Saturday, April 29, 2006

Day Ten

I've been trying to consolidate what I know about performance theory this week, and I've found Marvin Carlson's Performance: A Critical Introduction provides a good overview, in particular in its comparison of the influences of anthropology (via people like Victor Turner), sociology (Erving Goffman), and linguistics (speech-act theory) on what came to be performance theory. Many of the theorists involved can't easily be pegged in one category, of course, which indicates how intertwined these theories are. Also important are various writings by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (especially his concepts of the utterance and the carnivalesque), cultural historian Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), anthropologists Clifford Geertz and Richard Bauman, literary theorists Kenneth Burke and Umberto Eco and Shoshana Felman and Mary Louise Pratt, reader-response theorist Stanley Fish, psychoanalysts J.L. Moreno and Eric Berne, Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau (whom I will discuss later), philosopher Jacques Derrida, and of course Richard Schechner, who might be considered the father of contemporary performance studies, not to mention a whole range of theatrical theorists such as Artaud or Brecht. Carlson, by the way, is in the Comp. Lit. department at the Grad Center. It's all rather a lot to try to keep straight, so while I want to have a basic grasp of each of these theorists, I'm going to focus more on some of the issues brought up by their disagreements.

As a side note, Carlson also illuminated for me one of the sources of the basic confusion of performance and performativity and the wide range of meanings and uses of these terms (as pointed out by Sedgwick, for example), which lies in the different fundamental meanings of the verb "perform": first, in the sense of a theatrical performance, a citational utterance, or a "restored beahviour" as Schechner calls it — to perform like an actor — and second, in the broader sense of an act that accomplishes something, such as when we say a car performs well on the highway. While performance theory focusses on the first meaning, speech-act theory is really about the second: how language performs (succeeds) or not. The trick, though, is that on re-examining speech-act theory (which Austin supposedly wanted to exclude the theatrical kind of performance) with a poststructuralist understanding of meaning, we see that in language the performative is always infected by performance. The theory of gender performance, which could be seen as combining the two meanings, developed out of the same understanding.

2 Comments:

Blogger Vince said...

There's a lovely film about Artaud that I saw a few years ago at the Cinematheque Quebecoise - unfortunately I can't recall the title at the moment, but there's a scene of Artaud trying to instruct this actress in the 'correct' way to enunciate one of his texts - which is basically to be mad - it has to be seen to be believed.

You can hear Artaud on ubuweb, apparently. I've read his anthooogy lately and he certainly has a distinctive 'voice' even in translation.

1:31 PM  
Blogger Vince said...

There's a lovely film about Artaud that I saw a few years ago at the Cinematheque Quebecoise - I can't recall the title. Feature film. Anyway, there's a scene of Artaud trying to instruct an actress in the 'correct' way to enunciate one of his texts - which is basically to be mad - it has to be seen to be believed.

To hear Artaud's own voice, check out that ubuweb thing.

1:35 PM  

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