Waiting for Foucault: New Theatre Theory

Author(s): Gerald Rabkin

Source: Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1992), pp. 90-101
Published by: Performing Arts Journal, Inc.
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Waiting for
Foucault
New
Theatre
Theory
Gerald Rabkin
A DECADE
AGO,
I
complained
in the
pages
of this
journal
("The Play
of
Misreading," PAJ 19)
that "there has been
profound
unrest in the
larger
critical world . . . to which American theatre criticism was
largely
immune."
I was
noting
the enormous critical
energy
released into the discursive
worlds of
literature, film,
fine
arts,
and
philosophy by
the influence of new
European--largely French--theoretical
speculation.
In a
proliferation
of
new books and
journals,
traditional humanist and formalist axioms were
being challenged
and destabilized. Far from
undermining
criticism,
this
ferment was
empowering
because it breached the hitherto firm
boundary
between art and its
interpretation
and awarded the critic an
equal
role
in the
production
of artistic
meaning.
Theatre discourse
(and by
discourse I mean the
reciprocal
communi-
cation of ideas within a
prescribed field),
on the other
hand,
had
atrophied.
The seventies were a
highly productive
decade in American
experimental
theatre, but,
by
and
large,
the
vocabulary
of its critical
interpretation
was
inadequate.
Even "advanced" critics
usually
succumbed to the dominant
consumer-reporting journalist
model, issuing
absolutist edicts
proclaiming
aesthetic success and failure. I
observed, however,
that there were
signs
that the new critical
speculation
was
bearing
theatrical fruit: the American
publication
of
European semiological
studies such as Elam's The Semiotics
of
Theatre and Drama and Pavis's
Languages of
the
Stage,
and the emer-
gence
of the radical deconstructive voice of Herbert Blau in Blooded
Thought
and Take
Up
the Bodies
(both 1982). Hopefully,
I
suggested,
there would be a
burgeoning
of new critical
strategies
and models to
90
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better elucidate
contemporary experimental
theatre
praxis
and the
general
questions
of theatre
representation
it raised.
Given the acceleration of
post-structuralist
influence in the other
arts,
this took
longer
than one
might
think.
Intelligent
theatre critics such as
Richard
Gilman,
Robert
Brustein,
and Martin Esslin
proved highly
resistant
to the new ideas. As late as
1986,
for
example,
Esslin,
in
reviewing
PAf
s
10th
Anniversary
issue in American
Theatre,
complained
that "too
many
pieces
. .
approach
their
subject
on an
esoterically 'high'
level of
'theory.'"
Esslin
grudging
admitted that such thinkers as
Derrida, Barthes,
and Lacan had made "a valuable contribution to the debate about
meaning
and the
relationship
between the writer and his
[sic] reader,"
but he
cautioned
that,
all in
all,
the new critical
"game
is without issue or end."
Recently,
however,
this reticence has been overcome. Since the late
1980s
the theoretical trickle in theatre studies has turned
into,
if not a
torrent,
a
steady
stream of new critical
investigations
in
journals
such as
this
one, Theatre,
and Theatre
Journal,
and in an
array
of new books
published by
American
university presses and,
to a lesser
extent,
British
houses
long hospitable
to new
theory.
From Iowa: The
Performance of
Power and
Interpreting
the Theatrical
Past;
from Indiana:
Theatre,
Theory,
Postmodernism,
Theatre
Semiotics,
and
Stages of Terror;
from
Michigan:
Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance,
The Feminist
Spectator
as
Critic,
and Feminist Theories
for
Dramatic
Criticism;
from
Johns Hopkins:
Performing
Feminisms
and The
Audience;
from
Routledge:
Feminism and
Theatre. This far from exhaustive list is of books that focus
specifically
upon
theatre as a discrete field of
investigation.
But since
experimental
art has eroded the boundaries between forms and
genres,
studies which
subsume theatre under the broader
aegis
of
"performance" greatly
widen
the available theoretical
pool.
