Performances

Dening, Greg

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780522847000
• eBook ISBN: 9780522863161
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

'... history is my passion. Writing it, teaching it, reading it fills the days and years of my life. In all passions, there is pain and pleasure.' Greg DeningIn this collection of writings-some new, some previously published-Greg Dening reflects on his experiences both as a historian and a participant in history. Performances brings together the personal and the scholarly, demonstrating how our lives are saturated with history, how we can only understand our present through our consciousness of the past and how in thinking about the past we mirror the time and place of our own living.Each of these essays can be enjoyed on its own, yet throughout them all run the common themes of the intricate relationships between past and present, the personal and the political, historical research and the imagination. Dening writes with elegance and candour, inviting readers to reflect upon their own participation in the 'performance' of history.

Presenting the Past
HISTORY’S THEATRE

THE THEATRICALITY OF
HISTORY MAKING AND THE
PARADOXES OF ACTING

Prologue (Playful)

MT HELICON, we must assume, was the original Humanities Research Centre. At least the nine Mousai or ‘Mindful Ones’ had tenure there. They began in a fairly undifferentiated, we might almost say interdisciplinary, way, but visiting scholars introduced a little entrepreneurial competition. So the nine daughters of Zeus were made to fit, if not into departments, then into specialised consultancies: Calliope (Heroic Epic), Euterpe (Flutes), Terpsicore (Lyric Poetry—Dance) and Erato (Lyric Poetry—Hymns), Melpomene (Tragedy), Thalia (Comedy), Polyhymnia (Mimic Art), Urania (Astronomy) and, of course, Clio (History). Naturally they were judges and examiners in most of the important international competitions and prizes. They kept standards high, and some competitors suffered from their objectivity, notably the Sirens, who were obliged to re-tool or become redundant.

Originally the Muses were associated with springs and pools. Running water inspired: still water reflected. But with specialisation came institutionalisation and they ended up in museums. Consultancy outside museums had its problems. It usually ended up in a blank stare, which was called ‘being amused’. At the other extreme was the intense young man Narcissus. He actually went to Mt Helicon, trying to escape a pretty young plagiarist called Echo, who had the annoying habit of repeating everything everybody said. He paused by the still waters, made a reflection, fell in love with it and was transformed into a flower. Reflexivity can do that.

Clio, being first-born, always had a superior air. She was depicted crowned with laurels and usually held a trumpet in one hand and a book in the other. References, it seems, have always been important. Clio’s name meant ‘Glory’. There has always been an expectancy that history blows somebody’s trumpet.

Prologue (Even More Playful)

History-making—transformations of lived experience into narratives—is a universal and everyday human phenomenon. It has an anthropology, as it has a criticism and a history. This narrating in history-making is itself lived experience, not something apart from lived experience. In all its varied expressions narrating is, in Roy Wagner’s word, an impersonation—the clustering of signifying actions into recognisable roles, such as bard, novelist, prophet, historian . . . This narrating is itself lived experience: in Aristotle’s word, mythopoetic, the emplotment that engages an audience in its interpretation. This narrating is itself lived experience: In John Dewey’s word, an experience, pulled out of the stream of consciousness and given dramatic form. This narrating is itself lived experience: in Greg Dening’s words, metonymic of the present, metaphoric of the past; it presents the past with the double meaning of the word ‘presents’. Narrating both makes a now of the past and delivers the past in some dramatic display.

‘Theory’ and ‘theatre’ come to us out of the same Greek origin—thea, sight, viewing; theoros, spectator. Theory—a mind-set for viewing; theatre—a space-set for spectatoring; theatrical—a convention-set for mimesis. ‘The theater’, wrote Roland Barthes, ‘is precisely the practice which calculates the place of things, as they are observed. If I set the spectacle here, the spectator will see this; if I put it elsewhere, he will not, and I can avail myself of this masking effect and play on the illusions it provides. The stage is the line which stands across the path of the optical pencil, tracing at once the point at which it is brought to a stop and, as it were, the threshold of its ramifications. Thus is found, against music (against text)—representation. Representation is not defined directly by imitation: even if one gets rid of the ‘real’, of the ‘vraisemblable’ of the ‘copy’, there will be representation for so long as the subject (author, reader, spectator, or voyeur) casts his gaze toward a horizon on which he cuts out the base of a triangle, his eye (or his mind) forming the apex’.

The ‘theatricality of history-making’ involves the notion of viewing in a space so closed around with convention that the audience and actors enter into the conspiracy of their own illusions. The paradox is that self-awareness, performance consciousness, does not disturb the realisms of their understanding.

