Spencer Golub
Theatre, Speech and Dance, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

The world is not enough. How big the world, how small the "i"; how territorial the one and the other.

Does the world's condition make hypochondriacs of us all?

The world is a dream foretold but not foregone. It is held within the space that separates thumb and forefinger, an index only, and is present in the sound fingers make when tap-tapping a tabletop or snap-snapping us to attention. It is the surface that appears to enable things to roll off it and the same surface that defines a world that vanquishes flatness with the variety of its depths and meanings, its curvature of thought.

The world is not enough because it must always be invented to be achieved on the level of comprehension, if not to a comprehensive degree.

We are correspondents for correspondences with and to the seen and seen-through reality. Already dialed up and simulcast all over the world, our signal is beamed out across the airwaves, where it is not already banned for the beaming. Our picture is on the six o'clock news, in the newspaper morgue, rebroadcast overnight on the late, late shift of the late, late show as we stare sleepless and anxious at what our world has become in the absence of our making something of it that is our own.

We think about what tomorrow will bring us in the mail, through the wires, under the tree, on our mantle, to our doorstep. We wait for/fear/embrace what it will deliver us to and from in the end. That sound you hear is the fear of falling off the edge, that is ours to lose.

This very screen cites our distance, learning how far we must see to learn and learn to unsee; the "PS" and "i" sign the not yet done and the not ever enough.

Shannon Jackson
Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Department of Rhetoric, University of California

In order to create a compass for navigating the interdisciplinary complexity of performance studies, consider the range of connotations that have galvanized performance research. The word performance derives from a Latin root meaning "to furnish forth." To extend the etymological tack, the word theatre derives from a Greek root meaning "a place for viewing." A second angle yields another network of connotations. Performance conventionally employs bodies, motion, space, affect, image, and words; its analysis at times aligns with theories of embodiment, at times with studies of emotion, at times with architectural analysis, at times with studies of visual culture, and at times with critiques of linguistic exchange. Consequently, one analyst who speaks of sutures and gazes may struggle to translate that perspective to another who speaks of uptakes and perlocutions. Connotations of a third type are also attached to performance, reflecting the term's location in a contemporary theoretical context. Theorists of various stripes have foregrounded performance as a vehicle of community formation as often as others have emphasized its function as a site of social transgression. Meanwhile, performance's repeatability has been fundamental to its theorizing for some scholars; their point of entry that differs markedly from those who argue for performance as a reiteration whose chief feature is its non-reproducibility. For some philosophers, performance is an intentional realm of purposive action; for others, it is an unintentional realm of spontaneous or habitual enactment. Finally, many performers use a language of the actual and the real to distinguish their practices; that rhetoric contrasts starkly with long-held assumptions of theatre's fakery and inauthenticity. In sum, performance is about doing, and it is about seeing; it is about image, embodiment, space, collectivity, and/or orality; it makes community and it breaks community; it repeats endlessly and it never repeats; it is intentional and unintentional; innovative and deriviative, more fake and more real. Performance's many connotations and its varied intellectual kinships ensure that an interdisciplinary conversation around this interdisciplinary site rarely will be neat and straightforward. Perhaps it is time to stop assuming that it should.

Extract from Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance, (Cambridge UP, 13-5)

Tracy C. Davis
School of Communication, Northwestern University

["Theatrical" is not merely an adjectival relative of "theatricality." The latter term, coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1837 and clarified in his later work, refers to a distinct kind of phenomenon within social spectating. This is my distillation of his meaning, and the conclusion of my essay.]

Theatricality: n. A spectator's dédoublement resulting from a sympathetic breach (active dissociation, alienation, self-reflexivity) effecting a critical stance toward an episode in the public sphere, including but not limited to the theatre.

