IN A notorious comment, J. L. Austin once wrote that performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or if said by an actor on stage.' Perhaps Austin only ever attended amateur theatricals. Bertolt Brecht approved of amateur acting, since the occasional flatness and hollowness of its utterances seemed to him an unwitting form of alienation effect. For Brecht, the whole point of acting was that it should be in a peculiar sense hollow or void. Alienated acting hollows out the imaginary plenitude of everyday actions, deconstructing them into their social determinants and inscribing within them the conditions of their making. The void of alienated acting is a kind of Derridean spacing, rendering a piece of stage business exterior to itself, sliding a hiatus between actor and action and thus, it is hoped, dismantling the ideological self-identity of our routine social behavior. In Is Epic Theatre? Walter Benjamin remarked that the actor be able to space his gestures as the compositor produces spaced type.2 The dramatic gesture, by miming routine behavior in contrivedly hollow ways, represents it in all its lack, in its suppression of material conditions and historical possibilities, and thus represents an absence which it at the same time produces. What the stage action represents is the routine action as differenced through the former's nonself-identity, which nevertheless remains self-identical-recognizable-enough to do all this representing rather than merely to reflect a given nonidentity in the world. A certain structure of presence must, in other words, be preserved: verisimilitude between stage and society can be disrupted only if it is posited. Brecht was particularly keen on encouraging his actors to observe and reproduce actions precisely, for without such an element of presence and recognition the absencing of the alienation effect would be nonproductively rather than productively empty. The internal structure of the effect is one of presence and absence together, or rather a problematic contention of the two in which the distinction between representation and nonrepresentation is itself thrown into question. The stage action must be self-identical enough to represent as nonself-identical an apparently self-identical world, but in that very act puts its own self-identity into question.