The Performance Studies Reader [2 ed.] 0415772753, 9780415772754

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CONTENTS

Contributors Acknowledgements

Introduction HENRY BIAL

PART I

What is performance studies? 1

Performance studies: the broad spectrum approach RICHARD SCHECHNER

2

Disciplines of the text: sites of performance W.B. WORTHEN

3

The liminal-norm JON McKenzie

4

Professing performances: disciplinary genealogies SHANNON JACKSON

5

Performance studies BARBARA KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT

6

Performance studies in an age of terror JOHN BELL

CONTENTS

PART II 59

What is performance?

7

Performances: belief in the part one is playing

61

ERVING GOFFMAN

8

Blurred genres: the refiguration of social thought

66

CLIFFORD GEERTZ

9

70

What is performance? MARVIN CARLSON

10

76

Life the movie NEAL GABLER

11

Marina Abramovic: witnessing shadows

78

PEGGY PHELAN

PART III Ritual

87

12

89

Liminality and communitas VICTOR TURNER

13

“Performance” and other analogies

98

CATHERINE BELL

14

“The blood that runs through the veins”: the creation of identity and a client’s experience of Cuban-American Santen'a Dilogun divination

107

MICHAEL ATWOOD MASON

15

Saint Orlan: ritual as violent spectacle and cultural criticism

118

ALYDA FABER

16

Performative commemoratives, the personal, and the public: spontaneous shrines, emergent ritual JACK SANTINO

viii

125

CONTENTS

PART IV 135

Play 17

The nature and significance of play as a cultural phenomenon

137

JOHAN HUIZINGA

18

U1

A theory of play and fantasy GREGORY BATESON

19

The ambiguity of play: rhetorics of fate

152

BRIAN SUTTON-SMITH

20

159

Just doing ALLAN KAPROW

21

Falling apart to stay together: deep play in the Grand 164

Marais Mardi Gras BARRY JEAN ANCELET

PART V 175

Performativity 22

How to do things with words: lecture II

177

J.L. AUSTIN

23

Excerpt from “Signature Event Context”

184

JACQUES DERRIDA

24

Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenonology and feminist theory

187

JUDITH BUTLER

25

Introduction to Performativity and Performance

200

ANDREW PARKER AND EVE KOSOESKY SEDGWICK

26

Theater and anthropology, theatricality and culture JOHANNES EABIAN

IX

208

CONTENTS

PART VI

Performing

217

27

219

A dialogue about acting BERTOLT BRECHT

28

The actor’s technique

223

JERZY GROTOWSKl

29

A dream of passion

229

LEE STRASBERG

30

Presenting and re-presenting the self: from not-acting to acting in African performance

231

FRANCES HARDING

31

Reconsidering Stanislavsky: feeling, feminism, and the actor

249

RHONDA BLAIR

PART VII

Performance processes

32

263

First attempts at a stylized theatre

•

265

VSEVOLOD MEYERHOLD

33

The oral artist: training and preparation

274

ISIDORE OKPEWHO

34

The performance text

280

MARCO DE MARINIS

35

The deep order called turbulence: the three faces of dramaturgy

300

EUGENIO BARBA

36

The archaeology of performance

310

MARY ZIMMERMAN

X

CONTENTS

PART VIII

Global and intercultural performances

37

Performing ethnography VICTOR TURNER WITH EDIE TURNER

38

Of mimicry and man

337

HOMI K. BHABHA

39

Culturas-in-extremis: performing against the cultural backdrop of the mainstream bizarre

345

GUILLERMO g6mEZ-PENA

40

Reverend Billy: preaching, protest, and post-industrial flanerie

357

JILL LANE

41

Performance studies: interventions and radical research

369

DWIGHT CONQUERGOOD

42

Translating performance

381

DIANA TAYLOR

Index

387

CONTRIBUTORS

Barry Jean Ancelet is Professor of Francophone Studies and Folklore at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He has given papers and published articles and books on various aspects of Louisiana’s Cajun and Creole cultures and languages, including Cajun and Creole Music Makers (University Press of Mississippi, 1984, 1999), Cajun Country (University Press of Mississippi, 1991), and Cajun and Creole Folktales (University Press of Mississippi, 1994). He has contributed to numerous documentary films and radio programs on Louisiana French culture, directs the annual Festival de Musique Acadienne component of Festivals Acadiens, and hosts “Rendez-vous des Cadiens,” the weekly live radio show from the Liberty Theater in Eunice, Louisiana. J.L. Austin (1911-1960) was a philosopher and linguist. He is credited with coining the term “performative” in a series of lectures at Harvard University in 1955, which were later published under the title Flow To Do Things With Words (Harvard University Press, 1962). Eugenio Barba is the founder and director of Odin Teatret in Holstebro, Denmark, and of the International School of Theatre Anthropology. His most translated books are Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt (Black Mountain Press, 1999), The Paper Canoe (Routledge, 1995), Land of Ashes and Diamonds (Black Mountain Press, 1999), and The Secret Art of the Peformer (Routledge, 1991). Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was an anthropologist, cyberneticist, and communications theorist. His major works include Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (Ballantine, 1972) and Mind and Nature (Dutton, 1979). Catherine Bell is the Bernard j. Hanley Professor of Religious Studies, and former department chair, at Santa Clara University, California. She is the author of Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford University Press, 1992) and Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford University Press, 1997), and the forthcoming Teaching Ritual (AAR Teaching Religion Series, Oxford, 2007). I'he author of many articles on aspects of Chinese popular religion, she is currently working on a book project entitled Believing. John Bell is a scholar, performer, and teacher whose work tocuses on puppet, mask, and performing object theater as well as political theater and street pertormance. He began

xn

CONTRIBUTORS

his theater work with Bread and Puppet Theater, and currently works as part of the Great Small Works theater collective. He is the author of Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (Detroit Institute of the Arts, 2000), the forthcoming American Puppet Modernism,

and editor of Puppets, Masks, and Pe^orming Objects (MIT Press, 2001). Homi K. Bhabha is Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of Humanities at Harvard University, director of the Humanties Center at Harvard, and the Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at University College, London. The author of The Location of Culture (Routledge 1994) and editor of the essay collection Nation and Narration (Routledge 1990), Bhabha is currently at work on A Measure of Dwelling, a theory of vernacular cosmopolitanism forthcoming from Harvard University Press and The Right to Narrate, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Henry Bial (editor) is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Film at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (University of Michigan Press, 200S), and co-editor (with Carol Martin) of Brecht Sourcebook (Routledge, 2000).

Rhonda Blair, Professor of Theatre at Southern Methodist University, has published in Performance and Cognition (Routledge, 2006), Upstaging Big Daddy (University of Michigan

Press, 1993), Method Acting Reconsidered (Palgrave, 2000), Tennessee Williams: A Casebook (Routledge, 2001), and Metamorphos, among others. She is co-editor, with Bruce McConachie and Raynette Halvorsen Smith, of Perspectives on Teaching Theatre (Peter Lang, 2001). Some of Blair’s more recent performance work has included a political cabaret trilogy — American Jesus (solo), American Burka, and Dreaming America: In the Bunker with George — created in collaboration with Echo Theatre.

Bertolt Brecht (1898—1956) was a German playwright, director, and performance theorist. His major works include The Threepennny Opera (1928), Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948). Many of Brecht’s theoretical

writings were translated into English by John Willett in the collection Brecht On Theatre (Methuen, 1964). Judith Butler is Maxine ElHot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Lfe and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with

Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek (Verso Press, 2000), Subjects f Desire: Hegelian Rflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of

'‘5ex” (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Lfe of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), as well as munerous articles and contri¬ butions on philosophy and feminist and queer theory. Her recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press, 2005) is a critique of ethical violence and an effort

to formulate a theory of responsibility for an opaque subject.

xiii

CONTRIBUTORS

Marvin Carlson, Sidney E. Cohn Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has received the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, the Joseph A. Calloway Prize, and the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award. In 2005, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens. He has published widely in theatre history and theory, performance studies and dramatic literature. Dwight Conquergood (1949-2004) was Professor of Performance Studies at North¬ western University. An ethnographer who conducted extensive field research in refugee camps overseas and in immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago, Conquergood co-produced two award-winning documentaries based on his Chicago urban field research: Between Two Worlds: The Hmong Shaman in America (1985) and The Heart Broken in Half (1990). He

consulted with the International Rescue Committee and other human rights orgamzations working on the death penalty, as well as with public defenders working on capital cases, and taught at the Bryan R. Shechmeister Death Penalty College, School of Law', Santa Clara University. Marco De Marinis teaches Theatre History and Performance Semiology at the University of Bologna. He is a member of Eugenio Barba’s International School of Theatre Anthropology, and the author of The Semiotics of Pe^ormance (Indiana University' Press, 1993). Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher, considered the pioneer of “deconstruction” in the humanities. His many influential works include Of Grammatology (Editions de Minuit, 1967; Eng. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), Writing and Difference (Editions de Seuil, 1967; Eng. University of Chicago Press, 1978), Margins of Philosophy (Editions de Minuit, 1972; Eng. University of Chicago Press, 1982).

Alyda Faber is Assistant Professor of Theology at Atlantic School ol Theolog\' in Halilax, Canada. Her research and teaching interests include religion and film, feminist theory and theology, and violence as a category for theological reflection. She is working on a book project on religion and film, on the question of how certain strains of religious and ethical subjectivity contribute to spectator theory. Johannes Fabian is professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Previously, he taught at Northwestern and Wesleyan Universities and at the National University of Zaire in Luhumhashi. He did research on religious movements, language, work, and popular culture in the Shaba mining region of Zaire (1966—7, 1972-4, 1985, 1986). In his theoretical and critical work, he addressed questions of epistemology and of the history of anthropology, especially in his Time and the Other: How Anthropology' Makes its Object (Columbia University Pre.ss, 1983, 2002). His hooks include Power and Performance

(University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), Time and the Hbr/f of Anthropology (Routledge, 1991), and Anthropology with an Attidude (Stanford University Press, 2001). Neal Gabler is the author of An Empire ff Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (Crown, 1988), Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity (Knopf, 1994), Life The Movie: How

XIV

CONTRIBUTORS

Entertainment Conquered Keality (Knopf, 1998), and Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf, 2006).

Clifford Geertz is Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. He has conducted extensive ethnographical research in Southeast Asia and North Africa. He has also contributed to social and cultural theory and been influen¬ tial in turning anthropology toward a concern with the frames of meaning within which various peoples live out their lives. He has worked on religion, most particularly Islam, on bazaar trade, on economic development, on traditional political structures, and on village and family life. He is at present working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world. Erving Goffman (1922—82) was among the first scholars to make comprehensive studies of performance in everyday life. His books include The Presentation of Se^^in Everyday Life (Doubleday, 1959), Interaction Pdtual (Aldine, 1967), and Frame Analysis (Harper & Row, 1974). Guillermo Gomez-Pena is a performance artist, writer, and a Contributing Editor to TDK: The Journal of Pe^ormance Studies. His most recent book is Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2005).

Jerzy Grotowski (1933—1999) was a Polish theatre director, performer trainer, and theor¬ ist, and founding director of the Polish Laboratory Theatre. His book Towards A Poor Theatre (Odin Teatrets Forlag, 1968) has been widely influential on theatre training

aroimd the world. Frances Harding is Lecturer in African Drama in the Department of African Languages and Cultures at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She has worked in theatre in several African countries, particularly in Nigeria, and writes on different aspects of theatre and performance in Africa, and has edited the volume The Peformance Arts in Africa (Routledge, 2002).

Johan Huizinga (1872—1945) was a Dutch historian and an early theorist of play. His work includes Homo Ludens (Pantheon, 1940). Shannon Jackson is Professor of Rhetoric and Professor and Chair of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published and performed in munerous journals, theatres, collections, and galleries. Her book on per¬ formance and American social reform. Lines of Activity (University of Michigan Press, 2000), received Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association. Her second book. Professing Peformance (Cambridge University Press, 2004), received Best Book prizes from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the National Communication Association. She is currently at work on a new manuscript titled Social Works: The Infrastructural Politics f Performance. Allan Kaprow (1927—2006) helped to develop the “Environment” and “Happening” in the late 19S0s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings — some 200 of

XV

CONTRIBUTORS

them - evolved over the years, until they were nearly indistinguishable from ordinary Bfe. He published extensively and was, at the time of his death. Professor Emeritus in the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where she chaired her department for over a decade. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, among them the Guggenheim fellowship. She is the author of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (University of California Press, 1998).

Jill Lane is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, and Associate Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. She is the author of BIac}^ace Cuba, 1840—1895 (University of Pennsylvama Press, 2005) and co-editor, with Peggy Phelan, of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1998). She has previously taught at Ohio State University and at Yale University. Michael Atwood Mason is an anthropologist and exhibit developer at the Smithsonian s National Museum of Natural History, where he was a co-curator of the permanent jrfrican Voices exhibition. He is the author of Living Santeria: Rituals and Experiences in yrfro-Cuban Religion (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002).

Jon McKenzie is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of Modern Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (Routledge, 2001) and numerous essays, including “Performance and

Globalization,” “Global Feeling: (Almost) All You Need is Love,” and “Democracy’s Performance.” He is currently working on a second book, titled Performance Inc: Global Performativity and Mediated Resistance, and co-editing the collection Contesting Performance: Global Genealogies of Research.

Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874—1940) was a Russian actor and director who developed a system of acting known as “biomechanics” which emphasized the kinetic potential of the human body through highly-stylized movement. His writings on performance have been translated into English by Edward Braun as Meyerhold on Theatre (Methuen, 1969). Isidore Okpewho is State University of New York Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Binghamton University. He is the author of numerous scholarly works on African literature and performance, including Once Upon a Kingdom (Indiana, 1998), African Oral Literature (Indiana, 1992), and Oral Performance in .rfrica (Editor, Spectrum

Books, 1990), as well as the award-winning novels Tides (Longman, 1993) and The Last Duty (Longman, 1976). His latest novel. Call Me By My Rightful Name (Africa World Press,

2004), about African-American ancestral memory, is built around a focal African praise poem. He is currently writing a critical-cultural study of The Ozidi Saga, an Ijo epic from southern Nigerian, against the backdrop of the present environmental crisis in the Nigerian delta.

XVI

CONTRIBUTORS

Andrew Parker is Professor of English at Amherst College. He recently edited and co¬ translated Jacques Ranciere’s The Philosopher and His Poor (Duke University Press, 2004). Peggy Phelan is the Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts and Professor of Drama, Stanford University. She is the author of the Survey essays for Art and Feminism, edited by Helena Reckitt (Phaidon, 2001) and Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001). She is also the author of Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (Routledge, 1997) and Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge, 1997). She co-edited The Ends f Performance (New York University

Press, 1997) with Jill Lane, and with the late Lynda Hart, she co-edited Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993). Currently she is writing a book entitled Twentieth Century Peformance, to be published by Routledge.

Jack Santino is Professor of Lolklore and Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University. He has been President of the American Lolklore Society and Editor of the Journal of American Folklore. His documentary film. Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: The Untold Story of the Black Pullman Porter (1983), co-produced with Paul Wagner, received

four Emmy awards. He has published extensively in the field of ritual, festival, and celebration, including most recently Signs of War and Peace: Social Corflict and the Public Use of Symbols in Northern Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) and an edited volume. Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Richard Schechner is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. He founded The Performance Group and is cvu^rently the founding artistic director of East Coast Artists. He is the editor of TDK: The Drama Review and the author of many books, including Between Theatre and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), Peformance Theory (revised edition Routledge, 2003), and Peformance Studies: An Introduction (revised edition Routledge, 2006).

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is the author of several books, including Epistemology of the Closet (University of California Press, 1990) and Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003). She teaches in the Ph.D. Program in English at CUNY Graduate Center. Lee Strasberg (1901—1982) was co-founder of the Group Theatre, and one of the United States’ best-known acting teachers. He was the author of Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio (Viking, 1968) and A Dream f Passion: The Evolution of the Method (Little, Brown, 1987). Brian Sutton-Smith is Professor of Education, Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania. A pioneer in the scholarly study of play, he is the author of The Ambiguity f Play (Harvard, 1998), Toys as Culture (Gardner, 1986), and numerous other books and essays. Diana Taylor is Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (University Press of Kentucky, 1991), Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Duke University Press, 1997), and most recently The Archive and the Repertoire: Reforming Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), which won

xvn

CONTRIBUTORS

the Outstanding Book Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association. She directs the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Edith (Edie) Turner is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Virginia, and editor of the journal Anthropology and Humanism. Her books include Experiencing Ritual (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), The Hands Feel It (Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), Among the Healers (Praeger, 200S), and Heart of Lightness (Berghahn, 2006).

Victor Turner (1917-1983) was a Scottish-born anthropologist. His major works include The Ritual Process (Aldine, 1969), Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Cornell University Press,

1974), and From Ritual to Theatre (PAj, 1982). W.B. Worthen is J. L. Styan Collegiate Professor of Drama in the Department of Enghsh Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. He is the author of many articles on drama and performance theory, and of several books, including The Idea of the Actor (Princeton, 1984), Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (California, 1992), Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge, 1996), Shakespeare and the Force ■> l#i BBifliy* irfSW.-

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t •'•>;■• t M bHM|ffl|» il||ir^ tT'S ^,T.'*j*ower of maddening, lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play. Nature, so our reasoning mind tells us, could just as easily have given her children all those useful functions of discharging superabundant energy, of relaxing after exertion, of training for the demands of life, of compensating for unfulfilled longings, etc., in the form of purely mechanical exercises and reactions. But no, she gave us play, with its tension, its mirth, and its fun. Now this last-named element, the fun of playing, resists all analysis, all logical interpret¬ ation. As a concept, it cannot be reduced to any other mental category. No other modern language known to me has the exact equivalent of the English “lun.” The Dutch “aardigkeit” perhaps comes nearest to it (derived from “aard” which means the same as “Art” and “Wesen”

in German, and thus evidence, perhaps, that the matter cannot be reduced

further). We may note in passing that “fun” in its current usage is of rather recent origin. French, oddly enough, has no corresponding term at all; German half makes up tor it by “Spass” and “Witz” together. Nevertheless it is precisely this fun-element that characterizes the essence of play. Here we have to do with an absolutely primary category of life, familiar to everybody at a glance right down to the animal level. We may call play a “totality” in the modern sense of the word, and it is as a totality that we must try to understand and evaluate it. Since the reality of play extends beyond the sphere of human life it cannot have its foundations in any rational nexus, because this would limit it to mankind. The incidence of play is not associated with any particular stage of civilization or view of the universe. Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language

138

THE NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE

OF PLAY

possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play. But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter. Even in the animal world it bursts the bounds of the physically existent. From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous. Play only becomes possible, thinkable, and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos. The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation. Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational. In tackling the problem of play as a function of culture proper and not as it appears in the life of the animal or the child, we begin where biology and psychology leave off. In culture we find play as a given magmtude existing before culture itself existed, accompanying it and pervading it from the earliest beginnings right up to the phase of civilization we are now living in. We find play present everywhere as a well-defined quality of action which is different from “ordinary” life. We can disregard the question of how far science has succeeded in reducing this quality to quantitative factors. In our opinion it has not. At all events it is precisely this quality, itself so characteristic of the form of life we call “play,” which matters. Play as a special form of activity, as a “significant form,” as a social function that is our subject. We shall not look for the natural impulses and habits conditioning play in general, but shall consider play in its manifold concrete forms as itself a social construction. We shall try to take play as the player himself takes it: in its primary significance. If we find that play is based on the manipulation of certain images, on a certain “imagination” of reality (i.e. its conversion into images), then our main concern will be to grasp the value and significance of these images and their “imagination.” We shall observe their action in play itself and thus try to understand play as a cultural factor in life. The great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with play from the start. Take language, for instance — that first and supreme instrument which man shapes in order to communicate, to teach, to command. Language allows him to distinguish, to establish, to state things; in short, to name them and by naming them to raise them into the domain of the spirit. In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually “sparking” between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lies the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates a second, poetic world alongside the world of natme. Or take myth. This, too, is a transformation or an “imagination” of the outer world, only here the process is more elaborate and ornate than is the case with individual words. In myth, primitive man seeks to account for the world of phenomena by grounding it in the Divine. In all the wild imaginings of mythology a fanciful spirit is playing on the borderline between jest and earnest. Or finally, let us take ritual. Primitive society performs its sacred rites, its sacrifices, consecrations, and mysteries, all of which serve to guarantee the well¬ being of the world, in a spirit of pme play truly understood.

139

JOHAN HUIZINGA

Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primeval soil of playThe object of the present essay is to demonstrate that it is more than a rhetorical comparison to view culture sub specie ludi. The thought is not at all new. There was a time when it was generally accepted, though in a limited sense quite different from the one intended here: in the seventeenth century, the age of world theatre. Drama, in a glittering succession of figures ranging from Shakespeare and Calderon to Racine, then dominated the literature of the West. It was the fashion to liken the world to a stage on which every man plays his part. Does this mean that the play-element in civilization was openly acknowledged? Not at all. On closer examination this fashionable comparison of hfe to a stage proves to be little more than an echo of the Neo-platonism that was then in vogue, with a markedly moralistic accent. It was a variation on the ancient theme of the vamty of all things. The fact that play and culture are actually interwoven with one another was neither observed nor expressed, whereas for us the whole point is to show that genuine, pure play is one of the main bases of civilization.

NOTES

1 For these theories, see H. Zondervan, Het Spel bij Dieren, Kindern, en Volwassen Menscben (Amsterdam, 1928), and F.j.J. Buytendijk, Het Spel van Menscb en Diet ah openbaring van levensdrijien (Amsterdam, 1932). 2 Nature, kind, being, essence, etc. Trans.

READER CROSS-REFERENCES

Schechner, Kir.shenblatt-Gimblett — the inclusion of play in performance sUidies Bateson — the importance of play in communication and tht)ught Sutton-Smith — play as a concept in philosophy, science, and other disciplines Taylor — the translatability of technical terms

140

18

A THEORY OF PLAY AND FANTASY Gregory Bateson

This research was planned and started with an hypothesis to guide our investigations, the task of the investigators being to collect relevant observational data and, in the process, to amplify and modify the hypothesis. The hypothesis will here be described as it has grown in oirr thinking. Earher fundamental work of Whitehead, Russell,' Wittgenstein,^ Carnap,^ Whorf,"' etc., as well as my own attempt

to use this earlier thinking as an epistemological base for

psychiatric theory, led to a series of generalizations: (1) That human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction. These range in two directions from the seemingly simple denotative level (“The cat is on the mat”). One range or set of these more abstract levels includes those explicit or implicit messages where the subject of discourse is the language. We will call these metalinguistic (for example, “the verbal sound ‘cat’ stands for any member of such and such class of objects,” or “The word ‘cat’ has no fur and cannot scratch”). The other set of levels of abstraction we will call metacommunicative (e.g. “My telling you where to find the cat was friendly,” or “This is play”). In these, the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers. It will be noted that the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit; and also that, especially in the psychiatric interview, there occurs a further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted. (2) If we speculate about the evolution of communication, it is evident that a very important stage in this evolution occurs when the organism gradually ceases to respond quite “automatically” to the mood-signs of another and becomes able to recognize the sign as a signal: that is, to recognize that the other individual’s and its own signals are only signals which can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied, amplified, corrected, and so forth. Clearly this realization that signals are signals is by no means complete even among the hmnan species. We all too often respond automatically to newspaper headlines as though these stimuh were direct object-indications of events in our environment instead of signals concocted and transmitted by creatures as complexly motivated as ourselves. The nonhuman mammal is automatically excited by the sexual odor of another; and rightly so, inasmuch as the secretion of that sign is an “involuntary” mood-sign; i.e. an outwardly

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perceptible event which is a part of the physiological process which we have called a mood. In the human species a more complex state of affairs begins to be the rule. Deodorants mask the involuntary olfactory signs, and in their place the cosmetic industry provides the indi¬ vidual with perfumes which are not involuntary signs but voluntary signals, recogmzable as such. Many a man has been thrown off balance by a whiff of perfume, and if we are to believe the advertisers it seems that these signals, voluntarily worn, have sometimes an automatic and autosuggestive effect even upon the voluntary wearer. Be that as it may, this brief digression will serve to illustrate a stage of evolution — the drama precipitated when organisms, having eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, discover that their signals are signals. Not only the characteristically human invention of language can then follow, but also all the complexities of empathy identification, projection, and so on. And with these comes the possibility of communicating at the multiphcity of levels of abstraction mentioned above. (3) The first definite step in the formulation of the hypothesis guiding this research occurred in January, 1952, when I was in the Fleishhacker Zoo in San Francisco to look for behavioral criteria which would indicate whether any given organism is or is not able to recognize that the signs emitted by itself and other members of the species are signals. In theory, I had thought out what such criteria might look like — that the occurrence of metacommunicative signs (or signals) in the stream of interaction between the animals would indicate that the animals have at least some awareness (conscious or unconscious) that the signs about which they metacommunicate are signals. I knew, of course, that there was no likelihood of finding denotative messages among nonhuman mammals, but I was still not aware that the animal data would require an almost total revision of my thinking. What I encountered at the zoo was a phenomenon well known to everybody: I saw two young monkeys playing, i.e. engaged in an interactive sequence of which the unit action or signals were similar to but not the same as those of combat. It was evident, even to the human observer, that the sequence as a whole was not combat, and evident to the human observer that to the participant monkeys this was “not combat.” Now, this phenomenon, play, could only occur if the participant organisms were capable of some degree of metacommunication, i.e. of exchanging signals which would carry the message “this is play.” (4) The next step was the examination of the message “This is play," and the realization that this message contains those elements which necessarily generate a paradox of the Russellian or Epimenides type — a negative statement containing an implicit negative mcta.statement. Expanded, the statement “This is play” looks something like this: “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote.” We now ask about the italicized words, ''for which they stand.” We say the word “cat” stands for any member of a certain class. That is, the phrase “stands for” is a near synonym of “denotes.” If we now substitute “which they denote” for the words “for which they stand” in the expanded definition of play, the result is: “These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.” The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite.