Hence such books as
PAJ's
Interculturalism
and
Performance, Chicago's
The
Object of Performance,
and the
many
cross-disciplinary investigations
of the social and aesthetic
consequences
of the
enabling (if ambiguous) concept
of
postmodernism. Clearly,
the
days
of theoretical
impoverishment
in theatre studies have
finally
ended.
Much of the
impulse
for
change
derives from the rise within theatre
studies of those with an activist feminist
agenda
to whom it became in-
creasingly
evident that theatre's double text - both verbal and
corporeal
-
was
particularly
needful of new
scrutiny.
For feminism affirms that
patri-
archy
works as much
through
modes of discourse and
imagery
as
through
legal
subordination. Criticism is
not, then,
a
marginal political enterprise;
it is fundamental to
revealing
both the
inscriptions
of domination
and,
more
positively,
the subversive
power
of women to
disrupt
their confis-
cation and erasure
(in Greek, Elizabethan,
and much Asian
performance,
91
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an erasure that has been
literalized).
More on this
later;
my point
here is
that
just
as the feminist
project
in
general helped generate
a new
political
post-structuralist theory,
the
developing
feminist theatre
agenda helped
seed a new activist theatre
speculation.
Apart
from the
visibility
of feminist
analysis,
what strands of new critical
theory predominate
in recent studies? These strands include
semiology,
structuralism, deconstruction,
reader-response criticism, hermeneutics,
new historicism. Some of these theories are
overlapping,
some
antagonistic.
Some are
directly
reactive to theories that
predated
them. What all share
is the axiom that
interpretation
is not
subsidiary
to the
production
of
meaning.
No text can be read without
mediation;
even if the
precise
form
of this mediation is
disputed,
all
accept
what Bakhtin calls a
"dialogic"
model of communication in which
meaning
is never absolute and univocal.
In
charting
the critical terrain of the new theatre
speculation,
we note
immediately
that its belatedness defines its
strategies. Perhaps
an
analogy
from theatre
history
will elucidate
my point:
the modernist theatre tra-
jectory
from naturalism to anti-naturalism did not
happen instantly;
two
decades
separate Strindberg's
naturalistic The Father from his anti-
naturalist Ghost Sonata. But because of American theatre's belated reaction
to
European
modernism
(our
theatre of 1910
was
comparable
with Euro-
pean
theatre of
1880),
there is a
telescoping
of influences: Americans no
sooner discovered naturalism than it seemed
passe;
it was attacked before
any
serious realist theatre could be created.
Analagously,
we find in new
theatre
theory
a conflation of the new critical controversies of the
past
decade. Deconstruction is discovered
only
to
yield
almost
immediately
to
the historicist attacks
upon
it.
the return
of history
When I wrote "The
Play
of
Misreading"
in
1982,
the most influential
force in American new theoretical criticism emanated from the
group
of
powerful
critics then
gathered
at Yale who
appropriated
the Derridean
rubric of deconstruction.
They
did so
not,
like
Derrida,
to
challenge
the
very
foundations of western
metaphysics,
but to more
rigorously
scrutinize
the
literary
canon. This "new
formalism," however,
bred a
challenge
from
those who accused it of
retreating
behind the
privileged
fortress of the
great
work of art. A more radical theoretical
project grew
as the decade
progressed:
Whether
acknowledgedly forging
a bond between new
theory
and the Marxist
tradition,
or
eclectically creating
a
post-Marxist
discourse
of
power
and
ideology,
this anti-formalism condemned deconstruction's
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"violent
depoliticization" (Terry Eagleton)
and its
ignorance
of discourse
as
power.
The
traumatic,
posthumous discovery
of the hidden collaborationist
past
of the "Prince of
Deconstructors,"
Paul de
Man,
in mid-decade accelerated
the revalorization of
history.
