A Proposition: Performative Transcendence
orTranscendence: a virtual that behaves like a reality?
(a not too well structured think-through of some issues, written for the Performance and Religion Working Group with the International Federation of Theatre Researchers)
Transcendence, in a nutshell,
describes that which exceeds everyday experience of both the world and the self
(whether that be hidden realities of a metaphysical realm, or the sinking into
and contemplative attention to the everyday), which is why the idea of
transcendence, for most, points to the spiritual, the divine, or the
otherworldly. In the study of theatre and performance, transcendence has been
described as entering the realm of the “sacred” and “pure consciousness.” Since
the 1960s and into the present day, modern theatre practitioners like Jerzy
Grotowski[1]
and Richard Schechner[2],
following in the footsteps of avant-garde artists like Antonin Artaud[3]
and Hugo Ball[4],
and influenced by the anthropological research of Victor Turner[5],
turn to ritual in order to create liminal states between everyday reality and a
“higher plane.” A contemporary curiosity
about the transcendent infuses new work in theatre and performance studies, as
evidenced by Ralph Yarrow’s landmark book Sacred
Theatre[6],
focus groups affiliated with various academic conferences dedicated to theatre,
performance, spirituality, and religion, and journals such as Performance and Spirituality[7].
Such a burgeoning interest might seem at odds with contemporary academia, since
in philosophy since Kant, transcendence has often been the object of skepticism.
After Kant, transcendence became the childish past or “dark mirror” of philosophy,
which now, having put aside its childish ways, seeks the bright instance of the
present and of the particular “face to face.” This tradition is reflected in
the intersection between phenomenology and performance studies today, which
could be seen as a fusion of the modernist avant-garde fascination with the
sacred and sacred experience, and the empiricist turn toward phenomenology that
began with Kant. Performance studies scholar and phenomenologist Susan Kozel
calls this a “revitalization” of phenomenology as a result of the convergence
of theoretical, cultural and artistic forces that produce a new embodiment of
older ideas, responding to a “need in dancers, artists, writers, cultural
critics, and feminists to be able to describe concrete, lived human life,
without forcing it through a methodological framework, or reducing it to a
series of inner psychic experiences or conceptual abstractions.”[8]
Kozel understands phenomenology as a call, or a return, to lived experience.
Does transcendence still have a place in this present relationship between
phenomenology and performance?
In order to answer this question, I turn
to another set of questions: How is transcendence thought? Is transcendence
something that exceeds performance, or is it part of what constitutes the
experience (or the interpretation—which, I might argue in another place better
suited to such a discussion, is simultaneous to experience) of performance? What
Kant argued was that transcendence assumes a priori knowledge that can never be
proven or confirmed. Transcendence is what allows Kant’s critical formulation
of the so-called “transcendental argument”, wherein understanding or proof of a
condition rests on an already-assumed prior reality or condition, such as the
pre-existence of God before and as the condition for the existence of all else.
Such a priori stances are claims of faith rather than statements of fact, and
function as “virtual realities” that allow thinkers to understand and stabilize
themselves within a given context (such as the context of belief or faith)
rather than reveal timeless certainties and universals. Every belief, no matter
how well-founded, is a kind of virtual space within which a system finds its
context and within which it constructs meaning.
This is how Zizek reads Deleuze through Kant: “the proper transcendental space is the
virtual space of multiple singular potentialities, of ‘pure’ impersonal
singular gestures, affects, and perceptions that are not yet the
gestures-affects-perceptions OF a pre-existing, stable, and self-identical
subject.”[9] A
priori claims are synthetic knowledge of the world as it appears rather than it
is “in itself.” Kant was a negative thinker through and through—what we do and
can know does not necessarily describe what is, and what is may never be more
than what we think we know. I want to extend this further and argue, at least
for the moment, that we depend on that kind of virtual reality in order to
understand even what the most advanced technologies would affirm as the
undeniable and unchangeable real (and it is true that the further we progress
from Newtonian physics, the less and less we find that we are certain about
what and where we are). If transcendence is the ultimate virtual space, then
thinking transcendence, or thinking with and through transcendence, is the root
operation of every encounter with the world through perception, reflection,
interpretation, and communication. Perhaps transcendence is the “performative”
par excellence, the result of a “performative reduction” analogous to Husserl’s
“phenomenological reduction.”
