January 23, 2005
McKenzie: "The Efficacy of Cultural Performance"
McKenzie, Jon. 2001. "The Efficacy of Cultural Performance." In Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance London & New York: Routledge.
Overview: Trapsing through the history of performance studies, this essay frames the discipline through efficacy, liminality and resistance. The goal is to explain the significance of performance studies and to trace its contestations.
Scholars have regularly attributed the following to cultural performance: "1) social and self-reflection through the dramatization or embodiment of symbolic forms, 2) the presentation of alternative arrangements, and 3) the possibility of conservation and/or transformation" (31).
Performance studies inherently challenges, "provokes, contests, stakes a claim" (32). Like cultural studies, it "challenged theory to get real, while also challenging itself with theoretical questions concerning the status of that 'real'" (33). It pulls from a myriad of disciplines ranging from anthropology to cultural studies, linguistics to dance history. Four concepts are often cited as key: "Victor Turner's 'social drama,' Milton Singer's 'cultural performance,' Kenneth Burke's 'dramatistic pentad' and Erving Goffman's 'social psychology of everyday life'" (33).
For Carlson, "With performance as a kind of critical wedge, the metaphor of theatricality has moved out of the arts into almost every aspect of modern attempts to understand our condition and activities, into almost every branch of the human sciences - sociology, anthropology, ethnography, psychology, linguistics" (35).
Schechner: "Performance studies is 'inter' - in between. It is intergenic, interdisciplinary, intercultural - and therefore inherently unstable. Performance studies resists or rejects definition. As a discipline, PS cannot be mapped effectively because it transgresses boundaries, it goes where it is not expected to be. It is inherently 'in between' and therefore cannot be pinned down or located exactly" (50).
One concern: "By focusing on liminal activities, on transgressive and resistant practices, or, more generally, upon socially efficacious performances, we have overlooked the importance of other performances..." (52).
Notes: This framing of performance studies focuses on how the discipline is inherently other, and desirably so. There is contestation over how formal the discipline is and should be, a notable desire to be liminal and marginalized, situated outside of the normal structure of academia. Of course, this desire appears endemic to its self-view as resistant whereby acceptance would mean being a part of hegemonic discourse.
I have no idea how accepted this narrative of performance studies is, but the attempt to describe it is utterly fascinating, revealing many of the quirks of key characters.
Category: performance studies
Posted by zephoria at January 23, 2005 6:06 PM
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