For even critics
energized by
deconstructive
strategies (such
as
myself)
had
long
been troubled
by
certain of de Man's
mandarin
pronouncements: "Experience always
exists
simultaneously
as
fictional discourse and as
empirical
event,"
he writes in
Allegories of
Reading,
"and it is never
possible [my emphasis]
to decide which of the
two
possibilities
is the
right
one. The indecision makes it
possible
to excuse
the bleakest of crimes." The bleakest of
crimes,
indeed.
Coming
as it
did,
hard on the heels of revelations about the fervent commitment to Nazism
of Martin
Heidegger
(the philosopher
Derrida
acknowledges
as a
founding
father of
Deconstruction),
the de Man affair
crystallized questions
that
are more than
"textual";
they
are
literally
a matter of life and death.
A
political
momentum in new
theory
had,
in
fact,
been
underway
for
more than a decade. Critical
energy passed
from
semiology's quasi-
scientific formalism and deconstruction's "undecideable
play
of
signifiers"
to
methodologies
which
foregrounded history
and
ideology.
The influence
of Derrida receded
(though
some,
like Michael
Ryan,
searched for a
rap-
prochement
between deconstruction and a
revisionary Marxism),
the in-
fluence of
Lacan,
Althusser and Foucault
grew:
Lacan's neo-Freudian
psy-
chology posited
not a unified and autonomous
self,
but a
provisional,
contradictory
self
produced by
discourse;
Althusser's
project
was to re-
define the
subject
and the Marxist
concept
of
ideology
in
light
of
post-
structuralist
thought.
Althusser severs
ideology
from reductive determin-
ism,
seeing
it not as a series of
explicit political
ideas but as a
type
of
relation, produced
and mediated
by
social
practice,
which
positions
sub-
jects
in order to enclose them in a "natural" construction of social
reality
outside of
history,
eternal.
From Foucault came a sense of the
pervasiveness
of
power
in
history.
Power was
not, however,
easily
defined and
contained,
but
indeterminate,
dispersed,
and
polymorphous,
"a
multiple
and mobile field of force rela-
tions where
far-reaching,
but never
completely
stable effects of domination
are
produced" (The
History of Sexuality).
So to understand
history,
in
Foucault's
view,
it was
necessary
to desist from
constructing retrospective
narratives of
continuity.
As Renaissance scholar
Jane
Howard writes: "He
refuses to look for . . .
precursors
of one era in former
eras,
but
by
a
massive
study
of the situated discourses of
particular disciplines
he at-
tempts
to let their
strangeness,
their
difference,
speak."
It is this
proble-
matized vision of
history
which underlies the dominant movement of the
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past
decade in American
literary
criticism: the new historicism. Let us
briefly
chart its meteoric
rise,
for-with its British
cousin,
cultural mate-
rialism-it has
profoundly
influenced new theatre
theory.
new historicisms
In
1980
Stephen
Greenblatt
published
a book called Renaissance
Self-
Fashioning
which was
primarily
concerned with
how,
in
sixteenth-century
England,
the historical moment defined the conditions of
possibility by
which individuals
shaped
their identities. In a series of
scrupulous
his-
torical/critical
analyses,
he drew on Lacan to
challenge
the axiom of a
unified and autonomous self in control of its own
identity
formation.
Greenblatt
represented
a
generation
of
young
Renaissance scholars on
both sides of the
Atlantic,
reared in the activism of the
1960s,
who were
discontent with
writing
the formalist studies of
theme,
genre,
and structure
which dominated their field of
specialization. Rejecting
what
Jonathan
Dollimore called an "essentialist
humanism,"
they appropriated
the
insights
of theorists such as Foucault and Lacan to read
literary
texts of the
English
Renaissance in relation to 16th and 17th
century
social formations and
alternate,
non-literary
discourses.
By
1982,
Greenblatt was able to an-
nounce in his introduction to a collection of
essays by
the new scholars
(The
Power
of
Forms in the
English Renaissance)
that a critical movement
had been born: "what we
may
call the new historicism." It differed axi-
omatically
from the old historicism which "tends to be
monological ...
concerned with
discovering
a
single political
vision,
usually
identical to
that said to be held
by
the entire literate class." The new
project
would
work to
recuperate marginalized
and
repressed
voices,
to find in the
gaps,
fissures,
and contradictions of
literary
and
non-literary
texts the
negotia-
tions of
competing
classes and discourses.
