Responses to "Choices Made and Unmade"

Joseph Roach

In what looks like the inauguration of a styles section for Theater, David Savran invites performance scholars to unmake their fashion choices. Pondering the growing cachet of performance studies in recent years, he concedes that those who dress to "hang out with Judith Butler" or "cruise East Village bars in search of performative identities" find their work "a lot sexier than theater history." According to Savran, certain unnamed practitioners have thrown away their "antiquarianism" along with their pocket protectors, and he wonders about their motives for doing so: some, but not all, are "simply fashion victims suffering from terminal cases of ressentiment." Savran presents contemporary options in performance couture as Manichaean--T-shirts and jeans vs. tweed jackets--but his assignment of runway models from the House of Performance Theory is counterintuitive, to put it mildly: Victor Turner, the anthropologist, is hip but "symptomatic" of a seductively deconstructive "libidinal logic" of performance studies; Pierre Bourdieu, the sociologist, is stolidly unfashionable but proof (along with Raymond Williams) against the excesses of cultural studies, that "wildly eclectic arena where Elvis gyrates with Artaud, or Austin Powers shags with Lacan." (I'd be grateful for those references--what a prom!) Never mind that this bizarre cotillion puts Turner, fieldworking scion of the tweedy Cambridge ritualists, with the poststructuralists, while it leaves Bourdieu, a professor at the Collège de France who quotes Barthes and Derrida, hiking up his trousers to his rib cage and leading with his overbite. Nerd retro-chic? I guess that for empiricist and poststructuralist alike, those pens do leak.

Muddled dress-code aside, Savran might be challenged to give examples of performance theorists and historians who are not engaged in some fundamental way with the interpretation of culture and society. Is Turner such an example? Savran's selective presentation of the distinction between "liminal" and "liminoid" performances obscures the important idea of the contrasting roles of what Turner calls "social drama" in predominantly agricultural societies, where everyday life is crucially affected by such phenomena as the changes of the seasons, and industrial and postindustrial societies, where it is not. To dismiss as idealist the comparative ethnography that duly takes note of the development of the aesthetic as a category in liminoid societies, whose performances may be safely distanced from the pastoralist variety of ritual efficacy, is to recruit Turner as a straw man. The key Turnerian term is, after all, social drama, and as a paradigm of cultural analysis it might be applied to Jonathan Larson's Rent as readily as Bourdieu's habitus.

A number of the excellent questions Savran puts to the sociocultural moment of this musical--including that of the dissolution of the boundaries between high-,
middle-, and low-brow culture--are answerable ethnographically as well as sociologically. Is an "impoverished notion of the social" Savran's automatic verdict against those whose answers to such questions differ in any significant way from the "explicitly Marxist interventions of Bourdieu"? In the introduction to the "Cultural Studies" section of Critical Theory and Performance (1992), Janelle Reinelt and I cited Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu along with Victor Turner as useful exponents of differing but overlapping theories of cultural performance. The key point of overlap, we argued, was in their common emphasis on the importance of performances of various kinds (Williams, drama and television; Bourdieu, the social practices of everyday life; Turner, ritualized social dramas) in showing the many ways in which "culture may serve to exclude as well as to include different kinds of people for different kinds of purposes" (10). Turner's Van Gennepian explication of rites of passage, for instance, where the candidates for social inclusion pass over a threshold (limen) between the unborn and the born, the single and the married, or the living and the dead, illuminates by comparison Bourdieu's discussion of...