Žižek and Performance

B. Chow, A. Mangold, B. Chow, A. Mangold, B. Chow, A. Mangold

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137403193
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The first edited volume to examine philosopher Slavoj Žižek's influence on, and his relevance for, theatre and performance studies. Featuring a brand new essay from Žižek himself, this is an indispensable contribution to the emerging field of Performance Philosophy.

1

The Lacanian Performative: Austin after Žižek

Geoff Boucher

Introduction

In this chapter, I am going to interpret the early work of Slavoj Žižek (between 1989 and 1994) as proposing what is in effect a theory of language as theatrical. That would be a theory of speech in which speaking was not only action, but also act, that is, an attempt to affect auditors by speaking, as well as to coordinate efforts through speech. In the examples that Žižek discusses, as well as the example that Žižek’s own work itself provides, these effects are mainly shock and seduction, but other effects – persuading, delighting, amazing, frightening and so forth – are also possible. Regarding speech as inherently theatrical means focusing on the ways in which the speaker, in seeking to affect an audience, expresses their subjectivity as well as engages with social conventions and refers to the objective world. Based on pragmatic theories of language, a dramaturgical theory of language includes an acknowledgement that speech involves social coordination with a normative dimension, as well as information exchange in the interests of referential descriptions of things in the world. Going beyond language pragmatics, though, including theories of communicative action, recognition of the theatricality of language means acknowledgement that speech happens between embodied subjects and depends for its effectiveness upon the dialogue partners’ mutual presuppositions about their speech community. On this description, speaking always centrally involves an appeal to the implied audience of the speech community, even as the speaker seeks some satisfaction of their needs, desires, beliefs, or feelings from the interlocutor.

I am going to argue, then, that one of Žižek’s most innovative contributions to psychoanalytic literature is to have practised a form of cultural analysis that is implicitly based in a dramaturgical theory of language. That Žižek holds a theatrical conception of speech is evident from two considerations:

1. Žižek follows Lacan in his approach to language. Now, Lacan’s theory of desire in language is framed within the potential for ironic reversal that exists because of the speech situation, where this is conceptualised as a permanent gap between statement and enunciation. Against the background of the ironic potentials of the speech situation, Lacan’s conception of the unconscious in terms of what has been called the ‘scandal of the speaking body’, despite its apparently structuralist terminology, is thoroughly dramatic.

2. Žižek represents his own position as agonistic and theatrical – that is, as a dramaturgy of the social – often exemplified by cinema’s contemporary theatricality. For Žižek, what all dramatic media illustrate is the way that the agon between speaker and interlocutor depends on the unexpected effects of speech, whose key is the speaker’s and interlocutor’s libidinal investments in socio-symbolic authority.

Once I have clarified and defended these claims, I am going to show how Žižek’s position makes possible a solution to a persistent problem of the speech act theory proposed by John L. Austin and developed further by John Searle – the mystery of what is called ‘perlocution’. A dramaturgical theory of language will extend speech act theory, and my contention is that only psychoanalysis can successfully achieve this. I will therefore have demonstrated not only that Žižek’s conception of language is dramaturgical, but also that such a theory articulates a valid solution to a pressing intellectual problem.

Psychomachia as dramaturgy

Lacan’s insistence that he practised not linguistics, but ‘linguistrickery’¹ and not phonetics, but ‘faunetics’,² indicates that despite strategic references to Ferdinand de Saussure, Émile Benveniste, and Roman Jakobson, his work should not be simply thought of as belonging to structuralism and its sequelae. Lacan focuses on what linguistics represses, namely, the speaking subject as both a corporeal entity and as a reality constituted in the utterance; he also blithely ignores Saussure’s strictures against investigating either the diachrony of the utterance or the nature of the referent. Perhaps surprisingly, Lacan maintains that his description of condensation and displacement as metaphor and metonymy comes not only from Jakobson’s paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of selection and combination, but also from the ancient rhetoric of Quintilian.³ ‘The universe is a flower of rhetoric’, Lacan summarises, ‘that is what I am [actually] saying when I say that the unconscious is structured like a language’.⁴ And he adds, possibly more precisely, ‘I have developed a theory of the effects of the signifier that intersects rhetoric’.⁵

Now, what on earth would it be, this intersection of the signifier with rhetoric, of language as communication with language as persuasion? Whatever it is – and clearly my bet is that the answer is, ‘drama’ – it really only depends on two findings of structural linguistics, best summed up in Benveniste’s Problems in General Linguistics (1971 [1966]).⁶

Lacan’s concept of the master signifier, as that ‘signifier without signified’ that totalises language and lets meaning emerge, develops Benveniste’s insight into structural linguistics, that the ‘signified’ is just another signifier that, in a certain context, interprets the previous signifier. Specifically, the hypothesis of value (that a provisional meaning is assigned to the signifier in a context) renders redundant the concept of the signified as an independent entity.⁷ According to Lacan, the implication is that ‘the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier comes to the fore’, leading to the conclusion that the only way to momentarily join the ‘floating signifiers’ to the ‘flowing of the signified’ is by means of a special signifier, one that terminates the otherwise endless ‘chain of signification’ because it has no signified, and so can function as a final link.⁸ Put differently, meaning is transitory and retrospective, because ‘it is in the chain of signification that meaning insists, but none of the chain’s elements consists in the signification that it can provide’.⁹ The crucial point here is that the master signifier retroactively assigns a meaning to the chain of signification: the meaning that affects the subject happens through ‘delayed action and retrospective causation’ (Nachträglichkeit).

