a debt to pleasure: ecstasy + knowledge + performance a...

a debt to pleasure: ecstasy + knowledge + performance

a philosophical argument

submitted to the school of theatre studies in the faculty of creative industries at the

queensland university of technology in partial completion of the

degree of master of arts (research)

simon james-ian macklin

bachelor of arts (drama)

june 2002

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formalia

This section details administrative information for this document, including a list of

keywords, a short abstract, a table of contents, a list of illustrations and diagrams, a list of

supplementary material, a list of abbreviations, a statement of original authorship, and the

acknowledgements and dedication of this thesis.

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- keywords

Performance-as-Research, Practice-as-Research, Performative Knowledges, Ecstasy, Ecstatic

Communication, Eroticism in Performance, Music Theatre

- abstract

This performance-as-research project documents, both through linguistic and non-linguistic

texts, an investigation of the materiality of performative knowledges and analyses Music

Theatre as an ecstatic and hyper-erotic creator of these knowledges. By actively engaging

in a performative translation of an historical Music Theatre work, this research investigates

how ecstatic inscription creates materiality within the performative knowledges of Music

Theatre, and aims to provide further substance to the discourse surrounding performative

knowledges and their relation to the epistemology and methodology of performance-as-

research.

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- contents

formalia ......................................................................................................... i

- keywords.............................................................................................................................. ii - abstract................................................................................................................................ ii - illustrations and diagrams...................................................................................................... v - supplementary material......................................................................................................... v - abbreviations........................................................................................................................ v - statement of original authorship ........................................................................................... vi - dedication ........................................................................................................................... vi - acknowledgments ................................................................................................................ vi

preface .........................................................................................................1

the single argument ......................................................................................................... 2 introduction...................................................................................................................... 3 conceptual framework ................................................................................................... 13

- introduction........................................................................................................................ 13 - performative knowledges .................................................................................................... 13 - significance of this research................................................................................................. 15

methodological structure............................................................................................... 18 - introduction........................................................................................................................ 18 - theistic constructivism from philosophy to practice................................................................ 18 - theistic constructivist epistemology ...................................................................................... 20 - research method: philosophical analysis ............................................................................... 23 - conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 36

part i - the explicit cycle ............................................................................37

performative knowledges .............................................................................................. 38 - introduction........................................................................................................................ 38 - the problem of performance ................................................................................................ 38 - the discursive limits of knowledge........................................................................................ 41 - construction of performative knowledges ............................................................................. 44 - from construction to materialisation ..................................................................................... 48

ecstatic knowledges....................................................................................................... 58 - introduction........................................................................................................................ 58 - ecstasy defined................................................................................................................... 58 - ecstasy expanded ............................................................................................................... 62 - ecstatic music theatre ......................................................................................................... 69 - performance as a substrate of ecstatic experience ................................................................ 80

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part ii – the implicit cycle .......................................................................... 87

iniquity (as in den of)..................................................................................................... 88 the ecstatic performance ............................................................................................... 89

- introduction........................................................................................................................ 89 - monologic ecstasy .............................................................................................................. 89 - “The Diary” as Research ....................................................................................................100 - concluding thoughts ..........................................................................................................101

part iii – the explicit returns ................................................................... 102

the ecstatic performative............................................................................................. 103 -introduction........................................................................................................................103 - arguing with the real .........................................................................................................103 - when the lost action speaks ...............................................................................................103

the research performative ........................................................................................... 110 - introduction.......................................................................................................................110 - reiteration at work .............................................................................................................110 - the dispar model ...............................................................................................................113

epilogue........................................................................................................................ 116 - the discursive limits ...........................................................................................................116

source material........................................................................................ 117

bibliography ................................................................................................................. 118 appendices ................................................................................................................... 125

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- illustrations and diagrams

figure i - the dispar model ....................................................................................... 114

- supplementary material

Appendices

Appendix A –Working Script of “The Iniquity Project”

Audio Visual Material

PAL Video – Iniquity Project (31 March 2002)

- abbreviations

TC – “Theistic Constructivism”

⊃ - If Then Statement. For example, A ⊃ B means ‘if A then B’

⊇ - Necessary and Contingent Statement. For example, A ⊇ B means ‘A is necessary and

contingent upon B’

≡ - Necessary To Statement. For example, A ≡ B means ‘A is necessary for B’

∪ - Statement of Previous Construction. For example, A = ∪A means ‘A equal the

previous A’

∴ - Therefore Statement. For example, ∴ A means ‘therefore A’

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- statement of original authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma

at any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis

contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due

reference is made.

Signed : Date :

- dedication

This thesis is dedicated to my grandmother, Mrs Sheelagh Young, in great appreciation for

her inspiration, extraordinary insight and passion for knowledge. You helped raise me,

supported me, taught me, and loved me, so thank you for the long hours of conversation,

thank you too for the gentle chiding at my moments of stupidity, but most of all thank you

for being my friend.

- acknowledgments

My indulgence in this thesis leaves behind it a lot of acknowledgements.

Firstly, in an attempt to give all the acknowledgement due to my supervisor, Dr Jacqueline

Martin, I would like to thank her for the encouragement, sound advice, good teaching, good

company, and hours of discussion that have contributed to the preparation of this thesis.

Your enthusiasm, inspiration, undeniable love and passion for the theatre, and your efforts

to explain things clearly and simply, have helped me feel safe and always welcome to take

the journey that this thesis has undoubtedly been. Thank you for always smiling at my

seemingly disorganised and inept methods of enquiry and the confusion they always create.

I would have been lost without you.

I am indebted to my many research student colleagues for providing a stimulating and fun

environment in which to learn and grow. I am especially grateful to Bernadette Pryde,

Sarah Ogden, Fiona MacDonald, Ang Nolan, Andrew Haden, Mohamed Drissi, Jo Loth,

Melanie Whitelaw, Danielle Smith, and Sarah Hall, all of whose journeys have provided many

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laughs, tears and general moments of release. Thank you for your passion as artists and

commitment as researchers that has provide me with endless inspiration.

I wish to thank my friends from around the world, to Tale Liiv, Carla Martella, Inge Liiv,

Jason Madge, and Annika Liiv for helping me get through the difficult times, and for all the

emotional support, camaraderie, entertainment, and caring they provided.

Finally, I wish to thank my entire extended family for providing a loving environment for me

and my wacky thoughts, to my parents, my brother, my sister, my brother-in-law, my

cousins, my uncles and aunts, thank you for your love, support and general proofreading

abilities.

preface

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preface This section details information designed to allow the reader to engage with the context,

argumentative methods and purpose of this inquiry and includes the following chapters: the

introduction, the conceptual framework, and the methodology.

preface

the single argument

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the single argument

INTRODUCTION

This performance-as-research project – documented both through linguistic and non-

linguistic texts – is an investigation of the materiality of performative knowledges and an

analysis of music theatre as an ecstatic and hyper-erotic creator of these knowledges.

PURPOSE

The purpose of this research project is to add to the philosophical argument surrounding the

development of an epistemology and methodology of performance-as-research.

ARGUMENT

This research argues that the matter of performance (“performative knowledges”) can be

better understood through the concept of materiality and its inherent power relations. It is

further argued that the investigation of the propositional association of materiality with the

constructed apprehension of ecstatic performance in music theatre, can be used to model

the use of materiality as the basis for a methodology of performance-as-research.

THE “I” PRINCIPLE

This document uses the first person (‘I’), as a means of attempting to eliminate any call for

it to be objective in nature. This is a subjective philosophical argument from inside the mind

of a single person: ‘me’. Within this subjective argument, the only factor that I can know

with any certainty is that I have not become aware of all my thoughts, backgrounds,

prejudices and assumptions. Therefore the use of the first person is a method of including

the reader in my thoughts, while adding an authorial distance that illustrates the place

within this argument of colourings, omissions, and influences created by unawareness.

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introduction

How does it happen that the human subject makes himself [sic] into an object of possible knowledge, through what forms of rationality, through what historical necessities, and at what price? My question is this: How much does it cost the subject to be able to tell the truth about itself? - Michel Foucault, "How Much Does It Cost to Tell the Truth?"

(Foucault in Butler, 1993, p.93) The call came at a hotel in St. Bart’s where the young choreographer Jerry Mitchell was vacationing in January 1985. He had gone to the exclusive French West Indies island with a group of performers, including actress Swoosie Kurtz and dancers Jodi Moccia and Danny Herman. The group had just completed the fourth workshop for the musical Scandal, directed by Michael Bennett (best known for A Chorus Line and a few years before, lionized for his masterwork Dreamgirls). Thrilled by the expectation of the show’s move to Broadway but exhausted by months of work, the group was splashing in the surf when a stunned Herman, who had gone inside to answer the phone, came out and said, “The show’s not happening.” - Jerry Mitchell, "The Flesh Prince of Broadway”

(Lemon, 2000, p.94)

Let me begin with a welcome to the readers of this thesis. Welcome, to a thesis of

argument, a thesis of reverence, a thesis of pleasure. These elements combine to serve a

single thought, a singular love of music theatre and performance, and a single trust in their

ability to touch, build and show us our thoughts, minds and hearts.

However, how many attempts have tried to make apparent and apprehensible this ability to

touch? How many attempts have tried to define what is appropriate information and

knowledge for performance to be involved with? When Scandal, a musical theatre piece

about sexual longings, was cancelled from Broadway it was promiscuity that was the subject

deemed too inappropriate, too risky and too painful for an increasingly commercial musical

theatre.

But of all the assessments of appropriate/inappropriate subjects, informations, knowledges,

not one construction of appropriateness has been seriously questioned or deconstructed. Is

music theatre an object of knowledge? If so, what does it enable us to know? How does

this type of performance site itself as a subject of knowledge? What works within the site to

choose the subject of appropriate knowledge?

Each of these is an important question, fundamental to the discourse about the nature,

purpose and usage of performance as the basis or vehicle of knowledge (and ipso facto

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research). However, as Sauter (2000, p.1) says “The idea of theatre1 is too wide to be

caught in a single statement, or in some recipe-like descriptions, especially when theatre is

thought of as a phenomenon including all kinds of performative activities” or as this thesis

posits ‘all kinds of performative knowledges’.

However, it is not the domain of this thesis to answer this myriad of questions or give a

single statement about the materiality of performative knowledges. This thesis does not

investigate the inherent nature of aesthetic knowledges and languages - this area is an

incredibly developed area of thought comprising the work of many great philosophers from

Kant to Eisler to Abbs, all of whom have developed a solid contemporary grounding in the

form and usage of aesthetics. This thesis does not attempt to look at the symbolic or

performative languages through which performance might communicate. Indeed this is the

realm of great theorists , with the work of Fisher-Lichter, Pavis, Martin and Sauter, all

contributing to the great wealth of information about the languages which performance may

use.

Therefore, it is necessary to question, what is this thesis?. This thesis attempts to argue

that necessary to a solid construction of performance-as-research is a problematised notion

of aesthetic experience. This thesis attempts to provide a philosophical and theoretical re-

evaluation of the object of performative knowledge and performance research. To state that

performance-as-research is not based on a notional understanding of aesthetic experience

but on a materiality of performative knowledges emphasises a certain construction of

performance research rather than inventing a new theory to solve all the problems of

performance research. On the contrary, this philosophical argument is a notional

problematisation that I hope will raise more questions about the epistemology and

methodology of performance-as-research than it answers.

PROBLEMATISING KNOWLEDGE

Performative knowledges are those sets of aesthetic information or experiences (knowledge)

implicit within the realm of performance; some of these knowledges are cognitively or

linguistically available to the apprehender (or audience). Some of these knowledges are

only available to the apprehender through non-cognitive means and therefore cannot be

discussed through language. (Abbs, 1994, p.52) But there is no obvious dividing line

between that knowledge that can be cognitively known and that which by its very nature

1 I suggest that for the purposes of our argument, this comment is as equally applicable to music theatre as it is to theatre in general.

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must stay non-linguistically available. What is the difference that made certain knowledges

linguistically available?

I started to investigate the two philosophical realms, which were seen to be the basis of

apprehension (or linguistic availability): materialisation and formalisation. Each of these had

specific importance in discussing the notional nature of performative knowledges. The

formal components of an object or subject (or its form) are those distinctive properties that

create its ‘transferral definition’ or the definition of an object, which can be used and

understood by more than one person. ‘The Material’ is that notion which is produced out of

the matter of an object2 or its inherent essential components (those things that are subjects

and modes of discourse)3.

Here it is important to state that performance “is not something which is neatly packed and

distributed to an anonymous consumer; instead, the meaning of a performance is created by

the performers and the spectators together, in a joint act of understanding.” (Sauter, 2000,

p.2) Therefore, neither the form nor the material nature of performance can be thought of

in the same light as language. Language is a set of understandings passed down from the

knower (parent) to the unknower (child) but performance is a joint act of knowing where

two unknowers become knowers together. (This denotes the philosophical difference

between vertical transmission [parent to child] and horizontal transmission [child to child]).

It is obvious that not every joint understanding of performative knowledges is the same, but

what created these differences and how can performance research move forward when it is

based in the confusion created by these differences?

While there are numerous theories on the language that might be used to interpret

performance, there is more difficulty in finding a theoretical language in which to site the

discourse about these performative languages (knowledges?). Therefore, I returned to the

philosophical discourses again, and while it was apparent that the formal component was

what defined something and made it linguistically understandable, philosophy stated that it

was within the materiality that an object develops into ‘the subject of discourse’. What does

2 Object is used here to denote an simple mental construction and does not incorporate the philosophical discussion of multiple object types – simple, complex, performative etc.

3 Using the analogy most discussed by the Structuralists such as Sassure, a tree exists without the language to name it or describe it to someone who has never seen one, this internal existence is called its matter and the external language used to describe it is one element of its form. In philosophical terms, a thing may only have a single matter but may be discussed through many formal components such as “a tree”,

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this mean for performance and its inherent knowledges? How can research separate the

notions of ‘discourse’ and ‘linguistic availability’?

Consequently, it was back to the philosophy books to determine what was meant and how

matter components were what effected discourse rather than the more obvious formal

‘linguistic availability’. One of the theories that this investigation suggested became the

cornerstone for the argument built in this thesis. Michel Foucault suggests that any formal

nature is inherently based on conceptual norms: “there was a policing of statements”,

furthermore, he stated that this ‘regulation by statement’ was endemic in any contemporary

discourse: scientific, artistic or social. (Foucault, 1990, p.18)

The problem that I then faced was to argue a theory, or rather argue a concept of

materiality, which allowed for the inclusion of all elements without begin closed within this

apparent regulation. But the first problem became what was this regulation? At this point, I

must admit that it was all becoming a little too esoteric for me and I endeavoured to give up

this search and concentrate on the task at hand: determining a methodology for

performance-as-research from the ecstatic performance of music theatre. However, this

discipline didn’t last as questions kept invading my thoughts ‘How can this be

methodologically sound, if I can’t state what is controlling these methods? Therefore, the

search was for a regulatory medium.

THE ECSTATIC MODEL

This search began with a single philosophical notion, ‘Materiality is the means by which

matter can be brought into the realm of discourse’. Ultimately then, this is the process by

which matter can impact on the independent body of knowledge from which formal

composition can draw and make linguistically available. This body of knowledge is the usual

site of inscription for research practice, and can be independently accessed and

apprehended without the involvement of the inscribing object (the researcher).

Therefore, in recent years, within some quarters of performance research, there have been

calls to retrieve the performance as an inscribing object from the ideals of poststructuralist

thought and the credence it places in the elements of language and its textual

deconstruction. However, the language associated with these debates is difficult and often

unstable, it is difficult to know in either case who or what is designated by the term

"poststructuralism," and perhaps even more difficult to know what to retrieve under the sign

of "performance". And yet these two signifiers have for some performance theorists seemed

fundamentally antagonistic. Hearing the warnings that if everything is discourse, what

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happens to the performance? If everything is simply about the performance, what is the

point of the discourse that it is meant to create? If everything is a text, what about the

corporeality of performance? Or does anything matter in or for poststructuralism?

Based on this many researchers argue that in order for performance research to proceed as

a critical practice, it must ground itself in the specificity of a performance text (either

linguistic or non-linguistic). Even as the category of "performance text" is always reinscribed

as performative (Sauter, 2000), that performance text must still be presumed as the

irreducible point of departure for the various theoretical and critical constructions it has

come to bear. And this presumption of the material irreducibility of performance text has

seemed to ground and authorise theoretical epistemologies and ethics, as well as

methodologies of performance analysis.

In an effort to displace the terms of this debate, I want to ask how and why "materiality"

has become a sign of irreducibility and is this simply a Foucauldian “policing of statements”?

That is, how is it that the materiality of performance texts is understood as that which is

only a basis for theoretical constructions and, therefore, cannot be a construction itself?

What is the status of this exclusion? Is materiality a site or surface that is excluded from the

process of construction, as that through which and on which construction works? Is this

perhaps an enabling or constitutive exclusion, one without which construction cannot

operate? What occupies this site of non-constructed materiality? And what kinds of

constructions are foreclosed through the figuring of this site as outside or beneath

construction itself?

While the questions were flowing there was a hardly enough time to answer them all.

Therefore, this thesis became less a theory of performance construction than a consideration

of the scenography and topography of that construction as regulated by the “policing of

statements” that is inherently included in contemporary performance research. Therefore,

the scenography of performance research is orchestrated by and as a matrix of power that

will remain disarticulated if it is presumed that construction and materiality are necessarily

oppositional notions.

It was then important to consider how to investigate these esoteric philosophical questions

without removing the argument so far from practice that to apply it to performance-as-

research would require the bridging of an impossibly large dialogic gap. The problem I

faced was to construct a theory, or rather a concept of the materiality of performative

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knowledges, which allowed for the inclusion of all aspects of the relationship between

research, knowledge and performance.

The eternal question rose again as to how could I know the materiality of performance,

when it is based on the linguistically inapprehensible matter of performance. However,

while the philosophical conundrum remains a glimmer of hope presented itself in the form of

Popper’s definition of the philosophically material that, “The material form is that which

produced out of the power of matter or which dependenth upon matter in that self same

moment matter and act by which it is made.” (Popper in Happer, 1989, p.56) I must admit

that this problem was not solved within the context of a pure philosophical and logical

argument but instead needed further grounding in notions of performance, and therefore to

solve this problem I returned to the basics of the question that had started this all: the

notions of ecstatic music theatre performance. Was a conceptual grounding of music

theatre in an ecstatic performance convention the answer to this philosophical inefficacy?

Was the argument able to kill two philosophical birds with the one analytic stone by

investigating the self-same moment of ecstatic creation?

The phenomenon of ecstasy awakens complex and strange emotions in those who

contemplate it. (Toepfer, 1996, p.5) This complexity derives from a peculiar reality: people

contemplate ecstasy far more than they ever actually participate in it. Moreover, the

“contemplation” of ecstasy pervasively operates through fantasy, through images of ecstasy

that avoid becoming the object of systematic analysis or theoretical discourse. This

systematic avoidance sounded like aesthetic experience, but further investigation was

required to see a good correlation between ecstasy and the notion of performative

knowledges.

Therefore, whatever ecstasy was it also referred to a set of conditions: extremity,

transgression, and abnormality. “Ecstatic excess” signifies a mood of danger, and

extravagant risk. Ecstasy refers to pleasures and desires that are satisfied only by

transgressing a limit or norm for their satisfaction. In other words, ecstasy exposes a

conflict between a mode of desire and an ideologically defined norm for the magnitude of

the desire. Crudely, ecstatic feelings signify a quantitative dimension for desire, as they are

the manifestation of “too much” or “more than enough” pleasure.

This triggered a further ‘eureka’ moment. ‘Enough’ is an ideologically defined condition

therefore ecstasy was also controlled by a phantom regulatory force, similar to the

regulatory force I was trying to find within performance research. The power of ideology

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(norms of pleasure) over the relation between desire and the resources to satisfy desire is

such that most people perceive almost every pleasure (satisfaction of desire) to be “never

enough” rather than “more than enough”; and this constant lack of opportunity to reach a

threshold and then exceed it means that the phenomenon of ecstasy exists above all as an

object of fantasy, of which performance is a category. This connection was enough to

convince me, that through ecstasy the argument could investigate the notion of

performative knowledges, the correlation I hoped would enable the argument to find the

regulatory force within performance-as-research. The triptych of key terms for the study

was set, this was an investigation of ‘ecstasy, knowledge, and performance’.

CONCEPTUALISING THE ARGUMENT

‘Performative knowledges’ are not defined exclusively by their matter/form relationship, nor

are they often sufficiently distinguished from the surrounding contexts (performance events,

aesthetic experience) of which these knowledges form a part. Therefore, what status does

an argument about the ‘materiality of performative knowledges’ occupy – is it a theory, a

concept, a model? What was it that this argument was attempting to create?

Firstly, when I discuss materiality, I am thinking foremost that it should not be detrimental

to the integrity of Music Theatre – or any performance discipline – to look for answers to the

problems inherent in its creation. However, with the models of contemporary research

practice often siting the object of knowledge as a linguistic construction, and disregarding

other inherent knowledges – I argue that this detriment is almost a foregone conclusion. As

a site of non-linguistic knowledge, Music Theatre should not be allowed to disintegrate under

the force of linguistic interpretation required from contemporary research practice.

Therefore, this argument is developed through the framework of philosophical analysis, a

method of acknowledging language’s constructing influence while still investigating effectual

matters.

This thesis develops a philosophical analysis based on the analytical premise that within

traditional modes of performance analysis and aesthetic language induction, there is a

relinquishing to the regulatory power, which has tended to create the fallacious argument of

petitio principii (begging the question) and therefore an analytic disintegration. This analysis

states that as petitio principii is a fallacy of non sequiter (does not follow) it is created within

the traditional regulatory aesthetic arguments as a result of an undistributed middle within

their logical formulation: the undistributed middle ‘performance’4. Traditional arguments

4 While this may seem a strange concept to bring into this analysis, its importance will become apparent later in the argument. See part iii – the explicit returns.

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about performance-as-research have tended to apply a consistent approach to this term,

and while acknowledging the post-modern uncertainty of linguistics, they have only briefly

discussed the possibility of materiality rather than concepts of formal apprehension such as

aesthetic languages, pre-cultural dialectics, and symbolic languages. While few theorists

have acknowledged the form/matter dichotomy, there is a tendency to logically distribute

the properties of each – form and matter - to the same logical set: ‘performance’. This

creates the fallacy of the undistributed middle because it denies the proper logico-rational

place for each set of performative knowledges: the linguistic formals of performance and the

non-linguistic materials of performance. Therefore, because of this logical fallacy it is

inappropriate to believe that this argument could create a model on which performance-as-

research could proceed uncontested.

What was left was: a concept. By investigating an act by which research can create the

matter or distinctive property of performance, this thesis argues that it can develop a

notional (or sedimentary process) understanding of the materiality of performance and thus

bring an understanding of its argumentative or conceptual value. Therefore, the argument

had been given a purpose: it was attempting to create a concept about performance-as-

research.

PRESENTING AN ARGUMENT

For this thesis, I have chosen to present the philosophical argument in three parts – ‘The

Explicit Cycle’, ‘The Implicit Cycle’, and a second explicit cycle called ‘The Explicit Returns’.

Part I – ‘The Explicit Cycle’ contains three chapters, which develop some of the important

philosophical aspects of the ‘Argument for Materiality’, these are the arguments essential to

understanding of the concept. In these chapters, I develop the notion of a problematised

materiality of performative knowledges, as well as discussing the relation between this

concept and the notions of aesthetic knowledges and performance apprehension (although

these later concepts are only discussed in the service of the larger argument). To develop

this argument, firstly I develop a linguistic analysis of the conceptual relation between

discourse and performative knowledges – with particular reference to the limits of such a

relationship. Then I examine a key term of “ecstasy” in the second section, and investigate

the implications of this concept on the development of conceptual understanding of

discursive limitation and problematisation. Finally, I attempt to apply the concept of

discursive limitation to the supertext of “sexuality in music theatre”, as a principle of all

performative joint understandings. When this fundamental argument has been established,

the reader encounters the implicit cycle in Part II of the thesis.

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Part II – ‘The Implicit Cycle’ is a documentation of the argument in a non-linguistic text.

The performative text entitled ‘The Iniquity Project’ was performed at the Woodward

Theatre at the Queensland University of Technology on the 28th, 29th, and 30th of March

2002. This was a text, which looked at music theatre as an ecstatic creator of performative

knowledges and investigated the discursive limitation of these knowledges. ‘The Iniquity

Project’ was a performative translation of a historical music theatre work called “The Diary of

One Who Vanished” which was written by Leoš Janáček in 1917, this interpretation was

delivered as a performative text rather than an artistic product. It was an attempt to

document the thesis by means of a performative text and therefore has the same relation to

an artistic music theatre work as this thesis has to the novel. While a recording of the

performance is contained within this thesis, the performance was intended as a live text to

be aesthetically read by the audience in conjunction with this linguistic text.

In the explanation of this research it is important to privilege both sets of knowledge and

incorporate reference to both the linguistic interpretation and the theoretical basis and also

the non-linguistic documentation.

Part III – ‘The Explicit Returns’ is a final set of chapters in which the theoretical groundwork

developed in the first two parts is applied to a methodology of performance-as-research.

Firstly, the ecstatic performative as developed in a section titled, ‘Arguing with the Real’,

which indicates that the methodological concept of performance-as-research developed in

this documents can be useful in a number of areas of which I give examples. However, in

my view, it only represents the beginning of a discussion, and I hope that there is more to

come in a few years, as more scholars take up the investigation into performance-as-

research.

From there in the chapter, ‘The Research Performative’ a model of performance-as-research

is developed and applied using a reiterative list of the components of performance-as-

research developed during the first two sections and the section ‘Arguing with the Real’.

These chapters are not intended to provide the final model of performance-as-research but

rather a preliminary model for further development and investigation.

THE BEGINNING

Therefore, let me finish this introduction where I began with a welcome and a hope.

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A Welcome – to an argument. A documentation in which I endeavour to represent certain

extensions of both contemporary concepts of performance research and the scope of

possible applications of performance-as-research.

A Welcome – to a work of performative text, this argument although a written document

functions as both a linguistic and performance text, therefore welcome to the reading of an

academic performance.

A Hope – that in asking the single question: What does it cost performative knowledges to

tell the truth about themselves? By intertwining these threads of ecstasy, music theatre,

and performance research, this thesis can begin to push performative knowledges towards

their discursive limits.

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conceptual framework

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- introduction To better understand the philosophical analysis contained in this work, it is first important to

site the analysis within a broader analytical context of contemporary debates about

performance research and a look at the significance of this analysis. Therefore, this section

analyses the primary debates on the matter of performance (‘performative knowledges’) and

the basis and argument for performance-as-research.

- performative knowledges Is performance a form of knowledge? If so, what does it enable us to know? Can

knowledge about performance be created through contemporary deconstructions? Can

relational knowledges, such as the knowledges of ecstatic performance, help to document

and theorise dialogic gap of performative knowledges? These are all questions that

surround the contemporary usage of performative knowledges and there association with

performance-as-research.

‘Performative Knowledges’ are not defined exclusively by the relationship between

knowledge, apprehension and aesthetic experience; nor are they sufficiently distinguished

from the surrounding contexts, a context which the knowledges are themselves a part.

Therefore, what status does the ‘performative knowledge’ occupy – is it a theory, a concept,

a model? What does it mean to describe performance as the communication of

performative knowledges within certain contexts?

When I speak about the performative knowledges I think of them foremost in the terms of a

concept for use in performance research. I conceptualise performance5 (in its multitude of

meanings) as the apprehension of performative knowledges, not in the sense that they have

to be pure relations to knowledges but because all performance is at its core knowledged in

some sense.

However, this still leaves “materialisation” without a status within the argument as it stands

within this document. Sauter (2000, p.11) states that “theatre always materialises as an 5 Within this term, through the work of Willmar Sauter, I conceptualise the performance itself as an event that encompasses a wide variety of ‘playing’ cultures or cultural acts.

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event” and investigates the many levels upon which an event can be interpreted. Further he

states that

…this is in strict opposition to theatre as a “work of art”, something which is produced, distributed, consumed, etc. In my eyes, theatre manifests itself as an event which includes both the presentation of actions and the reactions of the spectators, who are present at the very moment of the creation. Together the actions and reactions constitute the theatrical event. (Sauter, 2000, p.11)

This conceptualisation while acknowledging the moment of creation is compiled from the

actions of both theatrical communicatory positions (performer and audience), and is still

placing the performance ahead of the spectators. Hence, Sauter follows the general siting

of performance as an a priori construction, that is, the performative knowledges inherent in

performance become theatre (or aesthetic communication) at the moment the event is

created by the audience, or apprehended. Therefore, for Sauter materialisation is still a

Foucauldian (vol 1, pp.82-83) ‘promise of liberation’, where the event promises to ‘liberate’

the internal communication of the performative knowledges. In this argument, however, the

a priori linguistic placing of performance is given the argumentative ‘status’ of the

interlocutor. It is through this inferential place that the notional understanding of

performance as an a priori siting is problematised in order, to place into question its

surrounding elemental constructions.

It is worth reiterating at this juncture in this argument that I am only dealing with scholarly

approaches to performance whereas the aesthetic-normative debates on how theatre ought

to be understood and classified are a different matter. Josette Féral (Féral in Carlson, 1996,

p.54) makes a very clear distinction between analytical theory and theory of production,

which seems necessary in the discourse on performance theory, although this arbitrary

distinction might be difficult to maintain at times when investigating performance research.

Therefore out of this argument, I call the idea of ‘material performative knowledges’ a

concept, and as such it can be compared with other concepts, not in order to argue against

them but for the sake of linguistic clarity. Thereby, the central focus of this work is of

course on the ‘performative knowledges’, the presentation and apprehension of a

performance text (in the widest possible sense).

One of the problems developed within this framework, is the function of aesthetic time in

regards to the apprehension of performance, and I understand that so far there has been no

mention of this problem. However, I am very well aware of the problems such negligence

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can raise. The basic problem is that for performance analysis and research consists of ‘the

absence of the object’. (Sauter, 2000, p.13) The time limitations of the apprehension of ‘live

performance’ means that performance analysis or research cannot engage aesthetically with

the performance in the way literary analysis can engage a poem or novel that is not limited

by time in its aesthetic apprehension. However, this argument states that fundamentally

this is only a question of mode for apprehension, when language is continually portable it

can be engaged with through a period of time (and some literary analysts would argue this

is actually a requirement of dealing with literary texts) While I can acknowledges that

performative languages that deal with live artistic products are not essentially portable, this

is not to foreclose the possibility of a portable linguistics of ‘performative knowledges’.

- significance of this research

The current situation in the Australian performance industry (and indeed worldwide) is

marked by the short, expensive, and underdeveloped reality of most performance products,

be it theatre, dance, independent film, or performance art. Within this context, large

amounts of time, money, and talent are expended by the performance industries and their

funding bodies to support creative practice without investigating and acknowledging the

complex processes or strategies deployed by the performance makers in their search for

significant new forms and products. Indeed, while such performance products may be given

a short season production, the creators are rarely (if ever) given time to explore, test, or

revise their creations, for the work is hardly ever treated as a form of knowledge, a form of

research. (McKechnie, 2000)

It is hoped that this thesis’ work on the acknowledgement and use of performative

knowledges in a research sense, will enable creative artist to view the creation process as a

research process and help to create highly evolved new work less constrained by the

economics of their production and commission. By contrast, the current Australian

performance industry suffers a perpetual shortage of highly evolved new work; and its

widely acclaimed performers and performance creators have little access to these highly

developed works which can develop them and their audiences. This research seeks to

investigate and understand ways of addressing these problems through the development of

a performance-as-research paradigm. In this argument, universities containing

departments of performance study will be positioned to work with industry partners to

advance the kind of performance research, which will enrich and enhance the creation of

evolved new work. This thesis argues that this partnership may be possible through a

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specific performance-as-research paradigm developed from the investigation, creation, and

legitimisation of performative knowledges.

This research is proposed as not only an original investigation into performative knowledges

in the development of artistic product but also as an indication of the use of performance in

the intellectual investigation of art and practice. The outcomes have the potential to alter

and improve performance development and research methods, to create a rich pool of data

on how and why performative knowledges are created and used in the creation of highly

evolved new work, and to make investment of funds in this work both more economic and

more productive.

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DEFINITION OF TERMS

The key terms of this study are:

Performative Knowledges : the facts, feelings, or experiences gained through the erudition of an

aesthetic performative object.

Ecstasy : a multi-component emotional manifestation of excess, which must be

hidden to be experienced.

Music Theatre : a theatrical production that consists of musical numbers and dialogue

based on a single unifying element such as plot, political statement or

entertainment value.

Apprehension : The act of capturing or arresting in cognition a system of knowledge such

as performative knowledges.

Materialisation : The state or quality of apprehensible formlessness.

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methodological structure

Page 18

methodological structure - introduction

Pleasure, performance, ecstasy, knowledge and analysis all play a major role in

understanding the topic of this thesis. To investigate these various factors, this research has

chosen a qualitative research framework.

According to Ely et. al. (1991, p.4) and Denzin and Lincoln (1994, p.2), qualitative research

is an interactive, multi-method process which studies phenomenon in their natural contexts

and views experiences as part of a whole. The use of multiple methods, or “bricolage”:

…reflects an attempt to secure an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon in question…[which results in] a complex, dense, reflexive, collage-like creation that represents the researcher’s images, understandings, and interpretations of the world or phenomenon under analysis

(Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, pp.2-3)

In accordance with Denzin and Lincoln’s phased and collage-like approach to qualitative

research, this chapter foregrounds the research in an interpretative framework detailing the

broader epistemology, methodology and methods of data collection and interpretation used

to argue the application of conceptual materiality to the epistemology and methodology of

performance-as-research.

- theistic constructivism from philosophy to

practice

This section charts the development of a subjective paradigm, which attempts to deal with

the complex questions of ontology and epistemology as they relate to materiality,

performative knowledges, and ecstatic knowledges. Qualitative research according to

Denzin and Lincoln, (1994, p.4) is by its very essence subjective in nature, interpreting

research data by the personal ontology and epistemologies of the individual researcher.

The aim of this section is to highlight some of the theoretical elements required for

integrating constructivist characteristics with a new theism in research practice.

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In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anybody could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback. Most intriguingly, this is happening not among theologians or ordinary believers, but in the crisp intellectual circles of academic philosophers, where the consensus had long banished the Almighty from fruitful discourse.

(Time Magazine, 1980, p.65)

Theistic thought and its relationship to a non-cognitive (non-linguistic) understanding are

inherent in the development of the inflected interpretative paradigm used by this research

and researcher. Such an approach I have termed Theistic Constructivism (“TC”).

Constructivism states that realities are to be understood in the form of multiple, intangible

mental constructions that are social and experientially based, and local and specific in nature

(Derry, 1996, p.85). The constructions are dependent for their form and content on the

individual persons or groups undertaking the experiences through which they construct

specific knowledge. The primary result being that these constructions are not to be taken as

objectively ’true‘ or ’valid‘ but that each construction can only be judged as being more or

less informed and sophisticated in its understanding. In Constructivism, it is assumed that

the investigator and the object of investigation are iteratively linked so that the ’findings‘ are

created (or constructed) as the investigation proceeds. (Guba and Lincoln, 1994, p.47)

On the other hand, Theistic Constructivism argues that such an experiential constructed

reality is separate from certain fundamental elements that shape the human experience.

