Performing

"Performance" is a word at odds with itself.

This word and its inner out-of-joint-ness became tangible for me when, a month ago, I started singing with a Catholic choir. I have sung in choruses for years and years and years, and thought I was completely used to the routine of rehearsals and concerts and, especially, perfectly comfortable singing religious music in churches, even though I am not religious. But I soon realized that what I was used to was singing Christian hymns and masses during secular performances and that singing at mass is not the same thing as giving a concert. It is singing religious music "for real," and the disjunction between what the Catholic mass has to say -- and what I now say along with it -- and what I think is acute.

In looking for a way to understand and accept what it means to be singing religious music "for real," I was reminded of an idea that started with J.L. Austin and was developed further by Derrida, at the center of which sits a similar word echoing the same dissonance: "performative." Performative is an adjective and a theory used to describe utterances that perform an action or accomplish a change in the world (other than the action of speaking) simply in being spoken. There are a few examples and they are, as we will see, necessarily limited. These include things like a priest saying "I now pronounce you man and wife" at a wedding; a celebrity breaking a bottle of champagne over a bow and saying "I christen this ship the Good Ship Wet;" an explorer stumping up a hill and jabbing a flag into the soft earth, declaring "I claim this land in the name of England;" a particularly hip Queen gazing down at the man kneeling before her and uttering "I dub thee Sir Mix-a-Lot."

Underlying and enabling all of these statements is some sort of social code -- most often, a legal or political code -- and a group of people who adhere to this code, such that if the right person says the right thing at the right time then something happens. If it sounds like magic it's because performative speech is not improvised but strictly scripted -- just like a magic spell. And although these scripts can have indirect material effects (a couple pays less taxes, a boat has its name painted on its hull, a baby is called by its name), their effects are never directly material. They work entirely in the realm of the linguistic: that is what makes them such tempting nuggets for a philosopher of language. And yet it is all the more frustrating to find that these linguistic events are contingent upon so many non-linguistic variables.

This is where Austin's theory of performative speech acts starts to digest itself. Austin seeks to distinguish between "serious" speech acts, in which all the external conditions for action are met, and "non-serious" speech acts, in which the script is followed but is, for whatever reason, void. The example he uses is a real wedding between two people intending to marry each other led by a real priest vs. a wedding scene in a play. The problem is that, from a linguistic point of view, there is no way to differentiate between these episodes. The real priest and the actor may very well speak the same lines, and likewise the couples. At the end of one ceremony a couple will be married and at the end of the other a lot of people will wash off their make-up and go home, and attributing this key difference to context, as Austin is forced to do, is deadly, for resorting to context is the linguistic equivalent of saying "I can't define it but I know it when I see it."

Derrida is the one who untangles this knot and he does so by splitting the word performance along its own natural fault line. Austin is preoccupied with the action sense of performance, as in performing a deed -- taking action, enacting, doing. But Derrida turns our attention to the other side of the word: performance as drama or art, acting instead of action. All of a sudden, the contradiction jumps out, like a sailboat in a magic eye poster: performing is both actually doing something (as opposed to sitting back and reflecting) and pretending to do something (putting on a show).

Derrida's insight occurs in two movements: first, he slices performance open to reveal its two opposing halves. So strange, we remark -- how did these two ever fit together in the first place? And then he shows us the seam that joins them. Performative speech requires a code of some sort, a script. In the right context, this script will take effect. However, the nature of a script is that it can be repeated by anyone, anytime, unlike spontaneous speech originating within a single consciousness. Performative speech is accessible to anyone even if it won't work for everyone in every situation. And if it couldn't be repeated by anyone then it wouldn't be part of a pre-established code and it wouldn't work for anyone -- if a priest gets up and says: "Now, um, you guys can move in together, I guess," no one would recognize that as an action. Performative speech acts depend on their own iterability and the foundation of the ability to actually do something with words is the ability to pretend to do something with words. Performing an action depends on being able to stage an acted performance.

Today is Palm Sunday. As we enter Holy Week, I am feeling more and more comfortable in my new robes, my new role. This comfort does not come from the fact that I have started to accept the teachings of the Church, but rather that I have realized my ability to go through certain motions without being implicated in them. There is no reason why a mass has to be different from a concert, for me, the performer. These chants and motets are available to me and I am free to intone them and not mean them without degrading either them or myself for they are, in a very important sense, empty: unlike other kinds of speech they lack the force of deriving from and expressing an individual's mind. They are empty and waiting to be filled with intention, without which they may ring and ring like so many open-mouthed bells, in beautiful, meaningless harmony.

A language, most will agree, is not just a static body of abstract relationships between concepts and signs, but also a manifestation, a realization, of a given culture. Within that culture, it functions as both map and city. To speak two languages, well, means being able to navigate (at least) two cultures at will. Translating or interpreting necessitates doing so at the same time. In most contexts, this ability is enviable, sought after, revered.

