Self and Other II

The ethnolinguist Richard Bauman articulated performance as the following:

‘All performance involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model of that action. Normally this comparison is made by an observer of the action – the theatre public, the school teacher, the scientist – but the double consciousness, not the external observation, is what is most central [...] Performance is always performance for someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as performance even when, as is occasionally the case, that audience is the self.’[1]

The performative act is based on doubleness: the self  invented an other - ima. Within the self there are two entities. This doubleness allows a comparison, as well as a conceptualisation of difference. As soon as ‘I’ becomes ‘we’ there is already an observer who is also an audience. This audience functions as a witness and thus recognises and validates actions performed by the self.

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[1] Marvin Carlson, ‘What Is Performance’ in Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (eds.), The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, 2^nd Edition, Routledge, London and New York, 2005, pp. 149-150. Carlson refers to the definition of performance, articulated by the ethnolinguist Richard Bauman in the International Encyclopaedia of Communications.