While, as in pure Constructivist thought, individuals continue to distil a consensus that

makes their understanding of reality more or less sophisticated, Theistic Constructivism

states that this does not negate the existence of an essential truth or validity but does

negate the existence of an essentially true or valid cognitive understanding of truth. It is

this non-cognocentrism6 that forms the basic tenet of Theistic Constructivism (“TC”) stating

that unlike social and radical constructivist thought not all knowledge is constructed but only

that knowledge inherently linked to the cognitive processes

Therefore, while the preceding paragraphs provide a seemingly simple explanation of the

development of the theistic constructivist paradigm and its relation to research praxis, this

section will attempt to further illustrate the link between the philosophy, on one hand, and

research practice, on the other. Moving from theory to practice always presents challenges

be it in research or in any other domain. When combining multiple brands of the theory, the

6 Non-cognocentrism – a neologism to describe the current centring of understanding in cognitive constructions, it is used to differentiate an understanding that is known from one that is intuited.

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task becomes even more demanding. However, this section begins with a discussion of the

main elements of TC epistemology and these notions are further developed in the next

section detailing the philosophical research strategy used within this thesis.

- theistic constructivist epistemology

Theistic Constructivism, as expounded above, is developed around the basic statement that

“Not all knowledge is born of cognitive processes”. Therefore, if there is some knowledge

that is not cognitive, where does this knowledge exist? To understand this, the argument

must investigate the basic epistemological questions: What is reality? What is truth? What is

knowledge? How do we come to know what we know?

Wilson (1997) in his description of the evolution of views on reality notes that, in ancient

times, people believed that only God could provide glimpses into the ‘real’ world and

mathematics and logic had an important role to play in making this knowledge manifest.

During the Renaissance, the scientific method evolved as the perceived method of

uncovering ‘the truth’. According to this objectivist view, objects have intrinsic meaning, and

knowledge is a reflection of its correspondence to reality. In this tradition, knowledge

should represent a real world that is cognitively known and exists as separate and

independent of the knower (Wilson, 1997, p.84). This knowledge was considered to be true

only if it correctly reflects that independent world. In contrast, TC argues that knowledge

and reality do not have an objective or absolute value or, more specifically, that there is no

way of cognitively apprehending this objective reality.

Von Glasersfeld (1995, p.7) indicates in relation to the constructivist concept of reality that it

is made up of the “network of things and relationships that we rely on in our living, and on

which, we believe, others rely on, too”. Rather than thinking of truth in terms of a match to

reality, Theistic Constructivism (like von Glasersfeld’s constructivist view) focuses instead on

the notion of viability: “To the constructivist, concepts, models, theories, and so on are

viable if they prove adequate in the contexts in which they were created”. (op. cit.)

Much of this thought, in theistic, radical and traditional constructivism, has been profoundly

influenced by the theories of Piaget who saw knowledge as being actively constructed by the

apprehending subject. (Steffe & Gale, 1995; Prawat, 1996; Heylighen, 1993). Cognition is

adaptive and allows one to organize the experiential world, not to discover an objective

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reality (von Glasersfeld, 1989). It is this dismissal of a cognitive objective reality that

reinforces the primary tenets in the epistemology of Theistic Constructivism.

In order to understand this more clearly, it is important to turn our attention to the new

theism movement, which provides further epistemological beliefs and discussion in the

development of this paradigm. The section of the new theism movement on which Theistic

Constructivism draws most heavily is the movement primarily related to philosophies of Alvin

Plantinga and his defence of the rationality of theistic belief as not based on argument.

According to Plantinga, belief or intuition of theism is a "properly basic" belief and therefore

not a belief based on inference from other beliefs but a belief that is rationally (though not

always cognitively) warranted in the circumstances of one's immediate experience7. (Craig,

1991, p.67) In this debate TC is primarily concerned with a view of truth and its correlation

to epistemological developments.

In his “The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology”, Plantinga attacks what he calls the

evidentialist objection to theistic belief (Plantinga, 1970, p.51). According to the

evidentialist, a person is rationally justified in believing a proposition to be true only if that

proposition is either foundational to knowledge or is established by evidence that is

ultimately based on such foundational knowledge. Plantinga’s objection to this position is

one of the foundational questions of Theistic Constructivism: “Why can’t the proposition

‘truth exists’ be itself part of the foundation, so that no cognitive evidence is necessary?”

(Craig, 1991, p.68) From this Plantinga, in “Reason and Belief in God”, developed an

argument that:

…the correct or proper way to believe in God … was not on the basis of arguments from natural theology or anywhere else; the correct way is to take belief in God as basic." Just as certain perceptual beliefs, like "I see a tree," are properly basic given the appropriate circumstances (authors emphasis).

(Plantinga, 1983, p.72)

On this basis, Plantinga argues that it is wholly rational to have a belief that is not basic

within the body of foundational knowledge considering the development of foundationally

basic beliefs. However, what is important for Theistic Constructivism is that Plantinga

agrees that rationality has no necessary connection with truth. In certain circumstances, it

may be rational to accept a belief that is, in fact, false or to reject a belief that is, after all,

7 Now it must be confessed that such a view is not entirely new - as Roy Varghese notes in his interview with Plantinga, much the same sort of religious epistemology has been long espoused by Hick, Mascall, and others.

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true, and under these circumstances the same thing may be said of properly basic beliefs

(Plantinga, 1986).

At first Plantinga seemed inclined to dismiss this problem by claiming that all we can hope to

know is rationality, not truth. Theistic Constructivism disagrees with Plantinga on this point

by stating that for finite, fallible cognitive minds the epistemic duty is only to be rational.

However, through non-cognitive, non-rational minds we can reach truth and this is indeed

our non-cognitive epistemic duty. More recently, Plantinga has developed thoughts along

these lines by directing his efforts towards providing an account of what it is for beliefs to be

knowledge or attempting to answer the third great epistemological question, "What is

knowledge?". (Plantinga, 1986, p.115)

Although in the works already cited above, Plantinga speaks repeatedly of properly basic

beliefs being justified, such language is often misleading since Plantinga is not addressing

the issue of justification insofar as it plays a role in the concept of knowledge, but rather he

is addressing the issue of justification as it functions within systems of belief or faith.

Plantinga seeks to address that question by taking his cue from Calvin's claim that

…there is in man an innate sensus divinitatis [author’s emphasis] and proposing an account of justification in which a belief is justified if one's cognitive faculties are functioning properly, that is, as God designed them to., Just as we have a natural tendency to form perceptual beliefs under certain conditions, so says Calvin, we have a natural tendency to form such beliefs as God is speaking to me, or God has created all this, or God disapproves of what I've done under widely realized conditions. And a person who in these conditions forms one of these beliefs is within his epistemic rights, displaying no epistemic defect; indeed, Calvin thinks, such a person knows the proposition in question. . . . In sum, on the Reformed or Calvinist way of looking at the matter, a person who accepts belief in God as basic may be entirely within his epistemic rights, he may thereby display no defect or blemish in his noetic structure; indeed, under those conditions he may know that God exists. This seems to me correct.

(Calvin in Plantinga, 1985, p.64)

It is this understanding, which forms a major part of the Theistic Constructivism’s

understanding about the nature of knowledge states that, there is no epistemic defect in

forming knowledge based on a theistic knowing or a sense of the divine,.

This brings us to the final epistemological question of ‘How do we come to know what we

know?’ For Theistic Constructivism, this questions the relationship between a properly basic

belief and an incompatible belief supported by evidence (Plantinga, 1986), or the theoretical

model of exclusion. The problem with such an epistemological question within theism is

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that, like theological rationalism, the majority of understandings still sanctions what Martin

Luther called the “magisterial use of reason”. That is to say, theistic belief is still subject to

potential rational defeaters and cannot be rationally held unless all such defeaters are

defeated. (Plantinga, 1983, p.55)

To deal with this, Theistic Constructivism draws on the contributions of C. Stephen Evans,

which details some of the prolegomena to natural theology and focuses on the "signal of

transcendence" in human existence. Evans stands in the tradition of Pascal in his emphases

that the proper basis of theistic belief is to be found through “reasons of the heart” and

again “a sense of the divine” (Evans in Craig, 1991, p.85). In combining this understanding

with the constructivist notion of the variable and personal nature of constructions,

conventional methodological techniques are compared and contrasted through a dialectical

interchange of beliefs. The theistic constructivist understanding of how we know is that

knowledge is a simple final consensus using both intuitive and constructed knowledge and

that this forms a construction more informed and sophisticated than any of the predecessor

constructions including the etic constructions of the investigator.

While, this section only provides space for a limited development of the epistemology of

Theistic Constructivism, it can be seen that the combination of new theism and constructivist

philosophies provides both opportunity and difficulties for the cohesiveness of the paradigm.

However, it is important to develop the understanding of Theistic Constructivism for its

application to research practice. In doing this, I will endeavour to explain the correlation

between philosophical analysis and the structure of primary basic beliefs that are the basis

of Theistic Constructivism.

- research method: philosophical analysis

This section will explore the notion of philosophical analysis and its attachment to a basic

belief structure, firstly we will look at the development and construction of this method

through the work of Bertrand Russell, and then explore the contemporary implications of this

method, through the work of later philosophical analysts such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl

Popper.

In the history of philosophy, idealism contrasts with materialism, rationalism with

empiricism, and monism with pluralism: but what contrasts with analysis? Although

analyses of concepts or complexes are present in philosophy from the pre-Socratics on, it is

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only in philosophy of the twentieth-century that the contrast between analysis and other

methods is sharply drawn and the precise nature and role of philosophical analysis are

clearly stated. In contemporary philosophy, Bertrand Russell was the first to articulate,

employ, and justify analysis as the proper method of philosophical enquiry. G. E. Moore,

Ludwig Wittgenstein, C. D. Broad, Gilbert Ryle, John Wisdom, Susan Stebbing, Rudolf

Carnap, and A. J. Ayer, among others, have been important in practicing, clarifying, or

defending analysis as a proper method of philosophical enquiry.

RUSSELLIAN PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS

Bertrand Russell was not only the first to articulate the method of analysis in contemporary

philosophy but was also one of the foremost practitioners of the method. Indeed, it is no

exaggeration to say “every major doctrine of contemporary analysis is present in his writings

or derived from them by others”. (Edwards, 1967(a), p.97).

After a brief excursion into absolute idealism, Russell formulated a dualistic theory of reality:

a dualism of mind and matter, and of universals and particulars that – despite modifications,

especially towards neutral monism – is retained throughout his work. This has strong

resonances with the Theistic Constructivist paradigm and Plantinga work towards the notion

of properly basic belief, and the investigation of the dualism of mind and matter, or faith and

knowledge.

By taking reality as one great analysable system, Russell persistently questioned: what are

reality’s ultimate constituent elements? In answer to this, Russell suggested that analysis

reveals that the constituents of reality are ‘the mental and the physical’, and ‘the universal

and the particular’. (Edwards, 1967(a), p.97) In contemporary philosophy, arguments

against this theory rest, at least in part, on the absolute idealist doctrine that pluralism (of

which the dualism of mind and matter is, of course, a type) and its accompanying method of

analysis which entails a view that the world consists of independently existing terms,

qualities, and relations. In particular, F. H. Bradley (Appearance and Reality, 1893)

castigated “analytical thinking” as a falsification of reality because it inevitably reduces the

immediately felt unity of the world to an unintelligible series of mere assemblages of

unrelated terms. (Bradley in Thomas, 1987, p.45) In this historic dispute between pluralism

and monism, the most important issue is indeed the ‘reality of external relations8’. Indeed, it

8 Relations, within philosophy, come in two primary categories – internal and external. If one item, x, stands in some relation, R, to another item, y, but neither its identity nor its nature depends upon this being the case, x is externally related to y. If x could not be the same item, or an item of the same kind, without standing in relation R to y, the relation is internal.

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is Russell’s reply to Bradley within his (and G. E. Moore’s) argument for external relations,

that we find the start of philosophical analysis in the twentieth century.

Without a defensible theory of external relations the independence of matter and

mathematics from the mind cannot be justified, nor can analysis as a method of thought and

discourse about the world be vindicated or argued. Russell’s early concern for science and

mathematics made it imperative that he refutes the absolute denial of external relations.

Absolute idealism or monism assumes that relations are never ultimate, that a relation is

always reducible to a fact about the nature of each of the related terms; hence, each of the

related terms is internal to the nature of the others. Russell rejected that assumption on the

grounds that it renders unintelligible any asymmetrical relations, such as “greater than”. In

the defence of external relations, Russell and Moore stated that the absolute idealist position

self-contradictorily distinguishes between the nature of a term and its qualities and then

identifies them; and therein it reduces ‘identity in difference’ to an ‘absolute identity’. By

doing this Russell stated that even the fundamental thesis of absolute idealism and monism,

that there is one subject and its predicate, becomes meaningless. (Edwards, 1967(a), p.98)

Relations, Russell countered, are real in the precise sense that they are irreducible to

qualities of subjects or of the whole. They are external not because they are independently

existing terms along with subjects and their qualities, but because they are irreducible.

Pluralism, he then states,

…is the doctrine that there are analysable unities or facts, consisting of individuals and their qualities in relation, not – as Bradley supposed – of individuals, qualities, and relations as three never-to-be related sets of terms.

(Russell, 1938, p.123)

Russell further defined his objection to this system of relations by stating that this notion of

a related set of terms is a necessary metaphysical condition of analysis – which he defined

as “the discovery of the constituents of a complex” – stating that to know anything besides a

given constituent that there must be independent of this constituent objects whose

constituent elements are terms and qualities examinable within their externals relations.

Therefore developing this, analysis is a system of “relational thinking” that can render any

experience analytically intelligible, and thus not base analysis solely on commonsensical and

scientific categories such as the physical object, space, time, causality, and motion.

Therefore, in Russell’s argument a simple dialectic, such as than given by Bradley and

designed to destroy the efficacy of analysis, fails because for a developed understanding of

the world a pure feeling of immediacy is not a satisfactory alternative to a method of

relational analysis..

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Having disposed of the arguments of absolute idealism against dualism, Russell employed

analysis to refute Berkeley’s subjective idealism. Borrowing from Moore’s “The Refutation of

Idealism” (1903), Russell pointed out that an analysis of our personal awareness of sense

data discloses the irreducible distinction between consciousness and its object qualities, such

as a particular colour or sound. These object need not and, in most cases according to

Russell, do not depend for their existence upon any independent consciousness. He also

used analysis, especially the doctrine of external relations, to refute nominalism by showing

that the reduction of universals to names rests upon the affirmation of the one universal of

resemblance, which is itself an irreducible internal relation among certain qualities.

By 1912, in The Problems of Philosophy, Russell’s dualistic theory of ‘mind and matter’,

‘universals and particulars’ was able to be fully articulated, and although Russell later

resolved mind and matter into simpler entities, such as sensibilia or events, he never

repudiated the basic pluralism of his philosophy or his continuing attempts to discover and

state the ultimate constituents of reality or its analysable complexes. In relation to Theistic

Constructivism, Russell was working solely on an attempt to discover the ultimate

constituents of reality that could form properly basic beliefs to be combined with properly

basic theistic beliefs for a total concept of the constituents of truth. Therefore, in

philosophical analysis we are looking at ‘reality’, in Theistic Constructivism we investigate

properly basic faith, and overall we are seeking a total truth structure.

RUSSELL’S FORMAL ANALYSIS AND LOGICAL ATOMISM

Formal analysis, as Russell conceived it, is an examination of the world from a purely logical

point of view. Its primary concern is with the various modes of organisation that are

revealed by language and reality; formal analysis is conceptualised as an abstract

cosmology, dealing with the ultimate structures of language and the world. It was develop

by Russell at the very beginning of his philosophical career, but it reached its climax after

the publication of Principia Mathematica (1910 – 1913) in a series of articles, “Philosophy of

Logical Atomism.” It is within this seminal work, that Russell develops the notion of

‘propositional logic’ or a logical system upon which mathematics is based. This thesis use

‘propositional logical form’ to show the development of certain arguments.

Within propositional logic form may be defined either linguistically or non-linguistically.

Russell defined it linguistically and then interpreted these findings as a clue in the analysis of

non-linguistic form. It is this argumentative tool of ‘propositional substitution’ upon which a

much of the argument of this thesis rests. Propositional form, is the “way in which the

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constituents of the proposition … are put together,” eventuates from the substitution of

variables for the constituents of a proposition. (Russell, 1938, p.12)

To develop the application of the tools of propositional substitution and propositional logic,

Russell developed a series of thoughts on the nature of linguistic construction. These

thoughts are mainly focussed toward the nature of ‘naming’ products. Within this system, a

proper name is a simple symbol that designates a particular object. It stands for a

particular with which the speaker is acquainted, for Russell stated “one cannot name

anything one is not acquainted with” (Russell, 1938, p.45). Russell then develops this notion

further, stating that naming constructions such as “this” and “that” are examples of a second

grouping of proper names separate from ordinary proper names like “Socrates”, this second

grouping Russell entitled ‘real proper names’ (Russell in Thomas, 1987, p.178) –. The third

identified grouping of ‘naming’ construction Russell called ‘particulars’ like ordinary and real

proper names, particulars are self-subsistent entities, however, insofar as our experience of

them is concerned; unlike the ordinary or the real, particulars persist only “through a very

short time.” (Russell in Thomas, 1987, p.178-179)

The fourth category in the system of naming, Russell identifies as ‘a proposition’ this

category is composed of indicative sentences that asserts or denies something. It differs

from other categories within the system of naming in that it has two possible relations to a

fact, either being true or being false, whereas any other category of naming –real, ordinary,

or particular - has only the one relation to an object, that of naming it, and as such cannot

have any truth value. Therefore, Russell stated that a notional fact is a complex of a

particular or particulars, qualities, and relations and it is these faction that make a

proposition true or false.

An atomic proposition is a proposition that asserts a certain thing has a certain quality, or

that certain things have a certain relations, i.e. ’This is white‘, ’This is below that‘.

Therefore, atomic facts correspond to atomic propositions, because they are the simplest

kinds of facts and consist within particulars as the possession of a quality or relation.

Russell, then stated that there is a perfect isomorphism between atomic propositions and

atomic facts: subjects (proper names) correspond to terms (particulars), adjectives, to

qualities, and verbs, to relations. (Edwards, 1967(a), p.98) Further to this there is the notion

of a ‘molecular proposition’ or a proposition that contains other propositions as its

components. Contained in these propositions, are truth-function words, such as ‘or’, ‘if’,

‘and’ (i.e., ‘If you come, so will your friend.’) Russell at first denied the existence of

molecular facts but following the development of his theory of general facts (of which

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molecular facts are a usually ascribed as a species), he began to develop an acceptance of

the existence of molecular facts.

During this process of accepting molecular facts, Russell developed a new species of

proposition: the existence proposition. These propositions assert the truth of at least one

value of a propositional function, for example, “Some performances are interesting”. That

there are existence facts as distinct from atomic facts Russell regarded as obvious (which

has been one of the weaknesses in further arguments about philosophical analysis).

Therefore, in combination, a general proposition asserts (or denies) the truth of all values of

a propositional function. A general fact is one that corresponds to a general proposition.

One cannot deny the existence of general facts or reduces them to other facts. A

completely general proposition is one that occurs in logic either as an axiom or a theorem.

It contains only variable and truth-functions. Thereby, existing as both analytic and a priori.

Besides positive and negative propositions and positive facts, Russell held that negative facts

also are ‘ultimate’ in nature. Otherwise Russell stated that any discussion or discourse

would find it difficult to say what corresponds to a proposition. For example,

…you have a false positive proposition, such as “Socrates is alive,” it is false because of a fact in the real world. A thing cannot be false except because of a fact, so that you will find it extremely difficult to say what exactly happens… unless you are going to admit negative facts. - Bertrand Russell “Philosophy of Logical Atomism”

(Russell in Edwards, 1967(a), p.98)

THE RUSSELLIAN ‘THEORY OF DESCRIPTION’

In this Principles of Mathematics (1903, p.43) Russell retained as a fundamental doctrine the

realist view that any object of thought or discourse “has being, i.e., is in some sense

existent”. But Russell saw immediately after publication that this doctrine leads to the

fundamental philosophical contradiction. For instance, the proposition “the round square

does not exist.” This is a significant and true proposition; yet, as Russell later put it, “if

there were such an object, it would exist: we cannot first assume that there is a certain

object, and then proceed to deny that there is such as object.” (Russell in Thomas, 1987,

p.182) In abandoning that doctrine, Russell set as his problem the analysis of propositions

containing symbols of unreal or self-contradictory objects, an analysis which would both

preserve our robust sense of reality and still allow us to talk about these “pseudo-objects”

intelligibly. This problem he solved in his famous ‘Theory Of Description’.

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The theory is a fundamental distinction between two kinds of symbols: proper names and

descriptions. A proper name, taken in an extended sense, is a simple symbol, such as

“Brecht”. It designates an individual directly; that individual is it’s meaning, and it has this

meaning insolation, that is, independently of all other words. A description is a complex

symbol, such as “the author of Threepenny Opera.” It does not designate an individual

directly, hence, is an “incomplete symbol,” that is, a symbol which has no meaning in

isolation, but which can be given a meaning in a context with other symbols.

“The author of Threepenny Opera” is an incomplete symbol, first, because it is not a proper

name for three reasons:

(1) It is not a simple symbol that designates a particular or an individual treated as a particular, but is a complex symbol.

(2) Its meaning is determinate as soon as we know the meaning of the separate words, whereas the meaning of a proper name is not determined by words but by our knowledge to whom the names is applied.

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(3) If it were a proper names, then “Brecht is the author of Threepenny Opera” would be either a trivial tautology or a truth independent of any and all facts about the world (equivalent to “Brecht is Brecht”) or a falsehood (if “the author of Threepenny Opera” stood for anything other than Brecht). But the proposition is informative (i.e. non-tautological) and true, disclosing a fact of history. It cannot therefore be treated as a proper name.

Descriptions are incomplete symbols for a second reason: what they are supposed to refer

to are not really “constituents of propositions.” By this Russell meant that there is not

actual entity, which we can call its denotation; when a description occurs in a proposition,

there is no constituent of that proposition corresponding to that description as a whole. This

is a consequence of the fact that we may utter significant and true propositions that deny

the existence of something.

How are descriptions to be resolved? By putting them into propositional contexts and

analysing the whole context in such a manner that the grammatical subject disappears and

is replaced by other symbols. We analyse, for example “Brecht is the author of Threepenny

Opera” rather than “the author of Threepenny Opera”.

“Brecht is the author of Threepenny Opera” is false if

(1) Threepenny Opera had never been written; (2) several people had written Threepenny Opera, or (3) the person who wrote Threepenny Opera was not Brecht.

Consequently, in order to obtain the correct analysis of this proposition, we need only

negate these three conditions of falsity. The (1) become “X wrote Threepenny Opera” is not

always false, this is at least one person wrote Threepenny Opera; (2) becomes “If X and Y

wrote Threepenny Opera, then X and Y are identical, this is, at most one person wrote

Threepenny Opera; and (3) becomes “If X wrote Threepenny Opera, then X was Brecht,’ is

always true” Together, these three propositions state that “X wrote Threepenny Opera” is

always equivalent to “X is Brecht”.

This analysis of propositions containing descriptions enables us to talk intelligibly about

unreal and self-contradictory objects, such as “the present king of Australia” or the “round

square” because propositions about them also can now be interpreted as ones involving

propositional functions and variables, not objects which are somehow not real.

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The theory of description became extremely important after its development in “On

Denoting” (1905) and Principia Mathematica (1910 – 1913), because it served as a model

for Russell in his treatment of other problematic symbols and putative entities. Classes,

numbers, relations (in extension), points, instants, particles of matter, even ordinary objects,

such as tables or persons, were dealt with in the same way as descriptions: the symbol from

each of these was treated as an incomplete symbol analysable in terms of propositional

functions and variable or vales of variables. In many influential essays and books, from

1914 to 1927, especially Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), “The Relation of

Sense-Data to Physics” (1914) “Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (1918-1919), The Analysis of

Mind (1921) and The Analysis of Matter (1927), Russell applied analysis as resolution of

incomplete symbols to the symbols or concepts of the natural sciences.

It was the status of the entities, which the symbols of natural science apparently designate,

that led Russell to treat these symbols as incomplete. For example, physics talks about

points in space, instants of time and particles of matter. It also claims to be an empirical

science; hence, its points, instants, and electrons ought to be observable which they are not.

Only immediate data of sense, with certain spatiotemporal relations, are observable.

Consequently, if physics is to justify itself as an empirical science, it must be defined in

terms of these sense data. The entities of physics are not longer the denotata of names or

descriptions, but become unnecessary inferential entities, for everything in physics can now

be stated in terms of sense data. “Points”, “Instants”, “particles” etc because they have no

meaning in solation – that is name nothing – Russell interpreted as incomplete symbols ,

and the proposition in which these entities are supposedly designated he interpreted in such

a manner that the symbols for these unnecessary entities were resolved into others, whose

denotata are empirical. Instead of inferring the existence of scientific entities, we construct

them out of empirical materials.

This process involves

(1) determining what are the ultimate empirical entities and (2) defining the symbols of science in terms of these empirical entities.

The definitions of these symbols in their appropriate propositional contexts, along with the

construction of unreal, self-contradictory, and described objects in there appropriate

propositional contexts, then, constitute analysis as resolution of incomplete symbols in

Russell’s philosophy.

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Although Russell, unlike Moore and others, has never stated what he means by analysis, it is

quite clear from his uses of the term that he conceives it as a form of definition – real or

contextual, linguistic or non-linguistic. If real definition is separated from its Aristotelian

setting and interpreted, as an attempt to enumerate the various constitutes of factual,

independently existing complexes, Russell has certainly practiced real definition. But “What

are the ultimate constituents of reality, or of certain aspects of it?” continues to be a

perennial philosophical problem for Russellian Philosophical Analysis.

However, real and contextual definition (i.e. definitions of symbols in use – the substitution

of one set of symbols for another) sometimes proceeds together in Russell’s philosophy. In

The Analysis of Mind, for example, there is a persistent attempt to arrive at contextual

definitions of psychological terms. But much real definition is involved in the process of

formulate contextual definitions. Russell’s analysis of memory, for instance, not only

contains such phrases as “true analysis,” “Complete analysis” and “faulty analysis” phrases

that make sense only on a view of analysis as real definition but is also primarily the

enumeration of the empirical constituents of the given complex that psychology or common

sense calls “memory”. Such analysis assumes that the term “memory” or its equivalent, is

not a legitimate constituent of the proposition in whose verbal expression it occurs, but must

be replace by other symbols, in certain propositional contexts, which refer to sensations and

images together with their characteristics and relations.

Russell follows the same practice in his philosophy of physics. A model example is his

analysis of “time” and “instant”, with the recognition that these terms do not refer to simple

entities, at least so far as our experience is concerned. It then proceeds to an enumeration

of the constituents, which are certain events, their characteristics, and their relations.

Finally, on the basis of this enumeration or real definition, contextual definitions are offered.

THE IMPORTANCE OF G.E. MOORE

One of the most expedient methods of developing a clearer understanding of Russellian

Philosophical Analysis, is to briefly investigate Bertrand Russell’s teacher, mentor – and on a

number of works co-author – the Cambridge Chair of Philosophy at the time: G. E. Moore.

After almost fifty years of doing philosophical analysis Moore, in his “Reply to My Critics”

(The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, 1942), articulated what he had persistently meant or

intended to mean by “analysis”. Analysis, he stated, is a form of definition, not of words,

but of concepts or propositions. One starts with a particular concept or proposition – the

analysandum – and attempts to provide another set of concepts or propositions which are

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logically equivalent to the original concept or proposition – the analysans. Although Moore

confessed that he was unable to formulate the necessary and sufficient conditions of a

correct analysis, he did confirm three concepts for correct analysis:

If you are to “give an analysis” of a given concept, which is the analysandum, you must mention, as your analysans, a concept such that (a) nobody can know that the analysandum applies to an object without knowing that the analysans applies to it, (b) nobody can verify that the analysandum applies without verifying that the analysans applies, (c) any expression which expresses the analysandum must be synonymous with any expression which expresses the analysans.

(Schlipp, 1942, p.663)

Now according to point “c” in the above elucidation of philosophical analysis, even though it

is not linguistic, it involves the use of language. What then, Moore asked, is the proper way

of expressing an analysis? Employing as his favourite example the concept of a brother, he

suggested four such ways: The concept ‘being a brother’ is identical with the concept ‘being

a male sibling’; The proposition function ‘X is a brother’ is identical with the propositional

function ‘X is a male sibling’; To say that a person is a brother is the same thing as to say

that that person is a male sibling; To be a brother is the same thing as to be a male sibling.

Each of these ways of expressing the analysis of the concept of brother satisfies the three

requirements. But it also engenders “the paradox of analysis”. For example, ‘To be a

brother is the same thing as to be a male sibling’, if this statement is true, it seems identical

with the statement, ‘To be a brother is to be a brother’. Yet it is analytically obvious that

these are not the same and that the latter, unlike the former, is not an analysis of the

concept of brother. Moore admitted he could not solve this paradox. But he did insist that

any purported solution must “hold fast” to the facts that the analysandum and analysans of

a correct analysis are the same concepts and that the expression used for the analysandum

must differ from that used for the analysans in that the latter expression must explicitly

mention concepts not explicitly mentioned by the former, along with the way in which the

concepts are combined.

Is analysis as Moore conceived it, compatible with his own practice of it? It is certainly true

that many of Moore’s analyses of ethical and perceptual concepts and propositions are

attempts – whether compete or not, successful or not – at conceptual definitions which

satisfy his criteria of a correct analysis. But Moore’s practice also reveals another use of

analysis that is not a definition of concepts and does not result in linguistic paraphrase. This

use is the basis for much of what is called Russellian Philosophical Analysis and results in the

discovery of the constituents of certain non-linguistic, non-conceptual complexes. This is

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based not in the linguistic definition of analysandum and analysans but at basis an attempt

of these complexes as ‘real definition’.

DEVELOPMENTAL PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS

Our belief in any particular natural law cannot have a safer basis than our unsuccessful critical attempts to refute it. Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994)

(Popper in Thomas, 1987, p.13)

For Popper accordingly, the growth of human knowledge proceeds from our problems and

from our attempts to solve them. These attempts involve the formulation of theories that, if

they are to explain anomalies that exist with respect to earlier theories, must go beyond

existing knowledge and therefore require a leap of the imagination. For this reason, Popper

places special emphasis on the role played by the independent creative imagination in the

formulation of philosophical analysis.

The centrality and priority of problems in Popper’s account of analysis is paramount, and it is

this, which leads him to characterise philosophical analysts as ‘problem-solvers’. Further,

since the philosophical analyst begins with problems rather than with observations or ‘bare

facts’, Popper argues that the only logical technique that is an integral part of philosophical

analytic method is that of the deductive testing of theories that are not themselves the

product of any logical operation. In this deductive procedure conclusions are inferred from a

tentative hypothesis. These conclusions are then compared with one another and with other

relevant statements to determine whether they falsify or corroborate the hypothesis. Such

conclusions are not directly compared with the facts, Popper stresses, simply because there

are no ‘pure’ facts available; all observation-statements are theory-laden, and are as much a

function of purely subjective factors (interests, expectations, wishes, etc.) as they are a

function of what is objectively real.

How then does the deductive procedure work? Popper specifies four steps:

(1) The first is formal, a testing of the internal consistency of the theoretical system to see if it involves any contradictions.

(2) The second step is semi-formal, the axiomatising of the theory to distinguish between its empirical and its logical elements. In performing this step the philosophical analyst makes the logical form of the theory explicit. Failure to do this can lead to category-mistakes - the philosophical analyst ends up asking the wrong questions, and searches for empirical data where none are available. Most philosophical analytic theories contain analytic (i.e. a priori) and synthetic elements, and it is necessary to axiomatise them in order to distinguish the two clearly.

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(3) The third step is the comparing of the new theory with existing ones to determine whether it constitutes an advance upon them. If it does not constitute such an advance, it will not be adopted. If, on the other hand, its explanatory success matches that of the existing theories, and additionally, it explains some hitherto anomalous phenomenon, or solves some hitherto unsolvable problems, it will be deemed to constitute an advance upon the existing theories, and will be adopted. Thus analysis involves theoretical progress. However, Popper stresses that we ascertain whether one theory is better than another by deductively testing both theories, rather than by induction. For this reason, he argues that a theory is deemed to be better than another if (while unfalsified) it has greater empirical content, and therefore greater predictive power than its rival. The classic illustration of this in physics was the replacement of Newton’s theory of universal gravitation by Einstein’s theory of relativity. This elucidates the nature of analysis as Popper sees it: at any given time there will be a number of conflicting theories or conjectures, some of which will explain more than others. The latter will consequently be provisionally adopted. In short, for Popper any theory X is better than a ‘rival’ theory Y if X has greater empirical content, and hence greater predictive power, than Y.

(4) The fourth and final step is the testing of a theory by the empirical application of the conclusions derived from it. If such conclusions are shown to be true, the theory is corroborated (but never verified). If the conclusion is shown to be false, then this is taken as a signal that the theory cannot be completely correct (logically the theory is falsified), and the philosophical analyst begins his quest for a better theory. He does not, however, abandon the present theory until such time as he has a better one to substitute for it. More precisely, the method of theory testing is as follows: certain singular propositions are deduced from the new theory - these are predictions, and of special interest are those predictions, which are ‘risky’ (in the sense of being intuitively implausible or of being startlingly novel) and experimentally testable. From amongst the latter the philosophical analyst next selects those, which are not derivable from the current or existing theory - of particular importance are those, which contradict the current or existing theory. He then seeks a decision as regards these and other derived statements by comparing them with the results of practical applications and experimentation. If the new predictions are borne out, then the new theory is corroborated (and the old one falsified), and is adopted as a working hypothesis. If the predictions are not borne out, then they falsify the theory from which they are derived.

Thus Popper retains an element of empiricism: for him philosophical analytic method does

involve making an appeal to experience. But unlike traditional empiricists, Popper holds that

experience cannot determine theory (i.e. we do not argue or infer from observation to

theory), it rather delimits it: it shows which theories are false, not which theories are true.

Moreover, Popper also rejects the empiricist doctrine that empirical observations are, or can

be, infallible, in view of the fact that they are themselves theory-laden.

The general picture of Popper’s philosophy of analysis, then is this: Hume’s philosophy

demonstrates that there is a contradiction implicit in traditional empiricism, which holds both

that all knowledge is derived from experience and that universal propositions (including

philosophical analytic laws) are verifiable by reference to experience. The contradiction,

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which Hume himself saw clearly, derives from the attempt to show that, notwithstanding the

open-ended nature of experience, philosophical analytic laws may be construed as empirical

generalisations which are in some way finally confirmable by a ‘positive’ experience.

Popper eliminates the contradiction by rejecting the first of these principles and removing

the demand for empirical verification in favour of empirical falsification in the second.

