The Politics of Discourse: Performativity Meets Theatricality

Author(s): Janelle Reinelt

Source: SubStance, Vol. 31, No. 2/3, Issue 98/99: Special Issue: Theatricality (2002), pp. 201-215
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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 The Politics of Discourse:

Performativity meets Theatricality

Janelle Reinelt

When discourses are in flux (of course from one point of view they

always are in flux), in periods of unsettled meanings, political struggles

exist at various sites of contestation. This productive dissonance is currently

the state of play within discourses of performativity and theatricality. Their

relationship to each other, and their meanings and uses within their own

terms are equally in question. In this essay, I will argue that volatility within

these discourses affords an opportunity for forging a new understanding of

both their practices and of the consequences of their usages. Further, the

identification of certain of these applications with specific nations or regions,

what we might call "local struggles," enables a challenge to the limits of

these discourses in light of an increasingly urgent imperative to rethink and

resituate performance theory in relation to our contemporary transnational

situation.

Mises en Scene: Performance / Performative / Performativity

These terms-performance, performative, and performativity-share

a cognate base, but although they are frequently used together or even

interchangeably, they have had had at least three separate but related scenes

of development. I will begin by distinguishing them for purposes of clarity,

but they will inevitably bleed together as the essay progresses.

Scene One: "Performance" has been used to differentiate certain

processes of performing from the products of theatrical performance, and

in its most narrow usage, to identify performance art as that which, unlike

"regular" theatrical performances, stages the subject in process, the making

and fashioning of certain materials, especially the body, and the exploration

of the limits of representation-ability.' Peggy Phelan's Unmarked is only one

text that celebrates staging disappearance in performance: "representation

without reproduction." Embedded in this notion is the singularity of live

performance, its immediacy and its non-repeatability. Convinced that

performance can simultaneously be empty and yet gesture toward value,

Phelan finds an oppositional edge in nonreproductivity. "Performance uses

? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2002 201

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 202 Janelle Reinelt

the performer"s body to pose a question about the inability to secure the

relation between subjectivity and the body per se; performance uses the body

to frame the lack of Being promised by and through the body, that which

cannot appear without a supplement" (150, 151). This understanding of

performance leads to valuing the processes of signification in performance,

and to radical skepticism about the presence or truth of any metaphysical

claim within performance.

This use of the term performance is related to a general history of the

avant-garde or of anti-theater, taking its meanings from a rejection of aspects

of traditional theater practice that emphasized plot, character, and

referentiality: in short, Aristotelian principles of construction and Platonic

notions of mimesis. The rejection of textual sovereignty, of authorial or

directorial authority, in favor of the free-play of performance links early

avant-garde experiments at the beginning of the century with the 1960s and

1970s Living Theater, Open Theater, and Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Theater

Laboratory. In our postmodern moment, as Elin Diamond writes in her own

account of this history, "In line with poststructuralist claims of the death of

the author, the focus in performance today has shifted from authority to

effect, from text to body, to the spectator's freedom to make and transform

meanings" (3).

Scene Two: Following another set of meanings, the field of performance

has expanded since the 1950s (initially through the work of anthropologists

such as Milton Singer and Victor Turner) to include cultural performances,

giving equal status to rituals, sports, dance, political events, and certain

performative aspects of everyday life. Linking theater performances to these

other kinds of cultural performance enabled a political project of great

potential as it developed through the 1970s and 1980s: not only did

distinctions between high and low culture, primitive and mature, elite and

popular seem to disappear, but also a methodology based on deliberate socio-

political analyses of the operations of these performances began to develop

in the work of Richard Schechner, most prominently, but also in performance

theorists who were committed to articulating an acute awareness of cultural

differences and historical specificities, producing work on race, gender, and

sexuality as they are asserted and inscribed in performance: as they become

performative. Concurrent with this widening of the understanding of what

constituted performance came a battle within the Anglo-American academy,

most especially in the United States, for a redefinition of the discipline of

theater studies.2 "Performance studies" developed its own history and

converts, and although somewhat parochial in its battles, this institutional

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 Performativity meets Theatricality 203

struggle for territory and legitimacy links to a long history of conflict within

theater studies between privileging dramatic texts or the processes and events

produced in concrete performances. In the wake of these battles, the

imperative of theater studies to eschew the disinterestedness of art and to

embrace the partisan struggles entailed in legitimizing such a program of

cultural studies and critique has become the fundamental underlying political

challenge. In this debate, the specific social meanings of performances are at

stake. On the other hand, performance in its struggle with theater, in the

first sense / scene, is often about the perceptual and cognitive capacities of

performance, seen as a formal apparatus that can be foregrounded and / or

transformed.

