Perfomativity in the Post-Human

The reappropriation of performativity in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Synecdoche New York.

In Bodies That Matter Judith Butler argues for a different understanding of gender and sexuality than was previously accepted. In this text Butler coins the term performativity in relation to gender roles and gender identity. Butler argues that none of us are born with a gender but that what we perceive as gender roles are social constructs. This idea of gender roles, or “sex” as Butler labels it, as a social construct does however come with a problem as ‘this relation between culture and nature implies a culture or an agency of the social which acts upon a nature, which is itself presupposed as a passive surface, outside the social and yet its necessary counterpart’. The problem that has raised the issue of performativity for Butler is the idea that ‘bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled’ (2)

Butler further argues that, once the normative ideal has been accepted, we are compelled to then act upon this ideal of gender roles and relate our own gender identity with this and perform accordingly, to act as is expected of us by both the Other and the Self. Butler continues by arguing that this act is exactly that, an act, or a performance. This performance is however a complicated idea as this performance of gender roles is different from that of actors on a stage. She thus labeled it performativity which she defines ‘not as a singular or deliberate “act,” but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ and produces ‘the phenomena that it regulates and constraints.’(2) Butler finally argues that the concept of performativity results in a radical ‘rethinking of the process by which a bodily norm is assumed, appropriated, taken on as not, strictly speaking, undergone by a subject, but rather that the subject, the speaking “I,” is formed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming a sex.’(3)

In this article I will look at three contemporary texts which, as I will argue, have taken the construct of performativity beyond the limits of gender roles and gender identity. I will argue that the 2006 novel Remainder by Tom McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go and the 2008 movie Synecdoche, New York have taken Butler’s concept out of issues of gender and reapporpriated them for the post-human concept of identity and the disassociation of the self. I will argue that the forming of the subject through the assuming of a sex by performativity and normative ideals is not only limited to gender roles but is, in post-human society, further developed to envelop all of identity, the self, and our understanding of the human.

Anyone who is familiar with both texts cannot help but notice certain similarities between both works. Indeed in both texts the protagonists are obsessed with their physical body and their functions. According to Butler ‘the regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual experience.’(2) In other words, with performativity the body has become completely material, an object.

In Remainder the unnamed protagonist, or reenactor, was the victim of an unidentified incident which resulted in a prolonged comatose state and an even longer period of physical and mental rehabilitation. It is due to this physical rehabilitation that the protagonist becomes acutely aware of his bodily movements, breaking them down into a series of single separate movements;

‘what they do is make you visualize things […] they just ask you to […] They make you understand how it works: which tendon does what, how each joint rotates, how angles, upward force and gravity contend with and counterbalance one another […] Everything was like this. Everything, each movement: I had to learn them all. I had to understand how they work first, break them down into each constituent part, then execute them.’(19-21)

It is this separation of the body and the mind that instills an idea of artificially and performativity of actions within the protagonist. This idea is then further reinforced within him by his exposure to contemporary media, in particular cinematography. It is within these films that the protagonist is exposed to what he sees as the social ideal, a fluidity and complete control of movement and action;

‘The other thing that struck me as we watched the film was how perfect De Nero was. Every move he made, each gesture was perfect, seamless. Whether lighting up a cigarette or opening a fridge door or just walking down the street: he seemed to execute the action perfectly, to live it, to merge with it until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between’(23)

In other words; the protagonist experiences a discrepancy between his experience of his own body and its functions, functions he is keenly aware of due to his “rerouting” of his brain to relearn his movements, and the onscreen appearance of movement by De Nero in Mean Streets. For the protagonist this onscreen performance is the ideal, the complete synchronization of self, body and other.

Later on in the text the protagonist suddenly experiences a clear memory of a particular moment in his past in which he, or so he believes, experienced this complete synchronization and, with the large amount of money he received as settlement after his accident, decides to reenact and re-attain this feeling of synchronization and it is this continual pursuit that lies at the heart of the text. It is with this that Judith Butler’s performativity is taken beyond the bonds of gender and sex and brought into the broader aspects of identity as a whole and our conceptions of the human.

According to Butler, performativity brings with it ‘the question of identification, and with the discursive means by which the heterosexual imperative enables certain sexed identifications and forecloses and/or disavows other identifications.’ (3) This identification of the ideal or the normative also requires the exclusion of others which are then  within the ‘domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects,” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject’. In this reading the abject ‘designates […] those ‘unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life […] who do not enjoy the status of the subject.’ (3)

In Remainder the place of the normative or ideal is filled by the cinematic performance of actors onscreen and the memory of a singular ambiguous event in the protagonist life. This then raises the question what performs the role of the abject. In my reading of the text this role is performed by the protagonist himself, in Remainder the protagonist’s body himself is the abject which is the necessary outside for the normative. The protagonist is no longer able to identify his self with the normative, his actions, movements and utterances appear to lack the fluidity and perfection he perceived in the movies he watched. The Self has thus, as a result of this, become the abject. The normative, however, is not only found outside the protagonist it is also within him. Indeed as Butler argues; ‘the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation.’(3) This abjected outside that is also within can also be found within the protagonist of Remainder in two-fold.

