22 But it cannot be reduced to it, not least because text itself tends to convey a dominant
ideology of textualism. For example, in philosophy, textualist ideology insists that
language exhausts the scope of experience, since whatever lies outside of language
cannot be thought or given context. Hence Sellars claims that ‘all awareness... is
a linguistic affair’. Gadamer stresses ‘the essential logisticallity of all human
experience in the world’; Rorty asserts that we humans are ‘nothing more than
sentential attitudes’; and Derrida declares that there cannot be a ‘hors-texte’; a
reality whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language.
Textualist ideology has been extremely helpful in dissuading philosophy from
misguided quests for absolute foundations outside of contingent linguistic and social
practices. But in making this therapeutic point by stressing what Rorty terms
‘the ubiquity of language’, textualization also encourages an unhealthy idealism
that identifies human being-in-the world with linguistic activity and so tends to
neglect or overly textualise nondiscursive somatic experience. As ‘the contemporary
counterpart of [nineteenth century] idealism’, textualism displays idealism’s disdain
for materiality, hence for the corporeal. Seeking to secure a realm of spirituality
after natural science, science had displaced religion’s authority and despiritualised
the world, idealism focused on mental consciousness and inherited, by and large,
the dominant Christian impulse to deprecate the body. After Freud’s disenchant-
ment of consciousness, language has become the new representative of the spiritual
in contrast to corporeal nondiscursivity.
(Shusterman 199 7 : 1 7 3–1 74 )In performance studies, there has been a move to performative writing, intended to
simulate the twists and turns of practice (see, for example, Phelan 1998). I am not overly
convinced by this move which often seems like a series of modernist experiments.
23 Clearly there is a problem of locating performance in the historical record, with which
I cannot deal here. The signs and traces of the archive become crucial. But I suspect
there are more signs and traces than have been looked for until quite recently.
24 In particular, the literature on dance is part of a growing awareness in feminist theory
that bodies are not just moulded, reiterative objects that have an excess arising out of
embodiment. For example,
the bodies of ballet dancers are clearly cultural bodies. In other words, female and
male take up the culture definitions of feminity and masculinity through ballet, with
its Western aesthetics, offers them. In order to render these representations on stage,
what is required is ‘a sculpting of the original body into a culture form’. Put in
Butler’s terminology, the physical practices of dancers are ‘reiterative and citational
practices’.
But a discourse that views female dancers as nothing more than the passive
recipients and unquestioning transmitters of the culture meanings of femininity is
too limited. While the world of classical ballet is clearly permeated with gender
stereotypes and power inequalities, if the life of a female dancer is as unbearable as
society suggested, why would any woman ever aspire to become a professional
dancer? And how is it possible that I have met many dancers who, while suffering
from the body demands made of them, clearly enjoyed their profession? Are these
demands experienced as oppressive or maybe as a continual challenge?
To enable the answering of questions like these, one has to abandon the woman-
as-victim model and devote more attention to the stories of female dancers.
(Aalten 199 7 : 55–56)Maybe this is one of the reasons why many of the great choreographers have been
women, especially of late. Dance calls for a language that is often ‘fragments rather than268 Notes