Simply put?
Performance deals in bodies, things and settings. Archaeology deals in the remains of bodies, the things people made and dealt in, and the places they lived. Both deal in experience. Though both performance and archaeology use texts (dramatic scripts and historical sources), the relation between experience and representation is, arguably, indirect and incidental.
The simple question - how do we represent performance, remains, memories, or an archaeological site?
Here is a more academic way of putting it.
The topic of Three Rooms is performance and the performative. And for me performance is intimately connected with archaeology.
First, because performance is a root metaphor for social and cultural practice - think, for example, of the concept of social actors. If archaeologists want to use the remains of the past to understand past societies, they may well be led to think of the past in terms of its social actors.
Second, because both archaeology and performance share a concern with documentation - for example, the question of the relation of dramatic text to performance, of how performance may be documented, of how an archaeological project may be documented. A simple question - what comes after the event? How do we represent a (cultural/social/performative) experience? And when there is perhaps no text involved to help us in our quest to represent.
Third, because archaeology may be conceived itself as performance, one where the remains of the past are mobilized in practices, often conceived as mimetic, of representing or restoring behavior. Museums are now very often stages for (a representation of) the past.
The concept of performance is often used to refer to heightened experience, to ceremony, formalized practice, and play. It is connected to the liminal, experience at the edge, and to identity, questions of who we are. I see less value in going further and ascribing particular attributes to a tightly defined concept of performance. Crucially, for me, performance and the performative are part of a contested cultural field; people don't agree about the word. The uses of concepts like power, community and discourse, also at the heart of Three Rooms, are similarly varied and often loaded. Rather than attempt to unpack and define precisely, I prefer to play on the ambiguities and stress the gaps and inconsistencies. For me, this is part of the significance of these concepts - they are essentially contested.
Here is a technical point of vocabulary. Compare the mimetic and the eidetic, in relation to performance and the performative. The former concerns a set of questions about the real and the represented. The second takes the matter further. The eidetic refers, in psychology, to mental imagery that is vivid and persistent, though not memory or afterimage. I note the fascinating etymology, with roots in the Greek eido and its cognates (to know, see, experience; that which is seen, form, model, type, image, phantom), and hold that performance is also eidetic because it raises questions of what is real and what is simulated, what persists, what is at the heart of experience (knowledge, impressions, physical materials). The eidetic is ironic - in its act of representation performance is this and that, simulated and real. Performance is ironic in drawing upon theatrical metaphors; for while we might suppose a script, performance has no such sole origin, and there is always the gap between script and act, as well as between performer and audience. What is being acted out in performance? We should answer that there is only ever the irony of reiteration without an origin, simulation without an original. And in these iterative chains the question of performance is immediately the question of how we may speak and write of performance.
Performance is about re-iterating, re-mediating,
re-working, re-presenting, re-storing.
For me, this is archaeology. We seek in vain a representation that will explain the ruin of history. In dealing with remains, the archaeologist is always working upon relationships between past and present that circle around the impossible irony of trying to turn action and experience, material form and body, remediated, into representation. There can, of course, be no finality to mimesis, only constant reworking and restoring. Performance and the performative are always archaeological: that is, there is always, with performance, the question of origin or precedent (what came first? what holds precedence? script? event? character? author? audience?), and the question of document and trace (what remains? what is left after the performance? how is its material and physical presence to be represented?).
How then, as archaeologists, are we to represent performance, that is, conduct our social archaeology? I have attempted an answer to this question in Three Rooms and in many other places too - . Three Rooms is mainly about textuality. On other modes of representation see my book Experiencing the Past (1991) and the work of my Metamedia Lab at Stanford.
On another academic point, Rosemary Joyce (2002) has recently done an excellent job of reframing archaeology in terms of this determinate practice of writing. She is contributing to that reflexive self consciousness about the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology represented by the collections of Clifford and Marcus (1986) and Marcus and Fisher (1986). This paper is offered in this context as another experiment in writing about the remains of the past. Specifically it deals with matters of narrative and chronotope, Bakhtinian concepts that Joyce places at the heart of the archaeological project.