I am, therefore, arguing for enabling effects of active dissociation, or alienation, or self-reflexivity in standing aside from the suffering of the righteous to name and thus bring into being the self-possession of a critical stance. And, like Carlyle, I call this "theatricality." Brecht (1977) and Boal (1979) base twentieth-century dramaturgies on a similar idea, relying on alienation from character and circumstances to bring about political critique as an affect of viewing. In a sense, the bystander in [Adam] Smith's example, who gazes at the good man put to the scaffold and reads into the social dramaturgy "the system fails, and the system is mine," is a Brechtian spectator. In the theatre, as Althusser describes, an actor "comes down to the footlights, takes off his mask and, the play over, 'draws the lessons'" (1997: 209). In public life, however, the onus for instigating this theatrical moment is on the spectator, who by failing to sympathize and instead commencing to think, becomes the actor. Through being spectators to the theatrum mundi of civil society, engaged but not absorbed watchers, we bring our whole experience to bear on what is seen without insisting on sameness as the criterion of worth. Do we not appreciate art for its ability to show us new ways of seeing, being, thinking? Is it not maudlin when it shows us what we already know and feel? And yet it is the act of withholding sympathy that makes us become spectators to ourselves and others. Is this not how new law is conceived: not by cathecting with victims but by enabling the seeing of acts (sexual harassment, stalking, driving under the influence of alcohol) where before there was either "nothing" or sympathetic social sanction? It is not solely in intersubjectivity that civil society is maintained, but in what separates us. And in this, as Carlyle allowed, theatricality "may also have its meaning."

Extract from Tracy C. Davis, "Theatricality and Civil Society," in Theatricality, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (Cambridge University Press, 2003) 127-55.

Branislav Jakovljevic
Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minneapolis in Minnesota

"i"

The most concise definition of Performance Studies I can think of is that it is the science of actions. Both as a research method and as a distinct academic field, performance studies is concerned with actions that come from or in any other way concern humans. Even though it prefers to see itself as a non-traditional academic field, this focus on action aligns Performance Studies with the long and powerful tradition that has its distant source in Aristotle.

That is why the "i" interests me much more than "PS." As we know, it stands, ambiguously, for "international." Or is it "internationalle"? The only bright points in the twentieth century internationalism were the instances when it acknowledged its own impossibility, in the projects such as Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International or Internationale situationniste. Both of them understood internationalism not as expansionism, but as dynamism. The decapitalization of the "I" is potentially of crucial importance for Performance Studies. It can be seen as one of the extremely rare instances of self-renunciation in contemporary public arena, be it art, politics, or higher education. Furthermore, it can be read as a humble protestation against the complete subjugation of higher learning to corporate capitalism. The small "I" stands for the weak, the emergent, and the infantile. It is naïve and vulnerable. It is the "i" which is unique, eccentric, idiosyncratic. Dial "i" for the irrational, insecure, and plainly idiotic. As such, the "i" escapes the action-packed PS and presents the lines of flight: from place to space, from body to concept, from actions to events. The "i" in-completes Performance Studies. In Serbian, my native tongue, as well as in many other Slavic languages, "i" is a connective. I always read PSi as Performance Studies, and?

Michal Kobialka
Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minneapolis in Minnesota

Defining any discipline is an arduous task. When I am thinking about Performance Studies, however, what comes to mind is the topography of movement in space and in time; space and time which ceased to be the conditions by which to live and allow themselves to be understood as modes of thinking, which are always in flux. This topography describes activities that occur when a performative practice is pushed to its final limits where it loses its pre-assigned meanings but, maintaining its specificity, establishes its own identity in the relationship with other objects or subjects in that space. This topography describes activities that occur when a performative act is seen as a gesture of space-time-matter exploring its own mediality in the process of folding back upon itself to disturb the stability of its own form. And finally, this topography describes activities that occur when we are deeply engaged in the act of thinking about performance studies thinking themselves as the experience that elaborates the initial forgetting prompted by the indelibility of words trying to establish the contours of singular visibility. In that multiplicity, Performance Studies has a potential to escape territorial limits because of its historiographic awareness of the ontology of the performative.

Jon McKenzie
Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

What is performance studies? A better question: "which performance studies?" Like "performance," "performance studies" is a contested concept with multiple meanings informed by different methodologies, disciplines, institutions, geographies, subject positions, object fields, and values. Though PSi focuses on cultural performance, other paradigms of performance research exist, including technological, organizational, financial, and environmental performance.

For instance, in engineering and computer sciences, "performance studies" refers to analyses of technical systems, devices, and materials. Supercomputers, refrigerators, and plastics all have precise performance specifications determined by extensive performance studies, a.k.a. "performance tests." Such performance studies are predominantly quantitative, though qualitative criteria may be included. In this context, performance research is not as transgressive as scholars of cultural performance have been inclined to think.

