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Abstract
This essay returns to key debates in performance theory regarding the relationship between performance and reproduction, offering a Marxian inflected theory of performance’s mode of reproduction. It suggests that both performance theory and Marxist theory appropriate the mother function in describing performance’s mode of reproduction and the reproduction of capital, while displacing the mother in the process. Through a reading of the work of contemporary artist Danh Võ, the essay explores how performance’s mode of reproduction can affect the reproduction and sustenance of minoritarian life against historical, social, and economic forces of elision, erasure, and annihilation.
Keywords:
Acknowledgments
An ocean of people provided research support, feedback, and help without which this essay would not have been possible. I am particularly grateful to Aliza Shvarts, Josh Lubin-Levy, the anonymous reviewers and editorial collective of w&p, Danh Võ, Bartholomew Ryan, Alena Marchak and the Marian Goodman Gallery, Joan Kee, Amber Musser, Jennifer Doyle, Tavia Nyong’o, Ann Pellegrini, Karen Shimakawa, Shane Vogel, Kelly Chung, Jonathan Magat, Marta Lusena, and Joshua Rains. I’m also thankful for the feedback from audiences at a host of institutions and universities, including the Clark Art Museum, Brown, Cornell, UC Riverside, NYU, and Washington U in St. Louis.
Notes
1 Marx, Capital (Citation1990, vol. 28, 22).
2 Marx, Capital (Citation1990, vol. 1, 179).
3 Spivak (Citation1996b, 111).
4 Marx, Capital (Citation1990, vol. 1, 188).
5 For Marx, commodities “are of course distinct, possess different properties, are measured in different units, are incommensurable”: Grundrisse, 28, 78. But gold undoes the incommensurability of things by reducing them to exchange values, and “bring[ing] them into … a numerical relationship [by] make[ing] them commensurable:” ibid., 80. He continues: “When a product (or an activity) becomes exchange value, it is not only transformed into a particular quantitative relationship … it must at the same time be qualitatively transformed, converted into another element, so that both commodities become denominated quantities, in the same unities, thus becoming commensurable”: ibid., 81.
6 Capital (Citation1990, vol. 1, 188).
7 Ibid., 187.
8 Phelan (Citation1993, 146).
9 Theoretically, and given that the art market is a slush fund for the financial class, when the new work that features the gold leaf is purchased, it will attain the dual life of art within contemporary capitalism, existing simultaneously as an aesthetic object and a quantifiable manifestation of suspended capital.
10 Phelan (Citation1993, 148).
11 Ibid., 148, 152.
12 Ibid.
13 As Hortense Spillers (Citation2003) teaches us, for example, during the emergence of global capitalism black life was stripped of all value as life when black people were reduced to flesh, transformed into commodities measurable by exchange value. Theorists from W.E.B. Du Bois (Citation1994) to Achille Mbembe (Citation2003) and Daphne Brooks (Citation2006) have argued that performance is a central means through which enslaved black people articulated other conditions of possibility from within slavery.
14 We want to adjust Phelan’s thesis, just slightly, to account for Rosa Luxemburg’s insistence that capital’s reproductive “machinery” is by no means “smooth” (Citation[1899] 2004, 144): See also: Althusser (Citation2014).
15 Moten (Citation2003, 14).
16 For an important discussion of Abramović and reperformance, see Schneider (Citation2011, 1–31).
17 It’s useful here to remember Federici’s (Citation2004) lesson about primitive accumulation as the perpetual and ongoing process through which capital seeks out “new” zones and practices to convert into sites for the extraction/production of value.
18 See Muñoz (Citation1996, 10–11): Alex Vazquez elaborates on Muñoz’s argument by noting that we often enter into a relationship with the traces of a performance not to follow it back to its originating moment and subject it to total capture, but instead as a means of mobilizing the “healthy and not-knowing quality of liveness that always reminds you: you were not there” in order to reanimate the lost and no-longer-with-us. “Because we were not there, we have to depend upon whatever ephemera are left behind rather than belabor our lack of access to the actual enactment. We have to listen hard for its trace in the performances to follow … and operate under the assumption that the live performances of the past announce themselves in the recordings of the present” (Vazquez Citation2013, 68). For Joseph Roach (Citation1996), Diana Taylor (Citation2003), and Dwight Conquergood (Citation2002), performance reproduces knowledge and experience through embodied practices of surrogation and transmission. As Rebecca Schneider insists: “Reenactment art poses a certain challenge to our long standing thrall, fueled by art-historical analyses of performance, to the notion that live performance disappears by insisting that, to the contrary, the live is a vehicle for recurrence – unruly or flawed or unfaithful to precedence as that recurrence may threaten to be”: Schneider (Citation2011, 29).
