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by Jane Goodall
Jan
(fo
wi
tea
Ne
Am
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
"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
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.
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.