Moreover, despite valorizing liminality, US cultural performance studies is increasingly perceived as hegemonic elsewhere. While Carlson's Performance and Schechner's Performance Studies focus primarily on US performance studies, performance research has been or is being invented in Western and Eastern Europe, New Zealand and Australia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East-sometimes building on US scholarship, sometimes working against it, sometimes ignoring it.

The very term "performance studies" is sometimes identified with a hegemonic US model. However, it should be noted that, collectively, performance research conducted in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand also forms a powerful, English-language hegemony, making the translation of "performance" a critical issues for other researchers.

Thus while performance studies is often cast in opposition to globalization, it may also facilitate it, especially when connected to other performance paradigms. The IMF regulates "global economic performance," and performance management techniques pervade multinational corporations. Significantly, systems theorists have developed methods to study multi-paradigmatic performance, and the UN's Global Compact encourages corporations and governments to assess financial, environmental, and social performance. Such developments I call global performativity.

What is an international?

The lower case "i" in PSi, sometimes mistakenly read as a typo, actually marks the ambivalence of the organization's own "international." From its beginning, PSi has sought to connect performance research and practice in different countries while simultaneously seeking to question the status, states, and stakes of any "international."

In general terms, an international is an organization with branches in two or more nations. The roots of the modern nation state and international order are often traced to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which formalized political relations between various European countries. Via European colonialism and its discontents (e.g., anti-colonial nationalist revolutions), this international order was extended worldwide.
When capitalized, "International" designates the four communist organizations founded in 1864, 1889, 1919, and 1938-respectively, the First International, Second International, Third International (Comitern), and Fourth International. These organizations linked communist, socialist, and anarchist parties from different countries, though arguably these Internationals foundered, in part, on members' nationalist loyalties.

In the 1940s, several powerful international organizations were established under the aegis of the United Nations, including the International Monetary Fund (the IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank), and the International Court of Justice (the World Court). Significantly, while the leftist Internationals have folded, these latter international organizations, widely perceived as Western capitalist institutions, have gained in strength and influence.
Contemporary debates on globalization often focus on the risks and opportunities accompanying different stresses on the international system of nation states. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the international political order established by the Treaty of Westphalia has come under increasing pressure from "above," in the form of transnational organizations, from "below," in the form of local and transversal political, social, and religious movements, and from "within," in the form of American hegemony.

Lois Weaver
School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London

What is Performance Studies?

In 1980 when we started making work at WOW and with Split Britches, we thought we were making it up as we went along. We were wayward girls who couldn't stick to the rules. We were having fun and breaking rules. We were making things. It wasn't art, it wasn't theatre, it wasn't politics and sometimes it just wasn't right. It was human size cardboard lobsters, video stand-ins for absent girlfriends, odes to clothes and recipes for chicken sushi.

Was this performance?

A couple of years later, I walked into a college classroom and saw some of these wayward girls' names listed on a blackboard. When I laughed, the lecturer said to me, 'Didn't you know that now you are a question on a test? '

Was this Performance Studies?

Twenty-five years on I think of Performance Studies like I used to think of those days at WOW. It's as hideout, an after school program for bad boys and girls, a safe house for those who can't go by the rules. Performance Studies is not one-size fits all but all sizes try to fit in. That is, if you can handle conflict, cope with ambiguity, navigate the incomprehensible, relish the rivalry. For both artists and academics it can be a place to see yourself reflected, challenged, codified cracked up, over baked and served up.

Too many metaphors?

Isn't that the point? To question. Is it fun? Is it fashion? Is it food? Or just further education?

Tavia Nyong'o
Performance Studies, New York University

What is performance? Readers of the June/July 2005 issue of Men's Fitness magazine found one answer rolled up and stuck in their gym bags:

Performance. In the gym and outdoors, in the office and on the street, on the court - and in her bed. Like you, I want it all.