Etymologically, “transcendence” is to
go across (from trans-, beyond) and
above (from scandere, to climb), and
as a performative it must be recognized as basically teleological; there is a
before and after, a process and its result. Transcendence always transcends
something—space, time, language, thought, experience, etc. It can’t exist for
itself, but depends upon a certain need for fulfillment, retribution,
salvation, fruition, completion, and the like, which is perhaps why it is such
a catch-word for Western religion. But here we easily stumble into a logical
conundrum when we try to think transcendence as a kind of ascent into “pure” or
“meta” experience, because in order to reflect on the process of transcendence,
one must engage in the process of reflection from a stance still entrenched in
the sub-reality that is only a pre-cursor to the possible transcendence that
the process of transcendence promises. So where does transcendence exist? If
the truly transcendent is fully transcendent, then inhabitation of this realm
is totally divorced from the prior experience. Perhaps the closest we can get
to “true” or “full” transcendence is in its own thinking. Thinking
transcendence, whether that is through the ecstasy of the mystic who
understands herself to achieve union with the divine, or the scientist who
stands in awe before the complex simplicities of a protein chain, is an
imaginative and embodied process that creates new possibilities for experience.
What I propose is transcendence as a
mode of thought that is also a performative. Transcendence is in its own
thinking, and as it is thought it is done or achieved. With this sketch of
transcendence, there can never be a question of transcending experience itself,
but always the affirmation that transcendence is in the experience of its own
thinking, but at the same time cannot be defined as that thought or event
itself. Reflecting on the history of transcendence in philosophy, John Lachs
comments that for thinkers after Kant, “instead of searching for a world beyond
space-time finitude, we must content ourselves with trying to find something of
intrinsic value in daily life. The stamp of the divine can no longer be some
small but revealing signal to thought; it must be a value in which we can find
true satisfaction, in which the striving self finds rest.”[10] For such thinkers, no longer is transcendence
about what is or what we can know, but the value and meaning revealed in our
choices and relationships. What interests me is the possibility that
transcendence, rather than axiology, ontology, or epistemology, is a
performative. So, how is the valuation that Lachs identifies performed? In the experience of union or communion, for
example, which some might identify as a “transcendent” experience, how does a
community decide its core values? What histories and relationships, what
processes of frame and economies of signs help a community agree that one event
or experience is transcendent, and another not? Lachs further writes, “Transcendence occurs in happy moments when we manage
to shed the cares of the world to embrace it for the marvels it presents.” This
statement belies the very argument that Lachs attempts to make. By arguing in
passive language that “transcendence occurs”—as if ex nihilo—he reinforces
transcendence as existing as its own thing. Transcendence is not a thing, but
the operation of experience. By recognizing transcendence as a performative
that occurs in and through its own process or experience but cannot be equated
with that process or experience may give both philosophy and phenomenology
another language with which to describe the shared human encounter with that
which is beyond the self but still constitutes reality.
What exists beyond the
self, while not knowable, can still be confirmed as real, such as the
interiority of other selves. Virtual realities reverse this paradigm: what
exists beyond the self is knowable (perceptible) but not necessarily “real.” Performatives
are always virtual—the ultimate “as if”s, the most willing of suspensions of
disbelief, the confluence of catharsis and denoument. Performatives are choices
that behave like facts—virtuals that behave like realities. One of J.L.
Austin’s examples, the christening of a ship wherein the “I christen thee…” is
both the naming and the named[11],
demonstrates that a performative is nothing other than a description that
behaves like a recognition. We behave as if ships have names, and so they do.
This hidden a priori assumption of the given—that ships have names—is the
virtual reality in which the naming of the ship makes sense. In this regard,
any kind of symbolic activity wherein meaning is made and circulated is a
virtual reality. When we live in such symbolic transactions, we are performing
transcendence. Transcendence is living in and through the symbolic enterprise
and exchange that is perception and interpretation, and transcendence
necessitates symbolic language and action because of this, such as the rites
and rituals of religions as well as therapeutic practices, sciences, and the
performing arts. To go beyond, to transcend the self, is as simple and as
profound as transitioning from “I am” to “you are.” The intersubjective stance
is as much a virtual reality, ripe for transcendence, as any apprehension of
the divine.
[2] See
Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and
Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).
[4]
Erdmute Wenzel White’s helpful biography with index of plays and poems is The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet (Camden
House, 1998).
[5] See
Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre:
the Human Seriousness of Play (PAJ Publications, 2001).
[10]
John Lachs, “Transcendence in Philosophy and Everyday Life,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 11.4
(1997)248.
