Performance: Recasting the Political in Theatre and Beyond (Stage and Screen Studies, V. 4)

Performance: Recasting the Political in Theatre and Beyond

Stephen Chinna

Peter Lang

Performance

S T S S S T A G E

a n d

V o l u m e

S C R E E N

S T U D I E S

4

E d i t e d b y K e n n e t h R i c h a r d s

PETER LANG Oxford

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Ber n

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Berlin

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Bruxelles

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Frankfur t/M.

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New York

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Wien

Stephen Chinna

Performance Recasting the Political in Theatre and Beyond

PETER LANG Oxford

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Bern

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Berlin

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Bruxelles

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Frankfur t/M.

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New York

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Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.ddb.de›. British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA

ISSN 1660-2560 ISBN 3-03910-000-9 US-ISBN 0-8204-5921-6

© Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2003 Hochfeldstrasse 32, Postfach 746, CH-3000 Bern 9, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany

Acknowledgements

The impetus for this book came from an ongoing interest in political theatre: what defined it, who defined it, and by what criteria was its efficacy measured. Equally strong elements in its gestation were my encounter with the conflictual discourses of modernism and postmodernism, with Marxist critiques of the latter being the strand I most often encountered as an undergraduate, and then postgraduate, at Murdoch University, Western Australia. These factors were underpinned by a practical involvement with theatre and performance, fuelled by my experience as an actor and director in a variety of theatre contexts. I would like to acknowledge the important roles that many people performed in the making of this text. I gratefully acknowledge the input of my then supervisor, Professor David E. R. George, during the gestation and production of an earlier version of this book as a Doctoral Thesis at Murdoch University, Western Australia; the discussion and feedback from colleagues and students – both past and present – at Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia; the people with whom I have had contact at Peter Lang for their useful and guiding feedback; and last, but never least, I acknowledge from my heart the ongoing love and support of Polly and Nick.

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Contents

Introduction

9

Chapter 1

Burying the Beast: Taming Postmodernism

17

Chapter 2

Dialectical Modernism

43

Chapter 3

Political and Theatrical Modernism

81

Chapter 4

What is Postmodernism?

109

Chapter 5

Performance in Postmodernism

133

Chapter 6

The Politics of Postmodern Performance

159

Conclusion

Ethics, Aesthetics, Différance

187

Bibliography

205

Index

217

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Introduction

Put broadly, the aims of this book are to analyse the distinctions (and their rationale) between postmodernism and modernism; to tease out the implicit, as well as explicit, implications of critical attacks on postmodernism; to show the strategic alignments between postmodern political practices and those of performance; and to show how deconstructive strategies are common to both. In short, it will be argued that postmodern performance practices and postmodern political movements share deconstructive strategies, and furthermore, that modernist ‘political theatre’ practices, like modernist politics, are constructed through a narrative – and thus teleological and eschatological – paradigm. Therefore, there is a need to recognize a performance paradigm for postmodernism – a paradigm that deconstructs fixed binary oppositions, narrative linearity, absolute closure and especially the unproblematic representation of a ‘real’ real. The justification for this argument rests on the interrogation of assumptions that would identify deconstructive strategies, postmodern political strategies and postmodern performance practices as politically non-effective – often categorized as ‘aesthetic’ and partial strategies, which cannot substitute for the epistemologies of modernism. Such epistemologies invariably rely on a metaphysical distinction between the prioritized binaries (or a dualistic episteme) of theory and practice, idea and achievement, text and performance, and so forth. While it might be argued that such distinctions, and arguments for and against the existence of a postmodern ‘episteme’ are no longer valid, it is evident that the dualisms of classical and modernist metaphysics are still operative and continue to have material effects in the spheres of politics, performance, academia, and beyond. Although postmodernism has noticeably been collectivized, categorized and defined in the terms of its critics and detractors – there is no ‘monolithic’ postmodernism. While postmodernism is comprised of a diversity of processes which can never be defined in

terms of achieved positions, an implied static positionality is invoked – necessarily – by its critics. This has the equally ‘necessary’ result of either reducing it to aesthetic effect, or subsuming its many manifestations into a linearly-constructed model that must eventually come to terms with its own aporias and becoming what is past, gracefully slide from the scene of critical/political discourse. Crucially, postmodern discourses operate as a process – a performative and deconstructive process that resists strict definition or achieved position; a ‘special’ dialectical process which does not search for syntheses that might set up yet another dialectic. Rather, in Derridean terms postmodernism defers the closure of the dialectic and remains open – practising différance. Postmodern oppositional practices are skewed towards a ‘solicitation’ in the Derridean sense,1 a ‘shaking’ of the ‘whole’, and focus on specific, contextually and temporally relevant issues or points of contention rather than aiming towards a transcendence, or a transgression, of monolithic value systems. Such specificity also works against the grounds of a transcendental and universalistic ethics – a theme implicitly raised throughout the book and engaged with in the conclusion. Postmodernism is not oppositional to any dominant in the sense of a non-reflexive dialectical relationship. It does not have a dialectical relationship with an ‘other’: rather a dialectic is carried on with itself, on its own terms and in the sense of a continuing redefinition. The critics of the postmodern can be categorized (a dangerous business, but one of their own invention) in terms of their nostalgia for such ‘bases’ as a pre-problematic ‘scientific Marxism’, a neatly dualistic modernism, a politically-adventurous avant-garde – or, in other words, a secure positionality from which to fire their missives. Of course, it can be contended that such positions were in themselves already betrayals: that modernism was ‘really’ dynamic and processual – not a rigid binarism; that the avant-gardes were really terroristic, not merely oppositional; and that postmodernism rescues the lost dynamism – the performance dynamics – of modernism. Nonetheless, 1

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Derrida uses the term ‘solicitation’ to suggest a ‘shaking’ – ‘in the sense that sollicitare, in old Latin, means to shake as a whole, to make tremble in entirety’. See ‘Différance’ in Margins of Philosophy, 21.

the performance dynamics of modernism were always already constrained by a fundamentally colonizing and stabilizing impulse. Postmodern discourses, on the other hand, aspire to no such stable positionality; recognizing – if not revelling in – transience, with a concomitant lack of nostalgia for that which has been and gone. They pillage the past, investigating and utilizing what works (in a specific context, at a particular time, for a specific purpose) and then reconfigure their discourses into process – without teleological determinants imposing a utopian, or dystopian, end: the noesis of activity against the noema of result.2 But, a caveat: whether in politics or performance, postmodernism does predict results – but understands that these can be only contingently predictive. Reception is the key, and the criteria for effectivity are always only partial and provisional. Postmodern discourses expose the fictivity of the secure place – the stable position from where the unified subject may experience the object of his or her perception. It is performance that shakes this duality – where between subject and object, cause and effect, transmission and reception, a deconstruction of binaries occurs, and the dualities of modernism can no longer operate with such surety. Postmodern discourses that are engaged with the implications of interventionist political practices which work against the totalizing gestures of such modernist political ‘master’ narratives as Marxism or Liberalism, take into account the strategies of deconstruction and the arguments of poststructuralism, especially if their particular political aims are not to be subsumed under totalizing rubrics of transcendental rationality or teleologically inspired closure – whether from ‘outside’ or ‘inside’. The same critiques that attempt to deny the effectivity of postmodern political practices underlie a critical agenda seeking to tidy up the messiness implied by the transience of ‘theatrical’ performance. While it can be videoed, and a specific performance frozen in its own space and time, the lack of regret for the ephemerality of performance on the part of its practitioners can invoke hostility. This is through nostalgia for the fixity of a text that can be repeated, in its materiality at least, to 2

See Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena (46–7). Derrida discusses Husserl’s use of noesis and noema, and their application to the ‘real’ and the ‘nonreal’ elements of sensory experience in terms of Husserl’s phenomenology.

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conditional infinity. This nostalgia for stability informs denigrations of both postmodernism and performance. The metaphysical closure/enclosure that a narrative totality constructs permeates the cultural/political discourses which still operate strongly under the modernist rubric – an aesthetics of unity and wholeness, of a teleologically inspired progression of means towards ends. What is desired is the capacity to finish the job at hand, which can then be hoarded for later use – for re-ingestion, regurgitation, re-interpretation, and the eventual canonisation of the past in a form of suffocating nostalgia for that which has been and may hopefully come again, as it was, now and for ever, world with an end. This eschatological strain of modernism prefigures similar early constructions of an apocalyptic strand of postmodernism – by its own proponents. While modernism implies a search for innovation – or the ‘new’ – that new is conditional on an implicit reverence for the old. Tradition is not dispensed with in modernism. Contrary to its celebration of a rupture with the past, tradition forms the necessary dialectical relationship against which modernism must define itself. The ‘old’ is laid into the museums of the modernist mind, to be disinterred at will and caressed once more for its difference from the ‘new’. Such nostalgia is parodied in postmodern practices – where the past is paraded, to be inspected and utilized, or discarded if not useful at that particular time and for a specific purpose. The linear model of modernist time and the expanding and evenly segmented grid of modernist space are deconstructed in and through postmodern discourses and postmodern performance. While the present can exist only in relation to definitions of past and future in the modernist paradigm, and the margins can only exist in relation to the centre, postmodern discourses affirm the shifting boundaries between these categories. Space and time shift and merge, depending on their contextual vagaries. Context is vitally important here, for such a paradigm cannot be imposed for all times and on all places. Performance, like postmodernism, must necessarily escape universalization. Implicitly throughout, but particularly in the conclusion, it shall be argued that the political performativity of postmodernism is based on an aesthetics of desire. Its terms of effectivity are tempered by an awareness of intersubjectivity that cares for the same-in-the-other, the 12

other-in-the-same – that sees the experience and the event as that which defines subject/object relations. It keeps its eye on the chiasmus between those dualities, playing in the space between all metaphysical oppositions. In short, performance is the deconstructive strategy par excellence. Performance is différance made manifest. Between transmission and reception, between idea and achievement, between cause and effect, as with the theatre/performance discourse of process versus product, there lies the chiasmus. Postmodern strategies of performance and politics share the recognition of this gap – and the liberating space of play between polarities. In Chapter One, I invoke a number of critics of postmodernism to argue that the criteria by which they define (and invariably denigrate) it are based on modernist and Marxist models. Thus, positions that put postmodernism as a reaction to modernism, or as a periodizing and historically transitional phase, or as a manifestation of late capitalism, among others, are critiqued in this chapter, as with the perception that postmodernism lacks the coherent and effective strategies of modernist political structures. Here, Marxist critics are addressed – and countered – using selected perspectives and invoking Lyotard’s ‘Ideas of Reason’ and Calinescu’s arguments concerning ‘theatricality’, ‘Idols of the Theatre’, and ‘mythological scripts’. In Chapter Two, I analyse modernist performance and theatre practice and the modernist quest for an underlying ‘real’. The performance practices of the modernist avant-gardes are invoked, with a principal focus on Dada and its self-reflexivity in respect of its own co-optation. It is argued that the modernist avant-gardes were always trapped within the dialectic of representation and the ‘real’ in their quest for a merging of art and life. Neo-avant-garde performance practices, from the 1950s onwards, fall into a similar abyss with their prioritizing of the flip-sides of binaries such as those of absolute presence, the essential body, and so forth. Hence, I look at arguments concerning subversive versus transgressive strategies in performance, which prefigure the deconstructive practices of postmodern performance in their recognition of the inability to stand ‘outside’ the context and cultural practices of the societies they inhabit. Chapter Three analyses modernist political theatre, as selflabelled and invariably allied to left-wing politics. Some practitioners 13

are analysed in terms of their political context, such as Meyerhold and Piscator, with obvious reference to Brecht. I argue that the dialectical determinism and utopian dreams of much modernist political theatre were no match for more determined and politically pragmatic oppositions such as German National Socialism and Stalinist policies in Soviet Russia. I then look at 1960s ‘guerrilla theatre’ – in particular the political performance practices of the Yippies whom I argue were similarly trapped in a binary of the either/or with their utopian dreams of total revolution. In Chapter Four, postmodernism is defined (as much as it can be) on what I argue are its own terms. Here, postmodernism is construed as neither a reaction nor dialectical response to modernism; nor the latest manifestation of the avant-gardes; nor a movement or a style. Rather, it side steps the rules of the game as set out by its modernist and Marxist critics. The focus shifts to postmodernism as a deconstructive strategy. Hence the major argument invoked in this chapter is a Derridean reading of postmodernism. Thus play, undecidability, between-ness, différance, and iterability are explored in relation to postmodernism. The chapter then addresses the postmodern political, analysing tactics such as those theorized by Laclau and Mouffe – among others – with their invocations of specificity and contextuality. Political action is re-theorized from postmodern perspectives rather than by modernist criteria. Hence, postmodernism is defined in terms of a performance model – it is what it ‘does’, rather than being some ‘thing’ that ‘is’. In Chapter Five, I analyse the relationship between postmodern performance and postmodern political strategies with their joint recognitions of contingency and specificity, their strategic ephemerality, and their self-reflexive interrogation of their own forms and purposes. The question of representation and its relation to a putative real is addressed here, invoking Derrida on Artaud and Owens on representation and power. A sustained critique of classical representation is effected with examples from the work of Robert Wilson, and feminist performance art, among others. Issues of absolute presence and the essentialized body raised in Chapter Two are revisited. Furthermore, improvisation, transience, adaptability and deferral of closure are addressed as key factors in postmodern performance and politics, as is 14

a deconstructive recognition of the impossibility of finding an outside to representation, and the ‘real’. In Chapter Six, I explore the shifts from class-based political issues to those of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and so forth, which have led to a recognition of diverse, specific struggles circumscribed by particular contexts. Hence, the often didactic, single-issue, classbased thrust of modernist political theatre has split into a multiplicity of specific-interest issues. After discussing the work of Augusto Boal, whom I argue is representative of a practitioner who straddles both modernist and postmodernist epistemological and performance positions with his notion of spect-actor interactions in political performances, I analyse the criteria of critics who condemn postmodern performance for its perceived apoliticism, or conservative and reactionary tendencies. I argue that these critics, like those of postmodernism addressed in Chapter One, are operating from modernist criteria in terms of what constitutes effective political theatre. Here, I address questions of efficacy, and the undecidability of their assessment. I then argue that certain modes of performance art, and the political performances of Greenpeace, for example, blur that demarcation between ‘theatre of a political nature’ and ‘politics of a theatrical nature’ – to use Joel Schechter’s terms.3 I also address that vexatious concern of the historical avant-gardes – the wished-for integration of art and life. I conclude the chapter with the argument that postmodern performance – in its recognition of the specific and the contextual, in its disavowal of a belief in ‘grand narratives’ of transcendence and eschatology, and in its strategies of différance – is always ‘political’ in its playing between the binaries of both representation and the ‘real’. In the Conclusion, a deconstruction of the binary of order and chaos is invoked in order to argue that postmodernism is not a secure place but rather inhabits the ‘in-between’ of those formalistic divisions. Postmodernism has a dialectical relationship with itself, and reading Levinas through Derrida, différance-as-performance can be invoked for an aesthetics of care and re-cognition – of the self-in-theother / the other-in-the-self. Hence ethics and aesthetics are redefined 3

Schechter, Durov’s Pig, 202.

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in postmodernism – the former as grand narrative, the latter as a performed ‘ethical’ practice constrained by specificity and context. That Levinasian re-cognition forms a counter to an ‘anything goes’ reading of aesthetics as a performed practice which is not reliant on an underpinning ethics. Invoking the notion of alterity in media performance, and the notion that performers – like Derrida, like Boal, like Meyerhold, et al – are ‘troublemakers’, I conclude with the argument that postmodern performance presents a ‘realism’ aware of its own entrapment within cultural and therefore aesthetic/political discourses, and thus it can be interpreted as the principal paradigm for the practices of a deconstructive postmodernism and its politics.

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Chapter One Burying the Beast: Taming Postmodernism

So much has been written and spoken about in relation to the postmodern, postmodernism, and postmodernity; perhaps more than enough for many. For them, either the moment has arrived and been successfully integrated; or, it is now past and we can resume business as usual; or, it never amounted to much anyway, so why bother still to kick it around? However, while some may argue that other, more pressing, discourses deserve their turn in the academic and cultural arenas, postmodernism still has strong resonances, in the diversity of discursive positions on feminism, postcolonialism, and queer theory, to name but some of the more prominent players. Much remains to be discussed, and besides, the notion of a use-by date for postmodernism is very much a part of a modernist paradigm with its desire to move on to the next ‘new’ thing. Critics of postmodernism have used, and continue to use, a variety of analytic methodologies to explain it away. This can be in terms of its existence as a response to late capitalism; as a non-reflexive collapse into yet another (postmodern) totality; as a depthless parodic betrayal of all that a Marxist-inspired avant-garde fought for; as a simulacrum machine gone mad, and so forth. But, these criticisms are informed by a nostalgia that assails them in their urge to categorize in order to castigate the beast that supposedly threatens them. Such critics often lapse into a prescriptive language of categorical ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ which display the fears that postmodern discourses engender, and thereby show up that desire for a return to a fixed positionality of epistemological and ontological certainty. The title of a long essay published in 1991 by John Frow – What was Postmodernism? – exemplifies the oppositional field to postmodernism, encapsulating a classic Marxist – and ‘end of history’ – desire for the control, and hopefully the closure, of the discourses of

postmodernism.1 The title is symptomatic of that sense of relief experienced by the critics of postmodernism, who can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and get back to business as usual. That ‘business’ is, of course, the serious, politically legitimate one of defining the cultural in terms of its relation to the socio-economic, and the socio-political in terms of its capacity to change through a determinate and teleological model of historical materialism. Frow, in what has been described as his ‘brilliant and furious attempt to wrestle postmodernism to the ground’,2 answers his own question: postmodernism is ‘nothing more and nothing less than a genre of theoretical writing’ (3). One problem with postmodernism (and it is often defined in terms of a problem) is that it ‘casually junks a whole tradition of radical negativity, the gamble on an absolute and rigorous commitment to critique, that was at stake in the dynamic of modernist change’ (38).3 While Frow’s title implies a moving beyond, a strategic shift into a position of gazing back upon an era now past, his essay gnaws away at the question of the ‘is’ of postmodernism. Although ‘logically incoherent’ for two main reasons, those of exemplification and periodization, it still resists its own disappearance – in his own text. Concerning exemplification, Frow sees the ‘literature on postmodernism’ as being ‘notorious for its contradictory assumptions, rarely made explicit, about what is contained in the set of the postmodern’, giving either ‘almost no examples’ or being ‘so overinclusive as to blur all boundaries’ (9). Instead, ‘the definition of the concept shifts with the objects taken to exemplify it’, and ‘What replaces any rigorous practice of exemplification is the list, which is characterised by arbitrariness and eclecticism’ (10). Periodization is problematic in terms of both its temporality and its content. As Frow writes: ‘In both of these cases the problem is dependent upon the prior 1 2 3

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Frow, What was Postmodernism? Further references to this text are by page number. Denzin, ‘Where has postmodernism gone?’, Cultural Studies 7.3 (Oct. 1993), 507. Frow is referring in particular to ‘the time of postmodernism’, pointing out that Iain Chambers, in Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience, makes a distinction between modernist time – with its accent on the ‘new’ – and postmodern time – or an ‘uninterrupted montage of the “now”’ (38).

question of the dating of modernism, and then more broadly the dating of the modern and of capitalist modernity’ (12). Nonetheless, the ‘very persistence of the word, however irritating this may be, seems to indicate that something is at stake’ (8). The point that ‘something is at stake’ might explain why, perhaps other than for reasons of nostalgia or a wish for ‘dynamic’ change, there is a desire to bury it, co-opt it, or move beyond it. Indeed, as Craig Owens so perceptively pointed out: ‘What is at stake, then, is not only the status of narrative, but of representation itself. For the modern age was not only the age of the master narrative, it was also the age of representation’.4 It could be argued that the moment is indeed past, that postmodernism does have a ‘use-by’ date – especially from the perspective of critics locked into a modernist dynamic of innovation and the search for the ‘new’. As Gianni Vattimo wrote: ‘Much is said about postmodernity nowadays. So much, in fact, that it has become almost obligatory to distance oneself from the notion, to see it as a fad and to insist on its having been overcome’.5 Overcome by what? What replaces ‘postmodernity’ if it is implied that everyone is bored with it, or that postmodernism’s use-value as a contestatory discourse has become obsolete, retaining only its exchange-value as a straw target in academic journals? This would be to deny those that may still benefit from the spaces opened by the discourses of postmodernism, in particular the diverse range of feminist and postcolonial discourses, among others. While its reception, whether positive or negative, is often ambivalent, such ambivalence is a characteristic of, and is a necessary part of, postmodern discourses. Negative evaluations of postmodernism can be made positive, however, if the criteria that define that negativity are examined. Furthermore, those criteria that seemed stable and immutable in a discursive practice such as Marxism have fragmented – although it must be recognized that such modernist discourses were themselves only ever fictive in their dreams of totalization.

4 5

Owens, ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’, in Beyond Recognition, 175. Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 1.

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In his critique of the models of postmodernism put forward by Fredric Jameson and Jochen Schulte-Sasse,6 Frow argues convincingly that to accept the notion that postmodernism is now the dominant ‘cultural’ discourse, even if only as the logical outcome of the pre-eminence of a multinational political economy which it reflects, is to fall into a ready acceptance of the terms of the debate, where an either/or dichotomic dialectic still holds sway. That is, postmodernism must be the ‘cultural logic’ of late capitalism – as it forms a necessary dialectical relationship with the dominant base that informs it. As Frow argues, a leading tactic of critics of postmodernism has been either to set up a model of a dialectical relationship between it and a cohesively constructed modernism, or else posit a classical Marxist base–superstructure relationship between cultural postmodernism and socio-economic postmodernity. Hence postmodernism, as either cultural expression or dialectical reaction, can be read off a fixed model to track, chart, and map the differences as well as the similarities with its dialectically constructed dominant partner. Frow recognizes that such models are retrospectively constructed. As Malcolm Bradbury has pointed out, specifically in relation to the modernist avant-garde, but equally applicable to Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism (as well as postmodernism), there is a need to ‘impose [...] a model of stylistic coherence, a notion of an aesthetico-historical realization’.7 As Bradbury argues, ‘modernisms’ are composed of a stylistic pluralism, but the urge to incorporate ‘contradictions and counteractions’ into singular stylistic categories serves as a strategy to historicize, and therefore periodize, particular periods.8 Frow points out this urge to periodize, and the strategies it entails, specifically in the temporality of the construction of historical blocks where ‘the internal synchronic necessity of such blocks tends to be derived from a narrative teleology’ (11). In other 6

7 8

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Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review 146 (July–Aug. 1984), 53–92; Schulte-Sasse, ‘Modernity and Modernism, Postmodernity and Postmodernism: Framing the Issue’, Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986–7), 5–22. Bradbury, ‘Modernisms/Postmodernisms’, in Innovation/Renovation, ed. Hassan and Hassan, 315. Bradbury, 315.

words, a chronologically dialectical relationship requires the construction of, and a prior dating of, that with which the model is to be compared. It can be argued that postmodernism, if defined as a temporal category (that is, as ‘after-the-modern’), cannot avoid periodization. Furthermore, it is difficult to escape the ‘fact’ that there is a discursive temporal affinity which postmodernism shares with deconstruction as well as with postmodern political strategies. But that need to define postmodernism (or, for that matter, modernism) in terms of its particular historical moment assumes only one model of history – the familiar linear model of development, innovation, and progress – the one shared by the modernist discourses of both Liberalism and Marxism. It is not the only possible model: indeed, postmodernism has also been defined as coexistent with the modern and modernism. Lyotard, for example, has argued that postmodernism ‘is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’.9 Elsewhere, he warns that the term ‘postmodern’ invokes the notion of ‘periodization’ and therefore, ‘is probably a very bad term’. For Lyotard, periodizing ‘is still a “classic” or “modern” ideal. “Postmodern” simply indicates a mood, or better, a state of mind’.10 This ‘state of mind’ will be expanded on in chapter four; for now the strategy is clear – and exposes its own limitations: postmodernism can be effectively contained if forced into a modernist view of history, which, notwithstanding its own self-critique, can be interpreted primarily as one of dialectical reaction and linearly temporal development. Such periodizing of the ‘postmodern’ dominated the chronological overviews of the emergence of postmodernism, and has been amply covered by numerous critics.11 However, whether positive or negative towards postmodernism, most brought their own 9 10 11

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 79. Lyotard, ‘Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix’, Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986–7), 209. See, for example, Huyssen, ‘Mapping the Postmodern’, in After the Great Divide, 178–240; Best and Kellner, ‘In Search of the Postmodern’, in Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, 1–33.

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modernist and hence dualistic agendas to bear on the debate. Sociological accounts tended to focus on the socio-economic, while the cultural theorists trained their sights on the artefacts of what would formerly have been defined as the aesthetic sphere, even while often bemoaning its collapse into mass consumerism. Most, however, either nonreflexively or deliberately, worked with the sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, remnants of a base–superstructure model – which, when reversed, would argue that the cultural now determines the economic. This, once again, steps into that binary which assumes a separation between all facets of what are often seen as, arguably, two separate ‘spheres’ – the one directly informing the other, rather than recognizing, as Frow certainly does, ‘any more complex causality’ (14). Hence, there were those critiques which attempted to track category differences between the ‘ism’ and the ‘ity’, between the cultural and the socio-economic; the former, as Frow notes, often constructed as a ‘manifestation’ of the latter. For Frow: ‘Manifestations’ gets it quite wrong because it sets up a mechanically causal relation between a primary and an epiphenomenal realm, and thereby leaves no room for discontinuity or any more complex causality. (14)

Frow provides, instead, a model of ‘three conceptual moments’: those of modernism (an adversary aesthetic culture); of modernization (an economic process with social and cultural implications); and of modernity (which overlaps with the modernization process, but which I understand as a philosophical category designating the temporality of the post-traditional world). (16)

For Frow, on the ‘ontological level’ the same distinction ‘holds good, mutatis mutandis, for postmodernism, postmodernization, and postmodernity’ (16). Therefore, in this argument, postmodernity is (and must be) a philosophical-cum-temporal category defined in opposition to or in a dialectical relationship with, modernity. Nonetheless, as Jochen Schulte-Sasse advises, such terms as modernism/modernity and postmodernism/postmodernity, however they are employed, should be used ‘as analytical categories apprehending features of and

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differences between societies and cultures’.12 Furthermore, he warns that the positionality of the analyst needs to be self-comprehended – that is: one needs to ask whether the analysis is undertaken from a modernist standpoint, utilizing the codes of modernism, and trying to stand ‘above or outside a system’, or whether there is already an acceptance of postmodern discourses which non-reflexively, or deliberately, inform the theorist.13 One might go further and ask how much the discourses of postmodernism have themselves affected the constructions of modernism, especially considering the difficulty, or impossibility, of standing ‘above or outside a system’. If, as Frow argues, ‘the concept of the postmodern responds to a narrative necessity’ (19) then the question must be asked: what constitutes a ‘narrative necessity’? As Frow writes: ‘In its determination to succeed modernism, however, it corresponds entirely to a modernist logic’ (19). The tactic is transparent: Frow, like so many others, has set up his own model of postmodernism in order to nullify it. (Rather, to be honest, as I will set up my model in order to utilize it.) He shows how postmodernism is constructed in all its ‘logical incoherence’; he then shows how modernism is constructed in terms of a narrative, salvational model, particularly by Lyotard; he then reveals the duplication of these models constructed through binary opposition – to reach a point where postmodernism takes on the character of a ‘discursive necessity’, and modernism, in its desire to be superseded, is overtaken and replaced by its chronological successor – postmodernism. It is no wonder that his model assumes a narrative necessity – it is constructed so as to be inevitable in his paradigm. But, taking into account his own pertinent warnings against collapsing the parts into a whole, or committing the postmodern error of fusing the ‘spheres of crisis’,14 I shall focus on a particular interpretation. This 12 13 14

Schulte-Sasse, ‘Modernity and Modernism’, 6. Schulte-Sasse, ‘Modernity and Modernism’, 20. Frow defines these ‘spheres of crisis’ as follows: ‘Briefly, they take the form of the crisis of an obsolescent modernism; a crisis of political representation; a crisis of representation in general, bound up with the commodification and the proliferation of information; a crisis of intellectual production and of the social function of the class of intellectuals; and a crisis of the economy of cultural values, in particular of the relations between high and low culture’ (41–2).

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entails setting out my model of what constitutes modernist politics. Furthermore, what will be explored is how this relates to a scientific Marxist model (as an exemplum of modernist politics), and how that ‘narrative necessity’ (which is paradigmatic of a Marxist political programme) fuels their attacks on the postmodern disruption of a determinate linearity. Such a ‘knowing’ disruption is, as I shall argue, paradigmatic of postmodern discourses. A key element in Marxist critiques of postmodern discourses was – and still is – centred on the presumed lack of an effective or coherent political programme. There is a relatively long history (in terms of postmodernism’s fairly recent appearance) to what Huyssen termed ‘the thrashing of the 1960s’ – where, then as now, the ‘left’s ridiculing of postmodernism was of a piece with its often haughty and dogmatic critique of the counter-cultural impulses of the 1960s’.15 This raises the question of the criteria by which Marxism constructs a ‘coherent’ political programme, and furthermore, within the paradigm of modernism, of what constitutes the theoretical underpinnings of an ‘effective’ political programme. It is surely unnecessary to recapitulate at length the now standard equation: modernism equals grand narratives. Nonetheless, what always underpins modernist political programmes is a narrative form of politics – bearing in mind that narrative, in this sense, implies an internally logical set of determined events leading to eventual closure. Modernist political programmes are based, in the main, on ideological master discourses, almost all having their relatively recent foundations in the post-Enlightenment discourses of Liberalism and Marxism. There is a common ‘history’ to them, whereby the social is constructed through external and extradiscursive forces – whether they be God, Nature, Spirit, the necessary dialectical laws of history, the flow of capital, and so forth – with the unitary subject ‘subjected’ to and formed by a particular strategic selection of the above. Such programmes are characterized by a dialectically and teleologically determinate movement towards growth-oriented planning and production. This, furthermore, potentially leads towards a ‘utopian’ future better life that therefore necessitates the postponement

15

24

Huyssen, 199.

of the present, as well as, implicitly and explicitly, of pleasure in the present. Such programmatic political systems are governed by notions of objectivity, resolution and an often-assumed majority consensus, which will lead inevitably towards eventual stability and social harmony. But the hierarchical structures of such systems, as well as the unavoidable tensions set up by a certain theoretical and practical rigidity, ensure that the attainment of this putative social totality must be through disciplined controls as the means to guarantee that harmony. Modernist political programmes, whether of the Left or the Right, work by intimidation through varying degrees of what Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher have termed a dictatorial (explicit) and/or a paternalistic (implicit) patriarchal ‘force’. Invoking a problematic appeal to the universal, they write: The explicit use of force implies dictatorship, the implicit use of force implies paternalism. Both dictatorship and paternalism contradict the universal values of freedom and life, the universal norms ‘equal freedom for all’ and ‘equal lifechances for all’, even if not to the same degree. To live up to these norms requires a just procedure. A procedure is just if everyone concerned with an institution, social arrangement, law and the like participates in a rational discourse concerning the rightness or justice of such institutions, arrangements and laws.16

This universalist master narrative ensures that the ‘good of all’ shall be attained in the future through sacrifice in the present; that ends shall justify means; and that forward planning and rational decisionmaking shall be the guidelines towards the eventual formulation of this ‘better’ society. Whether of the Left or the Right, a future society will be theorized on what Ernesto Laclau describes as the ‘great myths of emancipation, universality and rationality’.17 Modernist political programmes invoke transcendental justifications for their existence and practice. By invoking such rationales as a higher Justice, a transcendental Ethics, and a unified Subjectivity, the overt machinery of civil law and a less explicit coercive morality can be applied to the 16 17

Heller and Feher, The Postmodern Political Condition, 87. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 216.

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‘individual subject’ – the subject constructed as a character (or an ‘extra’, and, at times, ‘spear-carrier’) in the teleological dramatic narrative of modernist politics.

Marxism and Postmodernism Marxism was exemplary of such modernist agendas, and it is no surprise therefore that many of the leading critics of postmodernism, particularly in the flurry of published titles in the early to mid-1980s, focused on their object from the position of critical Marxist theory. While the ‘condition’ was generally acknowledged, a sometimes desperate reaction-cum-rearguard action was clearly taking place. The 1984 publication, in translation, of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, as well as certain seminal essays (in particular, Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’), prompted a rash of journal activity, with several devoting entire issues to the debate.18 Jameson’s 1984 essay defined its stance in the title, leading to that still ongoing discourse on the Marxist reduction of ‘cultural’ postmodernism to being nothing more than a reflection of the political economy of multinational late capitalism – a trend carried on in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity. Similarly, Terry Eagleton’s fulminations against what he saw as the ‘depthless, styleless, dehistoricized, decathected surfaces of postmodernist culture’19 and its betrayal of the aims of the ‘historical’ avant-garde, fuelled a debate that split along the now classic lines of either bitter denigration or facile celebration, with a struggling middle-ground which set out to explore the possibilities opened up by the challenges generated by the debates on postmodernism. Underlying these debates was a central 18

19

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Special issues that focused on postmodernism were, among others: New German Critique 33 (Fall 1984); Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986–7); Theory, Culture and Society 5.2–3 (June 1988). Eagleton, ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism’, New Left Review 152 (July–Aug. 1985), 61.

and crucial focus – the ongoing discussion centring on the practical and/or potential effectivity of a ‘postmodern’ politics. That is, how could the ‘depthless’ discourses of postmodernism have the political credentials and credibility of a committed Marxist project – a project underpinned by the grand narrative, the ‘master’ narrative, of a perhaps deformed Marxism? It is this issue that lies behind that desire to impose a narrativistic and hence teleological structure on ‘postmodern’ politics, rather than recognizing an alternative: the ‘performance’ factor which, as I shall argue later, informs the strategies of postmodern political practices. Marxist writings on postmodernism centred around a critique of its lack of an epistemological base and, by implication, its lack of an effective and coherent political programme – on Marxist terms. Nonetheless, as Douwe Fokkema writes concerning the ambivalence of Marxist responses to postmodernism: Marxist and leftist critics will welcome it as long as it serves to undermine the métarécit of capitalism or of justice in the Western world; but as soon as Postmodernism challenges their own myth of exploitation and suppression, it must be curtailed or, at least, be relegated to the realm of ineffective playfulness.20

While Jameson’s 1984 essay occasioned much critical comment, chiefly in terms of its perceived Marxist reduction of the cultural to an expression of the socio-economic, it has been argued that his reductionism is tempered by a willing usage of the terms and conditions of postmodernist discourse, and a recognition of some of postmodernism’s positive traits in the aesthetic ‘sphere’ – for example, Jameson’s ‘appreciation for some of the styles invented or practiced [sic] by artists whom he regards as postmodern’.21 However, Jameson’s critique did not escape censure from other Marxist-oriented critics. Huyssen pointed out that ‘the wholesale writing off of postmodernism as a symptom of capitalist culture in decline is reductive, 20

21

Fokkema, ‘Concluding Observations: Is There a Future for Research on Postmodernism?’, in Exploring Postmodernism, ed. Calinescu and Fokkema, 234. Calinescu, ‘Introductory Remarks: Postmodernism, the Mimetic and Theatrical Fallacies’, in Exploring Postmodernism, 13.

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unhistorical and all too reminiscent of Lukacs’ attacks on modernism in the 1930s’.22 For Warren Montag, a reductive and totalizing strategy was at the core of Marxist critiques, whether from Jameson, Lyotard, or Perry Anderson: Thus Lyotard can write the metanarrative of the end of metanarratives in politics, art, criticism, philosophy and science in a mere eighty pages. In the same way, Anderson asserts the rapid rise and fall of structuralism and poststructuralism in linguistics, psychoanalysis, philosophy and politics in a text of approximately the same length.23

Both Calinescu and Montag castigated Jameson for clinging to a reductive, or even ‘vulgar’ Marxist scenario – Calinescu in order to point out the suffocating effects of master narratives, or ‘theatrical fallacies’, Montag in order to initially defend postmodernism against its Marxist critics. For Montag, ‘irreducibly divergent forces’ had joined in their attack on postmodernism, ‘objectively united to force knowledge back to the domain deemed proper to it by the established theoretical order’ (88). The purposes of this unity were twofold: For Marxists, the task is not only to strike out at this counter-offensive against the principles of historical materialism, but equally to understand why it now occupies a privileged position in theoretical debate. (88)

Nonetheless, for Montag postmodernism, with its emphasis on the ‘end’ of things, shows its own limits – an inability to deal with the present, which only Marxist theory with its creed of historical materialism has the credentials to handle. Montag thus manages to save Marxism from postmodernism, but at the same time points out the dangers of reductive, totalizing arguments from the Left, which, both in constructing Marxism as a metanarrative, and postmodernism as a metanarrative which has purportedly abolished metanarratives, are ‘not only painting themselves into a corner but out of the picture entirely’ (96). Postmodernism is seen as yet another grand narrative in 22 23

28

Huyssen, 199. Montag, ‘What is at Stake in the Debate on Postmodernism?’, in Postmodernism and its Discontents, ed. Kaplan, 91. Further references to this text are by page number.

its ‘totalizing, transcendental pretensions’ and its ‘claim to be the end of all crises, the end of all narratives, the end of resistance and revolutionary transformation’ (102). But for Montag, Marxism needs to recognize its role as a means of intervening in the present rather than staking its ontological rationale on any metanarrative such as those based on transcendental illusion or teleological certitude: For there is no metanarrative, no transcendentality. We act within a specific conjuncture only to see that conjuncture transformed beneath our feet, perhaps by our intervention itself, but always in ways that ultimately escape our intention or control, thereby requiring new interventions ad infinitum. (102)

That this might constitute a recognition of some ‘post-Marxist’ contingent positionality – as exemplified, for example, in the writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe24 – is an implication I shall discuss in chapter four; for now, as Montag writes concerning the status of metanarratives: ‘the fact that many philosophies (including tendencies in Marxism) have imagined themselves to be meta-narratives does not make the fantasy true’ (95). On the other hand, it is important to note that although metanarratives may be fictions, they still function, existing as the ideological ‘commonsense’ underpinning material forms of power and repression regardless of a postmodern (and even Marxist) exposure of their fictivity. Marxists were, of course, not the only critics of postmodernism. As Roy Boyne and Ali Rattansi remarked in the ‘Introduction’ to Postmodernism and Society: much radical thought, particularly among Marxists and feminists, still holds that the widespread hegemony of capitalist and/or patriarchal values still functions as total ideology which stands in need of opposition, demystification and dismantling.25

Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson took objection to Lyotard’s jettisoning of the ‘grand narratives of legitimation’, particularly as they relate to social criticism or ‘for critique of broad-based relations 24 25

In particular, see Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Boyne and Rattansi, eds., Postmodernism and Society, 15.

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of dominance and subordination along lines like gender, race, and class’.26 Focusing in particular on gender inequalities, their argument is concerned with the rejection of a social theory large enough to cover the discursive fields of male domination. As they write: It requires, at minimum, large narratives about changes in social organization and ideology, empirical and social-theoretical analyses of macrostructures and institutions, interactionist analyses of the micropolitics of everyday life, criticalhermeneutical and institutional analyses of cultural production, historically and culturally specific sociologies of gender… The list could go on.27

Sabina Lovibond also pointed out the difficulties that feminist theories have with the renunciation of grand narratives as well as the call for the end of the ‘project of modernity’: What, then, are we to make of suggestions that the project has run out of steam and that the moment has passed for remaking society on rational, egalitarian lines? It would be only natural for anyone placed at the sharp end of one or more of the existing power structures (gender, race, capitalist class ...) to feel a pang of disappointment at this news. But wouldn’t it also be in order to feel suspicion? How can anyone ask me to say goodbye to ‘emancipatory metanarratives’ when my own emancipation is still such a patchy, hit-and-miss affair?28

Nonetheless, it is Marxists who have led the fight, another illustrative wholesale critique coming from David Harvey. He too rebukes postmodernism for denying the capacity for informed political action through its lack of a ‘coherent’ politics – that is, a ‘meta-theory which can grasp the political-economic processes’.29 For Harvey, ‘The rhetoric of postmodernism is dangerous for it avoids confronting the realities of political economy and the circumstances of global power’ (117).

26 27 28 29

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Fraser and Nicholson, ‘Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism’, in Universal Abandon?, ed. Ross, 88. Fraser and Nicholson, 91. ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’, New Left Review 178 (Nov.–Dec. 1989), 12. The Condition of Postmodernity, 117. Further references to this text are by page number.

Harvey echoes Eagleton in his condemnation of postmodernism’s putative obsession with only play and surfaces. Representation is once again under suspicion; a Platonic suspicion that sees art as only representation reflecting a ‘real’. Representation, for Marxist critics as it was for Plato, is suspect – not because of its falsity or immateriality, but precisely because of its materiality and overdetermination. As Montag notes, there is a fear that ‘the effects produced by the work of art will escape the control of the determining form, scattering like seeds to sprout wherever they land’.30 It is noticeable that, particularly in Harvey’s references to postmodern architecture, the pejorative use of theatrical metaphors figures strongly. For example, with reference to San Francisco: ‘The geography of differentiated tastes and cultures is turned into a potpourri of internationalism’ where, ‘the effect [...] is to draw a veil over real geography through construction of images and reconstructions, costume dramas, staged ethnic festivals, etc.’ (87).31 As Harvey further states: ‘The theatricality of effect, the striving for jouissance and schizophrenic effect [...] are all consciously present’ (97). Furthermore, Harvey extends these elements of a negative theatricality into a wider field of postmodern discourses: Fiction, fragmentation, collage, and eclecticism, all suffused with a sense of ephemerality and chaos, are, perhaps, the themes that dominate in today’s practices of architecture and urban design. And there is, evidently, much in common here with practices and thinking in many other realms such as art, literature, social theory, psychology, and philosophy. (98)

Much of the above could well apply, positively, to postmodern theatre performance, which is omitted from Harvey’s list. However, the main point is that Harvey’s negative accent on theatricality is reminiscent of 30 31

Montag, 98. It is in Harvey’s references to an article by H. Klotz that the theatrical metaphors abound: ‘the organization of spectacle and theatricality, have been achieved through an eclectic mix of styles, historical quotation, ornamentation, and the diversification of surfaces’ (93). As Klotz writes: ‘After all, this is not realism, but a facade, a stage set, a fragment inserted into a new and modern context’ (Harvey, 95, quoting from H. Klotz, ed., Post-Modern Visions catalogue, New York: 1985, n.p.).

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that Platonic distinction between representation and reality – the former mimetic and deemed negative in contrast to the positivity and ‘reality’ of the latter. This ongoing gnawing away at the question of the ‘real’ and its representations will be returned to in following chapters. Another strand of Harvey’s attack on postmodernism links the growth of neo-conservatism and the rise of fundamentalist movements to a nostalgia for a return to the stable values of the family, religion, the State and so forth. This is set against the fragmentation of postmodern life that seemingly makes collective action so much more difficult. As Harvey writes, citing Simmel: ‘it is [...] at such times of fragmentation and economic insecurity that the desire for stable values leads to a heightened emphasis upon the authority of basic institutions – the family, religion, and the state’ (171). But, if despair at a postmodern fragmentation of traditional sureties is leading towards a shift to a neo-conservative stance, then perhaps it is timely to renegotiate the meanings of ‘conservative’ and its dialectical opposite – ‘radical’. There are postmodern ‘positions’ that are ‘conservative’ in their relation to the planet, the politics of representation, and the pragmatic aspects of social interaction, communication, and care. There may well be a conservatism that values protection of the planet against growth at all costs; that provides for more open interpretations of what constitutes relationships of difference between social agents – with not only a commitment to tolerance but also an affirmation of diverse social and sexual practices and relationships; a conservatism that seeks to enhance the possibilities of small-scale political interaction and decision-making against monolithic political ideologies that perpetuate themselves in a seemingly agentless way. In questioning grand narratives, with their epistemologies of agentless transcendence, essentialism and teleology, subjects – as agents – might be left free to pick up, discard, or selectively utilize the numerous ideological ‘isms’ – including the ‘post’ – that have structured concepts of transcendence, subjectivity, and representation till now. Similarly, a definition of ‘radical’ may well be interpreted as coming from a ‘nihilistic’ approach to society; one which can find its theoretical justifications through the construction of a concept of totality that must be fought for, or against, as a matter of principle, 32

rather than through a recognition of the variety of means of communication and action open to the social agents of a shifting world. Harvey’s ‘nothing remains of any basis for reasoned action’ lends itself to a radical and nihilistic interpretation. If radical may be labelled as militant, then conservative could be labelled as cautious – a caution towards metanarratives of utopian dreams, metatheories that can grasp the whole picture, teleological models of eventual salvation, and so forth. While Harvey is correct to point out that a nostalgia for stability can lead to the growth of neo-conservative movements and differing fundamentalisms, a similar sense of nostalgia strongly informs the Marxist critiques of postmodernism. Nostalgia is a strong theme in these critiques – a nostalgia, as Lyotard has put it, for ‘the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience’.32 It is a nostalgia for an essential unity, a teleological certitude, a grand narrative that can supply the script ready-made, thus avoiding the contingencies of performance. It is a nostalgia for an ontologically transcendent, frozen ‘reality’ that can underpin that dialectically-constructed immanent reality of performance and practice in everyday life.33 It is a nostalgia for what Calinescu terms a ‘mythological script’34 – one that even its ‘authors’ knew could never be performed in its pure form. Such a script could only be performed by improvising, transforming, and transgressing its original scriptic and mythic certitude. Deformations and aberrations must constantly transform it – for it was ‘always already’ an impossibility that it could be realized in its essential purity. To carry this ‘theatrical’ analogy one step further: the execution of such a mythic script must inevitably lead to the setting up of totalizing, and totalitarian, programmes to enforce ever-partial realizations.

