Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (review)

Heidi R. Bean

Cultural Critique, 71, Winter 2009, pp. 151-154 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press DOI: 10.1353/cul.0.0033

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PROFESSING PERFORMANCE
THEATRE IN THE ACADEMY FROM PHILOLOGY TO PERFORMATIVITY BY SHANNON JACKSON Cambridge University Press, 2004
Heidi R. Bean

Shannon Jacksons Professing Performance is a timely book. The generic literary subdiscipline of drama has only recently yielded its place to the more charged, interdisciplinary, and ambiguous term performance. This shift opens the way for a wider methodological scope and troubles the taxonomies that once dominated literature and theater departments. Indeed, as any performance scholar knows all too well, the concept of performance has become a very large and shaky common ground for a variety of disciplines and practices, including music, art history, anthropology, philosophy, literature, and, of course, theater. To this contested terrain, Professing Performance aspires to serve as a much-needed Weld guide. What makes this text unique from other guidebooks is that rather than modeling a number of interdisciplinary approaches to performance studies, Professing Performance examines the discursive emergence of the Weld, mapping its interdisciplinary fault lines (what Jackson refers to as the axes of sameness and difference around which disciplinary identities collect), explaining the nature of its instabilities, and working towards more Xexible alliances within and around the Weld itself. Grounded Wrst and foremost in the history of the university, the book examines the variety of personal, theoretical, and institutional concerns, from practicality to professionalism and from generic purity to national identity, that has led some to champion and others to disavow the signiWcance of performance. Jackson draws on her expertise in rhetorical analysis and theater studies to demonstrate the ways in which the discursive switchbacks and
Cultural Critique 71Winter 2009Copyright 2009 Regents of the University of Minnesota

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interdisciplinary contradictions found in the evolution of performance studies contribute to its currently contested status. The competing genealogies of performance studies that Jackson illuminates expose the mistake inherent in assuming a close relationship between what she refers to as the p-wordsperformance studies, performance art, performativity, the performativesimply because they look alike. Butlerian performativity, for example, which develops out of linguistics, literary theory, and psychoanalysis and which examines the ways in which social identities cohere in the reiteration of normative conventions, has little directly to do with stage performance. One of Jacksons goals here is, therefore, to identify potential spaces for dialogue between performativity theory and theater studies, which will both allow for better communication between artistic and academic professionals and offer new ways of understanding the power employed and created in and by theatrical acts. Her ultimate goal is to interrogate the assumptions that link performance studies with transgression and resistance and reduce drama to literary professionalization, institutionalization, and bourgeois complacency. Complicating these stale descriptors enables a signiWcant rethinking of the methodological approaches to all varieties of performance. Each of the books six chapters can stand alone as a signiWcant and thought-provoking essay in its own right, but together the chapters work to expose and destabilize the disciplinary oppositions and assumptions that currently afXict the Weld of performance studies. Chapter one serves as the books introduction, in which Jackson argues for the importance of genealogical analysis, la Foucault, and begins to point to some of the challenges in present-day performance studies, including performances Xexible essentialism, or its tendency to inhabit the essentialist as well as anti-essentialist side of any conceptual binary (37), and the difWculty of performances hypercontextuality, which may at times be considered at odds with the decontextualizing goals of scholarly analysis. Chapter two examines the early twentieth-century institutionalization of the opposition between academia and practice, contrasting the struggle to include drama and stage performance in academic curricula (for example, at Harvard), on the one hand, and the resistance to dramatic literature rather than to performance practice in practical curricula (for example, at Carnegie Tech), on the other. In chapter three, Jackson examines the

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emergence of cultural studies, which helps to enable the opposition between text and culture, arguing that although this relatively recent Weld claims to have supplanted formalist literary analysis, it may from some perspectives be shown to perpetuate and even reafWrm the literary studies it disavows. Chapter four reconsiders the basis for the twentieth centurys antitheatrical prejudice. In chapter Wve, Jackson analyzes the speciWcally gendered effects of applying New Historical paradigms to theater and performance. Finally, chapter six looks at the work of Adrian Piper and Anna Deavere Smith to examine how performance responds to issues of racial identity. As is customary with such historical examinations, the chapters are arranged more or less chronologically, beginning with the creation of early twentieth-century theater departments and ending with a look at the work of several contemporary artists. Unfortunately, this arrangement interrupts and obfuscates what I consider to be Jacksons most useful contribution to contemporary performance scholarship: the possibility for putting theatrical performance and social performativity into a productive analytical relationship with each other that is theorized in chapter four and demonstrated in chapter six. Chapter four begins with Jacksons analysis of the discourses of Wgurality and literalism that have inXected performance scholarship at different times in different ways. Her trenchant argument Wnds continuity between the postmodernist disavowal of authenticity in Derridas notion of deconstructionism and the modernist critique of theatricality in Michael Frieds classic essay on Minimalist art, Art and Objecthood. Jacksons key term here is hypercontextuality that is, a sense of the situation that includes embodiment itself. For Fried, such hypercontextuality compromises art, confusing the object itself with its receptive situation. In identifying an alliance between Frieds objection to artists concern with the actuality of a work and Derridas deconstructionist critique of the very idea of actuality, developed out of the recognition that all things contain within them the means of their own disavowal, Jackson both exposes the mistake of too-easy oppositions and sets up the terms for her Wnal chapter, in which she examines the connections between performativity in its deconstructive mode and theatrical performance. Through the work of Adrian Piper, Anna Deavere Smith, Ntozake Shange, and others, Jackson examines the ways in which performance responds to issues

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of racial identity, ultimately concluding that one of the signiWcant values of theater is its ability to bring performance and performativity together by foregrounding the contingency of the subject that is the focus of performativity analysis. When, for example, Smith faithfully performs the conversational hesitations and vacillations that mark her white subjects speech in Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, she is, Jackson argues, exposing the unregistered citationality of white privilege through highly dramatized specularity of theatrical staging (214). By revealing otherwise hidden social conventions and then raising incisive questions about the force and receptive effects of these conventions, the cooperation of social performativity and theatrical performance can, she asserts, shed new light on the often-internalized processes and varied experiences of racism. For Jackson, this must be the agenda for drama and performance in the contemporary era, and, given recent critiques of the relief response to Hurricane Katrina, the rest of us may increasingly agree. Professing Performance is not, of course, the only book that attempts to map the unruly Weld of performance studies. But what makes this book worth reading is Jacksons own extreme interdisciplinarity, which unsettles many of the instinctive alliances and blind spots she might otherwise have. Her ambitious project examines key Wgures in the development of the Weld and contextualizes the debates within larger struggles over the role of the university and its relationship to social structures of gender and power, all the while self-reXexively interrogating the interests and assumptions of the genealogies she constructs. For students and scholars hoping to understand how performance came to be such a contested term, Professing Performance is a thorough and readable guide to this unsettled but rich terrain. And those looking for ways of putting that same contestation to productive use will be hard-pressed to Wnd better examples than the brief but thought-provoking discussions that comprise the books Wnal chapter.