Performance vs Performativity

Lia, my instinct is to respond that process is everything, which goes completely against what I said in my earlier post, that process is irrelevant in my work. In performance, where documentation always fails, process IS the product.

Perhaps this accounts for the prevalence of process as the main content in performance (in the downtown dance community of New York, at least). There is no product in live performance, so people (artists and viewers) hold on to form and structure as if it were pottery, like they can touch it. When I try to imagine my performances, try to grab them and hold them, anything which I made (video, movement, sound, lighting) seems flimsy, and what I grab is an audience through time. I feel differently about this with my videos. So is the actual live performance the process or the product?

That goes back to our initial question for this symposium where we were trying to decide between performance and performative. I think this quote of Judith Butler is of relevance:

. . . It is important to distinguish performance from performativity: the former presumes a subject, but the latter contests the very notion of the subject. . . . What I'm trying to do is think about performativity as that aspect of discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names. Then I take a further step, through the Derridean rewriting of Austin, and suggest that this production actually always happens through a certain kind of repetition and recitation. So if you want the ontology of this, I guess performativity is the vehicle through which ontological effects are established. Performativity is the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed.
Judith Butler, "Gender as Performance," in A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals, ed Peter Osborne, 111-112

I want to go ahead and post this to further our conversation.