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34

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81. The reference to ‘everyday life’ is not accidental. Michel de Certeau’s writings have had a profound effect on the theorizing of the postmodern, and his keywords of ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’ form important alliances with the ‘strategies’ of postmodern political movements discussed here. See De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, for a fuller exposition of these terms. Calinescu, ‘Introductory Remarks’, in Exploring Postmodernism, 12.

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Nostalgia, as Bryan S. Turner has pointed out, is a ‘crucial product of modernization’35 – a nostalgia for epistemological certitude and ontological stability. Nostalgia implies, however, a false teleology that is utopian in hoping for the return of an imaginary past, transformed by its passage to the future, and bypassing the present – for example, the fictively-constructed utopias of a pre-technocratic age. Furthermore, it can be argued – especially in reference to the discourses on and about postmodernism – that, as Turner points out, the ‘strains and uncertainties’ of rapid social change generate ‘especially in the intellectual classes, a nostalgia for the values of a more traditional society, in which the intellectual had an esteemed and worthy position as the guardian of high culture’.36 Vattimo also sees nostalgia as a reaction to a sense of disorientation caused by a profusion of the ‘merchandise and images’ of a mass-media culture.37 He argues instead for the positivity of a heterogeneity occasioned by the proliferating discourses of the mass media, countering Adorno’s argument that there must occur a flattening of critical faculties in the face of modernist masshomogenization.38 The great casualty is the modernist ‘sense of reality’ – victim to what Vattimo terms ‘the phantasmagoria of the mass media’. He asks: Should we counterpose to this world the nostalgia for a solid, unitary, stable and ‘authoritative’ reality? In its effort to reconstruct the world of our infancy, where familial authority was both a threat and a comfort, such nostalgia is in continual danger of turning into neurosis.39

And thus fascism. However, as well as describing the oscillation between belonging and disorientation which characterizes the experience of freedom in a ‘pluralistic world’, and our difficulty in recog35 36 37 38

39

34

Turner, ‘Introduction: Defining Postmodernity’, in Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. Turner, 7. Turner, 7. Vattimo, 8. Vattimo is referring here in particular to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as well as Adorno’s Minima Moralia, where there is a prediction that ‘radio (and only later TV) would produce a general homogenization of society’ (5). Vattimo, 8.

nizing that oscillation as potential freedom, Vattimo warns that: ‘Individually and collectively, we still have a deep-seated nostalgia for the reassuring, yet menacing, closure of horizons’.40 The questions that need to be asked are not only for whom Vattimo is speaking, but what informs this desire for a closure of horizons? Which discourses dictate that there can and should be closure? Furthermore, what underpins modernist/Marxist programmes, which have – at least historically and to date – fallen into the abyss between foundationalist theory and performed practice in their search for closure?

Ideas of Reason and ‘Theatrical fallacies’ Grand or ‘master’ narratives such as Marxism are, as Lyotard argues, informed by Ideas of Reason, which, if practically enforced, or programmatically applied, can only lead to totalizing enterprises.41 The inevitable gap between such metatheories and their micropractices dooms them to failure, or at least, to what might be inhumane distortions in terms of subjectivity and social agency. Lyotard also talks of the difficulties in relating the conceptual to the experiential, arguing that Ideas of Reason can be only ideas, or ‘guiding threads’ (11). In response to Eagleton, he cites specifically Marx’s ‘idea’ of a proletariat, and relates this to a politics of the sublime, or ‘the terrible mistake of trying to present in political practice an Idea of Reason’ (11). Furthermore: Nobody has ever seen a proletariat (Marx said this): you can observe workingclasses, certainly, but they are only part of the observable society. It’s impossible to argue that this part of society is the incarnation of a proletariat, because an Idea in general has no presentation, and that is the question of the sublime. (11)

40 41

Vattimo, 11. See Lyotard, ‘Complexity and the Sublime’, in ICA Documents 4 and 5, ed. Appignanesi, 10–12. Further references to this text are by page number.

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However, while Ideas of Reason are unpresentable, plural reasons can be presented. As Lyotard stressed in a 1988 interview: ‘there is no reason, only reasons’.42 Furthermore, when drawing support for his argument from those of Kant and Wittgenstein, he pointed out: it is easy to show that it is never a question of one massive and unique reason – that is nothing but an ideology. On the contrary, it is a question of plural rationalities, which are, at the least, respectively, theoretical, practical, aesthetic.43

Lyotard’s suspicions concerning ‘Ideas of Reason’ are comparable to Calinescu’s use of the ‘theatrical fallacy’44 – borrowed from Francis Bacon’s concept of there being four ‘classes of Idols’: the Idols of the Tribe; the Idols of the Cave; the Idols of the Market Place; and the Idols of the Theater.45 As Bacon wrote, the latter are those which have ‘immigrated’ into people’s minds from: the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theater, because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.46

It is not difficult to see which model of theatrical practice Bacon is referring to, where through dogmatic assertion and the exclusion of loose ends, ‘the playbooks of philosophical systems’47 construct, tidy scenarios with neat endings. As Bacon described it: in the plays of this philosophical theater you may observe the same thing which is found in the theater of the poets, that stories invented for the stage are more compact and elegant, and more as one would wish them to be, than true stories out of history.48

42 43 44 45 46 47 48

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Lyotard, in Van Reijen and Veerman, ‘An Interview with Jean-François Lyotard’, Theory, Culture and Society 5.2–3 (June 1988), 278. Van Reijen and Veerman, 279. Calinescu, ‘Introductory Remarks’, in Exploring Postmodernism, 3. Further references to this text are by page number. Bacon, The New Organon, 48. Bacon, 49. Bacon, 58. Bacon, 59.

Calinescu’s description of ‘theatricality’, carrying the normative pejorative baggage the term has long endured, could well describe not only ideological constructions, but also a dualist metaphysics: Theatricality has a way of dramatizing the old philosophical distinction between appearance and essence, between surface phenomena and profound – ‘really real’ – processes. A quasi-narrative principle of conflict is thus introduced in the realm of theory: to get to the truth one must unmask or demystify the deceptions of naive realism, one must tear up the veil of illusory appearances and courageously identify the hidden actual causes of what one perceives. (9)

Calinescu applies this model of theatricality to Jameson’s 1983 essay ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’,49 describing its reduction of postmodernism to the ‘cultural aspect’ of multinational capitalism as a ‘standard (vulgar) Marxist scenario’ with postmodernism as ‘the projection – the performance – of the last but one act from the great Marxist masque’ (12). For Calinescu: Jameson’s production of the play reconfirms that external historical and cultural events are easy to fit into a mythological script, and also that such events can serve, in the circular logic of intellectual mythology, as verifications of the fundamental premises. (12)

‘Theatricality’ is Calinescu’s ‘foreground theme’, in relation to his ‘larger background theme’ which examines how periodization and the ‘theatrical fallacy’ can be (and has been) utilized in a discussion of postmodernism, and which arguably has a bearing on the interpretation of its politics. Criticizing Lyotard for his attempted denial of periodization in The Postmodern Condition, and his clinging to a ‘Manichean framework’ of opposition between modernity as a synonym for a ‘strangely timeless notion of capitalism’, and postmodernism as a ‘personification of an equally timeless desire for freedom and justice’, Calinescu argues that postmodernism must be seen as a temporal category (in that diachronic references are unavoidable), and therefore ‘when one tries to deal intelligently with temporal categories, history cannot be shunned’ (6). Calinescu highlights the need to see history as construction, rather than reconstruction, and that period 49

In Postmodern Culture, ed. Foster, 111–25.

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terms ‘function best when they are used heuristically, as strategic constructs or means by which we inventively articulate the continuum of history for purposes of focused analysis and understanding. Strategic is the key word here’ (7). Seeing history as a construction leaves it more open to recognition in terms of its strategic use-value. Seen positively, it has allowed the ‘histories’ of the formerly marginalized and silent minorities to be re-presented as counter-‘histories’ to the dominant historical record. Negatively, it can be, and has been, utilized for the construction of ‘false’ histories, designed to reconstruct (in an Orwellian sense) the faces of the past, or to distort or ameliorate the past for the benefit of a select few in the present. Postmodern strategies view the past as amenable to pillaging, recognizing the fictivity of a historicity that only appears to be determined and linear. In activating the ‘past’ through a selective bricolage, history can be seen as a repository of alternative possibilities that can be removed from their context of time and place and reinvigorated into different scenarios. Or, as Calinescu elsewhere puts it: a new historicism is emerging, a historicism that sees the past neither as a normative paradigm (the old traditionalist view) nor as an opponent (the modernist view which conceives novelty exclusively in terms of rupture), nor as a collection of ‘facts’ that should be carefully gathered because one day they may reveal general patterns and universal laws (the positivistic view), nor yet as pure intertextual circularity (the structuralist view, ultimately as sterile as the positivistic approach that it opposes), but rather as a ‘storehouse’ of alternatives and counteralternatives, of stories and counterstories, of smaller and larger narrative scenarios, involving not only individuals but also groups, societies, beliefs, ideas, emotions, myths, and ultimately worlds and ‘ways of worldmaking’.50

Thus ‘strategic’ for Calinescu ‘suggests goal-directed action, permanent readiness to weigh possible scenarios against each other, and ingenuity in the selection of those scenarios that are at the same time most promising and unpredictable. (The right degree of unexpectedness is a major strategic value)’ (7). That degree of unexpectedness (or 50

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Calinescu, ‘From the One to the Many: Pluralism in Today’s Thought’, in Innovation/Renovation, ed. Hassan and Hassan, 286.

contingency) is what must be recognized in postmodern political movements that will no longer put their faith in Ideas of Reason nor ‘mythological scripts’. The latter are paradigmatic of a ‘large-scale’ theatricalism which attempts to ‘dissolve apparent multiplicity into essential unity’ (15), whereas ‘small-scale’ theatricalism shows a disposition to maintain readiness, to be prepared to shift and improvise. Ideas of Reason (and other such ‘mythological scripts’) highlight the gap between theory and practice, idea and achievement – either through the impossibility of their realization, or the mistaken belief that all-encompassing ‘ideas’ (or dramatic scripts) can be realized in performance without a partial or even massive skewing of ‘original’ intentions. The problem lies in trying to fit the Idea of Reason, the ‘mythological script’ or the ‘master’ plan to the performance; rigidly following the completed and handed down authoritative text – infallible, immune to improvisation, and impervious to differing receptions. The notion of discovery, rather than invention, suggests the transcendental a-priori existence of an essentialist, teleological pattern, only waiting to be ‘discovered’ if one just has the intelligence and perspicacity to do so. For Calinescu, discovering ‘the scientific laws of history’ lends Marxism a prophetic and religious aspect, where adherents believe the ‘blueprint’ to be ‘real’: Thus, mere hypothetical schemes and abstract constructions were theatricalized, in an almost literal sense: world history assumed the shape of a huge allegorical masque illustrating the career of the original sin of production through the climax of demonic capitalism – with its frightening Walpurgisnacht of commodities and its myriad perverse enchantments, alienations, and fetishisms – to the final redemption by Revolution. (10–11)

To avoid falling into the trap of a large-scale theatricalism, Calinescu suggests a ‘theatrically moderate and self-skeptical treatment of postmodernism’, where such a ‘pluralistic methodology [...] could also turn out to be the best defense against the ghost of totality which haunts all great theatrical-ideological schemes’ (14). Therefore Calinescu ‘welcomes’ a ‘certain degree of theatricalism’ (13), but large ideological fictions must be kept at bay. These lead to abstraction and fatuousness, whether in the fields of literary theory or cultural analysis. Whether the ‘big’ questions, the either/or totalizing 39

formulations, are ‘answered positively or negatively, the possibilities for discussion and argument they open up are equally meager, intellectually unexciting, and predictably banal’ (14). A ‘mythological script’ assumes the form of a classical dramatic narrative, a model of ‘theatre’ that demands a closed system with its own internal logic of conflict and resolution, where relief and redemption can be obtained at the conclusion. The last act can tie together the pieces that have been deliberately permitted to oscillate during the time and space of a preordained duration and location. The grand narrative of Marxism has, however, been decentred, as its adherents must have now realized. It has lost – at least for now – its sense of an ending, and perhaps now the penultimate phase, that of postmodernism, the ‘last but one act’ has opened up the narrative. Perhaps it has done more: destroyed the reliability of the very form of narratives, transforming it into play and contingency. Either way, without those last few pages of script, it is time to improvise – not endings, but the play of possibilities released by the breakdown of the ‘mythological script’. On the other hand, the fear of instability through a lack of control and closure can lead to the urge to hurriedly write, or rewrite, the ‘last act’ so as to regain that stability and find that sense of a determinate outcome. Postmodern discourses reopen the improvisational aspects of all scripts, including even the theoretical ‘foundations’ of Marxism. Michael Ryan makes the point (utilizing a handy theatrical metaphor) that Marx’s inversion of the Hegelian dialectic transformed foreclosure into movement, promoting: a sense that the social world is in movement, that previous conclusions are merely starting points, and that much remains to be not only known but also made. This radical use takes the cap off the dialectic, turning a triangle into a square with an open fourth wall.51

However, whether Marxism has necessarily kept open the dialectic (in terms of a dynamic), and the question of the role that that ‘open fourth wall’ plays in classical representation – as a mirror or a picture frame – is a point to which I shall return later. 51

40

Ryan, Politics and Culture: Working Hypotheses for a Post-Revolutionary Society, 64.

Between political theory and political practice (as between script and production) lie those ‘necessary’ compromises in translating projects into practice. Modernist politics, with Marxism as its exemplum, has had to make those necessary compromises, often with severe consequences leading to disruption on a tragic scale when it has tried to avoid them. Whether they be the grand narratives of Marxism or Liberalism, there has been a constant need for compromise and improvisation. Between the Ideas of Reason that govern transcendental concepts such as Justice, Ethics, and even Economics, and the metaphysical/mythological scripts of an internal narrative logic and their play in the ‘real’ world, lies that gap between theory and practice. Though required to play their historical role in this script, postmodernist discourses work to deconstruct the teleological and dualistic narratives of modernist discourses. Similarly, postmodern political movements also dispense with such transcendental scripts and instead focus on the specific and contingently contextual practices, or micronarratives, that most immediately affect them, especially in terms of agency. Contrary to the dominantly pejorative sense of ‘theatricality’, they recognize that it is the performance that is the criterion of the ‘script’s’ political viability. In what follows, I will focus on modernist performance practices, particularly in respect of Naturalism and Dada with their embracing, or attempted rejection, of the dialectic of either innovation or negation. This will entail a discussion of modernist theatre practices (including the claims for the avant-gardes), and their ongoing entrapment in the binaries that inform not only metaphysics, but also Western theatre practices and modernist political programmes. Necessary to this discussion is an examination of those definitions of postmodern performance that centre around its putative relationship with the avant-gardes, performance art, and late-modernist theatre practices.

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Chapter Two Dialectical Modernism

Modernist Performance and the Dialectic Within the discourses of traditional Western theatrical practice, the status of performance, both as a concept and an event, has invariably been limited – until relatively recently – to the enactment, in a theatre or denoted performance space, of a dramatic text or a rehearsed event (for example, a circus). Among other things, this interpretation limits performance to that which takes place between an actor/performer and a spectator. For example, Patrice Pavis, distinguishing between the dramatic text and the performance, sees the latter as ‘all that is made visible or audible on stage, but not yet perceived or described as a system of meaning or as a pertinent relationship of signifying stage systems’.1 That further ‘system of meaning’ requires Pavis’s concept of the mise en scène.2 The theatre context is wider than the architectural implications of stage and auditorium implied in such a term. Circus performances, puppet shows, and staged official events also fit into the category of performance within those narrowly defined terms. Performance has now come to imply more than only a relationship between the dramatic text, or rehearsed event, and its theatrical enactment or, more than just actors ‘performing’ in the presence of spectators in a theatre context. It has also been defined in respect of human subjects in terms of their interactions with others, even if only ‘performing’ a greeting.3 Nonetheless, to limit definitions of performance to a ‘theatrical’ usage, or even to extend it to ‘extra-theatrical’ 1 2 3

Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, 25. Pavis outlines this concept in ‘From Page to Stage: a Difficult Birth’, in Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, 24–47. For example, those ‘framed’ role-playing performances by individuals in the social realm as researched by Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

interpersonal encounters, still curtails the potential applications of the term. The meanings of the term have stretched in their contemporary usage across discourses. Richard Schechner, who in 1966 stated, ‘a performance is an activity done by an individual or group in the presence of and for another individual or group’ has extended the concept to games, rituals (both sacred and secular), sport, media events, and politics.4 As Schechner wrote in 1987: Performance is an inclusive term. Theater is only one node on a continuum that reaches from the ritualizations of animals (including humans) through performances in everyday life – greetings, displays of emotion, family scenes, professional roles, and so on – through to play, sports, theater, dance, ceremonies, rites, and performances of great magnitude.5

We are all now familiar with its dominant use as a marker of efficiency in industry, human resources management, entertainment, sports, and in advertising for almost all products – where nearly everything is measured in terms of its potential performance, or ‘effectivity’. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, performance has been seen as inhabiting a wider field of meanings and contexts than its former narrower purview. As Bonnie Marranca wrote, in 1984: The concept of ‘performance’ increasingly dominates American culture as a way of viewing everyday activity. It is, for example, encouraged as a therapeutic technique, and used to describe sexual activity, the operation of a car, a politician’s form, business management style. Media commentary is increasingly attuned to describing behaviour in theatrical terms, as if all human action was incapable of being anything other than artificial.6

It is in that latter – or ‘media commentary’ – sense where the ‘theatrical’ as ‘artificial’ still carries those pejorative connotations which have long been attached to performance – those of pretence and illusion versus sincerity and ‘realness’. While it would appear that performance in its multiplicity of usages escapes singularity, some 4 5

6

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Schechner, Performance Theory, n10, 30. Schechner, Performance Theory, xiii. The extension of performance in Schechner’s terms is shown in his ‘Performance Space/Time/Event Chart’, 252–3. Marranca, Theatrewritings, 135.

will still argue for that more specific use of the term – as it relates to performance in the ‘theatre’ or on the ‘stage’. Johannes Birringer, for example, argues that a certain specificity is at times necessary in order to reclaim ‘performance’ for the theatre, while recognizing the need for a shift from the strictures of ‘dramatic realism’: I believe that any theatre practice worth thinking about in the context of postmodern culture has been fundamentally concerned not only with recovering the meaning and boundaries of performance in the theatre (in distinction to what is meant by ‘performance’ and ‘theatricality’ just about anywhere else in contemporary mass culture) but, specifically, with the transformation of visual space and the difference in attention to the perceptual process produced by scenographies of visual and acoustic images that no longer recreate the appearance of dramatic realism.7

Nonetheless, performance does not exist only in the ‘closed shop’ of a particular prescribed theatre space. Performances take place not only in such spaces, but also in the streets, and in many different nonmatrixed locations – being presented ‘live’ to shoppers, passers-by and unwitting and sometimes unwilling spectators. Furthermore, these performances can be displayed or replayed on television screens (including those connected to surveillance cameras of city streets), and photographed and frozen in the print media. Performance then, can serve as a term that describes specifically the enactment of a dramatic text in the presence of an audience. It can also refer to those words and actions that people ‘perform’ in their encounters with one another outside of a theatrical space. And thirdly, performance also serves both positively – as a marker of efficiency – and negatively – as a pejorative label connoting artificiality or deceit. The first is constrained within the protective context of a more strictly defined ‘theatre’ event. The second suggests a ‘framed’ and conscious (or even non-reflexive) role-playing activity. The third denotes efficiency and also, like the previous two, an often pejorative artificiality. What these multiple usages have in common is the implicit and often explicit suggestion of an un-‘real’, a self-conscious, or framed, representation of something else – whether a character, a psychological 7

Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism, 31.

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interior motive, or a gloss upon the perhaps inferior quality of the product being promoted. They concomitantly serve as a term which suggests an ideological attitude (or an epistemological position) which sees performance as the secondary manifestation of an ulterior, or prior, deed, event, or position. While it may appear that the term is potentially free to range widely across and through cultural and ideological discourses, it remains that performance is seen as the representation of an a-priori reality. Both ‘theatricality’ and ‘performance’ cannot be circumscribed in such a secondary, or representational sense. Performance as an ideological attitude and as a deconstructive ‘methodology’ will be the focus of chapters four and five. In this chapter the principal focus will be on modernist ‘theatre’ performance and its relationship to the dramatic text and a narrative form – since that is the dominant modernist definition. However, it shall include those performances that attempt to escape rigid classification in terms of their epistemological and architectural contexts. The reason for this focus will become clear once it is recognized that, in modernist terms, the ‘theatrical’ context is more often than not the limit of the uses of the term. Performance, in modernism, is chiefly that which takes place as the faithful enactment of a prior dramatic text. It is that fidelity which was repeatedly challenged by the modernist avant-gardes – a reaction in rejection of that fidelity to the dramatic text, and hence, ‘bourgeois theatre’. This reaction, and therefore redefinition of performance, will be explored later in this chapter after discussing the model of modernist theatre which was invoked as a form against which the avant-gardes could be in reaction and, furthermore, which ‘world view’ modernist theatre reflected, bearing in mind its expressive (or mimetic) and representational function.

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Representation and ‘Reality’ Theatre, by modernist criteria, was seen as the representation of a referential reality (embodied in the authorial text), and/or as the expression of an interior psychological state; where theatrical expression was seen as mimetic of, and secondary to, a more primary reality. With its roots in naturalistic theatre (itself initially an avant-garde), and with its own avant-garde tendency to reaction, modernist theatre prioritized the dramatic text, and saw itself as representing and reflecting both an external ontological reality and an internal psychological ‘reality’. It was, therefore, only ever representative of that putative ‘real’ – internalizing its own sense of ‘make-believe’ and hence inhabiting a state of self-deception. Modernist theatre can be loosely periodized (and thus interpreted as a linear development) in the shift from the experimental and avant-garde impulses of Naturalism in Western theatre. The ‘beginnings’ of naturalistic theatre were heralded with the verve typical of an avant-garde movement. Emile Zola, writing in 1881, presented a ‘manifesto’ for this new form: The future is with naturalism. The formula will be found; it will be proved that there is more poetry in the little apartment of a bourgeois than in all the empty, worm-eaten palaces of history; in the end we will see that everything meets in the real: lovely fantasies that are free of capriciousness and whimsy, and idylls, and comedies, and dramas.8

Zola saw naturalistic theatre as a revolt against romantic drama – itself, a short-lived rejection of neo-classical tragedy. For Zola, the problem with the romantic revolt lay in its notion of a complete overthrow of the ‘falseness’ of neo-classical tragedy; however, one could not choose between neo-classical tragedy and romantic drama in terms of their truth or falsity. The revolt by romantic drama against neo-classical tragedy is described by Zola in terms that are worth quoting at length, and which in different contexts, could serve as a description of all ‘total’ revolutions. This is especially so in terms of 8

Zola, ‘From Naturalism in the Theatre’, in The Theory of the Modern Stage, ed. Bentley, 365.

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Zola’s doubts concerning the ‘Revolution’ versus the revolutionary impulse: One begins by breaking windows, chanting and shouting, wrecking relics of the last regime with hammer blows. There is a first exuberance, an intoxication with the new horizons faintly glimpsed, excesses of all kinds that go beyond the original aims and degenerate into the despotism of the old, hated system, those very abuses the revolution has just fought against. In the heat of the battle tomorrow’s truths evaporate. And not until all is calm and the fever has abated is there any regret for the broken windows, any understanding of how the effort has gone awry, how the new laws have been prematurely thrown together so that they are hardly any improvement over the laws that were destroyed.9

As Zola wrote: ‘Our condemnation of the romantic formula is summed up in one severe remark: To destroy one rhetoric it was not necessary to invent another’.10 In short, the destruction of one rhetoric leads, seemingly inevitably, to the establishment of another, rather as the attempted destruction of one totalitarian system can almost invariably lead to the establishment of another. Arnold Hauser defined this new drama in terms of its ‘polemical and programmatical character’.11 It was in particular critical works of Diderot and Lessing that Hauser located what he saw as ‘that alliance, so familiar in the nineteenth century, between radicalism and naturalism’ (408). This relationship was summed up by Hauser as follows: It was now discovered for the first time that artistic truth is valuable as a weapon in the social struggle, that the faithful reproduction of facts leads automatically to the dissolution of social prejudices and the abolition of injustice, and that those who fight for justice need not fear the truth in any of its forms, that there is, in a word, a certain correspondence between the idea of artistic truth and that of social justice. (408)

That ‘faithful reproduction of facts’ is echoed in Hauser’s description of the formulation by Diderot of ‘the most important principles of naturalistic dramatic theory’ (408). With reference to Diderot, Hauser 9 10 11

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Zola, 355. Zola, 356. Hauser, ‘The Origins of Domestic Drama’, in The Theory of the Modern Stage, ed. Bentley, 403. Further references to this text are by page number.

wrote: ‘He requires not merely the natural, psychologically accurate motivation of spiritual processes but also exactness in the description of the milieu and fidelity to nature in the scenery’ (408). These concepts of ‘exactness’ and ‘fidelity’ were crucial to the practices of naturalistic theatre. It is important to point out that naturalistic theatre could not only interpret its performance practices as being a faithful enactment of the ‘real’, but could also see them as being influential on the ‘real’. That is to say, naturalistic theatre would be able to influence the ethics of the social ‘reality’ through its aesthetics – or the formal underpinnings of its ‘artistic truth’. In other words, modernist theatre became a mirror of, or a laboratory for, a burgeoning Western bourgeois consciousness of its assumed dominant place in the world, and as such, could potentially effect changes in that ‘world’. The importance that this ‘burgeoning’ bourgeois influence had in the development of naturalistic theatre cannot be underestimated. Raymond Williams saw five influential factors leading towards the development of a modern ‘naturalistic’ theatre, with their roots in the rise of the bourgeoisie (specifically in England, where ‘this was early’) during the mid-eighteenth century.12 Paraphrasing Williams, those factors were: an admission of the contemporary, rather than the legendary or historical as legitimate material; an admission of the indigenous, rather than an emphasis on the exotic; an emphasis on everyday speech-forms, with ‘formally rhetorical, choral and monological types being steadily abandoned’; an emphasis on social extension, or a shift in focus from personages of ‘elevated social rank’; and a ‘decisive’ secularism, or ‘a steady exclusion [...] of all supernatural or metaphysical agencies’.13 While Williams stresses the need to explore the ‘variations and tensions’ in this bourgeois takeover of theatre, he writes that the newly dominant mode is embraced by these five factors. ‘Drama was now, explicitly, to be a human action played in exclusively human terms.’14 While the ‘middle-class’ or naturalistic theatre began as an avant-garde reaction against the 12 13 14

Williams, ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, in Visions and Blueprints, ed. Timms and Collier, 309. Williams, ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, 309–10. Williams, ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, 310.

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aristocratic neo-classical tragedy and romantic drama, it, like any avant-garde movement, was soon co-opted, or ‘naturalized’ into the bourgeois drama of the ‘well-made’ play. The bourgeoisie had become the ‘new order’, and a growing middle-class literacy (and increased leisure time), helped cement the formalism of the naturalistic drama – as literary text. Notwithstanding naturalistic theatre practice, it would appear that the status of the written dramatic text – with its narrative form and novel-style marketing – helped steer the experimental impulse of naturalistic theatre into the ‘dramatic literature’ of modernist drama. Here, performance could be more strictly defined as the faithful enactment in the theatre of the dramatic text – the author’s words that became the blueprint for production. Certainly, much of the popularity of the dramatic text lay in its narrative form – each act structured with a beginning, a middle and an end – each act leading from a crisis point at the conclusion into the next act. But, importantly, the play could be read as a novel, with the ‘stage directions’ substituting for descriptive novelistic passages (along with those bracketed directives for the external actions and inner states of the characters supplying the dialogue). To use a canonical example: the stage directions in Ibsen’s plays were for a reading audience, as well as being directives for the actors and the staging. For example, in Ibsen’s Ghosts: [OSVALD ALVING comes through the farther door on the right, having left his hat and overcoat in the hall. MRS ALVING goes to meet him.]15

Importantly, in the most material sense, plays earned an income for the playwright in being sold as books – not through proceeds from their performances. For example, concerning Ibsen, and Ghosts, Peter Watts writes:

15

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Ibsen, Ghosts and other plays, 53. Emphasis added. The scenic description on the first page of the play explicitly displays the novelistic convention, with a detailed description for the reader of the Alving ‘garden-room’. The last sentence can certainly be seen as a novelistic, rather than a performance, convention: ‘Through the glass, a view of a gloomy fjord, half-hidden by continual rain, can be made out’ (21).

After two or three weeks for revision, he sent the MS. to Hegel his publisher in mid-November, so that, like most of his great plays, it could be in the bookshops in time for the Christmas rush. It seems strange that, though Ibsen was a practical man of the theatre who had worked for many years behind the scenes as stage manager and ‘Resident Poet’, he always thought of his plays as primarily books to be read. We must realise though that, in the Scandinavian theatre of his day, half a dozen performances meant a great success, and that it was from the book sales that the royalties came.16

Hence, one can see the importance of the narrative form in respect of a recognition of the demands of the market, and concomitantly the necessary elevation of the playwright as author. The place of the author was paramount, which – in theatre performance – emphasized the priority of the dramatic text and a fidelity to the author’s intentions laid down in that text. Drama was perceived as a literary form, or, as Williams puts it: ‘an arrangement of words for verbal performance by a group of actors’.17 Modernist drama prioritized the verbal performance of language – the language of the ‘dramatist’: It seems to me that the most valuable drama is achieved when the technique of performance reserves to the dramatist primary control. It does not greatly matter whether this control is direct or indirect. In an age when it is accepted that the centre of drama is language, such control is reasonably assured. For when the centre of drama is language, the form of the play will be essentially literary; the dramatist will adopt certain conventions of language through which to work.18

Mainstream modernist ‘performance’ can therefore be defined as the enactment, in a theatre, of that narrative literary form, with a desire to represent – primarily through language, and with a faithfulness to the text and the author’s intentions – an external ‘reality’ founded on those ‘conventions of language’ which order – and reflect – a cohesive ‘reality’. Furthermore, the cohesiveness of the narrative of the dramatic text when ‘performed’ served, invariably, to legitimate the epistemological validity of the material ‘reality’ that it purported to represent.

16 17 18

Watts, ‘Introduction’, in Ibsen, Ghosts and other plays, 11. Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, 24. Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, 33.

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Bourgeois theatre (including the naturalistic theatre of modernism) was – and still is – a primarily narrative theatre, constructed with beginnings, middles and ends and adhering to a traditional Aristotelian emphasis on plot. It presupposes, as Robert Corrigan states, ‘a dramatic structure that will have coherence and be self-contained, and yet be of sufficient magnitude for transitions to occur, whether they be reversals or discoveries’.19 In his search for a ‘new’ poetics of postmodern theatre, Corrigan’s description of ‘Western theatre’ draws on Aristotle’s Poetics. He focuses primarily on the Aristotelian form, which requires a correspondence to notions of possibility and appropriateness (its mimetic qualities) as well as its teleological and eschatological functions. To focus on the latter two, Western theatre, importantly, is: Teleological in that it affirms that a design or purpose in nature exists and can be known, and also that phenomena are guided not only by outside forces, but they move toward certain final causes and goals of self-realization – in short, that action moves to endings. It is eschatological in that it affirms that this movement will be realized in a final end and with a judgement.20

In other words, there is not only closure in a material sense, but closure in the sense of justice (whether divine or secular) being done and being seen to be done. The legitimation for such justice is ideologically encoded in the form of the play; naturalized by its narrative flow, which leads, seemingly inevitably, to its closure. However, to limit modernist theatre to a model based on neoAristotelian descriptions of what constitutes a tragedy is to ignore varying and conflictual strands of modernist theatre, where not only an interrogation of the bourgeois ideologies that informed familial and social life occurred, but also counter-discourses which questioned the forms of that which was being represented. As Williams points out, a theory of modernist theatre practices cannot be constructed as though these, in the diversity of their ‘variations and tensions’, constituted a

19 20

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Corrigan, ‘The Search for New Endings: The Theatre in Search of a Fix, Part III’, Theatre Journal 36.2 (May 1984), 157–8. Corrigan, 158.

singular entity.21 The examples that Williams cites are the mid to late nineteenth century shifts from an emphasis on action through plot, to an exploration of interiority as shown through the consciousness of the protagonists – exemplars being the later Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg. As Williams puts it, this was a movement from ‘the dark areas of the bourgeois human order’ in the ‘physically convincing’ living rooms of the bourgeois stage towards an exploration of those ‘dark areas’ by other means; a shift from the implied visual images of ‘early’ naturalistic drama to the proto-expressionism in the later plays of Ibsen and Strindberg among others.22 Nonetheless, while the subject matter in terms of the ‘proper’ gravity of the events and the ‘essential’ probity of the characters may not have conformed to Aristotle’s descriptions of the tragedy, there still persisted a formal adherence to structural completeness. Such a model also required the classical prerequisites of complication, change, and denouement, as well as those important ‘elements of plot’ – reversal, discovery, and calamity.23 For Corrigan, notwithstanding the move towards interiority where ‘consciousness replaces action as the theatre’s central concern’, modernist theatre ‘no matter how labyrinthine the route – still believed in beginnings, middles, and ends’. Furthermore: The Modernist Theatre still believed that a representation of an action – even if that action were to become increasingly minimal – was both possible and significant. It believed that destiny can be known and revealed through a representation of human action in dramatic form, and that it is still possible to bring action to judgement.24

In ‘Modernist Theatre’, performance (through the presence of the voices and the bodies of the actors as well as the stage setting) could enact the representation – or secondary manifestation – of a distinct primary reality embodied in the external world, inscribed in the dramatic text, and represented in performance. Not only did there persist 21 22 23 24

Williams, ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, 310. Williams, ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, 312. See ‘The Poetics’, in Aristotle, Horace, Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism, 38–57. Corrigan, 158–9.

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the belief in the existence of an ‘outside’ ontological ‘real’ but also the belief that that ‘real’ was graspable. For example, Stanislavsky, in his production plan for Gorky’s The Lower Depths, expresses the enthusiasm that a visit to the Khitrov Market to research the ‘reality’ of the tramps’ lives ‘awoke’ in him: The excursion to the Khitrov Market, more than any discussion or analysis of the play, awoke my fantasy and inspiration. There was nature which one could mold to his desire; there was live material for the creation of images. Everything received a real basis and took its proper place.25

The ‘truthful’ representation of reality required research – utilizing a scientific paradigm that stressed an empirical accuracy. As Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote concerning the research carried out on the use of ‘pauses’ in dialogue: They were attained with difficulty, and only through persistent and involved research, not merely external but also psychological; the quest was for harmony between the experiences of the characters of a play and the entire setting.26

Stanislavsky’s strong insistence on authenticity, like NemirovichDanchenko’s ‘quest’ for harmony, epitomized the desire accurately to incorporate the reality of the ‘outside’ world into the world represented in the theatre. In naturalistic theatre, the setting, and the words and actions of the characters, would be (in order to effect change on that reality) as truthful as possible to the external reality they represented. Nonetheless, the quest for a ‘true’ representation of reality was always flawed. The stage could never be ‘reality’. It would continually expose its dialectically-constructed ‘fictivity’ merely by the context of its ‘theatrical’ setting – without requiring the more obvious exposures of its ‘authenticity’ through a flat falling over, or an actor forgetting lines or movement. What is more problematic is not so much the fictivity or otherwise of the theatrical setting but the assumptions concerning the ‘nature’ of a given outside reality which could be reflected. This is apart from the obvious questions concerning the role

25 26

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Cole and Chinoy, eds., Directors on Directing, 284. Cole and Chinoy, 286.

of the metaphysical dialectic of ‘appearance’ versus ‘reality’ set up in this model, which I shall explore later. The conclusion of the above argument is clear: the continuing formal gesturing, whether implicitly or explicitly, towards an external ontological ‘real’ was the underlying characteristic of modernist theatre, notwithstanding the diversity of its themes and forms. However, while late-nineteenth-century naturalistic theatre could comfortably inhabit the dualistic epistemology of a Cartesian paradigm, modernist theatre (in the early twentieth century) could no longer adhere so unproblematically to such a model. The epistemological shift from a model of causality to one of chance presages and in part explains the moves towards a different concept of performance – that espoused in the manifestos of the early-twentieth-century avantgardes. The modernist critique of epistemology and a rejection of the Cartesian dualism of subject and object as stable identities led, argue Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley, to an early-twentiethcentury anxiety about inhabiting a state of ‘betweenness’ – or the fear of floating in an ‘epistemological limbo’.27 This, in part, inspired the search for an outside viewing space – ‘a platform for seeing things as they really were’ (26). With the breakdown of an outmoded epistemology, where ‘reality’ could be perceived as inherent in the objective world, there arose the quest for the ‘idea of a new perspective which would get us outside of ourselves and outside of our systems and from which we could see reality in its wholeness’ (26). An example they use is the Cubist exploration towards a ‘fourth dimension’, or Apollinaire’s ‘dimension of the infinite’ (27). For Brooker and Bentley: In fact, most of the techniques in the twentieth-century revolution in the arts stem from a conscious rejection of materialism (the notion that reality has to do with matter) and a conscious adoption of idealism (the notion that reality has to do with the mind). (30)

27

Brooker and Bentley, Reading The Wasteland, 13–33. The authors use, with a caveat, Jacob Bronowski’s ‘made for television’ divisions, where a distinctive philosophical or scientific paradigm sets up, in certain periods, ruling ‘dispensations’. Further references to this text are by page number.

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This shift from a material world to one of the mind was one that could dispense with God and be secular in its aspiration for an ‘outsider’ viewpoint of reality: Early-twentieth-century artists knew that no single perspective is privileged, that no one perspective captures the truth, and they responded by presenting many perspectives at once. [...] This mode of formalizing reality suggests that the only point of view or perspective that could capture the whole truth would be a transcendent one, analogous to another dimension in space or time. (31)

Coupled with this idealist quest for a transcendent point of view – importantly, one which ‘could capture the whole truth’ – was the lure of primitivism. This fascination with the ‘primitive’ was prevalent in the visual arts, in a line from Gauguin through to Picasso and beyond, and in early expressionist theatre in its search for the archetypes of human expression in performance – a search that continued throughout the twentieth century through Artaud and onwards to the present. While the interrogation of Cartesian dualism led to doubts concerning the constructions of subject/object relationships, there also occurred a retrograde shift towards a monistic and universalizing epistemology. Brooker and Bentley invoke J. G. Frazer as representative of this shift ‘beyond dualism’ – as representative of a search for the Jungian archetype of a universalizing epistemology. Frazer ‘had worked his way backward through layers of myth to a monistic vision, one that indicated an underlying unity in human history, one that included a mythic platform for seeing all history more comprehensively’ (32). Nonetheless, whether secular or divine, or from the ‘inside’ or the ‘outside’, the point remains that ‘reality’, or the ‘whole truth’, was still the ontological referent for all forms of representation. Modernist performance remained an enactment of representations of reality – primarily a reflection, as well as a questioning, of bourgeois ‘reality’ and its chief concerns – the family, society, religion, nationalism, and materialism.

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Modernism and the Avant-gardes The question might be put as to whether the search for a ‘mythic platform’ was modernist or avant-gardist – and indeed, whether there is any real distinction between the two. Schulte-Sasse stresses Bürger’s point that the difference between modernism and its avantgarde must be seen in terms of the former’s attack on ‘traditional writing techniques, but the avant-garde can only be understood as an attack meant to alter the institutionalised commerce with art’.28 Jost Hermand sees modernist innovation in terms of its experiments with form, whereas the avant-garde explored both form and content. Hermand almost echoes Hauser with the notion of a correspondence between ‘artistic truth’ and ‘social justice’: What this phenomenon meant beginning in the early nineteenth century was an art that attempted to base itself on the most progressive social ideas of its own time and strove to develop into progressive conceptions of art corresponding by parallel, analogy, or homology to those social principles; in other words, concepts of art which evinced an inner correlation of aesthetic and social progress. That – and just that – is what was once meant by ‘avant-garde,’ whereas purely formal innovations, regardless of whether they were of a technical or aesthetic nature, were viewed as mere ‘modernism.’ Thus the status of the avant-gardistic could be claimed by a work of art whose progressive quality was realized both in content as well as in form.29

Hermand sees ‘three great avant-garde movements in Europe’. These were (briefly paraphrasing Hermand): from 1830 to 1848–9 – the turn to ‘realism’; between 1870 and 1889 – the turn to ‘Naturalism’; and the ‘years between 1905 and 1925 when, set against the most varied revolutions – such as the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the German November revolution of 1919 – such movements as

28 29

Schulte-Sasse, ‘Foreword: Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the AvantGarde’, in Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, xv. Hermand, ‘Avant-Garde, Modern, Postmodern: The Music (almost) Nobody Wants To Hear’, in Zeitgeist in Babel, ed. Hoesterey, 192–3.

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Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Constructivism and Surrealism developed’.30 Such a reductive linearity – or even causality – is problematic, but nonetheless, the aim of the above ‘movements’ to not only transcend art but also to provide a social critique, continued in the rejection by the ‘later’ neo-avant-gardes of the commodification of the art market and hence the development of conceptual and performance art strategies – from the happenings of the 1960s through to performance art and the improvisational theatre practices of the 1970s. Latemodern performance art has been defined as having its roots in the ‘historical’ avant-gardes, specifically, as Thomas Heyd points out, in its attempts to make art that goes ‘beyond art’.31 Using Bürger’s definition of the ‘historical’, Heyd writes: Earlier this century the movements which have been called the historical avantgarde (by which generally is meant Dada, Futurism, Surrealism and the Russian Avant-Garde) had already sought to transcend art by seeking the integration of art and life.32

There has been an ongoing reaction against the sanctity of the authorial text of bourgeois drama – from the 1890s to the present day. Therefore, avant-garde performance can be seen as a series of reactions against the prescriptive forms of naturalistic/modernist theatre, and the form and pre-eminence of the dramatic literary text. The avant-gardes – in general – prioritized performance over text; in other words, there was a movement from literary text to theatrical performance, with performance being elevated to a position of primacy over the a-priori text and its reliance on an ordered language and a cohesive narrative. A discussion of the neo-avant-gardes is reserved for later in this chapter. What will be discussed first concerns the ‘historical’ avantgardes, and the dialectical relationship avant-garde performance (like modernist performance) had with the ‘real’. For, while the avant-garde 30 31 32

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Hermand, 193. Heyd, ‘Understanding Performance Art: Art Beyond Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 31.1 (Jan. 1991), 68–73. Heyd, 69.

movements of the early twentieth century could no longer believe in the epistemological sureties that preceded them, the ontology underpinning their interrogation of representation, as well as their concept of performance as ‘provocation’, still trapped them within a dialectical framework. This led to their co-optation and submersion into the dialectics of modernism. Whether caught in the grip of a metaphysical dualism, or seeking a monistic collapse of that dualistic frame, the avant-gardes remained entwined within a dialectical movement – trapped in a reaction complex and therefore always already recuperated by the anti-movement of modernism. In other words, although prioritizing performance, the avant-gardes were swallowed up by this urge to rebel against accepted forms – co-opted by their desire for provocation, rupture, and innovation. Dada and Surrealism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Constructivism, all preached for a merging of art and life, particularly disputing the assumed split between the real and its representations exemplified, as Scott Lash points out, by ‘surrealism’s unconditional refusal to consider art as of a different order than life’.33 Performance as antiliterature, as well as anti-theatre, was stressed. The avant-gardes’ attack on theatrical form was, in effect, a revolt against the bourgeois drama. It was also a revolt against modernist rationality but, paradoxically, in the name of a search – still – for a true essential reality. For all their rebellion, the avant-gardes were caught within bourgeois structures – both patriarchal and political. They were similarly trapped within the either/or political debates of the time, especially post-Great War affiliations with either the Left or the Right. The pre-Great War avant-garde impulse is best exemplified by the Futurists, with their celebration of the ‘new’, their infatuation with the technology of speed and movement, their embracing of the communications revolution (especially radio and film), and their emphasis on innovation and rupture. While Futurism, in its post-Great War ‘second wave’ continued in this mode, the impulse of the post-Great War avant-gardes can be condensed to being a reaction against militarism, nationalism, bourgeois values and life-styles, patriarchy, and modernist rationality.