Philosophical analytic theories, for him, are not inductively inferred from experience, nor is

philosophical analytic experimentation carried out with a view to verifying or finally

establishing the truth of theories; rather, all knowledge is provisional, conjectural,

hypothetical - we can never finally prove our philosophical analytic theories, we can merely

(provisionally) confirm or (conclusively) refute them; hence at any given time we have to

choose between the potentially infinite number of theories which will explain the set of

phenomena under investigation. Faced with this choice, we can only eliminate those

theories, which are demonstrably false, and rationally choose between the remaining,

unfalsified theories. Hence Popper’s emphasis on the importance of the critical spirit to

analysis - for him critical thinking is the very essence of rationality. For it is only by critical

thought that we can eliminate false theories, and determine which of the remaining theories

is the best available one, in the sense of possessing the highest level of explanatory force

and predictive power.

- conclusion

The development of this argument as a philosophical analysis requires a strong indication of

the modes of discourse that we have available. Therefore, one aim of using philosophical

analysis for this discussion is to awaken some important philosophical issues that may have

never been discussed in relation to performance analysis, and other philosophical questions

that have been thought through over and over again without what I consider to be a

satisfactory conclusion.

part i - the explicit cycle

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part i - the explicit cycle This section details the development of the conception of materiality within performance.

This section includes the chapters: performative knowledges, ecstatic knowledges, and

conceptual materiality.


performative knowledges

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- introduction

The “object” of theatre studies is considered an essentially phenomenological problem: is it a question of materiality, people, relationship; is it an idea or a condition; is it permanent or transitory? How do scholars conceptualize [sic] theatre, and how does it affect their writing about theatre? Willmar Sauter, “The Theatrical Event”

(Sauter, 2000, p.20)

In beginning this propositional argument, firstly it is important to attempt to stabilise the

proposition that this argument is investigating – performative knowledges. Carlson (1996,

p.10) uses the term ‘performance’ to include “dance and opera, not to speak of happenings,

circus, ritual, festival and ultimately the performance elements of everyday life.” While, I do

not wish to investigate such definitions and distinctions any further, I do wish to make a

slight adjustment to this definitional matrix in order to clarify the proposition of

‘performative knowledges’. To do this the notion of ‘performance’ needs to be moved from

Carlson’s definition which is based on the method of cultural apprehension to one based on

creation: a performance is that which is created by through performative knowledges. While

this may seem to included many things and hardly be useful in delimiting and stabilising

performance-as-research, it’s use will, I hope, become clearer as the argument progresses.

This section is the beginning of this clarification as we begin to investigate the heart of ‘the

problem of performance’.

- the problem of performance

THE SHIFTING PARADIGM

What is performance? What is its purpose? Can it help us to know or discover anything or

is it simply a reflection of something else? In writing this thesis, it became important to

consider these questions about the conceptualisation of performance and its impact on the

nature of knowledge. Was the nature of knowledge as it exists within performance different

to that which we can construct through language? If so, what is the nature of these

“performative knowledges” and how can we move towards a better understanding of their

purpose within performance?



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To clarify these questions further, it was necessary that I attempted to discipline myself to

stay on the subject, and acknowledge the task at hand. But I found that knowledge or more

specifically performative knowledges could not be fixed as simple objects of thought. Not

only did they tend to indicate a world beyond their inherent acknowledged components, but

this movement beyond traditional boundaries, and a movement of the boundary itself,

appeared to be central to what performative knowledges inherently “are”. In losing the

boundaries of the subject, and resisting the discipline of the subject I began to consider that

perhaps the resistance was essential to this investigation. Perhaps, performance research,

had a regulatory framework which was impinging on performance-as-research’s ability to

function as a fully developed methodology.

This argument suddenly became evident in many of the current arguments surrounding

performance research. Performance research, should be retrieved from the ideals of

poststructuralist thought, and more specifically, retrieved from the credence post-

structuralism places in the elements of language - either aesthetic or linguistic. However,

although performance research’s basis in language had been questioned quite often, few

people had questioned what it meant for performance to be a site of linguistic resistance.

Therefore, by asking this question I am placing into the contested philosophical realm not

only what can be known about performative knowledges but also what is trying to be

known, and how these knowledges are going to used? With this in mind, it is important to

begin to retrace the steps performative knowledges have taken.

LINGUISTIC CONFUSION?

The languages associated with these regulatory debates are often difficult to understand.

While it is difficult to know who, what, or even where is nominated by the term

‘poststructuralism’, as I have discussed above, it is perhaps even more difficult to know

where or what to salvage under the linguistic signal "performance". While acknowledging

the difficulties inherent within these linguistic constructions, in an attempt to break this

barrier performance research, in general, has continued to site these two signifiers as

fundamentally antagonistic concepts.

This antagonistic siting has allowed a continuous formation of a conceptual resistance

between performance and language. However, it does not investigate the antagonism

between performance and resistance itself. Consequently, much of the discourse

surrounding performance research formulates warnings such as: If everything is discourse,

what happens to the performance? If everything is simply about the inherent nature of the

performance, what is the point of discourse? How can performance be separated from its



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enabling structure? Is not all the meaning of performance constructed through the

language by which we discuss it? Perhaps to get answers to these questions, it might be

more important to question: If everything is about aesthetic experience, then what about

knowledge and how can performance research be separated from its enabling regulatory

framework?

These questions assume (often with the best possible intention) that for performance

research to proceed as a critical practice, it must ground itself in an identifiable and

intelligible structural specificity. Within this notion specificity is seen as the groundwork

upon which knowledge can be built. Specificity, for many performance researchers, is the

category labelled ‘the performance text’9, and this specific notion is then presumed as the

irreducible point of departure for the critical and analytic practices of performance research.

This presumption of the material irreducibility of specificity within performance texts seems

to ground and authorise the various theoretical epistemologies and methodologies at the

basis of much contemporary performance analysis.

In other words, the performance text is taken as the primary source of the inherent

knowledges contain within performance and their internal matter is understood to be the

groundwork upon which the performance text is built and therefore the site of origin for

these knowledges. Therefore, by propositional default the site of performative knowledges

is a site of no dialogic contest in that it is taken to have an existence without any prior

methods of constructing these knowledges.

In an effort to displace the terms of this debate, this thesis questions: how and why

specificity has become a sign of irreducibility, that is, how is it that the materiality of

performative knowledges are understood as that which only bears the theoretical

constructions of discourse and, therefore, cannot be constructions within themselves? And if

this is true, and materiality is a site or surface that is excluded from the process of

construction, what is the status of this exclusion? Is it one of the ethic frameworks on which

the construction of theoretical discourse constitutes itself? Or is perhaps materiality an

enabling or constitutive exclusion, one without which the construction of a discourse cannot

operate? If so, what occupies this site of non-constructed materiality?

9 This term does not only refer to the written textuality but is developed to include “the performative” by referring to the inapprehensible aesthetic languages.



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Consequently, this thesis is not arguing that the languages used to apprehend the meaning

of performance are not useful, or indeed essential. It is not an idealist appeal to transfer

knowledge about performance through some non-linguistic means. However it is a call to

disrupt the antagonistic relationship between discourse and performative knowledges. This

thesis argues the need to make apparent the restrictive power given to the research limits of

knowledge. A call to acknowledge the power performance research wields by siting

performance as the cognitively unknowable.

- the discursive limits of knowledge

Having come to these questions, doubt about this path still existed. Was this wavering

about the nature of performative knowledges simply a strange vocational difficulty of those

trained in performance? Was the distance from non-corporeal matters inherent in this

training hindering understanding that which is apparent to others? Were these questions

trying to demarcate the terrains of these knowledges: by missing the natures of knowledge

delineated by those without this vocational impediment, or worse, was this an act of writing

against the acknowledged wisdom of the nature of performative knowledges? Perhaps,

after a generation of post-dualism writing which has tried both to bring the nature of

knowledge into language and to structure knowledges either proximately or directly, the only

question might have been how to learn to read those troubled translations. However,

having considered these answers to the questions of the non-constructed materiality of

performative knowledges, questions lingered and required returning to pillage the useful

remains of the Logos.

Speculating from the carcass of the Logos invited a simpler question about the nature of

performative knowledges and its relation to performance analysis discourse: “What about

the construction of materiality within these knowledges?”

However, if I persisted in this notion that performative knowledges were in some way

constructed, perhaps I really thought that the researcher alone had the power to craft

performative knowledges from their one aesthetic substance and therefore that the working

of aesthetic experience can be exposes to critique instead of hiding it behind the notion of

performance as special in its relation to the unknowable?



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Could not someone simply take this aside and explain that performance should not be

exposed or it will lose its power to mystify? Was this the regulation that was keeping

performative knowledges as the uncontested site of non-constructed materiality?

To argue that the nature of performative knowledges within performance are constructed,

that could mean that performance was simply a perusal of the creative or cultural space for

the performative knowledges of choice; a use of those knowledges, and then a restoration

of the knowledges to their place and as such it is a wilful and instrumental subject of

aesthetic knowledge. This argument suggests that the knowledges inherent in performance

are constructed. It is a controlling subject, a subject which decides on its use of

knowledges, and therefore is clearly not its knowledge basis from its inception and fails to

realise that its existence is decided through this knowledge.

A theory such as this would restore performance as a choosing subject – a dynamic object –

and a subject of which performative knowledge is simply one attribute. Simply argued:10

IF performance is the irreducible object of aesthetic experience, and IF all independent attributes of irreducible objects are built upon them, and IF an independent attribute of performance is performative knowledges THEN performative knowledges are independent attributes built on performance OR AE(e) ⊃ P(O) P(O) ⊃ P(A) P(A) ⊃ P(pk) ∴ AE(e) ⊃ P(pk)

Therefore, the first proposition of the argument has been set. The argument will consider

performative knowledges as a simple attribute of performance rather than the site of

irreducibility.

DEVELOPING MATERIALITY

If there is no subject (no analysis) that decides on its basic knowledge, and if, on the

contrary, knowledges are part of what decides the subject, how might an argument that

preserves these knowledges as a site of critical agency and discourse be formulated? If

knowledges are constructed through relations of power, such as formulating an analysis of

performance at a distance from its matter as a means for maintaining its mystery; how

might agency be derived from this notion of performative knowledges as the effect of a 10 For a description of the logical argumentative abbreviations used in this formulation, please see the list of abbreviations on ‘Page v’ of the Formalia section of this thesis.



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productive constraint? If knowledge is not an artifice to be taken on or off at will and,

hence, not an effect of choice, the question is how to understand the constitutive and

compelling status of ‘acceptable’ within the methods of apprehension without falling into the

trap of deterministic methods of knowing? How precisely to understand the ritualised

repetition by which such ‘acceptable methods’ produce and stabilise not only the effects of

performative knowledges but also the inherent materiality of such knowledges? And can this

repetition, this rearticulation, also constitute the occasion for a critical reworking of

apparently constitutive knowledge norms?

To claim that the materiality of performative knowledge is constructed through ritualised

repetitions of methods of analysis that are considered acceptable is hardly a self-evident

claim. Indeed, our customary notions of ‘construction’ seem inadequate for developing and

understanding such a claim. Questioning whether at their very essence performative

knowledges live and breathe, are understood, and are able to use thought to construct

cultural and social understandings. These ‘understandings’, cannot be dismissed as mere

constructions of choice. There must be some kind of necessity that accompanies these

primary and irrefutable experiences of performative knowledges (often related as aesthetic

apprehension). And there is. But their irrefutability in no way implies what it might mean to

affirm them as norms and through what discursive means this affirmation takes place.

It should be questioned, as to why what is constructed is understood as artificial and

dispensable in character? How to make sense of the constructions without which there

would be no ability to apprehend, to live, to make sense at all, those constructions which

have acquired a kind of necessity? Are certain constructions of performative knowledges

constitutive in this sense: could understanding not operate without them? Contemplating

performative knowledges as constructed demands a rethinking of the meaning of

construction itself. If certain constructions appear constitutive, that is, have this character

of being that without which I could not think at all, I then suggest that performative

knowledges only appear, only endure, and only live within the productive constraints of

certain highly basic – and when repetitively acknowledged - regulatory schemas of

acceptable analysis.

This understanding of construction as constitutive constraint, gives rise to a critical question

of how such constraints not only produce the domain of intelligible performative

knowledges, but also produce a domain of unthinkable, abject, inapprehensible performative

knowledges? This latter domain is not the opposite of the former, for oppositions are only

part of intelligibility; the latter is the excluded and illegible domain that haunts the former



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domain as the spectre of its own impossibility, its own constitutive outside: the limit to

intelligibility. How, then, might one alter the very terms that constitute the ‘necessary’

domain of performative knowledges through rendering unthinkable and unknowable another

domain of performative knowledge, one that does not matter in the same way. Therefore,

can more be known about performative knowledges by constituting some other attribute of

performance as unimportant to apprehend and analyse?

The discourse of “construction” that has for the most part circulated in performance

research is perhaps not quite adequate to the task. Nor is this thesis’ first logical inductive

argument adequate for describing the functions of the ‘construction by exclusion’. It is not

enough to argue that there is no prediscursive ‘aesthetic experience’ that acts as a stable

point of reference on which, or in relation to which, the analytical construction of

performative knowledge proceeds. To claim that aesthetic experience is already

apprehended, already constructed, is not yet to explain in which way the “materiality” of

aesthetic experience is forcibly produced into performative knowledges. What are the

constraints by which the performative knowledges are materialised as ‘the acceptable

analytic objects of aesthetic experience’, and how are we to understand the ‘matter’ of

aesthetic experience and of performative knowledge more generally, as the repeated and

violent circumscription of analytical intelligibility? Which performative knowledges come to

matter – and what has been excluded to make them material?

This argument is then in part a rethinking of some current methods of performance research

but also as an effort to think further about the workings of analytical hegemony in the

crafting of matters of importance within performance research and analysis

- construction of performative knowledges

Is there a way to link the question of the materiality of performative knowledges to the act

of apprehension? And how does the category of ‘aesthetic experience’ figure within such a

relationship? Consider first that difference within performative experiences is often invoked

as an issue of material differences: “A performance is that which is joint understanding

between the performer and the spectator and therefore completely individual” (Brook, 1972,

p.12). Performative difference, however, is never simply a function of material differences,

difference is both marked and formed by discursive practices. Further, to claim that

performative differences are indissociable from discursive demarcations is not the same as

claiming that discourse causes performative difference.



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The category upon which much of performance research is based: “aesthetic experience”11

is, from the start, normative. It is what Michel Foucault has called a “regulatory ideal” and

in this sense, “aesthetic experience” not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory

force that functions as a form of power: the power to demarcate, circulate, and differentiate

the performative knowledges it controls. As discussed earlier, the mystery of aesthetic

experience is wielded as a powerful indicator of performance’s claim for academic

importance. Through performance, the cognitive unknowable can be known. This regulates

the realms of importance for performance research, one of which is to stay away from

attempting to materialise the unknowable and therefore damage the power that

performance wields as an academic discipline. However, this is the realm that performance-

as-research works within and damage to this power base is apparent within its inherent

methodologies. Therefore much of the work within performance-as-research is to make

sure that it does not materialise too fully.

Thus, ‘aesthetic experience’ is a regulatory ideal whose materialisation is compelled and this

materialisation takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices.

In other words, ‘aesthetic experience’ is a constructed ideal which is forcibly materialised

through time and the need to know. It is not a simple fact or static condition inherent in

performance but a process whereby regulatory norms materialise ‘aesthetic experience’ and

achieve this materialisation through a forcible reiteration of those acceptable forms of

analysis and apprehension.

That the reiteration of these methods of apprehension is necessary is a sign that the

materialisation is never quite complete and that ‘aesthetic experience’ never quite complies

with the acceptable methods by which their materialisation is impelled. Indeed, it is the

instabilities or possibilities for rematerialisiation that are opened up by this process which

mark one domain in which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself to

spawn rearticulation that calls into question its nature as a hegemonic force.

But how then, does the notion of the act of apprehension relate to this conception of

materialisation? In the first instance, this “acting” (such as that of acceptability) must be

understood not as a singular or deliberate process, but rather, as the regulatory, reiterative

and citation practice by which discourse produces the effects that it then names and brings

within the context of language. In a simple context, this making of a method of analysis

11 This is particularly related to the concept of “aesthetic experience” as beyond words.



Page 46

acceptable is not a single act of declaration but rather it has to be repeated until all

argument is dissolved. What I hope will become clear in what follows is that the regulatory

acceptability of “aesthetic experience” works in an “acting” fashion to constitute the

materiality of performative knowledges and, more specifically, to materialise that

knowledge’s specific aesthetic conditions. This materialisation of aesthetic difference is

guided in the service of consolidation and specificity that feeds the scienco-analytic

imperative.

In this sense, what constitutes a performative knowledge, its contours, its movements, will

be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most

productive effect. There will be no way to understand ‘acceptability’ as an analytical

construct which is imposed upon the surface of matter, understood either as ‘performative

knowledge’s or as given underlying aesthetic experience. Rather, once “aesthetic

experience” itself is understood in its normative essence, the materiality of performative

knowledge will not be thinkable apart from the materialisation of that regulatory norm.

‘Aesthetic experience’ is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one

is: it will be one of the norms by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a

performative knowledge for life within the domain of analytical intelligibility.

At stake in such a reformulation of the materiality of performative knowledges will be the

following:

(1) the recasting of the matter of performative knowledges as the effect of a

dynamic of power, such that the matter of performative knowledges cannot be disassociated from the regulatory norms that govern their materialisation and the signification of those material effects;

(2) the understanding of “acting” not as the process by which a subject brings into being what they name, but, rather as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains;

(3) the construal of “aesthetic experience” no longer as a performative knowledges’ given on which the construct of apprehension is artificially imposed, but as an analytical norm which governs the materialisation of performative knowledges;

(4) a rethinking of the process by which a performative knowledge norm is assumed, appropriated, taken on and not, strictly speaking, undergone by a subject, but rather that the subject, the speaking “I” is formed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming ‘as’ an aesthetic experience; and

(5) a linking of this process of “assuming” a dimension of aesthetic experience with the question of identification, and with the discursive means by which the scienco-analytic imperative enables certain aesthetic identifications and forecloses and / or disavow other identifications.



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This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed requires the simultaneous production

of a domain of abject performative knowledges; those knowledges who are not yet

“subjects”, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject

designates here precisely those “unknowable” and “unintelligible” zones of performance

research which are nevertheless densely populated by those knowledges who do not enjoy

the status of the known aesthetic experiences, but whose living under the sign of the

“unknowable” are required to circumscribe the domain of the aesthetic experience. This

zone of unintelligibility will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which – and

by virtue of which – the domain of the performative knowledge will circumscribe its own

claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the

force of exclusion and abjection; one that produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an

abjected outside, which is after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation.

The forming of a performative knowledge requires an identification with the normative

phantasm of ‘acceptable aesthetic experience’ and this identification takes place through a

repudiation that, in turn, produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the

subject cannot emerge. This is a repudiation that creates the valence of “abjection” and its

status for performance research as a threatening spectre. Further the materialisation of a

given performative knowledge will centrally concern the regulation of identificatory practices

such that the identification with the abjection of aesthetic experience will be persistently

disavowed. And yet, this disavowed abjection will threaten to expose the self-grounding

presumptions of the “knowledged” or aesthetic subject, grounded as that subject is in the

repudiation whose consequences it cannot fully control. The task will be to consider this

threat and disruption not as a permanent contesting of research norms condemned to the

pathos of perpetual failure, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the

very terms of performance research acceptability and intelligibility.

Lastly, the mobilisation of the categories of cognition within a political discourse of research

will be haunted in some ways by the very instabilities that the categories effectively produce

and foreclose. Although the political discourses that mobilise categories of identification

tend to cultivate identification in the service of a political goal, it may be that the persistence

of disidentification is equally crucial to the rearticulation of the contested. Indeed, it may be

precisely through the practices that underscore disidentification with regulatory norms that

aesthetic experience difference is materialised, and both research and performative politics

are mobilised. Such collective disidentifications can facilitate a reconceptualisation of which

performative knowledges matter and which knowledges are yet to emerge as crucial matters

of concern.



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- from construction to materialisation

The relationship between truth and analysis as presupposed by some models of knowledge

“construction” implies an analytic or an agency of research which acts upon “a truth”, which

is itself presupposed as a passive surface, outside the research and yet its necessary

counterpart.

Other scholars have argued that the very concept of performance truth needs to be re-

thought, for the concept of truth has a history: that figuring of truth as the blank and lifeless

page. Truth as that which is, as it were, always already dead, is a decidedly modern view,

linked perhaps to the emergence of technological means of domination within the notions of

deconstructing knowledge. (Butler, 1996, p.19) Indeed, some have argued, such as Jacques

Derrida (1998) and Samuel Weber (1987, p.54), that the rethinking of ‘truth’ as a set of

dynamic interrelations suits both performative and research aims. This rethinking also calls

into question the model of construction whereby the research unilaterally acts on the truth

and invests it with its parameters and its meaning.

Truth has a history that is not merely research based but also one in which aesthetic

experience is positioned ambiguously. This concept of ‘aesthetic experience’ is itself troubled

terrain, formed through a series of contestations over what ought to be decisive criterion for

distinguishing between the two experiences; the concept of aesthetic experience has a

history that is covered over by the subject as the site or surface of inscription.

Figured as such a site or surface, however, the truth is construed as that which is also

without value. Moreover, it assumes its value at the same time that it assumes its research

character , that is, at the same time that truth relinquishes itself as a basic linguistic

construct. According to this view then, research’s construction of the truth presupposes the

cancellation of the truth by the research. Insofar as it relies on this construal, the

performative knowledges/linguistic apprehension distinction flounders along parallel lines. If

apprehension is the research significance that performative knowledges assume within a

given analysis – and for the sake of argument “analysis” and “research” sit in a state of

uneasy interchange – then what, if anything, is left of the performative knowledges once it

has assumed its analytic character as linguistic apprehension?



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At issue is the meaning of “assumption,” where to be “assumed” is to be take up into a more

elevated sphere, as in “The Assumption of the Virgin.” If apprehension consists of the

analytical meanings that performative knowledges assume, then performative knowledges

do not accrue social meanings as additive properties but, rather, are replaced by the analytic

meaning it takes on. Performative knowledges are relinquished in the course of that

assumption, and the apprehension emerges, not as a term in a continued relationship of

opposition to performative knowledges but as the term that absorbs and displaces

“performative knowledges”. The mark of its full substantiation into apprehension or what,

from a materialist point of view, might constitute a full desubstantiation.

When the aesthetic experience/apprehension distinction is joined with a notion of radical

linguistic constructivism, the problem becomes even worse, for the “performative

knowledges” which is referred to as a priori to apprehension will itself be a postulation, a

construction, offered within language, as that which is prior to language, prior to

construction.

Therefore, while this argument has made some gains as to the use of performative

knowledges in performance research and their relationship to further issues of construction,

it is now faced with the problem of making them explicit within this context. In simple

terms, the argument is stating that if everything is constructed by its relationship to

language then it is impossible to know anything else.

Performative knowledges posited as prior to construction will, by virtue of being posited,

become the effect of that very positing, the construction of construction, and logically tied

with the fallacy of begging the question. If apprehension is the analytic construction of

performative knowledges, and there is no access to this “performative knowledges” except

by means of its construction, then it appears not only that cognition is absorbed by

apprehension, but that “performative knowledges” becomes something like a fiction,

perhaps a fantasy, retroactively installed at a prelinguistic or paralinguistic site to which

there is no direct access.

Is it right to claim that “performative knowledges” vanish altogether, that it is a fiction over

and against what is true, that it is a fantasy over and against what is reality? Or do these

very oppositions need to be rethought such that if “performative knowledges” is a fiction, it

is one within whose necessities we live, without which life itself would be unthinkable? And if

“performative knowledges” is a fantasy, is it perhaps a field of phantasm that constitutes the



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very terrain of analytic intelligibility? However, would such a rethinking of such conventional

oppositions entail a rethinking of “constructivism” in its usual sense?

THE PROBLEM OF CONSTRUCTION

The radical constructivist position has tended to produce the premise that both refutes and

confirms its own enterprise. If such a theory cannot take account of performative

knowledges as the site or surface on which it acts, then it ends up presuming performative

knowledges as the non-constructed, and so concedes the limits of linguistic constructivism.

If, on the other hand, performative knowledges is a contrived premise, a fiction, then

apprehension does not presume performative knowledges which it acts upon, but rather,

apprehension produces the misnomer of a prediscursive “performative knowledges”, and the

meaning of construction becomes that of linguistic monism, whereby everything is only and

always language. Then, what ensues is an exasperated debate, either

(6) Constructivism is reduced to a position of linguistic monism, whereby linguistic construction is understood to be generative and deterministic. Critics making that presumption can be heard to say, “If everything is discourse, what about the knowledge?” or

(7) Construction is figuratively reduced to a verbal action that appears to presuppose a subject, critics working within such a presumption can be heard to say, “If knowledge is constructed, then who is doing the constructing?” Though, of course, the most pertinent formulation of this question is: “If the subject is constructed, then who is constructing the subject?”

In the first case, construction has taken the place of the omnipotent agency that not only

causes but also composes everything which is its object. It is the divine actor, bringing into

being and exhaustively constituting that which it names, or rather, it is that kind of transitive

referring which names and inaugurates in a single component. According to this view of

construction, for something to be constructed is for it to be created and determined through

that process of omnipotent intervention.

In the second and third cases, the seductions of grammar appear to hold sway. The critic

asks: Must there not be a human agent, a subject, if you will, who guides the course of

construction? If the first version of constructivism presumes that construction operates

deterministically, making a mockery of human agency, the second understands

constructivism as presupposing a voluntarist, choosing subject who makes its performative

knowledges through an instrumental action. A construction is understood in this latter case

to be a kind of manipulable artifice, a conception that not only presupposes a subject, but



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rehabilitates precisely the voluntarist subject of humanism that constructivism has, on

occasion, sought to put into question.

If performative knowledges are simply constructions, must there be and “I” or a “we” who

enacts or performs that construction? How can there be an activity, a construction, without

presupposing an agent who precedes and performs that activity: the teleological element of

construction? How to account for the motivation and direction of construction without such

a subject? As a rejoinder, I would suggest that it takes a certain suspicion toward grammar

to reconceive the matter in a different light. For if performative knowledge is constructed, it

is not necessarily constructed by an “I”, “we”, or “performance” which stands before that

construction in any spatial or temporal sense of “before.” Subjected to knowledge, but

subjectiviated by performative knowledge, the “I” neither precedes nor follows the process

of this knowledgeing, but emerges only within and as the matrix of performative knowledge

relations themselves.

This then returns us to the second objection, the one, which claims that constructivism,

forecloses agency, pre-empts the agency of the subject, and finds itself presupposing the

subject that it calls into question. To claim that performance analysis is itself produced in

and as a performatively knowledged matrix of relations, is not to do away with the subject,

but only to ask after the conditions of its emergence and operation. The “acting” of this

performative knowledging cannot, strictly speaking be a human act or expression, a wilful

appropriation. It is the matrix through which all wilful actions first become possible; it is an

enabling analytic condition.

In this sense, the matrix of performative knowledge relations is prior to the emergence of

the “human” and its involvement in performance. Consider the linguistic interpellation that

shifts a performance from an experience to an analysis, and in this naming the performance

is “knowledged”, brought into the domain of language and analysis through the

interpellation of performative knowledges. But that “knowledging” of the performance does

not end there; on the contrary, that founding interpellation is reiterated by various

authorities and throughout various intervals of time to reinforce or contextualise this effect.

The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of an

acceptable analysis of aesthetic experience.

Such attribution or interpellations contribute to that field of discourse and power that

orchestrates, delimits, and sustains that which qualifies as “performance”. Seen most clearly

in the examples of those abjected performative subjects who do not appear properly



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knowledged, for example pornographic films, street theatre, and amateur productions.

Thereby, it is their very essential performance nature that comes into question. Indeed, the

construction of performative knowledges operates through exclusionary means, such that

the performance is not only produced over and against the non-performance, but through a

set of foreclosures, radical erasures, that are, strictly speaking, refused the possibility of

analytic articulation. Hence, it is not enough to claim that performance subjects are

constructed, for the construction of the performance is a differential operation that produces

the more and the less “performance”, the non-performance and the performance

unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bind the “performance” as its constitutive

outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and

rearticulation.

Paradoxically, the inquiry into the kinds of erasure and exclusion by which the construction

of the subject operates is no longer constructivism, but neither is it essentialism. For there

is an “outside” to this discourse, but this construct is not an absolute “outside” and

ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse. As a

constitutive “outside” it is that which can only be thought – when it can – in relation to that

discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders. The debate between constructivism and

essentialism thus misses the point of deconstruction altogether, for the point has never been

that “everything is discursively constructed”; that point when and where it is made, belongs

to a kind of discursive monism or linguisticism that refuses the constitutive force of

exclusion, erasure, violent foreclosure, abjection and its disruptive return within the very

terms of discursive legitimacy.

And to say that there is a matrix of performative knowledges relations that institutes and

sustains the subject is not to claim that there is a singular matrix that acts in a singular and

deterministic way to produce a subject as its effect. That is to install the “matrix” in the

subject-position within a grammatical formulation which itself needs to be rethought.

Indeed, the propositional form “Discourse constructs the subject” retains the subject-

position of the grammatical formulation even as it reverses the place of subject and

discourse. Construction must mean more than such a simple reversal of terms.

There are defenders and critics of construction, who construe that position along

structuralist lines. They often claim that there are structures that construct the subject,

impersonal forces, such as Culture or Discourse or Power, where these terms occupy the

grammatical site of the subject after the “performance” has been dislodged from its place.

In such a view, the grammatical and metaphysical place of the subject is retained even as



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the candidate that occupies that place appears to rotate. As a result, construction is still

understood as a unilateral process initiated by a priori subject, fortifying that presumption of

the metaphysics of the subject that where there is activity, there lurks behind it an initiating

and wilful subject. On such a view, discourse or apprehension or the research becomes

personified, and in the personification the metaphysics of the subject is reconsolidated.

In this second view, construction is not an activity but a process, one which happens once

and whose effects are firmly fixed. Thus, constructivism is reduced to determinism and

implies the evacuation or displacement of human agency.

This view informs the misreading by which the philosophy of Michel Foucault is criticised for

“personifying” power (Butler, 1993, p.93). If power is misconstrued as a grammatical and

metaphysical subject, and if that metaphysical site within humanist discourse has been the

privileged site of the human, then power appears to have displaced the human as the origin

of activity. But if Foucault’s view of power is understood as the disruption and subversion of

this grammar and metaphysics of the subject, if power orchestrates the formation and

sustenance of subjects, then it cannot be accounted for in terms of the “subject” which is its

effect. And here it would be no more right to claim that the term “construction” belongs at

the grammatical site of subject, for construction is neither a subject nor its act, but the

process of reiteration by which both “subjects” and “acts” come to appear at all. There is no

power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability.

What I would propose in place of these conceptions of construction is a return to the notion

of matter, not as site or surface but as Butler (1996, p.9) states as “a process of

materialisation that stabilises over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface

we call matter.”

Therefore

IF the attribute of performative knowledges exists, AND an attribute has to be brought into apprehension to be understood, and IF it is apprehended it is either constructed or materialised; and IF bringing into apprehension by construction requires a linguistic context, and IF a linguistic context is a priori, a posteriori or contingent, and AND performative knowledges are not a priori, a posteriori or contingent THEN materialisation is the apprehension of performative knowledges OR (P(pk) ⊃ P(E)) & (P(E) ≡ P(LA)) LA ⊃ (c v m) c ⊃ (PR v PS v CT) (P(~PR)) & (P(~PS)) & (P(~CT)) ∴ P(pk) ≡ P(m)



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Therefore, the second premise of the argument is set. If there is a need to investigate and

apprehend performative knowledges then materialisation is a necessary condition.

THE NOTION OF MATERIALITY

That matter is always materialised has, I think, to be thought of in relation to the productive

and, indeed, materialising effects of regulatory power in the Foucauldian sense. In this

argument, shown as the regulatory production of performative knowledges by aesthetic

experience. Thus, the question is no longer: How is apprehension constituted as or through

a certain interpretation of aesthetic experience? (as this question leaves the “matter” of

aesthetic experience not theorised) but rather, through what regulatory norms are

performative knowledges itself materialised? And how is it that training the materiality of

performative knowledges as a given presupposes and consolidates the normative conditions

of its own emergence?

Crucially, then, construction is neither a single acting nor causal process initiated by a

subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. Materialisation not only takes place in time,

but also is itself a temporal process, which operates through the reiteration of apprehensive

norms; aesthetic experience is both produced and destabilised in the course of this

reiteration. It is through this sedimentation of a reiterative practice that performative

knowledges acquire its truth effect. It is also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and

fissures are opened as the constitutive instabilities in these constructions and defined as that

which escapes or exceeds the apprehensive norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or

fixed by the repetitive labour of that norm. This instability is the deconstituting possibility in

the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very effect by which ”performative

knowledges” are stabilised, the possibility to put the consolidation of the acceptable methods

of analysing “aesthetic experience” into a potentially productive crisis.

Certain formulations of the radical materialist position appear almost compulsively to

produce a moment of recurrent exasperation for it seems that, when the materialist is

shown as a linguistic idealist (or one for whom language can do anything and show

anything), the materialist refutes the reality of apprehension, the relevance of research, the

alleged facts of truth, human superiority and the independent existence of knowledge. The

critic might also suspect the materialist of a certain somatic phobia and seek assurance that

this abstracted theorist will admit that there are, minimally, aesthetical experiences, parts,



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and activities, capacities, all of whom are differences that can be conceded without

reference to “the material”.12

In relation to aesthetic experience, if one concedes the materiality of aesthetic experience or

of the performative knowledges, does that very conceding operate – dynamically or actively

– to materialise that aesthetic experience? And further, how is it that the reiterated

concession of that aesthetic experience – one which need not take place in speech or writing

but might be “signalled” in a much more inchoate way – constitutes the sedimentation and

production of the material effect of performative knowledges?

The moderate critic might concede that some part of “performative knowledges” are

materialised, but some other part is certainly not, and then, of course, find him or herself

not only under some obligation to draw the line between what is and is not materialised, but

to also explain how it is that “performative knowledges” come in parts whose differentiation

is not a matter of construction. But as that line of demarcation between such ostensible

parts gets drawn, the “immaterialised” becomes bounded once again through a signifying

practice, and the very boundary which is meant to protect some part of aesthetic experience

from the taint of analysis is now defined by the its own need to be analysed. The question

becomes: is the argument perhaps referring on both sides of the debate to an inevitable

practice of signification, of demarcating and delimiting that to which is then “referred” such

that our “references” always presuppose – and often conceal – this prior delimitation? Or in

simple language, are performative arguments always doomed to have some level of which

they are unaware?

Indeed, to “refer” naively or directly to such an extra-discursive object will always require

the prior delimitation of the extra-discursive. And insofar as the extra-discursive is

delimited, it is formed by the very discourse from which it seeks to free itself. This

delimitation, which often is enacted as an non-theorised presupposition in an act of

description, marks a boundary that includes and excludes, that decides, as it were, what will

and will not be the stuff of the object to which is then refer. This marking off will have

some normative force and indeed some violence, for it can construct only through erasing; it 12 At this moment I want to offer an absolute reassurance to my interlocutor, that within this argument some anxiety prevails. To “concede” the undeniability of “aesthetic experience” or its “materiality” is always to concede some version of “aesthetic experience” some formation of “materiality”. Is the discourse in and through which that concession occurs – and, yes, that concession invariably does occur – not itself formative of the very phenomenon to which it concedes? To claim that discourse is formative is not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which it concedes; rather it is to claim that there is no reference to pure performative knowledges which is not at the same time a further formation of that performative knowledges. In this sense, linguistic capacity to refer to aesthetic experience is not denied, but the very meaning of “referentiality” is altered. In philosophical terms, the connotative claim is always to some degree active.



