Phelan: The Ephemerality of Performance

"To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology."
-Peggy Phelan, "The Ontology of Performance," in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance

"Performance approaches the Real through resisting the metaphorical reduction of the two into one."
-Phelan

"'What history cannot assimilate, Felman argues, 'is the implicitly analytical dimension of all radical or fecund thoughts, of all new theories: the "force" of their "performance" (always somewhat subversive) and their "residual smile" (always somewhat self-subversive).'"
-qtd. in Phelan


from Ursula Le Guin's short story, "The Kerastion," printed in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea:

"Even while they watched, the wind destroyed Kwatewa's sculpture. Soon there was only a shapeless lump and a feathering of white sand blown across the proving ground. Beauty had gone back to the Mother. That the sculpture had been destroyed so soon and so utterly was a great honor to the maker."

"His death was no shame, since there had been nothing for him to do but die. There was no fine, no ablution, no purification, for what he had done. Shepherds had found the cave where he had kept the stones, great marble pieces from the cave walls, carved into copies of his own sandsculptures, his own sacred work for the Solstice and the Hariba: sculptures of stone, abominable, durable, desecrations of the body of the Mother."