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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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1993,
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XXXI,
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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
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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
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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
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