With these words editor Neal Boulton sums up the biopolitical logic of late consumerism: the ever-intensified self-subjugation of the body in the privatized pursuit of happiness. Mark Greif calls it in a timely polemic against exercise. "The true payoff of a society that chooses to make private freedoms and private leisures its main substance … is a set of forms of bodily self-regulation which drag the last vestiges of biological life into the light as a social attraction." 1 Of what does the political imperative of performance studies consist, if not a reckoning with the forms through which life is captured by and for it own "performance"?

This dilemma is both new and old. "A sound mind in a sound body" is an old, shopworn imperative that, Robert Martin once observed, has long concealed a hatred of both. 2 Part of what is new is the reinvestment our pursuit of "peak performance" has made in "race" and raciology.3 The cover of Men's Fitness featured rapper Ja Rule - sporting a "Pain is Love" tattoo across his muscled chest - positioned next to the caption "How to Build a Bullet Proof Body!" The magazine re-stages the aggressive rivalries of gangsta rap "beefs" in the service of a flexible masculinity hungry for the "health" that the racialized body promises. "Ripped Abs." "Badass Arms." The commodification of the black body, begun in the slave trade, reappears as choice, leisure, and realness. As Boulton broke it down for the New York Times: "It's all about authenticity …I'm just trying to show folks what's really there." 4 What neater summation of the performance imperative of a society where "reality" now regularly appears in scare quotes, a society in which, to adapt Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's formulation, life has been turning into a racialized, biopolitical display of itself?

Notes:
1. Mark Greif, "Against Exercise," n+1 1(1) (Fall 2004): 65.
2 Robert Martin, "Life at Wesleyan Before Stonewall," Hermes (March/April 1994): 19.
3 See Paul Gilroy's prescient formulation of this dynamic in Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
4 "Men's Fitness Magazine Takes a Little Dig at Hip-Hop Celebrity," New York Times (23 May 2005). Boulton told the Times that an earlier issue of his magazine, featuring Ja Rule rival 50 Cent on its cover, "sold better than any issue in five years."

Philip Auslander
School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology

As an interpretive paradigm, the idea of performance has been used to describe everything from static art forms to everyday behavior, to political demonstrations and terrorism, to large-scale social conflicts. The "postmodern turn" in a variety of humanistic and social scientific disciplines amounts mainly to viewing those disciplines and their objects of study in performance terms. Scholars in history, sociology, anthropology, and many other fields have come to see their respective discourses as contingent rather than absolute; as engaged with specific audiences rather than autonomous; as existing primarily in a specific, time-bound context; and as characterized by particular processes rather than by the products they generate. It is significant that one of the new, arguably postmodern disciplines to emerge from this intellectual ferment is performance studies, which takes performance in the expanded sense that subsumes aesthetic performances, ritual and religious observance, secular ceremonies, carnival, games, play, sports, and many other cultural forms as its object of inquiry and unites the tradition of theatre studies with techniques and approaches from anthropology, sociology, critical theory, cultural studies, art history, and other disciplines.

Extract from Philip Auslander, "Postmodernism and Performance." In The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, edited by Steven Connor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 99-100.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña

"I see myself as an experimental cartographer. In this sense I can approach a definition of performance art by mapping out the "negative" space (as in photography, not ethics) of its conceptual territory. Though our work sometimes overlaps with experimental theater, and many of us utilize spoken word, stricto sensu, we are neither actors nor spoken word poets. (We may be temporary actors and poets but we abide by other rules, and stand on a different history.) *1. Most performance artists are also writers, but only a handful of us write for publication. We theorize about art, politics and culture, but our interdisciplinary methodologies are different from those of academic theorists. They have binoculars; we have radars. Performance artists spend the bulk of our time "scanning" rather than "focusing," as theorists do, settling on one spot and then pulling out the binoculars. When performance studies scholars refer to "the performance field", they often mean something different than what performance artists mean: a much broader field that encompasses all things performative, including anthropology, religious practice, pop culture, sports and civic events. While we chronicle our times, unlike journalists or social commentators, our chronicles tend to be non-narrative, symbolic, and polyvocal. It's a different way of chronicling. If we utilize humor, we are not seeking laughter like our comedian cousins. We are more interested in provoking the ambivalence of melancholic giggling or painful smiles, though an occasional outburst of laughter is always welcome.

