Kate Sample
A Summary and Application of Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance
Here it is a book seen from the outside. A book is only a book when seen from the outside. Seen from
the inside, a book is not a book, but a train ride at night - Michael Goulish
In his book Presence and Resistance, Philip Auslander responds to the claims of many prominent cultural theorists that recent performance has been unable to engage in political critique. He argues contemporary performance can - and has - mounted a critique of postmodern politics. He holds up performance of the 1980’s as an example of politically critical (what he terms ‘’resistant’’) performance, claiming it carved a space for political critique by questioning, or reconstructing, the authority of the performer’s presence. He breaks his argument into two parts. First, he positions resistant performance of the 1980’s within postmodern mass media culture and identifies it as a response to the failure of the 1960’s avant-garde. Second, he examines the resistant strategies performers of the 1980’s employed to deconstruct presence and mount political critique. He focuses mainly on performers Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, and The Wooster Group, and secondarily on comedians Andy Kauffman and Sandra Bernhard to illustrate his points. Part I will summarize Auslander’s argument, and Part II will use his insights to discuss Michael Goulish’s book, 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance, which gains relevance as a resistant text in light of Auslander’s analysis.
Part I
Auslander takes time to situate the performances of the 1980’s within the context of postmodern culture before launching his main argument on the strategies resistant performance employed. The ‘’mediatized,’’ information-saturated, environment of mass media culture, he argues, is paralyzing. Paralysis extends to the political sphere, where even the most vehement political critique is neutralized by the fact that one “must participate in the very activity that is being denounced... to denounce it’’ (Jameson qtd. Auslander 23). Auslander acknowledges mechanized culture’s impact on political critique but refuses to accept the conclusions of other major cultural/media theorists that a politically resistant performance aesthetic has not yet been developed, or that performers can only find a voice by rejecting mainstream culture altogether. Instead, he argues that performers of the 1980’s succeeded in critiquing postmodern cultural politics and did so, necessarily, from within mediatized postmodern culture.
Auslander explains the significance of internal critique, arguing that resistant performance of the 1980’s grew from a rejection of the fringe approach of the 1960’s avant garde. Experimental performance of the 1960’s, he says, attempted to remove itself from the mainstream. It focused on the power of the performer’s ‘’pure presence’’ (37) and used presence to offer another an alternative socio-political model. But, Auslander points out, while performers manipulated presence to offer a new socio-political model, they did not critique the nature of, or the relationship among, power, presence, and politics. They could only refigure, not critique, the political practices from which they sought to distance themselves. Performers of the 1980’s, he claims, succeeded where their predecessors failed. They did not try to step outside the dominant culture, but worked within it. Instead of manipulating presence to enforce an alternative political order, they examined and reconstructed the ways that ‘’pure presence’’ is assigned power.
Once he positions performance of the 1980’s within mediatized postmodern culture and in relation to the avant garde of the 1960’s, Auslander begins Part II and his more specific argument outlining the strategies resistant performers employed. He claims performers succeeded in deconstructing presence in two ways: by replicating the “flow’’ of media culture and by appropriating and recontextualizing historical texts. He links specific performers to both strategies to argue his point. Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, and the Wooster group replicate the flow of media culture, and the Wooster Group appropriates and recontextualizes historical texts. He also includes examples of performers more closely associated with popular culture. He ties Andy Kauffman to the strategies of reconstruction illustrated by the Wooster Group, and Sandra Bernhard with those of Anderson and Gray.
The first strategy of resistance Auslander details is the replication of the structure, or flow, of media culture. The flow of media culture, Auslander argues, reflects the structure of television, bombarding individuals with an endless string of decontextualized bits of information but offering no overarching, connective narrative. It destroys reciprocity between media and the individual, as well as between the individual and her peers. It creates, he says, a culture of disempowered, isolated individuals, “inert members of a series... [each an] Other in the midst of Others’’ (Sartre qtd. Auslander). Laurie Anderson and Spalding Gray, Auslander claims, reflect the flow of mass media in the structure of their performances and place their performance selves inside that structure, confronting audiences with representations of their own isolation and the processes by which their critical voices are muted.
The Wooster Group also replicates the flow of media culture in their performance structure, Auslander says, but he focuses on another resistant strategy they employ: the appreciation and recontextualization of historical texts. He explains that by appropriating historical texts, such as Miller’s The Crucible, and distancing themselves from them, the Wooster Group exposes the text’s underlying political assumptions. This strategy manipulates the text as a frame, not for the performance of the text itself, but for the performance of the actors performing the text, undermining textual authority as well as traditional notions of compliant actorly presence. The group does not offer an explicit commentary on the disturbing images raised by their repositioning of historical texts but calls on audience members to formulate their own commentaries, their own answers to the questions raised; in doing so, the group returns critical voices to the audience.
The last portion of Auslander’s argument deals with the resistant performances of popular entertainers. He examines the performances of Andy Kauffman and Sandra Bernhard and links them to strategies of resistance outlined earlier. Kauffman, Auslander argues, reconstructed presence by offering himself as a product of the media: he never revealed a ‘’true’’ Kauffman-as-performer, only Kauffman-as-character. By presenting himself as a product of the mass media, and placing himself inside it, he held up the mass media itself for critique. Auslander compares Kauffman’s use of the media to frame and create his identity to the Wooster Group’s manipulation of historical texts to frame their performances.