The activist function of the new historicism was embraced more in-
tensely by
the British
practitioners
of the new
methodology
who
preferred
to call themselves cultural materialists as a
sign
of their connection to the
Marxist tradition.
Unwilling
to remain focussed on the
Renaissance,
they
were determined to draw
contemporary parallels,
to
show,
for
example,
how the
history
of
Shakespearean
criticism creates and sustains a still
repressive ideology
of national character
(Terence Hawkes),
how the
rep-
ertoire of the
Royal Shakespeare Company
reinforces conservative ide-
ology
(Alan Sinfield).
American new
historicism,
on the other
hand,
is
positioned
within academic
scholarship;
its
practitioners' politics vary
considerably, exposing
the movement to attacks from both the
right
and
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the left. Some are
centrally
concerned with issues of containment and
subversion;
others deal more
obliquely
with
power's
reification.
All,
how-
ever,
in one
way
or another are concerned with the social dimension of
symbolic practice
and the
symbolic
dimension of social
practice.
All at-
tempt
to trace the circulation of rhetorical
power
from one cultural zone
to another.
Since the
major
artistic
figure
of the
English
Renaissance
(and
of all
time,
most would
agree)
is
Shakespeare,
it was inevitable that the new
historicism would devote
particular
attention to the institutional form
through
which his work was
produced:
the theatre.
Indeed,
several new
historicists,
though
members of
English departments,
have devoted their
research
primarily
to theatrical
questions. Stephen Orgel,
for
example,
considers the
ideological implications
of Elizabethan
public
and
private
theatre
production:
how the
new,
open public playhouse physically
em-
bodied "both the idea of theatre and the idea of the
society
it was created
to
entertain,"
how the
power
of the
King
created the
necessity
of a framed
and
perspectival stage
in
private performance (The
Illusion
of
Power,
1975).
Steven
Mullaney (The
Place
of
the
Stage, 1988) investigates
how
the new
public playhouses, by locating
themselves
literally
on the
city's
geographic margins, represented
a subversive social
fluidity.
And in the
work of new historicism's
acknowledged
leader,
Stephen
Greenblatt,
the-
atrical
questions
are
continually foregrounded.
Some
excerpts
from Shake-
spearean Negotiations (1988):
"Theatrical values do not exist in a realm
of
privileged
literariness";
"Shakespeare's
theatre was itself a social event
in contact with other social
events";
and these fundamental theoretical
questions:
"How is it determined what
may
be
staged?
To what extent is
the
object
of theatrical
representation
itself
already
a
representation?
What
is the effect of
representation
on the
object
or
practice represented?"
theatrical
negotiations
Theatre studies's debt to new historicism's
raising
of these
questions
is
explicitly
stated in Bruce A. McConachie's contribution to The
Perform-
ance
of Power:
Theatrical Discourse and Politics
(edited by
Sue-Ellen
Case and
Janelle Reinelt, 1991).
McConachie
suggests
that the new his-
toricism offers theatre scholars "a
general
framework within which a new
paradigm
. . . can
emerge,"
a
paradigm
that welcomes a radical
agenda
because it seeks to "understand the
ways
in which
producing
and
enjoying
works of art can both
subjugate
and liberate individuals and social
groups."
Because new historicism
highlights
cultural differences of
race,
gender,
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and
class,
it offers a
powerful revisionary
lens. The
past
illuminates the
present
not
by constructing
a continuous
narrative,
but
by revealing (in
the
quoted
words of Sacvan
Bercovitch)
that
"political
norms are inscribed
in aesthetic
judgment
and therefore inherent in the
process
of
interpre-
tation."
