Postmodernism and the Discipline of Drama / Theater Studies by Jane Goodall. Hassan dwells at length on the problematics of the term, for which he professes dislike. Goodall: "the term thus contains its enemy within"
Postmodernism and the Discipline of Drama / Theater Studies by Jane Goodall. Hassan dwells at length on the problematics of the term, for which he professes dislike. Goodall: "the term thus contains its enemy within"
Postmodernism and the Discipline of Drama / Theater Studies by Jane Goodall. Hassan dwells at length on the problematics of the term, for which he professes dislike. Goodall: "the term thus contains its enemy within"
Postmodernism and the Discipline of Drama/Theater Studies
Author(s): Jane Goodall
Source: American Studies International, Vol. 31, No. 2 (October 1993), pp. 24-30 Published by: Mid-America American Studies Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41279160 . Accessed: 18/05/2014 13:20 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Mid-America American Studies Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Studies International. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 136.152.209.102 on Sun, 18 May 2014 13:20:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 24 Postmodernism and the Discipline of Drama/Theater Studies by Jane Goodall WRITING is himself still moving ABOUT was instrumental "THE "Toward POSTMODERN a Concept in giving TURN" of currency Postmodernism/'1 IN THE LATE to such 1980s, a lHAB although concept HASSAN he in is still moving "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism/'1 although he himself was instrumental in giving currency to such a concept in American criticism from the early 1960s. In his recent work, Hassan dwells at some length on the problematics of the term, for which he professes dislike. "The word postmodernism," he says, "sounds not only awkward, uncouth; it evokes what it wishes to surpass or suppress, modernism itself. The term thus contains its enemy within."2 One of Hassan's most influential contributions to the critical study of Postmodernism has been his two column schema, first published in Paracriticism (1975) and reprinted with expanded commentary in The Postmodern Turn (1987). This schema, cited again in two subsequent major studies of postmodernism (David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity and Steven Connor's Postmodern Culture ), stakes out the properties of modernism and postmodernism in two parallel columns, as though making a gesture towards the conceptual segregation of "the enemy within." At the head of the right hand column labelled "Postmodernism" is"pataphysics/Dadaism."3 Hassan insists that his divisions are provisional, and that he is deliberately confusing simplistic attempts to define a postmodern turn chronologically: postmodernism is also "the enemy within" modernism, working toward pluralism and indeterminacy even as the high modernists are committing themselves to mastery and the logos, totalization, hierarchy and closed form. But the particular enemy identified here is Alfred Jarry4 whose influence from the 1890s through to the 1950s was predominantly registered in the theater. Whereas the application of Hassan's schema to architectural theory and practice presents little difficulty (albeit requiring "provisional" caution), it is an exercise which rapidly breaks down in a survey of theatrical modernism. In architecture there is a marked "postmodern turn" in aesthetic theory and practice which may be defined with some confidence, but it is difficult if not impossible to demarcate an equivalent turn in the theory and practice of theatrical performance. Rose Lee Goldberg, whose book Performance Art traces examples of it through all the major movements of modernism, suggests in her introduction that "live gestures have constantly been used as a weapon against the conventions of established art" and that this has made performance a catalyst in the history of the avant-garde: "whenever a certain school, be it Cubism, Minimalism or conceptual art, seemed to have reached an impasse, artists have turned to performance as a way of breaking down categories and indicating new directions."5 Architecture and theater may be said to offer polarized views on the question American Studies International, ^October 1993 , Vol. XXXI, No. 2 This content downloaded from 136.152.209.102 on Sun, 18 May 2014 13:20:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