But in times of war, when cultures meet each other in conflict and the danger of trusting the wrong person deepens and darkens people's sense of cultural identity and identification, this ability, in higher demand than ever, can prove deadly. The intermediary is capable of the unthinkable: discoursing with the enemy without actually becoming the enemy and so they are doubly Other, inhabitants of a realm beyond the binary of the conflict, practitioners of an impossible, an untenable, third way. Instead of being viewed as symbols of the hope they embody, they are often shunned, and their disillusionment becomes the sharpest indictment of our failure to get along.

I urge all of you to read the excellent article by George Packer on Iraqi interpreters published in this week's New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/26/070326fa_fact_packer before they take it off-line.

Tragedy and Pathology

One of the central questions posed by scholars of tragedy is whether or not one can write a modern tragedy. Is it a living genre that could nourish itself on our current crises of war, nationalism, and inequality, and could in turn sustain us with its inescapable, compelling contradictions? Or is it fixed, like a photograph of someone turning away from us: an image we can return to again and again but that will never again return our gaze?

Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres (1991: Knopf), an adaptation of or response to King Lear set on a 1970s mid-Western farm, uses the tools of contemporary narrative to pose that question. For anyone who has read the Shakespeare play, spotting the dozens of superficial points of intersection between the two works is an enjoyable diversion. Lear here is renamed Larry, or Laurence, Cook and he is the proud and powerful owner of 1000 acres of land -- by far the largest plot owned by a single farmer anywhere in the area. His daughters, Ginny and Rose, have been raised to fear and obey him; only his youngest daughter, Caroline, feels she can empathize with him, although in the end it seems she doesn't know him very well at all. The action begins when he decides to incorporate his farm and divide it up between his children, even though he is still in good health, and doesn't end until every character has died or lost all recognizable pieces of their former identity. There is a storm, a fool, a blinded man. There is incest, abuse, and poison.

But the book is not just a transposition in which the elements of a well-known plot are renamed and relocated. It is a gaping mouth, an unfurled question mark beckoning to us to put aside our pat understanding of human consciousness and face a darkness filled with everything we don't know and can't control about each other, for nowadays we tend to pathologize difference and so distance ourselves from suffering and loss. Viewing tragic dilemmas as symptoms of a treatable pathology means neutralizing the tragedy, refusing to face it, and instead replacing it with a bland moral.

In A Thousand Acres, the characters grapple with formidable issues. For example, following a church supper in which Larry's friend Harold (Gloucester) publicly denounces and humiliates Ginny and Rose, the two girls discuss what is happening to their father whose behavior has become increasingly erratic of late:

"Listen, I can't tell you how it makes me feel that Daddy's taking some sort of refuge in being crazy now. You know who they blame, don't you? But it isn't even that."
"What is it?"
"Now there isn't even a chance that I'll look him in the eye, and see that he knows what he did and what it means. As long as he acts crazy, then he gets off scot-free."

In this scene, and throughout the book, Rose (the first speaker here) is the angry one, self-righteous and demanding of justice, while Ginny, the narrator, attempts to accept her lot and avoid conflict. Both of them try, in their own way, to incorporate their father's behavior into a narrative framework they can make sense of and they suffer when those narratives don't fit together.

In Shakespeare's play, Lear goes mad. That's not a term we use anymore: we say, sick, ill, disabled, altered. Mental illness belongs to the realm of things we don't understand and can't control, but because of that it is often closed off to us in popular discourse. A diagnosis, whether mental or physical, is, in many stories, an answer. But in Lear, as in A Thousand Acres, there are no words to hide people behind. Larry's madness is a question for his daughters and for the reader, another inscrutable part of his character, just like his aggression, his stubbornness, and, in the fictional past that precedes the narrative's start, his predictability.

Likewise, the law plays a large role in the novel. When the farm is incorporated, papers are signed, lawyers are consulted. And when the family starts to fall apart, again there is a trial in which Larry tries to win back what he gave away. In the original play, too, there is a trial: it is in a barn during a rainstorm and a footstool is one of the main participants. The Acres trial takes place in a real courtroom and seems like it should be more definitive, more meaningful, than the mock version it is based on, but it is not clear that it really settles anything.

Ultimately, these questions -- who is right and who is wrong, who owns what and for how long, what it means to be sane and how that definition shapes human interaction, what a family is and what holds it together -- are questions that inhabit us. They fill people's lives. Ideas of justice and reason, truth and meaning, are the ghosts we try to net in tomes and textbooks, decisions and diagnoses. Medical and legal code can help us negotiate these questions as a society, they can help people heal and can preserve order to a certain extent. Pathologizing is far better than it's predecessor, demonizing, but not the same as empathizing, or trying to. A jury's verdict, a doctor's prescription, is the beginning of a journey not the end of one. If we are to use these tools to their fullest then we can't treat words like fences to separate ourselves from misery's plot of land: they must be bridges, gateways that open always onto further discussion.

Smiley's book ends with Ginny pondering her inheritance:

"I can't say that I forgive my father, but now I can imagine what he probably chose never to remember -- the goad of an unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he wandered around the house late at night after working and drinking, like the very darkness. This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all others."

At the end of it all, all she can do, all we can do, is continue our impossible struggle to relate.