On February 28, 2008, we discussed chapter one of Peggy Phelan's Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. A festive atmosphere prevailed. CG took notes. Please, if you notice any errors or misrepresentations, email CG or AG and one of us will change this post.
Present: AG, CG, Nathalie Wolfram, John Muse, Jesse Schotter, Susannah Hollister, Anne DeWitt, Christopher Grobe, Gabriele Hayden
JF: Although Phelan's book is more performance theory than psychoanalysis, her use of Lacan is difficult for me. Unmarked is hard, especially the introduction. This is why:
- The meaning of her key term, "unmarked," changes halfway through. At first, "unmarked" refers to marginal, invisible, powerless peoples. But then "unmarked" starts to refer to white men in business suits whose power comes out of not being marked. The film Paris Is Burning shows drag queens trying to look like normal women and, so doing, marks them. Phelan's point seems to be that invisibility is powerful because it means you can mark yourself. Performance is empowering precisely because it is ephemeral and non-representational. The performing self controls the interpretation of its performance; there is no record that can be interpreted by others.
- Lacan creeps in--and style trumps clarity--because Phelan wants to analyze the the parts of performance that disappear and psychoanalysis provides a hermeneutic system for things that are lost or invisible.
This is why Phelan is useful: She brings performance theory into English departments, where textuality is privileged. Richard Schechner [biography on this Princeton library page--ed.] and Victor Turner pioneered performance theory in the 1970s, but it was Phelan who expanded the definition of liveness so that literary scholars could talk about it. Phelan makes performance more about the interpretation of the reader and the text, focusing on what gets erased with the reader hits the text (defined broadly to include film, photography, and anti-abortion posters). Now, with Joe Roach's suggestion that memory is as important as history, performance theory can be carried over into theater history. This is how my project uses Phelan's version of performance theory. The proliferation of printed texts in the eighteenth century heightens the possibility of visibility for marginalized peoples (colonized subjects, for instance), and this possibility has increased yet again with the new media (television, the internet, etc.) that emerged during the twentieth century. What's most useful about Phelan's theory, for literary critics, is that the things she examines leave traces.
But there are some important problems with Phelan's method for analyzing performance. Is it possible to honor invisible or ephemeral things by writing them down? Phelan is, in an important sense, marking the unmarked things that she takes as her subject. This is symptomatic of a much larger problem in performance studies: when the performance theorist discusses a performative text something is lost in the process, the unfamiliar is made familiar. Turner, for example, finds parallels between African rituals and Aristotelian drama. Likewise, Joe Roach pointed out that the UNESCO World Heritage project's attempts to preserve languages and rituals as "sites" necessarily changes their meaning--performances once for small communities now become performances for a global audience. Phelan is ahead of her time in attempting to address this basic conceptual problem in performance studies: recognizing that academic discourse is premised on enlightenment assumptions that privilege rationality and textuality, she tries to make the post-Enlightenment age legible through enlightenment-inflected academic writing. So when the media celebrates video footage depicting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for making underprivileged people visible, and therefore more powerful, Phelan rightly points out that we need to rethink our understanding of the relationship between value/power and visibility. Visibility does not have to be, and indeed should not be, equated with power.
Nathalie Wolfram: What about Adam Smith's argument that the visible man is powerful because everyone wants to be him--does that make applying Phelan's theory to the eighteenth century problematic?
JF: Yes, Phelan is writing against that idea of visibility; Phelan is trying to articulate an alternative to the enlightenment idea that Smith helped to develop. Although Phelan doesn't address Smith directly.
NW: In the autobiographies that you're writing about, do the actors see themselves in terms of enlightenment notions of visibility?
JF: Yes, they're all influenced by Tristram Shandy--and therefore Locke. The actors are objectified but not marginalized; they should be powerful, but they're never actually standing for themselves and always told what to represent. Bringing in Phelan, you could say that the actors don't have the luxury of being unmarked so they overexpress themselves. Colly Cibber, for example, performed the role of a fop and he overexpressed his heterosexuality. Similarly, Charlotte Charke performed a role where she cross-dressed as a man who cross-dressed as a woman. In these performances, normative gender roles eroded.
Andrew Goldstone: Is invisibility really powerful? What about the ephemeral is redemptive? Visibility politics is an easy target. The problem there is that it's based on a misunderstanding of racism--a misunderstanding that the enlightenment may solve. But what then? What's left?
JF: This is a problem in Phelan and there's no easy solution to it. Performance is only valuable in its negative form, but what political system honors invisibility?
Colin Gillis: I wonder if Heather Love's notion of modern social stigma as something that comes out of statistical thinking could help us see how invisibility could be a legitimate form of resistance? If in the modern world groups are marginalized through the statistical organization of populations, then perhaps invisibility can hotwire the style of reasoning that makes that makes modern social stigma possible.
JF: Performance theory extends the conceptual boundaries of performance to include [gap in notes--note-taker trying to think of what to say next. Note the relevance of performance theory.]
CG: Maybe the double consciousness DuBois describes could transcend this visible/invisible binary so that a subject could be both visible and invisible at the same time.
John Muse: Double consciousness is rendered as a performance. Performances can be understood as bids to power. The problematic form of identity politics that Phelan is critiquing has not gone away.
CG: Could the older form of identity politics be more effective? In queer studies, for example, constructivist notions of sexual identity prevail in academic discourse, but there's a general recognition that essentialism is more effective politically.
AG: This is unique to America.
Nathalie Wolfram: No it's not. Look at the treatment of muslim populations in Europe.
Gabriele Hayden: I've been reading The Gnostic Gospels, and I think Pagels describes a similar conflict in early Christianity: orthodox Christianity celebrated martyrdom as a public performance of faith, while the gnostics believed that faith could be private and secret.
JF: I think Greenblatt's notion of self-cancellation is relevant here: Thomas More argued that inner faith is valuable, but so is participating in the church as an institution.
Gabriele Hayden: Yes.
John Muse: What do you think about positive forms of performance?
JF: Performance theory teaches us not to identify people based on how they look. For my own project, this is useful because it helps us see how actors achieve liveness in the process of recording their lives.
But I don't have an answer to your question.
AG: Why would you want one? Don't we want more visibility?
JF: Visibility is not in your control.
AG: But in utopia, after the revolution, say, visibility politics won't be a problem.
Nathalie Wolfram: Isn't the idea that it's good to be unmarked, not necessarily invisible?
CG: What about alternative media, like the local access program Democracy Now, where people try to wrest control of visibility?
JF: It's important not to confuse visibility and reproduction. Performance can't be reproduced or made into a commodity.
John Muse: But isn't performance all the more commodified because it's ephemeral? What I want to know is why does Phelan stress the ocular so much? Why equate visibility with permanence and invisibility with impermanence?
Gabriele Hayden: In the current election, for example, there's this obsession with consistency, which is based on the presumption that consistently supporting one position means that you will follow through with it after you are elected. This same obsession with consistency is legible in racial and class politics in America. There's this anxiety about authenticity, this fear that in performing class or race you risk becoming inauthentic.
JF: Yes, we want to appropriate the politician. This is an interesting example because, in electoral politics, the most visible candidate is the easiest to appropriate.
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