Perform or Else

From Discipline to Performance

Jon McKenzie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134538614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

'Performance' has become one of the key terms for the new century. But what do we mean by 'performance'? In today's world it can refer to experimental art; productivity in the workplace; and the functionality of technological systems. Do these disparate fields bear any relation to each other?
In Perform or Else Jon McKenzie asserts that there is a relationship cultural, organisational, and technological performance. In this theoretical tour de force McKenzie demonstrates that all three paradigms operate together to create powerful and contradictory pressures to 'perform...or else'. This is an urgent and important intervention in contemporary critical thinking. It will profoundly shape our understanding of twenty-first century structures of power and knowledge.

PART I: PERFORMANCE PARADIGMS

I BELIEVE THAT THIS NATION SHOULD COMMIT ITSELF TO ACHIEVING THE GOAL, BEFORE THIS DECADE IS OUT, OF LANDING A MAN ON THE MOON AND RETURNING HIM SAFELY TO THE EARTH.... [I]N A VERY REAL SENSE, IT WILL NOT BE ONE MAN GOING TO THE MOON—IF WE MAKE THIS JUDGMENT AFFIRMATIVELY, IT WILL BE AN ENTIRE NATION.

John F. Kennedy, 25 May 1961

CHAPTER 1. THE EFFICACY OF CULTURAL PERFORMANCE

THE CHALLENGE OF EFFICACY

To construct a general theory of performance, we first examine different models or paradigms which help to compose it. These performance paradigms are themselves composed of movements of generalization, by which diverse activities are gathered together and conceptualized as performance. This chapter focuses on the Performance Studies paradigm and its field of cultural performance, and I analyze both in terms of the challenge of social efficacy. To theorize this challenge, we will look at its interdisciplinary origins, its practical and theoretical models, and the development of the paradigm over the past five decades.

The field of cultural performance that has emerged over the last half century includes a wide variety of activities situated around the world. These include traditional and experimental theater; rituals and ceremonies; popular entertainments, such as parades and festivals; popular, classical, and experimental dance; avant-garde performance art; oral interpretations of literature, such as public speeches and readings; traditions of folklore and storytelling; aesthetic practices found in everyday life, such as play and social interactions; political demonstrations and social movements. This list is open to additions, subtractions, and debate, but from it one can see that cultural performance is cultural in the widest sense of the term, stretching from “high” to “low” culture, though its most ardent proponents stress its countercultural aspects.

Given the great diversity of activities, how can we call them all “performance?” Identifying different practices and discourses as “performance” first requires gathering them together and conceptualizing them as a field of study, a field of objects, a field of performance. It simultaneously requires a gathering of subjects, a community of practitioners and researchers constituting itself around and indeed through performance. Today, there are students, teachers, and practitioners of performance, as well as programs, departments, and professional organizations devoted to its study. The field of cultural performance and the paradigm of Performance Studies thus co-create and co-legitimate one another. To identify different activities as performance; to study and teach such performances in terms of individuals, peoples, genres, movements, and periods; to apply diverse methods across institutional disciplines; to establish performance departments and programs; to organize panels and conferences and, of late, an international professional association—to do all this under the name of “Performance Studies” presupposes a movement of generalization capable of gathering all these differences under the concept of “performance.” It presupposes that such questions as “What is performance?” and “What is Performance Studies?” if not definitively answered, have nonetheless been proposed, contested, and recast innumerable times and in numerable sites.

The history of cultural performance and Performance Studies is precisely the history of such questioning. To follow the movement of generalization that has produced the field and paradigm of cultural performance, I shall engage a number of texts that not only define performance, but also outline intellectual histories of the paradigm.

What, then, is the performance of Performance Studies? From the perspective of the general theory under construction here, this performance can best be distinguished from other performance concepts by its challenge of efficacy. That is, at the heart of its movement of generalization, Performances Studies scholars have constructed cultural performance as an engagement of social norms, as an ensemble of activities with the potential to uphold societal arrangements or, alternatively, to change people and societies. While performance’s efficacy to reaffirm existing structures and console or heal peoples has consistently been recognized, it is its transgressive or resistant potential that has come to dominate the study of cultural performance. It has long been its cutting edge. From the happenings, rock concerts, and political demonstrations of the 1960s to the drag shows, raves, and Culture Wars of the 1990s, cultural performance has been theorized as a catalyst to personal and social transformation. Richard Schechner provides guidance here concerning the efficacy of cultural performance. Writing in 1976, he addressed the notion that theater and other performing arts functioned as simple entertainment or, at best, as a reflection of changes occurring elsewhere, arguing instead that entertainment and efficacy are two strands of a braid that cross one another throughout history.

“At each period in each culture one or the other is dominant—one is ascending while the other is descending. Naturally, these changes are part of changes in the overall social structure; yet performance is not a passive mirror of these social changes but a part of the complicated feedback process that brings about change. At all times a dialectical tension exists between efficacious and entertainment tendencies.”¹ From this perspective, the emergence of cultural performance entails the reascendance of efficacy over entertainment.

