In their development of Saussure’s basic structuralist principles, Judith Butler, Emile Benveniste, and Pierre Bourdieu declare that subjectivity is generated by language not only through the systems of signs and signified, but also through the temporal presence of language. An act of speech is a nexus in a web of social, cultural, and linguistic realities – it represents a totality of experience that spans past, present, and future, creating a permanency that is essential to being. The originative properties of language extend to the ontology of domination and resistance, in which the subject self-creates through either assumption of guilt or resistance to that guilt, through the medium of language. This resistance is most effectively realized in a collective, as George C. Wolfe presents in The Colored Museum. From the inherent structure of the play to the specificity of each scene, performance as temporal language, and thus self-creation, is revealed as a powerful form of resistance.

Saussure defined the idea of language as a trinity of sign, signifier, and signified, where the sign is the representation imposed upon the signified by the signifier. Reality does not only structure language; language also structures reality, particularly social reality. As Pierre Bourdieu points out, both linguistic and social relations are instruments of actualization. Observational statements, which reflect an existing reality, have a counterpart in originating statements, which create reality in the instant of their utterance. Of these originating or creational statements, Bourdieu gives the example of “the divine word, the word of divine right, which, like the intuitus originarius which Kant ascribed to God, creates what it states.”¹ In this statement he references both, “’Let there be light,’ and there was light,” from Genesis and, “In the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” from the Book of John. “We can never get back to man separated from language and we shall never see him inventing it,” Emile Benveniste echoes in “Subjectivity in Language.”² Similar to the implicit connotations of Bourdieu’s biblical reference, Benveniste is presenting the idea that human time begins with the creation of language.

Benveniste arrives at this conclusion by way of his concept of subjectivity. “It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of ‘ego’ in reality.”³ The use of the personal pronouns solidifies the identity of the ego, Benveniste suggests, yet that ‘being’ is essentially an active process. Instantaneous ‘being’ does not exist, Benveniste argues; subjectivity “is defined not by the feeling which everyone experiences of being himself (this feeling, to the degree that it can be taken note of, is only a reflection) but as the psychic unity that transcends the totality of the actual experiences it assembles and makes the permanence of the consciousness.”⁴ Without a continuous presence in time, consciousness does not exist, and one can only achieve such continuity through the temporal nature of action. “An ‘act’ is not a momentary happening, but a certain nexus of temporal horizons, the condensation of an interability that exceeds the moment it occasions,” Judith Butler writes in “On Linguistic Vulnerability,” her introduction to Excitable Speech.⁵ Action, particularly defining action, serves as a temporal anchor, and no action is more definite than the act of speech. Butler quotes Toni Morrison: “We do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”⁶ Without language as a temporal anchor, the subject does not exist, and without subjectivity, there is no awareness of time, in the finite form it takes within human consciousness – a cyclical relationship where each element depends on the others.

However, this idea of the temporal is a simplification of the idea of history, which is shaped by social relations – taking us back to Bourdieu’s original statement about instruments of actualization. Throughout Bourdieu’s “Economy of Linguistic Exchanges,” he examines the various influences that affect language, driving home the point that “the all-purpose word in the dictionary, a product of the neutralization of the practical relations in which it functions, has no social existence.”⁷ The universal form of language, which Bourdieu names ‘denotation’, is inherently unstable and intangible; only connotation, or the specific, singular form of language, has a practical presence. Butler’s ‘nexus of temporal horizons’ is a nexus of social, political, economic, and cultural influences. These influences inevitably emerge in the form of power relationships, most commonly that of the individual to the state.

The effect of power on subjectivity is expressed in Althusser’s doctrine of interpellation, which proposes that the dual meaning of the word ‘subjection’ is not just homonymic coincidence, but an indication that subjects can only become through yielding to a dominating power. In Althusser’s model, an individual walking on the street is hailed by an officer of the law and responds to that act of naming-claiming, an assumption of guilt that is both creation and submission. Butler elaborates: “Subject formation appear[s] to take place only upon the acceptance of guilt, so that there is no ‘I’ who might ascribe a place to itself, who might be announced in speech, without first a self-attribution of guilt, a submission to the law through an acceptance of its demand for conformity.”⁸ In this model, the state names a subject, creating them through language – as Bourdieu points out, legal speech is the quintessential example of creational language; it creates not only the law, but the negative space of the law. Legal speech has more power over the violation of the law than the law itself; the idea of “innocent until proven guilty” illustrates the non-being of innocence as opposed to the being, and becoming, of guilt. Creation takes place outside the law, not within it, but the state claims power over both.

