Abstract
When viewed through the lens of performance theory, communities have always appeared temporal. Such a processual view is reflected in concepts such as the ‘theatrical community’ or the ‘aesthetic community’, which have been negotiated in the arts and humanities since the 1990s. However, according to the argument of this Insight, such communities have a strong tendency towards the here and now (of performance). They certainly draw on memories, feelings and objects from the past, but these are then subject to a kind of re-presentation. Other forms of temporalisation come into view when communities extend on the scale of ‘deep time’.
Communities are constellations of social coherence: forms of collectivity that are assumed to have a unifying sense of belonging. The notion of ‘community’ is essential for the social sciences, but is also used in the humanities—in very different ways, for example, to characterise structures of reception, the audience or the public sphere. When community is addressed in performance studies or theatre studies, one usually thinks of a convergence of human actors, quite similar to what is meant by ‘assembly’ in the social sciences. This can hardly be surprising if one defines the basic concept of performance studies, or simply ‘performanceʼ, in the sense of the German word ‘Aufführungʼ (staging, performance, presentation) as an assembly of actors and spectators. In this sense, a performance requires
[…] two groups of people, one acting and the other observing, to gather at the same time and place for a given period of shared lifetime. Their encounter—interactive and confrontational—produces the event of the performance. […] The actors act, that is, they move through space, gesture, change their expression, manipulate objects, speak, or sing. The spectators perceive their actions and respond to them.
Accordingly, it is human participants who gather on stage or in the auditorium in order to create or experience a common programme of activities. This concept of performance is much more narrowly reduced to assemblies in bodily co-presence, than the notion of performance in anglophone performance studies which can refer to very diverse repetitive structures, to the display of skills, or any kind of patterned or restored behaviour (; ). If intense shared feelings, common perceptions, and thus a sense of belonging arise in these groups, one can speak of ‘theatrical communities’ or ‘aesthetic communities’ . These are temporary communities of people, which were often deliberately assembled in the history of modernity: significant examples that have been much discussed and reflected upon in the humanities include mass gatherings in the age of revolutions, the monumental choral productions of the labour movement, but also the marches and mass meetings of the fascists and National Socialists in the interwar period: in such arrangements, class, but also ethnic, communities were not merely represented, but rather actively produced—with the inclusion of the audience.
In recent years, in the course of New Materialism, the call has emerged to think of the community concept as less anthropocentric (see, for example, ). Why should we not also imagine objects and things as integral parts of that coherence that we call ‘community’? Are not the performative arts a place where people interact intensively with objects and thereby create aesthetic experiences? This further expands the variety of existing notions of community. For its part, EXC 2020 Temporal Communities has formulated its own requirements for the concept of community. Communities are not only to be understood in terms of (social) space, but also in terms of time. The idea is that literature, in its textual and performative dimensions, can constitute temporal communities over the centuries. From this perspective, community would be an intertextual event generating diverse relations in time (and between times). Such an understanding breaks free from the above-mentioned focus on the here and now of a performance. By being based on texts, scripts, writers, and readers, communities can develop a wide range of inter-temporal relations. They can open up temporal horizons that go far beyond the lifetimes of individual actors. This model is, in turn, also productive for a reflection on performance art and theatre, because, in fact, it is often the dramatic texts in theatre that can establish relationships between times long past and contemporary audiences.
I. The notion of performativity
One of the basic assumptions of theories of the performative is the insight that communities must be produced performatively: they do not simply exist but are constituted in performative processes. In most cases, this constitution does not occur instantaneously (in one instant or moment), but extends over a certain period of time. It (the constitutive process) must be understood as a process that arises and passes away, that takes its time and is eventually over.
Judith Butlerʼs gender theory has had the greatest influence on international and transdisciplinary discourses of performativity. From her early work Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (, first published 1988) onwards, Butler showed that gender identities (as well as other identities) are produced performatively, and this ought to mean that they are constituted in thought and action, that is through speech acts and bodily acts . Such acts obviously extend not only in space, but also in time. Butler’s insistence on the productive power of the speech act proved to be extremely fruitful for the analysis of performance art and theatre, in particular for the description of what human actors on the stage can do and produce. Even in particularly experimental variants of performance art, it is usually not enough to simply be present in the space. The performers must do or say something in order for a performance to be able to be experienced as such. For theatre, speech acts and acts of impersonation are equally indispensable: in speech and action, the actors produce the dramatis personae—and even in more recent post-dramatic forms, we encounter the most diverse practices of figuration, which can be effectively described in Butlerʼs terminology. Communities are produced on stage in a similar way. In the theatre of the twentieth-century, for example, speaking choirs or movement choirs, among others, were used to represent communities on stage. These collectives required a longer phase of rehearsal and could only develop their community-generating effect if they were active on stage for a prolonged period of time: then synchronicity could become perceptible, or a common rhythm could unfold that involved the audience. The perception of community—on and off stage—is a complex process that also takes time and raises its own questions and problems. Just because a group, choir, or collective appears on stage does not necessarily mean that the audience will perceive them as a community. From the perspective of performativity, however, the focus is generally on the creation of community rather than its perception or experience (cf. ).
