Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture (review)

In Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture, Harris M. Berger uses phenomenology to classify "social behavior with an aesthetic dimension" (137). A less common trope than either affect or style, "stance" represents Berger's distinct approach to phenomenology.

What is stance? The book begins with a general definition: "the valual qualities of the relationship that a person has to a text, performance, practice, or item of expressive culture" (5). An associate professor of music and performance studies at Texas A&M University, Berger brings his reader, in his first example, to an American music conservatory where an undergraduate plays a Chopin piano piece (7). The performer has a relationship to, or stance on, the composition and on her interpretation. Additionally, there are "stance relationships" between the composer and the piece, and the listener and the piece.

At the heart of his argument, Berger uses stance to consider "the ways in which socially situated people engage with texts and bring them into lived experience" (xii). From here, however, the term grows increasingly slippery; he uses myriad hypothetical circumstances and case studies that further complicate stance and its potential nuances. Berger divides what he calls the "total stance" of complex situations into "facet stance," or distinct aspects of multifaceted experiences, and "meta-stance," an approach to a pre-established stance (33). Additionally, Berger expounds upon this phenomena as an active and intentional engagement with experience, thereby differentiating it from other, related performance qualities such as style and affect. Where style, for example, stems from "preexisting cultural resources," Berger defines stance as the active and intentional practice component of not only performance, but also of reception and composition (31).

Arguing that phenomenology is an underused method for understanding culture, Berger insists on its importance to disciplines including ethnomusicology, folklore studies, and performance studies. While he systematically grounds stance in work by Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Samuel Todes, and Hubert Dreyfus, Berger also engages in dialogue with sociology, media, and folklore scholars such as Erving Goffman, Philip Auslander, and Charles Briggs to link phenomenology to the performance and practice of art and society. Interestingly, Berger does not reference the genealogy of theatre and dance scholars who use phenomenology to address experience in performance. A closer look at this genealogy would complicate Berger's claim that phenomenology is an underused method. An acknowledgment of other phenomenological analyses of performance, such as work by Bert O. States (Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre [1985]) and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (The Phenomenology of Dance [1966]), would not detract from the originality of Berger's claim since previous models lack the social and cultural perspective that Berger brings to his notes on stance. Engagement with this preexisting literature would have strengthened Berger's argument and provided necessary context for his discussion of phenomenology and performance.

While it is clear that Berger chooses to present a breadth of examples for the sake of illustrating the wide-reaching nature of stance, his argument could have benefited from either a more methodical approach from outside of his own subject position, or a more self-conscious analysis of fewer situations. Ranging from music students practicing instruments and dancers performing movements to actors in popular television programs such as Everybody Loves Raymond and Happy Days, a lack of topical coherence or methodological structure linking examples leads me to believe that each anecdote is chosen from Berger's own culturally specific perspective. He presents models that seem to exemplify his own stance experience. In this way the argument is performative: Berger performs his own stance. However, he neither claims this as a research method nor acknowledges its shortcomings. Berger consequently fails to account for cultural and social particularities of situations that might arise from a more diverse sample of experiences.

While Stance mostly stays close to phenomenology...