Law Text Culture
Volume 14 Law's Theatrical Presence Article 5
2010
‘We Say Sorry’: Apology, the Law and Theatricality
Theron Schmidt
King's College London, UK
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Recommended Citation
Schmidt, Theron, ‘We Say Sorry’: Apology, the Law and Theatricality, Law Text Culture, 14, 2010,
55-78.
Available at:http://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol14/iss1/5
‘We Say Sorry’: Apology, the Law and Theatricality
Abstract
When ideas about theatre are used to describe political events, the theatrical is usually made to stand for that
which is undesirable, inauthentic and empty about political life: we might describe a particular speech or
gesture as ‘only theatre’, or use language such as ‘playing politics’ or ‘political drama’ to denounce the way selfreferential
questions about character or personal intrigue have obscured the ‘real’ issues of politics. In contrast
to this dismissive usage, I would like to explore the ways that theatricality’s apparent failures or shortcomings
might be themselves generative of political potential. My approach here is to consider certain problems of
speech and gesture in the political realm as essentially theatrical problems — problems for theatre, but also
ideas that theatricality makes problems of — such as problems of representation, authenticity and
spectatorship. I will explore the theatricality at work in three examples of publicly performed discourse: Kevin
Rudd’s official apology in 2008 to the Indigenous peoples of Australia; a gallery artwork by Carey Young
which, in its entirety, is a legal disclaimer of its status as art; and a text and video work by Lebanese-born artist,
Rabih Mroué, in which the artist offers an apology for the Lebanese civil war.
This journal article is available in Law Text Culture: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol14/iss1/5
55Law Text Culture Vol 14 20100000
‘We Say Sorry’: Apology, the
Law and Theatricality
Theron Schmidt1
When ideas about theatre are used to describe political events, the
theatrical is usually made to stand for that which is undesirable,
inauthentic and empty about political life: we might describe a
particular speech or gesture as ‘only theatre’, or use language such as
‘playing politics’ or ‘political drama’ to denounce the way self-referential
questions about character or personal intrigue have obscured the ‘real’
issues of politics. In contrast to this dismissive usage, I would like to
explore the ways that theatricality’s apparent failures or shortcomings
might be themselves generative of political potential. My approach here
is to consider certain problems of speech and gesture in the political
realm as essentially theatrical problems — problems for theatre, but
also ideas that theatricality makes problems of — such as problems
of representation, authenticity and spectatorship. I will explore the
theatricality at work in three examples of publicly performed discourse:
Kevin Rudd’s official apology in 2008 to the Indigenous peoples of
Australia; a gallery artwork by Carey Young which, in its entirety,
is a legal disclaimer of its status as art; and a text and video work
by Lebanese-born artist, Rabih Mroué, in which the artist offers an
apology for the Lebanese civil war.
Each of these examples is a variation on apology: Rudd’s is an
official gesture of the state, and also the fulfilment of an election
campaign promise; Young’s is a pre-emptive disavowal for any potential
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misunderstanding; and Mroué’s is an apparently personal confession,
but one which complicates its authenticity through its presentation as
a work of art. All three consist entirely of spoken or printed text, and
all invoke a legal framework that appears to elevate the potency of
the words from that of everyday speech. This ability of certain words
spoken in certain contexts to have a special kind of effectiveness was
analysed by the philosopher of language, J L Austin, who described
these kinds of speech-acts as ‘performative’. In such contexts, Austin
noted, utterances are capable not only of referring to actions in the
world but also of performing actions in and through the utterance
itself, such as marrying two people, pronouncing a verdict, or issuing
an order or prohibition. In contrast to ordinary statements, which have
the capability to be true or false, Austin argued that performatives are
distinguished by their susceptibility to ‘infelicities’: ‘things that can be
and go wrong on the occasion of such utterances’ (Austin 1965: 14).
For Austin, an infelicitous utterance, rather than being false, would be
‘unhappy’. Because of this concern with infelicity, Austin excluded from
the category of performatives any deliberately infelicitous or ambiguous
speech acts, such as speaking on stage or in works of literature, calling
these ‘parasitic uses of language’ and therefore ‘not serious’ (22, 104).
I will use Austin’s categories as a starting place for the comparison
of my three examples, as each seems to fit Austin’s description of doing
something by nothing more than the pronouncement of certain words:
an apology is made, a legal agreement is undertaken, a confession
is declared. However, whereas Austin would say that something
different is going on in the official apology, compared with the two
examples that are ‘not serious’ (the two artworks), I will argue that
all three share a theatrical quality that complicates the apparently
self-fulfilling autonomy of Austin’s performative. Underpinning
the happy performance of law, I will argue, is a mutually supportive
relationship between authority and authenticity. I will suggest that by
placing ourselves in the same position toward Rudd’s apology as we
do toward these seemingly ‘not serious’ apologies, this relationship is
exposed. In this way, what I offer is not so much a critique of whether
Rudd’s apology is a ‘good’ or ‘happy’ performance, but instead a way
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‘We Say Sorry’
of thinking about the theatrical politics of the event itself and our
relationship toward it.
