Confessions of a Tischaholic -2- first impressions

An Introduction to Introduction to Performance Studies: The Things Performance Studies Does

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

–Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Yellow brick buildings, dating back to the early 1930s. Towering trees providing shade for the vast spread of walkways occupying the space between the yellow bricks and the green patches of grass and botany. Water running down quickly in the small brooks aligning the pavement, the meditative trickling sound of its jubilance evoking memories of chasing after your feet while running down a soft slope on a cool summer day. A stray cat here, a love-stricken couple there, crows lurking in the skies, crowds generating distant brouhahas, books and magazines and newspapers held in hands, backpacks and messenger bags slung over the confident figure of youth, the defeated student leaning against a tree which grants the support lacking in an infelicitous romantic relationship –all makings for a typical college campus.

Except this college campus is anything but typical, located in the heart of a city which does anything but boast its approximate population of 12 million. The city is Tehran, capital to a climatically diverse country sometimes still referred to as Persia, which for its inhabitants resonates a time of greatness. A time that –given the linearity with which they have been taught to progress through temporal dimensions– they have no hopes of ever experiencing, ever repeating, except by its realization via their rich oral culture. A culture driven to basements under a totalitarian regime fearful of its own shadow, and concealed in the safe depths of the hearts of its loyal parish. An oral (aural) tradition fabled to be safeguarded behind the affective gazes of the students constituting this very college’s devoted body. The college, the oldest new school in the Middle East. The college, a university. The college, The University of Tehran.

And at this non-typical university, there are very typical schools –highly typical departmental divisions. The five-story School of Engineering sits opposite its twin, the School of Sciences, with a park moderate in size disjointing the two. To forge a connection seems impossible in this narration, for the narrator is well-aware of a grave injustice; an injustice stemming from the lack of justice of the type Derrida was concerned with. A justice impregnated with a sense of responsibility to those not present; or better to say, those whose absence signifies their presence. The absentee here is a free-standing Persian language: ruptured and colonialized by the penetration of French, Arabic and English, this living force serves not just as an archival form, but as a repertoire for the Iranian population. This repertoire consists of an embodiment of the textual repository of knowledge, thus rendering it transmittable in a visceral fashion. As a culture which expresses, acts, and lives with and through its poetic language, this infiltration –while problematic– also serves as a problem which unifies and links different societal generations. A DNA pattern, one based in performance, is formed in this bothersome way.

Let us return however, to the problem arising from linking –in a totalitarian fashion unaware of the true happenings within the campus– the two aforementioned structures. This dilemma is embedded in the very name of the “School of Sciences,” for this school is not the school of sciences at all. Or at least, its Persian name –which in fact uses an Arabic term– does not imply so. In this literal translation, sciences is meant to represent the term o’loum: an Arabic word in the plural form, the singular of which is elm. The trouble here, is that based on its mode of employment in Farsi, elm should be translated as knowledge. Translation thus becomes a double-edged sword: not only is this complexity one emergent from translation, but it is also one only recognizable through translation.

In a world where mere words do things, where uttering a statement can make it so, referring to “knowledge” as “science” engenders a crisis, the extent of which is hidden to no one dedicated to the study of performance. To performance studies, epistemology is grounded in embodied comprehension: performance knowledge is a form of knowledge which is embodied. Words –which perform actions in their own respect, and can elicit actions in return– are also vessels which bottle knowledge. This is precisely why translation is so fundamental to this field of study; as important perhaps, as articulation to the arena of everyday life. And if we’re to accept the veracity –or the felicity– of Roderick Hart’s statement, “freedom goes to the articulate,” then perhaps we can go a step further and conclude that proper translation is a must, if we are ever to approach the hopes of a just society, which understands the importance of artistic and aesthetic expression to the annihilation of totalitarian rule.

Since we have already docked at the School of Sciences, let us investigate it further. At this school, one can excel in one of many academic fields: Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and other “core” sciences. Yet whatever discipline is chosen, one must also decide upon a branch: Pure or Practical, that is the question! While the dichotomous structure imposed in this manner can be effortlessly deconstructed with a gentle critical push, it is one worth considering; for its roots speak to our ontological understanding of disciplinary fields in the academic world. Our need to somehow arbitrarily classify that which we realize through not just our five senses, but also our sixth, has led to our creation of countless “either/or” dichotomies. While we may do so with the intent of increasing our ease of access to the material, natural, and supernatural world surrounding us, we are in fact partaking in a losing battle: such categorizations are incapable of doing much more beyond limiting our means of travel –mental or physical– from one plain to the next.