33

Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism, 169.

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Williams (focusing on Expressionism) has argued for the ‘avantgarde’ as having split into two strands – either as the quest for an ‘intense’ subjectivity (into inner consciousness, the unconscious) or the quest to go fully public – to be ‘political’ – and to reintegrate art into society.34 Paraphrasing Williams, there coexisted two strands of the one movement – a ‘subjective’ and a ‘social’ Expressionism. The former culminated in Surrealism; the latter sought an affiliation with the working class via Piscator, Toller and eventually Brecht. The former dominated avant-garde theatre after 1950, leading towards the ‘theatre of the absurd’; the latter became a left-wing political theatre that would be evicted from Germany by 1933.35 In other words, a neat division is constructed between what David Roberts also sees as ‘two genealogies of the avantgarde’, epitomized dialectically by the names of ‘Marx and Freud, Brecht and Artaud’.36 Such a neat division is problematic, but such a tactic is useful, and will be heuristically deployed in that the focus of the remainder of this chapter will be on the ‘subjectivist’ former, leaving the overtly political ‘strand’ of the avant-garde to be discussed in chapter three.

Dada and the Dialectic The ‘historical’ avant-gardes developed a concept of performance specifically in terms of an anti-literature and anti-narrative impulse. This included a revolt against the traditional separation of representation as being split from the real. Of the diverse ‘historical’ avant-gardes, the focus will be on Dada as it has been variously categorized as being exemplary of the modernist avant-gardes; as an anti-modernism; and as a ‘movement’ which has been interpreted, retrospectively, as a proto-postmodern performance mode. It is exem34 35 36

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Williams, ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, 313. Williams, ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, 313–16. Roberts, ‘Marat/Sade, or the Birth of Postmodernism from the Spirit of the Avantgarde’, New German Critique 38 (Spring–Summer 1986), 124.

plary of all three viewpoints, but it is in the latter, with its recognition of the threat of dialectical recuperation that it came closest to escaping that modernist epistemological stance in its realization that there is no ‘outside’ to the dualistic metaphysics of Western thought. In brief, Dada can be periodized as the chronological forerunner to Surrealism – disintegrating through its self-induced internal contradictions (or, as Paul Mann argues, dying of deliberate exposure as well as through its wish for suicide37) and, in part, evolving into Surrealism, which in turn embraced a pre-World War shift towards Marxist politics, before being formally disbanded in 1969.38 The marked differences between Dada and other ‘futurist’ avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century are often paraded as a means of separating Dada from its then near-contemporaries. For RoseLee Goldberg, Surrealism had its focus on language, whereas Dada – as well as Futurism – focused on chance, simultaneity and surprise.39 Importantly, in contrast to Futurism, one of the major tenets of Dada was its refusal to accept that rupture must necessarily lead to innovation. Rather, as Goldberg argues, Dada saw ‘no new value arising from the destruction of the old’. Furthermore, it was this rejection of innovation that angered its opponents. For example, the Parisian Dadaists refused to provide ‘a blueprint for anything better than what had gone before’.40 Annabelle Melzer points out a similar antipathy between Futurist and Dada objectives: Futurism was for the future – Dada against it; Futurism urged a daily spitting on the altar of Art – Dada rejected Art; Futurism was for programmes – ‘Dada had no program and was against all programs’.41 The performance practices of the diverse avant-gardes all shared similar attitudes towards naturalistic theatre and the bourgeois conventions of the stage. They were against the domination of the dramatic text, especially canonical ‘masterpiece’ drama.42 Avantgarde performances worked towards disruption, provocation, shock, confusion, and distraction. Rational meaning was attacked – and often 37 38 39 40 41 42

Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde. See specifically, 87–9. Matthews, Theatre in Dada and Surrealism, 270. Goldberg, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present, 62. Goldberg, 54. Melzer, Latest Rage the Big Drum, 53. See Artaud’s ‘No More Masterpieces’, in The Theater and its Double, 74–83.

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the audience – in certain Futurist and Dada performances. The aim was to produce confusion, to attack what was seen as the passivity of the audience in the face of a ‘new’ way of looking at the world. Much has been written on Dada performance and its contexts. I intend to furnish only a brief overview as there has been considerable writing on this subject.43 The initial Dada performances are invariably linked to the cabaret-style performances at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich during the Great War. As David G. Zinder points out, the aim was to provoke reactions from their audiences, utilizing such performance modes as the ‘manifestation’: a ‘potpourri of polemical, artistic, musical, and theatrical fare’.44 Zinder sees three categories of Dada performance. They were, as follows: the individual act of disruption – with Arthur Cravan and Salvador Dali as examples; the ‘large scale assault’ of the manifestation; and later the use of the scripted play. Concerning the latter, Zinder writes: By the very use of a theatrical convention, that is to say, the assumption of roles by live actors, and the implicit demand that the audience identify the actors with their roles, the playwrights trod a path quite different from that of the direct confrontation of the manifestoes and declamations.45

This third category is more problematic than being only a nonreflexive use of a particular ‘theatrical convention’ – a point to which I will return below. As Dada performance shifted from the cabarets of Zurich to the streets of Berlin and the theatres of Paris, its performances, as well as the viewpoints of its practitioners, underwent marked changes. Nonetheless, it continued with its rationale: to aggressively attack complacency and habit, and to confound the expectations of traditional theatre audiences. However, although it started out as provocative in its ‘manifestations’, with its usually successful intention to enrage the audience, it ended up with engaged audiences who enjoyed 43

44 45

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For some other earlier texts see Foster and Kuenzli, eds., Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt; Erickson, Dada: Performance, Poetry and Art; Foster, ed., Dada/dimensions; Sellin, Reflections on the Aesthetics of Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. More recent material is extensive and includes dissertations and many journal and book articles too numerous to selectively list. Zinder, ‘The Theatre of Attack’, in The Surrealist Connection, 59. Zinder, 65.

the experience and who were provocative in return. In short, Dada’s provocative performances served to reaffirm the existence of that which it attacked – especially its audiences. Mel Gordon claims that Dada, in its placement in twentiethcentury art had become (for museum curators and art historians by the late 1940s): ‘In some ways [...] the bedrock of all late modern and postmodern art’.46 For Gordon, Dada in terms of its influence as a theatre movement, suffered a fate ‘less fortunate’, but its influence has nonetheless become ‘crucial in understanding the post-fifties avantgarde, especially in the phenomena of happenings, performance art, and Robert Wilson’.47 Dada performance might be seen as protopostmodern with its accent on disruption and disturbance, as well as in its attitude of derision towards the ideologically-encoded ontological reality of post-Great War, West European bourgeois society. But, where a more apt proto-postmodernism can be detected is in Dada’s deconstructive aspects. Although the focus of Peter Nicholls is on the negation of the Oedipal plot in much avant-garde theatre (with a particular emphasis on the works of Artaud), he also discusses Tristan Tzara’s theatre experiments of the early 1920s, where he sees Tzara’s ‘La Première Aventure’48 as being deconstructive in comparison to the language experiments of the Surrealists: ‘Sidestepping the dualistic tension between discourse and mise en scène which had characterized Expressionism, Tzara opened the possibility of a kind of deconstructive practice within the theatre’.49 That is to say, Tzara’s theatre experiments sought to undermine representation from within accepted forms, recognizing the impossibility of being ‘outside’ those forms. As Nicholls writes: If it is apt to term Tzara’s theatre ‘deconstructive’, it is because it does not seek to negate the authority of some absent text through recourse to ‘absolute’ or

46 47 48 49

Gordon, ed., Dada Performance, 7. Gordon, 8. An English translation by Ruth Wilson is ‘The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine, Fire Extinguisher’, in Gordon, Dada Performance, 53–62. Nicholls, ‘Anti-Oedipus? Dada and Surrealist Theatre, 1916–35’, New Theatre Quarterly 7.28 (Nov. 1991), 337.

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non-linguistic effects, but rather puts in question the terms of textual authority while continuing to operate within them.50

Rather than constituting a frontal attack on logocentricity (which could only serve to reinforce it), Tzara’s approach attempts to evade transgression and hence that inevitable recuperation into a dominant logocentric theatre form. In inhabiting the form of that which it was attacking – logocentric realist theatre – it can be argued that these later Dada performances fit into a postmodern strategy of subversion rather than transgression. What is important here is the question of the dialectical relationship to an ‘other’. As Mann has argued, it is the acceptance of the dialectical relationship that leads to recuperation: The anti is unthinkable without the relations expressed in the dialectic, which is to say that at its most basic level the avant-garde defined itself as a primary mode of the discourse it otherwise rejected. Conformity/resistance, tradition/ innovation, creation/destruction, stability/movement: the avant-garde cannot be consigned to the second term in any of these binaries: it must be seen as the means by which the polarity as such is articulated. No conformity without resistance, no tradition without innovation.51

Although avant-garde performance practices questioned the content of modernist theatre, and played with the forms (Artaud’s ‘artistic dallying’52), they were still based on modernist ontological foundations and therefore the search for a real ‘real’. Whether it was the subconscious, the class revolution, or the absurdity of life, all had their base in a belief in the putative reality (or the loss), of another, separate, ontological dimension. From a feeling of entrapment in the stultifying drama of bourgeois realism, the avant-gardes searched for an escape – whether through transgression, or transcendence – from the ‘prison house’ of bourgeois drama. 50 51 52

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Nicholls, 338. Mann, 86. Artaud’s oft-paraphrased quote reads in full: ‘And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames’ (The Theater and its Double, 13).

Mann, in his analysis of the attempt of the ‘anti’ to escape recuperation (specifically in relation to Dada), uses as an example a manifesto by Tzara where a simultaneous process of presentation and cancellation is operating. Tzara’s manifesto reads: I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles… I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense.53

Mann sees this as ‘a recognition of and hence a revulsion against the anti’s tendency to resolve itself almost immediately into a virtual factotum of affirmative culture’. Tzara, is ‘groping for [...] an anti that will turn against the teleological instrumentalism of the dialectic, that will turn against itself: in these syntactical contortions he is trying to make contact with that force in the anti which cannot be recuperated’.54 It remains problematic as to whether there is any way in which the ‘anti’ cannot be recuperated, once it sets itself up as such. As Mann writes: ‘Dada saw itself among its enemies; it knew that the avant-garde becomes what it opposes and therefore had to oppose itself’.55 Therefore Dada, as an oppositional practice, was doomed to either recuperation or suicide. Or, as Charles Russell writes, its ongoing negativity led to its suicide, through what might be termed its self-cannibalism: Dada’s negativity unavoidably fed on its own practitioners; in effect, it fed on itself. For dada had reached a logical dead end. Since it had undermined all attempts to establish positive goals or principles of action, dada could only sustain itself by acting as a tool of endless negation. But this meant the ceaseless repetition of the same activities, the same absurdity, the same jokes. Nihilism and play finally proved merely boring.56 53

54 55 56

Mann, 89–90. The quotation is from The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Motherwell, 76. Also, see Gordon, Dada Performance, for another translation of this manifesto, 45–51. Mann, 90. Mann, 89. Russell, Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries, 120.

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While it can be argued that Dada escaped co-optation through its voluntary suicide, resulting from the recognition (particularly by Tzara) of its inevitable co-optation, it must be recognized that in its performance practices it always reaffirmed the primacy of what it attacked – the audience, language, narrative, and bourgeois reality. The same may be said for the post-World War neo-avant-gardes. While post-World War neo-avant-garde performance practices pushed against the dualistic epistemology and consumerist co-optation of late modernism, this should be seen as an anti-modern, not a postmodern strategy. Rather than escaping the anti-impulse and its concomitant co-optation, in the shift from text to performance, or from the word to the body, the neo-avant-gardes merely reversed the dualisms and were trapped, once again, in a binary occlusion. This shift towards yet another re-prioritization of an either/or configuration will be the subject of the remainder of this chapter.

Neo-avant-garde Performance: Reaffirming the Dialectic Neo-avant-garde performance forms a bridge between the performance practices of the ‘historical’ avant-gardes and what will be defined as postmodern performance practices in chapter five. While attempting to transgress the increasingly petrified formalisms of late modernism, neo-avant-garde performance was still immersed in an ‘anti’ movement. It reaffirmed what it attacked – using modernist tropes and modernist strategies. Rather than discussing at length the continuing entrapment of the neo-avant-gardes in the either/or dialectic of modernism, some brief examples will be used. The main focus will be on those practices that heralded a shift from the dualisms of the modernist avant-garde to the deconstruction of those dualities in postmodern performance. An obvious manifestation of the avant-gardist urge to break from the conformist and consumerist strictures of modernist aesthetic practices can be discerned in neo-avant-garde performance practices. The

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‘trajectory’ of the ‘historical’ avant-gardes (in their different manifestations) has been seen as culminating in the performance art of the 1960s and 1970s and in the range of improvisational performance practices of that time. Goldberg traces a history of avant-garde performance, chronologically and geographically, from the Futurists, the Russian avant-gardes, Dada and Surrealism, and the Bauhaus – through to the shift across the Atlantic and thence to North American performance practices – from the 1930s to the 1970s. For Goldberg: Performance in the United States began to emerge in the late thirties with the arrival of European war exiles in New York. By 1945 it had become an activity in its own right, recognised as such by artists and going beyond the provocations of earlier performances.57

Goldberg sees the innovations of the Black Mountain College, primarily through the works of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, as being central influences in the formation of North American ‘Live Art’.58 Early-1970s performance art grew out of conceptual art, that is, a revolt against the power of the art galleries and the static materiality of the art objects displayed in them. This led towards ‘an art of which the material is concepts’.59 Despite tensions and differences in form, neo-avant-garde performance art was characterized by a search for fusion and unification, not unlike a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Echoing the quest of the ‘historical’ avant-gardes, it incorporated the search for a universal means of expression through art that would serve to annihilate the split between art and life, subject and object (artist and spectator), and lead towards a new era of collectivity. In other words, there occurred, yet again, a desire to collapse the binaries, if not re-prioritize them. There are several important factors in the formulation of these neo-avant-garde performance movements. These included: a utopian belief in a new epoch; a revolt against the authority of the written text – incorporating an anti-narrative drive which was tied into the performance versus theatre debate; an accent on presence versus 57 58 59

Goldberg, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present, 79. Goldberg, 80. Goldberg, 98.

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representation – with a focus on the immediate materiality of the body versus the mediated word; and an ongoing search for ‘universals of performance’. Exemplary of this avant-gardist agenda of performance art in the 1960s was a form of modernist nostalgia expressed in the quest for a utopian ‘new epoch’ that would transcend the gallerydefined separations between the cultural sphere and ‘real’ life and herald a return to a former organic and pre-industrial set of values. This search was typified by a rejection of materialism and what Udo Kultermann described as ‘a growing trust in psychic, magical, and mythic values’.60 Beyond the merging of art into life and the rejection of what was seen as the crass materialism of the commercial art world, there was – once again – the search for new beginnings, expressed by Kultermann as a quest for ‘a new, human system of values, an ethics based upon love and mutual help, the sign of a new epoch. The culture of the 1960s shows the way’.61 Such a messianic (and short-lived) faith in a ‘new epoch’ could be captured, unproblematically at the time, in those late-1960s icons of Woodstock, the Age of Aquarius, the San Francisco ‘summer of love’ and the hippie ‘movement’. The emphasis was on ‘Action’ and ‘Change’ – a vanguardist attack on the status quo which echoed the manifestos of the ‘historical’ avantgardes. The neo-avant-garde distrust of narrative echoes that disruption of narrative in the works of Dada and Surrealist artists. As Nicholls writes: Aragon’s dislike of ‘stories’ resonates with a general Dada and Surrealist distrust of narrative structure – a distrust of forms which subordinate the immediacy of presentation to some kind of external textual authority.62

Barbara Haskell singles out the anti-narrative strain of neo-avantgarde ‘performance events’ – like Goldberg, dating these from the works of the Black Mountain group in the early 1950s.63 There was an 60 61 62 63

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Kultermann, Art and Life, 209. Kultermann, 209. Nicholls, 332. Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance 1958– 1964, 31. Further references to this text are by page number.

impetus, following the example of Artaud, to ‘circumvent traditional forms of theater’, with a focus on anti-narrative as well as on Artaud’s call for ‘primitive, ritualistic spectacle’ (32). Such ‘performance events’ or happenings were, to paraphrase Haskell, distinguished by a lack of ‘narrative logic’ and conveyed ‘no sense of cause and effect’: Happenings dispensed with a linear story line; like a series of anecdotes, they presented compartmentalized events in which each action was self-contained – no plots or stories, no character portrayals, no sense of time and place. (43–4)

In such a manner, they worked against the ‘character-context matrices of traditional theater’ (44). These attacks on ‘traditional’ theatre forms, especially through an outright denial of closure and a ‘certain’ uncertainty of narrative linearity, can only be seen as constituting a reaction against those forms. The quest was for new means of expression towards a revolution against the art institution. Haskell ties the period neatly into 1958 to 1964. At the close of this period, with the ‘international renown’ of what were formerly fringe practitioners, plus their utilization of (or co-optation by) the major galleries, there were ‘signs that the new aesthetic was firmly established. It had already become the place from which another generation would extend and against which, ultimately, it would react’ (108). The reaction/innovation reflex of the ‘historical’ avant-gardes continued throughout the 1960s through to the 1980s. (Indeed, this ‘reflex’ still prevails in much performance of the 1990s and beyond in the search for ‘new’ means of shocking, or at least surprising, the spectator.) A major aspect in the interrogation of conventional theatre forms was a shift towards the opposite poles of those dominant forms. This shift was characterized by the search for new forms, or means of expression, often in terms of an exploration of that which had previously been deemed to be inferior, or altogether omitted. The move towards an ‘immediacy of presentation’ to which Nicholls refers, was – yet again – the manifestation of a modernist sensibility which was seeking a rupture from past, stultified forms towards new means of expression. Neo-avant-garde performance, while it can be termed late modernist, did signal a proto-postmodern move in its interrogation of traditional binary prioritization. 69

Whereas modernist theatre foregrounded representation and narrative, according to Josette Féral neo-avant-garde performance attempted to escape this reliance, and rather focused on a ‘nonnarrative and non-representational theatre’.64 Performance itself was explored as the primary ‘reality’. As Féral writes: The absence of narrativity (continuous narrativity, that is) is one of the dominant characteristics of performance [...] It attempts not to tell (like theatre), but rather to provoke synaesthetic relationships between subjects.65

Bonnie Marranca, investigating the notion of the ‘body as text’ through the works of Pirandello, Brecht and Artaud, identified the shift from theatre to performance, in part, as a separation of actor identification with role to a ‘recognition of the actor’s body itself as a text’. However, while performance art was seen as being ‘primarily’ a narrative form, nonetheless, that ‘narrative style of performance’ included a ‘commentary on the act itself’.66 These two aspects of neoavant-garde performance – the accent on narrative, or the lack of it; and the focus on the body as a text; form two intertwining areas. Both have their underpinnings in the concept of presence, and hence foreground the question of representation, but are chiefly concerned with the primacy of performance itself. That is to say, performance becomes the primary ‘reality’ in late-modernist avant-garde theatre – a turning around and a re-prioritizing of the subordinate pole of a – still – dualistic opposition. Hence, ‘presence’ was a major focus for performance practitioners in the 1960s and 1970s. This focus took several forms; in part as a revolt against the sanctity of the authorial text. As Philip Auslander writes: In modern, Western theatre, the question of presence cannot be separated from that of the authority of the text – the actor’s presence is conventionally defined in relationship to character, which in turn is delineated by the dramatic text. The 64 65 66

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Féral, ‘Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified’, Modern Drama 25.1 (March 1982), 171. Féral, 179. Marranca, ‘Performance World, Performance Culture’, Performing Arts Journal 30, 10.3 (1987), 23.

ideological effectiveness of presence, however, requires that the authority of the text be conferred on the actor; the authorizing text itself must disappear behind the performance.67

That is to say, ‘modern, Western theatre’ attempted to present a seamless representation, denying its representational aspects in the service of the ‘drama’ – presented on stage as though unmediated by author or actor. Nonetheless, these prime components were always already necessarily evident to the spectator. Indeed, that is where the pleasure for the spectator manifested itself – in bravura personal performances of masterpiece texts. For Elinor Fuchs, presence became an ‘absolute value’ in certain theatre practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s; that presence ‘staked on the revelations of the self and a corresponding suspicion of the text’.68 As Fuchs opens her essay: Since the Renaissance, Drama has traditionally been the form of writing that strives to create the illusion that it is composed of spontaneous speech, a form of writing that paradoxically seems to assert the claim of speech to be a direct conduit to Being. (163)

The importance of absolute presence was manifested in the theatre works of people such as Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Richard Schechner, Joseph Chaikin and Peter Brook. Invoking distinct echoes of Artaud, Fuchs writes: To the positive value assigned to improvisation, audience participation, myth, ritual, and communion they opposed a view of the author’s script as a politically oppressive intruder, demanding submission to author-ity. The speech that bubbled up from the inner depths was more trustworthy than the alien written word, and many of them experimented with efforts to slip the constricting knot of language altogether. (164)

However, Fuchs argues that these notions of presence were problematized by artists such as Mabou Mines with their performance of 67 68

Auslander, ‘Toward a Concept of the Political in Postmodern Theatre’, Theatre Journal 39.1 (March 1987), 28–9. Fuchs, ‘Presence and the Revenge of Writing: Re-thinking Theatre after Derrida’, Performing Arts Journal 26/27, 9.2–3 (1985), 164. Further references to this text are by page number.

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Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go (where mirrors were used to reflect the actors’ ‘presence’ on to the stage); Richard Foreman’s ‘ontological-hysteric theatre’ – with its foregrounded author/director (Foreman); and Robert Wilson’s ‘spectacles’. In the latter two, ‘amateur’ actors were used to counter the ‘presence’ of the ‘professional’ (164–5). In place of this theatre of presence, Fuchs posits a ‘theatre of absence’, where performances challenged not only the celebration of presence, but also the privileging of the written text – often foregrounding its materiality by incorporating ‘reading and writing directly into the texture of performance’.69 Such an ironic ‘foregrounding’ of the text does suggest a deconstructive move towards shifting beyond the either/or dialectic of a purely anti-textual impulse. However, a ‘theatre of absence’, as counter to a theatre of presence, necessarily invokes the binary oppositions of a dualistic modernism: the acceptance of an epistemological duality, or, in other words, a search for either a monistic ‘presence’ or ‘absence’. The return to the ‘materiality’ of the text is indicative of a nostalgia for the fixity of the work which can stand outside the specific contextuality of where it might be performed and received. The drama, in its Aristotelian form, offers a fictive stability in its mode of staging which implies a consensus in its interpretation (and therefore, in theory, a belief in the predicability of a collective audience response). But the stability that the written text supposedly provides is disrupted in performance, as is that belief in the collective receptivity of an audience. As Jean Alter wrote in a review of Languages of the Stage concerning Patrice Pavis on the semiotic instability of performance: ‘It is no wonder then, that, in several essays, one detects a frustration with the elusive nature of performances and a nostalgia for the stability that drama offers in the unchanging materiality of its verbal signs’.70 In other words, there is a frustration with the ephemeral, and a nostalgia for the stability of the 69

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Fuchs singles out The Wooster Group’s ‘L.S.D.’ and Stuart Sherman’s ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Chekhov’ as examples of performance ‘being invaded by what it banishes’ (‘Presence and the Revenge of Writing’, 170). Alter, ‘Theater Semiotics at a Crossroads: On a Book by Patrice Pavis’, boundary 2 18.1 (Spring 1991), 250.

dramatic text which can escape the transience of performance and be authoritative in its authorship. The execution of that nostalgia for stability, made accessible through the fixity of a dramatic text that can ‘mean’ for an assumed majority of people – as well as the capacity for the repetition of that materiality – is most readily contained in the narrative structure of drama. The drama text’s ‘unchanging materiality’ to which Alter refers works against a signifying system that, in performance, is always changing, particularly in terms of the differing contextualities of its reception. For Régis Durand: Once freed of the great narrative continuum which rules over Western performing arts, signs become floating, polyvalent elements, capable of entering into polymorphous combinations according to the energy they are charged with.71

Durand, in seeing the shift from an essentially ‘narrative art’ to a diversity of practices based on different modes, such as ‘description, inventory, montage, documentation, chance, effectuation’ as ‘not so much a rejection of narrative as a displacement of its status’,72 is pointing towards a postmodern conception of performance. The ‘absolute’ rejection of narrative, explicit in an anti-narrative drive, reaffirms its potency as a recuperative force, as does any either/or configuration. Such a reaffirmation of the dialectic can also be seen in the debate concerning an ‘essential’ body as unmediated presence against the mediated dramatic text or logocentrism of modernist performance. In late-1960s and early-1970s performance there was a strong focus on the body as being most ‘representative’ of presence. As Auslander argues: The assumption behind much of the experimental theatre and performance of the 1960s (really the period from about 1964 to about 1974) was that because the presence of the actor as one living human being before others is spiritually 71

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Durand, ‘Theatre/SIGNS/Performance: On Some Transformations of the Theatrical and the Theoretical’, in Innovation/Renovation, ed. Hassan and Hassan, 220. Durand, 220.

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and psychologically liberating, pure presentation of performer to audience is the best means available to the theatre to make a radical spiritual/political statement.73

In a similar manner to the concept that the spoken word could be the unmediated signifier of pure presence, the materiality of the performing body on a stage was linked aesthetically, culturally, and metaphysically, to the concept of presence. One of the more simplistic manoeuvres in separating performance from theatre in late-modernist terms was in the text/body dialectic. There was a presumption of impurity associated with the authorial, text-mediated word versus the purity of the supposedly unmediated body, freed from the taint of ideological coding and therefore standing as more representative of a ‘performance’ versus theatre paradigm. A major strand in this debate saw the materiality of the body (in performance art in particular), as being more ‘true’ than the cleanedup iconic body of most mainstream film, advertising, and fashion modelling. Hence in 1960s–70s performance art there was a focus on the body as material subject. However, as Auslander points out in his essay on Vito Acconci, the materiality of the body is problematized in that it is doubly-encoded in performance – as defined by the codes of a specific performance and as it is inscribed by social discourses.74 For Auslander, modern performance theory attempted to evade this double encoding. The body was seen as either representation (in the sense of immersion into character), or as ‘irreducibly originary presence’, transcending the discursive (186). In other words, there occurs a simplistic binary of Stanislavski versus Appia, with the actor’s body as either ‘an iconic sign for the character’s body’, or the body as a source of Artaudian ‘true hieroglyphs’ leading towards an ‘early’ Grotowski model of the body as ‘ideogram’ (186–7). Both strands wanted the body to disappear, either into the character or, as Auslander para-

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Auslander, ‘Toward a Concept of the Political’, 24. Auslander, ‘Vito Acconci and the Politics of the Body in Postmodern Performance’, in After the Future, ed. Shapiro, 186. Further references to this text are by page number.

phrases Grotowski, to ‘vanish and burn in a flash of pure psychic apprehension’ (187).75 In both cases the body is robbed of its materiality, subjected ‘to the discipline of text, whether the dramatic text or the text of archetypal psychic impulse’ (187). Thus, while the body may be seen by modernist performance theorists as encoded by social discourses, these are but an overlay on ‘an essential body that can short-circuit social discourses’, but as such, it is ‘a metaphysical, even a mystical concept: it is asocial, undifferentiated, raceless, genderless, and, therefore, neutralized and quietist’ (187). Against the notion of an archetypal pure physicality of the body (a universal body), bodies in postmodern performance art are produced by ideological discourses, and for Auslander this needs to be recognized: Whereas the modernist artist believes that ideological and cultural codes may be transcended, or even annulled, through transgression, the postmodernist artist recognizes that he or she must work within the codes that define the cultural landscape. (188)

Referring in particular to the works of Acconci, Auslander notes that the distinction is an epistemological one, not an historical one. Acconci’s performances highlight the materiality of the body in terms of its existence in time; the body as a kind of ‘machine’, of flowing fluids and bodily desires and functions: ‘the body as a system, sweating and spermatic, fecal and salivating’ (189).76 In a similar vein, Herbert Blau points out (in reference to the plays of Jean Genet), that ‘biology and its functions are always on the verge of discrediting the body as either the sanctuary of a self or a purified vision of theatre’.77 As Birringer also affirms, there has never existed a ‘natural’ body. Rather: ‘Performers have always only performed representations of

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Grotowski puts it thus: ‘Impulse and action are concurrent: the body vanishes, burns, and the spectator sees only a series of visible impulses’ (Towards a Poor Theatre, 16). Auslander is quoting Germano Celant, ‘Dirty Acconci’, Artforum 19 (1980), 76. Blau, ‘The Surpassing Body’, Drama Review 35.2 (Summer 1991), 88.

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bodies inscribed by language, theatrical codes, and gestural/corporeal stances, and imprinted by history’.78 The longing for an aesthetics (even a metaphysics) of pure presence implies a desire for an essentialist subjectivity – or, the discourse of a universalist, teleologically oriented end to difference and dispersed subjectivity. That search for a pure presence, characteristic of certain theatre practitioners of the 1960s and 1970s, can be coupled with the search for ‘universals of performance’, particularly in the writings of Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, and entered into, with some irony, by Blau.79 Such a quest appears endemic among certain theorists and practitioners of the 1960s and 1970s, the major influences being taken from Artaud and evident in Grotowski among others. Taking into account the scope needed for a suitable discussion of this topic, I refer to it only in order to point out the modernist epistemological assumptions of that particular search for an essentialism that could underpin performance. The concept of a common, underlying vocal and bodily language, or archetypes of sound, gesture, and facial emotion which would elide difference in the search for the essential actor/human subject, was based on an essentialism founded on the modernist, universalist, and ultimately metaphysical project of the subsumption of difference into sameness. Along with this quest for an unmediated presence and a universality in performance, there existed a focus on play as being paradigmatic of performance. Blau has discussed the prominence that play assumed in the theatre experiments of the 1960s: As conventional dramaturgy came to be thought of as the agency of repression, it was the ethos of play that displaced the dramatic texts and took over the acting studios with games and improvisations, moving from the theatre into the streets, and subsequently – with the sublimation of dissidence in a theatricalized theory – into the psychosexual discourse about an economy without reserve.80

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Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism, 212. In particular see the chapter ‘The Future of Ritual’ in Schechner, The Future of Ritual, 228–65; Turner, ‘Are There Universals of Performance?’, Comparative Criticism 9 (1987), 47–58; and Blau, ‘Universals of Performance; or Amortizing Play’, in By Means of Performance, ed. Schechner and Appel, 250–72. Blau, ‘The Surpassing Body’, 92.

But, without entering the trap of the dialectic – where play is the necessary binary duality of, in this case, ‘repression’ – play can, nonetheless, be defined positively as the space of performance: as that state between free will and fate, or contingency and necessity in Laclau’s terms, or between presence and absence for Derrida. As D. W. Winnicott argued, play is a between state. It lies between subject and object, between the ‘extrovert’ life and the ‘inner’ life. It is an ‘intermediate’ zone, a ‘potential space’ – a place where there is room to manoeuvre, to experiment, to test the possibilities of experience.81

Precursors and Correspondences As long as the dualistic criteria of modernist epistemologies are accepted and utilized in theories of performance, postmodern performance can be subsumed under a late modernist, or particularly an avant-gardist, rubric. Nonetheless, the performance practices of the avant-gardes (both ‘historical’ and ‘neo’), even if not necessarily figuring as precursors to postmodern performance practices, can be usefully seen as providing correspondences. For Helmut Lethen, postmodernism’s similarities with the historical avant-gardes – particularly Dada, which he notes has been mentioned as forming a ‘tributary’ to postmodernism – form ‘correspondences’ in specific attitudes and techniques, rather than general precursors.82 However, certain strategies have been put into effect to serve the purpose of reducing postmodernism into yet another avant-garde manifestation of the modernist impulse. On the other hand, Lethen sees certain postmodernists as deliberately excluding the avant-garde from the ‘concept of Modernism’ so as to ensure a clear-cut binary between modernism and postmodernism (234). This ‘logic’ has two functions. 81 82

Winnicott, ‘The Place where we Live’, in Playing and Reality, 104–10. Lethen, ‘Modernism Cut in Half: The Exclusion of the Avant-garde and the Debate on Postmodernism’, in Approaching Postmodernism, ed. Fokkema and Bertens, 234. Further references to this text are by page number.

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It guarantees the ‘coherence of the critical construct of Modernism’, against which postmodernism can define itself, and such an exclusion ‘is the only way to warrant the claim of innovation which is inherent in Postmodernism’ (234). This, arguably, is a postmodernism conforming to the modernist criteria of reaction and innovation. If, as Lethen argues, a postmodern position can acknowledge, quoting Hassan’s terms, that history is a ‘palimpsest’ and that we can all be ‘a little Victorian, Modern and Postmodern, at once’, then postmodernism is characterized by diffusion, not polarity (235). Therefore, bipolar schemes that attempt to show the difference between modernism and postmodernism work upon ‘the battlefield on which Modernism itself operates’. What is shown are polarities within modernism, and therefore Lethen is arguing against the notion of a radical break, or ‘an abrupt discontinuity’ (236). Lethen states that it is only by shifting away from those modernist bipolar schemes, away from the ‘dichotomic structure of Modernist thinking’, that the postmodernist ‘writer’ can escape. He suggests alternatives: in place of the tension of polarity: shifting; in place of duplication: diffusion; in place of the mirror: the media, which refuse to function as a mirror. Let me be clear, – diffusion not as an opposite pole in the dichotomic scheme, but as medium. (237)

As Lethen writes: ‘One must learn to navigate without the polar stars of the Modernist scheme’ (237). Nonetheless, Lethen’s postmodernists ‘generate the legend of discontinuity’ – a position which is more late, or anti-modern (237). Discontinuity implies rupture, and to shift beyond the ‘polar stars’ of modernist criteria does not imply rupture, but rather an ongoing dialectic, that ‘special’ dialectic which refuses closure through its recognition of différance. Obviously, it would be refractory to deny influences and correspondences between postmodern performance practices and, for example, Dada and other avant-garde theatre practices. That would be to suggest some decisive rupture. On the other hand, to see those above practices, in their diverse variations, as being informed by the same epistemological assumptions, or, in particular, being received in a similar manner, would be a mistake. Beyond the desire for an essen-

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tialism based on one side or the other of an epistemological dualism – which I have argued is characteristic of modernist performance – is the shift towards a questioning of such strict polarities, as well as an interrogation of that need for an ‘outside’ from which to view reality. As I shall show in chapter five, postmodern performance plays in the space between the dualities ‘inherent’ in modernist performance theories – particularly between those of the ‘real’ and its representations. Furthermore, it dispenses with the ruling tropes of forward movement, of action, of innovation – which imply the necessity for a clean break with that which has preceded it. In short, in its willingness to ‘play’ between the rules of an either/or duality, and in its refusal to mount a direct attack on modernism, postmodernism escapes the potential recuperation that an anti-modernism, with its entrapment in the dialectic and its confrontational avant-gardist aspect, always invited. What now follows is modern political theatre’s necessary contextual struggle with the dialectics of the Left and the Right, the affinities to which helped serve to define the ‘political’ of modernist political theatre.

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Chapter Three Political and Theatrical Modernism

The Political Theatre of Modernism In the previous chapter the concept of performance was discussed, with some background on how it might be conceived in relation to and with the modernist paradigm. Against that background it is now possible to focus on modernist political performance, discussing its primary identification with left-wing politics. It is argued that modernist political theatre shared a Marxist belief in the grand narrative of collectivity and class emancipation and therefore fell into a reliance on the modernist ideals of closure, transcendence and a utopian eschatology. What is necessary at this point is not only to identify the underlying theoretical rationale of these practices – but importantly, how it is exemplified in the works of certain of its more prominent and representative practitioners. Numerous anthologies and collections are already available that have focused on modernist political theatre, from the mid-nineteenth century through to the present.1 Notwithstanding the many others who were also leading figures in the development of political theatre (especially in Russia and Germany), as well as the diverse political theatre practices in other parts of Europe, Britain and the United States, certain figures have been valorized, notably: in Russia – Vsevolod Meyerhold; and in Germany – Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, ‘the two most renowned exponents of twentieth-century political drama’.2 1

2

This list would include: Bradby and McCormick, People’s Theatre; Bradby, James and Sharratt, eds., Performance and Politics in Popular Drama; Craig, ed., Dreams and Deconstructions; Samuel, MacColl and Cosgrove, eds., Theatres of the Left 1880–1935; Stourac and McCreery, Theatre as a Weapon; Davies, Other Theatres. Patterson, ‘Aspects of Terrorism in the Work of Piscator and Brecht’, in Terrorism and Modern Drama, ed. Orr and Klaic, 83.

The dominant factor of modernist political theatre is already evident: there is, as Graham Holderness points out, an ‘automatic identification of “political” drama with “left-wing” drama’.3 In definition as well as in practice, political theatre in modernism was, in the main, the expression of left-wing politics, and explicitly constructed and conceived in response to, or as a vanguard for, revolution; in particular the class revolution of Marxism, or what Marc Silberman refers to as ‘perhaps the most highly developed form of modernism’.4 Modernist political theatre can be defined in terms of an explicit selfcategorization based on its political alignment with the Left and a desire to address socio-political issues in the interests of societal change. This sets it up in contradistinction to a ‘non-political’ theatre, whether self-proclaimed or merely not overtly perceived as such. That is to say, modernist theatre that does not proclaim itself as ‘political’ is invariably ‘conservative’ of the political status quo, whether selfreflexively or otherwise. In that sense, all theatre is political. As Baz Kershaw has noted, to term all theatre political is an ‘unhelpful idea’ and a more stringent critical approach is required in order ‘push past’ what could justifiably be deemed a somewhat trite reduction.5 Nonetheless, as Sandy Craig writes: All theatre is political in the sense that theatre is not autonomous and is forced continually to decide in whose service it acts. While most theatre-workers in the commercial and bourgeois subsidized theatres do not recognize this choice, workers in political theatre consciously place themselves on the side of the

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Holderness, ed., The Politics of Theatre and Drama, 5. Silberman, ‘A Postmodernized Brecht?’ Theatre Journal 45.1 (March 1993), 7. Obviously, right-wing political theatre practices existed, although in Germany especially they were marginalized by the predominance of left-wing theatre up to the early 1930s. However, with the Nazi win in 1933, a right-wing and conservative theatre (either extolling or acquiescent with the policies of the Nazi Party) was reinstated. See, for example, Gadberry, ed., Theatre in the Third Reich, the Prewar Years; and Berghaus, ed., Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925– 1945. Kershaw, ‘The Politics of Performance in a Postmodern Age’, in Analysing Performance: A Critical Reader, ed. Campbell, 134.

working class. Political theatre is, by necessity, a theatre of socialist political change.6

Furthermore, as Augusto Boal states in the opening sentence to his Theatre of the Oppressed: all theater is necessarily political, because all the activities of man [sic] are political and theater is one of them. Those who try to separate theater from politics try to lead us into error – and this is a political attitude.7

However, in this chapter, and by the criteria of a modernist paradigm, the term as a specific refers to theatre that self-consciously sets itself political goals, and moreover, aligns itself self-assuredly with the political goals of the Left. In summary, political theatre, in the context of modernism, was that which explicitly stated its political intention – to show through its mainly prescriptive forms that social reality is neither solely natural nor totally determined. Furthermore, through the activities of political theatre the spectator might achieve a ‘critical awakening’ of how those dominant power structures work which prevent human subjects from perceiving the ‘true’ state of affairs, and thus attain the subsequent capability to intervene in those affairs. That capability for intervention necessarily spans a diverse range of options, encompassing such goals as the dissemination of ‘radical’ ideas in order to change opinions and attitudes as well as action in the political sphere, and even on the streets. The identification with the Left is a mainstay of modernist political theatre, traceable back to the ‘social realism’ of the early naturalistic drama of the 1880s – especially in its German reception. A schematic chronological series of particular periods and particular identities is conjured up by the following: Naturalistic theatre, Expressionism, Meyerhold, Piscator, Brecht, and on to the ‘guerrilla theatre’ of the 1960s. Notwithstanding the diverse forms that these modernist political theatre practices took – from Naturalism to the Epic; from agitprop to ‘guerrilla theatre’; underlying them were certain common denominators that can serve to define modernist 6 7

Craig, ed., Dreams and Deconstructions, 30. Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, ix.

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political theatre. These include a reaction against Naturalism; the notion that art is the secondary representation of a real (notwithstanding the avant-garde drive to collapse these distinctions); a certain didacticism (and occasional ruthlessness) on the part of its theorists and practitioners; and a teleological determinism that predicted an allencompassing revolutionary overturning of the status quo through a newly informed audience that would collectively be the means towards this revolution – the left-wing revolution of the ‘masses’. The subsequent history of twentieth-century modernist political theatre can be defined, in part, as a series of attacks on naturalistic theatre practices and a quest for alternatives: a constant self-revision that is symptomatic of modernism and which helps explain recent and current attempts to prove that postmodernism is but the latest phase in this self-revision. However, although the theatrical and theoretical revisionists of Naturalism attempted to escape its confines, they nonetheless persisted with many of its underlying ideological and epistemological assumptions. In the main though, modernist political theatre could only disseminate ideas or else use its forms to celebrate that which had already been achieved. Political theatre in modernism contained two main strands, though neither should be seen as standing isolated from the other in terms of both influences and practices. One took the line of a dialectical reaction against the determinism of Naturalism, in which it had its roots; the other was a manifestation of the need for a theatre that could reflect the ‘new’ political realities of a Europe in revolution. Political theatre in the context of European modernism arose with the growth of a political consciousness informed by the pertinent writings and the social revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century. For Erwin Piscator: its roots reach back deep into the last century. It was then that the intellectual situation of bourgeois society was penetrated by forces which, either by design or by their mere existence, decisively altered that situation, in part even destroying it. These forces came from two directions: from literature and from the proletariat. And at the point where they met a new concept arose: Naturalism, and a new form of theater; the Volksbühne, a stage for the people.8 8

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Piscator, The Political Theatre, 30. Further references to this text are by page number.

Piscator did not grant Naturalism an undeserved revolutionary role: ‘Like its great predecessor Ibsen, it never got past stating the problem. Cries of exasperation stand where we should hear answers’ (33). According to Piscator, with Gustav Hauptmann’s The Weavers, ‘for one historical moment, Naturalism did turn the theater into a political platform’ (33). Nonetheless, as he qualifies: ‘Naturalism is far from expressing the demands of the masses. It describes their condition, and restores a proper relationship between literature and the state of society’ (33). That ‘proper relationship’ can be termed one of a reflective nature rather than a dynamic one, a point which will be expanded on later in this chapter in the context of post-revolutionary Russian political theatre, especially as it relates to the conflict between socialist realism and the theatre practices of Meyerhold. As pointed out in chapter two, naturalistic theatre, in the late nineteenth century, was perceived as avant-garde – a radical theatre practice that challenged dominant concepts concerning the human subject and its ordained place in society. For Raymond Williams: At its centre was the humanist and secular – and, in political terms, Liberal and later Socialist – proposition that human nature was not, or at least not decisively, unchanging and timeless, but was socially and culturally specific.9

As such, it was revolutionary, challenging the concepts of a divine teleology and a providential determinism, which served to reinforce the presumably natural and inalienable right of God and His representative monarchs to oversee an unalterable set of laws for ‘mankind’. Nonetheless, Naturalism had its own set of deterministic laws – informed by Darwinism, sociology, and positivism where ‘man [sic] is an animal whose course is determined by his heredity, by the effect of his environment, and by the pressures of the moment’.10 By the late nineteenth century, however, Naturalism was perceived as moribund by a ‘new’ avant-garde – exemplified at first by the Symbolists and then later by the Expressionists. Naturalism had become the new tradition, epitomized by the dramas that expressed 9 10

Williams, ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, in Visions and Blueprints, ed. Timms and Collier, 310. Furst and Skrine, Naturalism, 18.

