Research Center on Performing Cultures – Performative turns in the Middle Ages and in early and late modern times
Come and meet the crowd!
Swarms of birds. Cell phone dating services. Internet communities. Police squads duped by demonstrators using the "out of control" strategy. Critical customers organizing payment boycotts online. Hooligans. International terror networks. What do these acutely heterogenous groups have in common?
They all describe performative collectives. They have no central leadership, no masterplan, no fixed structures, and no self-representation as a single entity. Their actions as a group are the result of local contacts and temporary synchronizations.
These forms of collective performance are responsible for numerous ongoing cultural, social, and political transformations. They remain fleeting, event-like structures that elude definition. While they have great productive potential, they can be equally destructive and dangerous. Given their characteristics, these structures pose a new challenge for the study of performative processes and inspire a reevaluation of established terms and concepts pertaining to the performative.
How do we define performing cultures?
Performative actions are self-referential insofar as they mean what they do. They constitute reality by creating and possibly transforming social realities. Institutional and social conditions determine the specific performative situation and its course. Wherever cultures occur, collide, interact, and transform in this sense, performativity marks their constitution, organization, and reflection.
Performative processes describe transformative processes that, in principal, cannot be fully planned or controlled. They create ludic spaces in which the unplanned and the unpredictable recurs and fundamentally co-determines the transformative process. Here, intention and contingency, planning and emergence are inextricably linked.
The Collaborative Research Center "Performing Cultures" (henceforth referred to by its German acronym SFB) explores the relationship between performativity and textuality. It examines the function and significance of performance during the major historical developments in media and communication technologies that transformed Europe in the middle ages, the early modern period, and modernity.
Objectives and research areas
We aim to explore the nature of the transformative power and specific energy of the performative, and find ways to describe and conceptualize it. We examine the conditions necessary for the performative process to enable emergence.
A special starting point for the creation of something new is the emergence of a blank space, a hiatus. A liminal phase or moment of pure potentiality may change the course of the performative process and lead it in unplanned - perhaps even unimagined - directions.
The following research areas study the particular power inherent to these open performative processes:
- processes of exchange, interweaving, and differentiation that occur/occurred in the encounter of European with non-European cultures and led to significant transformations,
- performative processes inducing transformation through violence, destruction, and suppression, and
- participatory processes which collapse the opposition between actor and spectator.
Interdisciplinary collaboration
On the basis of their research the sub-projects identified the overarching topics and questions. They will be explored in the following four interdisciplinary research groups:
I Contact zones
II Destructive dynamics
III Synchronization and participation
IV Performativity, theory building, autoreflexivity
The SFB has been co-operating with the independent Emmy Noether Research Group for Young Scholars entitled "The Practice of Law - The Comparative Microsociology of Criminal Justice Proceedings."
>> detailed concept, members
The performative turn in the arts, aesthetics, and cultural studies - a review
The concept of the SFB was originally founded on the hypothesis that the constant shifts in the relationship between performativity and textuality influence cultural change. The systematic exploration of the function and significance of performative processes and their relationship to textuality during key developments in media and communication technologies in European culture informed our interest. The focus lay on investigating the relationship between performativity and textuality in constellations where medial conditions are fundamentally reevaluated, creating new parameters for performativity and textuality as the result of different conditions for the materiality and mediality of communication. The creation of a professional theatre as a multi-dimensional mass medium at the end of the sixteenth century serves as an example here. The first juncture studied by the SFB spans the medieval and early modern period. Four pivotal shifts in the conditions for communication marked this era: the transition of vernacular languages from oral to written form which reached its first apex during the twelfth century; the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century; increasing dialogical references to ancient authorities; and, lastly, the widespread encounters with newly "discovered" cultures. The second juncture refers to the development of the new media during the nineteenth century and extends into the present.
According to our initial hypothesis, these periods each marked a paradigmatic performative turn. Yet, we always rejected the notion of a naive, linear construction of history whereby the invention of the printing press transformed the largely performative, medieval culture into a predominantly textual one, which the new media have since returned to its primarily performative state with the onset of the twentieth century. Such a linear construction seemed untenable from the beginning given that in the aftermath of Gutenberg's invention new performative formations such as commedia dell'arte, Elizabethan theatre, and opera were established, and that the new media have given rise to alternative forms of textual production. However, the term performative turn was introduced here with the conviction that such junctures in the conditions for communication crucially changed the relationship between performativity and textuality, therefore describing fundamental paradigmatic shifts.
From "culture as text" to the performativity of culture
In the 1990s the humanities and social sciences experienced a shift in orientation triggered by a new understanding of culture. Until the late 1980s, the notion of "culture as text" dominated the field. Specific cultural phenomena as well as entire cultures were conceived as structured webs of signs waiting to be deciphered. On the one hand, this understanding of culture, which specified the decoding and interpretation of texts as the central activity of humanistic studies, extended its area of interest to include not just texts and monuments but also rituals, festivals, political demonstrations, etc. On the other hand, however, these cultural activities were studied solely with regard to their potential meaning, while ignoring their particular nature as events. In the 1990s the humanities accepted this challenge by acknowledging the performative nature of culture and extended its sphere of interest beyond the text. The humanistic disciplines began to look beyond traditional text models to increasingly focus on the activities, actions, processes of exchange, shifts, and dynamics that constitute cultural events. The frame of reference for the analysis of culture shifted from textuality to its nature as event. This gave rise to the notion of "culture as performance."
