Peggy Phelan was not part of our reading list at first but we curiously (or not that curiously) both tripped on her ; same book, same chapter. Whether we like her postures or not she stimulates our thoughts in regards to the idea of becoming-trace. (Please see the TEXTS section for the bibliographical reference.)
Disappearance vs. Preservation.
Phelan posits that performance cannot be recorded, saved, documented otherwise it becomes something else; performance’s essence, like the being of subjectivity, “becomes itself through disappearance” (Phelan : 1993, p. 146). Aside from suggesting a somewhat purist/essentialist vision of performance – which we will come back to – that sentence makes us believe that performance would be ontologically superior to other kind of art… (really?)
If we cannot deny that disappearance is intrinsic to our existence, we are begged to ask: don’t we exist through many modes? and thus don’t we rather want to talk in terms of becoming rather than in terms of being (which tend to imply a homogenous essence) not only for performance art but also when discussing what subjectivity is, when speaking of our very existence ? If disappearance is a mode of becoming, so is inscription, and, (whether or not it is a vain attempt to counter disappearance) we’d say, as a full mode of becoming in itself. Derrida’s project of deconstruction tackles these recurrent binaries of Western metaphysics: presence/absence; speech/writing; man/woman, but also, essence/phenomenon; nature/culture; “facticity”/authenticity; appearances/reality.
Through this research-creation process on the “becoming-trace/recording objects” we want to think about the performative possibilities of traces. This precisely implies that we’ll question such binaries as the fake/the authentic; the audience/the performer; the material/the immaterial traces. Those binaries are, as Derrida posits, political. They imply that one term is generic (the reference) and the other is parasitic. Binaries are hierarchic. As he explains in Force de loi, deconstruction does not pretend to annihilate oppositions but rather to dis-place them. In spite of our first reading of Phelan, we come to wander if it might not be where she is going -slowly- when she admits that writing on performance, although in alters the latter “in it’s essence”, allows to re-mark the performative possibilities of writing itself.
Albeit Phelan acknowledges that redefining the relationship between self and other; spectator and performer; subject and object is a challenge, she still take a strong stance against reproduction drawing on J.L. Austin’s performative utterances (which by definition can never be reproduced or represented) (Phelan: 1993, p. 164) and Felman’s “radical negativity” in that it offers resistance to reproduction (“What history cannot assimilate, Felman argues, is thus the implicitly analytical dimension of all radical or fecund thoughts, of all new theories: the ‘force’ of their ‘performance’ (always somewhat subversive) and their ‘residual smile’ (always somewhere self-subversive)”) (Phelan: 1993, p. 165). « Representation without reproduction » : …….(to be continued).
Yet, even though she sticks with the metaphysical discourse of presence, her critique of what others have called the “museification of the world” is clearly deconstructive: “Institutions whose only function is to preserve and honor objects—traditional museums, archives, banks, and to some degree, universities—are intimately involved in the reproduction of the sterilizing binaries of self/other, possession/dispossession, men/women which are increasingly inadequate formulas for representation. These binaries and their institutional upholders fail to account for that which cannot appear between these tight “equations” but which nonetheless inform them.” (Phelan: 1993, p. 165.) These in-betweens are what is at stake in Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic (vs. the arborescent/root-tree) thinking we are delving into in order to grasp the notion of becoming. “La logique binaire est la réalité spritiruelle de l’arbre-racine” (Deleuze & Guattari: 1980, p.11). ……..
Metaphor vs. Metonymy. The same can be said about her critique of our “gender economy” (the division of sexes and their evaluation): its is deconstructive in that is clearly attacks the political (hierarchic) binary at hand and yet draws from the metaphysics of presence. The gender binary “metaphor” is potentially threaten by performance art, says Phelan, in that the latter uses the body metonymically rather than metaphorically. The metaphor is defined here as a cultural worker that continually reduces difference to the same, it constructs a vertical hierarchy of value and is reproductive where as the metonymy is additive and associative: “it works to secure a horizontal axis of contiguity and displacement” (Phelan: 1993, p.149).
In leaving no visible traces, performance also offers capitalism a certain political resistance, recalls Phelan: “Performance clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital” (Phelan: 1993, p. 146-149.). Phelan offers a fine analysis of art economics which we wonder whether it might be drawing from or merely put in dialog with Bataille’s ideas on “spending as pure loss” (cf. La part maudite). Performance is indeed presented as spending without left-overs thus resisting the accumulative logic of capitalism. Saving nothing, performance art risks charges of valuelessness and emptiness but it may as well hold “the possibility of reevaluating that emptiness” (Phelan: 1993, p.147).
….
We are about to read Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” so we will be in a position to potentially put those two authors in dialogue in a short while and thus develop further on the critique of reproduction.
The question lying beneath our discomfort with Phelan’s ontological discourse just came to us: we need to identify thoroughly the point of disjunction between deconstruction and the rhizome.
Les Ricaneuses 
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