The Apology
As leader of the Australian Labor Party, Kevin Rudd promised to
issue an official apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples as part of his
campaign during the 2007 federal election. The voting into power of
the Labor Party brought an end to eleven years of Government under
the Liberal Party’s John Howard, who had stubbornly resisted growing
public pressure to issue such an apology. A year after taking power,
Rudd honoured his commitment. Issued as an act of Parliament, the
Prime Minister’s apology was televised live throughout the country
and was a national (and international) event; ‘parliamentary business
became spectacle, spilled into the community to become compelling
social performance’, wrote theatre scholar Gay McAuley (2009: 48).
Here is an excerpt from the official transcript of Rudd’s apology:
Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples
House of Representatives
Parliament House, Canberra
13 February 2008
— I move:
That today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest
continuing cultures in human history.
We reflect on their past mistreatment.
We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen
Generations — this blemished chapter in our nation’s history.
The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s
history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with
confidence to the future.
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We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and
governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on
these our fellow Australians.
We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and
their country.
For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their
descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.
To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the
breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.
And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people
and a proud culture, we say sorry.
We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology
be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing
of the nation.
For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history
of our great continent can now be written. …
A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal
partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping
the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.
In purely technical terms, this apology is exemplary. It demonstrates
none of the typical pitfalls of public apologies, such as those outlined
by philosopher Nick Smith (2008) in his wide-ranging treatise on
apology, I Was Wrong: The Meaning of Apologies. Smith’s book is designed
to help understand the usefulness of apologies at a time when every
month seems to bring another news report of some bungled apology, or
failure to ‘properly’ apologise, by a Western political leader or celebrity.
Often these fail to satisfy because they are offered conditionally,
as in ‘I apologise if I caused offence’ or, even worse, because they
shift responsibility onto the offended party, as in ‘I apologise if you
took offence’. Smith gives the example of Pope Benedict’s disastrous
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‘We Say Sorry’
attempts in 2006 to remedy the offence caused by the inclusion in one
of his speeches of a passage that criticised Muhammad. Subsequent
statements by the Vatican and the Pope were consistently rejected as
being not properly apologetic, which is hardly surprising given that these
statements included phrases such as: ‘I am deeply sorry for the reactions
in some countries to a few passages of my address …’ (Smith 2008: 5-6,
my emphasis). Rudd’s apology makes no such blunders, and instead
seems to satisfy all twelve of Smith’s conditions for ‘the categorical
apology’, including such dimensions as ‘acceptance of blame’, ‘shared
commitment to moral principles underlying each harm’, ‘categorical
regret’, and ‘an appropriate degree … of empathy and sympathy for
the victim’ (140-5). It is certainly a more satisfying declaration than
the Howard Government’s 1999 ‘Motion of Reconciliation’, which
used the word ‘regret’ but pointedly refused to include the word ‘sorry’.
Despite its technical proficiency, the political value of Rudd’s
apology has been widely criticised. Many reactions to the apology
argue that without changes in policy, the apology itself is meaningless
— an example of what I alluded to in my introduction as ‘only theatre’.
Political commentator Tara McCormack, for example, noted that the
new Rudd Government’s policies toward Indigenous peoples in the
Northern Territory were essentially the same as those of the Howard
Government, continuing to adopt a paternalistic, interventionist
tone. McCormack writes, ‘Rhetoric costs nothing; Rudd’s apology
can be seen as an attempt to appease people’s consciences on the
cheap’ (McCormack 2008). Writing from a legal theory perspective,
Alex Reilly (2008) argues that Rudd’s apology effectively historicises
any wrongdoing, leaving unchallenged the concept of absolute state
sovereignty that led to the wrongdoings in the first place. And Gay
McAuley regrets that the convergence of Aboriginal and Islander
representatives, who assembled at Parliament to protest ongoing
Government policies, has been largely ignored (McAuley 2009: 60-2).
I agree with these criticisms, and the failure of the Rudd
Government to change its course of action in keeping with its apology
would, in Austin’s terms, render the apology ‘infelicitous’: the speech-
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act properly considered must include what Austin calls ‘the total
speech situation’ (Austin 1965: 147, also 52), including the context
and conventions for the utterance as well as the future actions of all
parties. However, as I will argue, Rudd’s speech seeks to frame itself
as an autonomous, self-completing performative, one that exhaustively
fulfils the requirement of apology in order to draw a line under the
action of past Governments and, in Rudd’s words, to turn over a ‘new
page’ for the future. For this reason, I want to look more closely at the
performative elements of the apology itself, rather than cataloguing the
failure of action to accompany the apology. If the act is ‘only theatre’,
then what might this act of apology reveal about the state’s ability to
perform itself, to make itself present? What contradictions might be
exposed between the authoritative autonomy of the performative and
its more theatrical appeal to emotional sympathy?
