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TWO | Performing Informing and Shrieking Innocence: Surveillance, Informance, and the Performance of Performance THERE WERE FEW REVELATIONS FOR COMMITTEE MEMBERS during Robeson’s HUAC hearing, just as in most other HUAC spectacles. In fact, many witnesses were even provided with names to offer up to the committee . This absence is perhaps the most significant quality of HUAC hearings as technologies of the Cold War performance complex. The hearings ’ raison d’être, the revelation of Communist infiltration in the United States, was a red herring. The event of performing the act of informing, or “informance,” was the actual focus of HUAC spectacles. The transformative efficacy of informance changed witness from traitor to loyal citizen through the act of informing rather than the information enumerated. While compulsory performance was an emergent technology of the Cold War performance complex, both in the hearing room and out (in the form of “egalitarian panopticism”), performance troubled the very stability of the Truth that HUAC sought to produce. The absence of visual evidence of the interior truth of the witness, itself the ostensible purview of the committee, compelled an anxious repetition of performances, always necessary but inadequate to produce the inward truth of allegiance. While the Cold War performance complex hinged on performances, it was always vexed by them, as acts of performance always produced the possibility of revealing their status as performance: as acts that produce rather than reveal. PERFORMANCE UNDER PRESSURE Perhaps the quintessential compulsory performances of the Cold War performance complex were those enacted as a witness—a condition that extended from the juridical settings of trials and congressional hearings to quotidian spaces of schools, union meetings, and workplaces. All were witnesses, and as witnesses they were required to produce the authenticity of their loyalty through informing and the performative speech acts of 62 their oaths that their allegiance required. These loyalty oaths and their many variations soon became ubiquitous aspects of American culture when President Truman introduced them as standard for all federal employees in a 1948 executive order. As witnesses, Americans were compelled to perform numerous rituals that bore witness to one’s inner conviction of loyalty to the United States. The most famous of these rituals was the answering of the “$64,000-dollar question” asked of HUAC witnesses: ”Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” However, with the increasing ubiquity of the loyalty oath, swearing allegiance became first a condition of employment, and then a natural part of daily life. As performative speech acts, loyalty oaths are, in their illocutionary form, utterances that enact what they seem only to describe. In J. L. Austin’s theory of performative speech acts, presented as a series of Harvard lectures in 1955, he argues that oaths such as “I swear to uphold the Constitution,” “I pledge allegiance to the United States,” and so on, are not “outward and visible sign[s]” of a truthful “inward performance, but rather they enact a contractual relation.”1 Even a false oath is still an oath according to Austin, since the speech act “obliges me—puts on record my spiritual assumption of a spiritual shackle . . . our word is our bond.”2 The speech acts of swearing allegiance in the pledge, a loyalty oath, or in answer to the “$64,000 question” are performative in that they do not merely describe the “inward performance” of patriotism. As HUAC had its lists of “named” Communists provided by the FBI, even informers did not primarily describe reality by revealing information in the act of naming names. Rather, the acts of swearing, confessing, and informing produced the witnesses’ “spiritual shackle” of loyalty to the United States of America.3 Constituted by these rituals, the Cold War performance complex operated as a truth-producing machine. Although the oath does not reveal truth, it does nevertheless produce “evidence” of the inward performance of loyalty, since as critic Alan Nadel notes of Cold War–era oaths, “swearing . . . marks them [the utterances] not as true but as important to the speaker—the things that he or she wants the audience to believe, cares enough to mark with an oath.”4 The oaths of the Cold War performance complex did not reveal the truth of the loyalty of oneself or the Communism of another as much as the truth of the witness’ testimony was an effect produced by the hearings themselves.5 The truth-effect of these oaths was dependent, as are all performative speech acts, on their...

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