This axiom underlies several of the
essays
in an
anthology
on
procedures
and
problems
in theatre
history
that McConachie has edited with Thomas
Postlewait,
Interpreting
the Theatrical
Past:
Essays
in the
Historiography
of Performance (1989).
Although
this collection
posits
no
single
meth-
odology,
most of its contributors reveal an indebtedness to new critical
theory.
Erika Fischer-Lichte examines
aspects
of the
history
of
acting
in
terms of
semiology
and social
history;
Marvin Carlson melds
aspects
of
semiological
and
reader-response theory; Tracy
Davis offers a
culturally
materialistic feminist
methodology;
and Herbert
Lindenberger
and
Joseph
R. Roach
present
new historicist
investigations of, respectively,
how
opera
"speaks
out as
history,"
and how the
presence
of castrati on the
eighteenth-
century stage
reveals a discourse of
power imposed
on the
signifying body.
This Foucaultian theme of
discipline
and surveillance is evident as well
in
many prototypical
new historicist
essays
in the
Performance of
Power
collection:
Jeffrey
D. Mason situates the first
production
of Metamora in
the context of
contemporary
Indian removal
projects; Janice
Carlisle uses
Foucault's notion of the
gaze
as
panopticon
to reveal how
bourgeois
sur-
veillance mechanisms of the
working
class are structured into Victorian
theatre; Joseph
Roach
similarly interprets
the
Augustan
theatre as an in-
strument,
analagous
to
contemporary optical instruments,
to
magnify
so-
cial control.
The
Performance of
Power
grew
out of a
proliferation
of
papers
on
politics
and theatre at the Association for Theatre in
Higher
Education
conference in New York
City
and the annual
meeting
of the American
Society
for Theatre Research in
Williamsburg, Virginia
in
1989. Editors
Case and Reinelt affirm an activist
agenda
in the cultural materialist tra-
dition,
asserting
that
"struggles
over
representation
and
invisibility
are far
from
merely
'academic':
they
are based in the economic and social struc-
tures of the
society,
.
. .
[and] are,
in
every
sense, 'political.'"
Hence the
necessity
of
historicizing theory
and
theorizing history.
Case and Reinelt
note that
many
of the
political analyses
in their book "owe their
strength
and
precision
to the social activist movements
[past
and
present]
behind
them." If we are to deconstruct the
oppressive representations
that have
defined and still define dominant
theatre,
if we are to
develop
new sub-
versive means of
productional recuperation,
we must
carry
the historical
"performance
of
power"
into the
present
to
analyze
how
contemporary
institutions such as the
academy
inscribe
ideology.
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the woman's
part
As I wrote
earlier,
the rise of an articulate feminist
project consciously
indebted to
post-structuralist
ideas served as the
catalyst
to the
growth
of
theory
in theatre studies. The
year
1988
saw the
publication
of two
books--Case's
Feminism and Theatre and
Jill
Dolan's The Feminist
Spec-
tator as
Critic--that
have been
influential,
not
only
in feminist studies such
as
Gayle
Austin's Feminist Theories
for
Dramatic Criticism
(1990),
but
in other theoretical/historicist works. Case and Dolan's books were the
fruit of their authors' involvement
throughout
the
eighties
in various fem-
inist
projects, primarily
the Women and Theatre
Program
of the
profes-
sional
organization
of the academic
discipline
of theatre
(which
recon-
stituted itself in mid-decade as the
ATHE).
Case also found an ideal
platform
for the dissemination of new theoretical concerns in her
appointment
as
editor of the
professional organization's
academic
periodical,
Theatre
Jour-
nal.
For those in theatre with a new feminist
agenda
there was much to
build
on,
for feminist
theory
had
burgeoned
since the
seventies,
partic-
ularly
in film and
literary
discourse and in the
poststructuralist
French
l'6criture
f6minine.
Laura
Mulvey
had
radically
redefined film in terms of
the look born
by
the male and directed at the female
subject;
Teresa de
Lauretis had found in the
major quest myths
in western culture a universal
positioning
of the female as obstacle or void to be entered
by
the male
and traversed. And nowhere was the new feminist intervention more
intense than in criticism of the
"patriarchical
bard."
