Triumph of the Performative

In his study of Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (p. 11), Lawrence Kramer describes the shift from modern to postmodern in terms of speech-act theory. Modernism privileged the constative and subordinated the performative; postmodernism deconstructs the hierarchy and especially highlights the fact that all constatives are also performatives: “The performative is the ‘originary’ category within which the constative is produced, enfranchised, recast, subverted, and ramified. In this context, communication appears as a process in which socially and discursively situated subjects act by meaning. Communicative acts arise in signification and at the same time constitutively exceed it.”

He suggests that the consequences of this shift are massive:

“The constative declines from a first principle to a distinguishing feature of language as a medium, in the process losing some (but by no means all) of its epistemic authority. In its performative or “illocutionary” aspect, language combines with all other media to form a continuous manifold – call it a field, a dynamic, a current, a network, an economy – of communicative acts. Whatever signifies affects, in so doing, the situation(s) recognized or misrecognized, believed or imagined to envelop it. Both this process itself and the meanings it generates are protean. Particular communicative acts can nearly always be realized in a variety of media and must in principle be capable of varied repetition in an indefinite number of situations. Each must be freshly interpreted rather than merely received, and even the plainest resonates with alternative uses and realizations, with displacements, substitutions, and revaluations, with unexpected alliances and antipathies. This general transposability is a hallmark of the communicative economy. One effect of it is to break down the customary divisions between different spheres of action and the motives and meanings proper to each sphere. In the dynamics of acting by meaning, psychical, social, and cultural agencies can intersect and mutually implicate each other at any point. Meanings and values characteristic of each undergo transferences onto the others and invest the communicative economy as a whole.”

In such a setting, Kramer thinks, it becomes possible to revive talk about classical music. Modernism shied away from extramusical analyses of music: “Music must somehow be understood from the inside out” (p. 13). The “heart” of this viewpoint is a particular understanding of the relationship of music and language, such that “music and language lie on different sides of an epistemological divide” (p. 14). By shaking the common understanding of language, postmodernism also shakes the relationship of music and language. On postmodern assumptions, Kramer argues, what has been conceived to be “outside” will be relocated within: “The emergence of postmodernist musicologies will depend on our willingness and ability to read as inscribed within the immediacy-effects of music itself the kind of mediating structures usually positioned outside music under the rubric of context. These “structuring structures”locally general dispositions, tendencies, or cultural tropeswould appear as forces both deployed by and deploying music, deployed by and deploying discourse about music.36 At the same time the differences between text and context, the aesthetic and the political or social, the “inside” and the ‘outside’ of the musical moment, the hermeneutic and the historiographical, would be (re)constituted as provisional and permeable boundaries destined to disappear in and through the heteroglot weaving of musicological discourse. The music “itself,” whether studied at the level of work, style, or genre, would be decentered in that discourse – sometimes more so, sometimes less – but not thereby relinquished as an occasion of pleasure, understanding, or valuation” (pp. 18-19).