Posthuman Shakespeare performance studies

Is there (or are there) posthuman Shakespeare(s)? Or, to frame the question slightly differently, what would a notion of the ‘posthuman’ lend to our thinking about early modern dramatic writing in late (posthuman) (post)modernity? Much as digital writing has opened a material critique of the status of the printed work, so, too it provokes a reinspection of the stabilities often attributed to dramatic performance, especially those seen to arise from an artificial understanding of dramatic performance as predicated on the dramatic text. Rather than seeing contemporary ‘postdramatic’ theatre merely as a succession in technologies, we might more productively take the constitutive instability of performance – and perhaps especially of dramatic performance – as a location for the ongoing negotiation of the technologies of the posthuman. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 215–222. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.26 Is there (or are there) posthuman Shakespeare(s)? Or, to frame the question slightly differently, what would a notion of the ‘posthuman’ lend to our thinking about early modern dramatic writing in late (posthuman) (post)modernity? One way to track the question might be via a persistent yet surprisingly durable dichotomy, ‘text versus performance.’ Its durability extends well beyond Shakespeare, of course: as a field, performance studies was initially – and in some places remains – animated by a desire to restore or promote ‘embodied’ forms of knowledge and knowledge transmission against prescriptive r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 215–222 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ (could they be anything else?) epistemologies predicated on writing. For this reason – the bulking authority of writing in Shakespeare studies, the resistance to writing as the ground of effective performance in performance studies – ‘Shakespeare performance studies’ may well prove a critical oxymoron. The instabilities lurking in the phrase are revealing. In Shakespeare studies, for instance, writing about performance is commonly called – in terms used nowhere else in drama, theatre, or performance studies – ‘performance criticism,’ ‘performance-oriented criticism’ or ‘stage-centered criticism.’ The terms themselves imply that to write about Shakespeare performance is to incorporate the stage or performance (as though these were singular, homogenous, trans-historical sites, technologies, activities) to the licensed practices of literary critique. Yet, although the recent assertion of ‘Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist’ has challenged the ‘omnipresent’ distractions of performance in Shakespeare studies (‘If we have erred in the last thirty years or so, we have erred on the side of performance and at the expense of the text’ [Erne, 2003, 14, 23]), the distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘performance-oriented’ critique is considerably less than it appears. For much ‘performance-oriented’ critique in fact shares a sense that Shakespeare’s drama is ‘literary,’ that both critique and performance are modes of interpreting the text, and that performance (like a critical essay or even, heresy aside, a critical paraphrase) is a mode of access secondary to the privileged, direct encounter engaged through reading. And while the most ‘stage-centered’ of ‘performanceoriented’ critics – John Russell Brown and J.L. Styan come to mind – sometimes dismiss un-stageable ‘interpretations’ as intrinsically un-Shakespearean, they nonetheless ground the legitimate practices of performance (and so of ‘performance-oriented criticism’) in the text, Shakespeare’s text, that implement for the invention of the human (Bloom, 1998). The opening I would like to raise here is not, or not at first, from the ‘performance’ but from the ‘textual’ side. How have the ‘radiant textualities’ (McGann, 2001) of contemporary digital culture altered our (Western) relation to writing, and so altered the ways the performance of writing – more accurately, the uses or instrumentalizations of writing in the technologies of theatre – have defined a certain arena of ‘the human’: dramatic performance. Dwight Conquergood, Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor and others have not only worked to redefine performance away from the essentializing terms of Western drama and theatre (a gesture defined, perhaps, by Richard Schechner’s emphasis on performance as ‘restored behavior’), but have seen efficacious performance as providing a subversive means of contesting the uses of writing to legislate oppressive social relations (McKenzie, 2001). The genealogy of performance, in this sense, marks a subaltern strategy of resistance, the production of an alternative embodied narrative (Roach, 1996); in Taylor’s terms, the repertoire of unscripted forms of performance stands outside (and so potentially outside the control) of the institutional, legitimating means of Worthen 216 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 215–222 performance governed by the archive of writing (Taylor, 2003). While I think that on some occasions, these paradigms have been leveraged against a too-simple understanding of dramatic performance as fully troped by writing (the phrase ‘text-based theatre’ perhaps says it all), they are part of a wider effort not merely to redefine performance, but to reconceptualize the functioning of writing in the narrower genre of dramatic performance (Worthen, 2008). Here, I would like to position performance studies a bit differently. What if we were to see performance studies not as the successor to a benighted literary critique of ‘drama,’ nor as the replacement for a critically uninflected understanding of ‘theatre,’ but as part of a different revolution, a revolution in the instrumentality of writing itself, in the ways we make it perform, and make ourselves through performing with it. One edge of the ‘posthuman’ has to do with the unsettling of the boundaries of representation in all – aesthetic, political, phenomenal – senses. As Iain Chambers remarks, the ‘tendency to treat history, culture and, above all, political economy, as a world system’ characteristic of contemporary globalization ‘began with modernity itself’; the possibility of ‘reducing the world to a single and unique point of view,’ and managing it from there, is embodied in the development of Renaissance perspective, and reflected in the rise of the modern subject (Chambers, 2001, 26). Of course, print is an essential technology, perhaps the essential technology fashioning Enlightenment ‘humanity,’ and was long experienced as such, not only in the pervasive metaphors of the ‘book and volume of my brain’ (Hamlet, 1.5.103), but in the notion of books as at once material extensions of the reading subject and its convivial interlocutors. Perhaps more to the point, booking the word means creating the author as a subject and the book as the vehicle for the enactment of authority. To that extent, insofar as ‘the idea of post-humanism means to register limits; limits that are inscribed in the locality of the body, of the history, the power and the knowledge, that speaks,’ then our relation to print changes as well: ‘I find myself conversing in the vicinity of the other who refuses to be the ‘‘other’’ for me; that is, refuses to remain at a distance, as an object dependent on my desires and powers’ (Chambers, 2001, 26). Technological and cultural change are not synchronous; at the same time, it strikes me that the increasing liberation of writing from the book in digital culture has also rearranged familiar notions both of writing as the metaphor and instrument of ‘human’ consciousness, and changed the ways we make writing perform. To be sure, print persists, and in the enthusiasm to celebrate the ‘death of print culture,’ it may seem that the parade began before the corpse had arrived. But while print and the book continue to occupy important cultural, economic and metaphorical space, they are no longer definitive of writing: the ‘book and volume’ of the brain has been replaced by a different, digital random-access metaphor. More to the point, in many ways, digital writing – for all its reliance on the conventions of print – images not the 1 Citations of