UnmarkedThe Politics of Performance

Peggy Phelan

EìLondon and New York

7

The ontology of performance:representation without reproduction

Performance's only life is in the p1es,ent. Performance cannot be saved,rècorded, documented, or otherwise participatlq_the circulation-ofrepresentations o/ representations: once it does so, it becomes some-thing other than performance. To the degree that performance attemptsto enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the pro_miseof its own ontology. Performance's being, like the ontology of subjec-tivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance.

The pressures brought to bear on performance to succumb to the lawsof the reproductive economy are enormous. For only rarely in thisculture is the "now" to which performance addresses its deepest ques-tions valued. (This is why the now is supplemented and buttressed bythe documenting camera, the video archive.) Performance occurs over a

time which will not be repeated. It can be performed again, but thisrepetition itself marks it as "different." The document of a performancethen is only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to becomepresent.

The other arts, especially painting and photography, ate drawnincreasingly toward performance. The French-born artist Sophie Calle,for example, has photographed the galleries of the Isabella StewartGardner Museum in Boston. Several valuable paintings were stolenfrom the museum in 1990. Calle interviewed various visitors and mem-bers of the museum staff, asking them to describe the stolen paintings.She then transcribed these texts and placed them next to the photo-graphs of the galleries. Her work suggests that the descriptions andmemories of the paintings constitute their continuing "presence," de-

and galleries, the institutional effect of the gallery often seems to put themasterpiece under house arrest, controlling all conflicting and unprofes-sional commentary about it. The speech act of memory and description(Austin's constative utterance) becomes a performative expression

lhe ontology of performance 147

when Calle places these commentaries within the representation of the

not reproduce the object, it rather helps us to restage and restate theeffort to remember what is lost. The descriptions .e-ind us how loss

nd for thef lhe qbjectdislRpear-

For her contribution to the Dislocntions show at the Museum ofModern Art in New York in 7997, Calle used the same idea but this timeshe asked curators, guards, and restorers to describe paintings that wereon loan from the permanent collection. she also asked them to draw

ies of the paintings. She then arranged theto the exact dimensions of the circulatingon the wall where the actual paintingspiece Ghosts, and as the visitor discovers

Calle's wo le,s own eye isfollowing- y through themuseum.l because it isdispersed ilection whichcirculates despite its "permanence." Calle's artistic contribution is a kindof self-concealment in which she offers the words of others about other

\'.t,,"

148 Unmarked

I --------

Performance in a strict ontological sense is ,ííÇo" rrye,iris thisquality which makes performance the runt of th-httei-of contemporaryart. Performance clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive represen-tation necessary to the circulation of capital. Perhaps nowhere was theaffinity between the ideology of capitalism and art made more manifestthan in the debates about the funding policies for the NationalEndowment for the Arts (NEA).2 Targeting both photography andperfgrnlnce art, conservative politicians sought to prevent endorsingthe "qe!? bodies implicated and made visible by these art forms.

Performance implicatelthe teal through the presence of living bortigs.In pèrformattce ari spectatorship there is an ãlement of coãÈuñpdÌon:there are no left-overs, the gazing spectator must try to take everythingin. Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility - in amaniacally charged present - and disappears into memory, into the realmof invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control.Performance resists the balanced circulations of finance. It saves nothing;

í-'

t\

To attempt to write about the undocumentable event of performanceis to invoke the rules of the written document and thereby alter theevent itself. fust as quantum physics discovered that macro-instrumentscannot measure microscopic particles without transforming those par.ticles, so too must performance critics rcalize that the labor to write

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:.,',^a !l't ,i ,,''.: ft- -''''' "t'

about performance (and thus to "preserve" it) is also a laborfundamentally alters the event. It does no good, however, torefuse to write about performance because of this inescapableation. The challenge raised by the ontological claims of performance

project and an exceedingly ambitious one, for it seeks to find connectiononly in that which is no longer there. Memory. sight. Love. It mustin¡29!ve a full seeing of the other's absence (the ãmbitTous part), a seeingwhich also entails the acknowledgment of the other's !resence (thãhumbling part). For to acknowledge the Other,s (always partial) pres_

absence.h act shares with the i

o be re!róduced or repeated. 1. . -_

be repeated. Each reproduction is a new pèiformative utterance cannot-r' - '!

