Performance and Cultural Politics

Elin Diamond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136165955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Performance and Cultural Politics is a groundbreaking collection of essays which explore the historical and cultural territories of performance, written by the foremost scholars in the field. The essays, exploring performance art, theatre, music and dance, range from Oscar Wilde to Eric Clapton; from the Rose Theatre to U.S. Holocaust museums. The topic includes:
* Sex Play: Stereotype, Pose and Dildo
* Grave Performances: The Cultural Politics of Memory
* Genealogies: Critical Performances
* Identity Politics: Passing, Carnival and the Law
In the concluding section, `Performer's Performance', performance artist Robbie McCauley offers the practitioner's perspective on performance studies.
Interdisciplinary, thought-provoking and rich in new ideas, Performance and Cultural Politics is a landmark in the emerging field of performance studies.

1

INTRODUCTION

In our simplest references, and in the blink of an eye, performance is always a doing and a thing done. On the one hand, performance describes certain embodied acts, in specific sites, witnessed by others (and/or the watching self). On the other hand, it is the thing done, the completed event framed in time and space and remembered, misremembered, interpreted, and passionately revisited across a pre-existing discursive field.¹ Common sense insists on a temporal separation between a doing and a thing done, but in usage and in theory, performance, even its dazzling physical immediacy, drifts between present and past, presence and absence, consciousness and memory. Every performance, if it is intelligible as such, embeds features of previous performances: gender conventions, racial histories, aesthetic traditions – political and cultural pressures that are consciously and unconsciously acknowledged. Whether the performance of ones gender on a city street, an orientalist impersonation in a Parisian salon, or a corporation-subsidized, “mediatized” Broadway show, each performance marks out a unique temporal space that nevertheless contains traces of other now-absent performances, other now-disappeared scenes.² Which is to say – and every essay in this anthology offers a compelling version of this saying - it is impossible to write the pleasurable embodiments we call performance without tangling with the cultural stories, traditions, and political contestations that comprise our sense of history.

Yet to invoke history, and to propose a “drift” between presence and absence, is not to hitch performance to an old metaphysics of presence – the notion that an absent referent or an anterior authority precedes and grounds our representations. In their very different ways the contributors to this anthology take up the postmodern assumption that there is no unmediated real and no presence that is not also traced and retraced by what it seems to exclude.³ Indeed, postmodern notions of performance embrace what Plato condemned in theatrical representation – its non-originality – and gesture toward an epistemology grounded not on the distinction between truthful models and fictional representations but on different ways of knowing and doing that are constitutively heterogeneous, contingent, and risky. Thus while a performance embeds traces of other performances, it also produces experiences whose interpretation only partially depends on previous experience. This creates the terminology of “re” in discussions of performance, as in reembody, reinscribe, reconfigure, resignify “Re” acknowledges the preexisting discursive field, the repetition - and the desire to repeat - within the performative present, while “embody,” “configure,” “inscribe,” “signify,” assert the possibility of materializing something that exceeds our knowledge, that alters the shape of sites and imagines other as yet unsuspected modes of being.

Of course, what alters the shape of sites and imagines into existence other modes of being is anathema to those who would police social borders and identities. Performance has been at the core of cultural politics since Plato sought to cleanse his republic of the contamination of histrionic display, from both performers and spectators. But contestations over censorship are just one manifestation of cultural politics. The essays in this book explore performances as cultural practices that conservatively reinscribe or passionately reinvent the ideas, symbols, and gestures that shape social life. Such rein-scriptions or reinventions are, inevitably, negotiations with regimes of power, be they proscriptive conventions of gender and bodily display (see Apter, Foster, Cohen, Schneider) or racist conventions sanctioned by state power (see Robinson, Dicker/sun, Roach, McCauley, Patraka). Viewing performance within a complex matrix of power, serving diverse cultural desires, encourages a permeable understanding of history and change. As Joseph Roach puts it, the “present” is how we nominate (and disguise) “the continuous reenactment of a deep cultural performance.” Critique of performance (and the performance of critique) can remind us of the unstable improvisations within our deep cultural performances; it can expose the fissures, ruptures, and revisions that have settled into continuous reenactment.