Looking again at the text of Rudd’s speech, we find that it is full
of uses of language that Austin would identify as performative, in such
expressions as ‘we honour’, ‘we reflect’, ‘we request’ and, of course, the
three repetitions of ‘we say sorry’. These can be further categorised
according to sub-categories proposed by Austin. For example, the
repeated central apologetic utterance — ‘we apologise’ — represents
instances of what Austin describes as the behabitive type, ‘a kind of
performance concerned roughly with reactions to behaviour and with
behaviour towards others and designed to exhibit attitudes and feelings’
(83). But these instances are framed within an ever-expanding bracket
of other speech-acts. The speech is suspended within the clause, ‘I
move’, which is uttered by Rudd in his role as Prime Minister and
Government leader and would be classified by Austin as exercitive —
‘the exercising of powers, rights, or influence’ (150). The event also
begins with additional procedural performatives not recorded in the
published text, but seen in the officially archived video: the Speaker of
the House recognises the Clerk, who announces the motion, and then
the Speaker recognises the Prime Minister. These acts of recognition
are fundamental to the proceedings: if the words are not spoken and
the people who speak them are not present, then the event does not
count. Expanding the frame further, the execution of the apology is the
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‘We Say Sorry’
fulfilment of Rudd’s campaign promise, so the whole event is further
bracketed within the class of commissives, the name Austin gives to
promises, contracts and oaths (156-7). And indeed, the fact that it is
Rudd rather than the leader of the opposition who is Prime Minister
is the consequence of millions of individual speech-acts, each with
their own requirements for felicity and authentication, consisting of
individuals declaring ‘I cast my vote for [candidate X]’.
In Austin’s analysis, not all of these performative types have the
same degree of obvious performativity and he proposes a valuative
spectrum along which different kinds of speech-acts would fall. At one
end, Austin identifies the verdictive or exercitive types, in which an
authority’s pronouncement is judged to be successful (that is, felicitous)
based on seemingly obvious and verifiable criteria such as whether
the person is authorised to make such a judgment or pronouncement.
However, the behabitive category, to which apologies belong, falls
within the more problematic end of the spectrum; Austin calls these
‘troublesome’ because they have ‘special scope for insincerity’ (151,
159). The criteria for judging these as successful — again, in Austin’s
sense of whether one could definitively conclude that the act was
happily performed — are less obvious and verifiable. The person must
mean what they say, but how can we know this? And the listener must
believe what they hear — but again, which listener, and how do we
know what they believe?
Throughout his search to define the performative, Austin gives
ontological priority to those utterances that most exemplify a kind
of purity and self-sufficiency, in which the actual action takes place
at precisely the same time as the words are spoken. So, for example,
he makes a distinction between the utterance ‘I apologise’, which
is a pure performative, and ‘I am sorry’, which is ‘not pure but half
descriptive’ (79). ‘I am sorry’ is less pure for Austin because it might
more accurately be understood as a statement about the speaker
rather than the performance of apologising (134). He gradually
abandons his initial distinction between performatives and descriptive
statements (149), but maintains a distinction between three different
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kinds of performative forces that may be involved in every utterance:
its locutionary dimension, the extent to which it performs an act of
saying something; its illocutionary dimension, the extent to which it
performs an act in saying something; and its perlocutionary dimension,
the extent to which it performs an act by saying something — with
this last component including all the intended and unintended
consequences, interpretations, and inferences of a speech-act (91, 99).
In this expanded consideration of performative discourse, however,
the illocutionary retains a special privilege for Austin: all utterances
are locutionary, and any utterance may manifest perlocutionary effects,
but only certain utterances have an illocutionary dimension. Whereas
Austin would demarcate the illocutionary effects of a speech-act from
its perlocutionary ones, the example of Rudd’s apology reveals how the
two are intermingled and mutually dependent; indeed, I would like
to propose that the way in which it appears to be illocutionary — to
have achieved the act of apology through the saying of the words in
the carefully controlled circumstances — might be understood as itself
a perlocutionary effect.
Returning to Austin’s valuative spectrum of performatives, I would
note that the critical attribute at the exercitive end of the spectrum is
authority: is the person authorised to perform the speech-act? At the
other end of the spectrum is authenticity: does the person mean what
they say, or might they be ‘not serious’? At first glance, the exercitive
type would seem to possess the self-sufficiency, the autonomous
authority, that would exemplify the apparent immediacy of the
purely illocutionary: the law is what the legal authority says.2
But in
Rudd’s apology, I would argue that the two kinds of performatives are
intermingled and mutually dependent upon each other. For the state to
apologise, the rules for exercitives would stipulate only that the words
‘The State apologises’ be passed by Parliament. But such an apology
would clearly be insufficient, and its failure to demonstrate authenticity
would undermine the authority of the state. As Austin acknowledges,
an apology cannot be felicitous without knowing whether its sentiment
is meant by the speaker; but the only way to demonstrate conviction
is through acts which are more and more prone to infelicity — which
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‘We Say Sorry’
are, for example, statements about the speaker. For the illocutionary
dimension of Rudd’s apology to be successful — that is, felicitous —
that success must be based on his perlocutionary proficiency, on his
performance of sincerity. In this way the closure of the act never exists;
it has a kind of deferral away from itself, a prolongation away from the
purely illocutionary ‘We say sorry’.