For over thirty years, social, political, and artistic processes have been analysed using the concept of performativity. In the United States, a separate academic discipline has been established, Performance Studies, which, with a view to rituals, festivals, protests, gatherings, and the like, also addresses questions of community formation. The field of Performance Studies works using a broad concept of performativity, which, in the most general sense, poses the question of how reality is constituted. In practice, however, performance studies continues to focus on very specific aspects of reality. Following the work of Judith Butler, Richard Schechner, Rebecca Schneider, Shannon Jackson, and many others, the primary focus of reflection is still on how subjectivities, like gender and other identities, and, ultimately, communities are produced. It is certainly justified to say that our ideas of subjectivity, identity, and community have changed under the decades-long influence of theories of performativity.
The changes relating to the notion of community are particularly evident when one recalls the historical notions of the term ‘Gemeinschaft’, the German equivalent of ‘community’. ‘Gemeinschaft’ (community) was traditionally understood as the opposite of ‘Gesellschaft’ (society), in line with the classical definition of the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (, first published 1987). In this sense, communities were understood as comparatively homogeneous structures, as firm forms of social cohesion that were to be stably based on family ties, national descent, or religious denomination. Since these resources—family, nation, religion—were considered to be ‘givenʼ, unchanged and, indeed, almost primordial up until the early twentieth century, it was possible to conceptualise community as a stable social formation with fixed external borders. With National Socialism, however, traditional discourses on community in Germany were so fundamentally discredited that the modern social sciences could no longer draw on the old terminology after 1945. What performativity theory achieved in later decades was a kind of belated theoretical debunking of the idea of community as a stable entity: ‘doing communityʼ means understanding community as an action, not least as a speech act, whereby any idea of homogeneity or stability must be abandoned. But once community is no longer any of these—neither homogeneous, stable, nor clearly delimited—it presents itself as a fluid and, at the same time, temporal phenomenon. This is because community then becomes completely changeable: if it has a certain contour at one moment, it will already be shaped differently the next. The passage of time manifests itself in the structure of community.
II. Performativity and temporality
The temporalisation of community suggested by the concept of performativity can be found in various aspects. It influences how we think about community in different ways. Three exemplary aspects—processualisation, repetition, and the ‘touch of timeʼ—will be briefly outlined below.
II.1 Processualisation
Consistent processualisation of our ideas of community entails, first of all, a change in the way we speak about communities. It is achieved if the noun ‘communityʼ is removed from our descriptions and analyses and is consequently replaced by verb forms, such as ‘communitisationʼ or ‘de-communitisationʼ. This emphasises that communities arise and disappear only through concrete (speech) acts. Where people act collectively, community emerges Where people perform dissociative, divisive actions, on the other hand, community is lost. Beyond such actions, from the perspective of performance theory, one cannot speak of community at all.
Theatre provides many examples of such communitising actions. Theatrical communities can arise in performances where a choir speaks on stage, when actors synchronously perform the same movements or gestures, when a larger number of performers come together to chant a text jointly, or when—transcending the stage—actors and audience perform certain actions together (cf. ). In the same way, various examples of dissociative action can also be observed on stage. Dancing collectives and choric groups can fall apart, with individuals left behind in different segments of the space. An impression of dissociation also arises when dancers or performers simultaneously perform in completely disparate and fragmentary movements: the choreographer and director Laurent Chétouane is a specialist in such centrifugal arrangements (see, for example, his famous Out of Joint / Partita 1, HAU Berlin 2017). All these are elementary examples of the constitution or deconstitution of community without a strong imaginative dimension. However, such performances of grouping, degrouping, and regrouping can also invite all kinds of social projections, ranging from traditional formations such as families or cliques to novel forms of flash mobs or swarms.