His analysis of Bernhard’s performance is slightly less developed. He focuses on her refusal to identify herself according to her sexual orientation. He loosely ties her to the resistant strategies of Anderson and Gray, suggesting her refusal to place seemingly contradictory cues about her sexual identity into a homo-, hetero- or even bi-sexual frame, is reminiscent of the structural flow of their performances, which placed decontextualized bits of information in a “free-floating” chain, without offering an overarching narrative. Her insistence on maintaining indeterminate sexual orientation, he argues, presents audiences with (and assumes as a subject) a protean, flexible, resistant identity.
Auslander concludes by summarizing his argument and placing it, once again, in the context of a greater theoretical debate. He restates his attempt to outline a performance aesthetic that works within the terms of mass media culture and simultaneously resists them. He remains cautiously optimistic that if performers can represent the isolated, politically impotent subject of media culture, while dealing in its currency, they can open the space for political critique.
Part I I
Auslander’s identification and analysis of resistant performance strategies illuminates Michael Goulish’s book 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance. Armed with Auslander’s argument that the reconstruction of presence is a successful strategy to combat the oppression of and political paralysis induced by mass media culture, we can identify Goulish’s deconstruction of authored presence as a resistant strategy to the same end. Goulish undermines the traditional authoritative role by deprivileging it. He speaks directly to the reader and admits his dependence on her; he joins his voice with others’, using lines and whole excerpts of other writers’ work, not to verify his claims, but to illuminate them; and he asks questions, demanding, like the Wooster Group, that his “audience’’ of readers construct their own answers, their own narratives, their own authoritative voices. In doing so, he gives readers back their voices and opens a space for a critical dialogue and political resistance. This analysis of Goulish’s text is, necessarily, partial and incomplete. It focuses on just a few examples of his deconstructive strategy, all of which are taken from his introduction.
Goulish reconstructs presence by deauthorizing his own voice and exposing textual authority as circumstantial and performative. On the first page of his book (even before the copyright information), he writes. “A series of accidents led you to this book... you may think of it not as a book, but as an amateur performance in a nearby theater.” By framing his book as an “accidental’’ discovery and an ‘’amateur performance,” he exposes his own authority as accidental or circumstantial - a crude, seams-showing performance of authority. In doing so, he redefines textual authority as circumstantial and performative, undermining the very basis of traditional textual authority and providing the tools to begin critiquing the politics of textual authority.
He continues to deauthorize his writing, saying, “Always remember that this book is not important. That other writer, that other performance, that other book that will now never be written— that was the necessary one’’ (4). In this passage, he devalues his own work by placing it in a world of “necessary’’ literary texts. He simultaneously exposes the failure of all written work by identifying the “necessary texts’’ as ones that will remain unwritten. In this way, he deconstructs not only his own writing, but also writing itself, suggesting there are an infinite number of exchangeable texts, each seeking to capture something necessary and elusive. The “necessary texts,” as it turns out, are not texts at all. By questioning his own voice, he questions and reconstructs his own instrument of communication. His reconstruction and examination of his own authoritative role opens a door to understanding the author’s voice as a political instrument, making political critique more feasible.
Goulish’s directly addressing the reader, an act that reconstitutes the reader’s presence in the text, de-emphasizes his authoritative role … [and encourages] the reader …to be active in the creation of his—disowned—narrative, reinstating the reciprocity between speaker and listener, performer and audience, writer and reader, that mediatized culture dissolves. On the first page, he asks his reader to “read...as a creative act’’ and repeats this request several times throughout the introduction: “I need your help. You must read creatively’’ (4). That Goulish calls on the reader to create as she reads exposes the passivity inherent in the traditional concept of authored presence, which focuses (myopically) on the writer’s creative act. His invitation reveals the author’s dependence on the reader, which he later admits in a passage To the Listener: “I realize I have imagined you...you are absolutely necessary for me, since it would be impossible for me to imagine this process other than in conjunction with a constantly imagined recipient’’ (24). By admitting his dependence on the reader, Goulish reconstructs and deprivileges the authoritative voice, and reconstructs the reader’s presence as powerful, necessary, and creative, resisting the mass media’s construction of isolated, mute, ‘’Other among others’’ (Sartre qtd. Auslander 80).
Another way Goulish deconstructs his authoritative voice is by weaving lines and passages of other writers’ works into his own. His book, which is broken down into 39 “microlectures’’ that resemble short personal essays, is filled with the writing of other authors. He discusses his strategy of textualappreciation in the introduction, saying, “this book represents a meeting place of many books… with that in mind, you may want to avoid reading [it] all together. Go directly to the source notes, and read the books from which I have quoted and misquoted’’ (3). By disowning his own narrative voice in favor of others’, Goulish deconstructs the myth of the individual author, replacing it with an image of corporate authorship that privileges other thinkers and writers as well as the reader.
Finally, Goulish’s book is full of questions—the kinds of questions outlined above: questions about the nature of textual authority, about authorial versus readerly presence, and simple epistemological questions (“What is a fact?” “What is a book?” “What is an Introduction?”) that quickly become complex. These questions function in two ways: they reconstruct his means of representation, and they give authority (back) to the reader. Auslander, perhaps, would identify his text as politically resistant. It is encouraging to see contemporary performance translated into a narrative that deconstructs traditional notions of authority and presence, and creates a space for critique within an oppressive political climate.
Works Cited
Auslander, Philip. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
Goulish, Michael. 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance. New York: Routledge, 2000.