3 SEARCH FOR A GREAT TRADITION IN CULTURAL PERFORMANCES Milton Singer Source: Milion Singer. When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization. New York: Praeger. 1972. pp. 67 80. During a visit to India in 1954 55, I had an opportunity to do a methodological field study in South India. The purpose of this study was to chart an intellectual map of some of the researchable territory that lies between the culture of a village or small community and the culture of a total civilization. This study is not easy to classify in terms of prevailing conceptions about "research." since it falls between the intensive anthropological field study and the purely conceptual types of methodological analysis. But despite its unorthodox character, it seemed an appropriate study to undertake in a new and not-well-known field. Although the study was primarily designed to serve the methodological purpose of giving an empirical content to some very genera] ideas and to suggest concrete hypotheses for further research, it also turned up some substantive findings that have importance on their own account. In this report. I shall mention some of these in passing but will in the main confine myself to the problems of method posed by the study. Before I went to India I already had a fairly explicit framework of ideas for the study of civilizations. Most important of these was the view of a civilization, suggested by Redlield. as a complex structure of a Little Tradition and a Great Tradition.1 Using these ideas, as well as another distinction of Redfield's between "orthogenetie" and "heterogenetie" cities, I had tried to formulate several broad hypotheses concerning the relation of Little and Great Traditions in Indian civilization,2 These were: ' that because India had a "primary" or "indigenous" civilization which had been fashioned out of pre-existing folk and regional cultures, its Great Tradition was culturally continuous with the Little Traditions to be found in its diverse regions, villages, castes and tribes 57 frOLN DAT JONS AM; DI.HMIIONS 2. that ih>s cultural continuity wai> product and cause of a common cuhural consciousness shared b> most Indians and expressed in essential similarities of mental outlook and ethos 3. that this common cultural consciousness has been formed in India *nr. the help of certain processes and factors that also play an important role in other primary civilization* i.e.. sacred books and sacred objects as a fixed point of worship, a special class of literati (Brahmans) who have the authority to recite and interpret the sacred scriptures, professional storytellers, a sacred geography of sacred centers temples, pilgrimage places, and shnnes and leading personalities who b> their identification with the Great Tradition and with the masses mediate the one to the other 4. that in a primarv civilization like India's, cultural continuity with the past is so great that even the acceptance of "modernizing" and "progress" ideologies does not result in linear forms of social and cultural change but may result in the "traditionalizing" of apparently "modern' innov ations In considering how such broad hypotheses might be tested by a field stud;, m India. I got some help and encouragement from several other quarter* One of these was M. N. Srinivass study. Religion and Society Among tht Ctjorg.i <>j South India, from this work I learned that the Great Tradition of Indian civilization might be approximately identified with what SrinrtttS called "Sanskritic Hinduism' and u hat prev jous writers like Momer-W illiams called "Brahmanism" in contrast to popular Hinduism. As Snnivas defines It, Sanskritic Hinduism is the generalized pattern of Brahman practices and beliefs that have an all-India spread, in contrast to those forms of Hinduism with a local, regional, or peninsular spread. From Snnivas s work. too. I learned that Sanskritic Hinduism was not confined to the Brahmans but. as in the case of the Coorgs. might be taken over by non-Brahman groups as pan of an effort to raise their status. To this process Snnivas has given the name "Sanskrilization." and it is obviously an important way in which the Great Tradition spreads from one group and region to another group and region. Other ways of conceiving the relationship of the great Indie civilization to the culture and social structure of a particular Indian village were suggested by Ml Kim Marriott in a seminar that we held in Chicago during the spring of I954.J Between Srinivass conception of Sanskritic Hinduism as a generalized all-India phenomenon and Marriotts description of one village as the locus of interacting Little and Great Traditions, there appeared to me to be a gap which might be filled by a synchronic and functional type of field study- Defining (he unit of field study The unit of field study proved to be much smaller than the "intelligible unit ol Mudy" with which our methodological discussions in the Chicago seminar had dealt namely, a total civilization in its full historical and geographic# 58 GREAT TRADITION IN CULTURAL PLRFOR MANCKS sweep, did not, ol course, expect lo encompass the history of Indian civiliza-tion within a lew observations and interviews carried out over a period of several months. But I must confess I entertained some hope of making contact w.th Indian civilization on an all-India level. The basis of this- as it turned out -naive hope was the assumption that, if Hindu traditions were still cultivated by professional specialists and if Sanskritic Hinduism, at least, had an all-India spread, a strategy selection of the mam types of such specialists should offer a quick access to the structure of the civilization. 1 was not sufficiently familiar with India to feel confident in my selection of the -strategic"' specialists, but. with the help of my reading and the advice of some who knew India better than I did, I obtained introductions to caste genealogists (Bhats) in Uttar Pradesh, a subcaste of bards (Carans) in Rajasthan and Saurastra. some individual sddhus and pandits in Benares, a Sanskritist in Madras, a cultural historian in Bombay, and several political-cultural leaders in New Delhi. While this rather broad geographical spread was in part an accident of the location of my advisers, it seemed to assure a genuine all-India scope to my inquiry. When I arrived in India, I quickly saw that, however strategic such a selection might appear from 10,000 miles away, it did not take sufficient account of the cultural and noncultural realities of the Indian scene. The sheer physical problem of traveling around to these various points in India would leave little time for even a preliminary study of any of these groups. But this was not the decisive obstacle: in the end. I did get to almost all these regions and to several others. A more serious obstacle to my original program arose from the fact that, even if I had been able to make studies of these various groups. I did not see how I could directly relate them to one another and to Indian culture as a whole. Perhaps one deeply learned in the history of Indian civilization and familiar with its regional and local varieties could have brought off such an integration, but to a neophyte the task appeared overwhelming. The regional variations alone were sufficient to give me pause. Indians in the north and south did not speak the same language or identify with the same tradition. Beset by such difficulties. I decided to abandon the plan for an all-India unit of field study and to reformulate a plan that would limit the study to one region. Because I had met in Madras a very knowledgeable Sanskritist sympathetic with the study, and because Madras itself seemed to he a rich center of cultural activities. I selected the Madras area for an exploratory study. This selection, however, still left open a number of other alternatives. Should I set the bounds of the study by the boundaries of the linguistic region, that is, all of the Tamil-speaking country: should I concentrate on a village or a city, or on one group of specialists, or perhaps on one individual or on one institution, like a temple? Had I been doing an intensive field study over a longer period of time. I should probably have chosen the smallest manageable unit and concentrated on it alone. Since I was interested in charting the topography of Indian culture, its general terrain and its different ^untaim valleys, and river sources, such a procedure would have given me too narrow 59 FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS a perspective. For my purpose, it seemed belter to begirt with it rich and Complex cluster of Indian culture so that I could iind representatives of the major kinds of cultural institutions, cultural specialists, and cultural media. Such a cluster was olTered to me by the cultural activities and institutions of the city of Madras and the adjoining towns ol't'onjeeveram, Mahabalipuram. and Chingleput, as well as about six villages on the immediate outskirts of Madras. It is diflicull to characterize such a cluster with any degree of precision, and perhaps it would be futile to try for great precision. It might he characterized geographically in terms of the land area covered and in terms of the different kinds of settlement units included withm it. But since my criteria of selection were not geographical, this characterization would be misleading. The cluster could also be described m terms of political-administrative and cultural categories, Madras is the capital of the state, Chingleput is a district seal. Conjeeveram is an ancient temple and pilgrimage city. These characterizations, although quite apposite, were not the basis of selection. Perhaps the characterization that comes closest to describing my actual unit of field study is that which describes it in social terms as a community of people. For it was primarily the subeaste of Smarta Brahmans in the Madras area whose culture I found myself studying most persistently and intimately. It was their rites and ceremonies, their households, temples, and mathu. their Sanskrit and Ayurvedh colleges, their storytellers, devotees, patrons, scholars, and spiritual leaders that I got to know best. But even this description of the unit is inaccurate. For I did nol set out to study a community of Smarta Brahmans, and because of the dispersed character of this community, I doubt that it would be possible to do a community study on them. Through a series of coincidences, 1 simply found that members of the Smarta Brahman community were also leading representatives of the Great Tradition of Sanskritic Hinduism. While most of these representatives have face-to-face interpersonal relations, the relationships among these representatives alone would be a very fragmentary segment of the social relations to be found in the community as a whole. On the other hand, I was not prevented by a concentration on the Smarta Brahmans from studying other subcastes of Brahmans. like the SrTvaisnavas, or non-Brahmans, like the followers of Tamil Saivism. Sometimes I was led to take notice of these L'out groups" by the Smartas themselves, e.g.. of the non-Brahman performers of classical bharatanatya dancing and Carnatic music, because the Brahmans are patrons and connoisseurs of these arts; sometimes I came upon these other groups quite independently—as in the case of village tolk plays, still performed by lower castes in the villages and in the cities. Defining the units of observation: cultural performances When I got my program of observations and interviews in the Madras area under way. 1 discovered what I suppose every field worker knows, that the a*i n rnAomoN in í » i ruiui n rformancbi turiu a! cogitation an noi nuns ol obeemtioo i hen wes nothing that souU Ih< Mill) labeled ] lUle ImuIkiom oi Qnel liadilion. m Ythos" 01 world view " Instead, i round mynll confronted with ■ leHetol concrete experietieet, thi observation md tioordioi » deliberate!) look fall lot Lhoni but in noticing the eentreltt) end recuneuec ol cenám i\pe\ ol things 1 had observed In the experience ot Indian* ihcmschos 1 shall cull then limine "cultural perfortnancaei11 because they include what we in 1 lis-wvsi usually call bj thai nams foi example, playi. concent, end leotuny itui they Include eleo prayers, ritual reading! end recitation!, rites end own monies. fettlvaJe, mul all thon things we ueuall) chusily undei religion end ritual liiiltei Hum with the cultural mid art i itk in the Madrai em end India generally, I luepect the distinction cannoi in- a iharp ont because the plays are more often than noi baaed on the sacred I pus ami Purines, and ilit concert! and dunces ;uc tilled with devotional tongs 1 h! religious rituals, on 11 ie m he 1 hand. ma> involve the use of musical uisti uments, tonga, and dance muiirns similar to those used m the concerts In cultural ' aitisis." One of the u .himi- Madias newtpapen deil) lists forthcoming cultural events undei 111101- headings: "Discourses." lot religious feeding! and discourses OA the sacred books: "líiilťiInumients." foi pciloniianccs ol plaw dances, and concerts mostly classical; and "Miscellaneous,'1 lot meeting! ol political and prole* sioiuii groups, public lecture! on curreni topics, end reception!. As 1 obaerved the range of cultural perfonnancce (and was illowed, somt- times asked, lo photograph and record them) U scorned to me thai im Indian friends and perhaps all peoples ihoughl ol ilien enliiuc as encapsulated in ihese discrete performances, which they could exhibil to visitors end to ihomselves. i he pciTorniunOt! became loi mo the elcntoniaty constituents of tho Culture and the ultimate units of observation. Inch one had I definite!) limited t«no span, or nt U'jisi a ivginmnn and an end, in organiied program Of activity, 1» sol of performers, in audience, end I place and occasion ol performance. Whether n was a wedding, en h/>iw.nyeae (secred thread) een mony, a floating lomplo festival. 11 village Pmgtl festival, a 111 mil lecUaimn Of i snored text, ti hhtirottwťtlrtt dauoo. Of » devotional movie, thees wan the kinds of things thai an outsidei could obeervc end comprehend within 11 single direct experience, I do nol menu Ihai I could, even with the help ol nun pivlers, always understand eveiylhutg I hut went on at one ot these performance* or uppreciule then fuuciions In (he total lile of ihe community. (.1 FOUNDATIONS IHHNMIONS And sometimes even the "limited'* time span was not limned enough: I was not accustomed to sitting through a four-hour nio\ie. a plav or dc\otional gathering thai lasted all night, or a reading thai took hi teen daw Hut u eon-soled me to obsene that the local audiences did not sit through these stretches of time either; the> would do/e. talk, walk around, go home and conic hack, and find other resources for diverting their .mention el. despite such qualifications, whenever I looked for the ultimate units of direct observation, u ua> to these cultural performances that I turned. \nal\sis of cultural performance* Once the units of observation had been identified. mv interest in the con oeptaal ordering and interpretation of the observed revived How were the cultural performances interrelated so as to constitute "a culture'"? And were there anions them persistent patterns and structures of organization, perhaps diverse patterns of cultural tradition, which were related as Lit tic Tradition and Great Tradition'"' Two tvpes of ordered patterns suggested themselves almost at once as being particulars obvious and natural One grouping included the cultural performances that marked and celebrated the successive stages of the individual life cvclc from birth to death (the rites J< /x;.vvtjg< i. and the other marked nature's cycle of seasons, phases of the moon, and the like. I was somewhat surprised to find, however, that neither grouping had any special prominence in the minds of m> friends and acquaintances. In fact. 1 do not recall a single instance when am one identified a particular cultural performance as belonging to one or the other of these two groups. In formal discussions of the iisranta system and in discussions of I Hi ahinan's duties, the individual life cycle is used as an ordering principle. But this usage in highly abstract and conventionalized and rarelv takes account of the prevailing local ntes and customs When I found that the ordering of cultural performances by these distinct principles was not in the forefront of consciousness of the participants and did not in any case include all of the cultural perfonnances I had observed, I ceased (o regard these principles ascompel-lingly "natural." It occurred to me then that the cultural perfonnances mav be susceptible to a number of different types ol patterning, varying in explicit -ness and degree of significance for cultural analysis. 1 therefore re-examined my materials to see what some of these alternative patterns might be The cultural stage One type of analysis might study the place where the cultural performance occurs. The home, for example, is the center for a fixed cycle of rites, ceremonies, and festivals (including both the life-cycle and nature-cycle riles), and the temple is a center for another set of daily rites and periodic festivals. Thai division is consciously recognized, and there are two quite distinct sets if 62 rtRUT IRM1ITIOS IN (LI 1 I R.U PERFORMANCES ntual functionary. Jomwn, and icmple pneMs. who mas conduct the nies ,n the two places Temples and pilgrimage Place> arc also specialised with respecT 10 thetvpeot deii> To whom thev are dedicated and the kind of motive for which (hey are visited: to have a specific request granted, to fulfil a vow; lo expiate for sins; lo gain spiritual edification, tor example Beyond the home and the temple is the nuihu. not so much a center for cultural performances as a seat of ihe highest spiritual authority of the sect, the taeaJeuru. who approves the annual religious calendar and whose blessings and advice are much sought after. The more secular pertormances or popular culture are put on in public halls before mixed audiences and are usuallv sponsored bv cultural associations or uihhas. when they are not complete!) commercialized. In the villages, thev mav still be performed in the houses of well-to-do patrons or in the temple hall, but there, too. the institution of the community center is introducing a new kind of stage, less closelv tied to individual. caste and sect. In all of these institutions, much goes on that is culturally significant but mav not be pan of an organized cultural performance. This is particularly (rue ol the informal and casual cultural "training" (hat children receive from their parents. But this function, too. is probably being increasingly professionalized and institutionalised in (raining centers -schools. Sanskrit academies, dancing schools. An analysis of cultural performances in terms of their institutional settings would he relatively comprehensive both as to The range of performances and the range of performers and institutions to be found in South India. 1( cannot deal, however, with those types of performance that have no fixed or recurrent institutional base—e.g.. a folk play u?rukkuriu\. uhtch i> given in a village field or city lot. or a group of devotees who sing devotional songs along a street or country road. It also fail* to include certain iv pes of cultural specialists whose primary function is not to participate in or conduct cultural performances bur to give advice about proper times iastrologers) or to supply the necessary props umagemakersi. Thus, a construction of the cultural pattern that starts from institutional sellings would have to be completed with constructions that include n on institutionalized performances and "n on performing" cultural specialists. Cultural specialists One w ants to know more about a cultural specialist than can be learned from watching him perform: his recruitment, training, remuneration, motivation, attitude toward his career, his relation to his audience, patron, other performers, and his community-all matters that can best be discovered b> interview™* the specialist himself While all of these Things cannot be directly observed in the field, some aspects of them can be observed in favorable circumstances, for example, the training process or the performers relation 63 II) LINDA ] IONS AND DEFINITIONS 10 an audience. In the main, however, the analysis of culture in terms of the careers and social roles of the professional cultural specialists is, like the institutional analysis, a construct for analyzing observable cultural performances. Rediield has suggested that such a construct is a specialization and extension of the social anthropologist's constructs of "social structure" and "social organization" to a community of cultural specialists: he therefore has called it the "social organization and the social structure of tradition." The Madras area provided representatives of live types of specialists thai 1 had on my original list as well as a considerable number of others that I had not previously known about. The only type I did not gel to hear or meet were the local bards and caste genealogists, although I was told that there were some in the area. Most of the specialists I interviewed were affiliated with special cultural institutions- temple priests with the temples, domestic priests orpurohhas with household ceremonies. Sanskrit pandits with Sanskrit schools and colleges, a Sanskrit research scholar with the university, and a whole group of reciters, storytellers, singers, dancers, dramatic performers, and instrumental musicians with the cultural associations oxsobhds. The press, the radio, and the movies have also developed new types of cultural specialists in the form of editors, program directors, story writers, and producers, and I interviewed several. As far as possible I tried to observe the performances of these specialists in their respective institutional settings as well as to interview them outside of these settings. There was also a group of cultural specialists, as 1 have already mentioned, without any fixed institutional affiliations, who nevertheless still play an active role in transmitting traditional culture. Among them were a specialist in Vedic mantras, an astrologer, a maker of metal images for temple and domestic shrines, leaders of devotional meetings, and an Ayurvedic doctor. Whether associated with an institution or not, the cultural specialist rarely stands alone. Supporting him are usually other specialists and assistants, a teacher or guru, a patron, an organizer of performances, an institutional trustee, a public critic of the specialty. Occasionally I was lucky enough to interview the several representatives of such a functionally linked senes. e.g., a dancer and her patron, a dance teacher, student dancers, the organizer of a dance school, and a publicist and critic of the classical dance. The patron, organizer, and critic are usually not themselves specialists, although they may know a good deal about a particular specialty and play an important role in setting standards of public taste and criticism. In this respect, they function as cultural policy-makers. I also found cultural policy-makers who assumed responsibility not merely for formulating the aspirations and standards governing a particular cultural specialty but for an entire cultural tradition. The head of a mafha in the region, a svami and sannyasin, highly respected and influential, showed much concern about the future of orthodox Hinduism in the area and throughout India. Another svami. without any institutional affiliation, was through public lectures urging a policy of democratizing the GklSl I K A t > I I III N IS (( | f( |t A I HIKMIKMAMI.S Veda* Such mauers. too were ihe concern ol some people who held political oflicc and who were in .1 pmiiion to alkvi public opinion and I c cola live policy Jkt wciai wr$juiimtim oftrudti'mn in the village In ihe villager, loo. one can hnd cultural policy-makers, especially among individuals associated wuh the introduction of village development plans and extension services The heads of the village development committee* and youth leagues, the social recreation olhcer*. the village-level worker, although primarily concerned with agricultural improvements sanitation, and similar mailers, are alv» a!feeling cultural aspiration* and policies The building of new village school*, community and recreation centers vmiIi then libraries, radio-., and community stages are creating in ihe village single centers of cultural lite that formerl\ revolved around its several temples. The villages lack the variety t»l cultural specialist* 10 he found m ihe cities and towns In the villages I visited j temple pnesi. j domcsiic pnesl. and a schoolteacher seemed to he the usual minimum Several villages had more specialists, but the social organization ol tradition in the village siill differed from thai ol theciiy because it involved les* speciali/ation. less lull-lime and professional act 1 s us .in.I depended more on traveling speciahsis Ironi oihct villages and ncarbv towns In one village, the temple pnesi is also something ol a pandit, a nlual reciter ol sacred texts * singer o1 devotional songs, and an astrologer functions that tend to he rained out bv dillerenl people in Ihe city In this same village a re>klem dramatics teacher train* the village boy* to perform in purintc plays, but he is also a drummer and the village potter. There are no professional dancers, actors, doclors, or image-makers in this village, although residents know about these specialists from having seen them in neighboring villages and towns or occasionally when ihev pass through the village Specialists representative ol the newer mass media the newspaper, radio, and him are ol course nol lo be found in the villages J heard about villages in South India that until recently were the homes of famous musician*, dance teacher*, poet*, and pandits and were active cultural centers Ibis situation is no longer common, however, since it depended 00 grant* of village land* or on grants of temple privileges to families of specialists, tixcept lor the occasional village that i* the *eat ol a famous shnne. the village looks 10 the city and 10 the planning commiilee foi ns cultural specialist* hven the most traditional cultural specialist* told me how then itineraries have shifted from the * illagc* to the town* in the last twrntv vrars because the most educated and "cultured" villagers have moved to the cities and Inwm f>*pilc the declining position of the village an a center for cultural specialists for trveral reason*, one nevenheie** still find* a strong sense ol cultural eon imuriy between villaa* and i«wn I ntil recently, many village* were active toaaÉKBOtf. It & because they rxrtortn Ano know the tw stones that «< Or. 10 pvi it More ^auiKHtsis and more operationally. a MNri anaivsi> d epw and cwran*. **ones »ou*c proCttbry dtociose an iinderismg coowi> I did. simply in a hook This i> not how they learn them and it is not how they think of them There is a sense of intimate familiarity with the characters and incidents in ihe reference* made to Haracandra. Rama and Síta. Knshna. -\nuna. and Prahlada. as it the world of the stones were also the everyday world. Manx children are told theae stones from an earl> ape hs parents and grandparents but this ■>> b\ no means the only way in which they learn them. The verv tissue of the culture i> made from purámc themes Practically every cultural performance includes one «i song, dance, play, recitation, and exposition Characters and wxnes are ever present on the colored lithographs used in homes and public halts wdl as in the brilliantly colored figures on temple lowers, for example, on the modern Srí kapáftsvara temple in Mylaporc. Madras! The cultural and Physical landscapes are literally and imaginatively painted with them. A» I grew familiar with the different ways in which the stones were communicated in ihe Madras area. I realized that ihc modes ol communication trv liRl M I K A Dl 1 ION IN 1 , , I l"R A I |.,HIORMťs lnilwiuhlTť»ťnii..lu.iu>ll\MimasM.ng.daiKV and drama, tne) oonatitutt whai .s popubrt) oomldered -oulturt . md ůmm lorinal dnTcrrutidlumi Mt in (um uell ai.ictilaied with Otta Mf»Ctl ol lha culu.tv and iocict\ l ullural spcv.aliMs. lot cxamplc. a.v disi.nituishod ac-cordmu » ■•■tflf) of ihc d.lVoivnt media in sm^m*. dancing, actimi. nowfedfc ol Sarakrit, technique of dramatu- reduUon, and iho likt Bvaa whcn ■ ptribnMr is i htrediurj ipccialtsl, in> ttatus is not takeo foc granted hui in [vdgod ta ternu oJ Kw proflďtncj in lbe medium Spokcn laneaiage is tho pio cmmeni culím al medium, n i* a conMitucni i>l culturc, sxmhoh/csolomoniN olfvlief and pt adice, and MM adiui\. arncu-latcs \xtlh olhci aspevts ol socuvuliiual oieau./ation Noulmiiuistk media, howexcr.also pla\c\1 an importanl rolem ihcculiural pcrfoimaiícvs I obsened Soni;, daucv. acimt: oul. and ejaphic and plaslic art comhtne in man> fpeyi to npnn and oocnmunkttn um oontool of Indián cultura \ Etud) or tne diiVcivitt fonm of cultura) medu in theii sociál and outturaJ oontexti would, I hcliexc. ívwal Ihem to lx- importanl links in lhal ctiltural coniimnim vxhieh mcludes \illaitc and town. Hiahman and non-Miahman. noith and sout h. ihe modem mass-media cul ture and ihc traditional folk and classic cuhurvs. tho l utle and lho iJrvat l raditions front m\ limited obtwrvntion, I ntc one cvample 10 ttlusiiatc ihc pOSM bdít řCN for such inquuv Ihe Rjnuwtrui is prohahb one of the mosl popul.u s»cml te\ts ii\ the area and is commumcated thioujih a tanci) ol cuhural media One eallcd fřiuthlmnu f\tt*iuuht isadaiK rituál readiAf of a csnto of the Yalmíkt Sanskril ie\t. It is done in ihe household h\ the Brahman householdei oř b\ a speciál Biahman icadei. and at tho temple b\ .i Brahman nviter Ihe readtni: is ooutinucid trnul the entue tcvi is eompleicd. and then a new eyclc of readin^ts vvith the símuo oř anothei tc\1 is bafQfl I htm ealM n I "ntual reading" Kvausc it is i\ prescnbeii rchiitous dut) loi all Bi ahmans; ii is done before a savu\l shnne b\ a Biahman. aiul the coriwt repeiition ol ihe hol) worvls m Síinskni i> as m.^ttani as undemandutíí thetr meaumi! In thesv resrxvts. H metnblcs rcciiatioiw and chantini! of V«4fc IINMlMl and ma\ be constdetxNl I |\iri of the saered culuire \tuMhei fonn ol ivadinc «> evrxvstton lis duel purposc is lo explam the *loi\ in the tvetonal Lmeiiaee ramil. rnxl lo dl ivt monil lossons IVpending on the erudmou ctÚŘjmmŠfm and of his audience, the text k Saltem oi a lamii xersion UUMflIIld OJ I Tamil |wi. Knmbun. aKmt *W )ears afto. I v|v-non uvi.at.ons m MMl^ fitxen in puhhc halls. al.houch lbe) ma) also bc >:.u-n ni P. uate honws and m icmples Bi ahmans most trevmcnil) a.v the ex^unders. but mvn-Bruhmam do u also A ihird fonn. íht k***tkl IBIUI rrsembks ihe secxxnd in usmS expositon narrntion m lanul as Hic chieť mehum but diller* Iron, ,t m •dd.nií relevant so.uw tnm» S*nsknt. Tdujiu. kannada. Hindi, NUmtht, anvl FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS Tamil with musical accompaniment. The performer in the latter case must be something of a singer, a linguist, and an "artist," as well as a dramatic storyteller. This art form is relatively recent in the Tamil country, having been developed about 250 years ago from Maharastrian models. It is practiced by non-Brahmans as well as by Brahmans. and one of the outstanding artists is a woman. Then there is the variety of dance and dramatic forms, traditional and modern, through which themes from the Ramayana are presented. Folk as well as classical forms are used, and both have been adapted to such mass media as the film. A detailed analysis of cultural media would cast much light on the ways in which cultural themes and values are communicated as well as on processes of social and cultural change. The ritual reading in the sacred setting seems to be the oldest form and differs from the others in types of institutional setting, specialists, values expected, and amount of Sanskrit used. Yet it is possible to see strong links of continuity between this form and the less ritualized forms of popular culture. Even the most recent of the mass media, the movies, draws heavily upon the older cultural media and on the common stock of traditional devotional and mythological stories. From field study to the study of a total civilization Some anthropologists advised me before I went to India not to spend much time preparing myself by studying the history of Indian civilization or reading the Indian epics and other texts. A field study, they said, has a strict obligation to record only those realities which the field worker himself can observe within a limited area and what is within the living memory of the people he interviews. Historical and literary research would only clutter the mind with preconceptions and should be done, if at all. after the field work is finished. Although I did not take this advice, the course of the study would seem to justify it: I was compelled to limit my attention to a particular group of people within one region restricted enough to be brought under a single conspectus of interrelations; I had to set aside generic conceptual categories about total civilizations in favor of concrete units of observation like cultural performances: and even the analysis of cultural performances runs in terms of constituent factors such as cultural institutions, cultural specialists, and cultural media, which in part, at least, are amenable to the direct observation and interview of the field worker. Yet the necessity of concrete research does not quite end the story. The purpose of the study was to test some general concepts and hypotheses about Indian civilization as a whole—particularly about the cultural continuity of its Great and Little Traditions across the barriers of village and town, caste and caste, region and region, past and present. How can the results of a limited field study be relevant to hypotheses so general in scope? How can the "cultural pattern of Indian civilization" be found in a regionally delimited GREAT TRADITION ,N C L E T I R U PIRFORMASCIS cultural cluster with a very shallow h.stoncal depth' Must we ihen abandon the civ.hzalional frame of reference or reconsider how a hmiied and func-i.onal held stud> .s relevant to the study of a whole civil.zai.on in its full regional and temporal scope ' Methodologically, there are two different wavs to relate a hm.ted 6eld study to a total civilization. One way is to consider the unit of field studv-whether it be a village or a cluster of vj||age> and towns- as an isolate that contains within it the culture pattern. Once the pattern is delineated for one field unit, it may be compared with the pattern found in similar units in other regions until enough cases are studied to give good measures of central tendency and of the range of variation in patterns To give historical depth to such patterns, it would of course be necessary to supplement the field studies with historical and archaeological studies of similar isolates in the past This procedure results in a view of the cultural pattern of a civilization as a kind of statistical aggregate of the patterns of all the cultural molecules, past and present, that have been isolated for studv. If. however, a civilization is. as Redtield writes, "a great whole in space and in time by virtue of the complexity of organization which maintains and cultivates its traditions and communicates them from the great tradition to the many and ven small local societies w ithin it." then it is doubtful whether the procedure will reveal the required complexity of organization. Within a delimited unit of field study, such as I started with, it was possible to find a variety of cultural institutions, specialists, and media that link Brahman and non-Brahman, villager and townsman, one sect and another, to a common cultural tradition. But if a unit is to disclose the cultural links with the past and with other regions, it cannot be regarded as an isolate but must be considered rather as one convenient point of entry to the total civilization, as one nodule in the organized network of cultural communication to which Redfield refers. Different field studies may of course choose different points of entrv—in terms of size, character, and location - but the interest in comparing their results will be not to count them as instances lor statistical generalization but rather to trace the actual lines of communication with one another and with the past. The general description of this organization in its most embracing spatial and temporal reach will then be a description of the cultural pattern of the total civilization. In closing this preliminary report, I should like to mention several lines of cultural communication that lead out from my chosen unit of field study into other regions and other times The pilgrimage to the Ganges and to other sacred spots is undertaken by many ordinary people, but one also hears of many sannyasins who have been to the Himalayas or who are planning to retire there. Thus does the sacred geography of the land extend cultural consciousness beyond one region. One harikathá artist I interviewed told me that she has performed all over India, as well as in Burma and Ceylon Outside of the Tamil-speaking areas, her audiences rarely understood her 69 FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS Tam.l narration bm never tailed to respond 10 her songs and pantomime because the\ were familiar with the puran.e and epic stones she recited. The links to the past are plentiful in a culture based until recently on the transmission of oral and w nltcn texts within families ol hereditary specialists. An image-maker I interviewed still knew a separate \edie numtra to help him draw each image and occasionally consulted on diftieull points ancem manuals (Silpa&Hras) that had been handed down to him on palm leal manu scripts. Specialists on different l>pes of xa.\(rny as well as on the I'uraiias are >AiH regularh consulted to settle difficult eases, and Vedic prayers and chanting siiII accompany many ntes and ceremonies. To follow up these \ arums strands would require competence in the different regional languages, in Sanskrit, in Indian cultural history, and other subjects, and more time than is usually given to .-. single tield study. 11 is obviously a task that requires cultural historians, linguists, and Sanskntists, as well as held anthropologists. Occasionally one finds, especially among the cultural leaders and scholars of Tamilnadu, persons whose outlook seeks to comprehend the total pattern of Indian civilization and to define its Cireat Tradition. A Sanskrit scholar, a Smarta Brahman, sees Sanskritic and Vedic Hinduism as the Ureal 1 nidi -tion that has in ihe course of history incorporated many elements of folk and regional cultures not included in the Vedic one. He sees the formative process us a constructive Sanskriti/alion thai has conserved e.Mstinii practices and customs, has reduced a bewildenng mass lo some cultural homogeneity, and has resulted in a refinement and "civilization" of lower practices. A Vaisnavite Brahman pandit, on the other hand, spoke of two lines of tradition that lie had inherited: one "familial and spiritual" Ihe Vedic—and the other ''spiritual only"—Vaisnavism. The latter has its scriptures, rituals, temples, nuitiias, saints, and functionaries thai overlay a Vedic foundation and that he shared with non-Brahman Vaisnavites. A non-Brahman Saivite scholar made the cleavage between the Vedic and Tamil traditions sharper still. Respectful to the former, lie identified with a Saivism whose medium was Tamil and whose institutions, practices, and beliefs were, as he described them, largely non^Brahman and non-Sanskntic. And then there are individuals who speak only of a great Tamil and Dr.i vidian tradition and who actively reject the Vedic and Sanskritic tradition as cunning impositions of a northern, Aryan, Brahman "fifth column." Representatives of this group, pursuing a program of de-Sanskritization, have rewritten the Ramayana, as a drama in which Ravana is the southern hero, and Rama the northern villain. All of these views represent in one sense "autodefinitions" of the Great Tradition, since they all begin from some special vantage point-usually mhen.ed-of occupation, caste, sect, and region. But they can also serve, especially the more scholarly and informed among them, as valuable guides in the effort to add regional scope and historical depth to a limited field 70 ORE A1 IIUDIIION IN CULTURAL PL k I ORMANCES Notes 1 Robert Redfield, "The Social Organization of Tradition." FED 15 No I (November, 1955): 13-21. 2 Robert Redfield and Milton Singer, "The Cultural Role of Cities." EDCCl No. 1 (October, 1954): esp. 64-73. 3 Srinivas. Coorgs (see note 15 to Chapter 2. above). 4 McKim Marriott, "Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization," in Marriott, ed.. 17 (see note f>. Introduction to Part One). 5 Redfield. "Social Organization ol Tradition " 6 Oscar Lewis. "Peasant Culture in India and Mexico: A Comparative Analysis." in VI. 7 An ancient manual on the classical dance beautifully expresses this organic interrelationship of different media: "The song should be sustained in the throat: its meaning must be shown by the hands; the mood (bhSva) must be shown hy the glances: time [Jala) is market! by the feet. For wherever the hand moves, there the glances follow; where the glances go. the mind follows; where the mind goes, the mood follows: where the mood goes, there is the flavour (roifl).M The Minor of Gesture Being the Abhinnya Darpana oj Xumhke.wtmi. trans, hy Ananda K. Coomaraswamv and Duegirala Gopalakrishnayya (New York: E. Weyhe. 1936), p. 35. K Redfield, ■'Social Urbanization of Tradition." 71 Kl II'Al PK AM A AS "HUB S,.....kowwih »«uch In iho simple expedient ol nwuf us ihe nla> uni'ut, is lhal o| Hamlet as the "wwnlisi," a man humous lo NOijjh all the ohieviisc eudeuvc pnoi to the «et. Amoiiji olhei things, it has been pointed out, thciv w.is ilk- Vn-ntiú1 ptohlem las so conceited wilhin ihs" belieľst Olli rent tn Shakespv.ue s daM ol deietmimnn whelhei llu- jihosi w.*s rtvth the voice of his ľathci oi a *aUum vKwpuon. And Hamlet, as pie|Mia lion loi Ins aei, mnployi\t the stolid Hoi Mint and the ruse ol ihr pU\ withm a-pla\ as "rtmiuih." lo mukr miiv lhal his mtei pictntion ol t he sivne w as not ľnlldi/mux, oi as v\c nu^hi sa\, "šub.nvU\ť l" n not Kl TI A L DRAMA AS [U If The object.on may be raised lha. -hiatorictJly" the ritual drama ,s w the I r-lorm II one does not conceive oi ritual drama in a restrict sen* (but allows lor a "broad mterpretation* wherebj ■ tireek goat^on* and a savage dance to tom-toms m behalf of fertility, rain, or vioton could be put in the same bm). a good argument could be adduced, even on the historical, or genetic, interpretation of the Ur-form However, iron, mj pomt ol v.ew. even it il were proved beyond all question that the rituaJ drama is not b> any means the poetic prototype from which all oihc lorms ol poetic and critical expression have successrvel) broken off (as dissociated fragments each made "efficknt" within its own rights), im proposal would be in no way impaired. Let ritual drama be proved, tor instance, to be the last form historical]) developed; or lei u be proved io have arisen anywhere along the line. There would be no embarrassment: we could contend, tor instance, thai the earlier forms were but groping towards it, as rough drafts, with the ritual drama as the perfection of these trends while subsequent forms could be treated as "departures" from it. a kind of "aesthetic fall." The reason for our lack of embarrassment is that we are not upholding this perspective on the basis of historical or genetic material We are proposing it as a calculus—a vocabulary, or set of coordinates, that serves best for the integration of all phenomena studied by the social sciences. We propose il as the logical alternative to the treatment of human acts and relations m terms of the mechanistic metaphor (stimulus, response, and the conditioned reflex). And we propose it. along with the contention that mechanistic considerations need not be excluded from such a perspective, bul take their part in u. us a statement about the predisposing structure of Ú\c ground or scene upon which the drama is enacted.' Are we in an "Augustinián" period or a "Thomistie" one? "Faith" cannot act relevantly without "knowledge" "knowledge" cannot act at all without "faith." But though each requires the olher. there is a difference of emphasis possible. The great political confusion of the present, which is matched in the poetic sphere by a profusion of rebirth rituals, with a great rise of adolescent characters as the bearers of "representative" roles (adolescence being the transitional stage par excellence), gives reason to believe that we are in a kind of "neo-evangelieal" era, struggling to announce a new conception of purpose. And we believe that such a state of affairs would require more of the "Augustinián" siress upon the agon, the contest, with knowledge as the Hamletic preparation for the act required in this agon. Scientific pragmatism, as seen from this point of view, would be considered less as a philosophical assertion per se than as the lore of the "complicating factors" involved in any philosophic assertion. Il would be a necessary admonitory adjunct lo any philosophy and thus could and should be engrafted as an essential eorrect.vc ingredient in any philosophy; its best service is in admonishing us what to look out for in any philosophic assertion. 