Performativity and historiography – an introduction

Svein Gladsø

Firstly, let me thank the conveners for giving the topic such a prominent place in the overall program. I hope that we, the speakers, invited colleagues and guests, will justify the space given us. Already, the inclusion in the programme has given scholars, archivists and librarians with an interest in theatre history an opportunity to discuss certain challenges concerning the history of performance. In a morning session we have met to discuss the state of Norwegian theatre archives. During this session, we have confined ourselves to problems of accessibility, organization and information of archival resources in the Norwegian context. I think it is fair to say that we, during the last ten years or so, have witnessed a revitalization of the writing of the history of theatre in Norway – particularly manifested through doctoral theses. This is good, but at the same time, we have growing concerns about the management, maintenance and organizational framing of crucial archives. The meetings and discussions today will, hopefully, result in a bigger conference about the same topic in November this year. 

When we meet here, in this session, under the heading “performativity and historiography”, we take a slightly more theoretical point of view, trying to enrich the discussion on the state of the archives with some thoughts on the relationship between the scholar and the archive, through the lens of performativity. And in the afternoon session, being a little self-centered, we will try and gather some input for the improvement of a not-yet-funded project called “Art, culture, career” – hoping to benefit from all the sessions today. 

As you may have noticed, there are different “we’s” around today, depending on the sessions and the topics involved; “we” the group of theatre scholars with affiliates that met this morning, “we” the participants of this very session, and “we” the owners of the project. “We” hope this won’t be too confusing…

So, what does the concept of performativity offer theatre historians? At first sight, the answer seems to be in the negative. Performance studies and cultural studies after the performative turn are, apparently, busy with analyzing contemporary phenomena. I think this could be exemplified by looking at the programme of the seminar for these three days. Prove me wrong, but the study objects of the two following days are, temporally and physically, within good reach of the scholars involved. There is nothing wrong in this, but it illustrates the fact that the relationship between performativity and history – the past – is not something occupying the minds of many scholars. I think it is fair to say that the writing of the history of theatre, dance and music has not, yet, made performativity a core concept. One reason for that may be because other concepts and other discourses have contributed to the necessary problematization of historical work, in history in general and in the history of the arts. That is; the problems facing all contemporary historians concerning truth, objectivity, factuality, the role of ideology, the role of structure versus agency etc. have, by and large, been discussed without the involvement of theories of performativity. 

Della Pollock, in her 1998 book Exceptional Spaces, notices that theories of narrativity have covered a lot of these challenges, for instance through the works of Hayden White and his successors. Within these theories, historical narratives do not represent the past, they produce history, including turning points, agents and events. Thus, it’s quite easy to “translate” the findings of the narrativists into the realm of performativity, because historical narratives within this line of thought “perform” history. To quote Della Pollock, the writing of history, in fact, “becomes the ultimate historical performance”. In this sense, there is a relationship between performativity and history in modern historiographical thinking, but it occurs in the guise of other concepts and perspectives. May be because of that, specific theories of performativity haven’t been strongly missing in the field of historiography. We can disagree on that. 

Preparing this lecture, I had planned to differentiate between various kinds of relationships between performance and history – in particular between history of performance and history through performance. Within museum studies, life narrative research, historical reenactments etc. history is treated through performance. This way of rearticulating history through play and embodiment, was supposed to lie beyond my scope today. I had planned to use the work of Shannon Jackson as example of what should be my focus: the history of performance – that is; past events studied through the sharp lens of performativity.

Then I noticed that Della Pollock, in her 1998 Exceptional Spaces, mentions Shannon Jackson’s work, her contribution in Pollock’s own book, as an example of the opposite, of history through performance. And the picture got a little blurred. Della Pollock is referring to an essay by Shannon dealing with the Labor Museum at Jane Addams’s Hull-House in Chicago, and Della Pollock claims that Shannon Jackson “performs the Labor Museum” through her essay. This is done as Shannon “interrogates the status of the Labor Museum as a place, placing herself in dialogic relation to it”. This “performing” is done in an essay, not through a live performance. Following that lead, one could ask: what are then the important differences between performing history through action and through a narrative? Isn’t the divide important at all? Is this the consequence of the claim that the writing of history is the ultimate historical performance? That the distinction between performing and writing would only be one of means and methods?

I would like to follow that lead a little further, because I really would like to make the most of the presence of Shannon Jackson at this seminar. I do find her work, for instance the chapter I have referred to in Della Pollocks book, but above all her own book from 2001 Lines of Activity. Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity very inspiring for a reflection on performativity and history. Being very late in my preparations for this lecture, I have mentioned this for Shannon only during lunch today, so I hope Shannon forgive me for putting her at the very center of my considerations.

