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Theatricality and Performativity pp 253–276Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Knots and Loose Ends: Metaphors of Range, Cycles of Change

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Part of the book series: Performance Philosophy ((PPH))

Abstract

Thread 7 revisits not only the various case studies, but also some central themes, figures, and tables from Thread 1: dramaturgy, contextualism, Pepper’s four world hypotheses. The ‘binary fourfold’ of theatricality and performativity is developed into a more ‘perspectival’ one, relativizing some of the key tensions and paradoxes proposed. An approach is outlined in which performativity names the way we tacitly weave worlds and identities, variously concealed or clarified by the step-aside tactics of theatricality. If the paradox of performativity consists in its naming the eventness of apparent objects and essences while simultaneously dissimulating it, then that of theatricality consists in rendering this eventness perceptible precisely by reducing it to manageable objects. To enlist the two terms in a general philosophy of action and perception—true to their etymologies of doing and seeing—if the performative names a dramaturgy of becoming, then the theatrical provides an optic for its analysis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Lessing 1890, 399.

  2. 2.

    Thread 7, p. 153.

  3. 3.

    E.g. Cull 2013, 8, 22, 25.

  4. 4.

    See e.g. Turner 1996, 26–51.

  5. 5.

    See e.g. Boyer 2001, 61ff.; Paavolainen 2012, 38.

  6. 6.

    Barba 2010, 204–5.

  7. 7.

    Pepper 1984, 243.

  8. 8.

    See Paavolainen 2012, 42–3.

  9. 9.

    See Ingold 2011a, 28, 86–7.

  10. 10.

    Ingold 2015, 15, 25.

  11. 11.

    Bohm 1980.

  12. 12.

    Cooper and Fox 1990, 575, 578.

  13. 13.

    Ingold 2011a, 236.

  14. 14.

    Ingold 2015, 15.

  15. 15.

    Cull 2013, 6.

  16. 16.

    Cooper and Fox 1990, 578.

  17. 17.

    Cull 2013, 12.

  18. 18.

    Sedgwick 2003, 8.

  19. 19.

    Cull 2013, 12, 229–31, 225.

  20. 20.

    Cull 2013, 22, 225.

  21. 21.

    Cull 2013, 16.

  22. 22.

    Cull 2013, 6. Thread 3 is cited from p. 115.

  23. 23.

    States 1985, 8. He exemplifies “the everyday nature of [such] perceptual extremes” by the experience of suddenly perceiving the bus he is boarding as “a queer, unforeseen shape,” “outrageously large and rectangular … heavy with material and texture” (8–9). Here, States’s notions of semiotics and phenomenology—the bus’s “transportational value” and this novel perception—approximate those of functional performativity and theatrical estrangement.

  24. 24.

    Jackson 2004, 15.

  25. 25.

    Pepper 1984, 98–9, 143.

  26. 26.

    Pepper 1984, 147.

  27. 27.

    Pepper 1984, 148.

  28. 28.

    Butler 1993, 12.

  29. 29.

    Butler 1993, 234.

  30. 30.

    Diamond 1996, 1.

  31. 31.

    Sauter 2000, 63; Weber 2004, 6–7; Fried 1998, 164, 168.

  32. 32.

    McKenzie 2001, 90; Schechner 2006, 34; 2003, 327.

  33. 33.

    Butler 1988, 519.

  34. 34.

    Bell 2007, 32, 36.

  35. 35.

    Pepper 1970, 42; Pepper 1963, 60.

  36. 36.

    Pepper 1963, 60 (relativity); Pepper 1984, 256–60 (integration).

  37. 37.

    Butler 1997, 147.

  38. 38.

    Loxley 2007, 124.

  39. 39.

    Pepper 1984, 252, 250.

  40. 40.

    Lessing 1890, 399.

  41. 41.

    Carlson 2002, 243–4; Burns 1972, 3; Fischer-Lichte 1995, 103, 88, 104; States 1996, 18, 19–20.

  42. 42.

    States 1996, 23.

  43. 43.

    Ingold 2007, 111.

  44. 44.

    Ingold 2011a, 63; Ingold 2007, 74. For Ingold himself, the argument “that theatricality does to life pretty much what [he] imagine[s] happens to the line when you cut it up and roll each segment into a tight ball … makes a good deal of sense” (e-mail 9 December 2014).

  45. 45.

    States 1985, 66–7.

  46. 46.

    States 1985, 68; Ingold 2011a, 152.

  47. 47.

    Cull 2013, 25, 212.

  48. 48.

    See e.g. McKenzie 2001; Postlewait and Davis 2003, 4; Austin 1962, 22.

  49. 49.

    Ingold 2011a, 162.

  50. 50.

    Ingold 2000, 361. Here and most often, Ingold is specifically discussing storytelling.

  51. 51.

    Ingold 2011a, 179.

  52. 52.

    Ingold 2007, 90.

  53. 53.

    Ingold 2011a, 161.

  54. 54.

    Ingold 2000, 361.

  55. 55.

    See his “Magnitudes of Performance,” in Schechner 2003, 290–332.

  56. 56.

    Cf. Thread 1, p. 12–13, and especially Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 235–43.

  57. 57.

    Schechner 2006, 54–5, 28.

  58. 58.

    Carlson 2002, 245–6. Specifically, he here discusses the theatricality that he has identified in the ‘performant’ aspect of theatre semiotics, as distinguished from the ‘referential’ in Alter 1990.

  59. 59.

    Ingold 2011a, 97; see also Gibson 1986, 16–9.

  60. 60.

    Ingold 2011b, 2. See also Derrida 1988.

  61. 61.

    Ingold 2011b, 11.

  62. 62.

    Ingold 2011a, 223–4.

  63. 63.

    Ingold 2013, 72, with reference to Merleau-Ponty 1964, 166.

  64. 64.

    Shaffer 1984, 26.

  65. 65.

    States 1985, 93, 36, 39, 29.

  66. 66.

    Pepper 1970, 28–9.

  67. 67.

    Cull 2013, 225; Pepper 1984, 234–5.

  68. 68.

    Cull 2013, 237.

  69. 69.

    Ingold 2011a, 179.

  70. 70.

    States 1985, 8.

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  1. University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

    Teemu Paavolainen

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Paavolainen, T. (2018). Knots and Loose Ends: Metaphors of Range, Cycles of Change. In: Theatricality and Performativity. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73226-8_7

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