In fact, the core apology — the motion tabled in Parliament and
excerpted above — was presented within the context of a longer
event, and Rudd’s speech carried on for another thirty minutes. In the
remainder of his speech, Rudd addressed the question of why an apology
is necessary and deployed a range of rhetorical techniques to answer
this question. These include recounting the story of one woman from
the Stolen Generation who was taken from her parents in the 1930s by
Government agents; quotations from egregiously racist Government
policies of the past; and finally, an argument about reconciliation,
which is articulated in terms of promoting a core Australian value,
what Rudd calls ‘a fair go for all’. Rudd makes the following appeal:
I ask those non-Indigenous Australians to imagine for a moment if
this had happened to you. I say to honourable members here present:
imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect.
Imagine how hard it would be to forgive. But my proposal is this: if
the apology we extend today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation,
in which it is offered, we can today resolve together that there be a
new beginning for Australia. And it is to such a new beginning that
I believe the nation is now calling us.
The purely illocutionary moment of apology is supplemented with
rhetorical extension, becoming less a single performed act and more
an extended sequence that might suitably be described as ‘theatrical’.
Paradoxically, this perlocutionary supplementation is both necessary
for the success of the performative, and at the same time detrimental
to the purity of that illocutionary autonomy. The version of the state
that is presented here is no longer composed of self-contained and
self-determining actions but instead consists of statements about other
people. Rudd’s speech becomes crowded with voices and characters,
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including the dramatic narrative of a particular Indigenous woman,
the invoked presence of his non-Indigenous listeners, and claims on
behalf of, and appeals for sympathy from, Australia’s non-Indigenous
citizenry. That is to say, the state is rhetorical.
This is the kind of conclusion drawn by two of the more prominent
re-interpreters of speech-act theory, Jacques Derrida and Stanley Fish.
For Derrida, Austin’s attempt to distinguish between performatives
that are more prone to infelicity and those that are less prone (and more
autonomous) prevents Austin from recognising his own most crucial
insight. Rather than excluding the risk of infelicity as ‘accidental’ or
‘exterior’, Derrida declares such possibility to be the ‘law’ of utterance,
the law of communication itself; infelicity ‘is always possible, and is
in some sense a necessary possibility’ (Derrida 1988a: 15, original
emphasis). For Derrida, there is no possibility of an Austinian ‘pure’
performative: ‘a successful performative is necessarily an “impure”
performative’ (17). In a related argument, Derrida considers the
illocutionary act that is the US Declaration of Independence — which,
like Rudd’s apology, is an act of state attempting to articulate itself.
Derrida asks, ‘who signs, and with what so-called proper name, the
declarative act that founds an institution?’ (Derrida 2002a: 47). The
signer is authorised to sign, Derrida claims, only by virtue of the
signature that he or she has not yet made; Derrida describes this as ‘a
sort of fabulous retroactivity’, deliberately suggesting connotations of
‘fabricated’ and ‘fable-like’ (50; see also Derrida 1992). For Derrida,
such a speech-act functions as both a constative and a performative,
and the confusion between the two functions is not accidental but
necessary: ‘This obscurity, this undecidability between, let us say, a
performative structure and a constative structure, is required to produce
the sought-after effect’ (49, original emphasis).
Stanley Fish expands Derrida’s arguments, emphasising that it is
not only Austin’s distinction between performative and constative that
is unsustainable, but also the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘not
serious’ utterances. Fish revisits Austin’s declaration that ‘not serious’
utterances lack the autonomy of true performatives and are somehow
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‘parasitic’ upon their capacity. Fish remarks:
The reasoning behind this declaration is clear enough: a speaker in a
poem or an actor on a stage does not produce his utterance with a full
and present intention but with the intention of someone behind him,
a poet or a playwright; his is a stage utterance, and [the argument would
be that] in order to get at its true meaning we have to go behind the
stage to its originating source in the consciousness of the author (Fish
1989: 49, original emphasis).
However, Fish continues, we are always and already at such a
remove: ‘If by “stage utterances” one understands utterances whose
illocutionary force must be inferred or constructed, then all utterances
are stage utterances, and one cannot mark them off from utterances that
are “serious”’ (49). It is, of course, vital to the functioning of ‘serious’
discourse that it designate itself as having a special access to the real,
but, for Fish, these are characteristics of genre rather than ontological
distinctions (Fish 1980: 231-44).