Many of us are exiles from the visual arts, but we rarely make objects for display in museums and galleries. In fact, our main artwork is our own body, ridden with semiotic, political, ethnographic, cartographic and mythical implications. Unlike visual artists and sculptors, when we create objects, they are meant to be handled and utilized without remorse during the performance. We actually don't mind if these objects get worn out or destroyed. In fact, the more we use our performance "artifacts," the more "charged" and powerful they become. Recycling is our main modus operandi. This dramatically separates us from most costume, prop and set designers, who rarely recycle their creations.

At times we operate in the civic realm, and test our new personas and actions in the streets, but we are not "public artists" per se. The streets are mere extensions of our performance laboratory--galleries without walls. Many of us think of ourselves as activists, but our communication strategies and experimental languages are considerably different from those utilized by political radicals and anti-globalization activists.

We are what others aren't, we say what others don't, and we occupy cultural spaces that are often overlooked or dismissed. Because of this, our multiple communities are composed of aesthetic, political, ethnic, and gender rejects."

Della Pollock
Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

As Diana Taylor has made plain in Disappearing Acts, the nation is a "theatre of operations." It is a militarized zone defined by defensive strategems. Among these are spectacular reiterations: elaborately staged representations of itself to itself, securing by rehearsing identification. The primary battle is an internal and symbolic one, played out on the bodies-often tortured, dead, or disappeared-that make up the "nation."

Performance-as a practice and as an analytic-shows the antagonistic insecurities at the heart of the "nation." The nation is instable and anxious. It requires elusive cohesion-elusive to the very extent that it is performed: each performance, disappearing into time and strife, needs another. Each moreover underscores the extent to which performance may repeat, suspend, critique, and transform the normative values and practices of (self-)colonization.

Accordingly, performance troubles the terms of nation-making, challenging empire with androgyny, disappearance with witness, oppression with paradox, dogma with dialogue, and the promise of continuity with discontinuity and incommensurability. Performance variously extends, asserts, breaks, and refuses the boundaries necessary to secure a national "self." Performance involves crossing borders, magically and violently. It exceeds itself in material contingencies and instabilities. As a poetics of political practice, it introduces ambivalence even into those places where it would install the unitary vision of military dictatorship or even traditional dance, risking in turn the gaps, division, contradiction, paradox, mimicry, parody, and play that comprise counter-memory. It configures the ground of ongoing answerability, continually deferring closure while re-marking loss, "goneness," disappearance, and displacement. And yet as a means of invention and intervention, performance may be a specific, strategic practice of negotiating boundaries, articulating difference, and reproducing (colonial) subjectivities. Performance studies thus challenges inter/national studies to answer to "the materiality of the individual body" while it initiates material possibility and change.

Adapted from Della Pollock, "Introduction," Part II: Performance and Culture, Internationalizing Cultural Studies, ed. Ackbar Abbas and John Nguyet Erni (Blackwell, 2004).

William Pope.L

In the human context the concept of nature has to be re-defined. Perhaps one can start from the demonstrable fact that it is possible to distinguish between two types of structures which deserve to be called natural. There are, on the one hand, structures which are completely inaccessible to change as a result of stored and remembered experiences - that is, as a result of learning. There are also, on the other hand, natural human structures which remain dispositions and cannot fully function unless they are stimulated by a person's 'love and learn' relationship with other persons. The presence of such structures is most obvious in the case of young children. But the fact that the presence of human structures which remain dormant unless they are awoken by the relationship with other persons makes itself most strongly felt and is perhaps most obvious in childhood, does not denote their total absence at other ages in the life-cycle. The general thesis is, as one may remember, that humans not only can but must learn in order to become fully functioning human beings.

Freddie Rokem
Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

Performance Studies - Quo Vadis?
Some Personal Remarks

It has gradually become more and more difficult to say exactly what counts as Performance Studies. The field covered by PS has become much more than what it is not, engaging in issues from almost all spheres involving human agency and even beyond, like contemporary technologies and their applications. 'To perform' and 'performance' have become like a PacMan, swallowing everything they encounter.