73 NDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS u -J.—ih^ "dialectic" is obvious Plato's The relation between the drama and the diaietiK i dia£t* *a> appropriated written ,n the mode ot ntual drama It is con-ttZ^JLL,. or nunnery ofphilosoph. assert .on. ,hewa>s tn which an .dea m developed b> the -cooperative competition ol the pariu-mentarv.- Inimical assertions are invited to collaborate in the rvrtcvtmg ot the assertion In tact, the greatest menace IP dictatorships lies in the lact thai, ihroueh their "emciencv" ,n silencing the enemy, thev deprive themselves ol competitive collaboration. Their assertion lacks the opportunity to mature throush "agonistic" development. Bv putting the quietus upon then oPPon-ent thev bring themselves all the more rudely against the nmj/i.vMvwMe opponent, the opponent who cannot be refuted, the nature ol brute reality Hself. In so far as their chart of meanings is inadequate as a description ol the scene, it is not equipped to encompass the scene. And bv silencing the opponent, u deprives itself of the full value to be got from the "collective revelation" to the maturing of which a vocal opposition radical!) contributes And there is a "collective revelation." a social structure of meanings bv which the individual forms himself. Recent emphasis upon the great amount of superstition and error in the beliefs of sa\ ages has led us into a false emphasis here. We have tended to feel that a whole collectivity can be "wrong" in its chart of meanings. On the contrary, if a chart of meanings were ever "wrong." it would die in one generation. Even the most superstition-ridden tribe must have had many very accurate ways of sizing up real obstacles and opportunities in the world, for otherwise it could not have maintained itself. Charts of meaning are not "right" or "wrong" they are relative approximations to the truth. And only in so far as they contain real ingredients of the truth can the men who hold them perpetuate their progeny. In fact, even in some of the most patently "wrong" charts, there are sometimes discoverable ingredients of "rightness' that have been lost in our perhaps "closer" approximations. A ntual dance for promoting the fertility of crops was absurd enough as "science" (though its absurdity was effectively and realistically corrected in so far as the savage, along with the mummery of the rite, planted the seed; and if you do not abstract the rite as the essence of the event, but instead consider the act of planting as also an important ingredient of the total recipe, you see that the chart of meanings contained a very important accuracy). It should also be noted that the rite, considered as "social science," had an accuracy lacking in much of our contemporary action, since it was highly collet live in its attributes, a group dance in which all shared, hence an incantatory device that kept alive a much stronger sense of the group's consubstantiality than is stimulated today by the typical acts of private enterprise In equating-dramatic ' with "dialectic," we automatically have also our perspective for the analysis of history, wh,ch is a "dramatic" process, involving dialectical oppositions. And if we keep t„w always j„ mind, we are reminded £ZZl em bcquea!rhed us b> »»«°ry must be treated as a strawy for encompassing a muauon. Thus, when considering some document like the RITUAL DRAMA AS "HUB" American Constitution, we shall be automatically warned not to consider it in isolation, but as the answer or rejoinder to assertions current in the situation m which it arose. We must take this mto account when confronting now the problem of abiding by its "principles" in a situation that puts forth questions totally different from those prevailing at the time when the document was lormed. We should thus claim as our allies, in embodying the "dramatic perspective;" those modern critics who point out that our Constitution is to be considered as a rejoinder to the theories and practices of mercantilist paternalism current at the time of its establishment.'1 Where does the drama get its materials? From the "unending conversation" that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument: then you put in your oar. Someone answers: you answer him; another comes to your defense: another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. It is from this "unending conversation" (the vision at the basis of Mead's work) that the materials of your drama arise/ Nor is this verbal action all there is to it. For all these words are grounded in what Malinowski would call "contexts of situation." And very important among these "contexts of situation" are the kind of factors considered by Bentham. Marx, and Veblen, the material interests (of private or class structure) that you symbolically defend or symbolically appropriate or symbolically align yourself with in the course of making your own assertions. These interests do not "cause" your discussion: its "cause" is in the genius of man himself as homo ioqiwx. But they greatly affect the idiom in which you speak, and so the idiom by which you think. Or, if you would situate the genius of man in a moral aptitude, we could say that this moral aptitude is universally present in all men, to varying degrees, but that it must express itself through a medium, and this medium is in turn grounded in material structures. In different property structures, the moral aptitude has a correspondingly different idiom through which to speak. By the incorporation of these social idioms we build ourselves, our "personalities," i.e.. our roles (which brings us again back into the matter of the drama). The movie version of Shaw's Pygmalion shows us the process in an almost terrifyingly simplified form, as we observe his heroine building herself a character synthetically, by mastering the insignia, the linguistic and man-nerislic labels of the class among whom she would, by this accomplishment, POUNDATIONI AND DM-INI 1 symbolically enroll herself tw,th the prom.se that this symbol.e e.i.olhncm would culmmate .n objective, matenal fulfillment I In Ms simplicity ilw plav comes close to heresy, as migh. be revealed bv matching it with a coun.e. heresv Joyces individualistic, absolutist. "dictatorial' establishment o| a language from within Shaw's heroine, in making her sell over h> aiiiliciallv acquiring an enqueue of speech and manners. ,s mic. nal.z.ng the external (the term is Mead's). But Joyce is "externalizing the internal I call bOtfl of ihese "heresies because I do not take a heresv to be a Hal opposition to an orthodoxy (except as s<» made to appear under the "dialectical pressure" arising from the fact thai the I wo philosophies may become insignia of opposed material lorces); I lake a heiesv rather to be the isola lion of one strand in an orthodoxy and its follow mg-through-wiih-ialional elheiency to the point where "logical conclusion" cannot be distinguished from *Wm no adahsurdum " An orthodox" statement here would require us la consider complementary movements: both an internalizing of the external and an externalizing of the internal. Heresies tend to present themselves as arguments rather than as dictionaries. An argument must ideally be consistent, and tactically must at least have the appeurantr ol consistency But a dictionary need not aim at consistency: n can quite comfortably locale a mean by terms signalizing contradictory extremes.'1 The broad outlines of our position might be codified thus: (1) We have the drama and the scene of the drama. The drama is enacted against a background (2) The description of the scene is the role of the physical sciences: the description of the drama is the role of the social sciences. (3) The physical sciences are a calculus of events: the social sciences are a calculus of acts. And human a flairs being dramatic, the discussion of human affairs becomes dramatic criticism, with more to be learned from a study ol tropes than from a study of tropisms. (4) Criticism, in accordance with its methodological ideal, should attempt to develop rules of thumb lhat can be adopted and adapted (thereby giving it the maximum possibility of development via the "collective revelation." a development from first approximation to closer approximation, as against the tendency, particularly in impressionistic criticism and its many scientilic vanants that do not go by this name, to be forever "starling from scratch") (5) The error of the social sciences has usually resided in the attempt to appropriate the scenic calculus for a charting of the act. (6) However, ihere is an interaction between scene and role. Hence, dramatic criticism lakes us inlo areas lhat involve the act as "response" lo the scene Also, although there may theoretically be a common scenic background for all men when considered as a collectivity, the acts of other persons become part of the scenic background for any individual person s act (7) Dramatic criticism, in the idiom of theology, considered the individual's act with relation to God as a personal background. Pantheism proclaimed 76 RITl AL DRAMA AS "hlb" the | 1 J1lB or th.s divo* role U . whereas theologv treated the seen* ttmction ot Nature as a "representative* of God. panther made the natural Wkground identical wnh God ii narrowed the circumference of the eon-tot in which the act would be located. Naturalism pure and simple sought to eliminate the role of divine part.dpat.on completed thouch often with theological vestige*, as w.th the "God-function" implicit in the idea of "progressive evolution, where God now took on a -fetsmt» role himoiv however, deals wnh events." hence the increasing tendencv in the social sciences to turn from a calculus of the act to a "pure" calculus of the event. Hence, in the end. the ideal of stimulus-response nsvcholoey. (8) Whatever may be the character of existence in the physical realm, this realm (unctions but as scenic background when considered from the stand point of the human realm. I.e.. it functions as "lifeless.* as mere "property for the drama. And an ideal calculus for charting this physical realm must treat 11 as lifeless (in the idiom of mechanistic determinism\. But 10 adopi such a calculus for the charting o! life is to chart b\ a "planned incongruity" (i.e.. a treatment of something in terms of what it is nor) (9| The ideal calculus of dramatic criticism would require, not an incongruity, but an inconsistency I.e.. it would he required to employ the civ>rdinaies of both determinism and free w ill. (10) Since, like biology, n is in a realm midway between vital assertions and lifeless properties, the realm of the dramatic i hence of dramatic criticism | is neither physicalist nor anti-phy-sicalisi. but physicalist-plus. Narrowing our discussion from consideration of the social drama in general to mailers of poetry in particular, we may noie that the distinction between the "internalizing of ihe external and the externalizing of the internal' involves two different functions of imagery: imagery as confessional and imagery as incaniatory, ihe two elements that John Crowe Ransom has isolated from Aristotle's Poetics in his chapters on The Cathartic Principle" and "the Mimetic Principle." Imagery, as confessional, contains in itself a kind ot "personal irresponsibility, as we may even relieve ourselves of pnv ate burdens by befouling the public medium. If our unburdening attains an audience, it has been "socialized" by the aci of reception. In us public reception, even the most excremental" of poetry becomes "exonerated" thence the extreme anguish of a poet who. w mine "with maximum efficiency * under such an aesthetic, does not attain absolution by ihe suffrage ol customers I. But we must consider also ihe "incantatory ' factor in imagery: its function as a device for inviting us to "make ourselves over in ihe image of ihe imagerv " Seen from this point of view a thoroughly "confessional" art may enact a kind of "individual salvation at the expense of the group Quite as the development of the "enlightenment m the economic sphere was from a collective to an individual emphasis (with "private enterprise as ihe benign phase of an attitude which has its malign counterpart in the philosophy ot "sotnr qui peui and the devil take the hindmosTl. so have mass rituals 77 FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS tended to be replied by individualist revisions, with many discrmuna-ons th adjust them with special accuracy to the particular needs ol their n en or nd "signer"; while this mode in turn attains Ms log,,, conclusion or eduction to absUy in poetry having the ™— efficiency, a kind of Uterary metabolistic process thai may sal si> h la needs oľthe Poet well enough, but through poct.c pa-ages iliat leaxe oil. 1 ,n their train Such puns seem lo have been consciously exploited by Joyce when he is discussing his ars poetica io Famegans Wake, hence should be considered hv any reader looking for the work's motivations (i.e.. the center about which its structuie revolves, or the law of its development) Freud s "cloacal theory would offer the simplest explanation as to the ways in which the sexually private and the exerementallv private ma> become psychologically merged, so that this theme could be treated as consubstantial with the theme of incest previously mentioned. For if we test the efficient confessional (as perhaps best revealed in a writer like Faulkner) from the standpoint of the incantatory (from the standpoint of its exhortation to "crane on" and make ourselves over in the image ol its unagen I, we quickly realize its sinister function, from '.he standpoint of overall social necessities. By the "incantatory" test, a sadistic poetry, when reinforced by the imaginative resources of genius, seems to be a perfect match, in the aesthetic sphere, to the "incantatory" nature of our mounting armumeni in the practical or political sphere, or to the efficiency of newspaper headlines (got by the formation and training of worldwide organizations devoted to the culling of conflicts, calamities, cataclysms, and atrocities "rationally" selected from the length and breadth of all human society, and given as our "true" representation of that day's "reality"). Confessional efficiency, in its range from poem to report, has given rise to an equally fallacious counter-efficiency which, recognizing the incantatory function of imagery, diligently selects for "reassuring" purposes. Hence, the confessional emphasis of the nineteenth century was "dialectically complemented" by an aesthetic of easy optimism, merging into the sentimental and hypocritical, making peace with the disasters in the world by flatly decreeing that "alls right with the world." I think that much of Whitmans appeal resides m this poetic alchemy, whereby the dangerous destruction of our natural resources could be exaltedly interpreted as an "advance"-while simple doc- "ľiľnľifiľbiľ11" inCVitable pr0gľeSSÍVe eVolution were '-Plica in the So in sum. we had two opposite excesses: the "cathartic" poetry which « intľSr ľ"' °f SPC" b> lranSrCmng * tons ££ - ľof r i" tVDľhSCaPah,eK°fdOÍn8 S° US thc AnCÍCIlt M-i-r got a ľe wedd^ĽZfľ T", ' 1 lrans*™« from himself to thattrtľ 4b™"r P,'0ťS ^ 11 ÍS M as the "aesthetic ofa -ľ "í « ^ Pr°pOSC lo sum UP uneKoe story, a monotonia art. from which the reader 78 KIM \ I UK y\| y ^ v -m n-OMtjetponl) b) ivtt.s.iUw being "wholcsoiivb im i.iľ' enough UMVspond bill stl|VltMalb lo I hi poets ItUailUltoils \,ut vw |Ui1 A mmu.,K pottf) thai did proceed on tkw ntcoyniuori ot the inoantator) nutJit; lit lintm function in inviting ms m ftt&unti, Um ftttiiudes corresponding toto gest um), but wasdisposod lowatds the Itmlff) Oj ilu- ideahsne Ik." m simpb tenant tag it o\ii as • )1xhhI. esttbusJúng sotten k mtakaJ decree Perfctpe the suu.inon is most ,k';iiK reveeted in mi, i« the grtdutl change ťwn ■'Mini*iu»ii\"io"itMn'iwiii, with i ivt ^tnunportinl Motu» m the chenge 'he lyinphonw tom conteined .1 m." u.n 1 humph." ml "wa\ oni " It WMghl (o place i s|vll ofdangei upon us. nut m the Mtertton oi us rtthiit io relttte u* from ihis s|vii ftui tin tem poem iwugjhi jo íiWwwi»míA\mh\ HHfft lo KtVS us sink Ivnoaih ihe giotuid erfffc Alphetis and newi W twmm jío wtil» \teilnua li sought 10 Sen f/, /i tis mul om oitl\ protection against u wt* etthei imi.dm ol responv 0i nucenou h\ a hun died Olhet Wltehews, ,1 general cltlliei of spells, so tailing tCTOSf CUM anothet on ilw has ihai m thou contusion the) somewhat netitiali.od tlie ctUvts ot ono auoihei \v tcgauls ihe bouleiluw m which the symbolic tet ol ait o\ et laps upon the tyenbotic act »n hic. i would now öltet tn eneedot« itlustfittve of spells, and how one might seive the emb oi freedom, not h\ the attempt to eliminate spells (which I constdci impossible) but b\ a entice] attempt 10 WWh "good" spells A man is. lei us *a\ . subject to spells of alcoholic del\iuchoi\ I ot mitks he subsists, tn :t di tigged Mtipoi Mlet winch he recovers, is "puttlied." and lot vamug lengths of tunc njionmsb abstains Iumh «tleohoi He illso has a s|vuultc jitfl toi wuttitf Itut he eaunot Misiám this happiei KiikI A spell aiul when he reltpeet into ;m itlc\>bok dcKmeh. he tuts tu^ PUMU piywenoftrtfcnritf) than tetbhtce, HielViendset) thai hti wts&ntss fiel Akvhol ts ctadnalb deitrO} ut>; his »;itt for w tut«*!; and he als\> RJM* thts to Iv the ease Vhcti unci ptvtation seems bot nc ottl b\ a cvaivlation K'twcvn the two kttuls orIhe nuthgu jiirt lor" alcoholism and the hesdgfl 1 ivlaivscs into" wtumg lot sflei he has eiuh\1 ;» debauch, and Ints aManuxt fiotu akt>hol lot a lune. Ins luemv aptness ivhitns Me is cspvvialb apt. let us sa>, tn deptcimjs the citrivnt scene b\ « Idictious «wist ^>l humor thai pH ihiujís pictinvv%nicK <»wi\ Vnd when the bcnijin Mvll is ujviMt bun, some \ei\ a^vahivtí sqtitKs ihts sou oevui io htm I hen he is hrtPf> *»iut hts IikíkIs bejnn to renew then hopes tor htm ľhe> tvstu irtentsfhes assivt Ktnt tn iviuni' the items pubhstu\l Hut whai I tin* wrifLnton hetwven tlw nwltjin :tkvholtv s|vll and the benijin lnetat> s|vU should be dtlVetvnils itttetpiete\i? Whet il the\ sre but ditlctvnt siAjtes alotijt the saute plaval sews, different r**Us of t»w Sitnte *twirum,ř Ihe hierstA etlt of leih nous disiotuon woviM ihu> lxi bul an hkipkmu ntamlcstaiion of Ute evircme dtstoitions jiot b\ akvbol Hence, when out ■0 I (11 N I) A I IONN ANI) IM ľ I N I I H • N S ho.o«i\ws hisiquibi......c batiefihi.....-v i« H" apposit* oi hli eloohollam, herna) reall) be turning to the kind of incantation thai acta ee the "way tV to hti period of debauch, Preoieelj when he.....iki In- is on Um road m recovery, h« would hive heaim the lirsi stage oi yielding the iquibi, Utni is, are m his ntychk eoonomj ■ wpreeentnUve ol the alcohol; ihey aw pan of the lame eluifctr; they foiwtíon lynoodoohloally. and ihui contain m 111111111 \. as "foreahndowing/1 the whole ol the cluatet I ience, m *......y them, he is taking alcohol dearioualy I hii is not to it) thai the iquibe an a more "lttbUmalion" ol alcoholism; you could will) more niMin lay Unit the alcoholism is a more "efficient*1 ■mbodlmeni oi the Mitheik exemplified in theaquibi What La got In miterkliitic manipulation through the taking of the alcohol, *vv opere o/ierow," is buf the attainment, in i sun phlied, loslin led idiom, of the effects gol in B mote complex idiom through the writing oi the iquibe i he I nim formuie is borrowed bom theological controvert) about the nature ol the lacrament In pagan magic, the material operationi of the laeramenl were deemed enough to produce the put iftcation, Ritual puriAca lion was ii "seienlilic" process, with the purifying effect! got simply b) the rhatrrfol optrutkutí of the rite. No matter of conscience was involved: no pnvale "belief" was thought necessary 10 I he success ol the lite. I he punhca lion w.is, laihci, (lioughl to opW ale hke (he cures of modern medicine 11 mm I he mere jvi forming of t he correct ma lei lal acts themselves) ns the effects ol eaatOI Oil are the same with "believer" and "nonheliovci" alike Theological tacticians had the problem of taking over the "seienlilic" magic ol paganism tind introducing a religious emphasis upon 1lic need of conscience 01 belief as a facioi m the effectiveness of the rite, wilhoiii therein implying that the rite was purely "'symbolic." The magical doctrine was " realistic": and similarly, the religions sacrament was "realistic" (that is, the rile was held miJIv to have transubstantiated lbe holy wafers and I he wine into ihe hodv and blood of Christ: the net was not deemed merely "symbolical." excepi among schismatics; it was as materialistic a means of purification as castor oil, yet at the same time its effective operation required the collaboration ol belief, is castor oil docs not; the effect could not be gol, as with pagan magic and seienlilic mnimahsm. through Ihe objective operation alone, i.e.. r\ optTuto). We liiul this delicate state of indeterminacy m ihe relation between the Nquihs and the alcoholism, though the "piety" here is of u son dilleivnt from thai considered us the norm by orthodox Christian theologians: a piet) more in keeping perhaps with the genius ol Ihicchanlic services, the cull ol methodic distortion lhal stressed the element of IViupic obscenities and hnally became sophisticated, alembicated, and attenuated in comedy. Ihe writing ol the squibs corresponds to the stage aimed at hv the theologians u «s n material operation, yet at the same time it requires "belief " I he alcoholic Htage in purely materialistic, the results now bemg attamed cllk-iciilh In the real power ol Ihe suhntimcc alone. HO JUTUAL UkAMA AS "HI B" But note the .ronic clement her.. If the writing of the squibs is in the same equation;.] structure with the taking of the alcohol. ,n writing the squibs ,t is as though our hero had "taken his fir* drink." This is the one thing he knows he must not do. For he knows that he is incapable of moderation, once the first drink has been taken. Bui if the squibs and the alcohol are in the same cluster, he has vicariously taken the first drink in ihe very act which, on its social face, was thought by him and his friends to belong in an opposing cluster. Thus, he has begun his *Vuy in/' He has begun infecting himself with a kind ol incantation that synecdochically foreshadows, or implicitly contains, Ihe progression from this less efficient, ritualistic yielding to an efficient, practical yielding: he has begun the chain of developments thai finally leads into alcohol as the most direct means for embodying the same aesthetic of distortion as was embodied in his squibs. The irony is that, if he wanted to guard properly against relapse, instead of writing the squibs, he would resolutely refuse to write them. He would recognize that, however it may be in the case of other men. in his case he conjures forth a djinn (or, if you will, gin) thaL will come at his beckoning but will develop powers of its own, once summoned. He may know the magical incantations that summon il; but he does noi know the magical incantations that compel it to obey him, once it has been summoned; hence, let him not summon it. Would this mean that our hero should not write at all? I do not think so. On the contrary. I think it means that he should attempt to coach some other kintl of writing, of ti different inamuttory qtuility. From this kind he would rigorously exclude the slightest distortion, no matter how appealing Hitch distortion might be. tor him. such disionions are to the category of intemperance, regardless of what category they may be in for others. Only thus, by deliberately refusing to cultivate such incantatory modes, would he be avoiding a "way in" lo a dangerous state of mind and utilizing a mode of incantation truly oppositional to his weakness.' We are not proposing here a mere literary variant of Buehmanism. We take it for granted that our hero's alcoholism is also interwoven with a material context of situation, which has become similarly endowed with "incantatory" quality, and must be critically inspected from ihe standpoint of the possibility that many environmental ingredients would also require alteration. We do hold, however, that environmental factors which one is personally unable to change can be given a different incantatory quality by a change of one's relationship towards them (as with a change of allegiance from one band to another). It is. then, my contention, that if we approach poetry from the standpoint of situations and strategies, we can make the most relevant observations aboui both the content and the form of poems. By starting from a concern with the various tactics and deployments involved in ritualistic acts of membership, purification, and opposition, we can most accurately discover "what is going SI FOUNDATIONS AND [DEFINITIONS on" in poetry. I contend lhat the -'dramatic perspective" is the unifying hub for this approach. And that it is not to be "refuted;' as a calculus, by introducing some "argument" from logic or genetics, or simply by listing a host of other possible perspectives: the only serviceable argument for another calculus would be its explicit proclamation and the illustrating of its scope bj concrete application. I do not by any means maintain that no other or better calculus is possible. I merely maintain that the advocate of an alternative calculus should establish its merits, not in the abstract, but by "filling it out," by showing, through concrete applications to poetic materials, its scope and relevance. Some students, however, seem to feel lhat this perspective vows us 10 a neglect of the "realistic" element in poetry. Its stress upon processes of ritual and stylization, they feel, too greatly implies lhat the poet is making passes in the air. mere blandishments lhat look silly, as tested by the "realistic" criteria of science. In the first place, I would recall my distinction between "realism" and "naturalism," as a way of suggesting that much we call "realism" in science should be more accurately called "naturalism." In the aesthetic field, "naturalism" is a mode of "debunking." Where some group ideal is being exploited for malign purposes (as when the scoundrel has recourse to patriotism in cloaking his unpatriotic acts), the "naturalist" will proceed "efficiently" by debunking noi only the scoundrel but the patriotism. Or he will "debunk" the religious hypocrite by "debunking" religion itself. Thurman Arnold's "scientific" analysis of social relations in his Folklore of Capitalism is largely of this "naturalistic" cast, leading him finally to a flat dissociation between the "scientist" and the "citizen." To act as a "citizen," by his criteria, one must participate in certain forms of political mummery. But to diagnose as a "scientist." one should simply "expose" this mummery. Now, 1 grant thai there is much faulty mummery in the world (indeed, I propose to wind up this discussion with a little burlesque revealing some of it). But where a structure of analysis is found to vow one to a flat antithesis between one's role as scientist and one's role as citizen, we should at least consider the possibility that the structure of analysis itself may be at fault. And I think that the distinction between the strategies of "realism" and "naturalism" may provide us with a handy way in to this matter. Scientific "naturalism" is a lineal descendant of nominalism, a school that emerged in ihe late Middle Ages as an opponent of scholastic realism. And we might sum up the distinction between realism and nominalism, from the standpoint of strategies, by saying that realism considered individuals as members of a group, whereas nominalism considered groups as aggregates of individuals. We thus observe lhat the nominalist controversy, finally incorporated in the Franciscan order, prepared for scientific skepticism in undermining the group coordinates upon which church thought was founded, and also prepared for the individualistic emphasis of private enterprise. 82 RITUAL DRAMA AS HIB" ( his individualiiik: emphasis bd .n turn to naturahsm. Thus, i should call Dos I'assos a naturalist rather than a reahst. And I should call the "hard-boiled style today a kind of "academic school of naturalism" (a characterization suggesting that Steinbeck's social.t> ,s still encumbered bv "nonicalistic" vestiges I. As used by Arnold, the naturalist-nominalist perspective hnallv leads Ui the assumption 111,il the devices employed in a Kroup act air mere ■■illusions.'' and that the "scientific truth'' ahout human relations is discovered from an individualist point of view, from outside the requirements of group action. One reviewer, intending to praise his book, hit upon the most damning line of all. in calling it a "challenge to right, center, and left." which is pretty much the same as saying that it is a "challenge to any kind of social action. Hut let us try out a hypothetical case Suppose thai some disaster has taken place, and that 1 am to break the information to a man who will suffer from the knowledge of it. I he disaster is a hu r. and J am going to i umonon, ,<■;<■ rhi\ fait. Must I not still make a choice of stylization in the communication of this fact? I may communicate it "gently" or "harshly," for instance. I may try to "protect" the man somewhat from the suddenness of the blow; or 1 may so "slrategize" my information that I reinforce the blow Indeed, it may even be that the information is as much a blow to me as it is to him. and that I may obtain tor ntvself a certain measure of relief from my own discomfiture by "collaborating with the information": I may so phrase it that J lake out some of my own stillermg from the mformation by using it dramatically as an instrument for siriking him. Or I may offer a somewhat similar outlet for both of us. by also showing thai a certain person "is to blame" for the disaster, so that we can convert some of our unhappmess into anger, with corresponding relief to oursdvo* Now, note lhat in every one of these eases I have communicated "the fact." Yet note also that there are many different styles in which I can communicate this "fact." The question of "realistic accuracy" is not involved: for in every vase, alter I have (hushed, the auditor knows that the particular disaster, about which 1 had to inform him, has taken place. I have simply made a choice among possible styles and f could not avoid such a choice. There is no "uustylized" feature here except the disastrous event itself (and even lhat may have a "stylistic" ingredient, in that it might be fell as more of a blow if coming at a certain time than if it had come at a certain other imie—a "stylistic" matter of timing that I. as the imparier of the information, may parallel, in looking for the best or worst moment at which to impart my information). I should call il a "naturalistic" strategy of communication if I so stylized the informative act as to accept the minimum of "group responsibility" in tin dunce. If I communicated the fact, lor instance, without sympathy for the auditor, Or even more so, if I did have sympathy lor the auditor, and the fact was as disastrous to me as it was to htm, but I "took il out on'- him by FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS reinforcing the blow rather than softening it And 1 should call il a "realistic" strategy if 1 stylized my statement with the maximum sympathy (or "group attitude1'). K Do not get me wrong. I am not by any means absolutely equating science with "naturalisms i am saying that there is a so-called science that identifies Truth" with "debunking"- and i am simply trying W point out that such " truth" is no less a "strlizathtr than any other. The man who embodies it in his work may be as "lendcrmitided1" as the next fellow: usually, in tact, 1 ihmk that he is even more so—as will be revealed when you find his "hard hitting" at one point in his communication compensated by a great humanitarian softness at another point (which, as i have tried to show elsewhere, is partly the case with Arnold). Stylization is inevitable. Sometimes it is done by sentimentalization (saying "It's all right" when it isn't). Sometimes by the reverse, brulalization. saying it with an overhluntness, in "hard-boiled" or its "scientific'' equivalents {sadism if you like to write it. masochism if you like to read it J. I recall a surrealistic movie that revealed the kind of "protection" we may derive from this strategy, in the aesthetic field where the information to be imparted is usually not quite so "disastrous" as the hypothetical event we have been just considering. The movie opens with a view of a man sharpening his razor. We next see a close-up of his eye, an enormous eye filling the entire screen. And then, slowly and systematically, the blade of the razor is drawn across this eye, and in horror we observe it splitting open. Many other horrors follow, but we have been "immunized" by the first shock. We are calloused: we have already been through the worst; there is nothing else to fear: as regards further pain, we have become roues. Sometimes the stylization is by neutral description, the method more normal to scientific procedure. And tragedy uses the stylization of ennoblement, making the calamity bearable by making the calamitous situation dignified. From this point of view we could compare and contrast strategies of motivation in Bentham, Coleridge, Marx, and Mannheim. Bentham, as "debunker." discusses motives ''from the bottom up." That is: they are treated as "eulogistic coverings" for "material interests." Coleridge's motivation is Tragic/' or "dignifying," "from the top down" (in his phrasing: ~aJove prmcipium% He treats material interests as a limited aspect of "higher" interests. Marx employs a factional strategy of motivation, in debunking the motives of the bourgeois enemy and dignifying the motives of the proletarian ally. Since he has reversed the values of idealism, he would not consider the material grounding of pro let ana n interests as an indignity. The proletarian view is dignified by being equated with truth, in contrast with the "idealistic lie" of a class that has special prerogatives to protect by systematic misstatements about the nature of reality. Mannheim seeks to obtain a kind of ~documenl- Z ™TT °n SUbjCCl °f m°tiveS' 0n a "sec™d of generalization. That is: he accepts not only the Marxist debunking of bourgeois motives, 84 RITUAL DRAMA AS "HUB" but also the bourgeois eounter-debunkmg of proletarian motives: and he next proceeds to attenuate the notion of "debunking" ("unmasking") into a more neutral concept that we might in English call "discounting" or "making allowance for. Or let us consider another hypothetical ease. A man would enroll himself in a cause. His choice may be justified on thoroughly - realistic" grounds. He surveys the situation, sizes it up accurately, decides that a certain strategy of action is required to encompass it and that a certain group or faction is organized to carry out this strategy. Nothing could be more "realistic." Yet suppose that he would write a poem in which, deliberately or spontaneously, he would "stylize" the processes of identification involved in this choice. His act. no matter how thoroughly attuned to the requirements of his times, will be a "symbolic act." hence open to the kind ofanalysis we have proposed for the description of a symbolic act. If his choice of faction is relevant to the needs of the day. its "realism" is obvious. If the chart of meanings into which he fits this choice of faction are adequate, the relevance is obvious. And to call his poetic gestures merely "illusory" would be like calling it "illusory" when a man, wounded, "stylizes" his response by either groaning or gritting his teeth and flexing his muscles. There is. in science, a tendency to substitute for ritual, routine. To this extent, there is an antipoctic ingredient in science. It is "poetic" to develop method: it is "scientific" to develop methodology. (From this standpoint, the ideal of literary criticism is a "scientific" ideal.) But we can deceive ourselves if we erect this difference in aim into a distinction between "reality" and "illusion," maintaining that, as judged by the ideals of scientific routine or methodology, the ideals of poetic method, or ritual, become "illusions." The body is an actor; as an actor, it participates in the movements of the mind, posturing correspondingly; in styles of thought and expression we embody these correlations - and the recognition of this is, as you prefer, either "scientific" or "poetic." It will thus be seen that, in playing the game of life, we have at our command a resource whereby we can shift the rules of this game. It is as though someone who had been losing at checkers were of a sudden to decide that he had really been playing "give away" (the kind of checkers where the object is not to lake as many of your opponent's men as possible, but to lose as many of your own as possible). Where our resources permit, we may piously encourage the awesome, and in so encompassing it, make ourselves immune (by "tolerance," as the word is used of drugs, by Mithndatism). Where our resources do not permit, where we cannot meet such exacting obligations, we may rebel, developing the stylistic antidote that would cancel out an overburdensome awe. And in between these extremes, there is the wide range of the mean, the many instances in which we dilute, attenuate, mixing the ingredient of danger into a recipe of other, more neutral ingredients, wide in their scope and complexity, a chart that concerns itself with the world in all 85 i hi nda i ions AN!) 1)1 MM I KINS ,is miraculous diverse plcmiude And lor this plenitude oil he Creation, being n But om" mbohc acts can vary greatly in relevance and scope II we enact h> tragedy a purificatory ritual symbolizing our enrollment in a cause shaped to handle a situation accurately, lor instance, we may em bod > the same processes as if we enacied a purificatory nlual symbolizing our enrollment in a cause woefully inadequate to the situation. And the analyst of the two tragedies may, by reason of his over-all classificatory terms, find much in common between the two symbolic acts. The fact remains, however, that one of these acis embodies a chari of meanings superior to ihe other (and if the chart is too far out of accord with the nature of the situation, the •unanswerable opponent." the objective recalcitrance of the situation ilselt. will put lorth its irrefutable rejoinder! To illustrate the point. i will close this discussion by a burlesque m which a certain important faultiness of chart may be revealed Our form here may be like that ol the (ircek Jr.una. where the tragic trilogy was regularly topped oil by a satyr-play exemplifying the same heroic processes, but in caricatured equivalents So we would offer a kind of "critical analogue" to such a program, rounding oui our observations on the nature of tragic purification by a burlesque in which our democratic elections arc charted by the same coordinates, hut with the President in the role of the Sacrificial King. KJeclHineerin^ in Psychoanalysia Psychoanalyse, an island situated in a remote area of the Not-so-Pacific Ocean, was given this name by the Western sociologists who went there to study its customs. The natives call iheir island Hobo-i, which means nearly the same as "En Route" in our idioms, and is also the Psychoanalyses" word for "investment." The mosi sinking characteristic of Psyehoanaiysia is the natives' vivacious interest in popular elections, which are conducted in a vocabulary strikingly similar to thai of our Freudian and post-Freudian psychologies Notes J The Paget theory of "gesture speech" obviously makes a perfect (it with ihis perspective by correlating the origins of linguistic action with bodilv action and posture 2 An exceptionally good instance revealing the ways in which dramatic structure underlies ewaywiic material may be got by inspection of Max Lemer's article. Constitution and I nun as Symbols" t 7V Yale Lau Journal. June 1^7) The «sav „ divided into four parts, or as we should say. (our act* (In modern plavw nimg. d,amT,h i m aS rcplHLcU lhc ***** form of curlier "Western drama, ihe climax coming in ihe third act, with the aftermath ol acts IV and V telescoped into one ) I T U A L DRAMA AS " II LI II" Act 1- Symbol, Posses* Men [ mm dramatist acquaints us with the situation in which his tragedy is to be enacted He describes the wavs „, which leaders prod pt-op e to desired o. ms of action by manipulating the symbols with wh.eh these people think. Me then narrows the held to ihe "constitution as symbol." and places the Supreme C ourt as a personalized vessel of the Constitutional authority. Act II. Constitution into Fetich.'- The action is now under way. Reviewing American history, (he dramatist develops in anecdotal arpeggio the proposition summed up b> a tuneless ley el of abstraction in Act I The act ends on "evidence of the disintegration ot ihe constitutional symbol." a theme that will be earned an important step larther in— Act III. "Divine Right: American Plan." The Justices of the Supreme Court are here presented as our equivalent for kingship and godhead. And the act ends on the tragic crime, the symbolic slaying of the sacn1ici.il Kiivl as the author is attacking our "kings." tt\u-livit. which is identical with structure. Hence. one will watch, above all. even reference that bears upon expeclanc> and foreshadowing, in particular every overt reference to any kind ol "calling" or "com* pulsion" (i.e.. active or passive concept of motive). And one will note particularly ihc situational or scenic material (the "properties") in which such references are contexts: for in ihis wa> he will tind the astrological relationships prevailing between the plot and the background, hence being able to treat scenic material as. representative of psychic material (for instance, if he has distinguished between a motivation in the sign of day and a motivation in the sign of night, as explicitly derivable by citation from the book itself, and if he now sees night falling, he recognizes that the quality of motivation may be changing, with a new kind of act being announced by the change of scene). In this connection, we might note a distinction between positive and dialectical terms—the former being lerms that do not require an opposite to define them, ihe latter being terms that do require an opposite. "Apple." for instance, is a positive lerm. in that we do not require, to understand it. the concept of a "counter-apple " But a term like "freedom" is dialectical, in that we cannot locale its meaning without reference to some concept of enslavement, confinement, or restriction. And "capitalism" is not a positive term, but a dialectical one. to be detined by reference to the concepts of either "feudalism" or "socialism." Our courts consider the Constitution in accordance with theories of positive law—yet actually the Constitution is a dialectical instrument; and one cannot properly interpret the course of judicial decisions unless he treats our "guaranties of Constitutional rights" not as positive terms but as dialectical ones. Our Bill of Rights, for instance, is composed of clauses that descended from two substantially different situations. First, as emerging in Magna Carta, they were enunciated by the feudal barons in their "reactionary" struggles against the "progressive" rise of central authority. Later, in the British Petition of Ri^ht and Bill of Rights, they were enunciated by the merchant class in their "progressive" struggles against the "reactionary" resistance of the Crown. It is in this second form that they came into our Constitulion. BUT: Note this important distinction: in the British Bill of Rights, they were defined, or located, as a resistance of the people to the Crown. Thus they had. at this sta^e. a strongly collectivistic quality, as the people were united in a common cause ag.n:>: the Crown, and ihe rights were thus dialeclically delined with relation to this opposition. The position of the Crown, in other words, was a necessary term in giving meaning to the people's counter-assertions. In the United States document, however, the Crown had been abolished. Hence, ihe dialectical function of the Crown in giving meaning to the terms would have lo be taken over by some other concept of sovereignly. And the only sovereign within ihe realm covered by the Constitution was the government elected by the people. Hence, since the opposite "cooperates" in the definition of a dialectical term, and since the sovereignty or authority against which the rights were proclaimed had changed from that of an antipopular Crown lo that of a popularly representative government, it would follow that the quality of the "rights" themselves would have to change. And such change of quality did take place, in that the rights became interpreted as nghis of ihe people as huiividuuts or minorities ugainst a government representing the will of the people as a collectivity or majority. Eventually, this interpretation assisted the rise of the great super-corporations, linked by financial lies and interlocking directorates, And these super-corporations »I I HAI I) k A MA AS "JMU" n"1 'ni11;e"lor> B,8C*'P" And m Lhii k........builiieľtWeigniy txcome. rwjmind m hima fuU lovcreigmy, you begin lom i nee change taking place... Ihr dialectical coiiccpl ,.