Postmodernism Athens journals

PT Journal (Analytic)
AU Kaye, Nick
AT Presence and Resistance: Postmoderism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance.
CT TDR (Cambridge, Mass.)
CY 1994
DB General OneFile
XX Service Name: Gale
XX Date of Access: 12 Oct. 2009
IL http://find.galegroup.com/gps/start.do?prodId=IPS
DE Book reviews
DP Summer 1994 v38 n2 p181(3)
DP Jun 22, 1994
PB MIT Press Journals
PS Auslander, Philip
RM COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
SU Presence and Resistance: Postmoderism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance.
SU Presence and Resistance (Book)_Book reviews
SU Books_Book reviews
TX
By Philip Auslander. Michigan: University of Michigan, 1992; 206 pp.;
illustrations. $34-50 cloth.

In Presence and Resistance, Philip Auslander expands upon a series of
essays first published between 1987 and 1992. Drawing a definition of
the postmodern around the increasing "mediatization" of contemporary
culture, Auslander observes the imbrication of "high" art and
"popular" entertainments, and identifies politically "resistant"
aesthetic practices in solo performances by Laurie Anderson and
Spalding Gray, productions by The Wooster Group and stand-up routines
by Sandra Bernhard and the late Andy Kaufman.

Beginning with a qualification of Jean Baudrillard's proposition that
contemporary culture is characterized by the circulation of "pure
information without meaning, signs without referents" which has
resulted in "the end of the social" (15), Auslander argues for the
necessity of attacking this process from within. Adopting Raymond
Williams's concept that the mass-media (television) drains meaning
from the individual unit of information in favor of the flow of
information into which it is absorbed (1974), Auslander sees the power
of the media rooted not only in an overwhelming of stability and depth
of the sign, but also in the isolating of the individual spectator.
Extending this reading into an understanding of the "culture of
television ... as television" (19), Auslander calls the efficacy and
meaning of conventional avantgarde and political art practices into
question.

Auslander draws on Frederic Jameson to argue that aesthetic production
has been integrated into commodity production generally (1991). By its
very dissemination through the media, Auslander argues, as well as its
own self-conscious mediatization, "avantgarde" performance has lost
its capacity to transgress: analogously, overtly political
art--through its absorption into the flow of signifiers--is no longer
able to project itself or its vision beyond the parameters of that
which it would contest. The result is straightforward. Just as this
"information saturated environment" leads to the sense that
"generating still more information is less desirable than manipulating
and combining existing information" (17), and so too the
characteristic "postmodern" play with sign and style, so conventional
political strategies are rendered impotent.

Where the flow of information itself disarms "content," neither a
control of "content" nor ownership of the media can counter its
effect. It follows that a "postmodernist" political art, one that
reflects critically upon this mediatized culture, must resist
co-option from within the flow, finding its political voice through a
deconstruction of the very stream of representations of which it is
constituted.

In this context, Auslander contrasts 1960s political theatre to
contemporary "deconstructive" performance practices. Where the Living
Theatre and The Performance Group were drawn into the paradox of
attempting to liberate the spectator by valorizing the performer's
presence, Auslander suggests, "postmodernist" performance exposes the
performer's charismatic hold on the spectator, and in doing so
participates in the wider poststructuralist project which would
disrupt "the Western metaphysics of presence" (48). In this way,
Auslander argues, the "mediatized" performances of Laurie Anderson and
Spalding Gray "mime ... the process of mediatization of the subject"
(81), as their self-conscious construction of their media
"personalities" at once participates in and deconstructs their own
commodification.

Auslander goes on to consider The Wooster Group's manipulation of the
iconography of gender and race, their attack, in L.S.D .... Just the
High Points, on the opposition between historical and fictional
discourses, and, through this, and their presentation of an "image of
culture conceived |as an arena of contestation' (Foster 1985)" (104).
Drawing on Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984), Auslander suggests that in
its deep resistance to the construction of a dominant discourse, such
work is inescapably postmodernist.

Finally, Auslander traces out analogous provocations in stand-up, and
through them, the imbrication of comedy and performance art. Focusing
on Andy Kaufman's various acts and Sandra Bernhard's live act and
film, Without You I'm Nothing, Auslander sets Kaufman's routines
against "conceptual performance," recounting his presentation of
unconventional routines in conventional "comedy" contexts. As a
result, Auslander suggests, Kaufman's "acts" deliberately served to
disrupt the terms through which the audience attempted to read his
work. What emerges, then, is "comedy about the failure of comedy"
(125), a comedy which not only calls into question its own efficacy,
but, as it does so, raises questions over the response and behavior of
its audience, even their reasons for attending. In this situation,
Auslander suggests, where Kaufman pointedly tries not to be comic, the
very "contentlessness ... leaves the charismatic relationship fully
exposed: the audience is |hooked' purely by the performer's presence,
not by the significance of his or her performance" (141).