Leaves of a commonplace book . . .

This Poet is that Poet’s plagiary
And he a third’s, till they end all in Homer
And Homer filch’t all from an Aegyprian Preestesse.
The World’s a Theater of theft.

Thomas Tomkis, 1615

For myself I prefer to utilize [rather than comment on] the writers I like. The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest. And if a commentator says I am unfaithful to Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no interest.

Michel Foucault, 1975

The best grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological.

Hayden White, 1973

The development of civilisations is essentially a progression of metaphors.

E. L. Doctorow, 1977

The importance of innovative extension cannot be overstressed. Meaning is ultimately involved in every conscious cultural act, and cannot justifiably be detached from the events and actions through which it is constituted, or from the modes of its production. Eventless meanings are as inconceivable in a cultural context as meaningless events. The creation of meaning shares the rhythm of man’s active and productive life; it neither forms nor presupposes a ‘closed system’ because, like the life of a society, it is ‘open-ended’ and ongoing. Human actions are additive, serial and cumulative; each individual act standing in a particular relationship to the life of the individual or the group, and it also ‘adds’ something in a literal or figurative sense, to these continuities and to the situation itself Thus every act, however habitual or repetitive, extends the culture of the actor in a certain sense.

Roy Wagner, 1972

Life is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plot, its own inception and movement towards its close, each having its own particular movement.

John Dewey, 1934

[Human solidarity] is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers . . . This process of coming to see other human beings as ‘one of us’ rather than as ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel. Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright gives us detail about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like that of Chodeleros de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the detail about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have gradually, but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principle vehicles of moral change and progress.

Richard Rorty, 1989

To paraphrase Abbie Hoffman, there is a manner in which one may legitimately say that the role of political theorist is to shout theater in a crowded fire.

Tracey B. Strong, 1978

AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PRESENT OF AN ETHNOGRAPHIC MOMENT

I make an ethnographic present out of a very ethnographic moment, the years between 1767 when Samuel Wallis ‘discovered’ Tahiti and 1797 when European hegemony established a first institutional presence in the central Pacific in a mission station. These years were towards the end of the period in which European philosophes exhilaratingly and selfconsciously knew themselves to be ‘enlightened’. Identifying with those who, as Immanuel Kant described them, ‘dared to know’, belonged to the naming process of discourse. We know the comfort it brings. The ‘Enlightenment’ of one century is ‘structuralism’, ‘neo-marxism’, ‘postmodernism’ of another. Recognition of keywords, a sense of the meta-phoric nature of styles of thought, a feeling that what one has just read is what one was about to say, knowing the truth in the caricatures of oppositional stands made by one’s associates, knowing on the other hand how untrue the stereotypifications are of oneself—all the stuff by which paradigms and epistemes are made and seen—had given for nearly a hundred years a tribal sense to the lovers of criticism, the ‘enlightened’. They had been to the top of the mountain with Petrarch and opened Augustine’s Confessions with him there. ‘Men went forth to behold the high mountains and the mighty surge of the sea, and the broad stretches of the rivers and the inexhaustible ocean, and the paths of the stars and so doing lose themselves in wonderment’. ‘A new thought seized me’, Petrarch had written, ‘transporting me from space into time’ (Gebser 1984: 13–14). To have discovered that everything in nature, everything in human beings was set in time, that the abstractions of law, science and the market, even God himself, were in time was indeed enlightening. It made for a season of observing.

Those years of the late eighteenth century were years in which England itself was thought to be eminently observable. Anglophilia was strong among the ‘enlightened’, mostly because the English were deemed to have managed time so well, so expediently and so stylishly, in government, in law, in political economy, in religion, in moral philosophy. Joseph Addison had helped make it so as ‘The Spectator’ in The Spectator. ‘I live in the World rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species’. ‘I have acted all the Parts of my life as a Looker-On’ (Marshall 1986: 9). Irony was the enlightened s trope, the spectators worldliness. Irony requires a perspective, a line of vision that the looker-on has but that the participant does not. Of course, this can often be merely a matter of physical angles of vision in which one can be enlightened by seeing something from a different angle. But perspective is more composed than th...

Table of contents

• PERFORMANCES
• Prelude
• Making a Present out of the Past HISTORY’S ANTHROPOLOGY
• Presenting the Past HISTORY’S THEATRE
• Returning to the Past its own Present HISTORY’S EMPOWERING FORCE
• Postlude