Genealogies of Performance Studies

In the last decade, several scholars have innovated in the practice of performance historiography. Significant for this body of scholarship is the notion of a “genealogical” consciousness, one that calls for history writing that recognizes the multireferentiality of particular terms and that takes seriously patterns of discontinuity in apparently linear historical progressions.1 As performance scholars use the concept of genealogy to write histories of performance, I will argue for a similar consciousness in our histories of performance studies as a discipline itself. Any introduction to performance studies must include an understanding of the many, often contradictory, ways that our field has been incorporated into the academy. By scrutinizing the arena of academic knowledge production in which many of us learn, teach, and are employed, we will better define the predicament of performance as a cultural practice, as a historical body of knowledge, and as a discipline in higher education. Through such an encounter, the study of performance history comes to terms with the history of performance study.

Disciplinary Genealogies

My approach in this essay derives from a larger project, one that itself derives from a larger mission, to reconcile if not exactly to resolve the relationship between the study of performance and the structures of higher education (Jackson, 2004). Many of us who identify as scholars of performance have found it necessary to adopt a heuristic as well as ironic perspective on what exactly it means to affiliate with such a protean, productive, and impossible discipline. As a field recently consolidated under the umbrella of “performance studies” —incorporating literary, media, theatrical, art historical, and anthropological analyses of diverse cultural forms—performance draws from newer discursive currents in cultural studies and in feminist, critical race, postcolonial, and queer theory.2 As such, the field can be said to be both an activator and a symptom of new trends in humanities scholarship, incorporating interdisciplinary approaches and responding to political critiques of identity that have circulated throughout the cultural field. Such larger trends have of course been the subject of [Page 74]conflicted discussion as scholars such as Gerald Graff (1987, 1992), Sander Gilman (2000), John Guillory (1993), and (posthumously) Bill Readings (1996) consider the future of the humanities and, indeed, the field of the cultural more generally. It will be my contention throughout this essay that performance and performance studies actually play a partial, multireferential, and ambiguous role in such discussions, an instability whose consequences come into higher relief when current discussions are placed next to disciplinary histories.

To exemplify the predicament of performance in larger discussions of higher education, consider Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg's “A Manifesto for the Humanities in a Technological Age” (2004, p. B7), a much-circulated document that called for a firm embrace of new trends in “literary theory,” “science studies” and “post-colonial” classics. While celebrating the fact that the “humanities in 2004 are a many-splendored thing” they also lamented the fact that “humanists do not receive credit for the contributions they make” (¶ 11). In the document, Davidson and Goldberg offered bullet-pointed lists of different “characterizations of the humanities,” deciding to position it “normatively” as a site for disseminating an “historical” imagination, an understanding of “relationality,” a “conscience and critical memory,” the “social values” behind social policy, and a respect for cultural and linguistic “diversity” (¶ 16–23). They argued that such moral and critical skills were part and parcel of the cultural education now offered in a modern research university, a realm of “insight” and “value” that surpassed the technical training in “expertise,” “vocational training,” or “specialized … skills” offered “in a trade school” (¶ 11–12). Interestingly, “performance theory” made an appearance on their list of humanist contributions, credited with having “(at long last) broken down the barrier between humanistic writing about the arts and actual artistic production” (¶ 7). The “arts” also reappeared again as a domain that was “vital” to the humanities, “co-terminous and codepen-dent… both are concerned with representation. … Both are based on assumptions that there are multiple forms of intelligence.” However, their elaboration had a slightly different tone: “The relationship of the humanities to the arts, however, cannot be simply subject and object (the aesthetic production as an object for humanists). Artists have traditions of expression, voice, and performativity from which those of us in the humanities have much to learn” (¶ 19). Rather than simply another normative characterization of the humanities, the domain of the arts was less securely under the humanist umbrella, even if its potential contribution warranted inclusion in a humanist manifesto. By suggesting that humanists still had much to learn from artists, Davidson and Goldberg somewhat unselfconsciously qualified their own previous assertion that performance theory had (“at long last”) broken down the barrier between these realms. Interestingly, their text seemed both to celebrate and defer the undoing of the boundary between the humanities and “actual artistic production.”

...