Introduction: perspectives on performativity and creativity

1 INTRODUCTION: PERSPECTIVES ON PERFORMATIVITY AND CREATIVITY Martin Pr This special issue has originated from an international conference on at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague in November 2019 as a part of the Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interre Whereas the topics of conference presentations ranged from the public spher this issue focuses on two major perspectives on performativity: philosophical/aesthetic and theatrical/dramatic. Apart from semiotic, existential and legal angles, the first perspective comprises more complex approaches of language and political philosophy as well as those of the theories of fiction and media. The second perspective includes models as performatives in theatrical and social practice, anthropologically defined types of play and distinct forms of media transposition. The problems of creativity, ranging from the making of aesthetic objects in poetry and modelling worlds through play to uses of masks for the construction of a public persona are discussed in the framework of these perspectives representing two major dimensions of performativity. As a concept, performativity emerges rather late: it does not appear foundational lectures, How to Do Things with Words. It had been used quite rarely and rather reductively1 before the early 1990s when Judith Butler put it in 1 Linguistics and Philosophy, 12.5 [1989]: 535-58) John Searle , trying to collapse the 2 circulation with her influential books Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. A new, no longer language-centred, perspective on performativity develops from alternative, non-essentialist and dynamic, view of gender based on her analysis of . as the 2 Butler challenged nding and deepening the meaning of , (viii), she endowed the category of performativity with a specific political meaning, decentring the authority of invoked by Austin and Searle and focusing instead on the political stakes in designation as origin and cause of those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices and discourses with multiple and diffuse points of (viii-ix). The fact that performativity of gender (and, one could add, all other important concepts used to identify and describe individuals and communities) ca also implies that performativity -parody, self- [a] natural (139). In brief, s early use, implies both the possibility (or even feasibility) of performing identities or social norms and their subversion by means of parody or critical reflection. In Bodies That Matter Butler narrows down her approach, connecting performativity, broadly understood as a discursive phenomenon and an enforced difference between its linguistic aspects and extra-linguistic phenomena, such as encodes executive selfapproach was criticized by Jacqu fterword: Toward an Ethics of (trans. Samuel Weber, Limited Inc [Evanston, IL, and London: Northwestern University Press, 1988]) the iterability of the mark beyond all human speech -35) and also beyond the such as, e.g., The Declaration of Independence Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2000, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rothenberg [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002] 49). Linguistics and Philosophy, 3.2 (1979): 245-65, which sums up Austin contexts and semantic qualities of specific verbs. 2 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) viii. Subsequent references are given as page numbers in brackets in the text. Introduction 3 social practice, s general citationality 3), and using the Foucauldian notion of l regulating sexual identities and desire.4 In her more general perspective, l (187). Despite this rather determinist view - selfentities (188). Moreover, in her Butler shows that into mark at once the limits of agency and its most enabling conditions (228). This, among others, implies that Butler defines performativity as a specific dynamic of power, which enables its self- ) and, simultaneously, a redirection to produce alternative modalities of power, to establish a political contestation that is not a of contemporary relations of power, but a (241). As a , which is not understood as an arbitrary act of individual will contemporary relations of power, but as a future-bound transformation of discourses and norms We no more create from nothing the political terms that come to represent carry the pain of social injury. And yet, neither of these terms are as a result any less necessary to work and rework within political discourse. (229) 3 and Jeffrey Mehlman, Limited Inc 12-23. 4 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and London: Routledge, 1993) 8-9, 12-15. Subsequent references are marked by page numbers in Limited Inc a reiteration of a norm or a set of norms, and to that extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a outside a p 4 Two years after the appearance of Bodies That Matter, Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick responded academic discourse and a deepening difference between its usages in philosophy ity signals absorption; 5 Another gap is widening between the me s a technocratically understood efficiency of a system criticism of Niklas Luhmann6) and Paul de J the dislinkage precisely of cause and effect between the signifier and the world (2). Parker and Sedgwick point out the interconnection of the traditional examination speech to act act to identity 6). Although which constitutes