is qualified. Otherwise, the reproductioby someone else necessarily tuãnsforms

., writing, an activity whicí, relies on the reproduction of the Same (the-

th¡ee letters cøt wlTl repeatedly signi4z thr foirJegged furry animal withwhiskers) for the production of rneaning, cari"!1Q_qc¡ _the frame ofPegry:e but_cannot mimic an art thalls .ror,ièpro4,rctive. The*"l.ry of speech and writing, the strange process by which we putwords in each other's mouths and others relies on asubstitutional economy d and re_established. Performanc resists theTlyl"lgly economy tun e idea thata-ïmitèd-ñum!er çf pgople in a specific time/space frame càn have an

trace afterward. Writing aboutnaugurated within this perfor_ence from mass reproduction,tically, is its greatest strength.

s of capital and reproduction, itg about performance often,

behind the drive of thedocument/ary. Performance's is to discover a way forrepeated words to become nces, rather than, asBenveniste warned, constativ

The distinction between performative and constative utterances wasproposed by J.r. Austin in How To Do Things with words.s AustinTg"e¿ that speech had both a constative element (describing things inthe. world) a¡d a performative element (to say something i" to do o,make- somethilg, e.g. "I promise,,, "I bet,,, ,,I beg,,). "erformativetp"".".| ac.ts refer olly to themselves, they enact the aãtivity the speecht@"r. For Derrida, performative wriã

-

utterance of the promise: I protive is important to Derriãaindependence from the refereperformative enacts the now of writing in the pïesent time.Z

Tania Modleski has rehearsed Derriãa's rehùon to Austin and argues

writing is to re-mark again the performative possibilities of writing iThe act of writing toward disappearance, rather than the act of writitoward preservation, must remember that the after-effect of diance is the experience of subjectivity itself.

This is the project of Roland Barthes in both Camera Lucida andBarthes by Roland Bqrthes.It is also his project in Empire of Signs,butthis book he takes the memory of a city in which he no longer is, afrom which he disappears, as the motivation for the search for a dipearing performative writing. The trace left by that script is thepoint of a mutual disappearance; shared subjectivity is possibleBarthes because two people can recognize the same Impossible. To

_,.1J- ,i ,: __

¡ ,' | ,' '

I Tlie ontology of performance 14g

for a love whose goal is to share the Impossible is both a

150 Unmarked

that "feminist critical wriling is simultaneously performaüvq _andutopian" ( "Some Functions" : ts)._T_ Ct tq, f,ernlnullttliÇel1yqti4g is anenactment of belief in a better futrrre; lhe act of_rllriting brings that futurecloser.s Modleski goes further too and says that *ornãn't rãlation to theperformative mode of writing and speech is especially intense becausewomen are not assured the luxury of making linguistic promises withinphallogocentrism, since all too often she is what is promised.Commenting on Shoshana Felman's account of the "scandal of thespeaking body," a scandal Felman elucidates through a reading ofMolière's Dom luan, Modleski argues that the scandal has differentaffects and effects for women than for men. "[T]he real, historicalscandal to which feminism addresses itself is surely not to be equatedwith the writer at the center of discourse, but the woman who remainsoutside of it, not with the 'speaking body,' but with the 'mute body' "(ibid.: 19). Feminist critical writing, Modleski argues, "works toward a

time when the traditionally mute body, 'the mother,' will be given thesame access to 'the names' - language and speech - that men haveenjoyed" (ibid.: 15).

If Modleski is accurate in suggesting that the opposition for feministswho write is between the "speaking bodies" of men and the "mutebodies" of women, for performance the opposition is between "the bodyin pleasure" and, to invoke the title of Elaine Scarry's book, "the body inpain." In moving from the grammar of words to the grammar of thebody, one moves from the realm of metaphor to the realm of metonymy.For performance art itself however, the referent is always the agoniz-ingly relevant body of the performer. Metaphor works to secure a

vertical hierarchy of value and is reproductive; it works by erasingdissimilarity and negating difference; it turns two into one. Metonymy isadditive and associative; it works to secure a horizontal axis of contiguityand displacement. "The kettle is boiling" is a sentence which assumesthat water is contiguous with the kettle. The point is not that the kettle islike waler (as in the metaphorical love is like a rose), but rather the kettleis boiling because the water inside the kettle is. In performance, the bodyis metonymic of self, of character, of voice, õf "presence." But in-theplenitude of its a-!!aIiñt visfuillty and availability, the performer actu-ally disappears and represents something else - dance, movement,sound, charâcter, "art." As we discovered in relation to CindySherman's self-portraits, the very effort to make the female body appearinvolves the addition of something other than "the body." That "ad-dition" becomes the object of the spectator's gaze, in much the way thesupplement functions to secure and displace the fixed meaning of the(floating) signifier. lust as her body remains unseen as "in itself it reallyis," so too does the sign fail to reproduce the referent. Perfolmance usesthe performer's body to pose-a question about the ina6ility to secure the