| < eiwitttUOIUil right! Pol UMJOfiltt bcgm 110« l.> think ol these t.glu* us assoMions agamst ihe aiiio.,, lunents o| the s u per-co r m .ration! (the New ( rown) lh.,i Ik the tendency in.........k onec ......c rights m churned by UM people as li mammy against ilu- ,„ic ol ihe supcr-cotpoiulious as .. sovcieign inuioiity However, the itsitciticnl th.it a let in isdialectical." in tli.it .1 derive* it* meaning ..........1 t>PPt»»I< lerm, end ihtl the opposite leu , may he dillciciil al dilfeieiii Mltoiical periods, does not ill all imply thai such teiins |/e "mfintngfffffľ All we need do is to decide whal tin v aie m.wiw al ,i given |vin>d I in briel, to rcoOgDJM lhal the ( oiisliluli.ni i.iiuiot he inlcfprctcd as l( positive document, but inusl contain,illy lve t reeled as ,iu ,i, i imi \crnr outside it, hence to recognize thai wemuil always I'oii.sidei "ihct orwtltution fotntath iin- ( onitilution," oi wUu>Constitution tiiui\r the t oiisiitulion." m Ilio C oustiiiiiion /»n <ik as deputing from some "rock holtom tad" the sl.iris. loi instance I look al this tahle I jvrccivc U to luive "etc ) Actually. I he \cty select ion ot ins "lock hnitom lad" derives Us line gmuiidiug from the anient slate ol itie conversation, and assumes quite a different place In the "hierarchy ol lads" when the locus ol die union has shifted An ideal philosophy, lioni i h is poini ol view would seek lo salisly the requirements ol a |Vilect dictionary It would he a calculus (matured by constant reference to the "collective levelalion" lhal is gol by a social hodv ol llioughll toi chaitmg ihc nature of events tnd for clarifying sJlltnportanl relationships, In practice, however, I plulosophv is developed partially m opposition in othei philosophies, so that ladies Of refutation are involved, thus tending to giw ihe philosophci's calculus the stylistic loim ol a lawyer's plea ihe connection between philosophy and law (moral tnd politice!) Ukewiie eoiiliibules lo the "law vet's hi id" siiaiegy ol presetilalion Die philosophei thus is ollen letl i" .niempl ' piovmg" his philosophy hy pioving Us "justice" in the abstiacl. whereas the only "proof" «>l a philosophy, considered as a calculus, resides In showing, by concrete application, Ihe icope, complexity, and accuracy ol Ms coordinates lor charting ihe nature ol events Ilms, ihe name lor "house" would noi Ik- piimatib lesleil loi "consisiencN" wilh the names loi "nee" or "money " One would icvcnl ihe value ol ihe names b} revealing their correspondence with tome Impo........hing, (unction, 01 relationship ľhii "s whal we mean by saying Hun u philosophy, as i "chert*" ii quite n borne u> «mtredlctioni I ov all a man. loi instance, ol "heretical" cast, who came to me with a sorrow ol llus soil "How can you evet have a behel in human rationality." he complained, "when you see things like tins?" And lie showed me a news dipping about a truck driver who hid reoeivtd i prtn fo« driving his truck the mwdmum distance without an au idem When asked how he did It, ihe liuck diovi answered I had two rules; i iive as much ol the......I as you can, and take as mm I. as yoiuan I saw in this no grounds i>' despaii of human reason, on the contrary, I thought lh«l ihe prt/e FOUNDATIONS AND IMIINITIONS winner had been ,i %ci > muial truck dn\er. and I w;is glad In read that, fur once m least, such great virtue had been rewarded. This was true Aristotelian truck driving, if [ ever saw it: and whatever else one may say against Aristotle. 1 never heard him called "irrational." What, in fact, is "rationality" bul the desire for an accurate chart for naming what is goittg on? Isn't this what Spinoza had in mind, when calling for a philosophy whose structure would parallel the structure of reality'.' We thus need not despair of Human rationality, even in eruptive days like ours. I am sure that even the most arbitrary of Nazis can be shown 10 possess it; for no matter how inadequate his chart of meaning may be us developed under the deprivations of The quietus and oversimplifying dialectical pressure, he at least wants it to tell him accurately what is going on in his world and in the world at large, Spinoza perfected an especially inventive strategy, by this stress upon the "adequate idea" as the ideal of a chart, for uniting free will and determinism, with rationality iis !he bridge, For if one's meanings are correct, he will choose the wiser of courses; in this he wilJ be "rational"; as a rational man. he will "want" to choose this wiser course; and as a rational man he will "hare to want" lo choose this wiser course. 7 I should L-imtend thai our hero, in thus altering his mcamator) methods, would gel greater freedom by acting more rationally. Others, however, might consider any incantation as per se a sign of "irrationality." The issue probably resolves into two contrasting theories of consciousness. There is a one-way theory, which holds that freedom is got by a kind of drainage, drawing something ("energy"?) from the unconsciousand irrational into the conscious and ralional. 1 will this the "reservoir theory." according to which a "dark" reservoir is tapped and its contents are gradually pumped into a "light" reservoir, the quantities being in inverse proportion to each other. Against this. 1 should propose a two-way, "dialectical" theory, with "conscious" and "unconscious" considered as reciprocal functions of each other, growing or diminishing concomitantly. An infant, by this theory, would be sparse in "unconscious" (with sparse dreams) owing to the sparsity of its consciousness (that provides the material for dreams). And by this theory, the attempt to "drain off " the unconscious would be absurd. Instead, one should seek to "harness" it. I believe that this dialectical theory, as ultimately developed, would require that charitas, rather than "intelligence," be considered as the primary faculty of adjustment. 5 LECTURE I IN HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS J, L. Aim hi Source: J 0. Unnson and Marina Sbisi (eds) How to Do Things with Words (2nd edn>, Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1975. pp. I II. What 1 shall have to say here is neither difficult nor contentious; the only merit i should like to claim for it is that of being true, at least in parts. The phenomenon to be discussed is very widespread and obvious, and it cannot fail to have been already noticed, at least here and there, by others. Yet I have not found attention paid to it specifically. It was for too long the assumption of philosophers that the business of a 'statement' can only be to 'describe' some state of affairs, or to 'state some fact', which it must do either truly or falsely. Grammarians, indeed, have regularly pointed out that not all 'sentences' are (used in making) statements:1 there are, traditionally, besides (grammarians') statements, also questions and exclamations, and sentences expressing commands or wishes or concessions. And doubtless philosophers have not intended to deny this, despite some loose use of ^sentence' for 'statement'. Doubtless, too. both grammarians and philosophers have been aware that it is by no means easy to distinguish even questions, commands, and so on from statements by means of the few and jejune grammatical marks available, such as word order, mood, and the like: though perhaps it has not been usual to dwell on the difficulties which this fact obviously raises. For how do wc decide which is which? What are the limits and definitions of each? But now in recent years, many things which would once have been accepted without question as 'statements' by both philosophers and grammarians have been scrutinized with new care. This scrutiny arose somewhat indirectly at least in philosophy, hirst came the view, not always formulated without unfortunate dogmatism, that a statement (of fact) ought to be 'verifiable', and this led to the view that many 'statements' are only what may be called pseudo-statements. First and most obviously, many 'statements' were shown FOUNDATIONS AND DIHMTIONS to be. as k\m perhaps hrst argued systematically, strictly nonsense despite an unexceptionable grammatical form: and the continual discovery of fresh ivpes of nonsense, unsystematic though their classification and mysterious though their explanation is too often allowed to remain, has done on the whole nothing but good. Yet we. that is. even philosophers, set some limits to the amount of nonsense that we are prepared to admit we talk: so thai it was natural to go on to ask. as a second stage, whether many apparent pseudo-statements really set out to be 'statements' at all. It has come to be commonly held that many utterances which look like statements are either not intended at all. or only intended in part, to record or impart straightforward information about the facts: for example, ethical propositions" are perhaps intended, solely or partly, to evince emotion or to prescribe conduct or to influence u in special ways. Here too k.ant was among the pioneers We very often also use utterances in ways beyond the scope at least of traditional grammar. It has come to be seen that many specially perplexing words embedded in apparently descriptive statements do not serve 10 indicate some specially odd additional feature in the reality reported, but to indicate (not to report) the circumstances in which the statement is made or reservations to which it is subject or the way in which it is to be taken and the like To overlook these possibilities in the wav once common is called the descriptive fallacy but perhaps this is not a good name, as 'descriptive' itself is special. Not all true or false statements are descriptions, and for this reason I prefer to use the word 'Consiaiive*. Along these lines it has by now been shown piecemeal, or at least made to look likely, that many traditional philosophical perplexities have arisen through a mistake—the mistake of taking as straightforward statements of fact utterances which arc either (in interesting non-grammatical ways) nonsensical or else intended as something quite different. Whatever we may think of any particular one of these views and suggestions, and however much we may deplore the initial confusion into which philosophical doctrine and method have been plunged, it cannot be doubted that they are producing a revolution in philosophy. If anyone wishes to call it the greatest and most salutary in its history, this is not. if you come to think ot it. .1 large claim. It is not surprising thai beginnings have been piecemeal, with parti pn\. and ['or extraneous amis: ihis is common with revolutions. Preliminary isolation of the performative* The type of utterance we are to consider here is not. of course, in general a type of nonsense; though misuse of it can. as we shall see, engender rather special varieties of 'nonsense1. Rather, it is one of our second class the masquernders. Hut it does not by any means necessarily masquerade as a statement of fact, descriptive or consiative. Yel it does quite commonly do no. and that, oddly enough, when it assumes its most explicit form. 92 TURE 1 IN HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS Grammarians have not, I believe, seen through this disguise, and philosophers only at best incidentally. It will be convenient, therefore, to study it first in this misleading form, in order to bring out its characteristics by contrasting them with those oi the statement of fact which it apes. We shall take, then, for our first examples some utterances which can fall into no hitherto recognized grammatical category save that of 'statement', which are not nonsense, and which contain none of those verbal danger-signals which philosophers have by now detected or think they have delected (curious words like 'good' or 'all', suspect auxiliaries like ought' or *can\ and dubious constructions like the hypothetical): all will have, as il happens, humdrum verbs in the first person singular present indicative active.4 Utterances can be found, satisfying these conditions, yet such that A. they do not 'describe' or 'report' or constate anything at all. are not 'true or false"; and B. the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as 'just', saying something. This is far from being as paradoxical as it may sound or as 1 have meanly been trying to make it sound: indeed, the examples now to be given will be disappointing. Examples: (E. a) 'I do (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife)'—as uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony/ (E. b) 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth'—as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stem. (E. c) 'I give and bequeath my watch to my brother—as occurring in a will. (E. d) 'I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.' In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what 1 should be said in so uttering to be doing6 or to state that I am doing it; it is to do it. None of the utterances cited is either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not argue it. It needs argument no more than that 'damn1 is not true or false: it may be that the utterance 'serves to inform you'—but that is quite different. To name the ship is to say (in the appropriate circumstances) the words i name, &c.\ When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c., '1 do', I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it. What are we to call a sentence or an utterance of this type? 1 propose to call it a performative sentence or a performative utterance, or, for short, 'a performative'. The term 'performative' will be used in a variety of cognate ways and constructions, much as the term 'imperative' is.* The name is derived. 93 FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS of course, from 'perform', the usual verb with the noun 'action': it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something. A number of other terms may suggest themselves, each of which would suitably cover this or that wider or narrower class of performatives: tor example, many performatives are contractual (*1 bet) or declaratory (*1 declare war) utterances. But no term in current use that 1 know of is nearly wide enough to cover them all. One technical term that comes nearest to what we need is perhaps "operative', as it is used strictly by lawyers in referring to that part, i.e. those clauses, of an instrument which serves to effect the transaction (conveyance or what not) which is its main object, whereas the rest of the document merely 'recites' the circumstances in which the transaction is to be effected.'* But "operative" has other meanings, and indeed is often used nowadays to mean little more than important". I have preferred a new word, to which, though its etymology is not irrelevant, we shall perhaps not be so ready to attach some preconceived meaning. Can saying make it so? Are we then to say things like this: To marry is to say a few words', or Betting is simply saying something? Such a doctrine sounds odd or even flippant at first, but with sufficient safeguards it may become not odd at all. A sound initial objection to them may be this: and it is not without some importance. In very many cases it is possible to perform an act of exactly the same kind not by uttering words, whether written or spoken, but in some other way. For example. I may in some places effect marriage by cohabiting, or I may bet with a totalisator machine by putting a coin in a slot. We should then, perhaps, convert the propositions above, and put it that 'to say a few certain words is to marry7 or 'to marry is, in some cases, simply to say a few words' or 'simply to say a certain something is to bet'. But probably the real reason why such remarks sound dangerous lies in another obvious fact, to which we shall have to revert in detail later, which is this. The uttering of the words is. indeed, usually a, or even the, leading incident in the performance of the act (of betting or what not), the performance of which is also the object of the utterance, but it is far from being usually, even ifit is ever, the sole thing necessary if the act is to be deemed to have been performed. Speaking generally, it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are uttered should be in some way, or ways, appropriate, and it is very commonly necessary that cither the speaker himself or other persons should also perform certain other actions, whether 'physical' or 'mental' actions or even acts of uttering further words. Thus, for naming LECTURE 1 [N IIO W TO IX) THINGS WITH WORDS the ship, it is essential thai I should be the person appointed to name her. Cor (Christian) marrying, it is essential that 1 should not be already married with a wife living, sane and undivoreed. and so on: for a bet to have been made, it is generally necessary for the offer of the bet to have been accepted by a taker (who must have done something, such as to say 'Done'}, and it is hardly a gift if 1 say ] give it you' but never hand it over. So far. well and good. The action may be performed in ways other than by a performative utterance, and in any case the circumstances, including other actions, must be appropriate. But we may, in objecting, have something totally different, and this time quite mistaken, in mind, especially when we think of some of the more awe-inspiring performatives such as 'I promise to . ..'. Surely the words must be spoken 'seriously' and so as to be taken "seriously'? This is. though vague, true enough in general—it is an important commonplace in discussing the purport of any utterance whatsoever. 1 must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem. But we arc apt to have a feeling that their being serious consists in their being uttered as (merely) the outward and visible sign, for convenience or other record or for information, of an inward and spiritual act; from which it is but a short step to go on to believe or to assume without realizing that for many purposes the outward utterance is a description, true or false, of the occurrence of the inward performance. The classic expression of this idea is to be found in the Hippolytus (I. 612). where Hippolytus says f) yXdao' ofitojaox'. q 8e pnv avco|joi;6<;. i.e. 'my tongue swore to, but my heart (or mind or other backstage artiste) did not'.111 Thus "I promise to. ..' obliges me—puts on record my spiritual assumption of a spiritual shackle. It is gratifying to observe in this very example how excess of profundity, or rather solemnity, at once paves the way for immodality. For one who says promising is not merely a matter of uttering words! It is an inward and spiritual act!' is apt to appear as a solid moralist standing out against a generation of superficial (heorizers: we see him as he sees himself, surveying the invisible depths of ethical space, with all the distinction of a specialist in the sui generis. Yet he provides Hippolytus with a let-out, the bigamist with an excuse for his 1 do' and the welsher with a defence for his 'I bet*. Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond. Jf we exclude such fictitious inward acts as this, can we suppose that any of the other things which certainly are normally required to accompany an utterance such as "I promise that. . .' or M do (take this woman ... )' are in Tact described by it, and consequently do by their presence make it true or by their absence make it false? Well taking the latter first, we shall next consider what we actually do say about the utterance concerned when one or another of its normal concomitants is absent. In no case do we say that the utterance 95 FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS was false but rather that the utterance -or rather the oci,11 e.g. the promise was void, or given in bad faith, or not implemented, or the like. In the particular case of promising, as with many other performatives, it is appropriate that the person uttering the promise should have a certain intention, viz. here to keep his word: and perhaps of all concomitants this looks the most suitable to be that which 1 promise1 docs describe or record. Do we not actually, when such intention is absent, speak of a 'false1 promise'.' Yet so to speak is not to say that the utterance 1 promise that. . is false, in the sense that though he states that he does, he doesn't, or that though he describes he misdescribes misreports. For he does promise: the promise here is not even void, though tt is given in had faith. His utterance is perhaps misleading, probably decoiful and dnuhtJess *rong. bui h is noi a lie or a misstatement At most we might make out a case for saying that n implies or insinuates a falsehood ur a misstatement (to the effect that he does intend to do something): but that b a very different matter. Moreover, we do not speak of a false bet or a false christening: and that we do speak of a false promise need commit us no more than the fact that we speak of a false move. 'False' is not necessarily used of statements only Notes 1 It is. of course, not really correct that a sentence ever is a staiement: rather, ii is used in making a statement, and the statement itself is a logical construction- out of the makings of statements. 2 Everything said in these sections is provisional, and subject to revision in tlie light of later sections. 3 Of all people, jurists should be besl aware of the true stale of affairs. Perhaps some now are. Yet they will succumb to their own timorous fiction, that a statement of 'the law' is a statement of fact. 4 Not without design: they are all 'explicit' performatives, and of thai prepotent class later called 'eitercilives'. 5 [Austin realized that the expression 'I do' is not used in the matnage ee re mono too iate lo correct his mistake. We have let it remain in the text as it is philosophically unimportant that it is a mistake J. O. U.] 6 Still less anything that 1 have already done or ha\e yet to do. 7 'Sentences* form a dass of 'utterances*, which class is to be defined, so far as 1 am concerned, grammatically, though I doubt if the definition has yet been given satisfactorily. With performative utterances are contrasted, for example and essentially, "constanve' utterances: to issue a constat]ve utterance fU. to utter it wdh a historical reference) is to make a statement. To issue a performative utterance is. for example, to make a bet See further below on allocutions' 8 Formerly i used 'perform*lory*: but 'performative' is lo be preferred as shorter, less a e a. more Instable, and mine traditional in formation 9 I owe this observation lo Professor H. L. A, Han. 10 Bui I do noi mean to rule out all the offstage performers -the Lights men. the stage mananL-r e-.cn the prompter; ] am objecting onIv lo certain officious understudies who would duplicate the play. 11 We deliberately avoid distinguishing these, precisely because the distinction is not m point. 96 l.Z Definitions, District ions, ana Denotes 7 PERFORMANCE AS METAPHOR Bert O. States Source: Theatre Journal 48< I) (1996): 1-26. Performance is clearly one of those terms that Raymond Williams calls "keywords," or words (e.g.. realism, naturalism, mimesis, structure) whose meanings are "inextricably bound up with the problems [they are] being used to discuss."" Find a word that is suddenly emerging from normal semantic-practice (a word you are hearing, say. a dozen times a week), and you can bet that it is a proto-keyword spreading on the winds of metaphor. And in this process the word's standard dictionary meanings seem to fall into a dormanc\ while the new "key" meaning, not yet clear, gets tested and extended far and wide, revised, qualified, and finally settles into the vocabulary as if it had always meant what it now means/ Keywords are usually two-edged in that they belong to the fields of both ideology and methodology: they are at once an attitude and a tool."1 It goes without saying that the field of theatre studies is rapidly being reshaped by the principle of performance, abetted by the rise of multiculturalism, interdisciplinarity and gender studies. So far the major task has been to coax out the various manifestations of performance, to find, so to speak, our neighbors in places we haven't bothered to look for them before. By and large this coaxing has had the character of a colonization, since a keyword, seconded by ideology, never stops ramifying itself until it has claimed as much territory as possible. This is not a complaint; it is simply the way keywords behave. The political aspect of this revolution is not my concern here. I want to address a semantic problem that seems to me to have surfaced in performance theory. 1 am referring to what in philosophy is called a limit-problem, or one in which the inquirer turns out to be part of the problem. For example, two common limit-problems are the problem of the subject and the problem of the world. No observer (subject) can fully observe or confront the self or the world because we can never stand outside what it is that we are trying to encompass and understand. In the broadest sense, the limit-problem of performance is that we are all, in a manner of speaking, performers. If nothing 108 PERFORMANCE AS METAPHOR else, as Judith Butler reminds us, we perform our gender/ Even the attempt to investigate the nature of performance turns out to be somethi g o7 performance, in at least one definition of the word More particularly, there .s our habit of using words-especially key-words-,n a metaphorical way and then forgetting they are metaphors. One danger is that of reading metaphor as if it were a two-way street, instead of the one-way street it usually is. in which case the vehicle and the tenor can easily become contused. To take an example from John Searle, the metaphor "Richard is a gorilla ' does not work the other way around, where gorilla becomes the tenor (or subject) and Richard the vehicle for telling us what the gorilla is like. The metaphor, as Searle says, "is just about Richard; it is not literally about gorillas at all/'5 only about the "truth conditions" (Searle's term) under which we perceive gorillas. Another difficulty with metaphorical analogy is that since the vehicle never specifies the intended meaning or application, one is free to call the similarities as one sees them, and it is easy to find similarities that apply in one case but do not apply in another. This leads to increasing instability in one's working definition and it is particularly acute in performance theory because quite often something is called a performance for one reason (it is intentional behavior or it draws a crowd) and something else for another (the unintentional playing of a role, as on Candid Camera), and so on through all the qualities of the phenomenon. And one can move through culture identifying all sorts of performances and performative modes, but one has lost the common denominator that binds them together into what we might call Performance, with a Platonic capital P. The problem can be graphically represented by a sequence, inspired by Wittgenstein's theory of games, that Umberto Eco recently used to demonstrate the difficulty of defining fascism: 12 3 4 abc bed cde def As we move from left to right similarity of feature gradually declines, until we reach 4 which shares two similarities with 3. one with 2, and none with 1. Still, as Eco points out. "owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one."" So too with performance, and presumably with any multi-featured concept in which we slide from one manifestation of the phenomenon to another (e.g., from theatre to ritual, from ritual to parade, from parade to protest, protest to terrorism, etc.). We can never really be certain when we are in the grip of "illusory transmv ty or finding family resemblances between things that g^uaBy different than they are alike/ I want to emphasize some degree inherent in ^^^^^^^^Zi especially complex things like performance, don t ooey 109 FOUNDATIONS ANU UfcHNiriONS ihcy arc subject to continual mutation and intermixture -which is another way of saying that they are continually open to metaphorical extension. This is basically the problem I want to worry here. My procedure will be to look first at some instances of performance theory, by way of grounding our usage in current practice. As a convenient way of sampling the range. I ha\e chosen my examples to include complementary approaches to the performance phenomenon The first pairing (Erving Goffman and Victor Turner) are what Richard Schechner would call "outsider" theorists/ in the sense that they are professionally uninvolved in the arts and concerned with social performance at the largely unintentional level: the second pairing (Peggy Phelan and Schechner) are "insiders" in the sense that they are concerned professionally with deliberate artistic performance. This is much too simple a breakdown because there are close "anthropological" ties between Turner and Schechner. and Phelan and Goffman share at least an interest in the interaction between the self and others, Goffman from the sociological. Phelan from the psychoanalytic perspective But all of tins is incidental to my concern for an adequate cross-section of viewpoints among which the resonances. I hope, will become clearer as I go along. Finally, in the last section 1 will examine the relationship between artistic and scientific performance practices by way of isolating certain variables around which performance and performaiivity seem to circulate, irrespective of one's orientation. This is not my attempt at a definition because I am convinced that a definition of performance, as we have been pursuing one. is a semantic impossibility. I First, however, it would be useful to consider the semantic evolution of the word itself, if only as a way of illustrating the problem. Performance is much tike the term culture the "original difficult word." as Raymond Williams puts it. in that it participates in "two areas that are often thought of as separate —art and society."* Like culture, performance began its semantic life as a relatively simple noun of process. Just as culture basically meant "the tending of something, basically crops or animals,"1" performance—Williams doesn't deal with the word simply meant carrying something out. a "working out of anything ordered or undertaken" (OLD. 1 & 2). So while you were tending the crops (cultivation) you were also performing; moreover, it took a lot of performing of various sorts to turn cultivation into culture. In fact, the word performance didn't signify theatrical presentation until well into the seventeenth century, though there are ambiguous usages For example, the Chorus in Henry V {\swy 'Still be kind, and eke out our performance with your mind." But it is doubtful that even this use of the term referred to performance in any specifically theatrical sense. Shakespeare's use of the various form* at perform and performance (111 by my count) suggests that he made no distinction between performing work, performing an office, playing a role 110 PERFORMANCE AS METAPHOR in politics, putting on a play, or (as Macbeth's Porter reminds us) making love or going to the bathroom. It all comes to the same act or undertaking to do something and then doing it. Even so, the evolution suggests a number of discrete, or at least semantically isolable. sectors of meaning: {1) any act or duty done, (2) a notable act, achievement, or exploit, (3) a literary or artistic "work," (4) the act of performing a piece of music, a play, or gymnastics. (5) finally, in the current usage (not yet in OED). a particular (postmodern) branch of aesthetics known as performance art. What we learn from this evolution is that any word is subject to tropological drift and, more specifically, to what we might call the Pelican effect, whereby the mother-word feeds its errant offspring with its own blood (its prior meanings) and by this means, as Umberto Eco elsewhere suggests, "the field [is] restructured, semiosis rearranged, and metaphor (from the invention which it was) [is] turned into culture"1'—that is, into current understanding. In fact, most words arc potential metaphors, and many of them expand to include virtually everything in a given semantic or metonymic network. Frequently they even jump to heretofore incompatible networks with the irresponsibility of tornadoes.12 Even so. the word carries its own semantic history (or bloodline) with it, however submerged by the new meaning, and this history can be invoked as a kind of "Salique Law," to return to Henry V, that will justify new conquests, if justification is needed. One can always claim that almost anything is a performance in sense #1 or sense #2 and then imply that a certain intentionality makes it a performance in sense #3 or #4. And with such a robust primary meaning as "anything ordered or undertaken," the word performance, like culture, was ideally positioned (as we say) to be used in almost any context. Hence, today the rapid advance of Performance Studies and Cultural Studies which are founded on extremely versatile, if not insatiable, terminologies. What isn't performance? What isn't culture? My first example is Erving Goffman's classic. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), which is probably the best known metaphorical expansion of the term. It was quite natural for Goffman to study social and individual performance, as he called it, because that is a sociologist's business. Moreover, it was understandable that he would adopt the theatre vocabulary as the one most suited to what he was interested in observing, even though theatre itself was only one of the kinds of framed behavior he eventually-addressed. On its broadest level, Goffman's interest was primarily in "the structure of experience individuals have at any moment of their social lives."1 1 And the term performance was defined, in his first book, as "all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants."14 So in an important sense Goffman was an outsider-theorist, as Richard Schechner aptly refers to him in another connection.15 In other words, he could, in a manner of speaking, get outside the "thing" because he was never inside it and could see pretty much all of what he was studying: his question wasn't as lofty as "What is the world?' or FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS "What is the self?" or even 'What is per form a nee?1' He didn't really care: the term performance was strictly a metaphor for social behavior and Goffman's modest question was. simply. "What are the ways in which we repeat ourselves?" The theatre offered the ideal metaphor for his project because, as everyone knows, all the world's a stage or. as Goffman points out. "the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify."1*1 Theatre is, in a sense, the quintessential repetition of our self-repetitions, the aesthetic extension of everyday life, a mirror, you might say. that nature holds up to nature. One wouldn't be likely to use the novel or painting as the key metaphor of such a project because their imitations of human experience are conducted in a non-human medium. Theatre, on the other hand, is the an that is most like life as it is lived in the real world. Hence it was made to order for Goffman,1' I will return to Goffman in a moment, but this is a convenient place to fold in my second example of metaphorical expansion. T speak of Victor Turner's influential idea that social conflicts are structured like dramas: they occur in four phases, or "acts," moving from breach, to crisis, to redress, ending in (either) reintegration or schism.16 This is a metaphor of sorts, and one that Turner has been criticized for applying to social life because it is taken from the field of art. But what happens if we reverse the tenor and the vehicle and say that dramas are structured like social conflicts'1 Unlike the Richard/ gorilla metaphor, the reverse would remain true: but the utterance would no longer be a metaphor: it would be closer lo tautology. Metaphorically, it makes no more sense to say that drama is like social conflict than it does to say that my love for X is like a strong emotion. The truth is that dramas are based primarily, though not always, on the confticcual forms of human experience, social or individual, and are therefore bound, inescapably, to follow Turner's model: that is. if there is a. problem or breach between parties in a community, it is likely to reach a crisis (unless it just goes away), and something will come of that crisis; there will be attempts at arbitration, rapprochement and back-and-forthncss. which will either succeed and resolve the breach (comedy) or the conflict will complicate itself into a complete division of the parties involved (tragedy, naturalism). How could it be otherwise? Of course, neither Turner nor 1 is suggesting that all social conflict {or drama} is identical. We are speaking strictly about causal structure in human experience. Turner's critics seem to feel that theatre's purification and refinement of the conflicts that go on in social life constitute a change in structure from what actually happens; but it seems to me that to the extent that plays are truthful about human conflict they are adapting its essential structure to their "four-act" forms, even if they come in two. three or five acts," Moreover. I'm not suggesting that Turner's model of the social drama is self-evident or worthless on this account or that his metaphor isn't a useful way to approach such breaches. For the metaphor was possible one-way -wise -only because we had forgotten, or put aside, the idea that social conflict necessarily precedes dramas about social conflict and that the entire 112 PERFORMANCE AS MKTAPHOR history of drama as a mimetic art. from The Oresteia to Oleatma, is that it reveals the patterns of human experience ^chiefly (but not always) its conflicts. If social conflict had somehow taken a different structure, we can be sure that drama would have imitated it in its imitations.-1' Hence, a statement like "Dramas are constructed like social conflicts" may be true but it is metaphorically vacant. Yet that, in essence, is what Turner was saying, and of course it is close to the model we find in Aristotle's Poetics: drama moves from one state of fortune, through crisis, complication, and reversal, to another, and what drama imitates is "the kind of thing that can happen" in real life. I presume that behind this "con happen" is Aristotle's awareness that that kind of thing happens a lot. So the value of Turner's model, like GotTman's. is that it allows us to escape a certain solipsism, or one-eyedness, by enlarging our field of reference. When GotTman says that people are like stage performers and Turner says that social conflicts are like plays, we are applying a model from one semantic network to a subject in another network whose characteristics we wish to elucidate by metaphorical comparison. Metaphor is what in science is called a "top-down strategy" or a "principle of least commitment" whereby one can, on the basis of a suspicion of likeness, initiate a direction of thought from which regularities and irregularities will display themselves and can be sorted out.2J The metaphor, if it is a good one, will draw out some of the characteristics of the phenomenon but will leave others obscure or invisible that might well be picked up by still other metaphors seeking still different characteristics—our friend abc / bed / cde / def again. And Goffman is very much aware that you can't get the whole phenomenon with one metaphor. When he arrives at the end of The Presentation of Self, he offers the following caveat: And now a final comment. In developing the conceptual framework employed in this report, some language of the stage was used. I spoke of performers and audiences; of routines and parts; of performances coming off or falling flat; of cues, stage settings and backstage; of dramaturgical needs, dramaturgical skills, and dramaturgical strategies. Now it should be admitted that this attempt to press a mere analogy so far was in part a rhetoric and a maneuver---- And so here the language and mask of the stage will be dropped. Scaffolds, after all, are to build other things with, and should be erected with an eye to taking them down.