The importance of efficacy to the conceptualization of performance can be seen in key definitions provided by various cultural theorists. John J. MacAloon provides one such definition in his 1984 anthology Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance.² In rehearsing this theory, MacAloon introduces his collection by citing the definition of cultural performance provided by the symposium organizers, Barbara Babcock, Barbara Myerhoff, and Victor Turner. Cultural performances are “‘occasions in which as a culture or society we reflect upon and define ourselves, dramatize our collective myths and history, present ourselves with alternatives, and eventually change in some ways while remaining the same in others.’”³ This citation of a citation identifies three functions which scholars have regularly attributed to cultural performance: 1) social and self-reflection through the dramatization or embodiment of symbolic forms, 2) the presentation of alternative arrangements, and 3) the possibility of conservation and/or transformation. Given the imperative of social efficacy, theorists have largely concentrated on performance’s transformational potential.

Another definition can found in Performance: Texts and Contexts, a 1993 book by Carol Simpson Stern and Bruce Henderson. Stern and Henderson’s Performance is a textbook, a work intended to assist the teaching of performance studies. As such, it also attests to the institutionalization of performance study, to its courses, curricula, syllabuses, canons, evaluations, examinations, and theses. Significantly, Stern herself served many years as chair of the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. The authors write that the “term performance incorporates a whole field of human activity. . . . In all cases a performance act, interactional in nature and involving symbolic forms and live bodies, provides a way to constitute meaning and affirm individual and cultural values.”⁴ Like MacAloon, Stern and Henderson define performance by citing its social functions, those of constituting meaning and affirming values. They also cite two forms, those of human symbols and human bodies. These functions and forms have been routinely employed by researchers, although as we will shortly see, the precise functions and forms have changed over the past half century.

The definitions provided by MacAloon and Stern and Henderson demonstrate how cultural performance has been conceptualized as social efficacy. Performance gives us an occasion to “change in some ways while remaining the same in others;” it “provides a way to constitute meaning and affirm individual and cultural values.” To theorize the ways in which performance produces this efficacy, scholars have also drawn upon specific genres of performance and deployed them as models to think about the transformative potential of cultural performance in general. Such models have thus been crucial to the paradigm’s movement of generalization, to the theorization of its field, and to the articulation of its challenge of efficacy.

Challenging, in fact, may be one of the most insistent gestures of Performance Studies, and thus my framing of Perform or Else as a challenge has been rehearsed many times. Across different sites, the tonality of challenging carries a force of efficacy. In the general introduction to their anthology Critical Theory and Performance (1992), Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach attribute “an inherently political character to the performance analysis that has emerged from critical theory; it revises, challenges, rewrites, interrogates, and sometimes condemns received meanings.”⁵ For his part, Marvin Carlson, in his Performance: A Critical Introduction (1996), writes that “almost any contemporary performance project” involves many cultural, social, and intellectual concerns, including “the varying challenges of gender, race, and ethnicity, to name only some of the most visible.”⁶ In a closely related though slightly different manner, Peggy Phelan opens her Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993) with another challenge. “Unmarked examines the implicit assumptions about the connections between representational visibility and political power which have been a dominant force in cultural theory in the last ten years. Among the challenges this poses is how to retain the power of the unmarked by surveying it within a theoretical frame.”⁷

Given the role which challenging plays in Performance Studies, one might say that performance challenges, it provokes, contests, stakes a claim. And there is some uncanny feedback here: not only does performance challenge, challenges perform. J.L. Austin includes “challenge” in his list of performative speech acts, words that “do something.” Specifically, Austin lists “challenge” as a word with illocutionary force.⁸ Challenges do something: they incite, demand, assert, accuse, and oppose. And as performance scholars have sharpened our challenges over the past several decades, perhaps we have witnessed the launch of something like “the Performance Studies challenge,” akin to the one which Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treicher cite in the introduction to their 1992 anthology Cultural Studies:

Through the last two decades, when theory has sometimes seemed a decontextualized scene of philosophical speculation, cultural studies has regularly theorized in response to particular social, historical, and material conditions. Its theories have attempted to connect to real social and political problems. Now that “theory” is more broadly returning to material concerns and interrogating the social effects of its own discourses, it finds its enterprises clarified and facilitated by the cultural studies challenge.⁹

Performance Studies, like cultural studies, has challenged theory to get real, while also challenging itself with theoretical questions concerning the status of that “real” (“real bodies,” “real materiality,” “real life”). Over the past half century, this paradigm has emitted many challenges and counter challenges in its study of cultural performance. In theorizing performative efficacy, Performance Studies has mimed its object of study; our scholars have launched their own challenges to the institutional norms of research and teaching. Developing specific models to theorize cultural performance generally, we have also deployed them as paradigms of the paradigm itself. To understand this process, let us now turn to the initiation of Performance Studies.

THE PASSAGE TO PARADIGM

To compose a field as diverse as that of cultural performance—and to compose itself as a paradigm—Performance Studies has drawn upon many different, even disparate, disciplines. These disciplines range from “a” to “z”: anthropology, art history, cultural studies (especially gender, ethnicity, class, and, of late, queer and postcolonial theory), dance history, ethnography, folklore, history, linguistics, literary criticism, media studies, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology, speech and nonverbal communications, theater studies, and zoology.

Because the fields upon which it draws are so diverse, the intellectual history of Performance Studies is quite complex, though there is general agreement that its formation began in the 1950s. MacAloon, for instance, cites “certain initially independent intellectual developments in the 1950s that have served as a foundation for the now rapidly expanding and coalescing interests in the study of cultural forms.”¹⁰ He goes on to discuss the importance of four concepts: Victor Turner’s “social drama,” Milton Singer’s “cultural performance,” Kenneth Burke’s “dramatistic pentad” and Erving Goffman’s “social psychology of everyday life.” These theorists are significant, for Stern and Henderson also discuss four authors important for their contributions to defining performance and performers. Despite their different disciplinary orientation, Stern and Henderson cite three of the same four theorists as MacAloon, namely, Turner, Burke, and Goffman. Instead of Singer, they stress the importance of Richard Schechner and his concept of “restored behavior.” The overlapping casts of performance theorists indicate that, despite the different perspectives and debates in the field, these differences circulate in a shared citational network of discourses and practices.

While MacAloon, writing in 1984, argues that “the study of cultural performance is in, as yet, a ‘preparadigmatic’ stage,”¹¹ Schechner outlines a more detailed intellectual history of a full-fledged research paradigm just five years later. In “PAJ Distorts the Broad Spectrum,” he writes:

The performance studies paradigm came to the fore in the mid-’50s. Gregory Bateson’s “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” was published in 1955, the same year as J.L. Austin’s Harvard lectures on the ‘performative’ (How to Do Things with Words). Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was published in 1959; Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales in 1960; and Roger Callois’ Man, Play, and Games in 1961. My “Approaches to Theory/Criticism” was published in 1966; Dell Hymes’ “Model of the Interaction of Language and Social Setting” in 1967. Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process came out in 1969, his Drama, Fields and Metaphors in 1974. Milton Singer’s When a Great Tradition Modernizes appeared in 1972. Folklore: Performance and Communication (editors, Dan Ben-Amos and Kenneth Goldstein) was published in 1974 as was Barbara Myerhoff’s The Peyote Hunt. Secular Ritual (edited by Myerhoff and Sally Moore) appeared in 1977, the same year as Richard Bauman’s Verbal Art as Performance.¹²

This paragraph reads as a dramaturgy of the paradigm, an expansive reading of its citational network. Though both Schechner and MacAloon date the field’s origins back to the 1950s, Schechner incorporates MacAloon’s “‘preparadigmatic’ stage” into the paradigm. And with the exception of Burke, he cites all of the authors cited by MacAloon, Stern, and Henderson—and then some.

The intellectual histories cited thus far are quite brief, limited as they are to but a few paragraphs or pages. Recently, however, a book-length survey of the field has been published, Marvin Carlson’s Performance: A Critical Introduction. The depth of this survey is unparalleled, as is its breadth: not only does Carlson reference over 300 theorists from a wide range of fields, he provides discussion of almost all of them. Needless to say, he cites all the authors we have cited above and, beyond this, all of the authors they cite (and, one suspects, all of the authors that they cite). In short, Carlson’s Performance delivers the most extensive reading yet of the paradigm’s formation and development, the most detailed mapping of its citational network. He states that the concept of performance is “heavily indebted to terminology and theoretical strategies developed during the 1960s and 1970s,”¹³ yet also discusses uses of the term dating back to the 1950s and earlier.

Carlson’s intellectual history of performance focuses on the concept’s development in the fields of anthropology and ethnography, psychology and sociology, and linguistics. I am interested here not only in the theorists and disciplines that contributed to the early formation of Performance Studies, but also in the ways that scholars have since theorized this formation itself. We find in Carlson’s introduction a telling description of the paradigm’s movement of generalization.

With performance as a kind of critical wedge, the metaphor of theatricality has moved out of the arts into almost every aspect of modern attempts to understand our condition and activities, into almost every branch of the human sciences—sociology, anthropology, ethnography, psychology, linguistics.¹⁴

Moving out of theater, out of a field taken by many to be its proper home, performance becomes the cutting edge of a critical wedge. Slicing into the human or social sciences, performance here brings with it the metaphor, the figure of theatricality and, at the same time, inscribes its own movement of generalization. This reading cuts its way through Carlson’s Performance, for in his conclusion he describes performance as a “metaphor or analytical tool,”¹⁵ suggesting that performance first enters the sciences as an unfamiliar metaphor and, after extended use, becomes a critical tool of analysis. But he also stresses a feedback effect: “as performativity and theatricality have been developed in these fields, both as metaphors and analytical tools, theorists and practitioners of performance art have in turn become aware of these developments and found in them new s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 0. CHALLENGES
• PART I: PERFORMANCE PARADIGMS
• PART II: THE AGE OF GLOBAL PERFORMANCE
• PART III. PERFUMANCE
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY