Performance

What I will present . . . makes no claim to be a work of scholarship; I wish it to be understood rather as a performance, a manifesto to the radical acts of private and collective memory of which we are all capable, and to which we must once again--without apology--find our way. (VC 89)

If Kwinter's article is a performance, it nonetheless urges a point. Though it would seem that Kwinter disavows the attempt to support any propositions, he does present arguments and evidence, he want to challenge our beliefs and affect our actions, and he does so by the dramatic presentation of these reasons and generalizations. His claim that his text is only a performance is ingenuous. But he might reply that given our loss of a language in which to describe adequately what is happening to us, he cannot in fact think clearly or present to us the arguments that are needed.