Postmodernism and the Discipline of Drama/Theater Studies

Author(s): Jane Goodall

Source: American Studies International , October 1993, Vol. 31, No. 2 (October 1993), pp.
24-30
Published by: Mid-America American Studies Association

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/41279160

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 24

Postmodernism and the Discipline of

Drama/Theater Studies

by Jane Goodall

is still moving "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism/'1 although he

WRITING is himself still moving
himselfABOUT was instrumental
was instrumental in giving"THEcurrency
"Towardto POSTMODERN
such a concept ina Concept in giving TURN" of currency Postmodernism/'1 IN THE LATE to such 1980s, a lHAB although concept HASSAN he in
American criticism from the early 1960s. In his recent work, Hassan dwells at
some length on the problematics of the term, for which he professes dislike. "The
word postmodernism," he says, "sounds not only awkward, uncouth; it evokes
what it wishes to surpass or suppress, modernism itself. The term thus contains
its enemy within."2 One of Hassan's most influential contributions to the critical
study of Postmodernism has been his two column schema, first published in
Paracriticism (1975) and reprinted with expanded commentary in The Postmodern
Turn (1987). This schema, cited again in two subsequent major studies of
postmodernism (David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity and Steven
Connor's Postmodern Culture ), stakes out the properties of modernism and
postmodernism in two parallel columns, as though making a gesture towards the
conceptual segregation of "the enemy within." At the head of the right hand
column labelled "Postmodernism" is"pataphysics/Dadaism."3 Hassan insists that
his divisions are provisional, and that he is deliberately confusing simplistic
attempts to define a postmodern turn chronologically: postmodernism is also "the
enemy within" modernism, working toward pluralism and indeterminacy even
as the high modernists are committing themselves to mastery and the logos,
totalization, hierarchy and closed form. But the particular enemy identified here
is Alfred Jarry4 whose influence from the 1890s through to the 1950s was
predominantly registered in the theater.
Whereas the application of Hassan's schema to architectural theory and
practice presents little difficulty (albeit requiring "provisional" caution), it is an
exercise which rapidly breaks down in a survey of theatrical modernism. In
architecture there is a marked "postmodern turn" in aesthetic theory and practice
which may be defined with some confidence, but it is difficult if not impossible
to demarcate an equivalent turn in the theory and practice of theatrical
performance. Rose Lee Goldberg, whose book Performance Art traces examples of
it through all the major movements of modernism, suggests in her introduction
that "live gestures have constantly been used as a weapon against the
conventions of established art" and that this has made performance a catalyst in
the history of the avant-garde: "whenever a certain school, be it Cubism,
Minimalism or conceptual art, seemed to have reached an impasse, artists have
turned to performance as a way of breaking down categories and indicating new
directions."5
Architecture and theater may be said to offer polarized views on the question

American Studies International, ^October 1993 , Vol. XXXI, No. 2

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 of t
has
pos
wri
has
crit
to h
crit
pos
The
cur
196
mod
hig
inst
rath
ana
Mar
the
term
app
rep
"th
spac
Wh
com
of t
pro
Mey
race

Jan
(fo
wi
tea
Ne

Am

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 26

romanticism/Symbolism pataphysics/Dadaism
form (conjunctive, closed) antiform (disjunctive, open)
purpose play
design chance
hierarchy anarchy
mastery/logos exhaustion/silence
art object/finished work process/performance/happening
distance participation
creation/totalization/synthesis decreation/de
presence absence
centering dispersal
genre/boundary text/intertext
semantics rhetoric
paradigm syntagm
hypotaxis parataxis
metaphor metonymy
selection combination
root/depth rhizome/surface
interpretation/reading against interpretation/
signified signifier
lisible (readerly) scriptible (writerly)
narrative/grande histoire anti-narrati we/petite histoire
master code ideolect
symptom desire
type mutant
genital/phallic polymorphous/androgynous
paranoia schizophrenia
origin/cause d ifference-d ifference/trace
God the Father The Holy Ghost
metaphysics irony
determinacy indeterminacy
transcendence immanence

From Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, pp. 91-92.

his " theatre of amazement, record break

the past stone dead, you can't help wonde
trajectory. It is perhaps in this loss of a p
to a strong teleological orientation that we
postmodernism, which has been dominat
words are threaded with incantatory insis
and Baudrillard.

