I saw Black Swan just before New Years’ on a visit to LA. Maybe I’m not listening to other people closely enough, many seem focused on Arronofsky trademark cinematography, or the mother-daughter-father relationship embedded in the film. But I still have only one pressing question as a result of that viewing – where does performance come from?

From the beginning of the film, virtuosity is at issue. Portman’s character, Nina, practices obsessively but yet cannot come to that point of reckless abandon, of virtuosity needed to play both black and white swan in the production. The requirement that she somehow double herself for this role we get through Mila Kunis’s Lily and Nina’s subsequent jealousies and hallucinations. The suggestion here is that practice only takes one, but performance takes two – and in certain roles, it takes two of the same person. It requires one to become multiple. But how?

The first suggestion is the rigid control of practice, diet, and time that her mother forces on her. The second suggestion, from her director, Thomas, is an old one. The key to a “free”, beautiful performance of the Black Swan requires Nina to somehow tap into some previously blocked sexual energy, to establish a sexual relationship with herself (and with him – though a conflicted one). The darkness that comes with this circulation of libidinal energy is his answer to the question of virtuosity and performance, but it is an antiquated answer, and Thomas’s advice and advances almost turn him into a caricature (besides creepy). This approach, his approach, while perhaps once legitimate, is no longer welcome and seems something from a bygone era. I feel the movie says to us “the libidinal answer was a serious contender, but no longer.” Performance has its roots in something else.

Another answer, one that’s too easy, is madness: that Nina has to go crazy to achieve the sought after performance.

Our visual focus at the end of the film is drawn to one thing – the wound she gives her double (Lily/Nina) and carries through to the end of her performance. And this wound is what ultimately makes the question of performance or virtuosity interesting, more than her schizoid episodes or failed efforts to sexually engage. The performance has no momentum until the wound comes on to the stage (seen by the audience or not). So what does this wound do?

First point. The wound is what allows her doubled selves to communicate with one another (that is, she realizes after discovering that she has stabbed herself and not Lily that she is having an experience of doubledness). Rather than the “dark” and the “light” Nina seeing each other in a flash, in a mirror for just a moment, Nina’s murderous rage incorporates itself into her own body, both of their bodies. This wound is the space of negotiation between the two personalities at odds within Nina.

Which draws a chuckle from me, as I think about Zizek saying in “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” that “desire is a wound in reality” – obviously he is not the only person to play on this theme. Another, much more detailed discussion occurs in Nancy’s essay “The Inoperative Community”, as he describes the wound or essential openness of subjects, the “beating” (and here is another reference to harmonics, to resonance and performance) of singular sites against one another that is the experience of language, art, and comunity. But in the case of Nina we have the wound moved from the figurative to the real, and it is not an “already” present wound but accidentally self-inflicted in the midst of a hallucination.

A wounded double delivers the performance of a lifetime.

Action insofar as it is free is neither under the guidance of the intellect nor under the dictate of the will… but springs from something altogether different which… I shall call a principle. Principles do not operate from within the self as motive do… but inspire, as it were, from without.

While Arendt ultimately speaks on freedom and politics in this essay, “What is Freedom?”, I take her comments on action in general seriously, given athletes’ and performers’ references to things like “the zone”. One popular account is that people are “outside” of themselves during a great performance.

So then what is this principle, this inspiration? The presence of a principle outside of oneself that does not determine the action or goal. But maybe it inclines (the clinamen). Performance, then, not as the possession of a certain skill through practice (though this is to some degree a prerequisite), but a movement, an inclination towards something “out there”.

A movement that requires openness, a radical openness. That is, a wound. A wound carries all sorts of potentialities, that’s the thing, that’s the insanity of Nina’s character as she opens herself to drugs and sex throughout the film. The mother is the closed world of practice and law, the director (a father figure?) speaks in terms of libidinal energy, but Lily, her peer, is horizontal to her in the hierarchy, and inspires this doubledness, this wound. Nina sees her other as herself, as having snatched her from herself, somehow. It is a dispossession. The wound allows someone else to enter our being somehow. It’s kinda fucked up.

What would it mean to do this consciously? To admit the other through this wound and allow them to possess you? The other as oneself, as part of oneself. Oneself as always doubled somehow, walled off. This is Freud’s contribution, Plato’s too- that we are not one with ourselves – but the suggestion here is that this is not the hierarchy of Freud’s or Plato’s psychology, but a kind of horizontal psychology, where my ego does not exist superimposed on my id, mediating between it and my superego, but that all lead parallel existences in the same space and time, that I am already multiple. My experience of myself as one is merely the collapse of the wave function, but I am always troubled by the presence of alternates, other interpretations, other paths, underdetermined classifications and ambiguous valences. That I never quite knew what I was doing because knowledge is ascribed to single subjects, but the subject of action is always multiple because of the publicness and openness of action, because action, and moreover performance occur in the world. One always has to be two people to be sane, even though many people will insist otherwise.

And the world is disjunct – one never knows which one of us(?) will appear and which part of the world, and they are not always compatible with one another. The DSM-IV definition of schizophrenia speaks of strong and inappropriate emotions, and this issue of appropriateness is what’s at issue – the wrong you showed up to the party. “I was not myself” – but you were, you always are, and that’s the difficult part. To acknowledge when you’re not feeling yourself, that that’s still you.

Virtuosity, performance, action, freedom.

Political excursus: the idea that one become double – politics and Rawls, the principle of justice that one imagine oneself, potentially, as the least privileged in a given system, rather than the raw self-preference of a Nozick. Horizontal, doubling politics. But that might be a different post. Here we’re concerned with performance and performing arts, right? Right? You don’t have to “lose yourself”, or rather losing yourself is not as foreign as it sounds, we are always lost to ourselves in the sense that we are doubled, unfocused, roaming across a psychological landscape that is us. Surfaces and clouds. What would it mean to accept this and the conflict it brings as the default world of our existence? We’re not subjects but landscapes. What does a wound have to do with this fact? It is the fact of being not-enclosed, cut off. Not a monad, but a wanderer in the presence of other wanderers (both within our brains and outside our brains, amongst others). There are others, amongst others.