“Also: isn’t the idea of performance rooted in Ayers who recognized that language never actually gets outside of its performative function? I think Rorty was heavily influenced by that given his faith in discourse –what you refer to as performance and Wittgenstein as language games.” -me:http://forum.philosophynow.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=15253
“I must confess I am not that acquainted with Ayer’s work but from the limited range of contact I had I did not find the performative there. In fact I think he represents the exact opposite perspective on language (but I might be wrong). As to Wittgenstein I think he is a big influence and he does call our attention to some performative aspects of language but I wouldn’t go as far as to say that all there is not the performative is language-games or the other way around. I think the obvious source of the performative is Austin’s theory. There I think we have a serious challenge of the purely descriptive aspect of language and the argument that we actually “do things with words”.” -Yoni: Ibid…
Actually, Yoni, mine was a throwaway sentence that sometimes occur in the on the fly manner in which we work on the boards. I would put my money on Austin. But I’m not altogether sure we can separate the performative aspect of language from the language game. But I’ll have to think about that and reserve it for another rhizome.
“I like to talk of a more aesthetic use of language. Language as fiction, as an attempt to create a narrative and therefore as a performance of a profession. Every use of language is an “as if…” but not in a sense of being untrue, rather in the sense of being a an action in the world so as to not have any truth value (or at least this value not playing a central role). So Rorty’s question of pragmatic interpretation is relevant but it does not cope with what I am trying to argue about language.”
Actually, you’re talking to someone who started out as a musician then moved on through poetry, fiction, and art to my present fixation on philosophy. In fact, my first encounter with philosophy was Will Durrant’s The Story of Philosophy which I picked up in a second hand store in order see how Aristotle’s Categorical Imperative would affect my music –which goes to show how much I knew about it back then. At that time, I thought it my manifest destiny to be a rock star. And I’m not sure I ever got over that. Like everything else I have gotten in to, I have pretty much approached philosophy with the purpose of making it rock and roll. So your point concerning performance and Derrida has always been waiting for me to arrive. Which brings me to zero in on a particular point:
“Language as fiction, as an attempt to create a narrative and therefore as a performance of a profession.”
Until I caught this, I had thought that the difference between my sense of performance and yours was that you (via Derrida (had generalized it into discourse in general. And that makes perfect sense to me given that discourse is ultimately a creative act. One person strings a sentence together based on previous sentences they have strung together. Then the other responds with a sentence built off of other sentences they have previously strung together. The above sentence, however, makes it seem like it is strictly a matter of how we talk about philosophy or any other discipline, like it’s strictly a matter of nomenclature or technical jargon.
?
That said, I had previously arrived at a conclusion or conceptional construction that might roughly correlate to yours. When it comes to writing, there are two pole in a spectrum of approaches: the functional (roughly correlating to Austin’s performative function you attribute to Derrida (and the aesthetic (roughly correlating to the performance aspect of your point. The functional is that which merely attempts to get a point across and can be as simple as a grocery list. The aesthetic is that which attempts to resonate and seduce as well as impress. And when it comes to writing, the functional is that which me must turn to when we’re working on-the-fly until the momentum of it pushes us into the aesthetic. The two are intimately entwined and I’m not sure that either can exist in any pure state anymore than craft and art can.
Once again: it’s like your article and Derrida was waiting for me to arrive. But then I’m always several steps behind the wave in front of me.
Where your article took me a step further was in the imperative presented by the double meaning of Performance in Derrida: performance itself and the performative function. What I saw was a sturdy response to a common neo-classicist dismissal (as well as a lot of other continental approaches which they group together in the erroneous category of relativism –that is along with Rorty and Pragmatism: this fantasy they seem to entertain that anyone who follows Derrida’s lead is just sitting around and reading texts only to come up with any interpretation that suits their fancy. As I understand it, Derrida encourages us to analyze text which is a lot different than just reading them. The idea, as you describe, is to follow the aesthetic through, respond as you will, then play that response against the reality of Derrida’s text. As you point out, Derrida is not just being pretty for the sake of being pretty, he is doing it to mean something. I would suggest that we have to approach it a little like the last lines of Donald Finkle’s poem Hands:
Lean back and let its [the poem] hands play freely on you:
there comes a moment, lifted and aroused,
when the two of you are equally beautiful.