19 Roach (Citation1996, 2).
20 Taylor (Citation2003, 143).
21 Spillers (Citation2003, 151). There is some resonance here between this and the way Taylor describes “the way performances tap into public fantasies and leave a trace, reproducing and at times altering cultural repertoires”: Taylor (Citation2003, 143).
22 Loraux (Citation1993, 132).
23 Shvarts (Citation2014, 205).
24 Ibid., 211.
25 Schneider (Citation2011, 7).
26 Auslander (Citation2008).
27 Phelan (Citation1993, 146).
28 Moten (Citation2003, 5).
29 Federici (Citation2012).
30 Spivak (Citation1996a, 57).
31 Ibid.
32 Newman (Citation2013, 169).
33 Marx (Citation1990, vol. 1, 163–77).
34 “16:32, 26, 05, 2009.” Wall plaque at the Whitney Museum of American Art for the exhibition, “Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner.” March 4, 2016.
35 Marx (Citation1990, vol. 1, 143).
36 Marx (Citation1964, 108, emphasis added).
37 My theorization of the touch or trace of the worker has been heavily influenced by thinking about this issue alongside Kelly Chung. Chung is writing a dissertation that contends that the aesthetic encounter offers the spectator an aesthetic education in developing a minor sense of the world attuned to sensing the trace black, brown, feminized, and immigrant labor that continues to be a central source for capital accumulation.
38 Marx (Citation1986, 28, 290).
39 Ibid.
40 Newman (Citation2013, 168).
41 Engels (Citation1985).
42 Johnson (Citation2014, 174).
43 Ibid., 175.
44 Althusser (Citation2014).
45 Phelan (Citation1993, 148).
46 Ibid.
47 Muñoz (Citation1999, 74).
48 Muñoz (Citation1996, 10).
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 10–11.
51 Shvarts (Citation2014, 217).
52 Danh Võ (Citation2013, 233).
53 Johnson (Citation2003, 66).
54 Ibid.
55 Kwon (Citation2014).
56 Moten (Citation2003, 4).
57 Muñoz (Citation1996, 10).
58 See Vazquez’ important meditation on the role of performance in the reproduction of lost lives and worlds within the Cuban diaspora: Vazquez (Citation2013, 203–34).
59 See: Taylor (Citation2003, 79–103).
60 As Johnson notes, “Tongue’ means ‘language’ only for certain expressions in English (like ‘mother tongue’), but for ordinary use there is another word: ‘language”: Johnson (Citation2003, 22).
61 Buchmann (Citation2013, 166).
62 Roach (Citation1996, 31).
63 Molesworth (Citation2012, 43).
64 There is an extent to which we might accuse Wojnarowicz of “playing Indian”, performing an identification with indigeneity that simultaneously justifies the ongoing dispossession and occupation of native space: Deloria (Citation1998).
65 On the genocidal logic of indigenous racialization in the United States, see: Kauanui (Citation2008).
66 Taussig (Citation2013, 183).
67 Where Jacqueline Kennedy mused to McNamara that Jack’s personal effects were “little personal things – so few at any value,” Võ’s purchase of the object reveals how value can be reproduced and valorized through performance. Touched by Jack, Jackie, and Robert, these items appropriated some measure of the value of their lives, warranting their sale by auction. Mediated through Võ’s aesthetic labor and exhibited in a blue-chip gallery, the value increases further. “Mother Tongue” reminds us that as much as performance may “clog” the machinery of capital’s reproduction, it may play an active role in it.
68 Johnson, Mother Tongues, 66.
69 Johnson again: “We never stop being a child. Only mothers are supposed to subordinate themselves entirely to the needs of someone else. The fantasy of being fully responded to is a fantasy we all have. That is why we remain so angry at the mother for frustrating that desire – or perhaps even more for fulfilling it”: ibid., 79.
70 Spivak (Citation1996c). See also Spivak (Citation1988).
71 Johnson (Citation2003, 84).