Performativity and cultural change (current state of research)
The SFB aimed to develop a theory of cultural dynamics that addresses the different processes of cultural transformation triggered by shifts in the relationship between performativity and textuality. Moreover, the SFB sought to bring about a performative turn within the relevant academic disciplines of art and cultural studies, extending the notion of performativity beyond its merely historical and phenomenal definition to stimulate new scientific methods and techniques.
One significant result of the first period (three years) concerned our distinction between performativity and textuality. The concept of performativity was accordingly defined as a weak, strong, and radical concept (Sybille Krämer), whereby it proved counter-productive within the radical context to define performativity and textuality as binary opposites even for heuristic purposes. As our research had shown, performative processes were capable of generating a dynamic that destabilized dichotomous terminological schemes as a whole. Like Austin, who collapsed the binary opposition between constative and performative utterances in the course of his lectures, we could not sustain a dichotomous understanding of performativity and textuality in our research. Increasingly, textuality revealed itself as a sub-category of performativity, seen, for example, in the performative processes of reading and writing. Instead, every signifying process must already be seen as performative, bearing the potential to create new meaning and constitute a new reality.
As Austin already recognized, it became necessary to take a new approach and work with other differentiations. To study the effects of performance we tentatively established special working groups based on cultural practices to cover media, perception, ritual, gender, and knowledge/science. Each working group and their associated sub-projects based their research on different semantic shades of the term performativity. Yet, all of them referred to the dual nature of performance: it was understood as an active and intentional process as well as a pathic act - a sudden occurrence or contingency, a spontaneous event.
Between staging and emergence
The first period examined the creative and generative nature of performative processes. Our interest focused on the transformative power of performance. It was crucial to show that performative processes do not merely express or represent something already in existence in another order, but that they are capable of inducing transformation, especially with regard to processes of iteration. All that performative processes bring forth appears for the very first time at that moment. Over the course of the second period (another three years) the interdisciplinary working groups increasingly confirmed the above-mentioned duality of performance. It became clear that performative processes grant a subject agency and empower it, while at the same time limiting the scope of this agency. This duality determines all that performative processes bring forth - they are intentionally created and passively allowed to happen. Again and again, our investigations of performative processes led us to the emergence of unplanned and unforeseen events that seemed to elude the control of individual subjects. This confirmed our initial postulation of the nature of performance as event, based largely on emergent appearances and processes. These formed the centre of our research during the third period (another three years).
Performative shifts
The second period of research also decisively altered our initial conviction that the developments in media and communication technologies during the transition from the middle ages to the early modern period and during the process of modernization constituted paradigmatic turns. Our current state of research rather suggests that the process described a sustained performative shift, over the course of which particular performative functions successively merged with textual ones (middle ages and early modern period) and vice versa (modernity). Yet, the overall process also involved contrary developments (see above). While these did not alter the relevance of the chosen periods for the aims of the investigation, the concept of a performative shift led to the extension of each period and enabled a deeper understanding of the historical continuities and gradual transitions at work in the areas under investigation.
The transformative power of performance
With the third period of research we shifted our attention to the appearance and effect of emergent processes in performance, producing results of great significance for the future work of the SFB. The first outcome concerned the overall characterization of performative processes. Be it the continuous repetition of rehearsed practices or an intentional, planned action aimed at inducing change, performative processes always constituted transformations that principally eluded individual control. Performative processes are not subject to fixed causal chains of movement and action but instead create ludic spaces allowing for unplanned and unforeseen events that co-determine the process of transformation. Intention and emergence seem inextricably linked within performative processes.
The second outcome concerned a phenomenon common to all research groups due to its special relation to emergence. Yet, this phenomenon, described as blank space, hiatus, liminal phase, potentiality, etc., has never been qualified, let alone examined closely. The phenomenon forms the precondition for something to emerge that changes the thrust of the ongoing performative process, thus leading to an unplanned transformation. The fourth and final period of research (another three years) will focus on this phenomenon.
Thirdly, we found that, despite the large breadth and variety of performative processes, they all shared a certain inherent force. This remained the case whether we examined changes in status, processes of transgression, distortion, alienation, differentiation, or experiments, translation, transcription, transfer, interweaving, or hybridization. They spanned processes of participation, exchange, and negotiation as well as systems of dynamic signs and spaces, movement, spatialization, the social production of space, symbolically or atmospherically charged spaces, synchronization, temporalization, embodiment, assimilation, and constituting or shifting identities, to name the main performative processes examined by the research groups and sub-projects. They all describe transformations that are partially or at least temporarily goal-oriented and aim at inducing different states. Yet, they constitute essentially open-ended processes. All examined processes spoke to the unique transformative power and energy of performance that can effect cultural change. A new theory of cultural dynamics must take this finding as a starting point.
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