Paul H. Gray
Professor of Communication
Department of Speech Communication
University of Texas
pgray@mail.utexas.edu
After thirty-seven years in the classroom and thirty years of speaking at this [National Communication Association] convention, I find myself in a new situation. For the first time ever, I don't have to worry about holding the audience's attention. I certainly don't want to ignore what Dean Wendt has just said, but I intend to comment on it obliquely rather than directly, because my focus, in this part of the program, at least, is Issue #1 of 1997's Text and Performance Quarterly, a special issue titled "Alternative Ways of Writing About Performance" and the real reason we're all here together. More specifically, I want to explain how that issue got started and how it developed over the first two years of my editorship.
Dean Wendt's title lays the faults he finds in it at the door of postmodernism. I think it would be more precise to finger a smaller entity than that--something we widely and loosely refer to as "cultural studies." I know of nothing in the humanities and human sciences that has had so profound an influence over the last twenty years--certainly nothing that has had such an influence in NCA. There isn't a division from Performance Studies to Organizational Communication that hasn't been radically altered by it.
Cultural studies really isn't a discipline, for it operates on the borders of disciplines where it often assumes an anti-disciplinary stance. Since
In an attempt to find a unifying element for cultural studies, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg recently concluded that though it cannot be bounded by either subject matter or methodology, cultural studies "is perhaps always, in part, about the rules of inclusion and exclusion that guide intellectual evaluations" (11).
There are few places in the academy that will immerse one so totally in such rules as an editor's chair. When I began editing TPQ, and the first batch of submissions started coming back from my board, I was struck by the consistency of the responses I got. Oh, readers might disagree whether to "Reject" and "Revise and resubmit" on one hand, or to "Accept as is" or "Accept with minor revision" on the other, but my board's agreement on the rules of scholarly publication certain met Stanley Fish's requirements of what constitutes a reading community.
Then I received a little piece on stage fright and sent it off to two readers I would trust with my life. And the first one said in comments to the editor: "I'm open to scholarly experimenting, but there's no news here. Reject." And the second reader said, "Accept as is. This piece looks at an old problem from the site performance studies claims as its unique vantage point, from the inside out." So I did what you're supposed to do in these cases, I sent it off to a third reader who was of no help to me whatsoever. He said: "I read it and assigned it to an undergraduate class, and it sparked the best unit on stage fright I've ever had. I'd recommend publishing it as pedagogy, but TPQ doesn't publish pedagogy, does it?"
Oh dear. I am a product of Louisiana State University, at the time I graduated, probably the most American-oriented speech program in the country, significantly shaped by Giles Wilkerson Gray, a man so rooted in pragmatism that he nearly went apoplectic when Speech Teacher spun off from Quarterly Journal of Speech. For Gray, generating theory might be dramatic, but putting it into practice was where the action was.
So I decided to play Hamlet and told the author something of the controversy his submission had caused; that I had decided not to publish his piece, unless I got others that turned out to be as unsettling to the board. Well, I did--submissions that sparked arguments about "the rules of inclusion and exclusion that guide intellectual evaluations" and seemed to me to mark important fault lines in the reading community TPQ serves.
Nothing, of course, caused me as much discomfort as "Sextext," the submission that sat the longest on the shelf, and the one I decided to publish last. When Janet Reno announced after the Waco disaster that she and she alone was responsible for her decision to storm those prefab ramparts, we all groaned at that tired old bureaucratic cover-up and longed instead, just once, for something like, "I got crappy advice, and there will be a full investigation, and heads will roll, and you will know about it." But I'm afraid I have to take the Reno line, because it's true. I sent "Sextext" to three readers, and I got the following responses to it: 1) "Publish," 2) "I cannot recommend that this article be published in TPQ, but if you decide to do so, I'll back you all the way," and 3) "You probably won't be publishing this piece, but either way, please put me in touch with the writer. I'm publishing a collection of essays on queer theory with Routledge next year, and I want it."
If I didn't want to publish "Sextext," these readers had given me the right to refuse two to one. Then, I began to assemble the articles that had caused such a stir among the members of my board. All of these articles are about the genre of scholarly discourse. Every article tries to push against its perceived boundaries in a different direction--one explores an old concern of performance studies (what do you learn from performing literature) but does it in the voice of a stand-up comedian. One adopts the alogical thinking of a cult into its structure, one tries to capture the feel of ritual through layout. They are all performances to the extent that they try to locate the point of view inside the subject matter.
