PERFORMANCE/TEXT
Notes on Roland Barthes and
the Origins of Performance
Art
"The Text is experienced only in an activity of production"
A. From Text to Performance
Roland Barthes, in his theory of the Text, provides a construct which can be taken
alternately as parallel to or as manifest in performance art. Unlike the Text, which Barthes has
the luxury of retroactively defining, "Performance art" as a practical and rhetorical field has
gradually developed. It (ironically) does not have a single author, a single origin, like Barthes
to reveal the intentions behind its development. None the less, there is an implicit political
register to performance as a reaction to its historical circumstance.
Barthes theory of the Text is most rigorously developed in the work from 1968 to 1971, just
at the point that performance itself was emerging as an independent form alongside sculpture,
dance, painting and theatre. But it was also from this moment, in becoming a discipline, an
independent form, as opposed to a methodology that we see its domestication. Performance is
no longer performance because of a methodological relation to its historical moment, rather
performance becomes anything that displays a recognizable set of codes that denote its place
within the discipline.
B. From Work to Theatre
Before I attempt to make what I believe to be a fruitful equation, I want to note that there
are several problems in relating Barthes theory of the Text to performance art. Barthes points to
the performative tense in language, the decree, the slogan. This tense displaces the usual usage
of language which hopes to do more than merely signify. Barthes also defines the Text as a
"methodological field"2. not reducible to one material object. In this case we can understand that
this methodology can be extended not only beyond the object of the book, but outside of the
performative practice of writing and reading. Barthes defines Text in relation to the Work.
"What constitutes the Text is ... its subversive force in respect of the old classifications"3 Barthes
examples of Texts, and the Works that they subvert ,are literary, writing and reading are the
practices at the center of his theory of the Text, and there are passages which seem to bar the
direct equation of performance with text, the Text must "reach the point where only language
acts, `performs' and not `me'"4. We are then left with three overlapping and perhaps confusing
and contradictory propositions describing the relation of Text to performance: A.) the Text is the
performance of reading and writing. B.) The Text (as practice of the written) is to Work as
Performance (the practice of demonstration and speech) is to Theatre. C.) Performance is
methodologically a type of Text and the theatre is methodologically a type of Work.
The first of these propositions is not really of concern in understanding the relation of the
Text to performance art, and to the extent that it might be, Barthes analysis is itself more or less
exhaustive. Both of the other propositions, however, hold out real potential for understanding.
From the second proposition, we understand "performance art" can only be understood as a
negation of the conditions of theatre. Performance can be negatively defined in relation to
theatre, just as Text is negatively defined in relation to the Work.
Performance, like Barthes imagines the text, is `interdisciplinary.' Both challenge the
distinctness of the disciplines which in turn maintain the criterion for evaluation of the work.
This interdisciplinary quality is not like the "total-artwork" of Wagner, recreating a supposedly
lost mythical wholeness. Rather, Performance and Text take on a fragmentary quality, and
these fragments remain fragmentary, refuse wholeness, acknowledge that wholeness is a social
fantasy of the past. When things become whole they loose their relation to one another, in the
text and performance there is a move to the fragmentary and interdisciplinary precisely to
create relations, not to overcome them. "(T)he modern scriptor can thus no longer believe , as
according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought or
passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this delay and
indefinitely polish his form. "5 At its origins both interdisciplinarity and this unfinished quality
had a radical political meaning, a rejection of the transhistorical evaluation of aesthetic taste in
favor of a momentary pragmatic evaluation, but it has now become only another finish,
removed from its pragmatic purpose and political origin.
The act of reading understood as an act of meaning production implies an emphasis on form
as content. The meaning no longer lies in the work, but in its enactment. Similarly, we see such
an emphasis on form as content in the works of 70's artist such as Oppenheim, Acconci and
Burden. In their work we see that the act itself no longer stands in for an event, but enacts a set
of relations resulting in a meaning. What became immediately to the fore were questions of
efficacy, where for instance a shooting might be staged to commemorate a historical event, or to
represent an imagined event, in Shoot, Burden enacts a historical event. Oppenheim notes how
"danger becomes almost a formal ingredient"6 in these works. Burden makes this explicit when
he says his goal, "to alter the history of representation of such themes [violence] for all time"7
Its proximity to, and shared use of the term "Body Art" to describe this work and the work
of essentialist feminism (as well as some more emergent critical feminism which was less). Body
art seems to emphasize object, and a return to something less artificial than sculptural materials.
