The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies

D. Soyini Madison, Judith A. Hamera

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781506320298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies brings together, in a single volume, reviews of the major research in performance studies and identifies directions for further investigation. It is the only comprehensive collection on the theories, methods, politics, and practices of performance relating to life and culture. Edited by D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera, this Handbook serves scholars and students across the disciplines by delineating the scope of the field, the critical and interpretive methods used, and the theoretical and ethical presumptions that guide work in this exciting and growing area.

PART I

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Performance Trouble

DELLA POLLOCK

Every essay in this volume is saturated with theory. Each of the studies of performance history is informed by a particular understanding of the nature of facts, narrative, and time. Each ethnographic moment evoked comes to us with the weight of 20, 30 years of thinking about what it means to “write culture” behind it. At the same time, no number of essays concerned with “performance and theory” (much less the select four included in this section) could ever be fully representative or exhaustive of developments in performance theory. So why a section exclusively on performance and theory? What difference does it make to make theory a particular site of engagement in the pages that follow?

First, these essays are particularly concerned with dramatizing possible relationships between theory and performance—between thinking about and doing performance, between doing theory and thinking performance. An empirical or even narrowly interpretive approach to the world may rest relatively comfortably with theory as a meta-narrative, as an explanatory thread wound around the object-world. Performance won’t stand still long enough for theory to wrap it up nicely. It moves in time and space through restless bodies. To track its contingencies, to plumb its affective depths, and to discover the power and pleasures of its rough currents, thinking about performance must move as well. In these essays, we see and feel theory as something like a collaborator with performance, a cosubject however uncomfortably removed from the stability of a subject/object relation. In embodied relation to performance, theory moves. It is less the primary figure in a new construction of performance than it is a reflexive participant in the poiesis of knowing, being, and acting that performance initiates. I would thus have to call performance-and-theory a project of interanimation: of discerning how many more vital possibilities (for performance, for theory, for the world) are wrought by the transactivity of performance and various ways of imagining it.

Second, then, each of these essays makes a significant “detour through theory,” taking up Stuart Hall’s early charge for cultural studies. For Hall, the question of theory is a question of method. Theory is not or should not be an autonomous practice running at best parallel with history. To the contrary, Hall takes from Marx the imperative that thought must “‘rise from the abstract to the concrete’ not vice versa” (Hall, 2003, p. 131). As J. Macgregor Wise observes, the “concrete” to which theory rises is not “what is empirically given, but a necessary complexity. It is the result of theoretical work, not its origin” (Wise, 2003, p. 107). Theory would thus produce the “concrete” in the form of a “necessary complexity.” Wise summarizes the principle method Hall recommends:

Take a concept and track its multiple material determinations and then you have the concrete. The process is not that of inserting philosophical abstractions into the ‘here and now,’ because that neglects these many determinations (1986c: 58). It is not about theory, but ‘going on theorizing’ (1986c: 60). However, the process of theorizing itself is always grounded in its historical conjuncture; thought presupposes society . . . and therefore is shaped by its own multiple determinations. (Wise, 2003, p. 107)

The “detour through theory” emphasizes the “process of theorizing itself” (as the unfinished work of “‘going on theorizing’”) and the mutual complexity of theory and history. For Hall,

Both the specificities and the connections—the complex unities of structures—have to be demonstrated by the concrete analysis of concrete relations and conjunctions . . . . This method thus retains the concrete empirical reference as a privileged and undissolved ‘moment’ within a theoretical analysis without thereby making it ‘empiricist’: the concrete analysis of concrete situations. (Hall, 2003, p. 128)

Writing in the mid-seventies, Hall’s reading of “Marx’s Notes on Method” reflects his encounter with Althusser and his emerging, concomitant interest in “the complex unities of structures.” At the same time, it makes a larger claim on the materiality of theory as a means of engaging in “the concrete analysis of concrete situations.” Hall preserves the “privileged and undissolved” empirical moment in theoretical analysis while carefully distinguishing theoretical analysis from empiricism. Indeed, by comparison to Hall’s version of theoretical analysis as “concrete analysis,” empiricism is abstract: it entails an abstraction of theory from the world of material determinations of which it is a necessary part.

The “detour through theory” throws off the “givenness” of both the mapped course and destination. Each of the essays in this section moves through and with theory as an alternate, even previously unknown or unmarked route that takes us off the beaten path. The landscape is suddenly less familiar. Gripping the wheel, my car compass proves useless: Where am I now? What is this place? Who am I now at this particular intersection of theorizing and historicizing? And who might I be at another?