American Studies International , October 1993, Vol . XXXI, No. 2

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 You
post
wit
usu
mak
ack
Deb
the
gen
mul
eter
has
Wh
dial
bac
pres
only
men
of s
Frie
of t
tha
pre
its
two
the
dom
In p
pra
sign
of m
tion
tra
colo
ano
ego,
uns
been
Sin
193
verf
obje
audience from narrative involvement and theatrical illusion. Five members of the
Black Mountain colony- Cage, Rauschenburg, Kaprow, Oldenburg, Segal- are
nominated by Fried as artists who have betrayed their original medium to

American Studies International, October 1993, Vol. XXXI, No. 2

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 28

"th
gov
dev
reg
dan
pat
sugg
and
been
mo
moment."
Richard Schechner and Herbert Blau have applied post-structural theories of
subjectivity to their work with companies of actors. Schechner has explored the
possibilities of training workshops as "a deconstruction process, where the ready-
mades of culture (accepted ways of using the body, accepted texts, accepted
feelings) are broken down."13 Blau's work in California during the late seventies
was dominated by the search for occluded presence and lost origins , seeking to
evoke "an initiatory breach which remembers primal violence."14
His quest is undertaken in full awareness of what Derrida, writing on Artaud,
had declared ten years earlier: that theatricality must traverse and restore
'existence' and 'flesh' in each of their aspects"15 but also that this was an
impossible quest because even the Theatre of Cruelty is bound by "the fatal limit
of cruelty which begins with its own representation. ..since representation has
always already begun."16 Caught between the rhetorics of "no longer" and
"always already," theatrical performance that still seeks presence and presentness
may be mortgaging itself to a kind of heroic futility. This, at least, is what the
logics of Derrida, Lacan and Baudrillard would decree.
Yet perhaps it is only by creating a time warp that we can escape the warped
time of postmodernity, which Baudrillard characterizes as tensed between
extreme velocity and terminal inertia. Perhaps, too, this impossible timescape of
postmodernity itself betrays a deep undertow of anxiety about presentness.
Perhaps the anomalous position of theater and theatricality in postmodernism can
offer some interesting perspectives on the postmodern turn. To begin with, the
term implies chronological bearings- yet postmodernism is chronologically
elusive. Lyotard suggests it is in some senses anterior to modernism, Hassan that
it overlaps and interweaves with modernism.
Habermas has pointed out that: "With varying content, the term 'modern'
again and again expresses the consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the
past of antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition from the old
to the new."17 Having served in this way since the fifth century, why won't the
term do for us? Is it that, for the first time since the fifth century, we have an era
which is unable to wrest the title "modern" from its predecessor? If the first half
of the twentieth century is unsurpassable and unsupplantable in its modernity,
it is understandable that the second half should be characterized by a pervasive
anxiety of influence, that it should have become a present without presentness

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 tha
the
Mod
"wh
as t
two
this
an a
basi
wit
dich
of e
Wh
the
earl
Arc
pre
The
sch
dem
mod
and
dem
If,
and
dra
our
as w
onl
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is in
spir

NOTES

1. This is the title of Chapter 4 of Ihab Hassan's The Postmodern Turn (Colum
Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 19 87).
2. Ibid., 87.
3. See Hassan, 91-92.
4. Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), inventor of "pataphysics" (the science of imaginary
solutions) and creator of the anarchic persona Pere Ubu.
5. Rose Lee Goldberg, Performance Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 7.
6. See Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism," New Left Review 145: 53-92.

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 30

7. Michael Fried, "Art and

(New York: Durron, 1968)
8. Ibid., 142.
9. Marinetti, The Variety Theatre, quoted in Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
(London: BBC Publications, 1981), 42.
10. Douglas Crimp, "Pictures," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation
(New York and Boston: Godine and The New Museum of Contemporary Art,
1988), 186.
11. See Steven Conner, Postmodern Culture (Ox ford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 138-140.
12. Eugenio Barba, Beyond the Floating Islands (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986),
100.
13. Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 99.
14. Herbert Blau, The Eye of Prey (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 198 7),
174.

15. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1978), 232.
16. Ibid., 250.
17. Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity- An Incomplete Project," in The Anti-Aesthetic,
ed. Hal Foster (Washington, D.C.: Bay Press, 1983), 3.

American Studies International, October 1993, Vol. XXXI, No. 2

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