Still Harping on Performativity

Elisabeth Bronfen 

        The title of my talk this afternoon is, of course, from Shakespeare's Hamlet and belongs to Polonius, who keeps asking in puzzled frustration, why the melancholy prince keeps harping on his daughter; which is to say, why this prince keeps making oblique references, whose meaning is duplicitous, but whose intent serves as an action: And the action involves drawing attention to the fact that something is amiss in the state of Denmark. Ophelia, somehow, embodies this malaise. I chose the reference in part because we have here a cunning example for the way performativity enmeshes in complex ways the performance of a speech act with the theatricality of a staged enactment. I chose it also, however, to signal from the start my own bemusement at the fact that we are still harping on a critical term which I had thought had come to be over-used. Or are we, perhaps, harping on it again? And if so, why? Let me, therefore, begin by recalling the moment of the turn to performativity within critical theory; after the linguistic turn and the visual turn, and remind us that the concept as such will not be found in a standard dictionary, nor in a thesaurus. The only entry one will find is in Wikipedia, and there it is defined as "an interdisciplinary term often used to name the capacity of speech and langauge in particular, as well as other non-verbal forms of expressive action, to intervene in the course of human events."

            The notion of performativity is derived, we all know, from J. L. Austin's discussion of the 'performative' in constrast to the 'constative' in How to Do Things with Words. Here Austin wrote: "the performative is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favour, it is not a profound word." The difference, within ordinary language philosophy atleast, is as follows: A constative statement involves a description of how things seem to be. That is to say, it involves an assertation of something that can be true or false. A performative, in turn, is a statement that rather than merely describing an action actually performs that action. The seminal difference lies in language that describes (by saying something about something) on the one hand and, on the other hand, an utterance which does or performs something even while it is offering a description. And again, let us recall Austin: A performative is an utterance "in which to say something is to do something; or in which by saying something we are doing something." It is a sentence in "the first person singular present indicative active form," and it is a sentence that (and this is important for the life this term has had in critical theory) when uttered by the right person at the right time brings about what it says. Most famous, as example, is the "I do" at the acme of the marriage ceremony or the "I promise to honor my debt':  a statement which, in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, almost gets Antonio killed and ultimately will cost the Jew Shylock his wealth and his religion. So performative utterances always have consequences. Though they could be more playful, such as if Polonius were to say: "I confess my befuddlement." Is the issue of consequence, perhaps, the reason why the concept came into play in literary and cultural studies?

            While a discussion of the performative quality of literary texts need not be limited to the postmodern, I want to give, as my example, the end of Toni Morrison's Jazz , because it is evidence of an ethically inflected poetics which quite self-consciously posits its own performative charm; to be more precise, the claim that prose not only describes a scene for a distanced reader, but rather makes something for, indeed does something with the reader; bespeaks the reader's complicity (which is part and parcel of language having consequences). At the end of this novel, Morrison's strange narratorial voice hovers over the re-united couple. This man and woman are whispering to each other, while lying naked under the covers of their newly rediscovered marital bed. Which is to say, they are returning to that initial performative "I do," which they shared in front of the alter many years earlier. This is how the narratorial voice of Jazz ends her voyeuristic partaking of her characters erotic re-union: "I envy them their public love. I myself have only known it in secret, shared it in secret and longed, aw longed to show it – to be able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all…But I can't say that aloud; I can't tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I'd say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now."

            The hands of the reader, to whom this passage is addressed, are, of course, holding the pages of a book, which has seemlessly transformed into an imaginary sheet, covering two fictional lovers. Or rather, by virtue of this sudden direct address by Morrison's narratorial voice, we have seamlessly moved from her fictional re-enactment of Harlem in the 20s, to our current moment of reading. I am less interested in offering my own interpretive description of this passage than in drawing your attention to the fact that, what Morrison is enacting is a bond between her audience and herself; a bond which goes beyond merely describing the bliss her fictional characters have finally found at the end of a story that began with adultery and murder. She is doing something very precise to us by disolving the boundary between the text and our reading. She is enacting a curious logic of holding out her narratorial hand to us, and emphasizing that this is a perpetual 'here and now.' If Austin has declared a useful criterion for a performative statement to be the presence of the word 'hereby', Morrison enacts this by making her specific claim on us. Her text has taken possession of us, and, at its conclusion is, in fact, drawing us into the haunting her ghostly narrator, hovering as an invisible presence over her characters throughout, has been itself undertaking.