Scene Three: Philosophical usages of performativity have come to

prominence as Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and many literary theorists

have reworked John L. Austin's theories of the performative, as part of an

ongoing poststructural critique of agency, subjectivity, language and law. In

the 1990s, the most important aspect of this dialogue was its place within a

larger philosophical move to explore an intersection between customarily-

divorced Anglo-American philosophies of language and of pragmatism

(Austin, John R. Searle, Noam Chomsky, Richard Rorty, for example) and

continental philosophies of deconstruction, post-phenomenology, and post-

Marxism (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Zizek,

for example).3 Judith Butler's work is an explicit case in point, where her

knowledge and commitment to revisions of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault

find a fruitful articulation with Derrida and Austin. The political stakes in

this work have to do with the recovery of possibilities for agency and

resistance after the poststructural critique of the subject.

J.L. Austin is actually a voice from the 1950s: his How to Do Things With

Words, issuing from a series of lectures at Harvard University in 1955, has

underpinned the contemporary philosophical focus on performativity and

its permutations. Adopting a common-sense style typical of Anglo-American

philosophy (at its most infuriating, I would editorialize), he makes the

discovery that in the case of performative utterances (I swear, I do [marry],

I bequeath) "it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the

appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be

said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it" (6).

Ironically, Austin wanted to exclude theatrical utterances from his

conception of performatives, finding them peculiarly hollow, and "parasitic"

on normal usages, falling "under the doctrine of etiolations of language" (3).

Linking this exclusion with a moralism long a part of the history of

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204 Janelle Reinelt

antitheatrical prejudice, Andrew Parker and Eve Sedgwick have pointed

out the politics of Austin's verb ("etiolate" to weaken, to make pale and

sickly): "What's so surprising, in a thinker otherwise strongly resistant to

moralism, is to discover the pervasiveness with which the excluded theatrical

is hereby linked with the perverted, the artificial, the unnatural, the abnormal,

the decadent, the effete, the diseased" (5). Jacques Derrida recovered

performance for performatives in his critique of Austin, which insists that

the general condition of language is iteration, "iterability," which makes

theatrical utterances not an exception but an instance of the general condition

of all utterances insofar as they are an iteration of a prior linguistic structure

(1-27). The force of utterance is its structural break with prior established

contexts. Iteration means that in the space between the context and the

utterance, there is no guarantee of a realization of prior conditions, but rather

of a deviance from them, which constitutes its performative force.

Judith Butler has tried to tie Derrida's critique of Austin to theories of

the body that involve it in the force of utterance in order to offer an account

of how the norms that govern speech come to inhabit the body (Excitable

Speech, ch. 4). Her work on the performative category of sex seeks to provide

an account of the possibility of intervention and redescription of sexual norms

possible in the structure of the speech act itself and its relationship to the

body. For while the subject is subjected to certain norms ("the Law," in

Lacanian parlance), the law itself is dependant on being cited, and is itself

confirmed in the repetition of its prescriptions. However, since performatives

can fail (Austin's "infelicities"), and as revised by Derrida, failure is

constitutive of the rupture between conditions and effects of the speech act,

the resulting destabilization of law allows an opening for resistance and

also for transformation in iteration. Ewa Ziarek explains how Derrida and

Butler both found possibility on the unlikely ground of failure:

For Butler, like for Derrida, the possibility of failure and impurity afflicting

the repetition of sexual norms [like all performative acts] is not only an

unfortunate predicament of "trauma," but also a positive condition of

possibility. By opening the possibility of intervention and redescription of

sexual norms, reiteration not only stresses the historicity of the law but

also opens an "incalculable" future, no longer submitted to its jurisdiction

(129).