Before I move on, I think it would be informative to say some words about the material of Shannon’s chapter and her book – Hull-House and Jane Addams. Hopefully, it will also show the relevance of Shannon’s work for the kind of cultural history our project “Art, culture and career” represents, and which we will discuss later today. 
Hull-House was a so-called “settlement” in Chicago, established in 1889, as part of a larger settlement movement, a reformist social movement in England and the US, with the aim of having people from different backgrounds live more closely together in a community. The movement had its heyday during the 1920s. In a typical settlement volunteer middle-class "settlement workers" would live, sharing knowledge and culture with low-income neighbors. In the US, there were 413 settlements in 32 states by 1913. We haven’t seen similar institutions in Norway, partly because social welfare in our country has been a public responsibility for a long time, and partly because this was, predominantly, an urban phenomenon. The settlements, especially Hull-House in Chicago, offered a mixture of social, educational, and artistic activities, and, as such, we can recognize a kind of Enlightenment atmosphere known from European associations and societies from the late eighteenth century on, both in upper- and middle-class environments. What we also should recognize is the Hull-House practice as a kind of realization of the educational ideas of philosophers like George Herbert Mead and John Dewey, who developed their theories in close interaction with Hull-House. And we ought to know Jane Addams, because we like to know who we find worthy of our prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, which Jane Addams was awarded in 1931.

It is what Shannon does with this rich material that I find so intriguing, and that makes her work an important reference when discussing what performativity can do with history. 

So, partly ignoring the blurred difference between history of performance and history through performance, I would like to draw the attention to two aspects of her approach. 

Firstly, there is the reading of the well-analyzed phenomenon Hull-House in the light of performance theory. This means focusing on aspects like locality, space, embodiment, gender, repetition, structuration and so on. What is important in her treatment, in my opinion, is that such categories are not superimposed on the material – they are at the same time extracted from the world of Hull-House in a “bottom-up” procedure. Locality is situatedness in the theory of performance – and it is commitment to locality and community in the minds of the actual Hull-House residents. Space is understood through constructivist theories of space and identity, but space is also a contested and sought-after resource for the real settlers in their quest for performance places, for rehearsal rooms, for interactions. The concepts of repetition and structuration echoes Derrida, Butler, Bourdieu and Giddens, but these concepts, in fact, also indicate day-to-day processes institutionalizing and fixating the different lines of activity within Hull-House.

“Lines of activity” is part of the title of the book. This is, at the same time, a structuring principle in the book at the level “above” the categories already mentioned. And more than that: it is a concept formulated by Jane Addams herself (29), describing “projects” running through the life of the settlement. In other words, it is the self-understanding of the settlers that is formulated in this way. In this case, probably in retrospect, but nonetheless a perspective from inside. 

This is, in my opinion, an important point when considering such an approach. At the heart of theories of performativity lies an attention to identity formation, to self-fashioning. A research design and a methodological framework in this vein should probably seek “lines of activity” reflecting some sort of self-understanding, some sort of identifiable personal or collective project. In the tradition of social or structuralist history, explanatory factors are often theory-laden and found (or created) “outside” the agents. I understand history in the wake of the performance turn as a sort of microhistory with the “driving forces” localized differently. Anticipating the discussions in the next session, around the project “Art, culture and career”, I should suggest a discussion on where the “lines of activity” in this project were to be “found” and developed. It could be in the repertory, the plays, the dances, the musical scores, seen as arenas for the achievement of personal and collective goals – it could be the buildings, as places for this self-fashioning – it could be the rehearsals and the production processes, where the skills and competencies were repeatedly tested and, eventually, manifested as professions.

But back to “Lines of activity” again, for the last time. In Shannon’s book, the different chapters covering projects identified as lines of activity also have certain “objects” attached to them – a museum, an archive, an oral history, a monument – and this points to the second aspect of this performative approach I want to focus on, the dialogical relationship between the archives/(slash) the sources and the scholar. These objects (museum artifacts, archives, buildings) are described as some sort of “starting points” for the historian in a very specific way – they are sensuous and material entrance points inciting the process of interpretation. One can, of course, reflect on whether this is an aspect of performativity per se. In the first chapter of the book Shannon cites Walter Benjamin on such approaches. Benjamin claimed that in moments where the scholar recognizes the very act of working with the material, the sensuous experience of struggling with the pages, the handwriting, the microfiche – in these moments the image of the past may “flash” up – for never to be seen again. I don’t know if it has to be that way – that we have to have such experiences of “flashing images” during archival work, and if this is a sought-after quality in the research process. But it is a beautiful illustration of the embodiment of the research process. Shannon takes the feeling of crossing temporalities a little step further in the closing parts of the chapter, where she reflects over why and how this “crossing” takes place. With reference to Peggy Phelan, who takes as the point of departure that the feeling of “loss” explains why we want to hold bodies that are gone, Shannon points to the fact that we don’t have to have “lost” somebody in order to experience this “crossing”, and we don’t have to “long” for something that we have lost. In what she describes as a “dialectical history”, this can happen even where we have no memory of what has disappeared. Again, I read this as a process where the materialities and the sensuousness of the archive are activated, so to say. Then one can find oneself “holding onto a body without ever having reached for it”.

Concluding remarks
How does the “method” behind such experiences look like? Is there a “method” at all? Or are we back to intuition and sensitivity as historical method? May be not. Turning to Della Pollock again, she describes – and again with reference to the writing practice of Shannon Jackson - such a “dialectical history” as “haunting of rooms and passageways”, “looking through windows, searching microfiches, reviewing artifacts, gathering gossip, and listening for the echo of “original” performances like so many historians before”.