The ontology of performance 151

relation between subjectiv se; performance uses thebody to frame the lack of B d through the body - thatwhich cannot appear with

In employing the body meton)..rnically, performance is capable of resist-ing the reproduction of metaphor, and- the metaphor I'm most keenlyinterested ín resisting is the _metaphor of gender, a metaphor whichupholds the vertical hierarchy of value through systematic maìking of thepositive and the negative. In order to enact this marking, the metaphor ofgender presupposes unified bodies which are biologically dìfferent. Morespecfically, these unfied bodies are different in "one" aspect of the body,that is to say, difference is located in the genitals.

As MacCannell points out about Lacan's story of the "laws of urinarysegregation" (Ecrits: 151), same sex bathrooms are social institutionswhich further the metaphorical work of hiding gender/genital differ-ence. The genitals themselves are forever hidden within metaphor, andmetaphor, as a "cultural worker," continually converts difference intothe Same. The joined task of metaphor and culture is to reproduce itself;it accomplishes this by turning two (or more) into one.e By valuing onegender and marking it (with the phallus) culture reproduces one sex andone gender, the hommo-sexual.

If this is t¡ue then women should simply disappear - but they don't.Or do they? If women are not reproduced within metaphor or culture,how do they survive? If it is a question of survivat, why would whitew-Omen (ãpparently visible cultural workers) participate in the repro-duction of their own negation? What aspects of the bodies and lan-guages of women remain outside metaphor and inside the historicalreal? Or to put it somewhat differently, how do women reproduce andrepresent themselves within the figures and metaphors of hommo-sexual representation and culture? Are they perhaps surviving inanother (auto)reproductive system?

"\Arhat founds our gender economy (division of the sexes and theirmutual evaluation) is the exclusion of the mother, more specifically herbody, more precisely yet, her genitnls. These cannot, must not be seen"(original emphasis; MacCannell, Figuring Lacøn:106). The discursive andiconic "nothingness" of the Mother's genitals is what culture and meta-phor cannot face. They must be effaced in order to allow the phallus tooperate as that which always marks, values, and wounds. Cast¡ation is aresponse to this blindness to the mother's genitals. In "The Uncanny"Freud suggests that the fear of blindness is a displacement of the deeperfear of castration but surely it works the other way as well, or maybeeven more strongly. Averting the eyes from the "nothing" of themother's genitals is the blindness which fuels castration. This is theblindness of Oedipus. Iç_ bllndnes" necessary to the anti-Oedipus? ToElectra? Does metonymy need blindness as keenly as metaphor does?

152 Unmarked

Culturalordersrelyontherenunciationofconsciousdesireandpl"usrrr" and promise á reward for this renunciation' MacCannell refers

to this as "the positive f,o"'ise of castration" and locates it in the idea of

"vaiue" itself - the desie to be valued' by the Other' (For Lacan' value is

he oi becoming valued PromPts the

SA

toth

subject a veil of dignitY. WhY 9"lYitseif? Because the fundamental Ot

scene" which ghosts the conscious s

the Ideal Other for whom the sub

cannot appear nal economY which is

predicated on ]i ii,tt"ffi^::,iiff'lperforms for a

rather than satisfaction.Performance approaches the Real through resisting.the metaplorical

reduction of the t*" ;;t" the one. Bgt in moving ftq!-n-lhe aims of

duction, and pleasure io tnose of metonymy' displace-

Performance marksvalue that which is I

through the stagin

(twins, actors within characters

crimes, secrets, etc.) which some

desire to be seen by (and within) t hich her

p"tio.-u"." spectãcle is itself a projection of the scenario in w

own desire takes Place.More specifi.ulÇ, u genre of perf< rlnalce art called 'hardghiLqrt" or