-2 It should be said that Goffman's use of the theatre metaphor is consistently very loose. Being a performer, being "on-stage." in his usage means simply that one appears in a social "region" ("any place that is bounded to some degree by barriers to perception"23) where behavioral patterns are established, expected, and carried out. much like the rehearsal /performance pattern of 113 FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS theatre. Thus, for Goffman. the terms stage, audience and performer come to he very resilient, even to the point where performer and audience might collapse into the same entity (self-deception, someone who is "taken in by his own act.":J Laing's "false-self system." and so on). So the theatre always remains a metaphor. To come hack to Searle's point, the metaphor uas about social life, not about theatre at all. Theatre was just a hermeneutical looi ("a rhetoric and a maneuver") for deploying and isolating elements in the "drama" of social behavior."' To sum up: I have linked Goffman and Turner as complementary outsider-theorists who have fruitfully applied the theatre/performance metaphor, respectively, to individual and to social life at large. Goffman's typical ■performer" is the single person moving in a world infested with behavioral do's and don't's; Turner's performers are usually "disturbed social groups" caught in the agon of competing political claims. So the two stand (at least in the works I've discussed here) in a more or less microcosmic/macrocosmic relationship, On the other extreme we have the insider-theorists, or people who are either theatre practitioners or theatre scholars, or, like Schcchner, both: they come to performance study with a strong theatre orientation, and are therefore not so much making simple metaphorical connections as metonyouca! ones- that is, they are interested in extending the performance concept into contiguous fields of application (adjacent art forms, rituals, politics, and ceremonies of various kinds). This is where the limit-problem finally becomes a real factor; for unlike Goffman. and Turner the insider-theorist's mission is now to define performance itself (not social behavior), and normally in the most basic possible terms, I'm not suggesting that every insider-theorist tries to do this: I'm only interested in what happens when one confronts the phenomenon of performance as something to be defined. This seems to me where the most energy is being expended right now. One senses that the shift to performance study was brought about historically as the terms theatre and theatricality undergo a demotion in centrality (or at least a critique) and the term performance emerges as the master concept. (Witness the astonishing number of books and articles with the term Performance in the title in the last five years.) I suspect this happened, roughly in the late sixties,-6 about the time when Susan Sontag was writing that what supplies the energy for all crises in the arts "is the very unification of numerous, quite disparate activities into a single genus____From then on. any of the activities therein subsumed becomes a profoundly problematic activity, all or whose procedures and, ultimately, whose very right to exist can be called into question."i7 Things never got quite this bad in the theatrical arts, but in the wake of widely disparate activities (social, behavioral, and artistic alike) being "subsumed" under the "genus" of performance the term theatre gradually underwent a loss in validity. It was seen as being at least temporarily worn out; it earned with it too many traditional and overfamiliar 114 PERFORMANCE AS METAPHOR institutional trappings. Theatre meant; a text performed "up there" by actors with emphasis on the thing performed ("the play's the thing"), paid admis-sion, a "general" audience, in short, a timeless roar-of-the-grease-paint aura that obscured the real nature of performance -the act &f performing itself. Just as "the world worlds" in Heidegger's phenomenology, so performance performs. Thus. Peggy Phelan. my first case in point, begins her essay on "The Ontology of Performance" by saying that "Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations ^/representations: once it does so. it becomes something other than performance." Performance "becomes itself through disappearance.'08 Or, as Richard Scheduler (my next case) puts the idea. "Performances are always actually performed."2''Thus. Goffman's metaphor takes a (J. L.) Austinian swerve and theatre becomes again (or still) only one of the many things that get performed.11J This is not by any means to say that theatre is a dead term in insider performance theory. But one of the agendas of insider-theory, as I understand it, is to chronicle and parallel theatre's attempt to liberate itself from "invisible" acting and the plot-character emphasis of most plays into other forms of self- or communal expression. It is interesting that Austin, who is an often-quoted "outsider" in this insider-movement, excludes utterances spoken by an actor on stage from his performative category because language in the theatre is "not used seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use."1' So too performance art, to take the extreme instance, would exclude traditional theatre from its performative category for much the same reason: theatre does not tell the truth about what it is or what it is doing, and in addition is apt to be parasitic on a text that compounds this very falsehood. Performances may well go on in the theatre but they are transitive in nature, performances ^/something in which the actor, as Sartre says, is "totally and publicly devoured by the imaginary."32 If. as Tom Stoppard has put it, "extraversion is a performance art," then we may say that theatre was its introverted cousin.11 For example. Phelan's definition of performance (quoted above) occurs in a book devoted to the examination of "photographs, paintings, films, theatre, political protests, and performance art," chiefly of the last ten years.3'' I want briefly to look at her notion of presence as the onlological foundation of performance because it seems to me not simply a characteristic of performance art but the most persistent consideration in any discussion of performance in general. Not only is performance what becomes itself by appearing and (then) disappearing, it is centered, she says, on "the interaction between the art object and the spectator [which] is. essentially, performative." As 1 see it, these aren't really separate things: performance's appearance-disappearance act can only take place as a consequence of this interaction: without a spectator the work would degenerate into pure existence (paper, paint on canvas, sound, substance, artifact, bodies). This condition would obtain I HC Nil A t lt>NN \NI> 111 I I N I I m N .\ not onu li performanci .m but fot nil artitta ptfformaaoe, regard teta ol tiu-medtum, though It w ill be mx w*f) toquauT) m hal a i mean b) Um h-i m to* n.....(which can in aome mim, rtft.....hi performou Indeed, imr might J.nin thai th« slnlemcnl. Teiloimaiue % »»nl\ UŇ il ill üm pľlMIIt, is wiothw tautology, tltwt eny "HAV* ■ performance aohievM ona onlj oacw m the preeenuand thai* it no nut h thing Mt preaenl unless there in i tpei tatoi (01 ,i oonactoueneet) then to experience It In otívw word*, um miim loga applies as well id liiiiuhiei Jk-íiiiiiiiu. leiuhiut,admiiťi pniiv>n an) dm1......1*1 experience which, having puv*ed. wasch hrmu iiwll and assumes ihc ontolo UK ill stains ol mcmoř) s.i the criterion oi pivHcuiuritti dorNii'i loiilK distinguish pertbrrnance (not to mention |vi iomuiiihv ,nii horn othot forma of experience, tad I assume ľhelan would have 10 u g tec I ho ie.il question would M umlet what eon dttioni is pcMHMi brought about? Sbi pom on to M) that " Performance oannot In Mved, rtwrded. docufntnMdi ot otherwlM pa/ttctpau in the en euliiiioii oi represent at ton* o/ reprMtntaUoni once u doei to, it b«comcn something othei than pet foi rnance " Am attempt to lave i pai tot mance nnh .i 'documenting camera [can otri) be] a ipui to memory, an ettoouragameni ol inenioiv, to heconM pMMni ' Here a tliftlculty emerges, loi me, though n max lesi on an impropei undariUndinj ol whal I'helmi means h\ "icpics Mtatiom o/ rapreeentationa" ot word* like "saved" oi "documented I md see how allempls lo doiuineni tlie.ilie oi "live" pel loiiuaiices ion lilm oi w i men aeeounis) ealeh on U j "meiuoi \ t a I lu i than l h< pi t loi m, i m e 11 si-11 I am less convinced (lial pciloimancc ,ttnu h dUappMr* in such cases Hul ílu- ule.i become* high!) proMetnaticel in othet kind* ot performance and peiloiiuaiicv ail rg. painting, smlpiuic .nul photograph} which don'l have the same tciupoiiil and uniologicul "hie" as theaHnal peilouname tor instance, elsewhere in the hook I'liolnn iivnix M applet hoi (v's and t'nulv Sherman's nhologiaphs .is examples ol peiioininiuv an llei dtlCUl sions au- "documented" hv photogiaphs which ap|vai in the book At whal point, if tiny, do t hew phoios heeome "sonieihmg othei than pei loi inn nee' since when something "lui'ns into that document a photogiaph, a »Inge dewgu. a video tii|H- |it| ceases lo lv pet lotmancc ini"?,N She)man's own peilonnuncc seems llum to he reduced to a re|uodnctiou from wWch ľholan chums onlv the MM*) ol a pMlotmanee can possihlv aiise Hin wheie did (oi does) the original perloiniaiue occur'.' Might n have heen in the photo gtapher'n uci ol photographing ihe Nuhicvľ; ti im Idl uucleai Still. I'lielun preniiimihK expv net iced a Sherman performance pi easels In interacting with the photos that ate only evidences ol n pei lot nialive ■'moment", olherwite how Lould da* have written ahout Sherman's |>eiloitnamv' N el hor dwew> sum ol the nature ol Sherman"* peiloimnnce is mute vonviiu'ing I tend hei text on Sheiniau.thetk n nuamsi the pholM and I can see Ihe performative ipuililv. Ihis inauipuhiiioii ol Immune "di^uiM-s"'.....eeilam end \nd 11 an clow Ihe hook, put it on my shell, eo.ue hack lo u lale. ami H.e.e is this I If. PERFORMANCE AS METAPHOR performative quality leaking out of the photos again. In fact, the more limes I see the photographs the better 1 understand them and what Phelan has said about their performative quality. And surely this understanding couldn't be improved iff were looking at a better or more "authentic" set of photos than one finds in Phelan s book {say. Sherman's personal "originals"), because as Walter Benjamin pointed out long ago. "to ask for the 'authentic' print [of a photograph] makes no sense."" So it would seem that the performance of the photograph can only occur by means of reproduction, that photography is the quintessential art (j/'reproduction, and that it survives only in the encounter and re-encounter of the spectator. Performance, then, is recoverable in time, though it is obviously never the same performance, even for the same individual. To be fair, 1 should add that in an earlier discussion Phelan suggests that the performative quality of photography OS performance art rests in a "staged confrontation" taking place at the surface of the print ("The surface is all you've got," as Richard Avedon puts it); performance is "a manipulation" of imagery that goes beyond the camera's claim "to reproduce an authentic 'real' [and brings] the status of the real. .. under scrutinyv1*1 So it isn't simply the ontological status of the photograph that makes it performative. The performance consists in the thematic manipulation of imagery to a non-reproductive end. The thing that remains unclear, however is whether any manipulation away from an (in)authentic "real" might constitute performance, or must it be the kind that attends performance art of the last decade or so? How, for example, would Sherman's or Mapplethorpe's manipulations differ from, say, Niepce's Dinner Table Around {1823), the first photograph, or Malevich's White on White (1918) which is (or was) a painting commenting on all previous (absent) painting, or Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" which directs the viewer's attention to the paradox in the perception of graphic art (the pipe is there/not there)?41 At any rate, Phelan's notion of performance seems to come down to a thematic matter, rather than to an ontological one; not, that is, to a matter of thing-ness or the basic process of interaction between work and viewer that always takes place in art but to a specific kind of political commentary the work is making on its own medium. How otherwise would the ontology of Sherman's performance differ from my coming back again and again to experience the performance in a musical recording or in the painting that hangs in my living room? Nor do I see, otherwise, wherein it is different from the experience 1 have on reading or re-reading a novel. Granted, there are big differences between reading and viewing, but what have they to do with performance if performance's presence/disappearance is simply something that happens between an auditor/reader and a tangible "work" when it is examined in any given "present"? Indeed. Mikel Dufrenne insists that a reader (of a novel or poetry) becomes the performer of the work and can "penetrate its meaning only by imagining the performance in his own way—in short, by 117 FOUNDATIONS AND definitions being a performer, if only vicariously and in imagination.""- The reader, you rrught say. does to the text of a book what an actor does to the text of a play. except that the enactment takes place in a mental space."1. You can debate or reject this claim, of course, but it docs stick tenaciously to the point that something is "essentially performative" when the spectator and the work interact, regardless of the medium. What (hen is the justification for the claim one frequently hears that performance should be restricted to the ■performing arts" I theatre, dance, music I simply because they have squatter's rights on the term performance or because they present their performances only ai a given time and place before an invited audience, as opposed to those arts which give their "performances" (painting, sculpture, books) as soon as someone appears and "interacts"' with the work? I am not claiming that all these things should be considered as performances, only that before you can know what performance is. in the phenomenal sense, you will have to know why these arts aren't performances. You might find all this so much caviling over hairs. But there is a real problem lurking in such limit-cases, and it is the problem of how far performance can go and remain performance, or at what point perfomitf/m/v begins to appear (i.e., Eco's "defness")—that is. something falling, "by a sort of illusory transitivity." within the shadow of true performance. In short: meta-phorization. If you "deconstruct" performance at what precise point does it disappear? What is the without-which-not of performance? Or. to come back to Goffman and Turner, if you "reconstruct" or manipulate reality at what point, under what conditions, does it appear as performance? Or is ihere no such point? Perhaps performance is unquantifiable. Reception is obviously an extremely complex process, and when we speak ontologjcally of aesthetic perception we cannot divide it into categories based on the kinds of media available and be done with it, if only because new media are arriving by the month. Some of these problems might be avoided if we think of performance as a way of seeing—not, that is. the thing seen or performed (from ritual to parade to play to photograph} but seeing that involves certain collaborative and contextual functions (between work and spectator) which are highly elastic. Performance, as Dufrenne puts it, involves the expectation that we are willing "to play the game" on which all aesthetic perception is based.44 That is the position I want to take, at any rate, and one I think is consistent with Peggy Phelan's principle of "interaction," albeit without the political implications. But if that it true, she is evoking a principle that has a long history in aesthetics and does not define performance or performance art any more than it defines any other kind of art. II I turn now to my final example, Richard Schechner, whom I see as complementary to Phelan in that both are working at different ends of the same 118 t'VRI OK \l y\lt \v. \,| 1 \ I' HUB, "insider scale Phclan in i w«.jr*, pushing it into practices (hat seem lo offer the (lightest analogical attraction. As of this writing. Scheduler's principle of restored behavior has almost achieved the status ol a received idea. "Performance means: never lor Um first time. It means: for the second to the nth time. .. . Put m personal (actor) terms, restored behavior is "me behuv mg as ifl am someone else' or as ill mn beside myself.' or 'not myself.' as when in trance""10; Restored behavior is living behavior treated as h film director treats a strip of film. These strips ol'beh.uioi can tv rearranged 01 reconstructed; they arc independent of the causal systems (social, psychological, technological) thai brought them into existence, They have a life of (heir own..., Moreover, the behavior that is performed "cxisl[s| separate from the pMr> formers who 'do' these behav tors" and therefore the behavior "can be stored, transmitted, manipulated, transformed." The actual work of restoration is "carried on in rehearsals and/or in the transmission of behavior from maslei to novice."4" Above all. "Performances," once again, "arc always actually performed.""1'1 I assume this means before an audience, though Seheehnei adds that some kinds of workshops (i.e., Grotowski's "■piiralheuler) might qualify as performances, even though there is no public presentation."' Most rehearsals apparently wouldn't qualify as performances but are only n pari of the restorative process. Still, in 1990 Schechner writes that the whole performance sequence (training, workshop, rehearsal, warinup. performance, cooldown. and aftermath) "is identical to what I call 'restored behavior." twice-behaved behavior,' behavior that can be repealed, I ha I is. rehearsed. ■ ■. Ritual process is performance.So rehearsals rest rather ambiguously within the domain of performance. They arc apparently not performance! in themselves but the "building blocks'" out of which the behavior is restored and performances gradually emerge. There is I strong etnpluiNix on process in Seheehner's theory and on qualities such as '■immediacy, ephemertililv. peculiarity, and cver-changingness."53 What isn't a performance then? I take il Schechner wouldn't ,ulmii a grcul deal of the behavior Goffman covers in his books. I hough it isn't clem where 119 FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS he would draw the line. Certainly, he would not admit things like marital, office, or teammate behavior, at least under "normal" circumstances. Indeed, he sees GolTman as dealing essentially with "the single behaved behaviors of ordinary living [that) are made into the twice-behaved behaviors of art. ritual, and the other performative genres"5-1 by means of the rehearsal process. As far as other arts are concerned, "Neither painting, sculpting, nor writing shows actual behavior as it is being behaved,"54 and hence. I gather, these arts could not be included in the category of performance, if only because performance "is behavior itself"55 and paintings and novels don't behave, as least in Schechner's view of behavior. They are. rather, what we might call a record of past or hypothetical or symbolic behavior. This is probably the main respect in which he is at odds with Phelan. Performance, however, would include such things as the restoration of events "from some other place or past—the Plimoth Plantation restoration in Massachusetts. Dons Humphery's restoration of Shaker dances, a 'living newspaper or a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. Strictly speaking." he adds, "dioramas are restored environments, not behaviors." So it isn't clear whether they're in or out. But, he adds, "increasingly action is being added to the environments... , Some zoos... try their best to make their displays genuine replicas of the wild... So I assume, given the range of his examples, that action is indispensable to performance and is therefore a characteristic of behavior in his definition—action meaning. I assume, direct human (or animal) behavior of some sort. I am not sure how Schechner would classify films, though he refers to them frequently, and in his Performance Event-Time-Space chart, he does include feature films, TV Soaps, and TV commercials as performative events." But the criteria for inclusion on the chart are "events called performances in this or that culture" and "events treated as performance' by scholars,"58 and I'm not sure Schechner himself would call all of them performances in the terms of his original essay on "Restoration of Behavior" in Between Theater and Anthropology (1985). So I'm tempted to conclude that films, however artistic or powerful, would not constitute performances in Schechner's usage, unless we are to think in such odd terms as "the restoration of a restoration of behavior." and even then the behavior represented is as past as the behavior of the characters in a novel (which is only imagined by the reader). In any case, the film problem is much too complex to settle here. I want to concentrate on one of the more interesting boundary cases of performance in this latter regard of restored events, Parks offer a good testing ground because they are midway between theatre, on one hand, and something strictly "public," recreational, or educational, on the other. I will center mainly on the wild animal park at San Diego, which Schechner discusses briefly; but he apparently puts it in the category of performative behavior, however tentatively, because the wild behavior of the animals, as it would normally occur ~ plains of Africa, is "restored" in the fields of California. Or partially PER FQR M A N C L AS METAPHOR restored: for no predaiion is permitted out of deference to the patrons who would be horrified by animals eating other animals; but otherwise, the animals behave naturally, enclosed behind fences that separate the various species. What is it, however, that has been restored? What makes the animals such an interesting test case is that nothing has been done to their behavior beyond depriving them of their natural diet and fencing them in. The animals don't have a choice not to "be themselves." as actors do: as Schechner says, "they repeat themselves [like] the cycles of the moon."w So, unlike the actors at Plimoth or the Humphery dancers, they aren't restoring their behavior any more than I am restoring last night's behavior when 1 sit down to eat my own un-predated dinner tonight. Schechner. of course, wo uld say that the park frame consti tutes the site and act of restoration, hence the performance. In Schechner's theory there are two kinds of framing: (I) when a performance generates its own frame selfconsciously, as in traditional theatre, and (2) when the frame is imposed from the outside by an agency of some kind/,ihThe animal park, then, would be an example of the latter: the park itself frames the behavior of the unknowing animals into a performative mode, just as (he says elsewhere) "documentary film imposes an acting frame around a nonacting circumstance."61 The animals do not know they are "on candid camera." they know nothing about this framing beyond a possible nostalgia for more open spaces. It is this framework, then, that makes the wild animals performatively different, say, from the pastured cows one might see in the open fields en route to the park. But now I wonder what might happen if the cattle farmer down the road were to get envious and put up a Tame Anima! Park sign in front of his pasture, serve delicious steak dishes (even better than those up the road), and provide monorail or horse transportation for any curious visitors who might want to observe cows at closer hand. For lots of reasons, there would be few customers for a Tame Animal Park; but I am interested in how framing devices create the sense of restored behavior—and hence a performance— that is somehow separated from normal empirical behavior. Therefore, it seems legitimate to take our framing device—our portable proscenium arch, you might say—and put it around all sorts of behaving things and see what happens to them; and 1 can't imagine anything more unpromising than a field of cows. 1 think cow farms would fail (fish hatcheries would be much more exotic) if only because of the factor of familiarity." One might as well put frames around the telephone poles along the road, though, come to think of it, having seen what Christo's umbrellas did to the Tehachapi mountains along Interstate 5 at Gorman, I am not sure where one should draw the line. Surely if someone were to follow Christo's example and paint all the cows bright yellow, people would come for miles around, as they did to see the yellow umbrellas, and cow behavior would be restored to some sort of "presence," even in Schechner's sense of restoration or Phelan's sense of appearance/disappearance. 121 FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS My feeling is that a field of yellow cows would constitute as much of a performance as wild animals grazing in California fields. What would make it a performance—or, to be more exacting, a performative event is the manipulation or mediation of empirical reality toward what is surely an artistic statement being made about reality. If Robert Whitman's warehouse in Light Touch or the people eating their own dinner in their own apartment in Hungary's Squat Theatre, or certain Happenings of the sixties, can be called performances, then my yellow cows must surely qualify. And I can only think that Schechner would have to agree. We are. after all, seeing behavior through a deliberate frame. In the case of the wild animal park it is the unexpectedness of seeing wild animals here in bucolic California that constitutes the interest of the performance, or much of it; in the case of the cows, it is the unexpectedness of seeing yellow cows. In either case the animals, as Schechner would say, are "not themselves, but not not themselves." In fact, after further thought, I think my yellow cows are even more of a performance than Schechners wild animals, if only because they have undergone a manipulation, not unlike that of actors who disguise themselves with make-up. But now, let us suppose that instead of painting the cows yellow, which is an insensitive thing to do, we take a further step: we arrange with the Edison company to paint all the telephone poles yellow. Is this a performance? Here is the same framing device, but we can't exactly claim that the behavior of the poles has been restored because the poles aren't really doing anything to begin with. However, if we expand our definition of behavior to something more Heideggerian like "the thing's way of being before us," we might make a good case for having restored, or deconcealed, their behavior. At least we have rescued them from their everyday inconspicuousness, just as we did with the cows. In essence, we have said, "Notice that telephone poles can be quite striking when we bring out their performative qualities—their measured intervals, their way of diminishing in size as they fall away from the eye, their steady symmetrical shapes, their 'equipmentaF qualities,63 and so on." But we have departed from Schechner on two counts: not only have we altered his conception of behavior but we have altered his sense of actual performance in the temporal sense. For performance is now as permanent and as passive as it is in sculpture and painting. In fact, there is no performance being "held" from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; there is just an avenue of yellow telephone poles, and within a week motorists who use this road every day won't notice them any more than they would notice that the farmer had painted his barn yellow—or his cows. On the other hand, the same could be said for the wild animals and the yellow cows: even though the animals' performance is staged only during certain hours, like theatre performances, their performance never begins or ends; it is the visitor who creates the duration-time of performance, which lasts as long as s/he remains in the park spectating. It is, as Phelan might say, the "interaction" that makes the performance, not simply the original act of putting up a PERFORMANCE AS METAPHOR sign saying "Open from 9 lo 5. daily. Try our delicious wildebeest burgers." And an interaction is what takes place—a performance -when spectator and work come together. So the only respect in which we seem to have changed Scheduler's theory is that we have broadened his conception of behavior to include inanimate things. And if he were willing to admit inanimate things into the category of performance (I don't think he would), then there seems no good reason to disqualify arts like painting, sculpture, music, or film, not to mention the performances in The Garden of the Gods in Colorado where people flock daily to see rock formations pretending to be animals and human beings {the "Kissing Camels," "Weeping Indian," "Three Graces"). 1 hope it is clear that I'm not trying to label ail these things as performances, but to see why and under what conditions we are comfortable in using the word. I am trying to tap some well-springs of feeling that I suspect in a subterranian way are connected with the reasons we go lo the theatre—or, for that matter, to the wild animal park, or even the fish hatchery, or to the zoo— or even look at the performance of a sunset. I have no idea how Schechner would respond to my painted cows or telephone poles. It seems to me that he and I are coming at performance from two different directions. And the most obvious ground of difference is that I have a wider conception of behavior than Schechner. Still. I find myself resisting the idea that animal parks are performances in the same way that deliberate art is a performance. Something is missing. Anyway, it seems odd to admit animal parks to the category of performance because the animals are alive in their restored enclosure and to reject art museums because the paintings aren't alive in theirs. Schechner's notion of restored behavior seems to me an almost unassailable criterion for performance, even if one wishes (as I do) to extend the range of the behavior that gets restored. Put simply: something is always restored in performance, even if the restoration comes through a simple framing device. My main problem with the principle of restored behavior concerns the term twice-behaved. By twice-behaved Schechner means behavior that can be repeated in successive performances ("never for the first time [but] for the second to the nth time"). I am not sure how this concept would apply to an execution or to a hostage crisis and such "one-time" performances that keep cropping up on Scheduler's charts, but I will stick to undisputed performance events. The notion of twice-behaved behavior dialectically posits the notion of once-behaved behavior, and that must surely be taken as a metaphor when applied to human experience. I can make the point best by coming back to Schechner's comment on Goffman which occurs in an essay in which Schechner is discussing restored behavior as a movement through a rehearsal process in which the single behaved behaviors of ordinary living are made into the twice-behaved behaviors of art, ritual, and the other performative genres. I'm aware of the opinion of Goffman and others that "ordinary living" includes a lot of performing. Insofar as it does, the [rehearsal \23 I i Hi NI* A I ItiNH ANIi Ml I I IJ I I In'. pimrss| llUVÜel .1 p| >l lis M,t\ I« U i ílmi U I .....I tilllill jim Minn limn i u k ľ bthlVtd "Ol ii i,u In H K «Iii lili \ In, IllfJ IS 111(11; 11 I I l11 111 ll mu 11 s ,i|i|>iit|uiiili>iii ni 11 n won I |i< ilmmmut mid Us pa | ihlr trhihmi lit Ins imn definition nl pri Im mum r I'lil simply l intímnu'. ' I vi Im in,nu i", dnu I 11 Mm r iiiiyltiing Iht) limply DO) mi Al M) mil | . | n, it I I lit [MNHNgC Si I in Ii m i i , .i-.sinunir- I Im i 11 > I hr r Mi nit li.i i m 11 in.i i \ IH ľ ttkt perli m 111 m ms c, u hum i Unci i >i ľ hr iikr ni í . meaning 11 *tu»pn t) theatre an Wlini pi-is Mii'Muiľi ii here, however, is the originär) lao( ihm theatre li pal kerned mi hiľ. ralhei than hir «in ihaatra ins < tollman was mitmcutina m his iluM.iplini I 1111111 v f i (Ins is j m h1111 >.* it .i hlllr Inn mir sulnlK Inden! 11 u Iwii r k 11.1 \ nl hi h,i mi u s i»l llinihr unci nlhn |>« 11« D lll.ilix <- nnirs" inr nm luilm l\ himetl mi Ix'hnum in mdnum lilt* dull is iisrll ,ili,,nl\ tum !>,iui\,;l Ihr ilu'uiir reheareal pi <>» cm then, would in gome tleuiec Iv Minted m perfei imy It set me nl niihniUN lllr's i \\i nihil lirli.ivn >i, m I In lun r In hnu i| mil hi r n! milium \ llli' lliinp.s \\\- dn mil ani r lud n niiiiihai OJ limrs Im r\iintp|r, vvc limy sn!rl\ .issmnr thill I l.inilrl's hrliimm m nu u r i mínily, "Ihimletli" Ih'Iiiivihi wild llrttd) iwnv bffhavad" before Slukrs|iniir mul Itiiilmn llrd llmnlcl, .nul Ihr l h.iiiu tri i/.ilimi would Ii.im hrrn im niltiiylrss mi Im il whs hiisnl mi Uhnvim the mulii'iuv m nyui/ed in milium \ hlr Im ■ ľ, Impi Schmik puls it. ihr In,mi is ,i pnui-ssm lli.it mils uiulei slum I wluil il hus uhnuly iiiulrisliiiiil 1 Sn Ihr iriin -.iti^h hrhiivol brhnvim raren to •otntUtfng ih.u dotan'l suit! m hm n.m eiperienea, 01 il látal In ihr ĽÄpťi triu r I hni thru H r. m lis tut u. sít ivrs In i r st mihni rAitmplr, I smnrlluiĽs iln .m mul ,i I n l invsrll ll I limlll'l. sn In spruk /uinimt iuy\rU n7/mi Ihne would hr tin milt tu r ihm .i pri Im mm k r w.r, Inking plmr upart, lhal is. limn niv poilmiuiiiur ns .i tnu lín Hul m limiting lt. inv imilnlion nppiiiviilly quahUcd jin ii pcilminiiiKY m rvviy u'tisir. hnwrvrt hnrl It mny have been ■■ a "nlrip oťhehaviot." (hic could certainly lay ihm I hud irsimrd (hr hrhuvmi ol Uril Slnli^. ll hy llutl we mcrtll llml I citiiwd llu' »ludent»to \rr Ihm ill in m Imiy licrl Stulen hud been iwice-bchüvtn»t himsrll PERFORMANCE AS METAPHOR Perhaps this is an unusual case, but I don't think so. It suggests that framing and performance are. at the very least, overlapping, if not conterminous principles. Framing is simply the way in which the an work sets itself up, or is set up. to be performed, in Dufrenne's sense of offering a sensuous presentation to the spectator and in Phelan's sense of producing an interaction between itself and an auditor. We might say that framing and presence are the two slopes of the keystone that holds up the arch of performance. And since almost anything can be framed, almost anything can be painted or impersonated and hence become susceptible to performance. Moreover, there is the possibility that the framing might be done by the spectator. For example, you can point to someone and tell your friend. "Look at that man trying to juggle all those packages," and lo and behold, you have a kind of performance that you have created, or at least released, from its empirical invisibility. It is hard to look at the man simply as another man juggling packages; he now becomes "a man juggling packages," or more Platonically, Man Juggling Packages, a garden-variety archetype, something you have seen, without seeing it, a hundred times. We have, to use another of Goflman's terms. Idealized his behavior, or as the phenomenologist would say, we have "bracketed" it. This is not a performance in any artistic (or other) sense; it represents a "first step" in the direction of performance, that incipience in certain human activities that gave rise to the word performativity which is a term with a built-in metaphorical capability. This is the perspective from which the artist views the world in order to wrest from it its twice-behavedness. An artist is someone who says. "This is the way people behave n number of times." and knows how to put the n into expressive form. I am suggesting only that any specialized vocabulary or set of terms does not exhaust the phenomenon it is intended to describe (performance, theatre, art), but simply "fixes" it from one possible angle of intcntionalily or expressiveness; for the phenomenon is always nameless and multiform before a vocabulary traps it in one of its manifestations. This is one reason that we can never define a phenomenon like performance: its constitution is not the same as that of a machine, a disease or a molecule of water. It is a concept with "vague boundaries," as Wittgenstein says,66 that is permeable to new meanings. By the year 2010. the perfection of virtual reality alone will have added unheard of dimensions to the field of performance. We can only seek the essential nature of performability, not a taxonomy of performable objects or behaviors. Thus one might perform the same act (of performance) to many different intentional ends, as I want to suggest below, though the structure of performance remains relatively constant. To sum up the point: I realize that the term behavior is not the same in and out of art and that twice-behaved, in Schechner's meaning, implies a conscious and deliberate artistic control and choice of behavior. But what is this control/choice process if not one of perfecting something "already understood" that has not yet passed into the frame of art? It is the getting of it into 125 FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS art. out of its natural, excessive, and unremarkable twice-behavedness in daily life, that constitutes the transformation of art. What isn't twice-behaved behavior (in my sense) can't be restored artistically (in Schcchner's), or wouldnt be worth restoring, even if you could find an example of it. because no one would know what it was. This may put a different spin on what Scheehner means by twice-behaved: but it helps us to keep in mind that performance depends for its liveliness on three phases: it begins in the natural (or twice-behaved) behavior of Goffman's and Turner's "raw" society or nature, gets refined in Schechner's composition or rehearsal process, and it is completed in Phelan's interaction of the work and the spectator who "already understands" what the work is about, having lived it in one way or another.bl III I want to turn finally to a boldly argued book by a philosopher, Robert P. Crease, who has recently applied the concept of performance to the "theatre" of scientific experimentation. Departing from Husserl's phenomenology. Dewey's pragmatism, and Heidegger's hermeneutics (and the fact that theatre and theory spring from the same Greek root) Crease defines scientific experiments as unique events in the world undertaken for the purpose of allowing something to be seen. What comes to be seen is not something unique and peculiar to that event, but something that can also be seen in similar performances in other contexts. . .. Scientific performances are addressed to specific communities and are responses to issues raised within those communities. But properly preparing and viewing the performances requires a detached attitude, one interested in seeing what is happening for its own sake rather than for some practical end. The outcomes of the detached seeing of such performances, however, can be a deepened and enriched understanding of the world and our engagement with it.6* Crease is well aware of the differences between scientific performance and theatre performance, but the performative act, he argues, is the same in either case, if we look beyond the cliches we hear about how far apart scientists and artists are in their procedures and goals. This is his definition of a performance: Performance is first of all an execution of an action in the world which is a presentation of a phenomenon; that action is related to a representation (for example, a text, script, scenario, or book), using a semiotic system (such as a language, a scheme of notation, a mathematical system); finally, a performance springs from and is presented to a suitably prepared local (historically and culturally bound) 126 performance as metaphor community which recognizes new phenomena in it. The field develops through an interaction of all three.'4 i can't do justice here to a discussion that is two hundred pages in length and far more complex than Goffman's casual use of the theatre metaphor to describe ordinary behavior. Indeed. Crease isn't invoking theatre as a metaphor for what goes on in science: theatre and science stand in a mutual relationship in which the same specified features appear, mutatis mutandis. Chiefly, both aim "at achieving the presence of a phenomenon under one of its profiles."71' What can this mean, specifically, in terms of the performative arts? What is the phenomenon that comes forth? To keep our vocabulary from proliferating, we might sum it up in a term I take from Richard Schechner: transformation. In theatrical presentation something is always transformed: it is simultaneously "not itself" and "not not itself." Other well-known terms for transformation are "making strange." "estrangement," Shklovskys "defamiliarization," Heidegger's "deconcealment." and more recently Wolfgang Iser's "fictionaliza-lion,"7t all of which involve transformations. As audience, we go to theatre to witness a transformation of the things of reality (or fantasy) and presumably the actor performs in order to undergo a transformation, or to become a twice-wfted self. So theatre, and as I will argue, artistic performance at large, offers us the pleasure of transformation. And 1 think this is a fundamental pleasure at the very core of mind and memory. "Memory [itself]," as Gerald Edelman writes, "is transformational rather than replicative."" Hence, the endless ability of "The brain to confront novelty, to generalize upon it, and to adapt in unforeseen fashions."7- All perception, all memory, is creative, which is to say adapted to the specifications of the organism, and performative art-making (of all kinds) is one of the extensions of this principle into the collective life of the community."1 1 want also to mention Crease's division of performance into four categories: failed, mechanical repetition, standardized, and artistic." In a failed performance the phenomenon does not appear (as in an inadequate interpretation of a play or an experiment which does not produce the expected result). A mechanical performance presents the same events over and over (an experimental "run"; film, player piano). A standardized performance simply fulfills the standards of the tradition (Kuhn's "normal" science: summer stock, a business-as-usual play in which the roles, as reviewers say, could well have been "phoned in"). Most interesting of all is Crease's conception of artistic performance which coaxes into being something which has not previously appeared. It is beyond the standardized program; it is action at the limit of the already controlled and understood; it is risk. The artistry of experimentation involves bringing a phenomenon into material presence in a way which requires more than passive forms of preparation, yet in 127 FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS a way so that one nevertheless has confidence that one recognizes the phenomenon for what it is. Artistic objects "impose" themselves they announce their presence as being completely or incompletely realized—but this imposition is not independent of the judgments and actions of the artist.7'1 This changes our normal understanding of artistic in a refreshing way. We, in the arts, tend to use the word artistic as a generic way of distinguishing what we do from what scholars or scientists do, and we tend to use it in a self-congratulatory way, when we are not using it defensively in a university system that often pays lip service to art. Thus if you are painting or writing a play or a novel you are doing "artistic" work. And this is certainly a legitimate use of the term. What it obscures, however, is another aspect of art that isn't restricted to what "artists" (painters, dancers, actors, etc.) do, but refers to any display or application of human skill (OED 1). In Crease's sense we might better define a lot of things that go by the name of art as "failed" or "standardized" or "mechanical" performances, that have nothing to do with art in his sense of the term artistic, in any case, scientists perform artistic work too, and this doesn't mean that they use metaphors and analogies (though they do), and above all it doesn't mean that the word artistic is being used metaphorically. The truly great scientific discoveries and experiments are artistic productions in the sense that they are "actions at the limit of the already controlled and understood." They are "risks" that succeed in making the phenomenon appear. And the fact that they aim to produce results that are repeatable and quantifiable shouldn't lead us to think that the process leading to the quantification isn't based on the imaginative construction of models. The very same kind of thinking that went into the Sistine Chapel or the plays of Shakespeare was occurring in the performances by Einstein, Copernicus, Galton, Cavendish, Godel. and Charles Darwin, who were artists of extraordinary vision and imagination. Artistic, or creative, thinking has nothing to do with the nature of the result or the discovery that is made: it is a modus operandi.77 What an artistic experimental performance produces may be a proof of how a certain phenomenon behaves in the field of physical matter; but how does this differ from a Cezanne painting or a John Gielgud performance that offers proof of something "true" about rocks and trees and human nature? So we might put beside our concept of performance as "restored behavior" this close variation from Crease: "Each artistic performance, rather than repeating or echoing, is a creation that pushes forward to produce what is repeated."