It is always possible the performance may fail. This performance is always inherently
interactive, and fundamentally risky. ‘Amongst the various people involved (who
often have different agendas) there is always something theoretically and/
or practically at stake, and something can always go wrong’ (Schieffelin 1998:
198). Indeed, even a ‘successful performance must be a qualified failure’ (Connor
1996: 121).
Fifth, performance is often assumed to be transgressive. But this is not necessarily
the case; there is a romance of performance. In truth, much performance is
normative;^21 if Butler does nothing else she makes clear that performative
transgression must be seen side by side with performative normativity:
within performance studies, Butler has in effect challenged the sedimented
signification of ‘performative’ as referring only to oppositional cultural
practices and sought to queer the term so that it refers to normative practices
and discourses. One might protest that such a queering amounts to a misuse
of language. ‘Surely, Butler’s performative refers to something else!’
‘It’s linguistic rather than embodied!’ ‘It means normativity as much as
subversion.’ ‘Couldn’t we use another term?!’ Rather than attempting to
justify her use of this term by again citing Gender Trouble’s alliance of theatrical
performance and discursive performativity, I shall entertain the thought that
it is a misuse, and that this misuse is itself a tactic of resignification, of
queering.
(McKenzie 199 7 : 229)Sixth, writing about performance as the art of the now is a problem since
marking the unmarked is likely to alter fundamentally and to devalue precisely
what it is about by pulling it into the system of mass reproduction and what Phelan
(1993: 1 4 ) calls the ‘drive of the documentary’. At the same time, there is the
problem of describing what performance is about in writing, why we should attend
to it, especially when
in representational arts like dance and music we are, indeed, quite accustomed
to deciding whether someone – a critic – has ‘understood’ a piece in terms
not of their formed analysis but of their figurative description, their account
not of what the music meant but how it did (‘the music rose and hesitated,
dropped and rose again, like a kite in flight’).
(Kemp 1996: 160)Of course, performance is irrefutably bound up with the written word.^22
Especially since the 1960s, performance has been boosted by clear theoretical
imperatives. Then, many of those working in performance studies have tried to
work towards various forms of ‘performative writing’ which can capture some
of the travails of performance such as incursion, permeation, and multiplicity, and
can constitute a performance in their own right. Thus, ‘performative writing seems
one way not only to make meaning but to make writing meaningful’ (Pollock
Afterwords 137