"ordeal art" attemPtr"to i"t'oke a distinction between presence and

bodY a

n. Thisdeath

h by rehearsing for it' (It is for this

fundamental bònd with ritual' The

t be reprod'uced or seen (again)' It

faiturË, that it cannot be achieved'

II

Angelika Festa creates performance pieces in which she appears in order

to disappear (Figure Z+¡. Her aPpearance is always extraordinary: she

The ontology of performance 153

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Figure 24 Angelika Festa, You Are Obsessive, Eat Somethlng (1984). (Photo:

Claudine Ascher. Courtesy: Angelika Festa)

156 Unmarked

Iike: the fecundity of the central image ts

(the mummy) and Future-as-Unborn (the

ì performanãe defines the Present (Festa's

bodv) as that which continuallv-susp trus-

ir-e return of that death and the app The

Present is that which can tolerate ne onlv

exist because of these two "originary" acts' Both are required for the

Present to be present, for it to exist in the suspended animation between

the Past and the Future'But this truism is undercut by another part of the performance: the

oment the fish breaks out of the

of the cYcle of that mutation which

Itiply" iÁ wittily made literal by the

)he first two' The Projected images

ironic, half-devout allusion to the

of thehe projand ontheir si

:.:::l t "ïüä i"ä :î'." f

"Ï

JT:il

tire fish tape in front of her also on the left, and the time-elapsed mini-

mon1tor dlrectlv in front of her and raised, forces the spectator con-

ru Festa's suspended bodv' in order to look at

has to look "beyond" Festa; in order to look at

r the video monitor recording the performance

itself, one has to turn one's back

seem to be consumable while the c

image, suggests that it is onlY

presentation that we "see" anvthineves) is averted from the spectator

rhus to seize-

The failure to see the eve/I locates Festa's suspende-d body for the

v to meet the eYe defines the other's

Tsnrtff;- ':i.*

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158 Unmarked

response to a PercePtioninment within the discur-to turn her back' In the

fists and rePeats the Pose

of Mapplethorpe's male model Leland Richard (1980), discussed in

chapter^2. \,Vhäreas for Mapple 's clenched fist is a

g"rirrr" toward self-imaginglÀis thorpe's holding the

äme-release shutter), irisiäpsott's ' is a response to the

sexual and racial attacks indäxed as the very ground upon which her

image rests. As in the work of Festa, the effort to read the image of the

repåsented woman's body in Simpson's photography- requires a

bitingual approach to worá and image, J9 whaj can and ca11ot $,"".r1Th" báck registers the effacement of the subject withjn

" hæf

tic and visual field which requires her to be either the Same or the

containable, ever fixed, Other- To attack that, Simpson suggests'

need to see and to read other/wise.Sight is both an image and a word; tJne gaze is possible both because

the änunciations of ãrticulate .yes and because the subject finds

position to see within the optics ánd grammar of language' In.denyil

ihis position to the spectat-or Festa and Simpson also stop the usu

".,rrr,.iuti.r" claims of ine critic. While the gazè fosters what Lacan cal

"the belong to me aspect so reminiscent of ProPerty" (F-our Fu

Concepts;8-1) and leaãs the looker to desire mastery of the image'

pain inscribed in Festa's performance makes the viewer feel master.

in Simpson's work, the "belong to me aspect" of the. document¿

tradition - and the narrative of rnastery integral to it - is far too close

the "belong to me aspect" of slavery, domestic work, and the history

sexual labo-r to be greèted with anyihing other than a fist, a turned bar

t?lôt\a-

t3lo)lzl¡lolõlot-ld)l(d

t;lslãlãt?lo)lcolo)t-tvlørlcloÈoo"q)

EG

(liaEõ(úci¡\C\t

aIt{"

160 Unmarked

and an awareness of her own "guarded condition" within visual

Simpson's work.In Festa's work, a similar splitting occurs. Untitled is an elaborate pun

olled and confined bodY, images ofes. Images as absurdlY comic as the

waiting for DudleY Doright to beat

the clock and save her, and as harrowing ãs the traditional burning of

marÇrs and witches, coexist with more cò--ot images of women tied

to white hospital beds in the name of "curing hysteria," force-fe

anorefcs, oi whatever medical malaise by which women have

painfulty dominated and by which we continue to be

enthralled.

fhe ontology of peformance 161

emphasizes the importance of the nainteperceptual power. These images re_enactperception which defines The Fall more

È

importance oof prime realthis clause - em weïe opened,, (Genesis g,7) _

lt, thu most compelling consequence detailed in this narrative ofongrn.

ade endlessly new is one of the

e, questions the traditional com_yes are completely averted and

es that "seeing her,,there is a peculiar

the sense oi seeings ÍilmThe Møn Who

rotagonÌst cannot be seen, herethe absence of that customary

only her own desire to be seen.acle is thwarted perpetually be_

performance issues. In this sense,siile-õl-th-saméiontinuum as R er's. whereas in the film Trishabecomes a kind of

'spectator, here the spectator becomes a kind ofperformer.

