ABSTRACT
Herbert Blau (1996:274) has noted the strong desire in current theory for “a language of ‘performativity’ that will outwit, baffle, or abolish the regulatory functions that work in the name of the law.” This desire is certainly reflected in contemporary performance theory. Peggy Phelan (1993a:148), for instance, argues that “without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility-in a maniacally charged present-and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control.” Despite the overheated rhetoric of this passage, Phelan makes an influential claim. Her suggestion that a performance cannot be copied and still remain a performance derives from her view that performance’s most crucial ontological characteristic is its disappearance, discussed in Chapter 2. In Phelan’s view, if performance cannot be copied, it cannot participate in a cultural economy based in repetition and is therefore exempt from control by the forces that govern that economy, including the law. She invokes another ostensibly ontological quality of performance when she refers to its continued existence only as spectatorial memory. Patrice Pavis (1992:67) explains the relationship between performance’s evanescence and its storage in memory: “The work, once performed, disappears for ever. The only memory which one can preserve is that of the spectator’s more or less distracted perception.” Phelan extends this analysis of performance into the political realm by arguing that performance’s disappearance and subsequent persistence only in memory makes performance a privileged site of resistance to forces of regulation and control. Her position depends on two premises: that performance resists reproduction and that memory is a safe haven from the law.
