But what, concretely, is this uncriticized ideology if not simply the “familiar”, “well-known”, transparent myths in which a society or an age can recognize itself (but not know itself), the mirror it looks into for self-recognition, precisely the mirror it must break if it is to know itself?Louis Althusser, For Marx1
I … still believe that it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text-and-language-bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons from the past … and still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused, as well as uniquely American.Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism2
Humanism, Drama, and Performance: Unwriting Theatre considers how the ideology of humanism appropriates theatre and theatrical performance, largely by privileging the textual dimension of dramatic writing, and how landmark texts of the disciplines of theatre, drama, and literary history echo this discrimination. Calling into question the humanist assumptions that regulate reflections on theatre, Humanism, Drama, and Performance analyzes that discourse in relation to three strains of ideological poiesis: literary, which segregates theatre and the practices of the spectacular from the function of the book and the internality of reading; dramatic, which approves the idiosyncratic capabilities of theatrical performance only to the extent that they instrumentalize literature; and theatrical, in which the medium of theatre is assimilated to the aestheticized conjunction of dramatic and liberal values, but only insofar as the “true ensemble” underwrites the political capacity of the public theatrical gathering, harmonizing actor, character, and spectator to the thematics of the drama.
In the evolution of the arts, literary humanism regards the theatre as superseded by literature, as incapable of realizing the readerly, individuated intimacy of the drama understood as literature. While literary humanism cannot avoid dramatic literature, it can avoid theatrical performance, treating the social, cultural, and spectacular means through which theatre takes public presence as extrinsic to the drama’s literary identity, as unable to materialize the drama’s literary potentiality as theatre. Excluded in literary humanism, theatre in dramatic humanism is subordinated to the faithful execution of literature and in theatrical humanism it is rendered as the licensed site of introspective interpretation incarnating the liberal motivation of drama, mediating humanity-as-poetics. In dramatic and theatrical humanism, the dramatic text embodies the anthropocentric qualifications through which the mise-en-scène is appropriated and resonates with a correlating humanity.
Theatre tempts the humanist imagination to produce notional audiences along a privileged binarism between the ensemble (an audience articulated as a supraindividual humanity prior to consciousness, inherent in the drama-as-word) and its nemesis, the assembly (an audience of rationalized individuals finding independent points of articulation within the liberal event of theatre). Figures for aesthetics and politics, the ensemble and the assembly are, though, to bring in Jacques Rancière’s reading of Plato’s Republic, “two interdependent forms of the same distribution, two spaces of heterogeneity,” which are “linked beneath themselves” and sequestered according to the “autonomy of the spaces reserved for art and its apparent contrary.”3 One of the dimensions of the humanist discourse on theatre has to do with how these potentialities are thematized, so that by the late eighteenth century the ensemble emerges as the “true” figure of the audience harmonized to and resonating with the conceptual humanity of the drama, an idealizing form of reception that casts the audience-as-assembly as illegitimate, the political other to the dramatic theatre’s defining aesthetic mission. The ensemble and the assembly, these incommensurable paradigms of cultural and political gathering, do not merely instantiate each other’s power; they also manifest the extent to which dualism relies on the performativity of separation by means of which the humanist conceit—the theatre—declasses its performative others, those desperately devalued performances and publics it devises to legitimize itself as irrevocable power.
As Edward W. Said’s posthumous Humanism and Democratic Criticism argues, humanism needs to confront its identitarian unanimities, it needs to be reconceived to engage with the implications of its global agenda, a self-critical aesthetic epistemology and history. Yet, while calling for a self-aware “cosmopolitan and text-and-language-bound” humanism, and critically approaching the methodology of Orientalism, “premised on the flawed nature of all representations and how they are intimately tied up with worldliness, that is, with power, position, and interests,” Said rather symptomatically overlooks that theatre provides him the mediating metaphor for the “flawed nature” of representation.4
Extending literary humanism’s principal exclusion by deploying theatre as a devalued echo of the literary, Humanism and Democratic Criticism carries forward the image of theatre Orientalism effectively appropriates. The Orient, according to Said’s analogy, “is the stage on which the whole East is confined,” embodying
figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe. An Orientalist is but the particular specialist in knowledge for which Europe at large is responsible, in the way that an audience is historically and culturally responsible for (and responsive to) dramas technically put together by the dramatist.5
Said’s theatre effectively registers a delusory practice, for the “dramas technically put together by the dramatist” are, like the language depicting the Orient, “not even trying to be accurate.” Indeed, the “figures” staged, measured, and controlled in the West’s gaze “are to the actual Orient” what “stylized costumes are to characters in a play,” clothing fictive personages for the consumption of the empowered spectator. Inasmuch as the “audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe,”6 this (in)humanity-as-theatre—epistemologically potent, yet spectatorially impotent—crystallizes its “passively, reactively, and dully”7 knowledge-absorbing readers as an ensemble, the antithesis to a critically engaged and democratically oriented readerly assembly.
Staging the systemic “moral and epistemological rigor”8 of intellectual and aesthetic colonialism through the vehicle of a notional theatre, Orientalism is contingent on an affective evocation of theatre as an essentially vitiating mode of (mis)representation, a mirror of self-reification which the West, to amplify Said through Louis Althusser, must “break if it is to know itself.”9 The discourse of orientalism theatricalizes the East; discourse on orientalism, despite arguing the Orient is free from the lumen naturale of Cartesian rationality, is nonetheless not free from an apposite blind spot, in that the register of its lux rationis, the light of reason, is motivated by the persuasive force of modern antitheatricalism. Said’s emphatically literary leanings validate his argument through the supposedly inconsequential use of (anti)theatrical metaphor and provide a pertinent example of how a self-consciously inclusive, perceptive, resistant, and democratic humanism derives its rhetorical power from packaging the seclusion of a cultural form—theatre—as a self-canceling image of consequential rationality. This image, as Humanism, Drama, and Performance suggests, nests not merely in postcolonial literary and drama studies but, somewhat counterintuitively, in theatre studies, inflecting performance-oriented theatre scholarship as well.
While theatre can be drained as a plausible cultural practice and subordinated to the cultural centrality of reading, “intellectual performances on many fronts, in many places, many styles that keep in play both the sense of opposition and the sense of engaged participation,”10 its figuration as nature, body, sensuousness can also be utilized to model the privileged practice of literary-humanist self-fashioning. Reflecting on “English-as-humanism,” Andy Mousley’s 2011 introduction to Towards a New Literary Humanism invokes theatrical experience as a determining metaphor of literary intimacy, without establishing a continuity between spectatorial and readerly exposure, summoning an antitheatrical attitude idiosyncratic to literary humanism. Emphasizing that “we attempt to work out who we are and what the significance of life might be” through books, Mousley represents literature as the instrument that “stages” and “intensifies” the “various problems and challenges of modernity,” enabling us—the readers—“to feelingly experience the question of the meaning and purpose of human life.” Reading is an “immersive experience,” an “‘affectively charged sensuousness’” sustained by the text’s “incarnation or embodiment of facts or ideas in characters.” Historically, immersion in theatrical spectacle has been seen to threaten the individual’s integrity, but immersion in reading, being engrossed in the virtual spectacle of the book, is understood to expand the cultural subject’s self-possession. Reading as a consolidating “form of emotional and sensuous immersion” assimilates and domesticates the “‘whole-person engagement’” of the theatrical encounter, so that the book “may transport us” and “may sometimes estrange us,” may expand and deepen our “cognitive/emotional/psychological repertoires.”11 Reading is mapped...