Returning to the tradition of Syllabary B as a core text of cuneiform education of the late periods, we need a way to explain how patterns of stability and variance are generated within the tradition of reading and writing. If the notion of scribal performance seems promising (and the premise of the project is that it is), it might be helpful to explain what that might mean. The following is meant to collect some scattered notes on approaches that seem particularly useful. Comments and corrections are most welcome.
Performance in Ancient Near Eastern Studies has figured prominently in numerous works, including Zainab Bahrani’s study of the Warka Vase and Paul Delnero’ study of Old Babylonian lamentation texts.1 The idea of “scribal performance” in the project’s title is, however, admittedly stolen first and foremost from the works of Alger N. Doane on Old English Beowulf.2 Trying to explain a “fallen and fluid textuality” in the manuscripts, Doane takes each act of writing as a special link in the chain of transmission in which memory and competence are put into physical form.3 The manuscript is used to reconstruct this physical process of writing to try to understand where that variance comes from.
We could of course let the methodological comparison rest there. But as the saying goes: That’s all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory? The following notes on the relationship between performance and texts make no great claim to originality and certainly oversimplify a complex discussion with a vast secondary literature. A useful starting point, however, is Catherine Malabou’s distinction of three meanings of performance: 1) playacting (dramatic performance of something); 2) art performance (artwork created through actions); and 3) accomplishment (doing something).4 It is the first two we’re interested in here, performance in a narrow sense as “embodied live presentations of events in the co-presence of an audience at a specific time and place.”5
One way performance might help us is to reframe the relationship between a written and non-written text. Roger Chartier’s Forms and Meanings looks specifically at what happens when texts, in this case two plays by Molière, are put on stage.6 Both writing and staging are subject to particular constraints, including not only the text’s immediate material embodiment, but extending to its audience, its surrounding community, and its place in time.7 Chartier highlights how that staging creates a new audience, a new text. The specific text and staging in turn provide evidence for changes meant to react to or anticipate their audiences. As echoed by Peter Kivy: readings are performances which instantiate the work.8 This sort of performance is deeply historicizing, concerned with processes, practices, and repetitions.9
Sylvia Huot’s From Song to Book goes in the other direction, from recitation to written text, in looking at what happens when Old French lyric is put into manuscript form. Writing practices adapted not only to record, but stage the lyrics, show traces of theatrical sensibility. Thus, the “scribe assumes a role analogous to the performer: he is an intermediary between the audience and the story, and the book is the space in which his written ‘performance’ takes place.”10 The view is echoed in Karin Barber’s Anthropology of Texts, where the text is the written analog to “dance, song, and bodily ceremony” in its capacity to “create form” and to perform “acts of instauration.”11 Barber continues: “… if a verbal text is to ‘tell us’ anything about a society, social experience, or cultural values, this can only be through its specific textuality, its specific way of being a text.” The argument we can take from Chartier, Huot, and Barber is the central focus on writing and reading as complementary forms of entextualization, the process by which a text comes to take form. Excerpt or quotation, in a way similar to Huot’s lyrical writing, allows the scribe and reader to focus on a particular section (or poem), to reinforce the way that section functions as a text in itself, and to put it into new and creative relationships with other texts: the “tenso disposition.”12
The obvious parallel here is to the performance of epic, where each performance is not simply a recitation but an act of composition. The point has been made not only for Homer, but also, for example, the Arabic epic Sīrat Banī Hilāl: every telling of the story of Abū Zayd al-Hilālī is a specific entextualization, as the social realities condition the poem and are given new meaning by the recitation.13 Performances are complex events involving not only the performer, but also any attendants and a large and sometimes participating audience.14 It has been objected that this notion of performance as a mode of composition is particularly inappropriate for Mesopotamia due to the primacy of the written and not the oral.15 It is also not automatically applicable to every performance in the same way. Steven Caton reminds us that not every poem recited is composed in performance, nor that there is necessarily a sharp distinction between recitation and composition in performance. While the Yemeni bālah “should be composed instantly and without forethought,” the traditional qaṣīda is composed beforehand and memorized, the zāmil is “somewhere in between these two poles.”16