In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler has moved toward a social and psychic

description of utterance, attempting to provide a ground for a social analysis

of utterance that goes beyond Derrida's structural account of the break from

context that every utterance performs while also allowing for the embodied

and subjected aspects of the speech act. Criticizing Pierre Bourdieu's view

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 Performativity meets Theatricality 205

that the body is formed by repetition and acculturation of norms, she writes,

"Bodies are formed by social norms, but the process of that formation runs

its risk. Thus the situation of constrained contingency that governs the

discursive and social formation of the body and its (re)productions remains

unacknowledged by Bourdieu" (1; 1997, 156). These philosophical

ruminations imply the power of performance as performative action and

also as the site for the emergence of novelty in representation. We will leave

this scene of performativity for now, struggling to theorize its own efficacy

for a politics of performance.

Although seeming to be separate scenes of struggle within the rubrics

of performance and performativity, these three sites are often interwoven.

The poststructural critique of the sign, of representation, and of the subject

is the philosophical backdrop to performance theory's concern with

performance processes and its deliberate rejection of totalized/completed

meanings. Performance theory has responded to this critique by isolating

performative processes in order to subject them to a de-representation and a

close scrutiny for lingering traces of the theological stage-the text-

dominated, logocentric stage of European theater and culture. And by

aligning theater studies with other disciplines under the rubric of Cultural

Studies, the comparativist work that has emerged opened a political project

that made sex, gender, race, and class central analytic categories of the new

"performance studies." "Performance" has come to signify an insistence on

a more inclusive set of practices: many from those of unheard, repressed or

overlooked voices. Elin Diamond has most adequately explained the political

stakes in these interrelations:

When performativity materializes as performance in that risky and

dangerous negotiation between a doing (a reiteration of norms) and a thing

done (discursive conventions that frame our interpretations), between

someone's body and the conventions of embodiment, we have access to

cultural meanings and critique. Performativity, I would suggest, must be

rooted in the materiality and historical density of performance. (5)

Theatricality and its Effects

Theatricality as a concept and as a discourse has a more diffuse history

than performance and the performative, partially because less technical and

widely distributed metaphorical usages of the theatrical and of theatricality

threaten to dilute any prospective genealogy of this discourse. Performance

has these generic applications too, of course, but the struggles around the

connotations and uses of "performance" have actually succeeded in creating

a network of meanings, which are at least less amorphous than those that

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206 Janelle Reinelt

operate in "theatricality." Many theater scholars use "theatricality"

uncritically to mark aspects of texts or performances that gesture to their

own conditions of production or to metatheatrical effects; these usages are

generally clear enough and forthright, if imprecise. In some instances,

theorists writing about theatricality reach back to Plato for a lineage that has

everything to do with the history of antitheatrical prejudice, including that

"prejudiced" art historian, Michael Fried.4 Cited often in connection with

discussions of theatricality and performance, his 1967 essay repeats the

distaste for theater and the theatrical that is based on a presumption of its

fakery, its false representation-here in the context of the values of modern

art: "Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theater" (139). Michael

Quinn, writing about David Mamet, used both performativity and

theatricality to locate Mamet's drama within an antitheatrical tradition insofar

as his thematic object of derision is "a rhetoric of deception in everyday

life." According to Quinn, Mamet's constant concern in his writings on the

theater, and in his explanations of his style, is with action, which he theorizes

as a constitutive, authentic movement of the mind and body, as opposed to

a less vital, static or mimetic way of living and showing life" (1996, 240).5

Thus Quinn calls Mamet's notion of action "performative" and his basic

attitude "anti-theatrical," where the exposure of artifices of deception is his

main dramatic through-line, and constitutive acts offer authentic

performatives to counteract the merely theatrical. This, then, might be the

most typical Anglo-American explication of the meaning of theatricality in

relationship to performativity: the latter is preferred when we are rejecting

the mimetic aspects of representation, whether in "theater" or in "life."

The term theatricality has a different set of associations if we look to

Europe. Erika Fischer-Lichte offers a history of its emergence in German

theater studies in conjunction with performativity. Max Herrmann's attempts

to define the "essence" of theater as the performance event, involving the

creative processes of the performers and spectators, combines in Fischer-

Lichte's account with Nikolai Evreinov's concept of theatricality (teatral

"nost"). Perceiving this theatricality to be a "pre-aesthetic instinct" that

informs all of culture, not only theater, he anticipated anthropological

understandings of the term. It does not seem merely a coincidence that

Hermann and Evreinov wrote in the early decades of the twentieth century

at the same time that avant-garde artists, whether Surrealist or Dada, Antonin

Artaud or Vasily Kandinsky, Adolphe Appia or Vsevolod Meyerhold, were

experimenting with the limits of representation. Many of these same artists

have become a link to contemporary performance theory-e.g. Derrida and

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 Performativity meets Theatricality 207

