PARIP 2003

NATIONAL CONFERENCE: 11-14 September

CONTRIBUTORS

MELROSE: SUSAN
department of drama and performing arts
middlesex university
the curiosity of writing (or, who cares about performance mastery?)

What is the relationship between (expert, professional) academic writing and 'performance theory', and what might be the relationship of academic writing and performance theory to 'practice'?

It might seem, from commonsensical uses of the expression 'theory and practice' — used as though we might all already know what these two nouns actually stand for, if not the reasons for the one’s preceding the other — that 'theory' either is writing, or is necessarily mediated by it. Certainly enough expert academic writers (some of whom actually do know better) use the noun “theory' as though what it stood for were writerly and written, to cause this understanding to be replicated throughout the land, in the university as well as in other sites.

Some few writers, however, have recently pointed out not only the processional, ambassadorial and performance-based understanding of theoros, but have noted in addition (from within writing) the historically-specific erasure of this rather different understanding. Others have signalled the historical bases for a division between aesthetics and semiotics, which rift produced not only a fundamental estrangement between these two (Osborne 2001: 21) and the further reinforcement of older divisions, but also the break between expert arts-practitioners, on the one hand, and on the other those trained in the university to 'semiologically rearticulate' what art-practices have already, and differently, undertaken. One of the curiosities of writing, from this perspective, is that while she can, in theory, make the most banal of everyday practices reveal its interest, she has relatively little to say about excellence in performance practice.

What has been the fate of the second noun, 'practice'? The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence, largely in social-sciences contexts, of what has been called 'practice-theory'. Practice theory, taken up late in the century by 'professional philosophers' (Osborne 2001), has developed in the early years of the twenty-first century to include what have been called its own 'posthumanist challenges'. Indicatively, in 'Objectual Relations', K. Knorr Cetina approaches creative and constructive 'epistemic practices' in terms of a relational idiom linked to the researcher’s own position within an 'interlocking structure or chain of wantings'. It is this interlocking chain of wantings which 'entails the possibility of a deep emotional investment in [research] objects' (2001:187). C. Spinosa, in the same collection, notes, in terms of an ethics of practice, that 'practices tend toward their own elaboration regardless of our explicit intentions' (Spinosa 2001). This presentation asks what might be the place of the master-practitioner and expert practice, in these different scenarios bringing together researcher, relational idiom, emotional investment, practice-autonomy and the artist’s own 'interlocking chain of wantings'.

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