First, as with Butler’s gendered performativity, the protagonist has created the idea of the normative himself, it is a construct of the self’s mind through the reiterated through the power of discourse that is cinema and the media. The protagonist at one point views the performance of De Niro, and several others later in the text, and the protagonist’s self defines it as the normative, an ideal. The protagonist’s self then attempts to identify with this ideal and in failing to do so abjects himself and his own behavior; ‘I’d always been inauthentic. Even before the accident […] I’d been walking down the street […] smoking a cigarette […] and even if it had lit first try, I’d still be thinking: Here I am, walking down the street, smoking a cigarette, like someone in a film.’ (24)

In Remainder, however, it is taken a step further in which the ideal is not only found outside the self but also within the self. As mentioned above the protagonist has a sudden recollection of a, seemingly insignificant, event in his past which the protagonist views as the ideal, and as proof that he too once belonged to the normative. Once this normative has been established the protagonist becomes acutely aware of the performativity of others, viewing them not as original but as flawed copies of actions; ‘the strip between the railings and the doors was like a fashion catwalk, with models acting out different roles, different identities […] one character after another, al so self-conscious, stylized, false.’(27)

This perfomativity as an element not only in gender roles and sexuality but as an important factor in the creation of the self, of identity, and as identification of the human can also be found in other post-human texts and highlights the importance of identification and reenactment in creating the self’s subject. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) we find several characters who are unable to fully identify with what they perceive to be the normative. Being clones, the three protagonists are acutely aware that they or not fully human but are instead “copies” of others. This awareness of being other, as well as the reinforcement of this fact by their guardians, forces them to believe they are outside of the normative, a believe that is instilled within them by their environment. The text revolves around the three protagonists’ attempts to reconcile with this normative and, as with the protagonist in Remainder find this normative ideal within the media; ‘there was, incidentally, something I noticed about these veteran couples at the Cottages […] and this was how so many of their mannerisms were copied from the television […] I realized that this […] stuff came from an American series […] Once I spotted this, I began to notice all kinds of other things the veteran couples had taken from TV programmes: the way they gestured to each other, sat together on sofas, even the way they argued and stormed out of rooms.’(118-119)

In both texts we thus find a form of performativity beyond gender roles and sexuality but as an inherent and indispensible part of the human. In both texts however, the normative does not come from the real but instead comes from actual, explicit, performances of actors onscreen, outside of reality. The media in these texts thus serves as Butler’s ‘phantasm of “sex” […] which produces a domain of abjection.’ (3)  Something that exists in the realm of perception only.

The problem with perceiving the normative human within the fictional creations of onscreen performances is the unreality of its source. Like Butler’s gender roles and sex are social constructs, artificial so is the normative ideal, or normative human, a fictional construct. Neither the normative human ideal in Remainder nor in Never Let Me Go is found within actual persons but in the performance of actors who have rehearsed their actions again and again. For Cathy in Never Let Me Go this is seen as problematic, inauthentic, and inhuman. For Ruth and the other clones in Never Let Me Go as well as the protagonist in Remainder this is insubstantial. For Ruth, who might very well have been unaware of its origins, her mannerisms, copied from others, are performed initially as an attempt to fit in with what she perceives to be the normative ideal; the veteran couples. Like Cathy, however, she is acutely aware of the performativity of her mannerisms; ‘it wasn’t long before Ruth realized the way she’d been carrying on with Tommy was all wrong for the cottages, and she set about changing how they did things in front of people.’(119)

This performativity in Never Let Me Go, however, did not have its origins at the Cottages but can be found throughout the text and indeed in earlier parts of the protagonists’ lives. At Hailsham the students would regularly perform medial tasks in role-play classes, acting out mundane scenes and activities like going to a bakers or asking a police officer for help. By doing this the guardians instill a sense of abject within the self of their students, creating a normative human ideal.

In Remainder this idea of performativity and the search for the normative human ideal is further explored by the protagonist’s attempts to recreate certain events. What is striking about the text, and the protagonist’s attempts at achieving this normative state of being is the explicit performativity of his actions in these attempts. Like Cathy in Never Let Me Go the protagonist in Remainder is acutely aware of the artificiality of what he perceives as the normative; the performance of actors onscreen. Unlike Cathy, however, the protagonist does not seem to mind this artificiality and inauthenticity. Instead, the protagonist embraces it in his quest to achieve this normative ideal.

