The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics

Introduction,

Introduction SUE-ELLEN CASE & JANELLE REINELT Over the past several years, the field of theater studies has displayed an increasing amount of debate and dissonance regarding the borders of its territory, its methodologies, its subject matter, and its scholars' perspectives. The nature of this debate, one might even say struggle, is political. It concerns the "performance of power"-the struggle over power relations embedded in texts, methodologies, and the academy itself. The issues at stake include representation (what is represented and who is authorized to represent it), the canon (the deconstruction of it, or the inclusion of previously suppressed voices and cultures), and boundaries (the dissolving of disciplinary distinctions, the separation of high and low cultures, and the blurring of methodological distinctions among theory, history, and criticism). These struggles over representation and invisibility are far from merely "academic": they are based in the economic and social structures of the society, which, in turn, shape the academy. Thus, these scholarly issues are, in every sense, "political." It might seem strange that, in the face of such efforts to broaden the scope of studies, we have organized this book along lines that retain a focus on drama as a genre. In some ways, this arrangement is out of step with the new political sense that opens out, through notions of discourse and semiotics, to a variety of ways that configure not only what constitutes a discourse but how discourses interrelate. By maintaining this more traditional boundary of genre study, we still resist, to some degree, giving way to the full notion of cultural artifact and thus participate in the old ideas of art and its mystification of class as culture. Yet, in another way, theatrical discourse, as a term, participates fully in the new committed constructs. Clifford Geertz (in "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of SoIX x Introduction cial Thought") notes, from the point of view of an anthropologist, that "the weight of the [theatrical] analogy is coming to be applied extensively and systematically." 1 Theatricality as metaphor, or analogy, accommodates the materialist perception that there is a "playing out" of power relations, a "masking" of authority, and a "scenario" of events. In other words, power is spectacle. In this collection, Auerbach's article analyzes the way theater as metaphor represented the construction of a certain kind of "self" in the nineteenth century, while the nature of theater's metaphorical status in turn produced its own performance conditions. Likewise, today, that same dynamic allows the critic to negotiate among a variety of strategies and discourses that map the topology of theater studies across its cultural, political, and historical terrain. For us, the ongoing experience in our professional lives of these crosscurrents of politics, academics, and theatrics became especially acute during the past academic year (1989-1990).. Perhaps because of our long association as feminists and friends, our recent work for Theatre Journal, and our differences of style and rhetoric, and sometimes of affiliation, we found ourselves involved in a gradually developing analysis of the "performance of politics" at the sites of national conferences. Upon three separate occasions, in three different parts of the country, we found ourselves together in conference rooms and hotel lobbies observing and participating in heated discussions. There seemed to be a confluence of papers on politics and political activism at these conferences. This situation became particularly acute at the annual meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) held in Williamsburg, Virginia, in November 1989. At that time, with "theater and politics" as the overt theme of the conference / a number of the issues and debates of the past few years seemed to have reached a watershed-both in the critical strategies employed in the papers and in the state of the profession panel-particularly Gay Gibson Cima's intervention there, which problematized the performance strategies of conferences (see her essay in this volume). We began to see the need for a book that would bring these concerns together. Upon further reflection, we realized that the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference in New York (August 1989) actually set up the narrative of conference politicking at Williamsburg , as we perceived it. Thus, we have collected a number of the papers from both New York and Williamsburg, as well as some others, for pub- Introduction : Xl lication in this collection. In addition, we would like to tie together the two major sections of the book...