Selective Inattention: A Traditional Way of Spectating Now Part of the Avant-Garde

SELECTIVE INATTENTION: A TRADITIONAL WAY OF SPECTATING NOW PART OF THE AVANT-GARDE Richard Schechner 1. Relationship between Social and Aesthetic Drama Victor Turner (1974) locates four actions as the nubs of social drama: (1) breach, (2) crisis, (3) redressive action, and (4) reintegration. A breach is a situation that schisms a social unit-family, workgroup, village, community, nation, etc. A crisis is a precipitating event that can't be overlooked, must be dealt with, or else the social unit will come undone. Redressive action is what is done to overcome the crisis-the crisis itself having stemmed from the breach. Reintegration is the elimination of the original breach that mothered the crisis: reintegration comes in two ways, either by healing the breach or by schismogenesis (see Bateson, 1958). Apply Turner's model to an actual social situation, say the recent dismissal of cabinet members by President Gerald Ford. The breach is the fact that Ford as an appointed rather than elected President carried with him a number of Nixon people on his cabinet. Thus, Ford was forced to defend policies he might not agree with and carry the stigma of a disgraced Administration. At the same time Ford wishes to seek the Presidency on his own.The crisis comes from severe embarrassment to the "security community" through revelations of planned assassinations of foreign heads of state, phone-tapping of Americans, and a widespread secret police apparatus whose operation pinnacled under Nixon. Other items added to the crisis: the disagreement between Ford and Rockefeller over aid to New York City, the growing feeling nationally that Ford is stupid and indecisive; and, perhaps (though there is no direct evidence), Ford's feeling that he was not the master of his own Administration . The redressive action, as described in the New York Times of Monday, November 3, 1975, was typically dramatic: President Ford has dismissed Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger and William E. Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, in a major shuffling of his top national security posts. Administration officials said that the President had also asked Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger to relinquish his post as national security adviser in the White House, but to stay on as head of the State Department. White House officials said that Mr. Schlesinger would probably be replaced by the White House Chief of staff, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and that Mr. Colby's likely successor would be George Bush, the present head ofthe American liaison office in China. 8 This redressive action did not end the crisis, but led to further surprising developments -as is often the case ("one thing leads to another"). Rockefeller told Ford that he would not in any case be a candidate for the Vice Presidency in 1976. And, in the Washington scheme of things, this apparent resignation by the Vice President is probably a firing by the President-the reversal of roles being a common face-saving device in American politics. Finally, the Secretary of Commerce resigned and was replaced by the one person in the Nixon Administration whose reputation was untarnished-even more, enhanced: Elliott Richardson, the man who resigned as Attorney General when his Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was fired. The reintegration phase of this social drama will take some time as Ford establishes "his own" government in preparation for the 1976 elections. The characteristic structure of this four-phase operation is that the breach exists for a long time, the corrective action is sudden and almost unpredictable because a precipitating event is usually not a crisis in itself but a "straw that breaks the camel's back." Once the action is over analysts can look back and "see what happened" detecting an orderly development of events that follow Turner's scheme. The scheme looks like: *Precipitating *Redressive Event Action eBreach - Reintegration *Crisis The visible drama is in the crisis and redressive action. From the hindsight of reintegration we reconstruct the whole sequence. This is where social drama and aesthetic drama coincide. Apply Turner's model to an actual drama, say Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The breach is the long-standing feud between Montagues and Capulets. Thus, wherever members of the two families meet there...