The connection to which I want to draw particular attention is that
between sincerity and authenticity, on the one hand, and authority, on
the other. In Austin’s illocutionary examples, authority is something
that is objectively known, and the authenticity of a speech-act is then
a function of the authorising circumstances. But in the case of Rudd’s
apology, the fact of having authority of office is not enough: a display
of authenticity is required to legitimate the apology, and Rudd must
‘play the part’ of the remorseful representative of the state. Looking
more broadly, we might see this interdependence between authority
and authenticity to be frequently at play, each appearing to be selfconstitutive
but ultimately depending upon the other.
Authenticity presents itself as self-sameness, the quality of a thing
or person or action to be what it purports to be, but precisely when this
self-identity is most critical, we often find that it must be guaranteed by
reference to some external authority: an oath on the Bible, the veracity
of a signature, the testimony of an expert. Conversely, authority is seen
to be dependent on authenticity: one must behave as an authority is
expected to behave. In Rudd’s case, this co-dependence is manifested
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in the way that the framework of democractic ritual and the rhetorical
signifiers of sincerity are mutually supportive, each deriving legitimacy
from the other. These gestures work to cover over and conceal other
measures of legitimacy, such as changes in actual policy, or the
Aboriginal and Islander representatives gathered outside. But, I have
argued, the performance of apology has a structural ambiguity that
cannot but be revealed, even as (and perhaps especially as) it works to
obscure. I want to turn now to two other examples of performative
speech acts, each of which deliberately exposes this ambiguity — not
by obstructing, perverting or subverting the act of apology, but by
revealing the logic that is already at work within the act.
Theatricality
Carey Young’s Disclaimer series (2004) is a set of three works of art
consisting only of printed text that borrows the discursive authority of
legal disclaimers. On the surface, these declarations appear to have all
the necessary characteristics of an Austinian performative. For example,
the element titled Ontology reads as follows:
This piece is provided ‘as is’. The artist does not represent this to be
a work of art. S/he hereby disclaims any liability for considering this
piece as a work of art and excludes any guarantee or warranty, both
expressed or implied, as to the fact that this may be exhibited or
marketed as a work of art (Young 2004).
Like many of Young’s works, Disclaimer interrogates the status of
the work of art within legal and economic frameworks and was created
in close consultation with legal experts. In its exploration of context,
her work recalls the Conceptual art of the 1960s that began to treat
the encounter with the spectator as part of the domain of the work. At
that time, art critic Michael Fried famously dismissed this tendency
as ‘basically a theatrical effect or quality — a kind of stage presence’
(Fried 1998: 155, original emphasis). Fried describes this theatrical
effect as a result of ‘the special complicity that the work extorts from
the beholder’:
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‘We Say Sorry’
Something is said to have presence when it demands that the beholder
take it into account, that he take it seriously — and when the fulfilment
of that demand consists simply in being aware of the work and, so to
speak, in acting accordingly (155).
This sounds like an accurate description of what is going on in
Young’s Disclaimer, and no doubt Fried would hate it. Fried condemned
the tendency toward theatricality, declaring that modernist art must
‘defeat or suspend theater’ (160) in order to make it possible for art to
be a space in which we can escape the literalism of everyday life and
achieve a kind of ‘grace’ (168).
Even amongst those who defended the work that Fried attacked,
‘theatre’ remained a disdainful category — so, for example, much of
the scholarship within the emerging discipline of performance studies
worked from a basic opposition of ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’ (see, for
example, Féral 1982). As theatre scholar Shannon Jackson notes, an
apparently intractable prejudice within discourses on art and politics
seems always to ‘place the theatrical on the opposite side of whatever
lines in the sand they are drawing’ (Jackson 2008: 19). More recently,
however, Jackson has been one of many theatre scholars to begin to
reconsider the idea of ‘theatricality’, and to do so precisely in terms
of its relationship to categories of the political. In the face of what
philosopher Jacques Rancière has called ‘the disappearance of politics’
(Rancière 1999: 102), Nicholas Ridout writes that the challenge
for political theatre is ‘how to make politics appear’ — a challenge
that is appropriate to the theatre’s primary function of manifesting
appearance (Ridout 2008: 19). Sophie Nield uses theatricality as a
way to understand issues of national borders and migration, describing
her approach as ‘expanding the idea of the “theatrical” to imply the
production of a space in which “appearance” of a certain kind becomes
possible’ (Nield 2006: 64). And Tracy Davis draws on eighteenth and
nineteenth century conceptions of civil society in order to propose an
expanded definition of theatricality:
A spectator’s dédoublement resulting from a sympathetic breach (active
dissociation, alienation, self-reflexivity) effecting a critical stance
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toward an episode in the public sphere, including but not limited to
the theatre (Davis 2003: 145).
How might Young’s Disclaimer be political in its very theatricality?