            I have, however, also chosen this final passage from Jazz as my literary example for its explicit political dimension. The world Morrison's narrator revisits, only to hold us there in a sustained spectral 'now', is a very particular moment in the history of modernity, namely the Harlem Renaissance: the first time African-Americans found a collective voice in their country's culture. By ending her text on this performative note, we are called upon to share with Morrison the debt we owe to this past, which is to say the heritage it has become. At the same time, the curious performance of both the resuscitation of a past world (in fictional guise) and the move toward sustaining a perpetual now that includes only the narrator and her implied, indeed adored reader, is one which entertwines our complicity (we, too, were voyeurs of the events) with our responsibility (we must remember to keep the past alive). We, the readers, performatively engendered in the act of reading, are the inheritors of a past which exists only if we act upon this cultural effect. Indeed, I want to bring into our discussion of performativity a further word, namely that of the effect we claim for aesthetic reconceptualization. The word, remember, is two-fold. When one speaks of the effects of the past, one speaks of history as cultural estate. But one is also speaking of the consequence of accepting this heritage. So my point is that, by moving beyond a merely descriptive closure, by being self-consciously performative, Morrison's language acts upon us and upon the past she is invoking. We wake up from having entered into a fictional world to take note that we have been sharing her re-imagination of this poignant cultural moment.

            As such, Morrision draws particular attention – and in this she inherits the project of classic modernism – to the fact that her text is writing, is representation. Yet there is more at stake than simply foregrounding the independence of the text from its author, indeed its survival over and beyond a specific auther, her historical moment and the historical moment she is reinvoking. Afterall, this rhetorical move is much older, belongs in fact to the standard of much Renaissance poetry, as, for example, in Shakespeare's sonnet 18, when we read in the couplet, about the eternal lines that will allow the beauty of the beloved to grow: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." What Morrison's performative adds to the standard formula of poetic surivival is that she insists on the first person singular: on the I that is present and active; an I speaking directly to an I who is listening, and who is called upon to respond. The text uses words to do something to the reader, to move beyond mere representation. It involves the reader as a producer of the textual effect in both senses of the word - the aesthetic result and the cultural heritage. And it serves as an enactment of something, namely the recognition of a bond. By calling her characters' renewed marriage a public love, Morrison also plays on the blurring of public and private at issue in all literature about intimacy. Every literary text, one might say, is a kind of letter; a text addressed privately to each of us, which we read in isolation. Yet this missive is also public, it has been published. And finally, to read a literary text it to agree to the idea of a possible relationship, in which the reader becomes a participant: in the erotic but also the ethic sense. Once a performative rhetorics is involved, the reader can no longer withdraw from the claim the text makes on her or him.

            The 'performativity' to be addressed and discussed in this master class, is, however, not limited to Austin's speech act, nor is it limited to the issue of literary poetics. Therefore, it is also useful to recall that performativity as an interdisciplinary term, combines speech act theory with Foucault's discussion of the disciplinary force of representation. It is also the term which brought forth performance studies based on Butler's powerful claim that gender is engendered by regulatory forces which coerce us into assuming qua performing subject positions that a given society deems to be appropriate (and one might extend the issue of symbolic interprellation to include class and race). Both Foucault and Butler add to the distinction between description and action which speech act theory makes, the performative self-legitimation of political power, even while especially Butler has prompted an enormous discussion revolving around cultural practices which parodically play through the implication of subject positions as social constructions. And it is this move into theater which has prompted so much harping on the confusion between performativity as performance (ie. theatrical enactments) and performativity as speech act. Hillis Miller has astutely noted that Butler's re-thinking of the performative implies that one is disciplined into becoming such and such a person or gender by performing that role repeatedly. "This is a depressing theory because it assumes I am not innately anything," he explains, only to add, "this is an exhilarating theory because…once I understand that, the way is open to change soceity so I can be different, or even, so it appears, to take my identity into my own hands and 'perform' myself into becoming some other person, some other gender, or some mixture of genders, or one person or gender today and another person or gender tomorrow."

            His point is to draw attention to the way this theoretical move brings with it a fundamental move from the original intention of speech act theory. Austin's performative presupposes the right person at the right time for the utterance to work, which is to say a "stable and perdurable selfhood as a condition of what he calls a 'felicitous performative'." Only such stability would allow for the "I do," "I promise," "I declare," to make any linguistic, but also any social-cultural sense. Only if there is stability can one be held responsible for the act a performative utterance entails. Again, I am less interested in exploring the difference between Butler's rethinking of the performative and Austin's original concern than in asking, why this move was made. Why did it have such extraordinary resonance in the 90s? What does it add to the deconstructive insistence that there is nothing outside the text? What does it add to Foucault's point that all subjectivity is inevitably enmeshed in systems of repressive representation? And in what way has the continued harping on performativity itself moved beyond Butler's curious merge between a constrictive and a liberating discussion of the wounding constraints imposed upon the subject by virtue of symbolic interpellation?

