ABSTRACT
In this brief meditation on personal pronouns I want, in the context of a journal dealing with performance, to keep in mind three different conditions in which pronouns operate, all of which have a bearing on performance writing: spoken exchanges; writing; and performance. The pronouns that interest me most are the first and second persons, I (or me) and you. The proximity of I and you implies an exchange that is both grammatical and more than grammatical: a relationship of persons. I want to suggest a tension always there between the grammatical and the extra-grammatical. Because pronouns together with the other ‘shifters’* always refer speech-acts back into the site in which they occur, it makes a considerable difference how that site is staged, what kind of site it is.
