The event is (re)inventing the field of performance studies.

There are laws for everything but then there’s the inevitable lawlessness created by those very same laws. This is where the action is. The Chief nods. A star witness here is that meticulously careful writer on the sacred in everyday life, a small Frenchman named Leiris. In his study of spirit possession among people in Gondor, Ethiopia, whom he visited in 1933, he concluded some possessions were real, some fake, and most were inbetween. This is a real problem for students of ontology. (Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State )

The event ascribes a dimension of meaning, quality of movement, or tension to be addressed in the process of articulating performance, its performative components and traces by means/method of language, writing, or inscription. The event (as Michael Taussig eloquently states) is where the action is. It reckons with the difficultly of deciphering the intangible or invisible, and locates performance’s insistence on action as verb-like tendencies that resist structural analysis. It is found in the artifact, detritus, or tropes that endure and complicate their presence as concrete evidence. The event is and is not performance. It is the paradox of performance that constitutes its potential to be performative, generative, creative, transformative. The event troubles the legibility of its remnants while at the same time insists a haunting presence in place of its absence. It mobilizes the signifier and the signified, explicitly playing on performative potential, and supports their necessary slippage that produces an articulation steeped in the dynamics of relation rather than hardens into object, artifact or code.

In The Logic of Sense Gilles Deleuze offers many words to describe aspects of the event – signifier, proposition, effects, empty square, ideal, singularity, incorporeal transformations – and its striking relationship to movement, (directionless) mobility, and sense, which inspires both its slipping glimpse (to quote de Kooning) or predilection for accumulating meaning via the corporeality (actions and passions) and its traversal through and consequence of contextualization (state of affairs). The event is neither object nor subject, neither material nor ephemera, but happens in the zone of their interaction. Deleuze takes no precaution repeating that the domain of the event occurs on the surface, and the vehicle of the surface, driving the interaction, is language. He sets up the event in the mode of the problematic. It is this problematic quality of the event, in the shape of the question, which ignites its movement and supports what he emphasizes as its “essential relationship to language,” traversing the edge of the proposition and the thing, along side and through the path of sense. Language, placed in an essential relation to the event, is held to its performative limit as active, creative, generative, and more verb-like than noun-like. But does this linking to language constitute language an event? A performance may be an event, but is conceived as such once it enters onto the surface of language, wrestling with the limits of its own signification, rehearsing the gap of translation. Performance is articulated through language, (re)eventing it, and is no more shallow or deep. It is a traversal, the phantasme as Deleuze calls it, and is an articulation that approaches its origin of the event through the midst of its desire to articulate it as such.

Language is the meeting place of concept and thing, sense and body on the surface. It articulates the encounter not by means of precedence of either signified or signifier, interiority or exteriority, subject or object, but by means of the singularity of this occurrence as an event. Incorporeal transformations persist as its effects and in turn draw its form. The event is subsequently enacted not through comprehension of the form, but the will to draw it, the meeting place of the hand-pen-paper as an act of writing, of inscription. The event is not the trace or remnant of picture or gesture, but is the meeting of the eye and the paper, the body and motion.

Deleuze specifies that the structure of the event occurs in terms of a linguistic analysis that can be illustrated by the paradox. “Paradox appears as a dismissal of depth, a display of events at the surface, and a deployment of language along this limit.” The paradox illustrates the moment of interface between two series, a moment which simultaneously embraces and dismantles the binary as foundation of a dialectical model. Deleuze explicitly states that the event and sense coincide. The presence of sense is indicative of the event and could be construed as a signifier of sorts, though here signifier must extend itself as mobile, unfixed, and porous. For Deleuze sense, and thus the event, occurs on the edge of a double sided surface which lines the distinction between the expressible of the proposition and the attribute of things or the states of affairs:

It is exactly the boundary between propositions and things […] It is in this sense that it is an “event”: on the condition that the event is not confused with its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs. We will not ask therefore what is the sense of the event: the event is sense itself. The event belongs essentially to language; it has an essential relationship to language. But language is what is said of things.

Sense, traversing the surface adventure of the Möbius Strip, is sited as an event, and this positioning happens by means of language. But the position is not static or fixed, it is rather singular. Here the paradox of the logic of sense resounds. The event happens in this connection of language and sense, yet as sense moves into the realm of language it moves into the role of the signifier, denoting things, concepts, subjects, bodies, states of affairs. Language is a vehicle of effects, transforming the terrain of sense’s initial proposition. Sense is creative.

The paradoxical feature of Deleuze’s event puts pressure on the defining concepts Diana Taylor elaborates upon in her seminal text The Archive and the Repertoire, which sets up the limits of discourse and thus documentation in relationship to its object, performance. Delineating a rift between spoken and written word, Taylor proposes that in fact it is the distinction between the archive of “enduring materials” and the repertoire of the “so-called ephemeral” that is truly at stake. She describes the repertoire as “embodied memory” which cannot be captured by the archive and is framed by a situational social structure referred to as a scenario which refuses its limit as disappearance. She asserts that, “Performances also replicate themselves through their own structures and codes. This means that the repertoire, like the archive, is mediated.” It is this shared mediation that resists binary logic, yet at the same time it is this mediation that potentially undoes her strategy of distinction. If the event is taken into account, meaning, context, or materiality supposedly captured by the archive might be contingently dissuaded, misinterpreted, misused, and potentially lost. A type of performance operates each time the archive is assessed in value or non-value, and the consistency of the archive to generate itself as sign becomes a coded repertoire of sorts.