Being in the field of Performance Studies has made it almost impossible to set up the boundaries to the study of philosophy, history, religion, psychoanalysis, literature, cinema, cultural studies, folklore, and anthropology, just to mention the most obvious ones. These open borders have been both creative and inspiring, and that all-encompassing quality, the "feeling" (and I consciously use this word) that performance is everywhere gave it a very strong force, initially, attracting some of the best minds of our generation. But on the way, I think we lost the ability to look at the field from the outside; to say this, but not that is PS, and it has gradually become very cumbersome to provide clear answers to ourselves and to our students what its methodologies are, besides observing, reflecting on, and interpreting human actions in all their varieties and multiple forms.

The most important issue we have to confront is to reformulate and to redefine the borders of the field from an external perspective, to place ourselves outside the field as spectators and to carefully examine the discursive practices of performance vis-à-vis its bordering disciplines. We will then hopefully find ourselves within a much more varied and multifaceted network of forces pulling in different and even contradictory directions. Our first task is to re-investigate our own roles as spectators in and of performances. I say 'in' and 'of' here, because to be in both of these positions simultaneously, both inside and outside what we see and hear, is crucial for how we watch, witness and react to performances, and it is perhaps one of the ways in which we can begin to formulate how performances differ from other discursive practices.

Edward Scheer and Peter Eckersall
School of Media, Film and Theatre, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and the University of Melbourne

Performance Studies is necessarily international or it is nothing. The sense of diversity: ethnic, cultural, and political, explored in performance studies is integral to its modes of operation and to its raison d'être. The concept of the international raises the question of how the local performance of culture, and the research it generates, can be connected with inter-or even intra-regional politico-cultural dynamics.

From a perspective informed by the Australian context, PS is a less disciplined discipline; an open field of practices, methodologies and discourses. It continues to move away from an anthropology of theatre and towards a theatrical anthropology after the style of James Clifford's "On ethnographic Surrealism". Here the idea of the discipline takes on some of the characteristics attributed to the so called objets trouvées, or readymades, of the surrealists, outmoded things (whose function is not outmoded), which are available for profane re-invention and which release them to other meanings and other uses.

In Australia, performance studies has been recontextualised in this way, not destroyed but reconfigured as a readymade discipline, a de-essentialised discipline. Its boundaries have come into play, in research and in teaching environments, allowing the teacher to become the student again and to continually re-awaken what Marjorie Garber calls the genius loci in the pedagogical exercise. Ironically, this embracing of Garber's 'discipline envy,' the desire for an active multidisciplinarity, has been the life blood of the practice of PS in Australia. Because of the openness of the field, students and researchers are able to cross territories of thought without an eye on the map, losing themselves in the 'permanent ironic play of similarity and difference, the familiar and the strange, the here and the elsewhere.' (Clifford)

By focussing not so much on its institutional context but on its properly performative politics and its potential for radical humour, PS in Australia is often both an exercise in surrealist re-invention and an everyday ethnographic practice, the critical and performative fusion of art and working life. The Australian case shows that Performance studies can be unpredictable, inconsistent, and marginal, but thereby able to work in areas that are off the map (under the radar). A condition which can be productive of new forms of scholarship and new modes of understanding the variety and significance of forms of human and post-human doings and becomings.

Amelia Jones
Department of Art History and Visual Studies, University of Manchester

As an interloper in what we seem to be calling Performance Studies (infiltrating from the art historical fringes), I can only say what Performance Studies is for me. I thrive on performance, the performative, and the discourses circulating around them partly for deeply personal reasons (William PopeL. pretty much sums them up on this web page: it has something to do with my insistent need to acknowledge and open up the way in which what I am, what we are, is all about engagements with others around us), and partly for political and intellectual ones.

Suffice it to say, as far as the latter goes, that art history does not particularly want to acknowledge this reciprocity noted by William PopeL.  In fact, it often goes to great lengths to veil, suppress, and otherwise disguise it.  Being the kind of perverse person that I am, I find myself obsessively driven to unveil and expose what is continually hidden (and here, it is Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s description of performance artists that indicate what draws me to them, and to this field: “We are what others aren’t, we say what others don’t, and we occupy cultural spaces that are often overlooked or dismissed. Because of this, our multiple communities are composed of aesthetic, political, ethnic, and gender rejects.”). I am compelled by the multiple communities Gómez-Peña describes, and by the usefulness of methods circulating around Performance Studies (drawn from philosophy, linguistics, and elsewhere), which enable the opening out of the ways in which we enact ourselves — and in which we attempt to cohere or secure our boundaries. It probably goes without saying that the (political) point for me is to use the tools provided by this renegade (anti?)discipline in order to expose the failure of such attempts and, thereby, to celebrate the significations, practices, and communities enabled and/or produced by this critical act.