a violation of the allegedly rigorous purity of every event of discourse or every speech act performative 7 es This is also true of their analysis of Aus parasitic upon the normal use etiolations 8 used to exclude Austin makes clear that his performative theory is based on problematic assumptions, first of the unity of the speaker and the speech act and also of the performer and the action, and secondly (8 9 Given the complexity and diversity of the relations among the speaker, performer, action performativity and performance in the theatrical 5 Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Performativity and Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1995) 2. Subsequent references are given as page numbers in brackets in the text. 6 See JeanThe Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 19 humanity after it, dehumanizing it in order to rehumanize it at a different level of 7 -18. 8 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975) 22. 9 Austin 6-8 and passim. Introduction 5 Performatives are apt to exercise with cal activism, or with ). In this way Parker and Sedgwick redefine the notion of performativity as agency which does not have to be connected with the identity or capacity of the spe context of the performative action. As a result, performativity must always be considered in connection with performance, which may include transformation of identities, institutions, interchanges, practices and their spaces. Although this broad perspective on performativity may almost seem to encourage its identification with creativity (especially in view of the theatrical dimension of performativity), it should be remembered that the relations between creative subjects and their creations (not only between speakers and their utterances as Parker and Sedgwick have it) are heterogeneous, The articles in this issue do not discuss performativity and creativity separately, but ships, agencies and forms. This is a major difference from the past approaches to creativity based on the analogy between divine and human creation as two interdependent agencies. Although its roots can be traced back to Platonism, this analogy grows in importance in early modernity and develops towards its transformation in the late Enlightenment and Romanticism.10 The two 10 For Renaissance notions of creativity see, e.g., George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589) 1 English name well conformes with the Greeke word: for of [Greek: poiein] to make, they call a maker Poeta. Such as (by way of resemblance and reuerently) we may say of God: who without any trauell to his diuine imagination, made all the world of nought, nor also by any paterne or mould as the Platonicks with their Idees do phantastically to the quote attributed to e i Greci li chiamano con un attributo, che si lendo inferire, che e il Poeta -given attribute, meaning that there is none in the world who would deserve the name of creator, but God and the Poet). Pierantonio Serassi, La Vita di Torquato Tasso (The Life of Torquato Tasso) (Roma: Stamperia Pagliarini, 1785) 492alleged quotation was stil Defence of Poetry ( Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. 6 poles of this analogy seem to merge in the Romantic notion of the work of art as an 11 In spite of this, the distinction between divine and human creation does not disappear. It survives not only thanks to the identification of the work of art with the process of natural growth (often explained as a God-given necessity), but also in the analogy between organisms and works of art in Critique of Judgement. based on the teleological concept of the organic form, intrinsic natural perfection inexplicable on any analogy to any known physical, or natural, agency [...], not even e 12 Even though the gap between the bridged by the overarching concept of , which gives the purpose to all existence, the duality of the divine and the human still remains: humans must recognize and fulfil ], whereby it is able to subject the whole of nature to that single design (for which nature is merely the instrument), i.e. to think it as a Deity. 13 The divine/human duality is transformed in the nineteenth-century approaches or its proclaiming the death of God. As Gilles Deleuze shows, for Nietzsche any proper use of excess in order to invent new forms of life But this task is not completed in man. Going as far as he can man raises negation to a power of affirming. But affirming in its full power, affirming affirmation itself this is beyond 14 Overman realises the whole of this programme: the highest power of the false, Dionysian affirmation or the genius of the superhuman 15 James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, The Bollingen Series, vol. 75 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) 1:305. 11 Romanticism see M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) 156-225, especially 177: in 12 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement ith, rev. and ed. Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 203. 13 14 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Continuum, 1986) 185. 