With the zāmil in mind, however, the distinction becomes further blurred if we follow Jonathan L. Ready’s work on the Homeric “Wild Papyri” and Elisabeth Kempf on Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes in extending performance to the process of writing itself. The scribe is again a performer precisely because writing involves a series of bodily acts and a display of mastery not as a rote copying of fixed content, but a voicing of the text as a specific event.17 The extension essentially suspends the division “between an initially stable text and the destabilising manuscript culture.”18 The writing and reading of a text are similarly centered on a present event in relationship to the community. Ready refers explicitly to performance as a “mode of communicative display.”19 The socially shared context governs and constrains the act of writing at the event, as text-internal elements create presence for the reader and allow the text to simulate oral communication.20
What can we take from any of this? We can note that performance bridges the material features of the inscribed objects as trace fossils of an event (writing) with the approach to materiality which sees objects as social agents in their own right (reading).21 In a broader sense, this appeal to performance dovetails with mainstays of approaches to the history of knowledge in merging savoir with savoir-faire, “un ensemble de connaissances et de pratiques qui permettent d’atteindre un résultat escompté, qui sont accumulées par un individu ou un groupe et qui sont susceptibles d’être transmises.”22 The approach recognizes that: “… knowledge does not exist by itself. It is always embedded in artifacts or embodied in individuals, communities, or institutions… Moreover, knowledge does not exist without the practices that construct it, fix it, and make its circulation and transmission possible.”23 With regard to variance, performance helps us frame the constant writing and rewriting of a text, Sb, which, by its very nature as a conduit for the transmission of cuneiform, is meant to be written over and over again.
In addition, this theatrical view of performance lets us better understand how variance forms an essential part of the system. Any number of performances can fight heavily against the purported base-text while still celebrating its notional fixity and authority.24 Paratextual features such as formatting, guidelines, and illustrations, and the “tenso disposition” created by combining various excerpts, are part of this variance. This understanding of performance, however, leads us into a paradox. If variance is inherent in performance, then how does writing stabilize the text? The question is doubly problematic since the texts we are looking at are supposed not only to form a core of the cuneiform canon, but to stabilize the very existence of cuneiform as a writing system. In looking at the long-term transmission from the Late Bronze Age to the Graeco-Babyloniaca, how much variation can we tolerate before the system breaks down? A look at Malabou’s third definition of performance as performativity, or doing things, might help to reframe the issues involved.
- Zainab Bahrani, “Perfomativity and the Image: Narrative, Representation, and the Uruk Vase,” in Leaving No Stones Unturned: Essays on the Ancient Near East and Egypt in Honor of Donald P. Hansen, ed. Erica Ehrenberg (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2002), 15–22; Paul Delnero, How to Do Things with Tears: Ritual Lamenting in Ancient Mesopotamia, Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 26 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). [↩]
- A. N. Doane, “The Ethnography of Scribal Writing and Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Scribe as Performer,” Oral Tradition 9/2 (1994): 420–439; A. N. Doane, “Beowulf and Scribal Performance,” in Unlocking the Wordhord: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr., ed. Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 62–75. The former is already cited by David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 44. A direct continuation of Doane’s work is found in Simon C. Thomson, Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript: Towards a History of Reception for the Nowell Codex, Library of the Written Word 67 (Leiden: Brill, 2018). The look to Beowulf also comes from a basic conviction that medievalists working on both the West and on the Islamic world are often the best people to steal from methodologically: they have astonishingly similar problems to those we face in Mesopotamia, but they’ve been thinking about them much longer and in greater detail. [↩]
- The quote is taken from A. N. Doane, “Beowulf and Scribal Performance,” 63. [↩]