What emerges from these artists work however, has been a critical reception which re-
essentializes the body. Whether we can locate this essentialism in a failure of the critical
apparatus or in the straight-white-male-bravado common to these artists is mute.
C. Performance Artist, the Production of
Self
From the third proposition, which directly equates performance with a mode of Text, we
understand that what is really transformed in the Text is its mode of production, the shift from
the texts origin in the author to its place in reception. The "Author" which has heretofore been
privileged as the origin of the fixed meaning of the work is displaced by the reception of the
audience which now takes on a productive character. This does not displace the author entirely,
but merely reveals the production of meaning as a two sided process. Marx makes a similar
observation in the Grundrisse, revealing that at each stage of the commodity process
consumption and production co-exist, forming in reality the pair consumptive production and
productive consumption, the act of production consumes raw material and human energy, the
act of consumption is always tied to the production of some satisfaction of human need, energy,
or pleasure.8 This realization has important political significance for Marx, revealing that the
relations of capital do not stop at the door of the factory, but determine all social relation as well.
We can see that in the division of labour in the theatre, the production of the script as a
historically unchanging and finished product which is merely interpreted by the actor without
the participation of the playwright the epitome of this relation. In performance, this relation is
overcome in two ways, on one hand, it is common that division to be directly overcome, the
writer directing and performing the work. This is not necessarily the case but it is common that
all participants have an acknowledged creative input, actually collaboratively producing the
piece, not merely interpreting what is already considered to be finished on the page.
Seen from the perspective of the "artist," the move from author to scriptor means a radical
change in understanding the relation between ones labour and ones identity. "the modern
scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, (and) is in no way equipped with a being
preceding or exceeding the writing"9 This transformation as well has a profound political
meaning, just as the performance or text transforms the relations of production, it also
transforms the reproduction of the relations of production, the production of subjectivity. The
idea of the autonomous subject epitomized in the Author as a complete subject creating a work
which is an expression of, but not a transformation of his identity is then a necessary part of this
class formation, and serves a particular use for that class, "this positivism, (is) the epitome and
culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the `person' of
the author" 10
This "personal" transformation has a broader implication, "since the Text is that social space
which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge,
analyst, confessor, decoder"11 Thus, this relation of the generator of the Text to themselves is
reflected in the broader social field in which it is deployed, and thus transforms the audience as
well. Performance represents a space where it is possible to experiment with temporarily
maintained transformations in production and subjectivity, this both proves that such a
transform is possible and provides a space to work through conflicts in such a system as well as
developing strategies for more permanently transforming the relations of production in society
as a whole.
While one might be tempted to understand this movement in the autobiographical content
of many performances from Jim Dine or Laurie Anderson. I would suggest that these works
represent an auto-biographical self as already in existence before the representation. In work
like Bruce Nauman's phenomenological investigations or Oppenheim's Reading Position for a
Second Degree Burn, we find the need to mark the self (often through pain). Oppenheim
speaks of turning himself into the canvas, thus in making his work he transforms himself.
When Oppenheim leaves a in second degree burn we see as much a production of the
artists self through willful marking as much as a re-inscription of essentialism, the existence of a
natural body re-emphasized by the fact that the mark is the result of natural processes
(supposing we set the negative, the book aside)
D. Audience Collaboration and Agency
Just like the reliance of the finished work on the independent author has been revealed to
be historical, "The distance separating reading from writing is historical"12 As Marx and Engels
note, the relations of a given moment of history are expressions of the interest of the ruling
class, "the text requires that one try to abolish the distance between reading and writing, in no
way by intensifying the projection of the reader into the work but by joining them in a single
signifying practice." Both in performance and in the Text, the subversion of reification occurs in
the active relation to its audience. Barthes imagines the audience taking an active role in the
construction of the meaning of the text. In the complete work all agency is granted to the author,
in the Text, the audience participates in the production process, this reveals both the historical
contingency of meaning, but also develops a sense of agency in the audience. The Text both
reveals to the audience that they can transform meaning and gives them an opportunity to do
so, the Text "asks of the reader a practical collaboration"13 .
Of course part of the reason why the "performative" serves Barthes, is the immediacy of
transmission and reception in performance space. It is also for this reason that Performance Art
provides the possibility for the most explicit realization of these relations. In performance art,
this development generates a new relation between the performer and the audience.
