ABSTRACT
The best way to…understand, enliven, investigate, get in touch with, outwit, contend with, defend oneself against, love…others, other cultures, the elusive and intimate “I-thou,” the other in oneself, the other opposed to oneself, the feared, hated, envied, different other…is to perform and to study performances and performative behaviours in all their various genres, contexts, expressions, and historical processes. What the book was, the performance has become: index and symbol, multiple truths and lies, arena of struggle. And what is performance? Behavior heightened, if ever so slightly, and publicly displayed; twice-behaved behavior. Even in con games, spies, and stings where performances are cunningly masked and folded into the expected, these are enjoyed by a secret audience, the producers of the deceptions. And no matter how sinister and destructive the deception, when it’s made public people get a special kick out of learning all about it. Gordon Liddy of Watergate harvested fat fees lecturing at colleges about his crimes. Performances can be celebratory; performances can terrorize. Many trials and public executions are both. The night the Rosenbergs were electrocuted some people wept, others were enraged, and still others danced in the streets. Performance is amoral, as useful to tyrants as to those who practice guerrilla theatre. This amorality comes from performance’s subject, transformation: the startling ability of human beings to create themselves, to change, to become-for worse or better-what they ordinarily are not.