™ Thus, to come back to Hamlet, we may say that even if there had been no Shakespeare, and therefore no Hamlet, there is still the "something" out there in human empirical behavior that finally got represented in the behavior of Hamlet, the character. This is the field of "invariance" Shakespeare tapped into by means of his own pungent "semiotic" system, the same (or a similar) 128 1*1 K I 11 R M A N ( I- AS Ml- I A PHOI Hold of in variance that Mallarnie in Uu- nmctcciiih ceiilun would call Haauetism anJ Jules de Qaultwf, tracking • variant variation, referred to (after Flaubert) as "ftovtrysme." So performance is always preceded by, and hnili on. ait "invariant" liold of twice-behaved behavior; somewhere, at all times, one of ihe profiles of human behavior Shakespeare embodied in Ins creation ofHamtot, Macbeth. I ear. Lady Macbeth. Rosalind, el al,, is delectable ta ihe world, if one had the wit (or the artistry) to see it.'" And i pool who did see it out there, or deep inside, could presumably recreate it whether there were a Shakespearean precedent or not (though obviously uol in ihe Shake spearean version), l his comes near the foundation of Crease's enlightening argument: this is the mode of thinking thai performers in science ami per formers in "the performing at is" share in common* fheie is one other matter that Crease clarities very well, and tins is the business of ihe presumed division between performer mid audience. Depart lag from Qadamer's essay on plav m Truth end Mi'ihthi, Crease notes thai when an experimental performance ("enacted by ihe equipment") causes the phenomenon of. say, electrons lo appear, it is present equally lo the scientist (the playwnght-pioducer-director) who designed ihe performance and "to those who merely look on." So lot* with iheatre. ritual and oilier perforin Stive ceremonies (including athletic events): "true performance of whatever soil absorbs players and audience in one comprehensive event, an event dominated by the appearance of u phenomenon."H" Or, ns tiadaiuei puis ilk-idea, "Artistic presentation, by its nature, exists for someone, even if there is no one there who listens or watches only,"*1 And finally, wilh particular relation to the theatre, I might cite Herbert Waifs massive study of ///<■ Audh'nvv which, among many other of Ms interests, chronicles theatre's continual attempts to return ihe spectator in "the center of the stage.11*3 It seems shorl-sighled. then, to insist that there be an audience separate from (he performers if there is to be a performance. Surely the chamber music quartet (cited by CJadamcr) Illustrates this idea perfectly When a quartet gels together to play (here are often only four people m the room and lliey are Ihe musicians. It does no good lo say that each member of ihe quartet becomes SOD audience when (and only when) his or her instrument isn't playing and the musician "only" listens. The work is being performed and the performers ire there to hear and feel it, and lo insist lhai ihe two variables be different cut hit's seems a misunderstanding of the pleasurable purpose of performance. The notion that a performance must have this sort of audience seems lo derive from two sources; (I) ihe historical fact, and hence semantic expcclu lion, that performances usually have (separate) audiences, being Intended primarily for them; and (2) (he idea thai a perlonnance. in Older to be such, should have a witness, an ear in Ihe forest, so lo speak, to hear the lice full These Iwo sources are noi really separable in their influence; and Ihe upshot is thai it seems peculiar lo call something a performance that was heard only by the performer. 12«> I OI'NIM I IONS \NU di I IM i IONS hut tl we (nit aside tliiN notion, all ihr OOBdhkHM "I DM I« nuiu I lit u tithed nj the q cartel litu.......t wherein mutk ii played In ordet m gjvi plcasUie lolhť plrtyťm NflřJ should tlíc lati lhal ihcic 111 loin plavci s, i atha Hun one, make «he llighiesi .hlleieiuv \\ hen I rani Lieft awl down at the piano, allei .Imnei, lo plav lOIW ( h"pm loi hunsoll. fli im)'i he pet burning t hopin I'm i rem i «s/t to the same end thai he mifhi have performed It ľoi liieiuK' One CM eeeUflM that he wauled tO heat lite iiiumi. though this does not unpK lhal he also didnl en|o\ pl.ivmg the uiusu \V .is he poiloi mine ' \ikI was then ualK a dilleicncc between iviiornuug and listening' 11 hfl was performing l hopin and I think he was then I was peiloMiimg Shake s|vaie in ni\ eat last week (quality ol peilonnancfl in iiiclcwinll. which I Irequenllv do. not because I'm so good at U hut because the language moves me \n\w,ty, I don't heai im own miNCiahle rendition I heai an ideal" 01 "imaginuiv Heil States tooling U (to bonow lint tick s woidsl. |iis,l || tl is mi ideal lien Stales who sings so heu u Hl u II) in the acoustical enhancement ol ilu diowei In othci wnids, I heai a kuul ol composite ol all the gie.il |h-i loiinam es I lenieuibot 1.1 niv mmd'scui One might sa \ lhal I ditapPCei as porformei and reeppeei as hcaiei ol the sweet "unheard melodies" lhal ol course would escape ins wile's moie ihscimunaling oai. woic she nearby.*1 Il could he .ngucd that this km,I m dunking leaves us nn u»mn lo sepaiale hue pei tm iii.iiKo hum s.i\ ichcais.il 01 anything else tn creation, Id I lhal mallei Hut I don t Ihmk this is the case I he siimg quaiici isn'l u he.using il is performing lot itsell, though it is likely lhal the group at some point mav have lehcaised (he miisu it plas s m Us pitváte pel I oi n unce I he reheat sal aluiospheie, on the other hand, is one ol (na! ami emu, Hceking, uilciinpt »ng. luuhiig in general the best \i.iv n> pmform And ihis is dillcicnl lioni pei loimiug a given vvoi k Itom beginning lo end, lot oucMcIľot lint others In »hört, "the artisti v is ,o ustry," a» (reime savs. "m tin mv vn c ol the appeal ing ol the phenomenon." not m tlie sei vice ol perlcvitng the technique ol the peilmmci there is no doubt some ol lbe lallet going mi m all "linal" peilotmuncc. and some ol the loimei going on m leheaisal. U in the altitude ol the pet burner towmd the artwtry thai I am concerned with hcie So I m »uggealing thai a them y ol pacta mance has to begin al the oniolo-gical llooi where ihe Immau dosuo to pai ticip.iic m peiloimahve liansloima lions begum. I his is the point wheie there is not vol a diltetvutiaUon beiweon ,v11-1 .»'dience, the.e is m.lv .in abiding mleiesi „i the spcvlaenlai poss.hihl.es ,,| the wo.Kl (the vo.ee, sound, phvs.cal mutc.ml. behav.o.l which one uncover* m perception and al once leels the plousme ol ihe dél fi.veiy Study all ttrliMs respond to then work as an audience m the von aci ol ueat.ng „ Svnelv Ihe act ol punning „ landscape is not exhausted in lite tramloiuiauonol what ihr piniiiei sees "on, ihce, but mcludesa uvip.ocal degree ol ■pcctation, So we may n u y that art (in which I include *cicncc> is iUownu.wiud.wha.eve.....,„ thing* H may aclnevc I lere.s wba. we might call the kernel or gene ol pc,lormativlly iron, which all d.vtded lortm ol I Mi ľl «■ "KMANl I Al Ml U......H "■■'*,h 'v,u,Kr S«,,,M»* ,,,ť d mnM a...i m4i......mi tém thi lumiltanott) ol produoini iomtthin| lad rwpondta| to H m ihc mok heheviPiui íici AH artiMu ptrfonniiiei íi poundod In Um ptauufi md prfbrmtnoi ihtroitoi vm lu cultureJ wi) lowtíd Mdlou fontu ol diíTci mtiatiM tnd loiontioiiiUi) wrhtnb) ochtn (mm oeJiod porfonnori) mnd. uparl tuul perlonu ľm M u-.ilU-d uiuIk-ikvm llu- "IhmuI nu-loduV ol ilu-.n m'Im's and oiluis n m |pon Hus ptotiyfihli bm Qrooo whiofa ptrforn.....m ipriiifi, bo* ewi, llun .m\ ililU-ionlMiion ol iptdtl ol iviIoiiimiky is apl lo Icud tu h lontunion ol dcnoiumalori I In, is ||K- piobkin uitli hmiu- i,. ,IUntuii loi t n il Im,III s WiU M ol M H l.ll |H'i loilll.llKV im lllť Silllkľ KlIMs lll.lt oi1c 1« ll \lltg Ii> tooouni ii>i ttio rormi ol .niMa perfonruinoe i thinh Si hoi hnoi »•» rí|hl to Mispccl lliiil ( iolTimin is dctilmy wilh U tltOfMhtl dilU-u-nl knul ol 'pciloim mg IhmnI < >n Inil.iiKľ, Mínu- ol ihc tliings Sclu-chiui app.ncnil> umsidcis a\ pctloinuiiki-s lioMugť \ uscs. k-iioiisl ,\k h\ itiev ľh I > mak. and wíld .mimal p.uks sivin ii> mc as ľni ľrom btinj perfornuinoM on <*nľ eUreoM (ondod iBgDI) wlli»v» OOWI, ofooiincl u« (iotínitiii\ ťVťt\ilii> mkhiI IvImvioi is on 1 lu- otlui I li.mklv don'l k nov* uhm- to "pm" tlu-ni il M musí BUl llu-ni uywhtfii ľni inolinod lo ilimk wt nuuht iolve ihe problera in tbi w»«> hm I skiinťs MiKi-d ílu- pioMcin ol miom h> uiving íl louilťľii 01 so dilli-irni iiMmcR Hu t I tlnnk ScIkvIhu'I is hving no Iosn mclaplioi u al líniu l mllnian m tnMiing stu/h iviiits as |H'i loi niiMíľťs vslmh i» t<« hitu* \01nc ol Itu- s.iliu- "lamik usvmbl.uu 1 s hul llu\ .tu- m.iu limy ď .111««|tclhri dilTerenl lunoi noom Willirtiiw, Kaymoiul. A. rin'flé I I "tuhilun <>) < uhutt titul \>; u 11 tNť« N nik Oxford, 1974», l» ll ixhaiilt.m .iiu-w nuMMiiiif «•! .1 w.M.U.'tiinl 11 "'>\ mlľHiriluliKiian .111J mhiu-ncvn d,. In DM *n*c, llu- dn iioiwin 1^1 iťhahlc iiuidc m niť.iinii|t. hui 111 anollu-i u» dchmiionx au- porpetuall) eul ....."> '.....'»•« ',»,,cc, ,,,k.....M.v coiiiiiiutilU ť\olviii|i I lu- uperatlvt definltioa ot .1 *otil I ani rclcmnu nuunh lo kťv*iwU and ilu-ii dťi.Milivc* a.n..i...l> m Im* .1 1» uw,l u\ u pa.lual... -nioMiciit nuulluu- ,uaWlMt.l.nc<.m.nlhcd.t1IOI»ry.ln»wn«- Ihrilu-lioíMn trik 10 only vslial a mml liun OMMII («001 ol whith .1 M.ll mcanM \Mu-ic-» Hu- MM-fl ..u-.m.MM » .d«a%MM th, o,v,.....n,,,l ... nu-l..|......u.il ^ -< ^- "l'.m llu- ml„nmm SťaM..ll cllnl ol t lum, llicon »o«ild «.|W^« hU -/i.,....../.f......\,hh.............<......«vri,,7"r,,M"; „r • hry ,M,i la,, numlh, lhou«h tlu- .h-nge m-\ Hc « .uhlk «» 1 u- m.n.Mun,.......t.........h.«,hk- k-. ..u* H..' V.-.S -cm...c.uc......d m >^• ........-xpamk... *,„-.,i.i 1..... 1'..........■« ;\''vJ;,v rvr, ,„,|w.aW.Ml W,,.k Uk. .Ihm.u |h,»............ ^ ! 7 ľ A-|^tffh».....iA. Sr».....n,.,-//.-m|MI.....n.nf1..n I-uIihm* M« I 11 I 1111 N p A I MINN A NM IH I I NI I MiNS ■w rational) eipecl i>i nutftphoi ) Moreover, ens ul Iba priiblero» with ce......i word», k«ywoaU wpociilly, thai the) weae to &■ wordi Ml mIJ mi »ums p...... ai u-asi "neutral" worü», .in«! beeonw lymhol« gf Irutitutlom and ln»tli........al >>■ revolutionär) thinking Word», In ^ «nie, Mra like lind ind prnpcri) lha) niiliiiľiťni to tln'u >mu di*poial um) dtiperitoh bul the*-4.inl ilrong nlrftrvnili tioni atnoni ílu.....wrfownirt i mi wempto lha piwlitrutíiuťaíhM m*»aul.....ílu termu tuuih tts .nul kvíivíh/iímoh wa» mmuiesiK waned ovai the Idaa thai people believed mlmenii Impllti imitation in the tenat cop) No utrloui lotithtti eiiiu would adVMnüM »Uch H till) lUaa, bill pnMsinu limilisls i l.itiiied thai lins m.is ,i widespread belief, s,m oni) -i ni.....a ^nnturialtatli " me.......| Irl tlíc word, »ml tumped ii m with ntlu'i received" nu no wordi llfci the ittf, truth, mminjt, khmWv, tfuttttiHi. t/h iinttiof, hutnuniMH. Hfttflty pt**HHt> itfi lhal si^iuMed tili old n len logy, II mimesis isliikeu m Itl Orlglual Amiololum (aioppmed Im Platonic) mm, thsaujii radical perfornuiwt artlili art ni ill cotnmtlttag thailn al miina»!» Inaofsj ,is iba) tngagt Iii parfbrnianuöi In which they in "ttol thomwlva», hui um not llieiusvlvvs," A convenient detimiioti ot.......MitOCCUfH in Ham < knfg t ludameľs Truth and Wr/WiNeu Yotit;Crotamad, IMS): "Thaconceptofmlmaili dkl not mean ^)1 14. / Wlttganttaia'i oflabratad tienimem of tins problem of ooncapt» with "blurred etiles,'' p.iilkiiluily n«incs, Meeins in Phihtuphiotl fawulJgttrfctttt, IniiiH. t i ľ M AnuĽomhe(N«w York. Muťiiiiiiiin. 196S). iaetlon»64 íl.orpp II H Klťhnrd S e heel me ľ. ffj) itfiwv ŕj/ ľfť/uťiiutth r litím utlum! Stuďttt i>f Thěůtn itttíi tatími, ad Richard Sohechnei and Wiiin Appel (Ňew Vork auti cámbrldn Oimhriiljiť Hntvťfsiiv I'ivhn. ľwin. ?K ^ Willianu. ^fľiKWv, 12. 10 Ibid., 77, tl lien. Hniť of th' tinnier Hl. \2 Whiii eixiHirajm ihiu lumping, aniónu other ihiiign, in ihe drverai power öf the wnm'ü hiiIHhiíh: -iil}í, -attee, ami -nitvr Somroiw wlu> wouhllľl meliiile seiilpluie aml peinlintl Himmg I he perlin niAijv iuIn eoiild neateolv deny ilu-u admillanee to ivifiiriHimcť art. where both mm io ilomi^h. Moreover, many ectJvJtie» OUtlldf ihe iiľisluivea ivitiuiiwrŕn- quality, in u metiphorioal wav, and oner u in pi......d oni one won hrgnm m npnik nl ihei> peilormanre So there is nn hope m bp.....a m etciiti Nhul nt h eore mciminit We eun hope- only to Understand Ihr lome behind it* prolileiNlioii aiH | keyword. M ľrvimj Uolími.n. home Amtvrts A,, ti^y m the fhmUnuUm a/£»f*m» I Hunt nn: NoiMieaMein Hnivcrttily ľienh, l'>Nli) \\ N l^vrnglJirflhiuil. the ľrimtltkmofWt* l^ruiuv Ute i Hv* York houhleilay, 1^ Seheehnei. «i- Mt'tm,\ uf ľerfurnuituv. 2«, PERFORMANCE AS METAPHOR 16 Gofľman. The Presentation of Self, 72. 17 Bruce Wilshire offers a critique of Goffman's theory in Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre As Metaphor (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1982), 274-81. 18 Victor Turner. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 68-69. 19 One of the things that marks a poor play is its "unrealistic" depiction of its conflict: it poses either weak extremes (breaches), convenient developments to the crisis, or easy solutions—that is, solutions that in real social life would scarcely occur, given the odds, The sudden unexpected arrival of a rich uncle might be a good example, though under some circumstances the rich uncle is part of the form (sentimental drama), hence part of what we expect. 20 Richard Scheduler would probably disagree with this "one-way" judgment. For example, referring to Turner's social drama he says: "Artistic action creates the rhetorical and/or symbolic possibilities for social drama to 'find itself.' and the events of ordinary life provide the raw stuff and conflicts reconstructed in art works" {Benveen Theater and Anthropology [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1985], 116. 1 In.). And in his previous book. Essays in Performance Theory: 1970 -76 (New York: Drama Book Specialists. 1977), he applies Turner's social drama theory to the 1975 imbroglio of President Gerald Ford's dismissal of the cabinet members and then to Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet (140 44). finding that both follow Turner's social drama pattern perfectly. First, 1 don't disagree with Schechner's sense of a two-way street in the least. It is quite true that social action uses the rhetorical and symbolic language of artistic works (not to mention the rhetoric of religion, military strategy, and perhaps even science and domestic life); but this is far from a structural adaptation. Second, my point is that social drama came first; it invariably follows the same pattern (as Schechner says, "it has always been this way in politics, from the village level on up" [143]). and drama modeled itself directly on this pattern. There was simply no other choice, and I would be surprised if the "dramatic conflicts" that take place in the psychical, physical, and animal worlds, if we cut them at the right joints, didn't follow a similar pattern. Particularly enlightening on this subject is Rudolf Arnheim's discussion of the struggle between the calabolic and the anabolic forces in the field of entropy (he calls this "the structural theme") in Entropy and Art: An Essay on Order and Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 21 See Zenon W. Pylyshyn. "Metaphorical Imprecision and the 'Top-Down* Research Strategy," in Metaphor und Thought, ed- Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 429. 22 Presentation of Self 254. 23 Ibid.. 106, 24 Ibid.. 80-81. 25 On this matter of the theatre metaphor as interpretative tool, see Mária Minich Brewer: "Theatre provides, on the one hand, a vast integrative reference for interpretation and. on the other, it narrows the field to the place of the desiring subject within those interpretive frames" ("Performing Theory." Theatre Journal 37 [1985], 17). 26 Philip Auslander discusses the beginnings of performance art in Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1992). 35-55. See also Michael Vanden Heuvel, Performing DramaiDramatizing Performance: Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press. 1991), chiefly pp. I - 66. 133 FOUNDATIONS AND DEFINITIONS 27 Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar. Straus & Giroux, 1969), 4. 28 Peggy Phelan. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London & New York: Routledge. 1993), 146. 29 Schechner. Between Theater and Anthropology. 41. 30 I refer of course to Austins famous term "performative utterance" in which "the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action" {How To Do Things With Words [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975], 6), 31 Ibid. 22. 32 Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Theater, trans. Frank Jelhnek (New York: Pantheon. 1976) . 162. 33 Tom Stoppard, Tom Stoppard in Conversation, ed. Paul Delaney (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 264. A useful way to differentiate theatre's "invisible" acting and staging from (he visible presentation of performance art is offered in Richard A. Lanham's "At and Through: The Opaque Style and Its Uses." in Literacy and (he Survival of Humanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Lanham proposes a distinction between the opaque style and the transparent style, which works like a "simple AtfThrough Switch" (58). The transparent style (invisible theatre) is the style of pure signification, or of the signified (meaning): the opaque style is the style of the phenomenon itself, of the sigmfier (presence). Needless to say, there are no pure examples and the "simple" AtVThrough switch turns out to be quite complex. 34 Phelan, Unmarked, 4. 35 Ibid., 147. 36 Ibid., 146. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 31. 39 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books. 1977) , 224. 40 Phelan, Unmarked, 36-37. 41 Phelan certainly has a valid point in claiming that performance consists in its commentary on its own medium. Here is one huge respect in which performance as used in the term performance art signifies something different from its meaning under normative circumstances (say, in theatre or concert performance). Perfonn-ance art was, and to a great degree still is. aimed at deconstructing the normal assumptions of traditional performance (see Michael Vanden Heuvel, Perform-ing DramatDramatizing Performance: Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 8fT). Understanding performance art outside the context of "normal" theatre and art would be as fruitless as trying to understand the Declaration of Independence outside the context of British imperialism. Thus the true performance of performance art occurs between whatever form it takes and the background presuppositions whose gravitational pull it sought to escape, Performance, in one sense at least, wasn't confined in the performance itself (as when Olivier plays Othello), but in a "betwixt" ontology, somewhat as the "ontology" of crossed sticks depends on the events at Calvary and all that followed. Even so, I see nothing essentially original about performance art, by which I mean only that it isn't doing anything different from what art has always done: waged an eternal struggle against the strangulations of its own repetitions. All of the topics Phelan takes up in her book are true performances (in my opinion) in the sense that each artist uses the medium as part of what the message is; Trisha's absence and the play with filmic space in Rainer's The Man Who Envied Women, the substitution of descriptions and photographs for the 134 PERFORMANCI1 as METAPHOR paintings tri Sophie í 'alie's Boston exhibition, ( 'indy Sherman's use of Bff own tody ill disappearing act. and soon. In each ease, ii is the medium giving birth to new offspring, led whh its own blood. Hut I lliink this is what painting, photo-grepny, rllm, and theatre have always done The true performative Moment of art (in Phetan'i sense), the moment before iis retreal into beeotuini either classic nr dead (Of both), OCeuri in I hut cultural «nw ol lime when it can he seen (or heard) us reactive, as poiied between the present practice of art and I he possibilities of fUttmevolution. Thil is l highly ambígUOUl process, however, because normal arl is always changing and the rebel art is always to some extant, repeating itself and thus giving rise to a set of ossifying characteristics. After this it enters the stream of whul we know and wlial has therefore to be constantly redone, like Penelope s lapeslry. 42 Mikel Dulrciine. The Them nmtia fogy <>f Aesthetic Experience, trims, fulwurd S. ( usey, et al. (Pvansloit; Northwestern University Press. 1473). Si, Dufrenue's aesthetics. I should odd. equates presentation of a work with performance (in French, execution). Even the plastic arts, "in being perceived aesthetically, give 'performance' in the sense of offering sensuous presentations to I he spectator^ (lid. note, I7n). Or. as Dufrenne puts the idea: "The work must oiler itself to perception: it must be performed m order to pass, as il were, from a potential U) in actual existence" (14), Hence, the reader, like the stage actor. beCOlUM the performer of the written work "||)|oos nol every reader have to be a performer in order to make words pass from the abstract existence of the written sign to I he concrete existence nl (he uttered sign, at leasl if the sign takes on its full meaning only when uttered?" (51 52). It should be said, however, lhal Dufrenne does not make this claim of the spectator ol graphic ail: perception of the work does not equal performance. 'The spectator only "collaborates" in the performance of painting, sensuously displayed by the (absent) author. The difference seems lo be that in the presence of I painting we perceive the sensuous organization, in reading a novel we must imagine it for ourselves with the text's help (59), 43 Roman Iugaidea's well-known term for this enactment of the text is "con-ercti/ulion." meaning that Ihe reader "must perform a vivid representation in reading. And this means simply lhal the reader musi productively experience intuitive aspects in the material of vivid representation and thereby bring the portrayed object to intuitive presence, to representational appearance" [The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R, Olson [Evanttow Northwestern University Press, 1473], 56 57). Engardee does not refer lo lliis as performance, as Dufrenne does: even so, the same principle (and term) applies to Ihe work of the actor who "concretes" ihe text of the author. 44 Dufrenne, řhe#emenotogy, 59. 45 See Between Theater and Anthropology, 1985,35; By Means o)< t'erfoanttnee, 1990, 43; The home of Bitími Writings on Vulture ami Terformanee (New York & London: Routledge. 1993), I. 4d Scheduler. Bctneen Theater and Anthrapotogy, 36 37. 47 Ibid.. 35. 4« I hid,. 3o. «9 I hid.. 41. » Ibid.. 51. 51 Scheduler. By Means of I'erformome, 43. ■s2 Ibid.. 25. ■s3 Scheduler, Between Theater ami Anthropology, 52. M Ibid,. 36, 135 1 iH'NUA 1 IONS AND DIUNIIIONS 5> Ibid.. S| 5b Ibid. 42. 57 Schechner. H\ Means of Performance. 20 21. Hie term "performative event." very common m theory, is a real fudge, but u ii almost unponibk to avoid. What is the dillerenee between a performance and a performative event? lo adopt ilu performance lingo, we might say thai a performative event is not exactly a pci formanee bul il is nol exactly inn a performance. 58 Ibid.. 19. 99 Ibid.. 37. Ml Schechner. R\ Means vi* Performance. 28. 61 Schechnei. Between Theater and .twin opt >logy, 97. 62 Of COUrte, il you put a 00* on the stage and made il pari ol the action of a play, that's another matter enlnely The familiarity of ihc annual disappears and is replaced h\ the shiK'k of ils appearance in an unaccustomed place. This, I lake il. would be the source of the fascination wiih Hippo-drama in the nineteenth cenlury 63 This is Heidegger's term ol course See "The Origin ol ihc Work ol An," in Poctt i Language Thought. Iran- Albert Holsladter < New York: Harper. 1975), 32(1'. fS4 Bchechner. Between Theater and Anthropology. 52. 6> Roger C Schank, and Robert 1». Abclson. Script*, Plans. Goals and L ndei standing An Inquiry into Human knowledge Structures (Hillsdale. NJ; Lawrence Ertbaum. 1977). 67. 66 Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations, trans, G. E M. Anseombc I New York; Macmillan. I96K), 34. 67 1 am not saying something that Schechner doesn'i realize. I or instance, see his essay on the relation of social drama to aesthetic drama in Essays in Performance Theory lV7t) 76 (New York: Drama Book Specialists. 1977). 140 56 Indeed, with a few changes his diagram on Social Dramas Aesthetic Drama (144) might be adapted to my point. I do share Victor Turner's reservations thai the diagram "suggests cyclical rather ihan linear movement" (From Ritual to Theatre The Human Seriousness ofPkty\NtM York; Performing Arts Journal Publications. 1982). 74) between theatre and society: that is. it overemphasizes the respect in which thealTe influences life When Schechner suggests that Gerald Ford "takes techniques trom ihc theatre" in order lo conduct his cabinet shake-up to besi public advantage [Essays in Performance Theory. I4t 44). I would ask where ilie theatre learned these PR techniques if not from realpolitik ilself. In other words. anything the theatre knows was taught to it hy reality. Maybe people deliberately "theatricalize" themselves in dress, manner, or lite-stvle according to populai theatre stereotypes (James Dean. Madonna), hut where did the stereotypes originate? 6K Roberl P Crease. The Play of Nature: Experimentation as Performance (Bloomington Indiana University Press. 19931.96 m I hid . ILK) 70 Ibid , 103 71 Wolfgang Iscr, 77?r Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1993|. 4 72 Gerald Edelman, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (New York: Basic Books, I9K7). 26 S. 73 Ibid.. 329. 74 Again Edelman: "We must look at all acts of perception as acts of creativity (Memory) it not a implicative recall of stored physical descriptors. It is an imaginative act. a form of dynamic recaiegorization with decoration by exemplars. Its very lack ol repetitive precision is the source of creative possibility for generalization 136 PERFORMANCE AS MftAI'HilK and pattern recognition" ("Neural Darwinism; Population Thinking and Higfltt Brain Functioo," in Wow We Know, ed. Michael Shafto [San Francisco- Harper & Row. 1985]. 24). 75 Ibid.. 109. 76 Ibid.. 110. 77 The best sustained ease lor the thought-parallels beiween scientific and artistic discovery is made b\ Arthur Koestler in The Act ef Creation tN.p.: Macmillan. 1969). "The logical pattern of the creative process is the same in humor, scientific discovery, and art; it consists in the discovery ol hidden similarities" [21). This is more complex than it sounds in this reduced form. The thing we must hear in mind in studies like Crease's and koestler's is not that the> are arguing For in across-the-board identification between science and art, only that the mental process of discovery is the same, along with certain procedures. There is not an awful loi of difference, in short between finding the right metaphors and designing the right experimental model (which, as koestler points out. is always "a caricature of reality , . . based on selective emphasis on the relevant i'aeiors and omission of the rest" [72]—just what we do unconsciously when we interpret a metaphor.) So when we separate art and science as different pursuits of understanding, we ought to know precisely what we're separating and what is identical. To quote Nelson Goodman on the point: "Even if the ultimate product of science, unlike that of art, is a literal, verba! or mathematical, denotalional theory, science and art proceed in much the same way with their searching and building" (Ways of Woridmaking [Indianapolis and Cambridge: Haekelt, 1978], 107J. 78 Crease. The Piny of Nature, III. 79 Is this not exactly the main reason for "reviving" old oul-of-fashion plays in which we (the stage director) suddenly detect a contemporary theme? Or, to reverse the order, why we do classics in updated locations (a Creole Othello, a Barbados Winter's Tale, etc.)? 80 The Play if Nature. 119. 81 Gadamer. Truth and Method, 99. 82 Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1990). 17: see also Vanden Heuvel. Performing Promt, 36; and Schmill, "Casting the Audience." 83 On this same line, the Princeton Emydopedia of Poetry ami Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 199?) defines performance as "The recitation of poetry either by its author, a professional performer, or any reader either alone or before an audience; the term normally implies the latter" (892). 84 The ur-forms of all performance would be the day dream and the nocturnal REM dream, the most private instances of "restored behavior." 137 16 THEATRICAL AND TRANSGRESSIVE ENERGIES1 Freddie Rokem Source: ,4.w.j/»/i Stttdki m the Theoirt IS 11999): l>> »8. The theatre like the plague release* Conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if these possibilities and these powers are dark, it is the fault not of the plague nor of the theatre, but of life, Anlonin Arlaud Discourses on the theatre as well as performance in general frequently refer to the different kinds of energy created on stage and transmitted it) the audience. This notion of energy* as a rule depicts how some form of uncompromising engagement on all levels of theatrical communication, mainly through the art of acting, is achieved. The number of texts on theatre and performance referring directly to the notion of 'energy', or drawing on concepts closely related to it. is even quite surprising. Usually, however, these concepts, and in particular the notion of 'energy', are employed without indexing them formally in any way; they simply appear as a central cord around which many discussions about the theatre are actually organized. The notion of'energy'does not of course belong primarily to the world of theatre, but refers lo how some kind of machinery or technical aid uses physical or chemical changes to produce a labor that has an effect; or to the ability of human intentions to perform actions with concrete results. It was Aristotle who was the first to use cnergi'M (vigor or force) or enarxeiu (vividness or shining forth) as rhetorical terms, signifying the actualization of that which had previously only existed potentially. The two terms very early overlapped, pointing at a visually powerful description that recreates something or someone, as several theorists say, 'before your very eyes'.2 These terms became important also in legal contexts to designate rhetorical excellence. Implicitly, for Aristotle, energy also meant accumulated 291 ELEMENTS AND circumstances Oi PtRKlRMANCE force For us today the concepts 'perform' and 'performance' also imply some form of creation and expenditure of energy that are not simply the result of technological achievements, like in the 'performance' of my car 01 computer, but concern human actions in all fields, including theatre. Energy' is undoubtedly also a concept that carries strong ideological implications and it has been used to describe the causes of social changes and upheavals. In discourses on theatre and performance the notion of 'energy' has perhaps been most frequently employed in the contexts of acting and directing. But it has also been used to discuss those energies that are present in dramatic texts from the distant past and which still make them relevant to us, centuries after these texts were first written and performed. The energies of acting can thus be seen as a theatrical or performative mode that makes it possible both to tell and show the spectators watching a performance something from and about that past, as supposedly preserved in these texts. The notion of "energy' has also been employed for pointing out and defining different modes of communication and semiosis in the theatre. In addition to examining these discourses, 1 also attempt here to develop different theoretical notions on the basis of which certain metaphysical and ritual dimensions of theatrical energies can be examined. These in turn arc also closely related to what we usually refer to as catharsis, the energies that can be experienced by spectators watching a performance. The widespread and quite different ways in which the notion of'energy' has been employed in discourses on the theatre serve 10 indicate the complexity of this cultural practice. In such discourses, it is a concept floating around 'out there", and to date no attempt has been made to examine this notion more systematically, as a key concept for the theory of theatre and performance. Although Aristotle was the first to use terminology directly relating to energy in the field of rhetoric, already in Plato's dialogue Ion, which explores the art of the so-called rhapsode - the singer of the Homeric epics - there is an extensive discussion about the sources of his power and inspiration. Here Socrates explains to the young actor, bearing the same name as the dialogue itself, that The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art but an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides called a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of irons and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration. For all good poets, epic as 292 ,nB,u*,vllL ' KAngstJRESSIVE ENERGIES well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed.1 The power-fields of these 'magnetic energies' of Ion's performances are created by what Socrates terms enthusiasmos, a term still used in contemporary English with more or less the same connotations, and according to Plato they are subject to an a priori hierarchy, in which each link in the creative chain refers back to a divine source, thus creating an integrated totality. This understanding of the actor as someone who is inspired or 'charged' with divine or metaphysical powers has had a very profound influence on the discourses on acting, as they have developed in most cultures. Plato's explicit aim, however, was to prevent a situation in which each link in the communicative chain preceding the performance, and in particular within the performance itself, is given some form of autonomy in which the actor can be seen as an independent source of this charismatic power and inspiration. The moment such an autonomy is accepted and mapped out -and Plato was no doubt aware that this is possible, otherwise he would not have banned poets and all other artists from his ideal state - each and every link in the creative chain of the theatre can become a source of independent energies. Artistic creativity. Plato claimed, contains a strong transgressive potential. And, furthermore, as he most certainly also recognised, such a transgressive potential will not always be totally confined within the more limited field of art itself, but can in different ways also influence the social and ideological spheres as well. However, even if such transgressive energies can at least potentially upset the existing social order - 1 believe that one of the reasons why art still interests us today is related to this possibility - they are nonetheless still deeply ambiguous. Pierre Klossowski, for example, reflecting on the ideas of the Marquis de Sade in the context of the French Revolution, even considered the very notion of'transgression' itself to be radically paradoxical, because it seems absurd and puerile when it [transgression] does not succeed in resolving itself into a state of affairs in which it would no longer be necessary. But it belongs to the nature of transgression that it is never able to find such a state. Transgression is then something else than the pure explosion of energy accumulated thanks to an obstacle. It is an incessant recuperation of the possible itself - inasmuch as the existing state of things has eliminated the possibility of another form of existence.4 Only a Utopian situation would make the need for transgressions unnecessary. What we usually witness in situations of social and psychological change » rather, as Klossowski seems to imply, an 'explosion ot energy accumulated thanks to an obstacle'. But even when such revolutionary energies are released 293 ELEMENTS AND CIRCUMSTANCES OF PERFORMANCE j, the social sphere they do not lead to any significant changes, particularly ■ftSf rnXn rf W holds such an ambiguous and even paradoxical posihon in social discursive practices as well as those connected to the arts, it dPe" v o be carefully examined. What 1 wish to argue here is that the theatre has become a point of convergence or union for such differently constituted energies which are generally conceived of as belonging to completely separate ontological spheres or fields. It is this form of violation of boundaries between spheres that was apparently most threatening for Plato, who argued for a transcendental metaphysics and could only accept that the aesthetic field too had but one, divine source. But it seems, rather, that the different forms of energies created and constituted by performances are somehow able to bring together a broad variety of such ontological spheres. It is even possible to argue that one of the basic constituent features of theatrical performances, what is gcnerall) termed their 'theatricality', is at least partially based on such a mingling of ontological spheres, which as a rule do not co-exist to the same extent in other contexts. The theatre itself is of course not just an indistinct blur, but designates borders between different ontological spheres such as between the aesthetic and the social, the fictional and the historical, the natural and the supernatural, the static and the dynamic, the naive and the metatheatrical. But the theatre also seeks to bring these spheres together; first to make them interact, at least for the duration of the performance itself, and in some cases even to unify them. The 'friction' such meetings give rise to is the source of the unique energies created by the theatre. The notion of 'energy' in the context of perfonnance thus serves both as a unifying and a separating or dividing force. The ability to bring many totally disparate ontological spheres together is no doubt one of the reasons why it has been so difficult to delineate theatre and performance as aesthetic phenomena, even if this is of course an issue that basically concerns all the arts. But the live presence of the human body, both on the stage as actors-performers (presenting characters) and in the auditorium as spectators, has made it much more complex to define the 'theatrical' than to delineate the 'fictional' in prose fiction, for example. Theatre, in addition to the complexities of the theatrical signs and in particular the presence of the human body, also has to confront the issues of fictionality. But the comprehensibility with which theatre simultaneously brings a vast number of different ontological spheres into play is of such a magnitude that the theatrical field has even become paradigmatic for human behaviour in different academic disciplines. However, theatre research, I believe, has not been able fully to take up the challenge of this paradigmatic aspect of its own field of research, the nS™i Z rCCn P?wivcd as act,valinK different kinds of energies from ^oft^Tat,VB metaPhysicaI Perspectives, as well as from the dTffe en. oilthegators. The textual perspective is based on radically different ontological assumptions to the performative one, which as a 294 THEATRICAL AND TRANSGRESSIVE ENERGIES integrates the human presence both on the stage as well as in the auditorium. The metaphysical dimensions of theatre are activated by quite different assumptions from the textual and performative ones, sometimes contradicting them, but frequently also supplementing or even reinforcing them. The fact that theatre at critical stages in its development has been closely associated with ritual and religious practices has no doubt inlluenced our perceptions of Lhts form of art. And finally, it is the spectator who carries away the meanings of the theatrical performance, making us imagine or even believe that it is possible to change the world ml' live in by trying Ui activate the different psychological and social energies the performance has triggered. This response is caused by the kind of catharsis a particular performance has been able to trigger among the individual spectators. This may perhaps sound somewhat too optimistic, because the complex interaction between performance and this historical world is. as Artaud -whom I quote in the motto to this article - quite clearly understood, also based on the fact that this world is permeated by destructive energies. The creative energies of the theatre can. however, in certain cases be seen as a kind of force that counteracts the destructive energies of history and its painful failures. The Second World War, in particular the Shoah and the use of the atom-bomb, both of which contain clearly distinct but almost unimaginable destructive energies, have profoundly affected our understanding of all expressions of culture, including the theatre. The notion of 'energy* in the theatre thus also raises the issue of to what extent performances are capable of creating and developing vital and creative energies that are not inherently destructive, and can therefore, at least ideally, also have a restorative function. Textual energies In his book Shakespearean Negotiations, subtitled The Circulation of Social Energy in Renuissance England. Stephen Greenblatt raised the seemingly obvious question of why Shakespeare's plays are still so relevant to readers and audiences of today. In answering this question Greenblatt makes an interesting move between a Foueaultian approach, focusing on the power hegemonies of a certain society, and a much more non-focalised understanding of the textual and performative energies with which Shakespeare's writings are imbued. Greenblatt relates the notion of'energy' both to the power and the hegemony in the social sphere, as expressed in different public discourses and social practices at the time, and to the literal and metaphorical expressions of these practices in the dramatic texts from the same period, On the one hand, and this is a position closely following Foucault. Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare's dramas, 'precipitated out of a sublime confrontation between a total artist and a totalizing society.'s In order to examine the complex interactions between the completely self-absorbed artist and the surrounding society, with Us 'occult network linking all human. 295 ELBM8NT« IND CIRCUMSTANCES Ol PERFORMANCE i . mic powers [which] generates vivid dreams of access to the ux at Whose pinnacle is the embolic ligurc at the monarch. Greenblatt educes the notion of'social eoergy'. This notion, he argues, will enable us " explain a hx the aesthetic po*er of a Pla> like Kmg Lear .n spue ol the Jact that it has been radical]) refigured' since the pla3 was written almost four hundred yean ago still SO Strong!) efforts Ittttoday. At the same time, however, and this enables a much less hegemonic strategy of reading, these ^figurations do not cancel history, locking us into a perpetual present", but are. Greenblatl continues. the signs of the inescapabiliu of a historical process, a structured negotiation and exchange. alread> evident in the initial moments of empowerment. That there is no direct, unmediated link between ourselves and Shakespeare's plays does not mean that there is no link at all. The life' that hterar> works seem to possess long both after the death of the author and the death of the culture for which the aulli. -i winie i> the h-v-ik.r consequence, howe\ er transformed and refashioned, of the social energ} initially encoded in those works. These social energies are. according toGreenblaii. embedded within a network of interiexiual webs, which continue to reverberate within these individual plays long after the) were written. He goes on to argue that the aesthetic modes of such social energies have been so powerfully encoded in certain works of art (thai this energy] continues to generate the illusion of life for centuries."1 Greenblatt closely examines the contemporary textual evidence of certain specific social practices at the time of Shakespeare and how the texts about them can serve as such intertexts with the Shakespearean masterpieces with the aim 'to understand the negotiations through which works of art obtain and amplify such powerful energy.'9 The issue Greenblatt has been able to confront by examining these inter-•c>!u-'1 negotiations is also mdireelK concerned with the transformation of the classical masterpieces into performances, and in particular with how the '■■'> - "» tin- Ma.ee are able to communicate the social energies embedded in ihem to the spectators of today. Because of the living ongoing dialogue that every culture has with the past, such performances will ideally not merely become archaeological reconstructions or a theme park re-enactment of the "us dialogue will, rather, create a tension between the performance and events depicted, which contain their own social energies based on the abilitj to perceive and interpret the distance both in time and space between the textual past and the performative present In today's Israeli culture the Hebrew Bible, i.e. the Old Testament, un- Ztull thC5C kinds °f social !«• text has served as the Dean both lor the Jewish religion and its traditional practices as well as being 296 THEATRICAL AND T R A N SG R ESSI V E ENERGIES a central ideological platform for the Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel. Hebrew theatre (before the foundation of the State) and Israeli theatre (after 1948) have constantly explored Biblical subjects in order to comment on the present, but also to say something about the past. A play like Hanoch Levin's Job's Sorrows, based on the Book of Job. situates the action of the play in the Roman period, critiquing the Israeli cults of suffering, self-pity and hero-worship. It presents a Job who is unwilling to accept the new Caesar as the ruler of the universe who has decreed that he is the only God. Job. who has denied the existence of God because he has lost all his family and possessions, has a vision of his father, who he believes is God. and since he no longer has anything to lose, he announces his belief in God. His punishment is to have his anus skewered by a spear. Rina Yerushalmi's Bible Project, which consists of two performances based on a collage of Biblical texts also presents a critique of the more traditional readings of these texts in the Israeli context. The recital of some of the most familiar Biblical texts by a group of actors who do not play specific roles of Biblical figures, but rather are presented as a gToup and as individuals, creates a powerful verbal space with moving bodies. Secular audiences, who have studied most of these texts in school, strongly identify with these productions on the emotional as well as intellectual levels. Both these productions, and several more, have taken the Bible as a point of departure for a radical refiguration of the traditional textual materials within a contemporary performance context. Besides their obvious intertex-tual relations to the one singular text, the Bible, which undoubtedly carries a strong mythological weight in contemporary Israeli culture, these productions are indicative of the current hierarchical power structures. They create what Greenblatt has termed "a sublime confrontation between a total artist [or rather a totally absorbing text] and a totalizing society', struggling to overturn the Jewish orthodox hegemony over these classical texts. The two productions I have mentioned here were able to create subversive or transgressive energies by removing the canonised texts from their religious context, and situating them instead within a theatrical one. The very dialectics between the two contexts is in itself a source of theatrical energies. Representation and semiosis Most theatrical performances depict situations in which the individual characters invest different efforts or energies in changing their private or social situation. But the themes represented on stage as a rule also interact on different levels with the aesthetic means of representation. Michael Goldman has described this correlation as a situation in which An actor is not simply a man presenting a careful behaviour of other men. or even of his own behaviour. His relation with what he imitates 297 ILBMINTS U*D ClltCUlltTANCI.......tPOHIIANC. i „ .wl „wl ofrOUfh KJUIVtteBCS.....T-^nu.k.n xcling IS neve. „ ^ mimetic, i. appeals 10 - Kv.uk of somcothc, 0. nunc nwlu- ' P owe, Wefed an energ) preseni m«n3 goodactoi i performance goes beyond the ikinoiistmtionol w hat some ^ pwsoo » Uke,M Gokhn in Roe* oe to describe this energ) of the ictor'j ert ai "terrific" jncm bearing in mind thai words rool suggestion ol the eweaome end the fearful rim'i> clearh something thai il also related to catharsis Goldman presents i position thai has undewbtedt) been strong!) inilucnced b\ the School of New Criticism, arguing lhal there is always something w the drama itself, us plot 01 il- characters, thai enables the actors to reaiiea these energ) potentials of thesi art: structure is meaning. Most forceful m thii respect are differenl forms of aggression. But, Goldman argues, I he aggnmion of the plot is not the result of some dramatic law requiring struggle, debate, event, emphasis all of which can he quite imdramatk li springs from other aggressions the aggressions of impersonation and performance. The plot must offer the actors aggressive energ) land the related aggressive energ) of the audience) ample and interesting scope, I he effort of the actoi to act and ihe pleasures thai aciiu^ generates are percen ed as pai 1 of llie action of the play, which forms their field.1 It is only, (ioldman continues when the energies ol the acting become combined with those of the drama itself that the performance will actually tain us 'real' course. "I his multi-faceted collocation between the themes of the piny and the means of theatrical representation through the acting on the stage clearly contains a meta-ihealrieal dimension, a mode of expression that is self-reflexive. It can perhaps even be viewed as a 'universal of performance* in Herbert Blau'l sense of the term. The theatrical sign, at least as a Utopian potential, actually becomes a kind oHilV in itself. For Blau. The theatrical gestus, the signifying element of theater "can become a sign", as Foucault says, "only on condition that it manifests, in addition, ihe relation that links il to what -signifies | . . J""1 The meta-thealrical link between the theatrical eestux, tl specific sign-systems of the theatre, and what a performance signifies, servt-as the hasis for the theatrical energies in Blau's thinking. Or. as he has stated •n a more recent publication: 'When we grow weary of the disorder of the world whose disorder spreads through our language so that wc grow exhausted, we retreat to or look for energy in the apparent order of art. its ingrown autonomy. The issue as | hope will become even more clear later on. is how ne relationships between the energies in the social field, the revolution tr.msgress.ve energies, and the energies that stem from what Blau terms the mgrown autonomy' of The apparent order of art' are constituted. THEATRICAL AND TR A N SGRESSI V E ENERGIES This issue, which stems from Plata's critique of the arts, has also quite strongly informed and influenced what we can term the lsemiotic project', the attempts among theatre scholars over approximately the last three decades, to expose and explicate the theatrical codes. One of the basic strategies of this project has been to emphasise the autonomy of the individual components of the 'theatrical text', and this has primarily been based on different principles of segmentation combined with the investigation of their communicative potentials in the synchronic/systemic context of individual performances. Gradually, however, these communicative potentials have in many cases also been formulated theoretically in terms that are closely related to the notion of 'energy1. 1 will briefly mention two such attempts here. For Patrice Pavis, who has gradually moved in the direction of analysing the individual performance in terms of different vectors or power fields through which it is dynamically organised, developing on a temporal axis, the energies are an expression of the most ephemeral elements of the performance. Pavis has focused on the performance totality of the mise-en-scene, including such elements as the rhythm and kinetics of the performance, which, he argues, the available scientific language is not yet fully able to depict, In order to confront this apparent embarrassment, the point of departure Pavis has established is that L[t]heatrical production has become impregnated with theorisation. Mise-en-scene is becoming the self-reflexive discourse of the work of art, as well as the audience's desire to theorise."!i The energies of the performance, Pavis argues, have thus become transformed into the desire of the individual spectators to determine how a specific performance functions and is constructed. This desire is based on a curiosity to locate the creative processes through which the performance has been produced, which, ideally at least, are revealed by its meta-theatrical superstructures. Erika Fischer-Lichte's semiotic project has a similar basis. But she has taken a much more direct recourse to psychoanalytic theory in order to answer the question of how it is 'possible for the different subjects participating in the production of a theatrical text to constitute themselves as subjects in the process of that production?'w In her theoretical deliberations Fischer-Lichte refers directly to Julia Kristeva, who offers a formulation of how the instinctual drives of an individual are articulated, and how (quoting Kristeva), Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and. in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body - always already involved in a semiotic process - by family and social structures.17 The basis for Fischer-Lichte's semiotic model of the theatre is the interface between the pre-linguistic, semiotic sphere, and the symbolic one, in the Lacanian sense even, through which the subject is constituted by letting some 299 elements and circumstances of performance kind of (almost instinctual! energy How through the body. This energy in turn becomes organised according to its own constitutional constraints m creai-ins what Fischer-Lichte terms the *body-texl\ She focuses on the work of the actor and how his individual physique masters the text by making it u extension of itself*, creating 'the texl a second lime - under his body's own specific conditions - both as something foreign to him and as something integral to his body.'" We must, therefore, she argues, concentrate predominantly on the question how the praxis of individual interpretation is accomplished by the different subjects involved in the process of constituting the theatrical text?" And this is clearly a question of how different instinctual energies are channelled into social communication. I he question Pavis focuses on is the constitution of the mise-en-scem as an assembly of elements, which in various ways creates a meta-theatrical key to the performance. A iheLiincal perform a nee is in some way always self-reflexive, drawing attention to the way it is made, and the energies created by a specific performance stem from the curiosity of the spectators to solve the riddles this specific performance poses. For Fischer-Lie hie on the other hand the energies expressed by a specific production basically stem from the constitution of a 'subject-in-process' within the framework of a performance. This process has its source in the instinctual drives of the actors, but it certainly does not exclude the possibility that it can also directly affect the spectators. For both, however, the communication created by a performance remains within the spheres of the "semiolic project' examining sign-systems, which by themselves, but primarily in alignment with each other, give rise to dynamic and constantly changing processes of interpretation. Performance energies The notion of 'energy' has undoubtedly been most frequently used in the writings of theatre directors summarising their experiences of working with actors for specific performances or in different workshop contexts. These views have no doubt been formulated from a hegemonic position, summarising what these directors have been able to 'do' to the actors, releasing or liberating various kinds of performative energies from or through themwhik working with them or thinking about the work retrospectively. Examining the ways in which the notion of'energy' has been employed in the writings of three contemporary directors (Richard Sehechner, Eugenio Barba and Peter Brook) provides just a sample from the wealth of writings in this specific area, and enables the distinction between several interesting kinds of emphasis. According to Schechner. who is the most academic of these directors, "the sense of heing taken over by a role, of being possessed by it in its "flow" or in the flow ol the audience's appetite for illusion, ludus. tila: play,'31 is of central importance, The transformation that takes place during the performance itself, he claims, is a kind of 'absorption into the center' This, he adds is the THEATRICAL AND T K A N SG R ESS I V E ENERGIES point where The chief parallel between performance and ritual process" can be discerned.1 Schechner presents what could be termed a more passive-view of the energies generated in and by a performance, arguing that the •surrender to the flow of action is the ritual process" through which what he terms the 'restored behaviour of acting originates.- Some of Schechners formulations even point in a direction where it would be possible to draw the conclusion that acting is like a kind of sleepwalking activity. Eugenio Barba, on the other hand, for whom 'energy" is a very central notion in his thinking about theatre, presents a much more activist understanding of the actor's energies. Stemming from what Barba terms the 'dilated body', the energies are like a kind of theatrical Trickery*, because '[l]here are certain performers who attract the spectator with an elementary energy which 'seduces" without mediation. This occurs before the spectator has either deciphered individual actions or understood their meanings."'1 The performer's presence holds a special force and attraction: The dilated body is above all a glowing body, in the scientific sense of the term: the particles which make up daily behaviour have been excited and produce more energy, they have undergone an increment of motion, they move further apart, attract and oppose each other with more force, in a restricted or expanded spaced4 The metaphors Barba has employed are taken from a more scientific field than those of Schechner. From a more practical perspective, the energy of the actor is most effectively produced by what Barba calls The negation principle'. This principle can be applied to the concrete work of the actors, both in training as well as during their work on the stage: There is a rule which performers know well: begin an action in the direction opposite to that to which the action will finally be directed. This rule recreates a condition essential to all those actions which in daily life demand a certain amount of energy: before striking a blow, one draws one's arm back; before jumping, one bends ones knees; before springing forward, one leans backwards: rentier pour mieux sauierr* This principle can, as Barba himself has no doubt also seen, somewhat simplistically be transformed into a kind of magic Trick' in which the actor uses The negation principle' to seduce the spectators rather than inviting them to participate emotionally or intellectually in the theatrical creation. At die same time, however, it is important to note that Barba conceives ot theatrical energy as a visible tension between two directions of bodily movement, not primarily as a flow, as Schechner does. 301 ELEMENTS ^ND CIRCUMSTANCES Of PERFORMANCE peter Brook baa presented r more dialectical view of theatrical energies. He d „med thai '[wje know thai the world of appearance is a crust [. .. andl under the crosi is the boiling matte, we see if we peer into a volcano'. 1 his leads him lo the question: How can we tap this energy?* In another interview Brook developed his quasi-scientific metaphors, first comparing the theatrical event with an explosion', in which sometimes the exact same combination of elements * ill cause an explosion, while at other limes nothing at all will happen. Brook then reflected on how (he carbon-arc lamp, when the two electric poles meet, generates light. The crucial difference for the intensity of the light produced depends on the resistance to the flow of energies. For this reason Brook also sees the meeting between audience and actors as crucial At the outset, these two elements are separated. The audience represents multiple sources of energy, as many as there are spectators, bttt these sources are not concentrated. In itself, the audience is just like the carbon-arc lamp: it has no intensity, each individual's energy is diffuse and dispersed. There is nothing inside any of these individuals which could make them sources of intensity in themselves. An event will only occur if each one of these individual instruments become attuned. Then all you need for something to happen is for a single vibration to pass through the auditorium but it cannot be produced if the thousand harps that represent the audience are not tuned in the same way, to the same tension. The same thing occurs with the actors. The first step in a performance is a process of gathering and focusing the dispersed energies of the audience, which in turn reflect the dispersed energies of the aciors.'K The goal in any theatrical event is to tune the different energy sources, thos of the actors as well as those of the spectators, and to make them flow within the new collective that has been created. The aim is of course to make these energies visible and understandable for the spectators, to make them eomniun icative on the aesthetic as well as on the emotional and the intellectual levels According to Brook the actor constantly struggles between opposing principle- Acting is in many ways unique in its difficulties because the artist has lo use the treacherous, changeable and mysterious material ol'himself as his medium. He is called upon to be completely involved while distanced - detached without detachment, He must he sincere, he must be insincere: he must practice how to be insincere with since m and how to he truthfully.29 f his paradoxical situation creates the basis for quite a different Itndei standing of the energies on which the actor bases his/her art complied i. Schechner and Barba. Instead of the unidirectional flow proposed h\ s 302 THEATRICAL AND TRANS GRESS1VK ENERGIES or the bidirectional conjuring movement of Barba, Brook sees the art of acting as an expression of forces or energies working simultaneously in different directions and on different levels. The interaction between revolutionary and theatrical energies, the energies that have changed the world and almost brought about its destruction and those that are hoped to become significant on the stage, creates a performance in which political and social changes can sometimes be both creatively imagined and perceived. Metaphysical energies The question of in what sense theatre and performance reveal metaphysical energies is much more complex than the discursive practices examined so far. My aim here is not to define what such energies are. 1 am not sure this can be done. But since theatre as an art-form has always been considered in the context of different religious and ritual practices, and since these practices are supposedly also a source of energy and power, what I wish to examine very briefly here is in what sense do such practices intensify an individual theatrical performance? As I have argued above, theatre has the ability to make sudden leaps between different ontological spheres that as a rule arc separated from each other, and to combine them in new and unexpected ways. The stage is actually the 'site' where such ontological systems are brought together, even within ihe fictional world itself. 7'he ontological sphere, which frequently appears in theatrical performances and which is obviously connected to different religious belief-systems, is represented by the appearance of supernatural creatures. Even people who are deeply committed to a secular world-view - and today this seems to be the norm rather than an exception, at least among theatre-goers are willing to accept that super-natural creatures can appear on the stage in performances. Throughout the history of the theatre various stage-machineries and other theatrical conventions have been employed to enable the appearance of supernatural beings. The most obvious examples are the pagan gods in the Classical Greek theatre, God and the Devil on the medieval stages, and the appearance of ghosts of dead people in Elizabethan theatre. Even the non-appearance of Godot in Beckett's now classical Waiting for Godot, around which the entire 'action' of this play revolves, alludes directly to such a metaphysical dimension, which like so many other things in the world of Didi and Gogo no longer oasts. Regardless of whether the appearance of such supernatural creatures is aimed at affirming the belief in them or is presented in an ironic light, as a critique of their 'existence', they are usually endowed with a kind of energy and authority that radically changes the given situation on stage. The appearance of the ghost of Hamlet's dead father, regardless of the beliefs of the spectators, is the supernatural force from whose appearance the whole play evolves. The theatrical machineries and conventions through which such supernatural entities appear on stage in contemporary theatre are still saturated with traces 303 ELEMENTS AND CIRCUMSTANCES OF PERFORMANCE from earlier historical periods, when there was a much greater acceptance of the belief-systems on which their 'existence' was based. While our enjoyment today of the Oresteia is probably not impaired by the (act that we do not believe in the Greek gods, our understanding of Aeschylus' trilogy is undoubtedly more limited than it was in the society for which it was composed. Even if we only have a very limited access to the belief-systems on which this play is based we are. however, still able to appreciate the use of theatrical conventions like the deus ex machina. The appearance of a god on stage, usually from above, in the central back-stage area, traditionally expresses the belief that the sods possess the power and ability to change the lives of humans in a positive manner. But even if the gods supposedly no longer possess this kind of power, the machineries through which they appeared on the stage are still frequently used on our own contemporary stages as a kind of'memory-trace' of the power they apparently possessed in the past. This potential to change the human situation can even be seen as a kind of energy, which the theatrical traditions themselves have preserved, although the device itself can no longer claim its traditional potency. As I have shown in detail in another context, transformations or ironical elaborations of the deus ex machina have also frequently been employed in modern theatre, in plays such as August Strindberg's The Dream Play or in Bertolt Brecht's Three Penny Opera and The Good Person of Sezuan: while Waiting for Godot clearly shows that this traditional machinery does not work anymore.30 In the modern theatre this convention is an expression of a metaphysical rupture and a void that can apparently not be filled. We are now. 1 believe, at a stage when the actor can also gradually be redefined in metaphysical terms, as an individual human being imbued with otherworldly energies and forms of knowledge. This view of course has strong roots in different Oriental practices of the art of acting, which have become integrated in Western theatre through direct or-theoreticians such as Stamslavski, Brecht and Artaud. One of the most poignant contemporary expressions of such metaphysical understanding of the actor in a Western context can be found in Wim Wenders' film Der Himmel titer Berlin {Wings oj Desire, 1987) depicting the then still divided city, in which the actor is viewed as a fallen angel. Its sequel So Weit and so Nahe (So Far and So Close, 1993). which takes place in Berlin after the wall was dismantled and the two Germanies were unified, more or less preserves this initial metaphysical conception. The first film depicts the fall of the angel Damiel, because of his love for the trapeze artist. Marion. As a fallen angel, who is also an exceptional human being, he meets the actor Peter Falk, who confesses that he too is a lormer angel. This is undoubtedly also a form of deus ex machina. The second mm shows how the fallen angels (the artists) and the angels who remain angels perform good deeds together. They are. however, not able to change the evils of the world in any radical way ™l?d,t'°nal,!y the angel has been seen hoth as a servant of the divine powers as well as a figure of revolt against them. Through its fall, the angel 304 IHFATRICAL AND TR A NSG RES SI V E ENERGIES accumulates a kind of spiritual power and knowledge, which for Wenders is directly connected with the art of acting and the ability to tell the story of the past In the wake of Second World War the angel has become a witness of the tragic failures of history. Walter Benjamin's seminal formulations on history in his essay 'Ober den BegritTder Geschichte" (Theses on the Philosophy of History) written in 1941. during the Second Woild War. presents such a position. According to Benjamin; to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and Lis receivers/ The theatre, when it is good, could be seen as the arena or locus where such sparks of memory can both be created and perceived in the form of theatrical images. The memories from the past through which history can be performed appeal during such moments of danger, when we have a sense that something from such a fearful past is repeating itself, that it is appearing again, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father. When this happens, Benjamin argues, it affects not only that past, as it is reformulated in the present, but can also have a deep effect on the spectators in the theatre. In one of the more famous passages from his fragmentary essay on history, Benjamin has also presented a concrete image of such a memory - Paul Klee's painting 'Angelus Novus": A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feel. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while (he pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress/2 rhis is the angel of history who is at the same time both historian and actor, ^ughl by the destructive energies that it perceives as one smgle catastrophe. •« its attempts to tap these creative energies, to awaken the dead, to resurreci ELEMENTS AND CIRCUMSTANCES OF PERFORMANCE them (which is one of the things that the theatre can do), the angel is hurled into the gradually evolving future by the storm 'we call progress'. This is indeed a very complex image, which can be given a constantly growing number of interpretations. In Klee's painting, however, the angel is facing the viewer and we do not see its back. This means, if we interpret the painting in theatrical terms, that the viewer's back is turned on the past and s/he is looking into the future. This points at an implicit Utopian dimension, another way of reading and performing the failures of the past through the completion of history. Benjamin also confirms such a Utopian possibility in his essay on the philosophy of history, claiming that in every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.33 The theatre constantly strives to reaffirm such impulses for liberation expressed by the actor who through his or her creative energies is able to stand up for the dead. This is at least one of the reasons why the theatre can have such an exciting and deep effect on us and can even, in some cases, become restorative. The energies of the spectator The final issue I want to examine briefly here is that of how the energies that the spectator might experience during and as a result of a theatrical performance - what we usually call catharsis, usually referred to in English as purgation of the emotions of pity and fear - can be formulated. The wide range of discussions on catharsis that have been carried out since Aristotle undoubtedly points at the inherent difficulties of formulating the more general principles concerning the subjective reactions of spectators watching a specific performance. There seem to be no objective criteria for communicating and examining the feelings a performance elicits among its spectators. The emotions it triggers must rather lead to a mixture of conjectures and speculations. One of the possible strategies to cope with this problematic issue is based on an attempt to distinguish performance devices, which are likely to create a strong emotional impact among the spectators. One such device is the participation of a spectator-witness in the performance itself. As I have previously pointed out* because such an on-stage witness is a transgreasrve 306 THEATRICAL AND TRANSGRESSIVE ENERGIES character, trying to gam information about the other characters in illicit ways, the witness frequently becomes a victim of some form of violence. Polonius' who is killed by Hamlet while eavesdropping behind the arras in Gertrude's closet, actually becomes the victim of his own transgression, while trying to find out the cause of Hamlet's madness. The Transgression' of the actual spectators of the performance, however, who are in a sense also eavesdropping on the characters on the stage, remains unpunished. One of the reasons for this is that instead of "punishing' the spectators for eavesdropping, performances as a rule contain situations in which the on-stage eavesdropper-witness becomes victimized as a sacrificial scapegoat. The eavesdropper is sacrificed instead of the spectator. The cathartic process consists of the more or less unconscious negotiation a spectator makes with him/herself, from having identified with the eavesdropper at the moment he (and eavesdroppers are as a rule men) becomes exposed to some kind of threat. When the transgression of the eavesdropper on stage is punished, the spectators, who according to this scheme have fell both pity and fear, become ritually cleansed of these feelings. This cleansing carries a potential for creating emotional energies for the spectator, for not having been punished for his/her transgressive scopophilic activity. This process of identification with the eavesdropper, which is interrupted when the eavesdropper becomes victimised, also constitutes the basis for the theatrical ritual. The emotional process this implies can also bring all the other onto-logical fields of energy together, unifying them in what we could call the 'total experience' of a theatrical performance. Notes 1 This article is based on my lecture at the symposium on "Revolution and Institutionalization in the Theatre", at the Department for Theatre Studies, Tel Aviv University, June 1999. It is a somewhat different and more expanded version ol a chapter in my forthcoming book Performing History: Theatrical Representations Of the Past in Contemporary Theatre, which will be published by the University of Iowa Press in November 2000. 2 See Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Berkeley. University ol California Press. 1991: 64-65. xi 3 Plato, Ion*. In The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. I. Trans. B. Jowett. New York: Random House. 1937:288-2S9, . . r _ t( 4 Pierre Klossowski. Sade my Neighbour. Trans. Alphonso Lmgis. London: Quartet Books, 1992: 21 [emphasis mine. F.R.]. , . . . _ „„, 5 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation oSoctal Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley: University of California Press. 19««. -. G Greenblatt, ibid.; 2. 7 Greenblatt, ibid.; 6 (emphasis mine. F.R.). 8 Greenblatt, ibid.; 7. 9 Greenblatt. ibid.; 7. , _, en,,,*, N^York "> Michael Goldman. The Actors Freedom: Toward* Theory of Drama. New York. The Viking Press. 1975; 5. 307 ELEMENTS \ N I) C I R C l MSI \ N t IS Ol PI RHlKMASi I 11 Goldman, ibid.; 7. 12 Goldman, ibid.: 23 24. L3 Herberl Blau, The Eye oj Prey: Subversions oj the rostmodern Bloomington; Indiana University Pros. 1987: 165. 14 Herberl Blau. To \!l Appearences Ideology and Performance, New York and London: Routledee. I1)')1. 5f. 1^ Patrice Pavis. Theatre at the Crossroads oj Culture. Irans, Loren Krüger London and New York: Routledge. 1992; 39. 16 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Tin Semiotics of Theater. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1992: 182. 17 Quoted by Fischer lachte, ibid.: IS3. 18 Fischer-Lichte, ibid.; 183. 19 Fischer Lichte, ibid.: 185. :n Richard Schechner. Between Theatre ami Anthropoloe\ Philadelphia; I ikutmu of Pennsylvania Press. 1985; 124. 21 Schechner. ibid.: 119. 22 Schechner. ibid.; 124. 23 Eugenio Barba. Tin Seen t Art <■! (tu Performer ■ I /),■': tionarv of Theatre Anthropology. London: Routledge. 1991; 54. 24 Barba. ibid.; 54. 25 Barba, ibid.: 57. 26 Peter Brook, The Empty Space. New York: Atheneum. 1982: 57. 27 Peter Brook. Any Event Stems from Combustion: Actors, Audiences and Theatrical Energy' (Interview with Jean Kaiman). New Theatre Quarterly. Vlll, May 1992; 107. 28 Brook, 1992. ibid.; 108. 29 Brook, 1982. ibid.; 117. 30 Freddie Rokem. A Walking <\ngel On the Performative Functions of the Human Body', Assaph: Studies m the Theatre. 8, 1992: 113 126. 31 In Walter Benjamin. Illuminations Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. 1969; 255 32 Benjamin, ibid.: 257-8. 33 Benjamin, ibid.: 255. 34 Freddie Rokem. 'To hold as 'twere a mirror up to the spectator: 'Katharsis' - A Performance Perspective*. Assaph; Studies in Theatre, 12. 1996; 101-109. 79 PERFORMANCE ART AND RITUAL Bodies in performance Erika Fischer-Lichte Source Theatre Restart Ii International 22i 111199"?): 22 37 1. Discovering performativitv During the summer school at Black Mountain College in 1952. an 'untitled event' took place, initiated by John Cage. The participants included, besides (age. the pianist David Tudor, the composer Jay Watts, the painter Robert Rausehcnbcrg. the dancer Merce Cunningham and the poets Mary Caroline Richards and Charles Olsen. Preparations for the event' were minimal. Each performer was given a 'score" which consisted purely of" 'time brackets' to indicate moments of action, inaction and silence that each performer was expected to fill. Thus, it was guaranteed that there would be no causal relationship between the different actions and 'anything that happened after that, happened in the observer himself",1 The audience was gathered from other participants at the summer school, members of the college staff and their families, and people from the surrounding countryside. The seals for the spectators were set out in the dining hall of the college in Iront of each wall in the form of four triangles, whose tips pointed to the centre of the room without touching each other. Thus, a large free space was created in the centre of the room in which, as il happened, very little action took place. Spacious aisles between the triangles crossed the room diagonally. A white cup was placed on each seat. The spectators did not receive any explanation; some used the cups as ashtrays. From the ceiling were bMft Painting by Robert Rauschenberg his "white paintings". age. in a black sun and tie, stood on a stepladder and read a text on 'the , ,lh 1,1 nuiML',n 7™ Huddh.sm- and excerpts from Master Eckhart. U«r « pcMoniied a 'composition with a radio'. At the same time, Rauschenber* Played old records on a wmd-up gramophone w ith a trumpet while a listeninje PERFORMANCE ART AND RITUAL dog sat beside it, and David Tudor played a "prepared piano". A little later Tudor started to pour water from one bucket into another, while Olsen and Richards read from the.r poetry, either amongst the spectators, or standing on a ladder leaning against one of the walls. Cunningham and others danced through the aisles chased by the dog who, in the meantime, had turned mad.: Rauschenberg projected abstract slides (created by coloured gelatine sandwiched between the glass) and clips of film onto the paintings on the ceiling; the film clips showed first the school cook, and then, as they gradually moved from the ceiling down the walls, the setting sun. Jay Watt sat in a corner and played different instruments. At the end of the performance four boys, dressed in white, served coffee into the cups, regardless of whether the spectators had used them as ashtrays or not. There can be no doubt that the 'untitled event' is to be regarded as a remarkable event in the theatre history of Western culture, as much of the relationship created between performers and spectators, as of the kind of interaction between the different arts. At first glance, it may appear as though the spatial arrangement favoured a focusing of the centre. During the performance, however, it became clear that such central focus did not exist. The spectators were able to direct their attention to different actions taking place simultaneously, whether in different parts of the room, or joining and overlapping. Moreover, they were in such a position that wherever they looked, they always saw other spectators involved in the act of perceiving. In other words, the actions were not to be perceived in isolation from each other, nor were they unrelated to the other perceiving spectators, despite the fact that they were not causally related to each other, and the perspective on other spectators was not determined or controlled. On the other hand, by placing a cup on each seat, one element was introduced that challenged the spectators to act without, however, prescribing how. They could pick it up. handle it. put it on the floor, throw it to another spectator, hide it in their bags, use it as an ashtray. Whatever the case, the cup challenged the spectators to act at the beginning of the performance as well as at the end (after the boys had poured the coffee) without forcing them to do anything in particular. In the performance, different arts were involved; music, painting, film, dance, poetry. They were not united into a Wagnerian Gesamtkunsmerk-rather, it seems that their unrelated coexistence closely approximated Wagner s nightmare, 'of, for example, a reading of a Goethe novel and the performance of a Beethoven symphony taking place in an art gallery amongst various statues',3 nor was their use motivated, caused or justified by a common goal or function; they were only co-ordinated by the *time brackets'. None the less correspondence did occur in the particular style of their appearance. They all Privileged the performative mode: the music was played, the poetry recited the film shown, painting was performed in so far as Rauschenberg changed his white paintings by projecting slides onto them, 'pamtmg them over , and 229 VISUAL ART AND PI KK)RMA\( I A R I dance is »1 ways realized as an action - or movement. The 'union of the arts', ihe iransüivsMon of the borders or (he dissolution of the borderlines separating one art from another, was accomplished here because all were realized in a performative mode. Thus the performative function was foregrounded, cither bv radically reducing the referential function (lor instance, in the unrclatedness of the actions, which could not be connected into a stor> or a meaningful symbolic' configuration: or by the refusal to give the untitled' event a title), or by emphatically stressing the performative function (for instance, by the arrangement of actions or by the emphasis put on the fact that it was an untitled event'.) Thus, one can conclude that the historical relevance of the "untitled event' is founded on its discovery of the performative. That is not to say that European culture has not been performative before the 1950s. Quite the contrary going back through the centuries we find that from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, European culture can most adequately be described as a predominantly performative culture. Even in the eighteenth century, when alphabetization and literacy grew among the middle class, reading was seldom performed as a silent act in isolation from others, but rather as reading aloud to others in different kinds of circles. Therefore it is not un exaggeration to -täte that Furopean culture, at least until the end of the eighteenth century (and in many areas throughout the nineteenth century too) consisted largely of different genres of cultural performance. The term 'cultural performance' was coined by the American anthropologist Milton Singer. In the 1950s Singer used the term to describe 'particular instances of cultural organization, for instance, weddings, temple festival recitatives, plays, dances, musical concerts, and so on'.4 According to Singer, a culture articulates its self-understanding and self-image in cultural perforin anccs which it presents and exposes to its members as well as to outsiders. 'For the outsider, these can conveniently be taken as the most concrete observable units of the cultural structure, for each performance has a definitely limited time span, a beginning and end, an organized programme of activity, a set ol performers, an audience and a place and occasion of performance.'5 Whereas until the 1950s, a consensus existed among Western scholars that culture is produced and manifested in its artefacts (texts and monuments which, accordingly have been taken as the proper objects of siud> in the humanities. Singer drew attention to the fact that culture is also produced anJ manifested in performances. He established the performative as a constitutive function of culture and provided another convincing argument for the importance of the performative mode in culture. Culture as a predominantly material culture, consisting of and formed bv documents and monuments, had become a prevailing concept in the nun teenth century, although, even then, the notion was vigorously attacked as. tor instance, by Friedrich Nietzsche. None the less, it was this notion which greatly influenced, if not determined, the development not 0*1 oftte 230 ľi RFORMANCI \i< i ani. MTUAI ,umlll„,nos. bul also ol othai cultural domains In theatre ľoi example the ptjfemativo -m put WfcWfťfic*. the Meiningei foregrounded th« Hieran lťXl of the dumm, on tni one hand which afta manj yean ol adaptation was then no longei opon to revision and the prose rva We elementu ol the fjifbnnanoB auch aa the sei und the costumes, on the othei < 'ulture, accord [■I to nineteenth contur> common belief, wax manifested In and resulted In arii'liicis which could be preserved and handed down ii> the nexl generation It was againBl thli thai avani gardisl movement« such as the luturists] dadaista and lurreaiiita directed their fierce attacks, proclaiming thedeatrue tioti of the muaeum« and hailing volocitj and ephemerality as the true culture creating forcesol the future In Ihiireapect, the Futurist iww*and the Padalsi xoirtrscan be wen as 'forerunners' to Cage'i 'untitled event1 Bui while the futurists and dadaista Ibcuaed on the deal motive fours ol theli Performance« in order lo shock lhc audiences 'dptttOI le bourgeois' and to destroy boui Moli culture, t age's even I emphasised the new possibilities opening up nol only for lhc aiiisis bul also Im dir audiences, I lie performative mode hen-was applied as a means of 'liberating' the spectator* In theii act ol perceiving tad ortatini meaning, In die 1950a, performativity was not only reclaimed by the mis In anthro oology the notion of cultural performance wai recognized, in literary theory Roland Berthes focused on the creatlvit) of ľécrltun Lnitoad of the itatlc (us in is Chtgřé 'ito Ji' i'ft inuiľ, publiahed m 1953) and in philosophy lohn I, Austin defined what he chose to call "the speech act'. Auatin developed a philosophy of language, which he presented al the William James I ectures m Harvard University m I955undei the title;'How To Do ľhingi With Wofda', He put forward the pioneering, if not revolutionary idea thai linguistic utterances do not only serve lo describe a procedure Of to State a fuel but con tended that the meic uttering ol 'Minn simultaneously performs an act as, fot example, the acl ol describing, stating, promising,congratulating, ouralng, and ho on. What ipeakers of language have always known Intuitively and practised accordingly was, for the lirsi time, articulated in a philosophy of language; language not only serves i referential function, bul also a performative one, I lun winch Austin's theory of speech act aceompllahed with regard to the knowledge of language, t age's 'untitled e\nit" ivuh/ul lot theatre KudoVnh. thai winch theatre artista and spectator! had known Intuitively and practised for ages became evident: theatre not only fulfils ti referential fuiichon, bin a performiiiive one, too. Whereas, at the beginning ol the 1950s, the Western fanatic theatre emphasized the psychological motivation for actions, plot "Mintruction, scenic arrangements, but ignored the performative function Ol theatre, the 'untitled event' foregrounded the performative function, rivalling tofmuinenl existence in theatre and bringing it back into view. To achieve this, performance art set ilself in opposition nol only lo the «wiiempornry art market, thai insisted on lhc production ol otyeett, 03 ■ncfMctn as commodities, bul also to eonloinponm Iheaire Whereas the 2.11 VISUAL A K I AND PERFORM A WC | ART contemporarv stage usually signified another space Willy Lomans living room forinstai.ee. or the road where Didi and Gogo are waiting for Godot-* the dining hall n. Black Mountain College did not signify any other space. One might Speculate OH whether the specific arrangements of the tour triangles formed b\ the spectators" seals pointed to a figure of the Yijtng and could be interpreted accordingly. But this is quite another matter. First, there was no particular segment in the room delineated for the performers to which a particular meaning could be attributed; second, any meaning derived from the Yijing would have to be related to the w hole room and. third, reference to the Yumg does not provide an> clue to the meaning of the actions The space was a real space, and it did not signify another (fictional) space Rather, it seems that it provoked a kind of oscillating reception. The spectator who tried to make sense of the event and its single elements/actions, became aware ih.n her/his usually applied patterns of constituting meaning did not fit. The usual patterns were noi discarded as useless, however, but rather held in abeyance, called up. present, and yet somehow inapplicable. Trying to apply them did not provide answers, hut led to further questioning. The dining hall was the dining hall to which the cup as well as the film clip showing the school's cook alluded and, al the same time, it was refunctionali/ed: during the time the untitled event took place, it w as another space, neither the dining hall nor a particular fictional space. None ihe less, the spectator was not prevented from perceiving ii as a particular fictional space, if that occurred ti> her/him. nor from asking the question: "What docs this space signify or mean'' In this case, the spectator might have concluded, at the end of the performance, that it did not mean anything (in the sense of a referent attrttV uted by the event). Space and its perception underwent a metamorphosis, a transformation, as did the search for possible meanings of its single elements like the empty centre, the aisles, and the step ladders. Similar conclusions can be drawn concerning the sense of time in the performance and ihe performers. The time of the performance was the real i line of its being performed It did not signify another time of the day, another year or epoch, nor a time in which a fictitious character performs a particular act.on. It was ihe time that passed during the performance, structured by the action, inaction and silences as indicated by ihe -time brackets' of the score, and not necessarily another, fictional time. Whereas in the theatre of the 1950s, the actors used their bodies to signify fictional characters, to perform actions that are supposed to signify actions by these characters, and uttered words which signified the characters' speeches. Hie performers ol the -untitled event' employed their bodies in order to perform particular actions: to play a gramophone, different instruments or ■> Prepared piano', to dance through the aisles, climb a ladder, or operate .he projector, and so on. When the performers spoke, they cither recited their auth. , L7k y 11 C,Mr ,hat lhc* wcre read»* from *"U bv other authors In tins way questions concerning fictional characters, their histories. 