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Abstract
This essay participates in exploring alternative styles of performance criticism. It also seeks to address critics of performative writing practices by providing a conceptual and theoretical foundation for one such style of practice. It calls for a style of performative criticism modeled upon hypertextual theories of movement. It advocates that critics of mediated performance events adopt a performative critical pose that emphasizes the speed and intensity of the movement of critical encounter. The value of such a posture lies in its distortion of the dialectic between meaning and sense that tends to circulate in humanities scholarship. Through a turn to hypertextual theories as influenced by the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, the essay argues that the relations produced in and through hypertextual interaction provide a model for such a critical response.
Notes
1. Some styles are compilation of textual fragments, poetry, personal narrative, photo essays, autoethnography, etc.
2. Pollock's “excursions” into performative writing encourage the writer to be evocative, metonymic, subjective, nervous, citational, and consequential. I see my comments on movement to be supplements, not substitutes, for these poses.
3. See CitationChvasta for a rationale of the importance of such explorations.
4. A more thorough description of hypertext can be found in the third section of the essay.
5. One version of this is based, for example, in “mystoriography” discussed below. For adaptations of this process in performance studies practice, see Bowman and Bowman.
6. See, for example, Teletheory and CitationScholes, Comley, and Ulmer.
7. I want to make it very clear that I am not suggesting that performance critics must necessarily reproduce the form of hypertext in their writing, although this can be a representational strategy. Rather, I am arguing for a critical orientation or performative posture inspired by hypertext theory.
8. In addition to the recent literature regarding performative writing, there is also a criticism of interpretation in terms of articulating the dangers of “text” centered approaches. For instance, Elizabeth CitationBell's feminist work has focused on the material pleasures of engaging with performance in her critique of privileging text over (female) performer. Dwight CitationConquergood's well-known work has also long been invested in sounding the dangers of “textcentricity” in terms of the oppression of cultures and communities who do not have access to, or who are oppressed by, technologies of reading and writing. What both Bell's and Conquergood's critiques demonstrate is the “othering” of the performer in the text/performer dialectic that, while recognizing the action of the text, elides the acting of the (female, subaltern) body.
9. For an extended discussion of the force of the mind/body dialectic in reinforcing its own structure of opposition, see CitationFenske.
10. Unfortunately, Darley's analysis tends to privilege a surface/depth dichotomy where meaning is depth and content interpretation, and surface is sensuous and emotional. This dichotomy reproduces the split between cognition (meaning) and embodiment (sense) or, in the terms of this essay, text/signification and performance.
11. For representative examples see CitationSanders; CitationHewitt; and CitationCaplan.
12. See, for example, CitationVale and Juno; CitationCamphausen; CitationDeMello.
13. This description reminds me of much of the performance art of the late twentieth century as well as MTV. The intersection between multiple forms of visual and verbal representation in multimediated performance practices, in other words, was not introduced by hypertext.
14. The rhetoric often used to describe this experience is that of a journey through a space that has depth, height, and length. The reader of a hypertext moves from one “place” to another through hyperspace. Each “place” is situated associationally, as opposed to linearly, to each other. The “bridges” in this landscape are the links one follows to move from one place to another.
15. Of course, as you might be thinking, the intertextual metaphor does not make hypertext unique simply because it is a literal representation of the intertextual process. Footnotes have accomplished the same thing in print textuality, for instance.
16. I am certainly not the first to make the conceptual connection between hypertext and performance (see, e.g., CitationdeLahunta; Farley; CitationSaltz). For instance, CitationMarie-Laure Ryan puts hypertext under the category “The Computer as Theater” in her introduction to Cyberspace Textuality (6). The rationale for the connection is best articulated for my purposes by Rita Raley. Raley argues that the experience of interacting with hypertext is more closely aligned with the “temporal and empirical structures of performance art” than it is with print textuality (par. 10). The reason is because the hypertext user's (a term she prefers to “reader”) experience is more akin to “performance art's situation and inclusion of the viewer within its boundaries, as well as the literary theorizations of the reader in terms of interaction, encounter, agonistic struggle, dialogue, and experience” (par. 10). The connection between performance art and hypertext is made by the simple fact that the user of a hypertext must make physical as well as cognitive choices as to what links to follow in order to move through the text. Moreover, this feature is essential to hypertext as opposed to merely accidental or stylistic. Raley's efforts to theorize hypertext, then, capitalize on the performative dimensions of the text in order to argue that hypertext is a complex and unpredictable system incompletely produced through interaction. What is important for my purpose is to turn the insights gained from conceptualizing the performance of hypertext back onto performance itself: in short, to generate a critical language for performance from the insights produced about performance that resulted when it became a critical tool for discussing hypertext.
17. Aarseth's terminology, however, does not necessarily endorse this position regarding movement because it is still tied to the notion of textuality and meaning and to the separation of text, reader, and author.
18. This description depends upon Deleuze and Guattari's illustration of movements within assemblages (503–5). Massumi's work is also alluding to this description and is using hypertext as a sort of textual metaphor for the assemblage.
19. For a more thorough discussion of the productivity and provisionality of moments of closure or finalization within the context of aesthetic production, see Fenske.
20. The lack of a center of meaning and the sense that meaning is reconstituted from moment to moment also obviously has implications in terms of stable subjectivity (Keep 166).
21. Though, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, smooth and striated, open and closed, are constantly folding over into one another. There are smooth spaces within striated space and smooth space overcomes striated while striated encloses smooth. No simple binary operation here.
22. This similarity is what motivated Raley to suggest that hypertext works like performance, after all.
23. It is important for me to mention the context of my use of the term “multiplicity.” Here I am again inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze makes a distinction between the use of “multiplicity” as signifying multiple singular points of view or perspectives, and the mobilization of the term as a way of indicating “a plurality of centres, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation” and which cannot be “attained by multiplying representations and points of view. On the contrary, each composing representation must be distorted, diverted and torn from its centre. Each point of view must itself be the object” (56).
24. Noting, of course, that these questions reproduce the subject–object relations that the critical terminology strives to decenter and disrupt.
25. Virus is borrowed from Deleuze and Guatarri (10–11) and Keep (172).
26. I say “seems” because the form of his essay is not the issue and I have no access to his “pose.” It is also important to note that Bowman's work is partly modeled upon Gregory Ulmer's mystoriography, which combines texts representing different voices or perspectives. This is valuable because it suggests that the form of the critical response is less important than the pose toward criticism. To act like a virus may produce all kinds of representational effects, in other words. It is also of note that this type of critical practice has a long history in live performance on stages and in classrooms.
27. Deleuze and Guattari note that movement and speed are different notions. Speed deals with intensity, whereas movement suggests travel (381).