The master signifier may be said to govern the entry of the subject into language, because it makes signification possible by letting meaning provisionally emerge – Lacan says meaning leaks from the utterance like water from a barrel – and so he identifies the master signifier as the locus of symbolic authority and designates it as the Name-of-the-Father. According to Lacan, however, entry into language divides the subject, because the linguistic ‘I’ ‘designates the enunciating subject, but does not signify him [as is evident] from the fact that there may be no signifier of the enunciating subject in the statement’.¹⁰ The existence of linguistic shifters and the fact that the time of the sentence is self-referential means that the ‘I’ of the enunciation (or act of saying) designates a transient entity not present as such in the utterance, a being which must objectify itself as ‘me’ in order to predicate anything of itself in the statement (or what is said).¹¹ The speaking being is therefore radically split between its ‘ineffable, stupid existence’ external to language, on the one hand, and the ‘defile’ of shifting significations, that passes through the permanent gap between the Scylla of the statement and the Charybdis of the enunciation, on the other hand.

In other words, for Lacan, the ultimate situation of speech is tragic. It is that of ‘an enunciation that denounces itself, a statement that renounces itself, an ignorance that sweeps itself away, an opportunity that self-destructs … [and] an enunciation that makes a human being tremble due to the vacillation that comes back to him from his own statement’.¹²

The drama of the alienation of the subject between being and the signifier, and the consequent tragedy of its division between enunciation and statement, prevents speech from being merely communication as informational exchange. But, equally, the opacity of the speaker’s relation to her own motivations, as well as her audience’s motivations, precludes any reduction of speaking to rhetorical manipulation. Neither linguistics nor mere rhetoric, Lacan formulates his conception of the process of the structuration of the subject in his ‘graph of desire’, and it is highly significant that the Lacanian theory of desire is thus elaborated with reference primarily to jokes (Seminar V) and theatre: Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Seminar VI), Sophocles’ Antigone (Seminar VII) and Claudel’s Sygne trilogy (Seminar VIII).

The graph of desire, Lacan’s ‘master key’,¹³ is a dynamic model of speech in terms of three dimensions of the utterance, intended to replace Freud’s three intrapsychic agencies. The triplicity of Lacan’s topology is not accidental, as the ‘vectors’ of the statement, the enunciation and of signification broadly correspond to (and complicate) Freud’s topographical regions of the ego, the id and the superego, respectively. Lacan has an extended derivation of the graph in his seminars on the formations of the unconscious and the dialectics of desire – which I will not rehearse here – presenting the findings of this investigation in his celebrated article on the ‘Subversion of the Subject in the Dialectic of Desire’.¹⁴ The ‘completed graph’ (see below) primarily consists of three vectors, representing the three major dimensions of the speech of the subject:

•The vector running from ‘Signifier’ to ‘Voice’, which is the diachronic dimension of the statement (of demand).

•The vector running from ‘Enjoyment’ to ‘Castration’, which is the diachronic dimension of the enunciation (of desire).

•The vector running from the barred subject, $, to the Ego Ideal – the imaginary Other, I(O) – which is the retroactively emerging dimension of the signification of the utterance (linked to the drives).

Two sets of intersections between the enunciation and the statement, running parallel, and the retroactive signification, crossing them in reverse, generate the ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ ‘levels’ of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Performing Žižek: Hegel, Lacan, Marx, and the Parallax View
• 1 The Lacanian Performative: Austin after Žižek
• 2 Kantor’s Symptom or Grotowski’s Fantasy? Towards a Theatre of the Political
• 3 Who’s Watching? Me!: Theatrality, Spectatorship, and the Žižekian Subject
• 4 Žižek’s Death Drive, the Intervention of Grace, and the Wagnerian Performative: Conceptualising the Director’s Subjectivity
• 5 ‘Even if we do not take things seriously ... we are still doing them’: Disidentification, Ideology, and Queer Performance
• 6 The Performative Constitution of Liberal Totalitarianism on Facebook
• 7 Enjoyment as a Theatrical Object: The Actor as Neighbour
• 8 ‘There are more of you than there are of us’: Forced Entertainment and the Critique of the Neoliberal Subject
• 9 Ideology and the True/False Performance of Heritage
• 10 Getting Involved with the Neighbour’s Thing: Žižek and the Participatory Performance of Reactor (UK)
• 11 Dancing with Žižek: Sublime Objets and the Hollywood Dance Film
• 12 ‘Actual Idiocy’ and the Sublime Object of Susan Boyle
• 13 Theatre’s Immediacy: Notes on Performing ‘with’ Žižek
• 14 Collaboration, Violence, and Difference
• 15 The Tickling Object: On Žižek and Comedy
• 16 Notes on Performing, Its Frame, and Its Gaze
• Bibliography
• Index