232 N Kl liRM AM i A H i AND RITUAL actions, or psychological motivations could not arise: real people performed real actions in a real space in a real time. What was at stake was the performance of 8fitiona--no! the relaiion of actions to a fictional character in a fictional story in a fictional world, or to one another, so that a 'meaningful whole-might come into existence. Even the role of the spectator was redefined. Since the referential function lost its priority, the spectators did not need to search for given meanings or struggle to decipher possible messages formulated in the performance. Instead, they were in a position to view the actions performed before their eyes and ears as raw material, and let then eyes wander between the simultaneously performed actions; they were allowed not to search for any meaning, or to accord whatever meaning occurred to them to single actions. Thus, looking on was redefined as an activity, a doing, according to their particular patterns of perception, their associations and memories as well as on the discourses in which they participated At the beginning of the 1950s, the artefact in Western culture was held to be the absolute constitutive factor of any art. Dramatic theatre proceeded from a literary text, music composed or interpreted scores, poetry created texts and the fine arts produced works. Various hermcneutic processes of interpretation proceeded from such artefacts, and returned to them in order to substantiate or justify different interpretations 1 he ai icfaci dominated the performance process to such an extent that its production (writing, composing, painting, sculpting), or its transformation into a performance (in theatre and concert) as well as of the performance itself and its reception, had almost entirely slipped out of sight. The 'untitled event' dissolved the artefact into performance. Texts were recited, music was played, paintings were painted over'- the artefacts became the actions. Thus, the borders between the different arts shifted. Poetry, music, and the fine arts ceased to function merely as poetry, music, or fine arts— they were simultaneously realized as performance art. They all changed into theatre. Not only did the 'untitled event' redefine theatre by focusing on its performative function: it also redefined the other arts. These were realized and described as performance. But, as mentioned before, the different arts did not unite' in a Wagnerian liesamtktmstwerk. but into theatre, the performative art par excellence. Thus, the -untitled event' not only blurred the borderlines between theatre and the other arts, but also those between theatre and other kinds of'cultural performance'. A theatre performance is to be regarded as a particular genre of cultural performance which, by realizing ihe features identified by Singer, partly differs from other genres of cultural performance as, tor instance, ritual, political ceremony, festival, games, competition, lectures, concerts, poetry readings, film shows, and so on, and partly overlaps with them. The 'untitled event' was realized as a theatre performance in the course of which lectures, poetry readings, a film show, a slide-show, concerts, tableaux 233 PERFORMANCE ART AND RITUAL actions, or psychological motivations could not arise: real people performed real actions in a real space ,n a real time. What was at stake was the performance of actions-not the relation of actions to a fictional character in a fictional story in a fictional world, or to one another, so that a meaningful whole-might come into existence. Even the role of the spectator was redefined. Since the referential function lost its priority, the spectators did not need to search for given meanings or struggle to decipher possible messages formulated in the performance. Instead they were in a position to view the actions performed before their eyes and ears as raw material, and let their eyes wander between the simultaneously performed actions; they were allowed not to search for any meaning, or to accord whatever meaning occurred to them to single actions. Thus, looking on was redefined as an activity, a doing, according to their particular patterns of perception, their associations and memories as well as on the discourses in which they participated. At the beginning of t fie the arte tact in Western culture was held ui be the absolute constitutive factor of any art. Dramatic theatre proceeded from a literary text, music composed or interpreted scores, poetry created texts and the fine arts produced works. Various hermeneuttc processes of interpretation proceeded front such artefacts, and returned to them in order to substantiate or justify different interpretations. The artefact dominated the performance process to -,uch .in extent that its production (writing, composing, painting, sculpting), or its transformation into a performance (in theatre and concert) as well as of the performance itself and its reception, had almost entirely slipped out of sight. The 'untitled event' dissolved the artefact into performance. Texts were recited, music was played, paintings were 'painted over' -the artefacts became the actions. Thus, the borders between the different arts shifted. Poetry, music, and the fine arts ceased to function merely as poetry, music, or line arts— they were simultaneously realized as performance art. They all changed into theatre. Mot only did the 'untitled event' redefine theatre by focusing on its performative function; it also redefined the other arts. These were realized and described as performance. But, as mentioned before, the different arts did not "unite' in a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, but into theatre, the performative art par exec He nee. Thus, the 'untitled event' not only blurred the borderlines between theatre and the other arts, but also those between theatre and other kinds of'cultural performance'. A theatre performance is to be regarded as a particular genre of cultural performance which, by realizing the features identified by Singer, partly differs from other genres of cultural performance as, for instance, ritual, political ceremony, festival, games, competition, lectures, concerts, poetry ladings, film shows, and so on, and partly overlaps with Ihcm. The 'untitled event' was re ah zed as a theatre performance in the course ot which lectures, poetry readings, a film show, a slide-show, concerts, tableaux 233 MM M A K I AND PERFORMANCI A U I iOd S/amop.......• HiH Mas.., l\ DUX ). dance and a kind ol niual I feast tin lbe sharing of *• look P,ace However, these cultural neiforriiances were not re-presented** in dramatic theatre, opera, o. classical ballet rather the performance mu the realization, or the realization h the performance. Since, in this instance, theatre occurred as a non-cam non-linear sequence ol'discrete actions, represented before an audience, difference from oilier genres of cultural performance became insignificant Performativiiy turned out to be the most important characteristic of theatre, art. culture, theatre, an and culture, thus, were redetiiied as performance. Krom todays \ icw point, the "untitled event' of 1952 appears lo have been a revolutionary event in Western culture. The trend towards performativiiy which has gradually grown since tlie IWs in ihe.me the .'tlicr ails .uni in culture in general, was unmistakably articulated and uncompromisingly realized in the untitled event' One could slate that i age's untitled event' and Austins speech act theory heralded the era of a new performative culture and were its lirst momentous manilesiations. for such a performative culture, theatre understood as performative art par exctikmet as realized in performance art could serve as a model. It 'theatre is understood as the paradigm of performative ail and. in this sense as the model of performative culture, what, since the 1960s, has it contributed to ihe development of Mich a new performative culture? This issue will be addressed hy drawing on some examples from so called performance art. Many performances consist of the performance of everyday practices. For instance, in the piece Cyele for Water Buckets, lirst performed in 1962, the ILUXUS artist lomas Sehimi, knelt in a circle formed by ten to thirty buckels or bottles, one of which was tilled with water Clockwise, he poured ils contents from bucket 10 bucket until all the water was spilled or cvap-orated. H> raking the action out of all possible context, the search for its intention, purpose, consequence or meaning was doomed to be as unsuccessful or, at least to remain as undecided as r n the case of the elements in the untitled event'. The focus lay on the very process by which the action was perlormed. The spectators witnessed how Schmil poured water from bucket to bucket, and since the context in which such an activity could be performed in everyday life was lacking, one could not attribute a meaning to it- as. for example, preparing to clean the floor, extinguishing a tire, filling a trough, cleaning a bucket/bottle, demonstrating a safe hand, and so on: Schmifs action could mean all ihis, something else or just what it was: pouring water Irom one bucket/bottle into the next. Other performances allude to or draw on different genres of culti pe rniance: r,,Ui,,s- fertiv*»*. services of all kinds, carnival, circus perfor ' '°*s ■'' ' ' 11' ľ 111 u n u I. ston telling, ballad singing, concerts, spor ■ ->es ami so on. In such cultural performances, culture always was (and is dehned and realized as performative. That is not to say that artefacts are m * l1° ,U>1 P,a> a P^m.nent role. Quite the contrary, in many culU 234 PERFORMANCE ART AND RITUAL performances some kind of artefacts are needed, some are even essential for the realization of the performance. However, they only function or are able to display their special power as elements of a performative process, and not as artefacts. Therefore the use of artefacts in a cultural performance by no means entails a reduction of its performativity. Since cultural performances emphasize the performative character of culture, it seems wise to proceed from performances that refer in one way or another to a genre of cultural performance when embarking on an investigation of theatre's contribution to the development of a new performative culture. In view of the great variety of possible genres of cultural performances referred to by performance artists, however, I shall restrict my explorations to performances which, in one way or another, have taken recourse to a particularly basic genre, namely the performance of rituals. 2. Performing ritual or the ritualization of performance? Second action of Nitsch's 'orgy mystery theatre' The walls of the main room are covered in white hessian splashed with paint, blood and bloody water, on a meat hook, at the end of a rope hanging from the ceiling, hangs a slaughtered, bloody, skinned lamb (head down), a white cloth is spread out on the gallery floor, beneath the lamb, and on it lie the blood-soaked intestines, the lamb is swung across the room, the walls, the floor and the spectators are splashed with blood, blood is poured out of buckets over the lamb's innards and the floor of the gallery, the actor losses raw eggs against the walls and onto the floor and chews a tea-rose, the bloody lambskin hangs on the blood spattered hessian wall, more blood is splashed over it.6 The action lasted thirty minutes and was accompanied by music by the Greek composer Logothetis: loud noises were created by the composer as he drove his hand, in rubbing and pressing movements, over the taut skin of a drum. The action was performed by Hermann Nitsch on 16 March 1963 in the Dvorak gallery in Vienna. It was his second 'action'. Nitsch had trained as a graphic designer and developed the later so-called 'action art' by way of 'action painting', in which he poured red colour on a canvas in the presence of onlookers. After initial attempts at concrete poetry and drama. Nitsch's second action already contains almost all the elements constitutive of his 'Orgy Mystery Theatre', which are constantly repeated regardless of whether the performance lasts thirty minutes, fifteen hours (as his seventh action, which took place on 16 January 1965 in his apartment and studio) or six days (as the play planned for the Prinzendorf Schloß). AH the elements used by Nitsch in a performance are characterized by two main features. They are all highly symbolic and they provoke a strong sensual 235 visual AKI AIM' rr.nrwMn/im l «i\ i impression Nitsch himself has listed a number of symbolic associations that can be presupposed tor any of the elements. Concerning the entrails he specific, •slaughter house, sacred killing, slaughter, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, primitive sacrifice, hunt. war. surgical operation-. Amongst possible sensual impressions he mentions: blood-warm, blood-soaked, malleable, resilient, Stuffed to bursting, to puncture, to crush, a stream of excrement, the intensive odour of raw meat and excrement'. To the element 'blood' Nitsch assigns symbolic associations: Ted wine. Eucharist, the blood of Christ, sacrifice, human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, slaughter, primitive sacrifice, sacred killing. hfe luices'. and sensual impressions: body-warm, warm from the slaughter, blood-soaked, wet. bright, blood-red liquid, to be splattered, poured, paddied in. salty taste, wounding, killing, a white dress smeared with blood, menstrual blood, the stench of blood'. With regard to 'flesh" Nitsch names the following symbolic associations: "bread. Eucharist, the transformation of bread into the body of Christ lllesh). sacrifice, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, sacred killing, slaughter, wounding, killing, war. hunt. The corresponding sensual impressions he cites are: 'body-warm, warm from the slaughter, blood-soaked, wet. raw. bright blood red. malleable, resilient, the taste of raw meat, wounding, killing, the stench of raw meat'. The tea-rose', according to Nitsch, provokes the symbolic associations "erotic flower (lust), rosary (Madonna), queen of the flowers' and releases the sensual impressions 'scent of tea-roses, the taste of tea-rose petals, the voluptuous opulence of tea-roses, the tea-rose stamen, the pollen of the tea-rose'.8 It is striking that most of the symbolic associations Nitsch assigns to the constitutive elements of his actions point either to archaic/mythic or to Christian/Catholic rituals. They are intended to operate as links between the action/performance taking place here and now (in the early 1960s) and certain kinds of ritual which still operated in the context of Western culture (in Vicuna in the early 1960s) such as the rituals of the Catholic church or those which we imagine as having taken place-or which still do take place in ancient Greece and other cultures. This does not necessarily imply that the spectators shared the symbolic associations proposed by Nitsch. But, at the very least, we can assume that as members of the Viennese culture of the 1960s, i hey disposed of a universe of discourse which wus open to the possibility of such associations.4 In any case, not only the symbolic associations but also the sensual impres-!:' : ' 0 accessible performers and spectators alike. In Nitsch's actions,' performances, the spectators were involved, even acted as performers. | he) were splashed with blood, excrement, dish-water and other liquids and were given the opportunity to do the splashing themselves, to gut the lamb. 10 consume the meat and the wine. I he sensual impressions and the symbolic associations triggered by the different elements of the performance, however, were ordered and structured through reference to one dominant element: the lamb. In Western Christian 236 PERFORMANCE ART AND RITUAL culture, the lamb symbolizes Christ and his sacrifice. Therefore, the lamb, as the focal centre of almost all of Nitsch's performances, opens up a dimension which strengthens the allusion to Christian rituals to which the possible symbolic actions may refer. Nilsch labels it the 'mythical leitmotif of the orgy mystery theatre (mythical expression of the collective need to abreact) the transformation'. communion: TAKE, EAT, THIS IS MY BODY. BROKEN FOR YOU FOR THE REMISSION OF SINS ... DRINK YF ALL OF THIS. FOR THIS IS MY BLOOD OF THE NEW COVENANT; SHED FOR YOU AND FOR MANY... the crucifixion of jesus christ the tearing apart of dionysus the blinding of oedipus ritual castration the killing of orphcus the killing of adonis the castration of attis ritual regicide killing and consuming the totemic beast the primitive excesses of sado-masochism consuming food: meat and wine in sumptuous measure1" The rituals to which Nitsch refers are scapegoat-rituals, exorcisms, cleansing and/or transforming rituals. Like all rituals they do not only signify a particular action, lhc\ also perform it: the referential function indicated by the symbols used in the process of ritual is closely linked to. even dominated by. the performative function. The ritual is able to achieve the desired effect to which the symbols (objects and/or actions) allude as cleansing the community, healing an individual, transforming a group of individuals, and so on—only because it is performed in a particular way. By equating his performances with ancient Greek and Catholic ntuals the a"ist claims that by performing his actions he performs a particular kind oi ntual. Such a claim seems problematic in many respects, for it ignores basic differences between rituals that operate within a community and the actions ^formed by the artist. When, for instance the Holy Communion to which Nit5ch refers, is performed as a ritual, this procedure is eert.hed as a ntual. 237 VJ SUAL ART AND PERFORMANCE ART because an authonzed person executes the actions ,n a particular context and under particular conditions and because the congregation * convinced tha( he,s entitled to perform the actions. In tins respect the ritual ,s comparable to a sneech act. It can only succeed when it is performed in a particular spacei asneecnacL.il'-""—j- , -r—B a particular time, in a particular way by a person who is entitled to perform it If someone other than the priest sprinkles water on somebody's forehead an(j utters the words: "Ego te baptisto in nomine Patr.s et Fill et Spir.tus Sancti' he has by no means performed a christenings best, a joke. Benveniste makes the point succinctly: De toute maniere. un enonce perfomiatif n'a de realite que s'il est authentifie cornme acte. Hors des circonstances qui le rendent per-formatif, un tel enonce nest plus rien. N'importe qui peul crier sur la place publique: 'Je decrete la mobilisation generale.' Ne pouvant etre acte faute dc 1'autorite requise, un tel propos n'est plus que parok>\ U se reduit a une clameur inane, enfaniillage ou demence. Un enonce performatif qui n'est pas acte n'existe pas. 11 n'a d'existence que eomme acte d'autorite. Or, les actes d'autorite sont loujours et d abord des enonciations proferees par ceux a qui appartient le droit de les enoncer." Applied to rituals, it means that they will only work when performed by an authorized person. Thus, s/he is part of ihe particular framing which the ntual needs in order to succeed:1 the frame may include a particular occasion, place, time, setting, specific actions; in any case, it will be put up by persons who are entitled to perform these actions. Therefore, when an artist like Nitsch proclaims that he is performing a ritual by performing particular actions, the question arises as to what entitles him to perform a ritual— whether in his own eyes or in the eyes of participants/spectators? Another question concerns the relationship between the performed actions and their possible meaning. If we assume that the action he performs succeeds in causing exactly that effect which it signifies, we have to explain how sign and signified merge. In the rituals to which Nitsch alludes, this occurs either because of the presence of divine or cosmic/magic forces/energy released by the ritual. What, in Nitsch's performance, operates as a substitute for such forces? What can initiate the merging of signifier and signified? Before investigating these questions—and in order to broaden and strengthen the ground from which to proceed—I will first briefly describe two other pcrtonnances which, in one way or anotnerj refer to ritual: Joseph Beuvs's action Coyote. I like America and America likes me which took place in May "»i m the Rene Block Gallery m New York, and Marina Abramovtc* m ilHe UpS °f THomas »ven al ^ Krinzioger gallery in Innsbruck as wHi 1 f° Perfonnances were very different from Nitsch's performaa* wen as from each other, and both referred to ritual in very different ws* 238 PERFORMANCE ART AND RITUAL Coyote: I like America and America tikes tne ore even Beuys started his action during the flight to the United States be ft reaching the American continent. He closed hjs eyes in order not to see thing. At J. K Kennedy Airport, completely wrapped up in felt he was fiken to the gallery by an ambulance, He left the same way. During his seven-day stay he did not see anything of America other than a long, bright room with three windows in the Rene Block Gallery which he shared with a wild coyote for a full week. The room was divided by a wire screen which separated Beuys and the coyole from the spectators. At the far corner, straw was put down for the coyote. Beuys brought along with him two long felt cloths, a walking stick, gloves, a torch and fifty issues of the Wall Street Journal (to which, each day, the latest issue was added), He presented them to the coyote to sniff at and urinate on. Beuys placed the (wo felt cloths in the centre of the room. One he arranged as a heap in which he hid the lit torch so that only its glow could be perceived. The issues of the Wall Street Journal were piled up in two stacks behind the wire screen to the front of the room. With the brown walking stick hooked over his arm. he approached the other felt cloth, put on the gloves and covered himself completely with the felt; all that could be seen was the staff sticking out. Beuys created the image of a shepherd who underwent a scries of Iransformations thanks to the position of hk staff: squatting down m an upright position, he held it up, swung it horizontally, pointed it to the floor. In response to the movements of the coyote, the figure turned on its own axis. Then, unexpectedly it would drop sideways to the floor where it remained stretched out. Then, all of a sudden Beuys would jump up, len ing the felt slip down and hitting the triangle which hung around his neck three times. When the last sound had died away, he turned on a tape recorder placed before the bars, so that for twenty seconds the noise of running turbines was heard. When silence returned, he took off his gloves and threw them to the coyote which mauled them, Beuys went to the issues of the Wall Street Journal which the coyote had scattered and torn, and rearranged them into piles. After-wards he lay down on the straw to smoke a cigarette. Whenever he did this, the coyote would move towards him. At other times, the coyote preferred to lie on the heap of felt. It looked in the same direction as the light of the torch and avoided a position where the spectators would be behind its back. Often il restlessly paced the room, ran to a window and stared out. Then it would return to the papers and chew them, drag them through the room or shit on them. The coyote kept a certain distance from the figure in felt. Occasionally it c^led him sniffing and excitedly jumping at the stick, it bit the felt and shred « W° Pieces. When the figure lay stretched out on the floor the coyote snilled «*» prodded him, pawed or sat down beside him and tried to crawl under tne fe!<- Mostly, however, it stayed away, fixing the figure with its eyes. Only 239 VISUAL ART AND PERFORMANCE ART when Beuvs smoked his cigarette on the straw did h approach him. Havlng finished his cigarette. Bcuyi got to his feet, rearranged the felt and covered h'wit-nTweek had passed, Beuys vers slow ly scattered the straw all over the room, hugged the coyote good-bye and left the gallery by the same route he had arrived. . __ , In contrast to Nitsch, Beuys mainl> used everyday objects -such as the papers, cigarettes, torch, straw, felt, walking stick, gloves- and performed everyday actions- such as arranging the papers, smoking a cigarette, switching on a tape recorder. Accordingly, neither the objects nor the actions implied any allusion whatsoever to ritual. Moreover, it is difficult, if not impossible, to ascribe to the objects and actions symbolic associations shared by artist and spectators. However, the elements were accorded a symbolic value by the artist, not in the sense of fixed symbols but of vehicles of experience, transmitters and communicators [...]. They represent hidden effects and can be made conceivable and transparent.*14 This is particularly true of the materials and objects. For instance, Beuys established a relationship between the possible implications of the felt and his former actions when he states: 'the way in which felt operates in my action, with double meaning, as isolator and warmer, also extends to imply isolation from America and the provision of heal for the coyote'.1' He used the torch as 'image of energy': 'First, the torch houses the energy in concentration, then, the energy disperses throughout the course of the day until the battery has to be renewed.'"' The torch was hidden in the felt because it was not to be presented as a technical object: Tt should be a source of light, a hearth, a disappearing sun glowing out from under this grey heap."7 The brown gloves which Beuys threw to the coyote after each turn represented 'my hands [... j the freedom given mankind through the hands. They are free to do all kinds of things, an infinite range of utensils are at their disposal. . . The hands are universal."* Beuys showed the manifold meanings of the bent walking stick for the first time in his action Eurasia (1965): it represented the streams of energy that float in EURASIA from east to west and west to east. The Wall Street Journal on the other hand, embodies 'the calcified death stare of CAPITAL thinking (in the sense of being forced to capitulate to the power of money and position) [. . . ] Time is the measure of the symptoms of the fact that CAPITAL has long been the only artistic concept. That, too, is an aspect ofthe United States.'19 Even the two sounds produced in the performances, the hitting ofthe triangle and the noise of the turbines, were accorded such meanings The no.se of the turbines was 'the echo of the ruling technology: energy which is never harnessed', while the sound of the triangle is rerninis-cent of the unity and the one' and is conceived of 'as a stream of consciousness directed at the coyote',20 vJUntT °f f^'l perfonniu,ce' the syndic associations assigned to various elements by the artist are not necessarily shared by his spectators. 240 PERFORMANCE ART AND RITUAL although a kind of communion was ultimately possible, since the elements of his performance belong to a general universe of discourse. In Beuys's per. formance. this assumption cannot be made. Rather, it is most likely that the American visitors did not share the associations suggested by Beuys at all and accordingly, made quite different associations when perceiving the objects However, there are two aspects which overcome such objections and point to the special status oi the performance. First, the objects were not linked to the meanings explained by Beuys in the sense of fixed symbols. Rather they were thought to be able to unfold and realize their potential meanings and effects only in the context of the event that constituted the performance; the meeting of Beuys and the coyote. Second, a certain mythical dimension was accorded to both partners. Beuys designed and staged himself as a shepherd-like tigure. alluding to the Good Shepherd, on one hand, and to a shaman, on the other—that is to say. to a figure which possesses divine and/or cosmic/magic forces. As his partner in the performance he chose a coyote which represents one of the mightiest Indian deities. The coyote is said to be blessed with the power of transformation, able to move between physical and spiritual states. The arrival of the white man changed the status of the coyote. Its inventiveness and adaptability admired and revered by the Indians as subversive power was denounced as cunning by the white man. Thus, it became the 'mean coyote" which could be hunted and killed as a scapegoat. Accordingly, Beuys's performance touched on a Traumatic moment' of American history: We should settle our score with the coyote. Only then can this wound be healed.'21 Beuys undertook the action in order to reach this goal. It was performed as an 'energy dialogue1" between man and animal, aimed at triggering the spiritual forces necessary for 'healing this wound' in the performer. He acted as a kind of shaman who performs a healing ritual that will save the community by restoring the destroyed—cosmic—order. Although the participants/spectators were not in a position to share the possible meanings accorded the objects by the performer it was assumed that they would benefit from the shaman's actions as he conjured up or exorcized the hidden potential meanings and effects of the objects employed, thus releasing the "healing forces', i.e., the spiritual forces within himself which enabled him to act as a representative of a community—at least in his own view. That is to say in terms of Beuys s performance, the questions formulated above become even more pressing. The lips of Thomas The third example radicalizes and, thus, brings into focus an aspect that was similarly constitutive of the two other performances, natney treatment of the performer's body. In her performance. The hps of Thomas, Marina Abramovic abused her own body for two hours in various ways. 241 A I ART A N I > l»l RtORMAMT A R I Abramowe started bv undressing totallj and everything she dtd was per-formed naked She then sat down at a table covered with a white cloth and set with a bottle of red wine, a glass of honey, a crystal glass, a silver spoon and a whip Slowly she ate the hone> with the silver spoon, poured the red wine into the crystal glass and drank it. After swallowing the wine, she broke the crystal glass in her right hand, hurting herself. She got up, went to the back wall where, at the beginning of the performance, she had fastened a picture of herself and framed it by drawing a five-pointed star around it. She then look a razor blade and cut a five-pointed star into the skin of her belly. Then she seized the whip, knelt down under her picture, her back to the audience, and started to Hog herself violently on the back. After this, she lay down, arms stretched out. on ice cubes laid out in a cross. A radiator hung from the ceiling was directed towards her belly. Through its heat, the slashed wounds of the star began to bleed copiously again. Abramovic remained on the cross of ice for thirty minutes until some spectators spontaneously removed the ice and thus broke off the performance. No doubt, the most striking aspect of this performance was the self-mutilation. However, the objects Marina Abramovic employed in order to execute the self-mutilation also allow for a variety ol"symbolic associations. The five-pointed star, for instance, may be interpreted in various mythical, metaphysical, cultural-historical and political contexts (even as a fixed symbol of a socialist Yugoslavia). The same holds true for other objects: the whip may point to Christian flagellants, to flogging as punishment and torture or to sadomasochistic sexual practices; the cross of ice may be related to the crucifixion of Christ—but also to icy prison cells or to winter and to death. Eating and drinking at a table using a silver spoon and a crystal glass may be perceived as an everyday action in a bourgeois surrounding but may equally allude to the Last Supper. Whatever symbolic associations were triggered by the objects, they were not caused by objects in isolation—the objects as such—but because they were used as instruments of self-mutilation. The actions which Marina Abramovic performed with these objects structured the performance in a way that its similarity to a scapegoat ritual (or a ritual of initiation), in which the performer played the victim, became obvious. By undergoing a series of clearly perceivable physical transformations such as the intake of certain substances, munlat.ons by the incision of the star, flogging, bleeding and freezing, in short, by undergoing such an ordeal, the naked performer acquired a new identity. None the less, it is difficult to classify the performance as a ritual-other a scapegoat ntual or a rite of initiation-, for such ntes not only suppose a consensus among members of a community concerning the symbolic cnnlnf JCCtS emPloved but such violations and muulationf--victut bt °f aS "0nstltultivc eIe™nts °rthe rite-are usually inflicted on the victim by members of the community empowered so to do Here, it was the PERFORMANCE ART AND RITUAL performer who inflicted the pain on herself and the spectators were the ones to end the ordeal by removing the ice. As in the case of the performances by Nilsch and Beuys, though in other respects very different, Abramovic's performance alluded to a particular genre of ritual without actually realizing it. All these artists introduced or used ritual structures in their performances They followed, for instance, the three phases of a rite identified by van Gennep.2J They started with a clearly marked separation phase: Nitsch. by arranging the environment and by putting on a white garment; Beuys' by letting himself be wrapped in felt at the airport; Abramovic, by setting the environment and by undressing. The actions described above constitute the transformation phase. The final incorporation phase was indicated by the shared meal at the end of Nitsch's ritual/performance, by the wrapping up of the figure in Beuys's, and by the spontaneous actions of some spectators in Abramovic's performance. It does appear that the structure and the process of these three performances derive from rituals. 1 hesitate, however, to class them as rituals despite the claims and interpretations of the artists themselves, as my initial question remains unanswered: 'What entitles an artist to perform a ritual not only in his/her own eyes but also in the judgement of the other participants, namely, the spectators?' 3. The body in performance In each of the performances which I have described, the artist used her/his body in a striking manner. Nitsch polluted his body with blood and excrement; he put his hands deep into the entrails of the lamb and thus, almost literally, carried out the lamb's disembowelment himself. He exposed his body to various sensations through contact with blood, wine, paint, dish-water, urine, excrement; and he inflicted violence on the carcass of the lamb with his own hands. Nitsch's body was the locus of performance. By using different materials and objects, he not only changed them but also transformed his own body. In Beuys's performance the performer's body obviously served a different purpose. By living in the company of a wild coyote for seven days and nights, Beuys created a particular situation. On the one hand, he exposed his body to the risk of being attacked, bitten or perilously hurt by the coyote. On the other, he employed his body to communicate with the animal. The energy of this 'dialogue' proceeded from and was received by his body. The spiritual forces which were meant to bring about the 'healing' were to be released in and out of his body. And this body, in turn, did not remain unchanged amidst all these risks and dangers even if it was ultimately unharmed. The seven days and nights shared with the coyote left their imprint. 243 VISUAL AK 1 AND Pi RIORMAM v. K I on Abramovic abused her body, literally cul into her own flesh, inflicted mjune, , „ thai caused pain and Icll lasting traces Rut she did not articulate her pains by screaming. She siniplv performed sell-mulikilmg actions and presented her blecdine. suffering body to the spectators She exposed the process of hurl and its visible truces, but nol her pain this had to he sensed by the spectators. But obvious!) tins sense became so strong and unbearable that they interfered and put an end lo the performer's tortures. In these actions the performers put their bodies at risk ihrough trans-formations, ihivais and injuries which legitimized the performance Since the performer put her/his body in danger, the const ruction of her/his own fiction'-* the mythical dismemberment of a god, the dialogue with a coyote, the acquisition of a new identity was substantiated and. in this sense, transformed into "reality*. It was precisely the defiled, endangered, violated body that entitled the performer to perform such actions as if the performance were a ritual. This condition clearly marks the principal difference between an acknowledged ritual and an artist's performance. Traditional rituals originate in collective constructions such as myths, legends and other traditions: to perform a ritual is to re-substantiate them and to reaffirm their effects. The artist's performances, on the contrary, proceed from subjective constructions. Here, it is onlv the defiled body of the artist, the endangered and still unbanned body, the body in pain, which is able to substantiate these constructions for the spectators. The performers' acting and suffering bodies, thus, gain the power of evidence of proof in the eves of the spectators. However, the spectators do not participate in a ritual as do the members of a Catholic congregation at Holy Communion, or the participants at shamanist demon exorcism. For even if the particular use of the body substantiate the performer's subjective constructions in the eyes of the sf tators, it does not follow that they will "believe" in these constructions, u that they will be convinced that they are participating in the dismemberment ol a god, in the healing of America's traumatic wound, in the birth of a n identity, or a sacrifice. At best, they will sense or even believe that the artis use of the body manifests and reveals a new attitude towards the body: the altitude ol "being my body' instead of only having it, as Plessner put it* Even if the particular use of the body does not entitle the artist to perform ritual or transform the performance into ritual, it endows the human bods with values long since forgotten and ignored in western culture—values that, at other times or m other cultures, were realized when such rituals were performed as those to which the artist's performance alludes. If we conclude that the artist does not perform ritual, what happens to ti* n'! u P thc acl,ons Panned ^d/or the objects used and their possible meanings, to the relationshtp between the signifies and the signified* bloo^on * 'JIT1™ PerCC,Ve h0W the art,s,s Perform the act.ons: pouring blood on a white canvas, teanng the entrails from the carcass of a lamb. 244 PERFORMANCE ART AND RITUAL wrapping himself in a long fell cloth, arranging papers, smoking a cigarette, drinking red wine, cutting a five-pointed star into her belly, and so on. And since the artists perform ihese actions not only themselves but as themselves, in their own name (not in order to represent actions of a given stage persona) the spectators will ascribe to them these obvious meanings: Nitsch tears entrails from a lamb's carcass, Beuys wraps himself into felt, Abramovic cuts a five-pointed star into the skin of her belly. In this sense one could state a momentary merging of signifier and signified. But all these actions and objects contain an abundance of possibilities which trigger symbolic associations depending on the universe of discourse of each spectator. This semantic accretion prevents simple merging of signifier and signified. However, the performance does not structure the process of perception and meaning constitution in such a way that any symbolic associations are emphasized and foregrounded. Therefore the semantic accretion may result in a similar process as the merging: it may draw the spectator's attention away from possible meanings of a gesture—that may mean anything—and focus on its materiality, back to the body of the performer. Such focus, at the same time, emphasizes that the action causes certain effects on the performer's body. When Nitsch tears the entrails from the Jamb's carcass he is tainted by them; when Beuys wraps his body in felt, he makes it disappear and creates a particular image: when Abramovic engraves a five-pointed star in her belly, it bleeds. Thus, despite the semantic accretion, the semantic dimension is devaluated as secondary. The spectator s attention, in this case, is not directed towards a possible meaning, but focuses first on the physical execution of an action, then on the effect it has on the performer's body. While participants in a ritual may take recourse to the collective construction which enables them to assume that by performing the ritual exactly only those actions are caused which it signifies—the transformation of a wafer into Christ's body, the exorcism of the demon because the merging of signifier and signified is based on collective construction, in the artist's performance they fall apart. Though the subjective construction may be substantiated in the eyes of a spectator because of the particular use of the body, none the less, the spectator will be able to relate signifier and signified to each other without considering this construction. The divine/cosmic/magic forces which the collective construction presupposes and whose working the 'correct' performance of the ritual will guarantee, are replaced in the artist's performance by her/his individual demonstration of her/his being a body and not only having a body (as the common basis of human culture) and the spectators individual response to it—be it particular sensations, emotions, reflections or even the execution of certain actions (as in Nitsch's performance) or in preventing the performer from continuing her actions. Thus, the performer's body, in many respects, appears to be the basic condition for the 'success' of the performance. The risks taken and the injuries substantiate the artist's subjective construction in the eyes of the spectators 245 \ I M \ I VK I '•» Kl »»KM ** Nt I \R » lltal „, ,|m ».t\ Iťginnwic her/hw perfaf lim M » Ifci trt»1 i pfayettJtj aťt,ó„ which inmicis scnsalums emotiOM .nul impulscs "' s,vu.u..i> , , ihcmscKc* .nul *hich miiiate* iťlkvlioiw which Will .illou ilu-m n> ha ,»K.eMvriciKv oi hcme. « hody. not oni) .. bod) 11,, receptům piocvssisch.iraciciiA\l In leultires ih.ii »recommoa lo* ■fOOtttOl ihc.iinc.il loniinunu.ilioii .nul «.lf.ii K dUUnpuiHh ii llom iceepli puKvsM-s in oihei i"< ronil!