Fourth, there is a further paradox. Though Deleuze and Guattari work through a logic
of multiplicity they proceed through careful dichotomies: paranoia versus schizophrenia,
molar versus molecular, deterritorialization versus reterritorialization, smooth versus
striated, and so on. Implicitly, they respect certain boundaries. Lecercle for example,
writes of their critique of language thatThey opt for parole against language, style against grammar, dialects or idiolects
against standard languages, fragments against syntax, the minor against the general,
the material (speech acts are material in so far as they are acts) against the abstract.
This is the methology of the professional smuggler: give me a frontier, and I shall
cross it; give me a rule, and I shall break it. But... the crossing of a linguistic
frontier is an ambiguous act, since it acknowledges the rule which it breaks.
(Lecercle 1990: 1 4 3)Fifthly, the body tends to disappear into the flow of desiring-production:while the poststructuralist commitment to fluidity and flow, after centuries of dualist
thought, is indeed refreshing, Deleuze and Guattari’s own particular treatment
of these issues; especially their emphasis on the process of ‘becoming’, not only
results in a radical reconfiguration of materiality itself, but also, as we have seen, an
‘acidic dissolution’ or disintegration of the body and the subject (i.e. the process
of ‘becoming-imperceptible’); a position which, quite simply, loses too much in
the ‘process’. A similar fate, in other words, befalls both the Deleuzo-Guattarian
and the Foucaldian body; first it becomes elusive and eventually it ‘disappears’
altogether.
(S.T. Williams 1998: 74 )19 And
the relation between performance and practice turns on this moment of
improvisation. Performance embodies the expressive dimension of the strategic
articulation of practice. The italicized expression here could stand as our definition
of performativity itself. It is manifest in the expression as part of the ‘way’ something
is done on a particular occasion: the particular orchestration of the pacing, tension,
evocation, emphasis, mode of participation, etc. in the way a practice (at the
moment), is ‘practised’, that is, ‘brought off’. It gives the particular improvisation
of a practice in a particular situation its particular turn of significance and efficiency
for oneself and others at the time and in the moment where habitude becomes
action. This performativity is located at the creative, improvisatory edge of practice
in the moment it is carried out, though everything that comes across is not
necessarily intended.
(Schieffelin 1998: 199)20 Although many performances are bound up with text, often very consciously, as in the
case of geometrical dance (see Franko 1993) which then elicited a counterreaction:
‘antitextual or burlesque dance was an attempt to establish a legibility for dance
independent of verbal means. Such aesthetic autonomy had political significance when
a body, independent of language, could mean something “more” or other than what
language said it did’ (Franko 1993: 5). Franko goes on to point out that in dance text
is often a metaphor for autocratic power.
21 As Turner noted in his discussion of liminality, in turning the world upside down for
an instant, the power of the dominant order could be reinforced. I am indebted to
Derek Gregory for this point.
Notes 267