Useless is useful

Editorial

In one of his most frequently cited aphorisms, Oscar Wilde famously declared, “All art is quite useless.”1 Rather than making the usual impassioned pleas for relevance, for the performing arts as contributors to social change, as vital in education or moral enrichment—even while these are all valuable, valid, and interesting avenues in themselves—this moment of apparent disowning offers a distinct possibility for thinking otherwise. In fact, rather than taking Wilde’s statement at face value, it should be understood as an artistic act, a provocative moment in itself. Although Wilde’s comment is often considered to be one made while retreating, what if it is a gesture of attack, shifting the territory of the argument? Preceding his provocative statement, Wilde was quite clear that “Art never expresses anything but itself,”2 yielding a productive begging of the question: What is “itself”? And what does that encompass? Isn't there a paradox in play here?

A paradox is only a bad thing if we accept that there has to be resolution, rather than committing ourselves to the struggle that the poles of a paradox set in motion. This particular moment strikes very much at the heart of our question: If we are to ask, “What is the function of the performing arts?” why should we bind ourselves to answer in someone else’s terms? In modern capitalist society, the marker of value is economic value, and while there may be cogent arguments that display the ways in which the various performing arts are entangled within or contribute to economic well-being, to argue this is to rather miss the point, to agree to “play the game” rather than ask why that game is the only one in town. We would not address the function of economics by understanding them as pieces of staged spectacle (although now, more than ever, this analogy might be more appropriate than we realize), nor do we ask what economic value could possibly be placed upon, say, informed political discussion. Yet we routinely shift our understanding of the value of the performing arts as a means to someone else's end. The performing arts are an end in themselves; they are a particular way of knowing about the world and being in the world.

The temptation to see the various performing arts as a purely educational practice, as a way of teaching or of asking earnest questions and answering them on an audience's behalf, is a legacy that the Western arts retain as a result of our bizarrely stubborn desire to locate our point of origin, no matter the contradictions involved, within ancient Greece. Yet, Plato's canonical formulation in The Republic is distinctive precisely for his dismissal of art as “representations [which] definitely harm the minds of their audiences.”3 According to Plato, the performing arts and spectacle can only be tolerated in the ideal state if they can be co-opted to carry definitive moral messages. Even then, the mere presence of a body “imitating” other actions renders the entire practice, at best, suspect and, at worst, a wholly degraded “mere imitation” of ideals. While this tendency toward validating the performing arts if and only if they serve to carry a consistent and morally-approved message remains influential, it carries this legacy of disdain—and it must at all costs be refused!

I do not mean to urge that the performing arts shy away from grappling with social issues, nor that they are inefficacious in providing ways for us to think through our lives. What I do contend is that the temptation to value the performing arts chiefly for providing these services is misguided. Furthermore, the reason that this is misguided is that performance should not offer answers, is at its most powerful when it does not. The chief weapons of the performing arts are created when we show ourselves to ourselves. In this process, ambivalence is key, as is the troubling of our conceptions.

To return to Wilde’s provocation, the performing arts “never express anything but themselves.” This is not purely an issue of “art for art's sake”; there is something considerably deeper at stake here. Rather than the much beloved conception of performance as something which we breezily refer to as having an “ephemeral nature,” as something that disappears, what happens when we consider Diana Taylor's contention, that performance might actually be that which remains? Meaning that if performances themselves function as “vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity,”5 how, then, might our understandings be reframed? Diana Taylor’s 2003 text The Archive and The Repertoire offers an influential viewpoint in performance studies, suggesting a very different conception of performance as not only a practice that displays meaning, but as a meaning-maker—a way of working through, questioning, and creating different types of knowledge. Rather than a series of vanishing moments, where an audience is briefly “entertained”—whatever that might even mean—Taylor suggests that performance is part of an ongoing process that does not vanish, but is not and perhaps even cannot be preserved in writing. It is a practice that brings people together in their bodies and shows them different knowledge through bodies. Therefore, the “archive” stores some types of knowledge, the embodied practices of the “repertoire” stores others, and not only are both vital to different ways of knowing about the world, but they inform and challenge each other.

The sense that performance doesn’t vanish, that it is a vital practice in making different types of knowledge possible, is earlier taken up in the work of Joseph Roach, in Cities of the Dead. Performance, for Taylor and Roach both, is coterminous with memory and history; that is, performance carries memory but is also in some way made up of it, and the act of performing participates in and reshapes knowledge production even while transmitting it. If, as Joseph Roach suggests, bodies in motion, performing, are “not prior to language but constitutive of it,”6 what other imaginings and knowledge productions are made possible through performance? What might be lost if bodily practice is ignored? These kinds of questions, as both Taylor and Roach note, are profoundly political, deeply embedded in what societies deem “worth remembering.” Performance, made of memory and transmitted through the body, cannot help but continuously re-imagine the world, blurring the margins where people tell us something is simply the way the world “is.”

Instead, performance directs us towards the child’s impulse to ask “why?” and “why not?” This is the childlike, but by no means the childish. Rather than accepting narrowly prescribed ways of thinking and being, performance shows us the ways in which these prescriptions are, themselves, performance while, at the same time, asking what might yet be possible. If our only marker for “function” is in another‘s terms, then shouldn‘t Darwin have abandoned his more dream-fuelled scientific studies in favor of using his intelligence to improve his local sewer system? How well are we served by remaining within what can be narrowly envisioned as immediately useful? Should we only favor the kinds of knowledge production that can be immediately understood, stabilized, and have an economic value placed upon them?

Particularly in an election year where posturing and performance in their emptiest senses seem to be the dominant languages, the performing arts are central in reclaiming theatricality from politics.7 Over twenty years ago, Herbert Blau urged that when economists and politicians see fit to acquire terms such as “playing the stock markets,” “performance,” “the theater of politics,” it falls to performing artists now, more than ever, to see themselves as key players in creating deep ambivalences. So some finger-wagging person righteously proclaims “performing doesn’t place food in people's mouths.” Performance exposes and understands the fissures in social roles and reveals that no human practice does, in isolation, carry out such a function (although, ironically, many of the apparently “valuable” professions have recently proved extremely effective at taking food out of people’s mouths). Performance's ability to play out difference, to articulate the ways in which things could be, and to refuse to be stabilized into simple agreement is precisely its strength. It may not immediately set social movements in motion, but it seems strange that detractors of the performing arts see fit to place that burden on others' shoulders. Performance's representational practices can and do offer different ways of knowing, different ways of seeing what cannot yet be grasped or understood,8 of learning how to ask questions that have not yet even been thought. Without these ways of thinking otherwise about what we take for granted, no new thought can take place. We would be much the poorer, then, if we were not to grasp Wilde's point: Performance is quite useless—but only if you're deluded enough to think that you know what “useful” is, can, and always will be. 

1 Wilde, Oscar. Preface. The Picture of Dorian Gray. By Wilde. Ed. Robert Mighall. London: Penguin, 2000.

2 Ibid.

3 Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 1974. 595b.

5 Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. 2.

6 Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 26.

7 For a more nuanced position on this, see: Blau, Herbert. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

8 See: Kobialka, Michal. Tadeusz Kantor's Practice: A Postmodern Notebook. PAJ 82. 2006. 20-21.

Ryan Hartigan
Ryan Hartigan is a Ph.D. student in theater and performance studies at the prestigious Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium program. He most recently directed Avye Alexandres’ Sorting the Coats at the Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis, is a Chapman Tripp Award-winning director, and is the first scholar from New Zealand to win the Veronica Kelly Prize (2007).