15 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 185. Introduction 7 Devoid of metaphysical and mythological connotations, the duality of creation seems to re-emerge even in later twentieth-century approaches to creativity, such as theory of reformulated by Niklas Luhmann. While Maturana and Varela use autopoiesis as analogy, 16 based on the action, 17 which can produce different domains, depending on the distin 18 Luhmann employs a different, disparaging analogy between the (early) modern subj empty circularity of pure - [is] able to formulate this latent unity of the subject and its ennui a theory of the self-despairing subject, a theory of dynamism achieved through self-desperation 19 t articulations of the duality of creation in terms of an analogy, one time between and the unity of a system (a different and the dynamis - referential system This persistent concept of the artwork as a machine, based on a transversal approach to systems, signs and their sense, and first formulated in his Proust and Signs (1964, 1969, 1973). The basis of , a dynamic wholeness manifesting itself in the rhizomatic, proliferating flow of time, which, in keeping 20 is self-referential but, in contrast to autopoiesis, does not produce an gather[s] up the ultimate fragments, to sweep along, at different speeds all the pieces, each one that refers to a different whole, to no whole at all, to no other whole than that of style. 21 This notion of performativity/creativity cannot be reduced to the machinistic aesthetics and automata of the early avant-garde: it can be posited as an objective of major 16 Metaphor: Problems and Perspectives, ed. David S. Miall (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982) 118. 17 Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1991). 18 Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, rev. edn (Boston, MA, and London: Shambhala, 1987) 135. 19 Niklas Luhmann, Essays on Self-Reference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) 118. 20 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 129. 21 Deleuze, Proust and Signs 115. 8 modern artistic developments transcending the organic analogy and the concept of autopoiesis. It has a potential to close the deepening gap between art and science, understanding both as to use Ilya Pri s 22 The articles in this issue have not been selected to illustrate the above narrative, but to show its incompleteness and limitations. Within the two major perspectives described in the introductory paragraph, they open different views of performativity and creativity in modern art and culture starting with Romantic drama and ending with recent post-conceptual poetry. They imply that the understanding of the links between performativity and creativity does not depend only on the above discussed notions of identity, discourse, agency, organic form or autopoiesis, but also, for instance, on grasping opening article on On the Ve s detailed comparison of selected works of English Romanticism, French Symbolism, later nineteenthcentury novel and twentieth-century modernist poetry and drama shows how the thetic values based on mimesis stressing the fictionality of the artwork as an aesthetic object and creative process points out another vital aspect of performativity , which, accor reality that gives us no determinate reasons or hopes upon which to justify our affirmations present, when values (especially hat will 23) are not only of power, but chiefly ideology, that presents itself as a solution without a problem, or a forced solution roach is valuable since it demonstrates a positive political use of Deleuzean concept of performativity (in its relatedness to an existentialist reflection of Sartre and Camus) as an ethical guidance in the time of fake news, populist manipulation of public opinion, and their general condition, the existence of political practice which presents itself as a solution without a problem. 22 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, (New York: Bantam Books, 1984) especially 213-32. 23 William Clare Roberts, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) 63. Introduction 9 discusses Hamacher deconstructive theory of language, law and justice in connection with Walter ns about the relationships between language, law-making, violence, state power and its breakdown. Balogh points out a crucial problem of reductive understanding of performativity as agency, which can be traced in the work of Butler, Kosofsky or Parker. Both in politics in the performative processes of law system that can still operate with the political opposition of legal norm and state of emergency. exception is an to performativity, an alternative opening a new dimension of freedom based on the other. David Vichnar an - introduced by a detailed interpretation of the historical development of the theory of Concep s Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983) Paratexts (1989) to works and the writings of his predecessors. They co art Conceptualist mystification, which performs the work of art as a which a residual Humanism persists in its attempts to produ 24 This also means that Conceptualism has developed misleading notions of performativity and creativity and handle what surpasses it the media flow, the extensions of the internet, the continuous sequences of any single life, the broad public implications of any ntrast to this rather megalomaniac as well as his life terminated by suicide, show the contexts of subjectivities (Autoportrait, Suicide), which thus demonstrate the limitations of performativity after the expansion and internal transformation of the philosophical and aesthetic scene by modern media and intermediality. The second part of this special issue is focused on performativity in theatre and related social practices. It opens with Heterotelic Models 24 CounterText 6.1 (2020): 76.