In my analysis of Rudd’s apology, I described the way that the
felicitous cooperation of authenticity and authority was underpinned
by a distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘not serious’. With Disclaimer,
this distinction is compromised. It certainly appears as ‘not serious’,
a joke, both a work of art and a legal declaration. Fried’s criticism of
Conceptual art would apply here: ‘Certain modes of seriousness are
closed to the beholder by the work itself, i.e., those established by the
finest painting and sculpture of the recent past’ (Fried 1998: 155).
This is not a complex, autonomous aesthetic realm within which the
viewer can be ‘absorbed’, as Fried would want to be, and one cannot
take it as seriously as Fried would, for example, a sculpture by Anthony
Caro. Instead, its seriousness is mock seriousness, pretend seriousness,
unfaithful seriousness.
In Austin’s distinctions, this would be a work that is as ‘hollow and
void’ as a stage utterance. It might have appropriated legal discourse,
but it is only ‘parasitic’ upon such discourse, falling under the category
of stunted ‘etiolations’ of language (Austin 1965: 22). And yet, its
parasitism is so precise that it is indistinguishable from its host. Were
a court of law to be forced to make a determination about its status as a
work of art — as has occurred in other cases, particularly in situations
where status as art is linked to tax liability (see Leiboff 2009) — how
seriously, or not seriously, could this ‘disclaimer’ be taken? Young’s
Mutual Release (2008), in which the artist and the gallery both sign ‘as
a deed’ an agreement ‘to each other’s complete mutual release’, poses
a similar complication. If the guise of seriousness helps to obscure the
performative speech-act’s foundational capacity for infelicity, then that
capacity is foregrounded in Disclaimer. In its theatricality it reveals that
the ‘serious’ discourse of law and the ‘not serious’ discourse of art are
both, in the end, only forms of discourse.
My final example of apology reflects more directly on Rudd’s official
act. This is an artwork by Lebanese-born artist Rabih Mroué titled
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‘We Say Sorry’
I, the Undersigned (2007), which has been exhibited internationally,
including at the highly commercialised Frieze Art Fair in London
(where I first encountered it). The work consists of two parts. The first
of these is a signed statement by Mroué in which he declares, ‘I, the
undersigned, Rabih Mroué, present a public and sincere apology to all
of you, and to all the Lebanese people.’ In this statement, he explains
that, in the absence of any official apology for the Lebanese civil war,
he has decided to present his own apology. In this half of the work,
then, Mroué adopts the guise of seriousness. It is notable that the piece
is titled after the act of signature, and that this signed declaration is
always visible alongside the second part of the piece, for the signature
is the double carrier of both authenticity and authority. It authenticates
the work under its own authority — its ‘fabulous’ authority, as Derrida
would say.
If the signed statement works through seriousness, then the second
part of the piece is quite different. A video monitor next to the signed
statement displays Mroué’s apology, which consists of a sequence of
concise mini-apologies. Some of the elements are as follows:
1. I apologise to all those who were my victims, whether they knew it
or not, whether I knew them or not, whether I had hurt them directly
or through mediators.
2. I apologise for what I have done during the Lebanese war, whether
in the name of Lebanon or Arabness or the Cause, etc.
3. I apologise for my ignorance of the meaning of many words and my
total ignorance of concepts I was fighting for. …
5. I apologise because I considered the Lebanese war a war of socialclasses
only.
In these first few elements, the apology is marked by its personal
scrutiny and by the sense of sincerity and reflection. As the apology
continues, these reflections become more personal and specific, as
Smith (2008), the author of I Was Wrong, might prescribe that an
apology ‘should’; but, in this instance, the increasing specificity has
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the paradoxical effect of making the whole performance more dubious.
7. I apologise because I fired bullets towards the sky in glee over Brazil’s
victory over Germany. …
9. I apologise for accepting to be a bodyguard for a Soviet diplomatic
delegation and for staying with them at the ‘Beau Rivage’ hotel for
almost one week. …
12. I apologise because at one point I considered myself to be a
policeman with the right to give orders in the name of keeping order.
13. I apologise for being proud of my ‘Lebaneseness’ while at the same
time aspiring to get another nationality.
14. I apologise that during the war I incurred no physical wounds, that
I wasn’t kidnapped, that no one attempted to assassinate me, and that
I received no personal threat.
Rather than supporting the authentic performance of apology, the
increased sincerity and detail of these comments creates fault lines
within the performance and, in the final elements of the apology, these
fissures are accentuated by critical self-reflection about the genre itself:
15. I apologise because I sometimes steal other people’s writings and
pretend they are my own.
16. I apologise because I enjoy playing with other people’s feelings.
17. I apologise for working in a medium that I dislike.
18. I apologise for presenting this apology in a medium that I almost
ignore.
19. I apologise for insisting that this is not a confession, and this is
not an apology.