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According to the Theory of Logical Types such a message is of course inadmissable, because the word “denote” is being used in two degrees of abstraction, and these two uses are treated as synonymous. But all that we learn from such a criticism is that it would be bad natural history to expect the mental processes and communicative habits of mammals to conform to the logician’s ideal. Indeed, if human thought and communication always conformed to the ideal, Russell would not — in fact could not — have formulated the ideal. (5) A related problem in the evolution of communciation concerns the origin of what Korzybski has called the majj—territory relationship; the fact that a message, of whatever kind, does not consist of those objects which it denotes (“The word ‘cat’ cannot scratch us ). Rather, language bears to the objects which it denotes a relationship comparable to that which a map bears to a territory. Denotative communication as it occiu's at the hmnan level is only possible after the evolution of a complex set of metalinguistic (but not verbalized) rules which govern how words and sentences shall be related to objects and events. It is therefore appropriate to look for the evolution of such metalinguistic and/or metacommunicative rules at a prehuman and preverbal level. It appears from what is said above that play is a phenomenon in which the actions of “play” are related to, or denote, other actions of “not play.” We therefore meet in play with an instance of signals standing for other events, and it appears, therefore, that the evolution of play may have been an important step in the evolution of communication. (6) Threat is another phenomenon which resembles play in that actions denote, but are different from, other actions. The clenched fist of threat is different from the punch, but it refers to a possible future (but at present nonexistent) punch. And threat also is commonly recognizable among nonhuman mammals. Indeed it has lately been argued that a great part of what appears to be combat among members of a single species is rather to be regarded as threat (Tinbergen,^ Lorenz^). (7) Histrionic behavior and deceit are other examples of the primitive occmrence of map—territory differentiation. And there is evidence that dramatization occurs among birds: a jackdaw may imitate her own mood-signs (Lorenz*'^), and deceit has been observed among howler monkeys (Carpenter"). (8) We might expect threat, play, and histrionics to be three independent phenomena all contributing to the evolution of the discrimination between map and territory. But it seems that this would be wrong, at least so far as mammalian communication is concerned. Very brief analysis of childhood behavior shows that such combination as histrionic play, bluff, playful threat, teasing play in response to threat, histrionic threat, and so on form together a single total complex of phenomena. And such adult phenomena as gambling and playing with risk have their roots in the combination of threat and play. It is evident also that not only threat but the reciprocal of threat — the behavior of the threatened individual

is

a part of this complex. It is probable that not only histrionics but also spectatorship should be included within this field. It is also appropriate to mention self-pity. (9) A further extension of this thinking leads us to include ritual within this general field in which the discrimination is drawn, but not completely, between denotative action and that which is to be denoted. Anthropological studies of peace making ceremonies, to cite only one example, support this conclusion.

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In the Andaman Islands, peace is concluded after each side has been given ceremonial freedom to strike the other. This example, however, also illustrates the labile nature of the frame “This is play,” or “This is ritual.” The discrimination between map and territory is always liable to break down, and the ritual blows of peace-making are always liable to be mistaken for the “real” blows of combat. In this event, the peace-making ceremony becomes 12

a battle (Radcliffe-Brown ). (10) But this leads us to recognition of a more complex form of play; the game which is constructed not upon the premise “This is play” but rather around the question Is this play?” And this type of interaction also has its ritual forms, e.g. in the hazing of initiation. (11) Paradox is doubly present in the signals which are exchanged within the context of play, fantasy, threat, etc. Not only does the playful nip not denote what would be denoted by the bite for which it stands, but, in addition, the bite itself is fictional. Not only do the playing animals not quite mean what they are saying but, also, they are usually communi¬ cating about something which does not exist. At the human level, this leads to a vast variety of complications and inversions in the fields of play, fantasy, and art. Conjurers and painters of the trompe I’oeil school concentrate upon acquiring a virtuosity whose only reward is reached after the viewer detects that he has been deceived md is forced to smile or marvel at the skill of the deceiver. Hollywood film-makers spend millions of dollars to increase the realism of a shadow. Other artists, perhaps more realistically, insist that art be nonrepresentational; and poker players achieve a strange addictive realism by equating the chips for which they play with dollars. They still insist, however, that the loser accept his loss as part of the game. Finally, in the dim region where art, magic, and religion meet and overlap, human beings have evolved the “metaphor that is meant,” the flag which men will die to save, and the sacrament that is felt to be more than “an outward and visible sign, given unto us.” Here we can recognize an attempt to deny the difference between map and territory, and to get back to the absolute innocence of communication by means of pure mood-signs. (12) We face then two peculiarities of play: (a) that the messages or signals exchanged in play are in a certain sense untrue or not meant; and (b) that that which is denoted by these signals is nonexistent. These two peculiarities sometimes combine strangelv to a reverse a conclusion reached above. It was stated (4) that the plavlul nip denotes the bite, but does not denote that which would be denoted by the bite. But there are other instances where an opposite phenomenon occurs. A man experiences the full intensitv of subjec¬ tive terror when a spear is flung at him out of the 3D screen or when he falls headlong from some peak created in his own mind in the intensity of nightmare. At the moment of terror there was no que.stioning of “reality,” but still there was no spear in the movie house and no cliff in the bedroom. The images did not denote that which they seemed to denote, but these same images did really evoke that terror which would have been evoked by a real spear or a real precipice. By a similar trick of self-contradiction, the film-makers of Hollywood are free to offer to a puritanical public a vast range of pseudosexual fantasy which otherwise would not be tolerated In David and Bathsheba, Bathsheba can be a Troilistic link between David and Uriah. And in Hans Christian Andersen, the hero starts out accom¬ panied by a boy. He tries to get a woman, but when he is defeated in tliis attempt, he

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returns to the boy. In all of this, there is, of course, no homosexuality, but the choice of these symbolisms is associated in these fantasies with certain characteristic ideas, e.g. about the hopelessness of the heterosexual masculine position when faced with certain sorts of women or with certain sorts of male authority. In sum, the pseudohomosexuality of the fantasy does not stand for any real homosexuality, but does stand for and express attitudes which might accompany a real homosexuality or feed its etiological roots. The symbols do not denote homosexuality, but do denote ideas for which homosexuahty is an appropriate symbol. Evidently it is necessary to re-examine the precise semantic validity of the interpretations which the psychiatrist offers to a patient, and, as preliminary to this analysis, it will be necessary to examine the nature of the frame in which these interpretations are offered. (13) What has previously been said about play can be used as an introductory example for the discussion of frames and contexts. In sum, it is our hypothesis that the message “This is play” establishes a paradoxical frame comparable to Epimenides’ paradox. This frame may be diagramed thus:

All statements within this frame are untrue. I love you. I hate you. The first statement within this frame is a self-contradictory proposition about itself. If this first statement is true, then it must be false. If it be false, then it must be true. But this first statement carries with it all the other statements in the frame. So, if the first statement be true, then all the others must be false; and vice versa, if the first statement be untrue then all the others must be true. (14) The logically minded will notice a non-sequitur. It could be urged that even if the first statement is false, there remains a logical possibility that some of the other statements in the frame are untrue. It is, however, a characteristic of imconscious or “primary-process” thinking that the thinker is imable to discriminate between “some” and “all,” and unable to discriminate between “not all” and “none.” It seems that the achievement of these dis¬ criminations is performed by higher or more conscious mental processes which serve in the nonpsychotic individual to correct the black-and-white thinking of the lower levels. We assume, and this seems to be an orthodox assumption, that primary process is continually operating, and that the psychological vahdity of the paradoxical play frame depends upon this part of the mind.

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(15) But, conversely, while it is necessary to invoke the primary process as an explanatory principle in order to delete the notion of “some

from between

all

and

“none,” this does not mean that play is simply a primary-process phenomenon. The dis¬ crimination between “play” and “nonplay,” like the discrimination between fantasy and nonfantasy, is certainly a function of secondary process, or “ego.” Within the dream the dreamer is usually unaware that he is dreaming, and within **play” he must often be reminded that “This is play.” Similarly, within dream or fantasy the dreamer does not operate with the concept “untrue.” He operates with all sorts of statements but with a curious inability to achieve metastatements. He cannot, unless close to waking, dream a statement referring to (i.e. framing) his dream. It therefore follows that the play frame as here used as an explanatory principle implies a special combination of primary and secondary processes. This, however, is related to what was said earlier, when it was argued that play marks a step forward in the evolution of communication — the crucial step in the discovery of map—territory relations. In primary process, map and territory are equated; in secondary process, they can be discriminated. In play, they are both equated and discriminated. (16) Another logical anomaly in this system must be mentioned; that the relationship between two propositions which is commonly described by the word “premise” has become intransitive. In general, all asymmetrical relationships are transitive. The relationship “greater than” is typical in this respect; it is conventional to argue that if A is greater than B, and B is greater than C, then A is greater than C. But in psychological processes the transitivity of asymmetrical relations is not observed. The proposition P may be a premise for Q; Q may be a premise for R; and R may be a premise for P. Specificallv, in the system which we are considering, the circle is still more contracted. The message “All statements within this frame are untrue” is itself to be taken as a premise in evaluating its own truth or untruth. (Cf. the intransitivity of psychological preference discussed by McCulloch.'* The paradigm for all paradoxes of this general type is Russell’s'^ “class of classes which are not members of themselves.” Here Russell demonstrates that paradox is generated by treating the relationship “is a member of” as an intransitive.) With this caveat, that the “premise” relation in psvehology is likely to be intransitive, we shall use the word “premise” to denote a de|>endency of one idea or message upon another comparable to the dependency of one proposition upon another which is referred to in logic by saying that the proposition P is a premise for Q. (17) All this, however, leaves unclear what is meant bv "frame” and the related notion of “context.” To clarify these, it is necessary to insist first that these are psychological concepts. We use two sorts of analogy to discuss these notions: the physical analogy of the picture frame and the more abstract, but .still not psychological, analogy of the mathematical set. In set theory the mathematicians have developed axioms and theorems to discuss the rigor the logical implications of member.ship in overlapping categories or “sets.” The relationships between sets are commonly illustrated by diagrams in which the items or members of a larger universe are represented by dots, and the smaller sets are delimited by imaginary lines enclosing the members of each set. Such diagrams then illustrate a topological approach to the logic of classification. The first .step in defining a psychological frame might

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A THEORY OF PLAY AND FANTASY

be to say that it is (or delimits) a class or set of messages (or meaningful actions). The play of two individuals on a certain occasion would then be defined as the set of all messages exchanged by them within a limited period of time and modified by the paradoxical premise system which we have described. In a set-theoretical diagram these messages might be represented by dots, and the “set” enclosed by a line which would separate these from other dots representing nonplay messages. The mathematical analogy breaks down, however, because the psychological frame is not satisfactorily represented by an imaginary line. We assume that the psychological frame has some degree of real existence. In many instances, the frame is consciously recognized and even represented in vocabulary (“play,” “movie,” “interview,” “job,” “language,” etc.). In other cases, there may be no explicit verbal reference to the frame, and the subject may have no consciousness of it. The analyst, however, finds that his own thinking is simplified if he uses the notion of an unconscious frame as an explanatory principle; usually he goes further than this and infers its existence in the subject’s unconscious. But while the whole analogy of the mathematical set is perhaps over-abstract, the analogy of the picture frame is excessively concrete. The psychological concept which we are trying to define is neither physical nor logical. Rather, the actual physical frame is, we believe, added by human beings to physical pictures because these human beings operate more easily in a universe in which some of their psychological characteristics are externalized. It is these characteristics which we are trying to discuss, using the externalization of an illustrative device. (18) The common functions and uses of psychological frames may now be listed and illustrated by reference to the analogies whose limitations have been indicated in the previous paragraph:

(a) Psychological frames are exclusive, i.e. by including certain messages (or mean¬ ingful actions) within a frame, certain other messages are excluded. (b) Psychological frames are inclusive, i.e. by excluding certain messages certain others are included. From the point of view of set theory these two fimctions are synonymous, but from the point of view of psychology it is necessary to list them separately. The frame around a picture, if we consider this frame as a message intended to order or organize the perception of the view, says, “Attend to what is within and do not attend to what is outside.” Figure and ground, as these terms are used by gestalt psychologists, are not symmetrically related as are the set and nonset of set theory. Perception of the ground must be positively inhibited and perception of the figure (in this case the picture) must be positively enhanced. (c) Psychological frames are related to what we have called “premises.” The picture frame tells the viewer that he is not to use the same sort of thinking in interpreting the picture that he might use in interpreting the wallpaper outside the frame. Or, in terms of the analogy from set theory, the messages enclosed within the imaginary line are defined as members of a class by virtue of their sharing common premises or mutual relevance. The frame itself thus becomes a part of the premise system. Either, as in the case of the play frame, the frame is involved in the evaluation of the messages which it

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contains, or the frame merely assists the mind in understanding the contained messages by reminding the thinker that these messages are mutually relevant and the messages outside the frame may be ignored. (d) In the sense of the previous paragraph, a frame is metacommumcative. Any message which either explicitly or implicitly defines a frame ipso facto gives the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand the messages included within the frame. (e) The converse of (d) is also true. Every metacommunicative or metalinguistic message defines, either explicitly or implicitly, the set of messages about which it communicates, i.e. every metacommunicative message is or defines a psychological frame. This, for example, is very evident in regard to such small metacommumcative signals as punctuation marks in a printed message, but applies equally to such complex metacommunicative messages as the psychiatrist’s definition of his own curative role, in terms of which his contributions to the whole mass of messages in psychotherapy are to be understood. (f) The relation between psychological frame and perceptual gestalt needs to be considered, and here the analogy of the picture frame is useful. In a painting by Rouault or Blake, the human figures and other objects represented are outlined. “Wise men see outlines and therefore they draw them.” But outside these lines, which delimit the perceptual gestalt or “figure,” there is a background or “ground” which in turn is limited by the picture frame. Similarly, in set-theoretical diagrams, the larger universe within which the smaller sets are drawn is itself enclosed in a frame. This double framing is, we believe, not merely a matter of “frames within frames” but an indication that mental processes resemble logic in needing an outer frame to delimit the ground against which the figxires are to be perceived. This need is often unsatisfied, as when we see a piece of sculpture in a junk shop window, but this is uncomfortable. We suggest that the need for this outer Emit to the ground is related to preference for avoiding the paradoxes of abstraction. When a logical class or set of items is defined — for example, the class of matchboxes — it is necessary to delimit the set of items which are to be excluded, in this case, all those things which are not matchboxes. But the items to be included in the background set must be of the same degree of abstraction, i.e. of the same “logical t>pc” as those within the set itself. Specifically, if paradox is to be avoided, the “class of matchboxes” and the “class of nonmatchboxes” (even though both these items arc clearly not matchboxes) must not be regarded as members of the class of nonmatchboxes. No class can be a member of itself. The picture frame, then, because it delimits a back¬ ground, is here regarded as an external representation of a very special and important type of psychological frame — namely a frame whose function is to delimit a logical type. This, in fact, is what was indicated above when it was said that the picture frame is an in.struction to the viewer that he should not extend the premises which obtain between the figures within the picture to the wallpaper behind it. But it is precisely this sort of frame that precipitates paradox. The rule for avoiding paradoxes insists that the items outside any enclosing line be of the same logical type as those within, but the picture frame, as analyzed above, is a line dividing items of one logical type from those of another. In passing, it is interesting to note that Russell’s rule