Julia Kristeva on Artaud, Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes on Bertolt

Brecht (see Murray, 1997 and Barthes, 1985).6

While recently Anglo-American theorists have embraced performance

and performativity as central organizing concepts, European theorists have

stressed theatricality, thus opening up a contemporary question concerning

the variability of these terms. Josette F1ral, whose Canadian-based work is

nevertheless closely aligned with French theory, has written both about

theatricality and performance.' Her account of theatricality also cites

Evreinov as pioneering this discourse, but offers a French lineage through

Aristotle, Denis Diderot, Jean Racine and Victor Hugo. She argues, however,

that in the past ten years, "la notion de theatralitd comme concept est une

preoccupation rdcente qui accompagne le ph6nomene de theorisation du

thdatre au sens moderne du terme" (348). For Feral, theatricality is a condition

in which a certain cleavage in space opens up where the spectator looks to

engage and to create the theatrical. Outside of the everyday, or rather a breach

in it (brisure, clivage), this space of theatricality requires both the gaze of the

spectator and the act of the other, but the initiative lies with the spectator.

This theatricality is an experience, then, that is not limited to the theater, but

is an aspect of life that appears whenever its minimum conditions are met.

Revising Evreinov's notion of a pre-aesthetic instinct, Feral claims that

theatricality is a dynamic of perception, creating between the spectator and

the one looked at (the actor) the special condition of theatricality:

Par le regard qu'il porte, le spectateur crde alors face a ce qu'il voit un

espace autre dont les lois et les rigles ne sont plus celles du quotidien et

oiu il inscrit ce qu'il regarde, le percevant alors d'un oeil different, avec

distance, comme relevant d'une altirit6 oii il n'a de place que comme

regard extirieur. (358)

This theorization of theatricality is compatible with Erika Fischer-

Lichte's project of isolating and studying theatricality,8 although her

formulation is inflected with a certain German emphasis on classification

and scientific inquiry which makes theater the "point of paradigm and

laboratory" for culture as a whole.9 Recognizing that theatricality applies to

theater and to processes in culture and in everyday life, she wants to keep

from blurring them together: "For, if everything is 'theater,' the concept

becomes so wide that it loses any distinctive or cognitive capacity." We will

return to this issue later in the essay.

While sharing with Feral an insistence that the condition of theatricality

transcends the limits of theater, Fischer-Lichte develops her precise account

of theatricality through an emphasis on the semiotic processes of transforming

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208 Janelle Reinelt

material (bodies and objects) into signs of signs (1992). Explaining the

difference between theatrical signs and non-theatrical signs, she writes:

Whilst human beings and the objects of their environment in every culture

always exist in certain communicative, practical and situative contexts,

which do not permit a human being to be replaced by another or by an

object at random or vice versa, mobility is the prevailing feature in the case

of the human body and the objects from its surroundings when they are

used as theatrical signs. Here, a human body can, indeed, be recalled by

another body or even an object, and an object can be replaced by another

random object or a human body because, in their capacity as theatrical

signs, they can signify one another. (1992)

Like Firal, Fischer-Lichte also emphasizes the role of these signs'

producers and recipients in creating the theatrical situation. In fact, reception

is central, since she believes that spectators must perceive that the process of

using signs as signs prevails over their customary semiotic function in order

for the process to be theatrical. In her work on theatricality, Fischer-Lichte

links up experiments from the avant-garde period with postmodern attempts

to stage the cognitive and perceptual operations of reality construction. In

an article that uses Max Rheinhardt's 1910 production of Sumurun as an

example of an early attempt to foreground the capacity of different spectators

to create reality and to model the process of constructing reality, Fischer-

Lichte argues that theater, unlike everyday life, deliberately provides an

experience of the "very process of construction and the conditions underlying

it. While constructing a reality of our own, we become aware of doing so

and begin to reflect upon it. Thus, theater turns out to be a field of

experimentation where we can test our capacity for And the possibilities of

constructing reality" (1995, 104). For both these theorists, representing French

and German engagements with this term, theatricality calls for an emphasis

on theatrical processes instead of their contents, their indeterminate

possibilities rather than their fixed cultural meanings (although this

formulation is overly schematic).