Shakespeare's privi-
leged
texts had become an
obligatory place
to debate whether the bard
was
subtextually
subversive or
complicitous
with
patriarchical oppression.
As the
eighties progressed,
the
weight
of feminist
Shakespeare
criticism
moved in the direction of cultural materialism: Kathleen McLuskie and
Catherine
Belsey, among others, rejected
the
tendency
to treat Shakes-
peare's
texts as
"unproblematically
mimetic,"
naively
reflective of fixed
categories
of male and female.
Belsey argued
the need of a
post-structuralist
base to
disrupt
"the
system
of differences which
legitimates
the
perpet-
uation of
things
as
they
are." Toril Moi
suggested
that feminist humanism
was,
in
effect,
complicitous
with
patriarchal ideology
with which it shared
the vision of a
seamlessly
unified self
purged
of all conflict and contradiction.
It is this cultural-materialist
project
that Case and Dolan affirm. Both
trace,
without
denigration,
the
trajectory
of feminist discourse
through
what have been termed
liberal,
cultural
(or radical),
and materialist
phases.
But both note the theoretical deficiencies of the first two
approaches.
Dolan asserts that liberal feminism
betrays
the same naivete as liberal
humanism: rather than
proposing
radical structural
change,
it
suggests
that
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equality
can be achieved within the
existing system.
Case observes that
liberal "mainstream women
playwrights regard political critique
as an
imposition
or confinement of their creative
processes."
While acknowl-
edging
that liberal feminist efforts have widened the
visibility
of women
theatre
artists,
Dolan and Case both find liberal feminism
ideologically
insufficient to confront the
deep
roots of
patriarchy.
Their criticism of cultural feminism
(the
feminism of sexist
stereotype)
is that of their
literary predecessors:
it freezes sexual differences into
essentialist
gender categories. Just
as McLuskie had
savaged Marilyn
French's
rigid
antithesis
(in Shakespeare's
Division
of Experience)
be-
tween a feminine
principle
of nurture and a masculine
principle
of
ag-
gression,
both Case and Dolan
agree
this absolute
polarity
is
theoretically
simplistic.
While
they
are
sympathetic
to cultural feminism's
unmasking
of what
Rosemary
Curb has termed "the
necrophilia
of
patriarchy,"
and
while
they respect
much of the "woman-centered" theatre it has
produced,
they argue
that "the nature of woman" cannot be defined
reductively.
Approvingly,
Dolan
quotes
Case's observation that cultural feminism ob-
fuscates "the critical differences
among
women
produced by
class and
race."
Clearly,
Dolan and Case affirm de Lauretis's
perception
that there
is "a shift . .. from the earlier view of woman defined
purely by
sexual
difference
(i.e.,
in relation to
man)
to the more difficult and
complex
notion that the female
subject
is a site of differences . . . that are not
only
sexual or
only racial, economic,
or
(sub) cultural,
but all of these
together
and often at odds with one another."
As avowed
lesbians,
Case and Dolan have no reason to observe that the
concept
of
gender
cannot
deproblematize
the
question
of sexual
prefer-
ence. Nor can
questions
of class and color be erased from the feminist
critique. Indeed,
to do so would shun some of the most vital
contemporary
women's theatre
practice.
If the sexual difference from men is essential-
ized,
women's differences from other women are
ignored.
The theoretical
frame of materialist
critique
is
necessary
to "deconstruct the
mythic
sub-
ject
Woman"
(Dolan),
to minimize
biology
and
foreground
such material
conditions of
production
as
race, class,
gender, history.