Ultimately, I find discourses and practices linked to the performative to be liberatory in that they embrace the possibilities of such failure rather than (as art history tends to do) attempting to disavow or occlude the failure in the first instance. That this can happen ‘internationally’ — across the boundaries of nation (whatever these may mean and be in our globalised network-based twenty-first century world) — testifies to the radical potential of performative acts to keep meaning in motion.

Rebecca Schneider
Theatre, Speech and Dance, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

Chicken Listening

I was at first dismayed to find that in the face of this grand question put forward by PSi -- What is Performance Studies? -- my mind kept straying from multinational capital and the so-called international War on Terror to smaller details and minor anecdotes. Sitting in Bush's America in these harrowing days, my mind kept shifting from monumentalizing agendas for Corporate ownership of the Globe, to the small detail of Clifford Geertz's cock. What could Clifford Geertz's cocks say to Bush's corporations?

Geertz famously wrote in l973: "We understand ourselves by telling ourselves to ourselves." This sentence appeared in "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" and has been frequently repeated in textbooks and classrooms as foundational to our field. Of course, Geertz could have been citing a much older Western story told by Aristotle: The "telling" of ourselves is both secondary articulation (mimesis) and primary construction (we become ourselves through mimicry). Thus this "telling ourselves to ourselves" makes a conundrum of firsts and seconds. Which Came First? The Performing or the Being?

What are we telling to ourselves in so frequently retelling Geertz? Geertz was interested in the ways in which human collectives tell themselves to themselves through surrogates in performance. The American read Balinese village cockfights as symbolic arenas for social negotiation in which men worked out complex social tensions through their bloody but mock warring. For Geertz, Balinese men told themselves to themselves via the representational vehicles of their cocks - by which he meant, with tongue in cheek, their masculine fowl. Cocks, of course, stand in for cocks. Geertz wrote: "The double entendre here is deliberate. It works in exactly the same way in Balinese as it does in English, even to producing the same tired jokes, strained puns, and uninventive obscenities" (417). But the strained puns and tired jokes were, apparently, not tired enough, as Geertz made cock pun after cock pun throughout this essay.

Of course, Geertz was having his own fight, and using the Balinese as his cock. With the help of his publisher and the academic "ring" (in which his book has been circulating for thirty years), Geertz was using the story of Balinese cocks/cocks as surrogates in his own bid to tell anthropology to anthropologists -- to "tell ourselves to ourselves." In this way, Geertz's "text" was a performance, carried out in a collective of readers and provoking counterpoints. Geertz was keen, indeed, to approach performance as "text" - that is, as readable in and as social negotiation. Reading his text as itself a cockfight is, however, a less apparent though perhaps equally valid interpretive move enabled by the Performance Studies his work, along with the work of so many others, called into being through telling.

Perhaps an amendment to Geertz's insight is in order: "We understand 'ourselves' by retelling ourselves to ourselves as others." We also retell others to ourselves as those who talk to themselves as if they were not themselves." Yikes! As we all know, this reflexivity in drag gets complicated fairly fast, and one begins to wonder about listening! Who speaks and who listens? Who has the publishing clout to respond? When? Why? According to what vectors of power, economies of privilege, and forces of habit? This is an ongoing question for the "internationality" of Performance Studies.
I suppose it is only fair to ask the following of me: By retelling Geertz, have I made him my cock (as Geertz made of the Balinese)? If so, can I do something else with my it? Can I imagine reorganizing the ring - or imagine other ways of arguing points than strutting and pecking for blood. Strutting and fretting perhaps? Is cockfighting for power - and Empire building for a "Discipline" called Performance Studies while Nation States draw blood all around us as surrogates masking agendas of multinational capital - forgetting to reorganize the ring itself in which our engagements take place?

Did you hear the one about the Chicken? Did you listen when she crossed the road? Are you listening as she crosses the border?

Kate Bornstein