February 11, 2005
Peggy Phelan - "The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction"
Phelan, Peggy. 1993. "The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction" in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge: London and New York.
Notes:
"Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance" [146]
Fundamentally, for Phelan, "The act of writing towards disappearance, rather than the act of writing towards preservation, must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself" [148]. She demands an economy "not based on preseration but one which is answerable to the consequences of disappearance" [165].
Phelan is interested in the political act of performance, the ways in which it challenges but also re-inscribes hegemonic structures of power.
- by being nonreproductive, "clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital" [148]
Performance 1) "implicates the real through the presence of living bodies"; 2) requires consumption; 3) "plunges into visibility - in a maniacally charged present - and disappears into memory" because of lack of copy; 4) offers the "possibility of revaluing that emptiness" [148]
"To acknowledge the Other's (always partial) presence is to acknowledge one's own (always partial) absence" [149].
Performance challenges writing to become performative [149].
Performance is tightly bound to metaphor and metonomy whereby, "metaphor works to secure a vertical hierarchy of value and is reproductive; it works by erasing dissimilarity and negating difference" and "metonymy is additive and associative; it works to secure a horizontal axis of contiguity and displacement" [150]
Phelan uses the work of performance artists to highlight the political element of performance that brings into question presence.
Sophie Calle:
"By placing memories in the place of paintings, Calle asks that the ghosts of memory be seen as equivalent to the 'permanent collection' of 'great works.' One senses that if she asks the same people over and over about the same paintings, each time they would describe a slightly different painting. In this sense, Calle demonstrates the performative quality of all seeing" [147]
"Seeing and memory forget the object itself and enter the subject's own set of personal meanings and associations... forgetting (or stealing) of the object is fundamental energy of its descriptive recovering" [147]
Angelika Festa:
"Appears in order to disappear" [152], "a direct and unmediated Presentation-of-Presence" [162]
"By taking the notion that women are not visible within the dominant narratives of history and the contemporary customs of performance literally, Festa prompts new considerations about the central 'absence' integral to the representation of women in patriarchy. Part of the function of women's absence is to perpetuate and maintain the presence of male desire as desire - an unsatisfied quest" [163-164]
"Festa's performance work underlines the suspension of the female body between teh polarities of presence and absence, and insists that 'the woman' can exist only between these categories of analysis" [164]
Phelan's critique is firmly situated in a feminist approach wile recognizing the performative desires of a feminist critique because "feminist critical writing is an enactment of belief in a better future; the act of writing brings that future closer" [150].
The spectator has dominance, a reality that is often unchecked particularly in American theatre.
Category: performance studies
Posted by zephoria at February 11, 2005 7:02 PM
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