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.