25 of the postmodern turn and how it is to be identified. The effect of this polarity has been to place architecture at the center of the critical debate on postmodernism, whilst theater is largely excluded from the arena. American writing on postmodernism has depended heavily on architectural examples and has followed a course indicated by the changing parameters of architectural criticism. Frederic Jameson acknowledges that architectural reference is integral to his characterization of postmodern culture in general6 and the architecture critic Charles Jencks has been instrumental in defining the terms of the postmodernist debate from its early stages. The term "theatricality/' thanks to Michael Fried, has also had strong currency in the debate. Fried's essay on "Art and Objecthood," first published in 1967, is a critique of a tendency in Minimal art towards "corrupted or perverted" modes of representation which he associates with "theatricality."7 Although the high-toned defence in Fried's essay of generic purity, absorption and instantaneousness against pluralism, spectacle and duration make it "modernist" rather than "postmodernist" in sentiment, it has served as a catalyst for critical analysis of postmodernism in the visual arts. Hal Foster, Douglas Crimp and Mary Kelly (among others) have been concerned to recuperate "theatricality" as the essence of postmodern representation. However, this appropriation of the term as an aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) signpost, a sign of promiscuity to be applied promiscuously, has also had the effect of displacing theatrical representation itself from the field of critical concern. "Theatricality" has effaced "theater." Theater as "what lies between the arts"8 can, by definition, occupy no space of its own. Where theatrical practice is a catalytic influence in modernism, it can seem by comparison strangely irrelevant to the postmodern era. From the 1890s to the end of the 1930s, the revolutionary theaters of modernism were concerned with projecting a new humanity into a new age. Thinking back to the Futurists, where Meyerhold's three minute Othello proved that the medium of performance could race any other into tomorrow's world, and Marinetti was convinced that with Jane Goodall is the author of Artaud and the Gnostic Drama (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), and has written widely on avant-garde literature and performance. She teaches in the Department of Drama, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. American Studies International , October 1993 , Vol. XXXI, No. 2 This content downloaded from 136.152.209.102 on Sun, 18 May 2014 13:20:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 26
MODERNISM POSTMODERNISM romanticism/Symbolism pataphysics/Dadaism form (conjunctive, closed) antiform (disjunctive, open) purpose play design chance hierarchy anarchy mastery/logos exhaustion/silence art object/finished work process/performance/happening distance participation creation/totalization/synthesis decreation/deconstruction/antithesis presence absence centering dispersal genre/boundary text/intertext semantics rhetoric paradigm syntagm hypotaxis parataxis metaphor metonymy selection combination root/depth rhizome/surface interpretation/reading against interpretation/misreading signified signifier lisible (readerly) scriptible (writerly) narrative/grande histoire anti-narrati we/petite histoire master code ideolect symptom desire type mutant genital/phallic polymorphous/androgynous paranoia schizophrenia origin/cause d ifference-d ifference/trace God the Father The Holy Ghost metaphysics irony determinacy indeterminacy transcendence immanence From Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, pp. 91-92. his " theatre of amazement, record breaking and body madness//9 he could kill the past stone dead, you can't help wondering what has happened to that furious trajectory. It is perhaps in this loss of a powerful sense of the future giving rise to a strong teleological orientation that we can begin to distinguish the turn into postmodernism, which has been dominated by the rhetoric of "no longer." The words are threaded with incantatory insistence through the writings of Jameson and Baudrillard. American Studies International , October 1993, Vol . XXXI, No. 2 This content downloaded from 136.152.209.102 on Sun, 18 May 2014 13:20:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
27 You can read your way through half a dozen collections of essays on postmodernism without coming across a piece that concerns itself specifically with theater- performance art, perhaps- but theatrical practice is just not on the usual agenda with photography, sculpture, architecture, literature and film- making. At the same time, these essays are often riddled with metaphorical acknowledgements of theater and performance. It seems that in what Guy Debord dubbed "The Society of the Spectacle," where the Simulacrum rules, there is no outside-the-theater. As all encompassing dramaturgy is being generated through mass media relay of multiplied and multiplying images, multitudinous fragments of recorded scenario are replayed and rerecorded in an eternal cycle of hyper-real exchange. If, theoretically speaking, postmodernism has subsumed performance, has theatrical performance become an anachronism? Why is it that some of us still go to watch live bodies engaged in quaintly heroic dialectics with space and time? Are we nostalgically indulging our longing to get back to the future? Or perhaps, to return to some primal scene where the presence of an anatomical real splits away from the signifying body that testifies only to absence. Douglas Crimp's