Emerging amongst other volumes concerned with contemporary American
performance and postmodernism, in particular Birringer (1991) and
Vanden Heuvel (1991), Presence and Resistance is an important
statement about the nature of political practice in contemporary
theatre, a statement strengthened by Auslander's careful balance
between the claim for efficacy and an acknowledgment that, where this
efficacy is founded upon the provocation of "undecidabilities," the
critic can only identify a political potential. Indeed, Auslander
acknowledges that such overtly deconstructive practices cannot easily
avoid an ambivalent relationship with that which they at once replay
and disrupt. Auslander quotes Derrida, who warns that "by using
against the edifice the instruments or stones available in the house
... one risks ceaselessly confirming, consolidating ... at an always
more certain depth, that which one allegedly deconstructs" (25). What
emerges here, as Auslander acknowledges, is more "a |theatre with a
politic' than |political theatre'" (104). Yet these very uncertainties
are in keeping with other conceptions of postmodernism. By disarming
or disrupting representation, deconstructive practices produce a
deeply ambivalent space for dispute, where resistance to explanation
and resolution is taken to be a resistance to commodification.

Yet it is in the context of this concern for deconstructive strategies
that one might also question the particular parameters and critical
methodology of Auslander's study. Within the disruption that Auslander
traces is an assumption of latent instability within representation
and thus within the work itself. One cannot, from this "postmodern"
perspective, look within the work (as the modernist critic might) for
its meaning, as meaning is an effect of the very flow of discourses
that Auslander sees politically resistant work disrupting.

This notion of the "work," like the postmodernism debate itself, has
important consequences for criticism. Yet, perhaps because Presence
and Resistance draws a larger frame around a collection of individual
essays, Auslander does not make a sustained address to these
implications. Acknowledging that "no monolithic description or
evaluation" (7) Of postmodernism is possible, Auslander draws on
Jameson's self-conscious use of postmodernism as a "pragmatic fiction"
(6), a way of historicizing a time in which the very notion of
historical and critical perspective is called into question. Jameson
himself draws on Baudrillard, who argues unequivocally for the
collapse of the distinction between criticism and its object, and in
doing so poses very difficult problems for any criticism that wishes
to claim transparency.

Such problems, of course, are not open to any final resolution from
within the postmodern. Yet in using "postmodernism [...] as a
periodizing term for the present and recent past" (5-6), Auslander can
be accused of passing too readily over the implications of these
conceptions of the postmodern for criticism itself Indeed, the
association of postmodernism with "the present" invariably lends
itself to too exclusive or general a view of postmodernism and
postmodernist practice. Here, particularly, one might argue that
Auslander passes over various deconstructive performance practices
that do not readily fit into an association of the postmodern with
1980s (mediatized) culture, some of which Auslander has touched upon
elsewhere (1992). In this respect, and from an interest in the
postmodern, Presence and Resistance has left a conflict unresolved: a
conflict between a concern for the contemporary, for "mediatized
culture," and a construction of the postmodern as a "pragmatic
fiction" which others might readily use; a conflict, in other words,
which results in too narrow a definition of postmodern practice.
Unquestionably, though, Auslander makes an important contribution to
what he quite rightly identifies as a phenomenon characterized by
"mutually contradictory, antagonistic and just plain different
manifestations" (7), and whose entry into performance criticism
through this book, and no doubt through many responses to it, is just
beginning to take hold.

References

Auslander, Philip 1992 "Vito Acconci and the Politics of the Body in
Postmodern Performance." In After the Future: Postmodern Times and
Places, edited by Gary Shapiro. New York: State University of New York
Press. Birringer, Johannes 1991 Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press. Foster, Hal
1985 Recordings. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. Jameson, Frederic 1991
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London:
Verso. Lyotard, Jean-Francois 1984 The Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press. Vanden
Heuvel, Michael 1991 Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance:
Alternative Theatre and the Dramatic Text. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press. Williams, Raymond 1974 Television: Technology and
Cultural Form, New York: Schocken Books.

Nick Kaye is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Warvick.
He is the author of Postmodernism and Performance, forthcoming in
1994.