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can bound a thing only through enforcing a certain criterion, a principle of selectivity. Could

this be the principle of selectivity that would help to delimit the exclusions from performative

knowledges and therefore make it a site of discourse?

What will and will not be included within the boundaries of ‘performative knowledges’ will be

set by a more or less tacit operation of exclusion. If I call into question the fixity of the

structuralist law that divides and bounds the performance by virtue of their dyadic

differentiation within the analytic matrix, it will be from the exterior regions of that boundary

(not from a “positive” but from the discursive possibilities opened up by the constitutive

instability of hegemonic positions), and it will constitute the disruptive return of the excluded

from within the very logic of the analytic symbolic.

Therefore, the trajectory of this project, then, will pursue the possibility of such disruption,

but proceed indirectly by responding to two interrelated questions that have been posed to

materialist accounts of performative knowledges, not to defend materialism, but to

interrogate the erasures and exclusions that constitute its limits. These criticisms

presuppose a set of metaphysical oppositions between materialism and idealism embedded

in received grammar which, I will argue, are critically redefined by a poststructuralist

rewriting of discursive activity as it operates in the materialisation of aesthetic experience.

Therefore as the argument stands

IF performative knowledges can be apprehended through materialisation, and AND materialisation is the effect of some regulatory power, and AND I can know regulatory power through an act of repetition, and AND the history of repetition leaves a process of sedimentation, and IF sedimentation is the process of acknowledge discursive limitation, and AND limitations are not a process of inclusion but a process of exclusion, and IF exclusions are a process of selectivity, and IF selectivity is a process of stabilisation and structural specificity, and IF critical discourse proceeds through structural specificity, THEN performative knowledges can be a structurally specific critical discourse through a process of selecting the exclusions. OR (P(pk) ≡ P(m)) & (P(m) ≡ RP) & ((RP(r)) (RP(r) ≡ RP(s)) & (RP(s) ≡ RP(dl)) & (RP(dl) ⊇ P(e)) P(e) ⊃ P(s) & (s(st & ss)) CD ≡ (st & ss) ∴ (P(m) RP(s & e)) ⊃ P(st & ss)

So the third proposition of our argument is set: performance is able through materiality to

have stability and structural specificity. However, this stability and specificity requires an



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understanding of the process of exclusion, and it is through trying to find this understanding

that the boundaries of pure philosophical argument were found. Therefore, I turned to a

second methodology of philosophical argument: inductive instantiation. This is a process of

finding an equivalent subject that can then be used to find the problems in the pure

philosophical argument, but where would I find an instance of instantiation that used

exclusion for the purpose of material stability. Another eureka moment was required, and it

came in the form of ecstatic performativity and music theatre. Therefore, what is to follow

is a practical discussion of ecstatic performativity and its process of exclusion, as an

argument of propositional equivalence for the exclusion used in the materiality of

performative knowledges.


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ecstatic knowledges

- introduction

Within the following section I have developed the theoretical nature of the materiality of

performative knowledges by investigating an analytic philosophical equivalence between

“performative knowledges” and “ecstatic knowledges” thereby investigating the nature of

the former without the regulatory language that has so far defined the debate. In what

follows, what is at stake is less a theory of the materiality of performative knowledges than a

consideration of the scenography and topography of that material nature by investigating

what is known about ecstatic knowledges, and thus looking for the nature of exclusions

which will help us develop the methodology of performance-as-research.

As you will see as this argument develops, ecstatic knowledges are contained in many

different realms, similar to performative knowledges. Therefore, to create the closest

possible analogy, it is important to make the philosophical propositions as close as possible –

to do this the argument investigates what I consider to be one of the primary creators of

ecstatic knowledge in performance – ecstatic music theatre. Why this medium was chosen

will, I hope, become apparent throughout the development of this argument.

- ecstasy defined

In its original sense, ecstasy (“ekstasis”) refers to a condition of being “outside oneself”. If

it is assumed that performance is central to the construction of a self (Butler, 1996, p.x),

then ecstasy also implies a condition of being “outside” the performative and therefore

excluded from its materialisation. However, it must first be considered that being outside

oneself and being outside the performative is not necessarily the same thing. Being outside

oneself entails being outside performance only to the extent that one perceives performance

as particular to (or synonymous with) the identity of its users, of a “self” out of itself. This

recalls us to the particular notion of performance research, and its search for the “specificity

of performance”. So is there a performance that within its research paradigm is considered

outside the identity of its performers. The answer is “yes”.


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Thus, in [music theatre]13, expression of a role’s mind often takes priority over representation of the realistic world surround him or her. Because [music theatre] is not limited by the demands of faithful representation, its means of expression are limitless, and therefore false can be easily become true, empty can become full and few become many. Ruru Lu, “False but True, Empty but Full, Few but Many.

(Lu, 1999, p.183)

This analytic siting of music theatre as “outside” it’s inherent users, places it as a strong

performative analogy to “ecstatic knowledges”. However, while being outside “oneself” is

important to the conceptual development of “ecstatic performance”. It is not its only

theoretical component. What occurs to the development of ecstatic performance/music

theatre philosophical analogy when one acknowledges the further theoretical construct that

ecstasy is a supreme response to a meaning, or at least that an experience is ecstatic insofar

as it signifies the greatest meaning for existence. (Any emotion discloses the value of a

meaning.)

Therefore, while a meaning may manifest itself independently of performance, as I have

discussed in the previous chapter, it is difficult to believe that the interpretation, the bringing

to consciousness, of meaning can also become independent of performance. Being outside

performance is not the same as being outside meaning; and for this reason ecstatic

experience can only become conscious of itself, of it’s meaning, when it actually expands the

power of performance to “construct” the experience. (Toepfer, 1991, p.13) Thus, the

phenomenon of ecstasy introduces an interesting problem of how performance “constructs”

a condition of being “outside” oneself whereby one is also “outside” of performance and

“inside” it at the same time.

But because this notion of being outside and inside at once makes for a confusing

terminology, let us just say that in relation to ecstasy it can pursued as two, contradictory

definitions of being “outside” performance.

(1) Ecstasy is a condition which is “beyond” the capacity of performance to define, signify, represent, motivate, “capture”, or disclose, for ecstasy is an “ineffable” condition which tests the limit of performance to order reality.

(2) Ecstasy is a condition in which performance is no longer transparent to the performance user (speaker, reader, spectator): the performer is no longer “inside performance in the sense that he or she no longer perceives performance as that through which one “knows” the world; rather one

13 I have included a substitution here for reasons of clarity. The terms of music theatre debate are confused because of the multiple terminologies from musical theatre, pastiche, music theatre, theatrical concert, and chamber opera. This is from an article which discusses contemporary Chinese opera and therefore within the broad definition of music theatre used within this thesis.


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perceives performance as a phenomenon which discloses itself or “speaks” as Heidegger ([1950] 1971, p.198) puts it, independently of the intentions of its users.

In this latter case, performance becomes the source, rather than the instrument, of

knowledge. One no longer “looks” through performance, but at it, as if “seeing” in a

supreme and unexpected way, that which is between the self and the Other. (Foucault,

1990, p.38) This “betweeness” or more properly, this otherness of performance discloses

itself, not in relations between the referents of performance, nor even, necessarily, in

relations between referents and signifiers, but continually in relations between signifiers, in

relations between the performed, between the performer, between the performative text

and the unperformed (silence, images, music).

As we discussed in the previous chapter of the argument, this function of horizontal

transmission (child to child) is one of the primary developments of a materiality discourse.

For it is within the joint creation of meaning that exclusions are created. The development

of a general relation between performance and emotional states is the subject of aesthetics.

To say that performance “constructs” an emotion is to say that particular units of meaning

(semenes), derived from relations between signifiers (rather than relations between

referents), motivate performers and or audience to act in such a way as to determine and

maximise the economy through which meaning is exchanged. (Sauter, 2000, p.4). Within

this framework, aesthetic experiences is primarily a process of creating value from meaning,

and this value might include a value judgement which includes a power base or regulatory

ideal. And it is this regulatory ideal from which I will begin my investigation of exclusion in

ecstatic performance.

The value of meanings (performative knowledges) depends upon its power to motivate an

action that satisfies a desire. (Foucault, 1990, p.43) For Butler (1996, p.78), especially

within her evaluation of the concept of materiality, “values establish hierarchical relations

between identities and concepts”. This discourse of value and economy of meaning-

exchange in performance suggest that it is not feasible to determine how performance

constructs emotion by identifying and focusing on the supposedly universal performative

structures, such as semiotic referents and audience conceptualisation, performative

typologies, or reception systems which point to some purely genetic control over the relation

between performance and emotion. (Sauter, 2000, p.25) That aesthetic experiences refer to

the context of artistic (or performative) meaning is perhaps an obvious development from

the materiality of a priori performative knowledges. However, what is not so obvious is an

effective method for determining context and therefore the sought after exclusion. Given


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the right context, possibly any set of actions, aesthetic devices, or configurations of

performance will “construct” ecstasy or the materialisation of performative knowledges

within the performer/the researcher or the performed/the researched.

For this reason, empirically oriented experiments that attempt to “measure” statistically the

“ecstatic value” of performative actions, aesthetic figures, or narratives for carefully selected

sample populations have yet to appear and indeed may never appear. Moreover,

descriptions of ecstatic experience are by no means the same thing as a performance that

constructs or materialises ecstatic experience. (Toepfer, 1991, p.15) Thus by analytic

analogy I can propositionally argue that descriptions of performative knowledges are by no

means the same thing as a performance or research methodology which constructs or

materialises performative knowledges.

Here the question is not whether there ought to be reference to matter, just as the question

never has been whether or not there ought to be reference to aesthetic mystery. This

reference will occur, and for performance research, must occur. The category of

performative knowledges does not become useless through deconstruction of regulatory

exclusion, but becomes one whose uses are no longer reified as “referents”, and which

stand a chance of being opened up, indeed, of coming to act in ways that none of us can

predict in advance. So where does this level of philosophical stalemate leave us? Am I no

closer to understanding the nature of philosophical exclusion?

Perhaps a more useful method for examining the relation between performance and ecstasy

does not concern itself with the possibility that ecstasy is objectively “immanent” in

performance, but with the ways in which performance discloses the exclusory conditions of

communication or actions under which ecstasy is possible. It is a more abstract approach, in

which I do not look for statements that necessarily, should, or even may provoke ecstasy in

persons who perform, action, disclose or invoke them. I look instead for types or categories

of actions in which performance (not the performer) “tells” us what relations between

actions produce the optimum economy of the exchange of meaning entitled ‘ecstasy’.

Thereby, creating an exclusory field of optimum economy, which will serve our statement of

propositional equivalence with performative knowledges.

Although within this action, surely it must be possible to use the term tactically (even

though, as discussed in the previous chapter, one is being used and positioned by that term)

and also to subject the term to a critique that interrogates its exclusionary operations. This

is the usefulness of deconstruction in the discussion of performative knowledges.


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If I understand deconstruction, deconstruction is not an exposure of error, certainly not other people’s error. The critique in deconstruction, the most serious critique in deconstruction, is the critique of something that is extremely useful, something without which we cannot do anything. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “In a Word, Interview with Ellen Rooney”

(Spivak in Butler, 1996, p.27)

To paraphrase Spivak, the critique of materialisation within action, is the ‘critique of

something useful’, the critique of something we cannot do without. Indeed, I would argue

that it is a critique without which the phenomenological debate surrounding performance

and performance materiality loses its research potential through refusing to engage – take

stock of, and become transformed by – the exclusions that put it into play. Indeed, the

exclusion that this argument is endeavouring to understand in order to put materiality of

performative knowledges into the realm of research discourse.

Therefore, our argument has developed

IF performative knowledges can be a structurally specific critical discourse through a process of selecting the exclusions, and IF exclusion are not only descriptive but active, and IF descriptive is not the critique of something important THEN our exclusion must be known as active components to the critical discourse. OR (P(m) RP(s & e)) ⊃ P(st & ss) RP ≡ CD e (d & a) CD(~d) ∴ P(m) ≡ P(ae)

- ecstasy expanded

To say that performance “tells” us anything is to acknowledge that what is being told is

something communicated from “outside “ the meaning, the speaker, the author, or self

ascribes to a fragment of performance; it is something communicated by abstract pressures

of history and ideology – that aspect of performative communication which remains

“unconscious” in the economies of meaning exchange: research. In other words, what is

“outside” a system of ecstatic speech is merely another system of discourse, which is called

“context”, the “historical movement”, or the “ideological matrix”. However, according to

Toepfer (1991, p.15) this “other” system is as much “inside” performance as any ecstasy

that transcends it.


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Something similar is at work with the concept of materiality, as it is something Butler (1996,

p.27) says, “without which we cannot do anything”. What does it mean to have recourse to

materiality, since it is clear from the start that matter has a history (indeed, often more than

one) and that the history of matter is in part determined by the negotiation of performative

difference. Therefore it may be sought, within performance research, to return to matter as

prior to discourse to ground our claims about performative difference. However, Butler

(1996, p.29) suggests that this argument will find that a priori matter is fully sedimented

with the discourses that bring it into transferable realm and limit the uses it can have within

the available discourse. Thus the exclusions have already taken place and without them the

arguer cannot bring materiality itself into the research discourse.

Therefore, let us return to our proposition equivalence with ecstatic performance and

question what are the general signs of ecstatic performance and how can I know them from

within this sedimentation process? First of all, a state of ecstasy, of being “outside oneself”,

implies a state of supreme fearlessness before “reality” the world, otherness. (Toepfer,

1991, p.15) The ecstatic speaker does not fear the consequences of his or her words and

thus manifests an attitude of maximum trust toward whatever appears as the Other. But

this trust exists only to the extent that the ecstatic performer achieves a state of supreme

vulnerability as well as supreme fearlessness. The performative therefore makes the

performer “naked” in the sense that they emerge without fear of misinterpretation, of

“misunderstanding” of ambiguity, of “unconscious” significations. This fearlessness of

ambiguity, and uncertainty of meaning is precisely what differentiates an aesthetic of

ecstasy from an aesthetic of seduction

It is perhaps useful at this juncture, to remind the reader that the purpose of developing an

argument about ecstatic knowledges is its usefulness as an analytical equivalent to

performative knowledges. Therefore, what does it mean through logical substitution to state

that: this fearlessness of ambiguity, and uncertainty of meaning is precisely what

differentiates research grounded in performative knowledges from research grounded in

seduction. It is the next premise of this argument that the often questioned difference

between performance-as-research and performance-as-artistic-product, is grounded in the

notional difference between exclusion (performative knowledges) and inclusion (seduction).

Therefore:

IF an aesthetic of ecstasy is an uncertainty of meaning, and


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IF an aesthetic of performance is seductory, and IF uncertainty of meaning is exclusory, and IF seduction is inclusory, and IF the aesthetic of ecstasy is performative knowledges, and IF the aesthetic of seduction is artistic product, THEN performative knowledges are exclusory and artistic product is inclusory. OR (A(e) ⊃ M(u)) & (A(p) ⊃ M(s)) (M(u) ≡ ex) & (M(s) ≡ in) (A(e) ≡ P(pk)) & (A(s) ≡ P(ap)) ∴(P(pk) ≡ ex) & ( P(ap) ≡ in)

To further develop this inclusion/exclusion proposition and its relationship to performance-

as-research, I needed to return to our proposition substitution between ecstatic knowledges

and performative knowledges.

An aesthetic of seduction differs from an aesthetic of ecstasy in the following way. The

seducer seeks to disguise a “real” motive for action or signification from the seduced. The

seducer signifies the promise of ecstasy but does not disclose the ultimate motive for this

signification; the seducer does not completely trust the seduced and therefore becomes

acutely sensitive to the consequences of his or her words. A seduction is successful to the

extent the seducer fulfils the disguised motive while neither the seducer nor the seduced

feels responsible for the loss of innocence which every seduction entails but does not

necessarily expose. Hence, the internal/undisclosed nature of most descriptions and

analyses of aesthetic experiences as tied to performance. Thereby, the ecstasy of the

seducer depends on destroying the innocence of the seduced, but the seducer cannot reveal

this motive while signifying the promise of ecstasy. However, as long as the seducer fears

to say what he or she “really” feels, ecstasy cannot occur. An ecstatic person is not afraid of

the consequences of his or her words. Another way of making this point is to say that a

seducer wears a mask of ecstasy, which hides another, stronger emotion (fear) and a less

interesting but more feasible or accessible desire. Ecstasy, on the other hand, is a state of

“being other than oneself” which nevertheless does not entail wearing a mask or signifying

an emotion which one does not “really” feel.

Therefore, the relationship emerges that performance can be used for either the purpose of

seduction or for the purpose of ‘performative knowledge’. This means that the seduction

performance is used to hide the motives of the knowledges inherent in the piece, whereas

an ecstatic performance is used to make apparent ‘performative knowledge’, but is this

apparent materialisation or something quite different?


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CONSTITUATIVE ECSTASY

First, ecstatic performance implies a performing of that which the performer desires to be

known but which the general social context fears is too laden with ambiguity and the

possibility of violent misinterpretation to be spoken at all. No performance is ecstatic unless

it demands courage of its performer. Ecstatic performance refers primarily to performance

which constructs ecstasy in the performer; but even in those strange cases when

performance constructs ecstasy in the audience but not in the performer, the aesthetic

relations between actions do not assume a special, audience-exclusive feature, because the

performer does what audiences want done but cannot do themselves. In such cases,

moving “outside” performance means “being performed by the Other,” even if the Other

itself remains un-ecstatically “inside” performance.

Secondly, ecstasy implies the fulfilment of a person’s greatest or most intense desire(s).

Ecstasy is always a “supreme” condition, a surfeit of meaning. During the ecstatic moment,

reality discloses a meaning that is “more” than complete or sufficient, a meaning which is

more than enough to make the ecstatic person “forget” the self and “other than those

desires that define the self and differentiate it from the Other. The achievement of this self-

abandonment through performance entails an aesthetic that does not place a high value on

meanings embedded in fantasy, memory, or the imagery of non-present identities. Ecstatic

performance constructs optimum meanings for what is now and immediate. Every ecstasy is

unique and unrepeatable. Ecstasy recurs only to the extent that it supersedes any previous

ecstasy. That is why ecstasy is not an “accessible” emotion, not an easy emotion to feel,

like rage, despair, fear, or contentment. Though the desire for ecstasy is probably

inescapable, always with us, no one can calculate, determine, or predict the occurrence of

ecstasy itself with any authority or even confidence, for ecstasy depends as much on an

unexpected as on a calculated set of conditions.

Here the propositional equivalence can be clearly seen, between the nature of ecstasy and

the nature of research-based performative knowledges. Performative knowledges are not

defined as “accessible” knowledges, not easy knowledges to apprehend and experience. In

that sense, research is always greater than the previous research, in that it is unique and is

adding to the body of knowledge from which further research can then pillage. Though as

with ecstasy the desires for performative knowledges are inescapable, and always within a

performance construction, no theory has been able to calculate, determine, or predict the

occurrence or apprehension of a performative knowledge with any authority or confidence.

But in the development of the performance-as-research paradigm is it possible to state that

the reason for this is also analogous with ecstasy, and performative knowledges depends as


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much on the unexpected as on a calculated set of structurally specific terms of critical

discourse.

Thereby, further imbedding the propositional equivalent

IF an ecstatic knowledge exists it is greater than any previous ecstatic knowledge, and IF ecstatic knowledge is performative knowledge THEN a performative knowledge that exists is greater than any previous performative knowledge. OR P(ek) > ∪P(ek) ek ≡ pk ∴ P(pk) > ∪P(pk)

The condition of being outside oneself inevitably calls attention toward the body as a “form”

of being that the ecstatic person is either “abandoning” or making “other” than the signifier

of an insufficient self. When the body becomes a signifier of supreme fearlessness,

vulnerability, and trust, ecstasy of course acquires a powerful erotic aspect. The relation

between performance as a “form” of consciousness or meaning and the body as a “form” of

ecstatic being is complex insofar as one “form” seems to contain the other through

performance. And yet most people, according to Laski (1961, p.226-244), apparently

perceive ecstasy as an experience that resists containment within any form (or limit) at all:

ecstasy is an experience of “formlessness”. An elemental manifestation (if not exactly a

form) of performance is performative knowledges, which perhaps is thought of as “formless”

because it cannot be “seen” or because it is failed to be regarded as an action of the

performer in relation to the performance (the body in relation to the subject).

Husserl ([1900] 1970 I: p.278-279) proposed that performance manifests its “essence” as an

idealised mode of knowledge which no one actually speaks even though everyone “hears” it:

performance “speaks” through a voice which is completely theoretical or, at any rate, utterly

remote from any particular performer or (presumably) erotic markers. Of course, Derrida

(1973 & 1976) contends that it is text, not performance, which discloses the being of

performance. From his perspective, textuality detaches performance from the body and

from the notion of “presence” signified by the body. Could therefore, this detachment be a

process of exclusion? For Derrida, it is still the performative actions which connect

performance to the body. Thus, insofar, as ecstasy entails an intensified attitude towards

the body, the power of performance to construct ecstasy manifests itself above all through

performance. The “image” of this extremely complex emotion is neither the text nor the


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system governing the text, but the commentary (“outside” the text) that exposes the system

in the text. Thus the argument returns to that which is outside the system (the excluded)

that exposes or makes apparent the text (the discourse). How do I get past this

understanding and into what the exclusion primarily consist of?

Ambiguity expands the relationship, not in reference to the total amount of information in

the representation, but in synchrony with the urge to return to the representation, to “re-

read” it. Each repetition or re-reading of the representation (or part of it) must produce a

variation in meaning if the reader is to experience the understanding exclusion. Re-reading

implies a capacity to ‘see’ not the mention of the ‘word constructed by the text’, but the

materialisation itself, which is then as the source of the meaning(s) sustains an (aesthetic)

emotion felt for its own sake, or in our terms the source of research undertaken not for the

purpose of the performance but for the purpose of research.

It is also worth noting at this point that the notion of representational repetition is integral to

Foucault’s concept of the “regulatory ideal”. (Foucault, 1990, p.78) It is this factor of

repetition that allows “regulatory ideals” to signify an apparently irreducible concept.

Indeed, if it can be shown that in its constitutive history “irreducible” materiality is

constructed through a problematic action matrix, then the repetitive discursive practice by

which matter is rendered irreducible becomes simply conceptualised. Therefore, while these

concepts simultaneously ontologises and fixes the action matrix into a specificity it can be

used to ground performance research practice. Further, if the constituted effect of that

matrix is taken to be the indisputable ground of materiality, then it seems that an

investigation into the genesis of the matrix is foreclosed from critical inquiry, giving further

sedimentary structure to the analysis methodology.

So in simple language, was the disclosure of the regulatory matrix by which the exclusions

take place enough to illustrate the exclusions and thereby materialise performative

knowledges within our research discourse?

This is paradoxically opposed to our previous claim that poststructuralism reduces all

materiality to linguistic elements. An argument is needed to show that to deconstruct

matter is not to negate or do away with the usefulness of the materialised matter. Against

those who would claim that a knowledge of aesthetic experience is a necessary precondition

for performance-as-research, I suggest that that heavily guarded notion may well be

constituted through an exclusion and poststructuralist degradation of performative


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knowledges that is profoundly problematic for materialisation of performative knowledges

and their further usage in performance-as-research.

Thus, in returning to our philosophical analogy, the “image” of the aesthetic emotion is

neither the matter of performative knowledges nor the system within the performative

knowledges, but the analysis of the system, the discourse on the performative knowledges

that is “outside” the knowledges but never a reference of the knowledges. The aesthetic

emotion projects an “image” when it becomes performatively knowledged with its own

transparent system of relations. This constructive relation between “formless” emotion and

the “image” of a system losing its transparency establishes the ground for ascribing a large

significance (or value) to the matter of performative knowledges. Once I acknowledge that

knowledge combinations which revise or ambiguate perception are forms of aesthetics, I

find it difficult to resist the temptation to regard every aesthetic device as a fragment of an

ideology.

Following that every matter has a history, therefore every ideology has a history, and a

unique relation to time. By acknowledging this historical regulation, this argument is in a

good position to investigate how the systems of performative knowledges operate as a sign

of change in the meaning that a social reality (a thing “outside” both the text and its reader)

which is ascribed to existence itself. It is this logical proposition interchange that compels

Nietzsche (1966, p.52, 141) to say “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and

the world are eternally justified.” Therefore, develop the propositional interchange set by

the argument that has so far developed.

IF an aesthetic phenomena is the only justified meaning for existence, and IF meaning is supreme only to the extent it has the properties of ecstasy, and IF ecstasy is the optimum magnitude of ambiguity, and IF magnitude of ambiguity depends on a capacity to be re-read, and IF ecstasy has the dual properties of an aesthetic emotion, THEN the re-reading of ecstasy is the manifestation of a supreme meaning. OR AE ≡ EX M(s) ⊇ M(e) M(e) ⊇ M(am) M(am) ⊇ M(rr) M(e) ≡ AE ∴ AE(s) ⊇ M(rr)

At a primary level, such attitudes involve a positive or negative inclination regarding the

power of performance to construct ecstatic magnitudes of fearlessness, trust, and intensely

desired vulnerability or receptivity to an Other. At a more complex level, such attitudes


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involve an inclination to approach, avoid, or overlook the reality of performance as that

which is “between” self and Other. Though these categories of “inclination” may seem very

obvious, they are nevertheless disturbing, for they are initial positions for undermining the

pervasive authority of an ideology which promotes the belief that ecstasy is somehow

“beyond” the power of performance (especially performance) to contain, signify, or construct

it.

It is necessary to point our a few philosophical inadequacies with the argument as it stands.

Firstly, either presuming materiality on the one hand, or negating it on the other does not

exhaust the options for this theory. It is not my argumentative purpose to take up either of

these options. To call a proposition into question is not the same as to total dispose of it but

rather the purpose here is to free it from its metaphysical lodgings in order to understand

what political or regulatory interests were secured in and by that metaphysical placing. This

permits the term to occupy and to serve different political or regulatory aims. To

problematise the matter of performative knowledges may entail an initial loss of

epistemological certainty, but a loss of certainty is not the same as regulatory nihilism. On

the contrary, such a loss may well indicate a significant and promising shift in the regulation

of performance research. Therefore, this unsettling of matter can be understood as

initiating new possibilities, new ways for performance research to be significant.

But the development of the theory and arguments needs a certainty of philosophical

approach and a closer inductive instantiation. As has been discussed at the beginning of

this section, to do this there is a need to narrow the field of ecstatic performance and look

for a ideal where it is clear and precise in its inclusion and exclusion. Therefore, the

following section develops the ecstatic/performative knowledges analogy by looking at the

theory of the ecstatic performance of music theatre.

- ecstatic music theatre

The “music theatre” history of ecstatic performance, is comparable with many of the “realist”

ideologies of performative communication. Realism tends to perceive performance as

something like a curtain (attempted unreal emotions “get in the way”) that separates the

self from the Other and inhibits an ecstatic sense of unity that transcends all difference.

The anti-metaphysical, sense-dominated ideology of realism implies eventually that ecstatic

transcendence is a response to an appearance, to an illusion, for realism always treats


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“reality” as something outside of “mystical” efforts to transcend it. More bluntly stated,

ecstasy is understood as a response to something apprehended in, not performed through

music theatre. The reason performances “get in the way” of ecstatic experience is that for

the realist the performative endows us with the power to see reality only to the extent that it

is natural and transparent. Therefore, what makes performance “natural” is the constraints

imposed upon it by particular physical or environmental conditions over which the performer

has little or no control.

Embedded in realist representations is the assumption that a close correlation exists

between emotional conditions and physiological constraints that determine the performers

control over the performed. However, as was discussed above, feelings of constraint are

antithetical to the experience of ecstasy. Frijda (1986: 124-175) has reviewed in detail

evidence linking emotional states to particular neurophysiologic activities, and none of this

establishes any significant connection between particular emotions and particular

physiological constraints on performative acts. Yet realist representations of ecstasy suggest

that the more intense the moment of ecstasy, the greater the atrophy in the ecstatic

person’s ability to engage in performative actions. Realism perceives ecstasy and

consciousness as states in extreme tension. Thus, as a natural event, when people

experience a profound rapture, especially orgasm, their control over vocal and performative

acts is reduced to “animal cries”, so that their aesthetics of ecstasy consists of a repertoire

of cries, moans, sighs, gasps, pantings, hums, squeals, giggles, shrieks, and occasionally

repetitions of a word or very simple performative action.

One might object that here it is sexual desires or passions rather than ecstasy which

constrains the performative acts, but the underlying implication of this hypothesis is that

ecstatic action, and the internal ecstatic dialogic are both “real” means by which sexual or

erotic communication, as a justification for ecstasy, signifies itself. The “communication” of

eroticism occurs on a completely internal, physiological level, through which performance

has no power to objectify.

Within this formulation the level of hyper-erotic and ecstatic communication within music

theatre constrains the performative acts of it form, so that their aesthetics must rupture into

the repertoire of “animal cries” and thus the vocal ecstatic given to music theatre. The

underlying implication of this hypothesis is that ecstatic action, and the internal ecstatic

dialogic are both “real” means by which the hyper-erotic communication of music theatre is

materialised. Therefore, this hypothesis states that, music theatre’s inherent communication

of eroticism occurs on a completely internal, physiological level, which the performance


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outcome has no power to objectify, and thereby slipping into non-dialogic forms - singing.

But how can this be developed, and can this be accurate, for surely music theatre exists in

forms that are not hyper-erotic in nature?

Music theatre for the realist is always beyond performance because performance is that

which constructs a reality only to the extent that it is natural (laden with the constraints

imposed by “reality”) and transparent, a mode of experiencing reality as something outside

the condition of experience, thus music theatre as not a “representation of reality” (Lu,

1999, p.183) cannot be inside the realm of the performative. As music theatre seeks to

create an illusion of life that ultimately effaces all difference between reality and

representation, realism resists making problem out of “the condition of experiencing”. Yet

as long as performance does not or cannot mediate it, the act of experiencing is

synonymous with the production of illusions, a phenomenon which Lacan (Wilden, 1968,

p.172-177) ascribes to an infantile level of consciousness (“the mirror stage”), wherein

nothing separates the self from the Other because the subject, unable to name anything or

convert objects into symbols, cannot formulate these categories.

Thus, to say that music theatre is beyond the capabilities of language and performance is to

state that in this context it is inherently synonymous with ecstasy, and as it is inherent

based in the body thereby music theatre becomes an erotic form. Therefore for Lacan, an

invoking of the “mirror stage” as a model of selfless unity with reality and to imply that

ecstasy – and it’s performative instantiation music theatre - is not only a response to an

illusion, but a state of regression to a pre-performative (Butler, 1996, p.71). This is an

infantile mode of being in which the world devoid of either the self or the Other “mirrors”

the one who is looking at it. But the problem with this implication is that it is not known that

a pre-performative mode of being is even capable of ecstasy, and therefore how does an

essentially performative act – music theatre – site itself as a pre-performative act.

The difference, I believe, lies in the nature of the form itself, in the very totality, of the demand opera makes on the human performer. Wesley Balk, ‘The Complete Singer-Actor’

(Balk, 1978, p.xii)

For our argument, this proposition states that the performative knowledges of music theatre

are posited as prior to the signifying act (performance). Performative knowledges are

always posited or signified as prior. This signification produces as an effect of its own

procedure the very performative acts that it simultaneously claims to discover as that which

precedes its own action. If the performative knowledges signified as prior to signification is

an effect of signification, then the mimetic or representational status of apprehension, which


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claims that signs follow performative knowledges as their necessary mirrors, is not a method

of copying at all. On the contrary, it is productive, constitutive, one could even argue

repetitional, in as much as this signifying act delimits and contours the performative

knowledge that it then claims to find prior to any and all acts of signification.

This is not to say that the materiality of performative knowledges is simply and only an

apprehensive event, which is reducible to a set of signifiers. Such an account also fails to

understand materiality as that which is bound up with signification from the start. To think

though the indissolubility of materiality and signification is no easy matter. To posit by the

way of apprehension a materiality outside of linguistic apprehension is still to posit that

materiality will retain apprehension as its constitutive condition. Derrida negotiates the

question of matter’s radical laterite with the following remark: “I am not even sure that

there can be a ‘concept’ of an absolute exterior”. (Derrida, 1978, p.64). He further

negotiates the nature of matter, when he writes:

I will not say whether the concept of matter is metaphysical or nonmetaphysical. This depends upon the work to which it yields, and you know that I have unceasingly insisted, as concerns the nonideal exteriority of the writing, the gram, the trace, the text, etc. upon the necessity of never separating them from work [author’s emphasis], a value itself to be thought outside its Hegelian affiliations.

(Derrida, 1978, p.65)

To have the concept of matter is to lose the exteriority that the concept is supposed to

secure. Can music theatre performance therefore simply refer to materiality, or is music

theatre performance also the very condition under which materiality may be said to appear.

This concept requires a return to the notion of Lacan’s mirror stage to see which matter still

exists in the conundrum of exteriority, and the conundrum of the music theatre as the pre-

performative.

What ecstasy exists within the mirror stage, the neurophysiology for orgasm seems to exist

during the “mirror stage”, but the extent to which infants control or use this neurophysiology

before the formation of any symbolic consciousness remains very obscure. After all, if

ecstasy means a selfless sense of identity or unity with the world, then it ought to be

presumed that during the “mirror stage” infants experience perpetual ecstasy or orgasm,

and yet it is known that they do not.

For this reason, I am inclined to argue that the realm of performance (symbolic

consciousness) makes ecstasy possible. The belief that ecstasy is “beyond” performance

does not negate a function for performance within ecstatic experience; it suggests, rather,


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that ecstasy is an attitude toward performance. Ecstasy is “beyond performance” precisely

because the performative constitutes the identifier of something, which exists “beyond”

them in the cognitive or linguistic sphere.


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But psychoanalysis is vague when it comes to motives for ecstatic regression to the “mirror

stage” and a preference for “animal cry” signification of rapture. (Toepfer, 1991, p.22)

However, Luhmann (1986, p.121-128) contends that the “incommunicability” of ecstasy is

an historical phenomenon that first manifested itself in the eighteenth century which

“witnessed the end of rhetoric, i.e. the end of a technical faith in communication,” (ibid,

p.124-125), when

…morality switched its techniques of disclosure over its narrative technique. Both began to take an interest in normal people….. Great demands were no longer made on one’s will power and dramatics was shifted into the sphere of communication problems

(ibid, p.121).

While this thesis does not have sufficient latitude to investigate the theoretical linking of

ecstatic communication with rhetorical structure14, it is important to note that theorists have

previously linked ecstasy and theatre to the same basic structure: rhetoric. Therefore, I

have a grounded hope of linking it to another theoretical structure by which I can

understand ecstatic exclusion.