It is evident that such dynamisation of the notion of community necessarily entails temporalisation. All of the actions described above unfold in time. Creating community takes time, and it also takes time to de-constitute communities. The performatively understood community is therefore always a temporal community. It lasts as long as the actions continue and allow the community to emerge or dissolve.
II.2 Repetition
An important means of making community enduring is repetition (of actions). Performance theory has been interested in forms of repetition since its inception. For example, in Gender Trouble Judith Butler emphasised that the performative production of gender is based on iteration: rules and codes of the heteronormative gender order, which are inscribed in social discourses, are repeated in action and speech, while simultaneously being varied. Butler explains changes in gender identities through such forms of variation that are inconceivable without iteration or repetition . From a young age, we learn how to put on a shoe as a girl or how to put on a shoe as a boy. We continue to put on shoes every day in later years, and this everyday act remains part of our gender performance. Over time, we probably develop our own variations of the act of putting on our shoes. According to Butler, what is distinctive about our individual (gender) performance lies in these variations. We develop something of our own, yet this individual variant that we practise today is based on the countless repetitions of what we learned in childhood.
Such forms of lifelong repetition of performative actions are also crucially significant for communities. Every persistent group has its rituals, and it is primarily in these rituals that the group manifests itself. A gang of robbers, for example, remains a gang of robbers by repeatedly stealing items together. In this way, repetition ensures the temporalisation of community. On this basis, we can assign each community its own rhythm. The repetition of common rituals determines the rhythm of a group or a relationship between a couple. If the rituals are performed less frequently—if you meet less often for dinner, rarely go on holiday together, or cancel family celebrations—then the rhythm of the community loses its intensity, and the social bond becomes looser (on such social rhythms: ).
II.3 “Touch of Time”
In her book Performing Remains, in which she investigates the phenomenon of the re-enactment, Rebecca Schneider also discusses various forms of repetition. She considers not only the restaging of masterpieces of performance art but also a repetitive form of amateur play popular in the United States. Schneider devotes an extended chapter to the long-standing tradition that, year after year, brings together large groups of Americans of all ages to re-enact meticulously battles of the American Civil War . These theatrical reconstructions appear to be motivated both by nostalgia and by identity politics, in the attempt to revitalise American society’s historical fight for freedom, human dignity, and democracy. Schneider’s field diary provides a vivid account of the peculiarities of such events, as observed during a re-enacted Civil War battle in Gettysburg in 1999:
I am amazed to note that the soldiers are entirely in the woods and we cannot see them at all. Some on the bleachers have binoculars, but most do not. Given that there is nothing to spectate, everyone is surprisingly attentive. Maybe twenty minutes in, a horse without a rider gallops out the woods and heads toward the ambulance. We can hear gunshot and muffled yelling. We see puffs of smoke. I don’t know quite what I’m seeing, I think. That’s not true, I tell myself: I’m seeing puffs of smoke. […] This event, it’s very clear, is not given for me or to me, nor does it concern my ability to see. It is taking place elsewhere.
As Schneider makes clear in her notes, the promise of a re-enactment is directed not at spectators but at actors, not at witnesses but at participants, whose feelings ensue from carrying out specific actions. The starting point of the experience is provided by the acting bodies of the players, who take up poses, make gestures, produce sounds, speak words, sing songs, or observe others performing these activities. The actors bring their bodies into an active return to the past. When contact of any kind with the past is sought through such bodily actions, according to what is probably Schneider’s most far-reaching thesis, a form of physical contact can be established between times far apart. The idea of touch, understood as both a bodily and an affective phenomenon, lies at the centre of Schneider’s theoretical conception of the re-enactment. In the theatrical representation of a battle, an uprising, or a political ceremony, there are moments in which, for the actor, a strong bodily sense of the here and now merges with the feeling of being transposed into a specific event of the past. This is the emphatic understanding of touch that is suggested in Schneider’s book: we can break away from the linearity of Western conceptions of time, move back in time, arrive in the past, and from there even think of other times. All of this is possible in a moment of overwhelming feeling that can be triggered by the repeated acting out of historical actions. What is more, the actions that are repeated are not highly complicated: one puts on a historical costume, trudges through the mud of original sites in old leather boots, exposes oneself to inclement weather, fires projectiles of varying sizes from toy weapons, has real and fake wounds tended to, fortifies oneself by the campfire, and drives back home on Sunday evening. At any point during this sometimes dramatic, yet mostly banal, assortment of actions, the ominous sense of touch may arise.
