Performativitiy and mimicry
• Performativity:
linguistics – cultural theory (Judith Butler)
Performativity in language
• Constative – performative (J. L. Austin)
• Grice: felicity conditions
principle of cooperation: contribute when
required, and make it such as is required
speech acts
• locution, illocution, perlocution
• “It is raining”
Performativity and literature
• 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)
Performativity and literature
• Literature: aberrant, parasitical, secondary,
etiolated
• Exclusion of literature: non-serious, “quasi
speech acts” (Richard Ohmann),
“pretence” (Searle)
Derrida, literature and
performativitiy
• Iterability, citationality: common to all speech
acts
• “For, finally, is not what Austin excludes as
anomalous, exceptional, ʻnonserious,’ that is,
citation (on the stage, in a poem, or in a
soliloquy), the determined modification of a
general citationality or rather, a general iterability
- without which there would not even be a
ʻsuccessful performative’?” (Derrida: The
Margins of Philosophy)
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
PROMISING
• Spouse: spondere (‘to bind oneself,
promise solemnly’) sponde: an offering
(Manzoni: I promessi sposi)
• “Promise me friendship, but perform none:
if thou wilt not promise, the gods plague
thee, for thou art a man! if thou dost
perform, confound thee, for thou art a man!”
(Sh, Timon of Athens, IV, iii)
• true or false vs felicitous or infelicitous
• failure: misfire or abuse
Don Juan’s performative promises
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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)
grammatical(?) markers of the
performative
first person singular (or plural), present
tense
• What happems if we change these
parameters?
• Performative → constative
• „I promise” = I describe my act of making a
promise
• “A lover’s vow, they say, is no vow at all”
(Plato)
• “Csak nyelvem esküdött, eszem nem volt
vele” (Euripidész: Hyppolitos)
• non-performative speech acts may have
strong performative effects: warning,
threat, flattery, provocation
• (agent provocateur)
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)
• ʻShall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’
he inquired politely.
• ʻNo thanks!’ I said. (Robert Nye: Mrs
Shakespeare: The Complete Works)
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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)
• The distinction between performative and
constative is weakened
• Austin: “Very commonly the same
sentence is used on different occasions of
utterance in both ways, performative and
constative, … the thing seems hopeless
from the start” (How to Do Things With
Words).
• Homi Bhabha: pedagogical and
performative aspects of language use
STRONG PERFORMATIVES
• Word magic, incantation, spell
• “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). “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).
• “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)
Performativity in culture
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Hermia:
“My good Lysander,
I swaer 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)
Performativity, agency, authority
• Austin: “Actions can only be performed by
persons, and obviously in cases [of explicit
performatives] the utterer must be the
performer.”
• 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, The
Declaration of Independence)
• 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.”
• Declarations: Austin’s exercitives (“a
decision that something is to be so”); here
“saying makes it so” and “we bring about
changes through our utterances”
• John Searle: “Declarations bring about
some alternation in the status or condition
of the referred to object or objects solely
by virtue of the fact that the declaration
has been successfully performed.”
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
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”
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’
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 preexist the performance
• „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)
• “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
• 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)
Retroactive subjectivity
• “Indeed, I can only say "I" to the extent that I have first
been addressed, and that address has mobilized my
place in speech; paradoxically, the discursive condition
of social recognition precedes and conditions the
formation of the subject: recognition is not conferred on a
subject, but forms that subject Further, the impossibility
of a full recognition, that is, of ever fully inhabiting the
name by which one's social identity is inaugurated and
mobilized, implies the instability and incompleteness of
subject-formation. The "I" is thus a citation of the place of
the "I" in speech, where that place has a certain priority
and anonymity with respect to the life it animates: it is
the historically revis-able possibility of a name that
precedes and exceeds me, but without which I cannot
speak” (Bodies That Matter 225)
• One is not born but rather becomes a woman – both
terms of this equation are unfixed
• Butler: “woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a
constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or
to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to
intervention and resignification. Even when gender
seems to congeal into the most reified forms, the
congealing is itself an insistent and insidious practice,
sustained and regulated by various social means. It is,
for Beauvoir, never possible finally to become a woman,
as if there were a telos that governs the process of
acculturation and construction.” (Gender Trouble 33)
• “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)
Putting on gender
• Freedom in (gender) identity
• We cannot choose the clothes but can
alter them subversively
Performance as subversion
• Performance as ‘accomplishment’,
completion of a task
• Performance as show, spectacle
• (showing that the second is always there
in the first)
• 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 in fact parody
drag
• “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the
imitative nature of gender itself – as well as its
contingency” (GT 137)
Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Stills
MIMICRY
• Gender performance: cultural survival
modell 1. Minta(darab). Műsz. Öntőminta. Ruha
Eredeti terv alapján készült (egyedi)
ruha(darab).
• 2. Építménynek, szerkezetnek méretarányosan
kicsinyített mása. A gép ~je. Repülőmodell.
Hajómodell.
• 3. Az, akiről, amiről képet, szobrot, es. irodalmi
ábrázolást készítenek. Műv. Ilyen alkotáskor a
művésznek díjazásért mintaként álló, ülő stb.
személy. ~t áll v. ül vkinek. Fotómodell.
Manöken.
• (Magyar Értelmező Kéziszótár 2003)
• „Az utánzás vele született tulajdonsága az
embernek gyermekkorától fogva. Abban
különbözik a többi élőlénytől, hogy a
legutánzóbb természetű, sőt eleinte éppen
az utánzás útján tanul is; mindegyikünk
örömét leli az utánzásban”
• (Arisztotelész: Poétika 10)
Batesian mimicry
Batesian mimicry
• A palatable animal mimics an
impalatable/poisonous one
• (e.g. Monarch butterfly
Owl moth
Mimicry camouflage
gecko
Mimicry
camouflage
• 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
Mimicry as subjectivity
• (1) it carries with itself this biological
ballast
• (2) bad (faulty) mimesis, imitation in the
order of subjectivity and identity
• (3) human subjects as being produced
as/by representations
Colonial mimicry (Homi Bhabha)
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(1) colonial strategy of reproduction
Result: grotesque mimicry
“almost the same but not quite”
the necessary failure: flawed colonial
mimesis (Bhabha)
• Mimicry: bad mimesis – imitation without
understanding (aping, parroting)
• Mimic man: Comic figure
Colonial mimicry
• (2) the mimic man as potential threat
• Uncanny mirror image, double
• Parody pf British identity, of racial identity
of identity as such
• Similarity itself is uncanny
• Mimic subjectivity: Olympia in E.T.A.
Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’
• „Mimicry hides no presence or identity
under its mask” (Bhabha, Location 88)
(Colonial) mimicry
• (3) Mimicry as a conscious strategy of
political resistance (~ performativity in
Butler)
• theatrical aspect: subversive
• Excess, overdoing (like in the animal world)
Mating dance of grebes
Capercaillie
Frill-necked lizard
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.