Abstract
Critical approaches to performance and performativity are often tied to sociocultural discourse marked out by people such as Darwin, Marx and Freud. Yet over the past century of criticism in the Euro-American West, there have been challenges to this ideological framework as its nation-state foundation has been questioned by global systems of power. Concepts of representation have been at the centre of this challenge, and this has impacted our understanding of performance. Early-twentieth-century critics such as Bakhtin, Benjamin and Brecht suggested alterior approaches of the sociosituated that intersected with postcolonial and decolonial critics—from Fanon to Mbembe. This chapter lays the ground for conceptualising what runs unknown and unknowable alongside discourse, where the work of performers takes root.
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Notes
- 1.
See Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick’s similar deployment of the terms ‘beside’ from later writings by Michel Foucault (2003, 32).
- 2.
Diane Macdonell explores this term in a neo-Gramscian manner (1986).
- 3.
Marvin Carlson (2003) describes a historical shift in political theater: ‘Instead of providing resistant political “messages” or representations, as did the political performances of the 1960s, postmodern performance provides resistance precisely by not offering “messages”, positive or negative, that fit comfortably into popular representations of political thought, but by challenging the processes of representation itself, even though it must carry out this project by means of representation’, 155.
- 4.
Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin 1968, quoted in Colin MacCabe (1980, 19).
- 5.
See Jacques Derrida (1988), on the importance of iterability as context, which later writers have used to define performativity.
- 6.
For a background to the theory of situated knowledge and textuality, see Lynette Hunter (1999b, chapters 5 and 6).
- 7.
For an analysis of the difficulty that liberal capitalism has with diversity, see L. Hunter (2004).
- 8.
Prior to the 1832 Reform Act, only 3% of the population in Britain could vote. The 1867 Reform Act more than doubled the number of voting men from around 13% to 30%, and in 1888, that figure went to 60% of men. In 1918, most men and some women received the right to vote, with women being granted the same right to vote as men in 1928. See www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
- 9.
‘Ideology and Ideological State apparatuses’, trans. Ben Brewster, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/index.htm, accessed 1/4/2016.
- 10.
Many critiques of Hegel derive from the way his dialectical thinking can foster assumptions about racism and Eurocentrism (Morton 2007b, 162–3).
- 11.
Throughout the modern period, this has been the case. Well-known examples include Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton, and the related National Endowment for the Arts case that included Karen Findlay.
- 12.
The Prague School theorists of performance and theatre, working in the 1920s–40s, recognised representation as ‘a direct perception’ in which models ‘stand for originals’ (Quinn 1995, 23). From this, representation becomes both ideologically predictable/predicating, but the theatrical sign becomes ‘a coded representation of signs that already exist in codes, [and] draws attention to the double articulation of the theatrical sign’ (63). The latter renders theatre experience a particular kind of aesthetic experience ‘constituted in the minds of the receivers’ (Mukarovsky 1941, quoted in Quinn 1995, 41).
- 13.
Even after colonising powers leave a country, they leave not only their footprint stamped in the earth, but also retain a sense of cultural ownership over the art objects that country produces. For example, England is inordinately proud of many of the English-language poems, novels and plays, produced from various parts of the Commonwealth, while it is not all that keen on non-English language products from the same countries. When Ngugi wa Thiong’o returned to writing in Gikuyu, his assertion of a cultural difference running alongside Western capitalism was interpreted as a kind of reverse violence, as was Quebecoise writer Gail Scott’s use of French in the supposedly Anglophone novel Heroine. And the economic colonisation of global corporate power, such as that exerted by the United States over Canada, can produce similar kinds of ownership: writers such as Margaret Atwood and Douglas Copeland are frequently described as ‘Americans’, that is, from the United States.
- 14.
There may be connections with the ethnographic refusal discussed by Audra Simpson with reference to Native American Indian ethnography (2007).
- 15.
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Hunter, L. (2019). The Sociocultural and the Sociosituated. In: Politics of Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14019-9_2
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