Taylor defines scenario alongside Pierre Bourdieu’s description of habitus as “durable, transposable dispositions” but differentiates scenario in that it also implicates “specific repertoires of cultural imaginings.” The scenario is a site for embodied memory to perform. Could the scenario not also be associated with the archive, which introduces a context for a performance of memory, meaning or narrative to occur? Could not the archive also pose itself as a material surface, or a spatio-temporal scenario, against which the encounter of concept, embodiment, experience, transformation can take place? Taylor says, “there is an advantage to thinking about a repertoire performed through dance, theatre, song, ritual, healing practices, memory paths, and the many other forms of repeatable behaviors as something that cannot be housed or contained in the archive.” While Taylor mobilizes the concept of repertoire to gain a material edge on the trope of ephemera associated with performance, by placing the event in the schema presented the archive begins to loose footing as a fixed object. These distinctions, while nonetheless useful to Taylor’s project, begin to unravel, drawing out the ephemeral qualities of the archive and the enduring materiality of practices of embodiment.

Deleuze further expands the structure of the paradox in relation to his project through a discussion of time. Referring to the temporal dimension of the event, he mobilizes the paradox to iterate a threshold of the virtual – the present. The event complicates time, revealing a double progression which seems fold time itself, and make impossible a single directionality of potential (past ‡ future) or a fixed identity (that of the present). He states, “The event, for its part, must have one and the same modality, in both future and past, in line with which it divides its presence ad infinitum. If the event is possible in the future and real in the past, it is necessary that it be both at once, since it is divided in them at the same time.”

The event creates tension with a fixed concept, identity, script, relation, law, or structure, and shifts the properties of all elements involved. It is a moment of rupture, a moment of action. The event is the encounter that does something. Here the poignant categories of fiction and non-fiction have the potential to be blurred and irreconcilable to the extent that binary logic becomes something else entirely. It is an opening, a creative portal, rather than a lapse of ambiguity or indistinction.

Performance studies scholars have many ways of mobilizing this phenomenon and in effect the event poses itself as a site of invitation for (re)invention. Through the act of writing performance, taking into account the breadth of this terrain, the event puts scholarship to the task by self-reflexively challenging its very limits. Text is a working place for the event, making it a temporal and spatial situation, which must continue to navigate within/through/along side an indeterminate (or should I say infinite?) network of subsequent contingencies which resist closure, capture, demarcation and even the very materiality of the pen and the paper. (Peggy Phelan’s essay “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction” insists upon the necessity of this limit when she states “Performance’s only life is in the present” and subsequently “becomes itself through disappearance.”)

The relationship of text to the event is central to the creative act of scholarship in general and performance studies in particular as it is a field which emphasizes specifically the relationship between theory and practice. The Deleuzian event and epistemological mapping of sense brings theory directly into the arena of performance, where it is moving and shifting, and becomes a practice in itself, an act of doing. This intersection of the event of theory, the act of writing, and the production of text as a site for participation between writer and reader continuously multiplies the frames in which the event takes place. Here the scholar is afforded the role of performer, which simultaneously complicates and diversifies the object of analysis. Method becomes central to the task of writing performance as an event, where the closer to the surface this writing takes place, the more it must take into account the paradox as qualitative strategy. In this vein performance scholars might seek out events not only as primary subjects of investigation or inquiry, but find ways in which the properties of the event might permeate the pages of the text, dispersing affect, and rest upon the edges of volatility.

Haunting is a phenomenon both directly and indirectly approached by Avery Gorden in her book Ghostly Matters. I say directly because haunting takes the central role as object/subject of analysis throughout the course of overlapping narratives, and indirectly because it also begins to trace itself as a meta-narrative, further elucidating the text through loose ends, invisible/transparent connections, and blurring the discrete silhouettes of fiction and reality. Her approach is an ethical one and relates to Michael Taussig’s “sympathetic magic” which he calls “granting… the representation the power of the represented.” Gordon’s object is moving, unfixed, and ephemeral. It is an interaction between visible and invisible, that which has been accounted for and that which remains unknown. The haunting she describes transpires as subtle incoherent traces, coincidences that bring light to curious networks of relations, folded spaces, histories, and temporalities. Haunting is described akin to the event.

[Haunting] is about reliving events in all their vividness, originality, and violence so as to overcome their pulsating and lingering effects. Haunting is an encounter in which you touch the ghost or the ghostly matter of things: the ambiguities, the complexities of power and personhood, the violence and the hope, the looming and receding actualities, the shadows of our selves and our society. When you touch the ghost or the ghostly matter (or when it touches you), a force that combines the injurious and the utopian, you get something different than you might have expected.

The event of haunting, like the Deleuzian logic of sense relates, traverses binaries and the gaps laid down in between, collapses temporal strategies of past, present, and future (“reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had” ), and pursues the consequence of desire as a perpetuation of its movement through partial light. Gordon draws out her object of analysis, haunting, by weaving together presence and absence, providing a space for their interaction, and letting the traces of sense happen as an effect of the reader’s (my) participation.

The event disrupts theoretical maps or frameworks that resist mobility and flexibility, concepts that resist disturbance. It is the moments of disturbance, the event, which in fact brings out meaning as the liveliness of sense. The Deleuzian map of the sense emphasizes the necessity for movement of/within a system, taking the stance of series rather than structure, and recalls the map as a process of mapping, constantly shifting, mutating and becoming. Articulation requires the singularity of specificity; at the same time its effectiveness also calls for degrees of rupture or transformation that render it distinct as such. Where writing itself becomes the event of its simultaneous weaving and unraveling, the event offers performance studies scholars not only a lens by which to (re)invent/(re)evaluate performativity and performance, but also a means by which to self-reflexively enable its transfer through language in the act of writing, theorizing, producing, and engaging with text.

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