But psychoanalysis and socio-history are not the only discourses, which explain the logic of

the “animal cry” theory and a connection between ecstasy and music theatre. A more

philosophical attitude regarding the affiliation between silence and ecstasy comes from

Willemsen (1986, p.104) who, in a penetrating discussion of “Dionysian Speaking” as

exemplified through the writings of Herder, Nietzsche and Musil, proposes that ecstasy is

“the immediate experience of nature” (ibid, p.109). “Immediacy” refers to the manifestation

of phenomena that the mind is unable to categorise or name. Reflection, apparently, is not

a category of ecstatic states while the “silence” which attends the ecstatic immediacy of

nature, according to Heidegger (in De Man, 1983, p.259), is not a negation of the

performative, but a commentary on it.

Therefore, this argument utilises the history of music theatre as it entails a history of

silences produced by nature. A history of these silences comprises essentially the histories

of arts and music: immediacy results from the “reality of images” (“Wirklichkeit der Bilder”),

as Klages put it (in Willemsen, 1986, p.112). This reality includes music, which functions as

a pre-linguistic or pre-conscious language of dreams, which, from Musil’s perspective, is

14 For a lengthy dissertation on this subject refer to, Toepfer, K. (1991) The Voice of Rapture: A Symbolist System of Ecstatic Speech in Oscar Wilde’s Salome, New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc.


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“language without a body” (ibid, p.119). This language without body may in turn breed a

“literature without any idea of domination” (ibid, p.120).

Willemsen concludes by asserting along with Bataille (1969: p.96-98), whom he

acknowledges, that orgasmic negation of the self signifies an indifference toward life: “At the

climax of rapture, the fact of existence itself becomes of neutral value”. Performance always

functions in tandem with a high value placed upon life, upon communication and the self.

At the moment of ecstasy, when the immediacy of nature undermines the categories of the

human, “neither reason nor language” exists to express the nothingness of the self (ibid,

p.135). Ecstasy cannot “perform” any more than death, and for the same reason: the need

for meaning ceases to exist for bodies in either state.

Moreover, performance has no claim to “immediacy” only in relation to its effects, not to its

actions, its materiality, and its body. Willemsen speaks of the body, as does Foucault, as

something that language and performance strives to dominate and neutralise. But in what

sense does the body produce an ecstatic silence? Mattenklott answers from a solidly realist

perspective which privileges the act of seeing and apprehending, the “immediacy” of

images:

We sense that truth is something unveiled […] To discover, to disclose, to undress something of all prejudices and represent it as nothing else… - hence as in love we prefer not to approach quietly until that unconcealed condition presses in on us, in which we have to look away. From outside we penetrate toward the center [sic] like a conqueror. But the closer we come to the core, the more language becomes occluded. Nakedness silences. We shudder in an incomprehensible perplexity- such is the assumption of theories of the sublime – that we perceive it [i.e., a condition of complete nakedness] as something utterly bare, to which nothing more or nothing else can be added. For this reason, nakedness is more frequently shown than described, remains an inexhaustible theme for image, while it is immediately without literary charm, as we already know from the past two centuries of pornographic belles lettres.

(Mattenklott, 1982, p.14-15)

But even these statements are perhaps an oversimplification of the relation between

performance and nudity (Mattenklott’s silent body), because it is not nudity in itself which

atrophies the performative and linguistic powers of its witnesses, but the degree to which

nudity functions as an index of proximity to ecstasy.

Therefore, in relation to the performative knowledges that I have propositionally

interchanged with ecstasy, there is a linguistic silence about performative knowledges

because of the immediacy of its relation to aesthetic experience. Nudity/Silence brings one

closer to ecstasy/performative knowledges and nudity/silence only insofar as being naked or


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watching nakedness entails a desired nakedness of feeling. Such nakedness of feeling is not

always simply a matter of seeing a body naked; or rather, the pleasure of feeling naked may

depend on acknowledging the voice, as part of the body which must be “unveiled”.

But Mattenklott’s observation does clarify the logic by which realism regards ecstasy as an

iconic rather than linguistic or performative phenomenon. It does not avail the analytic

position by which I can view the construction of the linguistic discussion about music

theatre’s ecstatic performance as that about performative knowledges.

The image of the body supersedes the sound of the voice as the immediate manifestation of

nature, powers of seeing surpass powers of speaking, in relation to the “performance” of

ecstasy. Indeed, since the eighteenth century, this perception of ecstasy has been so

persuasive that Wilhem (1979, p.33), in a discussion of “modern narratives” by Sade,

Klossowski, Battaille, and Blanchot, suggests that the relation between the voice (naming)

and the body has become such a profound source of concern for modern consciousness

that, beginning with the Sadian narrative, the liberating effect of writing (but not necessarily

reading) results from the construction of “formidable narrative machines…which exchanges

the places of discourse with the places of the body” (“qui échange les lieux du discours avec

les lieux corps”). “The narrative dissimulates the body” (“Le récit dissimule du corps”, ibid,

p.175, see also p.195-198).

In other words, these “modern” narratives attempt to disclose how the power of the body to

construct perception and feeling derives from the power of language and performance, in a

fictional mode, to name and “conceive” the body. In “modern” performance and literature,

the body is in the voice (insofar as a text “lives” organically with the same power to disturb

perception as a “real” body) as much as the voice is in the body, with narrative functioning

as the “simulacrum” of the voice.

The intensely realistic (i.e., psychologically detailed) complexity of modernist

“pornogrammic” or “pornological” (as opposed to pornographic) narratives (ibid, p.33) does

not “mirror” the body, through description, pornographic or otherwise; rather, the “modern”

narrative functions more as a model of the formal relation between language, the

performative and the body. It is this functioning of pornological narratives that will be the

most useful in the development of the relationship between performative knowledges, the

performance and the researcher. The body/researcher, is of course, a form in itself, the

form of being or presence, but the meaning of the body depends upon a narrative context


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for the body: thus, the formal organization of the narrative, the “body” of the narrative,

constitutes a more “realistic” disclosure of the body than any image of nudity.

However, this implication of the complex, “pornogrammic” narratives of writers like

Klossowski and Bataille does very little to undermine the pervasive appeal of the “animal

cry” theory of ecstatic performance and linguistic communication. For these narratives, in

their determination to demystify, deconstruct, or textualise the body (or rather the image of

the body), treat the body as a source of illusions, a mask, which, when “named” and

pressed into dialogue with narrative, emerges as a source, not of ecstasy, but of

disillusionment, disgust, humiliation, melancholy, despair, and hopelessly “heroic” attempts

to “transcend” or resist it.

The narrative voice (i.e., the authorial voice) does not enter the body nor does it “translate”

the body into the narrative; it transforms the body into the Imaginary, into a voice that has

no power to construct ecstasy because it exists above all to produce a self, a “signature”,

not to abandon it. The “modern” pornogrammic narrative becomes another “step in Man’s

[sic] drive for mastery over physic,” as Jardine (1985, p.108) remarks of Sartre’s postulation

of “existence before essence”. Through pornogrammic writing, the “modern” spirit

“conquers” the body and its illusory promise of ecstasy.

The “voice” of pornogrammic writing is always “outside” the body that feels ecstasy, it is

always “other” than any voice or image that “constructs” ecstasy. This voice is “modern”

because it seeks to free aesthetic (“literary”) language and performance from oppressive

attachment to “beauty”, to an idealise image of the body as the source of ecstasy; it

therefore focuses aesthetic energy into the construction of “negative” feelings: melancholy,

anxiety, terror, disgust, and repulsion, all of which arise from the “power” of performance to

“unveil” its own “body” (the text) and push the “real”, ecstatic body completely into the

realm of the Imaginary, into a discredited idealisation of the body.

Therefore, having gone this extended discussion that seems removed from the nature of the

ecstatic performance/performative knowledges propositional substitution, what does this

mean for the discussion of performative ecstasy

IF the re-reading of ecstasy is the manifestation of a supreme meaning, and IF supreme meaning is the situation of extreme ambiguity, and IF pornogrammic narratives, treat the body as a source of illusions, and IF named illusions emerge as a source of exclusions, and IF exclusion operate on a discrediting of idealisation, and IF idealisation works to completely push the known into the imaginary


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THEN the re-reading of the imaginary will manifest ecstatic meaning. OR AE(s) ⊇ M(rr) AE(s) ⊇ M(s & am) PN ≡ S(il) S(il) ⊇ M(e) M(e) ⊇ ID(d) ID (k ⊄ im) ID (~k) ∴ (M(rr) & ID(im)) ⊃ M(e)

Apparently it is very difficult for many “modern” people to believe that the manifestation of

ecstasy does not depend on the manifestation of an ideal, and as a result, many “modern”

narratives continue to put performative actions in a negative relation to the performing

body. Perhaps the most emphatic articulation of this position appears in the incomplete

aesthetic theories of Adorno (1977), for whom the value of aesthetic experience derives

from its capacity to heighten one’s sense of aloneness (difference), in a world unified

through illusions, by shifting perception into a perpetually critical (“negative”) relation

toward the economic and ideological conditions which produce unity of identity, among

other illusions. But the “negation” that Adorno preaches and practices entails an aesthetic

of intense distrust toward any signification of pleasure in reality; and this negativity can

never reach ecstatic intensity because the distrust that drives the negation is never a

component of ecstatic feeling, which is always the manifestation of a supreme trust.

Therefore, while traditional aesthetic theory (performance-as-artistic-product) views the

aesthetic experience as the ultimate embodiment of the ideal, performative knowledges

(performance-as-research) that the ultimate discourse about theatre requires a constant re-

reading of the idealism placed in aesthetic experience.

The problem, then, for the modern “critical” sensibility is, not to get “beyond” language or

the performative, which negates all illusions by constituting its own reality, but to get

“beyond” ecstasy, which in any manifestation is merely a response to illusions, a

consequence of limited (constrained) vision. Because the constraints are transparent to the

ecstatic body, and because constraints in themselves are as alien to “real” ecstasy as a

vigilant attitude of distrust, ecstasy always functions within the doctrine of critical theory as

a sign of “blindness” toward a reality that never justifies ecstasy.

Obviously the “animal cry” theory of ecstatic voice can operate in a variety of discourses:

Marxism, phenomenology, structuralism, psychoanalysis, socio-history, all of which tend to

make ecstasy a subject, not an object of discourse. Laski (1961) wrote a large book on

ecstasy, which unintentionally has the effect of documenting, “scientifically”, the


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pervasiveness of the realist attitude toward the relation between performance, language and

ecstasy. Her work uses a combination of ecstasy as something independent of ecstatic

meanings. Her emphasis is on collecting and cataloguing descriptions of ecstasy in the

terms supplied her by literary artists and sampled respondents. Thus her chapter on

“Language and Ecstatic Experience” (p.226-248) focuses on identifying the vocabulary (the

metaphors, really) that people use to form an image of ecstatic experience but the words

that describe ecstatic experience are by no means the same as those which construct

ecstasy.

Instead Laski identifies what she call “triggers” of ecstatic experience, such as drugs,

artwork, beautiful bodies, landscapes, memories, visions. But language is not a “trigger”,

and, moreover, none of these “triggers” seems to project any specific historical, cultural, or

ideological markers. Consequently, the book leads one to suppose that a timeless variety of

“triggers” can induce the same central emotion: ecstasy. The perception that ecstasy is the

same for everyone arises from the sameness of the (metaphoric) vocabulary used to

describe ecstasy. The sameness of this vocabulary reproduces the sameness of the

“scientific” language the interrogates ecstasy insofar as the interrogative language compels

those who encounter it to regard language itself as somehow “outside” what it describes: to

determine the “meaning” of ecstasy by asking people to describe what they think ecstasy is

automatically puts language in tension with ecstasy, for description itself is language that

constructs an image of something outside it.

Ecstasy constantly appears as a referent of performative and language, but the signifiers of

ecstasy are never in language or performance. This transcendental perception of ecstasy

encourages Laski to ascribe a quasi- mystical identity to the experience. Thus, while a few

pages (ibid, p.294-304) deal with “primary overbelief” and “the seeds of utopia”, Laski tends

to view ecstatic/utopian sentiment as a religious rather than political phenomenon

(“ecstasies do not seem to answer specific moral dilemmas,” ibid, p.337), and so the political

significance of ecstatic feeling, as well as the conditions which awaken the feeling, remain

very obscure.

It is premature to imply that ecstatic feeling functions to transcend reality rather than

change it as long as theoretical discourse, without having sufficient evidence, continues to

situate ecstasy “beyond” performance and therefore “beyond” politics, which is the

disclosure of power (to change) in performance. Without any political dimension, ecstasy

emerges as something which people experience, mystically, autonomously, in isolation from

the reality of an Other defined by the performative. Deprived of political significance,


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ecstasy seems nothing more than a fortuitous encounter with God or some intimation of a

divine spirit, and the same can be said of performative knowledges.

Therefore, what is left is only a slight indication of the nature of exclusions

IF an aesthetic of ecstasy is an embodiment of re-reading idealism, and IF an aesthetic of performance is the embodiment of trusting idealism, and IF re-reading of idealism is the functioning outside the subject, and IF trusting idealism is cataloguing internal to the subject, and IF the aesthetic of ecstasy is performative knowledges, and IF the aesthetic of seduction is artistic product, THEN performative knowledges are operating external to the subject and artistic product is operating internal to the subject. OR (A(e) ⊃ M(rr)I) & (A(p) ⊃ M(tr)I) (M(rr)I ≡ ex) & (M(tr)I ≡ in) (A(e) ≡ P(pk)) & (A(s) ≡ P(ap)) ∴(P(pk) ≡ ex) & ( P(ap) ≡ in)

- performance as a substrate of ecstatic

experience

Therefore, the previous track did not add a great deal to the notion of ecstatic performative

and performative knowledges. So where was the philosophical problem occurring? If these

critiques of various versions of the animal-cry theory of ecstatic voice urge us to

acknowledge that previous thinking about ecstasy tends to underestimate seriously the

significance of performance and language in materialising or actioning conditions for ecstasy,

perhaps it now needed to be considered what modes of action, what aesthetic properties of

performance, are important in the formation or exposure of a “system of ecstatic

communication in which performance, especially theatrical, assumes a central function.’

Barthes (1975) outlined a rhetoric for aesthetic discourse, especially that concerned with

literary texts, but this rhetoric applies only to the general phenomenon of aesthetic

“reading”; “the pleasure of the text” refers only to the conditions under which aesthetic

reading is possible. His short dissertation therefore functions as a kind of program that one

ought to apply to the reading of specific texts or types of texts. A major thesis of the book

is that aesthetic experience involves only one of two possible emotions: pleasure or bliss.

“Bliss,” he says (Barthes, 1975, p. 21), “is unspeakable,” because it is that emotion which,

according to Lacan (ibid, p.21), “cannot be spoken.” “Bliss may come only with the


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absolutely new [author’s emphasis], for only the new disturbs (weakens) consciousness…”

(ibid, p.40). Thus, “criticism always deals with the texts of pleasure, never the texts of bliss”

(ibid, p.21). Barthes’ use of the word “pleasure” is not very precise and seems to mean

what is “sayable” about the aesthetic interest of a text.

What’s missing in Barthes’ speculation is the acknowledgement that neither pleasure nor

erotic feeling are emotions in themselves; they constitute categories of emotions, categories

of attitudes which form in response to specific meanings, just as literal erotic feeling arises

in response to a particular body and not to the Body (the text). His argument makes clear

that pleasure is always “intermittent,” which is logically organised as a connection to a

fragment rather than a totality. However, he avoids the more ambitious task of showing

how the term “pleasure” conceals the emotions from which it acquires its power. The main

virtue of the book, then, is that in avoiding altogether the moralising rhetoric of catharsis

defining Aristotelian aesthetics, Barthes convincingly reveals that aesthetic experience –

pleasure – does not have any serious connection to emotions which dominate religious

experience: fear, awe, humility, or dogmatic conviction.

Therefore, the pleasure of the text is synonymous with a reading (not a writing) of what

myth or ideology doesn’t say or doesn’t want said. This short argument had created the

eureka moment I was trying to find. While I had previously assumed that the reading of

performative knowledges must follow the writing of performative knowledges, Barthes

argument had shown this to be precisely the wrong way around. I should consider that

because the ecstasy (pleasure) of a text is precisely what is excluded it can be considered to

be read before it is written.

While this is confusing, it is an important notion that the pleasure of text is not in the text as

such but in the criticism of the text. But from this general perspective, in which aesthetic

“value [has] shifted to the sumptuous rank of the signifier,” (Toepfer, 1991, p.30) every text

is a reading of another text, with analysis itself constituting a great text read by all other

texts; with value attached to the action rather than the effect, every text (either aesthetic or

linguistic) may be read as a critique of the analysis and in that critique is the pleasure of the

text.

More problematic is Barthes’ suggestion that desire may have nothing at all to do with

aesthetic experience: “we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure; Desire

has an epistemic dignity, Pleasure does not” (1975, p.57). But perhaps it is misleading to

put desire in tension with pleasure, for one can speak sensibly enough of a desire for


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representation, a desire for meaning, a desire for pleasure. Desire thus appears as the

force, which connects aesthetic experience to representation. Yet Barthes’ statement

remains significant because it implies that aesthetic experience is not synonymous with the

objectification or satisfaction of a desire, thus reinforcing the conceptualisation of a re-

reading before it is written.

In relation to our previous discussion, this perception of satisfaction of desire is discussed as

the empiricist theory. Therefore, if matter ceases to be matter once it becomes a concept,

and if a concept of matter’s exteriority to desire is always something is less than absolute,

what is the analytical status of this ‘outside’? Is it produced simply by philosophical

discourse in order to effect the appearance of its own exhaustive and coherent

systematicity? What is cast out from philosophical propriety in order to sustain and secure

the borders of philosophy? And how might this repudiation return? Thus while it is still

seeking the excluded it has made significant improvement in narrowing down our site for

investigation – investigating the reading rather than the writing of such texts.

CATEGORISATION OF ECSTATIC CONSTITUENTS

Barthes’ essay indicates that, as categories of emotion rather than emotions themselves, the

terms “pleasure” and “desire” tend to conceal, rather than expose, relations between the

performative and emotion.

Therefore, if a particular emotion, such as ecstasy, enjoys particular relations to

performance, it is necessary to differentiate that emotion from other emotions belonging to

the same general category (pleasure/desire). The particular emotion in itself entails an

attitude toward the emotion, which controls the capacity of performance to ‘materialise’ the

emotion. Thus by doing this the argument is concentrating not on differentiation for the

purpose of clarity of inscription but for clarity of reception, thus working through the model

of exclusion.

A more complex problem is to determine how a definition entails an attitude, an emotional

relation to performance. No adequate theoretical apparatus is available to me to solve this

problem, other than to suggest that a definition is the first step in building a theory of the

identity defined and that any definition makes the being of the object defined congruent

with the being of the language itself: an emotion “is” something only to the extent that “is”-

ness, the act of defining, is exclusively the “power” of language. Thus, in defining ecstasy -

in saying what ecstasy “is” – it is already acknowledge that language “constructs” ecstasy.

The initial problem, then, is to determine how language constructs a “difference” between


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ecstasy and other emotions that it “constructs.” Thus it has come to what I consider to be a

satisfactory conclusion surrounding the nature of language construction with performative

knowledges. While I am happy to acknowledge that the language constructs the

performative knowledges through its very existence, what I am contesting is how language

will enable us to determine the exclusory difference in helping us situate performative

knowledges as the matter of performance research discourse.

So how does this definitional argument help our discussion, the pervasive perception persists

that in an erotic context (at least) ecstasy is a type of orgasm or super-orgasm energised by

an extremely powerful mood of love. Every erotic action is an intimation of the ecstatic; but

the evidence that ecstasy does not depend on simultaneity of feeling in different bodies

suggests that love does not cause ecstasy – possibly it is the other way around. Feelings of

love are not intimations of ecstasy; they are signs of a capacity for ecstasy. This point is

important because while I can accept that ecstasy may entail some signification of love, it is

obvious to anyone who has felt or been the object of unrequited love that some love is

incapably of intimating ecstasy. A woman, a complete stranger, may unknowingly perform

an action which I deem erotic because it signifies her capacity to construct ecstasy, not in

herself, but in me, whose capacity for ecstasy obviously precedes any capacity for love.

Conversely, a woman may feel (and signify to me) an intense love for me, which I reject,

because I sense that her love lacks any potential for ecstasy. Love may signify itself through

an erotic action, which is an intimation of ecstasy for the person performing the action, but

not necessarily the person loved; a person who performs an erotic action unknowingly

nevertheless can intimate ecstasy in someone who is unknown to the person performing the

action. It is for this reason that I say that erotic action, not the signification of love, is

always an intimation of the ecstatic.

A system of ecstatic performance manifests itself most nakedly through a type or genre of

performative text, which intends to construct an overt relation between performer and text.

Such a genre is research. Of course, not all performance systems are research, in the sense

that systems are research because the forces that create them saturate them with research

objectives. However, because it is correct to perceive ecstasy as a ‘performative’ emotion, it

is useful to consider reasons why performance is a preferred genre for objectifying a system

of ecstatic performance. And thus why performance may be a preferred genre for

objectifying a system of performative knowledges.

Performance implies systems whose ‘real’ or strongest meanings depend on enactment. A

performance text seeks to objectify and intensify this dynamic relation between performance


ecstatic knowledges

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and meaning. I suggest that a system of performance is ecstatic to the extent that it is a

supreme magnification of the principle of dynamism inherent in the performativity of a

performance text.

Ecstasy itself, even when ‘beyond’ language, is an inherently dramatic condition. The notion

of abandoning the self or of being outside oneself implies movement, a dynamic, dialogic,

interactive relation between sites, forms, or objects of meanings. Ecstasy refers to an

optimum economy of meaning exchange. And yet ecstasy is a turbulent emotion, defined by

highly dynamic distributions of power and perception within and between forms. The desire

for this emotion is pervasive; it is the emotion for which most people live, for no matter

how rarely it is experienced, it offers the greatest meaning for existence. But in referring to

this supreme meaning or desire as an ‘optimum economy’, therefore a linking of ecstasy to a

form of utopia. A utopia which lacks an ecstatic dimension is above all a utopia devoted to

the satisfaction of needs rather than desires. Indeed, a non-ecstatic utopia does not imply

feeling any particular emotion; it implies having particular rights, resources, or things. It is

not an optimum economy of meaning exchange; it is equilibrium of power and action. Non-

ecstatic visions or narrative of utopia tend to project an image of finality, a world of static

perfection, ‘timeless’ symmetry of power and harmonious communication systems that

abolish rather than satisfy desires. The reason for non-ecstatic utopia is free of desire and

the gamut of emotions for which desire is a general category is that desires operate within

mechanisms of domination, hierarchies of value, preference that invariable entail sacrificial

(discriminatory) violence. (Butler, 1996, p.286) Desire is always an inclination towards one

value rather than another; and ‘rather’ denotes an asymmetry of power within a field of

perception, a hegemony of value defined and encoded by emotions.

To say this is to acknowledge, that for the intelligibility of performative knowledges it must

unlike artistic product not desire one value rather than another, the texts of performance-as-

research must be complete without artistic selection; or the asymmetry of power will disrupt

the power of perception and as a hegemony define the outcomes, thus negating its ability to

site itself as research.

Therefore,

IF an aesthetic of ecstasy is an embodiment of re-reading idealism, and IF an aesthetic of performance is the embodiment of trusting idealism, and IF re-reading of idealism is the functioning outside the subject, and IF trusting idealism is cataloguing internal to the subject, and IF functioning outside the subject does not allow selection, and IF functioning inside the subject compels selection, and


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IF the aesthetic of ecstasy is performative knowledges, and IF the aesthetic of seduction is artistic product, THEN performative knowledges are operating as the complete text while the artistic product is operating as a selected text of communication. OR (A(e) ⊃ M(rr)I) & (A(p) ⊃ M(tr)I) (M(rr)I ≡ ex) & (M(tr)I ≡ in) (ex ≡ (M(ns)) & (in ≡ (M(s)) (A(e) ≡ P(pk)) & (A(s) ≡ P(ap)) ∴(P(pk) ≡ (M(ns)) & ( P(ap) ≡ (M(s))

Thus to materialise performative knowledges this argument has investigated a number of

significant relationships between it and ecstatic knowledges. It is important to take this

point to reiterate the outcomes of this investigation, and to delineate between performative

knowledges and aesthetic knowledges.

Performative Knowledges (Performance-as-Research) is materialised, non-selective, non-

idealist, exclusory, definitional, based in reiteration and re-reading, functions outside the

performance, ambiguous and total, source of descriptive illusion, greater than previous

knowledges, uncertain in meaning, active in exclusion, and opaque to the user.

Aesthetic Knowledges (Performance-as-Artistic-Product) is constructed, selective, inclusory,

non-defined, based in single apprehension, functions internal to performance, is based in

idealism, has singular purpose, source of ideal illusion, operates within previous knowledges,

seductory in meaning, descriptive in exclusion, and transparent to the user.

CONCLUSION

Obviously ecstasy is a very complex emotion, and performative knowledges a very complex

concept. For both the conditions for their occurrence are also complex, dependent upon the

production of complex meanings over which any desiring ecstasy or performative

knowledges is never entirely in control. The complexity intensifies with the

acknowledgement that ecstasy/performative knowledges are not always beyond

performance but are beyond the ability for performance to construct. Indeed, it is evident

that attitudes toward performance control capacities for ecstasy insofar as one cannot feel

ecstasy or apprehend performative knowledges, and still withhold or repress performance

from the awakening Other because one fears the consequences of one’s words. However,

to say that ecstasy and performative knowledges are complex is to say that neither are

arbitrary or fortuitous; and that both are the manifestation of an intricate signification

system.


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However, it is not difficult to assume that if the signifying system manifests itself through a

text, the historical and ideological pressures on the system are properties of perhaps a text

higher up the hierarchy. Therefore, in an effort to dissuade the argument from detriment of

a linguistic hierarchy, I have incorporated a further discussion of this argument in an

aesthetic text called ‘the iniquity project’.

part ii – the implicit cycle

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part ii – the implicit cycle This section details the dialogic gap of the materiality of performative knowledges, and

documents this gap through a non-linguistic text. This section includes the chapters: the

iniquity project, and the ecstatic performance.

part ii – the implicit cycle

iniquity (as in den of)

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iniquity (as in den of)

AT THIS JUNCTURE PLEASE VIEW THE COPY OF ‘INIQUITY’ CONTAINED WITH THIS

THESIS OR REFER TO THE MEMORY OF THE LIVE PERFORMANCE.

A copy of the working manuscript for this performance is contained within appendix a to this

document.

The video representation of the performance of ‘iniquity’ is not a substitution for the live

performance and should be used as a supplement.

part ii – the implicit cycle the ecstatic performance

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the ecstatic performance

- introduction

My intention in this section is neither an analysis of the performance of the play iniquity nor

a justification for its existence. It is simply an exploration of the directorial application of

ecstatic performance conventions within a music theatre context. Hence this section maps

the argument of this thesis against performance.

What follows is essentially an aesthetic document – a director’s thoughts and intentions – it

is not an explanation of the performance nor could it ever hope to be. A performance “is

not something which is neatly packed and distributed to an anonymous consumer; instead,

the meaning of a performance is created by the performers and the spectators together, in a

joint act of understanding.” (Sauter, 2000, p.2) Therefore, no matter what the director’s

objective, a performance and the knowledges contained within it exist independent of

his/her intentions.

- monologic ecstasy

‘Iniquity’ culminates with a representation of ecstatic feeling in the form of a mono-

performance given by the male character. The performance is ecstatic insofar as the

performer is in a state of self-abandonment, completely given over to a mood of Otherness.

The otherness is intended through the detachment from the Image the world around him, or

the efforts of the other character to inscribe Images upon him. As mentioned earlier, the

text implies that such a condition is equivalent to a state of being utterly without fear of the

consequences of one’s words. The male character performs without concern for any

audience but himself; the aesthetic reader of this text (the viewer)15 who reads the

performance is in fact intruding into the personally inscribed performance of performative

knowledges, similar to the reading of a personally inscribed academic document such as this

thesis.

15 It is important to note here that this performance is not meant to be apprehended by the audience as an artistic product. Instead, the aesthetic skills used for apprehending artistic products are turned to the function of reading an aesthetic text of inscribed performative knowledges. While it is acknowledged that any viewer can aesthetically apprehend and read the text, I also argue that such a reading is enhanced by a higher proficiency in the reading of music theatre. I argue that this is a simple linguistic correlation, while most people can read academic literature, the greater the proficiency of the reader at reading academic literature, the more they apprehend from it.


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But the performance’s knowledges are not really a source of ecstasy, as they are in the

classical mode of ecstatic performance, but simply the externalisation (or “eroticisation”) of

an internal condition. A possible proof for this assertion might follow from the failure of the

performance to provoke ecstatic (or even pornographic) response in the spectator or any

performer on stage. The source of the performer’s ecstasy is a complex of things seen

which, for the sake of clarity, we may call The Spectacle of Resistance.

What excites the performer is the sight of the veiled body, the mouth that would not accept

his kiss, and the performer’s own vulnerability or nakedness (after stripping away the second

skin of leather) before the release. His ecstasy is an acknowledgement of his extreme

vulnerability and fearlessness in the presence of the ambiguity.

But the vulnerability and fearlessness are possible only because the speaker feels love, a

powerful compulsion to transcend his own identity by absorbing another identity (“to find my

life, I lose it” Appendix A, p.39) or, more precisely, by exulting in the destruction of the

other identity: that of the young woman. The absorbed or destroyed identity embodies a

purity, which surpasses that of the performer, even though, technically, the male character

remains virginal within the relationship. Therefore, within this performance ecstasy implies a

confession of impurity and a monstrous discharge of ambiguity.

Underneath, between, inside everything, something horrible. I sometimes wonder what a person has to do to go through life completely numb. To pretend, to not be a single thing to a single person, simply animate orifices of pleasure, disgust and violence. I’m absolutely honest with you. I’ve looked for the words to describe. But you shifted, I’ll resist your hide-and-seek allure. Through the hole in the wall, I seen men entering you, screwing you, sucking (Tom looks up at Kathryn) I see the moments going by fuck by fuck, dick by dick, through the little hole in the wall. Of all the people I ever…. knew. I see potential & I see squander. (Iniquity, p.19)

But while the performance is not the source of the performers ecstasy, it is nevertheless the

prime signifier of ecstasy. The performer’s ecstasy is not supreme unless he tries to

represent it, objectify it, externalise it, even if he concerns himself with not other witness to

its representation but himself. The monologue appears as an eruption of words that could

not be spoken before the gratification of his desire. (Ecstasy in this case does not depend

upon the return of the performer’s desire. The flippant reference to the customers of the

man, some of whom lavish ineffectual eroticism upon The Young Man, suggests that, for

him. ecstasy glorifies a capacity to eroticise rather than a power to attract erotic desire.)


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This spectre of resistance, in relation to erotic desire, is extended in the insistent paper

falling sequence, the most obvious case in the performance text of feeling and identity being

represented without performance. Within this sequence, the nature of the performative

cannot represent a state of ecstasy, for, like the elaborate metaphorical performance when

the male gaze is first engaged (the first meeting of the gaze in mirror), the performance is

merely a performative device for seducing the performers. This is done by constructing a

perception of The Young Man that conforms to the identity he wishes The Young Woman to

have; it is a means for achieving ecstasy, not the embodiment of ecstasy itself. The meeting

of the gaze, like silence, is symptomatic of a repressive environment which ecstatic

performance negates.

The argumentative arrangements of the ecstatic situations do not differ significantly from

the argumentative arrangement of the rest of the text. Indeed, the ecstatic situations

incorporate all of the devices we have discussed. It would seem that by incorporating all of

the argumentative categories discussed in the previous chapter, that the performance also

produces an extremely complex convolution of the aesthetic and perceptual effects, which

we have ascribed to each ecstatic argumentative category. Clearly the amassing of effects,

which, throughout the play have worked to destabilise perceptions does generate a total

effect of profound ambiguity in which the manifestation of ecstasy emerges as a very

strange and alien phenomenon, not only in the supertextual sexual context of the work

itself, but in the performative context which enacts the play and watches it. The performer’s

ecstasy is both ‘monstrous’ perversion, and ‘monstrous’ because it is perverse.

The basic value of the performance is that it discloses how in eroticised performance

performative developments intersect, overlap, multiply, echo, absorb, subsume, supersede,

and complete each other. The devices unfold concurrently, rather than discretely, to

dramatize the notion that ecstasy consists of a range of subsidiary emotions, such as

delight, resentment, pride, love, wonder, curiosity, tenderness, and vindictiveness. The

complexity of the performance derives from the intricate patterns of repetition embedded in

it. Each pattern presumably possesses its own motive, which contributes to a swollen,

ecstatic mass of motives. But the performer ambiguates these motives by addressing his

statements to a dead person: his purpose is not to “communicate” through language but to

excite himself with the realisation that he no longer has any motive for speaking to anyone

living who might “understand” him. Ecstasy is not the ultimate end of “communication” or

“understanding” but a supreme indifference to these conditions.


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I am simply washed clean. The intense pleasure of addiction. Apathy as the solution to living. Deciding to keep to what fate has set, I cannot escape my fate and it is not my fate to give up. To take the cost of living, moment-to-moment closer to edge. But as the slide begins, can we not tell that this cannot have a happy ending. (Iniquity, p.24)

The work employs what I have titled ‘numerous performative shifts’ Many of these shifts

involve modal construction that compound moods and actions to amplify, protract, or

vaguely qualify the central action of a statement. Within this notion of performance, the

performer and the inscribed performative, shift freely from past to present to future within

the contextual inscribing actions. Modal constructions function to suspend the performative

of an inscribing action and attach the action to an ambiguous ‘auxiliary’ condition used to

amplify the ecstatic content.

Ecstasy does not imply a capacity to experience different notionalities simultaneously;

rather, it constitutes a capacity to shift from the description of one notion to another. It is

performance that ‘exposes’ it. An ecstatic notion unfolds in a linear fashion but not in a

chronological mode. Instead, the ecstatic performative is a particular set of sentiments

which unfolds in linear fashion, and each sentiment emerges in relation to non-

chronologically ordered constructions of the past, present, or future. A statement in the

present performative evokes a statement about the past, which motivates a statement about

the future.

The ecstatic performative is neither chronological nor “unbounded” nor oblivious of itself. It

is time which moves according to the rhythm of a performer who is uncertain whether his

condition signifies the beginning or the end of an aspect of his being. Ecstasy is a

transitional state at the same time that it is ultimate. In other words, ecstasy does not entail

a condition of wholeness, totality, or finality, yet neither can it accommodate any sense of

deficiency, lack, or emptiness. The durability of ecstasy thus seems dependent on the

power of performance to include the performative within feelings that pulse independently of

their proper (chronological) order as events in repetition.

The ecstatic attitude toward time operates in relation to a bewilderingly intricate use of

repetition. While within this performance there are numerous obvious references to

repetition (a copy, of a copy, of a copy), there are also numerous dialogic repetitions that

are layered within the performance to reinforce the ecstatic ambiguity.