The protagonist buys up several buildings, refurbishes, remodels and decorates them to fit his memory, or those of others, as exact as possible, leaving things blank when his memory fails him rather than filling them up with what would be logical. He would then hire people to act out certain roles that he remembers, again highlighting the performative nature of their actions before taking on the role of himself within this reenactment. The text appears to highlight the performativity of the human as well as the protagonist again and again as the protagonist attempts to achieve what he perceives to be the ideal, to merge with his actions and surroundings, and indeed the protagonist rehearses his actions again and again until he experiences them to be fluid, perfect, and natural, only to repeat them again and again and exact as before.

A very different work from the two mentioned above however is the 2008 film Synecdoche, New York by director Charlie Kaufman. In this film Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays a stage director who attempts to recreate a life-size New York within a large warehouse as part of a play after, like the protagonist in Remainder, being granted a large sum of money.  The similarities between Remainder and Synecdoche, New York do not end with just this. Like the Protagonist in Remainder the protagonist in Synecdoche, New York, Caden Cotard, is obsessed with his body and bodily functions and indeed materializes the body in much the same way as the protagonist does in Remainder and, like this protagonist, Caden experiences the failure of his body. Throughout the film Caden is exposed to, and suffers from, multiple deceases and ailments, from non-deluding pupils and gum infections to seizures and other serious deceases. This continual failing of his body results in perceiving his body as abject.

A further resemblance between Remainder and Synecdoche, New York is what lies at the heart of the film; the artificial recreation of the real. In Synecdoche Caden attempts to recreate New York as part of a large scale theatre production and tries to discover the real. As with the protagonist in Remainder Caden hires people, in this case professional actors, to play out specific roles he creates for them and tries to have them perform as natural and as real as possible to events that he comes up with.

Like the protagonist in Remainder Caden eventually also puts himself into this large scale enactment but unlike in Remainder Caden hires someone to play him so he can observe and direct. In doing this the attempts made for the normative ideal are, unlike in Remainder, placed completely outside of himself, distancing it from the self. As is the case with Remainder Caden’s attempt to achieve the real through artificial and inauthentic means is only achieved through constant and continual rehearsals and repetitions, spanning over several decades. In Synecdoche the actor hired to play Caden eventually becomes a better, or more natural, Caden and appears to take over aspects of his life. Eventually Caden appears to live his own life through the performance of the actor playing him, giving him scenarios and letting him experience and perform them as if the actor is Caden. Caden is then not only the normative but also the abject as well as the social creator of the abject and the normative.

Caden is the normative as he is the originator of the actor’s role but by using an actor as a replacement of himself Caden also distances himself from the performance of the normative and instead becomes Butler’s abject. Caden however, takes it a step further by not only being the normative and the abject but by also creating the normative and the abject. As the director of this large scale theatre performance Caden is in complete control of the action, mannerisms, dialogue, and movement of the performers and it is Caden who decides what is good, what is right, what is normal, and what is wrong, or, as Butler puts it, what is “unlivable” and “uninhabitable”.

In Synecdoche the artificially created New York finally replaces the real New York for Caden and the inauthentic performance of the actors take over the real lives of the citizens in the real New York. Indeed the world outside the warehouse becomes non-existent for Caden as he merges with his own artificially created world. This inability to distinguish between the real and the performed is an element that reoccurs in all three works mentioned above. Both Caden, the protagonists in Never Let Me Go, and the unnamed protagonist in Remainder are exposed to performed behavior in either new media or in the more classical (yet also revolutionarily new) form of theatre and (eventually) take this as the normative, putting themselves in the role of the abject and attempt to either gain or regain a normative ideal human state of being.

What all three works appear to argue for is a rereading of both what we perceive to be identity, and of Judith Butler’s performativity. These three works appear to push modern conceptions of identity, which is perceived as fragmented, removed from the self, and fluid, to a completely non-existent concept. The works have taken Butler’s concept of gender and sex performativity and reapplied it to encompassing all of the Self and every aspect of our identity. The two novels further argue that this performativity originates within 20^th century media. They appear to argue that with the arrival of television and cinematography, and to a lesser extend through theatre in Synecdoche; our idea of the normative is both created and reinforced, or reiterated by these forms of performance art and made unattainable for more than just a short moment. These texts also appear to highlight the complete artificiality, unoriginality, and performativity of our actions, mannerisms, utterances, and movements. Rather than just gender roles or sex acting as regulatory norms the simple aspect of “being” comes to, as Judith Butler puts it, ‘work in a performative fashion’(2)

Bibliography:

Butler, Judith. (1993) Bodies That Matter; on the discursive limits of “sex”. Routledge: new York

Ishiguro, Kazuo. (2005) Never Let Me Go. Faber & Faber: London

McCarthy, Tom. (2006) Remainder. Alma Books: Richmond

Synecdoche, New York. Dir. Charlie Kaufmann, Perf. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams. Sony Picture, 2008. Film