(^{radically trivial}) The Pedagogy of Performance

The Pedagogy of Performance

The pedagogy of performance is a mode of parodic pedagogy which appears at a historical moment when the daily social contradictions of capitalist society are reaching unprecedented proportions and bourgeois knowledges are having to find "new” and innovative ways to explain away these contradictions. The concept of performance, which recycles the ideological uses of activist theatre of the 60s (the "Happening"), as a site of participation in an experiential "intensity"—is, although variously accented in differing localities of culture, premised upon an attention to the mode of enunciation—the HOW of culture—rather than to the mode of conceptual interrogation—the WHY of culture. This mode of anti-conceptual knowing is one of the current means of producing the "flexible” subjectivities necessary for the labor force in advanced capitalist societies which needs, more than anything else, a high rate of “adaptability"—subjects skilled in the HOW—who are able to "adjust" SPONTANEOUSLY and PARODICALLY (i.e without social and political commitments) to the high degree of fluidity and mobility which characterizes economic life under transnational capital. The pedagogy of performance then, is above all an experiential [(post)conceptual] pedagogy which "returns” in the moment of crisis of the traditional bourgeois cultural pedagogy of valorizing the subject-of-experience, in an appropriately up-dated (post)modern form. In the specific context of the post-al academy, the underlying subtext of this “up-dating” of experience in the deep and thoroughgoing cynicism of those pedagogues whose institutional positions depend upon their suppression of what they “know" about “experience” (= EMPIRICISM), foregrounded in Sloterdijk's notion of "cynical reason”: “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it." In the bourgeois academy the tropes whereby “cynical reason” is deployed as a cultural strategy of a pragmatics of crisis management are “irony," “parody," “laughter," “efficacy”...

The Classroom of Parodic Performativity

On the local scene at SU one site of promotion of performance pedagogy was Professor Charles Winquist's class “Postmodern Theology” offered in the Fall of 1993. In this class Professor Winquist suggested that the pedagogy of intelligibility—the pedagogy of “mode"—should be supplanted by a more “appreciative” approach—the pedagogy of “mood." When some classmates and I questioned this displacement several students were quick to defend Professor Winquist's decision stating that his shift away from the traditional humanist pedagogy of a “solemn” approach to texts of culture was automatically “progressive” in that it allowed for a “supportive” classroom, where “dialogue," “conversation” and “imaginative” readings (which reconfirmed the “unique," the “individual” and the “idiosyncratic") provided an “ambience” not readily available elsewhere. I was a little taken aback. I had heard that Professor Winquist was a rigorous (post)structuralist thinker who was actively concerned to conceptually engage contemporary political and social issues—and yet here he was advancing a pedagogy which was not only conceptually “relaxed” but had a rather New Age-y “feel” to it.

During the course of the semester, however, things became a little clearer. It became evident that the classroom of “ambience” is in fact a very effective way of “managing” conflicting intellectual and political positions while reviving the classical notion of reading as a “pleasureful” activity—and, not incidentally, thereby renewing the incontestable legitimacy of the “classics” themselves—through reading performatively. The ideological lesson of the semester thus came from Hume articulated to Nietzsche. Let me explain. . . As soon as it became obvious that certain positions were being put under unbearable pressure by other positions it became necessary to defuse this pressure: firstly, in order to maintain a semblance of "mood"-yness which, after all, is why many students took the class in the first place, and, as well, since, as everybody knows, liberal classrooms cannot just (overtly) shut one up but must retain the facade of “inclusivity." On these grounds, a (parodic) dual “criterion” for putting forward arguments emerged—the criterion of “force and vivacity," a phrase drawn from Hume regarding degrees of sensuous experience—meshed with Nietzsche's notion of “style”: “a condensation of all speech into the pleasurable/painful PHYSICAL FOUNDATION OF KNOWLEDGE” (Sloterdijk)—in order to determine whether any argument was “compelling” or not. In this way any position was declared theoretically “efficacious” or not on this basis—did it have “force and vivacity"/"style"—whether it was a position arguing for concept-uality as a means to further transformative social change, or, basically a religious position which argued that, in any case, all knowing essentially came down to a question of (personal) “belief." The extent to which this functioned as a strategy of containment, which, despite the congeniality of the classroom of “ambience," resulted in an extreme violence and hostility directed at those students who relentlessly foregrounded its actual practices, was revealed toward the end of the class. In response to a question which I asked of one particularly reactionary graduate student, she yelled: “Oh, just shut up." Judging by Professor Winquist's reaction—he ironically applauded the student's response as “theoretical"—this undoubtedly had a great deal of “force and vivacity” for him... Yet, ultimately, it merely testifies to the bankruptcy of the intellectual practices of the adherents of the pedagogy of performance in their reduction of all social spaces into merely an accumulation of “bodies” and “experiences” where, in the moment of “subjective” crisis, it is who shouts the loudest that “wins."