Vertiginous Performances: Iterability in the Performing Arts

In this essay, I argue that a “performance” cannot be experienced immediately or fully in virtue of the fact that it originates in an intricate and anarchic structure. Following Jacques Derrida, I designate that vertiginous provenance of performance as “iterability”. Initially, I discuss the institutionalisation of Performance Studies in the 1960s, which led to an enthusiasm for the performative dimension of artistic practice. Consequently, theorists and artists accentuated the values of presence, singularity and immediacy. Such a valorisation of presence is still a persistent attitude in performance studies and the performing arts. The aura attributed to the present event of performance constitutes a simplifying gesture that underestimates the complex provenance of performance. Derrida introduces the term “iterability” in “Signature Event Context” in order to problematise John Austin’s speech act theory and his distinction between constative and performative utterances. Next, I apply Derrida’s objections to Austin to the concept and event of performance. I explicate iterability as the necessary possibility of repetition in the absence of text or context, and I analyse the structure whereby every performance remains repeatable and independent of its text or context, although a performance may always be linked to a certain text or context. Iterability introduces alterity into the heart of performance, thereby preventing its identification in terms of presence and immediacy. Derrida uncovers a similar motif in Daniel Mesguich’s iconoclastic theatre, which has recourse to a “paradoxical presentation of the unpresentable”. Derrida and Mesguich understand the relation between performative presentation and the unpresentable in a vertiginous way: each performance, in order to be singular, must be radically distinct from any element contaminating its presence; simultaneously, it is always possible to associate a performance to something outside itself, to something unpresentable that may have an impact, nonetheless, on the event of presentation.