Judith Butler - Scholars Comment If the Commodity Could Speak

Judith Butler, Schechner, Richard , Timothy K. Beal, William E. Deal, Talia Rodgers, Claire L’Enfant, et. al. "Scholars Comment: If the Commodity Could Speak...” in: TDR. The Drama Review . Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 7-46, Spring 2009. (English).

I was dismayed to learn that my name and a discussion of my work was included in this volume on "performance theory" for a number of reasons, and the entire event opens up many issues for us to contemplate. Of course, I am pleased to be part of performance theory, or "theory for performance studies," but I am dismayed both by the shoddy ethics of this kind of book and by the intellectual ramifications of such a book, especially when it so egregiously fails to actually include the most important theoretical texts in the field.

Let me first address the financial and ethical dimensions of this crisis and then offer some of my thoughts on "theory" and performance.

Routledge maintains copyright over much of what I have written (since the publication of Gender Trouble in 1989), so they are technically within their rights to decide where and how to reproduce that material. The discussion of my work does not require my permission, especially if quotations are kept to the legal minimum. It is, however, telling to me that they did not send me this book, and I presume that the four other living authors were not sent the book either. It is in a way sad to have to take one's writing more seriously as "property" since one wants to give

it away, to let it circulate in ways that are not in one's control. But some forms of losing control are clearly better than others, and the issue here is not only a corporate seizure of one's material, but a profit-making activity that has an egregious effect on how fields of study and disciplines are defined and taught.

It is dismaying as well to realize that Philip Auslander and the "authors" of the other disciplinary variants of this text have agreed to produce books under such conditions; the royalties from such books go to the "author" who is largely reproducing the texts of prior authors, but who receives royalties for his "work." I do not know what function my name serves in this context, but "I" am become a name, to be sure, and one that suits me not at all. But can the commodity still speak? If so, I object to the logic of reproducibility here, which is the logic of the commodity, as if the same work could be "retooled" and "repackaged" for any and every disciplinary need. It is an obvious and chilling example of how the market exercises the power to rewrite the disciplines and the interdisciplines (on a continuum with donors linking gifts with changes in the curriculum or with certain decisions on tenure).

Intellectually, such books are a fiasco. The process is mainstreamed, so the same theorists who form the background for religious studies are supposedly the ones who form the background for performance studies. Where are Schleiermacher and Schussler-Fiorenza in the Religious Studies student guide? And where are Richard Schechner and Sue-Ellen Case in Theory for Performance Studies? Are such fields thinkable without such names? If we were to ask, what kinds of theory ought performance studies students read, we would have to think carefully about the various legacies that have informed that field. The idea that "theory" is a toolbox that can be "applied" to various disciplines not only belongs to a highly problematic view of theory as instrument, but misses the "instrumentalist" critique that critical theory itself can perform (cf. Adorno) as part of its very critique of capitalism. Both the approach to theory as "tool" and as "great thinkers" misses the fact that theory emerges in a dynamic and crucial relation to the various disciplinary modes of thinking, popular culture, art, and performance. In other words, those theories that would be crucial for thinking about performance studies would be substantially different from those that are needed to think about geography, and where there are intersections (which is interesting), these exist for a reason. But theory cannot be "exterior" to what it thinks about; it has its own multiple histories and trajectories, but it also is always engaged with the work that is going on in ostensibly nontheoretical domains: Benjamin and Barthes on photography, Derrida on Mallarmé; de Man on Rousseau; Marx on liberal political economy; Geertz on ritual; Johnson on Poe; Phelan on Freud; Jameson on Brecht. Even to start such a list risks the kind of canonization that does not quite work, since what is most important are not the "names" of theorists but the problems of performance studies. How does one theorize performance to the side of the proscenium stage, and how does that come to redefine our understanding of the stage, of public space, of public movement? What is the relation of performance and ritual? How do we understand the body, gesture, movement, and stillness? And how do we understand cultural action and practice in new ways? How do notions of performance in military, economic, and aesthetic contexts converge or fail to converge? How do we think about racial meanings in performance, and what does this tell us about how theories of race need to be developed? There are so many questions that performance studies has introduced to theory. There is no theory for performance studies, in this sense, but only a set of implicit and explicit theoretical challenges that are posed by the field itself, and which have already enriched and revised the field of theory. So any book that sought to think about critical theory for performance would have to really start with a different beginning: What does performance bring to critical theory?; and, Where do we find performance within critical theory?; and, indeed, my favorite, What form of critical theory do we find in performance?