This cruel reality is of course no secret –as the many who have exhausted years of their academic careers toward its revelation can tell you. The twentieth century saw a rise in the number of scholars who sought to break the conventional dualities which the majority of our modern, capitalist thinking patterns lead us to perceive as a given fact, the “truth” of which cannot be questioned. Inherent in this way of thought was, and continues to be, accepting the hierarchical power relations birthed out of exclusionary binaries. The contestation of such widely standardized constructs was picked up by J. L. Austin as well. Sadly however, while Austin did put one dichotomy behind him, he substituted it with another: utterances were to be happy or unhappy, felicitous or infelicitous, as opposed to “true” or “non-true.” Of course, breaking away from the neo-Aristotelian tradition of the Enlightenment era which honored truth and perfection above all was in itself commendable. The worth of Austin’s work is also in his introducing the idea of the performative: a controversial move which sparked much academic debate and squabbles, and opened up a space for the discussion of such possibilities, creating a stage full of potentialities. This potential, similar to others of its kind, generated a liminal space from which emerged the interdisciplinary field of Performance Studies.

Performance studies is situated in that connection which is impossible to forge: the connection which can be used not only to fuse together the different branches of one entity, but also to chain links among multiple entities. Performance studies can be viewed as betwixt and between; hop-scotching from theater, to anthropology, to photography, to literature, to rhetoric, to philosophy, to ethnography, to hauntology, supplementing one with the other and ultimately –going to infinity and beyond. And it is in those joyous moments of leverage, of hovering above, and simultaneously transcending across the borders of any conventional discipline, that the ontology of performance itself is understood. An ontology fixed in “liveness,” and a performative mode of being which is always on the verge of disappearance. As for the ontology of performance studies, we can conclude it to be a chimera of sorts, an intellectually eclectic method of studying the practices of everyday life. A continuous process accomplished by means of the various clever ways in which humankind has managed to engage itself with the world, and from which it has skillfully fabricated different lines of knowledge.

Having already addressed matters of epistemology and ontology –and bearing in mind a Persian proverb which can be clumsily translated as “unless there’s three, there’s no game,” probably arising from the notion of stability embodied by triangular forms comprised of three sides, and simmering down to the need to do things thrice– it seems rather immature to close this essay without attending to the notion of axiology in performance studies. Concerned with the nature of “truth,” this topic in itself appears as somewhat at odds with what Austin was trying to prove, at least in relation to speech utterances. This might lead to certain sloppy conclusions, purporting that “truth” is always a relative perception in the study of performance studies. Conclusive remarks of this nature are in large part correct: the notion of intentionality and attempts to uncover motives are considered a trap scholars should safely distance themselves from. Interpretation is fundamental in performance and its study, and is the sole thing one can ever hope to speculate about; inferences made based upon one’s own personal experiences which inform a certain attitude toward life. However, the use of the defining adjective “sloppy” just a few short sentences ago was intentional. This is because although we cannot fully understand the intention behind a performance, ideological performances should be singled out. Clearly, ideologies do have a specific take on the nature of truth: they believe in a single truth, and seek methods with which to pronounce it. Marxist devotee’s will always consider the exploitation of the laborer to be embedded in the power structure currently prevalent in the world, while feminist scholars will always believe misogyny to be the “truth” in today’s societies. While these ideological approaches have neo-Aristotelian presumptions, post-structuralists subscribe to no ideology, believing that all systems, even the one through which “truth” is understood, will be deconstructed through their own defective essence. It should be noted that here as well, similar to ontology, it is necessary to make a distinction between performance studies and performance.

In performance studies, it is the beholder who comes to life in response to the performer. It is in how one chooses to behold an action, a showing of a doing, that a performance is signified and understood. This notion of course implies the necessity for someone to audit a performance, placing a heavy weight on the importance of spectatorship and audience appraisal in its actuality. The perlocutionary act is at the heart of these performances, a placement in line with the movement away from l’art pour l’art, to l’art pour tous. These performances can range from the extraordinary epic theatrical creations facilitated by technology and exported worldwide, to the mundane ritualistic performances of everyday life carried out in the most banal way, in the confines of one’s home. They can even be as simple as a speech utterance in naming a pet, a plant, or a stuffed creature. Speech utterances which in this case, would most likely be happy, and felicitous; yet as curious creatures, it is seldom that we devote our time to their study. For it is precisely as Tolstoy puts it in the opening sentence of Anna Karenina: a happy statement is terminated, and therefore every felicitous statement resembles the next, just as all “happy families are… alike.” It is the unhappy statement that “pricks” us, the infelicitous misfires and abuses which delight our inquisitive nature, and fuel performance studies –sometimes forward, other times back– into the vast unknown pleasures of time and space.

Labels: narcissism, nyc, school, yada yada

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