20. I apologise because these are only words, words, words …
In contrast to Young’s perfect mimicry, here is another version of the
theatrical. This apology is too knowing: it knows itself as representation,
knows itself as genre, knows itself as rhetoric. It would fail the tests
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for felicity specified by Austin as a ‘misfire’ because ‘the particular
persons and circumstances in a given case’ are not ‘appropriate for the
invocation of the particular procedure invoked’; and also as an ‘abuse’
because it is not clear that the ‘person participating in and so invoking
the procedure’ does ‘in fact have those [designated] thoughts or feelings’
(Austin 1965: 15-16). Mroué may, he admits, be using someone else’s
words, recounting someone else’s experiences.
And yet this piece apologises for these infidelities as well; its
insincerity is a product of over-sincerity. Not exaggerated sincerity or
ironic sincerity, but sincere commitment to the performance of apology.
It is not a theatricalisation of apology — that is, a transformation of an
apology into something that is staged — but instead an articulation of
the theatrical that is inherent in the structure of apology all along. An
apology must perform sorrow but, if it is to be felicitous, it must also
demonstrate sorrow. For this reason, apology must always be a double
performance, both an apology and a representation of what it is to
be apologetic, and it is this overlapping of ‘real’ and ‘representation’
that is the characteristic feature of the theatrical. This doubling is
foregrounded in Mroué’s performance, which is contextualised as ‘art’
and is therefore already understood as representational. We might also
apply this idea of theatrical doubling to Rudd’s performance: in order
to be a ‘real’ apology, it would be insufficient for Rudd’s apology not to
demonstrate ‘sorrow’, but the demonstration of sorrow is exactly that
which undermines its authoritative autonomy and makes it dependent
on representation, narrative and sympathy.
We might understand the relationship between the two apologies
in terms of what Judith Butler has called ‘resignification’. In her early
work, Butler drew on Austin’s theory of performative speech-acts as
well as psychoanalytic theory in order to develop an understanding of
gender as discursively produced through ‘a stylized repetition of acts’
(Butler 1988: 519), a process of Derridean citation that she labelled
‘resignification’. However, she later moved to counteract readings of her
theories that, in her view, over-emphasised the possibility of individual
agency in relation to these performative repetitions. Butler makes a
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distinction between ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’: ‘the former
presumes a subject, but the latter contests the very notion of the subject’
(Butler et al 1993). This distinction is emphasised in Butler’s reading
of drag. Although Butler recognises drag as a conscious deployment
of gender’s performative subjectivation, she insists that this process
of resignifying gender does not necessarily enable political agency or
subversion:
Although many readers understood Gender Trouble [Butler 1990]
to be arguing for the proliferation of drag performances as a way of
subverting dominant gender norms, I want to underscore that there
is no necessary relation between drag and subversion, and that drag
may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and
reidealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms. At best, it
seems, drag is a site of a certain ambivalence ... (Butler 1993: 125).
In this way, Butler rejects the idea that the drag artist’s intentional
deployment of gender codes represents an escape or subversion of
gender, or that an exercise of ‘will’ or ‘choice’ somehow enables one to
move outside the performative framework of gender (Butler 1993: 234).
In keeping with Butler’s analysis, we might think of Young and
Mroué’s speech-acts as ‘apologies in drag’ in the way they resignify
and redeploy the discourses of authority and authenticity. As with
Butler’s description of drag, my point about these performances is not
that they transform or disable the discursive modes that they adopt,
nor that they reveal anything about them that was not already at play.
The theatricality I assert to be present in these instances is inherent
to the discursive form itself. Furthermore, when I wrote above that
Young’s work reveals that both its own ‘not serious’ proclamation and
other ‘serious’ proclamations are ‘only forms of discourse’, this does
not mean that the power of discourse has been somehow diminished
or arrested. As with Butler’s assertion that ‘all gender is like drag, or
is drag’, the implication is not that one is free to choose not to play a
gender, nor that the deployment of drag permits some special agency
with regard to gender (Butler 1993: 125). Where Butler does identify
the possibility of politically transformative practice, it does not have to
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do with ‘the fantasy of transcending power altogether’, but is instead
expressed in terms of ‘replaying power’, of ‘restaging it again and again
in new and productive ways’ (Butler et al 2004: 335).
My emphasis on theatricality (rather than performativity), however,
is intended to add another possible perspective to the kind of analysis
offered by Butler. Her differentiation between performance and
performativity is designed to constrain any assumption of agency on the
part of the performer in the speech-act, but I am interested here in the
possibilities for the spectator that are opened up by such performances. I
have argued that the structure of apology, requiring a demonstration of
both authenticity and authority, produces a coupling of the autonomous/
performative/‘real’ and the staged/infelicitous/‘representation’. But
in Tracy Davis’s (2003) re-definition (quoted above), ‘theatricality’ is
not something that inheres in the discursive performance but in the
relationship one has to it: she describes theatricality as ‘a spectator’s
dédoublement’ (145). These two doublings — the structural ambiguity
of the event and the self-division of the spectator that Davis describes
— are coupled: self-reflection within the event might alert us to our
own spectatorship, but we also might make an independent choice to
actively dissociate ourselves from the event that is making its appeal to
us. Davis suggests there is potency in the choice to withhold sympathy,
and argues for the ‘enabling effects of active dissociation, or alienation,
or self-reflexivity in standing aside from the suffering of the righteous to
name and thus bring into being the self-possession of a critical stance’
(Davis 2003: 153). If politics is ‘only’ theatre, then this does not mean
that our position as ‘spectators’ must necessarily be a powerless one.
