[-empyre-] response/comment for Robert

[Marc Leger]

about Robert's response to Christine's request, if I could, I would like to
say something about performatives - which relates too to Levinasian
ethics...

In his well-known essay, "Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes Please!,"
Žižek refuses the blackmail of the current predicament – defend liberal
capitalism or else support totalitarianism – without renouncing class
struggle as a universal problematic. [Slavoj Žižek, "Class Struggle or
Postmodernism? Yes Please!" in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj
Žižek, *Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the
Left *(London: Verso, 2000) 90-135.]  His refusal of choice implies not only
provocative writing but a serious theoretical challenge to the terms of the
choice, especially as these are encrypted in contemporary political and
cultural theory.  A constative can be performed as an illocutionary
transaction.  A key issue for a performative, according Austin, is whether
the circumstances are appropriate for words to be uttered in a certain way.
  Appropriate circumstances, however, are not the main issue.  The
performative in this case is subject to unsatisfactoriness; it is said in a
particular way and is parasitic upon normal use.  In other words, it is
symptomatic in the Freudian sense and not in the sense that
post-structuralists tend to read the symptom – as proof of the mutual
contamination of categories.  So it is with genuine cultural subversion - the
predicament of the contemporary artist who refuses to choose between class
struggle and postmodernism.  In relating to the plight of the other, or in
Levinasian recognition, *artists relate to themselves* and to the conditions
in which they live.  To perform a perlocutionary act is to emphasize the
illocutionary force of an utterance.  Ultimately, this does not rely on a
correspondence with the way things are but nevertheless posits the
possibility of effecting change.  Is this not, however, the famous Freudian
formula for denial: *I know very well, but I choose to ignore...*?



Interaction can be linked to emancipation through Austin's idea of
perlocutionary speech acts. [See J.L. Austin, *How to do Things with
Words* (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, [1962] 1975).]  The perlocutionary speech act is
tied to the illocutionary act of saying something. A perlocutionary act is
based on an interactive competence that is oriented toward mutual
understanding.  It operates, however, as an instrumental or strategic action
designed to produce certain effects and is not necessarily oriented toward
consensual coordination.  The performative contradictions of communication
do not require specific commitments but do imply the communicative use of
language to reach certain goals.  Moreover, interaction implies a process of
emancipatory action that does something, that changes the coordinates of
norms and statements. Do we not have here the conditions that define the
Lacanian split subject, caught between the speculative "I" and the workings
of the unconscious?



The limitation of Austin's performative speech act for a further
politicization of art is perhaps analogous to the weaknesses of most social
theories that rely on models of textuality.  A performative implies, I would
argue, a coincidence between the enunciation and the enunciated content.  In
this we encounter the trap of taking culture to be directly analogous to
society.  The strength of a performative, as is the case with artworks in
general, is that it is not limited by the non-coincidence of speech and
situation.  The problem is that the speech is self-contained, precluding the
dimension of fantasy, and by extension, an adequate model of subject
formation – which would also, incidentally, help to explain why it is that
audiences may not accept their status as political subjects.  In this sense,
the participant may very well wonder what it is that the artist wants from
them.  The artwork in this sense operates as a kind of *objet petit a*, the
object-cause of desire that causes anxiety inasmuch as it brings on the
disappearance of desire, the imaginary screen that masks the void of being
that lies behind it.
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