The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics

Introduction

Introduction THOMAS POSTLEWAIT In his satiric "romance," Small World, David Lodge tellsthe picaresque story of academics in search of the perfect conference, a quest for the grail of knowledge, prestige, and power. The novel gives the impression (surely false, of course) that scholars today do little else but go from meeting to meeting, attempting to outperform one another in the conference rooms. The academic conference, as Lodge well understands, provides far more than a symposium for scholarship in a field; it also serves as the nerve center and network for the intellectual and social politics of academic careers. Quite appropriately, then, Case and Reinelt, in their introduction to this book, focus primarily on their own recent experiences at conferences in order to illustrate that these professional gatherings function as a forum for politics at various levels of engagement (and disengagement). For the theater scholar, the "performance of power" is to be discovered and charted not only in what is being studied-plays, performers, productions , audiences, administrators, institutions, ideas, and culture forcesbut also, more immediately, in the act of scholarship itself, the procedures of writing, delivering, and publishing essays. Accordingly, this collection, besides presenting a number of essays on theater and politics, offers in this last section a group of essays on the "state of the profession." As could be expected, these six papers, which are reports, proposals, or discussion papers rather than critical and historical essays, were all written for (or in conjunction with) past or future conferences. Thcy present diverse-and sometimes contrastingperspectives on the political and ideological nature of teaching, curricula, scholarship, administration, publishing, and professional organizations. 235 236 : The Academic Institution In the main, these essays take up issues that directly affect American theater scholars. Yet, despite this national focus, the basic concerns, if not the specific situations, are international. Theater scholars around the world, as the recent meeting of the World Congress of the International Federation for Theatre Research in Stockholm demonstrated, share many of the same political conditions, problems, and opportunities in their teaching and research. Although each of these essayists identifies certain problems or crises in theater studies today, what strikes me most strongly is that all of them call for, if not always spell out, a program of integration. The key question, then, is whether the recommendations for integration are sufficient to meet the various problems. The list of concerns, challenges, frustrations, and complaints is substantial: the heavy teaching and production responsibilities , the burnout of overworked teachers, the conflicting demands of scholarship and production, the backwardness and lack of critical sophistication of many theater professors, the smallness of theater programs, the secondary status of theater studies in the university (and sometimes within theater departments themselves), the ethnic diversity of the students , the gaps in the curriculum, the shortsightedness and rigidity of administrators , the neglect of important fields of study, the confining arrangement of conferences, the financial limitations on salaries and travel, the lack of cooperation among scholars, the nostalgia for supposedly "commonsense" scholarship, the resistance to theory, and the pervasive disunity in the complex field of theater studies. Faced with these problems, theater professors could easily throw up their hands in despair. But instead, if these essays on the state of the profession are any sign, they advocate a concerted effort to unify and advance the field of theater studies. Almost all of these essayists call upon theater scholars to respond to the ferment of ideas in other fields. As Margaret Wilkerson notes, "the path-breaking scholarship in these fields is revolutionizing the ways in which we see ourselves and the places where we look for knowledge." Also, the demographic and political changes in our societies surely should influence our teaching and research . The diversity of people, values, and ideas offers a formidable challenge to which we have not yet adequately responded. The diversity of scholarly methods and ideas has unnerved some pro- Introduction : 237 fessors, but many others, as Marvin Carlson points out, have quite willingly wrestled with the new issues. Carlson reviews some of the key developments and reminds us that the study of culture is always ideological. The historical "context" for theater presents us with "a complex and not necessarily consistent interplay of ideological forces affecting both the production and the interpretation of any artifact or document being studied ." In turn, the very discourse of the historian is always charged with ideological assumptions and values. This understanding underlies...