While in this European work, performance and theatricality may be

seen to complement each other by illuminating a general field (theatricality)

and providing an account of its practices (performance), this harmony is

thrown off somewhat by the other political implications attendant on

performance. Fischer-Lichte theorizes in such a way that theater can be

separated from the theater-like, and holds that it is important to do so. The

Anglo-American rubric of performance studies has often, however, been

employed as a means of denying or blurring the differences between the

theater and other cultural performances. The expansionism and equivalencies

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Performativity meets Theatricality 209

of this drive have been directly related to the politics of cultural studies:

breaking down hierarchies of elite art, recovering the history of forms of

performance by including rituals, festivals, and other civic events that

previously were the province of ethnography or anthropology, and by making

visible constructions of race, sex, gender, and class along a range of cultural

practices in order to grasp how these interpenetrate and interrelate. In short,

for some purposes performance studies and the rhetoric of performativity

have more political possibilities than does theatricality, while in other

contexts, theatricality seems to provide the better comparativist discourse

for understanding the relationship between various cultural practices that

may or may not be considered theatrical.

These nuances can sometimes contribute to cultural misunderstanding.

Anglo-Americans can insist on what seems "obvious," only to find Europeans

reacting similarly to an opposite obviousness. For example, in his excellent

recent book The Theatrical Event, Swedish scholar Willmar Sauter views the

United States landscape as narrow, based on a conflict between text-and-

character based drama, and performance (meaning the range of other cultural

practices outside traditional theater). From his perspective, the European

concept of theater is much wider:

At least for Northern European scholars the term "theatre" does not

designate any given genre of artistic activities. There are at least five major

types of theatrical expressions, which are conventionally looked upon as

theatre: spoken drama, music theatre, dance theatre, mime / pantomime,

and puppet theatre. These types of theatre are not mutually exclusive...

nor is the list complete. Circus, cabarets, parades, and radio theatre are

just a few examples that could be added. (43)

Thus United States scholars seem limited in their conceptions of theater,

while the Europeans appear to have a catholic, eclectic approach. As for

questions about what, exactly, to include under the rubric of performance,

Sauter thinks (cf. Fischer-Lichte) that "Performance studies as a discipline

does not seem to set any limits to what could be interesting as a field of

inquiry." The debates about what counts among all the categories do not

seem to Sauter to be very fruitful. "The whole discussion becomes a

quantitative enumeration of study areas, although everybody intended to

bring up qualitative arguments" (46).

One can see why, given his premises, Sauter is puzzled as to the

importance of these definitional debates. However, this way of characterizing

the situation overlooks the relationship to cultural studies that is the political

backdrop for the North American debates. The stretching of "performance"

to include rituals, festivals, and other aspects of everyday life clearly goes

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210 Janelle Reinelt

beyond the conception of traditional theater, even the five types listed by

Sauter. These efforts come from an attempt to relate more traditional forms

of performance to a wide variety of cultural practices that together constitute

"culture" and that form the sites of legitimation and contestation of social

and political power. The consequences of this expansion of the field result

in various, sometimes unexpected configurations-such as the rewriting of

theater history to include early festivals and rites as part of performance

traditions of ancient civilization. For example, about the southern

hemisphere, Juan Villegas has written that traditional theater history recorded

Mexican theater's beginnings only in relationship to written texts, thus

aligning that history with Spanish conquest (35, 36). Rites, ceremonies, and

oral traditions thus are crucial in any enumeration of what counts as theater

in the Mexican context. A postcolonial revision of that theater history is

possible when "performance" is deliberately defined to extend beyond

traditional theatrical genres.

The lesson of these cross-cultural misunderstandings includes both a

critique of narcissism (the U.S. thinking its own configurations of these issues

are the only ways of seeing them) and also a critique of Eurocentrism (an

embedded but mistaken belief that Europe has already responded to these

issues). The example from the South American hemisphere provides the

"Other" view of both first-world positions.

Switching my own strategy of arguing for performance over theater as

the concept of greatest efficacy, I would now like to invoke Juan Villegas

again, but this time to argue for the discourse of theatricality over

performativity.