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cannot be stated without breaking the rule. Russell insists that all items of inappropriate logical type be exluded (i.e. by an imaginary line) from the background of any class, i.e. he insists upon the drawing of an imaginary line of precisely the sort which he prohibits. (19) This whole matter of frames and paradoxes may be illustrated in terms of animal behavior, where three types of message may be recognized or deduced: (a) Messages of the sort which we here call mood-signs; (b) messages which simulate mood-signs (in play, threat, histrionics, etc.); and (c) messages which enable the receiver to discriminate between mood-signs and those other signs which resemble them. The message “This is play” is of this third type. It tells the receiver that certain nips and other meaningful actions are not messages of the first type. The message “This is play” thus sets a frame of the sort which is likely to precipitate paradox: it is an attempt to discriminate between, or to draw a line between, categories of different logical types. (20) This discussion of play and psychological frames establishes a type of triadic con¬ stellation (or system of relationships) between messages. One instance of this constellation is analyzed in paragraph 19, but it is evident that constellations of this sort occur not only at the nonhuman level but also in the much more complex communication of human beings. A fantasy or myth may simulate a denotative narrative, and, to discriminate between these types of discourse, people use messages of the frame-setting type, and so on. (21) In conclusion, we arrive at the complex task of applying this theoretical approach to the particular phenomena of psychotherapy. Here the lines of our thinking may most briefly be summarized by presenting and partially answering these questions: (a) Is there any indication that certain forms of psychopathology are specifically characterized by abnormalities in the patient’s handling of frames and paradoxes? (b) Is there any indication that the techniques of psychotherapy necessarily depend upon the manipvdation of frames and paradoxes? (c) Is it possible to describe the process of a given psychotherapy in terms of the interaction between the patient’s abnormal use of frames and the therapist’s manipula¬ tion of them? (22) In reply to the first question, it seems that the “word salad” of schizophrenia can be described in terms of the patient’s failure to recognize the metaphoric nature of his fantasies. In what should be triadic constellations of messages, the frame-setting message (e.g. the phrase “as if”) is omitted, and the metaphor or fantasy is narrated and acted upon in a manner which would be appropriate if the fantasy were a message of the more direct kind. The absence of metacommunicative framing which was noted in the case of dreams (15) is characteristic of the waking communications of the schizophrenic. With the loss of the ability to achieve the more primary or primitive message. The metaphor is treated directly as a message of the more primary type. [. . .] (23) The dependence of psychotherapy upon the manipulation of frames follows from the fact that therapy is an attempt to change the patient’s metacommunicative habits. Before therapy, the patient thinks and operates in terms of a certain set of rules for the making and

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understanding of messages. After successiul therapy, he operates in terms of a different set of such rules. (Rules of this sort are in general unverbalized, and unconscious both before and after.) It follows that, in the process of therapy, there must have been commvuncation at a level meta to these rules. There must have been communication about a change in rules. But such a communication about change could not conceivably occur in messages of the type permitted by the patient’s metacommunicative rules as they existed either before or after therapy. It was suggested above that the paradoxes of play are characteristic of an evolutionary step. Here we suggest that similar paradoxes are a necessary ingredient in that process of change which we call psychotherapy. The resemblance between the process of therapy and the phenomenon of play is, in fact, profound. Both occur within a delimited psychological frame, a spatial and temporal bounding of a set of interactive messages. In both play and therapy, the messages have a special and peculiar relationship to a more concrete or basic reality. Just as the pseudo¬ combat of play is not real combat, so also the pseudolove and pseudohate of therapy are not real love and hate. The “transfer” is discriminated from real love and hate by signals invoking the psychological frame; and indeed it is this frame which permits the transfer to reach its full intensity and to be discussed between patient and therapist. The formal characteristics of the therapeutic process may be illustrated by building up a model in stages. Imagine, first, two players who engage in a game of canasta according to a standard set of rules. So long as these rules govern and are unquestioned by both players, the game is unchanging, i.e. no therapeutic change will occur. (Indeed many attempts at psychotherapy fail for this reason.) We may imagine, however, that at a certain moment the two canasta players cease to play canasta and start a discussion of the rules. Their discourse is now of a different logical type from that of their play. At the end of this discussion, we can imagine that they return to playing but with modified rules. This sequence of events is, however, still an imperfect model of therapeutic interaction, though it illustrates our contention that therapy necessarily involves a combination of dis¬ crepant logical types of discourse. Our imaginary players avoided paradox by separating their discussion of the rules from their play, and it is precisely this separation that is impossible in psychotherapy. As we see it, the process of psvchotherapy is a framed inter¬ action between two persons, in which the rules are implicit but subject to change. Such change can only be proposed by experimental action, but every such experimental action, in which a proposal to change the rules is implicit, is itself a part of the ongoing game. It is this combination of logical types within the single meaningful act that gives to therapy the character not of a rigid game like canasta but, instead, of an evolving system of interaction. The play of kittens or otters has this character. (24) In regard to the specific rclation.ship between the way in which the patient handles frames and the way in which the therapist manipulates them, very little can at present he said. It is, however, suggestive to observe that the psychological frame of therapy is an analogue of the frame-setting message which the schizophrenic is unahle to achieve. To talk in “word salad” within the psychological frame of therapv is, in a sense, not pathological. Indeed the neurotic is specifically encouraged to do precisely this, narrating his dreams and

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A THEORY OF PLAY AND FANTASY

free associations so that patient and therapist may achieve an understanding of this material. By the process of interpretation, the neurotic is driven to insert an “as if” clause into the productions of his primary process thinking, which productions he had previously deprecated or repressed. He must learn that fantasy contains truth. For the schizophrenic the problem is somewhat different. His error is in treating the metaphors of primary process with the full intensity of literal truth. Through the discovery of what these metaphors stand for he must discover that they are only metaphors. (25) From the point of view of the project, however, psychotherapy constitutes only one of the many fields which we are attempting to investigate. Our central thesis may be summed up as a statement of the necessity of paradoxes of abstraction. It is not merely bad natural history to suggest that people might or should obey the Theory of Logical Types in their communications; their failure to do this is not due to mere carelessness or ignorance. Rather, we believe that the paradoxes of abstraction must make their appearance in all communication more complex than that of mood-signals, and that without these paradoxes the evolution of communication would be at an end. Life would then be an endless inter¬ change of stylized messages, a game with rigid rules, unrelieved by change or humor.

NOTES 1 A.N. Whitehead and B. Russell, Principia Mathematica, 3 vols., 2nd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910—13. 2 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Harcourt Brace, 1922. 3 R. Carnap, The Logical Syntax (^Language, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937. 4 B.L. Whorf, “Science and Hnguistics,” Technology Review, 1940, 44: 229—48. 5 J. Ruesch and G. Bateson, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, New York: Norton, 1951. 6 A. Korzybski, Science and Sanity, New York: Science Press, 1941. 7 The verbalization of these metalinguistic rules is a much later achievement which can only occur after the evolution of a nonverbalized meta-metahnguistics. 8 N. Tinbergen, Social Behavior in Animals with Special Reference to Vertebrates, London: Methuen, 1953. 9 K.Z. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Pang, New York: Crowell, 1952. 10 Ibid. 11 C.R. Carpenter, “A field study of the behavior and social relations of howling monkeys,” Comparative Psychological Monographs, 1934, 10: 1—168. 12 A.R. Radchffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922. 13 WS. McCulloch, “A heterarchy of values, etc.,” Bulletin (f Mathematical Biophysics, 1945, 7: 89—93. 14 Whitehead and Russell, op. cit.

READER CROSS-REFERENCES Huizinga — the significance of play in human culture Sutton-Smith — play as a concept in philosophy, science, and other disciplines Austin, Derrida — repetition and metacommunication in speech Harding, De Marinis, Turner and Turner - how performance may be framed Blair — uses cognitive approach to analyze the process of acting Ancelet — threat in a context of play

151

19 THE AMBIGUITY OF PLAY Rhetorics of fate Brian Sutton-Smith

Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave. Edward Gibbon

Children are a lottery in the modern concept of progress. after Freeh

The ancient rhetorics of play, fate, power, identity, and frivolity are so called because they are of more ancient origin than the modern rhetorics, progress, the imaginary, and the self. The latter three can be traced to major historical concepts of the past two hundred years, those being the Enlightenment, romanticism, and individualism, while the ancient rhetorics have antecedents throughout history. But there arc additional differences as well. The ancient rhetorics tend to be about groups rather than individuals. And in general, those who believe in one or more of the modern rhetorics of play tend to discount the ancient rhetorics as play forms. In part this is because the older rhetorics are less socialized, more crude, and less in synchrony with modern rational life, though this is somewhat more true of fate and frivolity than of power and identity. Nevertheless the violence of the power rhetorics and the carnivalesque quality of the rhetorics of identity are also often seen as beyond the pale of civilized credibility, as arc the excesses of gambling and the travesties of folly. Additionally, these older forms of play are typically more obligatory than they are optional. They therefore offend the modern sensibility that play must be associated with voluntariness. The ancient rhetorics have more extrinsic motivation about them and imply that play can be coercive. The modern rhetorics state, contrarily, that play is an exercise of freedom. But to admit that play can be coercive is to deprive “freedom” of its legitimacy as a universal definition, so many moderns would prefer the alternative of denying that gambling and football and carnival arc really play at all; they can be called addiction, violence, and orgy instead. There is also a deep reluctance to associate children with any of these ancient rhetorics. The point of view taken in this work, however, is that all of the rhetorics, whether modern or ancient, arc based on or are simulacra of play forms, and all should be taken into account in any truly empirical examination of the character and functioning of play.

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The first rhetoric of the ancient group, the rhetoric of fate, is the most pervasive of all play rhetorics but the least publicly ideologized in modern times. It is at the heart of the most ancient of religions (animism and mysticism) and is at the deepest level of even modern minds, because life and death are, after all, fateful, not rational and not escapable. This chapter deals with various forms of fate as play, such as the attributions that the gods are at play, that the universe is at play, that our brains are at play, and finally that we are creatures of the play of fortune and luck, as exemplified by games of chance. There is a sense in which the irrevocability of fate leaves no answers except the most desperate and universal of human answers, which is that one might perhaps escape by luck or its personified equivalent, God’s favor. Luck is very much fate’s last hope. It is the play of the last chance. It is the play of everyman. Though pitiful, it is the only recourse in the mortal situation, vmless of course we really do rise by works rather than by grace. From a secular point of view, then, to be mortal is ultimately to be without hope, but in the game model of this predicament, there is a slight lottery like hope. The odds, though long, might occasionally be with us in the more confined worldly domain of chance. In this sense it is useful to think of games of chance not only as models of the irrevocability of fate but also as fate fantasied (though in Florida, as they say, the probability of winning the state lottery is the same as the chance of being hit by lightning three times — but then, as they also say, there is a lot of hghtning in Florida). Perhaps it can be said that the ones who lose at games of chance are at least playfully in control of the circumstances of their own losing. This is the definition of play — the illusion of mastery over life’s circumstances — once offered by the great scholar of child play Erik Erikson. In his words, the purpose of play is “to hallucinate ego mastery” (1956: 185). If such “illusory mastery” is indeed the spirit or motivation behind adults’ play in games of chance, as it is an account of children’s play, then it is surely a definition of play that escapes the limitations of the progress rhetoric. Play as an irrational act of gaining pleasure through one’s own illusions is hardly consistent with the rationality of the rhetoric of progress. Of comse if children and gamblers were put in a separate category of existence, then progressivists would not regard this reference to “illusion” as the ultimate definition of play. The discontinuity between adult and child play would be a discontinuity between rational adults and the collective group of irrational gamblers and nonrational children. Given the laws and prohibitions against gamblers and children throughout Western history, this negative collective category of children and gambling adults has actually existed, even though the groups are seldom theoretically linked in the present mordant way. But calling the masteries of play in childhood or adiilthood forms of hallucination or illusion is itself an epistemological discourse that implies something defective about them. This discourse implies that those who master their lives in more realistic ways are more mature or more adequate persons, and this may or may not be empirically true. Given that there is nothing more characteristic of human achievement than the creation of illusory cultural and theoretical worlds, as in music, dance, literature, and science, then children’s and gamblers’ full participation in such play worlds can be seen not as a defect, or as compensation for inadequacy, but rather as participation in a major central preoccupation of humankind. The modern computer-age habit of calling these “virtual worlds” rather than

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illusory worlds highlights this move toward a more positive, if narrower, epistemological attitude about their function. As we now see the creation of human meanings as central to human culture, we can give more primary appreciation to these manifestations in our artists, our children, and our gamblers (Hymes 1974). We might borrow from Steiner the view that the issue is no longer whether there is superior reality versus inferior play, but whether the play is itself merely ordinary or a case of “brilhant virtuality” (1995). The rhetoric of fate is a real threat to the rhetoric of progress, because the concept of virtuality promises to put adults and children in the same Indie world.

