Dance/Agency/History: Randy Martin’s Marxian Ethnography

The question of this special issue is Randy Martin and dance studies. Why is this a question? It is a question because Randy had a powerful influence on dance studies and because his work could also be considered in certain ways as peripheral to the field.¹ This is perhaps because he wrote on so many other topics, including Marx, academic labor, derivative finance, etc. But how can a scholar be considered both central and peripheral to a discipline? I want to propose here that one must return to the question of movement itself in relation to dance, meaning, and the social that preoccupied Randy throughout his career. Interconnections between dance, meaning, and the social were treated in Randy’s writing and public speaking with great sophistication and style. Anyone who heard him lecture or even converse can attest to this fact: There was almost a style of Randy Martin, one that was attractive and inimitable if also at times difficult and elusive. I propose here a close reading of certain of his early texts in order to track the commerce in his work between dance, meaning, and the social in his thought. Ultimately, my argument is that Randy returned repeatedly to the effect of dance on the audience and that this dance–audience relationship—expressed in certain important early essays as an ethnographic encounter—held the key to his thinking on dance in and as sociality. In a certain sense, the quasi-hypnotic effect Randy Martin had on us as a writer and speaker was itself the microcosm of this effect of movement on the spectator he was at pains to describe and theorize. This was, I believe, the great performative strategy of his presence in its written and spoken modes.

This article examines Randy Martin’s initial formulation of the project of dance studies in several essays on ethnography and representation he wrote and published between 1992 and 1998 in the wake of his first book, Performance as Political Act (Martin 1992, 1995, 1998).² What I offer here is a close reading of these essays. Moreover, this article also addresses the role of Marxian conceptual thinking in Randy Martin’s larger project.³ Yet, we must immediately nuance this to stress that Martin was not a believer in fixed concepts, but advocated instead for a rereading of Marx as a way of thinking in and of movement. “Naming,” he wrote of Marx’s fate, “fixes an identity that otherwise will not rest” (Martin 2002, xx).⁴ That neither dance nor Marx would rest in stillness forged a bond between Marx’s thinking and dance. Moreover, experiencing dance both as a dancer (which Martin was) and as a spectator allowed him to develop a protocol for reading Marx and writing about Marx. For Marx, as Martin liked to point out, “every historically developed social form is in fluid movement” (2002, xxi). I would venture to say that this was one manifestation of the model for dance studies of my generation, which works across critical reading and the experience of dancing and watching dancing. I would also venture to say that the intersection of Marx and dance was perhaps the most original among the many original insights of Randy Martin, and one that proved extremely generative for his work. I also want to suggest here that it might be equally generative for future generations of dance scholars. But it does come with certain theoretical problems that I hope to explore in what follows.

What does all this have to do with ethnography? Well, clearly it had to do with gazing upon the other. Martin’s early essays focused on the potential of dance studies in relation to the critique of anthropology as colonialist; the Marxian strain of the thinking in them was consequently somewhat implicit. “Anthropology,” wrote James Clifford, “no longer speaks with automatic authority for others defined as unable to speak for themselves (‘primitive,’‘pre-literate.’‘without history’)” (Clifford and Marcus 1986, 10). To look for a colonizing situation within the West, Martin seemed to be saying, one has only to look to dance...