The Peter Hujar Archive. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe. Postdramatic — Jens Hoffmann. Photo: A. Steiner, Untitled white , , color pigment print. Performers: Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs. Photo: Frank Aymami. Courtesy of Creative Time. Andrea Fraser, Projection , Still from a 2-channel HD video projection installation. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler.
David Levine, Bystanders , Performer: William Ellis. Photo: Guntar Kravis. Courtesy of Alexandro Segade. Richard Maxwell, Neutral Hero , The Kitchen, New York. Mac Wellman, Muazzez , Performer: Steve Mellor. Photo: Brian Rogers. Janine Antoni, Yours Truly , Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. The Getty Research Institute. Susan Foster! Photo: Jorge Cousineau. Brown improvises movements across a large piece of paper on the Medtronic Gallery floor, holding charcoal and pastel between her fingers and toes, drawing extemporarily.
Mixed-media installation with live performance and pre-recorded sound track, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery. Courtesy of the artist. Siobhan Davies and Helka Kaski, Manual , Courtesy of Glasgow Life. Photo: Michal Ramus. Steve Paxton, Intravenous Lecture , Performed by Stephen Petronio with Nicholas Sciscione. Photo: Josh Brasted. Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein. Courtesy of the photographer and Pick Up Performance Co s.
Performers: Eleanor Hullihan and Nicole Mannarino. Archival print from original film. Photo: Lydia Grey. Iannis Xenakis, Terretektorh, Distribution of Musicians , Collection famille Xenakis. Courtesy of the Iannis Xenakis Archives. Lisa Bielawa, Chance Encounter , premiered Co-conceived with Susan Narucki. Photo: Corey Brennan, , Rome. Headlands Center for the Arts. Photo: Maarten Vanden Abeele. Christian Marclay, Chalkboard , , paint and chalk, x 1, inches.
Photo: Christian Marclay. Photo: Cheung Chi Wai. Sign up Sign in. Simplified Chinese China. English US. Question about English US. What is the difference between performative and performance? Feel free to just provide example sentences. Report copyright infringement. The owner of it will not be notified. The most classic Austinian examples those unceasing invocations of the first person singular present indicative active open up newly to such approaches.
But to do justice to the performative force of "I dare you," as opposed to its arguably constative function of expressing "attitudes," requires a dis-impaction of the scene, as well as the act, of utterance. To begin with, while "1 dare you" ostensibly involves only a singular first and a singular second person, it effectually depends as well on the tacit requisition of a third person plural, a "they" of witness-whether or not literally present.
In daring you to perform some foolhardy act or else expose yourself as, shall we say, a wuss ,"I" hypothetically singular necessarily invoke a consensus of the eyes of others. It is these eyes through which you risk being seen as a wuss; by the same token, it is as people who share with me a contempt for wussiness that these others are interpellated, with or without their consent, by the act I have performed in daring you.
Now, these people, supposing them real and present, may or may not in fact have any interest in sanctioning against wussiness. They might, indeed, themselves be wussy and proud of it.
They may wish actively to oppose a social order based on contempt for wussitude. They may simply, for one reason or another, not identify with my contempt for wusses. Alternatively they may be skeptical of my own standing in the ongoing war on wussiness-they may be unwilling to leave the work of its arbitration to me; may wonder if I harbor wussish tendencies myself, perhaps revealed in my unresting need to test the w-quotient of others.
For that matter, you yourself, the person dared, may share with them any of these skeptical attitudes on the subject; and may additionally doubt, or be uninterested in, their authority to classify you as wuss or better. Thus, "I dare you" invokes the presumption, but only the pre-sumption, of a consensus between speaker and witnesses, and to some extent between all of them and the addressee.
The presumption is embodied in the lack of a formulaic negative response to being dared, or to being interpellated as witness to a dare. The fascinating and powerful class of negative performatives-disavowal, renunciation, repudiation, "count me out"-is marked, in almost every instance, by the asymmetrical property of being much less prone to becoming conventional than the positive performatives. Negative performatives tend to have a high threshold.
Thus Dante speaks of refusal-even refusal through cowardice-as something "great. For in daring you, in undertaking through any given iteration to reinscribe a set of presumptive valuations more deeply, and thereby to establish more firmly my own authority to wield them, I place under stress the consensual nature both of those valuations and of my own authority.
