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Theater 31.2 (2001) 106-107



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Response to the Responses

David Savran


Having played the role of agent provocateur with perhaps a bit too much gusto, I now find my explanatory narratives (and even my sartorial metonymies!) coming back to plague me. For I must own that I agree with most all of my respondents' points: yes, I was oversimplifying the genealogy of poststructuralism; yes, performance studies has unquestionably revivified theater studies and helped move it to the left; yes, I harbor a certain nostalgia for a 1960s that never was; yes, my emphasis on Turner ignores the other, and arguably even more important, figures who have defined performance studies; and yes, Bourdieu's study of art (especially in Distinction) is far more problematic, and far more specific to postwar France, than his theorization of fields and forms of capital. I failed to note--in defense of performance studies--that Schechner's turn to anthropology rather than sociology in the 1960s might be seen as a salutary rejection of the then widely influential structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons that brilliantly rationalized the most conservative principles of Cold War culture by imagining all societies as self-equilibrating, normalizing systems.

Responding to the responses, I would argue that the most important issue raised by this forum is less the relation between theater and performance studies than the role of the public intellectual. Despite the very real differences among my respondents, all would, I suspect, approve at least the broad outline of the activist-intellectual as sketched by Edward Said. That tacit approval accounts perhaps for a certain consensus among us, even as each disputes the disciplinary histories I relate and my fixation on the ideology of a founding father. For Said's theorization of modern public life as a drama offers an undeniable attraction to those interested in politics and performance. In this drama, intellectuals play the role of gadflies on the margins, "representative, not just of some subterranean or large social movement, but of a quite peculiar, even abrasive style of life and social performance." For intellectuals are misfits, dissenters, skeptics. Since exile is their "metaphorical condition," they always feel "outside the chatty, familiar world" of "accommodation and national well-being." Committed to defamiliarizing this chatty world, they are able "to see things not simply as they are," but as "a series of historical [End Page 106] choices." Despite the fact that they are obliged to be "unsettled and unsettling," they--or perhaps I should say, we--often manage to find homes, sometimes quite comfortable ones, in the academy. This contradiction produces a double bind that guarantees a constant struggle against the familiar worlds outside and inside the university and among intellectuals themselves for control of the fields they restlessly inhabit.

There is no question but that the contest between theater and performance studies is not only a turf war, but also a symptom of profound upheaval in the organization of universities. The emergence of new fields and the reconfiguration of old ones may well produce, I fear, the disappearance of theater departments within a generation, especially at elite universities. As theater is transformed into performance studies--and the process seems inevitable--virtually all social, cultural, and artistic disciplines and practices could conceivably be included under the new rubric. After all, couldn't both sociology and anthropology be considered the sciences of social performance? And isn't a painting or a poem every bit as much a performance as a play? By taking up a universalizing definition of performance--as does much of the most provocative work in the field--we are likely to find ourselves competing with scholars who are the products of more conventional professional training programs. My fear is that poaching on others' territories will foster a certain amateurism that, at its worst, will betray an ignorance of the long and contested histories of established disciplines. Yet if Said is to be believed, it is precisely this amateurism that could give performance studies both its intellectual heft and a certain political leverage. For he argues that only the not quite fully professionalized intellectual is able...

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