We hear dripping water on electricity; the scene is one of complete domestic boredom with a highly charged, heavy, oppressive environment. Kathryn is


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grooming herself in the mirror, she is intrigued by the grooves of her own body, languidly caressing her neck and necklace, she is acutely aware of the effect this movement is having on Tom and seems to enjoy the attention. The lights on stage flicker, like wavering street lamps and flickering fluorescent bulbs, we hear the distant sound of rain. In the flickering light, Tom crosses to catch Kathryn’s eyes in the mirror. He begins caressing Kathryn from behind running his fingers through her hair and retreating to behind the stream of water. A phone call breaks the silence, but Tom and Kathryn can’t break from their languid caressing, they paying no attention to the phone call. TOM (VOICEOVER) My life was in a strange way that summer and you have heard all the rest. But my life is like everything around here. Everything is a copy, of a copy, of a copy. I copied life, I got down on my knees and sucked. Facsimile pussy, facsimile cock, but then again, they all look the same after being copied out of any real existence. Under the final line we hear the breaking of a storm and water drips into the central void. The dripping water into a stainless-steel bowl and it fades to black. We hear the sound of an old projector coming to life, a film is projected onto the back wall and Tom retreats from Kathryn to behind the stream of water. The film shows footage of obsessive writing in a diary. The drawing and writing in the diary is repetitive a single hand going over and over a page, we also see momentary glimpses of naked men and women in various scene of bondage and sexual acts. The film is not steady but instead it is like the inside of a mind showing quick glimpses of memories. The film fetishises the atmosphere, again reinforces Tom’s words that the environment is simply an inferior facsimile, a copy of a copy. As the film is flickering to a close and as the music dies we are left with a single image on the back wall of the box reading ‘Monday’. The dripping of water continues. (iniquity, Appendix A, p.3)

What is perhaps significant about them is that, even in conjunction with the already

developed notions of the materiality of the performance, they do not do more to signify the

performer’s rapture: in a state of ecstasy, the performer has no difficulty in communicating,

in forming thoughts, in completing his intention, so the repetition serves a separate purpose.

Rather, than working within the paradigm of artistic clarity, the performative repetition

works to develop Bertrand Russell’s ‘Theory of Definition’ as it applies to the ecstatic

performative. In essence:

Ambiguity expands the relationship, not in reference to the total amount of information in the representation, but in synchrony with the urge to return to the representation, to “re-read” it. Each repetition or re-reading of the representation (or part of it) must produce a variation in meaning if the reader is to experience the understanding exclusion. Re-reading implies a capacity to ‘see’ not the mention or the ‘word constructed by the text’, but the materialisation itself, which is then as the source of the meaning(s) sustains an (aesthetic) emotion felt for its own sake, or in our terms the source of research undertaken not for the purpose of the performance but for the purpose of research. from this Thesis, page 61


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By attaching the little cries to complete thoughts and by scattering the orgasmic pauses at

rather widely separated intervals, ‘The Young Man’ of iniquity indicates that the source of

the ecstatic cry is the articulation, the performance of a knowledge. However for ecstatic

consciousness, the sum of the performed thoughts consists of an extremely complex pattern

of repetition, layers of thought-rhythms that the performer complicates even further and

protracts (since it is only his release of resistance which stops him from performing) because

of the knowledge that the condition can never recur.

As ‘The Young Man’ of iniquity begins to talk about the momentary nature of life, he totally

abandons this theme until he is entirely a performer in the dark. From there onward, nearly

everything he says has to do with the momentary nature of life. In other words, the

performance possesses a distinctive theoretical interest insofar as the language exposes a

motive for performance rather than for enacting what he is performing. The performer does

not declare his love for the Young Woman, and does not amplify any declaration of

emotional attachment, where the theme of love develops through convoluted repetition of

tense shifts. He appears hesitant in declaring his erotic interest until after she has

extensively analysed the object of erotic interest and her past and present relations to the

object.

From the first moment ‘The Young Woman’ steps into the water void, however, ‘The Young

Man’ begins with declarations of erotic interest in different performative tenses with

observations on capacities for seeing or looking. The Young Man’s failure to locate the

erotic interest of the The Young Woman simultaneously explains his silence, his release of

resistance, and her reason for performing: one locates the reality of erotic interest as one

locates the aesthetic – as something made apparent through performance.

However, as argued before, performance does not necessarily ‘locate reality – it veils reality

in the sense that The Young Man, who, before The Young Woman identified herself to him,

veils her. ‘The Young Woman’ as a reflection in the mirror states “Lovers in the rain are only

a reflection in the water, Appendix A, p.2) and therefore ‘The Young Man’ is to “see” reality

through the performance, implicit in the fabricate (the reflection) image of ‘The Young

Woman’ which actually masks ‘The Young Woman’ who is before one’s eyes.

The performer registers the magnitude of her eroticism metaphorically in terms of the power

of “natural” forces She cultivates a vague mood of reproach and regret, as if she can

sustain her rapture only by acknowledging something impossible, incomplete, imperfect, or


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at least impure (“Thank you, Daddy Dearest”). There is no ecstasy without the

disintegration of an illusion, the subversion of an ideal, an image of purity.

Ecstasy hardly implies an encounter with the absolute, even though it appears aligned with

an intense encounter with death. It is not in the action of being erotic but it is feeling the

erotic which drives one toward ecstasy, and so the mood of regret gives way to an aphoristic

conclusion in which the performer universalises her condition by referring to love as that

which abstracts identity and makes it ‘singular’ rather than the plural tension which up to

that point dominates the work.

The shift from plural to the singular dramatises and satirises the concept of intersubjectivity.

The plural tensions feed into, or culminate in, the aphoristic singular that is everyone with

the capacity to feel the erotic. The erotic explains the perverse or ‘monstrous’ actions of the

performer (either real or virtual), but the explanation does not resolve the morbid tension

between identities. Rather the erotic is the thing that makes “one”, everyone, one

ecstatically alone, profoundly estranged from the performative which thrives on illusions of

“understanding” arising from the dominance of sight, image, appearance, visibility over the

capacity of the mind to “know” what is “real”.

It would be morbid of a spectator to feel that ‘The Young Woman’ deserves the annihilating

punishment inflicted upon her by ‘The Young Man’ at the conclusion of the piece. The text

and the crushing to death of the performer awakens the reader/spectator’s awareness of

their individual capacity to emphasises or sympathises with those assertions of human

identity and erotic feeling that are morbid and bizarre. But this capacity of the reader to

love is devoid of the ecstatic thrill of suffusing the performer’s eroticism, for the reader is

conscious of the fatal consequences – of the deaths – as they are explained in the

introducing voice overs. ‘The Young Man’s’ rapture depends on her obliviousness to these

consequences, to this pressure in the performance to motivate violent sacrifice, to manifest

death.

The work ends abruptly and sadly with the implication that humans recover their sense of

purity (‘The Young Man’ attempts to recover his within the only pure space of the set: the

water void) through violence, ritual sacrifice, calculated suffering. ‘The Young Man’

sacrifices the life of ‘The Young Woman’ in order to placate his own craving for purity, for

release from the Image of him in which the rest of the performative seeks to imprison him –

i.e. the Image of the Momentary. This craving is synonymous with his hunger for ecstasy

and, more importantly, his desire to give and receive supreme “mysterious” erotic interest.


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The text embeds ecstatic impulses in the craving for purity, yet, paradoxically, it is this same

craving that sustains the pervasive fear of the aesthetic and its pervasive uncertainty about

the ‘authenticity’ (or purity) of appearances which fragments perceptions, undermines

feelings of trust and eroticism, amplifies the subjective “sexual” features of the performative.

This notion intensifies the authority of sensual experience (materialism and “addiction” to

images, especially of metaphorical construction), and produces a “decadent” atmosphere.

This notion is imprisoned within oppressive luxury, power is arbitrary and despotic but

incapable of satisfying, the desires of the performer’s identity, and unity of perception

between anyone (“understanding”) remains a doomed hope.

The play does not perceive ecstatic performance as differing significantly in stylistic and

performative devices from the language employed throughout. In short, ecstatic

performance does not differ in its formal organization from the common language of the

mythic society which the text as a whole constructs. Though the performative devices may

strike the spectator as perverse or arbitrary in their remoteness from the performance we

employ in ‘pragmatic’ artistic situations, ecstatic performance does not possess its own

performative categories. It is a monumental synthesis of categories that operate

independently of the performer’s mood. However, this monumental is not the sheer

quantity of performative acts, it is the “eruptive” nature of the piece.

What is unique about the erotic components is their monologic character. At this monologic

site all the performative categories interact, but now they seem to have lost their

performative functions. Thus, once ‘The Young Man’ has lost all concern for the

consequences of his words and their persuasive efficacy, the performer performs without

any listener in mind but himself. He empties the categories of their persuasive power and

leaves them with a power that is “pure” in the sense that it is an end in itself. The work is

like an orgasmic utterance in that orgasmic utterance has no performative function; it

signifies the performers submission to an overwhelming neuro-physiological power that

‘naturally’ resists the power of the performative to represent it.

‘The Young Man’s’ monologic function dramatise a situation in which ecstasy is possible only

when the performer submits to another overwhelming power – the power of performance to

represent and objectify the uniqueness of his mood. His monologic function is at most

extreme embodiment of individualism, even though the language itself never transcends the

performative categories of a society that discourages and eventually annihilates such

uniqueness (or perversity).


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This resolution eventually constructs a utopia (i.e. an ecstatic performative) that is possible

only on an individual level; it has no social dimension, no power to construct a model of a

utopian society, for it is passive. Moreover, the ecstasy generated within this utopian

resolution depends on a performance stripped of its performative functions, a performative

which no longer “communicated” with an acknowledged listener or Other but becomes a

narcissistic, quasi-masturbatory objectification (or representation) of that mirror in which

one finds identity, a redemptive desire or desirability, that the world seems incapable of

“seeing”.

Just before she dies, the bodily ‘The Young Woman’ disappears altogether, and she becomes

nothing but her voice – or rather, her voice seems to eclipse her image as the signifier of

her body, her desire and desirability:

KATHRYN Good things about Tom Mills? Could take some time!… Tom is talented. Tom is tender… Tom is beautiful… TOM (interjecting, he is tender and loving) You're such a liar… KATHRYN … Tom is a mystery… Tom is pressing against Kathryn, moving up her body, kisses her shoulder, the cord wrapped tightly in his hands… The audience is aware of the build menace of the scene, nothing good can happen now, they are just waiting for the inevitable. KATHRYN (VOICEOVER) (cont’d) …Tom is not a nobody. Tom has secrets he doesn’t want to tell me, and I wish he would. Tom has nightmares. That’s not a good thing. Tom has someone to love him. That is a good thing! (Feeling Tom’s weight on her) Tom is crushing me. Tom is crushing me. (Suddenly alarmed) Tom, you’re crushing me! (iniquity, Appendix A, p.83)

The Young Man’s monologic function indicates that the magnitude of ecstatic experience

does not depend on one’s power to celebrate things in themselves (the “real), but rather on

one’s power to represent them, without recourse to any greater motive than self-

abandonment through self-objectification. The elaborately artificial language winds up being

as amoral in its utterly aesthetic objective as the intricate mechanisms of nature and

evolution. A society which fears the body and its abstraction, its “death” through a pure

apprehension of the aesthetic and which seeks to dominate and domesticate that fear will

gradually assume that it deserves ecstasy on easier, more material terms than aesthetics

allows.


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Sexualism, as exemplified by iniquity, suggests that the signifier is the source of

contradiction, ambiguity, difference, and violence. The text constructs a hypothetical society

in which the ideology of intersubjectivity operates pervasively. Every utterance swells,

luxuriously with ambiguity. Yet these utterances operate within the form of commonplace

performative devices which function to make apprehensive the pure aesthetic.

Materiality, from this sexualist perspective, is consciousness of difference, not unity of

perception or feeling. The signifier does not dissolve the ambiguity of the cosmos; it

manifests it. What becomes invisible is not the signifier, but the subjectivity, the feeling

provoked by the signifier. That feeling above all is fear: fear of impurity, fear of abstraction,

fear of death, fear of what has no image, no ‘apprehension’. But all these fears emanate

from a dominant fear of the body, that image of identity that intensifies aesthetic feeling

into erotic feeling and dissolves representation as the thing between subjectivities.

The body, as signifier of ecstatic potential, conceals the signifier of ecstatic reality: the

performative. In the end, ‘The Young Man’s’ body disappears into darkness, nothingness,

but the pleasurable (virtual) performative continues. The performative reality implies that

such a magnitude of ecstasy does not manifest itself without great violence and without the

calculated detachment of the performer from the world of the performance. At this

magnitude of ecstasy, the Other no longer has a body – or rather, the body of the Other in

the performative signifier. Representation no longer stands “between” the self and the

Other; it is the Other, that level of consciousness which propels one out of one’s self – and

eventually out of life. The performative communicates that the ideology of intersubjectivity

cannot produce utopia, only ecstasy, for it is ecstasy, the most powerful and desired

manifestation of difference and uniqueness, which establishes the value of life independently

of its value to others, as an image or as something “understandable” in the performance-

world, in the social reality defined by the communicative system.

Music Theatre as a transformational enactment involves the transformation of language into

the performative – i.e. the performance of music theatre returns the arbitrary power of

inscribed signifiers (spatialised languages) to performer, to bodies. But this transformation

entails the transformation of the performer’s identity: the language, as performed, produces

the impersonation of an imaginary being (the “character”). The language is not “authentic”,

even in its performed manifestation, because it makes the performer someone “other” than

his or her “real” self. Iniquity enacts the inability (or refusal) of performed language to

authenticate any perception or identity.


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It does more. In ‘The Young Man’s’ monologic function, the performance of rapture, which

“monstrously” glorifies linguistic signifiers at the (murderous) expense of referents, detaches

itself not only from the performance-world defined by the performative devices, but from the

body, which dissolves into darkness. Neither the body nor a text “contains” the language.

But the voice does not “glorify” itself, as opera functions tend toward; it glorifies textuality

(both linguistic and non-linguistic). It glorifies the production of ambiguity, not the

production of the “world”; it glorifies the production of meaning, not the production of

“truth” or “reality”. And as such, textuality is “pure” a completely aesthetic phenomena.

The text excludes altogether the idea that ecstatic speech can assume a conversational form

or that ecstatic consciousness depends on the formation of “new” radically “different”

relations between words, of that ecstatic communal unity, signified or constructed through a

mass choral voice, has any place in the ecstatic system of performance.

Yet the monologic functions of the characters within iniquity suggests that this ecstatic

manifestation of purity, which is also the ultimate secretion of ambiguity, exists only through

the “presence” of a “monstrous” erotic feeling – i.e. through the superior will of the

performer to get outside of the Image, outside of their body, outside of representation and

into a condition of Otherness which is neither repeatable nor surpassable, only protracted,

prolonged, then killed. For ‘The Young Man’, self-abandonment does not “mean” self-

destruction. He simply goes on talking to sustain his ecstasy. Self-abandonment means

self-destruction (i.e. destruction of the ecstatic performer, who is completely ‘other’ than

one’s self) only for ‘The Young Woman’, for the performance-world, for those who fear to

acknowledge any “mystery greater than the mystery of death”. Ecstasy, then, manifests

itself as a peculiar system of meaning formation and exchange, and this system is not

“outside” or “beyond” the repressive, quasi-theocratic (“mysterious”) system of communal

performance that makes communication possible. Repression is the ground of ecstasy,

which occurs, not through the invention of a new “revolutionary” signifying system, but

through the pressure of an “invisible” feeling, love, to empower performance to dissolve the

transparency of the communal system of performance.

However, the text intimates the conditions under which we may overcome the “archaic” fear

(of impurity) defining performance communities and communication. Neither “new” symbols

nor even “new” performative structures can release communal identity from the fear

dominating it. It is not a question of a “new” textuality. Rather movement toward ecstatic

utopia depends on dissolving the transparency of signs and performative structures, on

dissolving the transparency of texuality (linguistic and non-linguistic) itself. When textuality


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loses it transparency, fear of being different (impure) can no longer hide within transparent

signifying practices. Indeed, such fear no longer exists, because difference achieves a

higher value than communality.

‘The Young Man’s’ speech and actions suggest that the only emotion stronger than fear is

the erotic. Fear binds performers into a community, and the erotic is what separates the

performer from the community. The erotic is the most powerful agent of difference within

the community – it is so “strange”, so “mysterious”, and so difficult to “understand”. The

erotic exposes the communicative structures which fear conceals. As long as we fear what

we do not “understand” and as long as “mystery” remains the sign of a power (the body,

the unconscious) which we fear, the “we” will never belong to a utopia and only a few of

“use” will ever find ecstasy. Therefore, the emancipation of ecstatic power is through the

difference, rather than unity, of identity.

- “The Diary” as Research

One of the interesting thoughts about using “The Diary of One Who Vanished” as a piece at

the basis of an argument about the nature of performance-as-research is that this piece has

within its approach and development many of the qualities that, through this thesis’

argument, have been attributed to Performance-as-Research.

Around 1916 when the poetic material on which “The Diary” is based was being published,

Janáček was finalising his thoughts on speech-melody. (Boyars, 1992, p.281) Therefore,

with “The Diary” Janáček is emboding his new thoughts about approaches to opera and to

composition in general. Following this small experiment, Janáček largely abandoned the

number opera, integrated folksong firmly into his music and formulated a performative

theory of ‘speech-melody’, based on the natural rhythms and the rise and fall of the Czech

language. This work was to influence all his ensuing works and give them a particular

colour through their jagged rhythms and lines. (Boyars, 1992, p.34)

Therefore, “The Diary” being Janáček’s first investigation of the nature of ‘speech-melody’ in

practice, has many of the developmental qualities that could place it within the Performance-

as-Research framework. Many of the development of Janáček’s ‘speech-melody’ theory,

show a continual procedural cycle between theoretical and practical instantiations of

individual thoughts layering into a performative theory that has its practical instantiation in

“The Diary”. While ‘speech-melody’ theory is almost certainly Janáček building on


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Romanticism’s trend towards coalescence. (Tyrrell in Janáček, 1989, p.iii) Indeed, from

Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and Skryabin’s colour piano to the number of major composers

of the period who addressed their audiences in words as well as music, Janáček’s ‘speech-

melody’ theory is a carefully developed experiment to forward a notion of text imbedded

within Romantic musical composition.

Therefore, “The Diary” is a reminder that the development of Performance-as-Research

should acknowledge the large number of artistic works which have broken new ground

around periods of change and flux in artistic practice. These works might indeed harbour

many traits which when mined could be shown to help develop and form the bricolage of

Performance-as-Research.

- concluding thoughts

Therefore, this implicit argument has continued to develop the nationality of performative

knowledges as material to the methodology and epistemology of performance-as-research.

In doing this, iniquity was shown to be non-selective in its construction, non-idealist in it

information matrix, exclusory to notions of audience intelligibility and artistic construction,

definitional in it use of performative languages, based in a model of reiteration and re-

reading, functioning as a text outside the notion of performance and ambiguous in its

textuality. In this realm, the performance is an inscribed object of argument, both within

the language and aesthetic text the argument for the nature of performative knowledges is

developed.

part iii – the explicit returns

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part iii – the explicit returns This section details an application in which the theoretical groundwork is applied to the

epistemology and methodology of performance-as-research. This section includes the

chapters: the ecstatic performative, the research performative, and the epilogue.


the ecstatic performative

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-introduction

Following the development of the explicit and implicit cycles of the philosophical argument, it

is important to return to ecstatic performative, its relationship to the materiality of

performative knowledges and the conceptualisation of ‘research performative’ as a

methodological concept for performance-as-research.

- arguing with the real

Countering the notion that aesthetic experience is the most effect expression of performative

knowledges in language, this thesis has sought to recast performative knowledges as a

mode of reconceptualising power within performance research discourse. For discourse to

materialise as a set of effects (which is the purpose of research), ‘discourse’ itself must be

understood as complex and convergent chains of regulatory ideals, and it must contextualise

these ideals before it explicates the notion of their use within a research methodology. In

this sense what is constituted in discourse, is not fixed in or by discourse, but becomes the

condition and occasion for a further action – or as has been argued the site of materiality.

As I have argued, the concept of the ecstatic performative does not mean that any action

or site of materiality is made possible by research discourse. On the contrary, the ecstatic

performative makes clear that certain discourses are barely apprehensible as repeated

discourses, for the ‘acting’ effects that they have materialised are those without it is seen

that the act of research discourse cannot operate. Therefore, in the words of Butler (1996,

p.187) “The power of discourse to materialise its effects is thus consonant with the power of

discourse to circumscribe the domain of intelligibility.”

- when the lost action speaks

If the notion of ‘performative knowledges’ within performance-as-research discourse can

never fully describe what it names, that is neither because the category simply act without

describing nor because ‘performative knowledges’ are the lost action of performance.

Performative knowledges mark a dense intersection of relations that cannot be summarised



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through the terms of identification. As a consequence, the terminology that is used within

contemporary performance research is inadequate to usage within performance-as-research

and inadequate to help in the identification of this dense intersection of terms.

However, ‘the research performative’ will gain or lose its stability to the extent that it

remains differentiated and that differentiation serves the research goals. To the degree that

the differentiation produces the effect of a radical essentialism of performance, the term will

work to sever its constitutive connections with other discursive site of research investment

and undercut its own capacity to compel and produce the constituency that it names.

‘Performative knowledges’ must work not to be an overarching knowledge base that will

solve all the problems of performance research but instead work to serve its own intended

purpose which is to include aesthetic knowledges within the realm of academic discourse.

To serve this purpose, performative knowledges must work with artistic practice as academic

writing does for creative writing where each serve a important purpose but both use

essentiality the same ingredient of the written English language.

Therefore, constitutive instability of the term and its incapacity ever to fully describe what it

names, is produced precisely by what is excluded. While I have attempted to problematise

that exclusory force, it has not been possible to identify these exclusion. The fact that

there are always constitutive exclusions that condition the possibility of provisionally fixing a

name does not entail a necessary collapse of that constitutive outside with a notion of a lost

action,. Such a view not only reifies performative knowledges as the lost action, as that

which cannot exist; but sites any research based on such a view - performance-as-research -

as the vain effort to resist that particular proclamation. To call into question performative

knowledge as the privileged figure for ‘the lost action’ is to recast that description as a

possible signification of power and to open the term as a site for a more expansive

rearticulation.

It is this rearticulation that any methodology of performance-as-research must attempt to

privilege by making it one of the primary associative methods. The performance-as-

research methodology developed in the next chapter will seek to do this.

Thus the argument creates a paradox, the assertion of the ‘real’ as the constitutive outside

to symbolisation is meant to support anti-essentialism, for if all symbolisation is predicated

on a lack, then there can be no complete or self-identical articulation of a given linguistic

knowledge. And yet, if performative knowledges are positioned as that which cannot exist,

as that which is barred from existence by the law of aesthetic experience, then there is a



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conflation of performative knowledges with that foreclosed existence. That creation and

exclusion of a lost action, that is surely as pernicious as any form of ontological essentialism,

which is at the basis of any performance analysis.

If essentialism is an effort to preclude the possibility of a future for the action, then the task

is surely to make the signifier into a site for rearticulation that cannot be predicted or

controlled, and to provide for a future in which constituencies will form that have not yet

had a site for such an articulation or which ‘are’ not prior to the siting of such a site.

Here it is not only expected unity that compels phantasmata investment in any such action,

for sometimes it is precisely the sense of futurity opened up by an action as a site of

rearticulation, that is the discursive occasion for hope. Butler (1996, p.219) persuasively

describes how once the political signifier has temporarily constituted the unity that it

promises, that promise proves impossible to fulfil and a disidentification ensues, one that

can produce factionalisation to the point of political immobilisation. But does politicisation

always need to overcomes disidentification? What are the possibilities of politicising

disidentification, this experience of non-recognition, this sense of standing under a sign to

which one both does and does not belong? And how am I to interpret this disidentification

produced by and through the very action that holds out the promise of solidarity?

Performance-as-research must embrace a policy of performative disidentification at the level

of aesthetic essence. The expectation of a full recognition leads to a necessary sense of

‘monstrous doubling’ and ‘narcissistic horror’, a litany of complaint and recriminations in the

wake of the failure of the term to reflect the recognition it appears to promise. But if the

term cannot offer ultimate recognition – and here Butler (op. cit.) is right to claim that all

such terms rest on a necessary méconnaisance – it may be that the affirmation of that

slippage, that failure of identification is itself the point of departure for a more democratising

affirmation of difference in aesthetic experience.

This recognises that at the basis of methodological import for performance-as-research is a

dual system of recognition and non-recognition, of identification and disidentification, of

linguistic apprehensibility and non-linguistic apprehensibility, and of cognitive understanding

and non-cognitive understanding. This is an important duality that is at the heart of the

nature the materiality of performative knowledges, within performance-as-research.

To take up the political action (which is always a matter of taking up an action by which

research is initiated) is to be taken into a chain of prior usages, to be installed in the midst



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of a dynamic set of actions that cannot be situated in terms of clear origins or ultimate

goals. This political notion is important to an understanding of the place of performance

research in the politics of performance research. This means that agency can never be

understood as a controlling or original authorship over that active chain of effects, and it

cannot be the power, once installed and constituted in and by that chain, to set a sure

course for its future. The ‘chain’ of dynamic actions operates through a certain insistent

citing of the action as an acceptable analytic practice, an iteral practice whereby the political

action is perpetually resignified and compulsively repeated at the level of the dynamic

political action. Indeed, an iteral practice that shows that what one takes to be a political

signifier is itself the sedimentation of prior signifiers, and the effect of their reworking.

Therefore, a dynamic chain of actions is political to the extent that it implicitly cites the prior

instances of itself, drawing the phantasmata promise of those prior actions, and reworking

them into the production and promise of ‘the new’. A ‘new’ that is itself only established

through recourse to those embedded conventions, past conventions, that have been

invested with the political power to act as the future discourse.

Therefore, in simpler terms

IF performative knowledges are exclusory and regulatory in nature, and IF exclusory natures are implicitly constructed through disidentification, and IF disidentificiton is part of the identification/disidentification dualism, and IF dualism are inherently the basis of political discourse, and IF discourse is composed of chains of actions, and AND these chains of action are either original or reiterative, and IF reiterative chains of action work as a regulatory power, and IF reiteration is either composed of original signifiers, prior signifiers, or their effects, and IF the composition is made apparent through a process of sedimentation, and AND sedimentation is the basis of ‘new’ discourse. THEN ‘new’ discourse in performative knowledges is based in a chain of sedimentation made apparent through regulatory disidentification. OR P(e & r) e(ds) K(id v ds) D(p) ≡ D(ds) D(ca) & ca(or v ri) ri(r) ri(os v ps v es) ri(os v ps v es) ⊇ (ri(s) & (s ≡ ND)) ∴ ND(P) ≡ P(s & r & ds)

It is in this sense, then, that political signifiers might be avowed as ‘acted’, but the action

orientation might be rethought as the force of citation. Agency would then be the double



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movement of being constituted in and by the action, where ‘to be constituted’ means to be

compelled to cite or repeat the action itself. This sites ‘acting’ strictly within the notion

ecstatic compulsion; where the emotion is both shown through and within the action itself.

Enabled by the very signifier that depends for its continuation on the future of that citation

chain, agency is the hiatus in iterability, the compulsion to install a regulatory practice

through repetition, which requires the very contingency, the undetermined interval, that

aesthetic experience insistently seeks to foreclose. The more insistent the foreclosure, the

more exacerbated the temporal non-identification of that which is heralded by the action of

performance. The future of the signifier of aesthetic experience can only be secured

through a repetition that fails to repeat loyally, a reciting of the signifier that must commit a

disloyalty against aesthetic experience in order to secure its future, a disloyalty that works

the iterability of the action for what remains non-identical in any invocation of aesthetic

experience, namely, the iteral or temporal conditions of its own possibility.

Therefore, the methodology must include some basis of conditional application that

compares for the non-identical iterations, and privileges these as sites of information about

the temporal conditions of performative knowledges and their aesthetic reference.

For the purposes of political solidarity, however provisional, performance research has called

for a political aesthetic that will halt the disunity and discontinuity of the signified and

produce a temporary linguistic unity. The failure of every such unity can be reduced to a

‘lack’ with no historicity, the consequence of a trans-historical law, but such a reduction will

miss the failures and discontinuities produced by analytical relations that invariably exceed

the action and whose exclusions are necessary for the stabilisation of the signifier. The

failure of the signifier to product the unity it appears to name is not the result of an

existential void, but the result of that term’s incapacity to include the analytic relations that it

provisionally stabilises through its individual set of contingent exclusions. This

incompleteness will be the result of a specific set of analytic exclusions that return to haunt

the claims of aesthetic experience defined through negation; these exclusions need to be

read and used in the reformulation and expansion of a democratising reiteration. That there

can be no final or complete inclusiveness is thus a function of the complexity and historicity

of an analytic field that can never be summarised by any given description and that for

democratic reasons, ought never be.

By not including the notion of materiality of performative knowledges performance analysis

has sought to enforce the autocracy created through the notion of the mystery of aesthetic



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experience. However, for the notion of performance-as-research to function it must be

more democratic in its assumed significance.

When some set of descriptions is offered to fill out the content of an aesthetic experience,

the result is inevitably fractious. Such inclusory descriptions produce inadvertently new sites

of contest, resistances, disclaimers, and refusals to identify with the terms. As non-

referential terms, ‘performative knowledges’ and ‘the research performative’ institute

provisional identities and a provisional set of exclusions. The descriptivist ideal creates the

expectation that a full and final enumeration of features is possible. As a result, it orients

this notion toward a full confession of the contents of any given knowledge category. When

those contents turn out to be illimitable, or limited by a pre-emptory act of foreclosure, the

politics of performance research flounders on factionalised disputes of individual definitions.

To understand ‘performative knowledges’ as a permanent site of contest, or as a

performance research site of antagonistic struggle, is to presume that there can be no

closure on the category. That the category can never be descriptive is the very condition

of its political efficacy. In this sense, what is lamented as disunity and factionalisation from

the descriptivist ideal is affirmed by this anti-descriptivist perspective as the open and

democratising potential of the category of performance research.

Therefore, the methodology of performance-as-research must have no method of

foreclosure, which would create this method of antagonistic struggle. However, it must be

noted that foreclosure is not unending, indeed the need for inclusory ending is important to

the notion of perpetual political instability, for without notional endings regulatory ideals

cannot be reiterated and therefore included with the process of sedimentation which helps

materialise performative knowledges into discourse.

The numerous refusals on the part of ‘aesthetic experience’ to accept the descriptions

offered in the name of ‘aesthetic experience’ not only attest to the specific violence that are

had at the hands of a partial concept, but to the constitutive impossibility of an impartial or

comprehensive concept or category. The claim to have achieved such an impartial concept

or description shores itself up by foreclosing the very political field that it claims to have

exhausted. This violence is at once performed and erased by a description that claims

finality and all-inclusiveness. To ameliorate and rework this violence, it is necessary to learn

a double movement: to invoke the category and hence provisionally to institute an identity

and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest. That the

term is questionable does not mean that research ought not to use it, but neither does the



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necessity to use it mean that research ought not perpetually to interrogate the exclusions by

which it proceeds, and to do this precisely in order to learn how to live the contingency of

the political action in a culture of performance stability and critical specificity.

Therefore, in order to develop a methodology of performance-as-research the researcher

must pay attention to the required double movement of invocation and contestation.

CONCLUSION

Given the uniqueness of each performance-as-research project, and the constant change in

research contexts, the ecstatic performative is mostly interested in these contexts rather

than in the individual performance. It is my aim to take the individual nature of the ecstatic

performative and rediscover the joy inherent in the notion of individual performative acts.

This will be the ultimate conclusion to the materialisation of performative knowledges.

part iii – the explicit returns the research performative

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the research performative

- introduction

The risk of offering a final chapter on ‘the research performative’ is that the term will be

taken as intending to provide a concrete finalisation As previously stated this thesis is

intended as a beginning. There is much work still to be done, and the necessary

conversations and arguments need to take place before a community can be built for

performance as research.

- reiteration at work

To begin this process of methodological development, I have condensed the premises

developed through this thesis .

From the arguments of the ‘part i – the explicit cycle’ it is important to highlight the

preliminary list of attributes which differentiate performative knowledges from aesthetic

knowledges.

Performative Knowledges (Performance-as-Research) is materialised, read, non-selective,

non-idealist, exclusory, definitional, based in reiteration and re-reading, functions outside the

performance, ambiguous and total, source of descriptive illusion, greater than previous

knowledges, uncertain in meaning, active in exclusion, and opaque to the user.

Aesthetic Knowledges (Performance-as-Artistic-Product) is constructed, written, selective,

inclusory, non-defined, based in single apprehension, functions internal to performance, is

based in idealism, has singular purpose, source of ideal illusion, operates within previous

knowledges, seductory in meaning, descriptive in exclusion, and transparent to the user.

While this only the beginning of the descriptive identification of the differences between

performative knowledges and aesthetic knowledges, it does provide an interesting insight

into the research differences which performance can serve within performance analysis. As

such it is important to look for these within the methodological model, as these are the

attributes that the methodology is attempting to make apparent.


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From ‘part ii – the implicit cycle’ focuses on the place of aesthetic texts within this research

paradigm. Aesthetic text is placed within the paradigm to allow a reading of the evolving

argument without recourse to a language structure in which regulatory structures are

implicitly re-enforced.

The aesthetic text has the relationship to the notion of artistic product, as academic writing

has to the novel. The aesthetic text require readers who are engrossed within the aesthetic

and can read the text at the level of an academic document. To site the document within

the notion of an aesthetic text, enables the writer of the text to site the arguments that they

wish to discuss through the complex notion of performative knowledges within a language

that is equal to the task of representing that complexity. Thus there is no detriment to the

research product from linguistic efficacy, only from confusion created through performative

complexity.

Therefore, while performance-as-research is still far from being fully formulated, this

complexity that is inherent within its performative, helps to create a basic understanding of

the complex thought-processes or strategies deployed by performance researchers.

Research efforts may then be given time to explore, test, or revise their creations, for the

work is treated as a form of knowledge, rather than an associated artistic product.

The acknowledgement and use of those performative knowledges creates highly evolved

new work less constrained by the economics of their production and commission. By

contrast, the Australian performance industry suffers a perpetual shortage of highly evolved

new work with which its widely acclaimed performers can develop either them or their

audiences. A research based in an understanding of the materiality of performance

knowledges is uniquely positioned to work with the industry to advance the kind of

performance-as-research, which will enrich and enhance the investigation, creation, and

legitimisation of highly evolved research performances.

As is evident within ‘the implicit cycle’ the argument is not only an investigation into

performative knowledges but also as an indication of the use of performance in the

intellectual investigation of art and practice. Therefore, within performance-as-research, it

will be important to develop a methodological means for collecting, collaborating and

creating highly evolved artistic works no longer contingent on the economics of product.


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At the heart of performance-as-research is an emerging faith in the nature of aesthetic

argument that it is possible to know and transfer to others everything that this performative

object argumentively contains. This is the essence of research practice.

From ‘part iii – the explicit returns’ it is important to reiterate the methodological concerns

created by ‘the ecstatic performative’. These notions help to solidify the notion of ‘the

research performative’ as separate from the descriptive means of performance analysis.

