Course Blog #9: Archiving the Repertoire, Berstein's Scriptive Things

In her essay “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Robin Bernstein argues that there are certain scriptive things which have the potential to “archive the repertoire,” in essence, preserving within themselves a record of their use and/or function by virtue of the fact that “a scholar understands a thing’s script both by locating the gestures it cites in its historical location and by physically interacting with the evidence in the present moment” (90).

Her argument leans heavily on the writings of Martin Heidegger and several more recent scholars of “thing theory“ such as Bill Brown who define a thing (as opposed to an object) as something which “asserts itself within a field of matter,” (69) that is to say a material article which invites or choreographs a particular interaction by virtue of its design which accommodates the “latent presence” of the human body (73). According to Bernstein, a “scriptive thing” not only “invites a person to dance,” but also dictates the array of possible steps that its partner might take (or refuse to take) and, in that act, “initiates or interpellates“ the reader into a specific version of the world that (74) Louis Althusser might call the “ideological state apparatus.” According to Berstein:

“The ontological distinction between things and objects is that things hail. And they do so persistently, constantly, when we are alone and in groups, when we think about them and when we do not, when we respond obediently and when we resist, when we individually or collectively accept the invitation to dance, refuse it, accept but improvise new steps, or renegotiate, deconstruct, or explode roles of leader and follower. A hail demands a bodily response: turning to face the police or turning the page of the book. By answering a hail, by entering the scripted scenario, the individual is interpellated into ideology and thus into subjecthood.” (73)

In her article, Berstein analyzes of a photograph of a light skinned woman named Helen Hernandez posing with the caricature of a black watermelon-eating caricature c. 1930 and “reads” into it a performance of race in America, noting:

“Helen Hernandez was a self-possessed woman who performed blackness and thus constructed whiteness, and who played at being a thing, a potential possession, and thus affirmed that she was not one.” (88-89)

The critical intervention of Berstein’s argument, however, is not the accuracy of her reading of this particular case study, but her assertion that these scriptive things can and should take precedence as evidence of/for performance over written personal narrative in the archive. When “read” by researchers with both performance literacy, that is to say knowledge of performance conventions, as well as performance competence, or a nuanced understanding of genre and historical context of performance, scriptive things can produce a more reliable pool of evidence than unintentially faulty or potentially deceptive memories or accounts.

In essence, by activating these thingly scripts in accepting the things’ invitation to dance, we can get at the ephemerality of performance more accurately than by seeing a representation of that performance, and in the process discover the “why” of a performance that is divorced from mere interiority, but is rather informed by the “how” of the dance itself. “By reading things’ scripts within historically located traditions of performance,” Bernstein writes, “we can make well-supported claims about normative aggregate behavior (74). … Ultimately, historians
must place our living bodies in the stream of performance tradition” (90).

WORKS CITED

 Althusser, Louis. “ Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. 121-73. London: New Left Books, 1971.

Bernstein, Robin. “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race.” Social Text 27, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 67-94.

Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. 174-82. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.