Performance art has of course developed several strategies for realizing a transformation of this
relationship, and distinctly differentiating it from classical theatre. In performance, this
collaboration can take on its truly social character, producing from the material basis of reality.
Thus the relations of signification, of representation themselves are transformed. Both these
movements are evident in the methodology of signification, performance generally attempts not
so much to represent, but act through, to reveal the signifying. In Performance/Text, one does
not seek to represent the world, but to act in it... even to produce meaning through signifying
acts. The Performance/Text references, or represents, objects, deploys signifiers, not in order to
call up some pre-existent signified, but in order to call the signs themselves into a field of
relations where meaning can be socially produced in the gaps. These gaps are open enough,
the interconnections and nodes at the intersections of lines of relations are plural enough that
one is always able to return to the text anew, and re-write it in the act of active reception, its
metaphor is the network, a combinatory system where relation develop interrelations endlessly.
E. The Semiotic Challenge
Artaud, who certainly represents one of the first theorists of a performed media defined as a
radical negation of theatre, one which clearly fits (or has inspired) Barthes theory of the Text,
declares that theatre must put an end to the masterpiece, and declares this the hour of
intonation. Confusingly enough, he says we must end the tyranny of the text, "instead of
continuing to rely upon texts considered definitive and sacred, it is essential to put an end to the
subjugation of the theater to the text, and to recover the notion of a kind of unique language
half-way between gesture and thought."14. "By this of course we must understand nothing like
the Barthesian Text, but the domination of the theatrical script, the written word, over the
sensual aspects of staging, vision sound, light and vibration. The technology of writing serves to
fix as eternal, and eternally valuable, the written script thus relegating all other aspects of
theater to "interpretation." If the public does not frequent our literary masterpieces, it is because
those masterpieces are literary, that is to say, fixed; and fixed in forms that no longer respond to
the needs of the time"15
If Barthes is attempting to develop a Marxist theory of meaning-production, he fails when
he falls back on the model of language as the model for his symbolic or semiotic system. Barthes
in his choice of the term "text" for this methodology presume the particular practice, indeed the
object, in which this method will become embodied. I would argue that the term "text" is better
left to the written word, not because I believe that there is something outside the "text", outside
the symbolic system. This does not mean that there is any less value in using his
methodological model to understand the nature of performance art. Rather, what I object to is
the equation, implicit in the use of the word "text" between a general symbolic system and the
written word. I would argue that the privileging of the technology of written language has
contributed to the appearance of a divide between the signifier-referent world and the signified-
meaning world. The radical political engagement with signification which is evident in Barthes
work, and which lays latent in performance art must insist on returning signification to a
practice and practice as the ground of signification.
The true semiotic project is to understand the world as a system of signs, not removed from,
but embodied in material relations. Likewise, we must come to understand art as the
transformation, rather than the mere interpretation of meaning in this system. When such a
project is realized we radically transform the nature of art from a project of reflecting the world
to one of changing it. By engaging in this system to produce meaning we necessarily transform
the relations of lived human life. Barthes theory of the text and the emergent performance art of
the Seventies are both part of a subversive current of which the last has not yet been heard.
Seamus Malone is an interdisciplinary artist and theorist living in Brooklyn. He is a recent
fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He is the New York regional
editor and a regular contributor to P-Form.
1 "From Work to Text," Image/Music/Text, (trans Stephen Heath) Hill and Wang, NY, 1977 , pg. 157
2 "From Work to Text," Image/Music/Text, pg. 157
3 "From Work to Text," Image/Music/Text, pg. 157
4 "The Death of the Author," Image/Music/Text, pg. 143
5 "The Death of the Author," Image/Music/Text, pg. 146
6 Alanna Heiss (ed.) Dennis Oppenheim Selected Works 1967-90, Abrams, NY 1992, pg. 162
7 Goldberg, Performance Art From Futurism to the Present, Abrams NY 1988, pg. 159
8 Marx, Grundrisse, (trans Martin Nicolaus) Vintage Books, NY 1973 pg. 94
9 "The Death of the Author," Image/Music/Text,, pg. 145
10 "The Death of the Author," Image/Music/Text, pg. 143
11 "From Work to Text," Image/Music/Text, pg. 164
12 "From Work to Text," Image/Music/Text, pg. 162
13 "From Work to Text," Image/Music/Text, pg. 163
14 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and It's Double, pg. 90
15 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and It's Double, pg. 75