The detour implicates the subjectivity of the driver (author) as much as it does the passengers (readers). It positions each in the precarious spatial and temporal position of becoming different. The detour is thrilling and terrifying in its unpredictability: the child’s “When will we get there?” becomes “Will we get there?,” “What will ‘there’ be when we arrive?,” and “Who will we be in relation to this place made scarcely or newly recognizable by a course of indirection?”

Third then, for me, making an explicit “detour through theory” is always a strangely utopian gesture. It holds out the (not always or generously consoling) promise of change.

As each of the authors in this section rounds back around the detour, each arrives differently at “performance.” The designated destination is the same and different. In each of these cases, the instability of theory redounds to the nominal designation of a “performance” as such, destabilizing it in turn—as if the passengers, disoriented from the alternate path, were to ask: this looks like “it” . . . but is this really where we meant to go? What was once familiar as a ready object of study is now strange, inviting such questions as: What does it mean to call something a performance? What values does doing so attribute or hail? What does siting a “performance” do for the way we think not only about performance(s) but the world “performance” names? And so how does or might binding an interaction or event to the name “performance” affect the way we live in that world?

Each of these essays more or less arrives at a place of what I would have to call performance trouble (echoing Butler, 1990). Through each theoretical excursion, “performance” becomes what it is: a name, a frame, a signifier, a construct. To call even what has become most familiar to us (most naturalized) as performance a “show” is as loaded as presuming gender is a stable, natural identity. Not unlike gender, and historically for many of the same reasons, performance as “show” has been disciplined into an object of spectatorship, formal appreciation, and/or enjoyment. When the nature and status of “performance” is itself disturbed, (1) whatever it is we are calling a “performance” is less immediately knowable: it is less easily assimilated to given bodies of knowledge and convention; (2) the “performance” event or practice becomes less stable and more vulnerable to contest over its nature, meanings, and values; and (3) the designated “performance” may be re-named, remarked, and/or made to re-signify—to mean differently.

Accordingly, these essays and others like them, may lead us less toward knowing about performance and more toward feeling, imagining, and/or making with performance. Concomitantly we might say that in the end we know less about and make more of the performances theory calls out.

Jon McKenzie is particularly concerned with what it means to call an event or a practice a “performance.” He begins with the troubled space of economic globalization in which “performance” more often than not designates the “fulfillment in form” of technological systems often affiliated with the rise of the U.S. military complex after World War II, including high-performance fighter planes and missile guidance systems. Performance has become the watchword in sales of lower-tech commodities including cars and laundry detergent, and of management styles aimed at eliciting “peak performance” from employees. In each case, performance has come to mean something more than the demonstration of competency that Richard Bauman found essential to the authority of the storyteller in his seminal essay on “Verbal Art as Performance” (Bauman, 1977). Indeed, the stakes have not only been transferred to commodities and corporations but have risen considerably, making “performance” practically synonymous with the highest levels of human-qua-technological accomplishment and productivity. More than gold-star achievement however, performance promises more: the car that really performs promises more speed, more power, more control of the road; the company that really performs outperforms others in an ongoing race for the competitive edge in a global market. Entangled with the military-industrial promise of strength and dominion, when “performance” is deployed in comparative global analyses showing that U.S. students do not, apparently, “perform” as well in math and science as their Asian counterparts, it becomes a figure of lack, shame, and discipline. Here, performance becomes accountability becomes “high-stakes testing” education on which the performance potential of a nation hangs.

Performance studies, as McKenzie notes, has by and large ignored these performatives: these acts of naming that constrain whole bodies of human behavior to mechanistic standards for best/better/more accomplishment, or what Marcuse, in an early critique of the rise of consumer culture in the U.S., called the “performance principle.” We have disregarded and dismissed the consolidation of multinational interests around “performance,” McKenzie argues, in favor of discerning resistance in local, cultural performances. Working his way prismatically through Butler, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida, McKenzie argues that we have not only systematically ignored prevailing formations of “performance” but their usefulness in seeing and reimagining performance as “an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge.” In this light, performance strata above and below that of the nation-state, including inter- and transnational organizations such as the United Nations and the Global Reporting Initiative on the one hand, and small businesses and nongovernmental organizations on the other, become critical sites of alternative performance production. McKenzie’s detour through performance theory expands the terrain of potential performance resistance to include global networks, ultimately appropriating the threatening, organizational imperative “perform—or else” to the micro and macro levels of production it would otherwise eclipse.

