"Performance in itself is, of course, not a phenomenon new or unknown. In Austin's speech-act theory it refers to a language act that does what it promises ("I now pronounce you man and wife"). In the sense of an artistic event in the modernist avant-garde, a performance foregrounds or "makes strange" the border between life and art; in the happenings and performance art of postmodernism it integrates the human body or subject into an artistic context.
The new notion of performativity serves neither to foreground nor contextualize the subject, but rather to preserve it: the subject is presented (or presents itself) as a holistic, irreducible unit that makes a binding impression on a reader or observer. This holistic incarnation of the subject can, however, only succeed when the subject does not offer a semantically differentiated surface that can be absorbed and dispersed in the surrounding context. For this reason the new subject always appears to the observer as reduced and "solid," as single- or simple-minded and in a certain sense identical with the things it stands for. This closed, simple whole acquires a potency that can almost only be defined in theological terms. For with it is created a refuge in which all those things are brought together that postmodernism and poststructuralism thought definitively dissolved: the telos, the author, belief, love, dogma and much,
much more."
much more."
(This suggests simple fixed characters : objectivism + easy to identify with? + subject to stereotyping?)
= object orientation -reduction a return to modernism?
= object orientation -reduction a return to modernism?
Knapp and Michaels, in their groundbreaking article "Against Theory" (Mitchell 1985, orig. 1982), call for the unity or "fundamental inseparability" (1985, 12) of the three basic conditions of interpretation: authorial intention, text, and reader.
****
the hermeneutical critic plays up authorial intention,
the deconstructivist the sign,
the relativist the reader, *** (Position Choice of!!!)
and so on; compare the discussion in Mitchell 1985, 13-24).
Our thesis has been that no one can reach a position outside practice, that theorists should stop trying, and that the theoretical enterprise should therefore come to an end" (1985, 30). Knapp and Michales
(Value of Theory!!)
(C.f subject acts in holistic performances ( Set roles and Consequences and hence values (Like game characters!!)
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