Performativitiy and mimicry

1. Performativitiy and mimicry

2. Performativity in language • Constative – performative (J. L. Austin) • speech acts • locution, illocution, perlocution • “It is raining”

3. Performative utterances (explicit performatives) • no ʻcontent’ apart from performing a verbal act, bringing about some change in the state of things • inaugurations: I declare this meeting/factory open • court sentences • baptism • insult

4. Failures of performative • True/false? • Successful/unsuccessful, felicitous/infelicitous • Two kinds of failure • (1) misfire (2) abuse • (eg. false priest) • actor on stage

5. J. L. Austin: „A performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner in any and every utterance – a sea-change in special circumstances. Language in such circumstances is used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use – ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language.” (How To Do Things with Words)

6. abuse: Don Juan’s promises • DJ. azonnal házasságra lépek veled • Aminta: Csak ne csapj be! • DJ: Vétkeznék, ha becsapnálak. • Aminta: Esküdj meg, hogy teljesíted • ígéreted, s hogy nem álttsz. • DJ: Asszonyom, fehér kezedre, • Poklok frissen hullt havára • Esküszöm: szavam megtartom! • Aminta: Istenre esküdj, hogy átka • Sújtson rád, ha megcsalsz engem. • DJ: Jó, ha meg nem tartanám a • Szót, mit adtam, Istent kérem, • Ne méltasson irgalmára, • S öljön meg egy (félre) ... halott (fennh.) ...ember. • (Félre) • S óvjon ég, ha élő támad. • Aminta: Esküdnek hiszek, tekints hű • Nődnek hát. (Tirso de Molina: Don Juan)

7. grammatical(?) markers of the performative first person singular (or plural), present tense • Changing any of these parameters • Performative → constative • „I promise” = I describe my act of making a promise

8. “A lover’s vow, they say, is no vow at all” (Plato) • “Csak nyelvem esküdött, eszem nem volt vele” (Euripidész: Hyppolitos)

9. non-performative speech acts may have strong performative effects: warning, threat, flattery, provocation • (agent provocateur)

10. seduction • Felicity= happiness • „It is extremely sweet to seduce a young beauty’s heart to submission, through a hundred flatteries ... But once you are master, there is no more to say, nor anything left to wish for; the best part of the passion is spent” (Molière: Don Juan)

11. ʻShall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ he inquired politely. • ʻNo thanks!’ I said. • (Robert Nye: Mrs Shakespeare: The Complete Works)

12. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? • Thou art more lovely and more temperate. • Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, • And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. • Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, • And often is his gold complexion dimmed; • And every fair from fair sometime declines, • By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed; • But thy eternal summer shall not fade, • Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, • Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, • When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st. • So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, • So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (Sonnet 18)

13. The distinction between performative and constative is weakened • Also culturally: • Reading The Waning of the Crescent Moon

14. STRONG PERFORMATIVES • Word magic,incantation, spell: real effect • “Let there be light;” “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters”; “Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness” (Gen. 1: 3, 6, 26).

15. Strong performative • “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” (John 1: 1). • “man lives from every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3). • Adam: the result of performative • Jesus: performative itself

16. “All other things may be expressed in some way; He alone is ineffable, Who spoke and all things were made. He spoke and we were made; but we are unable to speak of him. His Word, by Whom we were spoken, is His Son. He was made weak, so that He might be spoken by us, despite our weakness.” (St. Augustine: De Magistro)

17. Strong performative • Old Testament: felicity (vows, pledges) • New Testament: truth (accuracy of the gospels) • Bible: shift from performative to constative

18. Performativity in culture Hermia: “My good Lysander, I swear to thee by Cupid’s strongest bow, By his best arrow with the golden head, By the simplicity of Venus’s doves, By that which knitteth souls and prospers loves, And by the fire which burned the Carthage queen When the false Trojan on the sail was seen, By all the vows that ever men have broke – In number more than ever women spoke, - In that same place thou hast appointed me Tomorrow truly I will meet with thee. (Midsummer I.1.168-78)

19. Performativity in culture • Authority: not with the speaker • DECLARATIONS • John Searle: „Declarations bring about some alteration in the status or condition of the... object or objects solely by virtue of the fact the declaration has been successfully performed”.