PERFORMANCE/THEATER

Because performance discourse, and its new theoretical partner, “performa-tivity,” are dominating critical discussion almost to the point of stupefaction, it might be helpful to historicize the term (and this book) in relation to debates with clearly defined ideological investments. Since the 1960s performance has floated free of theater precincts to describe an enormous range of cultural activity. “Performance” can refer to popular entertainments, speech acts, folklore, political demonstrations, conference behavior, rituals, medical and religious healing, and aspects of everyday life. This terminological expansion has been produced and abetted by a variety of theorists whose critique of the Enlightenment cogito as fully self-present cause them to view their own critical acts as performative - as indeterminate signifying “play” or as self-reflexive, non-referential “scenes” of writing. Moreover, because it appears to cut across and renegotiate institutional boundaries, as well as those of race, gender, class, and national identity, performance has become a convenient concept for postmodernism. It has also become a way for skeptics of postmodernism to excoriate what Raymond Williams has called our “dramatized” society, in which the world, via electronics, is recreated as a seamlessly produced performance.

This focus on performance has produced provocative debates among theater theorists about the political status of theater in relation to performance.⁴ Among early experimental groups like Beck and Malina’s Living Theater, Joseph Chaikin’s The Open Theater, Ed Bullins’s and Robert Macbeth’s New Lafayette Theater, Richard Schechner’s The Performing Garage, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theater; in journals like TDR {The Drama Review, formerly Tulane Drama Review) and Performing Arts Journal’, and in mid-1960s poststructuralist theorizing (Barthes on Brecht, Derrida on Artaud), performance came to be defined in opposition to theater structures and conventions. In brief, theater was charged with obeisance to the playwright’s authority, with actors disciplined to the referential task of representing fictional entities. In this narrative, spectators are similarly disciplined, duped into identifying with the psychological problems of individual egos and ensnared in a unique temporal-spatial world whose suspense, reversals, and deferrals they can more or less comfortably decode. Performance, on the other hand, has been honored with dismantling textual authority, illusionism, and the canonical actor in favor of the polymorphous body of the performer. Refusing the conventions of role-playing, the performer presents herself/himself as a sexual, permeable, tactile body, scourging audience narrativity along with the barrier between stage and spectator.⁵ Theater collectives of the 1960s were greatly influenced by Artaud and by experimentation across the arts. They and their enthusiastic theorists believed that in freeing the actor’s body and eliminating aesthetic distance, they could raise political consciousness among spectators and even produce new communal structures. In performance theory of the late 1970s, the group affirmation of “being there” tends to celebrate the self-sufficient performing instant. In performance theory of the 1980s, consciousness-raising drops away (totalizing definitions of consciousness are, after all, suspect).⁶ In line with poststructuralist claims of the death of the author, the focus in performance today has shifted from authority to effect, from text to body, to the spectator’s freedom to make and transform meanings.

Feminist performance criticism has been vitally sensitive to both sides of this debate. Feminists have wondered whether performance can forget its links to theater traditions, any more than, say, deconstruction can forget logocentrism. As Brecht understood, theater’s representation apparatus - with its curtains, trapdoors, perspectives, exits and entrances, its disciplined bodies, its illusorily coherent subjects, its lures to identification – might offer the best “laboratory” for political disruption, for refunctioning the tools of class and gender oppression.⁷ But feminists also know that highly personal, theory sensitive performance art, with its focus on embodiment (the body’s social text), promotes a heightened awareness of cultural difference, of historical specificity, of sexual preference, of racial and gender boundaries and transgressions. This dialectic has been a focusing element for performers and theorists who want both political consciousness-raising and “erotic agency,” the pleasure of transgressive desire.⁸ Without resolving this dialectic, we might observe that if contemporary versions of performance make it the repressed of conventional theater, theater is also the repressed of performance. Certainly powerful questions posed by theater representation – questions of subjectivity (who is speaking/acting?), location (in what sites/spaces?), audience (who is watching?), commodification (who is in control?), conventionality (how are meanings produced?), politics (what ideological or social positions are being reinforced or contested?) – are embedded in the bodies and acts of performers. To study performance is not to focus on completed forms, but to become aware of performance as itself a contested space, where meanings and desires are generated, occluded, and of course multiply interpreted. Such discussion helps situate this anthology’s relation to “performativity” and to cultural studies.

