Les Trois origines du concept de Performance

Le concept de performance est inventé dans trois disciplines différentes entre 1965 (quand Chomsky publie Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge MA, MIT Press) et 1977 (quand paraît la version définitive de Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, Prospect Heights IL, Waveland): 1°) en linguistique (Chomsky), 2°) en anthropologie symbolique (Victor Turner) et 3°) dans les années soixante-dix lorsque naît l’ethnographie de la parole (Bauman, Hymes…). C’est la convergence de ces trois inventions qui produit le cadre théorique dans lequel nous nous situons aujourd’hui, en anthropologie linguistique, quels que soient nos objets d’étude.

Performance: «cadre d'interprétation»

Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance

“Performance represents a transformation of the basic referential (“serious,” “normal”…) uses of language. In other words, in artistic performance of this kind, there is something going on in the communicative interchange which says to the auditor, “interpret what I say in some special sense; do not take it to mean what the words alone, taken literally, would convey.”… Performance sets up, or represents, an interpretive frame within which the messages being communicated are to be understood, and … this frame contrasts with at least one other frame, the literal.

In employing the term “frame” here, I am drawing … on the powerful insights of Gregory Bateson and the more recent and equally provocative work of Erving Goffman (Frame Analysis, 1974).”