But while Festa successfuny eliminates the ethical complicity betweeni:ttTg and doing associated with most theatre, she does not create an

The austere minimalism of this piece (complete silence, one

former, no overt action), actually incites the spectator toward

making of this type. The lists become dizzyingly similar until one finds

almostlmpossiútè to distinguish between Nell screaming on the railroa

tracks and the hysteric screaming in the hospital. The riddle is as r

about figuring out how they became separated as about how Festa

them back together.The anorexic who is obsessed by the image of a slender self, Nell

is the epitome of cross-cutting neck-wrenching cartoon drama, tl

martyr "tta -it.t

whose public hanging/burning is dramatized as

lesson in moral certitude - either on the part of the victim-martyr or

the part of the witch's executioner - are each defined in terms ofthey are not - healthy, heroic, or legitimately powerful. That these

are themselves slippery, radically subjective, and historically md

ethically.neutral peiformance-. Fes_ta's body is disprayed in a completelyprivate (in the sense of enclosed) -rr.lr..,á, in a n,,L.t.i- o*a^r^^r^ or_ _pnvare (m the sense of- enclosed) Inanner in a p_úuli._q¿"ctacre. shebecomes a kind of s¡guJicialpuieét ìomõlètelv vulneral.rle ro rhe c-o._

awful, guilty, "sick.,, But after a while "";h";;;;";öilïä;i:;:::::, :T:19:: . ]1":" .1e

qq!-ne!ry4s-ermqst obscenely -år¡ogant i.,::'g¿ìfl_1,::t:i,*T_:,gt¡pr"y-rirïåã-resil",r,""ì-i#"t;;*:::-"":*'.1.ï_tlchriÈrs¡kk*f ã"ä;;;ffi ;räJ':ff ,"1""ff ipresent in the endurance she demands of both her spéctato; il Ë;ìi

162 Unmarked

This arrogance, which she freely acknowledges and makes blatantlyobvious, in some senses, "cancels" my cannibalism. While all this addi-tion and subtraction is going on in my accountant-eyes, I begin to realízethat this too is superficial. The perfqrnan#e-r#sides somcl^ihele else -somewhere in the reckoning itself and not at all in the sums anddifferences of our difficult relationship to it. But thß th-ougñt-does ñotallow me to completely or easily inhábìt a land of equality or democracy,although I believe that is part of what is intended. I feel instead theterribly oppressive physical, psychic, and visual cost of this exchange. IfFesta's work can be seen as a hypothesis about the possibility of humancommunication, it is an uncompromising one. There is no meeting-placehere in which one can escape the imposing shadow of those (bloody)feet: if History is figured in the tape loop as a repetitious birth cycle, theFuture is figured as an unrelenting cycle of death. Where e. e. cummingsw-rites: "we can never be born enough," Festa counters: "we can neverdie sufficiently enough." This sense of the ubiquitousness of death anddving is not completely oppressive, however (although at times it comesclose to that) - because the performance also insists on the possibility ofresurrection. By making death multiple and repetitious, Festa alsomakes it less absolute - and implicitly, less sacred - not so much theexclusive province of the gods.

Mv hesitation about this aspect of Festa's work stems not from thelatent romance of death (that's common enough), but rather from herapparent belief (or perhaps "faith" is a better word) that thissuspension/surrender of her own ego can be accomplished in a per-formance. It is this belief/faith which makes Festa's work so extrava-gantlv literal. Festa's piece is contingent upon the possibility of creatinga narrative which reverses the narrative direction of The Fall; beginningwith the post-lapsarian second-order of Representation, Festa's Untitledattempts to give birth - through an intense process of physical andmental labor - to a direct and unmediated Presentation-of-Presence.That this Presence is registered through the body of a woman in pain isthe one concession Festa makes to the pervasiveness (and the persuasi-veness) of postlapsarìan perception and Being. Enormously andstunninglv ambitious, Festa's performances leave both the spectatorand the performer so exhausted that one cannot help but wonder if thepleasure of presence and plenitude is worth having if this is the onlywav to achieve it.

