“Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated . . . behavior” (Taylor 2-3) “I believe it is imperative to keep reexamining the relationships between embodied performance and the production of knowledge” (Taylor xviii-xix) “What I am proposing is an active engagement and dialogue, however complicated” (Taylor 12).
Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (London: Duke UP, 2003).
I am still unsure what to write in response to this book. I have written all over it. I feel I want to perform something in response; to somehow reify the knowledge and expansion through which my brain has wandered by embodying it.
I have many new words in my vocabulary—or signifiers whose pool of signifieds have productively expanded: scenarios, hauntology, indecipherability. Even the episodic and tragic structures now have new meaning—a limit event or one that is related to others.
The new knowledge at times exploded my ideas—which had to be reigned back in for focus (save if for another time). For example, I need to go back to my paper about the roles performed by Princess Lissla Lissar in Robin McKinley’s retold fairy tale. My initial paper permutations did not have the words to describe what I was talking about—the scenarios played with and changed by the author. The embodied psyche performed by Lissar’s dog. In point of fact, rape as an archival act of writing versus the embodied experience which cannot be accurately archived, only understood through embodied performance. Trauma. Another example, Faith as performative. In church, the mantra “faith without works is dead” is used is so many ways. But to write about it and understand it as a performed activity that reifies and embodies the archival knowledge of church doctrine. The archive and the repertoire of spirituality work together. Moving beyond Christianity, how does this understanding of religious action as performance and reinforcement of spiritual identity help us to have conversations and gain knowledge from the religious Other? Again, Distracted, I was ready to recognize and discover the examples (contemporary and past) of the hegemony creating Aristotelian stories/tragedies and compare/contrast them to the multiple episodic narratives surrounding them. Where is this happening? What effect is it having?
There was so much in this book that was generative for me. It is difficult to pick any one thing. But I will say this. The book is about understanding performance in a world where cultures are colliding. Some goals that stood out to me were: to be aware of the scenarios that reappear and (one might say) act as mini/maxi behavioral vortices, to understand the Americas as being united and full of commingled cultures—rather than falling prey to misleading endings implicated by scenarios, to understand the power and proliferatory facets of surrogation (I might say in the biophysical sense: the surrogate of children does not replace the mother but multiplies the position, and often, since the fertilization is achieved by artificial insemination, a surrogate will have twins or triplets—multiplying the family rather than replacing pieces of it), to remind us that beginning from a place of ignorance “we don’t know”—but we can learn—often leads us to richer more expansive discoveries and productive transculturation, and to know that thinking in terms of limit events cuts out experiences that we need to internalize and perform in conjunction with other events, performances and people—an active witness can make connections and meaning, while a spectator is dismissed as non-participatory.
I still struggle to understand at times—meaning not that I don’t understand at all, but that I recognize that I am only on the surface of understanding many of these things. I am sure that with more experience, more learning, more encounters (intense ones for all the Rollo May scholars in the house), I will understand more.
Taylor’s discussion of the episodic, Denise Stoklos’ intense effort to communicate, and the repeated act called to mind “Einstein on the Beach,” but not analogously. I’m not sure. This thought did not quite finish.
Overall, there was a freedom and a joy to the knowledge and language I received from “This book . . . destined for the archive” (52). Taylor’s celebration of the multiplicity and her faith that despite the terrible things “The peasants die, but not before they have found the seeds of life.” (190) There are multiple seeds of life and the possibilities continue to expand and recreate/rebirth. People create and perform new memes and meanings, new endings for the scenarios that haunt our transcultural performances. It’s not the end. I find tremendous hope and courage in this book. The archival language that is articulated breaks down limits that keep the dialogue from moving toward healthy permutations of performance. It’s something that I am passionate about and only now am seeing the words, the language to describe what I could sense but not see.
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