Hence,
as
well,
the move to the new model of multiculturalism.
no end to
history
Even in recent theatre theoretical studies not
primarily
indebted to new
historicist/cultural materialist
models,
there is no return to
purely
formalist
synchronic strategies. Anthony
Kubiak's
Stages of
Terror: Terrorism,
Ide-
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ology,
and Coercion as Theatre
History (1991)
would seem at first
glance
to conform to the materialist
project
that has been the
subject
of this
article. Kubiak asserts that the
"representations
of violence that outline
the
history
of theatre also underline and
clarify
theatre's intentions and
complicities
not
just
with
power,
but also with the historical enormities
of
power
exercised
by
the state." But then he moves
dialectically
to an
opposed,
interiorized model of terror: "the more we see the violence 'out
there,'
the more it distracts our terrorized
thought
from
itself,
from what
is 'in here' . . . where this terror is born as
thought
and as
perception."
It is "in
here,"
he
asserts,
where theatre needs to turn its
"dysarticulating
eye."
So Kubiak
simultaneously
affirms and denies the role of
history.
He
studies terrorism as a cultural
and
performative principle throughout
his-
tory
without
submitting
to historical evidence: "It would be
contradictory
...
to
try
to
provide any
kind of
empirical (i.e. social, economic, scientific)
evidence for
my arguments
when I am
suggesting
that it is theatre itself
that
generates
the bias of
empiricism
and
supports
it." Is this not the de
Manian
fallacy
that
history
is a text to be
subjectively interpreted?
Tell
that "violence
...
exists as
theatre,
as
representation"
to the families of
the victims of Abu Nidal.
Johannes Birringer's difficulty
with the role of
history
is reflected in the
competing
models of
postmodernism
in his book
Theatre,
Theory,
Post-
modernism
(1991).
Is
postmodernism
an historical
stage
in the devel-
opment
of late
capitalism,
a
repressive,
exhausted condition of
"overpro-
duced
images
and
ubiquitous
information
circuities,"
a
positive
radical
contemporary struggle
with artistic
representation
as manifested in the
work of
Beuys,
Bausch, Wilson,
and
Miiller,
or is
it,
as the book's
opening
words
assert,
a vision that "has not
yet
taken
place"?
As a German
expatriate
working
in the United
States, Birringer
refuses "to
forget history
or the
political
fact that references to a shared
reality
do
matter,"
but he is
caught
between
postmodern
paradigms--a
pessimism
born of the ideas of
Ja-
meson, Baudrillard,
and
Lyotard
-
and an
optimism springing
from his need
as a
contemporary experimental
artist for a theoretical
ground
from which
to work to recover "the
meaning
and boundaries of
performance
in the
theatre."
Henry Sayre,
in The
Object of Performance (1989),
uses the rubric of
postmodernism
more
restrictively
as an
enabling
construct to
help
char-
acterize American
avant-garde
art since
1970.
Although
theatre is not a
major
concern,
he raises theoretical
questions
central to all the
experi-
mental,
consciously cross-disciplinary
arts of the
period.
Like Linda Hutch-
eon
in The Politics
of
Postmodernism
(1989),
he sees
postmodernism
as
not so much a
concept
as a
problematic,
a
paradox
of
complicity
and
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critique, reflexivity
and
history,
which at once inscribes and subverts con-
temporary ideologies. Sayre inveighs against
"an outmoded and
inadequate
formalist aesthetics" that celebrates a laissez-faire
pluralism.
He insists that
the work of the
contemporary avant-garde
"has
consistently engaged
his-
tory."
If recent art is
ambiguous,
it is because it is
"purposefully
unde-
cidable";
its
meanings may
be
fragmented
and
suggestive,
but
they
are
always
determined
by
the local and the
topical,
"the events of
history
itself."
Michael Vanden Heuvel
similarly
warns of the limitations of formalism
in
Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance:
Alternate Theatre and
the Dramatic Text
(1991)
a
study which,
though
at times indebted to the
full
range
of new critical
theory, clearly positions
itself
against theory
and
practice
that
deny history.