Performance-as-research, therefore, must embrace a policy of performative disidentification

and to do this it must recognise a number of methodological factors:

(1) it must recognises that at the basis of methodological import for performance-as-research is a dual system of recognition and non-recognition, of identification and disidentification, of linguistic apprehensibility and non-linguistic apprehensibility, and of cognitive understanding and non-cognitive understanding, and

(2) it must recognised that the ‘chain’ of dynamic actions at the basis of performance-as-research operates through a certain insistent citing of the action as an acceptable analytic practice, and that this is practice whereby the political action is perpetually resignified, compulsively repeated and itself created as the sedimentation of prior signifiers and the effect of their reworking, and

(3) it must be recognised that a dynamic chain of actions cites the prior instances of itself, and reworks them to produce and promise of ‘the new’, and that this ‘new’ is itself only established through recourse to those embedded conventions, past conventions, that have been invested with the political power to act as the future discourse, and

(4) it must be recognised that to understand ‘performative knowledges’ as a permanent site of contest, it is important to presume that there can be no closure on the category, and

(5) it must be recognised that to ameliorate and rework the category it is necessary to learn a double movement: to invoke the category and at the same time open the category as a site of permanent political contest.

In recognising the importance of these methodological factors, it is integral to place at the

heart of this methodological model the differences between performative knowledges used

in performance-as-research and references to aesthetic knowledges used in performance

analysis. These are:

(1) the recasting of the matter of performative knowledges as the effect of a dynamic of power, such that the matter of performative knowledges will be in dissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialisation and the signification of those material effects;

(2) the understanding of “acting” not as the process by which a subject brings into being what they name, but, rather as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains;

(3) the construal of “aesthetic experience” no longer as a performative knowledges’ given on which the construct of apprehension is artificially


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imposed, but as an analytical norm which governs the materialisation of performative knowledges;

(4) a rethinking of the process by which a performative knowledge norm is assumed, appropriated, taken on as not, strictly speaking, undergone by a subject, but rather that the subject, the speaking “I” is formed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming ‘as’ an aesthetic experience; and

(5) a linking of this process of “assuming” a dimension of aesthetic experience with the question of identification, and with the discursive means by which the scienco-analytic imperative enables certain aesthetic identifications and forecloses and / or disavow other identifications.

The next section of this chapter develops a methodological model for performance-as-

research an explains it relation the concepts reiterated above. Before the arguments

continues, I think it is important to explain that the model developed is named ‘The Macklin

Model’ not out some egocentric view of the importance of this model but to serve an

opposing purpose that it is not seen as some objective answer to the methodological

problems so far encountered.

- the dispar model Dynamic Interaction System for Performance-As-Research

To deal with the methodological questions posed above, this thesis has developed a specific

performance-as-research model where both the Research Performative and the Performative

Product (the performance product) are mediated through the identified Dynamic Chain of

Creation (the creative process). Thereby, these independent notions are connected through

an unending figure-of-eight model with two separate circles – the explicit or cognitive circle,

and the implicit or non-cognitive circle.

The Explicit (or Cognitive) Circle develops the theory of performance through the interaction

between the ‘Dynamic Chain of Creation’ and the ‘Research Performative’ and as such this

interaction influences both the explicit and the implicit cycle.

The Implicit (or Non-Cognitive) Circle creates knowledge through the interaction of the

‘Dynamic Chain of Creation’ and the ‘Performative Product’ and as such influences both the

explicit and the implicit cycle.


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figure i - the dispar model

KNOWLEDGE SELECTION CRITERIA

Whereas traditional epistemologies try to distinguish "true" knowledge from "false"

knowledge by postulating one or a few unambiguous "justification" criteria (e.g.

correspondence, coherence, consensus) in an performance-as-research context I must admit

that many different influences impinging on the acceptability of knowledge. Therefore this

model does not include any notions of “true” or ‘false’ but tries to differentiate between

"more adequate" to "less adequate" forms of knowledge. In the present framework, this

ordering is considered to be partial. It is not alway the case that one model is better than

another one.

Knowledge is more or less adequate according to how well it fills the selective criteria of the

model. Any performance sited as ‘The Performative Product’ must be developed through an

argument with the following attributes: the process of creation must be non-selective, the

argument presented must be non-idealist and be based on an understanding of which

knowledge has been excluded from the performance, it should be ambiguous, uncertain in

meaning, active in exclusion, and opaque to the user.

The analysis through ‘The Dynamic Chain of Creation’ must be a knowledge created through

reading a performance rather than inscribing or creating a performance, the knowledge

must be created through a reiteration and constant re-reading of the performance following

explicit cycle implicit cycle

time

research performative

performative product

dynamic chain of creation


Page 115

analysis, the knowledge created must be able to function outside performance, and it must

attempt to develop knowledge that is greater than previous understandings.

The aesthetic text used as ‘The Performative Product’ must fulfil the obligations not as an

artistic product but as an academic text without recourse to a language structure in which

regulatory structures are implicitly re-enforced.

Siting the document within the notion of an aesthetic text should enable the researcher

access to the complex notion of performative knowledges within a language that is equal to

the task of representing that complexity. Therefore, there should be no detriment to the

research product from linguistic efficacy.

By developing a two-cycle system, this model recognises the dual system of recognition and

non-recognition, of identification and disidentification, of linguistic apprehensibility and non-

linguistic apprehensibility, and of cognitive understanding and non-cognitive understanding.

Each dualism is has privileges within a certain cycle, thus proving the ongoing political

contest whereby an action can be revisited throughout the figure-of-eight cycle and is thus

perpetually resignified, compulsively repeated and itself created as the sedimentation within

the explicit cycle of prior signifiers and the effect of their reworking.

The infinite structure of the figure-of-eight cycle recognises that to understand ‘performative

knowledges’ that there can be no closure. However it also works to cement the double

movement that to invoke the category within the implicit cycle and at the same time opens

the category as a site of permanent contest within the explicit cycle. This same infinite

attribute enforces the matter of performative knowledges as the effect of a dynamic of

system which never ceases, the constant combination of explicit and implicit, insist on the

matter of performative knowledges (the implicit cycle) from being indissociable from the

regulatory norms that govern their materialisation and the signification of those material

effects (the explicit cycle).

Within this model, the implicit cycle influences the explicit cycle and vice versa. This

suggests and reinforces that performative knowledges (implicit cycle) is assumed,

appropriated by the research (explicit cycle). Within this cyclical notionality it is not, strictly

speaking, a one-way influence and the implicit cycle is further formed by virtue of having

gone through such a process of assuming within the explicit cycle.


epilogue

Page 116

epilogue

- the discursive limits

This is by necessity an unfinished product requiring further explorations of these notions of

materiality, performative knowledges, and performance-as-research.

Importantly, it has not been possible to fully conceptualise the area of exclusion as a

method of materialisation nor fully articulate on the attributes that make up exclusion.

Exclusion is a difficult notion and the limited space of this thesis did not allow a full

exploration of the philosophical considerations that have surrounded the process of trying to

come to terms with its essential nature. Just as performative knowledges once seemed as

the irreducible point that cannot be completely understood so exclusion too currently

remains too dense and complex for the purposes of research.

It has also not been possible to identify all the regulatory practices that have influenced me

and hence it has not been possible to make th4se explicit.

Neither has it been possible to map all the processes utilised on this journey nor to give the

credit that is due to so many, as I would have wished.

Finally, as stated in the beginning this argument is not intended to be programmatical but

rather a clarification of ‘performance-as-research. Thus it was that in his memorable essay

on politics and language, that George Orwell (1993, p.57), observed, “when we begin to

prefer the vague to the exact, we reduce the range of our consciousness. Eventually, he

predicted, we will not know, and then we will not care”. In this narrative on performance-

as-research, the vagueness has been acknowledged in order to drive us forward to care

about performative knowledges as genuine objects of research.

source material

Page 117

source material This section details reference material for the argument contained in this document. This

section includes the chapters: the bibliography, and the appendices.

source material

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Page 118

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appendices

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appendices

Appendix A – The Working Script of “Iniquity”

This working manuscript of ‘Iniquity’ contains the two current English translations of “The

Diary of One Who Vanished”. The left-hand column is by Seamus Heaney and the right-

hand column by Bernard Keeffe. This is not a complete script but the working manuscript

from which the performance was developed, some of the words used were a combination of

the two translations.

in+iq·ui·ty (I'nIkwItI)

19 February 2002

iniquity This Performance-as-Research project is submitted in partial completion as a component of the Master of Arts (Research) within the School of Theatre Studies at the Queensland University of Technology.

“To Find My Life, I Lose It”

R 18+ - Restricted to Adults 18 years and over Includes Smoke Effects, High-Pulse Strobe Lighting, High-Level Course Language, Nudity, Sexualised Violence, Depictions of Unusual Fetishes, and Adult Themes.

Characters

Kathryn Vincent, a stunning woman in her early 20’s, she is a prostitute obsessed with the small things in life. Thomas Mills, is an older man in his late 20’s, he is a prostitute who is obsessed with just getting by day-by-day

Setting

as we enter ‘inquity’ we are aware of the dank, dark contemporary void which

exemplifies this contemporary city. with noises of traffic, and constantly interrupting

arguments from the neighbourhood disputes we are brought to the lower end of this

dark city. it is a city of lost hope, of dreams shattered, of youth disappearing. it is a

place with its own feelings, smells, sounds, sights and tastes, and the people of ‘inquity’

are barely subsisting. within this world bodies are the major currency, bodies are

bought and sold to make the world more bearable.

kathryn and tom are not unusual for this city but like anybody they still have intense

hopes and dreams no matter how hurt and damaged they may be. apathy is the survival

skill for this city, and this is a skill tom and kathryn have learnt well. they are just

existing as the two nobodies they were born to be. ‘iniquity’ is at its core the struggle of

kathryn and tom against their intense feelings for each other and what these feeling

mean for their everyday existence. feelings give them no choice but to care, and it is the

caring that is their downfall. by feeling for one another they also have no choice but to

feel all the hopelessness, apathy and greed which surrounds them. this is the tradegy of

‘iniquity’…..

iniquity 19 February 2002

1

preshow Scene One The audience congregate in the dark and slightly smoky annex, the room has a dank smell of old beer and wine. A recording of Michael Nyman’s “The Book Depository” is playing in the background. The doorway to the theatre is lit by a single sign of red perspex against aluminium and it reads - iniquity. The room is decorated in a rundown decadent style of inter-war Europe with splashes of modern delights. The windows are draped with swathes of black material and as they view the room the audience is aware of only three elements - red, black and aluminium. Guarding the doorway, to the theatre is an usher dressed in black PVC. The room gives the impression of opulence and sensuality incorporating all five senses – sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. With a sudden burst Michael Nyman’s “The Memorial” begins….. Scene Two Two ushers, in an almost trance-like state, enter from outside the annex heading towards the theatre each carrying a silver platter of steaming asparagus above their heads. As this ceremonial parade nears the theatre the doors swing open, and the parade begins down a corridor, the audience follows. The theatre is filled to the brim with stacked newspapers and lit by small flickering electric lamps scattered through the paper. The theatre is a cacophony of sounds mixing “The Memorial”, a voice from loud hailer and a television news report interjecting from two televisions set amongst the paper. As the audience heads down the corridor of light they are aware of a low, hollow wind sound and the dripping of water, and electricity sparking. The audience starts to feel the chill of the theatre as they enter the dark, dank world of ‘iniquity’. LOUDHAILER (VOICEOVER) (repeated ad nausea)

Nothing about you redeems your life. The greatest joke on mankind is that every

morning we are there, every night we are there but how often do you take responsibility

for being there? Never because you are simply the excrement of social existence.

At the end of the corridor, the audience are ushered through to the seating bank which is facing a bounded box. On the front of the box is a large house curtain with a large insignia, between the curtains are a pair of woman’s leg, she looks as if she might be lying down naked, no clothes are visible from beneath the curtain only her diamond-banded spiked heels. Six front-of-house lanterns filled with candles, light the house. As “Memorial” comes to the conclusion the house lights dim and a set of voiceovers begin - two single voices (which we later realise are Tom and Kathryn) and a conversation between two policemen. The conversations and statements fade in and out over each other. TOM (VOICEOVER)

My life was in a strange way that summer, the last summer of its kind there was ever to

be. I was riding high on sex & self esteem – it was my time, my belle époque – but all

the while with a faint flicker of calamity, like flames around a photograph, something

seen out of the corner of the eye.


2

Sex and love, beauty and pain, passion and flesh. Each an age, a time, a hope….

KATHRYN (VOICEOVER)

Lovers in the rain are only a reflection in the water. Darkness spreads with every scent

& smell of their body. With the lovers, the mirror, the darkness, the rain. To find that

final kiss means finding a mirror, the clearest and most loyal mirror.

FIRST POLICEMAN (VOICEOVER)

A crime of passion. A crime of violence.

SECOND POLICMAN (VOICEOVER)

Passion? Yeah, look at all that passion bruised around her neck.

TOM (VOICEOVER)

As the saying goes, you only hurt the ones you love but it goes both ways. If only we

could hurt ourselves…..

KATHRYN (VOICEOVER)

With hands around your throat anything you say is simply a muffled gurgle of escaping

air.

TOM (VOICEOVER)

And it all has something to do with a woman called Kathryn. If I could just go back. If

I could rub everything out, starting with myself. Starting with thinking I could be

anything by an inferior copy, a diary of nothingness…. Following the voiceovers, the two ushers come forward and open each lamp and extinguish the flames. They then stand and ceremonially parting the curtain. Under the final words of the voiceover, instantly a blast of “The Miserere” which then fades away. Scene Three The low wind swells, underlining the silence of the scene and the city, intermittently we hear dogs barking, dripping water and distant arguments. The scene is one of a simple bounded box, the hollow wind sound has continued from before below the recording of ‘Miserere’. Tom is sitting on a side rise eating from a brightly lit silver platter of asparagus. Tom matching the box wears a long, black velvet overcoat over black leather pants and vest, he is intently watching the audience, and around him are the platter of asparagus, a metronome, a phone and a small lamp. Kathryn who is reclining at the front of the box, it was her legs that protruded from underneath the house curtain. Kathryn is a stunning


3

woman in her early 20’s, she has a pale complexion with thick black hair, she is dressed in a flowing gown entirely composed of satin, and is adorned with a stunning necklace of silver and diamonds. Tom places a half eaten asparagus back on the platter, he leans back to the black metronome which he sets ticking. Under the music they are slumped against the prompt-side wall, as the metronome starts ticking Kathryn rises and crosses to look at herself in the OP side mirror. We hear dripping water on electricity, the scene is one of complete domestic boredom with a highly-charged, heavy, oppressive environment. Kathryn is grooming herself in the mirror, she is intrigued by the grooves of her own body, languidly caressing her neck and necklace, she is acutely aware of the effect this movement is having on Tom and seems to enjoy the attention. The lights on stage flicker, like wavering street lamps and flickering fluorescent bulbs, we hear the distant sound of rain. In the flickering light, Tom crosses to catch Kathryn’s eyes in the mirror. He begins caressing Kathryn from behind running his fingers through her hair and retreating to behind the stream of water. A phone call breaks the silence, but Tom and Kathryn can’t break from their languid caressing, they paying no attention to the phone call.

TOM (VOICEOVER)

My life was in a strange way that summer and you have heard all the rest. But my life is

like everything around here. Everything is a copy, of a copy, of a copy. I copied life, I

got down on my knees and sucked. Facsimile pussy, facsimile cock, but then again, they

all look the same after being copied out of any real existence.

Under the final line we hear the breaking of a storm and water drips into the central void. The dripping water into a stainless-steel bowl and it fades to black. We hear the sound of an old projector coming to life, a film is projected onto the back wall and Tom retreats from Kathryn to behind the stream of water. The film shows footage of obsessive writing in a diary. The drawing and writing in the diary is repetitive a single hand going over and over a page, we also see momentary glimpses of naked men and women in various scene of bondage and sexual acts. The film is not steady but instead it is like the inside of a mind showing quick glimpses of memories. The film fetishises the atmosphere, again reinforces Tom’s words that the environment is simply an inferior facsimile, a copy of a copy. As the film is flickering to a close and as the music dies we are left with a single image on the back wall of the box reading ‘Monday’. The dripping of water continues.


4

monday Scene Four Out of the darkness, a torch flickers to life. Firstly, it highlights the dripping water and then flickers out. Kathryn again stands facing the mirror, and a voiceover begins…

TOM (VOICEOVER)

Let me begin again. Kathryn wasn’t anything different than other people. When I met

her Kathryn wasn’t necessary intriguing just startling. But as most people prowling the

streets will say, that state, between awake and asleep, between about two and four in the

morning, any light will startle you, anything can take on mythic proportions.

Underneath the voiceover, the music has begun and Tom sings highlighted by the torchlight he is holding. A faint glow is across the rest of the stage seems cold and uninviting. The dark and decrepit nature of the surroundings is slowly becoming apparent. Facing the dripping water from the corner of the box, and looking at a leather bound book in his hand, Tom begins to sing… I

TOM

I startled this young gypsy girl

Lightfooted as a deer,

Black ringlets on her mushroom breast,

Her eyes that cut deep into me

As she slipped behind a tree,

Two eyes that haunt and follow me

All the long,

long day.

I

TOM

One day I met a Gypsy girl,

lithe as a deer was she

Black hair lay on her shoulders,

her eyes were deep as the sea

With searching eyes she looked at me

Then swift as a bird flew

But left me yearning after her

For all that day, all that day through.

As the singing continues the rain fades away and the dripping slowly dries up. As the singing finishes, Tom throws the book across the box and into the void. Kathryn takes a cigarette and silver lighter from between her breasts. As she lights the cigarette and inhales the red tip is the only colour in an otherwise bleak scene. As she exhales, a brief breeze in the otherwise oppressively still scene blows the smoke away. Kathryn draws again on her cigarette and as she opens her mouth she forgets to exhale and the smoke draws across her face. Placing her hand out to try to feel the non-existent breeze, a single down light snaps to tight shot of Kathryn’s hand and cigarette. Everything is still as we watch the smoke rise in the light. Kathryn places her cigarette on the ground and then slowly, languidly pulls up her skirt and placing her foot into the spot grinds out her cigarette. Slowly, we hear dogs barking softly in the background and neighbourhood sound start to rise again, this time very softly accompanied by a few bars of “The Memorial”, and the lamplights rise again pervading the darkness.


5

As the lights fade up we see slowly scrolling along the back wall “Behold I was shapen in iniquity, And in sin did my mother conceive me.” Indirect lamplight pervades the box, which still has the haze of recently departed smoke. Kathryn has remained at the front of the stage staring out in to the darkness, breathing softly and waiting for Tom. Moving from the back of the stage, Tom comes up behind her and again caresses her hair. Enjoying the touch, Kathryn is trying to get a word out suddenly she breaks and with a final exhalation starts to speak in a slow methodical voice. KATHRYN

When I am touched, it is for life Mr Mills, for life. But I do wonder what is the point of

this conversation, why I have to stand and wait?

During this short outburst Tom has begun to slowly kiss Kathryn’s neck, and Kathryn’s voice has begun to wavier with the intensity of the experience. While Kathryn is enjoying the touch, the audience are aware that there is something dangerous about this progression of kisses down Kathryn’s neck. During this piece we hear the rise and fall of ominous cello music, which underlines the dangerous nature of the scene. Every now and then the TVs in the behind the box, flicker to life and we hear blast of news reports, which quickly fade out.

TOM

Kathryn Vincent, do you know where you are going? All those times you have

repeatedly cried out to God, has he forgotten you? Those ravenous times of

screaming…….panting…… fucking, all a moment-by-moment dissection of violence,

pleasure.

KATHYRN (interrupting)

Oh, God!!!

Still enjoying the touch Kathryn is in her own little world, lit from the side the lovers are casting a long shadow across the stage. Tom sings while still caressing her, he is at once trying to seduce her and pull away from her charms. Absorbed by her charms, Tom is looking out to the audience pleading for the ability to pull away. Over the duration of the song, the lights flicker and we hear the soft accompaniment of neighbourhood sounds – dogs barking, people arguing, and emergency vehicle sirens. Again the rain starts to fall, and we can here the electricity starting to spark in the water. Spurts of water fall to the stage slightly splashing off the stainless steel bowl. II

TOM

That dark gypsy lass

Keeps coming to the townland:

Why is she still out there?

II

TOM

That black-eyed Gypsy has

haunted my all the day.

Why does she not leave me,


6

Why is she still out there?

What brings her near the place?

TOM (continued)

My heart, be still and wait.

Pray God grant me respite

And pray that praying helps

Or my plight is helpless.

why does she not leave me?

Leave me, and go her way –

TOM (continued)

If she would let me be

She would end this worry,

The to the church with my prayers I

would hurry.

Scene Five Tom has returned to kissing Kathryn’s neck, enjoying the caressing of her flesh Kathryn is breathing audibly, softly we hear bit of “The Miserere” fading in and out of the general cityscape underscore – sirens, barking and arguments. Against Kathryn’s neck, Tom begins to speak. The darkness that has enveloped the box since the beginning lightens a little and the audience is becoming aware of the brightness of the scene.

TOM

Why are you doing this?

With a mixture of prayer and sexual advance, Kathryn slides down Tom’s body to her knees. During this she is explaining her position, and as she does we here the breaking of a storm and rain starting on the roof of the building. We hear intermittent breaks of news reels flickering to life in the background TVs.

KATHRYN

I’m am doing this because it is cheaper than a movie and like you it is something, the

only thing I do exceptionally well. (Trying further to seduce Tom, she reaches for his fly and

begins to unzip it. As she does, Tom grabs her head and then throws her to the ground) Besides on

the verge of orgasm, it is the only time when people really listen. Listen to the moans

and groans of the pleasure they are creating. Listening instead of just urging to say

something else. Masturbating with the sound of their own voice.

TOM (VOICEOVER)

And I became addicted and her little copy of a life show mine to be the paper thin

waiting period that it actually is. She brought me… in daylight and darkness to the

unimaginable purgatory between sleep and awake.


7

KATHRYN

A good deal of confusion exists with certain types of abuse simply because they are

difficult to define. When your brain is literally fucked out of existence then explanation

and definition, it all leads to look in the cracked mirror to figure out which marks you

own and which below to the reflection.

Tom has broken away from Kathryn to look again in the mirror. Tom takes a pen from his pocket and slowly inscribes on the mirror “My plight is helpless.” He turns back to watch Kathryn, as she still caresses her neck. The scene is lit from the behind the mirror, a shadow is cast across the stage keeping Tom almost in complete darkness. Tom speaking to himself and looking intently at his writing, begins to speak in the slow deliberate voice, Kathryn had earlier started.

TOM

My heart, be still and wait.

Pray God grant me respite

And pray that praying helps

Or my plight is helpless.

The phone rings, Tom moves towards the other side of the stage stepping down into the void Kathryn rolls back to the ground. Tom see her move looks across at her and the phone stops ringing. Tom then watches Kathryn as she takes a cigarette from her shoe and lights it again exhaling slowly, just letting the smoke escape from her mouth.

KATHRYN

This is the beginning

Scene Six The scene is controlled and quiet. The air is still filled with the feeling of oppression, there is the sound of rain on pavements and roofs, with dogs barking and the sound of flicker fluorescent bulbs. We get the feeling of a hot still day. Kathryn has rolled away towards the side of the box and continues smoking. Tom is not interested in looking a Kathryn, each is in their individual world. A dark world. Underneath this environment, we hear the faint glimmer of “The Memorial”, for a few bars and then it fades. Tom begins to sing…..


8

III

TOM

Glow-worms in the gloaming

Glimmer through their dances,

In the twilit hay-field

A lonely figure wanders.

Keep away. Leave me be

For I won’t be tempted.

Why do I see so clear

Mother brokenhearted?

TOM

Now the moon is setting,

Country shadows darken:

Someone stands stock-still

Beyond there, past the gable.

Two eyes like hot coals

Are glowing in the night.

God Almighty, O dear

God Almighty, help me!

Send me Your light

III

TOM

Through the twilight glow-worms

dance across the meadows

But the dusk falls and

across the fields a footstep goes.

Do not wait,

I will not yield to this temptation –

That would bring mother’s heart

endless tribulation.

TOM

Now the moon sets through

the world thick gloom creating,

By the corner of the stable

someone’s waiting

There are two bright eyes,

glittering through the shade.

Oh, my Saviour,

Oh my blessed Saviour,

Hear my prayer and grant me thine aid.

While singing Tom has returned to his original position, on the floor next to the original food. Tom has dipped his fingers in the sauce on the platter and placed them back into his mouth. Finally, grasping the metronome, which has been obsessively ticking since the beginning, Tom stops the ticking. As silence and darkness prevails, we here a projector coming to life and the back wall flickers to life again reading “Tuesday”


9

tuesday Scene Seven A film futters to life in the darkness again projected on the back wall. We see someone reading a newspaper, it is the early edition of next Monday’s New York Post, the headline reads “Murder with a new passion”. Intercut with this film are bits and pieces of the obsessive hand writing in the diary, the final words are written deliberately and slowly and the film zooms in as the hand writes, “Tears his flesh”. We also see flash of the cover of Time and Life Magazines. Underneath the film, we still hear the daily bustle and grind of city life but it is quite soft as if off in the distance. Cars starting up, planes overhead. Still however, the environment is oppressive and deliberate. Nothing ostensibly has changed, but the pace of the lives is more deliberate and precise. Tom has moved to below the film and is lit by its flashes and flickering. Underneath the film he sings, and we hear quietly “The Miserere Paraphrase”.

IV

TOM

Now small scaldies twitter

And chirrup in their nest.

I have lain awake all night

As if on thistles.

Now it is break of day,

The east fills up with dawn.

I have lain awake all night

On a bed of thorn!

IV

TOM

Already swallows are

twittering overhead,

But I’ve lain all the night

sleepless upon my bed.

Now in the sky there’s a light,

it’s the flush of dawn,

And I’ve lain all the night as on a bed of

thorn.

And I’ve lain all the night as on a bed of

thorn.

V

TOM

Fucking makes me weary,

I got so little sleep

And when I did get sleep

Dreaming of her woke me.

V

TOM

Weary work is ploughing,

without sleep to ease me,

For when I fell asleep,

still in dreams she’d tease me,

Still in dreams she’d tease me.


10

During this song, Tom has been obsessive clawing at his hands. Again during this piece we have heard the rise and fall of Michael Nyman’s “Miserere Paraphrase”. The dripping of water has continued and now we see spurts of water coming again from the ceiling and splashing across the stainless steel bowl. Scene Eight Unlike Monday’s scene where the feeling was one of intense opulence, Tuesday gives the feeling of a clean, sterile environment. The water is dripping from the ceiling in defined spurts and is now splashing across the bowl and into the central void. During this song, Kathryn has moved from the front of the stage and is now in the chair in the back OP side corner. She is intensely staring at the audience through the dripping water are developing the same we get the same feeling as the film - one of intense daily grind, the boredom of daily existence. It is still raining and the day is dark. As the film ends we see, again we are aware of bodies in strange, delineated, sexualised positions. As the film comes to an end across the back of the screen scrolls “The Illusion of Safety…”

TOM (VOICEOVER)

Today you come alive on 25th and 3rd, Tomorrow on 38th and 9th, The next day on 23rd

and 2nd.

An adventure of momentary pleasure, in the coprophilia between life and death.

Alive on a bed, in a shower, on your knees. Alive at a different time, and a different

place, a different person, invented in your mind alive as a copy of a fantasy.

Everywhere I go, Time and Life, momentary sex, momentary cum spreading across

your face, a single slippery sheet, indeed the frustrated fetish hobby kit of debauchery.

The rubber-lube combo, bareback fucking, and tiny bottles of booze. This is your

place, men spurting death down your throat, while their wives strap-on and fuck you up

the ass. People I meet each night. They are momentary in my life, between unzip and

ejaculation, we have our time together and that is all we get.

By the end of this voiceover, Tom has retreated to the back of the stage and is sitting with his head in Kathryn lap. Kathryn resisting the temptation, refrains from caressing Tom’s head. During the speech Tom goes to the ground and looks up at Kathryn, who is behind him. We hear the rising of Michael Nyman’s “Coupling” which continues. Kathryn looking down at Tom,

TOM

I don’t understand this place anymore. But to get people’s attention you can simply tap

them on the shoulder anymore. The gesture must be greater larger, something to shock

and shiver their bodies. Bodies that are no longer they way they have always been.


11

As Kathryn rises she has taken a sheer, lace veil from the back of the chair and placed it over her head, the vale blending her with the bleak, and washed out colouring of scene. As she rises she places a her foot over Tom’s throat as he lies on the ground, and in a slow methodical voice speaking both to the audience and Tom she begins talking. As she is speaking she is slowly pressing her foot into Tom’s throat and Tom has begun to caress her leg.

KATHRYN

Inconsequential thoughts escape my mouth

Such words, they make for despised effects

A foolish vice, offensive delicacy;

To cease the flow of darkly wounded blood

Oh anything a lover will allow to stop the rolling, tempestuous flood

Guilt rages, broken heart the heart to keep

A face downcast in quiet explanation of apathy

Scene Nine Under the final line we hear the breaking of a storm and water flows again into the central void. Projections again begin to flow across the back of the wall. The projections intermittently and at different speeds read, “I became addicted”, “Have mercy upon me, Blot out my transgressions”, “If I didn’t say anything people always assumed the worst”, “Wash me, Wash me. And I shall be whiter than snow”, “The Illusion of Safety”. As the projection begins, we again here a few quiet bars of “The Memorial” over which the accompaniment has begun and Tom struggling against Kathryn’s foot has begun to sing. VI

TOM

Top it up, my oxen team,

And plough it straight and take the strain

Don’t look near the boor-tree hedge,

Just top it up and plough it down.

Ploughshare bumps off ground that’s hard

And everything is skid and kick

Flutter of a headscarf frill,

Shadow-dapple, hide-and-seek.

VI

TOM

Hey, there my tawny oxen,

careful how you pull the plough,

Don’t look towards the elders,

follow the furrow now,

Where the ground is hard,

the plough springs back and lurches,

Still can I see that bright kerchief

through the branches.

During this section, Tom has lifted Kathryn from off his throat and she is clinging to the back wall. As he is struggling again, she presses against the wall and falls to the platform. As she walks away, Tom continues singing. Tom struggles back into the void and next to the falling water finishes the song.


12

TOM (continued)

Who’s out there

haunting me

I want her

turned to stone

Throbbing head.

Molten lead

Is pouring through

my burning mind.

TOM (continued)

Who’s there waiting for me?

Oh that she would turn to stone!

My poor head is throbbing,

and like a fire has grown.

Who’s there waiting for me?

Oh that she were turned to stone!

Following and overlapping on the middle and end of the song, the music of the Albinoni Adagio starts to rise. As Kathryn walks around the stage, she has come to the wall of paper which she is perusing. She chooses a piece of paper from the wall and pulls it off the wall and begins to read it. As she does we hear a few bars from the “Book Depository” and see Tom retreating to the back OP side corner of the void. The Music is getting louder and starts to envelope the entire void. Soft breathing can be heard above the music.

TOM (VOICEOVER)

I was addicted, therefore like with any addiction to find my life, I lose it.

As the voiceover begins, Tom rises from inside the void and walks towards Kathryn. As the voiceover continues Kathryn, pulls the paper takes the pin, slowly screws up the piece of paper and throws it in Tom’s face. As she does, the phone rings again and Kathryn walks down stage to get it. Stooping down and Kathryn picks up the phone and looks towards the audience. She hangs up the phone and removes her veil. Her voice starts to change and she says almost in a laugh.

KATHRYN

Oh God! I can hear your breathing you sick fuck!!!

As Kathryn moves past the front of the void and down the front step to sit on the front OP side. Tom moves to the back of the box where on prompt-side, columns and columns of small pieces of paper are pinned with silver pins to the velvet wall, each bit of paper has words written in black cursive hand. Tom grabs the small piece of paper Kathryn has thrown to the ground as he does this a cool blue light captures his hands, as it pins it from the wall. As his hand comes away from the piece of paper, we see that it is covered in a hand print of blood. Across the back wall scrolls “Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God”. As the focus on Tom’s hand fades, a film has flickered to life, unlike the previous films it only has single images, these images are long and studied – a hand writing on a piece of paper, a person splashing water on their face. Lit by the film lights, Tom peruses the wall of paper, having studied the paper he


13

pulls the leather bound book from inside the void, he opens it and begins to studiously write. Having finished he flips to the back of the book and quick scrawls a word on the back page and rips it out of the book. Kissing the page, Tom pins it to the wall.

TOM (VOICEOVER)

Written in ink, copied in ink, written in blood.

As the Albinoni Adagio comes to a to finish, the projector finally flickers to show “Wednesday”


14

wednesday Scene Ten

As the Albinoni Adagio is coming to an end, we hear the breaking of another storm. The dripping begins again starting to fill the central void, it is now a continuous stream of water that is filling the void. Kathryn is axious that time is starting to wear thin, she is becoming disdainful of the waiting for Tom. Sick of waiting, Kathryn has stubs out her cigarette and walks towards the audience. The atmosphere has suddenly shifted, the pace the fury start to escalate. Kathryn is still deliberate in her actions and begins to tell her story. For the first-time, we hear total silence, nothing is underscoring Kathryn’s talking. The audience are alone in this void of a space with Kathryn.

KATHRYN

If you're into penis-pierced, tattooed men who shut up, shove it in, and spurt. No-

holds barred, fast-paced rough sex armed with spit swapping, railroad rimming, and a

frenzy of fist fucking, then this is for you. Life’s short, fuck now.

It dulls my senses and induces sleep, but even without it I still become silent. I am

unaware of my surroundings and there are times when I really don't care. Already

wanting to fuck you, knowing I am going to fuck you, fucking for an hour. While

licentious funk filled the air and nothing could be heard but the pain, full-mouthed

moans and the slurping sound of juicy skin against skin as your cock slipping and sliding

in my pussy distended from the plastic trains, dildos and knives you keep in that sad

little black bag. Interrupted for a moment by the insistence of the phone, we fuck

again, (flicking her cigarette butt into the audience) the feel and taste of your violent hand not

stopping until called once more by that electronic watchdog guarding minutes and

dollars. You slash my body, I slash yours back, sweat rolling off your cut skin, my heat

melting into yours, mutilated alive corpses, ivory neck, glistening, open wounds, sucking

my airy breath, watching me, eyes dilated, you stamp me out, like, a fire.

I fucked you and it wasn't an accident, and I didn't let you feed me first, and I didn't

play the reluctance game, and I wanted to screw your sad little violent body. I let you

know I wanted my cunt filled with I didn't get drunk first like some sad little whore.

And I let you know I want to fuck you again, and would have again that night but we

ran out of time and because I can just barely wait to do it again and I told you and I

don't care and I do care that you enjoy fucking me as much as I enjoy being fucked by

you and fucking you and I will do it again, soon.


15

A thief... that’s what I am gliding your cock between the globes and gray and squeezing

it bringing you grand-scale permeation, flirtation, insemination. Your every exhalation

shall taste of me, and in your skin you don’t remember receiving me. A wet velvet

tongue pushed through every shadow. As I tighten, tense, and come apart, I take no

offence but welcome my abrasions and know that the whiteness of your eyes, the

rawness of your throat, these are sufficient scorn for me to cherish. Thank you, Daddy

Dearest.

A rented room lost in our city night. I stand here and sway before our dance concludes.

In a four-posted bed, I am his whore; a sightless acquisition, ally, acolyte, hungering to

be filled and filled, and filled again. Shattered at his call I bleed to be broken by his

stroke. The frigid kiss of leather and steel, his cold cerulean fires burning ever brighter

as my mouth dries. On this night, I stretch and he rises to that mute innuendo. And as

if a bell has sounded the sacred hoop tightens about my throat, to punish and twist my

soul. And my name is visible behind his eyes as drink him. His narcotic pearls.