However, the state and the law are the signifier and sign, only two-thirds of the equation – the signified, or emerging subject, also must take action to complete the act of subjection. “The customary model for understanding this process goes as follows: power imposes itself on us, and, weakened by its force, we come to internalize or accept its terms,” Butler explains, and points out that the ‘turning-point’ in Althusser’s model, the response of the signified, is what completes the act of creation.⁹ By assuming its own guilt, the emerging subject submits to the power of the state and is complicit in the state’s act of domination. Ngugi wa Thiong’o describes a real example of this act in the treatment of political prisoners in Kenya: “The rite of execution was so arranged that the condemned would himself proclaim his guilt by the amende honorable that he spoke, by the placard he displayed and also by the statements that he was no doubt forced to make.”¹⁰ Regardless of the objective truth or falsity of the accusation, the existence of which is questionable under structuralist principles, the guilt becomes real in the subject’s acceptance of it. Yet there is an alternative to acceptance; Ngugi states also that, “The artist-prisoner resists in every fibre of his being displaying ‘the placard of self-condemnation’.”¹¹ The artist-prisoner is aware that only he can condemn himself, only he can create himself, and he chooses to self-create not through submission to power but through resistance of it. Instead of internalizing the state’s terms of power, the subject refuses them, and becomes through the dynamic process of resistance.

The ontology of the domination and resistance of the state and the individual is most acute in the formation of racial identity, because within our temporal nexus of political, social, and cultural realities that forms colonialist-imperialist history, race is the central key to being. The state imposes a schematic of power over individuals along racial lines. In “The Fact of Blackness”, Franz Fanon links this act to the unavoidable presence of the body in the world – that the object that is the body is inseparable from the subject that is the self, and the “racial epidermal schema” of the body is what the state recognizes and utilizes in creating its structure of law. Since interpellation creates the subject, but the law is based on the body object, the power of the state is forcing an overlying objecthood onto the subject. Thus the choice of the Black individual is to accept the guilt of Blackness and internalize perpetual objecthood, or to resist and self-create a new subjectivity through that resistance. Fanon declares, “I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known.”¹² The Black subject must self-create to obtain true subjectivity, but the relative power of an individual against the state is insufficient; the unbalanced relationship means that the state will inevitably succeed in domination against the individual.

Fanon offers a solution through his narration of his encounter with objecthood. “Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others…Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I thought I had lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it.”¹³ Within a group resistance, some become new signifiers for others signified, and vice versa, reflexively creating each other. As Bourdieu states, language derives its originative capacity “from its power to produce existence by producing the collectively recognized, and thus realized, representation of existence.”¹⁴ Previously, this recognizing collective was the state, but in group resistance, a new, oppositional collective is formed. Collective recognition thus emerges as the solution to the impossible odds of resistance against the state.

Awam Amkpa agrees that collective recognition is necessary for self-creation of the subject. “Subjectivity suggests not only the action of acting or ‘becoming’ but a radical consciousness of conditions defining the individual and group’s sense of ‘being’ and terms of social and political ‘belonging’… I contend that postcolonial is not the event after colonialism but the moment of recognition of one’s colonial domination.”¹⁵ In the context of his discussion of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, he reveals the ideal form of that recognition. Recognition, by the structuralist principles, must be formed through language, and language is temporal in nature, rooted in social realities and iterable throughout time – yet with the racial schema, the presence of the body object must also be acknowledged. Performance, whether ritual or theater, is a temporal, embodied, linguistic medium.

Performance as a tool for collective resistance is illustrated in Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls, through its collective creation as well as the scope of its eventual audience, as Nancy Cho described, but George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum is a sharper, more wicked example of the self-creation of Black identity. The Colored Museum, satirical and bitterly comic, mocks For Colored Girls, A Raisin in the Sun, manifestations of the racial schema imposed by the society and the state, and even itself.  Each scene presents a new jab at some part of the Black identity; for instance, “Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel” references the Aunt Jemima of pancake fame, but instead they cook up Negroes – “But don’t ask me what to do with ‘em now that you got ‘em, ‘cause child, that’s your problem.” “The Photo Session” references the magazine ad representation of the Black identity, fabulous and empty, where everything is rehearsed. “Soldier with a Secret” gives us Junie, soldier survivor, who kills all the members of his unit to save them from the future.

