Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty, and: Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind (review)

Though radically different in their theoretical apparatuses and ideological stances, these two authors, who have previously contributed significantly to the ongoing retheorization of modern drama and theatre (Kubiak 1991, Demastes 1998), share a remarkably expansive approach to theatre studies. Both propose bold recontextualizations of performance that would, if successful, bring this field into some of the most vital conversations concerning mind, nature, and memory in and beyond the humanities today. Unfortunately, both books have something else in common: agendas so ambitious as to make them seem, to different degrees, positively quixotic. The main item on both agendas is theatre itself, or rather, a vision of theatre as a cure for some of the gravest ills of modern culture.

In their diagnoses of the source of these ills, however, Anthony Kubiak and William W. Demastes part company. The former, focusing exclusively on American culture, finds it plagued by a pervasive theatricality with deep historical roots and disastrous political consequences. Demastes's point of departure is much more familiar and also more generalized, extending beyond America to the West as a whole: it is the rationalistic legacy of the Enlightenment, especially as valorized by the mechanistic and empirical sciences of the 19th century. Both pathologies—blind theatricalization and smug scientism—are, the authors argue, susceptible to intervention and correction by certain self-conscious and consciousness-creating theatrical practices. For Kubiak this means confronting theatricality with the theatre itself, conceived as a critical space in which duplicities are foregrounded and unraveled. For Demastes it means cultivating a theatrical practice that foregrounds and engages the processes of consciousness.

Agitated States is a challenging and difficult book, aiming not only to explore the violence of American culture, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, but also to "assess 'what went wrong' in some of the theoretical thought of the 1980s and 1990s" (vii). These two goals are unexpectedly related, for what has gone wrong with theory, according to Kubiak, is that it has remained blind to the very conditions and formations that made 9/11 not only a tragedy but also, unfortunately, an example of American culture's long-standing, ever-increasing, and now near-total investment in spectacle. The attackers, says Kubiak, understood us better than we as yet understand ourselves, for they designed the attack with the formulas of the spectacles to which we are addicted. But they also misunderstood us as much as we misunderstand ourselves. They underestimated our capacity for neutralizing horror through commodification and repetition. In the attack and our reaction to it Kubiak finds "a violent indictment of who we are, people of the spectacle, blind to the theatre of it all" (3).

Performance theory—especially poststructuralist "contingency theories" like Judith Butler's (a primary target of Kubiak's theoretical critique)—exacerbate the very problem they should be solving. The pervasive theatricality that defines American culture is, in Kubiak's formulation, assisted rather than analyzed by contemporary performance theory, which notes and valorizes theatricality in a vast array of cultural practices but relegates theatre itself to the status of a pale ghost of cultural reality. In this dismissal of theatre, Kubiak argues, performance theory duplicates the defining anti-theatricalism of American ideology.

Agitated States traces the history and identifies the mechanisms of this virulent hostility to the very thing—call it theatre, performance, fiction, imagination, make-believe—by which this nation of immigrants has constructed itself. As such, it is an important contribution to the reassessment of anti-theatricalism currently underway (Ackerman and Puchner 2001, Puchner 2002) with which it shares a crucial interest in historicizing the relationship between theatre and other cultural forms, including literature. Kubiak's readings...