- Catherine Malabou, “Power and Performance at Play: A Question of Life or Death,” in Inter Views in Performance Philosophy: Crossings and Conversations, ed. Anna Street, Julien Alliot, and Magnolia Pauker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 127–138; see the older distinction of performance as speech act vs. form of staging in Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Introduction,” in Performance and Performativity, ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3–22; and the overview in James Loxley, Performativity (London: Routledge, 2007). Malabou’s distinction of three categories is, of course, also a simplification. See, for example, Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40 (1988): 526 n. 9 on the opposing ways in which social theory applies the theatrical metaphor, with reference to Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres,” in Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983). [↩]
- Ute Berns, “Performativity,” in Handbook of Narratology, Volume 1, 2nd Edition, ed. Peter Hühn, Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 677. [↩]
- There is likely a fruitful comparison to be drawn here with the notion of imitation vs. transposition, or deplacement of “‘des éléments d’un domaine à un autre’, en l’occurrence d’un matériau à un autre,” which figures prominently in Sarah Vilain’s discussion of Cypriote ring-base pottery. [↩]
- Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 4. [↩]
- Peter Kivy, The Performance of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). [↩]
- See the concerns reflected in Richard Schechner, Between Theater & Anthroplogy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 6 on performances as “restored behavior” and Jon R. Mitchell, “Performance,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tolley et al. (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 384–401. [↩]
- Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 26. A more clumsy attempt to make an argument for material traces of performance in Akkadian epic is my own “Songs of Clay: Materiality and Poetics in Early Akkadian Epic,” in Texts and Contexts: The Circulation and Transmission of Cuneiform Texts in Social Space, ed. Paul Delnero and Jacob Lauinger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 251–284. [↩]
- Karin Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4. [↩]
- Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 95; the notion of the the “tenso disposition” is stolen here from Stephen G. Nichols, “Why Material Philology?,” Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 116 (1997): 22. [↩]
- Dwight Reynolds, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). [↩]
- See Richard P. Martin, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 5. [↩]
- Piotr Michalowski, “Orality and Literacy and Early Mesopotamian Literature,” in Mesopotamian Epic Literature: Oral or Aural?, Ed. M. E. Vogelzang and H. L. J. Vanstiphout ( Lempeter: Edwin Meller, 1992), 232 (“quite inappropriate”). [↩]
- Steven C. Caton, Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 257. [↩]
- Jonathan L. Ready, Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and the Wild Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 203. [↩]
- Elisabeth Kempf, Performing Manuscript Culture: Poetry, Materiality, and Authorship in Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, Trends in Medieval Philology 33 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 17. [↩]
- Ready, Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics, 249; Richard Bauman, A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 9. [↩]
- Kempf, Performing Manuscript Culture, 19; Irmgard Maasen, “Text und / als / in der Performanz in der frühen Neuzeit: Thesen und Überlegungen,” Paragrana 10/1 (2001): 285–302; Stéphane Polis, “Linguistic Variation in Ancient Egyptian: An Introduction to the State of the Art (with Special Attention to the Community of Deir el-Medina),” in Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period, ed. Jennifer Cromwell and Eitan Grossman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 60–126 notes the direct link between extralinguistic factors and linguistic change. [↩]
- The latter is famously argued in Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). [↩]
- Jean-Jacques Glassner, “Savoir et Savoir-faire en Mésopotamie,” Cahiers d’anthropologie sociale 1 (2006): 13. [↩]
- Christian Jacob, “Lieux de savoir: Places and Spaces in the History of Knowledge,” Know 1 (2017): 87; Christian Jacob, Des mondes lettrés aux lieux de savoir (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2018), 327 on studying “les savoirs humains… comme des champs d’activités et d’expériences, impliquant des acteurs, des pratiques et des objets, matériels ou immatériels.” [↩]
- Richard Bauman, “Transformations of the Word in the Production of Mexican Festival Drama,” in Natural Histories of Discourse, ed. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 301–328. [↩]
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Christian W. Hess (4 avril 2024). Eclectic Notes on Performance. ScriPTS. Consulté le 13 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/w67a
