whereas Bourdieu fails to take account of the way in which a performative can
break with and assume new contexts, refiguring the terms of legitimate
utterance themselves, Derrida appears to install the break as a structurally
necessary feature of every utterance and every codifiable written mark, thus
paralysing the social analysis of forceful utterance.
(Butler 199 7 : 150)Thus, for Butler, Bourdieu is quite clearly necessary as a means of capturing a
bodily stylistics that, in turn, performs ‘its own social magic [which] constitutes
the fact and corporeal operation of performativity’ (Butler 199 7 : 153) but
Bourdieu also constantly misses that ‘something [which] always exceeds the speech
act the body performs [which] remains uncounted by any of its acts of speech’
(Butler 199 7 : 155). ‘What breaks down in the course of interpellation, opening
up the possibility of achievement from within, remains unaccounted for’ (Butler
1997 : 156). Yet Butler offers little to help the reader account for the unaccounted.
This is ultimately, I think, because she cannot bear to part entirely with a textual
model of performance based upon sign and referent.
The same criticism can, I think be applied to Bhabha, the second significant
contemporary cultural theorist with investments in performance. For Bhabha
‘performativity’ is defined by instability. It represents ‘the ever-present potential
for language to mean something else, to betray one set of meanings for another,
to slip from one context or set of relations into another’s arms, taking commercial
pleasure with it, laughing all the way’ (Pollock 1998: 23). In other words, Bhabha
is focusing on the creative moment in meaning-making:
the moment when the story-in-history is in effect caught red-handed, not
inventing the facts per se but investing the authority from which they
derive their meaning and weight. Like Bakhtin, he finds the ambivalence
at the centre of the narrative at its would be ‘origins’ – less a cause for despair
than celebration (even real romance). In fact, Bhabha characterises it as the
next best thing to an ongoing moment; it is, for him, a performative moment,
redolent with possibility, productivity, and agency.
(Pollock 1998: 2 4 )In other words, performance, used here in a distinctively theatrical sense, becomes
a technology for mining the creative implications of signification. But Bhabha’s
tendency to stick to textual signification makes it difficult for him to realize the
potential of his own thoughts. Not so for Deleuze, the third contemporary cultural
theorist I want to consider.
For Deleuze, the performative is an integral part of his conception of thought
and life. And the essentially textual model of Derrida and Bhabha, and even the
becoming-more-corporeal Butler model, are not sufficient to capture this general
generative intelligibility:
For me, a text is merely a small cog in an extra-textual practice. It is not a
question of commentating on the text by a method of deconstruction or byAfterwords 131