In a short but important passage of her book, Schneider depicts a crucial experience drawn from her observation of a Civil War re-enactment on a farm in Rhode Island (see ). It becomes apparent how the touch of time is initiated by an easily overlooked detail. On a warm afternoon in June, during a calm, slightly dull phase between two battle displays, Schneider was ambling through the army camp and stumbled upon a severed human forefinger on the fresh grass, at the root of which a bit of blood still seems to cling. At first, she was horrified and found herself gasping for air, but just a moment later she realised that she was looking at a fake finger made of plastic. The field hospital tent was close by: there, fake surgeons tended to mock wounds and amputated imitation body parts in vast numbers. Yet even after this realisation had sunk in, Schneider’s perception of time remained unsettled. She became aware that there were many more costumed amateur performers milling about the site—militiamen, gunners, nurses, and so on—than there were spectating audience members. The non-costumed spectators thus appeared to be visitors from the future, and for a moment it seemed that they were the ones who had fallen out of time, while the actors were operating in their historical present. The forefinger pointing into the void became a vital index of the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous and of the arbitrariness of a linear conception of time.
III. Deep time and deep community
Rebecca Schneiderʼs field notes and reflections show that a performative encounter with events of earlier centuries is possible in the here and now of re-enactment. Nevertheless, there is the overall impression that temporal communities over very long periods of time (spanning several centuries) are not easily related to the idea of performance as such. Performance theory, even where it is not directly related to performance art or theatre, has a certain inclination towards the here and now: by binding community to actions and speech acts, it suggests that the community only lasts as long as these actions and speech acts take place. This period of time during which the action or speech act continues to exist can be considerably extended by repetition. Through repetition or ritualisation, a performative community (such as a family, a group of fans, or a religious congregation) can exist for years or even decades. But when it comes to explaining communities that span entire centuries, the accounts offered by performance theory sometimes take on an enigmatic quality, as is striking in some passages of Rebecca Schneiderʼs book: a physical relationship with long-ago battles created by means of a plastic finger? The feeling of living in an earlier century evoked just because a few people are walking around in costumes? Really? One would not wish to deny Schneider these individual experiences. She rightly draws attention to the power of objects, props, and costumes to evoke vivid experiences of other times and places. Yet, it seems questionable whether such almost idiosyncratic experiences can form the basis for a general theory of temporal communities that affect us all and that belong to the formative social formations of our present.
Another version of temporalisation comes into view when the EXC 2020 Temporal Communities attributes to texts and literatures the potential to produce temporal communities on a deep-time scale. It is certainly the material, objective, and institutional dimensions of literature that can contribute to the conceptualisation of time on this scale. When reading and handling old manuscripts, the experience of ‘touch’ that Rebecca Schneider has outlined using the example of the index finger, seems particularly apt. Beyond this, however, the texts themselves can constitute communities over centuries through their configurations with each other, but also through the relationships they develop with writers and readers. This idea becomes plausible above all when we realise that the texts create their temporal dimension themselves. The time of the text can be a question of rhythm, of reading and writing speeds, but also of narrative and imaginary worlds that a text conceptualises. Such textual communities can be detached from concrete social actors to a greater extent than the performative communities discussed in this piece. At least, descriptions are conceivable that explain the community as the product of a purely textual event. Texts can circulate and be processed, even without being read by human actors. As a result, they can generate communities without human actors taking notice of them.
The idea of deep time—a time that unfolds beyond human imagination (cf. ; )—is suitable for decisively expanding our ideas of different communities. Sociology of the nineteenth-century had insisted, with Ferdinand Tönnies and others, that communities are evolved social structures that are stabilised by fixed—virtually primordial—affiliations and exclusions. The performance theory of the twentieth century focused (similarly to interactionist approaches of modern social sciences) on the concrete construction and production of community by social actors in action and speech. The human time of thinking, acting, and remembering was the time scale of such communities. The concept of deep time today makes clear that human timescales do not have to be the only conceivable understanding of temporality for communities either.
On the basis of a broad concept of literature, temporal communities can be imagined that, by virtue of their extent, are no longer based on human scales but instead in a time of things, of letters, and of all materials capable of accommodating acts of recording. These are communities that are more long-term, deeper, and more complex than we could performatively produce and represent ourselves as humans: this is the post-human dimension of these communities. However, these deep communities are also performative and can become the subject of performance theory that frees itself from the idea of performance as a social assembly of human actors in the here and now.