Becoming Carnival: Performing a Postmodern Identity

Abstract

Pe rf o rman c e Re s e a r c h 8 ( 3 ) , p p . 1 1 3 – 1 2 5 © Tay l o r & F ra n c i s L td 2 0 03 113 Dawn breaks over the stage of the 21st-century carnival. A stage already set, and a set already staged – the two-fold sign of a heteroglossic multiplicity that contextualizes the contemporary self. An age of imitative being and possessed role-play. The well-charted collapse of meaning, and its consequences in the loss of identity are misread under the sign of the meaningless, however.1 And what is missing here is the awareness that with the collapse of meaning comes also the collapse of its opposite. For with the collapse of the meaningless comes, inevitably, a mandate for play – but a mandate that is performative (as opposed to prescriptive). A state of self already in play, waiting simply to be noticed, theorized and played with. A 21st-century feast of fools, which negotiates its culture of boredom by carnivalizing the stage of its appearance. And with this, a 21st-century carnival. Not the carnival as it has progressed, developed and grown, but as it re-emerges under a sign of Bakhtinian influence. Which is to say the rendering of the carnival as a performative strategy in order to recontextualize Bakhtin in terms of a contemporary thinking. For our equivalent to the hierarchical (medieval) society in which Bakhtin’s carnival is played out is a society of revolt against the self; no longer a subversion of aristocracy, but rather a nihilistic subversion of identity itself. And as a consequence of this, identity becomes carnivalesque, performance of the self becomes its method, and Bakhtin’s heteroglossia becomes first a xenoglossia, and then a gestural glossalalia. And the project at hand holds as its aim a recontextualization of this sort – in the attempt to show how carnival attitude can be used strategically as a method of dealing with the contemporary nihilism of the self. A recombinant carnival that draws on concepts, reappropriates and recontextualizes them, in terms of possibilities rather than meaning. An ambivalence then towards the theoretical and historical contexts in which such discourse generally proceeds, not in order to deny meaning, but rather simply to acknowledge from the start a heteroglossic understanding of the world. And not just the world, but the self too. A textual alchemy of sorts that seeks a performative counterpart in the free-play of the self. And to think the self carnivally is to chart its transformation from a static state of identity (constructed or otherwise) to the fluctuating state of its perpetual becomings. The carnival, not as a license to be free, but rather now as a free license to become.

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