The play of the gods I move now to an array of examples in which play exemplifies not our own autonomy but our being controlled by some fate. The concept that play originates in the activities of the gods is well illustrated by O’Flaherty, who says, in her book Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities (1984), “This is a book about myths, dreams and illusion. It is about the ways in

which they are alike, the ways in which they are different, and what each teaches us about reality. Transformations of one sort or another are the heart of myths” (3). She goes on to show how, in Hindu mythology, the world is at play in the hands of the gods, and dreaming and playfulness are forms of reality treated as seriously as the so-called commonsense world. Play, like dreams, is not a secondary state of reality, as it is with us, but has primacy as a form of knowing. O’Flaherty says; “In India the realm of mental images is not on the defensive. Common sense has a powerful lobby there, as it has with us, but it does not always have everything its own way. Reality has to share the burden of proof with unreality in India, and it is by no means a foregone conclusion that reality will win” (304). Handelman (1992) brings these ideas to bear on the issue of play when he says:

In Indian cosmology, play is a top down idea. Passages to play and their premises are embedded at a high level of abstraction and generality. The qualities of play resonate and resound throughout the whole. But more than this, qualities of play are integral to the very operation of the cosmos. To be in play is to reproduce time and again the very premises that inform the existence of this kind of cosmos . . . Now in cosmologies where premises of play are not embedded at a high level and are not integral to the organization of the cosmos, as in Western society, the phenomenon of play seems to erupt from the bottom. By bottom up play 1 mean that play often is phrased in opposition to, or as a negation of, the order of things. This is the perception of play as unserious, illusory and ephemeral, but it is also the perception of play as subversive and resisting the order of things.

(12) Schcchner (1988), beginning with tlie same Hindu materials as O’Flaherty and extra¬ polating probably from his own iconoclastic career in theater direction, suggests that if we look more closely at Western play, particularly what he calls “dark play” and what 1

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have called elsewhere “cruel play” (Sutton-Smith 1982) and the “masks of play” (SuttonSmith and Kelly-Byrne 1984), there are some strong similarities with the Indian tradition. He agrees that for moderns play has low status, whereas in Hindu metaphysics it is indeed the divine process of creation; and whereas for moderns play is framed as not real, for Hindus it is one of multiple realities, all transformable into each other. However, when he shifts this discourse from a concern with metaphysical and cultural forms to the more ontological or psychological plane, then it is possible to see modern parallels between our own play behavior, particularly in what he calls our dark play, and that of the Hindus. Thus while Handelman might wish to deny it. Scheduler contends that playing is for us, as for the Hindus,

a creative destabilizing action that frequently does not declare its existence, even less its intentions. Playing is a mood, an attitude, a force. It erupts or one falls into it. It may persist for a long time as specific games, rites, and artistic performances do — or it comes and goes suddenly — a wisecrack, an ironic glimpse of things, a bend or crack in behavior. It’s wrong to think of playing as the interruption of ordinary life. Consider instead playing as the imderlying, always there, continuum of experience. Ordinary life is netted out of playing but play continually squeezes through even the smallest holes of the work net . . . work and other activities constantly feed on the underlying groxmd of playing, using the play mood for refreshment, energy, unusual ways of turning things aroimd, insights, breaks, opening and especially looseness. (1988: 16-18)

Here we have Schechner borrowing from his readings in Hindu metaphysics an interpreta¬ tion of play as a highly transforming and powerful, often irrational experience, which he apparently presumes to be universal. In this he goes beyond the typical Western tradition of play interpretation, although there are some scholars who are attempting to do similar things within Western theology. They believe that the Christian God can be seen as a creative player (Berger 1969; Miller 1969; Moltmann 1972; Nemoianu and Royal 1992). But on closer analysis they seem to be talking about a fairly rational creator, whereas Schechner, like Nietzsche, has a fairly irrational and secular player in mind. In sum, while in part accepting Handelman’s dichotomy of up and down, Schechner injects into the bottomup Western psychological play attitude a more comprehensive and heteronymous theory of play’s role than Handelman’s cultural bottom-up implies. On Schechner’s behalf it might be added that dreams, daydreams, and illusions could be included as a part of his bottom-up view in Western thought, particularly as this seems to be the case neurologically, as will be shown later. There is enough known about these oneiric phenomena to see that they have a kind of pervasiveness and automaticity of their own. They do seem to resist attempts to make the good things in life always a part of conscious control and choice. They constantly present us with other images of ourselves that seem to persist despite our desire to the contrary, so that even if we are usually reluctant to give dreams the ontological status of play, they do constantly permeate our thinking

and it

is not certain that when this happens it is not itself a kind of play of mind. What makes

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interpretation more difficult is that what permeates minds day by day,

the underlying,

always there, continuum of experience,” is usually referred to as daydreaming, reverie, or rumination. Is play to be the name for all of these, as Schechner implies? Or is play to be only the more active next step that is taken willfully with these daydreams, to turn them into controlled fantasies or imaginings? There is truly a sense in which a mind plays its own recordings and has its own streams of consciousness, very little of which is actively under control. But human passivity in these respects contrasts with the active nature usually attributed to waking play and usually thought to be essential to most modern definitions of play. One can see how the passivity or receptivity of the Hindu in face of the metaphysical universe at play could mingle quite easily with the Hindu ontological sense of the individual mind at daydreaming play. Play could then be thought to be mainly a phenomenon to be experienced top down rather than actively manipulated bottom up. Typical Western definitions, by contrast, make the player a more entrepreneurial kind of being. And this allows Westerners to divide off the “daydream stuff” as a less credible part of the mind. But Schechner’s alternative suggests that if the Western concept of play, no matter how controlhng, does rest on a bedrock of dreams, that would be a much more comprehensive bottom-up idea than most modern play theorists have in mind. A further advantage of Schechner’s broad view might be that it could help account for the way in which players quickly become highly absorbed in their own play. The message “this is play” lets go a flood of internally instigated emotion and involvement. The continuity between such imp>elling automata and the more behavioral matters of pby might well account for the ever present and sudden surge of ready engagement in virtual play experience. Without confusing Schechner’s ontological usage with the Hindu metaphysical usage, it can be proposed that the breadth of play he suggests for these secular nonmvthic times provides a broad play rhetoric. In what follows, the modern broad play rhetoric will be presented as one that encompasses all the mind materials of dreams, daydreams, tropes, and active play forms. Contrarily the narrow play rhetoric will speak for the more limited rhetorics of progress, power, identity, and the self .... Briefly, these can be called the broad and narrow versions of play. In the broad version, evervthing is plav that is clearlv not of an immediate adaptive usefulness. In the narrow version, nothing is play unless contem¬ poraneously so named. Most things, in this narrow version, are not play. Dreams are dreams, daydreams are daydreams, imagination is imagination (though it can become imaginative play), spectators arc just spectators of someone else plaving, and metaphors arc simply figures of speech, unless we actually play with them. Children do many things that arc not play, such as exploring, practicing, exercising, learning, imitating, problem solving, and all the art activities that are art, not play.

The universe at play The broader definition, in which either the gods or our own brains influence us playfully beyond our control, has aliout it an externality not likely to be popular in modern everyday parlance. Of similar externality arc those views of the universe that .sec it too as being at

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play. In the hard sciences the concept of play is constantly being applied as a metaphor or a metaphysic to handle the inconstancy, indeterminism, unpredictability, or chaos of basic physical processes throughout the universe. There is a daruiting similarity between some of these views of the umverse and some of the ways neurologists are beginning to talk about the brain. They are, umverse and brain, both more or less beyond control, and all one can do is try to understand the rules by which they operate. Perhaps one of the fascinations of games of chance is that they mirror both physical nature and human nature more adequately than we want to believe. I am grateful for Spariosu’s assemblage of the play theories of the play-oriented Nobel Prize-winning physical scientists, and I quote here briefly from his extended accounts (1989). Jacques Monod contends that “life on earth is entirely a matter of chance . . . essentially impredictable” (217). Eigen and Winkler state that “everything that happens in our world resembles a vast game in which nothing is determined in advance but the rules, and only the rules are open to objective understanding . . . chance and necessity underlie all events. The history of play goes back to the beginnings of time . . . chance and rules are the elements of play. Once begun by the elementary particles, atoms, molecules, play is carried on by our brain cells. Man did not invent play. But it is ‘play and only play that makes man complete’ ” (224). Erwin Schrodinger goes considerably further when he sees science itself as belonging to the play sphere, not just driven by the logic of adaptation: “Play, art and science are the spheres of human activity where the action and aim are not rule determined by the aims imposed by the necessities of life” (27S). For Schrodinger, science is a rhetorical product of its age no less than all the other ideological rhetorics of the particular time and place. Werner Heisenberg takes a similar position on the comparability of art (and play) and science as complementary modes of knowledge. The most playful of modern science philosophers, however, is Paul Feyerabend, who likens science to the play of infants with language: “It is a bricolage of experimentation . . . initial Playful activity is an essential prerequisite of the final act of understanding . . . new scientific practice needs time to develop its conceptual tools and its empirical data by playing with them, that is, by constantly repeating and combining them until they become common usage or reality” (29S). In his analysis Spariosu is able to show that even with this openness of science to the metaphor of play, the majority of the scientific philosophers are still dominated by a rational and progressive view of how science and art or play will proceed together. Like Kant and Schiller, they do not really allow for imagining as a subversive activity or allow them¬ selves to be seriously attracted to an irrational view of the universe. Even Feyerabend, who comes closest to Nietzsche’s view of the playful universe as a constant struggle between antagonistic powers, is stiU more moderate than Nietzsche. In his own pluralistic and idealistic notion of a post-scientific world, Feyerabend suggests there can be balance, with different subcultural powers observing a certain amount of fair play in relation to each other.

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REFERENCES

Berger, P.L. (1969) A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books. -(1992) “Passages to play: paradox and process,” Play and Culture 5, 1: 1-19. Handelman, D. (1990) Models and Mirrors: Toward an Anthropolgy of Public Events, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, F. (ed.) (1974) Reinventing Anthropology, New York: Vintage. Miller, D.L. (1969) Gods and Games, New York: World. Moltmann, J. (1972) Theology of Play, New York: Harper and Row. Nemoianu, V. and R. Royal (1992) Play, Literature and Religion, Albany: State University of New York Press. O’Flaherty, W.D. (1984) Dreams, Illusions, and Other Realities, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schechner, R. (1988) “Playing,” Play and Culture 1,1: 3-27. Spariosu, M. (1989) Dionysus Reborn, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Steiner, W. (1995) The Scandal of Pleasure, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sutton-Smith, B. (1982) “Play theory and the cruel play of the nineteenth century,” in The World of Play, ed. PE. Manning, West Point, NY: Leisure Press.

Sutton-Smith, B. and D. Kelly-Byrne (1984) The Masks of Play, West Point, NY: Leisure Press.

READER CROSS-REFERENCES

Schechner—play as an element of the broad spectrum approach to performance studies Jackson, McKenzie — disciplinary rhetorics Geertz — has addressed play from an anthropological standpoint Huzinga — the significance of play in human culture Bateson — play in communication and thought processes Derrida — uncertainty in philosophical and linguistic discourse Zimmerman — the unexpected in the creative process

1S8

20 JUST DOING Allan Kaprow

For years I’ve been trying to pick up my shadow on a sunny day, to put it in my pocket for a rainy day. I remember to do this now and then. It’s been difficult. And to tell the truth, I’ve never succeeded. The shadow changes as I bend over, and I can’t quite compress it to fit into my jeans. {All Mine, 1987-) *

On the same subject, I and a friend, the musician Jean-Charles Francois, did small events for each other in the 1980s to provide some diversion from our administrative duties at the University of California, San Diego. We did them together, usually just the two of us, sometimes with a few others. This one involved our going out to the hills east of the uni¬ versity campus. The idea was that one of us would follow the other without saying a word, only making sure to step constantly on the shadow of the other, no matter where he went. In practice, since the leader would go over boulders, around cactus, and up and down ravines, the length and relative position of the shadow changed. Sometimes it was in front of him, if he was walking away from the sim. In that case, it was a bit tricky; the follower had to jump in front of the leader and walk backwards to keep the shadow in view, making quick changes as the leader swung aroimd to different directions. According to plan, the leader had no obhgation to the follower. At certain moments, for example, when walking up a ravine, the shadow would be shortened by the angle of the ground. Then we would find ourselves nearly on top of one another, our shoes touching. When the follower lost contact with the shadow (as it frequently happened), he would loudly bang together two stones he carried in his hands again, as per plan. This single sound marked the moment when we exchanged positions; the follower became the leader. But of course, since contact was lost so often, and the distances kept changing, it all got pretty imclear as to who was what. Nevertheless, it was very formally executed. (Tail Wagging Dog, 1985) *

Ludwig Thurmer, Barbara Glas, Coryl Crane, and I were together in Berlin. Ludwig and Barbara had a new baby. We went for a walk to look for some new grass, since it was spring. Soon we found a perfect field of young shoots. Coryl and Barbara, carrying her baby, walked

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slowly into it, leaving clear footprints. Ludwig and 1 followed, placing our shoes exactly in the same depressions. But before each step, we reached behind us to lift up the flattened blades of grass, so that no marks were left. Afterwards, looking at the field, it was very odd, it seemed that we’d never been there. (Walking Light on the World, 1982) *

A few years ago, a group joined me for a workshop in experimental art. A large room was set aside for us. After the usual introductions (whose conventional form - “My name is . . .” — we soon saw as an “event”), we decided to play with the light switch. The idea was that anyone in the room could get up from where they were sitting and turn off the fights. How long it would take was unplanned. Then, anyone could turn it on. Then off. Then on, and so forth. Long periods of time followed. Although there were no guidelines about silence, no one spoke. You could hear people breathing. We peeked at one another, trying to anticipate who would make the next move. Sometimes we stared at someone, challenging them, to see who would wait the longest. People got up and played with the switch, flicking the fight, or archly changing it back and forth, as if to convey some message. Equally, there were 15 minutes or more of doing nothing. The only advice given in advance was that anyone could leave the room when they had to. The experiment would end when no one remained. After about tw'o and a half hours I had to give a talk elsewhere. There were nine in the room when I left. 1 went to the airport after the lecture and never heard when the room became empty. (On/Off, 1994) *