I acknowledge that there are limitations to this kind of argument:
the political efficacy it enables is personal, rather than collective, and
in the specific case I have raised here does little to help the immediate
situation of Indigenous Australians and their descendents. But it’s also
worth pointing out that collective identity is itself one of the problems
raised by those critics of Rudd’s performance who contest his attempt
to name what it is to be ‘Australia’. For example, McAuley writes that
the ‘we’ that is articulated in Rudd’s apology is fraught and contested:
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‘it serves to reinforce the fact that in Australia there is, as yet, no
comfortable speaking position from which to say “we”’ (McAuley 2009:
58). A spectator might refuse the apology’s problematic collectivisation
by reading ‘Australia’ as essentially a stage-name, a performed identity,
a fable (in Derrida’s sense), rather than the ‘serious’ legal entity that it
claims to be. Being a spectator to Mroué’s apology might be understood
as a kind of rehearsal for an event like Rudd’s apology, such that we
are prepared to ask the same questions of the state performance that
we do of the artwork: Who is it that is speaking? To whom? And for
whom? With what voice? Where am I in relation to this event? Is this
person apologising to me? Or on my behalf? Or in spite of me? Or
instead of someone else? These are theatrical questions, and they are
also political questions.
These questions begin to suggest how it might be productive to
read ‘real’ political performance as theatre — that is, to look for the
theatrical in the political. I want to conclude by returning to the two
artworks I have discussed and asking the reverse question: what is the
political in the theatrical? Adopting the question that Ridout borrows
from Rancière — ‘how to make politics appear’ — we might ask what it
is that appears in Disclaimer and I, the Undersigned. I have argued that
these two works, in their own way, trouble the distinction between the
‘serious’ and the ‘not serious’. This distinction is of the sort that Rancière
would describe as ‘partitions of the sensible’, distributions of power
that underwrite what is possible, and that differentiate between what
is art and what is politics (Rancière 2004). In their book on cultural
activism, the research collective BAVO draws on Rancière’s thinking
to argue that ‘politics … precisely takes place when somebody makes a
claim that s/he is unauthorized or unqualified to do’ (BAVO 2007: 19).
Young and Mroué could be seen as two examples of what BAVO calls
‘stepping out of line’ (19), and, in these terms, the politics that appears
in these works has to do with the policing of appearance itself: what
counts as real and what is only a semblance, what is politics and what
is only rhetoric. From this perspective, the political is not a category
of action, or a certain kind of content, but instead the very distinction
that labels some actions as political and some as not.
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The allure of the Austinian performative, with its fabled autonomy,
is easy to understand: here, at last, would be an authentic act of politics, a
declaration that was not posturing or rhetoric but meant (and did) what
it said. But I have argued that what passes for autonomy is a double-act
of authority and authenticity, each dependent on the other. Indeed, the
idea that there could be an autonomous, authentically political gesture
is already based on a political distinction, one that excludes the ‘not
serious’, the inauthentic, the unauthorised. By perfectly mimicking
the voice of the law, Disclaimer doesn’t step out of line in order to join
the ranks of the authorised. Instead it presents an encounter in which
authority is fully present, and yet completely insufficient, at the same
time. And in I, the Undersigned, Mroué’s apology does not so much set
the inauthentic against the authentic as show how the two are working
side-by-side, inseparable, indistinguishable. It is structurally ambiguous
claims such as these that might constitute the politics of the infelicitous,
the politics of the ‘not serious’, the politics of theatricality.
Notes
1	 This article began as a conference paper at Performance Studies
International and the author is grateful to the participants at that
presentation for their comments and suggestions, as well as to Sophie Nield
and Marett Leiboff for their ongoing support. The author also gratefully
acknowledges the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for its
financial support of his research.
2	 This interpretation of the performativity of law has an interesting
correlation with the ideas of the 19th century legal scholar, also named John
Austin — which might have been the source of some initial confusion for
some readers of this journal. The earlier Austin proposed an understanding
of law based on the premise that ‘Laws proper, or properly so called, are
commands’ (Austin 1873: Vol I 81) , a model that has become known
as the ‘command theory’ of law. There isn’t room here for an extended
comparison of the two Austins, but I will note in passing that both theorists
made similar distinctions within their respective fields: much as the later
Austin shifted the emphasis away from the capacity of statements to be
‘true’ or false’, the earlier Austin transformed jurisprudence by moving it
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away from discussion of the potential of laws to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ on some
kind of absolute moral scale.
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