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‘reality’ as a material set of human experiences but which were, nevertheless, performed on the proscenium arch stages of the bourgeois theatres of Europe. There thus occurred a shift from the reflection of an external material world of social determinism to the individual interiority and subjectivism of the ‘dream worlds’ of Strindberg, the ‘later’ Ibsen, and the early Symbolist/Expressionist plays of Maeterlinck, Kokoschka, and Sorge, among others. But, unlike the Symbolists, this Expressionist reaction against Naturalism was more than ‘merely’ aesthetic. As Walter Sokel writes: They constituted not merely an aesthetic but also an ethical, social, and sometimes even political revolt. Although there were strong Nietzschean and futurist influences on Expressionism, especially in its initial phase, full-fledged Expressionism was largely allied with pacifism, humanitarianism, Socialism, and progressive school reform.11

External ‘reality’ – the touchstone of Naturalism – could no longer be represented so unproblematically on the stage. It was the notion of the ‘unrepresentable’, partly fuelled by the publication of the writings of Freud, that had become the focus of the Expressionist avant-garde.12 In short, Naturalism was a victim of its own certitudes concerning what was natural and what was determined. Naturalism became ‘naturalized’ and reactionary, and hence fell prey to a ‘new’ antidialectic – Expressionism – as well as the ‘new’ political theatre of modernism. Coupled with this reaction against a deterministic Naturalism was a growing awareness that the changing political contexts of Europe demanded a new form of political theatre to reflect the prescriptions of Marxism. This ‘political’ reaction against Naturalism had its roots before the Great War – not only in Germany, but especially in Russia, where the theatre practices of Naturalism could no longer mirror the ‘realities’ of the late-Tsarist regime. This reaction against Naturalism as a theatre form was allied to a growing commit11 12

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Sokel, ed., Anthology of German Expressionist Drama, x. Later, it was the ‘reality’ of the Great War which had become the new ‘unrepresentable’. As Innes points out: ‘Karl Kraus complained of the impossibility of representing the First World War on the stage because the nature of the catastrophe had invalidated normal concepts’. Innes, Erwin Piscator’s Political Theatre, 59.

ment by certain theatre practitioners towards issues of class – and therefore, Marxism. Hence, there was a strong movement towards a left-wing political theatre practice tied into new forms of theatrical expression. It was in the context of the 1917 Revolution in Russia that political theatre practices evolved which directly informed the development of the contemporaneous German political theatre, in its practices as well as in its ideology. In turn, as I shall discuss later in this chapter, it was the German practices which came primarily to inform Western European, British and North American political theatre.

Political Theatre in Russia: Vsevolod Meyerhold In the Russian context (both Tsarist and post-Revolution), Meyerhold exemplifies both a reaction against Naturalism as well as the development of a theatre in the service of the revolution. For Meyerhold, ‘the only theatre which can become exemplary in this age of mighty revolution is a revolutionary theatre’.13 Meyerhold’s influence on the nascent post-revolutionary Soviet political theatre lay primarily in the innovations he had instigated in an attack against Naturalism in prerevolutionary Russia. Although initially attracted to Symbolism, Meyerhold increasingly turned to ‘popular’ entertainment forms. Amongst these was a return to an overt ‘theatricality’ which included the use of forms such as commedia dell’arte, ‘cabotinage’, and those borrowed from the circus. Such forms dispensed with illusion, showing performers’ skills, the visible elements of risk always associated with circus performance, and the social satire of commedia dell’arte, epitomized in his 1906 production of The Fairground Booth.14 Meyerhold also broke with the teleological narrative of Naturalism in his use of montage; breaking up the linear sequence of classically constructed events towards what Robert Leach describes as: ‘a method of play construction which relied not on the gradual unfolding of a plot 13 14

Braun, ed. and trans., Meyerhold on Theatre, 168. See Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre, 119–43.

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to its inevitable denouement but one focussed in a montage of attractions or sequence of theatrically exciting moments’.15 An example of this fusing of anti-Naturalism with ‘revolutionary’ theatre can be seen in Meyerhold’s production of Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe produced in November 1918 to mark the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.16 It displayed Meyerhold’s use of his pre-revolutionary theatre experiments, but now in the service of the Revolution. The accent on an episodic breakdown of naturalistic linearity, on the breaking of illusion with his use of circus techniques and so forth, and hence a recasting of the relationship between stage and auditorium, served – perhaps coincidentally – to fit into the fragmented and episodic nature of the Revolution, especially in 1917–18, when the boundaries were not yet fixed and a certain contingency, and risk, underlay all familiar traditions and positionalities. The formal innovations that Meyerhold had developed during his ‘Doctor Dapertutto’ phase were – contingently – the basis for his ability to create a theatre practice which could ‘reflect’ the disintegration of Tsarist Russia and the celebratory aspects of the Bolshevik Revolution.17 Although Christine Kiebuzinska sees the following stylistic innovations as being characteristic of future collaborations between Meyerhold and Mayakovsky, they also serve as markers of the styles that Meyerhold had already developed – such as ‘antiillusionistic devices of staging’ as well as ‘biting satire, the exaggerated theatricalism, the disregard for plot suspense, and constant interruptions and asides’.18 The impact of Meyerhold's practical theatrical innovations on the political theatre of newly revolutionary Soviet Russia was farreaching. As Leach writes: ‘The Blue Blouse movement, the agitprop developments, the living newspapers and so on, were all incalculably indebted to Meyerhold's energy, enthusiasm and above all his ideas’.19 Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that Meyerhold’s political 15 16 17 18 19

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Leach, Vsevolod Meyerhold, 23. For the 1921 version of this text, see Mayakovsky, The Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky, 39–139. See ‘Doctor Dapertutto 1908–1917’, in Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre, 11–156. Kiebuzinska, Revolutionaries in the Theater, 51. Leach, 169.

performance practices were the only effective, or primary, forms of political theatre at the time. But, while Soviet political theatre utilized a diversity of practices such as montage, the ‘living newspapers’, ‘agitki’ films (with their focus on specificity and flexibility), and mass spectacle in the works of Okhlopkov and Tairov, it can be stated that they constituted a ‘system of attractions in the service of a theme’.20 That theme, of course, was the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, especially at a time before consolidation when there existed a state of civil war against the ‘Whites’, as well as armed struggle against the ‘Entente’ nations. This was a context that demanded highly mobile performance groups which could adapt their performances to the specific exigencies of the areas in which they performed. Before discussing the subsequent fate of these Soviet theatrical innovations, I shall focus on the development of political theatre in Germany during the same period. A similar reaction against Naturalism and the exploration of new forms of theatrical expression to reflect the political concerns of a society in upheaval can be seen in this context.

Political Theatre in Germany: Erwin Piscator In Theatre as a Weapon, Richard Stourac and Kathleen McCreery chart the rise of a political theatre consciousness in Germany during the nineteenth century. They date this rise from a ‘lost’ 1847 play by Friedrich Engels through to the growth of ‘didactic agitprop’ plays, including one dealing with the theory of surplus value, written two years after the completion of the first volume of Marx’s Capital. Nonetheless: These militant Marxist beginnings gradually gave way to the ‘classless’ promotion of ‘pure entertainment’ and ‘great art’ in organizations such as the Volksbühne (People’s Stage). Such developments reflected the political

20

Stourac and McCreery, Theatre as a Weapon, 23.

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decline of the Social Democrats from a position of class struggle to class collaboration.21

Without going into detail concerning the later convolutions of the immediate post-Great War German political scene (with the rise of centrist parties and the short-lived alienation of both the Left and the Right), it can be said that it was the Russian revolution of 1917 which influenced the 1918 German revolution, as well as the 1919 Spartacus revolt and the setting up of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. These events (along with the ongoing rejection of Naturalism), in turn, influenced German political theatre practices. In 1919 the German Proletkult was set up – based on the Soviet model and devoted to the creation and dissemination of working class culture, in part through the establishment of a network of Proletarian Theatres in 1920. Stourac and McCreery argue that it was Piscator’s ‘Proletarian Theatre which laid the foundations for a number of important developments in the workers’ theatre movement some years later’.22 The work of Piscator was crucial to the development of the political theatre of Weimar Germany – both in his reaction against naturalistic theatre as well as in his commitment to a Marxist-inspired collectivism. Such a commitment (in the German context), can be seen as a rejection of Expressionist individualism – and a reflection of the Marxist concept of class interest versus the individualistic selfinterests of bourgeois capitalism. Piscator, like Meyerhold, did not come ‘cold’ to his theories for a political theatre. It was not only the incongruity of performing Charley’s Aunt for German front-line troops in the Great War, but also Piscator’s short-lived post-war involvement with Berlin Dada (and concomitantly, Marxist theories), and his brief membership of the Spartacus League, which all influenced his theatre practices.23 The influence of the politically inclined Berlin Dada on Piscator’s work cannot be ignored. It was chiefly their Marxism (and therefore a commitment to the mass working class rather than the individual), which so differentiated 21 22 23

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Stourac and McCreery, 87. Stourac and McCreery, 91–2. See Innes, Erwin Piscato’s Political Theatre, 16–18. For Piscator’s response to his Great War theatre experiences, see his The Political Theatre, 15.

Piscator’s work from the ‘subjectivist’ strand of Expressionism. Stourac and McCreery argue that the precursors to Piscator’s theatre (chiefly Expressionists, with immediate Great War experience in mind), were less committed to worker collectivity: ‘even those among them who supported a revolutionary theatre like Hasenclever, Toller and Eisner were isolated from the working class. Their idealism and concentration on the individual did not lend itself to making socialpolitical connections’.24 C. D. Innes argues that it was exposure to the devices of Dada, particularly ‘realism and immediacy’, which enabled Piscator to break from his training in naturalistic theatre.25 Four key elements of Dada – bruitism, collage, montage, and simultaneity – were, as Innes argues, ‘intended to have an immediate and actual effect on the public’.26 They were also – along with the use of the dialectic, and music – used in order to work against the rigid formalism of classical theatre and a moribund Naturalism. For Piscator, like Meyerhold, these innovations took the form of a dialectical response. They were a reaction against Naturalism as well as the search for a new means of theatrical expression to reflect the realities of post-Great War German society. Piscator’s innovations were substantial, and influential in the development of an ‘epic’ theatre. Earlier ones, arising from his experiences in agitprop, included technical simplicity, mobility, the use of dramatic montage, stylization in acting, and a shift from a hierarchy to a collective in the acting body.27 As Piscator moved from the exigencies of agitprop (with the closure of his Proletarian Theatre in 1921) into conventional theatres in 1922, certain techniques he had developed during his mobile agitprop period were further developed – especially on the technical side. Certain innovations became, with variations, conventions of Piscator’s theatre. For example, as John Willett points out, in the 1924 production of Fahnen (‘Flags’) these included a ‘complicatedly divided permanent set on the revolve, with a street running through it’; a ‘huckster figure carrying a pointer who 24 25 26 27

Stourac and McCreery, 88. Innes, 18. Innes, 15. See Stourac and McCreery, 92–4.

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spoke the prologue and commented on the characters’; screens on the sides and back of the stage for slide projections (the use of film came later, in 1925 in Trotz Alledem!); and in the final scene the raising of a coffin ‘bearing a Soviet star’ while a chorus of offstage extras ‘swore allegiance to the hammer and sickle’. Piscator further developed two of these ideas – ‘which came in due course to be specifically regarded as “epic”’.28 They were the use of revolutionary stage designs (in both the formal and political sense) and the use of projection, both still and film. Piscator further developed his inventive use of stage space, suggesting cinematic scene changes by using spotlights to light up particular scenes on a split-level stage in the 1927 production of Hoppla, We’re Alive. As Martin Kane writes: Speedy intercutting between these scenes by the use of spotlights which moved from space to space as the action required, leaving the rest of the structure in darkness, accompanied by garish effects [...] all built up a sense of frenzied pace.29

This ‘frenzied pace’ or ‘tempo’ was an important element in Piscator’s theatre. The point of this was to create a sense of both physical and emotional involvement by the spectator in the productions. One could continue to list the specific details, but it is already clear that the focus of all these innovations in modernist political performance was essentially one: to redefine the role of the spectator – from the supposedly mentally passive spectator of naturalistic theatre to the critically active spectator of the new political theatre. Thus Meyerhold, for example, was seeking the attempted destruction of the barrier between actor and spectator – the latter being what Leach refers to as ‘the vital fourth dimension of theatre (the others being the playwright, the director, and the actor)’.30 Kiebuzinska sees this shift to a focus on the spectator becoming ‘the coequal creator in the process of theatrical productions’ as that which made Meyerhold ‘an enormous influence on the work of the new, revolutionary age in the 28 29 30

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Willett, The Theatre of Erwin Piscator, 58. Kane, ‘Erwin Piscator’s 1927 production of Hoppla, We’re Alive’, in Performance and Politics in Popular Drama, ed. Bradby et al, 195. Leach, 30.

Soviet theater’.31 That Meyerhold wanted something more than the polite, silent spectator of pre-revolutionary naturalistic theatre is undoubted. But there is also no doubt that Meyerhold deliberately manipulated the spectator to achieve the galvanized reactions that he desired – through his use of slogans, songs, and massed uniformed choruses to promote revolutionary fervour. Piscator’s ultimate focus was also on the spectator. His call for ‘Total Theatre’ not only embraces the potential flexibility of playing space in the unrealized design for a theatre by Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus, as well as the capacity for the sophisticated use of mechanization and media, but also ‘the absolute integration of the onlooker in the play’.32 However, with Piscator there existed the paradox between a desire for an objective spectator witnessing ‘Documentary Drama’ and a committed spectator who, in being drawn in by the ‘tempo’ of the events would subsume their objective individuality into a collective class consciousness, thereby coming to the ‘correct’ political conclusion. For Innes, in ‘Total Theatre’ these two paradoxical aims were confused: An objective style was therefore fused with inflammatory techniques – and the amalgamation of these two mutually exclusive qualities was defended by Piscator with superb illogicality on the ground that, since truth is inevitably convincing and rational conviction is shown by emotional excitement, a production which arouses an audience has proved the objective truth of its thesis.33

The desire for a spectator simultaneously objectively distanced and empathetically involved mirrors the similar contradiction into which Naturalism had fallen – the desire to show the ‘truth’ of the social condition through an inevitably imperfect representation of that ‘reality’ while seeking a simultaneous suspension of disbelief. This belief in the possibility of a simultaneous objectivity and empathy was tested by Brecht, who saw that while both poles existed, it was necessary to shift between those poles, using empathy to set up the conditions for critical objectivity – through the breaking of that empathetic identification. 31 32 33

Kiebuzinska, 48. Innes, 150. Innes, 135.

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The need to arouse the spectator’s ‘emotional excitement’ in order to gain their political commitment is what differentiates Piscator so markedly from Brecht. Obviously, it would be impossible to discuss modernist political theatre, especially in its German context, without reference to the work of Brecht. The critical writings on Brecht are many, and any number of arguments surround his theories and his practices in the light of his relationship, among other things, to Expressionism, Fascism, and Stalinism, and his formulation of an ‘Epic theatre’ and later a ‘dialectical theatre’. As Erika Munk writes: ‘his archives seem endless, he’s documented to the teeth’.34 Brecht formulated his theories for a political theatre in a far more systematic way than Piscator. His sources were similar to a large degree – the political battles of post-Great War Germany, the influences of Dada and Expressionism, a commitment to Marxism (albeit guarded), and a concomitant rejection of naturalistic theatre with its focus on the individual and an inevitable and determined resolution. This rejection was instrumental in Brecht’s formulation of an ‘Epic theatre’ which ran counter to both Naturalism and, in time, as with the work of Meyerhold, to the ‘new’ socialist realism of the Soviet Union. That difference is expressed by Kiebuzinska: Conflict in Epic Theater is presented as an articulation or exploration, leaving the resolution with the spectator. In socialist realism, however, the aesthetic norm is raised to the level of dogma, leading back much as naturalistic determinism does to sympathetic identification with the hero.35

It was Brecht’s theory of distanciation derived, in part, from developments in Russian Formalism rather than Russian theatre, that sets him apart from Piscator in their attitudes towards the ‘ideal’ spectator. The major difference in the approach to the spectator is that between empathetic immersion and critical distance. Both Piscator and Brecht believed that theatre had a role to play in developing the spectators’ consciousness of their oppression through the events shown on the stage. Both believed that the spectator could be led to the ‘correct’ conclusion by the evidence presented. Nonetheless, Brecht’s concept 34 35

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In Brecht: Women and Politics, ed. Fuegi et al, 245. Kiebuzinska, 93.

of the spectator differed in that spectator objectivity was encouraged through a dialogic conflict – ‘an “acting-out” of argument’ as Kiebuzinska puts it.36 Brecht’s V-effekt required a double dialectic – firstly between the actor and their character, secondly between the actor and the spectator. Thus, showing, presenting, or demonstrating rather than psychological identification was to be at the center of the typification of social role performance. The next step in the dialectics of the actor between self and role was to stimulate the spectator to adopt this attitude in relation to his [sic] own role in society – to become critical, and to step outside his own role as well.37

The crux of Brecht’s attitude towards the spectator centres on the presumed ability of the spectator to recognize this distanciation between his or her critical self and the manner by which the actor (as character in Naturalism), and the dominant society manipulate them (both empathetically and ideologically) into perceiving their role as determined and their situation as unalterable. Importantly, however, the dialectic remains one-sided in Brechtian theatre – even in the ‘learning plays’. Whether it is through the ‘immersion’ of Piscator, or the ‘distanciation’ of Brecht, the spectator still remains that person to whom, in Brecht’s terms, ‘something is being done’.38 While the spectator’s critical attitude should remain his or her own, the directions which that might take are deliberately geared towards an ideologically determinate ‘correct’ answer. Although there exists a dialogue between the stage and the spectator, it is controlled from the stage – whether through an empathy with the plight of the individual, through a visceral involvement galvanized by sound and action, or through the critical shifting between gesture and effect – something which became even more explicit in Brecht’s later works, such as Mother Courage and her Children, Life of Galileo, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. In other 36 37 38

Kiebuzinska, 93. Kiebuzinska, 91. Willett, ed. and trans., Brecht on Theatre, 187. (Brecht’s ‘Short Organum’ in this text is often more prescriptive than descriptive of his implied ‘ideal’ spectator.)

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words: while Piscator and Brecht, like Meyerhold, were reacting against Naturalism and the conventions of the fourth wall and attempted to engage the spectator, both emotionally and intellectually, this still involved a separation between the stage and the auditorium, whether explicitly or implicitly, with the spectator constantly being manipulated through an underlying didacticism. Meyerhold and Piscator wanted to involve the spectator emotionally – a visceral grabbing of hearts and minds. Brecht also wanted to grab the spectator – but implicitly, and more through the intellect than the passions. However, although the means might have differed, they were directed towards the same ends – the enlistment of the spectator in the service of the Revolution. Furthermore, despite the ongoing theorizing surrounding these political theatre exemplars, it remains that their practices were largely ineffective. Taking into account the very difficulty of actually measuring effectivity, whether in the short or long term, it is whether this ineffectivity was due to external political factors or an underlying theoretical defect, or both, which needs to be discussed. There are a variety of obvious reasons for the demonstrable ineffectivity of modernist political theatre in its different political contexts. In Soviet Russia, once the revolution was consolidated and the elimination of ‘counter-revolutionary’ individuals and groups was under way, the official moves were toward a ‘reflective’ rather than a ‘dynamic’ art. Stourac and McCreery argue that as early as 1921, ‘most of the party’s leaders favoured a conception of art that merely reflected reality rather than one that acted as a dynamo’.39 The movement towards a less ‘revolutionary’ theatre, as well as an ongoing criticism of Formalist tendencies against Meyerhold and others continued during the 1920s and 1930s. With Zhdanov’s official endorsement of ‘socialist realism’ in 1934, the demise of a dynamic and revolutionary political theatre in the USSR was all but final. Chiefly under contention was the representation of reality as defined by the Party, constituting both an aesthetic and political struggle over conflicting notions of ‘realism’. As Leach writes:

39

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Stourac and McCreery, 24.

Essentially, for the socialist realists, a work of art aims to fuse conflicting strands of reality into a complex whole, thus integrating the spectator into the socialist reality, whereas for Meyerhold and those dubbed ‘Formalists’ in the 1930s and 1940s, ‘realism’ meant exposing the ‘conflicting strands’ in all their contradictoriness: for the spectator’s power to criticize, to seek new paths towards a genuine social harmony, derives precisely from an awareness of contradictions.40

This ‘awareness of contradictions’ implies an awareness of the dangers of closure. The revolution, once solidified, closed the dialectical process and hence ongoing revolution was replaced by ‘The Revolution’, now in the past, neatly packaged, and to be celebrated for what it had been – and, like Lenin, embalmed for show and veneration in a mausoleum. Long before Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930, let alone Meyerhold’s arrest in 1939 and execution in 1940,41 there had existed a ‘counter-revolution’ by the Bolsheviks to harness the dynamic revolutionary impulse. In the early uncertain stages of the revolution, and in the face of the setting up of the ‘soviets’ and workers’ committees, the Bolshevik Party had struggled to assume its ‘necessary’ vanguard role – eventually becoming the bureaucratic topend of a hierarchical political system.42 Long before this ‘shutdown’ of a revolutionary dynamic theatre in the ‘new’ Soviet Russia, the performance practices of Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, the Blue Blouse group, and others were known to German political theatre workers. However, as Michael Patterson writes: even by the mid-1920s there was still considerable ignorance in Germany about parallel developments on the Russian stage, and it would seem that the theatrical revolution that took place in both countries occurred independently rather than under mutual influence.43

Nonetheless, although the ‘theatrical revolution’ may have occurred independently to varying degrees, a similar underlying ideological 40 41 42 43

Leach, 172. See Braun, ‘Meyerhold: The Final Act’, New Theatre Quarterly 9.33 (Feb. 1993), 3–15. See ‘The Strategy and Nature of Bolshevism’, in Daniel and Gabriel CohnBendit, Obsolete Communism, 197–245. Patterson, The Revolution in German Theatre 1900–1933, 136.

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impetus fuelled them both – Marxism, and the ‘inevitable’ movement towards class revolution. After the National Socialist victory in the elections of 1933, left-wing political theatre in Germany collapsed. In the face of beatings, imprisonment, and executions by a determined, ruthless, and – above all – temporarily united enemy, those who could, fled the country. The most commonly invoked reason for this failure of the German Left to successfully combat Fascism is their lack of the same degree of unity as the forces of the Right. As Willett writes (with the benefit of hindsight): It seems self-evident now that if only the SPD and the KPD had joined forces to keep the Nazis out instead of wasting their energies fighting one another the course not just of German culture but of all human history would have been very different.44

But that is a big ‘if only’. Obviously, there were other reasons: the forces for appeasement, pro-fascist sympathies and anti-communist fears in other Western nations, and the German-Soviet NonAggression pact of 1939 being not the least of them. Nonetheless, while the failure was due to external political factors, an underlying theoretical deficiency played its part. One major problem for pre-World War left-wing political theatre was that it could not perceive that the very criteria of its own presumed effectivity – its dialectical determinism and its utopian dreams – were destined to create its own ineffectivity through an underlying ideological rigidity and thus a concomitant lack of manoeuvrability. A determined enemy that took lies and contradictions into account could swing either way, with an underlying pragmatism that a doctrinaire left-leaning political theatre lacked. Different rules were being enacted, and they were rules that were improvisational in their execution. Both the Bolshevik Left in Russia, and the National Socialist Right in Germany, improvised – performing their ‘revolutions’ in the specific contexts of their own political realities, before solidifying into the rigid bureaucracy of Soviet Russia and the suicidal Armageddon of German Fascism. Furthermore, once these regimes were established, in both Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, the magnitude 44

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Willett, The New Sobriety 1917–1933, 227.

of what needed to be resisted, in terms of its repressive and fierce structures for dealing with dissent, not only militated against fullfrontal attack, but also made even small-scale and partial resistance extremely dangerous. How do you have a dialectic with a monolith? Furthermore, how does one escape adopting the tactics of your opponent, and avoid becoming complicitous with the forms of repression? Joel Schechter points out that Brecht ‘in exile’ came to see political theatre in terms of subversion and resistance, since in fighting frontally against an oppressive force there is always the risk of assuming ‘the characteristics of one’s oppressors’ or, turning ‘bestial’ in the attempt to overthrow the ‘mass psychology of fascism’.45 This is the conundrum that Dada faced (though in a far less threatening context): in any form of resistance which engages in an anti-dialectic (whether with arms or aesthetics), one will end up affirming the power and the methods of that which one attacks. To conclude: both Stalinism and Fascism spelled the end of a dynamic and subversive political theatre in both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. In the years leading up to the Nazi electoral victory in 1933, many political theatre practitioners, including Piscator, left Germany. Some, like Brecht, escaped at the last moment. Many went to what they saw as a hospitable haven in the USSR, only to be exiled or executed in the Stalinist purges of the late-1930s. Others went ‘West’ – many, including both Piscator and Brecht, ending up in the United States. The exportation of these revolutionary theatre practices to Western Europe, Britain, and the United States fostered a form of political performance that might seem to have escaped the rigid doctrinarism of its European antecedents but which carried on a similar pattern of dialectical necessity, contained a utopian premise, and had a didactic attitude towards the spectator. All of these elements were informed by its roots in the avant-garde political theatre movements of European modernism.

45

Schechter, Durov's Pig, 124–5.

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‘Guerrilla Theatre’ As Stuart Cosgrove writes: ‘By the end of 1931 over 200 agit-prop groups were known to exist in the United States’.46 Cosgrove argues that the ‘Prolet Buehne’ and the political theatres of 1930s depressionera America were informed by the practices of left-wing German political theatre in particular, but by the end of 1934, with the Nazi Party in power in Germany and the shutdown of a dynamic political theatre in Russia, agitprop ‘disappeared from the American scene’.47 However, although agitprop had disappeared by the late 1930s, its influence persisted: It could be argued that agit-prop did not die in the thirties but merely retired. It was regenerated in the sixties when the Vietnam war and America’s protoimperialist policies created the ideal political climate. By this time the name agit-prop had become anachronistic and the term ‘Guerilla Theatre’ [sic] was invented. The name was new but the style and themes were time honoured.48

While it is evident that the ‘style and themes were time honoured’ in particular workers’ theatre groups in the United States,49 it is not so obvious that they were honoured in the practices of a different concept of political performance. This was one which not only also shifted onto the streets, but furthermore seemingly expressed no obvious debt to either pre-World-War European political theatre, or to its underlying epistemological code – Marxism. Indeed, it denied any such connections with the past. This was to be an innovative (and youthful) theatre, denying any influences from older precursors and outmoded forms. As Bradbury has pointed out:

46 47 48 49

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Cosgrove, ‘Prolet Buehne: agit-prop in America’, in Performance and Politics in Popular Drama, ed. Bradby et al, 207. Cosgrove, 211. Cosgrove, 212. Notably, for example, those working for specific issues such as Teatro Campesino (migrant worker wage issues), and The San Francisco Mime Troupe (anti-Vietnam War stance). See Sainer, The Radical Theatre Notebook.

All new movements are convinced of two things: their total novelty and their ultimate ‘realism’; and it was natural for those engaged in the many movements and tendencies that became active during the fluid art-scene of the 1960s to believe in the lore of a radical break from the past, a lore that indeed helped feed the revolutionary apocalyptics of 1968.50

An example of such a political theatre no longer overtly reliant on the Marxist ideals of revolutionary post-Great War Europe and Russia was the 1960s ‘guerrilla theatre’ practices of the ‘Yippies’. Rather than them being ‘Revolutionaries in the Theater’, to utilize Kiebuzinska’s title, these were revolutionaries determined to perform outside any such constrained space, and purportedly with no underlying ‘concrete’ ideological epistemology. Nonetheless, ‘guerrilla theatre’ in the United States in the 1960s echoed, to some degree, the practices of agitprop in relying on neither a fixed text, nor a fixed venue, nor a professionally-trained and paid group of actors. In the ‘counterculture’ it was suggested that anybody could be a performer, any venue could serve as a performance space, and almost any issue could be the subject of a performance. While it could be argued that this form of political theatre escaped the didacticism of its earlier proponents through its emphasis on play, on street theatre, and on a seeming refusal to take the ‘system’ seriously – underlying these practices was a similar didacticism, and even a ruthlessness, towards the object of their performances – the ‘passive’ spectator. Yippie’s ‘statements’ concerning their attitudes towards the spectator are coupled with their accent on theatre in the service of the ‘revolution’. For Abbie Hoffman, writing as Free in Revolution for the Hell of it: We are theater in the streets: total and committed. We aim to involve people and use (unlike other movements locked in ideology) any weapon (prop) we can find. The aim is not to earn the respect, admiration, and love of everybody – it’s to get people to do, to participate, whether positively or negatively. All is relevant, only ‘the play’s the thing’.51

50 51

Bradbury, ‘Modernisms/Postmodernisms’, in Innovation/Renovation, ed. Hassan and Hassan, 322. Free [Abbie Hoffman], Revolution for the Hell of it, 127.

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And, on spectator participation, he warns: ‘And so you ask, “What about the innocent bystanders?” But we are in a time of revolution. If you are a bystander, you are not innocent’.52 For Jerry Rubin also, in the context of political street theatre there were only actors – no onlookers. Observing, in itself, is a political act, and if the spectator is silent, or is not seen to be acting immediately, then he or she is a supporter, albeit passive, of the contemporary status quo. Theatre and reality, performer and spectator, become intertwined in Rubin’s statement: You are the stage. You are the actor. Everything is for real. There is no audience.53

His chapter, ‘Revolution is Theater-in-the-Streets’, ties together the political and the performance strands of ‘Yippie’ political theatre: ‘The only role of theater is to take people out of the auditorium and into the streets. The role of the revolutionary theater group is to make the revolution’. Hence, Rubin’s critique of The Living Theater: The Living Theater, a far-out guerrilla theater group, came to Berkeley while people were fighting the National Guard in the streets. As pacifists they opposed the street action. Living Theater eliminated the stage and joined the audience. Revolutionary theater. [...] At the end of the performance, everyone left to take the revolution to the streets. The cast stopped at the front door.54

The question of context is vital here, and for whatever reasons that the group did stop ‘at the front door’, it remains that in other contexts – notably Paris, Sicily, and Brazil – the group did participate in the ‘street action’. It might be pertinent to interpret this lack of ‘action’ in Berkeley as an awareness by the members of The Living Theater that revolutionaries in the theatre are not always necessarily revolutionaries in the street. More importantly, it is to recognize that it is not necessarily the role of political performers to tell others what to do. 52 53 54

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Free, 183. Rubin, Do it! Scenarios of the Revolution, 132. Rubin, 133.

Augusto Boal makes this point when he discusses the experience of inciting people to fight for their freedom. ‘False’ guns are not real guns, and actors are not necessarily revolutionaries. Following a ‘revolutionary’ performance telling people to ‘fight for their freedom’ Boal had to inform the ‘peasants’ that his troupe would not join in the fighting. As he states: ‘From that point on, and never again, have I incited audiences to do things that I would not do myself’.55 While ‘Yippie’ ran counter to the ‘love generation’ accent on passive protest and mystical enlightenment, it also appeared counter to the institutionalized and programme-driven protests of the ‘traditional’ American Left. Nonetheless, a ‘manifesto’ does appear in Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of it, calling for, among other things: an end to the Vietnam war, the legalisation of marihuana, the abolition of money, ‘a conservation program’, an end to censorship, and a more ‘streamlined’ political system.56 One very definite ‘message’ in Hoffman’s text is a belief in the technological revolution, where, in a ‘free’ America, ‘goods and services’ would be free. ‘That’s what the technological revolution would produce if we let it run unchecked, if we stopped trying to control it.’57 There is a utopian (albeit playful) sentiment being expressed here, one suggesting the eventual classless revolution where there would be abundance for all, and the end of struggle and ongoing revolution. Hoffman’s utopian position expresses, yet again, the desire for closure – rather than a recognition of the necessity for ongoing revolution as in the theatre of Meyerhold. Not only does the programmatic didacticism of the manifesto, and a nostalgia for utopian closure, underlie the Yippies’ ‘guerrilla theatre’, there is also an ideological ruthlessness and a simplistic dialecticism. As Herbert Blau points out, invoking President Johnson and his handling of the war in Vietnam, the thrust of 1960s political theatre was aggressive: ‘The president was convinced he was teaching aggression a lesson. The aggression of the sixties was to teach the

55 56 57

Taussig and Schechner, ‘Boal in Brazil, France, the USA: An interview with Augusto Boal’, Drama Review 34.3 (Fall 1990), 57. Free, 167–8. Free, 56.

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president a lesson’.58 As Blau also notes, there was ‘a radical fault on the radical Left’ which was constituted by a ‘mean-spirited binary thinking’ that refused to differentiate between specifics and stereotypes, reducing the former into the latter.59 Such utopian urges and reductive stances betray the similar doctrinaire self-righteousness of much modernist political theatre, in that it presumes it has the right to speak for the other. Furthermore, the ineffectivity of ‘guerrilla theatre’ can be linked to the same didactic and chiefly dialectical attack on the status quo which epitomizes all modernist political theatre: that is, a frontal assault on the dominant system, no matter how disguised it was behind an emphasis on ‘play’ and a seeming predilection to bypass, rather than break, the rules. I have focused briefly on late-1960s Yippie ‘guerrilla theatre’ because although it moved out of the auditoriums, and saw the importance of the manipulative use of the media, and recognized the ideological strategies in the separation of representation from reality and therefore questioned the veracity of either, it, like Marxist political theatre, could not shift beyond an either/or didacticism in its quest for revolution. Most tellingly, it was primarily in its attitudes towards the spectator that it exposed its fundamentalist position: those who are not with us are against us. Nonetheless, many of the actual practices of modernist political theatre, if divested of their theoretical didacticism and their both explicit and implicit manipulation of the spectator can still prove useful. Meyerhold’s importance lies not only in his recognition of the need for ongoing revolution, but also in the formal innovations which he developed – in the main, an overt ‘theatricality’ which can serve to undercut the seeming deterministic inalterability of that Naturalism which not only still informs theatre practices today, but is also the underlying ideological premise in the practices of ‘mainstream’ politics, film, and television. It can also be argued that it is Piscator who, in part, provides the model for what have been termed postmodern performances – both ‘political’ and ‘non-political’ – with his concept of ‘total theatre’ where the spectator’s senses are assaulted by a barrage of sound, light, and move58 59

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Blau, ‘(Re)sublimating the Sixties’, in The Eye of Prey, 1–2. Blau, ‘(Re)sublimating the Sixties’, 9.

ment.60 The ‘epic’ use of montage, music, an eclectic mix of styles, and so forth, prefigure some accounts of postmodern performance in terms of its presumed effect on the spectator. The description below of the hoped-for effects of the use of a ‘dialectical montage’ in 1920s German agitprop almost echoes current comments on the new Zeitgeist of spectator experience: The intercutting and juxtaposing of scenic elements and episodes demands constant alertness and associative thinking in order to make links and associations. The episodic and fragmentary structures distance the audience so that they can critically assess the content as well as the form of the dramatic argument to which they are exposed.61

Nonetheless, although it might appear that an ‘associative’ model is being constructed here, there is still the implication of a spectator who will integrate these diverse elements into a closed interpretation – made imperative by the fact that it is a ‘dramatic argument’ to which they are being ‘exposed’. There is no doubt that political theatre requires a certain didacticism in specific contexts to combat the effects of dominant ideologies transmitted through the mass media – particularly the imperializing exportation of dominant and naturalized ‘first world’ life-styles on ‘third world’ cinema and television. In certain contexts, agitprop techniques are most useful, as are short narratives making a specific political point. For example, such techniques work well when a performance must be short, catchy, memorable and to the point concerning specific issues. More often than not, such theatre must also be highly mobile in order to evade either arrests, beatings, or even murder. Both Piscator and Brecht have provided models for political theatre in the diverse postcolonial and anti-oppression struggles of what is collectively termed the ‘third world’.62 For example, Enzo 60

61 62

Innes notes that Piscator was pleased to have his aims compared to those of Wagner – that quest for a synaesthetic art work which for Piscator, importantly, was necessary to deal ‘comprehensively with contemporary realities’ (Erwin Piscator’s Political Theatre, 149). Stourac and McCreery, 291. Obviously, the first world/third world division is not a clean geographic split – the ‘third world’ exists in ‘first world’ countries – and to a certain extent, vice

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Cozzi sees Piscator as providing parallels between the theatre practices and the political situations of late-1920s Germany and late1970s Chile, particularly in respect of his Documentary Drama and his Epic Stage.63 Cozzi makes a distinction between Piscator’s ‘epic stage’ and Brecht’s ‘epic drama’. While the latter constitutes a major influence on Latin American political theatre with ‘its emphasis on narrative and dramatic structure’, Piscator has been more influential in the ‘architectural and physical use of the stage itself as a material, pictorial portrayal and deployment of society’s class divisions’.64 One of the major influences of the overt ‘theatricality’ of the politics of Yippie ‘guerrilla theatre’ has been yet another questioning of the distinction between representation and a singular ‘reality’. This is especially relevant as it concerns the media representations of politics and hence the exploration of what has come to be termed the theatricality of politics and the politics of theatricality, a point I shall expand on in later chapters. What chiefly distinguished Yippie from other contemporaneous guerrilla theatre groups were their recognition of ‘theatricality’ and an understanding of the role that the media – both print and electronic – play in the representations of ‘reality’. For Hoffman, representation in the service of the ‘revolution’ was carried through by distorting ‘facts’ and with the self-empowering use of myth. While stating that ‘Myths have more power than reality’,65 Hoffman distinguishes between the Hippies and the Diggers to show how myth-making works: Both are myths: that is, there is no definition, there is no organized conspiracy; both are in one sense a huge put-on. Hippies, however, are a myth created by media and as such they are forced to play certain media-oriented roles. They are media-manipulated. Diggers too are myth, but a grass-roots myth created from within. We have learned to manipulate media.66

63 64 65 66

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versa. The ‘second world’ – the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe – while always containing a ‘first world’ elite are now also visibly experiencing the ‘third world’ in their own contexts. Cozzi, ‘Political Theatre in Present-Day Chile: a Duality of Approaches’, New Theatre Quarterly 6.22 (May 1990), 119–27. Cozzi, 122. Free, 191. Free, 26.

Hoffman understood that the media can be a tool for the dissemination of myths – as well as political ‘manifestos’ – and that the press and television were only too eager for stories concerning the Yippies and their threats to the status quo. However, as Schechter points out, although the media can be manipulated, they in turn constantly manipulate the images their audiences receive: What Rubin, Hoffman and friends often failed to acknowledge (as R. G. Davis notes in ‘Rethinking Guerrilla Theatre’) is that the mass media select and control coverage of such comic protests, turning them into thirty-second news anecdotes or back-page amusement items, forgotten almost as soon as they are noticed.67

Nonetheless, Hoffman, like Rubin, saw the importance of a ‘theatricality’ that might expose the ‘theatrical’ (seen pejoratively), or the ‘unreal’ realities of dominant political ideologies and social mores in the United States in the 1960s. In summary: it is in the performance practices of those groups working for specific and contextual social changes that a political theatre practice which could be termed postmodern might be found, especially among those who have shifted beyond a Marxist didacticism and a quest for total social revolution, and have further explored the separations between stage and audience, actor and spectator. In modernist political theatre the spectator remains manipulated. Notwithstanding the desire on the part of its practitioners to liberate the spectator from the effects of oppressive ideologies, a counterideological didacticism is inserted in their place. It could be argued that it is Brecht who holds the means of escape in terms of his ambiguity concerning closure – exemplified in his epilogue to The Good Woman of Setzuan: It is for you to find a way, my friends. To help good men arrive at happy ends. You write the happy ending to the play! There must, there must, there’s got to be a way!68 67 68

Schechter, 199. Brecht, The Good Woman of Setzuan, in Parables for the Theatre, rev. and trans. Bentley, 109.

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The ‘way’ – with Brecht – is always problematic. But the implicit ‘way’ is that of the ‘new science’ – Marxism. Nonetheless, that position of potential agency could be where postmodern spectators might find themselves, in order to escape the didacticism of a political theatre that desires to preach. In the next chapter, before exploring the criteria of how political performance can be defined in the context of postmodern discourses, I will look briefly at how a post-Brechtian, and post-Marxist, political theatre practice operates in the work of Augusto Boal – specifically looking at how Boal’s practices explore that division set up between actor and spectator, and how spectators may find themselves in a position not only to write the ‘happy ending’ but also how to influence the process of the action. The bourgeois theatre highlighted individuality; Marxist theatre focused on class. The unified subject of modernist drama was defined in relation to other unified subjects – or seen as part of, or in a dialectical confrontation with, a community, or a class. The constructions of individualism and class, in their modernist senses, are questioned in postmodern discourses. There is a recognition of the difficulty in defining both individual subjects and groups into singular definitions or ideological categorizations, especially in relation to the concept of a ‘unified subject’ of the ‘class struggle’. If there is no unified subject, how can there be a tragic protagonist? If there isn’t a class, how can you have a Marxist theatre? Instead, there are subject positions – which are fluid, contingent, and contextual. They are performing positions, and as such, they are troublesome in that they are difficult to pin down. This difficulty of categorizing and ordering the unruly postmodern, which has formed part of the focus for the past three chapters, will be further explored in the following chapters.

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Chapter Four What is Postmodernism?

Constructions of postmodernism have been heavily influenced by poststructuralist discourses, and this chapter looks at postmodernism through a Derridean prism, focusing on the deconstruction of ontological certainties, epistemological verities, and the questioning of metaphysical dualisms. In defining what postmodernism ‘is’, there is the obvious danger of conforming to the same – questionable – criteria of exemplification and periodization that would want to define what it ‘was’. Therefore, before answering the question, or, supplying any provisional working definition, it could be useful to begin by echoing the strategies of Jacques Derrida, and define what it is not. Derrida’s particular relevance to a theoretical and methodological paradigm of the postmodern – and performance – has been of ongoing and important relevance to this book; here Derrida is invoked because of his insistence on the need to avoid closure through premature definition by employing what Christopher Norris has termed a via negativa approach.1 For, among other things, postmodernism has been defined as a reaction to late modernism; yet another grand narrative; the latest manifestation of the avant-garde; a movement; a cultural style; and a concept. However, all of those descriptions demand, and even presuppose, the modernist criteria of teleology, totalization and, specifically, the notion of a dialectical reaction or response. While it is obvious that there is merit in defining postmodernism in its own terms, it is first necessary to ‘clear the decks’ and explore certain categorizations; in particular, those of postmodernism as a reaction – or dialectical response – to modernism; as yet another manifestation of the avantgarde; as a movement; and as a style – leaving the ‘concept’ of the concept till later in this chapter.

1

Norris, Derrida, 18.

