Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (review)

In both this and his previous book, Becoming Criminal (2002), as well as in a series of single- and co-authored articles he has published in the last few years (five of which are reprinted here), Bryan Reynolds ambitiously sets out to make what he calls "transversal criticism" a household term. In the process, he has enlisted a team of collaborators to commit themselves to an interpretive methodology that Reynolds has already branded as his own in the pages of Becoming Criminal, along with a somewhat more select, team of "sponsors" (as authors of forewords, afterwords, and book-jacket blurbs), to aid and abet his project. But since only three of the ten chapters that comprise the body of Performing Transversally are authored solely by Reynolds (with the first effectively serving as the book's introduction), and the book's afterword is ascribed in its entirety to Jonathan Gil Harris, one may well ask: Why is this a book by Bryan Reynolds, as opposed to being a collaboratively-authored essay-collection which Reynolds has assembled and edited?

The most generous response would be to submerge anxieties about what Reynolds would term "subjective territories" and see Reynolds and his cohorts modeling an alternative to the established practice of solitary scholarly production by transforming a monologic process into a more dynamically dialogic or interactive enterprise. Something refreshingly akin to a utopian or reformist impulse is clearly at work here, seeking to alter the normative terms of scholarly engagement in order to recreate and bring to the page the energy and give-and-take that goes into the collaborative compositional process—however overshadowed that impulse might be by Reynolds's entrepreneurial aims and ambitions.

This "utopian impulse" characterizes transversal theory itself, as Reynolds defines the staging-points of transversal movements, transversal territory, and transversal power, the modifying term being deployed throughout in a notoriously tautological manner to signal something good, desirable, better than what we have, to wit:

Transversal movements are feelings, thoughts, and actions alternative to those that work to circumscribe and maintain a particular subjective territory.

[4]

. . .

[T]ransversal territory is a mysterious, challenging, and transformative space through which people journey when they defy or surpass the conceptual and/or emotional boundaries of their prescribed subjective addresses, in effect subverting the hierarchicalizing and homogenizing state machinery of the governing organizational structure.

[5]

. . .

[T]ransversal power induces people to transverse and permeate the organized space of subjectivity, of all subjective territory, and venture into the inestimable space of transversality, where learning and metamorphosis can be dynamic and limitless.

[5]

Although Reynolds's penchant for overstatement often makes entrance to the transversal seem equivalent to a trip through inner space (summoning up comparisons with R. D. Laing's Politics of Experience and Timothy Leary's Politics of Ecstasy), his claims become more grounded, if no less grandiose, when he turns to the subject of "transversal methodology" and what its chief component, which he calls the "'investigative-expansive mode' of analysis (also referred to as the 'i.e. mode')," makes available (6). Unlike the "'dissective-cohesive mode' . . . the interpretive strategy . . . which characterizes most dialectical argumentation," the i.e. mode

resists anything resembling predetermination or circumscription and requires continuous maneuverings and reparameterizations in response to unexpected, even sudden, emergences of glitches, quagmires, and new information as it deduces, trail blazes, follows off-beat leads, takes tangential excursions, while rigorously sprawling analytically.

[6]

If the "i.e. mode" begins to sound like a description of the improvisational genius of an unusually cerebral jazz musician (or cinematic superhero), the comparison is apt for the project and process Reynolds is trying to promote here, which will avowedly retain the analytic rigor he knows must continue to be ascribed to the academic practitioner in order to authorize the kinds of speculative connections between high theory and tabloid topicality, canonical literature and its avante-gardespinoffs he is interested in making.

In the end, Performing Transversally and "transversal criticism" will thrive or die on...