Vanden Heuvel's basic
project
is to trace the
development
of American theatre
experiment
since the sixties with
spe-
cific focus on the tension between drama and
performance. Briefly,
Vanden
Heuvel charts three
stages
which
neatly
coincide with successive decades:
(1)
the
sixties--"a
calculated
attempt
to circumvent the
rational,
intel-
lectual
aspect
of
traditionally 'literary'
drama to
replace
it with a more
intuitive, visceral,
body-oriented theatre"; (2)
the
seventies--"a
restrained
formalism . . . in
developing
'deconstructive'
spectacles
built around
qual-
ities of
dislocation,
play,
and the deferral of thematic
closure"; (3)
the
eighties--"the
revival of text and narrative and their
power
to enhance
performance."
Vanden Heuvel
champions
the latter
synthesis:
in
dismembering drama,
sixties' "transcendental"
experiment neglected
the
complementary
rela-
tionship
between text and
performance.
Wilson's and Foreman's work of
the seventies
ignored significant content;
the work was
"anti-intellectual,
antiverbal,
and . . . also
utterly apolitical,
almost
antipolitical,
. . .
[with]
essentially
no
temporal
or thematic relation to
history."
But the most
recent wave of
experiment
reveals that
more and
more,
playwrights
and
performance groups
are inves-
tigating
the
political
nature of theatre
itself,
as well as theatre's
complex
relations to other discourses that are
empowered
to
create and
reproduce meaning.
Rather than
trying
to move
past
traditional text-centered
theatre--whether
by performance-as-rit-
ual,
or
by performance-as-play/deferral- contemporary
artists are
more inclined to
critique
theatre's . . .
relationships
to
prevailing
ideologies. By destructuring
the orders of
representation
in order
to
critique
and re-inscribe
them,
avant-garde
theatre
eventually
rediscovers its social context ...
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Space precludes
an extended
critique
of Vanden Heuvel's
procrustean
dialectic. While there is some
validity
to his historical
triad,
too much
that does not fit his thesis is excluded:
Joe
Chaikin's
early
social and textual
concerns,
Mabou Mines's
early experiments
with Beckett's
texts,
Wilson's
conscious evocation of
Stalin, Einstein, Queen Victoria,
Foreman's Brech-
tian insistence on
perceptual
awareness,
etc. Nor does this
observer,
who
was fortunate
enough
to have seen most of the work discussed here first-
hand,
find his
optimistic progression convincing;
there was a
reciprocal
creative
energy,
a shared
community
of
dissent,
between
experimental
artist and audience in the sixties and
early
seventies that now is
only
fitfully replicated.
But while I do not
fully accept
his historical
reading,
I
share his conclusion that vital
contemporary
theatre "addresses the
past
by scrutinizing
the role that theatre
plays
in the
making
of
history."
The books that I have considered in this article do not tell the full
story
of theatre's recent
rage
for
theory.
Mention must be made of the influence
of
reader-response,
or
reception, theory.
The role of the audience
(and
hence
history)
in the
production
of theatrical
meaning
has been consid-
ered
by, among
others,
Marvin Carlson in Theatre Semiotics
(1990).
And
the
performative consequences
of the
problematic
of
postmodernism
have
been
pursued relentlessly. Clearly,
theatre scholars and
critics--paradox-
ically
at a time when their role in their academic
discipline
is
declining--
have felt
empowered by
the belated
discovery
of new
theory's enabling
models and
strategies.
At a historical moment of
depressing
conservative
hegemony
in America and much of the
world,
marginalized
theorist/scho-
lars find common cause with other
marginalized groups.
So
they posit,
in
opposition
to the conservative
proclamation
of an End to
History (by
which is
really
meant an end to
socialism), exactly
the reverse: a defiant
assertion that
history-even
if fractious and destabilized-is
by
definition
in constant motion. Behind this affirmation lies an act of faith that we will
survive what Nadine Gordimer calls our
present
"state of
interregnum"
between an
oppressive society
that is
dying
and a more
just society
that
is
yet
to be born.
Gerald Rabkin is a
contributing
editor to
PAJ.
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