20. We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. (Thomas Jefferson, TheDeclaration of Independence)

21. Sandy Petrey: “It was through speaking in the name of the American people that the delegates produced a people to name; it was by invoking an authority that they established an authority to invoke.” • Derrida: the signers “do not exist as an entity, the entity does not exist before this declaration, not as such. If it gives birth to itself, as free and independent subject, as possible signer, this can hold only in the act of signature. The signature invents the signer.”

22. Performativity and power • Whose is the authority? • the judge cites the law • The subject repeats, reiterates, cites, mimes gestures and phrases of power • discourse precedes and enables the ʻI’ • the ʻI’ only comes into being through being called, named

23. Performativity in culture • US Army Pentagon Policy instituted in 1993 (the “Don’t ask, don’t tell policy”) • “Sexual orientation will not be a bar to service unless manifested by homosexual conduct. The military will discharge members who engage in homosexual conduct, defined as a homosexual act, a statement that the member is homosexual or bisexual, or a marriage or attempted marriage to someone of the same gender.” • Until 1993: “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service”

24. Judith Butler and the performativity of gender • Judith Butler: Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter • “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” (Simone de Beauvoir) • ʻwoman’ is something we ʻdo’ rather than something we ʻare’

25. performance vs performativity • Performance: theatrical aspect (script and actor); there is already a subject who performs, who does the performance • Performativity: the performer does not pre-exist the performance

26. „It’s a girl!” „It’s a boy!” • „the term or, rather, its symbolic power, governs the formation of a corporeally enacted femininity that never fully approximates the norm. This is a “girl,” however, who is compelled to “cite” the norm in order to qualify and remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment.” (Judith Butler: Bodies That Matter 232)

27. “It is a girl”: not a constative, but an interpellation that initiates the process of ʻgirling’, a process based on perceived and imposed differences between men and woman, differences that are cultural

28. a subject is a subject-in-process that is constructed in discourse(s) by the acts it performs • a series of acts, little performances • Butler: gender “is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.” (Gender Trouble)

29. “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constructed by the very ʻexpressions’ that are said to be its results.” (Gender Trouble 25)

30. Performance as subversion • ‘putting on gender’ • Performance as ‘accomplishment’, completion of a task • Performance as show, spectacle • (showing that the second is always there in the first)

31. Performance as subversion • Joan Rivière: womanliness as masquerade • performativity, parody, drag as ways of subverting gender: overdoing things in order to show forth their constructedness • if all gender is a form of enactment, miming of a kind of unreachable ideal, then all gender is parody

32. drag • “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative nature of gender itself – as well as its contingency” (GT 137)

33. Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Stills

35. MIMICRY: camouflage

36. Mimicry camouflage

37. Batesian mimicry

38. Owl moth

39. Gender: a corporeal style, a bodily performance the am of which is cultural survival, blending in the environment, being accepted a sa certain kind of being

40. Colonial mimicry (Homi Bhabha) • (1) colonial strategy of reproduction • necessary failure: grotesque mimicry • Mimicry: bad mimesis – imitation without understanding (aping, parroting) • Mimic man: Comic figure

41. Colonial mimicry • (2) the mimic man as potential threat • Uncanny mirror image, double • Parody of identity as such • Subjectivity: a set of imitable gestures • Mimic subjectivity: Olympia in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’

42. (Colonial) mimicry • (3) Mimicry as a conscious strategy of political resistance (~ performativity in Butler) • theatrical aspect: subversive • Excess, overdoing (like in the animal world)

43. Mating dance of grebes

44. Frill-necked lizard

45. Luce Irigaray: Speculum • A nőnek lehetősége van arra, hogy „játsszon a mimézissel, hogy szándékosan öltse magára a női szerepet” (76), vagyis hogy az alávetettség egy formáját affirmációvá változtassa, s ezáltal kisiklassa azt, úgy vetve alá magát a róla kialakított maszkulin elképzeléseknek, hogy közben a játékos ismétlés révén „láthatóvá” tegye azt, aminek láthatatlanul kellett volna maradnia: a szubjektum ábrázolásként, utánzásként, rossz mimézisként való létrejöttét.