In a collection that he edited with Diana Taylor, the tension between

these discourses is evident already in its title: Negotiating Performance; Gender,

Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin America. Covering a wide variety of cultural

performances, Diana Taylor writes in the introduction,

In order to appreciate Carnaval... or indigenous performance... or women's

use of spectacle for political organizing... or the casita culture of the

Nuyoricans... we had to abandon traditional notions of theater and culture.

We had to replace the word theater with performance, a term that allowed

us not only to include all sorts of spectacles that "theater" leaves out but

to look at theater itself from a more critical perspective. (11)

Taylor goes on to qualify the many different valences of performance,

but insists that most of them share a subversive goal of rejecting the

institutionalization of theater. It is for that reason that "performance" came

to be substituted for "theater." However, in the epilogue, Villegas writes

about the problems of using "performance" since there is not an equivalent

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 Performativity meets Theatricality 211

term in Spanish. He reminds readers that the book, while about Latin

America, is published in the U.S. and exists mostly within the academic

discourse of the U.S. He raises questions about the consequences for the

topics of the book as well as its rubric: "Is there a potential misinterpretation

of 'Hispanic' cultures in the United States and Latin American cultures when

the writers choose to highlight some concerns according to the emerging

critical trends in the United States?" (310). Specifically addressing the term

"performance," he argues that it is a "loaded and untranslatable term" and

that it would be "less of an imposition of one culture over another if we

were to find or redefine a Spanish term or expression, which may be able to

describe the Latin American theatrical modes" (316). He suggests that

"theatricality" or "theatrical discourses" is more appropriate in the Latin

American context. Here, he offers an account of theatricality that will remind

the reader of Fischer-Lichte's since both stress theatricality as a mode of

visual perception. It also shares with "performance" an emphasis on the

body and on verbal, visual, auditive, and gestural signs performed in front

of an audience, which is a co-creator of meaning. Since this concept of

theatricality stresses the relationship between theatrical codes and the cultural

system and its socio-political context in specific historical periods, it includes

a militantly political set of entailments. Villegas writes,

Redefining "theater" as theatrical discourses or theatricality will allow

the inclusion as part of the "history of the theater" [of] a large number of

"popular" or nondominant theatrical discourses such as those associated

with, for example, political, religious, social, sexual, bourgeois, feudal,

Japanese, Chinese, British, or Victorian stagings... This is to say that

historically it is possible to relate some forms of gestural and linguistic

performances to specific periods or world views. (317)

In the end, both terms, performance and theatricality, appear in the

Taylor and Villegas volume's title. The dialectic between them is

foregrounded and played out in the course of the essays, and is perhaps the

most important contribution of this rich collection because it insists on a

kind of intercultural self-consciousness that ultimately safeguards against

local blind spots in the heat of these debates.

Charting the Connections

I have treated theatricality and performativity separately, trying to show

the differences between the history and usages of their discourses, but I

want to conclude by interweaving them once again in order to show how

they can interact in a polyvalent, self-conscious, critical practice. Heiner

Miiller has long been associated with an anti-foundationalist critique of

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 212 Janelle Reinelt

representation. In fact, he may be one of the only playwrights whose work

might be described as "performance," so committed was he to anti-

representational writing. Linked often to the work of Robert Wilson, Richard

Foreman, and other postmodern artists who have embraced performance in

its scene one mode, Heiner Muiller wrote plays that refused the

representational contract. Robert Weimann understands Mfiller's theater very

well, and offers an excellent account of his work:

What Mfiller had in mind is, literally, a strategic refusal to authorize

meaning, to preclude representations in which material and idea, signifier

and signified, are brought together meaningfully at all. From his position,

language is first and foremost material with which the audience is expected

to work so as to make and explore their own experiences. (58)

However, Weimann poses a serious challenge to this kind of performance

from a perspective within its own terms. Given that the goal of performance

is to enable the audience to create its own meanings through perceptual and

cognitive abilities, what if the audience is not capable of such activity? What

if the information technology of postmodern life creates a dissociation

between the acquisition of knowledge and the skills of individuals such

that "some form of integration of value and function disappears. To put it

bluntly, what if the audience lacks the capacity for working with these

performance materials to create new possibilities?" The question, Weimann

writes,

is how to accommodate a viable sense of give and take in theatrical

communication to the unending silence, the absence of human voices in

the postmodern mode of information. This, then, is finally the question of

a participatory mode of reception: how to project and realize a cultural

potential of communicative action in a theater that, in its obsession with

the materiality of dramatic action, tends to end up speechless. (960)

