedrich says I am never understood. Only attempts
(projections) are made to understand me.
Two key assumptions:
1. Meaning doesnt exist in some abstract realm of thought but
always involves the concrete.
2. Meaning is always social in origin.
The Sign
The linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept
and a sound image. There are two terms related to a sign the
signified and the signifier. If language is a sheet of paper,
thought is its front face and sound is its back face. One can
neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound. A
linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with
a series of differences of ideas.
Charles S Peirce says that Sign is a Vehicle which stands for
its object and this object conveys its meaning. He further explains
three kinds of signs.
1. Diagrammatic sign or icon
2. Index (Like a pronoun) forces the attention to the particular
object intended without describing it.
3. Symbol general name or description which signifies the
object.
Anything that startles is an index.
Example: Thunderbolt
Words, sentences, books etc are Symbols.
Exercise: To choose a performance and identify the icons,
indices and symbols in it.
The Myth:
Myth is also a type of speech. Myth cannot possibly be an
object, a concept or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a
form, entirely illusory. Mythical speech is made of a material
which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for
communication. Picture, cinema, photography, reporting, sport,
shows and publicity serve as support to mythical speech. They
provide different types of consciousness.
The structure:
Levi Strausss Structural Anthropology provided many of the
conceptual principles informing the broad movement of modern
structuralism. Culture as a whole function and the meaning of their
individual parts is determined by their systematic relations with
all others. Such relations are of two kinds: diachronic relations
govern the combination of elements in sequence, over time, as in
the historical development of a language or the word order of a
specific utterance (or parole); synchronic relations are those
which structure relations typically organize meaning in the form of
dichotomies of male/female, raw/cooked, etc. In this section, the
author tries to sequence the story of Oedipus in a structure and
decode the myth.
The frame:
Frame describes the perceptual mechanism by which actions are
recognized as other than functional or literal; as play. An
understanding shared by he who acts and he who views the act, the
frame indicates the nature and purpose of a behaviour, and hence
how it is to be interpreted. It thereby offers a tool for
understanding the implicit agreement of performer and audience on
the symbolic fictional status of performance.
