Ilê Sartuzi: Contract

CONJUROS, ou algumas notas sobre contratos (para ilê sartuzi)¹

Pedro Zylbersztajn

1.

Every contract is, in a sense, a spell: a set of words and symbolic gestures that establish a new reality. A signature and an incantation are very much alike from a linguistic perspective, and can be classified as performative utterances, that is, discursive acts that not only describe the world, but transform it.

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8.

Here, contracts are something between promises and scores. They lay down obligations but also insinuate performances. They attribute gestures and roles that must be fulfilled by certain actors over a specified timespan. The relationship between the score and its performance - a symphony, for instance - carries an ontological ambiguity: are they the same thing, or two entirely distinct things? Perhaps something in between? In such case, where along the continuum between those two positions does the answer reside? A score is often understood as a memory device, nothing but a resource so that a past event can be conserved and repeated. This notion, however, ignores how the score plays a disciplinary role in the exercise of the performance, establishing through (more or less) rigid linguistic codes what can and cannot be done in a certain field. The introduction of staff notation, for example, brings about a qualitative change in the approach to composing chamber music, causing it to respond to conventions that take place on paper as much as to aesthetic and material demands of the very act of playing. There are entire compositional forms, such as serialism, that make sense only if viewed as consequences of their notation system. Therefore, to assume that the performance always prevails over its score means to ignore the ordering effect of notation itself. On the other hand, to assume the superiority of the score means to subordinate the act of performance to the prescriptions of procedural signs, overlooking the fact that, in order to be actualized into performance, the score must be interpreted and is therefore subject to variations, errors and, simply put, to the physical realities of the world. As such, we must never mistake order for execution nor presuppose the primacy of one over the other.