If, for example, Romanticism can be constructed as a reaction against a didactic Enlightenment rationality, and the anti-modernism of the neo-avant-gardes as a reaction to an elitist high modernism, then does postmodernism escape this reaction reflex completely? No. But postmodernism cannot be seen simply as a reaction to modernism, for that would imply two things. The first is that modernism, and thence postmodernism, form successive stages in a teleological motion through history, which suggests a determinate linear periodizing model. The other, perhaps more importantly, implies a collectivizing and reductive interpretation in the constructions of both modernism and postmodernism. It can be argued that certain postmodern practices, as they have been constructed in a specifically cultural or ‘aesthetic’ sense, grew out of particular anti-modernist aesthetic movements reacting against high modernism. Nonetheless, to argue that postmodernism be defined as a reaction implies the model of the classical dialectic, where the antithesis (postmodernism) is latent in the thesis (modernism).2 This, perhaps, is what Lyotard is gesturing towards in his contention that the postmodern is always already ‘nascent’ in the modern.3 It would be more useful to see postmodern discourses as forming an ongoing cluster of diverse reactions and ongoing revolutions, perpetually ironic towards even their own discourses – especially those that would set themselves up as the new cutting edge of a tired, or nearly defunct, modernism. It might be argued that postmodernism is not only the necessary complement to modernism (and vice versa) in order for them neatly to define each other, but moreover postmodernism could be theorized in terms of an avant-gardist shift which seeks to go beyond an exhausted modernism. However, postmodernism is not the latest manifestation (nor the dying breath) of the avant-gardes, for the concept of an avant-garde relies on an interpretation of it constituting the leading edge, or the 2

3

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Michael Forster, in ‘Hegel’s Dialectical Method’ (in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Beiser, 130–70), describes the method of the dialectic thus: ‘It is a method of exposition in which each category in turn is shown to be implicitly self-contradictory and to develop necessarily into the next (thus forming a continuously connected hierarchical series culminating in an allembracing category that Hegel calls the Absolute Idea)’ (132). Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 79.

vanguard of that which it is in reaction against – through its innovation and striving for the new. Inherent in the concept of an avantgarde is the notion of the future being discovered for the present, which lags behind with its tradition of the past. Avant-gardism is futurism, even without the capital F. While the project of the ‘historical avant-garde’, to use Peter Bürger’s term, was to provide the means ‘to lead art back into social praxis’,4 this was predicated on a putative split between a solely auratic world of art and the praxis of social life. Such a dualistic model cannot be assumed on the same basis for postmodernism, unless postmodernism is wilfully constructed as a cultural category separate from, and as a reflection of, the base of the economic determinism of late capitalism. Therefore, for critics either to castigate postmodernism for having failed to carry through the aims of the avant-garde project, or for having betrayed that project through pastiche and the ‘play of surfaces’, is to fail to recognize that postmodern discourses may be neither a reaction to modernism nor – simply – a cultural reflection of late capitalism. Once again, the crux of the argument is the notion of a dialectical response, or a dialectical relationship. The ‘historical’ avant-garde can be interpreted as a dialectical response – to Aestheticism, to Modernism, to technological warfare, to patriarchal power, to Imperialism, to Naturalism, and so forth – but, it is always in terms of a response, or reaction. Postmodernism is not an avant-garde in terms of a response, either to late capitalism or high modernism. It is neither after modernism (in that it does not supersede modernism), nor the vanguard of, or for, the ‘new’. As Huyssen states in respect of the avant-garde as it was conceived in Henri de Saint Simon’s ‘messianic’ model: The avantgarde [...] only makes sense if it remains dialectically related to that for which it serves as the vanguard – speaking narrowly, to the older modes of artistic expression, speaking broadly, to the life of the masses which Saint Simon’s avantgarde scientists, engineers, and artists were to lead into the golden age of bourgeois prosperity.5

4 5

Schulte-Sasse, ‘Foreword: Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the AvantGarde’, in Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, xiv. Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 4–5.

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It is certainly possible to construct a theory that would see the roots of the postmodern ‘condition’ in some aspects of the ‘historical avantgarde’ as well as in the neo-avant-gardes, as they were defined in the context of the 1960s and early 1970s. Such a theory is, however, yet another instance of a reduction – into a singular avant-garde as well as a singular postmodernism. As Susan R. Suleiman states: ‘there is no such thing as the avant-garde; there are only specific avant-garde movements, situated in a particular time and place’.6 The same can almost be said for postmodernism, if the situated specificity of time and place is stressed, and the idea of ‘movement’ dispensed with. Postmodernism is not simply the latest avant-garde – because it refuses to have a dialectical relationship with any monolithic ‘other’. Rather, it is a shifting set of discourses among many other competing discourses – and inhabits, as well as being inhabited by, those competing discourses. The postmodern ‘condition’ is, indeed, the realization of this contamination and recognition of the fictivity of the construction of any particular discourse as being either essentially dominant, or necessarily pure. Contamination, or infection, in this sense is positive: a self-reflexive recognition of diversity, difference, otherness, and impurity – which, in a political sense, might aid in an ongoing questioning of strict dualistic distinctions between right or wrong, good or bad, true or false. All such distinctions must be recognized in the light of specificity and contextuality, particular and strategic in terms of time and place. Postmodernism might be better described, in part, as a ‘state of mind’ in Lyotard’s terms, echoing the model of its sometimes-related ‘avant-garde’ predecessor, Dada, which was, ‘as its adherents never tired of repeating, a state of mind rather than a movement’.7 It is not uncommon for postmodernism to be defined as a movement. This strategy constructs it – as a singular entity – within the same parameters as a singular avant-garde. Thus, while Harvey recognizes that ‘aesthetic interventions’ such as postmodernism can have material consequences, he concludes ‘that there is much more continuity than difference between the broad history of modernism and the 6 7

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Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 18. Bigsby, Dada and Surrealism, 10–11.

movement called postmodernism’.8 The concept of a movement, if it is, as the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it, ‘a body of persons with a common object’, can hardly be fitted to postmodernism. It implies a similarity of aims, a singularity of intent, and an ideologically and teleologically driven movement towards a common goal. There might well exist movements, both cultural and political (if such a separation is possible), which can share similarities in intent and strategy, and be subsumed under a postmodern rubric. But, postmodernism ‘itself’ is not a movement: it is not a singular entity, it does not have a manifesto, nor does it supply a teleologically defined programme. ‘Movement’, in its ‘meta’ sense, has lost its resonance. The concept of a mass movement is tied in with the teleological projects of modernism, with Marxism as its exemplum – which might help explain why Michael Ryan has also described postmodernism as a movement: It is the name for a movement in advanced capitalist culture, particularly in the arts – literature, the pictorial and plastic arts, music, performance and video art, etc. – that emphasizes reflexivity, irony, artifice, randomness, anarchy, fragmentation, pastiche and allegory.9

While this ‘movement’ inhabits those cultural spheres, and ‘emphasizes’ those commonly invoked tropes of postmodernism, there is a singularity implied; a conceptual cluster informed by a singularized ideology. The two tropes of reflexivity and irony should be warning enough against the construction of postmodernism as a movement, for, as Ryan himself states, postmodernism is ‘resolutely ironic regarding the enabling myths of art, culture, society and philosophy’ and therefore, ‘the emphasis shifts from content to form or style’.10 Postmodernism might positively be termed a style, for style suggests transience. But transience, when set against its dualistic binary of permanence, must be interpreted negatively on metaphysical grounds that would see style as superstructural and superficial – 8 9 10

Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 116. Ryan, ‘Postmodern Politics’, Theory, Culture and Society 5.2–3 (June 1988), 559. Ryan, ‘Postmodern Politics’, 559.

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ephemeral and mimetic of a transcendental or determinate reality. Thus, for Marxists, defining postmodernism as a style (with its connotations of transience and surface), will be to denigrate it in the light of an assumed servitude to, or reflection of, the workings of a late-capitalist renewal and recycling of styles in the interests of an accelerated commodity turnover in respect of marketing and consumer gratification. Furthermore, to see style as transient is to base it on a teleological model that interprets it only in terms of a succession of stages. But postmodern style is not a serial movement. Style is multisimultaneous in postmodern cultures and heterogeneous in its diverse ‘manifestations’. If postmodernism is seen as stylistic heterogeneity then the positive aspects might be celebrated. That is, while styles change their forms and shift their locations in terms of cultural and national border-crossings, so too does postmodernism shift and change – but not in a teleological movement towards some eventual ‘true’ postmodernism. It is not the blueprint for a better and truer version yet to come. As Calinescu has argued, the ‘concept’ of postmodernism is not ‘a tentative frame for a more sophisticated model to be assembled [...] Each particular use of the term will have to create its own validity’.11 Using the criteria employed by Marxist critics, postmodernism can be, and must be, constructed as all those above ‘categories’. For example, postmodernism can only be the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ if the classical Marxist duality of base and superstructure is invoked. But this still posits postmodernism, as well as latecapitalist multinationalism, as holistic entities: to reduce postmodernism into being only, in the last instance, the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, as Jameson has done, it is necessary to reduce the diversity of postmodernisms and the many facets of multinational and transnational late capitalism. This process is endemic to the fields of modernism and Marxism, which construct similar monolithic entities of their own programmes, even if retrospectively. Indeed, certain postmodernist positions can do a similar totalizing job on modernism and Marxism, constructing the totality of that which they wish to 11

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Calinescu, ‘Introductory Remarks’, in Exploring Postmodernism, ed. Calinescu and Fokkema, 8.

define themselves against. As Helmut Lethen has suggested: ‘If one wants to deconstruct, one has to homogenize one’s object first so that it becomes deconstructible’.12 However, it remains that all of the preceding attempts to define postmodernism have done so according to their own seemingly diverse but epistemologically-singular modernist criteria. It now remains to attempt to define ‘it’ on its own terms. Postmodernism is neither the totality of the sum of its parts, nor the latest attempt to transgress the codes of modernism. Rather, it side steps the rules of the game as set out by its modernist and Marxist critics. Importantly, it deconstructs those reductive dualisms that modernism and Marxism needed to set their respective criteria. For example, if it is argued – from a putatively postmodern perspective – that modernisms can be subsumed under the totalizing rubric of needing some transcendent ‘reality’ as an ontological referent, and that postmodernisms can be totalized as the rejection of such a transcendent ontological referent, then the champions as well as the critics of postmodernism fall into the same reductive and totalizing trap. This is why postmodernism must maintain that dialectical relationship with itself, and its contradictory, rather than parallel (or dialectical), relationships with different discourses. If postmodern discourses lose that sense of self-reflexivity, they also fall into the metaphysical duality of either/or, where postmodernism will be interpreted as either a reaction, a stage, the latest manifestation of an avant-garde, and so forth, or it will seek the decisive (and futile) rupture that will set it free from modernism. But, more importantly, postmodern discourses need to maintain that critical awareness of the tendency to comment from an ‘outside’ to their own discursive positions, if they are to remain ‘postmodern’. As Smith and Kerrigan write concerning their particular field of psychoanalysis: What above all distinguishes the postmodernist analysis is the methodological necessity of including itself in the issue and the problem, accepting responsibility for its own reflexivity of error. Postmodernist discourse wants to field its rebound – to abandon a tradition of self-certainty, to stand aside from the 12

Lethen, ‘Modernism Cut in Half: The Exclusion of the Avant-garde and the Debate on Postmodernism’, in Approaching Postmodernism, ed. Fokkema and Bertens, 233.

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conditions of sense defined in this tradition, without lapsing into mere unintelligibility.13

Postmodern discourses must remain self-reflexive, and that selfreflexivity entails maintaining an awareness of the tendency to promote only those labels that their opponents pejoratively employ – surface, play, process, performance – without recognizing the necessity of inhabiting the spaces between those poles and their binary opposites. Therefore, postmodernism is best defined as a deconstructive practice – a performative mode – that deconstructs the polarities of metaphysical dualism, and resists the nihilistic impulse towards the total negation of any opposition. This is not through some sense of squeamishness concerning the jettisoning of all rules, but rather through the realization and recognition of the impossibility of living outside of the laws of metaphysical oppositions – or, outside of the text of contexts.

Postmodernism and Deconstruction Taking a cue from Ryan, who has usefully articulated Marxism and deconstruction, it seems a valid strategic move to ‘articulate’ postmodernism and deconstruction.14 Postmodern discourses do share a sufficient degree of similarity with the strategies of deconstruction, in spite of what Christopher Norris claims in ‘Deconstruction Versus Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the “Nuclear Sublime”’.15 While 13 14 15

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Smith and Kerrigan, eds. Taking Chances, x. See Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction. Norris, ‘Deconstruction Versus Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the “Nuclear Sublime”’, New Formations 15 (Winter 1991), 83–100. Further references to this text are by page number. Norris is referring to J. Fisher Solomon’s Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age. As Norris sees it, Solomon ‘takes a sturdy realist stand against what he sees – justifiably enough – as the drift toward positions of extreme cognitive scepticism visible in many quarters of current theoretical debate’ (88).

Norris compliments Derrida for his ‘concern with epistemological issues’ and ‘the insistence that such issues entail an irreducible ethical dimension’ (84) theorists such as Baudrillard, Rorty and Lyotard get short shrift. Norris’s contention is that postmodern thought is characterized by such ‘anti-cognitivist’ exponents of an ‘anti-enlightenment creed’, whereas deconstruction, with Derrida as exemplar, escapes what Norris sees as ‘that strain of facile pseudo-deconstructive thought which so easily joins onto Baudrillard’s variety of postmodern-textualist rhetoric’ (87). As Norris writes: At the moment there are many commentators – ranged on both sides, ‘for’ and ‘against’ – who take it for granted that deconstruction is indeed just a product, symptom or specialized offshoot of the wider ‘postmodern condition’, and that the only possible end-point on the road now travelled by ‘advanced’ literary theorists is one that brings them out on this heady terrain of thoroughgoing cognitive and ethical scepticism. (87)

But, which postmodernism is this? There is no denying that certain postmodern discourses do entertain a high degree of nihilism and a destructive stance towards both cognitive and practical reason, Enlightenment rationality, and all claims to truth, even partial and specific – with Jean Baudrillard, once again, being cited as the ‘prime representative’. Admittedly, Norris is writing to save Derrida from inclusion amongst the extreme ‘anti-cognitivists’. It might appear that in saving Derrida from such unsavoury company, Norris is also saving deconstruction from a particular reckless variety of postmodernism and thereby preserving it in some unsullied form for the purpose of the continuation of the epistemological discourses of modernism and the Enlightenment tradition. But in reducing the range of postmodern discourses to particular exemplars of a ‘pernicious’ and ‘nihilistic’ anticognitivism, Norris cannot argue that deconstructive strategies are not part of those discourses. They may not, as he states, be ‘product’, or ‘symptom’, or ‘specialized offshoot’, but they are an integral component, informing and infiltrating postmodern discourses in their critical reflexivity and their ongoing (rather than ‘thoroughgoing’) ‘cognitive and ethical scepticism’. The discourses of postmodernism, which challenge the metaphysical concepts of presence, foundation, transcendence and 117

teleology, among others, do utilize deconstructive strategies. Derrida has written: Deconstructive discourses have sufficiently questioned, among other things, the classical assurances of history, the genealogical narrative, and periodizations of all sorts, and we can no longer ingenuously propose a tableau or a history of deconstruction.16

The same applies in respect of the discourses of postmodernism. It is, of course, possible to construct a history, through exemplification and periodization, for postmodernism; and concomitantly, describe what it ‘is’ – or ‘was’ – defining it and thereby explaining it away. But, it is equally possible to explain away modernism, or Marxism, conceptualizing them into that which is past. Postmodernism, thus conceptualized, can be packaged up and stored away to allow the serious business of coherent metatheorizing to continue. However, postmodernism cannot be captured under the rubric of a ‘concept’, but at the same time, in the same action, conceptualizing must take place – for to argue from the position that there exists no conceptual space for postmodernism is to fall into the abyss of the either/or binary once again. Derrida terms this a state of ‘ideal purity’, an impossible and ‘inaccessible’ state suggested once either/or distinctions are assumed: To be sure, all conceptual production appeals to idealization. Even the ‘concept’ of iterability, which plays an organizing role in ‘Limited Inc ...,’ supposes such idealization. But it has a strange status. Like that of ‘différance’ and several others, it is an aconceptual concept or another kind of concept, heterogeneous to the philosophical concept of the concept, a ‘concept’ that marks both the possibility and the limit of all idealization and hence of all conceptualization.17

While it should hardly be necessary to spell out the tactics and techniques of deconstructive practices as a whole, it is important to briefly set out that vital second step, the one so often ignored by those who wish to castigate both deconstruction as a ‘method’, and postmodernism as an ‘entity’, for their assumed positions of either political 16 17

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Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, 15. Derrida, Limited Inc., 117–18.

quietude or apolitical hedonism. Having reversed the binaries of a classical metaphysical dualism such as, for example, those of presence and absence, the important second stage is to utilize that shift in hierarchy to challenge the previous order, but not so as to instigate a new order (where absence would be more positive than presence), or even imply the ‘absence’ of presence. Rather it is to show that absence is the necessary ‘ground’ of presence, or, put simply, that without the concept of absence there can be no presence. A deconstructive strategy requires that what is seen as the primary pole of the binary depends on its ‘negative’ pole for the conditions of its possibility. From such a perspective, it could be argued that modernism needs postmodernism against which to define itself, rather as it needed tradition, or antiquity, or Romanticism, to define itself in the past. This obviously begs the question, once again, as to whether postmodernism similarly needs modernism against which to define itself. Alternatively, one can ask whether postmodernism can escape the dualisms of metaphysics and still utilize deconstructive practices, which, as Derrida has so often affirmed, cannot escape the grammar of metaphysics.18 Perhaps postmodernism can escape strict definition by removing itself from the need, or the imposition, of a dialectical relationship with an ‘other’. If postmodernism were to define itself provisionally as being the necessary marginalized other of modernism, wouldn’t it already be trapped within the dualistic models? Yes, and no. Yes – if only those metaphysical binaries are adhered to. No – if différance, especially in its sense of deferral, is invoked. That is to say, the desire to define postmodernism in terms of its ‘otherness’ to the dominant discourses of modernism is part and parcel of the modernist dialectic – to define the other in relation to itself. If postmodernism is seen as the marginalized ‘other’ to the grand narratives of modernism and the totalizing tendencies of Marxism, 18

Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Writing and Difference, 278–93. As Derrida writes: ‘The step “outside philosophy” is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who think they made it long ago with cavalier ease, and who in general are swallowed up in metaphysics in the entire body of discourse which they claim to have disengaged from it’ (284).

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then it may well need the alterity that a deconstructive gesture constitutes in order to unravel the hierarchical binary of modernism/postmodernism. However, it might be more strategic to withhold such decisions for the moment; to resist the urge to dispense with the opponent and rather to continue to play with that dialectical relationship between modernism and postmodernism, where, while a dialectic must necessarily be acknowledged, it is a ‘special’ kind of dialectic – one which plays in the space between the strict polarity of an either/or configuration. In that case, it is important to define play more closely than simply as ‘some kind of obscurantist free-for-all’.19 Derrida defines ‘play’ differently: not in the sense of gambling or playing games, but what in French we call jouer, which means that the structure of the machine, or the springs, are not so tight, so that you can just try to dislocate: that’s what I meant by play.20

To interpret play, or undecidability, in terms of a total lack of limits is not, as Derrida argues, what is entailed in deconstruction. Derrida, never proposed ‘a kind of “all or nothing” choice between pure realization of self-presence and complete freeplay or undecidability.’ [...] There can be no ‘completeness’ where freeplay is concerned.21

Undecidability suggests the incompleteness of any totalizing either/or configuration, and therefore implies inhabiting a space between polarities – between positions. In the space between the metaphysical certainties of either/or, or yet another metaphoricity, black and white, lies a grey area. Admittedly, undecidability in the fields of political action, or decision-making, could suggest a space for paralysis – for inaction. But, there is no reason why that space of undecidability cannot be defined positively, as a place of choice and improvisation, of constant negotiation and renegotiation – transient, strategic, contingent – ever liable to reassessment: that is, an ability to shift strategies, defer goals, and improvise the possibilities of endings.

19 20 21

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Derrida, interviewed, in Criticism in Society, ed. Salusinszky, 19. Criticism in Society, 20. Derrida, Limited Inc., 115.

Between the polarities, between the transcendent truths of right or wrong, lies the shadow. But, that shadowy place can be a space for action – alternately light, alternately dark – but never completely one or the other. It is possible to re-label that ‘gap’, that ‘shadow’, as a ‘serious’ playing space – recognizing that it is because of the dualistic structure of our metaphysics, and the grammar of our language, that we must play within such a space and therefore must resist the closure that a shift towards inhabiting either pole of that duality would entail. It can be a perilous space, trembling above the abyss that separates the certainties of either/or. As Alan Bass puts it: Between-ness – the suspended decision – is intolerably anxiety-provoking for thought as we know it. Speech, consciousness, presence, and truth, [...] form a system of values that must disavow ‘writing’ and ‘the unconscious,’ the functions of irreducible doubleness that are what Derrida called in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ philosophy’s ‘adverse foundation.’22

This understandable anxiety, in the face of a long tradition of a contextually necessary desire for certitude, can often lead to the temptation to take a position that will deny undecidability by clutching at a transcendental ‘system of values’. That is a safe position to inhabit; a sure and secure position to rebut rival discourses. But in postmodern, as in deconstructive, discourses there is no secure place: there is a recognition of insecurity, even if not necessarily a revelling in it. Instead of the poles of security and insecurity, there is rather a state of shifting securities – not securely positional, but open to those doubts, conjectures, and improvisations that inhabit the gaps between polarities. To reiterate: poles may define the boundaries of undecidability between spaces, but it is only in the spaces that one can escape the either/or situations of modernisms, fundamentalisms or any other configurations of discourse which decide that shifts must be, one way or another, based on transcendental, totalizing and essentialist grounds. Those thrown into physical and material insecurity through the depredations of those who require a fixed positionality, secured in a national, ethnic, racial, financial, or epistemological base, are in that 22

Bass, ‘The Double Game: An Introduction’, in Taking Chances, ed. Smith and Kerrigan, 74.

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position because of the insecurities that drive that urge for a permanent security, or, what Derrida terms ‘this will to purify’.23 Those who fear undecidability, or who strategically invoke an epistemology of transcendental belief and permanent faith, are the ones who most often occasion the material insecurity of their victims. The fear of insecurity is doubled around and can be seen to be the foundation of their actions. Fanaticism and terror are the means towards such fundamental ends – whether they be religious and/or political – again, if there can be a separation between those two ‘spheres’.

Re-politicizing the Postmodern Apolitical The political implications of postmodern discourses can be usefully approached in a similar manner to Derrida’s caveat on the political implications of deconstruction, where, in the following, postmodernism could be substituted for deconstruction: As deconstruction is inherently neither ‘conservative’ nor the contrary, the political evaluation of each of the gestures called deconstructive will have to depend, if it is to be rigorous and in proportion to what it is addressing, upon analyses that are very difficult, very minute, very flexible with regard to the stereotypes of political-institutional discourse. Deconstruction does not exist somewhere, pure, proper, self-identical, outside of its inscriptions in conflictual and differentiated contexts; it ‘is’ only what it does and what is done with it, there where it takes place.24

In other words, there is no escaping the grammar and the language of the text/context we inhabit. Although postmodernism is not an ‘is’ but rather a shifting, loosely-defined collection of discursive practices without an essentialist foundation or transcendental rationale, it still remains a provisional ‘is’ – in ‘what it does and what is done with it, there where it takes place’. Postmodernism works as a continually 23 24

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Derrida, Limited Inc., 135. Limited Inc., 141.

deconstructive process, always shifting, and always specific and contextual. This is to recognize that contexts ‘themselves’ are not stable but are plural, shifting, always already fragmented sites of struggle – that is, ‘conflictual and differentiated contexts’. As Derrida writes: One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization. The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (‘there is nothing outside the text’ [...]), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context.25

In a similar vein, but using a different term, Derrida’s caveat on the uses of deconstruction mirrors what I define as postmodernism – again substituting postmodernism for deconstruction: there is no sense in speaking of a deconstruction or simply deconstruction as if there were only one, as if the word had a (single) meaning outside of the sentences which inscribe it and carry it within themselves.26

As Derrida’s terms différance, trace, supplement, among others, are tools, not concepts, so too can postmodernism be defined in the same sense – as a tool, a lever, the parasitic grub that will inhabit the host – not in order to overthrow it and set up a new hierarchy, but in order to live off it and, at the same time, subtly ‘solicit’ it from within. Derrida’s work, because it is often seen as primarily focusing on the metaphysics of presence (or is reduced to centring on the opposition between speech and writing), is therefore interpreted as having no political application. Furthermore, deconstruction suffered from having been co-opted by a particular group of literary theorists in the United States – the ‘Yale critics’ – where its strategies were used, almost exclusively, to ‘deconstruct’ literary texts.27 These viewpoints serve to obscure the uses that deconstructive strategies or practices can have in the analysis of post-Enlightenment politics. As previously 25 26 27

Limited Inc., 136. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, 17. See The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, ed. Arac, Godzich, and Martin.

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referred to, the writings of ‘post-Marxists’ such as Laclau and Mouffe among others, focus on a model of social, or ‘radical’ democracy.28 Such a model serves as a potential example of how deconstructive strategies can work against both the totalizing pretensions of transcendentally and teleologically informed political programmes, as well as against postmodern discourses which fall into the trap of forgetting that they play in the space between the poles. That is to say, they cannot ignore the ‘flip side’ of that polarity which they have reversed – the materiality of the social – in all of its diverse constructions. If the world is no longer seen as determinate, eternal and immutable, then the political implications of postmodernism can be recognized. It comes down to social agents to construct that world, and to continually redefine the terms and means of that construction. This is to say, once again, that contra Lyotard, among others, there is not a postmodern ‘condition’, but rather postmodern strategies, only ever provisional, contingent, and contextually specific. This is not to claim that there can be no thinking the whole: rather, there cannot be a grasping of the whole. Social criticism can move beyond the micro-sites where action may take place to encounter and imagine the potentialities of wider actions. But, the tendency to confer upon itself the ability to seize and act upon the ‘big picture’ must be resisted. There is no one big picture. Rather, there are differential sites of struggle that can encompass varying degrees of size and complexity. As noted in chapter one, Fraser and Nicholson in their critique of Lyotard’s espousal of only micro-narratives, point out that there exist larger questions concerning cross-cultural problematics of class, gender, race, and sexual orientation – which work across spaces that cannot be covered only in localized actions. To argue, as Harvey has done, that postmodernism needs a metatheory to grasp the implications of a transnational, multinational global situation, is to ignore the fact that global thought can be performed without the underpinning of a metatheory. Postmodernism does not require the possibility of a 28

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In particular see Laclau, ‘Politics and the Limits of Modernity’, and Mouffe, ‘Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?’ in Universal Abandon?, ed. Ross; Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, and Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time.

metatheory able to grasp the complexities of a global situation, even one reduced to the determinate logic of late capitalism. But that is not to say that one cannot think globally on specific issues, and still remain aware that the ‘whole picture’ cannot be grasped. Actions can be performed locally with an ongoing recognition of wider encroachments and implications. Between the specific contextualities of particular action situations, and an overarching metatheory that would seek to grasp these implications, exists that space between the theory and the practice, the idea and the achievement. This is the space where postmodern political movements and their deconstructive practices operate. It is not simply a case of either specific actions or the grasping of a global metatheory. Both determine the other to varying degrees, and neither is singular in their existence. To act locally is not to forget to think globally – to paraphrase that which Harvey terms, ‘the revolutionary slogan of the 1960s’.29 The simplistic dualism of either local action or global theory shares the same metaphysical base as all other binaries, which need to be deconstructed into all of their particular specificities and contextualities.

The Implications for Postmodern Politics The implications for a postmodern politics, if postmodern discourses are allied with, or utilize, deconstructive strategies, must be addressed. Postmodern political practices renounce claims to foundational thought or determinate and hierarchical ‘master’ discourses. Rather, such practices look towards a pluralist politics formed through a diversity of pragmatic and temporarily existing affinities between similar interest groups. The social (bearing in mind the diversity of positions encompassed by that problematic term) is constructed through ongoing arguments and conflicting discourses, which dismiss notions such as an extradiscursively-divine, or a historically29

Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 303.

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dialectical, grand plan, and furthermore, argue that the subject is a constantly deconstructing/reconstructing social agent. Rather than being informed by teleologically driven endpoints or totalizing assumptions, there is, instead, a focus on praxis, pragmatics, particularity and performativity.30 There is the recognition of specificity, contingency, agency, and the formation of temporary alliances rather than the adherence to a monolithic party line; which is not to claim that monolithic (or otherwise) two-party political systems do not still operate with varying degrees of effectivity in various contexts. The fundamental theoretical methodology and metaphysical underpinning of modernity is dualistic. The metaphysics of subject/object differentiation are integral to the politics of domination through a hierarchy of values, where the self is defined by its difference to the other. However, as Donna Haraway has pointed out, anticolonialist discourses, for example, serve to dissolve ‘the West and its highest product – the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman: that is, man, the author of a cosmos called history’.31 Haraway’s arguments concerning differing feminist points-of-view helps highlight the weakness of the critique that postmodern political practices need a universalizing metatheory that would ignore or subsume difference. As Haraway writes: The permanent partiality of feminist points of view has consequences for our expectations of forms of political organization and participation. We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of a perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction.32

30

31 32

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Performativity, in this sense, would imply not only that which is capable of being performed, but more importantly, the performing of it in terms of specificity and contextuality – rather than the modernist ‘optimum’ performativity invoked by Lyotard: that is, be operational – or ‘disappear’. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 44–7. Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Nicholson, 198. Haraway, 215.

A common language implies a sense of universal experience. Counter to this in the arguments for postmodern political practices are those that invoke the particular – or the specific. Specificity is a disavowal of the universalizing principles of metaphysics – the subsumption of the other into the same. Specificity is the recognition of the particular and the singular, of the dangers of universalizing ideas, categories, judgements, or subject-positions, to the exclusion of each or any of them. Thus, in postmodern politics the ‘new struggles’ as Mouffe terms them, ‘renounce any claim to universality. They show how in every assertion of universality there lies a disavowal of the particular and a refusal of specificity’.33 In a similar manner, contingency – in working against a determinate and universal necessity – is potentially liberating in the face of categorical ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’. Nonetheless, as the grand narratives of the Enlightenment still have material effects, so to do the ‘necessities’ of modernist political programmes. As Laclau argues (in a deconstructive mode), the celebration of contingency does not preclude necessity. To argue that contingency implies the absence of necessity is to ignore the play between the dualisms of metaphysics, and therefore to fall, once more, into the game of binary oppositions and metaphysical hierarchies. For Laclau: it is not possible to threaten the existence of something without simultaneously affirming it. In this sense, it is the contingent which subverts the necessary: contingency is not the negative other side of necessity, but the element of impurity which deforms and hinders its full constitution.34

This play between opposing polarities and the contamination of an essentialist ‘full constitution’ disrupt the narrative, and thus teleological, necessity of modernist political programmes. In a similar manner, this play and impurity and the ongoing recognition of contingency are constitutive of postmodern political movements (as well as the practices of performance). As Laclau argues, echoing Derrida: ‘this interplay of mutual subversion between the contingent and the necessary is a more primary ground, ontologically, than that of a pure objectivity 33 34

Mouffe, ‘Radical Democracy’, in Universal Abandon?, ed. Ross, 35. Laclau, New Reflections, 27.

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or total contingency’.35 Furthermore, this ‘interplay of mutual subversion’ has a positive value, rather than the pejorative connotations that ‘subversion’ suggests in ‘official’ discourses. Henry Giroux, who suggests that the emancipation project of modernity can be renewed in the ‘postmodern world’ where the ‘monolithic boundaries of nationalism, sexism, racism, and class oppression’ are being challenged by postmodernism, also invokes contingency. He writes, with a self-acknowledged utopian sentiment: In a world whose borders have become chipped and porous, new challenges present themselves [...] to all those for whom contingency and loss of certainty do not mean the inevitable triumph of nihilism and despair, but rather a state of possibility in which destiny and hope can be snatched from the weakening grasp of modernity.36

Such a ‘state of possibility’ opens up a field of potentiality for postmodern political movements, which challenges any claim that such movements are trapped by the specificity of their aims and their lack of a metatheory into static ineffectivity. As Laclau argues, throwing away the myth of foundations need not lead to nihilism: ‘It leads, rather, to a proliferation of discursive interventions and arguments that are necessary, because there is no extradiscursive reality that discourse might simply reflect’.37 In a similar vein, Mouffe differentiates the ‘emancipatory’ project of the Enlightenment from the epistemological perspective, arguing that there need be no necessary relationship between the political project of modernity and a ‘specific form of rationality’ – the self-foundation of the Enlightenment. As she writes: Although [it] did play an important part in the emergence of democracy, it has become an obstacle in the path of understanding those new forms of politics, characteristic of our societies today, which demand to be approached from a nonessentialist perspective.38

35 36 37 38

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New Reflections, 27. Giroux, ‘Border Pedagogy and the Politics of Postmodernism’, Social Text 28 (1991), 65. Laclau, ‘Politics and the Limits of Modernity’, In Universal Abandon?, ed. Ross, 79. Mouffe, ‘Radical Democracy’, 33.

The utilization of the term agency by postmodern political theorists can be related to the poststructuralist dissolution of the unitary Enlightenment human subject. Agency implies a social being no longer subject to the myths of foundations, or a biologically and hence ideologically driven essentialism. As Mouffe argues, the theorizing of the subject as ‘a decentered, detotalized agent, a subject constructed at the point of intersection of a multiplicity of subject-positions’ is ‘indispensable’ for the thinking of politics today.39 As a consequence of this ambiguity of identity: What emerges are entirely new perspectives for political action, which neither liberalism – with its idea of the individual who only pursues his or her own interest – nor marxism – with its reduction of all subject-positions to that of class – can sanction, let alone imagine.40

Importantly, Laclau argues that the dissolution of the category ‘human’, or ‘subject’, does not necessarily lead to a loss of motivation for action: On the contrary, social agents appear in concrete situations and are constituted by precise and limited discursive networks. In this sense, lack of grounding does not abolish the meaning of their acts; it only affirms their limits, their finitude, and their historicity.41

What is obvious here is a dominant theme of the subject as an active social agent, as someone who can have a hand in writing and performing the social script. That might well be the main implication for a postmodern politics utilizing deconstructive strategies, with the social agent as performer and actant on his or her ‘reality’. In other words, social agents are actors/performers in a performance with limits – specific and contingent limits – which potentially open up an awareness of a freedom to ‘write’ one’s own script. Furthermore, there is a recognition of the political import of such relative freedom – a freedom which perhaps can be frightening: that of the responsibility for one’s own actions – or lack of them. As John W. Murphy writes: 39 40 41

Mouffe, ‘Radical Democracy’, 35. Mouffe, ‘Radical Democracy’, 35. Laclau, ‘Politics and the Limits of Modernity’, 80.

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‘Like Nietzsche, Derrida demands that those who live must manufacture their own fate’.42 As such, social agents as political performers can dispense with the author-ity of the classical narrative of modernist politics, and assume that author-function for themselves – as a performer-function – improvising the script of the everyday play of the social. A common catch phrase of postmodern politics is the one concerning temporary alliances, or ‘affinities’ to use Haraway’s term.43 Such affiliations, affinities or ‘rainbow’ alliances are characteristic of postmodern political movements. Furthermore, formerly fixed categories that served to define, and confine, political positionality – especially from the stance of a dualistically opposed viewpoint – no longer have their former strength in postmodern political movements. As Stephen Crook has written: ‘Established analytical categories of Right and Left, radicalism and conservatism, reform and revolution, socialism and liberalism, fail when applied in the analysis of new politics.44 Political movements based on strategic alliances for specific purposes must remain improvisational and reflexive of the necessity to continually rethink the ongoing and particular rationales of their alliances. As Andrew Ross has pointed out, with specific reference to Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: These links have to be articulated, or bound together, from contest to contest, and from moment to moment. The result is an agenda appropriate to a modern Gramscian war of position; a field of heterogeneous positions and sometimes

42 43

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Murphy, ‘Deconstruction, Social Imagery and Liberation’, Southern Review [Adelaide], 21.3 (Nov. 1988), 275. Focusing on the roles that feminist critics can play in the recognition of a fragmented post-middle-class white 1960s and 1970s feminism, Haraway draws on the work of local political interest groups which work against the ‘Star Wars’ industries of California’s Silicon Valley. She writes of a particular group (the Livermore Action Group) as one ‘committed to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state’ (Haraway, 196). Crook, ‘Social Movements and the New Politics’, in Postmodernization: Change in Advanced Society, ed. Crook, Pakulski and Waters, 141.

contradictory discourses, often with no common content and no overall guarantee of a progressive outcome.45

However, the construction of the affinities and alliances of postmodern political movements is not unproblematic, as all such groupings must work not only to maintain a provisional cohesion between interested parties but also, as Ryan has argued, to recognize the slippage that occurs when ‘material linkages’ are not acknowledged. Ryan’s critique of Negri and Guattari’s Anti-Power focuses on their use of ‘alliance’ which implies ‘difference within unity’ but argues that ‘the concrete form such alliances might take’ is not engaged with.46 While the ‘necessary link’ between certain movements, such as the antinuclear and the proletarian movements, to use Ryan’s example, are made, Negri and Guattari are criticized in that the relations between the women’s movement and the other movements in terms of the linkages between patriarchal sexual power, the hyperbolic aggressivity of the military institution, and the power drive of either the capitalist market or statist administration are not addressed.47

This is a valid argument, but that non-reflexive use of an implied singular ‘women’s movement’ shows the necessity for a constant vigilance in any analysis which seeks to utilize deconstructive strategies and demonstrates the need to recognize the specific and diverse interests of those so easily subsumed into uniform groupings. The imputed ‘coherence’ of any political programme depends upon the criteria deemed to measure its effectivity. The criterion of ‘performativity’ – or, ‘that which works’ – should be embraced as much by modernists as postmodernists. Performativity, ideally, works in the gap between theory and practice – and can be defined as praxis. The potentiality that informs the positivity of postmodern political movements lies in the recognition of that gap. But, rather than falling into the trap of the either/or, and dumping the theory to engage in the practice, postmodern discourses recognize the space of the gap, and 45 46 47

Ross, Introduction, Universal Abandon?, xiv. Ryan, ‘Postmodern Politics’, Theory, Culture and Society 5.2–3 (June 1988), 573. Ryan, ‘Postmodern Politics’, 573.

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inhabit it, as postmodern performance recognizes, and inhabits, the gap between theory and practice, between text and performance, between product and process. The practice informs the theory which in turn informs the practice – ongoing and without closure. It would therefore be pertinent now to shift from the question of what postmodernism ‘is’ to that of what it ‘does’ – with the accent on the doing. The author-function implicit in the narrative of modernist political programmes, or, the patriarchal ‘direction’ of the modernist telos, is replaced by the performer who not only acts different scenarios but also asks different questions. As John Johnston has written (in relation to postmodern art, but is equally applicable to both politics and performance in postmodernism): Questions like ‘What does it mean?’ or ‘What does the author intend?’ must be replaced by questions like ‘What does it work in conjunction with?’ and ‘What new intensities does it produce?’48

If postmodernism ‘is’ a diverse constellation of deconstructive discursive strategies which work to question the dualistic categories of metaphysical modernist patriarchy, and which need to be recognized for what they do, or how they perform, rather than what they essentially ‘are’, then potentially, performance is the model for postmodern political practices. In the following chapters I shall explore the concept and practice of performance – a necessarily political performance – as it is defined in postmodernism.

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Johnston, ‘Ideology, Representation, Schizophrenia: Toward a Theory of the Postmodern Subject’, in After the Future, ed. Shapiro, 91.

Chapter Five Performance in Postmodernism

Much of what has been termed postmodern performance is still locked into anti-modernist and late-modernist dualistic and ontological models. Performance, in modernist terms, is invariably defined as a theatre of representation, reflecting reality, and therefore upholds a system that invokes the dualisms of appearance versus essence, mind versus body, in short, the real versus its representations. The argument that postmodern performance is one more manifestation of an avantgarde is strongly contested throughout this chapter. An analysis of the avant-gardes and performance art, as well as more recent manifestations of purportedly proto-postmodern performance practices, will reveal the hidden agenda of those who denigrate what they have termed postmodern performance – either for its lack of a political programme and therefore an inability to intervene, or its collapse back into modernist essentialism. The isolation and identification of the key factors informing modernist attitudes towards performance, described in chapter two, and the exploration of postmodern and deconstructive strategies in relation to postmodern politics in chapter four, set the scene for the opportunity to define performance in the context of postmodernism. Principally, postmodern performance shifts away from modernist connotations that would attempt to tie it exclusively into theatre and drama. Furthermore, it throws into doubt those metaphysical appeals towards universality and essence that underlie modernist epistemological dualism. Performance will be discussed in the context of conventionally defined limits of theatrical time and space, before being looked at in its wider sense – as a marker of the deconstruction of the polarities set up between theory and practice, product and process, idea and achievement and, in particular, between representation and the ‘real’. This will enable a re-examination of those conventional polarities that informed Marxist suspicions concerning representation

which were surveyed in chapter one,1 leading into some provisional, and heuristic, arguments as to why and how performance is the paradigm for a postmodern politics. Principally, this expansion of the definitions of performance will serve to illustrate how performance, in postmodern discourses, attains a wider range of meanings and usages, particularly in socio-cultural and hence political discourses. Postmodern performance attempts to break with, or at least throw into doubt, appeals towards universality, essence, and a metaphysically-inspired project of dualistically-formulated separations between appearance and essence, presence and absence, text and performance, process and product, and so forth. Postmodern performance and postmodern political practices are related in their strategies: for example, in their dismissal of dualistic binarisms, in their struggle against a closure of the dialectic, in their questioning of any hierocratic separations which are imposed in the name of transcendental grounds – for pragmatic reasons (as well as those imposed in the name of pragmatism) – and of any system that attempts to impose an ontological referent of the ‘real’ onto contingent constructions of performance situations and social formations. In short, postmodern performance and politics can be allied in their recognition of contingency (in their process and practice); specificity (in terms of their contextual strategies, and importantly, their aims); their transience, or ephemerality; their self-reflexive questioning of their own specific forms; their ability to engage in short-term effectivity-based ‘programmes’ or performances; and their willingness to break and re-form into differing configurations for specific purposes. Postmodern performance deconstructs the practices of both the ‘historical’ avant-gardes and the neo-avant-gardes of late modernism, which highlighted (but did not escape) the inversive aspect of the 1

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For example, see Montag on representation and Marxism in ‘What is at Stake in the Debate on Postmodernism?’ in Postmodernism and its Discontents, ed. Kaplan: ‘For Jameson is only the latest in a long line of Marxists who have proven utterly incapable of conceiving of a form of determination proper to literature or art outside of representation. Accordingly, a work is either anchored to and controlled by a reality which is the guarantee of the meaning of the work to the extent that it is external and therefore foreign to the work, or the work has no relation to reality and is thus simply false, illusory’ (96).

dissolution of dualisms. Performance, in that inversive (and late modern) sense, attempted to transgress the primacy of the dramatic text, logocentrism, the product, and ‘theatre’. Performance in its postmodern senses, does not try to invert these binaries, but rather plays within them, recognizing that there is no outside from which to take an either/or position – a position that would prioritize and essentialize one pole to the exclusion of the other. What needs to be untangled are the various ways in which postmodern performance can in turn be categorized – and limited – by particular stylistic and/or epistemological criteria. This can occur, for example, through an accent on the disruption of narrative and the displacement of the authorial text in postmodern performance theories; or through the overt use of multimedia technologies. What is more important is the problematizing of representation and its relation to the ‘real’ in postmodern discourses. Other areas of major importance concern the relationships between performers and spectators as well as the place of the body – once again – in postmodern performance. Furthermore, the implications for a postmodern politics in relation to performance also deserves explication. In the context of postmodern discourses the meanings of performance have widened and the distinctions have blurred – with the acknowledgement, through reconceptualizations of the uses of the term, of its multiplicity of applications. This is where ‘text’ as well as ‘performance’ in their postmodern usages, shift markedly from modernist conceptions. However, this shift to a wider application of the terms differs from the notion of ‘theatricality’ in the modernist sense. A metaphorical theatrum mundi model is not being implied here, with its sense of an invisible omniscient authority guiding the actors on the world stage. Performance, if used as a ‘metaphor’ for actions and events in socio-political contexts, dispenses with the transcendental authority of the scribe as well as the primacy of the print text. However, while the authority of the text is questioned, postmodern performance will not try to insist that a text does not exist. If taken in Barthes’ sense, where text is defined in terms of a ‘methodological field’, then the text can be assimilated into postmodern performance. Quoting Barthes’ ‘From Work to Text’, Gerald Rabkin writes: ‘The work is an object, “a fragment of substance” like a book in a library: 135

the text is a “methodological field.” The former is displayed; the latter demonstrated’.2 Nonetheless, even modernist performance was always already subversive of textual and therefore authorial authority. Prior to, and during rehearsals, adherence to what is presumed to be the author’s intention could be subverted through the dictates of the director, as well as through the vagaries of the individual actors to subvert the intentions of both author and director. Any author’s script, even if written as tightly as possible to maintain a rigid form and lead towards closure can be subverted in, and through, performance. However, to be experimental and daring is not the same as to deconstruct the systems of representation that are controlled by the text. To deconstruct a dramatic text in performance requires more than a playful subversion of spectator expectation. As Rabkin warns: Deconstruction does not assert that anything goes, that all interpretation is equal. [...] a strong misreading must be rigorous, tied to a theoretical framework meticulously expressed. It must lead to the dissemination, not closure of the text. It must affirm play and produce pleasure in the reader/audience.3

A deconstructive postmodern performance is not A Midsummer Night’s Dream on trapezes; it is not Macbeth in futuristic military uniforms, or with laser swords flashing; it is not Coriolanus in cloth caps or business suits. If postmodern performance utilizes a canonical classical text it is in order to find the aporias, to deconstruct that which the text has been assumed to be saying (without regard for contextuality); to expose a different meaning – but not a ‘true’ meaning. Furthermore, a deconstructive performance serves to disrupt the ‘reality’ of narrative coherence and those forms of representation which can lead to closure and the cementation of meaning in a form of prescribed finality. It is the ephemerality of performance, set against that relatively recent but still powerful reverence towards the written dramatic text, which underpins a late-modernist sensibility regarding performance as 2

3

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Rabkin, ‘The Play of Misreading: Text/Theatre/Deconstruction’, Performing Arts Journal 19, 7.1 (1983), 49. Barthes’ essay, ‘From Work to Text’ appears in his Image–Music–Text, 155–64. Rabkin, 59.

an inversive revolt against the permanence of the word. As Rabkin points out: Performance, in its non-metaphorical sense, by its very nature denies the logocentric impulse – the body transcends the word. But the logocentric authority of the word has indeed been sustained by the evanescence of performance and the survivability of the dramatic text.4

The ‘survivability of the dramatic text’ is not in question here. A certain logocentrism is contextually inevitable, not in the sense of a pre-ordained determinism but as the means by which people primarily communicate with each other. Postmodern performance does not deny the ‘logocentric impulse’. Rather, it decentres it from a position of primacy. That the body might transcend the word is the dream that Artaud attempted to formulate – in words. But Artaud was caught within the same dilemma that has haunted us from before Nietzsche to beyond Derrida – how can we escape the ‘grammar’ of our metaphysical, and inevitably metaphorical submersion in language? Neoclassical drama, and naturalistic drama, emphasized the importance of the canonical and literary dramatic text. Artaud’s appeal for ‘no more masterpieces’ highlights his modernist rejection of the literary aspect of classical theatre, as well as its clinging to outmoded, or noncontextually relevant forms of theatre. For Artaud: ‘If the public does not frequent our literary masterpieces, it is because those masterpieces are literary, that is to say, fixed; and fixed in forms that no longer respond to the needs of the time’.5 Despite Artaud’s rejection of the ‘literary masterpiece’ his attempted eviction of the written text was unsuccessful – as Artaud recognized, and to which Derrida refers: He knew this better than any other: the ‘grammar’ of the theater of cruelty, of which he said that it is ‘to be found,’ will always remain the inaccessible limit of a representation which is not repetition, of a re-presentation which is full presence, which does not carry its double within itself as its death, of a present which does not repeat itself, that is, of a present outside time, a nonpresent.6 4 5 6

Rabkin, 54. Artaud, The Theater and its Double, 75. Derrida, ‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference, 248.