critique of Fried winds up to the pronounce- ment: "Needless to say, we are not in search of sources or origins, but structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture."10 Fried treats theater as the enemy of presentness, stage presence as the thief of true presence. Steven Connor, in his recent study Postmodern Culture suggests that such an argument is already effectively subverted by Artaud's claim that presence has always already been stolen and stage presence may be a means for its occult restoration.11 Connor sees the rediscovery of Artaud through Derrida's two essays on him in Writing and Difference as marking the postmodern turn in theatrical performance. Undoubtedly, the quest for presence and presentness dominates postmodern performance. In performance criticism, actor training and experimental performance practice, there is a marked tendency to concentrate attention on the body as a signifying medium. Eugenio Barba acknowledges that the body and its repertoire of movement and gesture are culturally determined and has founded an Interna- tional School of Theatre Anthropology in order to create a cross cultural range of training that may help to free the body that has been "acculturated and colonized." He describes acrobatics as "the transition from one body culture to another/'12 As Lacan aimed at creating a Copernican revolution to decenter the ego, Barba aims to decenter the body by forcing it to be in continuous transition, unsettled, off balance, estranged from all those articulations with which it has been programmed. Since the establishment of the artists' colony at Black Mountain College in 1933, American performers have been pioneering a version of the verfremdungseffekt which has more to do with rediscovery of the body through its objectification and estrangement than with Brechtian techniques of distancing an audience from narrative involvement and theatrical illusion. Five members of the Black Mountain colony- Cage, Rauschenburg, Kaprow, Oldenburg, Segal- are nominated by Fried as artists who have betrayed their original medium to American Studies International, October 1993, Vol. XXXI, No. 2 This content downloaded from 136.152.209.102 on Sun, 18 May 2014 13:20:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 28 "theatricality/' but the collaboration of John Cage and Merce Cunningham was governed by a determination to engage with "the NOW moment": it was theater devoted to breaking free of duration, the diachronic temporality which Fried regards as "paradigmatically theatrical." Cunningham's intricate dislocation of his dancers' whole vocabulary of attitude and sequence was designed to produce not patterns but "Points in Space" (the title of one of his recent works). Cage's suggestion that if something is boring for two minutes, you should try it for four and if it is boring for four minutes try it for eight, then sixteen and so on, has been widely adopted in contemporary performance experiments. Stillness, slow motion and inordinate repetition are forced engagements with "the now moment." Richard Schechner and Herbert Blau have applied post-structural theories of subjectivity to their work with companies of actors. Schechner has explored the possibilities of training workshops as "a deconstruction process, where the ready- mades of culture (accepted ways of using the body, accepted texts, accepted feelings) are broken down."13 Blau's work in California during the late seventies was dominated by the search for occluded presence and lost origins , seeking to evoke "an initiatory breach which remembers primal violence."14 His quest is undertaken in full awareness of what Derrida, writing on Artaud, had declared ten years earlier: that theatricality must traverse and restore 'existence' and 'flesh' in each of their aspects"15 but also that this was an impossible quest because even the Theatre of Cruelty is bound by "the fatal limit of cruelty which begins with its own representation. ..since representation has always already begun."16 Caught between the rhetorics of "no longer" and "always already," theatrical performance that still seeks presence and presentness may be mortgaging itself to a kind of heroic futility. This, at least, is what the logics of Derrida, Lacan and Baudrillard would decree. Yet perhaps it is only by creating a time warp that we can escape the warped time of postmodernity, which Baudrillard characterizes as tensed between extreme velocity and terminal inertia. Perhaps, too, this impossible timescape of postmodernity itself betrays a deep undertow of anxiety about presentness. Perhaps the anomalous position of theater and theatricality in postmodernism can offer some interesting perspectives on the postmodern turn. To begin with, the term implies chronological bearings- yet postmodernism is chronologically elusive. Lyotard suggests it is in some senses anterior to modernism, Hassan that it overlaps and interweaves with modernism. Habermas has pointed out that: "With varying content, the term 'modern' again and again expresses the consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past of antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition from the old to the new."17 Having served in this way since the fifth century, why won't the term do for us? Is it that, for the first time since the fifth century, we have an era which is unable to wrest the title "modern" from its predecessor? If the first half of the twentieth century is unsurpassable and unsupplantable in its modernity, it is understandable that the second half should be characterized by a pervasive anxiety of influence, that it should have become a present without presentness American Studies International , October 1993, Vol. XXXI, No. 2 This content downloaded from 136.152.209.102 on Sun, 18 May 2014 13:20:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
29 that both denies ("no longer") and affirms ("always already") the continuance of the past with schizophrenic insistence. Modernity is both our lost presence and lost origin. The attempt to determine "what is postmodernism?" often simply results in modernism being constructed as the other of what we wish to be. This is certainly the effect of Ihab Hassan's two column schema. However much Hassan insists on the provisional nature of this model and on the extent to which the two columns blend, it is nevertheless an attempt at contradistinction between modernism and postmodernism on the basis of intrinsic qualities, drawing the diachronic axis between the two columns with an implied arrow to the right hand set saying "you are here." But the dichotomy which heads the list- Symbolism versus Pataphysics- makes nonsense of even the most provisional attempt to read these binaries in diachronic terms. What we have here is an expression of the antinomic tensions between Jarry and the Symbolists in the 1890s, and from there the right hand column flows through early twentieth century modernism every bit as strongly as the left hand column. Architecture, not theater, may be the anomalous discipline in that it has presented us with the illusion of a postmodern turn. David Harvey's recent study The Condition of Postmodernity although it actually endorses Hassan's binary schema in an early chapter, presents an analysis of modernism which demonstrates in some detail how these same binary tensions run through the modern era from 1890 to the second world war, surfacing repeatedly in economic and political arenas, in aesthetics, urban planning, communications. He demonstrates such tendencies to be intrinsic to capitalism. If, then, it is truer to say that both of Hassan's columns belong to modernism and should be encompassed within one frame, the diachronic axis might be drawn from this to an outer frame from which it is observed. And that is surely our own position. What is going on in our frame is reflection and repetition. So as we incessantly try to contradistinguish postmodernism from modernism, the only differential which will stay in place is that of time. We are no longer modern. Yet we are always already everything that modernism was. Perhaps it is in the very compulsion to seek presence that theater is still epitomizing the spirit of the age. NOTES 1. This is the title of Chapter 4 of Ihab Hassan's The Postmodern Turn (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 19 87). 2. Ibid., 87. 3. See Hassan, 91-92. 4. Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), inventor of "pataphysics" (the science of imaginary solutions) and creator of the anarchic persona Pere Ubu. 5. Rose Lee Goldberg, Performance Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 7. 6. See Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 145: 53-92. American Studies International, October 1993 , Vol. XXXI, No. 2 This content downloaded from 136.152.209.102 on Sun, 18 May 2014 13:20:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 30 7. Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art (New York: Durron, 1968), 147. 8. Ibid., 142. 9. Marinetti, The Variety Theatre, quoted in Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (London: BBC Publications, 1981), 42. 10. Douglas Crimp, "Pictures," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York and Boston: Godine and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988), 186. 11. See Steven Conner, Postmodern Culture (Ox ford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 138-140. 12. Eugenio Barba, Beyond the Floating Islands (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 100. 13. Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 99. 14. Herbert Blau, The Eye of Prey (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 198 7), 174. 15. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 232. 16. Ibid., 250. 17. Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity- An Incomplete Project," in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Washington, D.C.: Bay Press, 1983), 3. American Studies International, October 1993, Vol. XXXI, No. 2 This content downloaded from 136.152.209.102 on Sun, 18 May 2014 13:20:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions