The Grammar of Politics and Performance

Shirin M Rai, Janelle Reinelt, Shirin M Rai, Janelle Reinelt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134751334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This volume brings together important work at the intersection of politics and performance studies. While the languages of theatre and performance have long been deployed by other disciplines, these are seldom deployed seriously and pursued systematically to discover the actual nature of the relationship between performance as a set of behavioural practices and the forms and the transactions of these other disciplines.

This book investigates the structural similarities and features of politics and performance, which are referred to here as 'grammar', a concept which also emphasizes the common communicational base or language of these fields. In each of the chapters included in this collection, key processes of both politics and performance are identified and analyzed, demonstrating the critical and indivisible links between the fields. The book also underlines that neither politics nor performance can take place without actors who perform and spectators who receive, evaluate and react to these actions. At the heart of the project is the ambition to bring about a paradigm change, such that politics cannot be analyzed seriously without a sophisticated understanding of its performance. All the chapters here display a concrete set of events, practices, and contexts within which politics and performance are inseparable elements.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars in both International Relations and Performance Studies.

1
Introduction

Janelle Reinelt and Shirin M. Rai

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

(Walter Benjamin¹)

Wherever you go, you will see a polis.

(Hannah Arendt²)

This volume brings together a set of essays that work in the interstices of the disciplines of politics and theatre and performance studies. This intervention takes place against the backdrop of contemporary disillusionment with political processes and democratic institutions and actors, addressing in particular those scholars who are inclined to give up on some major categories of political struggle such as interests, representation, identity and redistribution. The languages of theatre and performance have long been deployed by other disciplines such as psychology (Freud’s primal ‘scene’), sociology (Goffman’s ‘backstage’), anthropology (Turner’s ‘liminal’, Singer’s ‘cultural’ and Bateson’s ‘ritual’ performances) and politics (Aristotle’s spectator/citizen and Lukes’s ‘political ritual’). This attribution often remains at the level of metaphor and has not been pursued systematically in the discipline of politics to discover the nature of the cross-over between performance as a set of behavioural practices and the transactions of these other realms.

Rather than take these for granted, we investigate the relationship between politics and performance to discover structural similarities we are calling ‘grammar’. Designed to mean that certain features of political transactions shared by performances are fundamental to both provenances, the concept of grammar also emphasises the common communicational base or language of these fields. Neither politics nor performance can take place without actors who perform and spectators who receive, evaluate and react to these actions. Moreover, the notion that one can study and describe the ‘grammar’ governing politics (which will always involve performance) as well as the ‘grammar’ governing performance (which will always involve politics) is a provocative idea which we hope will give rise to further research on the complex and fluctuating relationship between these two terms. There is another more direct objective in this work as well: to bring practical political processes back into theatre and performance studies, from where they have been somewhat displaced in recent years by a variety of less defined and definitely less partisan thematics and stylistics (as we discuss further on in this Introduction). Additionally, we argue that political thinkers need to consider a dramaturgical and performative³ analysis such that politics cannot be analysed seriously without a sophisticated understanding of its performances. While theatre scholars have often cited political thinkers from Plato and Aristotle forward, politics scholars have rarely engaged reciprocally. Our authors, however, are equally chosen from both disciplines, developing a dialogue between fields and strengthening our claim that performance and politics are co-constitutive even if distinct.

We regard theatricality and performance more fundamentally as indispensable and unavoidable components of democratic politics. As Reinelt (2006) argues, ‘this time – our time – is aggressively theatrical … the present historical moment is in fact specifically and technically theatrical and performative’. Thus beyond the grammar which operates between politics and performance, the historical specificity of this time intensifies the affinities. The essays that were chosen for this volume display a concrete set of events, practices and contexts of special concern to the present: e.g. crises of legitimacy and the role of ritual in the face of the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal (see Edelman, in Chapter 13), or the questionable efficacy of certain forms of political protest after 9/11(see Nield, in Chapter 9), or the tension in instruments of transitional justice in Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commissions (see Lynch, in Chapter 12).

This is not, of course, the only historical conjuncture governed by a ‘performance culture’. Scholars have written extensively about the performative power of the state and of social movements throughout history. Indeed, we highlight a portion of this scholarship further on. But this contemporary moment addresses our lifetime and therefore, as a matter of personal urgency, we respond to the political necessity that confronts us by exploring ideas for better governance and the theatrical possibility of its imagining.

Why ‘grammar’?

A grammar is a set of recognisable rules or codifications that facilitate communication. However, grammar shifts and changes over time, and thus allows for a space to re-form and re-enact rules through everyday subversion of some codes and renegotiation of others. This definition is part historical, part literal, and implicitly metaphorical. The earliest grammars were found in Iron Age India, and in the West in Hellenic Greece. Children are taught grammar in primary schools (or at least they used to be), where they learn parts of speech and sentence construction. More recently, emphasis has shifted from the prescription of grammar to its description – informed by the practices of actual language speakers and the evolution and indeed instability of grammar’s governing structure. If we deliberately look for a looser, more flexible formulation, Merriam Webster gives a broad definition as its fourth place citation: ‘the principles or rules of an art, science, or technique “a grammar of the theater”; also: a set of such principles or rules’. When Kenneth Burke wrote A Grammar of Motives in 1945, he evoked ‘grammar’ to mean ‘the basic forms of thought … that are exemplified in the attributing of motives’ (p. xv). He used the term to connote that this highly questionable and ambiguous matter – motives – could be understood and grasped through an orderly formal structure of attributes. He was seeking to ground his commentary on a strong set of principles common to his subject – motives.

Kenneth Burke is a deliberate choice for an interlocutor. Throughout a long and productive life as a multi-disciplinary thinker working at the interface of literature, sociology and philosophy, Burke carved out a unique theory of ‘dramatism’ that attempted to provide a methodology for analysis of realms other than the theatrical. He serves the purposes of this book because he wanted to find flexible and yet durable categories of thought to highlight the connections between elements of social experience. He was one of the first theorists to insist that the text or the performance needed to be analysed in relation to its audience and its socio-political context (what he called its scene). He was influenced by Aristotle’s ideas about rhetoric and believed that the act of persuasion in political speech elicited a complex set of possible responses on the part of its recipients (cf. Parkinson’s Chapter 2). And although he used the term ‘grammar’ to describe his interpretative principles in A Grammar of Motives, he also believed that parts of speech and grammar would always be trumped by the particular social context of their employment. He considered communication a form of action, and his emphasis on symbolic action, seen in retrospect, seems like a version of ‘the force of the performative’ (although he had no truck with J. L. Austin or other linguistic philosophers who were prominent in his time).

Burke referred to ‘drama’: the term did not have quite the exclusive emphasis on text and formal script characteristics that it does today, ‘drama’ having lost out in the hierarchy of objects of study in the contemporary discipline of theatre and performance studies. In Burke’s thought, ‘dramatism’ ‘invites one to consider the matter of motives from a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action’ (p. xxii). Here we can see how his sense of the dynamics of the theatrical set-up seemed to him descriptive of the communication act itself. He put forward five terms he called ‘the pentad’ as his grammatical basic categories: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. This seemingly fixed system of alternating elements was also, however, informed by Burke’s insistence on the presence and the value of ambiguity. Recognising that any categories he named would not always deliver a straight-forward or total explanatory power, he writes that what he wants ‘is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise’ (p. xviii; emphasis in the original). In a particularly prescient claim for the purposes of our own investigation in this volume, he writes:

Instead of considering it our task to ‘dispose of’ any ambiguity by merely disclosing the fact that it is an ambiguity, we rather consider it our task to study and clarify the resources of ambiguity. For in the course of this work, we shall deal with many kinds of transformation – and it is in the areas of ambiguity that transformations take place; in fact, without such areas, transformation would be impossible.

(p. xix; emphasis in the original)

Remembering him in our title, we also recognise him in the spirit that animates our present work – it is precisely in the ambiguities where politics and performance intersect that we might find the possibility of (political) transformations. This is what Sophie Nield argues in her chapter on the Occupy movement, and what James Harding teaches us about the logics of lying that govern security and surveillance regimes. If we are turning away from Burke’s dramatic pentad or his specific form of analysis and interpretation, we honour him in seeking to create our own grammar that catches the overlapping but ambiguous motives of politics and performance.

We approach the conjunction of ‘politics and performance’ in search of a set of principles that can anchor our interdisciplinary investigations. Holding the conviction that there are good reasons why it makes sense to consider politics and performance as inter-related discursive and embodied practices, we set out to identify what some of these structures in common might be, remaining mindful of the ambiguity of the overlap and its potential for transformation. To begin with the most obvious, both politics and performance require publics and exist to affect their constituencies in aggregate form, whether through laws and policies or through providing certain (often aesthetic) experiences in common. However, just as grammar is constantly evolving and adjusting to the stimulus of its actual usage, politics is similarly processual, defining itself in sometimes revolutionary, sometimes incremental transactions and signature practices. In this it participates in the fundamental features of performance: performances are actions, events, or behaviours that are relational and self-conscious (Schechner 2003; Carlson 2003; Balme 2008; McKenzie 2001). ‘Any action that is framed, presented, highlighted or displayed is a performance’ (Schechner 2003). Key to its structure is reflexivity: to perform is to be aware of the act of doing something, and to show doing it. Performance always bears the traces of this reflexivity – it ‘knows’ it shows. Not all performance is confined to individual subjects – institutions also perform when they demonstrate their power in particular scenarios or appearances: the ‘halls of justice’ utilise literal and metaphoric space to identify a precinct where justice theoretically prevails (Resnik and Curtis 2011). All performances are transactional – between the performer(s) and the spectators or recipients of the act.

In the chapters that follow, our authors identify a number of features that constitute this hypothetical grammar, draw on a range of political thinkers in their case studies and engage in disciplinary debates to push beyond available formulations. This volume thus lays the foundation for an ongoing collaboration between these discrete fields.

A partial genealogy

Although this book is a contemporary study, it is useful to highlight some of the work that has preceded us and the efforts of scholars who have recognised the important relationship between our two keys terms in the history of both disciplines. Starting with ‘Classical Greece’, both politics and theatre/performance studies have paid significant attention to the relationship between Greek theatre and politics. Aristotle and Plato provided theoretical starting points for a series of topics in which it is all but impossible to disassociate politics from theatre: mimesis, representation, spectacle, citizenship, rhetoric, leadership, participation and polis. Civic festivals containing performances were clearly ceremonies of the Athenian state, and it is difficult if not impossible to separate out the aesthetic concerns of the one from the governance concerns of the other.

Thus one strand of theatre scholarship that leads towards our present study might begin with Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of the Drama (1946) in which Marxist scholar George Thomson first put forth an analysis of Athens in relation to class relations and Aeschylus as a key to this understanding (also see Vernant’s work on Greek society (1974)). In the 1990s, John Winkler and Froma Zeitlin (1990), and Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (1999) argued explicitly for a political reading of the Greek theatre and a theatrical understanding of democracy. Winkler and Zeitlin’s collection stressed the civic ceremony of theatre and the way as an institution it bore civic status, while for Goldhill and Osborne, the role of citizen was linked to participation – and often to display; moreover citizens deliberated as part of audiences. More recently, we note that David Wiles (2011), writing on theatre and citizenship, opens with a first chapter on Athens, and concludes with a meditation on the public sphere and theatre’s place within it today, while Nicholas Ridout grounds his conviction that ‘the polis might itself be constituted in the action that is the making of theatre’ in a certain vision of Athenian democracy as social praxis (2013: 16).

‘Early modern England’, the period marked by the Tudor monarchs, Shakespeare and eventually civil war is a second logical site to look for scholarly recognition of the inextricable links between politics and performance. Indeed, many Shakespeare courses started by asking students to read E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (1943). However, theatre historians’ archival work on the playhouses and companies, and ‘New Criticism’ based on close readings of texts (but little context), were the dominant trends in Shakespeare scholarship – until the rise of ‘New Historicism’ circa 1980 placed a methodological emphasis on the socio-political context of works of art leading to exciting new scholarship that followed up on this theoretical stance. Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985) were landmark publications, and over the next decade were joined by Orgel and Keilen (1999) and Howard (1994), among others. Shakespeare scholarship, in fact, became a stage for playing out the culture wars that marked the British and American academies in the 1980s and 1990s.⁴ In recent years, Shakespeare scholarship has turned to global politics and the ways Shakespeare has been appropriated by a range of nations and contexts, as well as the politics of transnational cultural exchange. (Examples include Kennedy (1993), or more recently Litvin (2011). Julia Lupton is probably closest to our conceptualisation of the relations between politics and performance in her equal immersion in Shakespeare studies and contemporary political problems: in her latest book (2011), she marshals Arendt and Agamben to discuss political questions of life and living such as friendship, and elections, concluding with an epilogue on ‘defrosting the refrigerator’, a return to Arendt’s notions of oikos for purposes of Shakespearian refashioning.

The modern period gave us Brecht and Beckett, arguably the two most influential Western playwrights of the twentieth century. While Beckett resisted any socio-political programme, Brecht’s overt desire for a politically engaged theatre led to scholarship that mined links to Marx, Althusser and Benjamin (Willett 1977; Giles 1998; Kruger 2004; Carney 2005; Rokem 2009). Augusto Boal, with his own idiosyncratic readings of Aristotle, attempted to create political theatre as a tool of struggle for the oppressed, and has been widely influential across the globe with his ideas of Forum Theatre and Legislative Theatre (Cohen-Cruz and Schutzman 1993; Emert and Friedman 2011). No contemporary survey of modern theatre would omit Brecht, nor more recently Boal. Both men wrote extensively about their ideas and their theatre, so their primary texts remain the most important sources.

Turning to the politics literature, while there is no unified history of engagement with performance and theatre scholarship, the different subfields within politics have made various connections, depending on their focus. Of course, Plato and Aristotle took positions on the role of performance and its audience – Plato’s scepticism condemned both, fearing an erosion of deliberative politics and the dethroning of reason; Aristotle on the other hand found the citizen/audience a site of catharsis for politics in the democratic city-state. But in contemporary debates on democratic theory, performance makes an appearance fairly recently, largely inspired by social anthropological work on the performance of ritual. For example, Stephen Lukes (1975) noted the importance of performances of ritual in both the politics of integration and fragmentation of polities. Political symbolism has been another focus of attention in political analyses alert to performance and its affects. As Michael Walzer pointed out, ‘Politics is an art of unification; from many, it makes one. And symbolic activity is perhaps our most important means of bringing things together, both intellectually and emotionally’ (1967: 194). Aesthetic effects of political performance have been a third strand of engagement since the Situationist movement, led by Guy Debord, developed the idea of the performance of capitalism through the concept of the spectacle (1999). The reproduction of capitalist social relations through the globalisation of taste through control over media and advertising has figured in the cultural economy of capitalism literature (Debord 1999; Appadurai 1990; Chomsky and Herman 1994). Rhetoric and language, speech and music also made entry into political analyses to reach back to the Durkheimian concept of ‘charismatic leadership’ but also its rejection through counter-rhetorics and disruptions performed by ‘audience’/citizens (Finlayson 2007; Ilie 2003). And finally, politics and international relations scholars have examined the performance of state institutions, not just in terms of their efficacy, but also their performative reach, which can shore up or undermine their legitimacy (Kertzer 1988; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992; Lukes 1975; Shils and Young 1953).

This opening up of behavioural and normative politics to performative scrutiny allowed political scientists to explore the mobilisation of ...