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The a-priori text, whether written or visual, remains a part of performance. However, and importantly, it is not necessarily the starting point for performance. Texts, as a record rather than a recipe, can be assembled during the preparation time of a performance, during the ‘actual’ performance, as well as after the ‘event’. A postmodern text can contain possible variations of what might have happened, or may still yet happen in the performing of a particular piece of work. It thereby recognizes contingency. Postmodern performance does not jettison the text, but rather distorts its conventional form as well as its former temporal and authoritative priority. The a-priori text, in postmodern performance, might be no more than an idea, or a theme. It may be ‘nothing’ more than a book of pictures, a visual text that escapes the logocentricity of modernist Western theatre performance – the visual and aural imagery of what is often termed postmodern performance, especially in respect of its technological effects.7 Importantly, performance, in postmodernism, is both a performing and a writing of the text – thereby escaping what Steven Connor describes as the ‘compulsion to repeat’8 which typifies modernist theatre’s reliance on the apriori text. However, it is those ‘technological effects’ that are worth looking at briefly, for they are, to a large degree, a ‘red herring’ in terms of what defines postmodern performance. There has occurred a heightened prominence of electronic ‘multimedia’ technology in the performing arts of the past two to three decades. An exemplary practitioner of multimedia performance during that period, if only in terms of the amount of discussion of his works, is the North American designer/director Robert Wilson. Writing about the 1987 London performances of Wilson’s production of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, Nicholas Zurbrugg describes it thus: Mixing almost every theatrical and extra-theatrical trick in the Post-Modern book, it combined classical declamation, parodic classical declamation, autistic 7

8

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Arens cites Robert Wilson’s CIVIL warS and the refusal by the Pulitzer Prize committee in 1986 to accept Wilson’s explanation that there was a ‘visual book’. The committee wanted a written ‘text’. ‘Robert Wilson: Is Postmodern Performance Possible?’ Theatre Journal 43.1 (March 1991), 29. Connor, ‘“What? Where?” Presence and Repetition in Beckett’s Theatre’, in Rethinking Beckett, ed. Butler and Davis, 2.

anti-declamation, colloquial declamation, cry, whisper, laugh, whimper, taperecorded screech and mutter, tape-recorded noise, mime, acrobatics, sculptural immobility, videoesque choreography, virtuoso lighting, projected slideimagery, black and white and coloured film-imagery, digitally deconstructed video-image, and an array of musical sound-tracks ranging from the nostalgic tango accompanying the cast’s final bow, to the echoing tones of a piano piece by Lieber and Stoller (composers of Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog).9

However, if postmodern performance is to be defined principally in terms of its adventurous use of available technologies, then much classical and modernist theatre could be categorized similarly. That a performance uses all the contextually available means of technology to generate its sound and light scapes, and to utilize differing modes of vocal communication, does not make it postmodern. ‘Special effects’ have always been available in varying degrees, whether in the form of cranes, wind machines, gaslights, moving stages, or megaphones, for example. If digitalized video effects and synthesized soundscapes had been available to Shakespeare, we may be sure he would have used them. The same can certainly be said for Wagner, Craig, Piscator, and Meyerhold – to name but a few. What Birringer, using Lyotard’s term, calls the ‘technological sublime’ is not the ruling trope of postmodern performance.10 However, Birringer’s concern is not so much with the use of available technology, but how and why it is used – that is, where the ‘technological sublime’ replaces a focus on human action and where representation is carried out through ‘special effects’, rather than through human agency. Birringer’s desire is to shift focus, specifically in terms of representation: I suggest, therefore, that we need to give more attention to those postmodern performances that do not let the multimedia apparatus represent itself to itself, but react against that mise en abyme by foregrounding, and experimenting with, the transformable theatricality of body and voice in real space-time – and thus addressing the actually changing conditions of representation for social subjects that we experience today.11 9

10 11

Zurbrugg, ‘Post-Modernism and the Multi-Media Sensibility: Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine and the art of Robert Wilson’, Modern Drama 31.3 (Sept. 1988), 439. Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism, 180. Birringer, 180.

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It is that question of representation in both its classical and modernist paradigms, and its status in postmodern performance, which needs to be addressed. Representation (as that which must be the expressive, mimetic, and/or formal representation of an originary presence) might no longer be counted as a major issue in postmodern performance. That which classic realism accepted, which modernism agonized over (and which Artaud struggled against), may appear to be no longer contentious. Nonetheless, representation in the sense that Birringer uses it above, still has potency, especially in terms of the political aspects of performance in postmodernism – in the materiality of its effects on the body of the ‘social subject’. But firstly, representation needs to be discussed in the contexts of theatrical representation, and particularly in terms of its relationship to presence. The status of representation, and its relationship to presence, can be invoked as serving to define whether or not performance is categorized as modernist or postmodernist. The modernist conception of Western theatre rested, in part, on two pertinent notions. One was that theatre is the representation of another event – its ‘otherness’ prescribed in the form of a representation of a dramatic text (or the rejuvenation of a former event, or the representation of a possible future event). The second is that theatre invokes the presence of the dramatic text or the event through the presence of the bodies and voices of actors on a stage. As Connor notes: The drama’s claim to embody a ‘metaphysics of presence’ rests largely upon two other claims: that it represents human beings with the actual bodies of other human beings, and that it represents spoken words with words spoken by those actual human beings.12

The concept of representation, to recall its Platonic ‘origins’, is founded on the notion of its being representative of an Ideal, or as the secondary representation, or copy, of an original. However, an Ideal (like an Idea of Reason) is neither an action nor an event. It is a cognitive fiction that serves as a model, or template, for that which is deemed secondary and subordinate to it. The representation, in theatre, 12

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Connor, 4.

of either a prior event or of the potential action and outcome of an event yet-to-come are both problematic. Any representation of a prior event must change, if only in terms of the time and space of that event. The predictive aspects of the representation of a future event, through an analysis of its potentiality of outcome, must also be flawed if seen as being a representation. In that sense, presentation might well serve. However, the debate concerning presentation versus representation in modernist performance theory is, once again, an attempt to prioritize presence – this time through presentation. Here, it is argued, it is only presentation that can evade repetition, and thus affirm full presence in terms of actors’ bodies and voices on the stage. However, if there is no escape from representation and repetition, as even Artaud realized, then full presence can never be present to itself. It is always already contaminated by repetition and difference; Derrida’s ‘iterability’ and différance which deconstruct pure presence and to which Elinor Fuchs refers: If there can be no assurance of the bond between thought and speech, there can be no single moment at which utterance originates; and if no originary principle can be identified, then such a thing as a self-same Presence is merely a selfserving illusion. Thus Derrida’s attack on phonocentrism has the aim of undoing not only the speech/writing binary, but two thousand years of the ‘metaphysics of Presence’.13

In the 1978 translation of Derrida’s ‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ which concerns Artaud’s search for a theatrical form that might escape representation and repetition and find full presence, the hopelessness of Artaud’s quest is pointed out – in part, evocative of an avant-garde desire for a collapse of the putative gap between life and art; or between the ‘real’ and its representations. The fear underpinning the dualisms of modernism and classicism is summed up by Derrida where, in opposition to Artaud’s desire for ‘festival’, classical theatricality becomes a model of metaphysical duality:

13

Fuchs, ‘Presence and the Revenge of Writing: Re-thinking Theatre after Derrida’, Performing Arts Journal 26/27, 9.2–3 (1985), 166.

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All the limits furrowing classical theatricality (represented/representer, signified/signifier, author/director, actors/spectators, stage/audience, text/interpretation, etc.) were ethico-metaphysical prohibitions, wrinkles, grimaces, rictuses – the symptoms of fear before the dangers of the festival.14

The obvious point that Derrida is making concerns the dissolution of dualistically formulated oppositions between supposedly pure states of being. To recall that conditional first stage of deconstruction: the defining of one pole of an opposition is always already dependent on the existence of its ‘inferior’ opposite, leaving presence, in the sense of a full, ‘self-same Presence’, as an impossibility. Self-same presence is deferred, in time and space, contaminated by the impurity and impossibility of any single moment being pure to itself in time and space. Hence, representation, repetition, and difference are the ‘originary’ requirements of presence, which is therefore always mediated by these requirements. As Derrida writes: ‘Presence, in order to be presence and self-presence, has always already begun to represent itself, has always already been penetrated’.15 However, it is important to recognize that representation and repetition are not pure states either. Performance is presentation contaminated by representation, and vice versa. It is both repetition and alterability, and hence is Derrida’s ‘iterability’ made manifest – an ongoing repetition and difference that can maintain the play of differences and escape closure.16 In the same essay, Derrida ‘rescues’ the dialectic from its triangular solidification. Invoking Artaud and his ‘certain dialectics’, Derrida re-conceives the concept of the dialectic, as well as affirming the necessity of repetition freed from origin. He writes: For if one appropriately conceives the horizon of dialectics – outside a conventional Hegelianism – one understands, perhaps, that dialectics is the 14 15 16

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Derrida, ‘Theater of Cruelty’, 244. Derrida, ‘Theater of Cruelty’, 249. Maria Minich Brewer invokes a Derridean ‘iterability’ when she writes concerning Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: ‘Time in Beckett’s play no longer obeys the pull of a linear, continuous narrative whose telos or narrative end would reside in Godot and all that he signifies. The time of play, as repetition and difference, is invented.’ In ‘Performing Theory’, Theatre Journal 37.1 (March 1985), 24.

indefinite movement of finitude, of the unity of life and death, of difference, of original repetition, that is, of the origin of tragedy as the absence of a simple origin. In this sense, dialectics is tragedy, the only possible affirmation to be made against the philosophical or Christian idea of pure origin, against ‘the spirit of beginnings’.17

For Derrida, Artaud ‘knew that the theater of cruelty neither begins nor is completed within the purity of simple presence, but rather is already within representation’ and therefore, ‘what is tragic is not the impossibility but the necessity of repetition’.18 Performance, in its deconstructive, and hence its postmodern senses, can be seen as différance made ‘manifest’. Performance defers – in space and in time – closure and a ‘purity’ that hopes to evade the specifically-contextual decisions which must be made concerning a performance, along with a ‘purity’ that would confidently predict outcomes of an action as well as the reactions of a spectator – that ‘social subject’ of representation. Craig Owens approaches the important role that representation plays in the defining of subject positions in his essay ‘Representation, Appropriation, and Power’.19 Owens cites the work of Michel Foucault, and specifically Louis Marin, on Classical representation in painting in the seventeenth century and ‘representational systems as apparatuses of power’ (91). As Owens points out: Foucault and Marin do not interpret works of art, if to interpret them is to assign them a meaning. They are interested less in what works of art say, and more in what they do; theirs is a performative view of cultural production. (91)

Furthermore, they ‘investigate representation not simply as a manifestation or expression of power, but as an integral part of social processes of differentiation, exclusion, incorporation, and rule’ (91). For Owens, ‘Representation, then, is not – nor can it be – neutral; it is an act – indeed, the founding act – of power in our culture’ (91). While Owens’ focus is chiefly on ‘Classical representation’, it is useful in that it has marked relevance with similar concerns raised in 17 18 19

Derrida, ‘Theater of Cruelty’, 248. Derrida, ‘Theater of Cruelty’, 248. Owens, ‘Representation, Appropriation, and Power’, in Beyond Recognition, 88–113. Further references to this text are by page number.

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performance theory: those relating to presence and absence, and in particular, to the ‘real’ and its representations. Representation, in the Classical paradigm, and particularly in painting, suggests either substitution, or imitation. The first implies that the ‘image is conceived as a replacement, a stand-in, and therefore as compensating for an absence. The second, or theatrical mode, is the mode of repetition; the image is defined as the replica of a visual experience, and the artist works to promote the illusion of the tangible, physical presence of the objects he [sic] represents’ (97). A relationship between ‘painterly’ and theatrical representation is obvious: It could be demonstrated that art history has always defined representation in relation to these two activities – substitution or imitation – and that they correspond perfectly with the German Vorstellung – representation, in the sense of a symbolic activity – and Darstellung – presentation, in the sense of a theatrical presentation. (97)

For Foucault and Marin, representation in the seventeenth century is also defined by its ‘transparency’. There is neither substitution nor imitation but rather the object existing ‘independently of its representation’, designating ‘a perfect equivalence between reality and its representation; signifier and signified mirror one another, the one is merely a reduplication of the other’ (98). While the accent is primarily on pictorial representation, certain aspects fit the representational paradigm of classical, and even modernist theatre. Owens draws on Marin’s distinction between ‘paintingas-a-window’ and ‘painting-as-a-mirror’ (102). This distinction serves to place the artist as the subjective viewer in the former, whereas in the latter, ‘this subjective viewer disappears, and the world therefore seems to represent itself without the intervention of an artist’ (102). Quoting Marin, Owens writes: The second axiom thus postulates perfect equivalence between reality and its representation, so that representations ‘can ontologically appear as the things they represent, ordered in a rational and universal discourse, the discourse of reality itself.’ It is through the suppression of all evidence of the representational apparatus, then, that the authoritative status of Classical representation, its claim to possess some truth or epistemological value, is secured. (102)

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While classical realist theatre practices might tie in with the above second axiom, ‘theatre-as-a-window’ would suggest the ideological dimensions of modernist theatre, especially with respect to the ‘fourthwall’ convention of most bourgeois theatre practices. Here, the spectator takes a subjective position outside the frame of action on the stage. However, it is arguable whether that spectator then sees representation and reality as separate. Or, more importantly, although separated, ‘reality’ still remains the unproblematic referent for the representations ‘presented’ on the stage. Bourgeois theatre was both window and mirror; mirror in the sense that the means of representation were obscured, but window by dint of the proscenium arch and the view into the bourgeois living room. The modernist heritage of classical representation is overturned by a postmodernist critique of representation, in both its substitutive and imitative aspects, as well as its notion of transparency. As Owens states: ‘Postmodernism – like poststructuralism – is a critique of representation, especially as it was conceived by modernism’ (110). Therefore, the relationship of representation to the ‘truth-content’ of art, or a dualistic model of representation either mirroring or substituting for a ‘real’ is collapsed: In the visual arts, the postmodernist critique of representation proceeds by a similar attempt to undermine the referential status of visual imagery and, with it, its claim to represent reality as it really is, whether this be the surface appearance of things (realism) or some ideal order lying behind or beyond appearance (abstraction). Postmodernist artists demonstrate that this ‘reality,’ whether concrete or abstract, is a fiction, produced and sustained only by its cultural representation. (111)

However, does the assumed postmodern emphasis on the play of surfaces and the ‘technological sublime’ distort, or even efface the notion of representation as a system of defining power relations? Here, Maria Minich Brewer describes Wilson’s 1984 production of the Knee Plays: The intensities of rhythm in language and sound, figures of performers’ bodies transforming themselves in space and time, echo Artaud’s notion of ‘poetry in space.’ Performance seeks to escape a traditional aesthetics of representation,

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narrative, and illusion, exploring instead previously excluded dimensions of words, sounds, and images.20

For Brewer, Wilson’s images are ‘rhythmic images’ which ‘never quite freeze into figurative forms with an assignable meaning, for his compositions never quite become fully present as representation’. Instead of a ‘vertical overlapping of codes to be interpreted’, there is: rather a network arrangement in which the hermeneutic impulse of performers and spectators alike is blocked by a horizontal drift of images. Theatrical elements are allowed to develop freely without being bound by or directed to representation. This is because no one system, be it linguistic, graphic, scenic, musical, or gestural, is allowed to impose its specific order on the others. The open measures of the Knee Plays produce a space-time that is perceived as polygraphic, polymorphous, and polyphonic.21

Nonetheless, while the ‘hermeneutic impulse’ may be blocked, that does not mean there is not still an attempt to make meaning. A ‘system’ is still operating and imposing a ‘specific order’ overall. The question of agency cannot be dispensed with here: it is Wilson controlling, to a major degree, this polysemic representation. There is no escape from representation. Postmodernism recognizes that lack of escape, but works to destabilize its sanctity – from the inside. Performance in postmodernism does not necessarily try to transgress – nor subvert – but it does seek to destabilize nonproblematic concepts of representation, of a dualism of pure presence versus the doxa of Artaud – that ‘glue of minds’, the ‘stench of excreted thought’,22 or ‘commonsense’ – that assumes a simplistic either/or, cause-and-effect scenario in the constructions of representation, positionality, and agency. The ‘real’ and its representations no longer hold their polarized distinctions in the discourses of postmodernism. It can be argued that all is representation, because all is mediated. However, although all is mediated and filtered, that is not to suggest some pure essence before or behind that which is filtered. Even though that is all we have access 20 21 22

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Brewer, ‘Performing Theory’, 24. Brewer, 27. Blau, ‘The Surpassing Body’, Drama Review 35.2 (Summer 1991), 90.

to, it does not imply some blockage in a metaphysical sense, but rather in an ideological sense. In modernist terms, representation and ideology are both representative of a more primary ‘reality’. They are either the imitation of – or substitution for – a more primary aesthetic reality, or the ‘false consciousness’ that conceals the ‘real’ conditions of human production. Performance, in being presented to our senses, is always already representation. It is constructed, and is therefore always already ideological. Nonetheless, although ideologies may not mask a ‘real’, they still have material effects. Jeanie Forte sees women’s performance art as a particular instance where the ideology of representations, and those who own the rights to that representing, can be challenged. Invoking deconstruction, Forte writes: As a deconstructive strategy, women’s performance art is a discourse of the objectified other, within a context which foregrounds the conventions and expectations of modernism. This deconstruction hinges on the awareness that ‘Woman,’ as object, as a culturally constructed category, is actually the basis of the Western system of representation. Woman constitutes the position of object, a position of other in relation to a socially-dominant male subject; it is that ‘otherness’ which makes representation possible (the personification of male desire).23

Forte’s focus is on women’s performance art as a means of showing how representations of women, in the theatre, in art galleries, in the visual arts, and in the media, affect the lives of particular women – and sometimes physically endanger them. This ‘transposition of women into signs (or representations of femininity)’ (219) can be expanded to cover all systems of representation which set up generalized models of specific subjects – subsuming difference into sameness. Because the women performance artists to whom Forte refers use ‘the condition of their own lives to deconstruct the system they find oppressive’ (thereby showing how ‘the personal is political’), they highlight the connections between ‘systems of representation and its ideological alliances’ (219):

23

Forte, ‘Women’s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism’, Theatre Journal 40.2 (May 1988), 218. Further references to this text are by page number.

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The deconstructive nature of women’s performance art is thus doubly powerful because of the status of women in relation to representation, a status which, in the performance context, inherently foregrounds the phallocentricity of modernism/patriarchy and its signifying systems. (219)

Forte’s argument, rightly identifying the role of representation in the construction of woman as object and the ‘other’, can be further expanded. With the deconstruction of the grand narratives of the Enlightenment comes an ever-increasing interrogation of the specific uses of representations and those who control them. Nonetheless, this prompts the question of what happens when an ‘incredulity’ towards grand narratives with their foundational representational epistemologies emits yet more and more micronarratives – even metanarratives to represent the loss of foundational representation. The problem of what happens when the ‘archive’ is full of representations; of which strategies can be invoked when choice is seemingly boundless; of when what is ‘true’ and what is ‘real’ are open to endless interpretation, is tackled by Stephen W. Foster in relation to the anthropological quests of Victor Turner. For Foster, with the problematics of representation come interpretations that of necessity are local, contingent, idiosyncratic, political, convenient, tentative, and temporary, derived as they are from a definable occasion rather than emanating directly from ‘the real.’24

All we can have access to is the specific contextuality of representations. They do not represent ‘the real’. Rather, they represent specific reals, and furthermore, they are specific reals. These specific reals can be allied to what Foster terms a ‘definable occasion’ – those specific demands of both postmodern performance and postmodern political movements. Foster writes: Representation is subjected to an occasion, a set of practices, and momentary conditions. It circulates through a changeable flux of discursive formulations,

24

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Foster, ‘Symbolism and the Problematics of Postmodern Representation’, in Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism, ed. Ashley, 135.

historical constraints, rhetorical forces, configurations of power, and presumptions and claims to knowledge.25

To reiterate: there is always already and only ever representation. The ‘real’ is represented in terms of its mediated constructions. There is no ‘real’ outside of these mediations. This is not to say that ‘reality’ does not affect us in a material sense. Rather, it is to say – yet again – that there is no real that can escape representation, and conversely, there is no representation that is not real. Therefore, what occurs in a ‘theatrical’ performance is always already real, even when it is the work of an ‘author-creator’ letting ‘representation represent him [sic] through representatives’.26 Importantly, it is the recognition of representations as being specific and having their own ideological imperatives which postmodern performance can display. The constructions and dissemination of representations are, like theories concerning universality, emanating from particular subject positions. It is not that they are masking the ‘real’ or an Ideal – but they can serve to mask the specific benefits for those who control their dissemination. In both postmodern performance and politics, what is of interest is that ‘definable occasion’. It is the specificity of that which can be grasped and acted upon rather than attempting to see the whole picture. This is how performance in postmodern discourses (and apart from its theatrical context) comes to be used. It is that which takes place, seeing performance as ‘things done’ – as the making of some action or event rather than the re-presentation of a former, or scripted fictive event. Hence performance, in its postmodern sense, is fluid and contextual; closure is deferred and an ongoing play of provisionality takes its place. Nonetheless, while final and absolute closure is banished, it is not the provisional closures and positionalities that must always occur. As Derrida writes, on both representation and closure: Because it has always already begun, representation therefore has no end. But one can conceive of the closure of that which is without end. Closure is the circular limit within which the repetition of difference infinitely repeats itself.

25 26

Foster, ‘Symbolism and the Problematics of Postmodern Representation’, 135. Derrida, ‘Theater of Cruelty’, 235.

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That is to say, closure is its playing space. This movement is the movement of the world as play.27

Postmodern performance works against closure and resolution; that final resolving of contradictions and of the dialectic which is the totalitarian aspect of metaphysics. It serves to deconstruct that imperializing gesture which through its teleological and inevitable determinism precludes the openings and play of différance. In a similar manner to the earlier substitution of postmodernism for deconstruction, at this point the term performance can be used in place of either of those terms. To ‘misread’ Derrida, performance ‘does not exist somewhere, pure, proper, self-identical, outside of its inscriptions in conflictual and differentiated contexts; it “is” only what it does and what is done with it, there where it takes place’.28 Similarly, performance could stand in for différance as ‘a strategy without finality’.29 Performance, in its wider postmodern applications, moves beyond that which takes place in the space of a constrictive architecture, and a pejorative ‘theatricality’, and that ephemerality of performance time, or a mise en scène defined as the ‘enactment’ of a pre-existing dramatic text.30 Performers, similarly, move beyond the confines of ‘theatrical’ definitions to inhabit – temporarily and strategically – the positions of both performer and spectator. It is generally accepted that performance, in the conventional theatrical model, is dependent on the presence of the spectator. In this model, without a spectator a performance remains yet another rehearsal – for the ‘real thing’. However, with just one spectator in a performance space (other than those who form part of the ‘theatrical’ sphere – directors, stagehands, stage managers, etc.), a performance supposedly takes place. Is it so obvious that performers and spectators depend on each other, symbiotically and parasitically needing both poles of that opposition? Rather, it can be argued that such a polarity is always already deconstructed in the space of play between performer and spectator. Performers are spectators of their own perform27 28 29 30

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Derrida, ‘Theater of Cruelty’, 250. Derrida, Limited Inc., 141. Derrida, ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy, 7. Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, 25.

ances, as well as of the audience. Spectators also perform, not only their interpretations of a performance, but also in their awareness of each other, and the context of the foyer, and the auditorium. Postmodern performance does more than deconstruct those binaries between text and performance, presence and absence, representation and original, and so forth. It goes further than its questioning of how we, as spectators, are given representations of the ‘real’. It also asks ‘who’ that spectator is – and who is speaking for that spectator. Nonetheless, the spectator, even in more recent critical writings on performance, while no longer ignored, is often collectively lumped together into the shape of an ideal audience. Erella Brown, writing on the Artaudianinspired theatre of cruelty of Israeli playwright and director Hanoch Levin, discusses the limits to what can be shown on the stage in terms of ‘the staging of atrocities’, but where such staging ‘is distinct from the illusionary filmic simulation of similar events’. Brown writes: ‘The postmodern theatrical effect consists in the self-referential awareness of theatricality, rather than in succumbing to illusionary devices’.31 The notion that ‘effect’ resides in ‘theatricality’ implies that the transmission of effect is, if not one-way, at least controlled from the performance space. And to a certain degree it is. However, rather than the transmitters of representations holding the power and controlling the flow to the consuming spectator, it is often argued that the spectator, as the producer of meanings, holds the power. This then implies an inversive model of reception versus transmission. With regard to this shift in ‘power relations’, Erika FischerLichte argues that there has occurred a change in the receptive faculties of the spectator. There is a growing acceptance of complexity, a postmodern acceptance of multi-faceted and multi-targeted media that works against interpretation and towards association. Once again, the example cited is Wilson’s CIVIL warS, where: The separate elements presented by the actor’s body such as costume, make-up, gesture, movement in space, and voice do not relate to one another, and thus cannot be integrated by the spectator with one another to provide internal relations that will produce any meaning. On the contrary, they create the 31

Brown, ‘Cruelty and Affirmation in the Postmodern Theater: Antonin Artaud and Hanoch Levin’, Modern Drama 35.4 (Dec. 1992), 594.

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potential of many random associative external relations which are almost wholly dependent on the spectator’s own universe of discourse.32

However, the ‘spectator’s own universe of discourse’ cannot be so unproblematically separated. Spectators do not inhabit some totally separable universe (neither spatially, temporally, intellectually, nor emotionally) from those of the performers. On the other hand, there is still a tendency to construct spectators as audience groups, who because of their physical collectivity are thereby assumed to constitute a collectively-receptive mass. Such a view of the spectator, caught up with the representations sanctioned by the ‘power’ that controls the flow of representational information is furnished by Katherine Arens, referring to the ‘audience’ reception of Wilson’s CIVIL warS: A postmodern performance about war will be reduced to author theater by one audience and to entertainment by another. Postmodern performance will not work without a postmodern audience that understands plurality, referential insecurity, and individual significance instead of the security of the group.33

This sounds very much like an audience constructed in modernist terms, with two separate performances constructing two separate collective audiences. Can one imagine this audience shouting in unison: ‘We understand plurality, referential insecurity, and individual significance’? Similarly, as Rabkin wrote some years previously with regard to the deconstructive ‘misreading’ of texts: The playwright misreads his [sic] own text because he is trapped in the prisonhouse of language; the traditional director unconsciously misreads the play even when striving to be faithful to it; the experimental director consciously misreads both the score and the performance text; the audience collectively misreads the theatre event; and the privileged critic misreads all the readings.34

32

33 34

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Fischer-Lichte, ‘Postmodernism: Extension or End of Modernism? Theatre between Cultural Crisis and Cultural Change’, in Zeitgeist in Babel, ed. Hoesterey, 225. Arens, ‘Robert Wilson: Is Postmodern Performance Possible?’ Theatre Journal 43.1 (March 1991), 40. Rabkin, ‘The Play of Misreading’, 60.

The collective audience is constructed so as to subsume difference into sameness. The performer becomes a transmitter of effects – an icon for symbolic imagery emanating from the stage. The audience becomes the collective producer of meanings. Nonetheless, both spectator and performer ‘have’ bodies, and those bodies constitute the social subjects who are both transmitters and receivers of representations. I shall therefore return to Birringer’s concern with ‘representation for social subjects’ – and the place of the body in postmodern performance.

Representation, the Body, and Closure The body is not denied its corporeality in postmodern performance – but neither is it necessarily prioritized. Representation does take place, but not the representation of an idealized, essential body. Rather, it is a specific body inscribed by certain discourses – the discourses of a patriarchal and imperializing epistemology which cuts across difference to construct the subject, particularly in Western culture, as a class-specific, heterosexual white male who is then universalized to subsume the differences of gender, race, class, and sexuality. That almost-specific body thus becomes the metaphor for one that is universalized, and difference is thereby subsumed under its representational generality. Moira Gatens describes how another but clearly related metaphor, that of the body politic, has worked since Hobbes’ formulation in the Leviathan. ‘Natural man’ is protected by ‘artificial man’ – the body politic created by ‘pacts and covenants’ that protects ‘natural man’ and ‘renders itself free from the necessary but difficult dealings with both women and nature’.35 Hence, essentialism returns with universalism where the body is metaphorically pronounced as ‘man’:

35

Gatens, ‘Corporeal Representation in/and the Body Politic’, in Cartographies, ed. Diprose and Ferrell, 80.

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It is still ‘anthropos’ who is taken to be capable of representing the universal type, the universal body. Man is the model and it is his body which is taken for the human body; his reason which is taken for Reason; his morality which is formalised into a system of ethics.36

However, rather than seeking that inverted pole to pronounce solely individuality and pure difference, postmodern discourses concerning the body take into account a certain essentialism and a specific universality. This is not in order to subsume difference under the name of ‘man’, but rather to recognize the physicality and corporeality of bodies as agents, both acting and acted upon, in their specific cultures and contexts. Certainly in respect of women’s movements, gay and lesbian rights movements, postcolonial identification strategies, and ecology politics, the body, in terms of a certain essentialism, remains an important site for identification and self-empowerment. For Vicki Kirby: essentialism is the condition of possibility for any political axiology: the minimal consensual stuff that political action fastens onto is already essentialism’s effect. There is no ‘outside’ this entanglement. However, the task is not to dream of deliverance, of yet another theology that promises to transcend this contamination. Rather, it is to begin to real-ise that we are inextricably immersed within that contamination and that our fundamental complicity with it is, strangely, its enabling moment.37

Kirby invokes Derrida to point out the impossibility of escaping from essentialism, as well as its attendant closure: ‘Rethinking essentialism is a thinking through the body, and this is the thinking through of closure; essentialism’s identifying gesture’.38 Nonetheless, this closure is, as Derrida has argued, within the circularity of play, and therefore continually disrupts formal and final closure. In performance, closure is always provisional and temporary. It might be stated that this is so for neo-Aristotelian drama, where, although closure is effected through narrative imperative, it can only 36 37 38

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Gatens, 82–3. Kirby, ‘Corpus delicti: the Body at the Scene of Writing’, in Cartographies, ed. Diprose and Ferrell, 93. Kirby, 98.

be temporary and provisional due to the potential reopening of the text in performance in subsequent enactments. But ‘Classical’ closure contains its own specific ideological imperative – to naturalize the events enacted through actions that are predetermined teleologically and eschatologically. Postmodern performance resists the conventionalized ‘naturalness’ of closure through a refusal to satisfy a conventionalized desire for unequivocal meaning. It is only through the continual disruption of closure – always remaining a potential that cannot be realized (or be only temporary) – that performance can be deconstructive of full and final closure, essentialism, and universality. Nonetheless, it will remain aware of their potential to return. Similarly, postmodern political movements will remain aware and alert to these ideologically-informed directives to seek final answers and a universal consensus. Such movements know that they cannot speak for others under the guise of a universalized body politic, or a transcendental ethics, and so must re-cognize every agenda and every programme in terms of a deconstructive and performative stance. What then, is the relationship between postmodern performance and postmodern politics? Postmodern discourses have, among other things, challenged the validity of grand narratives, deconstructed dualistic metaphysical positionality, and interrogated the accepted forms of representation and their separation from the real. Performance can be seen as a model for the discourses of postmodernism – a model that is eminently applicable to a postmodern politics. There is an acceptance of transience; a recognition of the need to work towards specific short-term goals. There is a willingness to improvise – to maintain a state of ‘la disponibilité’ – that is, of ‘availability – openness – readiness – acceptance’ – a ‘state of “armed neutrality” from which all movements are equally possible’.39 Performance shows the ability to adapt – to change focus when conditions suggest, or demand it. It acknowledges a lack of predictability of outcome, and hence, maintains that readiness to shift suggested above. It accepts a deferral of closure and therefore recognition of the ongoing flow, or play, which disrupts and prevents any but the most iron-fisted attempts at closure. Postmodern performance affirms the ephemerality of all 39

Frost and Yarrow, Improvisation in Drama, 151–2.

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performance, and recognizes that ephemerality is not only the ‘condition’ of postmodernity but what was always already the condition of classicism and modernism behind the attempts to grant reality an essentialism which theatrical performance – as representation – could reflect. Postmodern performance, in the above senses, is reality – presentation as well as representation. It does not exist as a secondary reflection of a more primary real. Representation loses its primarily referential status and is recognized as ‘having’ its own ‘reality’ – along with ‘theatricality’ and ‘performance’ in all of their contextual realities. The facade does not mask the ‘real’ – it is the real, as well as being a representation of yet another representation. In a similar manner, politics in postmodern discourses are not manifestos for the replacement of a representational model of law and morality with a more transcendental model of justice and ethics. Postmodern performance is no more essentially controlled by the dramatic text than are law and morality by transcendental imperatives. As there is no ‘outside’ to the text – or context – so too there is no underlying ‘real’, transcendental God, categorical ethical imperative, supreme justice or canonical text to provide blueprints for a ‘better’ world. Recognizing complexity and realizing there is no neutral ‘outside’ place from which to view reality, postmodern performance will be conflictual and agonistic, denying closure and supplying only provisional answers and solutions. As Voss and Schütze write concerning postmodern literature and its denial of closure, but which can also relate to performance: ‘Lack of proportion is a mark of postmodern literature; it allows no meaningful, authorial, or mimetic distance from the complex reality of life’.40 As I shall argue in chapter six, postmodern political performance ‘reflects’ that inability to distinguish and remove oneself completely from the maelstrom of experience. We are all embroiled in the reality of representations and the impossibility of disentangling ourselves. Hence, political performance will recognize its place in this entanglement and realize the impossibility of distance; but not the impossibility of recognizing the implications of that 40

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Voss and Schütze, ‘Postmodernism in Context: Perspectives of a Structural Change in Society, Literature, and Literary Criticism’, New German Critique 47 (Spring–Summer 1989), 142.

entanglement. In other words, while ideology and representation ‘rule’, so too do the possibilities of action. Action can still take place ‘inside’ – once it is recognized that there is that space of play between the binary of inside/outside. Performance, by the above criteria, can be used as a paradigm for a deconstructive postmodernism and postmodern politics, and that raises the question of the practices of political theatre in postmodernism, and particularly of the definitions and criteria of what constitutes postmodern political performance. From one viewpoint – Birringer, on the political import of Robert Wilson’s theatre: Although Wilson’s ‘theatre of images’ (with its unmistakable Eastern influences) strives toward an irrational, mystical syntax, its psychoperceptual processes are firmly grounded in a bourgeois ideology that seeks to displace its actual civil wars by imaginary flights into transcendent and mythical realms.41

Modernist political theatre sought to present – and change – the real through its exposure of bourgeois ideological representations. Postmodern political performance is the presentation of multiple potential realities through its representations, with the acknowledgement of there being no ‘outside’ to representation. These differences, and the ongoing questions concerning the criteria by which they are judged, will be the subject of the next two chapters.

41

Birringer, 197.

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Chapter Six The Politics of Postmodern Performance

Postmodern political practices are informed (either knowingly or unknowingly) by the strategies of postmodern performance, in terms shared by both discourses, where there is an awareness of specificity, contingency, transience, and agency, to list but four. It is the immediate performative aspects of both discourses which cause dis-ease to those who favour generality, universality, and especially closure. Postmodern political movements utilize the same deconstructive strategies as those performance practices termed political, and postmodern. That is to say, postmodern politics and performance, whether explicitly or implicitly utilizing such strategies will be deconstructive of their own ‘inherent’ predilection to universalize, and rather will focus on the specific contextuality of contingently-informed issues as well as self-reflexively on their own forms – forefronting their own agenda which will, of necessity, not conform to modernist criteria of political effectivity. Importantly, the criteria of what is ‘political’ – in modernist terms – have changed. Modernist political theatre, with its ideological roots in Marxism, had its primary focus on the Western proletariat and the issue of class. While class still remains an issue in many contexts, there are other strands of political theatre which, while addressing those Marxistinfluenced concerns of class, the ownership of the means of production, and revolution, for example, in certain ways escape that potentially overpowering determinism and totalizing impulse of a rigid model in that they address specific and contextual issues for particular subjects – whether in the workplace, the ‘community’, the school, the factory, and so forth. While class struggle might be explicitly addressed, it will be related to specific contexts. Struggles against the obvious, as well as the insidious, effects of the colonizing forces of Capital are still carried on in many parts of the globe. This is especially so in the ‘third world’, where not only economic struggles

concerning the markedly uneven distribution of land ownership, postcolonial structural inheritances, World Bank debt, and so forth maintain their importance, but also the exploitation of a non-Western working-class proletariat in the ‘Newly Industrialized’ countries is a growing class-based issue. In other words, the Western Eurocentrism of the classical Marxist model has been decentred. As John Roberts writes: The anti-imperialist revolutions in the peripheries, the continuing failure of the Western proletariat to overthrow capital, the increasing integration of science into the state, the rise of the ‘peripheries’ within Western capitalism itself – the shift in revolutionary focus away from class to gender, race and sexuality – have all contributed to a decentring of the industrialised West and the Western proletariat as the absolute horizon of socialist, cultural and technological advance.1

As in the contexts of ‘first world’ capitalism, specific struggles in the ‘third world’ are as likely to be based on contestatory ‘master’ narratives of race, gender, and sexual differentiation as on the Marxist ‘master’ narrative of class. Hal Foster has pointed out: new social forces – women, blacks, other ‘minorities,’ gay movements, ecological groups, students ... – have made clear the unique importance of gender and sexual difference, race and the third world, the ‘revolt of nature’ and the relation of power and knowledge, in such a way that the concept of class, if it is to be retained as such, must be articulated in relation to these terms.2

With regard to theatre practices, this serves to shift these struggles away from a classic Marxist-inspired political practice into more contextual and differentiated models, even if they do utilize certain aspects of a Marxist epistemology, as well as being influenced by the theatre practices of such luminaries as Meyerhold, Piscator, and Brecht. As Foster states: political art is now conceived less in terms of the representation of a class subject (à la social realism) than of a critique of social representations (gender

1 2

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Roberts, Postmodernism, Politics and Art, 11. Foster, Recodings, 140–1.

positioning, ethnic stereotyping, etc.). Such a change entails a shift in the position and function of the political artist.3

That ‘shift’ is exemplified not only in the way that political theatre has shifted – away from actors enacting playwrights’ texts in front of audiences in auditoriums, but also in the manner that political artists have become wary of the inherent didacticism of such theatrecontextual structures of performance. The places of performance have shifted, encompassing such different forms as community theatre, street theatre, performance art, and the use of the electronic media with varying degrees of understanding and effectivity. In turn, the role of the spectator has been re-defined. Not only has that role shifted – beyond both the Aristotelian ‘passive’ spectator and the Brechtian critical thinker – but also the sites for spectator intervention have moved, encompassing not only the spectator as active interventionist in the theatre space, but also in the socio-cultural sphere. The problem always was, and still is, how to transfer theatrical responses to political arenas.

Rethinking Political Performance: Augusto Boal Before looking at how certain of these forms could be defined as models for postmodern political performance in the ‘West’, it is worth examining a practitioner who straddles the demarcations between modernist and postmodernist political theatre, and attempts to effect that transfer from the theatrical space to the political arena. That practitioner is Augusto Boal, who while utilizing strategies of specificity, agency and contextuality in his work – similar to those employed in postmodern political movements – nonetheless echoes a modernist concern with the dualistic divisions between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, as well as the distinct separation of the aesthetic from the social and the economic. Boal’s performance practices straddle both ‘third world’ 3

Foster, Recodings, 141.

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and ‘first world’ contexts – invoking, but challenging, both classical and Marxist theories of performance in order to expose their limitations in the empowerment of the ‘oppressed’ in specific contexts. In Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal tracked the development of a ‘poetics of the oppressed’ from Aristotle to Machiavelli, through to Hegel and Brecht, and thence to himself.4 To summarize (and paraphrase) Boal’s theory very briefly: In Aristotelian poetics, the spectators delegate power to the dramatic character, who acts and thinks for the spectators; in Brecht’s poetics, the spectators delegate power to the character (or actor) who acts for the spectators, but the spectators reserve the right to think for themselves. Boal argues that in the first case ‘catharsis’ occurs, and in the second case an ‘awakening of critical consciousness’. However, in Boal’s ‘poetics of the oppressed’ the focus is on action, with no delegation of power to the character or actor. The goal of Boal’s poetics is the changing of passive spectators into actors (spect-actors), where the spectator ‘assumes the protagonic role, changes the dramatic action, tries out solutions, discusses plans for change – in short, trains himself [sic] for real action’ (1979, 122). Boal’s actual practices are also described in detail in this text.5 Put briefly, they involve a process of spectator interaction within themes suggested by those spectators. The workshop process moves through four stages. ‘Knowing the body’ and ‘Making the body expressive’ are the first two stages. The third stage is ‘The theater as language’, which involves three degrees – ‘simultaneous dramaturgy’, ‘Image theater’, and ‘Forum theater’. It is in ‘Forum theater’ that ‘the spectators intervene directly in the dramatic action and act’ (1979, 126). The fourth stage is ‘The theater as discourse’, where ‘simple forms’ (such as ‘Invisible theater’) are used to help the spectator-actor either discuss themes or rehearse actions (1979, 126–55). While Boal initially developed his concept of Forum Theatre in Brazil in the 1970s, and later while in exile in Argentina, he has also used its forms in many other contexts. While it is not specifically a 4 5

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Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (1979). Further references to this text are by publication date and page number. See Chapter Four, ‘Poetics of the Oppressed’, Theatre of the Oppressed, 119– 56.

political theatre for the ‘third world’, its stress on the spectator as protagonist in contextually-specific sites of political oppression has proved useful in those contexts. In respect of the Filipino ‘theatre of liberation’, Eugene Van Erven writes that Boal has proved more useful than Brecht, in that Brechtian techniques of activating the spectators ‘if they worked at all, could only work within the limited time of the performance itself’.6 This echoes Boal’s contention that the separation of the stage from the auditorium ‘puts two different worlds in contact’ and that ‘conventional theatrical rituals determine the roles that both worlds must play’.7 The on-stage images have an autonomy that can be challenged, but not changed from the auditorium: During the performance, the auditorium is deactivated, reduced to contemplation (sometimes critical) of the events that develop onstage. Osmosis moves from the stage to the auditorium in an intransitive manner. If there is strong resistance to deactivation in the auditorium, the performance can be stopped, but it cannot be transformed since it is predetermined. The conventional theatrical ritual does not change. It may broadcast, mobilizing ideas, but the ritual itself remains unchanged.8

It is this distinction which enables Richard Schechner (who has also experimented with spectator-actors9) to define soap opera as modernist and Forum Theatre as postmodernist. Soap opera is modern because ‘it projects the mentality of inevitability – no spectator can intervene’.10 Boal’s work displays that shift from the modern into the postmodern, in that narrativity is not only fractured but destabilized – with the spectator’s intervention facilitating the opening of possibilities, and thus potentially deferring premature closure and resolution. As Van Erven writes concerning Boal: 6 7 8 9 10

Van Erven, ‘Theatre of Liberation in Action: the People’s Theatre Network of the Philippines’, New Theatre Quarterly 3.10 (May 1987), 148. Boal, ‘The Cop in the Head: Three Hypotheses’, Drama Review 34.3 (Fall 1990), 37. Boal, ‘The Cop in the Head’, 37. For Schechner’s own account of actor-spectator interaction see ‘Dionysus in 1969’ in Schechner, Environmental Theater, 87–124. Taussig and Schechner, ‘Boal in Brazil, France, the USA: An Interview with Augusto Boal’, Drama Review 34.3 (Fall 1990), 61.

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Moving from productions of Western classics to adaptations of Brecht, he finally arrived at the inescapable conclusion that it is not the plotline, the dialogue, or the epic acting of a committed actor that should be the focal point of effective political theatre, but the operations in the spectator’s mind.11

By involving the spectator in ‘the creation and performance of a play’, Boal moves beyond both an Aristotelian catharsis and a Brechtian ‘awakening of critical consciousness’ to the involvement of the spectator in the action.12 For Boal, Western theatre in following Aristotle’s ‘Coercive System of Tragedy’, blocks the opportunity for the spectator to become a protagonist – chiefly through the powerful role that catharsis plays in Aristotelian theatre: ‘Aristotle formulated a very powerful purgative system, the objective of which is to eliminate all that is not commonly accepted, including the revolution, before it takes place’ (1979, 47). Boal’s attack on catharsis is based on his interpretation of its aim of purging the spectator of an avenue by which he or she could alter their social condition. As he points out: I am against Aristotelian catharsis because what is purified is the desire to change society – not, as they say in many books, pity and fear. No, pity and fear is the relation the spectator has with the protagonist. Fear because someone like you is destroyed; pity because the protagonist is a deserving person who fails. So what Aristotelian catharsis tries to do is eliminate the drive that the protagonist, and the spectator, have to change society.13

While Boal does state that catharsis occurs in the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’, it is: ‘Not the catharsis of the dynamic factor but the catharsis of the blockage’.14 But if Boal moves beyond Aristotle, he also moves beyond his predecessors in proposing a non-Aristotelian political theatre. How radical and decisive that move is, can be seen simply by comparing Boal’s empowerment of the spectator with what – in retrospect – were Brecht’s relatively tame experiments in this direction in his Lehrstücke. Arguably, Brecht tried to achieve the same result – the empowerment of the spectator – with the production of 11 12 13 14

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Van Erven, The Playful Revolution, 15. Van Erven, The Playful Revolution, 16. Taussig and Schechner, 60. Taussig and Schechner, 60.

The Measures Taken in Berlin in 1930: the ‘Control Chorus’, consisting of 400 Berlin workers, ‘witnessed the scenes and passed judgement on them in song’.15 As Joel Schechter notes, the lyrics and music, written by Brecht and Eisler, allowed no room for intervention during the performance. Nonetheless: There were, however, opportunities for chorus members to ask questions and suggest changes during the rehearsals; this they did and in this sense the production permitted spectators to become co-authors and/or judges in the tribunal.16

A similar attempt by Brecht to incorporate and thereby empower the spectator might be seen in the ‘learning plays’ He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No. As Keith A. Dickson reminds us, the latter was written in response to criticism of the rigid Marxist determinism of the former.17 However, yet again, once the performance was in process with either of these alternative texts, the space for theatrical intervention – unless forceful and against convention – was closed. By contrast, in Boal’s Forum Theatre the issues raised are able to be intervened in at a stage when this is possible. This ability to – really – intervene implies not only an active participant but also a breaking of the role of the spectator as passive onlooker constrained by the flow of a traditional narrative and by theatrical (and political) convention. This not only goes beyond Brecht but as Boal himself notes, beyond that other reviser of the spectator’s role – Grotowski. Boal cites Grotowski’s concept of the spectator as a witness to an event: as Boal argues, Grotowski’s use of the image of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk’s self-immolation, ‘lends itself perfectly to a theatre where the spectator is a witness. But in the Theatre of the Oppressed, far from being a witness, the spect-actor is, or must do his [sic] utmost 15 16 17

Schechter, Durov’s Pig, 192. Schechter, 192. Brecht, The Measures Taken and other Lehrstücke (London: Methuen, 1977). In Towards Utopia: A Study of Brecht, Dickson writes: ‘When it [Der Jasager] was performed at the Karl-Marx-Schule in Berlin-Neukölln in 1930, shortly after the première, the audience was asked for its comments and several of them faulted Brecht’s logic. [...] Brecht accepted their criticism and rewrote the piece as Der Neinsager’ (51–2).

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to become, the protagonist of the dramatic action’.18 In Forum Theatre the possibility exists of activating alternatives which therefore furnish the potential for ‘real’ action. Boal does recognize that at certain times, under specific oppressions, the space for alternative action may not exist. But his point is that such times can be examined in Forum Theatre to explore the possibilities of alternative actions before that closure of options. Boal expresses this possibility using Grotowski’s example: To make a good Forum Theatre piece with the monk scene, one would have to show the moment at which, having doused himself with petrol, the monk is still holding the box of matches in his hand, and the match has not been lit. At this key moment, when the thing has not yet been set in motion, an excellent forum could be done! But when the body is burning, nothing more can be done. [...] My conclusion is that Forum Theatre is always possible when alternatives exist. In the opposite case it becomes fatalist theatre. (1992, 227)

Nonetheless, the example is debatable. In this case, it can be assumed that the monk did not want to be ‘saved’. The purpose of the act would have been defeated by actual intervention. However, the active intervention of the spectator in the present, even if only as a rehearsal for a potential future, recognizes the practicalities of resistance, and therefore renders performance necessarily specific and related to context. While Boal, like Piscator and Brecht, uses theatre practices to attack the diverse oppressive faces of fascism and capitalism, this is not in order to see them collapse in the face of a historical determinism that would render their demise necessarily inevitable. Rather, it is in order to attack the specific spaces in which they operate. Boal himself stresses the specificity and contextuality of his ‘poetics’: ‘The proposal of a new system does not arise out of a vacuum. It always appears in answer to esthetic and social stimuli and needs’ (1979, 173). He gives as an example the opening scenes of many of Shakespeare’s plays, which, to grab the attention of an often noisy and vola18

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Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1992), 226 (no page citation for Grotowski). Further references to this text are by publication date and page number.

tile audience were of necessity, ‘decisive’ or ‘vigorous’ (1979, 174). Similarly, advances in technology determine stylistic changes, where, for example, ‘without electricity expressionism would be impossible’ (1979, 174). The point of his argument – which also notes the large proletarian membership (60,000) of the Volksbühne as a contextual factor in the rise of a proletarian theatre in Germany – is the role that contextuality plays in particular systems of theatrical representation. He cites his own ‘Joker’ system. This, ‘was not a capricious creation; it was determined by the present-day characteristics of our society and, more specifically, of our Brazilian public. Its objectives are of an esthetic and economic nature’ (1979, 174). Boal’s Forum Theatre practice is extremely conscious of context. Outside of what he calls its ‘Latin American experience’ and in terms of its ‘numerous directions in Europe [it] inevitably entails a reconsideration of all the forms, structures, techniques, methods and processes of this kind of theatre’ (1992, 224). Nonetheless, while contexts will determine the forms and techniques, Boal’s ‘fundamental principles’ remain intact. That is to say, Forum Theatre ‘as Theatre of the Oppressed’ retains ‘its intention to transform the spectator into the protagonist of the theatrical action and, by this transformation, to try to change society rather than contenting ourselves with interpreting it’ (1992, 224). While this may sound like Boal echoing Brecht echoing Marx, the leap is radical: Boal’s strategy is to work with particular issues in specific contexts with the spectators becoming protagonists of the actions performed: they become, in Boal’s neologism, spect-actors. Boal, of course, knows that action is not always possible: he himself makes the distinction between the varying degrees of oppression – ‘against which one can struggle’ – and aggression, or what he terms ‘the last level of oppression’ (1992, 225–6). Here, alternatives for action are strictly limited. In the face of aggression, the use of ‘physical strength’, flight, or surrender, are the only resorts. This is not dissimilar to the point made by Schechter concerning Brecht: the alternatives between flight, mute survival, or becoming ‘bestial’. When the forces of oppression are so powerful and so ruthless that the avenue for unarmed resistance is closed, then the oppressed must either flee, go silently underground, or take up the same means as their oppressors – using force against force. At that point, political theatre, 167

in its antagonistic role, cannot exist – as occurred in both Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany where flight, for most, was the more conceivable option than fighting. As Boal says, the only time he readily took the ruling junta’s advice was when they told him, following his release from prison, to leave Brazil: ‘that’s the last time we arrest you, the next time we are not going to interrogate you, we are going to kill you. So you get the hell out of here’.19 Brecht too had fled, and like Brecht, Boal believes that spectators (or spect-actors) should be left to seek out their own answers to the questions raised. As Boal writes: I believe it is more important to achieve a good debate than a good solution. Because, in my view, the thing which incites the spect-actors into entering into the game is the discussion and not the solution which may or may not be found. (1992, 230)

The spaces Brecht left open for spectators were never real openings, but rather were prescribed solutions – as pointed out in the example of The Good Woman of Setzuan in chapter three. Whereas, Boal, unlike Brecht, is happy to really resist closure. Asking rhetorically when a ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ session might come to an end, he answers: Never – since the objective of the Theatre of the Oppressed is not to close a cycle, to generate a catharsis, or to end a development. On the contrary, its objective is to encourage autonomous activity, to set a process in motion, to stimulate transformative creativity, to change spectators into protagonists. And it is for precisely these reasons that the Theatre of the Oppressed should be the initiator of changes the culmination of which is not the aesthetic phenomenon but real life. (1992, 245)

This may sound very much like a modernist reaffirmation of the ultimate priority of the ‘real’ over its representations, for which the theatre can only be a more-or-less useful mirror. But Boal resists a return to this binary too. For Boal, the ‘image’ presented in Forum Theatre is both real and an image of the real – the image being no less 19

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See Van Erven, The Playful Revolution, n24, 244. Van Erven cites ‘To Dynamize the Audience’, an interview with Boal transcribed by Robert Enright, Canadian Theatre Review 47 (Summer 1986), 43–4. Boal left Brazil in 1971 after three months’ imprisonment and torture. Also, see translators’ notes, Theatre of the Oppressed, 156, and Boal, Hamlet and the Baker’s Son, 284–94.

‘real’ than the reality it ‘represents’. The ‘oppressed’ person who creates the image (the ‘anti-model’), as well as those oppressed who identify with the creator, ‘participate simultaneously in these two worlds, the world of the reality and the world of images made real’ (1992, 246). That which is enacted by the spect-actor in Forum Theatre is as real as that which occurs ‘outside’ – in terms of it being a form of activity which can be repeated, or improvised on, in the face of concrete oppressions. As Boal writes: The oppressed act as subject in both these worlds. In their fight against the oppression of the imaginary world, they are practising and fortifying themselves in preparation for the future fight they will undertake against the real oppressions, and not simply against the real images of these oppressions. (1992, 246)

This suggests a genuinely radical revision of the very status of representation, which is removed from its second-rate status and is granted equal ontological (and political) validity with any other ‘reality’. Nevertheless, Boal hesitates at this point: although operating in the gap between the real and its representations, he does not wish to remain there. Rather, he wishes to transgress that border: The Theatre of the Oppressed is located precisely on the frontier between fiction and reality – and this border must be crossed. If the show starts in fiction, its objective is to become integrated into reality, into life. (1992, 246–7)

Although it might appear that Boal is operating between the binaries of ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ in Forum Theatre, he chooses a demarcation between them, which echoes his divisions between ‘esthetics’ and the social, and ‘esthetics’ and economics. While contexts must be taken into account, Boal’s division between ‘fiction and reality’ suggests that the latter somehow escapes the constructedness of the former. As such, this might suggest the impossibility of integrating action into the ‘real’. Boal is not immune to criticism. For example, Michael Taussig, while praising Boal’s ability to ‘heroically’ walk ‘a line of contradiction’, raises concerns of the possibility that Boal’s theatre practices might play into ‘the politics of othering which are always based on

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unequal power’. Boal replies: ‘Let’s see how it works in practice’.20 This response implies a willingness to examine all extant theories and contextual political ‘truths’ through pragmatic enactments rather than becoming trapped in generalized theorizing. So, although it can be argued that Piscator (and sometimes Brecht) stressed the practice, and the ‘actuality’ of political theatre – its functional and empowering potentialities – Boal works with specific and contextual issues. However, unlike them, he does not universalize their significance in terms of an underlying, potentially contingency-denying epistemology. That is not to deny that Boal does, still, talk of revolution. But in the contexts of his theatre practice, ‘revolution’ is different. It is not only that it is specific and contextual, but also that it works with particular people on issues that specifically concern them – of their choice. In sum, there can be no doubt that Boal creates an explicitly labelled political theatre – as did Meyerhold, Piscator, and Brecht. However, it must be argued that Boal ‘reflects’ the strategies of what have been termed postmodern, or ‘new’ political movements, in that he concretely addresses the important question of agency in the issues that social agents, or spect-actors, perform. The revision of the strategy is crucial: political theatre, even labelled as such and overtly antagonistic towards dominant power structures, remains marginal except at a ‘grassroots’ level where it has always been most effective – in schools, in factories, working with small groups of people with similar experiences of oppression. In contrast, a political performance that would address the audience en masse in terms of their oppression by ‘capitalism’, ‘the ruling classes’, multinational imperialism, the International Monetary Fund, or the World Bank, not only loses its effectivity due to the generality of its targets but also because of the impossibility of any effective action against them – unless undertaken on the local level and dealing with specific issues. In a similar way, postmodern political movements also recognize that although one may think globally, it is only by acting locally that degrees of social change can be effected. In a major sense Boal typifies a shift away from both Aristotelian and Brechtian theatre practices – and therefore from classical or 20

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Taussig and Schechner, 64.

Marxist ‘grand narratives’ concerning either the tragedy of the heroic individual or the hopes for a unified class. His theatre practices display an awareness of the important role that agency plays in political processes. Again, that is not to say he can escape criticism: for example, Martin Maria Kohtes sees the means by which Boal’s ‘Invisible Theatre’ activates ‘innocent’ spectators to join in, or at least discuss the situations presented, as still being Aristotelian. In other words, it utilizes an ‘emotional appeal to the spectator’s ethical sensibility’ and therefore complies ‘precisely with Aristotle’s demand for pity and fear’. As such, Boal’s political theatre practice implies, Kohtes argues, a ‘recourse to traditional aesthetics’.21 However, if ‘traditional aesthetics’ rely on an appeal to the emotions, in terms of personal desire, or what pleases or displeases ‘me’, then there exists a link between aesthetics in that sense and the ways it is utilized in certain postmodern political discourses. Concepts of right or wrong in a totalizing sense (whether enforced by categorical imperative, or party directive), are replaced by an aesthetics of desire – or a contextual appeal to the emotions which does not, by necessity, preclude rationality in the planning and execution of ‘performances’ designed to create public awareness of particular issues. A recourse to ‘traditional aesthetics’ does not necessarily constitute some dualistic polarity between either empathy or objectivity – a point that Brecht was also well aware of in terms of the necessary oscillating play between the empathy and objectivity of the spectator.22

21 22

Kohtes, ‘Invisible Theatre: Reflections on an Overlooked Form’, New Theatre Quarterly 9.33 (Feb. 1993), 88. See Brecht’s many references to tha oscillation between empathy and objectivity in Brecht on Theatre, especially in the ‘Appendices to the Short Organum’, where an actor’s ‘effectiveness comes from the tussle and tension of the two opposites’ (Willett, ed., 278).

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Postmodern Political Performance I have spent some time summarizing aspects of Boal’s work in order to illustrate one important example of how an ‘overtly’ political performance practice has shifted into a postmodernist mode – particularly in terms of spectator empowerment. There are other forms of postmodern performance which can also be seen as political, chiefly in terms of their interrogation of the relationship between the ‘real’ and its representations, their disruption of narrative linearity and a deferral of closure, and their varying degrees of an always relative empowerment of the spectator. While Boal’s Forum Theatre might appear vastly different in its form and intent to those of more ‘mainstream’ practitioners labelled postmodern (such as Pina Bausch, Laurie Anderson, Heiner Müller and Robert Wilson – to name but four of the more well-known), arguably, all of the above not only problematize the hierarchical relationship between representation and the ‘real’ and deconstruct notions of narrative necessity, hierarchy and teleology, but furthermore must be seen as political for these very reasons. That however, requires the abandonment of a particularly modernist definition of the political, and its necessary criteria of effectivity. For example, in an argument indebted (by his own admission) to David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, Marc Silberman not only queries attempts to co-opt Brecht into postmodernism, but also asks whether ‘postmodernist theory’, once it has shifted beyond its ‘vigilant critical mode’ does not regress into ‘self-parody, apathy or docility as a prescription for encountering the decentered reality’.23 Silberman, echoing Harvey’s condemnation of postmodernism, goes on to say: 23

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Silberman, ‘A Postmodernized Brecht?’, Theatre Journal 45.1 (March 1993), 3. Silberman cites Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity and Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. On the co-optation of Brecht into postmodernism, see Elizabeth Wright, Postmodern Brecht: A RePresentation. Wright uses the ‘early’ expressionist drama of Brecht to illustrate his proto-postmodernism. Wright argues that the ‘problem’ with Brecht for many of his commentators in the West has been his presumed adherence to a ‘scientific Marxism’, especially in the Lehrstücke, and how that adherence

Moreover, the tendency to validate playful and improvisational forms of cultural representation and interpretation at the expense of meaning and signification strikes me as symptomatic of a defensive, if not narcissistic critical practice under the guise of tolerance: anything goes. To engage in such practices, to trace the play of signifiers and of intertextuality through a mode of difference that does not or can not recognize conflict and contradiction, might well reflect the traditional class interest of the proverbial liberal intellectual in a period of threatened stability.24

This echoes other critical attacks on certain performances defined as postmodern. Those critiques invariably centre around the apparent absence of a definitive political position, implied by the lack of a firm and non-equivocal closure, and, more often than not, centring on modernist criteria of what constitutes politics and performance. Beyond that, there may well lurk a traditional distrust of the ‘falseness’ of theatricality, and the ‘aestheticism’ of theatre. As David Savran writes on the Wooster Group’s Frank Dell’s The Temptation of Saint Antony: In its playful aestheticism and its reluctance to bring home the ‘groceries,’ the piece has become, I believe, remarkably akin to a variety of deconstructive theater that has become increasingly fashionable and profitable, from which the Group’s work was so easily distinguishable during the early 1980s. Like the recent pieces of Robert Wilson and Laurie Anderson, which have discarded politically charged images and rhetoric in favour of a postmodern shrug of the shoulders, Saint Antony stages both the self and the world as relentlessly textualised and paralytically undecidable.25

For Savran, the Wooster Group with Saint Antony, ‘produce a cultural critique so subtle and so endlessly skeptical that it finally does little else than deconstruct itself’.26 In a similar vein, Nicholas Zurbrugg, commenting on Robert Wilson’s ‘transmutation’ of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, writes that ‘one frequently confronts something very

24 25 26

struggles in a dialectic with his ‘earlier’ more overtly expressionist-influenced works such as Baal and In the Jungle of the Cities. Silberman, 3. Savran, ‘Revolution...History...Theater: The Politics of the Wooster Group’s Second Trilogy’, in The Performance of Power, ed. Case and Reinelt, 52. Savran, 53.

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close to re-cycled, partially politicized surrealism’.27 Nonetheless, such recycling is undoubtedly deliberate, and the critique that there is ‘something surprisingly unsurprising about the obscurity of the monologues and dialogues’28 suggests a modernist nostalgia for innovative forms to express political issues theatrically. Gautam Dasgupta, in ‘The Theatricks of Politics’, invokes a similar nostalgia in order to attack the ‘postmodern’ merging of theatre with a pejoratively-tinged ‘theatricality’ when discussing the ‘role’ that Ronald Reagan played as President of the United States. Dasgupta points out that the advertising campaigns of political contenders shown on television ‘come to us propped up by all the trappings of a theatrical presentation’.29 But, the theatre which is being threatened by postmodernism, as with the political system that has been supposedly perverted by a ‘teflon’ president, is a nostalgic model, informed (as in the political campaign commercials) by ‘a narrative line, a history, even a sub-plot in these dramas of promotionalism’.30 While there is no doubt that major political parties have coopted the narrative devices of the traditional theatre to spin their television mini-stories in favour of particular political candidates, it is precisely the same theatre form which Dasgupta wishes to preserve: Theatre, to me, remains the art of Aeschylus, of Shakespeare, of Chekhov. It is the art of imaginative directors, of talented actors, of expert craftsmen [sic], of gifted thinkers and critics. I am more and more convinced that the theatre should play by the rules that have been handed down to us by the most prominent exemplars in its illustrious history. I would also hope that politics, too, would play by the same old-fashioned rules. There is a stability in that thought. At least, we each would know where we stand.31

27

28 29 30 31

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Zurbrugg, ‘Post-Modernism and the Multi-Media Sensibility: Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine and the art of Robert Wilson’, Modern Drama 31.3 (Sept. 1988), 443. Zurbrugg, 443. Dasgupta, ‘The Theatricks of Politics’, Performing Arts Journal 32, 11.2 (1988), 77–83. Dasgupta, 81. Dasgupta, 81.

Notwithstanding the non-apologetic nostalgia and ‘old-fashioned’ conservatism in that desire for tradition, stability, and an implied hierarchy, what needs to be recognized is that television has taken over precisely that theatre model which Dasgupta wishes to wrest back. It is because television has co-opted the tidy narrative, the saga of the heroic or anguished individual, and the Aristotelian line of plot development in its ‘dramas’, its chat shows, and its ‘news’ and ‘information’ programmes, that postmodern performance has shifted in its forms. Therefore, the modernist criteria of what constitutes both performance and politics will continue to find it difficult to analyse and critique postmodern performance in terms of its ‘politics’ – if only those criteria are used. Furthermore, if ‘deconstructive’ political theatre ends up being so ‘paralytically undecidable’ (as Savran claims), then that sets it up against a putative decidability of ‘grand narrative’ political theatre – especially in terms of its effects. The ongoing critique of the efficacy of postmodern political theatre invariably elides the question of the efficacy of modernist political theatre. Nonetheless, the question is not so important given the relative inefficacy of both categories, especially if put in terms of ‘theatre’ – which implies the traditional finite time and closed space of a ‘theatrical performance’. In terms of place, this ‘performance’ invariably occurs in a building, which, even if not specifically designed for the purpose, will adhere to the conventions of a set performance time and a separated performance space – between actors and spectators, or stage and auditorium. Nonetheless, the question of efficacy must ultimately devolve to the spectator, whose presence is the primary rationale for theatre, whether explicitly or implicitly political or ‘apolitical’, modern or postmodern. By modernist criteria, if spectators have not been ‘moved’ critically to rethink their ideological boundaries at the very least, or at the most, to take to the streets en masse to start the glorious revolution, then political theatre’s effectivity is presumed to remain questionable. There is, of course, the obvious answer that effectivity should not be, and cannot be, measured in terms of short-term results. The seeds of infection and disquiet that a political theatre performance might sow could take a relatively long period to mature. Spectator empowerment cannot be defined merely in terms of immediate effect, 175

nor in terms of a collective shift in audience consciousness. In The Politics of Performance, Baz Kershaw explores this question of efficacy in respect of community theatre and its potentially wider effects on British society from the 1960s to the 1990s. Kershaw points out the difficulties of assessing the efficacy of performance in terms of its socio-cultural contexts, arguing that while ‘theatre-in-itself’ can have important immediate effects, it is in its relationship to the wider social context where ‘crucial problems’ must be faced. In particular the use of empirical methods of assessing spectator response – for example, through questionnaires after the performance – produce ‘inconclusive or superficial results’.32 As Kershaw states, it is in the ‘potential of performance [...] to achieve efficacy in a particular historical context’, rather than through empirical questionnaires after a performance that an approach to the effectivity of theatre on its wider cultural and political contexts needs to be made.33 It is Kershaw’s focus on the local and the contextual in relation to British political theatre from the 1960s to the 1990s, which places his analysis within a postmodern critique.34 Importantly, Kershaw recognizes the risks involved in being both ‘oppositional and popular’. Echoing Foster, he writes that such a position ‘places performance on a knife edge between resistance to, and incorporation into, the status quo’.35 This ‘undecidability’ of assessment, while taking into account the complexities of ascertaining effect in terms of the local and the contextual, and the balance between affirmation and subversion, points out the ineffectivity of modernist criteria in measuring theatre’s political effect on the spectator. While Boal’s practices display a concrete example of spectator empowerment, the diversity of other postmodern performances and their ‘politics’ make it difficult to define a similarly concrete theory of spectator empowerment. Nonetheless, it can be argued that the very diversity, in terms of specificity and 32 33 34

35

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Kershaw, The Politics of Performance, 1–3. Kershaw, The Politics of Performance, 3. Kershaw stresses the importance of contextuality, seeing it as ‘utterly fundamental to the potential efficacy of the dialectical aesthetic of celebratory protest’ and, ‘contextuality is the source of performance efficacy’ (The Politics of Performance, 248). Kershaw, The Politics of Performance, 8.

context, creates a situation where agency can operate – either during the event (with Boal’s ‘spect-actor’), after the event (through direct action on the streets), or at a later date. In certain contemporary contexts it could be argued that spectator empowerment can take place through the ballot box; in contexts where theatre spectators are also constituents of a State apparatus that allows them to vote, and register their responses to ‘politics of a theatrical nature’ in a more traditionally empirical manner. In short, spectator empowerment is not necessarily linked to an immediate and visible effect. In other words, the question of relative spectator empowerment is tied up with the criteria of definition yet again. Similarly, while certain theatre practices remain ‘acceptable’ as political theatre (by modernist criteria), that is, the overtly political, which follow modernist practice in being explicitly political and announced as such, there has occurred a shift in what defines ‘theatre’ as well as ‘politics’ and their seemingly necessary separation. This shift is, of course, prefigured in the ‘art versus life’ debates of the ‘historical’ avant-gardes and invites a similar shift in defining the role of the spectator and their potential empowerment through the differing forms of political performance. A selective sampling of writings and theorists on contemporary political theatre practices would cover such areas as clowning, street theatre, satire, ‘trial by theatre’, and some performance art. In Durov’s Pig, Schechter, researching the role of the clown in politics and theatre, cites the work of both past and contemporary clowns such as Durov, Lazarenko, Frank Wedekind, Lotte Goslar, Dario Fo, and the ‘Joker’ figure of Augusto Boal, among others. However, it is when Schechter focuses on ‘trial by satire’ – a tradition ‘from Brecht to the Green Party’ (in the context of preunification West Germany), that the focus shifts. Schechter argues that whereas ‘the term “political theatre” once applied generally to theatre of a political nature, [it] may today also apply to politics of a theatrical nature’.36 Schechter sees this ‘merging of the social and aesthetic realms’ as leading back to Brecht and Piscator, where, as well as the audience being entertained by the performance, decisions could also be made. Schechter argues that a recent manifestation of 36

Schechter, 202 (his emphasis).

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this avant-garde merging of aesthetics and politics is provided by the German Greens: The Green Party has, repeatedly gained press coverage of its controversial speeches and rehearsed or staged events, which thrive on the novelty-seeking tendencies of mass media. The events might more properly be termed counterplays than plays; they originate as responses to, and parodies of, government power displays.37

Schechter sees the theatrical politics of the German Green Party in this context as a movement ‘between carnival and parliament, satire and politics’. Carnival, in this sense, is used specifically in relation to the Bundestag’s annual visit (since 1949) by carnival revellers – that is, elected delegates – who ‘abandon decorum and order for a day during the carnival season’.38 What is still at issue here is that division between, or merging of, discrete spheres. Whether it be ‘theatre of a political nature’ or ‘politics of a theatrical nature’ a major debating point in current discourses on theatre/performance as it relates to politics must revolve around where theatre ends and politics begins – and vice versa. It is because ‘theatre’ is so often constructed as an aesthetic practice – concerning great works, great actors, great playwrights, and involving a separation of action from audience – that it is category-bound and therefore able to be separated from ‘politics’ and ‘life’. Performance, on the other hand, is so much looser as a category – the definitions are more slippery and less easily categorizable as either ‘theatre’, or ‘politics’, or ‘life’ – and like definitions of postmodernism, can tend to make some critics angry at this seemingly wilful desire to escape rigid definition and demarcation. When the ‘message’ of a putatively political postmodern performance cannot be readily extracted, problems occur for those who prefer a tidy, closed interpretation of a performance’s political intent. For example, Arens, referring to the reception of both audiences and 37 38

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Schechter, 203. Schechter, 211. Without entering into a necessarily wider discussion of the concept of ‘carnival’ it maintains an important profile in recent discourses on political theatre. For example, see Kershaw, The Politics of Performance, 67– 92; also, Tim Prentki, ‘Cop-Out, Cop-In: Carnival as Political Theatre’, New Theatre Quarterly 6.24 (Nov. 1990), 362–4.

critics to Wilson’s Death, Destruction, and Detroit, writes: ‘Wilson’s work is not constructed to be overtly political; it suggests a political climate without specifying a political message’.39 Arens argues that critics who were seeking a ‘unitary explanation’ were undoubtedly utilizing the criteria of modernist political theatre: As a postmodern critique of the war era, DD&D played with popular culture to reopen a closed space in history. Wilson’s war had fun, and evil, and stereotypes, and sociopolitical implication – but no unitary ‘explanation’ in modernist terms.40

While the montage style of agitprop could also play with the dialectics of ‘fun’ and ‘evil’ there was a strong enough epistemological and ideological theme imposed to provide a ready-made unitary explanation with an obviously ideological intent. Nonetheless, it is all too easy to invoke binary explanations to imply some decisive rupture between modernist and postmodernist spectators and critics. For example, Arens points out that ‘each member of the audience would have had to perform an absolutely individual analysis of the sociopolitical dimension of the war’.41 What constitutes an ‘absolutely individual analysis’ is extremely problematic. Without a ‘unitary explanation’, and taking into account the ambiguity of intent in much postmodern performance, it would be difficult for spectators to reach an ‘absolutely individual’ decision on what they have experienced. It is more likely that they would withhold judgement, and even their impressions; often waiting until after the event before coming to a decision on what their interpretation might be, if ever there could be a final one. What is more to the point is the criticism that much postmodern performance lacks a specific political message. However, this is to ignore the specificity that may operate in respect of the political positions and viewpoints of individual spectators at a performance. Furthermore, that specificity is not solely ‘political’ in modernist 39 40 41

Arens, ‘Robert Wilson: Is Postmodern Performance Possible?’, Theatre Journal 43.1 (March 1991), 36. Arens, 37. Arens, 37.

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terms. It might be specific in relation to the personal, to the social, and to the cultural – depending on how these issues impinge on that particular spectator, in the context of the performance, and in the wider contexts which the spectator inhabits. In other words, there will be no grand narrative for all spectators, produced with a rhetoric of putatively communal words and images which will define a specific performance as ‘political’ – in modernist terms. For example, Hal Foster makes the distinction between a ‘political art’ which, locked in a rhetorical code, reproduces ideological representations, and an ‘art with a politic’ which, concerned with the structural positioning of thought and the material effectivity of practice within the social totality, seeks to produce a concept of the political relevant to our present. A purchase on this concept is no doubt difficult, provisional – but that may well be the test of its specificity and the measure of its value.42

Notwithstanding that lingering implicit art/politics split, the point that a ‘purchase on this concept’ is difficult, and provisional, might be the fitting measure of its placement in postmodern discourses. A concept of the political which would seek to efface difficulty, provisionality, and specificity, and suggest a universality, is that which becomes overtly ideological, in the sense of what Foster sees as its seeming ahistoricity.43 The acceptance of ‘conflict and contradiction’ (notwithstanding Silberman’s claim of their non-recognition in ‘postmodern theory’), stripped of their modernist connotations of either dialectical inevitability (where conflict is the driving force of capitalism), or dialectical contradiction leading to ultimate synthesis, is what helps define both performance and the political in postmodern discourses. To continue with this theme: Auslander (in paraphrase, and in substitution for Hal Foster) cites the Wooster Group as a ‘theatre with a politic’ rather than being ‘political theatre’.44 With reference to the

42 43

44

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Foster, Recodings, 155. Foster writes: ‘However general the social practices of the industrial worker are, as soon as they are represented as universal or even uniform, such representations become ahistorical and thus ideological’ (Recodings, 155). Auslander, ‘Toward a Concept of the Political in Postmodern Theatre’, Theatre Journal 39.1 (March 1987), 33. As Auslander states, he is paraphrasing the title

Wooster Group’s production of L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...), Auslander writes: By asserting their dependence on text yet radically problematizing their relationship to it, the Group dissected the major structure of authority in traditional theatre. It was not a matter of declaring, with Artaud, ‘No more masterpieces,’ but of simultaneously occupying and resisting the given structure.45

The simultaneous occupation and resistance of the ‘given structure’ – whether of language, metaphysics, or the dramatic text – is, of course, of key importance in deconstructive practices. To separate the political from art is to imply that there exists an ‘outside’ to either; that art, somehow, can be innocent of political intent, or interpretation, and that politics stands aside from a discrete aesthetic sphere, with each able to offer commentaries on the ‘culture’ of the other. As Derrida has written on the ‘effectivity’ of speaking from the ‘outside’: The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it.46

This recognition of the inability to step ‘outside’ the culture that one inhabits is echoed in Foster’s distinction between ‘countercultural’ forms (those of the 1960s) and ‘subcultural’ forms. Whereas the former pose revolutionary programmes of their own, the latter work to ‘recode’ cultural signs. Echoing Barthes’ distinction between text and work, Foster writes: ‘Far from an inert sociological category, the subcultural must be grasped as a textual activity. Plural and symbolic, its resistance is performed’.47 Such performed ‘textual activity’ invites comparisons not only with Derrida’s use of ‘text’ – as always constituting ‘a field of forces’48 – but also with his defining of text as

45 46 47 48

of Foster’s ‘For a Concept of the Political in Contemporary Art’, in Recodings, 139–55. Auslander, ‘Toward a Concept of the Political’, 29. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 24. Foster, Recodings, 170. Derrida, quoted in Bernstein, The New Constellation, 211.

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‘context’.49 Importantly, Foster focuses on the contextuality of the ‘politics of representation’: what seems radical in SoHo may be counterrevolutionary in Nicaragua. To rethink the political, then, is not to rule out any representational mode but rather to question specific uses and material effects – to question the assumption of truth in the protest poster, of realism in the documentary photograph, of collectivity in the street mural.50

The point should hardly need making further: all representation is political, no matter how seemingly innocent, and representations must be seen in terms of their specificity and in particular their contexts. Performance, seen through postmodern discourses, is always already political – in terms of its specificity, its contextuality, and the necessary agency of the spectator. It is impossible to conceive of a ‘theatre’ performance (whether labelled as political or non-political – or modern or postmodern) escaping the political. Whether explicitly stated, or not, all performance has a politics in that it deals with, to varying degrees, issues of gender, race, sexuality, history and so forth, whether self-reflexively or otherwise. Postmodernism deconstructs the modernist binary of theatre being either self-reflexively ‘political’ or ‘nonpolitical’. In short, there could not be a postmodern performance that is not, in some way, political. Nonetheless, the strength of the metaphysically and culturally constructed separations between art and life, and between aesthetics and politics, and the ongoing post-avant-garde attempts to collapse this distinction, highlight the inescapability of the dualism that sets up either of these approaches. For example, Thomas Heyd sees postmodern performance as being art that moves beyond art – that is, into an integration of art and life.51 As an example of this integration, he cites performance artist Bené Fonteles’ 1980s garbage delivery performances that involved the delivery of truckloads of garbage into the main square of Cuiaba in Brazil. These ‘performances’ could be interpreted, as Heyd puts it, as 49 50 51

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Derrida, Limited Inc., 136. Foster, Recodings, 143. Heyd, ‘Understanding Performance Art: Art Beyond Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 31.1 (Jan. 1991), 68–73.

both ‘eco-political protest’ and as ‘an integral part of his performance and installation work which consistently addresses itself to the natural environment and human interactions with it’.52 Heyd also cites the ‘dramatic actions’ of Greenpeace, seeing their performances as not necessarily ‘solely political’ but able to be included in the ‘history of protest theatre’ or ‘guerrilla theatre’.53 As Heyd writes: These Greenpeace pieces should be considered as performances that exemplify art beyond art because, despite their rational appeal for changes in societal/ corporate behaviour, they achieve their political effect through the creation of potentially ambivalent imagery. Their imagery incites reflection since these actions usually are provocative and sometimes appear to bring on the defilement of quasi-sacred locations. [...] These pieces are also exemplars of the integration of art and life in so far as they involve the demonstration of serious political commitment, to the point of personal risk.54

Nonetheless, Heyd’s seeming commitment to the integration of art and life is problematic. If those terms are to be used as distinctive categories, it already implies a certain purity in the separation of these categories. While it might be claimed that Heyd is setting up that distinction in order to argue for the dissolution of these categories, such a dissolution is problematized in postmodern discourses. Rather than seeking the collapsing of such categories, there is a recognition of the inescapability of that polarity, indeed, a polarity whose very existence allows shifts in accent. Instead of integration, there is the acceptance of an impure region that seeks not integration but rather juggles with the necessary priority of either category. The problem that the art-and-life distinction sets up is one conceived from a dualistic and dialectical inevitability. On the one hand, there is life; on the other hand, art – the superstructural expression of that determinacy of the ‘real’ which attempts to break with it by highlighting its difference. There is thus produced a tidy two-handed dialectic which mirrors that of the ‘real’ and its representations. Nonetheless, ‘life’ cannot be so unproblematically assumed to be that which ‘naturally’ 52 53 54

Heyd, 71. Heyd, 71, quoting Steven Durland, ‘Witness: The Guerrilla Theater of Greenpeace’, High Performance 10 (1987, issue 40), 30–5. Heyd, 71–2.

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occurs, or is historically determined, and is somehow separate from an auratic notion of art, or a superstructural culture. What Fonteles and Greenpeace perform might be both art and life – if one wants to get trapped in those categories. Otherwise, it can be seen as performance – neither solely politics, nor solely performance art – nor just political theatre – no matter how ‘political’ its intentions. In summary: ‘Political theatre’ (depending on context) is a modernist category which defines it in terms of its form (theatrical) and its content (implicitly or explicitly interrogative of existing dominant power structures). This is opposed to ‘mainstream theatre’, defined in terms of its form (also theatrical) and its content (safe, ‘bourgeois’, and non-interrogative of existing power structures, but nonetheless, emphatically still political). Such a differentiation was always problematic, and cannot be applied to postmodern performance. Performance escapes that dualism through its deconstructive denial of either the primacy or secondariness of reflection, representation, illusion, or mimesis, and so forth. It also escapes the traditionally ‘theatrical’ through its lack of adherence to authorial power and textual authority. This takes place through its questioning of narrative and eschatological teleology; its non-recognition of any split between the personal and the political (particularly in gay, feminist and ‘third world’ performance); its deconstruction of an actor/spectator, stage/auditorium polarity; and especially in its refusal to countenance the possibility of any ‘non-political’ form or content – if that latter separation can be maintained. Furthermore, the pejorative connotations of the ‘theatrical’ are disempowered by the use of a flagrant ‘metatheatricality’ – with quotation, bricolage, and a self-reflexive display of the ‘theatrical’ in all of its self-consciously ‘frivolous’ aspects. And finally, the spectator is allowed a definitive agency through the work of interpretation in performances that deny transparency through a problematization of narrative linearity, or a unified voice, and serve rather to deliberately obscure the possibilities of either immediate catharsis or a selective ‘critical awakening’. Heuristically (and effectually), then, what form can a postmodern political performance practice take? It will focus on one or more specific issues (which could be major, but would not encompass a grand narrative – recognizing that although the themes may be global, action 184

resides in the local). It will take account of contingency – within its form – perhaps inviting overt spectator participation in both the process and its provisional ending. It will remain self-reflexively aware of its inescapable interweaving with its context. It will blur spectator focus, disturbing notions that either a resolution will be reached (reconciliation in the dramatic sense), or that the spectator must necessarily ‘witness’ everything that is occurring. Rather, individual spectators will experience and engage with different aspects, gaining partial glimpses that need not necessarily leave them hungry for the whole, nor necessarily dissatisfied with the refusal of closure of the dialectic, or even the need for a dialectic; unless that dialectic can be reinscribed as the ongoing deferral inscribed in différance. The role of postmodern political performance is, in part, continually to remind the spectator that there is a distinct and subjective rationale that decides the selection and presentation of representations. As such, it could be defined as ‘realist’ in the context of postmodern and deconstructive discourses. Postmodern political performance will recognize that there is always a deliberate selection of possible representations, with its ‘reality’ intertwined with the images it selects to perform. Postmodern performance will not show reality as though it was separate from the time and space of its staging. It is ‘in time’ and across times – displaying a lack of anxiety about full presence and fully unified subjectivity. Teleology, linearity, cause and effect can be acknowledged – but as specific and contextual constructs – and any claim to transcendental inevitability would be deconstructed and thereby disrupted. Postmodern political performance is therefore ‘reality’ in all of its imagery, simulation, representation, and repetition, as well as its lack of a unified vision or a collective interpretation, that is, that which modernist performance attempted to bracket under the model of a secondary event: the repetition of the dramatic text, or the repetition of a more primary ‘reality’. Nonetheless, postmodern performance could only become the primary reality in a dualistic system. It is only one of many competing ‘realities’ in postmodernism.

