“Actions are performative insofar as they can be understood as communicating meaning to an audience. For purposes of understanding such performance, it does not matter what meaning “really” is, either for the actors themselves or in some ontological or normative sense. What matters is how others interpret actors’ meaning.”
With saying this, Alexander is leading into everything he is trying to write in this piece. I understand him to be saying that by doing an action, it is only “successful” (Which he talks about further in the piece), if the audience is getting some sort of meaning out of it and it is the meaning you are trying to give them.
He then goes on the talk about how a performance is successful. According to Alexander, the only way a performance or action can be successful is if the audience believes what you are doing is real, not just a script that you happen to be following. The action cannot appear to be performed and the audience must be able to put their selves into the performance or the actors’ shoes.
I also understood him to be saying the same thing about power, that for something to be powerful people must believe it to be real. He then started to connect what he was talking about with Performance and Power to what we were talking about in class about Gender. He quotes Judith Butter “there is no power construed as a subject that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability about one’s gender.” The reason I believe this to connect is because if you want someone to believe you are a certain gender, than they have to believe it to be real.
He does also talk about power in the sense of dictatorship and the Iraqi War. He is saying that even today dictatorship can be successful. That basically all you need is “audience alienation.” Also that something traumatic helps the actor be successful with their power. For example with the Iraqi War. As many Americans would not have backed up such a war if something like 911 did not happen first.
2 comments:
The author of this summary actually did a decent job. I understood Alexander's writing better than if I would have read it without this summary. I also found this reading to be a bit over my head, but then again, most are.
Cultural pragmatics is a micro theory of action theory and a macro theory of institutions and culture. What I got from this was that Cultural pragmatics has to do with culture and the institutions surrounding it. Alexander explains actions as communicating to an audience, however what matters is how the audience interprets their meaning.
I really liked the fact that Alexander gave us a description of the important terms in the first couple of pages of his article. As for dictatorships, they do have a lot of power, by “refusing every element of its own performance, while preventing other potential powers from ever doing the same.”
“Skeptical audiences are the key to causing the performances of institutional power to fail.” This part I feel is an important part of the article, and yet I did not see this in the summary. All in all I believe that this summary did a great job detailing most of the important points of this article.
I thought that this article was very unique and fairly easy to understand. I completely agree that in order for the audience to believe what is going on they need to believe that they are actually a part of what is going on on stage (tv, movie screen, ect.). Another point that Alexander made was that the audience and the performer need to have similar backgrounds to make the connection even stronger. I agree with this because a performance will probably not have much appeal to me if I don’t really understand where it is coming from compared to a performance that I happen to know something about. I think it is very true that skepticism is what can keep power at bay or at least to make another performance when people don’t agree on the message being presented. Also, I don’t know if this really applies but something it made me think of was that today’s movies are mostly aimed at making money (this probably doesn’t have to do with power so much) so they have acceptable storylines. They know what people like and want so the appeal to those desires. I feel like if “Hollywood” started producing movies that the public didn’t like (mostly stories that didn’t have happy endings) then there would be skepticism and the public would speak out and someone would end up creating other “performances” that people wanted to see. I don’t know if that really applies… but I feel like it is kind of along the same lines.
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