Is it possible to free performance from the idea of the statement or the idea the discourse?

Once the originating subjectivity of the playwright/creator has been displaced or problematized, I can’t help but imagine other “agents” crashing in to claim the voice of the performance:  ideology, culture, dominant or subversive interests so that even the chaotic, unprocessed sequence of acts becomes a statement or a pseudo-statement proclaiming freedom from expression, intention, convention, tradition, formal values of any kind.  Roughly the non-assertive performance (or the non-discursive performance) becomes analogous to the statement:  “the speaker is a liar.”   And, of course, in the terms of structuralism, any definable unit seems to invoke its opposite so that this chaos before me becomes a challenge to form and, hence, an aesthetic “statement” about form.

Whether I identify the originating impulse in the unconscious or in the unconscious inscription of culture embedded in language and visual image, more often than not I view the organizational structure of a work of art as the implementation of a structure that itself implements a grammar, using the model of structuralism that searches out an “underlying” organizational pattern that is cultural but implemented unconsciously.

What Derrida calls “hermeneutic compulsion” makes me see any structure or sequence of images as an encoding of some sort and a challenge to my ability to de-crypt the implicit statement.  So, if I attempt to produce a text, performance, or event that attempts to make no statement, I expect the following to be said about the result:

• My very avoidance of intention and the randomness of selection of elements may make my audience even more vulnerable to operation of non-consciousness paradigmatic structures from culture or their own unconscious;
• My attempt to make no statement, like the response “no comment,” makes a in my opinion a rather disingenuous statement:  “I intend no statement.”  As well, because modernist literature and performance contains gaps or interstices, disjunctions, audiences have become adept at bridging the illogical separations of text and performance and extrapolating a unity.  Look at Wolfgang Iser’s notion of indeterminacy in The Implied Reader.  His analysis of a series of texts from Tristam Shandy through Beckett’s Endgame asserts that they demand active participation by the reader who shares in the process of creation with the writer.  This idea is related to Barthes distinction, “readerly” versus “writerly” texts.

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I think I have to shift the terms of my thinking to focus upon that phenomenon of current performance that intends, at least, to play itself free of referentiality–or a referentiality that excludes self-referentiality.  One of the questions here, of course, focuses upon the issue of whether or not when Marina Abromovitch “performs herself”.  Does her performance constitute a character that, while it sustains direct self-reference, still functions as an aesthetically generated “figure”.  The same question, of course, relates to many performance artists.