In the spectacle of endurance, discipline, and semi-madness that thisu'ork evokes, an inversion of the characteristic paradigms of performa-tive exchange occurs. In the spectacle of fatigue, endurance, and de-pletion, Festa asks the spectator to undergo first a paralle[.rnovementand then an opposite one. The spectator'J second 1;performaacg'l-ilq

-qmor¡ement of accretion, excess, and the recognition of the plenitude of

The ontology of performance 163

one's physical freedom in contrast to the confi¡ement and pain of theperformer's displayed body.

IIIIn The History of Sexualitll Foucault argues that "the agency of domin-ation does not reside in the one who speaks (for it is he who isconstrained), but in the one who listens and says nothing; not in the onewho knows and answers, but in the one who questions and is notsupposed to know" (SenLøIity: 64). He is describing the power-knowledge fulcrum which sustains the Roman Catholic confessional,but as with most of Foucault's work, it resonates in other areas as well.

As a description of the power relationships operative in many formsof performance Foucault's observation suggests the degree to which thesilent spectator dominates and controls the exchange. (As DustinHoffman made so clear in Tootsie, the performer is always in the femaleposition in relation to power.) Women and performers, more often thannot, are "scripted" to "sell" or'-confess" something to someone who isin the position to buy or forgive.

Mùch Western theatre evokes desire based upon and stimulated bythe inequality between performer and spectator - and by the (potential)domination of the silent spectator. That this model of desire is appar-ently so compatible with (tuaditional accounts of) "rnale" desire is noaccident.15 But more centrally this account of desire between speaker/performer and listener/spectator reveals how dependent these positionsare upon visibility and a coherent point of view. A visible and easilylocated poiñ't of view provides the spectator with a stable point uponwhich to turn on the machinery of projection, identification, and (inevi-table) objectification. P-erformers and their critics must begin to redesignthis stable set of assumptions about the positions of the theatricalexchange.

The question raised by Festa's work is the extent to which interest invisual or psychic aversion signals an interest in refusing to participate ina representational economy at all. By virtue of having spectators sheaccepts at least the initial dualism necessary to all exchange. But Festa'sperformances are so profoundly "solo" pieces that this work is obviouslvnot "a solution" to the problem of women's representation.

Festa addresses the female spectator; her work does not speak aboutmen, but rather about the loss and grief attendant upon the recognitionof the chasm between presence and re-presentation. By taking thenotion that women are not visible within the dominant narratives ofhistory and the contemporary customs of performance literally, Festaprompts new considerations about the central "absence" integral to therepresentation of women in patriarchy. Part of the function of women's

1.

\

ù

164 Unmarked

absence is to perpetuate and maintain the presence of male desire asdesire - as unsatisfied quest. Since the female body and the femalecharacter cannot be "staged" or "seen" within representational me-diums without challenging the hegemony of male desire, it can beeffective politically and aesthetically to deny representing the femalebody (imagistically, psychically). The belief, the leap of faith, is that thisdenial will bring about a new form of representation itself (I'm thinkingonly half jokingly of the sex strike in Lysistratø: no sex till the war ends).Festa's performance work underlines the suspension of the female bodybetween the polarities of presence and absence, and insists that "thewoman" can exist only between these categories of analysis.

Redesigning the relationship between self and other, subject andobject, sound and image, man and woman, spectator and performer, isenormously difficult. More difficult still is withdrawing from represen-tation aitogether. I am not advocating that kind of retreat or hoping forthat kind of silence (since that is the position assigned to women inlanguage with such ease). The task, in other words, is to make courlter-feit the currency of our representational economy - not by refusing toparticipate in it at all, but rather by making work in which the costs ofwomen's perpetual aversion aré clearly measured. Such forms olaccounting might begin to interfere with the structure of hommo-sexualdesire which informs most forms of representation.

IVBehind the fact of hommo-sexual desire and representation the questionof the link between representation and reproduction remains. Thisquestion can be re-posed by returning to Austin's contention that aperformative utterance cannot be reproduced or represented.

