ABSTRACT
This essay has a history relevant to the position it takes and the ground it seeks to occupy. It began as a contribution to a seminar at the 1991 World Shakespeare Congress in Tokyo on “The Body as Site of Gender and Class Hierarchy and Differentiation,” chaired by Peter Stallybrass and Steven Mullaney, and was designed to pose a number of questions. The seminar clearly assumed that the body was such a site, but I wanted to approach the topic interrogatively, refusing the implicit assumptions. One of the questions I had, and still have, concerns the relation between what I call here “discourse theory” and theatrical performance. I wanted to raise the matter of performance in the discussion of Shakespearean texts and the body, since cultural materialist criticism has frequently failed to take the measure of the stage, and yet the stage is one place where the body is clearly on the line. The term “discourse theory” is a catch-all, but what I mean generally by it is that complex of ideas, put into circulation by new historicist appropriations of Foucault and cultural anthropology, that insists on the primacy of discourse, that views culture as an interweaving of texts, and that regards as a critical responsibility the task of unraveling discursive networks and exposing their ideological weft and warp. What is meant to emerge from such analysis is a description of culture that historicises texts by linking them to each other and to “social texts” (modes of social negotiation such as courtship or courtiership, for example, or various types of ritual), and by establishing analogous social and textual patterns. There is of course a whole politics associated with this kind of analysis, but it is a troubled and uneasy politics at the moment, having emerged somewhat scathed from the critiques of new historicism and cultural materialism that were widely circulated in the late 1980s, not to mention the assault on “political correctness” from a number of quarters. It is notable now that a dissatisfaction with the restrictiveness of discourse theory is making itself felt, and there is a resurgence of interest in subjectivity and a broadening insistence on heterogeneity of response to cultural phenomena. There is by now a strong sense
of déja entendu in the very sound of words like “gender” and “class,” and the ideologically pure concepts such terms represent tend to incite resistance, even when one shares the leftish assumptions of those who utter them. So my Tokyo intervention was part of a broader movement of sceptical detachment. My suspicion of the hold on contemporary theory exerted by a particular reading of Foucault is clearly shared, as are my concerns about some of the narrowing implications of that particular version of materialism. There are other versionsdidn’t Nietzsche (Foucault’s great precursor), reflecting on the corporeality of thought, make a remark about what happens to idealism when the philosopher has a bad cold?
