Liminal Text

Can writing perform? Is the archive merely bones – and what does it mean if it is? Or if it isn’t?

W.B Worthen argues that there is a relationship between the text as it is laid down onto a page, and the ways in which this affects how it is read or performed. I read a performance text, or a script, as prescriptive, rather than proscriptive: the mise en page suggests, rather than dictates the mise en scene.

Text is shifting
Image Source: archdaily.com

Text is not a static, stable signifier; rather it is an active participant in the mutual destabilisation of a performative event. We can read culture in to text; we can see the advent of printing processes creating order in a society as the words on the page become a referent of fixity and stability. Therefore, can writing undermine culture through playing with the performance of text, as well as the text in performance?

When we read a page of text, especially playtexts, writing that is meant to be both performative and performed, we read the poetics of the page as well as the words themselves. We read, and are thus invited to fill, the space of silence, the white space. Compared to novels, plays give us less but allow us more: we are given the space and the script is a call-to-action, energizing us to play.

Image Source: hrc.utexas.edu

Taking into account this energy, this collaboration between the page and the player, we can argue that reading is a performative action. Different types of texts, and types of type, infer multiple readings and styles of reading. For example, when I read a play, I actively imagine the performance – reading is a personal theatre; when I read an academic text I write, take notes, performing these actions as an aid to memory.

Writing is an aid to both memory and forgetting. The text permits us to forget even as it inscribes remembrance. Text is not stable: form and formation are informed by cultural constructs at a given moment, and defined by the canonical institution, which, itself, is shifting. The archive represents a present moment of permanence: a liminal constant.