The Politics of Discourse: Performativity meets Theatricality

Reinelt, Janelle G.

SubStance, Issue 98/99 (Volume 31, Number 2&3), 2002, pp.

201-215 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press

DOI: 10.1353/sub.2002.0037

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Performativity meets Theatricality 201

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 Scne: Performance / Performative / Performativity

These termsperformance, performative, and performativityshare
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.1 Peggy Phelans 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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the performers 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 Grotowskis 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 spectators 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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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. Austins 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 Butlers 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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antitheatrical prejudice, Andrew Parker and Eve Sedgwick have pointed

out the politics of Austins verb (etiolate to weaken, to make pale and
sickly): Whats 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 Derridas 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 (Austins 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 Derridas 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 Bourdieus view

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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 theorys 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 stagethe 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
someones 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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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 representationhere 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 Mamets drama within an antitheatrical tradition insofar
as his thematic object of derision is a rhetoric of deception in everyday
life. According to Quinn, Mamets 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 Mamets 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 Herrmanns attempts
to define the essence of theater as the performance event, involving the
creative processes of the performers and spectators, combines in Fischer-
Lichtes account with Nikolai Evreinovs 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 theorye.g. Derrida and

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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 Fral, whose Canadian-based work is
nevertheless closely aligned with French theory, has written both about
theatricality and performance. 7 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 thtralit comme concept est une
proccupation rcente qui accompagne le phnomne de thorisation du
thtre au sens moderne du terme (348). For Fral, 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 Evreinovs notion of a pre-aesthetic instinct, Fral 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 quil porte, le spectateur cre alors face ce quil voit un
espace autre dont les lois et les rgles ne sont plus celles du quotidien et
o il inscrit ce quil regarde, le percevant alors dun oeil diffrent, avec
distance, comme relevant dune altrit o il na de place que comme
regard extrieur. (358)

This theorization of theatricality is compatible with Erika Fischer-

Lichtes 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 Fral 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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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 Fral, 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 Rheinhardts 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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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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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 configurationssuch 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 theaters 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 womens
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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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-Lichtes 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 volumes 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
Mller has long been associated with an anti-foundationalist critique of

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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 Mller wrote plays that refused the
representational contract. Robert Weimann understands Mllers theater very
well, and offers an excellent account of his work:
What Mller 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 Mller, Wilson,
Foreman, and others serves very well in the transnational art markets of
elite culture. Challenging no significant cultural and political formations of
powerat least not directlyit 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 Mller), 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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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 Frieds essay in terms of both modernist art
and its relation to theatricality, see Carlson, 1996, 125 ff.
5. See also Quinns 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 Fral) 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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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,
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Carlson, Marvin. Performance; a critical introduction. New York and London: Routledge,
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