The playground for experimental art is ordinary fife. But playing in this ordinary world does not mean including even more features of the commonplace than we are already used to finding in exhibitions, concerts, poems, dances, films, and performances. Such appro¬ priations are the traditional strategies that turn life into art. No matter how much fife we confront in them, their standard contexts never allow us to forget art’s higher station. In contrast, the experimental artist who plays with the commonplace does so in the very midst of crossing the street or tying a shoelace. There is no excerpting and reenacting them on a stage, no documenting them for a show. Art is thus easily forgotten. .\nd that is the condition for experimentation: the art is the forgetting of art. For John Cage, an experimental action in music was one whose outcome couldn’t be known in advance (my paraphrase). Musical and nonmusical sound (“noise”) were equally welcome, along with their unpredictable arrangements. But, for the most part. Cage’s experimental music was still music, and took place in the concert situation. Art was auto¬ matically affirmed despite Cage’s commitment to the stuff of fife. But that was the 1950s and it was a big step into the vernacular. Today, we may say that experimental art is that act or thought whose identity as art must always remain in doubt. Not only does this hold for anyone who plays with the “artist”; it holds especially for the “artist”! The experiment is not to possess a secret artistry in deep

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disguise; it is not knowing what to call it at any time! As soon — and it is usually very soon — as such acts and thoughts are associated with art and its discourses, it is time to move on to other possibilities of experimentation. *

A woman agreed that she needed guidance. Her friends proposed to give it by moving her in the right directions. So she just stood and waited to be moved. Her friends had a discussion and decided on some right directions for her; that is, out the door, down the stairs, along a river . . . They moved her by pulling, shoving, dragging, and carrying her in the right directions. They set aside some days for this, as their decisions were quite serious. And, naturally, there were some disagreements. But the woman was patient and just waited until they agreed on what to do. (Help Is Always Welcome, 1990) *

In answer to my suggestion to Brian Dick — that he might like to do the stupidest thing he could think of, and then the smartest — he hung a roomful of big pickles from a ceiling, wrapping them with electric wire attached to the house current. When he turned on the switch, the pickles glowed and sent out blue sparks before burning out and smelling bad. Then, for his “smartest” thing, he repeated the whole procedure the next day. (1990) *

Play, of course, is at the heart of experimentation. Elsewhere, I’ve pointed out the crucial difference in the English language between playing and gaming (1993; llCfr26). Gaming involves winning or losing a desired goal. Playing is open-ended and, potentially, everybody “wins.” Playing has no stated purpose other than more playing. It is usually not serious in content or attitude, whereas gaming, which can also involve playing if it is subordinated to winning, is at heart competitive. *

Experimentation also involves attention to the normally unnoticed. I scratch my ear when it itches. I notice the itch, notice my scratching, and notice when the itching stops, if it does. I attend to my raised arm and my fingers pulling at my ear (it’s the left one), while discussing pohtics. But mostly, I scratch itches without noticing. I learned as a child not to scratch an itch in pubhc, and now that I intentionally notice that I do so anyway, the whole action looms large. It’s a Uttle strange, and my conversation about pohtics loses interest as itching and scratching shine brighter. In other words, attention alters what is attended. Playing with everyday hfe often is just paying attention to what is conventionally hidden. *

For example, we all know about those creeps who telephone someone and breathe a lot but don’t say anything. Five friends and I decided to play with heavy breathing on the telephone.

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We exchanged numbers and were free to call any of them at any time for the next three days. All we were to do was breathe heavily for as long as we wished, or until we were cut off. Sometimes a phone would just ring and ring. It was never clear if the person was out or was refusing to pick up the receiver. Sometimes we would reach an answering machine, and we had to decide if we wanted to breathe for the recording. It was the same uncertainty when we were at home: Was the phone ringing because it was an expected business call, or was it going to be heavy breathing? Would the phone ring in the middle of the night? How long could we keep from giggling? Once, I reached the mother-in-law of one of the group. She listened to me breathing for a moment and screamed in Italian that I was a pervert and worse, before slamming down the receiver. The funny thing about this caper was that you couldn t tell from the breathing who was telephoning. (Touching Someone, 1991) *

If the analytically inclined still want to know why to play at everyday life, an answer might go like this: Experimental art is the only kind of art that Anglo-America can call its own. This American culture has long rejected the fine arts as irrelevant and devoid of honest labor. “Idle hands make devil’s work.” Experintental art, as described here, is the one kind of art that can affirm and deny art at the same time. It is the one kind of au't that can claim as value no value! It is in agreement with American philistinism and its throwaw’ay materialism - while it is free to enact a sort of “native” creativity in the play of ordinary fffe (c.f. John Dewey). The one caveat is that it must not be called art. *

I woke up one day and had an idea. I would dig a bucket of dirt from the garden, and I’d put the bucket of dirt and a shovel in my truck. On some future day. I’d trade my dirt for someone else’s dirt. A month went by and I didn’t think about it. Usually, every week, 1 go on Wedne.sdays to sit at the Zen Center in San Diego. So, one Wednesday, I remembered the bucket of dirt. I asked Ben Thor.sen, who lived there at the time, “Can I have a bucket of dirt? Don’t worry. I’ll give you a bucket of good garden dirt in return." 1 told him about the rich compost in the garden. He looked at me anil started to laugh. “Sure, there’s plenty of dirt.” He pointed in all directions. I went to get the bucket of dirt and shovel. When 1 came back Ben said, “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s crawl under the Zen Center and get the dirt from just below the seat of our teacher [Charlotte joko Beck). That’ll be heavy-duty Buddhist dirt!” 1 agreed it was a very good idea. We got a flashlight and .squeezed our way under the floor of the house, dragging the bucket and shovel behind us. It was cramped, with maybe 15 inches of clearance, filthy dirty, cobwebs everywhere. But we couldn’t determine the exact spot we were looking for. So Ben said he would go back out and would tap on the floor above; 1 could move over to where his taps were coming from, and tap back to him. That’s what we did. At the right place under the floor, 1 scooped out a hole in the dreadful dirt that was only construction remnants. Replacing it with my garden dirt would be an improvement.

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JUST DOING

I thought uncharitably. In any case, the heavy-duty Buddhist vibes were the main consideration. So I wiggled out with the stuff and brushed off my clothes. Ben was thoroughly amused by then and said, “What are you doing this for?” I said, “Oh, it s what I hke to do. No big deal.” He said, “Well, I guess it’s no sillier than sitting on a cushion for hours doing nothing” (as we seem to do at the Center). We talked for some time about the meaning of life. Some weeks passed, and I stopped at the local farm stand where 1 bought my fruit and vegetables. I asked the woman there, “Can I have a bucket of your dirt? I’ll give you one in return.” She stared at me. “You want a bucket of dirt? From here? Why?” She pointed to the barren clay of the roadside. She thought she hadn’t heard me right. I said “It’s heavy-duty Buddhist dirt,” and I told her the story. She was clearly impressed with the Buddhist part. “I thought you were an artist.” I said to her yes and that this was what I did. “I thought you were a college professor.” “Sure. I teach this sort of thing, trading dirt.” “They pay you for it?” she asked me. Then she thought a moment. “But it’s not serious; it’s what my grandson does.” She gestured toward the child playing on the floor with cornhusks. “What’s serious?” I said to her. So we had a long talk about the meaning of life while I dug a hole at the side of the road. As I was about to pour the Buddhist dirt into it, she tossed some dry seeds into the bucket. I said “What did you do that for?” “Why not? It can’t hurt,” she said. (The dirt trading and the stories went on for three years. It had no real beginning or end. The stories began to add up to a very long story, and with each retelling they changed. When I stopped being interested in the process [it coincided with my wife and I having to move after our rental property was sold], I put the last bucket of dirt back into the garden.) {Trading Dirt, 1982—S)

REFERENCE

Kaprow, Allan (1993) “The education of the un-artist,” part 2, in Essajs on the Blurring ojArt and Life, Berkeley: University of California Press.

READER CROSS-REFERENCES

Goffman, Gabler — the blurring between art and hfe Huizinga, Bateson, Sutton-Smith — academic discom-ses of play Phelan, Faber, Grotowski, Brecht, Strasberg, Zimmerman - playing with the quotidian in the service of art

163

21

FALLING APART TO STAY TOGETHER Deep pLy H the Grand Marais Mardi Gras Barry Jean Ancelet

As a social game, Mardi Gras ultimately reaffirm the status quo, perhaps nudging it along conservatively toward change, instead of undermining it or threatening it with genuine chaos as Bakhtin has suggested (Ancelet 1993; Davis 1975: 97-123; Le Roy Ladurie 1979: 316; Lindahl 1996). The Cajvm Country Mardi Gras in southern Louisiana has been shown to be a powerful definer of its petit monde by visiting cind extracting a commitment from those who belong to the social hub of the region or neighborhood (Ancelet 1992; Lindahl 1996). In this article, I examine the dramatic play that underlies one particular Mardi Gras ritual, the one that takes place in Grand Marais, Louisiana. In addition to fulfilling the usual functions of the Louisiana country Mardi Gras, in visiting the neighborhood and extracting a show of social commitment in the form of a donation of gumbo ingredients or money, this community’s version of the celebration includes an intense dramatic ritual that chronically and impulsively spills over into something like what Clifford Geertz has called “deep pl^y” (1973). The result of this practice seems to be a reaffirmation of the tradition; it engages all players to reach an intensified level of commitment to the game itself by requiring them to cooperate in pulling it back from the brink of apparent disaster. In his study ol Balinese cockfighting, Geertz pointed out that there were real issues and tensions driving the play associated with this social ritual. What on the surface appears to he a purely ludic affair can have serious undercurrents that reflect community realities and concerns. Yet outside observers with no attachment to the community have frequently mistaken the surface play at face value, describing various versions of the Mardi Gras as a colorful, chaotic frenzy (Ancelet 1989). 1 have been interested in South Louisiana’s Cajun Country Mardi Gras since 1977. I addressed the blurring of the participant and observer roles available to me during my first experience on the Mamou run that same year, in an American Folklore Society conference paper entitled “The Mamou Mardi Gras from behind the mask: problems of the ethnic folklorist working in his own community.” Since then 1 have participated in various Mardi Gras runs on horseback, in a wagon, in a truck, and on foot. 1 have observed, photographed.

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FALLING APART TO STAY TOGETHER

and reported on 24 different versions of the country Mardi Gras, some all ■white, some all black, some mixed; some all men, some all women, some mixed; some all adults, some all children, some mixed; some on horseback, some in wagons, some on four-wheelers, some on foot, most in some combination. With that possible variation in mind, generally, masked (or painted) and costumed revelers gather on a designated day before Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lenten season, usually on Tuesday (Mardi Gras) but in some cases on Saturday (Samedi Gras) or Sunday (Dimanche Gras). They travel together through the countryside, usually circling the town, sometimes approaching the town from a designated gathering point out in the country, collecting the ingredients for a communal gumbo to be eaten at the end of the day. Specific elements, such as masking and costmning strategies, singing styles, and begging practices, change from place to place as towns and country settlements give shape to their own versions of the celebration. In the two-day Grand Marais run, participants run on Saturday and Sunday. They disguise themselves with painted faces instead of masks. Participants and organizers explain that masks are prohibited in Jeff Davis Parish, but this may in fact have more to do with history and tradition than statutes.

They also identify themselves by wearing some sort of hat or

cap, usually with a feather attached to it. Runners visit houses in the working-class neigh¬ borhoods of Jennings and visit farmsteads in the rural countryside north of town and west of Bayou Nezpique, an area known as Grand Marais. They also stop traffic on the road between houses. They approach houses and cars in positions of supplication, on their knees or crawling, with hats in hand to beg for any contribution, including money for their gumbo fund to help pay for the communal meal they will make available to all on Tuesday night. Black-faced negres with braided burlap whips vigorously enforce the ‘law” of the vmdisguised capitaine (captain) during the mock trials and subsequent ritual floggings of designated

participants — improvised for especially generous households or individual contributors. If the capitaine judges that enough money has been donated to the gumbo fund, he orders his group of soldats (soldiers), also called sauvages (Indians), to sit in a circle and sing the traditional questing and drinking song, which describes a bottle and glass of liquor that are slowly emptying in the depths of winter and must be refilled:

Mardi Gras, d’ayou viens-tu?

Mardi Gras, where do you come from?

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver.

All around the depths of winter.

Mardi Gras, d’ayou -vdens-tu?

Mardi Gras, where do you come from?

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver.

All arovmd the depths of winter.

Je viens de I’Angleterre, o mon cher, o mon cher.

I come from England, oh my dear, oh my dear.

Je viens de I’Angleterre.

1 come from England.

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver,

All around the depths of winter.

O Mardi Gras, quoi portes-tu?

Oh Mardi Gras, what do you bring?

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver.

.\11 around the depths of winter.

O Mardi Gras, quoi portes-tu?

Oh Mardi Gras, what do you bring?

Tout alentour du fond d’liiver.

All around the depths of winter.

J’apporte la bouteille, o mon cher, o mon cher.

I bring the bottle, oh my dear, oh my dear.

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver.

All around the depths of winter.

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BARRY JEAN ANCELET

O la bouteille est bue.

Oh the bottle is drunk.

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver.

All around the depths of winter.

O la bouteille est bue.

Oh the bottle is drunk.

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver.

All around the depths of winter.

D reste que le plein verre, o mon cher,

Only the full glass remains, oh my dear, oh my dear.

o mon cher. D reste que le plein verre.

Only the full glass remains.

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver.

All around the depths of winter.

O le plein verre est bu.

Oh the full glass is drunk.

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver.

All around the depths of winter.

O le plein verre est bu.

Oh the full glass is drunk.

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver.

All around the depths of winter.