            To address these questions, I want to bring in another critical voice, that of Mieke Bal, who in Traveling Concepts has directly address the vested confusion between performance and performativity. Her seminal addition consists in linking the discussion to issues of cultural memory, claiming: "memory is itself, by definition, a re-enactment, and in that sense, a form of performative." Even if Austin meant the performative to bespeak to a unique occurrence of an act in the here and now, she explains, such an utterance can only be effective if it is cushioned in a culture that "remembers what that act can do." In other words: only social conventions guarantee the possibility of a felicitous speech act. The preformative implies a process of repetition subtending any individual speech utterance. Though marked by clear intentionality, occurring as singular acts, each performative utterance is tacitly inscribed by a convention that can be re-iterated. My own interest in harping again on performativity involves precisely this inclusion of cultural memory as the lynchpin between a theatrical staging (implying the repeatability of pre-existing texts) and a public enactment, that, though including description, declares itself to be a singular, unique, and authentic act. More precisely, performativity has become important to me in my own thinking about aesthetic re-enactments as a form of cultural memory, where not only the past is recalled, but more importantly previous aesthetic reformalizations of the past, adjusted to the cultural concerns of the present. In re-enactments – regardless whether they involved a theatrical, a cinematic, a ritual or a literary performance – we are justified in speaking about an actitivy, because what is generated in the process of the public display is a transformation: of the past and of the way the past comes to be  transmitted. Bal herself, quite pointedly argues, that performance and performativity should not be treated separately: "Memory concerns the past and happens in the present."

            To make this more concrete: For my recent work on Hollywood's representations of war, about which I will be speaking on Thursday, it has become very important to insist that if a cinematic re-enactment retrieves a moment of past history for the present, it does so not merely by describing the past. The re-enactment is an act in its own right, it brings the past (as our collective cultural effect) into visceral effect again. A tentative answer to my question, why critical theory moved to aline performance (qua theatrical staging), with the performative (qua description as action) is that it endows representation with two additional dimensions: the body and movement. On the one hand, performativity allows us to speak about cultural memory as a form of embodiment; about how the past writes itself into the body and how the inscribed body serves as the site for utterances about the past. [To invoke just one example: Remember that Freud claimed hysteria to be a suffering from reminiscences, with the hysteric's body – both in pain and in ecstacy – the site where a traumatic past found its performative utterance.] On the other hand, our harping on performativity is also part and parcel of the affective turn that has occurred in the recent critical debate on re-enactment. It allows us to conceptualize cultural memory in relation to issues of affects and emotions, pertaining both to our retrieval of the past and to its persistent aesthetic recycling. Which is to say: an en-acting as staging entails physical movement, where those performing embody certain ideas, values, or retrieved knowledge. Then again, any enactment also appeals affectively to its audience, prompts a visceral response. To see cultural memory as a form of re-enactment, and thus as performative, allows us to conceive of history as something that takes possession of us. The act of remembering is a form of reclaiming the past, even while it also makes its claims on us. We do something to the past as we remember it, even while the act of cultural commemoration transforms us as well. The performative lies in the affective force of this two-way transmission.

            My own interest in performativity thus moves beyond both the initial distinction between description and action, as well as Butler's discussion of the wounding symbolic interpellation we can not afford not to subject ourselves to. I see the theoretical equation between cultural memory, enactment and performativity as a way of exploring the evidence which aesthetic reformalizations of the past offer, precisely as these appropriate the past, approximate and disfigure its knowledge. To conceive of utterances of cultural memory as acts, publically put on display, involves a performance of the past that insists on drawing attention to the impossibility of overlooking that this re-staging is happening irremediably in the present. At the same time, the embodied theatricality is a critique of any claims to historic realism. In Bal's words, it is "an endorsement of theater as a form that, by virtue of its artificiality, is the most authentic one possible, and thus the site of a paradoxcially utopian cultural agency." Counter-intuitive as this claim might be, self-reflective theatricality, splicing together the performative and with enactment, allow us to make claims to authenticity not inspite of the post-modern insistence that all access to the world past and present is through representations, but because of the recycling of these representations.

            I harp on the production of authentic evidence in and through the aesthetic act, because this foregrounds the question of taking responsibility. My own turn to the concept of performativity has to do with a sense that to track a cultural history of wars' recycling on screen involves moving beyond a deconstruction of the opposition between past and present, authenticity and citation. It also means moving beyond a psychoanalytic treatment of texts as cultural symptoms. Instead, it allows me to bring the notion of affect to bear on the effects historical events have had in our cultural memory; to the way representations engender their own cultural effect and their own effects; invoking and promising an act that makes its claim as much on history as on us, on our present and our future. The performative act lies in the affective charm of the re-enactment.