PERFORMATIVITY/PERFORMANCE

Poststructuralist conceptions of the human subject as decentered by language and unconscious desire, and postmodern rejections of foundational discourses (especially totalizing conceptions of gender, race, or national identity) have all made performance and performativity crucial critical tropes, whose related-ness I want briefly to explore. In a runner-up article to her ground-breaking Gender Trouble, Judith Butler uses performance to underscore the fictionality of an ontologically stable and coherent gender identity. Gender is rather a “stylized repetition of acts… which are internally discontinuous… [so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief.”⁹ Butler’s point is not that gender is just an act, but that gender is materially “performative": it “is real only to the extent that it is performed.”¹⁰ Performativity derives from J.L. Austin’s concept of the performative utterance which does not refer to an extra-linguistic reality but rather enacts or produces that to which it refers. This anti-essentialism pushes past constructionism. It’s not just that gender is culturally determined and historically contingent, but rather that “it” doesn’t exist unless it’s being done. And yet the intractable existence of the cultural ideologies of gender is marked by Butler in the word “repetition"; gender is the “stylized repetition of acts…” Or, put another way, the “act that one does, the act that one performs is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene.”¹¹ Gender, then, is both a doing – a performance that puts a conventional gender attributes into possibly disruptive play – and a thing done - a pre-existing oppressive category. It is a cultural apparatus that coerces certain social acts and excludes others across what Butler calls “culturally intelligible grids of an idealized and compulsory heterosexuality.”¹²

When being is de-essentialized, when gender and even race are understood as fictional ontologies, modes of expression without true substance, the idea of performance comes to the fore. But performance both affirms and denies this evacuation of substance. In the sense that the “I” has no interior secure ego or core identity, “I” must always enunciate itself: there is only performance of a self, not an external representation of an interior truth. But in the sense that I do my performance in public, for spectators who are interpreting and/or performing with me, there are real effects, meanings solicited or imposed that produce relations in the real. Can performance make a difference? A performance, whether it inspires love or loathing, often consolidates cultural or subcultural affiliations, and these affiliations might be as regressive as they are progressive. The point is, as soon as performativity comes to rest on a performance, questions of embodiment, of social relations, of ideological interpellations, of emotional and political effects, all become discussable.

Interestingly, in Butlers more recent Bodies That Matter, performativity moves closer to Derridean citationality, operating within a matrix of discursive norms, and further from discrete performances that enact those norms in particular sites with particular effects. For Butler, “cultural norms” materialize sex, not the body of a given performer, even though she wishes at the outset to pose the problematic of agency. Noting that performativity in Gender Trouble seemed to instantiate a humanist subject who could choose her gender and then perform it, Butler is careful here not to personify norms, discourse, language, or the social as new subjects of the body’s sentencing. Rather she deconstructively elaborates a temporality of reiteration as that which instantiates gender, sex, and even the body’s material presence. “There is no power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability,” ¹³ and again, “performativity is thus not a singular ‘act, ’ for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition.”¹⁴ Performance, as I have tried to suggest, is precisely the site in which concealed or dissimulated conventions might be investigated. When performativity materializes as performance in that risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing (a reiteration of norms) and a thing done (discursive conventions that frame our interpretations), between someone’s body and the conventions of embodiment, we have access to cultural meanings and critique. Performativity, I would suggest, must be rooted in the materiality and historical density of performance.

PERFORMANCE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Performance as rite, ritual, specialized play has always been a privileged locus of anthropological investigation. In this discourse, culture complexly enunciates itself in performance, reiterates values, reaffirms community, and creates, in Victor Turners words, sites of “liminality” with which to broach and resolve crises.¹⁵ In Turners concept of the “social drama” (encompassing breach–crisis–redress–outcome) and in Richard Schechner’s performance models, liminality both interrupts and sustains cultural networks, tending to reaffirm an organic model for the understanding of culture.¹⁶ Postmodern skepticism about all totalizing metanarratives challenges such descriptions. In the words of contemporary ethnographer James Clifford: “Twentieth-century identities no longer presuppose continuous cultures or traditions. Eve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Dedication
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• I Re-Sexing Culture Stereotype, pose, and dildo
• II Grave Performances The cultural politics of memory
• III Moving/Seeing
• IV Identity Politics
• V Performer/Performance
• Index