II reste que la rin9ure, o mon cher,

Only the dregs remain, oh my dear, oh my dear.

o mon cher. U reste que la rin9ure.

Only the dregs remain.

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver.

All around the depths of winter.

O la rin9ure est bue.

Oh the dregs are drunk.

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver.

All around the depths of winter.

O la rin9ure est bue.

Oh the dregs are drunk.

Tout alentour du fond d’hiver.

All around the depths of winter.

O ring et rang et ma bouteille, et ma bouteille,

Oh ring and rang and my bottle, and my bottle.

O ring et rang et ma bouteille qui s’en va.

Oh ring and rang and my bottle is dwindling.

Les Acadiens sont pas si fous

The Acadians are not so foolish

De se laisset sans boire un coup.

As to leave each other without ha>'ing a drink.

Toute chanson qui passe a fin

Every song that reaches an end

Meirite un petit coup a boire.

Is worth ha^ng a little drink.

Afterward, the capitaine and his assistant improvise charges against a few of the participants, accusing them of such trumped-up transgressions as not singing the song properly or approaching the house or donor inappropriately. The capitaine designates the “accused” by collecting their hats. There is a brief mock trial, based on circular logic that flees from the truth. The capitaine always wins, and the condemned are then ordered to lie face down in alternating directions. Invariably they add to the play, creating confusion by deliberately lining up wrong, that is, crossed or in the same direction. The negres then whip the accused vigorously as they yell to each other to “get right.” The guilty will sometimes turn several times at the same time to find themselves still wrong, as the negres continue their whipping. Other soldats may crawl over the accused to ostensibly protect their “brothers” from the blows, which can be surprisingly earnest. This, however, can be a mixed blessing at best, as the accused are often lying face down on gravel or cement driveways. Eventually, the capitaine gets them right and gives them a preordained number of ritual taps, usually less severe than the lashings they have already received. The negres are basically the capitaine’s lieutenants. They carry out his orders without question. They can also be beaten by the capitaine or his assistant if they tran.sgress one of the rules designed to define their

166

FALLING APART TO

STAY TOGETHER

performance. As lead beggars, they are to approach each house on their knees with hats in hand. And they are not to question the capitaine’s choice of soldats to be whipped. Beyond the already intense nature on the surface of this ritualistic play, there is an even deeper level of play (cf. Geertz 1973) in the Grand Marais March Gras. This deep play is initiated by a crisis that apparently jeopardizes the celebration itself. These crises are then incorporated into the March Gras, providing participants an opportunity to shift into another level of improvisation, a level that far surpasses the level of improvisation routinely performed for the homeowners as part of the “normal” Mardi Gras visit. The first time I saw this deeper level of play emerge was in 1993 at the Tuesday evening gumbo supper and dance, during which participants have no painted faces and wear no costumes other than hats decorated with symbolic flowering branches, and whippers have what they call “dress whips,” part of what Le Roy Ladurie describes as the third, “redressive” stage of carnival, representing the end of festivities and the beginning of reintegration into normal life (1979; 306). During that year’s closing ceremony, at which were gathered all participants as well as members of the community who contributed to the March Gras, someone proposed that Capitaine Wallace should be whipped for having lost the flag that served as his standard at one point during Sunday’s run. At the mock trial that necessarily ensued, Capitaine Wallace and his lieutenants valiantly explained that Wallace had indeed been separated from his flag but that this was because it had been stolen by one of the soldats, that this was not his fault, and that the thief more properly should be whipped. The soldats countered with the undeniable point that the guilty one had been whipped plenty for his transgression during Sunday’s run but that it remained true that the capitaine had lost the flag, betraying one of his primary responsibilities to clearly identify himself as the responsible party and negotiator to all the households that the Mardi Gras visited. Up to this point, the improvised trials of the evening had resembled those performed for homeowners and donors throughout the countryside. In this instance, however, the accusation called the capitaine himself into question, and the trial headed into new and potentially dangerous territory. The outcome of the trial was determined as soon as the accusation was first brought up, an eventuality that the initial accusers may not have taken into consideration. After many convoluted arguments, Capitaine Wallace, in typical Mardi Gras fashion acting as both judge and accused, eventually annovmced that his condemnation was indeed justified. According to the rules of the game that they found themselves making up as they went along, the capitaine could choose to designate a heutenant to receive his whipping in his place. Dallas, a formidable man and the run’s most vigorous whipper, was understandably concerned that the soldats might try to take advantage of the situation by exacting a measure of revenge if he were chosen. Apparently unwilUng to take the chance, Dallas left the circle of soldats, declaring that he would not participate in the whipping of the capitaine. At this point, the play shifted into a deeper mode. Dallas had broken the ritual circle and defied the game itself. After considerable protesting and confusion, the game went on without Dallas. Capitaine Wallace declared that he would accept his ovm flogging. Though well into his 70s, Capitaine Wallace remained both physically and mentally sturdy, an excellent horseman, a powerful man, and a born leader with a commanding presence that was never challenged. Yet, on this occasion, for the purposes of the game, he slipped

167

BARRY JEAN ANCELET

into another of his personae, an apparently frail and fragile old man who regularly com¬ plained, especially in the weeks preceding each Mardi Gras, that his age and failing health made his continued participation in this rigorous ritual questionable. There was a clear sense of awe as the venerable capitaine handed over the banner to his assistant capitaine and went down onto the floor with much ado and dramatic difficulty. From his prone position, he put on quite a show in response to the symbolic taps given to him by the remaining lieutenants, quivering in mock pain though the whips were hitting much more floor than him. Capitaine Wallace’s improvisation was not without precedent. He explained later, in 1996, that there is an existing procedure for whipping the capitaine and the negres;

Capitaine Wallace: Yeah, I’ll have to do it. The others can t do it. Barry Ancelet: That’s to keep things in order? CW: Yeah, if you didn’t do that, you let the others do it, you know, it’d be too much of it. It don’t work. So it’s always been the way it was done. If the negres have got to be whipped, it has to be the capitaine or the co-capitaine, his assistant. BA: Somebody above him? CW: Yeah, you see, one of the leaders. BA: Now, can the capitaine ever get whipped? CW: The capitaine can at the dance over there, but it has to be the next guy in command. That’s the only one. Because if you go down, people like Dallas, they’re going to get you. You can believe, you’re going to get it.

But for the purposes of the game, everyone inside and outside the circle seemed to feel that this was a particularly vulnerable time as this potentially volatile game, which can exist only under the absolute control of its strong leader, was apparently leaderless for the moment. Afterward, all were reassured when Capitaine Wallace abandoned the temporary role he had donned for the occasion and rose from the floor to resume his position of absolute power at the head of the circle. With order apparently restored, Dallas sought to return to the circle. But his leaving had broken a ritual tru.st. All players now shifted gears to participate in a remarkable improvised mock trial to deal with the matter of his desertion. They used the game itself to deal with a problem that was quite real and that threatened to deprive the Mardi Gras of one of its most valued members. Negotiating from the edge of the circle, Dallas was eventuallv allowed to reenter with the understanding that he would stand trial for his transgression. He was, of course, convicted in due course and condemned to be flogged. He thus found himself in position to receive the potentially harsh treatment he was earnestly trving to avoid in the first place. Understanding that the game was flirting witli disaster if there were genuine revenge or a genuine mutiny, Capitaine Wallace declared that he would take care of the sentence himself and administered a modest whipping to the relief of everyone involved. Members of the community watching this spectacle were mightily entertained. Even nonparticipants knew of Dallas s notoriously fierce whippings and found that turning the tables on him was hilarious. The ostensible purpose of such play is precisely to generate

168

FALLING APART TO

STAY TOGETHER

laughter in the community. No members of the community indicated any awareness of the close call that the ritual had endured. Members of the group did not articulate an overt understanding of the potential danger of the situation at the time. In fact, there was an audible sigh of relief from participants upon the discovery of a viable solution. Nor did anyone respond to questions about the situation later. But events in subsequent years seem to indicate that this level of play may actually be cultivated, consciously or subconsciously, by the group or parts of the group, not only to satisfy a desire for greater thrills but to reaffirm the group by creating a need for it to negotiate between cohesion and disintegration or dissolution. Another year, Dallas, the enforcer, was temporarily entrusted with the moneybag used to hold donations during the day. According to the rules, the bag is the responsibility of the capitaine, whose role it is to represent the players to the community they are visiting. As master of the game, he is the only person who can be expected to control such serious matters as negotiating visits and guarding the group’s booty. Otherwise occupied for a moment during this particular day, Capitaine Wallace delegated to his toughest lieutenant the responsibility for returning the moneybag to the vehicle accompanying the ride for safekeeping. On his way, some of the soldats succeeded in distracting Dallas and spirited away the bag. This lapse genuinely jeopardized the accountability of the capitaine, and thus the Mardi Gras, vis-a-vis those working to collect the funds and those contributing to the commimal gumbo. The soldats who pilfered the bag came immediately to show it off to Capitaine Wallace, who promptly summoned Dallas before him. Dallas was accused of losing track of the bag and was immediately foimd guilty by the same kangaroo court logic as that which convicted Capitaine Wallace in the previous episode. The soldats were pun¬ ished for stealing the bag — but so was Dallas for losing it. This time, however, the sentence was to be carried out on the road, in public and in process. It became immediately clear that whipping a whipper in media res was a highly unusual turn of events. Once the game got this far, no one knew exactly how to proceed, for it had not happened before. Confused over the procedure for such an unanticipated event, the players then engaged in considerable negotiation concerning how this was to be done and by whom. It was determined after considerable discussion that only the capitaine and the co-capitaine could participate in the administration of the sentence. Dallas also invoked the right not to be whipped alone. Someone pointed out that Troy, another lieutenant, had been observed without a hat during the same visit, and he was pressed into service as Dallas’s partner in crime and punishment. It was also determined that Dallas and Troy must be disarmed to receive their sentence, and their whips were removed with considerable gravity and circumstance along with their hats, as per the tradition. Even then, the two bareheaded and unarmed condemned lieutenants lay down in the circle only to come back up or roll over at least 20 times to negotiate another fine point, hands in the air as if attempting to hold off the inevitable. The tension was palpable. These were not just any participants but, in fact, leaders being court-martialed — and not back at headquarters, as in the previous example, but in the field. A refusal by Dallas or Troy to accept the terms of the sentence would have amounted to a mutiny and would have led to a breakdown in the game. Soldats who might use the opportunity to obtain revenge for their own harsh treatment during the

169

BARRY JEAN ANCELET

day tried to negotiate a role for themselves in the process. Several of them added to the confusion of the moment, taking advantage of the traditional practice of protecting those to be whipped by crawling over them, taking special care to crush the lieutenants into the ground as they went. After several tenuous minutes, Capitaine Wallace finally succeeded in guiding the group through these uncharted waters. Both men stoically accepted the sen¬ tence and their flogging with grace. The crisis was resolved, and all continued the day with the structure of the game intact and the roles of the players reaffirmed after this hair-raising performance. People at the house thought that the whole scene was hilarious. A few of the more experienced soldats and whippers, including John and Wilson, confided through ner¬ vous smiles that they were relieved to get out of that fix with all members still in the game. They knew how close they had come to a meltdown of the core, but their faith in the ability of the game to ultimately prevail was confirmed. The following year, Troy accidentally bumped his father-in-law Wilson, knocking him from his horse while roughhousing during a rare charge up to a house. Some murmured that this was the first time in 20 years that someone had fallen from a horse diu'ing the March Gras. Slightly injured and genuinely embarrassed, Wilson tearfully announced his resigna¬ tion from the group at the lunch stop near his own home. There was a moment of awkw ard silence. Faced with the imminent loss of a valued member of the team, the men chd the only thing they could figure out to do. They applauded Wilson, thanking him for his years of service. Troy protested that he, and not Wilson, should resign because he was the cause of the trouble. Then a most remarkable thing happened. One of the soldats sitting in the circle took off his hat and threw it into the center - then another and another, until all the men were bareheaded. Then some of the older men who do not usually participate in the floggings, including the driver of the wagon and the old man who looks after the horses during the stops, took off their hats and threw them into the circle as well. .And then the entire group — over 30 men - lay face down on the ground for a mass whipping, spontaneously offering themselves in atonement. The frenzy went on for a long time. Threatened with the loss of two of their most respected members, the soldats reacted with a heartfelt attempt to collectively atone for the transgression in a remarkable show of solidarity. What had started as quite real had been forced into game-threatoning play by the sheer momentum of the group, which tlicn turned this problem into an opportunity to reaffirm itself. Wilson and Troy were so touched that they remounted after the lunch break and fini.shed the day. Next year, both were back in the saddle. Once again, the game w'as questioned and preserved by the players. This time, a real problem had started the process. That real problem was eventually co-opted and transformed into game-threatening play. Once that happened, though, it was then defused, and the game was reaffirmed once again. Crises such as these have occurred at some point during each of the years that 1 have observed this version of the Mardi Gras. In some cases, the cri.sis seems to have been first improvised as part of the game and then turned into a structural problem when it tripped over the game’s usual boundaries. In other cases, the crisis seems to have started as a real problem that was eventually defused when the group co-opted it to turn it into a game. In each case, the crisis appeared to threaten the very structure of the game, thus placing the game itself in apparent jeopardy. The challenge in each case, then, was to restore the game by