For Lacan, the inauguration of language is simultaneous with theinauguration of desire, a desire which is always painful because itcannot be satisfied. The potential mitigation of this pain is also depen-dent upon language; one must seek a cure from the wound of words lrother words - in the words of the other, in the promise of what Stevenscalls "the completely answering voice" ("The Sail of Ulysses," in ThePnlm at the End:389). But this mitigation of pain is always deferred by thepromise of relief (Austin's performative), as against relief itself, becausethe other's words substitute for other words in an endles s mise-en-abymeof metaphorical exchange. Thus the linguistic economy, like the finan-cial economy, is a ledger of substitutions, in which addition and subtrac-tion (the plus and the minus) accord value to the "right" words at theright time. One is always offering what one does not have because whatone wants is what one does not have - and for Lacan, "feelings arealways reciprocal," if never "eewal."t6 Exchanging what one does not

!

The ontology of performance 165

does not have) puts us in theof what Felman calls ,,radical

ing stuck in what sue_Ellen Cas atedlv cautioned about becom-

what cannot be seen,,, I think r

s nor make a claim to truth;ïî.ïï;

the performative utterances of ne As such,because their affects/effects, like y history

ut stolenpaintings which Sophie Calle turn aming themely unstatic

rqcticTt or t'ecutrd thoughts, :ft!ri^#,rmance, (always somewhat subver_lways somewhere self_subversive),,

play within performance and withining, is comic rather than tragic ,,ariïlill,lîi"ï:TlÏfi:ïff;:î:Within the retatively deteririned limits .f th".;;'Å;;;""kJ, are towindeed.

Or are they?. T.h" performance of theory, the act of moving the ,,as if,, into theindicative "is," like the act of moving descriptionJ or pui.,irr-rg, into theframes of the stolen or lent .ur-r.r^r"i is to replot the reration between!9-rcgiver and object, between serf and other. In substituting the sub-ject's memory of the object forthe object itr"u, èril";ö;;3 redesignthe order of the museum and the representational field. Institutionswhose only function- is to preserve ånd honor ou;".t, - ìllditionarmuseums, archives, banks, and tintimatelyself/other,ingly inadeinstitutiona ¡unt for that which cannot appearbetween.these tight "equations" but which nonetheless inform them.These institutions must invent an economy not based on preservationbut one which is answerable to the consequences of disappearance. Thesavings and loan institutions in the us have lost the customer,s berief inthe promise of security' Museums whose co'ections include objects

166 Unmarked

takerVpurchased/obtained from cultures who are now asking (andexpecting) their return must confront the legacy of their appropriativehistory in a much more nuanced and complex way than currentlyprevails. Finally, universities whose domain is the reproduction ofknowledge must re-view the theoretical enterprise by which the objectsurveyed is reproduced as property with (theoretical) value.

Afterword: notes on hope- for my students

The uncertainty principle fundamental to physics is based on the failureof the empirical to secure the real. Fort. Da. Testing for the quantum is ahazard of probabilities if not fortunes, best guesses of events before andafter the leap. The measurement of the quantum's movement in time/space cannot be securely repeated within the logic of empirical rePresen-tation. (Nor can the boson's, the quark's, or the gluon's.) Like perform-ance, the quantum cannot be preserved, recalled, measured, andevaluated by recourse to representation's insurance policies. Alwaysinsecure, the nervous system of matter is reflected in the nervouscondition of psychic being.l

Performance art usually occuls in tþe ¡¡spension between the "real"physical mattèr of "the performing body" and the psizchic experience ofwhat it is tô be em-bodied. Like a rackety bridge swaying under toomuch weight, performance keeps one anchor on the side of the cor-poreal (the body Real) and one on the side of the psychic Real.

fotmed

and setup their tripods on one side or the other - the "physical" readers areusually trained in movement analysis and/or history, and the "psychic"readers are usually trained in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytictheory (although rarely in practice). Perhaps it would be worthwhile toexperiment with the possibility of a different notion of the relationbetween these two camps. It might be fruitful to take the body as alwaysboth psychic and material/physical: this would necessitate a combinedcritical methodology. One could employ both physics and psycho-analysis to read the body's movements and paralytic pauses.