McKenzie draws on the work of Judith Butler in his final reflections on how we might connect the study of global economic performativities with that of local, discrete, cultural performances. Butler haunts much of the work represented here, although perhaps none so pointedly as Rebecca Schneider’s “Never, Again.” Schneider’s essay is a performance in its own right. Naming it as such, I am calling attention not only to its temporalization of social and linguistic grammars, its evocation of the banality of horror, and its episodic structure, but also to its complex articulation of theory and scene in vexed moments of repetition.

Repetition has been repeatedly declared a definitive characteristic of performance. Performance is, for Richard Schechner, “restored behavior,” a repetition in heightened form of a “strip” of human behavior (Schechner, 2002, pp. 28–29). For Butler, it is that “stylized repetition of acts” that repeats itself into invisibility, making the performance seem natural, that is, not a performance at all (Butler, 1990, p. 140). In the end, for Butler, the ultimate trick of performance-as-repetition is to make itself disappear into the appearance of history as “given.” It is the performance of this trick, under pressure of disciplinary threat (perform—or else) that Butler calls “performativity.”

Repetition intrigues and goads Schneider. In “Never, Again,” as in related work (Schneider, 2001), Schneider recovers the performance in performativity—not impossibly wresting it from the networks of repetition in which it is embedded but enabling it to reappear as such in the concrete analysis of reiteration.

“Yesterday,” Schneider begins. Underscored, yesterday is the day that haunts today. Today (unmarked except by reference to what it is and is not: yesterday) is at once the day on which we are reading the essay and the day on which the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center twin towers occurs and is simultaneously represented. “First one, then the other,” Schneider writes. The fall of the first tower is repeated in the second. The collapse of both is then repeated in “replay upon replay” on TV. Whatever was original in the first televised glimpses of the attack becomes a ghost of simulation:

Sometimes the second tower was played first, then the first tower was played second. Oddly, as replay led to replay, as forward led to back, the image became only more incredible. The more it reappeared, the more it seemed as if we had missed it and needed to see it again, and each ‘again’ lent itself less to familiarity than to disbelief. The sense of “how to read” the image became increasingly unsettled with each repetition as the “already seen” began to partake of the uncanny union of overly familiar and impossibly strange. Perhaps the towers had never been there? Or, perhaps they had always been coming down and we had just refused to see it before now?

Time shifts. The apparent orderliness of an appalling history—“first one, then the other”—becomes more terrifying yet in its repetition. With each replay—again and again, forward to back—time itself seems to collapse into never and always: “Perhaps the towers had never been there? Or, perhaps they had always been coming down . . . ?” and yesterday becomes the “now” in which in which we seem to be seeing (as if) for the first time.

Immersed in the performance of repetition, Schneider parses the torment of time as it conspires with media replay to produce “a kind of violence of ambivalence.” Notably, Schneider does not “tour” the violence from a camera-safe distance but writes in and through the material, structural repetitions that compose our spectatorial “experience” of the terrorist attack. She performs in writing a “detour” that courses through the material formations of extra-canny events: watching Peter Jennings’s televised news report at a local coffee shop; teaching class in the wake of the first media blast, surrounded by the gossipy buzz of “have you heard?” (about what has already been and will be seen); the repetition of the father (Bush I) in the son (Bush II) in their respective declarations against repetition—“Never again”—that, in the repetition, invokes what was to have been “never” again; Gertrude Stein’s own literary performances of repetition, here performed as a variation on the kind of catharsis interruptus Schneider attributes to the media representation; a tactical diversion through the pages of Michel de Certeau’s renowned essay, “Walking in the City,” now perhaps most infamous for its representation of the twin towers as “the tallest letters in the world,” as a rhetorical figuration of the excess of consumer culture seen grandiloquently from “above,” raided, tricked, detoured from below.

The essay moves in precisely the way Schneider’s reading of de Certeau suggests our writing-performance of the world might: “in reading the detail as a practice, in play,” she argues, “we shift our focus to movement, to moving through, and in shifting to movement, change becomes not only possible but the condition of any myth of stasis (the monument’s secret).” Moving through, Schneider goes on theorizing. She challenges the monumentalism of ocular memory and its twin image in spectators moved to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Performance Studies at the Intersections
• PART I INTRODUCTION: PERFORMANCE TROUBLE
• PART II INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING HISTORY: A POLITICS OF LOCATION
• PART III INTRODUCTION: PERFORMANCE OF AND BEYOND LITERATURE
• PART IV INTRODUCTION: PERFORMANCE AND PEDAGOGY
• PART V INTRODUCTION: PERFORMANCE AND ETHNOGRAPHY, PERFORMING ETHNOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE ETHNOGRAPHY
• PART VI INTRODUCTION: PERFORMANCE AND POLITICS: THEMES AND ARGUMENTS
• Index
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors