“Unstable Events: Performative Science, Materiality and Machinic Practices”

Christopher L. Salter

Replace 2007, Berlin, HKW

In 1973, in the pages of the avant-garde theater journal TDR, the well-known theorist and director of the New York-based Performance Group Richard Schechner called for an increased use of the theories and methods of the social sciences to understand the nature of performance. “I believe that the convergence of the social sciences and the performing arts and the creation of performance theory is an antecedent to an avant-garde movement just taking shape. This movement will be more iconographic that iconoclastic; more conservative than prodigal; and more based on sheer observation and analysis than intuition and feeling. The movement will be radical not in the political sense of the late sixties but in the manner in which it attempts to go to the roots.” (Schechner 1973, p. 4).

Schechner was not just talking about performance from the point of view of the traditional theatrical stage or the body-based practices of artists escaping the still at the time largely object-dominated visual arts. Along with the influence of cultural anthropologists Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, the sociologist Erving Goffman and others, what the performative turn emerging from anthropology and sociology attempted to do was radically reorient the significance of performance away from its purely artistic bound connotations. By turning its focus onto the kinds of events studied by ethnographers, anthropologists and sociologists such as rituals, festivals, systems of games, play, sports, interaction rituals and performances within quotidian life like social work or gang violence, performance theory sought to “combine aspects of the scientific method with some of the traditionally intuitive methods of the arts,” analyzing what the late Dwight Conquergood later described as “the fabricated, invented, imagined and constructed nature of human realities.” Yet, the performative turn not only encompassed performance as the subject of research but, more radically, the method by which research would be conducted. Performance as method aimed to challenge traditional understanding that saw the transmission of knowledge only in textual form and described with a critical, objective distance “from above,” instead focusing on the tacit, non-verbal, embodied and immanent act of doing research, particularly, ethnographic research—what Conquergood eloquently described as the difference between “knowing that” or “knowing about” versus “knowing how.”

As method, practice and world-view, it would not be an exaggeration to say that performance is becoming one of the central paradigms for the twentieth-first century, not only in the arts but also the sciences. As disciplines as diverse as new media, human-computer interaction, architecture, science studies and ethnography oriented participatory design increasingly embrace performance as a technique to discover (or recover) embodiment, localized context, felt experience and multi-sensory affect, a new performative turn appears to be on the horizon. Unlike performance studies’ still largely anthropocentric viewpoint which has, to a large extent, ignored techno-cultural issues, however, this new performative turn attempts to grapple with the complex human-machine relationships that mark not only the past, present and future histories of artistic practices but also scientific ones as well. Indeed, in an ironic twist of fate to Schechner’s original declaration that the arts should integrate more social science methods and research, the arena of STS (Science and Technology Studies or Science Technology and Society) has taken up the call in an inverse way, appropriating performance for the sciences while leaving the arts totally behind.

Of course, the areas researched by STS are certainly not new. For the past twenty years, its adherents have been trying to understand the complex entanglements among the “social, natural, technological and corporal,” as John Law writes, that help shape the world. A mixture between the naturally given and the culturally constructed, scientific knowledge has become an object of study by those seeking to understand, as Karin Knorr-Cetina articulates, “the strategies and policies of knowing that are not codified in textbooks but do inform expert practice” (Knorr 1999, p.2). Proliferating a language focusing on laboratories as the site where science is created and practiced while examining the bizarre hybrids or imbroglios, as the French anthropologist Bruno Latour describes them, of “human and non-human collectives,” those working in STS have effectively displaced humans as the sole producers of knowledge, the expressers of agency and the only performers worthy of study in scientific dramas. Instead, STS has explored how non-human things like bacteria, yeasts, scallops, rarified technological instruments and cultural artifacts act and how the complex manner in which the materiality of human embodiment and the materiality of things or matter itself might be reconciled.

What is more revealing in this hybridized landscape is how often the word performance appears in order to understand the actions of such entities or actants like lactic acids, failed utopian transportation systems or genetically modified organisms that transcend the neat social/natural binaries that we are wont to divide them up into. In numerous articles, for example, the sociologist of science Michel Callon discusses the performative properties of economics, arguing that, like any social scientific discipline, economics partially engages in the constitution of the reality that it attempts to describe, acting or performing on the object of its discourse and changing it. In his anthropologically oriented ethnographies of laboratory practices, Latour aims to give an equally important performative role to what he terms the “non-human.” In fact, already in his and Steven Woolgar’s 1986 study of the Salk Institute entitled Laboratory Life, the two authors discussed that the aim of science is not to provide facts or representation about nature but rather to “perform” it. “Interpretations do not inform as much as they perform” (Latour and Woolgar 1986).

Likewise, for sociologist of science Andrew Pickering, performance is a method that too breaks with the representational modes of sciences—the sense that knowledge can only be encoded in the minds of scientists or in the inscriptive forms they produce to disseminate knowledge. Rather, the performative image of science is of “a field of powers, capacities and performances, situated in machinic captures of material agency” (Pickering 1995, p. 7). As demonstrated by the invention and deployment of instruments, devices and machines, the material aspects of scientific practice come to the fore, practices arising from the intertwining of human and non-human forces (like the weather) or what Pickering calls the dance of agency. “Scientists,” writes Pickering, “are human agents in a field of material agency which they struggle to capture with machines…reciprocally and emergently intertwined in this struggle” (Pickering 1995, p. 21).

From yet another direction, physicist Hans Diebner’s notion of “performative science” is intimately bound up with his research into complex dynamical systems; systems whose behavior becomes unstable over longer time evolutions. Just as performance is a time-based, non-repeatable (in the sense of the exact same situation) practice, so too is the behavior of fluid flow dynamics or cognitive behavioral systems which defy the scientific cornerstone of exact reproducibility due to their continual, statistically measured variance over time. The stability of a fixed research object suggesting an objective observer from a distance, something which is clearly challenged by both performance studies and STS paradigms, breaks down as the researcher becomes actively implicated in the “moment in which the action is taking place;” a moment that is not altogether controllable nor repeatable (Diebner 2006, p. 20).

Despite their different contexts, part of this new performative turn from science studies is an attempt to understand the role that doing plays in the formation of scientific knowledge, in other words, how things are done by way of material practices rather than how they are described, marking out the territory between representational versus performative knowledge. Although representation usually suggests mimesis or imitation, in its cognitive science context the word takes on a particularly significant resonance. Representation denotes a correspondence between a mental image (a representation) in the brain and an object or world that the image corresponds to. What this assumes first of all is that the object out there is fixed and that the role of cognition is to recover the representation as it exists a priori, that is, before experience. In other words, what representationalist forms of knowledge production suggest is that a fixed, stable reality exists independent of the knower’s actions and experience in the world and that this reality can be captured and described purely through the representation, whether a set of abstract symbols manipulated by the brain, descriptions in text or code, or more generally, the formation of culture itself.

In contrast, what performance as method/word-view suggests is that there is not a reality pre-given before one’s experience of it but rather that the world is enacted or actively performed anew. The word enaction here has a specific meaning, derived from the work of psychologist Jerome Brunner and, more recently, Franciso Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson (1991). In Varela’s sense, enaction describes the performance or action of “bringing forth of a world” based on the fact that we are a sensory-motor-based embodied agent in which meaning emerges through a continually historical process of “active living” —a history of coupling between us and the dynamical environment “not as a representation system, but as constrained imagination (which the name enaction evokes)” (Cohen and Varela 2000, p.1).

While Varela’s theory of enaction relates to the embodied and dynamic interactions between the neural-cognitive system of an organism and its environment, there is nevertheless a curious resonance to the connotations of performance found in other disciplines. If representational accounts privilege a demarcation between subject and object, self and world, performative ones may imply a world in which subjects and objects have not yet come into being and, even once materialized, are always in a constant state of transformation, unstable and difficult to repeat. “The move towards performative alternatives to representationalism,” as the physicist and cultural studies scholar Karen Barad states, “shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality (e.g., do they mirror nature or culture) to matters of practices/doings/actions” (Barad 2003, p. 3). Like Judith Butler’s use of performative that proposes an active practice, a doing that constructs gender, performative implies that the world is not filled with fixed entities but rather emerges over time, continually transformed due to our history of interactions with it.

Although it is beyond the scope of this short paper, as science studies can find agency in microbes, scallops, missile systems and particle accelerators, might it not then be useful to apply the same frameworks to also examine and construct artistic practices and events that involve equally messy entanglements between human performers and larger socio-technological apparatuses? After all, even before the digital, the long history of the performing arts’ engagement with technology has totally mixed up things as much as Latour’s natural-cultural imbroglios, fusing many concepts of performativity simultaneously: as real time actions played out in front of a spectator, the enactments of machines and, increasingly, the creation of spectators/participants who willingly or unwillingly become performers in interactive mise en scene both on and off the stage. Watching what Brecht called the apparatus of the theatre stage from a distance, one in which things mechanically go up and down in the flies or rotate on a turntable may be easy enough but how are we to understand the Gordian territories that jumble together performers and spectators, spectators and scenographic environments, computers and actors, theater and urban space, architecture and machine, the research lab and the festival?

In conclusion, if one of the hallmarks of performance then lies in its embodiment, its material presence in the world, whether the body is defined by the human form, a sound that rattles the chest, a screen upon which ocular visions of the world are projected, a material that changes its shape or a machine trying to decode the nuance of a choreographed gesture, then why should we make a cut between ourselves and the technologies we imagine, design and choreograph to generate a world of sheer artifice; one, that, as Antonin Artaud stated, is not represented but lived? What would it mean to examine a history of artistic performance practices using technologies as machinic performances in the spirit that Felix Guattari used the term—as an immanent, collective entanglement of material enunciations which operate on, shape and thus, transform the world in real time.

Notes

See Latour 1986 and Barad 2003.

Callon 1998 and 2006.

For another take on Varela and performance, see Fischer-Lichte 2005.