With an autonomy of its own, performance spreads by deconstruction not only from theatre to other disciplines but across the binaries of art and life, picking up momentum from critical theory – obsessed as it is with the “overflows, leaks, shifts, slips” and eroticised staging of dispersion itself, which cancels aesthetic distance. As we may gather from the Image-repertoire of Roland Barthes, spectacle seems to have become, with the body as irreducible difference, “the universal category in whose aspect the world is seen.”
– Herbert Blau, The Audience (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society), John Hopkins University Press, 1990, p. 2
In what manner does performance "pick up momentum from critical theory?" How do those reflective intricacies affect performance? Is performance an extrapolation, an advocation of those intricacies? Am I missing something?
the unleashing of all manner of miniature egos across the various divides, figuring large, the subject/object divide, the slippages of shifters, signifiers, I's and You's, and 'its;' the latter in place as if placed there, staged, as contemplative souls of the matters in hand, passing hand to hand, hand to mouth, mouth to … and so on… Blau's viewpoint here is of one across the theatrical divide contemplating the metaphoricity of theatre. It is a theatrical one. And as you can see, the body swells; the performance is all inside; there is no leverage against the slippage, the selvedge; the outside escapes without comment. The surface is unharmed… not a ripple.
which is further to say that such momentum as performance picks up from critical theory is fixed at the subrepresentational stage of performance itself, theatre always being first and foremost its own best diagnostician. (This is why bad theatre really tells you how bad things can get, that they can get worse, i.e. ATC's production of God of Carnage.) Theatre's power as metaphor, its virtual immanence derives from theatricality and the Kantian theatricalised conscience of the image of thought, its moral huing and crying, gives rise to a critique which however solid and stately cannot get behind the curtain. Hence, a critical theory exacerbating a movement already incepted, intercepting it with a shrill scepticism, like a whistle on the sideline. If the performance is already the diagnostic, these 'reflectivie intricacies' are already in its affect, made mobile in the fix of it, affixed or inflected, and 'those intricacies' effect performance such that the image of thought is the extrapolation, makes representation. So the theatricalisation of everyday life may be the sum effect of the sinking of every metanarrative – even to and including that of the transcendental subject – below the surface of representation, with its critique. I.e. the critique is not critical enough.
I was missing something. Wonderful. Hence, above. More to say on your second later.