It seems only too clear that the postmodern theater of Miiller, Wilson,

Foreman, and others serves very well in the transnational art markets of

elite culture. Challenging no significant cultural and political formations of

power-at least not directly-it has been popular and palatable for art

patrons in the West. Indeed, the many critiques of lack of political bite in

this work, its collusion with conservative social formations even as it seems

to protest against them (in the case of MUiller), is commonplace. What is

perhaps essential is an insistence on the relationship between performance

and its historical and material entailments. The ideology of such a notion of

performance, once it is visible, is a complicating factor in its discourse. As

Elin Diamond observes, performance is "precisely the site in which concealed

or dissimulated conventions might be investigated... Performativity must

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 Performativity meets Theatricality 213

be rooted in the materiality and historical density of performance" (5). This

is true for traditional theater as much as for performance art.

For as Derrida knows, theater never escapes representation, and like

Artaud, she who cannot resign herself to theater as repetition cannot also

assure herself of its nonrepetition. Returning to the philosophical dimension

of these discourses, the structure of the performative seems critically central

to the consumer of theatrical experiences as well as to the producers.

Weimann raised the question of audience competencies in a new information

age when we might worry about "the deficit in authority and legitimation

on the part of those who would use it [representation] in relation to their

own existential situatedness" (959). Concluding that changing conditions of

authorship and reception need constant examination in order to avoid the

premature acceptance of the foreclosure of invention and creativity, he

suggests that the challenge of our postmodern moment is to examine the

resilience of authority in representation, and the conflict that inevitably marks

it. What Butler and in his later work Derrida seem to be trying to secure is a

future horizon of possibility against which the trepidations of repetition

and subjection might be tested. Without foolishly presuming the subject as

free agent, a critical cross-reading of Derrida and Butler, Althusser and Pierre

Bourdieu might provide a sufficient connection between the structure of

speech and writing, the implication of the body in material regimes of power

and precedent, and the future space between them to project performance

as a model for the emergence of novelty and the theatrical as the space of its

emergence. Performance makes visible the micro-processes of iteration and

the non-commensurability of repetition, in the context of historically

sedimented and yet contingent practices, in order that we might stage

theatricality, and render palpable possibilities for unanticipated signification.

University of California, Irvine

Notes

1. In addition to Peggy Phelan, cited below, other explanatory writing about "Scene One"

include Philip Auslander (1995, 59-67); Marvin Carlson (1996, Chapters 5 and 6, 100-

143); and Rebecca Schneider (1997).

2. This debate took place most clearly in the pages of TDR in 1995 (see Worthen and

Dolan).

3. Three collections, which address these intersections, include Derrida and Feminism (see

Feder Rawlinson and Zakin; Mouffe and also Cornell, Rosenfeld and Gray Carlson).

4. For a good discussion of the implications of Fried's essay in terms of both modernist art

and its relation to theatricality, see Carlson, 1996, 125 ff.

5. See also Quinn's contributions to discussions of theatricality (1995).

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 214 Janelle Reinelt

6. Timothy Murray has collected the primary examples of Derrida, Kristeva, and Althusser

together with other French writings on theatricality (including Feral) in Mimesis,

Masochism, and Mime; The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (1997).

In the case of Barthes, see especially Howard (1985).

7. For example, see her essay in Murray (1997).

8. Fischer-Lichte ran a large, multi-year research project under the auspices of the German

government involving scholars throughout Germany. Other German scholars to publish

on theatricality include Joaquim Fiebach (1978) and Helmar Schramm (1995, 1996).

9. Erika Fischer-Lichte, "Performance and 'Theatricality"'; some remarks on the rise of

theater studies and the idea of a performative culture, unpublished manuscript.

Works Cited

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York: Routledge, 1995, 59-67.

Austin, John. L. How To Do Things with Words. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa Eds.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2nd edition, 1975.

Barthes, Roland. "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein." In The Responsibility of Forms. Trans. Richard

Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985, 89-97.

Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech, a politics of the performative. New York and London: Routledge,

1997.

- . The Psychic Life of Power; Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press,

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Carlson, Marvin. Performance; a critical introduction. New York and London: Routledge,

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Cornell, Drucilla, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson Eds. Deconstruction and the

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Murray, Timothy. Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime; The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary

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