The “Miss Roj” scene explicitly addresses the idea of self-creation. Beginning with the assumption of another gender with his stage name, the black queen Miss Roj goes on to define himself as an entirely different self than the one society would impose upon him. “I ain’t just your regular oppressed American Negro. No-no-no! I am an extraterrestrial.” In Miss Roj’s self-creation, ‘snap queens’ have the power of life and death, and with the anecdote of the Brooklyn thug who had a heart attack, it becomes true in this time and space, in this iteration of reality. “So come on and dance with Miss Roj and her demons,” he says. “We don’t ask for acceptance. We don’t ask for approval. We know who we are and we move on it!” Miss Roj neither needs society’s affirmation of his subjecthood nor will accept the guilt the state tries to impose upon him. With the collective formed of his audience, he self-creates in his own image.

Miss Pat starts out in “Git On Board” with a glib presentation of a slave ship as a luxury flight, and a even glibber summary of hundreds of years of oppression. “All right, so you’re gonna have to suffer for a few hundred years, but from your pain will come a culture so complex,” she cheerleads. The largest threat to her model of history is the drums and the call-and-response between cabins; she says, “We ask that you please refrain from call-and-response singing between cabins as that sort of thing can lead to rebellion. And, of course, no drums are allowed on board.” She gets the audience to repeat her, creating her own call-and-response for the official version of identity, sponsored by the state. Ngugi locates this tactic in history, stating that: “In any case, dislocation and dispersal can be one way of removing any basis of a collective performance of identity and resistance. The method had been tried during plantation slavery in America and the Carribean islands.”¹⁶ However, in The Colored Museum scene as in history, the collective power of the call-and-response breaks through as the drums grow louder and Miss Pat can no longer get the audience to respond to the official call. The collective of the oppressed overwhelms the collective of the oppressors.

Topsy Washington, in the final scene of The Colored Museum, sums up the idea that only the subject can create itself. “I used to jump into a rage anytime anybody tried to deny who I was, now all I got to do is give attitude, quicker than light, and then go on about the business of being me,” she declares. “And here, all this time I been thinking we gave up our drums. But, naw, we still got ‘em. I know I got mine.” The drums, the black symbol of collective creation, are still audible, uniting the group into a powerful resistance. “My power is in my madness,” they finish, “and my colored contradictions.” Madness, as separation from the world, is denial of all external logic, and the triumph of internal cohesion. The many scenes of the Colored Museum form a pluralistic image of Black identity, as each character creates itself through originative speech, attaining subjectivity through their rooted, temporal presence.

The creation of the subject, as recognized and defined by language, can be initiated by the oppressive power of the state or the resistant power of collective unity. The temporal nature of language ties linguistic reality to social reality, indicating that all subjectivity is iterable through time, and revealing that performance is the ultimate form of collective self-creation. Revolution is ituĩka in Kenya, Ngugi mentions, literally, a complete break from what has come before. In English, revolution is literally a cycle, a “painful struggle constantly in need of renewal and recalibration.”¹⁷ Domination and resistance become a perpetual struggle, but they are matched by the repetitive and reciprocal power of performance.

² Benveniste, 224.

³ Benveniste, 224.

⁴ Benveniste, 224.

⁵ Butler, “Linguistic”, 14.

⁶ Butler, “Linguistic”, 8.

⁷ Bourdieu, 39.

⁸ Butler, Psychic, 107.

⁹ Butler, Psychic, 2.

¹⁰ Ngugi, 57.

¹¹ Ngugi, 57.

¹² Fanon, 115.

¹³ Fanon 109.

¹⁴ Bourdieu, 42.

¹⁵ Amkpa, 296, 302.

¹⁶ Ngugi, 59.

¹⁷ Moten.

Sources

Amkpa, Awan. “Drama and the Languages of Postcolonial Desire.” Irish University Review. 29.2. (1999)

Benveniste, Emile. “Subjectivity in Language.” Problems in General Linguistics. University of Miami. (Miami, 1971.)

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Economy of Linguistic Exchanges.” Language & Symbolic Power. HUP. (1991).

Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford. (Stanford, 1997.)

Butler, Judith. “On Linguistic Vulnerability.” Excitable Speech. Routledge. (New York, 1997.)

Fanon, Franz. “The Fact of Blackness.” Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press. (1968.)

Moten, Fred. “Magic of Objects.” Callaloo. 26.1. (Baltimore, 2003).

Ngugi wa Thiong’o. “Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space.” Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams. Clarendon. (Oxford, 1998.)