Placed together, they share other traits that locate them on the borders of traditional academic discourse. One of these is the prominence in some of them of the self. There is, of course, no such thing as self-free scholarship. The writer's self is always evident in even the most traditional academic writing, telling the reader to note this and ignore that. But some of these pieces deploy the self as an example, focusing entirely or partially on personal experience.
But for me, at least, the most interesting quality they all shared, a quality at the heart of performance and rarely encountered in what Bill Nichols calls "the discourse of sobriety" (3-4)--the ludic. Not necessarily ludic as in "funny," though that sense is certainly present in Terry Galloway's piece. And not ludic in the sense of game playing, though that too is present in Moe Meyer's strategy. But ludic in the sense of "playing around," or as John Dewey puts it, a "playful attitude" whereby the material at hand is transformed "to serve the purpose of a developing experience" (279).
And now, having worked my way this far out on the branch, I shall proceed to saw it off. If these pieces were performances that operated through the ludic, their presentation in a special issue ought also to be a performance wherein the material at hand is transformed to serve the purposes of a developing experience. This whole issue was a production with a production concept, the carnival as Bakhtin describes it: an event "celebrating temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; [marking] the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions, . . . hostile to all that was immortalized and completed" (10), an issue influenced by the recent tendency in anthropology and ethnography to explore, not the center of a culture, but its boundaries.
I added to the issue an article that had not caused trouble with my board, John Rodden's description of how Isabel Allende turned one genre, the interview, into another, autobiography. A carnival experience ought not scare the customers away right off the bat, and the Rodden piece introduced the process of genre-bending that every other article would further. And I concluded it with a photo essay the board never saw, because I wanted, after all the voices of that issue, to end in silence.
And finally, the decision to include "Sextext." Every one of these articles pushed the envelope when it comes to the genre of academic discourse, but only "Sextext" stated that project up front as its avowed intention. Of all the examples of what we seem to be calling "postmodernism," this was the only one that took the fictive road. Of all the pieces that attempted to honor the knowledge of the body, this was the only one to explore desire.
And, last, but by no means least, it was the only one to push the envelope into that other discourse of our time the farthest removed from the language of the academy, pornography. Pornography is the obsession of our postmodern times. Last year the revenues from pornography were greater than the domestic box office receipts of all Hollywood films, greater than the revenues from country-and-western and rock-and-roll recordings combined (Schlosser 44). And what a powerful discourse it is. Just 528 words out of an issue of 108 pages brought us to this event.
"Sextext" aside, pornography has, of course, been mother's milk to NCA scholarship (Matlon's Index lists almost forty articles not counting what's been written since 1990), and it has been a publishing industry for the likes of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. We've force-fed it to undergraduates and measured the results, we've attacked it as dangerous to women and praised it as analogous to ethnography. We've done just about everything with it but actually quote it. (My favorite example of the fastidiousness of academic writing is an article published in Journal of Communication that undertakes a Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytical analysis of The Story of O, and manages the whole thing quoting just one sentence from the original: "Nothing was keeping [O] enslaved save her self enslavement" (Malamuth 124). Like medieval scholars ready to argue into the night about how many teeth in a horse's mouth but not to actually check out the horse itself, the porn wars rage in our journals fueled by nothing more accurate than the vaguest descriptions of its content.
More to the point, what kind of carnival is it if it doesn't stir up the town fathers enough to call out the cops? It isn't a carnival at all, it's just a church fair.
I love performance studies as much as anybody, but for me, as Mr. Dooley said about the Democratic Party, "Tis niver so good as whin . . . rayspectable people speak iv it in whispers."
Someone recently asked me what I had enjoyed about the controversy I have sparked. That's an easy one. In the CRTNET exchanges, performance studies was called just about every negative epithet fertile minds could devise, but the word "dinosaur" didn't come up once.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968.
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn Books, 1958.
Malamuth, Neil M., and Victoria Billings. "Why Pornography? Models of Functions and Effects." Journal of Communication 34 (1984): 117-129.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
Nelson, Cary, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg. "Cultural Studies: An Introduction." Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Schlosser, Eric. "The Business of Pornography." U.S. News and World Report 10 Feb. 1997: 42-50.