But before one can speak of a psychoanalytic physics or a physics ofpsychoanalysis one must first recognize how each system "proves" theimpossibility of seizing the Real. At the risk of redundancy: this is not tosay that the real does not exist. It does. But it is to say that it cannot beseen, arrested, fixed with the "slower" Ileye. "Love's interpretation

Culture in tÌret participates inrters.r of the court,srd its haste to

safe spending,

ldeterminantsof race/ethnic'f the innocentrn rights cam_lzation. For aBirth Control

iinuing failurerbortion rrglrfs' reproductivehing akin tomen, particu-'racial politicstd (ed.), Fronr

r, DC 20009. Ir,us three yearshere were no

f the Completel-rey, vol. 23:

,

,,,,,

ued over theBut interest-

r rights were, go like this:irst priority;

: logic of thers." In otherluired, in thenter familias,Reproductiaenter a public'r is requiredhe potential

Notes.l91interest in the abortifacient known as RU-486 is keen in part because eventu_

I to becorne a med_ical téchnology capable of:: åT,iå J :'äii JI L' : -t ::'"i åï ïî'S; liå;Tribe (pp. 2IS-20) for a full discuision.

21 Randall.Terry on video^-taped interview with Julie Gustafason, october 19gB;quoted in Ginsburg, "Saving Ameri ra's Souls": 26.

22 For a brilliant reading of- law's _inability to think of a continuous body seePatricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights.

7 THE ONTOLOGY OF PERFORMANCE:REPRESENTATION WITHOUT REPRODUCTION

1 This notion of following and tracking was a fundamental aspect of Calle,searlier performance pieces. See Jean Baudrillard Suite Venitienne/Sophie Cnlle,Plense FoIIoztt Me, lor docurnentation of Calle's surveillance of a stranger.

2 See my essays "Money Talks" and "Money Talks, Again" for a ftìll elab-oration.

3 Of course not all performance art has an oppositional edge. Tl-re ontologicalclaims of performance art are what I am addressing here, and not the politicsof ambition.

4 Emile Benveniste, Problens in General Linguistics, quoted in Shoshana Felman,Tlrc Literøn1 Speech Act:21.

5 J. L. Austin, Horu To Do Things With Words,2nd edn. Derrida's rereading ofAustin also comes from an interest in the performative element withinlanguage.

6 Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context."7 See Felman, The Literary Speech Act, for a dazzling reading of Austin.B See my essay, "Reciting the Citation of Others" for a full discussion of

Modleski's essay and performance.9 Juliet MacCannell, Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural l)nconscious, esp.

pp. 90-177.10 The disappearance of the Mother's Being also accounts for the (relative)

success of the visibility of the anti-abortion groups. The smooth displacernentof the image of the Motl'rer to the hyper-visible image of the hitherto ulìseerìfetus, is accomplished precisely because the Being of the Mother is what isalways already excluded within lepresentational econornies. See Chapter 6 inthis volume for further elaboration of this point.

11 Some of the description of this perfonnance first appeared in rny essay"Feminist Theory, Poststructuralism, and Performance."

12 For an excellent discussion of these guarded conditions in television, fiction,and critical theory for the African-American woman see Michele Wallace'sIrtuisibility Blues.

13 Festa actually began the Untitled performance wearing a white rabbit head-dress, which is lighter and cooler than the red; she has on other occasionsworn the red one and the themes of "red" and "white" are constant preoccu-pations of her work. The heat during Untitled (in the nineties) was intenseenough that she was eventually persuaded to abandon the white headdress.

14 This is one of the reasons "shock" is such a lirnited aesthetic for theatre. It ishard to be shocked by one's own behavior/desire, although easy to be bysomeone else's.

15 In fact it may account for the intense male homoeroticism of so much oftheatrical history. J-

192 Unmarked

8 AFTERWORD: NOTES ON HOPE

power reassert themselves ed to dissolvinghierarchies altogether. An or egalitarian ideol-ogy such as ACT-UP faces dissimilar to the

struggles of Opetwe have done w!alternative comrJnotion of Power'l

5 A text such as \'!in mind. FIe usethus the integriessential "goodtextraordinarY rr"writing the boAIDS" and Evtmoments in whbody's ontodis/iuncturesuncertaintY is"understandirthe social bodthis task intheir bodiesphysical PerfSong faces ththe death offour works (of the relatcates the Aated with

Tl-rese fouration of thethe worksIacobs' lrcirihe "folk taograPhies oBluest EYe aSpetting of"clwnershpreoccuwomen vLane. Greenarrative'

of the Preit, Lane'sand form,examPle, s

ing Pieces,feet flat, a:

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67

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