*, which dkpOM. ol iihcIikin \u iiriclacl ullo tllO HVípiCIll (o .UIIiImiIC ť\CI IKW lllCUllingK >«' Hs \.HIiMls eloimills. hi iIk-u ixmbúuittofi .nul lo ihc stmelme <«s .1 whole; and, wheuui thc incaniti|i m.o Iv 11 is possiMe othcis i»' chtěli tfceni b\ duřel iclcicuco (o ihc .iiulaci In e performance, howeu-r. lite pioccss «'l iiicminv pioduciion in ^iiuii .1 uvípu-ni m.i\ eoeofd eeruue meanings 10 ihc eciiona ni ihe pet lormci islooseh eoiuievled lo ihe llecting moment ol theii phyaicel ekectltj h\ ilu* pciďiiiici \n\ inodíhcaiion »> iluni 111 ordei 10 chcok ihc mcannig coiivcvcd to thc hy a panu ip.uu \ll modilu ahons. ic\ imoiih end ditKUsnions w ill uivcfttuu il iclei lo thc mcmoiy ol thc pailuipanls. 1 c . an\ pioccss ol iiicauingcouslilu- lion lakcn upni coniinued ejftu khe pciIbinunoe íi <'\ei w mi iv |h 1 immcd ,is .i proces* ol ivťollcvtion 1'hť subjectivc conslruction which thc pciloiiner tciuis to suhstantiulc thiough thc pcifoiin.iucc is thiu hioughl tuto nlution \i> .nul lollowcd h\ thc \.uiinis Milncctoc consiruclionx which ilu- spec lat oř* ailiculau- .is thc\ uvalí ilu- pci toi mam c I 01 tlum. thc onU poiul ol lVicr-OIICC Is llu'11 owi1 111011101 \ CngllIVcd 111 thcil ow II IhmIu-s Hnis, wc cm coucliulc that ilu aitisťs iiuhv ulu.il liaiislotinalnni ol T lícme imial' as icahml 111 thc peilornmiícc has coiiMiIcrahly slnllcd thc cti lnul hvus It him^s hack inio \ ku au insight which has lonn luvn liugoll .nul u-pu-sscd 111 western culluiv cven il ncvci coinplclclv lhal ihc hnsis nn> cultui.il pioiluclion is thc hiiuian botly" aml that tlns hmly crea culluiv hv ivrlbrininK aclions Iloto. thc locus docs not cenin- on ailclať cu-atťil In sin.li aelions piivilcgcil In western cultiuv 111 nenernl mul l" hunianuiťs in parlicular; ralhei, allenlion is alliiicteil U» Ihe vers moment which theeclions ,iu ivrlormeil. I his moment, m ils ephemeial presence, is accouled a unie dinieiiMon Kvanseol itsrvIcienceiosuhiectiM-consinicHons It ispiecedcdln thesub-uvtive coiisimciion ol U,e artisi who has desiKiied thc iiclions. .nul M flowi "'i., ihe suhieclive consiruction ol ihc spectalois who lnici. 111 thc pio*r**ol Kvolkviion, uttt ihme dilleieni iikMiniijis lo theni. W hile dui mg Ihe pcrfoT i,,uv-»uvtiim moment. siKinlier and HiKn,iirJ seem lo merge, befoi»í ■iltei ,1. m n,e Suh|ectiveconxiruction»orihc pc.lo.n.eis and ihe spcclMtoM, '7 ,,K'lllt'v'11^ ' 'II ■•P.ul h, U,,, u-specl. o,,e uuehl exen discxeriffl "''I ulopia 111 ihe poiíoimanee. nis ph\ sical perloMnaiuv and its rccolleclion Ifpeai to Iv ilu p« nu' <»•ci.liu.al priHluctton and .1 ,s„nly theinomeui ol plusu.il ,v.lorm» PERFORMANCE ART AND RITUAL that is endowed with the power to transform subjective construction into sensually perceivable realizations which, in turn, become the point of depar ture for other subjective constructions. However, a theory of culture ľhat would proceed Irom the moment of performance, taking this as its pivot is still to be developed. Regarding the process of reception, the artists' performances described here fundamentally question the traditional concept of aesthetic distance. When the spectators' bodies are splashed with blood, when the audience becomes eyewitness to actions by which the artist exposes her/his body to risks and inflicts on it severe injuries, how will they be able to keep an aesthetic distance? In such performances, is it still valid to hold aesthetic distance as the •adequate' attitude of reception? A theory of aesthetic perception taking into consideration the body in pain has still to be developed. For it is highly questionable as to whether the aesthetics of the sublime already deal with this aspect satisfactorily. And such a theory seems all the more desirable, since theatre, from the 1960s and 1970s, increasingly employs the performer's body ma way which literally puts it at risk and violates it. whether in the performance of individual artists or of theatre groups. In the 1960s and 1970s the Viennese artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler. for instance, abused his body with cables and bandages (1960); Chris Burden had himself locked up in a locker measuring 2' x 2' x 3' for five days, nourished only from a water bottle placed in a locker above (1971): in the same year, in a performance entitled Shooting Piece. Burden was shot through his left arm by his friend; Gina Pane was cut on the back, face and hands and, lying on an iron bed, scorched and burned her body by candles placed underneath.-'' In the 1990s, Sieglinde Kallnbach walked on fire and trickled hot wax onto her skin;27 in The Reincarnation of the Holy Orion,2* the French performance artist Orlan, underwent cosmetic surgery to shape her face according to a computer-synthesized ideal that combined the features of women in famous paintings—such as Bolicellľs Venus, Leonardo's Mono Lisa, Boucher's Europe. Diane from the Fontainebleau school. Gérôme's Psyche. The operation was directly transmitted from the surgical theatre to a New York gallery. Since the 1980s, performers increasingly use the body in violent ways, both W dance and theatre groups. Injuries and pains are inflicted on the performer's bodies as, for instance, in the theatres of Jan Fabre. Einar Schleef. R«a Abdoh, Lalala Human Steps or Fuera dels Baus. In productions ol Harry Kupfer. Frank Castorf. Leander Haussmann and others, singers and actors are thrown about and made to fall dangerously. If the endangered, scorched, pierced or otherwise injured body is the locus attention, the question arises as to how this affects aesthetic perception. A* Elaine Scarry has shown, pain cannot be communicated: So, for the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present »« that 'having pain' may come to be thought ol as the most vibrant 247 msi m AK1 and hi r i <> k m a n ( i A \< i • x iniPlc of * hat U in -io haw ccriaiiily'. while lor the other person it ' ' > Jusivt thai 'bearing about pain' may exist as the primary model Ifwfc it it h to have doubt-. Thus pain comes unsharably into our ■Metal ai «1« thai wfak* cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed."*" To perceive pain can only mean to perceive ones own pain, never the pain another The spectators perceive the action by which the performer hurts her/himself but not the pain which s/he suffers. They are only in a position to assume that s/he feels pain. Thus, a kind of paradoxical situation presents uself The Heeling instant ut which an action is performed and. thus, significr and signihed seem to merge, is experienced by the spectator at the very moment when perception and meaning fall apart and the signified irretrievably separates from the signifier. While the action of hurting her/himself is perceived, the pain which it causes can only be imagined A gap opens up for the spectator between what is performed an the performer's body, and what happens in the performers body, a gap that seems to be bridgeable only by way of imagination. While the performer makes her/his body the scene of violent actions, the spectator is forced to move the scene into her/his imagination. The real presence' of performance is questioned not only by the subjective constructions of the artists and the spectators, but also by the performer's pain. For her/his pain can only gain presence for the spectators in their own imaginations and not in the performance of the action by which the performer hurts her/himself. Thus, the performance, in a way. turns into a scapeeoal ritual. The perfonner exposes her/his body to risks and injuries against which the spectators aim to protect their bodies; the performer causes her/himself the pains which the spectators seek to avoid. The performer, in this sense, suffers in place of the spectators. S/he saves them from their own physical suffering. The 'sacrificial victim' at the torment and death of a martyr, or even at the execution of a repentant Christian up to the eighteenth century, held 'a magic power' and the onlookers hoped for 'the healing of certain diseases and similar miracles' from the tortured or executed sinner, from 'his blood, his limbs or the rope'." While here it was the tortured and violated body of the sinner that seemed to promise and to guarantee the onlookers' own physical integrity, in the artiMs performance, it is the imagination of the spectator which replaces the magic Their imagination saves" them from the anxieties of violence and pain directed towards their own body by imagining the performer's pain and by attempting to sympathize with it and to sense it themselves. The aesthetic perception, thus initiated, triggered and provoked by the perlormance can hardly be described as 'disinterested pleasure'. On the one nand. the spectators feel shocked and deny what they sec; on the other. 0*5 arc fascinated because someone violates h.m/herself voluntarily and because action conjures up taboos of torture and physical punishment, Spectators 24H PKRFORMANCt ART AND RITUAL are fascinated and shocked by their own curiosity since, according to cultural norms, they should feel disgust or horror. It is this ambiguity in the reception process to which the performance artist Rachel Rosenthal refers: In performance art, the audience, from its role as sadist, subtly becomes the victim. It is forced to endure the artist's plight empathetically, or examine its own responses of voyeurism and pleasure, or smugness and superiority. [... ] In any case, the performer holds the reins. [.. . ] The audience usually 'gives up, before the artist/11 Here, aesthetic perception may be described as a kind of perception which transforms the spectators into involved participants and. in this sense, into performers themselves by projecting the scene of the body onto the scene of the imagination an imagination which, however, is tied to the body, or is even part of the body, i.e., a physical imagination that causes physical sensations. Therefore, the spectators usually 'give up' before the performer; their imaginations have replaced the performer s body with their own and, thus, penetrated into the realm of the incommunicable—to the pain of the other, which, now becomes manifest in a physical sensation, a physical impulse, in a physical response in the spectators. As van Gennep has shown, rituals work in a community in order to secure a safe passage from a given status to a new one at moments of life or social crisis in an individual (such as birth, puberty, marriage, pregnancy, illness, changes in professional positions, death). The performances created by individual artists over the last thirty years alluding to or transforming rituals seek to secure and accelerate the passage of Western culture from the state of a prevailingly material culture to a new performative culture. This passage is also to be understood as a passage from the given order of knowledge, the given sign-concept, as well as semiotic processes, towards a new, yet undefined order of knowledge. The performances, thus, operate as the signature of a time of transition. Notes 1 John Cage, quoted in Roselee Goldberg, Performance Art. From Futurism to the Present (New York: Harry Abraham, Inc., Publishers, 1988), p. 176. 2 Rauschenberg's dog barked loudly throughout the performance, running aller anyone moving in the hall. The dog had been a very popular performer in the nineteenth century, but not to everyone's taste. Rumour has it that Goethe resigned his directorship at the Weimar Court Theatre because in Der Hund von Auhry a live dog was desecrating the holiness of the stage. 3 Richard Wagner, Gesammehe Schriften und Dichtungen, I-IX, Vol. IV (Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1887/8; 2nd edition), p. 3. 4 Milton Singer, ed.. Traditional India: Structure and Change (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1959), p. xii. 5 Ibid. p. xii ff 6 Hermann Nitsch. Das Orgien Mysterien Theater Die Partituren aller aufgeführten Aktionen 1960-1979, Erster Band, 1.-32. Aktion. (Neapel/München/Wien: Edition Freiborg. 1979), p. 50. 249 VISUAL ART AND PERFORMANCE Akl 7 n,rmitl,i Nitseh 'Die Realisation desO. M. Theaters' <1973). In f lennann N,tsĽh Si h££ W«v. (Salzhurg/WiS ^«-Verlag. 1990), pp. 67 107 & pp 103 ff í T^'ifngľtheplaa to investigate the special traditions on which Nits* draw, in mrtiailar the Viennese tradition. Concerning this question, see Ekkehard SHrk Hanumn Nitseh. Dos Orgien Mysterien Theater unddie Hysterieder Griechen Quellen und Traditionen zum Wiener AntikenbUdseit /Ä3ö(München: Fink-Verlag, 1987). III Das Orgien Mysterien-Theater, p. 87. 11 Emile Bcnveiiiste, Problimes de finguistique generale |l uns: Gallimurd t 73: 'In any case, a performative Statement can only achieve reálií y when it h confirmed as an action. Outside the circumstances which make ii performative, sucha statement is nothing more than a mere statement. An- hk can call nut in the market square. '1 declare general mobilization1. Bui this statement cannot become action because it tacts authority, it is just speech; it is limited to an empty shout, childishness, or madness. A performative si a lenient without ad ion cannut exist. An authoritative action will always be derived from statements made by those who have the right to express them.' 12 Concerning the concept of frame, see Gregory Hateson. 'A theory of play and fantasy; a report on theoretical aspects of the project for study of the role oľ paradoxes of abstraction in communication", in: APA Psychiatrie Research ReportsII, 1955). 13 Marina Abramovic is Yugoslav. But it would restrict her performance to. take it as a statement about Yugoslavia. 14 Joseph Be u y s. in Carolin Tisdall, Joseph Beuys i oyote. 3rd edition, 1988 (München, first published in 1976). p. 13. (My description of the performance follows the description /liver. h\ Tisdall). 15 Quoted in Tisdall, p 14 16 ibid. 17 Ibid p. 15. J8 ibid. p. 15 rf 19 Ibid, p, 16. 20 Ibid. p. 15. 21 Cited in Tisdall, p. 10. 22 Tisdall. p. 1.1. 23 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, translated by Monika Vizedom and 7d £.abrxiel|e Cafl'M (ChÍĽať°: ;- nivciMiy of Chicago Press. I960). ae ,Heimuth Plessnen Anthropologie der Sinne. Gesammelte Schriften in drei Händen (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), and Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying. A study oj the hmtts oj Human Behaviour (Evanston. IL: Northwestern University Press. 1941, reprmt 1970). 25 See also Thomas J. Csordas, ed., Embodiment and Experience. The Existential 26 Thľr^™'H'e^AWambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1994). to The Condttwnlng, Part I of'Auto-Portrait1 1972 27 Frankfurtern Main, 1991 28 New York. 1990 ff 29 York'ox^' u" Body in Pain: The Hakit* ™d Unmaking of the World®** 30 pľíľ' Oxtord University Press, 1985), p. 4. " ErSmľZ l™™n;.Tbeater dex Reckens. Gerichtspraxis und Strafrituale m (Wintľrmi,* erí°^ance ™J the Masoehist Tradition". In; High Perfol PERFORMANCE Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies Edited by Philip Ausländer \ otumt- l\ IJ Routledge 1 ONtXJN *W NW W«* T198570 I UM lUlNlHlKtl by Koutlciljic ) i Htm I iMu-i i lim-, i oedott i * 4P 41 I simuiuitK-tuisis publiihad in tin- USA rod Ctnadi li\ Routlcilgc .»> Wem 1Mb Stuvi. New Yolk. NN HKNil Rouiittlxf i\ on Imprint "/ '''«' /m/ni ■( hutu i\ t in tup I diloHal inalU'i mul tclcvimii C 2003 Philip AiiNÍntuĽt iihIiv lttu«l owners leUim iitpynghl m iIhmi own innlniiil ľ y pene I in I unes b> (iiuphtcutM I united. Ilonu Kunu PiitiU'il ami hound m ( itiMl Hut,im M Iniernutionul I ul, I'mUtow. * 'oiiiwull All rights reserved No pun ol (his book nm y \v iep..... il 01 itpimliitĽil »Ii uliliM'il m iitiv r<>i m tu hy >»nv eUu iiouit , rTtCchtllUi ill. 01 ollici mním. now knuwn nr lieieullei invented. iiuluilniK plii)Uiťii]>viii(j rind mOfdHlgi 04 in liny inlormulion «loruye m removal iy»teni. without peimtMion m writing (Vom the puhlWtefs Hrttnli I limit i f 'nt,if,iguing iti ľuhltt titliw Ihitu A lululojitie uvi tul Im linn hook i» itvmluhlc lunu the Mulish l.lhiury library of ( tinnn:v\ ( 'maloxtnx tu ľuhlti uflttn lUilu A catalog record loi this book hu» horn requested ISBN (J-4IV25M 1-2 (Srn ISBN Mt5-25515-9 (Volume IV| PuMkh*r\ NcHo Kelcreiicc within euch chapter «rc hk ihcy Mppciir in the original loMipU'U- work CONTENTS VOU'MK IV Acknowledgements. PART I Identity and the self /, / The performing .self 6K The performing self RICHARD poirier 69 Presenting and re-presenting the self: from not-acting to acting in African performance FRANCES HARDING 1.2 Performing identity 70 Doing difference CANDACE WEST AND SUSAN fensterMAKER 71 Prologue: performing hlackness KIMBFRLY W. BENSTON 72 Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory JUDITH BUTLER 73 Choreographies of gender SUSAN LEIGH FOSTER CONTENTS 74 Performing lesbian in the space of technology; part 1 SUE-ELLEN CASE 141 PART 2 Visual art and performance art 2.1 Visual art 163 75 Art and objecthood 165 MICHAEL FRIED 76 The object of performance: aesthetics in the seventies 188 HENRY SAYRE 2.2 Performance art 77 Performance and theatricality: the subject demystified 206 JOSETTE FERAL 78 British live art 218 NICK KAYE 79 Performance art and ritual: bodies in performance 228 ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE 80 Women's performance art: feminism and postmodernism 251 JEANIE FORTE 81 Negotiating deviance and normativity: performance art, boundary transgressions, and social change 269 BRITTA B. WHEELER PART 3 Media and technology 289 3.1 Media and mediatization 82 Film and theatre SUSAN SONTAG 83 The presence of mediation ROGER COPELAND 291 306 vi CONTENTS 84 "The eye rinds no fixed point on which to rest.. CHANTAL PONTBRIANI) 85 Listening to music: performances and recordings TIMODORE GRACY1C 3.2 Performance mid technology 86 Negotiating presence: performance and new technologies ANDREW MtJRl'HIE 87 The art of puppetry in the age of media production STEVE TILLIS 88 I lie screen test of the double: the uncanny performer in the space of technology MATTHEW CAUSEY 89 The art of interaction: interactivity, perform a tivity, and computers DAVID 2. SAITZ Index vii PERFORMANCE Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies Edited by Philip Auslander Volume III IJ Routledge I % Taylor iFrincu Group LONDON AMD NEW VOUK 198573 First published 2003 by Roulledge ] I New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Roulledge 29 West 35lh Street. New York. NY 10001 Rout (edge it an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group Editorial matter and selection C 2003 Philip Auslander: individual owners retain copyright in their own material Typeset in Times by Graphicrafl Limited. Hong Kong Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow. Cornwall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-25511-2 (Set) ISBN 0-415-25514-7 (Volume III) Publisher's Note References within each chapter are as they appear in the original complete work. 1001155515 CONTENTS VOLUME III A cknowledgements PART 1 Science and social science I. J Performing science 45 From science to theatre: dramas of speculative thought GAUTAM DASGUPTA 46 Performance and production: the relation between science as inquiry and science as cultural practice ROBERT P. CREASE 1.2 Social behavior as performance 47 Verbal art as performance RICHARD BAUMAN 48 A performance-centered approach to gossip ROGER D. ABRAHAMS 49 Becoming other-wise: conversational performance and the politics of experience LEONARD C. HA WES 50 Social dramas and stories about them VICTOR TURNER CONTENTS 1.3 Performing ethnography 51 Performing as a moral act: ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance DWiGHT CONQUERGOOD 52 Performance science ^9 MICHAL M. McCAXL AND HOWARD S. BECKER 53 The efficacy of performance science: comment on McCall and Becker 169 RICHARD A, HILBERT 54 SNAP! Culture: a different kind of "reading1' 173 E. PATRICK JOHNSON PART 2 History, politics, political economy 199 2.1 Performing history 55 Disappearance as history: the stages of terror ANTHONY KUBIAK 201 56 Historical events and the historiography of tourism MICHAL KOBIALKA 213 57 Spectacles of suffering: performing presence, absence, and historical memory at U.S. Holocaust museums VIVIAN M. PATRAKA 234 2.2 Political activism and performance 58 Spectacles and scenarios: a dramaturgy of radical activity LEE BAXANDALL 253 59 Fighting in the streets: dramaturgies of popular protest, 1968-1989 266 BAZ KERSHAW co nt tn ts 2.3 Theorizing political performance dl! There must be a lot of fish in that take: toward an ecological theater 293 una chaudhuri 61 Brechtian theory /feminist theory: toward a gestic feminist criticism 305 elin diamond 62 The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction 320 PE(jGY phelan 63 Praxis and pcrfbrmativity 336 andrew l'.Mt k EK 2.4 Work. Production. Political economy 64 The future that worked 344 joseph roach 65 Rhythm and the performance of organization 353 richard a. rogers 66 The performance of production and cunsumption 372 miranda joseph 67 Legally live 405 philip ausländer VII iMKioR manct: C 'riticat C oikvpts in I Hnaiy and c ultural Studies Edited by Philip Auslander \ otiinu I I )JVlN ANO NtW Vi m I 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group Editorial matter and selection © 2003 Philip Auslander; individual owners retain copyright in their own material Typeset in Times by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-25511-2 (Set) ISBN 0-415-25513-9 (Volume II) Publisher's Note References within each chapter are as they appear in the original complete work. 1001155514 (ON II N IS VOM NU U I, Aemoh'A ttfťtm tils is ľ S H I I Kť|irťsťiilHtion I'\H1 2 Ttxtuallty 25 ľhvutrknl iHTforiiittiH-o: llltislrallon. IrniwUH«»«. lullMmviil. "i siip|)l( nu 11 r' M AU \ IN CÁRI m IN 2ft Drtiinu, pirlormiillvlh, und pťrlornmm'ť ^ ii \M l|t II II N I 1\ Mu- llitulti nl ťiiu'lh miiUliľ fliiMiu- dI u puMUtutioii ' i u i)|i| s Hl HKI1) \ 22 I hi" Innlli. Iho pnlni ii \n I It ani, 1118 I mm \iM \ \ 24 Hu Humum v •>! >ltsln : m-miuIH) Mid m-iuln In |»oiiii)«rrtpll> und pri lt>i iiuiin-ľ iii 1 l»ih \n *7 77 7*í CONTENTS 27 Presence and the revenge of writing: re-thinking theatre ^ after Derrida ELINOR EOTHS 2H Performance writing RIC Al.LSOP 29 Making motions: the embodiment of law in gesture 124 BERN AKI) J. HIBHITTS PART 3 Bodies 30 The actor's bodies OAVII> < «RAVER 155 157 31 The body as the object of modern performance 175 JON ERICKSON 32 Strategic abilities: negotiating the disabled bod\ in dance 188 ANN COOPER Al HRIÜHT 33 Feminine free fall: a fantasy of freedom 207 PETA TAIT PART 4 Audiences/spectatorship 217 34 Dramaturgy of the spectator 219 MARCO DE MARINIS 35 The pleasure of the spectator 236 ANNE UBERSFELI) 36 The audience: subjectivity, community and the ethics of listening 249 ALICE RAYNER 37 Odd, anonymous needs: the audience in a dramatized sociely 269 HERBERT BLAU 38 Spectatorial theory in the age of media culture 282 ELIZABETH KLAVER VI CONTENTS PART S Culture 5, J Cultural studies 301 39 Drama in a dramatised society ^ RAYMOND WILLIAMS 40 Why modern plays are not culture: disciplinary blind spots 313 SHANNON JACKSON 41 Embodying difference: issues in dance and cultural studies 334 JANE C. DESMOND 5.2 Intercultural studies 42 Twins separated at birth? West African vernacular and Western avant garde performativity in theory and practice 359 CYNTHIA WARD 43 Western feminist theory, Asian Indian performance, and a notion of agency 382 AVANTHl MEDURI 44 Interculturalism, postmodernism, pluralism 395 DARYL CHIN PERFORMANCE Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies Edited by Philip Auslander Volume T 11 Routledge jjj T,ivlr.>r & F rantis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK NARODN! KNIHOVNA ■iiiiiiii 001155513* 198433 I'irst published 2003 by Routlcdgc 11 New I cller Lane. London IX'4P 41*1* Simullaneously published in the I ISA und Canada by Rout ledge 29 West 35th Street. New York. NY HUH)I lit mi If ike is mi imprint of the Taylor A Francis ihoup Editorial mailer and selection ■< 21HH Philip Ausländer; individual owners retain copyright in their own material Typesel in Times by Ciraphierafl Limited. Hong Kong Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd. Padslow. Cornwall AH rights reserved, No purl of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing Publication Data A catalogue record for this hook is available from the British Li brut Library of C angress C 'attilaging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book bus been requested ISBN 0-415-25511-2 (Set) ISBN (M15-25512-0 (Volume I) Piilillslit r*s Note References within each chapter lire bh they appear in the original complete work, CONTENTS VOLLME I Acknowledgements xv Chronological Table of reprinted articles and chapters xviii General Introduction 1 PART 1 Foundations and definitions 25 /. / Foundational texts and concepts 1 The territorial passage 27 ARNOLD VAN GENNEP 2 Nature and significance of play as a cultural phenomenon 36 JOHAN HUIZINGA 3 Search for a great tradition in cultural performances 57 MILTON SINGER 4 Ritual drama as "hub" 72 KENNETH BURKE 5 Lecture I in How to Do Things with Words 91 J. L. AUSTIN 6 Introduction in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 97 ERVING GOEFMAN V CONTENTS 1.2 Definitions, distinctions, and debates IDS 7 Performance as metaphor BERT O. STATES g Approaches to "performance": an analysis of terms 138 GRAHAME p, THOMPSON 9 The politics of discourse: performativity meets theatricality 153 MNELLE REINELT 10 Virtual reality: performance, immersion, and the thaw 16H JON MCKENZIE 1.3 Disciplinary actions 11 Blurred genres: the refiguration of social thought 189 clifford GEERTZ 12 Life as theater: some notes on the dramaturgic approach to social reality 203 SHELDON L. MES51NGER WITH HAROLD SAMPSON AND ROBERT D, TOWNE 13 A paradigm for performance studies 215 RONALD J. PEL1AS AND MMES VANOOSTING 14 Performance studies as women's work: historical sights/sites/citations from the margin 232 ELIZABETH BELL PART 2 Elements and circumstances of performance 261 15 Performers and spectators transported and transformed 263 RICHARD 5CHLCHNER 16 Theatrical and transgressive energies 291 FREDDIE ROKEM 17 On acting and not-acting mo MICHAEL KIR BY 18 Screen acting and the commutation test ^24 JOHN O. THOMPSON vi CONTENTS 19 Poetry's oral stage FETER MIDDI.ĽTON 20 The integrity of musical performance STAN GODLOVITCH VOLUME 11 A cknowledgements IX PART 1 Representation 1 21 The theater of cruelty and the closure of representation 3 JACQUES DERRIDA 22 The tooth, the palm 25 JEAN-FRANCOIS LYOTARD 23 Frame-up: feminism, psychoanalysis, theatre 32 BARBARA FREEDMAN 24 The dynamics of desire: sexuality and gender in pornography and performance 57 JILL DOLAN PART 2 Textuality 25 Theatrical performance: illustration, translation, fulfillment, or supplement? MARVIN CARLSON 26 Drama, performativity, and performance W. B. WORT HEN 27 Presence and the revenge of writing: re-thinking theatre after Derrida ELINOR FUCHS 28 Performance writing RIC ALLSOP vii CONTENTS 29 Making motions: the embodiment of law in gesture BERNARD J. HIRBMTS PART 3 Bodies 30 The actor's bodies DAVID GRAVER 31 IIr- bod\ as the object of modem performance JON ERICKSON 32 Strategic abilities: negotiating the disabled body in dance ANN COOPER ALBRIGHT 33 Feminine free fall: a fantasy of freedom PETA TAIT PART 4 Audiences/spectatorship 34 Dramaturgy of the spectator MARCO DE MARINIS 35 The pleasure of the spectator ANNE UHERS1ELD 36 The audience: subjectivity, community and the ethics of listening ALICE RAYNER 37 Odd, anonymous needs: the audience in a dramatized society HERBERT BLAU 3« Spectatorial theory in the age of media culture ELIZABETH KLAVER PART 5 Culture 5. \ Cultural studies 39 Drama in a dramatised society RAYMOND WILLIAMS viii CONTENTS 40 Why modern plays are no! culture: disciplinary blind spots SHANNON JACKSON 41 Embodying difference: issues in dunce and cultural studies JANE C. DESMOND 5.2 Inter cultural studies 42 Twins separated at birth? West African vernacular and W estern avant garde performativity in theory and practice CYNTHIA WARD 43 Western feminist theory, Asian Indian performance, and a notion of agency AVANTHI MEDUR1 44 Interculturalism, postmodernism, pluralism DARYL CHIN VOLUME 111 A cknowledgements PART I Science and social science i. 1 Perfo rm ing scien ce 45 From science to theatre: dramas of speculative thought GAUTAM DASGUPTA 46 Performance and production: the relation between science as inquiry and science as cultural practice ROBERT P. CREASE 1.2 Social behavior as performance 47 Verbal art as performance RICHARD BAUMAN 48 A performance-centered approach to gossip ROGER D. ABRAHAMS ix CONTENTS 49 Becoming other-wise: conversational performance and the politics of experience leonard C. HAWtS 11IS 50 Social dramas and stories about them victor H RNI H 1.3 Performing ethnography 51 Performing as a moral act: ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance 134 DWIGHT CONfJUERGOOD 52 Performance science 149 MICHAL M. McCALL AND HOWARD S. BECKER 53 The efficacy of performance science: comment on Met all and Becker 169 RFC HARD A. HII.BERT 54 SNAP! Culture: a different kind of '•reading*' 173 e. patrick johnson part 2 History, politics, political economy 199 2.1 Performing history 55 Disappearance as history: the stages of terror 201 anthony KUB1AK 56 Historical events and the historiography of tourism 213 michal kobialk a 57 Speclacles of suffering: performing presence, absence. and historical memory at U.S. Holocaust museums 234 VIVIAN M. PATRAKA 2.2 Political activism and performance 58 Spectacles and scenarios: a dramaturgy or radical activity 253 LEE BAXANDALL 59 Fighting in the streets: dramaturgies of popular protest, BA7 Kt-KsilAW 266 I CONTENTS 2.3 Theorizing political performance 60 "There must be a lot of fish in that lake"; toward an ecological theater una chaudhuri 61 Breelitian theory/feminist theory: toward a gestic feminist criticism elin diamond 62 The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction PEGGY PHELAN 63 Praxis and performativity andrew parker 2.4 Work. Production, Political economy 64 The future that worked joseph roach 66 Rhythm and the performance of organization richard a. rogers 66 The performance of production and consumption miranda joseph 67 Legally live philip auslander VOLUME IV Ackno wledgemen ts PART 1 Identity and the self 1.1 The perfo rm ing self 68 The performing self richard poirier CONTENTS 69 Presenting and re-presenting the self: from not-aeting to acting in African performance FRANCES HARDING 1.2 Performing identity 70 Doing difference CANDACE WEST AND SUSAN FENSTERMAKER 71 Prologue: performing blackness KIMBERLY W, BENSTON 72 Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory JUDITH BUTLER 73 Choreographies of gender SUSAN LEIGH FOSTER 74 Performing lesbian in the space of technology; part I SUE-ELLEN CASE PART 2 Visual art and performance art 2.1 Visual art 75 Art and objecthood MICHAEL FRIED 76 The object of performance: aesthetics in the seventies HENRY SAY RE 2.2 Performance art 11 Performance and theatricality: the subject demystified JOSETTE FERAL 78 British live art NICK K A VI 79 Performance art and ritual: bodies in performance RRIKA EISCHER-LICHTE xii CONTENTS 80 Women's performance art: feminism and postmodernism 251 JEANIE FOR TP HI Negotiating deviance and normalivity: performance art, boundary transgressions, and social change 269 HRITTA B. WHEELER fart 3 Media and technology 289 3.1 Media an dmedia t iza turn 82 Film and theatre 291 SUSAN SONTAG 83 The presence of mediation 306 ROGER COPELAND 84 "The eye finds no fixed point on which to rest. . ." 323 CHANTAl PONTBRIAND 85 Listening to music: performances and recordings 332 THEODORE GRACYK 3.2 Performance and technology 86 Negotiating presence: performance and new technologies 351 ANDREW MURPMIi: 87 The art of puppetry in the age of media production 365 sum. ru.i.is 88 The screen test of the double: the uncanny performer in the space of technology 381 MATTHEW CAUSEY 89 The art of interaction: interactivity, performativity, and computers 395 DAVID Z. SALT7 Index 411 XIII Chronological Table of reprinted articles and chapters Date Author Tille Source Vol. C hap 1908 Arnold Van Gennep The territorial passage x 1938 Johan Huizinga 1957 Kenneth Burke 1959 Erving Goffman 1962 Sheldon l Messinger, Harold Sampson and Robert D. Towne 1966 Susan Sontag 1967 Michael Fried 1969 Lee Baxandall 1970 Roger D. Abrahams 1971 Richard Poirier 1972 Michael Kirby 1972 Milton Singer Nature and significance of play as a cultural phenomenon Ritual drama as "hub" Introduction in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Life as theater: some notes on the dramaturgic approach to social reality Film and theatre Art and objecthood Spectacles and scenarios: a dramaturgy of radical activity A performance-centered approach to gossip The performing self On acting and not-acting Search for a great tradition in cultural performances Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960 [1st edn], pp. 15-25. Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens- A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, Boston: Beacon Press. 1955. pp. 1-27. Kenneth Burke. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 87 113. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. pp. 1 16. Sociometry 25(1): 98 110. The Drama Review 11(1): 24-37. Artforum 5(10): 12-23. The Drama Review 13(4): 52-71. Man. New Series. 5(2): 290-301. Richard Poirier, The Performing Self. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. X6 Ml The Drama Review 16(1): 3-15. Milton Singer. When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization, New York: Praeger. pp 67-80. IV IV III ill IV 12 82 75 58 4S 68 17 t 0 1 TO O z r o Q > p H > OS r n If. 53' 1975 J. L. Austin 1975 Richard Bauman 1975 Raymond Williams 1976 Jean-Francois Lyotard 1978 Jacques Dernda 1978 John O. Thompson 1979 Clifford Geertz 1980 Victor Turner 1981 Richard Schechner 1982 Josette Feral 1982 Chantal Pontbnand 1982 Anne Lbersfeld 1983 Henry Say re 1985 Herbert Blau Lecture i in How to Do Things with Words Verba! art as performance Drama in a dramatised society The tooth, the palm The theater of cruelty and the closure of representation Screen acting and the commutation test Blurred genres: the refiguriition of social thought Social dramas and stones about them Performers and spectators transported and transformed Performance and theatricality: the subject demystified "The eye finds no fixed point on which to rest..." The pleasure of the spectator The object of performance: aesthetics in the seventies Odd, anonymous needs: the audience in a dramatized society J. O. Urrason and Manna Sbisa (eds) How to Do Things with Words (2nd Edn), Cambridge. Harvard Universitv Press, pp. 1-11. American Anthropologist 77(2): 290-31 L Raymond Williams, Drama in a Dramatised Society (Inaugural Lecture). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-21. Translated by Anne Knap and Michel Bcnamou, SubStance 15: 105 110. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicagu Press, pp. 232-250 Screen 19(2): 55-69. The American Scholar 49(2): 165-179. ( riticat Inquiry 7(1): 141-168. The Kenyan Review, New Series, 3(4): 83-113. Translated bv Terese Lyons. Modern Drama 25(1): 171-181. Translated by C. R. Parsons, Modern Drama 25(1): 154-162. Translated by Pierre Bouillaguet and Charles Jose, Modern Drama 25(1): 127-139. The Georgia Review 37(1): 169-188. Performing Arts Journal 9(2/3): 199-212. II) I IV IV II 50 15 77 84 35 > r H > u r IV 76 II 37 I I s a m B ■ ■ - B - S d • 1 T i í I j 11,1*1 m j 5 í 1 i * ä íl* Í Í im hi HLi »I! nuítílíí tú i 13 s í s i m i'* es« i li i ísi l!i i i íl i! 1 i > ú! .ílr:'i y ii .;''! j 1 1J! ] ill ! * S « « i i i i t ! ! I X 1989 1990 ls»sM> |>>* I 1990 Dar Roger Cope la nil Ion Eriekson Richard V Hilbert Michal VI Mut. .ill and Howard S. Becker C.1990 Andrew Murphie 1992 Avanibi Meduri 1999 l:b/abeth Bell 1993 Robert IV Crease 199? 1994 1993 Jane C Desmond Stan (iodlovitch Peggy 1' he I. in 1993 Alice Ra>ner 1^4 Nick Kaye Interculturalism, postmodernism, pluralism The presence of mediation The body as the object of modern performance I he efficacy of performance science comment on MeCall and Becker Performance science Negotiating presence: performance and new technologies Western feminist theory. Asian Indian performance, and a notion of agency Performance studies as women's work: historical sights/sites/eilalions from the margin Performance and production: the relation between science as inquiry and science as cultural practice Embodying difference: issues in dance and cultural studies The integrity of musical performance The ontology of performance: representation without rcprixJuction The audience: subjectivity, community and the ethics of listening British live art Performing Arts Journal III 3) / 12(1): 163 175 / DM Journal of Performance Studies 34(4) 28 44. Journal of Dramatu I hear i ami ( ntu i m 5(1): 231-245. Social Problems 37< 1 >: 133 135 StKial Problems 37( 1 >: 117 132 Philip Hayward led.). Culture, Technology & Creativity, London: John Libbcy. pp.209-226. Women ami Performance 5(2): 90-103. Text and Performance Quarterly 13(4): 350-374. Robert P. Crease. The Play of Nature: Experimentation a\ Per for/name. Bloominglon: Indiana University Pre**, pp. 158-177. Cultural ( r nit/in 26: 33-63. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51(4): 573 -587 Peggy Phelan, Cnmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routkdge. pp. 146-166. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 7(2): 3-24. Live Art: Definition & Documental ion*. Contemporary Theatre Revie* 2(21 1-7. II 44 ÍV 83 II 31 (II 53 III 52 IV 86 II 43 14 III 46 II 41 III 6: II 36 IV PJ : : - Chronological Table continued Date Author Title Source Vul Chap 1994 Jon McKenzie 1994 Richard A. Rogers 1994 Cynthia Ward 1995 Sue-Ellen Case 1995 L'na Chaudhuri 1995 Bernard .1 Hibbitts 1995 E. Patrick Johnson 1995 Elizabeth KJaver 1995 Candace West and Susan Eenstennaker 1996 Michal Kobialka [996 Andrew Parker 1996 Vivian M. Patraka 1996 Bert O. States \ 'J96 Peta Tait 1997 Philip Auslander Virtual reality: performance, immersion, and the thaw Rhythm and the performance of organization Twins separated at birth? West African vernacular and Western avant garde perturmativity in theory and practice Performing lesbian in the space of technology: part 1 "There must be a lot offish in that lake" toward an ecological theater Making motions: the embodiment of law in gesture SNAP! Culture: a different kind of "reading" Spectatorial theory in the age of media culture Doing difference Historical events and the historiography of tourism Praxis and performativity Spectacles of suffering: performing presence, absence, and historical memory at I IS holocaust museums Performance as metaphor Feminine free fall: a fantasy of freedom Legally live The Drama Review Journal of Performam t I Studies 38(4): 83 106. TeXl and Performance Quarterly 14(3)". 222 237 Text and Performance Quarteriv 14(4): 269 288 Theatre Journal 47(1): 1 18. Theater 25( 1): 23 31. Journal ol Contemporary Legal Issues 6: 51-81. Text and Performance Quarterly 15(2): 122 142. New Theatre Quarterly I H44): 309-321. Gender and Society 9( I): 8-37. Journal of Theatre and Drama 2: 153- 174. Women And Performance 8(2): 265-273. Elin Diamond (ed). Performance and Cultural Politic*. London: Routledge. pp. 89-107. Theatre Journal 4U\\- I 26. Theatre Journal 48( I): 27-34. The Drama Renew: Journal of Perform*** ■ Studies AUiy. 9 29 III II 10 65 42 IV 74 111 60 II 29 III 54 11 38 IV 70 III 56 III 63 III 57 1 7 ir 33 ui 6" n x c z z r C Q n > r - > - n X 1997 Erika Fischer-Lichte 1997 Theodore Gracyk 1997 David Graver 1997 Baz Kershaw 1997 David Z Saltz I99S Ann Cooper Albright I99X Susan Leigh Foster 1998 Leonard C. Hawes 1998 Miranda Joseph 1998 Joseph Roach 1998 W. B. Worthen 1999 RicAllsop 1999 Matthew Causey I9V9 Franca Harding 1999 Peter Middlelon Performance art and ritual: bodies in performance Listening to music: performances and recordings The actor's bodies Fighting in the streets: dramaturgies of popular protest, 1968-1989 The art of interaction: interactivity, performativity, and computers Strategic abtlities: negotiating the disabled body in dance Choreographies of gender Becoming other-wise: conversational performance and the politics of experience 1 he performance of production and consumption The future that worked Dr.on.i. pcrformalivitj and performance Performance writing The screen test of the double: the uncanny performer in the space of technology Presenting and rc-presenting the self: from not-acting to acting in African performance Poetry's oral stage Theatn Research International 22l 1): IV 79 22-37. Journal oj'Aesthetics and Art Criticism IV 85 55(2): 139-151. Text and Performance Quarterly 17(3): II 30 221-235. New Theatre Quarterly 13(51): 255-276. Ill 59 Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism IV 89 55(2): 117-127. Michigan Quarterly Review 37(2): 475-501. II 32 Signs: Journal of IVomen in Culture and IV 73 Society 24(1): 1-34. Text and Performance Quarterly 18(4): III 49 273-299. Sadat Text 16(1): 25 62. Ill 66 Theater 8(2): 19-26. Ill 64 Publications of the Modern Language II 26 Association 113(5): 1093-1107. Performing Arts Journal 21 (1): 76- 80. II 28 Theatre Journal 51(4): 383-394 IV 88 TDR: The Journal oj Performance Studie IV 69 43(2): 118-135. Salin* Kanal and Ivan Gaskell (eds). I 19 Performance and Authenticity in the Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 215-253. Chronological Table continued Date Author Title Source Vol. Chap. n 1999 Freddie Rokem Theatrical and transgressive energies Assaph: Studies in the Theatre 15: 19-38. 1 16 r ;= J 999 Steve Til lis The art of puppetry in the age of media production The Dream Review: Journal of Performance Studies 43(3): 182 195. IV 87 z z o 1999 Britta B. Wheeler Negotiating deviance and normalbity: performance art, boundary transgressions, and social change Marilyn Corsianos and Kelly Amanda Train (eds). Interrogating Social Justice: Polities, Culture, andIdentity,Toronto: Canadian Scholars" Press, pp. 155-179. IV 81 — — 2000 Kimberly W. Benston Prologue performing blackness Performing Blackness: Enactments of IV 71 African-American Modernism. London: _, Routledge. pp. 1 21. 40 > 2001 Shannon Jackson Why modern plays are not culture; Modern Drama 44(1): 31 51. II disciplinary blind spots Substance 31(1-2), I - 2002 Janelle Reinelt The politics of discourse: performativity meets theatricality 9