To have my dare greeted with a witnesses' chorus of "Don't do it on our account" would radically alter the social, the political, the interlocutory I-you-they space of our encounter. So, in a different way would our calmly accomplishing the dare and coming back to me, before the same witnesses, with the expectation of my accomplishing it in turn. Or let us join Austin in reverting to his first and most influential, arguably the founding, example of the explicit performative: '"I do sc.
As one of us has recently written, in a discussion of specifically queer performativity:. Austin keeps going back to that formula "first person singular present indicative active" The subject of "I do" is an "I" only insofar as he or she assents in becoming part of a sanctioned, cross-gender "we" so constituted in the presence of a "they"; and the I "does," or has agency in the matter, only by ritually mystifying its overidentification with the powers for which no pronoun obtains of state and church.
The marriage example, self-evidently, will strike a queer reader at some more oblique angle or angles. Persons who self-identify as queer will be those whose subjectivity is lodged in refusals or deflections of or by the logic of the heterosexual supplement; in far less simple associations attaching to state authority; in far less complacent relation to the witness of others.
The emergence of the first person, of the singular, of the active, and of the indicative are all questions rather than presumptions, for queer performativity. Austin-like, the obliquity of queer reception needs and-struggles to explicitate the relations on the thither side of "I do. Compulsory witness not just in the sense that you aren't allowed to absent yourself, but in the way that a much fuller meaning of "witness" a fuller one than Austin ever treats gets activated in this prototypical performative.
It is the constitution of a community of witness that makes the marriage; the silence of witness we don't speak now, we forever hold our peace that permits it; the bare, negative, potent but undiscretionary speech act of our physical presence-maybe even especially the presence of those people whom the institution of marriage defines itself by excluding-that ratifies and recruits the legitimacy of its privilege.
And to attend, as we have been here, to the role of witness in constituting the space of the speech-act: where does that get us but to the topic of marriage itself as theater-marriage as a kind of fourth wall or invisible proscenium arch that moves through the world a heterosexual couple secure in their right to hold hands in the street , continually reorienting around itself the surrounding relations of visibility and spec-tatorship, of the tacit and the explicit, of the possibility or impossibility of a given person's articulating a given enunciatory position?
Marriage isn't always hell, but it is true that le manage, c'est les autres: like a play, marriage exists in and for the eyes of others. One of the most ineradicable folk-beliefs of the married seems to be that it is no matter-of-fact thing, but rather a great privilege, for anyone else to behold a wedding or a married couple or to be privy to their secrets-including oppressive or abusive secrets, but also the showy open secret of the "happy marriage.
And the epistemology of marital relation continues to be profoundly warped by the force field of the marital proscenium. Acquiring worldly wisdom consists in, among other things, building up a usable repertoire of apothegms along the lines of: don't expect to be forgiven ever if you say to your friend X, "I'm glad you two have broken up; I never liked the way Y treated you anyway" and your friend and Y then get back together, however briefly.
But also: don't expect to know what's happening or going to happen between X andY on the basis of what your friend tells you is going on, or even on the basis of lovey-dovey or scarifying scenes which may be getting staged in one oway or another "for your benefit.
Think of all the Victorian novels whose sexual plot climaxes, not in the moment of adultery, but in the moment when the proscenium arch of the marriage is, however excruciatingly, displaced: when the fact of a marriage's unhappiness ceases to be a pseudosecret or an open secret, and becomes a bond of mutuality with someone outside the marriage; when a woman says or intimates something about "her marriage" to a friend or lover that she wpuld not say to her husband.
These tend to be the most wracking and epistemologically the "biggest" moments of the marriage novel. Such a text, then, also constitutes an exploration of the possible grounds and performative potential of refusals, fractures, warpings of the proscenium of marital witness. The entire plot of The Golden Bowl, for instance, is structured by an extraordinary aria uttered by Charlotte Stant to Prince Amerigo, her ex-lover, when she has persuaded him to spend an afternoon alone with her on the eve of his marriage to another woman:.
I want to have said it-that's all; I want not to have failed to say it. To see you once and be with you, to be as we are now and as we used to be, for one small hour-or say for two-that's what I have had for weeks in my head.
I mean, of course, to get it before-before what you're going to do This is what I've got. This is what I shall always have. This is what I should have missed, of course," she pursued, "if you had chosen to make me miss it I had to take the risk. Well, you're all I could have hoped. That's what I was to have said. I didn't want simply to get my time with you, but I wanted you to know. I wanted you"-she kept it up, slowly, softly, with a small tremor of voice, but without tht least failure of sense or sequence-"I wanted you to understand.
I wanted you, that is, to hear. I don't care, I think, whether you understand or not.
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