170

FALLING APART TO STAY TOGETHER

reaffirming or redefining its rules and the roles of the players. This deep play occurs dming the improvised mock trials that are part of a typical house visit or during the more stylized mock trials that are part of the Tuesday evening dance and gumbo supper at the American Legion Hall in Jennings, but the primary audience is clearly the players themselves. The need for this chronic reaffirmation may come from the real identity crisis expressed frequently by Capitaine Wallace in interviews with members of the press, folklorists, and anyone who will hsten. The Grand Marais Mardi Gras never totally disbanded during the World War II years, as happened with other runs such as the well-known Mamou and Church Point models. Those big horseback runs were eventually revived by community leaders, such as attorney Paul Tate in Mamou and Dr. R.L. Savoy in Chmch Point, who redefined the Mardi Gras runs to enable them to exist in contemporary terms. Whipping, for example, once a common feature of most Mardi Gras celebrations, was eliminated. The Grand Marais run, on the other hand, continued throughout the war years and did not need to be revived or redefined. Here, the celebration has weathered considerable social criti¬ cism, especially in the town of Jennings, part of the territory of the Grand Marais rim, from segments of society that are genuinely embarrassed by what appear to be politically incor¬ rect aspects of the tradition, including its blackface components and its apparent violence through flogging and aggressive behaviors among the participants (David Marcantel, per¬ sonal communication, 1990). Capitaine Wallace often insists on the importance of preserv¬ ing the specific nature of the run and tries to avoid diluting it or having it drift stylistically toward other runs. Wallace is especially concerned with the future of the run when he will no longer be able to provide the leadership it takes to pull off this improvisational wonder. It is clear that no written (or oral) description could be produced to guide the next generation in the practice of this tradition. One learns to improvise by improvising. The deep play that emerges each year may represent Capitaine Wallace’s demand for an expression of renewed commitment to the game itself from its players. In 1998, Capitaine Wallace finally gave his troupe the ultimate test, retiring from his position as master of the game. This act, together with a series of other challenges, includ¬ ing the unavailability of other key members of the band, caused the run to be cancelled that year. In 1999, however, spurred on by the runners as well as their extended famihes and neighbors, who all found that they missed what the run did for the community, the run was successfully revived under Capitaine Francis, a considerably younger member of the group with years of experience as a whipper. Former Capitaine Wallace looked anything but former, though, as he stood next to Capitaine Francis, advising him at every turn, helping to lead the song, and especially helping to improvise the play that is at the heart of this ritual. The image of passing the torch would be ineffective in describing this transition. Instead, it was more like a father running along with his child who was just learning to ride a bicycle, guarding against disaster, just in case. Eventually, Wallace withdrew from his strident super¬ vising role under pressure from several members of the group and from several of their wives, who provide much of the support structure for the run, and especially his own sister, Laura. The community felt it necessary to see whether or not Capitaine Francis could lead the group on his own. He did. There was considerable improvisation during the day, though perhaps not as intense as before.

171

BARRY JEAN ANCELET

The deepest play I observed under Capitaine Francis’s early leadership was the whipping of Troy, a longtime member of the circle, who was unable to run because he was in training to become a police officer but who was in attendance at every house along the way as an observer. It was clearly painful for all concerned to have Troy outside the circle. At one point during what is traditionally one of the most important visits of the day, at the Landry family compound, it was “discovered” that Troy had paid his dues for the year, as though he were running. Capitaine Francis had him hauled into the circle, demanded his hat, and cleverly accused him of running Mardi Gras incognito. As an observer, Troy was unpainted and not in costume, but the edge between performance and observation, already thin in his case, had been blurred by one of the soldats who had bumped Troy’s face with his own, thus marking him with a little paint and adding to the available confusion. He was tried and, of course, convicted. He was whipped in an emotional and touching frenzy that included his being covered by everyone in the circle. He and many participants were visibly moved to tears, as the play reinforced Troy’s inclusion in the participant circle. With this incident, young Capitaine Francis demonstrated his ability to improvise beyond the circle, that is, beyond the game, though in a relatively safe way. If the nature of the game survives this change of leadership, eventually this capitaine will be tested with the same sort of deep play that Wallace so deftly survived for years. And if the nature of the game survives, the tests he will face will be different every year, requiring him to lead the group in improvising a creative and ingenious solution to preserve the Mardi Gras. This, then, is a game within a game, and the goal of this inner game is to save the game itself, to confirm through innovation the rules and roles necessary for this ritual of apparent social disorder to continue to function. Geertz’.s analysis of the social function of deep play among Balinese cockfighters (1973) is based on similar issues, though the stakes are obvi¬ ously different. There is not necessarily a veritable social restructuring involved in this Mardi Gras play, as appears to be the case in Geertz’s example, nor does the chaotic inversion of this Mardi Gras risk spilling over into real life, as happened in Romans in 1579 and 1580 (Le Roy Ladurie 1979). In those two cases of what Geertz has called “deep pl^y,” real-life social relationships were negotiated under the surface of a cultural game. Serious social status is at stake in the deep play of the cockfighters described by Geertz. Le Roy Ladurie’s study of the Romans Mardi Gras shows how that town’s feuding factions used the deep play of their Mardi Gras as a cover for a real power struggle that eventually ended in civil upheaval. This betrayal of the game’s integrity and intent ultimately led to the demise of the Mardi Gras in that community. Though there are certainlv social issues at play in the Grand Marais Mardi Gras, as in mo.st, the “deep play ” described here is plav tor the sake of the preservation and dvnamic regeneration of the game itself. It is internallv directed improvisational theater primarily by and for the actors — the participants themselves — rather than for the spectators. Though the spectators get to watch, and some can even be brought into the circle, it seems that only those who are privy to the relationships and issues in play arc aware of the nature of this deeper play or of the stakes involved. .Actual crises threaten to escalate the pretend chaos inherent in the Mardi Gras into what appears to be genuine chaos. Yet, upon closer examination, the crises actually seem to be a deeper level of pretense that seeks instead to reaffirm the game itself. This is border maintenance not along

172

FALLING APART TO STAY TOGETHER

the outside edges of the March Gras to prevent an explosion but, rather, at its very heart to prevent an implosion.

NOTE

1 According to LS [Louisiana Statute] 14: 313, masking in public is prohibited statewide, but events such as Halloween and March Gras are specifically exempted from this prohibition. The chief deputy of the Jeff Davis Parish Sheriff’s Office and the chief of police of the City of Jennings both confirmed that there is cairrently no parish statute or city orchnance further limiting masking on the local level. The current version of the state law apparently dates from the 1960s. An earlier version of the state law from the 1920s was broader and defiberately left enforcement up to local officials. Accorchng to Louisiana historian Carl Brasseaux, officials in the Jennings area at that time elected to use the statute to mhibit Ku Klux Klan activities. This may have contributed to a change in cultural practice from masking to face painting at one point, although there is no longer a legal reason to avoid masks. Ironically, planned Klan activities are also now exempted from this prohibition in the current version of the law.

REFERENCES

Ancelet, Barry Jean (1977) “The Mamou March Gras from behind the mask: problems of the ethnic folklorist working within his own community,” paper presented at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting. -(1989) “March Gras and the mecha: who’s fooling whom?” Southern Folklore, 46(3): 211—219. -(1992) “Singing outlaws and beggars with whips: variety in the South Louisiana Mardi Gras,” paper presented at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting. -(1993) “Playing the other: ritual reversal in the South Louisiana Country Mardi Gras,” paper presented at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting. Davis, Nathahe Zemon (1975) Societj and Culture in Earlj Modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Geertz, Chfford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Le Roy Ladmie, Emmanuel (1979) Le Carnaval de Romans, trans. Mary Feeney. New York: George Braziller (original: Paris: Galhmard, 1979). Lindahl, Carl (1996) “Bakhtin’s carnival laughter and the Cajun Country Mardi Gras,” Folklore, 107: 57-70.

READER CROSS-REFERENCES Geertz — coined the term “deep play” Bateson, Sutton-Smith — offer frameworks and terms for describing the play event Turner — the role of ritual in creating and sustaining commimity Barba — harnessing turbulence and chaos in the service of dramaturgy

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Part VI PERFORMING

For every kind of performance there is a different kind (and often many kinds) of perform¬ ing. Performing happens in everyday life, in the home, in the workplace, in sports and games, in the arts, and in sacred and secular ritual. Any time you take on a role, tell a story, or simply enact a bit of restored behavior, you are performing. This does not mean that you are “faking” or being untrue to your “real self.” As the essays in Part II (“What is Performance?”) and Part V (“Performativity”) show, performing often involves the utmost sincerity. Sincere or ‘Taelieved-in” performing is the basis of virtually all social interaction. Performance studies encompasses all these branches of performing. However, the essays in this section specifically address the theory and practice of performing in theatrical contexts: that is, the theory and practice of acting. If we recognize that virtually all human behavior involves performing, then we can think of the theatre as a kind of laboratory where actors and directors stage experi¬ ments to help us better understand ourselves. Some of these experiments are described in the following pages. In the 1920s and 1930s, German director and playwright Bertolt Brecht became dissatis¬ fied with conventional Western acting, in which the performers attempted to re-create their characters’ emotions and convey them to the audience. Rather than disappear into the role, presenting the character only from the inside, Brecht called on the actor to present the entirety of the character by engaging the role critically, letting the audience see that the actor and the character are not one and the same. Brecht called this technique Verjremdungsejfekt - a theatrical technique that makes the familiar appear strange and/or the strange appear famil¬ iar. The word has also been translated as “alienation” or “estrangement” effect. Many of Brecht’s writings were collected and translated by John Willett as Brecht on Theatre (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964). One example from that volume, “A dialogue about acting” (1929), is excerpted here. Another leading experimenter of the twentieth-century theater was Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. “The actor’s technique” (1967) describes the approach to acting that he developed at the Polish Laboratory Theater, which he founded and directed from 1959 to 1984. Grotowski’s intensely physical approach to acting is contrasted vdth the more internalized “method” acting advocated by American director Lee Strasberg. In “A dream of passion” (1987), Strasberg describes his controversial “emotional-memory” exer¬ cise, through which actors draw on their own experience to re-create feelings and sensations

217

PART VI

on stage. What unites these essays is the intensity with which each director insists on a definition of acting that is something more than mere impersonation or imitation. Building on this idea performance scholars Frances Harding and Rhonda Blair offer more explicitly theorized ways of thinking about acting. Harding’s “Presenting and re-presenting the self: from not-acting to acting in African performance” (1999) applies performance theorist Michael Kirby’s model of a continuum between “not-acting” and “acting to a variety of African performances. Her extended analysis shows that the difference between acting and other types of performing is often a function of context rather than techmque or intent. Blair’s “Reconsidering Stanislavsky” (2002) explores how recent developments in cogmtive neuroscience and neurophysiology can offer new perspectives on the experience of the performer. The so-called Stanislavsky System (or “Method”), the most influential approach to European and American acting in the twentieth century, employs concepts such as “character,” “given circumstances,” and “feefing” that, notes Blair, are imperfectly understood by most performers. Blair argues that understanding the biological reality that imderlies these ideas can enhance the actor’s art, but that feminist actors and acting teachers must first overcome their skepticism of biological research, a skepticism that she attributes to an “antibiologism” which Judith Butler (see Chapter 24) and others use (rightly) to chcdlenge essentialist constructions of gender. The search for a biology of acting brings a new dimen¬ sion to Brecht’s call for a scientific theater and Grotowski’s idea of the performance space as laboratory, and reminds us of how much performance studies has yet to discover.

218

27

A DIALOGUE ABOUT ACTING Bertolt Brecht (translated by John Willett)

The actors always score great successes in your plays. Are you yourself satisfied with them? No. Because they act badly? No. Because they act wrong. How ought they to act then? For an audience of the scientific age. What does that mean? Demonstrating their knowledge. Knowledge of what? Of human relations, of human behaviour, of human capacities. All right; that’s what they need to know. But how are they to demonstrate it? Consciously, suggestively, descriptively. How do they do it at present? By means of hypnosis. They go into a trance and take the audience with them. Give an example. Suppose they have to act a leave-taking. They put themselves in a leave-taking mood. They want to induce a leave-taking mood in the audience. If the seance is successful it ends up with nobody seeing anything further, nobody learning any lessons, at best everyone recollecting. In short, everybody feels. That soxmds almost like some erotic process. What ought it to be like, then? Witty. Ceremonious. Ritual. Spectator and actor ought not to approach one another but to move apart. Each ought to move away from himself. Otherwise the element of terror necessary to all recognition is lacking. Just now you used the expression ‘scientific’. You mean that when one observes an amoeba it does nothing to offer itself to the human observer. He can’t get inside its skin by empathy. Yet the scientific observer does try to understand it. Do you think that in the end he succeeds? I don’t know. He tries to bring it into some relationship with the other things that he has seen. Oughtn’t the actor then to try to make the man he is representing understandable?

219

BERTOLT BRECHT

Not so much the man as what takes place. What I mean is: if I choose to see Richard III I don’t want to feel myself to be Richard III, but to glimpse this phenomenon in all its strangeness and incomprehensibility. Are we to see science in the theatre then? No. Theatre. I see: scientific man is to have his theatre like everybody else. Yes. Only the theatre has already got scientific man for its audience, even if it doesn’t do anything to acknowledge the fact. For this audience hangs its brains up in the cloakroom along with its coat. Can’t you tell the actor then how he ought to perform? No. At present he is entirely dependent on the audience, blindly subject to it. Haven’t you ever tried? Indeed. Again and again. Could he do it? Sometimes, yes; if he was gifted and still naive, and still found it fun; but then only at rehearsals and only so long as I was present and nobody else, in other words so long as he had in front of him the type of audience I was telling you about. The nearer he got to the first night, the further away he drifted; he became different as one watched, for he probably felt that the other spectators whose arrival was imminent might not like him so much. Do you think they really wouldn’t like him? I fear so. At any rate it would be a great risk. Couldn’t it happen gradually? No. If it happened gradually it wouldn’t seem to the audience that something new was being gradually developed but that something old was gradually d^•ing out. And the audience would gradually stay away. For if the new element were introduced gradually it would only be half introduced and as a result it would lack force 'ir». •y

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