As Kathryn has finished her speech she has turned upstage and is again heading for the chair is the back OP side corner. The sound of the neighbourhood follows her and rises as she steps into the void and begins to walk towards the chair, this section is underscored by “The Opening”. As she does Tom has moved to the void and almost followed her as she has gone back. The accompaniment to his song has started, and he has begun to sing. As Kathryn finishes we are already half-way through the first stanza of the song. Tom is bewildered and towards the end of the song heads towards the small mirror in the back prompt side corner of the box. As he reaches the mirror, he again picks the pen from his pocket and scribbles “Fate” on the mirror.


16

VII

TOM

My plough-pin is broken.

I’ll have to stop and mend it.

So, oxen, stand your ground,

Soon all will work again.

Over there I’ll cut one

From that boor-tree bower.

Who can escape his fate?

Fate comes upon its hour.

VII

TOM

I’ve got a loose axle,

that means the axle-pin’s gone,

Now oxen wait for me, wait for,

I’ll make another one.

Over there I’ll cut one

from that fine elder tree.


For what must be, must be.

Tom has settle to looking in the back mirror. As he puts the pen back in his pocket, he turns around and begins to speak. As he begins to speak, the rain starts getting heavier and heavier, almost drowing out the words that Tom is saying. Then As Tom begins to speak words from the Book of Psalms begin to scroll across the back wall they read “‘Have mercy upon me, Blot out my transgressions, Purge me with hyssop, And I shall be clean, Wash me, wash me, And I shall be whiter than snow.’ Psalm 51” TOM

Have mercy upon me,

Blot out my transgressions,

Purge me with hyssop,

And I shall be clean,

Wash me, wash me,

And I shall be whiter than snow.

KATHRYN

Fuck the Psalms!

Scene Eleven The accompaniment for the next piece has begun, over the top we start to hear a phone ringing again and again. Interspersed with the song are lines from Kathryn. Thiss is almost a duet – one part sung, the other part spoken. – as Tom and Kathryn both head towards the front of the stage. Repeated scrolling across the back of the box is the parts of Psalm 51. It reads “Wash me thoroughly from my


17

iniquity, And cleanse me from my sins. For I acknowledge my transgressions, And my sin is ever before thee. Against thee, only thee, have I sinned, And done this evil in thy sight.” As Tom is singing this is the greatest moment of bonding between the Kathryn and he, they are flirting, but not looking at each other and Tom is falling further and further under Kathryn’s intoxicating beauty. The void is slowly filling with water but Tom is not noticing, he is trying to concentrate on the words at hand. We hear the “Miserere Paraphrase” rising and falling softly under the song, it is almost non-existent by the time the song is rising to it conclusion. We are caught up in the pace and rising crescendo of the song. Kathryn is becoming more and more impatient, as she is walking towards the front of the box. The pace of the scene is considerably higher than ever before, we hear clashes of music, sound effects and live performance. The scrolling of words is at a faster pace than before and Tom retreats towards the flowing water, singing not only to the water but also to the phone. Which rings softly a couple of times during the song, distracting Tom and reinforcing the potency of Kathryn’s hold. VIII

TOM

You oxen, don’t be sad.

Don’t be afraid to look.

Don’t be afraid, I say.

I’ll come back from the wood.

Dark-haired Kathryn stands there

In the deep boor-tree shade.

Night-sparkle from a fire

The brilliance of her gaze.

Don’t be afraid, I say.

Even though she is there –

Shifting shape –

I’ll resist

Her hide-

and-seek allure.

VIII

TOM

Don’t look, my oxen,

so sad at my change of heart,

No need to fear that

because of this we must part.

Black-haired Kathryn’s

waiting there by the elder tree,

Where like the glowing coals of fire

her black eyes watch me.

If I should go near her,

think not that she’d harm me.

I’ll show you,

I’ll be safe.

Her eyes will not

charm me.

KATHRYN

A rented room lost in our city night. I stand here and sway before our dance concludes.

In a four-posted bed, I am his whore; a sightless acquisition, ally, acolyte, hungering to

be filled and filled, and filled again. Shattered at his call I bleed to be broken by his


18

stroke. The frigid kiss of leather and steel, his cold cerulean fires burning ever brighter

as my mouth dries. On this night, I stretch and he rises to that mute innuendo. And as

if a bell has sounded the sacred hoop tightens about my throat, to punish and twist my

soul. And my name is visible behind his eyes as drink him. His narcotic pearls.

The piece has risen to it’s first climax, we are aware the Kathryn has Tom within her grasp but is frustrated by not being able to use her understanding of intimacy and love – sex – to get closer to him. Tom is completely intoxicated by Kathryn.

TOM (VOICEOVER)

Everything about her became intoxicating. She came into my dreams and I couldn’t

sleep wandering the street half awake, half asleep. Seeing her in every bed and wishing

her to be every cock inside me. The addiction was taking hold, and coursing through

my veins it made me feel alive.

There is a slow motion film of Kathryn in the throws of passion, she has is on top of her chosen conquest and we are shown her face and body in ecstasy. This film is an intense study of passion as it is in the throws of finishing Kathryn starts commenting on the action happening on film.

KATHRYN

Of course in every copy there are always imperfections. Every momentary friend in a

fit of passion has something different and this guy was different. A momentary friend

with whips, cock-rings, slings, every once in a while he’d call out in pain, as I ripped his

skin apart. I like getting in everyone sad little faces, to say these bruises are from having

my brains fucked out and yes I like them. (She snaps to the audience and responds to a

question) Why does you mother want some? (Kathryn grins at the audience and snaps on her

lighter. Suddenly, like a slight break in the oppressive atmosphere, there is a break into laughter.

Kathryn takes a drag on her cigarette and looks back to the audience and begins to talk with a grin)

Give her my number, (she is getting more and more serious) tell her I can fuck her till she

bleeds.

After a brief moment of silence, when Kathryn sucks on her cigarette the ordinary sounds of the neighbourhood – dog, dripping water and arguments. Softly, we can hear “The Memorial”, overshadowed by the opening music. Again the phone rings and Kathryn draws the curtains to see the bright side lighting, which fills the box and we here a blast of “The Miserere” short and swift. As we slowly slip into darkness, Tom is seen writing on the front of the stage writing in white chalk “Sweet Addiction”. As the darkness prevails a momentary pause, the spotlight comes to rest on Tom hand, he then writes “Thursday” as it scrolls across the back of the box.


19

thursday Scene Twelve As the light, rise again we find Tom has crawled around and is lying with his head over the water looking at his reflection. Luxuriating in the open, Tom is still extreme apprehensive. We see him intensely looking at his reflection talking to himself, the only lighting it rippling off the water. Tom is playing with the water, breaking his image and letting it settle again. He is playing with a single piece of paper floating in the water. TOM Underneath, between, inside everything, something horrible. I sometimes wonder what

a person has to do to go through life completely numb. To pretend, to not be a single

thing to a single person, simply animate orifices of pleasure, disgust and violence. I’m

absolutely honest with you. I’ve looked for the words to describe. But you shifted, I’ll

resist your hide-and-seek allure. Through the hole in the wall, I seen men entering you,

screwing you, sucking (Tom looks up at Kathryn) I see the moments going by fuck by fuck,

dick by dick, through the little hole in the wall. Of all the people I ever…. knew. I see

potential & I see squander. I see us, an entire generation fucking, screwing, being raped

for a living, slaves to…. living simply through that little hole in the wall. Ahhh…. (Tom

swats his hand at the water and rolls over to face the ceiling) Trying to live has us chasing

people, place, living, just so that we can have a copy of the things that enslave us, as the

pained children of history, no purpose or place, no words recording of moment seen.

We have no great life or great success. We are raised in an age, a time where we believe

that we are all equal - we aren’t and we are slowly being fucked out of existence.

Tom has begun to speak, he is facing into the pit of water & in the middle Tom splashes his hand in the water and to speak to the ceiling. Kathryn comes over to him and kneels beside Tom in-between his arm and body. Kathryn bends down to kiss Tom he avoids her by turning his face upstage, Kathryn retreats to an upright position and takes a cigarette from her shoe and lights it up. This time she exhales with a deliberate force blowing the smoke away and talking to Tom. We hear Michael Nyman’s “Coupling” beginning softly under the action KATHRYN

(Trying to make small talk) Do you know it has been raining for almost four days now?

(Changing tact trying to get further and further under Tom’s skin.) Just sitting there, watching as

I stood waiting, watching, trying to contain the silent piece of pain as it throbs in my

chest. I watch the changes in his breathing, I take his tongue in my mouth and

succumb, as I take him by the hand, I lead him to the bedroom, the red room, the room


20

filled with the apprehension of your gaze, his dick is ready, the silence gasp escapes his

throat as the coolness of the air kisses the dripping head of his cock. I am aware of

your gaze, as my finger circles his head. Everything is gentle and unhurried, as he

straddles me waiting and wanted. I slip my wet finger up his arse, a sudden inhale

breaks the silence and I follow it with a second finger. I look at him turn around and

wait for the violence, I catch your gaze as he slips inside me. To wake up every

morning, just wake up and be silent, sitting, watching…… I just long to sit, be…..

interrupted for a moment by the insistence of the phone, and fuck , you watching me.

Maybe it is grotesque to say this now, so just write on your paper, and keep it in your

pocket. (Kathryn’s hand goes up to her mouth, she now knows exactly what she has to do.) I feel as

if you haven’t heard anything, I’ve been saying to you. It is all true.

TOM

I don’t believe you.

Tom is starting to shiver with the coldness of his wet clothes. Kathryn, ominously takes her cigarette from her mouth, and during the speech she turns from looking into Tom’s eyes and faces his hand and looks at his hand. As Kathryn finishes her speech, she slowly takes the cigarette from her mouth in-between her thumb and forefinger, then slowly and deliberately grinds the cigarette into the top Tom’s hand. Tom is taking the pain almost enjoying the sensation that this is causing for him and he begins to speak.

TOM

However terrible, however hurtful, however painful whatever you do to hurt the one’s

you love. It all makes sense…., doesn’t it….., in your head. No-one thinks that they

have seen all there is and made sense out of all the pain. (Changing tact still enjoying the

painful sensation, Kathryn has begun to rub his crotch) The past is something that you can’t

want, can’t see, it deserves that part of your existence, somewhere you just can’t get to,

the place your mind locks numbs to keep you alive. To open it up, to see the good,

you must also see the demons. You can’t take even a single step inside, once the key is

found and the lock opened….

Want to see the demons? Want to see the ugliness, the vile repulsive violent ignorant

moments that have filled my life, you can’t open the door and then choose. This is a

choice that has to be made….. (Kathryn works down to try to kiss him, again Tom turns his

head, but this time Kathryn unzips his vest and slides her hand inside)


21

IX

KATHRYN

“Tommy, you are welcome

Underneath the greenwood.

What star kept you on course,

Well and truly guided?”

“Tommy, you are welcome!

What are you afraid of?

You are pale, you are scared.

Are you scared of me, love?”

TOM

“Scared? Why should I scare from

You or from anyone?

I’m here to cut and wedge

And whittle sharp a pin.”

KATHRYN

“O Tommy, there’s no need

To whittle and sharpen

I’ll sing. Listen now.

Hear my gypsy song now.”

THREE WOMEN (offstage in low

voices)

Then she joined her hands

Singing her sad hurt

And the notes she sang

Ravished his young heart

IX

KATHRYN

Welcome my handsome one,

I am hear to greet you.

Why this stroke of fortune?

What kind twist of fate has let me meet

you?

Once more welcome, Jan.

Won’t you then come near me?

Standing there pale and still,

Is it that you fear me?

TOM

I’ve no cause to fear you,

why should such fear begin? I’ve come

here to whittle wood for my axle-pin,

Wood for my axle-pin.

KATHRYN

Leave it, my handsome Jan.

Do not be so headstrong.

Leave your work, sit and hear,

I’ll sing a Gypsy song.

TRIO ONE

Folding then her hands, sang so sad a strain

TRIO TWO

Softly, sang so sad a strain

TRIO THREE

Softly sang so sad a strain

That the mournful song filled his heart with pain.


22

During this song, Tom has lifted to the upright position and started undressing by taking off his jacket. Kathryn has taken the jacket and stood above him looking down at him and trailing the jacket across his chest. Kathryn is walking to the back prompt side corner of the stage, she hangs up the jacket over the back prompt-side mirror. Standing there Kathryn is deciding what to do, she begins to walk back towards Tom, as the we here faint glimmers of the “Coupling” and flickers of the news broadcasts as the come off and on the TV’s behind the set. Everything is erotically charged as Kathryn turns around, and plays with the top of her dress. She is taking her time understanding, the effects she is having on Tom. X

KATHRYN

God Almighty, hidden from us,

Why did You give gypsies life?

Coming, going, toing, froing,

Moved along and hunted off.

“Can you hear larks, Tommy,

The skylarks rising there?”

THREE WOMEN


Ravished his young heart

KATHRYN

“Sit and rest, he happy

Beside a gypsy girl.

“God Almighty, God of mercy,

Grant, grant me this

Before I leave this world:

Let me near life,

Let me know it.”

X

KATHRYN

God all-powerful, God eternal,

why create the Gypsy race?

Endless wand’ring, never resting,

hunted on from place to place.

Why are you silent, Jan?

Is it the lark you hear?

THREE WOMEN

That the mournful song

filled his heart with pain.

KATHRYN

Come and sit beside me,

surely you have no fear.

God all-powerful,

God redeemer,

ere I perish in the wilderness,

Grant me the knowledge of desiring,

grant me knowledge of desiring.


23

THREE WOMEN


Ravished his sad heart.

KATHRYN

“Still you stand there staring,

Silent as a statue.

Do I scare you that much?

What has happened to you?

Move beside me closer.

Why are you so distant?

Is it just my colour?

Does that still disturb you?

My face and hands and arms

Are burnt dark in the sun

But parts I’ll let you see

The sunlight’s never seen.”

THREE WOMEN

She opened her blouse,

She showed her unsunned self,

His young blood was rising,

His young blood was rising.

THREE WOMEN

That her mournful song

filled his heart with pain.

KATHRYN

Why are you so silent?

Won’t you then come near me?

Being so close to me

seems to make you fear me.

Come and sit beside me –

do not think I tease you.

It is then my colour?

Does my skin displease you?

But not all my body has

endured the sunlight,

Won’t you look more closely,

here my skin is snow-white.

THREE WOMEN

Then from her breast

her bright kerchief she slowly turn.

And all his hot young blood

rushed to this face and burned.

Returning to Tom, Kathryn grabs a piece of paper that has been floating in the water. Slowly and methodically she screws the piece of paper in her hand and kneeling down stuffs it into Tom’s mouth. As she is gagging him, Kathryn in looking straight into Tom’s eyes, this is one of the most erotically charged moments since the beginning of the week. Tom is intently enjoying every emotion, and as Kathryn leans over to rub his crotch again, she quick zips up his fly and returns to the seat in the back OP side of the box. Through the black again we see a torch light flickering on and off, as if the batteries are getting low. It narrows in on the wall of poetry, and frames the bloodied hand print once more. Tom is now intently, slowly recovering from the past. TOM (VOICEOVER)


24

I am simply washed clean. The intense pleasure of addiction. Apathy as the solution to

living. Deciding to keep to what fate has set, I cannot escape my fate and it is not my

fate to give up. To take the cost of living, moment-to-moment closer to edge. But as

the slide begins, can we not tell that this cannot have a happy ending.

KATHRYN (VOICEOVER)

When you have his attention you feel like the only person in the world. Small, Safe

from the changes of the world. He asks before the violence, ‘Who loves you?’ But of

course in every copy there are always imperfections.

Tom and Kathryn are lost intently in each others gaze and the music of the “Book Depository” is swelling up and over the voiceovers. The voiceovers having to compete get louder and softer, ebbing and flowing with the music. We hear the rumbling of the subway and words begin scrolling across the entire back wall at different heights and in different fonts. Together all the words form a story not one that is particularly comprehensible from the way that they are presented but they are words from the pieces of paper at the side of the stage. They tell the following story

“I am but one of hundreds, or thousands, perhaps more; afraid of a black robed image between our child-self and a door. It matters less what happened then, what matters is the lasting pain; as we fight that black-robed image in our nightmare once again. The fight is weak and futile there's but one way out that door; become enveloped in that black robe as our child-self had before. But we're not a child we realize, There's no need for fear or shame; We can face that black robed image and we can call it by a name. With my pain, that of others, lessened, as we met our nightmare, face to face; A bad dream remains regardless, as other children take our place. So the fight for right is not over, regardless of the gain; For I know that black robed image Is still causing someone pain.”

As the scene flickers to a close the start of the accompaniment for the next song begins.


25

friday Scene Fourteen Tom begins to sing and as Kathryn joins in “Friday” is projected in the upper OP side corner of the box. She is standing up and walking forward and Tom enters the void and cross towards her on the OP side thrust walk. XI

TOM

Fragrance fills the woodland,

Wind-swayed wheat is ripe.

KATHRYN

“Now, Tommy, I’ll show you

How sunburnt gypsies sleep.”

TOM

With that she broke a branch

And laid it on a stone:

“There now, my bed is made,”

She lightly said, and laughed.

KATHRYN

“Earth is my pillow,

The sky my counterpane.

I keep my dew-cold fingers

Warm-buried in my lap.”

TOM

In her skirt she lay

Bare on the barren ground

And for say virtue’s sake

He wept with a sad heart.

XI

TOM

From the rip’ning cornfield,

oh what sweet odours creep?

KATHRYN

Let me show you how Gypsy people

sleep?

Shall I show you the way the Gypsies

sleep?

TOM

She brushed some twigs away,

threw some pebbles after,

‘Behold my bed’ she said,

then she shook with laughter.

KATHRYN

Earth is my pillow

and heaven my covering,

I warm my fingers in my lap

when they’re shivering.

TOM

In her tattered skirt,

there on the ground she lies,


26

And for my virtue’s sake tears spring to

my sad eyes, Tears spring to my sad eyes.

During this song, Tom has fallen to the ground and the sounds of rain from outside have intensified. Tom is sitting at the front step of the OP side of the box. The TVs are flickering on and off in the background, the lights have turned to a clear, warm state. Some of the lamps throughout the theatre are flickering on and off, the water is still and the reflection is filling the box.

TOM

Where are you going?

KATHRYN

There is nothing that can happen now

TOM

But who will be there in the end?

Kathryn smiles and sits on Tom's lap.

KATHRYN

The illusion of safety. I need you to understand the changes that this requires.

Tom rubs her shoulders.

TOM

I'm at your service.

KATHRYN

Thank you. Mmmm, that feels good.

TOM

Oh ………

Tom moves his hand down her shirt and under her bra, he is met with no resistance. There is nothing

KATHRYN


27

I felt hot wanting to slice through everyone, every person that wouldn’t screw to save

the species. It makes me horny.

TOM

I hate it too.

He takes his hand out from her shirt and slides it up her thigh.

TOM (cont'd) (baby talk)

Oh baby, your soaking.

KATHRYN

I know.

She closes her eyes and rubs his crotch. She unzips his fly and slides her hand inside his pants.

KATHRYN (continued) (seductively)

Any luck?

TOM

Moving along quite well.

KATHRYN

Have you succeeded in your task?

TOM

Any day now.

KATHRYN

Well, let me know when you do. Until then.

KATHRYN

Sorry. Scene Fifteen


28

XII

TOM

Dappled woodland light,

Spring well chill and bright,

Eyes like stars at night,

Open knees so white.

Four things death itself won’t cover,

Unforgettable forever.

XII

TOM

Forest’s shady height,

Water cold and bright,

Eyes as black as night,

Bare knees snowy white,

These four things, till death relieve me,

Will, I swear it, never leave me.

Kathryn slowly removes her hand from Toms fly and crosses into front of him. As Kathryn get to the top of the step, Tom grabs her and throws her to the ground. Kathryn lying next to the wall of paper and gradually all other lights fad out and we only see Kathryn’s torso and Tom’s hands caressing Kathryn’s body. As the action begins to build the light begin to dim and a curtain is pull back and a large red neon crucifix lights the entire scene. The action is punctuated by the sounds of the “Miserere Paraphrase” which is playing in the background. As the music rises, the audience becomes aware of another set of hands that have begun to caress Kathryn’s body, and then another set of hands joins in. Kathryn is becoming drowned in the sensual overload created by these hands. She turns over and approaches Tom still guided by the many hands and she finally seduces Tom, again we hear. TOM

No….. No….. No…..

As the music continues Kathryn, disappears and the hands are left caressing Tom. The lights dims and finally all we are left with is a single spot on the bloody hand print on the wall. XIII

[Piano solo: Andante]

XIII

[Piano solo: Andante]

TOM (VOICEOVER)

And the addiction was gone……


29

saturday Scene Seventeen Across the back of the box in the upper prompt-side corner we see “Saturday”. As the day starts, everything becomes softer, quieter and clearer. The rain has ceased falling and the lights have brightened on stage, the water is slowly rippling and casting shadows across the wall of the box. The audience are aware of the calmness surrounding the day, after the pace and problem of Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we have a slight resolution of the tension. Tom is looking into the void watching the water ripple below him, Kathryn has left the stage from beneath the mirror. XIV

TOM

Sun and sunlight heighten,

Shadows shorten.

Who, O who can bring back

All I have forfeited?

XIV

TOM

See how high the sun is? Is it noon then?

Oh what I have lost now,

Oh what I have lost now,

Who can give back again?

Who can give back again?

TOM

Oh God, who can bring back all I have forsaken? There is so much that….. I mean we

live in an age where feeling is the be all and end all of life. To feel is to hurt, but that is

life. But to feel you must feel everything, this place, the people, each and every

violation. How can we survive with very feeling coursing through our veins, there is so

much that living day to day has numbed us from. People pity us, judge every moment

of our existence, but they have never considered that we are the forsaken and really

don’t care. Every violation is a moment closer to numbness and every numbness….

(Turns towards the audience, while not address them directly Tom is talking to humankind which the

audience are a part) Don’t you ever wish that you could be numb, to open every door,

take every violation, just the chance to ask yourself without praise, without judgement,

who would I be and what would I do? (Tom picks the pen out of his pocket and begins to write

on his own arm the words that he is saying) The dark violent places of our souls are locked

up, the key dispensed with, to just open the door is…..

From the bright warm begin, the box slowly transforms into a cool blue light with the shimmering of the water ever apparent on the sides of the box.


30

Scene Eighteen XV

TOM

Move, you tawny oxen!

What are you looking at?

Could it be you’re waiting

To let my secret out?

Try it and you’ll see

The flogging I’ll give you.

Just you try, my oxen,

Then see what will happen!

Now I dread my summons,

The noonday Angelus

That calls me home, alas,

To meet my mother’s eyes.

XV

TOM

Now my tawny oxen,

Why do you stare at me?

If you should betray me,

Sadly you’ll fare with me.

Just give my secrets up

And I’ll punish you.

Just dare betray me,

My beating will finish you.

But now before me by

Far the worst ordeal lies –

How can I go back home?

How face my mother’s eyes?

A single spot comes to life, it focuses on the hand on Kathryn’s stomach. Kathryn then reaches down and sets the Metronome ticking we are aware of the incredibly fast pace in total contrast to the beginning speed. Scene Nineteen XVI

TOM

How did this happen me?

Can I live to bear it?

And take this girl to wife?

And rear a gypsy brat?

Gypsies all around me,

Father, mother? Never!

XVI

TOM

What has come over me?

What is it I have done?

Must I now learn to love

Gypsy who call me son?

Father a Gypsy lout?

Mother a Gypsy slut?


31

O find a millstone quickly!

Throw me in the millrace!

Even skylarks singing

Unearthly melodies

Cannot ease this sadness

Or bring joy to my days.

Better that a finger

From my own hand were cut.

There’s a lark above me,

Offering me gladness,

But my heart is heavy,

Who can ease my sadness?

Scene Twenty XVII

TOM


Fate comes upon its hour.

Evening now I hurry

To the boor-tree bower.

What is it leads me there?

Looking for strawberries…

Tiny leaves prinked open.

Taste of felicity!

XVII

TOM

Who can escape his fate,

For what must be, must be.

Ev’ry night I hurry to that same elder tree.

Ask me where I’m off to!

Ask me where I’m off to!

Gathering strawberries –

Under the foliage

Searching for mysteries.

Scene Twenty-One XVIII

TOM

Night-time, night-time, night-time

Cannot come soon enough,

Dark night in Kathryn’s bed,

The small hours of love.

XVIII

TOM

Nothing matters now

Until ev’ning shadows fall,

Soon I’ll be with Kathryn,

I hear her call.


32

Roosters, I’ll wring you necks

If you don’t stop crowing.

Roosters, your cry at dawn

Is beyond enduring –

Interrupting love’s

Deep dream and yearning.

With her in my arms

I defy the morning.

Gladly I’d wring the neck

Of ev’ry cock that crows;

Then there’d be noone to tell us

It’s time we rose.

Oh that night were

Endless without dawn,

Then from each other’s arms

We would never be torn.

The phone rings and fades, it continues ringing over which we hear. Neither Kathryn nor Tom are crossing towards the phone. Time has slowed down to almost stopping. While there movements are tired, they aren’t fast either. Both Kathryn and Tom have reverted to the domestic tedium that exemplified Monday, Tom is looking at himself in the water and wets his hair, Kathryn has begun to roll a few cigarettes.

KATHRYN (VOICEOVER)

Tom, I am going to have an abortion. I am going to have your abortion.

We don’t see any action, just a flickering of a film. We see again obsessive writing in a diary, over and over again a hand crosses the page. This film does not have the rapid cutting nature of the previous films, what we are doing is crossing backwards and forwards between the images of writing and footage of a stream of falling paper flitter to the ground. Sometime overlaid the images are all about writing and falling, Shot entirely in black and white this film washes out the colour from the stage, as the papers fall to the ground we see a close up of a single piece of paper flittering to the ground, as the camera zooms in it reveals “Sunday”. And the background music, a foreboding cello solo rises.


33

sunday Scene Twenty-Two XIX

TOM

Magpie, sorrow’s magpie

Rising up suddenly,

Did you rob my sister’s

Washing on wash day?

What if she should ever

Find who the real thief was?

She would abhor me,

All of my lies to her.

Holy God, Holy God,

What has come over me?

Everything’s upended. God,

What has happened to me?

I kick against myself

Like a horse that’s spancelled.

Prayers pour through my mind like

Sand down through an hourglass.

XIX

TOM

See that thieving magpie

Suddenly fly away!

Did it steal the skirt my

Sister washer on Monday?

Is she should ever know it

Was no magpie’s beak,

She would disown me,

No more to me she’d speak.

Oh my Lord God,

What a change has come over me.

In my desperation,

What strange fancies stir me.

And pray’rs confuse my mind –

These I can’t unravel.

All is like a stream that’s sluggish,

Clogged with gravel.

There is another phonecall and the music starts its final build. “Memorial” begins for the last time this the only time we hear, “Memorial” to conclusion.

This scene starts in silence, the physical action builds the scene. The lighting is swapping quickly between characters, at the end of the scene the lights suddenly become very stark and cold. Tom and Kathryn are staring straight at the audience. The actions are small and deliberate, Tom has made the decision and realises what he has to do, although hesitant Tom is still moving forward, closer and closer


34

to the abyss. As the accompaniment starts for the next song, the across the back of the stage is projected the entire of Psalm 51, some in Latin and some in English.

Have mercy upon me, Blot out my transgressions, Purge me with hyssop, And I shall be clean, Wash me, wash me, And I shall be whiter than snow. Miserere mei Deus Secundum magnam misericordium tuam. Have mercy upon me, O God, According to thy loving kindness. Have mercy upon me, O God, According to thy loving kindness. According to thy tender mercies, Blot out my transgressions. Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum Dele iniquitatem meam Amplius lava me Ab a peccata mea Munda mea. For I acknowledge my transgressions And my sin is ever before thee. Against thee, only thee, have I sinned, And done this evil in thy sight. Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco; Et peccatum meum contra me est semper. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, And cleanse me from my sins. For I acknowledge my transgressions, And my sin is ever before thee. Against thee, only thee, have I sinned, And done this evil in thy sight. Have mercy upon me. Blot out my transgressions. Asperges me hyssopo, Et mundebor, Lavabis me, Et super nivem dealbabor. Perge me with hyssop, And I shall be clean, Wash me wash me, And I shall be whiter than snow, Make me to hear thy joy and gladness, That the bones which thou has broken may rejoice. That thou mightest be justified, When thou speakest, And be made clear, When thou judgest. Behold I was shapen in iniquity, And in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold thou desirest truth; In the hidden part I know wisdom. Hide thy face from my sins, And blot out all my iniquities Have mercy upon me, According to thy loving kindness, Averte faciem tuam. A peccatis meis. Et omnes iniquitatis meas dele. Have mercy upon me, According to thy loving kindness, Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, Dele iniquitatem meam, That the bones which thou hast broken. May rejoice. Create in me a clean heart, And renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence, And thou not thy holy spirit from me. Cor mundum crea in me Deus, Et spiritum retum innova in visderibus mels. Ne progicias me a facie tua, Et spirtum sanctum tuum, Ne auferas a me, Redde mihi laetitaem salutaris tui. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, And uphold me with thy free spirit; Then I will teach transgressors thy ways, And sinners whall be converted unto me.


35

Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God; My tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness. Have mercy upon me. Blot out my transgressions. O Lord, open thou my lips, And my mouth shall show forth thy praise.

Scene Twenty-Three Tom in a mystical dream world, is fascinated by Kathryn’s body, he is looking at her stomach. We see the pain and anguish that this incident has caused for both Kathryn and he. XX

TOM

Now she’s in full bloom

How she ti- ti- tightens dresses!

Now her time has come

Look how bri- bri- bright-eyed she is!

XX

TOM

Now she bears my child, see how bright,

bright, bright her eyes are!

As her skirt rides up, see how white, white,

white, white her thighs are!

Scene Twenty-Four Kathryn takes one last look in the mirror. XXI

TOM

Father, what made you think

My match could be arranged?

Father, you little knew

What sort of son you’d raised.

As the night follows day

Punishment’s sure to come.

Father, my fate is clear,

Cannot be escaped from.

XXI

TOM

Father, how wrong you were not to

respect my pride,

Choosing the girl that you wanted to be

my bride.

He who has sinned must be punished, so

life taught me.

So too must I accept what my fate has

brought me.

Scene Twenty-Five

Kathryn is smoking on her cigarette, lying on her back, apparently engrossed in the simple act of smoking. Tom walks towards her and for a long time just looks at Kathryn.


36

KATHRYN

How was it?

TOM

Good. But I think we should stay in here for the rest of the trip

KATHRYN

Was that Meredith?

TOM (sighs)

Was who Meredith?

KATHRYN

Meredith, your sister. You were kissing somebody. Looked like Meredith.

TOM

Hardly kissing. Kissing off.

KATHRYN

Didn’t look that way – you know – from a distance.

TOM

I lied. To her. She thought she’d seen you.

KATHRYN

Why lie?

TOM

Tom and Kathryn, that’s just too good gossip, isn’t it?

KATHRYN

Really, why??? (Completely lost) Sorry, I’m completely lost.


37

TOM

I know. I’m lost, too. I’m going to be stuck in the basement, aren’t I, that’s my, that’s

my – terrible and alone and dark – and I’ve lied about who I am, and where I am, and

so nobody can ever find me.

KATHRYN

What do you mean lied about who you are?

TOM

I suppose I always thought – better to be a copy of somebody than a complete nobody.

KATHRYN

What are you talking about – you’re not a nobody! That’s the last thing you are.

TOM

Kathryn, I… I…

KATHRYN (Conciliatory)

And don’t forget. I have the key.

TOM

You have the key. Tell me some good things about Tom Mills. Don’t get up. Just tell

me some nice things.

He sits on the bed, leans against Kathryn. His eyes are brimming with tears. He takes the cord from Kathryn’s dress and begins twisting it in his hands. Tom is wrapping his hands so tightly that the hands are going red from his cut circulation. While no tears drip from his eyes, Tom is aware now of everything that he had to do, and he is sad and resigned to fate guiding his every move.

KATHRYN

Good things about Tom Mills? Could take some time!… Tom is talented. Tom is

tender… Tom is beautiful…

TOM (interjecting, he is tender and loving)

Your such a liar…


38

KATHRYN

… Tom is a mystery…

Tom is pressing against Kathryn, moving up her body, kisses her shoulder, the cord wrapped tightly in his hands… The audience is aware of the build menace of the scene, nothing good can happen now, they are just waiting for the inevitable.

KATHRYN (VOICEOVER) (cont’d)

…Tom is not a nobody. Tom has secrets he doesn’t want to tell me, and I wish he

would. Tom has nightmares. That’s not a good thing. Tom has someone to love him.

That is a good thing! (Feeling Tom’s weight on her) Tom is crushing me. Tom is crushing

me. (Suddenly alarmed) Tom, you’re crushing me!

During the last section of the speech, the lights begin to fade and we are left in darkness for the first-time. Images flashing on and off against the back screen. The real voices fade under the voiceover which is getting louder and louder, it fills the entire space. We also hear the rising of “Memorial” in it second phase. We are left alone with Tom, tears on his face with no noise, as the lights rise against entirely reflected of the rippling water. Tom is hunched over a dead Kathryn, and he takes the black veil and places it across her face, and slowly Tom is writing on her body “Hide thy face from my sins, And blot out all my iniquities”

TOM

Hide thy face from my sins, and blot our all my iniquities

There are tears still welled in Tom’s eyes but nothing is being expressed. Everything inside tom has become numb, he has now reached his ultimate goal and embodies the saying “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.” XXII

TOM

Fare you well, my townland,

Fare you well, my people.

Nothing matters here now.

I embrace my exile.

So farewell, Father dear,

And farewell my Mother.

Fare you well, Sister dear

Farewell, my little flower.

XXII

TOM

Then farewell, dearest land,

Fare thee well from my heart,

All that’s left for me now is to

Say we must part.

Fare thee well, Father dear,

And to you, Mother dear,

Fare thee well, sister sweet,

You with your eyes so clear,


39

Pardon me, don’t blame me,

Take my hand and kiss it.

There’ll be no returning.

To find my life, I lose it.

Destiny direct me.

Life’s doorway stands open.

Kathryn waits and calls me,

Nursing our firstborn son.

See my hands raised to you,

Please forgive ev’rything.

There can be no return

From the life I’m beginning.

No escape can there be,

Fate’s bidding must be done

Kathryn waits from me there,

In her arms is my son.

During the final song, Tom takes off his vest, and his entire chest and back are covered in writing. He slowly submerges himself in the water and slowly and methodically trying to wash away everything but it isn’t possible. As all the curtains drop from the edge of the box. Tom picks up a single piece of paper that has been floating in the void, as he sits in the void and looks out to the back of the stage. The news reports on the TVs flicker to life again, and as the lights on stage dim Tom, is alone, in a nightmare of his own making. TOM (VOICEOVER)

As someone once said, “Sex is as close as some of can imagine to being ‘loved’

unconditionally – not for our clever accomplishments but simply for the mute flesh we

are.” I agree with them but sometimes imagining isn’t enough.

The front curtains swish closed and we hear a repeating the last chord of the songs, over and over as it fades out along with the TV reports. THE END

a debt to pleasure: ecstasy + knowledge + performance a...

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