the real

In “The explicit body in performance” Rebecca Schneider separates between a ‘Real’ that is cultured by Western societies (which we can also call symbolic order) and a real as recognition of the symbolic order. She argues that “Western civilization is in thrall to a ‘Real’ we are acculturated to accept as forever beyond our grasp”³. The insatiable desire to achieve a “Real” out of reach, which she calls “a paradoxical ‘reality’ only of dream”, promotes infinite accumulation of commodities. To wake up from this dream is to become aware of the dream-reality itself, to become aware of our social reality, the symbolic order and its effects⁴. Considering this, it seems to me, that the real presented in performance art is the becoming-aware-of the symbolic order. An opportunity is presented to step back or to the side and look at the structure, look at the symbolic order from a distance.

On the other hand, Nicholas Ridout claims that performance art presents ‘realness’ rather than the real⁵. He compares the real in performance to Kleist’s aspiration of aesthetic grace. Its precondition is the absence of self-consciousness: “That is to say, the human frame attains this state of aesthetic grace only by being inhuman”⁶. Hence, Ridout considers that Kleist’s discourse on the ideal aesthetic grace “dramatizes the impossibility of its realization”⁷. In the same way in performance art, despite some artists explicitly expressing their intention to go beyond theatrical representation in search of the real⁸, what they really present is the impossibility of this reach. The search of the real or, better put, the approximation of the real might be called realness. In O. G. Perry’s paper “Fictional realness” we find a few approaches to this word by various authors. Dorian Corey describes realness as being “as close as we will ever come to the real”; “Jack Halberstam reads realness as ‘not exactly performance, not exactly imitation; it is the way that people, minorities excluded from the domain of the real, appropriate the real and its affects’”; “in Butler’s terms, ‘what determines the effects of realness is the ability to compel belief’”⁹.

Performance art offers a possibility to acknowledge the symbolic order. That doesn’t automatically mean that access to the real is granted. On the other hand, maybe realness is as close as we can get to the real, since we are self-conscious human beings cultured inside the symbolic order. What is this real that seems to be constantly slipping away?

According to Lacan the real is one structural part of the triad Symbolic-Imaginary-Real. The real is “that which resists symbolization, inclusion into our universe of meaning”¹⁰. Thus we can’t approach it through the symbolic order (signs, language, society, culture); which practically means, that I am not able to talk about it with words. Still, let’s try exploring it through Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan. Žižek suggests that the real is a “pure structural gap”, a “pure difference”¹¹. A pure difference exists prior to “the difference between”. It exists prior to having two parts to differentiate between. Kant’s thoughts on human freedom could give us a clearer understanding. Freedom belongs neither to nature (animals are enslaved to their instincts) nor to culture (symbolic laws). It is an excess of humanity. What does it mean to exceed in this case? If I say ‘You are not human’, I mean that you are outside of humanity, e.g. you are a god, an animal etc. If I say ‘You are inhuman’ that is not the same sentence as the one above. Inhuman is not outside humanity, it is an excess of humanity inherent to humanity itself. Likewise, we can’t say that freedom is external to culture and internal to nature and that’s what the difference between the two is. Freedom is an excess of humanity inherent to humanity itself and what culture is trying to do with prohibitions is to regulate this excess. We see now that, paradoxically, the difference between nature and culture “is a level of its own”, it is a pure difference existing a priori as a gap between the two¹².