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Conclusion Ethics, Aesthetics, Différance

Performance is wider than the boundaries circumscribed by modernist discourses on ‘performance’ in theatre, and their expanded dimensions of private or public interactive role-playing, and personal or product excellence. If the active and dynamic connotations of performance are emphasized (particularly the all-important role that agency plays); and if the deconstructive strategies of performance in its postmodern applications are also stressed, then it can and does escape being only a descriptive term for some ‘thing’ that people do in the presence of others, whether in an agreed ‘aesthetical’ dimension, or architectural space, or at parties, or on the street; or suggest some ‘quality’ attached to a particular product or event. Such an extension of the term and its range of meanings has been necessary in order to unravel certain unresolved issues concerning modernism and postmodernism that require further explication – notably the binary of ethics and aesthetics. In short, there is a much broader set of ‘fundamental’ issues involved here which can – necessarily – only be sketched out, involving as they do a demanding and extended analysis which is beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, in short, in the classical paradigm, and in modernist discourses, ethics is, by and large, construed as a grand narrative based on universalizing models and categorical imperatives rather than on context-based moral positions; aesthetics serves as a generalized universal statement concerning the beautiful – rather than a statement of individual like or dislike founded on a subject/object paradigm. Différance, however, can be seen as an aesthetics of re-cognition – of the self in the other/the other in the self. Bearing in mind that these dualisms are operative, and inescapable, from this perspective one can detect how the condemnation of postmodern discourses as lacking a ‘coherent’ and ‘effective’ political agenda concealed – but was based on – another argument: the relationship between postmodern discourses and their alleged ignoring, or

rejection of an underlying ethical base. If ‘anything goes’ in postmodern discourses, and therefore the decision as to which actions shall be ethical in terms of their effects is problematized (where genocide might be as acceptable as – or on a par with – homicide), then the relationship between this ethical base and the contextual morality of any particular social formation needs to be addressed. Obviously, this has occurred,1 but while classical metaphysics and modernist epistemologies wrestled with both the origin and the validity of the ethical imperatives that inform the moral laws and codes of social formations, nonetheless, a higher order of imperatives was still seen to transcend (in their implied universality) those contaminated ‘all too human’ moral lapses that are part and parcel of the lives of subjects in particular social formations. These imperatives, whether religious or secular, were always informed by the concept of a higher order. Such a convenient concept is, of course, the base and final point by which any hierarchy will justify itself. A higher order always implies a state of ‘otherness’ to those who are commanded by its imperatives. In other words, there is an implicit – and sometimes very explicit – message that those considered incapable of accepting responsibility for their own fate must, necessarily, accede to the orders emanating from the paternal and patronizing ‘care’ of those who must – equally necessarily – do it for them. Behind this facade of care lurks a despotism which, in the putative interests of the whole, will explicitly and ruthlessly quash dissent, or at least, implicitly educate and guide those who have not realized, or recognized, the God-given (or historically determinate) right of those who must rule. Such a hierarchy of values, handed down from generation to generation, undoubtedly provides a sense of security – not only for those who directly benefit from it, but also for those who have become accustomed to the security that a rigid positionality provides. As such, this ‘ethics’ negates difference and promotes closure. This is a pattern and a surety that the discourses of postmodernism question. For this pattern 1

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See, for example, Corlett, Community Without Unity; Critchley, ‘The Chiasmus: Levinas, Derrida and the Ethical Demand for Deconstruction,’ Textual Practice 3.1 (Spring 1989), 91–106; Martin, Matrix and Line: Derrida and the Possibilities of Postmodern Social Theory.

deliberately raises the spectre of a dialectically constructed irrationality that could transform order into chaos, and let loose the nihilistic hordes which would smash down the gates of a rational and orderly modernist episteme. Conversely, it might be argued that postmodern discourses have had their effect, and that the lessons of deconstruction have been learnt – all too negatively. Fragmentation and dissolution are all the rage. ‘Tribal’ warfare makes the headlines. Nationalist and fundamentalist ideologies gain strength in newly discrete regions which were formerly held together by ‘coherent’ political ideologies, imposed boundaries (and the force of arms). In the face of this confusion, there might be some who would argue that it is time to return to the models that worked, to combat that apocalyptic strain of postmodernism which would seemingly deny reason and revel in a nihilistic vengeance against rationality and order. Consequently, as Larry L. Langford warns: ‘Postmodernism terrifies those who can only see what it may deny us and not the possibilities it offers’.2 Implicit in the fear and loathing that postmodern discourses generate are their presumed complicity with not only a ‘fascist aesthetics’ but also with the forces of ‘multi-national capitalism, neo-colonialism, and media manipulation’.3 It is the ‘irrationality’ of postmodernism that invokes many of its negative critiques. However, Langford argues that it is postmodernism’s ability to promote discussion, rather than seek closure, that gives it the possibility of opening up a certain dialectic of the Enlightenment – not the dialectic of Horkheimer and Adorno, which dualistically oscillates between freedom and control, but a dialectic of the Enlightenment which Langford sees as a ‘mode of oppositional critique […] caught up in a dialectic that it maintains entirely within itself’.4 As Langford writes: Rather than being a challenge to the Enlightenment, therefore, postmodernism is necessitated by it and exists not as an external critique but as a product of the ongoing dialectic that Enlightenment thought maintains with itself.5 2 3 4 5

Langford, ‘Postmodernism and Enlightenment, Or, Why Not a Fascist Aesthetics?’, substance 67 (21.1), 1992, 39. Langford, 38. Langford, 26. Langford, 26.

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This echoes the point raised earlier, namely that postmodernism has a dialectical relationship with itself – a ‘special’ dialectic of selfreflexivity, rather than a dialectic of resolution and closure. In other words, even if not conforming to an Enlightenment dialectic (which is highly questionable), it is a dynamic – performative – dialectic, rather than the narrative-driven Enlightenment model. Of course, it can then be argued that all postmodernism has done is rescue the seemingly lost performance dynamics of modernism, the avant-gardes, Marxism, the dialectic, and so forth. It could be maintained that the dialectic was always potentially processual rather than a rigid set of binary oppositions, historically or ‘spiritually’ destined for resolution. That is to say, the potentially revolutionary dynamic of Marxism was betrayed by the Bolshevik counter-revolution (and the Second International); the avant-gardes were potentially more innovative than oppositional; modernism was really an ongoing and innovative process that only used the present in order to challenge the traditions of the past and avoid the dangers of utopian futures; and that all of the above were aware of the need to maintain openness towards diversity, leaving the space for the other – other ‘subjects’, other cultures, other political agendas. Nonetheless, it is extremely questionable whether any of the above really performed that openly, primarily because the dynamic movement of them all was only – really – in terms of a fundamentally colonizing gesture. Closure was constantly lurking, for these were projects which were teleological and utopian: the search for the ‘new’; the merging of art and life; the eventual grasp of all that could be known and thought through the inexorable movement of the dialectic towards the merging of life into Spirit. Therefore, although there was a dynamism in these movements, it was always epistemologically geared towards eventual closure, concealing a utopian element that sought the eventual subsumption of the other into the same through the closure of the dialectic. While opponents of postmodernism will argue that it lacks the necessary epistemological and ontological foundations which could underpin an ethics, constantly elided from these

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attacks is the recognition of the artifice of any ethical foundation.6 On what criteria do critics of postmodernism base their ethics? Ethical imperatives (in both their classical and modernist senses), are transcendental, and are not recognized for their own pragmatic ‘origins’. As Simon Critchley writes: When one thinks of ethics in its traditional determination, one imagines a collection of laws, principles, and moral rules which habitually have some claim to universality and are thus meant to prescribe human action. […] ethics is traditionally determined as the construction of a system or procedure which is bound to law and universality and binding upon human beings, such as the Kantian Categorical Imperative […]7

In other words, ethical imperatives governing moral codes are constructed for material reasons – towards the survival of the ‘tribe’; the furtherance of specific individuals within a community; the smooth running of the nation-state in the interests of the dominant power. Postmodern discourses openly recognize that ethical imperatives are strategic constructs formed for specific reasons, the ‘origin’ and specificity of which have become naturalized into a universalized episteme underpinning an ideology of commonsense, or doxa, and handed down via metaphysical transcendentalism, the inexorable laws of history, or through religious prescription. All ethical and ontological constructions are just that – constructions – improvised, but then solidified, outside of the contexts of pragmatic and contingent considerations.

6

7

See Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity for the point that postmodernity lacks an ethics. There is, as Harvey puts it in referring to the economic policies and the popularity of the Reagan Government, a ‘triumph of aesthetics over ethics’ (329). However, for Harvey the wheel is turning. He comments that: ‘Even some of the deconstructionists seem to be reverting to ethics’ (359). In his chapter ‘Cracks in the mirrors, fusions at the edges’, he notes that with a ‘renewal of historical materialism and of the Enlightenment project’ it is ‘possible to launch a counter-attack of narrative against the image, of ethics against aesthetics’ (359). Critchley, ‘The Chiasmus: Levinas, Derrida and the Ethical Demand for Deconstruction’, Textual Practice 3.1 (Spring 1989), 102–3.

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Ethics has traditionally been designated as either a branch of metaphysics, or even as constituting the base of metaphysics.8 However, it could be argued otherwise; that aesthetics is the ‘origin’ that defines not only metaphysics, but ethics, and therefore politics also. Furthermore, if aesthetics is reinscribed as desire, rather than being the agreeable perception of object by subject (which suggests a colonizing gesture of appropriation), desire can also be defined in terms of the perception (and the recognition) of subject by subject, without the metaphysical prescription of the subsumption of the other into the same. For, as Critchley argues, the singularity of the other subsumed and reduced to the same is the basis of metaphysics. He writes, with reference to Levinas: For Levinas, the ontological event which defines and distinguishes the entire philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Heidegger, consists in suppressing all forms of otherness and transmuting alterity into the Same (le Même).9

However, postmodernism, like deconstruction recognizing intersubjectivity, does not collapse these distinctions. Even if thought of as the same in the other, the other in the same, this is not in the sense of the dialectic. Rather, it is as a constantly shifting différance which affirms subjectivity, difference and the ongoing deferral of closure. As Roy Boyne has written: ‘From the standpoint of deconstruction, a society without difference could only be a closed society sustained by force’.10 If aesthetics, rather than being seen in terms of a dialectic with ethics, is re-cognized as différance, and seen in its performative and improvisational strategies of deferral as well as difference, then Wlad Godzich’s contention that Kant’s aesthetic is grounded in experience might serve in order to compact a complex argument: The theoretic and the practical are both grounded in the a priori and can therefore aspire to some transcendental status (through Reason or its Idea). The aesthetic, however, is grounded in the domain of experience: It experiences the 8

9 10

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See Critchley, 95–7. Critchley also asks: ‘What could deconstruction possibly have in common with ethics, given that the latter is habitually understood to be one of the most derivative and traditional areas of philosophy?’ (96–7). Critchley, 100. Boyne, Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason, 128.

world as the theoretic and the practical have already pre-given it to us; it cannot possibly aspire to a transcendental status; it is caught in the finite; hence, the completion that is effected by the aesthetic act is always provisional, never final; it must always be done all over again.11

If one wanted to set up aesthetics as the ‘ground’ of metaphysics and ethics, then its improvisational praxis should serve; but importantly, its obvious paradigmatic connections to différance – and performance – would suffice. The central point may now be reiterated: ethics, aesthetics, and politics are redefined in postmodern discourses. They are no longer subject to modernist criteria. Certainly, politics are subject to different criteria, beyond the programmatic dictates of modernist political party systems. The justification for political action is no longer necessarily dependent on universalizing grand narratives, whether of class, race, sexuality, or gender, without recognizing the diversity of subject positions which are contained within these categories. The justification for political action lies in the ‘here and now’ strategies of social agents who recognize specificity, agency, and contingency – and especially the role that différance plays in the latter. Contingency, unlike necessity, must be based on the possibility of deferral – a deferral of the expectation of final and resolute closure, or a dialectical synthesis. As Boyne points out, the dialectic, for Derrida, ‘tends to deny difference’. Furthermore: It does this in its aspiration to that moment of transcendence when the difference between the two dialectically opposed moments is dissolved, the ground of that dissolution being the yet-to-be-revealed presence of each moment within the other. The horizon of dialectics, then, is the resolution of difference.12

Nonetheless, this is not categorically to refuse the dialectic, for as Derrida has pointed out, embracing the ‘antidialectical’ must be recognized as being ‘too dialectical’.13 Rather, it is to recall that ‘special’ dialectic – the dialectic that postmodern discourses maintain with 11 12 13

Godzich, ‘Correcting Kant: Bakhtin and Intercultural Interactions’, boundary 2 18.1 (Spring 1991), 12. Boyne, Foucault and Derrida, 128. Derrida, Limited Inc., 116.

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themselves, thereby escaping the either/or traps of discourses which set themselves up in opposition to, or outside of, dominant forms. The performance dynamics of postmodernism recognize the need to operate in the spaces between such oppositions to forestall the move towards final resolution and the closure of the dialectic. Within social formations that were (and are still) structured on metaphysical and thus hierarchical formations, the conventions of leadership (actors) and followers (audience) could ensure the continuation of those hierarchies – through the metaphysical disciplines of Gods and transcendent ‘outside’ powers. They could also be applied materially, through the force of arms or an enforced scarcity of needs. But, underlying these exigencies, there existed a fictive, transcendental, and generalized ethic which was based on denial – a denial of personal power and pleasure in the present with the reward of a future paradise, whether in Heaven, or as a workers’ Utopia on this earth. In contrast, postmodern political movements work with an aesthetics of desire – going beyond appeals to a transcendent ethical code to an immediate ethics of aesthetics – in other words: This is what I want because it is good, for me, and therefore I will fight for it. Like feminist movements, affinity groups, ‘third world’ postcolonial movements and so forth, there is a distrust of and a distaste for that which is handed down from on high and justified by appeals to progress, essential human nature, heredity, biology, economic rationalism, and the putative common good. This ‘common good’ is, of course, the good of those who benefit from such a hierarchically enforced imbalance of wealth and power. Nonetheless, such an aesthetics of desire might also be applied to power-based movements of nationalism and fundamentalism – but there is a difference. This is an aesthetics based on a superimposition of the desire of the few onto the many. It is a theoretic – and future-based – aesthetic, and hence, it bears a relationship with fascism. It is ends-based, seeking the subsumption of the individual into the mass – or the common and future good of the people, who constitute ‘the nation’. As I have argued, nostalgia and utopianism go hand-in-hand, and along with a denial of singularity and individual agency, both are important aspects of fascism. A postmodern aesthetics of desire, on the other hand, recognizes the danger of this fascistic tendency in us 194

all. As Michel Foucault writes in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: the strategic enemy is fascism […] not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.14

For example, postmodern discourses will not preach morality in terms of communality. This is where that potential latent fascism in the members of groups such as Greenpeace (but more often evident in emotive single-issue groups such as animal rights, ‘right to life’, or, the ‘do as I do’ groups) needs to be carefully monitored by their own practitioners. The enthusiasm for change, which can be the positive driving force of such organisations, can over-spill into an evangelistic zeal that will take the moral high ground and potentially deal ruthlessly with dissent. Therefore, there is a need to differentiate between aims and means, and any colonizing moral stance; recognizing the dangers of a ‘holier than thou’ morality that can become enforced on others – as with any fundamentalist belief system, where fascist tendencies are always present. In short, a potential fascism is fostered in any programmatic attempt to grasp the whole – to achieve, through overarching change in a social formation, final redemptive closure. It can be argued that all Utopian dreams (and dramas) are always potentially totalitarian. Utopia is a fascist concept – whether from the Left or the Right: a dream of final closure; a return to Eden; a thousandyear Reich; Year Zero. In contrast, postmodern discourses recognize that there can be no Utopia. There can exist no definitive ‘performance’. This is exemplified in the restlessness of theatre practitioners for the next production – not in the hope of ‘getting it right’ but for the experience of working once again – in a different configuration, with a different production, towards a different interpretation. Underlying this is an aesthetics of desire that seeks difference rather than the ‘new’ – and not necessarily from a distaste for the old. Rather it is the ‘new’ in the sense of 14

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, viii.

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continual ‘news’ – an ongoing revolution of spaces and times and ideas without closure and without end. On the other hand, utopian dramas suggest final programmes and prescriptive agendas; the search for the perfect and ideal model, or the frozen, inert, and finally dead, performance. Divested of its utopian impulse, postmodern politics operates in the here and now, not basing its future on what should be, nor looking nostalgically at what has been, but rather at what can be implemented in the present. Hence, there is a certain pragmatism to these political movements; not the woolly pragmatism of ‘anything goes’ but a pragmatism which acknowledges the specific and the contextual – a performance pragmatics. Ends no longer justify means, because there has arisen a suspicion of such programmes and the binary on which they are based. The end product, no matter how seemingly worthy, can no longer be justified by ‘the measures taken’ towards its conclusion. The deformations that may occur in the process are an integral part of the process, because, like performance, every ‘deformation’ has become part of the product, or performance, at the putative – and provisional – end. Postmodern political movements, by operating without a totalitarian ends-based agenda, can avoid the dream of sitting back with the fruits of their labours at some future time. This is because those labours are redefined – they are not the means towards an eventual utopian cessation of effort, but those which can be enjoyed in their process. As most theatre practitioners recognize, it is not only the process of rehearsal that is the learning part, but the performance is also a learning process – towards the next rehearsal/performance – ongoing and without closure. Nonetheless, as I have earlier stated, the postmodern jettisoning of utopian dreams is not the same as dispensing with an envisioning of alternatives. Alternative realities, shifting subject positions (and a suspicion towards who and what defines that positionality, or the need for it), temporary alliances, and pragmatic and alterable aims (which operate within local and specific conditions of social being), constitute that envisioning of alternatives, rather than the imposition of ‘new world orders’ devoid of a specific context. For example, postmodern political movements often do not debate issues in ‘houses of parliament’. Greenpeace is a prime example. It operates its ‘debates’ against invariably unwilling partners in situ. It performs, 196

usually through the media, at sites of ecological pollution or potential nuclear devastation. Therefore, there is a contestation concerning the effects of those operations on both the people in close proximity and the wider environment. Much political performance has moved away from conventional theatre spaces which in a sense are like debating chambers, but with one side strategically and conveniently muzzled. That is to say, the traditional spaces of theatre, notwithstanding much experimentation with the dynamics of actor/spectator relationships, invariably serve to lock out the potential interaction of the spectator in the event, not only through the brief and particularly Western convention of a separated and silent audience, but especially through the flow of a narrative which resists intervention. This is a specific definition of narrative, with a story, and characters, moving from disruption to resolution – with an outcome, the essential importance of which links it to the utopian, teleological and eschatological themes of the Enlightenment, Marxism, the avant-gardes, and so forth. If we take ‘narrative’ as the paradigm of modernist epistemology and politics, it can be stated that an Aristotelian frame operates – a linear narrative leading from disruption, to crisis, to resolution – and particularly a separation of the spectator from a position of agency. This is a very powerful paradigm. Notwithstanding the fractures and disjunctions of this paradigm that occurred in modernism, there are two points worth noting. The first is that it is the narrative frame which is being reacted against: that is, the frame defines the terms of the reaction and, inevitably, provides the means for the re-absorption of the reactive impulse. The reactive impulse is built into the dialectic of modernist conflict. The second is that theatre as a paradigm has traditionally implied that ‘reality’ is outside of the representations being performed. Two interpretations of this are available. One is that ‘reality’, in being ‘outside’ of its representations is beyond the reach of intervention, and that the spectator is therefore powerless to effect change in or on that reality. The second is that there exists a ‘real’ that is separate and can be grasped, and mastered, outside of the ‘falsity’ of ideological and aesthetic representation. Therefore, if narrative is seen as linear, teleological and eschatological, and is thus defined as the modernist political paradigm, then there is a need for the recognition of an alternative (and coexisting) paradigm – a performance paradigm 197

for politics and theatre. To see performance as the paradigm, or the key, to grasping postmodernism entails a necessary interweaving of both the political and the performance (in the ‘theatre’ sense) aspects of postmodernism in the following.

Performance: The Postmodern Paradigm If performance is allied with deconstructive strategies and affirmed in its active function, rather than seen as a noun for a finished product; that is, if performance is recognized as never reaching a utopian state of final closure, then it must serve as the paradigm that challenges the narrative eschatological necessity of both modernist theatre and politics. Performance therefore loses its pejorative connotations of falsity, pretence, and copy; as well as its modernist connotations of performativity – in the sense of be operational, or ‘disappear’.15 It can then be re-cognized as the always existent paradigm of the ethico-sociopolitical – a paradigm which has been buried under metaphysics and the totalizing epistemologies of Marxism and modernism. Performance is the paradigm that underpins the strategies of postmodern political movements which favour transience, improvisation and contingency – and recognize the place for specificity, contextuality and the important part that a singular agency plays. One of the enduring concepts concerning theatre has been the notion of a communal experience; that is to say, the communal experience for the spectator at the theatre event is what distinguishes it from the individual experience of television, the home video, or the Internet. However, that presumed communal experience of theatre is problematic. Like the theatre-goer, the television viewer, in his or her interpretations of programmes, undertakes the same process as the theatre-goer both during and after the performance; that is, a shifting back-and-forth between the performance being witnessed, and the ‘ideal’ performance being imagined. Thoughts and impressions are 15

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See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 44–7.

compared before ‘final’ decisions on what it ‘meant’ are made. Auslander makes the point (using Sartre’s theory of mass media and the notion of the alterity of the radio listener), that there is a similar lack of reciprocity between the medium and the individual spectator in both radio and postmodern performance.16 Even though performance, unlike radio or television, is a ‘live art’, the examples that Auslander uses (of Laurie Anderson and Spalding Gray) are never ‘completely’ present for the audience. They are always mediated by the ‘otherness’ of their performances. Hence presence, as reciprocity, cannot occur: ‘Postmodern performance offers no antidote to alterity; rather, it accepts alterity as its condition of being’.17 In other words, postmodern performance recognizes a separation, not only of a fictive commonality between separate individuals, but also without a nostalgia for a singular full presence and being-in-itself. Similarly, there is not necessarily regret (nor nostalgia) that within the murky spaces of representation we are left with only a representation without original. There is arguably a recognition of the blurring of a dualistic demarcation in the representations performed. Concerning alterity, as well as political performances taking place at specific sites of contestation, there is the argument that political debate might become the province of the individual and interactive participant through computer technology. It is possible for ‘play’ scenarios to circulate through electronic mail systems, with recipients able to insert their prospective scenarios and changes into an ‘original’ scenario. However, it is then debatable as to whether this is still theatre, especially if that is predicated on the concept of a communal experience. Nonetheless, it could be interpreted as performance, if the requirement of the communal experience is dispensed with.18

16 17 18

Auslander, ‘Going with the Flow: Performance Art and Mass Culture’, Drama Review 33.2 (Summer 1989), 130. Auslander, ‘Going with the Flow’, 132. See J. Yellowlees Douglas, ‘Where the Senses become a Stage and Reading is Direction: Performing the Texts of Virtual Reality and Interactive Fiction’, Drama Review 37.4 (Winter 1993), 18–37; and, Richard Gess, ‘Magister Macintosh: Shuffled Notes on Hypertext Writing’, Drama Review 37.4 (Winter 1993), 38–44.

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Importantly, to ‘perform’, in one sense, is to make trouble, to cause a fuss, to ‘rock the boat’. A performer is a troublemaker – one who does not conform to expectations of inevitability, to deterministic programmes, to metaphysical designs based on ‘commonsense’ dualities. A troublemaker lives différance – endlessly deferring final solutions and continually disturbing any form of absolute closure. In this sense, Derrida, like Boal, is a troublemaker; Meyerhold was a troublemaker. Performers/actors, in the most material sense, have always been seen as troublemakers (as nomads, gypsies, thieves, charlatans, and prostitutes), disturbing, among other things, both religious and secular forces that desire discipline and a secure positionality. Needless to say, troublemakers have to watch out for themselves – they can be ridiculed, ignored, imprisoned, and sometimes even executed. However, troublemakers who oppose the system by engaging frontally with the dialectic that the system imposes are in more danger of being co-opted (or destroyed) than those who refuse to play by the rules. Postmodern troublemakers recognize that there is no escape from the dialectical and representational framework which they oppose, especially if they take up an explicitly oppositional stance and attempt to fight against the system on its own terms. Nonetheless, even while recognizing that there is no absolute escape, postmodern troublemakers can effect a certain escape – always provisional, specific, and contextual – in their deconstructive ‘recodings’ of representational frameworks. Thus, in postmodern political movements, people – as actors, as social agents – are the ones who have the potential to script their own performances. They do so within the gaps and interstices of dominant ideologies – not in order to remain marginal, but in order to deconstruct that centre/margin binary; not being content to wait for others to script their performances for them; nor waiting as passive spectators for their representations to be represented by representatives.19 Postmodern performance cannot be simply defined by multimedia innovation; nor by its use of bricolage; nor in its intertextual weaving; nor in its historical juxtapositions. Those formal elements 19

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Here, I am paraphrasing Derrida, ‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference, 235.

would cover most mainstream Hollywood films as well as much television programming. Rather, it can be defined by its lack of reconciliation, its recognition of diversity and difference, and its disruption and deconstruction of both a privileged access to ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ and the deferral of any final redemptive closure. Does it still have a message? No – other than that the spectator, as social agent, is potentially the partial constructor of her or his own particular reality, no matter how much, or how often, informed differently. In the overtly political sense, alliances and affinity groups can relieve that accent on solitary action, but it is no more a purely communal action than that the singular spectator is ever purely alone. Nonetheless, the objections of those who would argue that certain postmodern discourses can blithely ignore the struggles of those who have not yet been constituted as subjects (or actors) in their particular social configurations must be recognized. Hence, those involved in the diverse range of women’s movements, gay rights, postcolonial struggles, and ‘third world’ situations, may not necessarily be amenable to the deconstruction of subjectivity, when that has not yet been attained by them. Similarly, once the oppressions of a particular social formation have moved beyond the capacity for intervention, other than by force of arms, then the potential ability to ‘manufacture’ one’s own fate is strongly determined by those contextually relevant situations. There exists no set of prescriptive rules for what ‘needs to be done’. Such prescriptions fall all too easily into programmatic directives for ‘society’ as a whole. Nonetheless, the prescriptions, no matter how imperfectly informed or enforced, are already in place. And there exists an already powerful media arm to dominant government policies – in television in particular. However, if it is argued that performance is transient, then likewise, television politics can be seen as transient. All representations, whether on the street, the screen, or the stage, are transient. With television, the sheer bulk of the information transmitted, regardless of whether it is preserved on tape (which is doubtful in terms of the material contingencies of space and time) must necessarily lead to a transient experience of what is transmitted. In short, nothing is permanent, whether in live performance or on television. ‘Reality’ cannot be seized and remembered in some imagined entirety. It is always 201

partial, fragmented, and suspect in terms of any ability to grasp the whole. The dream of the Enlightenment, that there could be an empirical and rational explanation for all that could be known was always a utopian concept. Perhaps a better term for transient would be ‘ephemeral’. Eugenio Barba points to two separate meanings, arguing that while the term generally implies that which lives for only one day, there is a second interpretation: ‘that which changes from day to day’. As Barba writes: ‘The first meaning evokes the image of death; the second, on the other hand, evokes the ever-changing flow which characterizes being-in-life’.20 As such, the ephemerality of performance mirrors not only the ephemerality of postmodern political strategies – which take cognizance of contingency and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances – but also evokes the undecidability of deconstructive practices, where there is a refusal to choose decisively between binary oppositions, unless determined by specific contexts. Postmodernism is inseparable from deconstructive strategies; and performance is deconstructive in its différance. Neither performance nor postmodern politics rely on grand narratives; neither takes positionality for granted; neither goes for either extreme of polar oppositions. Postmodern performers (whether explicitly or implicitly ‘political’) are improvisers – not relying on a pre-written script – but on loose (albeit monitored) scenarios of potentials and possibilities. And postmodern ‘troublemakers’ do not expect simple solutions. Therefore, resistance is ongoing, with the recognition that there is no easy ride; there are no simple solutions. Postmodern politics, like deconstructive strategies, like performance, must necessarily remain improvisational and open-ended. Strategic goals can be aimed for, positions can be attained, but these remain open and temporary – always suitable for particular times and places, but never for all time and for all places. Ultimately, the focus returns to the spectator, and therefore that all-important notion of agency. If postmodern performances prioritize the spectator – not in an abstract sense, but in the material sense of an ‘actor’ always within the bounds of performance, and of politics – then this must be the import of performance in postmodernism. If the spectator is repositioned as ‘troublemaker’, as actor, 20

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Barba, ‘Four Spectators’, Drama Review 34.1 (Spring 1990), 96.

as shifting between the dualistic roles of witness and protagonist, then that might be where a ‘future’ for theatre resides. Not the theatre of stage/auditorium and actor/spectator separation; not the theatre of text versus performance; not the theatre that purports to represent a primary reality; but the ‘theatre’ of subversion and different rules: in short, one which revels in diversity – in terms of subjectivities, of places, of times, of themes, of actions – and especially in terms of spectator intervention, in its necessarily contextually varying degrees. Thus, postmodern performance presents a ‘new’ realism – but a realism aware of its own entrapment within cultural and therefore aesthetic/political discourses – and of its own need continually to question its own means of representation. Performance, as was stated at the start of this chapter, is far broader in its implications than those implied in modernism. While there is the obvious danger that performance is then seen as an all-encompassing catch-phrase to describe the strategies of political movements and aesthetic expressions of postmodernism in their deconstructive methodologies, nonetheless, performance must be the paradigm in that it is always transient, contingent, specific, and ultimately contextual. In performance, practice and theory are intertwined – no theory, or idea, can be entertained without its practice. Performance is do-ing, not just talking. It is an ongoing dialectic without closure, and therefore it is Derrida’s iterability made manifest, with both repetition and alteration being unavoidable. Performance is never free from contingency, never free from impurity, and is therefore, paradigmatic of not only what has been termed the ‘postmodern’, but what has ‘essentially’ underpinned all ‘ideas of reason’ – that is, the totalizing epistemologies and the metaphysical imperatives of the cultures of the ‘West’.

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Index

Acconci, Vito 74, 75 aesthetics 12, 15, 16, 49, 76, 99, 145, 171, 178, 182, 187, 189, 191n, 192– 5 agency 35, 41, 76, 108, 126, 128, 129, 139, 146, 159, 161, 182, 184, 187, 193, 194, 197, 198, 202 and Boal 170–1, 177 agitprop 83, 88, 89, 91, 100, 101, 105, 179 alterity 16, 120, 192, 199 Anderson, Laurie 172, 173, 199 Anderson, Perry 28 anti-dialectic 86, 99, 193 Aristotle 52–3, 162, 164, 171 Artaud, Antonin 14, 56, 60, 63, 64, 69, 70, 71, 74, 76, 145, 146, 151, 181 and Derrida 137, 140–3 avant-garde 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20, 26, 41, 46, 47, 77, 78, 84, 99, 141, 177, 178, 182, 190, 197 and naturalism 49–50, 55, 85–6 and modernism 57–60 and Dada 60–6 and neo-avant-garde 66–70 and postmodernism 109–12, 115, 133, 134 Bacon, Francis 36 Barthes, Roland 135, 181 Baudrillard, Jean 117 Bauhaus 67, 93 Bausch, Pina 172 Beck, Julian 71 Beckett, Samuel 72, 142n Berlin Dada 90 Black Mountain Group 67, 68

Blau, Herbert 75–6, 103–4 Blue Blouse Group 88, 97 Boal, Augusto 15, 16, 83, 103, 108, 161–72, 177, 200 body 13, 14, 66, 68, 70, 73–5, 133, 135, 137, 139, 140, 153–4, 162 Bolshevik Revolution 88–9 bourgeois theatre 46, 52, 108, 145 Brecht, Bertolt 14, 60, 70, 81, 83, 93, 94–6, 99, 105, 106, 107, 108, 160 and Boal 162–8, 170, 171, 172, 177 Brook, Peter 71 Cabaret Voltaire 62 Cage, John 67 Chaikin, Joseph 71 Chekhov, Anton 53, 72n, 174 CIVILwarS (Wilson) 138n Come and Go (Beckett) 72 commedia dell’arte 87 Constructivism 58, 59 contingency 14, 39, 40, 77, 88, 126–8, 134, 138, 159, 170, 185, 193, 198, 202, 203 Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 136 Craig, E. Gordon 139 Cravan, Arthur 62 Cubism 52 Cunningham, Merce 67 Dada 13, 41, 58, 59, 60–8, 77, 78, 90, 91, 94, 99, 112 Dali, Salvador 62 Death, Destruction, and Detroit (Wilson) 179 De Certeau, Michel 33n

Derrida, Jacques 10n, 11n, 14, 15, 16, 77, 109, 127, 129, 149, 150, 154, 181, 193, 200, 203 and deconstruction 117–23 and Artaud 137, 141–3 dialectic 10, 13, 20, 40, 41, 43, 55, 60, 64–6, 72–4, 77, 78, 79, 86, 91, 95, 99, 110, 119, 120, 134, 142, 150, 173n, 183, 185, 189, 190, 192–4, 197, 200, 203 – see also ‘special’ dialectic Diderot, Denis 48 efficacy 5, 15, 175–6 Eisler, Hanns 165 Eisner, K. 91 Engels, Friedrich 89 Enlightenment 24, 110, 117, 123, 127– 9, 148, 189–90, 191n, 197, 202 Epic theatre 83, 91, 92, 94, 105, 106 essentialism 32, 76, 78, 129, 133, 153–6 ethics 10, 15, 16, 25, 41, 49, 68, 154, 155, 156, 187–8, 190–94 Expressionism 53, 58, 59, 60, 63, 83, 86, 91, 94, 167 fascism 34, 94, 98, 99, 166, 194–5 feminism 17 and postmodernism 19, 29, 30, 126, 130n, 184, 194 feminist performance art 14 – see also women’s performance art Fo, Dario 177 Fonteles, Bené 182, 184 Foreman, Richard 72 Foucault, Michel 143–4, 195 Frazer, J. G. 56 Free – see Hoffman, Abbie Frow, John 17–20, 22–3 Futurism 58, 59, 61, 111 Gauguin, Paul 56 Ghosts (Ibsen) 50

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Good Woman of Setzuan, The (Brecht) 107, 168 Goslar, Lotte 177 Gray, Spalding 199 Green Party 177–8 Greenpeace 15, 183, 184, 195, 196 Gropius, Walter 93 Grotowski, Jerzy 74, 75, 76, 165–6 ‘guerrilla’ theatre 14, 83, 100–4, 106, 107, 183 Hamletmachine (Müller) 138, 173 happenings 58, 63, 69 Hasenclever, Walter 91 Hauptmann, Gustav 85 Hauser, Arnold 48, 57 He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No (Brecht) 165 Hegel, G. W. F. 40, 110n, 142, 162 Hobbes, Thomas 153 Hoffman, Abbie [Free] 101, 103, 106–7 Hoppla, We’re Alive (Piscator) 92 Ibsen, Hendrik 50–1, 53, 85, 86 Ideas of Reason 13, 35–6, 39, 41, 203 iterability 14, 118, 141, 142, 203 Kant, Immanuel 36, 191–2 Knee Plays, the (Wilson) 145, 146 Kokoschka, Oskar 86 Lazarenko, Vitaly 177 Levinas, Emmanuel 15, 192 Liberalism 11, 21, 24, 41, 129, 130 Living Theater, The 102 L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...) (Wooster Group) 72n, 181 Lyotard, Jean-François 13, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 33, 35–7, 110, 112, 117, 124, 126n, 139 – see also Ideas of Reason Mabou Mines 71

Macbeth (Shakespeare) 136 Machiavelli, Niccolo 162 Maeterlinck, Maurice 86 Malina, Judith 71 Marin, Louis 143–4 Marxism 10, 11, 19, 21, 24, 26–9, 35, 39–41, 82, 86, 87, 90, 94, 98, 100, 108, 113, 114–16, 118, 119, 129, 134n, 159, 172n, 190, 197, 198 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 88, 97 Measures Taken, The (Brecht) 165 metaphysics 9, 37, 41, 61, 76, 119, 121, 123, 126, 127, 140, 141, 150, 181, 192–3, 198 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 14, 16, 81, 83, 85, 87–94, 96, 97, 103, 104, 139, 160, 170, 200 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) 136 modernist theatre 41, 46–9, 52–3, 55, 58, 64, 70, 82, 138, 139, 145, 198 Müller, Heiner 138, 172, 173 ‘mythological script’ 13, 33, 37, 39–41

Piscator, Erwin 14, 60, 81, 83, 84–5, 89–96, 99, 104–6, 139, 160, 166, 170, 177 political theatre 9, 13, 14, 15, 60, 79, 81–108, 157, 159, 161–71, 175–80, 184 postmodern politics 125–30, 133–5, 155–9, 196, 202 presence 13, 14, 67, 70–7, 117, 119–23, 134, 137, 140–4, 146, 151, 185, 193, 199 Proletkult 90 realism 16, 20, 31n, 37, 45, 57, 64, 83, 91, 96, 97, 101, 140, 145, 160, 182, 203 representation 9, 13, 14, 15, 19, 23n, 31–2, 40, 45–7, 53–6, 59–60, 63, 68, 70–1, 74, 75, 79, 84, 93, 96, 104, 106, 133, 134n, 135–7, 139–49, 151–7, 160, 167, 168–9, 172–3, 180, 182–5, 197, 199, 200, 201, 203 Rorty, Richard 117 Rubin, Jerry 102, 107

Naturalism 41, 47–8, 57, 83–9, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 104, 111 naturalistic theatre 47–50, 52, 54, 55, 61, 83, 84, 85, 90–94 Nazi 82n, 98, 99, 100, 168 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir 54 Nietzsche, Friedrich 86, 129, 137 nostalgia 10–12, 17, 19, 32, 33–5, 68, 72–3, 103, 174, 175, 194, 199

Schechner, Richard 44, 71, 76, 163 Shakespeare, William 139, 166, 174 socialist realism 85, 94, 96 Sorge, Reinhard 86 Spartacus League 90 ‘special’ dialectic 10, 78, 120, 190, 193 specificity 10, 14, 16, 45, 89, 112, 126– 8, 134, 149, 159, 161, 166, 176, 179–80, 182, 191, 193, 198 spectator 43, 45, 67, 69, 71, 83, 97, 99, 105, 107, 108, 135, 136, 142, 143, 145, 146, 150–3, 172, 175–7, 179– 80, 182, 184–5, 197–9, 200, 201, 202, 203 and empathy 92–6 and Yippie 101–2, 104 and Boal 161–8, 171 spect-actor 15, 162, 165, 167–70, 177 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 54

paradigm 9, 12, 16, 17, 23–4, 38, 54, 55, 74, 81, 83, 109, 134, 140, 144, 157, 187, 197–8, 203 performance art 14, 15, 41, 58, 63, 67– 70, 74–5, 133, 147, 148, 161, 177, 184 performativity 12, 126, 131, 198 Picasso, Pablo 56 Pirandello, Luigi 70

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Strindberg, August 53, 86 Surrealism 58, 59, 60, 61, 67, 174

V-effekt 95 Vietnam War 100, 103

television 45, 55n, 104, 105, 107, 174, 175, 198, 199, 201 theatricality 13, 31, 37, 41, 45, 46, 87, 104, 106–7, 135, 139, 141, 142, 150, 151, 156, 173, 174 Toller, Ernst 60, 91 Trotz Alledem! (Piscator) 92 Turner, Victor 76, 148 Tzara, Tristan 63–6

Wagner, Richard 67, 105n, 139 Wedekind, Frank 177 Wilson, Robert 14, 63, 72, 138, 145–6, 151–2, 157, 172, 173, 179 women’s performance art 147–8 Woodstock 68 Wooster Group, 72n, 173, 180–1

undecidability 14, 15, 120–2, 176, 202

Zola, Emile 47–8

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Yippie 14, 101–4, 106–7

S T S S S T A G E

a n d

S C R E E N

S T U D I E S

This series of monographs is concerned with drama and allied entertainment in a wide variety of kinds in the theatre and on film, television and video screens. The emphasis is on the history and interpretation of dramatic entertainment, performance and production in regular and musical theatre, including music hall and variety stages, in para-theatrical activities, like fairground performance and festivals, and in the silent and sound cinema and on television and video. The series engages particularly with the social, political and economic contexts of drama on past and present stages and screens, considering the work of dramatists, performers, directors, designers, technicians and administrators, and will aim to be very wide-ranging in scope, its subjects spanning Classical, Medieval and Renaissance European drama and theatre, Eastern theatre forms, and international modern drama in its various performance kinds. Within this broad remit, the series hopes to publish historical, critical and theoretical studies, annotated anthologies of critical, theoretical and dramatic texts, and collections of interviews and screenplays. Vol. 1 Gabriella Giannachi & Nick Kaye Staging the Post-Avant-Garde: Italian Experimental Performance after 1970 216 pp. 2002. ISBN 3-906769-57-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5869-4 Vol. 2 Alessandro Marcigliano Chivalric Festivals at the Ferrarese Court of Alfonso II D’Este 182 pp. 2003. ISBN 3-906769-65-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5902-X Vol. 3 Robert Leach Stanislavsky and Meyerhold 255 pp. 2003. ISBN 3-906769-79-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5916-X Vol. 4 Stephen Chinna Performance: Recasting the Political in Theatre and Beyond 220 pp. 2003. ISBN 3-03910-000-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5921-6

G. Giannachi & N. Kaye

Staging the Post-Avant-Garde Italian Experimental Performance after 1970 Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt/M., New York, Wien, 2002. 216 pp. Stage and Screen Studies. Vol. 1 General Editor: Kenneth Richards ISBN 3-906769-57-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5869-4 pb. sFr. 62.– / €1* 42.80 / €2** 40.– / £ 26.– / US-$ 37.95 * The €1-price includes VAT and is only valid for Germany and Austria. ** The €2-price does not include VAT.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the emergence of the Italian theatrical post-avant-garde marked a watershed in the development of experimental performance. In its vital mix of aesthetic experimentalism and philosophical and political engagement, the work of directors such as Federico Tiezzi, Mario Martone, Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, and Romeo Castellucci confronted the ubiquitous influence of North American art, performance, and popular culture, while challenging and transforming the European theatrical avant-garde. This book provides the first fulllength English-language study of the emergence and development of this work, its theoretical underpinning, and its impact on contemporary performance theory and practice. In detailed and illustrated analyses of performances by key companies including Magazzini Criminali, Nobili di Rosa/Falso Movimento, Gaia Scienza/Compagnia Teatrale di Barberio Corsetti, and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, this book sets out the postavant-garde’s highly rigorous engagement with concepts of the real, contemporary urban experience, the nature of mass media, and visual and performance art. The book concludes with an exploration of performance by a new generation of companies who have extended this post-avant-garde practice in performances engaging with the aesthetics of theatre, film and new technologies, including Motus, Masque, Teatrino Clandestino, Fanny and Alexander and Egumteatro. PETER LANG Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Oxford • Wien

Marc Maufort

Transgressive Itineraries Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt/M., New York, Oxford, Wien, 2003. 250 pp. Dramaturgies. Texts, Cultures and Performances, Vol. 9. General Editor: Marc Maufort ISBN 90-5201-178-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6601-8 pb. sFr. 47.– / €1* 32.– / €2** 29.90 / £ 20.– / US-$ 29.95 * The €1-price includes VAT and is only valid for Germany and Austria. ** The €2-price does not include VAT.

The fast-growing body of postcolonial drama is progressively gaining its just recognition in the twentieth-century canon of English-language plays. From the vantage point of various samplings along the Trans-Pacific axis linking English Canada, Australia and New Zealand, this monograph seeks to document the significance of this emerging postcolonial theater. More specifically, it examines the myriad ways in which, over the last two decades, representative mainstream, ethnic and First Nations playwrights have dramatized Europe’s «Other» in its multiple guises. In their efforts to match new content with innovative form, these artists have followed transgressive itineraries, redrawing the boundaries of conventional Western stage realism. Their new aesthetics often relies on techniques akin to Homi Bhabha’s notions of hybridity and mimicry. The present study offers detailed analyses of the modes of hybridization through which Judith Thompson, Louis Nowra, Tomson Highway, Jack Davis, Hone Kouka, and other prominent writers have articulated subtle forms of psychic, grotesque, and mythic magic realism. Their legacy will undoubtedly affect the postcolonial dramaturgies of the twenty-first century. PETER LANG Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Oxford • Wien

M. Maufort & F. Bellarsi (eds)

Crucible of Cultures Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt/M., New York, Oxford, Wien, 2002. 343 pp. Dramaturgies. Texts, Cultures and Performances, Vol. 4. General Editor: Marc Maufort ISBN 90-5201-982-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4686-6 pb. sFr. 50.– / €1* 34.20 / €2** 32.– / £ 21.– / US-$ 29.95 * The €1-price includes VAT and is only valid for Germany and Austria. ** The €2-price does not include VAT.

The dawn of a new millennium offers an opportunity to reappraise the achievements of contemporary English-language theatre and drama in an increasingly cross-cultural age. New multicultural voices are gaining access to the international English stage, which today more than ever is becoming a crucible of cultures. The many challenging essays gathered in this volume reflect this developing mosaic. Written by prominent theatre scholars from Europe, the United States, Canada, Asia, and Australia, these contributions explore recent drama not only in the United Kingdom and the United States, but also in such countries of the former British Empire as Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Focusing on major Anglophone dramatists of the past few decades, these essays provide a fascinating survey of the myriad ways in which Englishlanguage drama in transition transcends traditional aesthetic and cultural boundaries.

PETER LANG Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Oxford • Wien