Performance studies emerged as an academic discipline over half a century ago (see Schechner Reference Schechner1966). Three new books, focusing on performance practices across a broad sweep of time and place, identify a new front in the evolution of the field. Call it “performance capital studies”—a novel approach to performance as an exchange of cultural, legal, and identity capital retailing different forms of knowledge and power in the constitution and regulation of governance.
Performance capital builds on Gary Becker’s Human Capital (1964) and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital” (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu, Karabel and Halsey1977) where capital is understood as “accumulated labor” that, once appropriated, may be converted into social benefits such as monetary gain. Bourdieu offers the example of elite schools in France. Cultural capital accumulates from the acquisition of competencies essential to gaining admission to designated schools. Cultivating the right competencies in preferred systems of knowledge and learning technologies endows society’s privileged classes in particular with opportunities for socioeconomic gain.
To be sure, capital cannot exist simply as a cultural asset. Whatever form capital assumes, it must receive protection from the law. As Katharina Pistor explains, capital is a by-product of legal coding (2019:2). This means that it is inextricably linked to, and dependent on, state power (4).
Performance capital retails constitutive myths and shared notions of identity (including national character) (Wilson 2023:8) in what Clifford Geertz called “the theatre state” (1980:2). Through ceremonial spectacles and rituals of governance, political power becomes real. State sovereignty, which we typically identify with the rule of law, is made visible, and deemed worthy of authority (or resistance), in the hierarchical rituals that performance capital endows.
Performances that constitute and regulate governance do not always occur in official spaces, such as courts and legislatures. Performance capital also can accumulate and be distributed in hybrid spaces located between the private domain of the home and the public domain of the state. For example, theatres, social clubs, charitable organizations, and other forms of incorporation may serve as sites for sovereign rituals that model and, under some circumstances, constitute hierarchical systems of governance.
These performances are complex and may be contested. But the prestige (once accepted as such) associated with the myths and identities that performance capital endows has the power to constitute and bind discrete social groups as well as the larger polity that contains them.
Recent works by Julie Stone Peters, Dana W. Logan, and Kathleen Wilson show in compelling detail how performance capital functions within a broad array of cultural and historical contexts: Peters surveys legal performances across a longue durée from ancient Greece to early modernity in Europe; Logan studies various “corporate” social practices in postrevolutionary America from 1790–1850; and Wilson investigates theatrical performances of “Englishness” in Britain, India, Jamaica, and Australia from 1656–1833.
Each of these authors explores how power in conjunction with preferred forms of knowledge are performed, and what comes of it. Along the way, we learn how the nomos or legal reality that we inhabit is more than a set of texts that locate and assign meaning and value. Footnote 1 The nomos is constituted (and reconstituted) over time through a variety of performances (i.e., bodies, practices, events, and media). As Richard Schechner observed early on, the stage of relevant behavior is very wide indeed, including “many kinds of play, games, sports, theatre, and ritual” within a variety of aesthetic genres (such as popular entertainment, music, and dance) (Schechner Reference Schechner1966:27).
The study of performance capital expands the range of what can be recognized as public ceremonies and sovereign rituals of governance. Novel insights, together with new forms of knowledge, begin to emerge as we learn to ask such questions as: Where is the performance taking place? Who are the players, who are the spectators, and what is the discursive, pictorial, or alternatively mediated or embodied interplay between them?
Peters’s broad-ranging account of law as performance plays throughout upon the contronymic nature of performance. Contronyms make up that singular category of terms that simultaneously entertain opposite meanings. Consider, for example, “cleave” (to adhere or separate), or “bolt” (to secure or flee), or “custom” (a common practice or a special one). Likewise, the word “performance” may be used to refer to an act that lacks reality (by being merely a performance) or an act that creates reality (through a performance that makes something happen).
Peters draws vignettes of both kinds of legal performances from an astounding range of history—from ancient, medieval, and early modern Europe—beginning with an open-air piece of theatre that seems ideally chosen to underscore the inescapably contronymic nature of performing law.
It is 1571, and Queen Elizabeth I of England has gathered 4,000 spectators in Tothill Fields, Westminster, to witness a trial by battle. Notwithstanding the fact that such trials have by this time become obsolete, the litigants take the field. According to Peters, “[T]his was clearly theatre […] But it was also law” (2).
A real case involving a property dispute in Kent had to be decided. And a real court—the entire Court of Common Pleas—decamped to Tothill Fields to hear it. Everyone dressed as their roles for the occasion required. But in the end the champions refused to fight.
As it turns out, the legal assembly was just play (theatrical performance as make-believe). In reality, the parties had settled the matter the day before. Nevertheless, in order to dramatize for public consumption the defendant’s rightful ownership, the stage was set for a spectacle of combat.
Peters offers that this theatrical staging really was no different from an actual legal event. “Perhaps there was no difference between a trial and a prize fight, a spectacular diversion, a bit of theatre?” (4). Yet, the message to the public seems to have been precisely the reverse. To the 4,000 spectators whose appetite for legal battle had been stoked only to be frustrated in the end, the lesson apparently was “do not expect trials to be like prize fights. Law is not entertainment” (5).
What are we to make of this apparent paradox?
One way to make sense of such ambiguity in legal performance is to view it in terms of performance capital. The English queen invested performance capital in the form of shared myths and identities to make her case against law as theatrical entertainment. She prepared the stage for a familiar scene of law as battle to get the crowd’s attention. But then the scene simply dissolves, like a dream, or a collective fantasy. There is no battle. It’s like the penultimate scene in David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive (2001). As soon as the emcee at Café Silencio proclaims “there is no band” the music immediately ceases and the scene dissolves. The fever dream that film viewers had been drifting through is at an end. The real power behind the production may now emerge (see Sherwin Reference Sherwin2011:101).
There shall be no battle, the queen-emcee declared. And, indeed, it was by her regal will that the battle scene had been set up and would as readily break down without a fight. The queen’s intended message for the assembled spectators is plain enough. Law is not constituted as trial by battle. Which is to say, in effect: You spectators are not the dispositive audience for determining how legal outcomes are derived. I am the law. I set the scene by my sovereign will—or simply dissolve it.
The play of law that unfolded at Tothill Fields was meant to serve as a public validation of law as it actually operates, which is to say, wrapped in mystery, a veiled agreement, reached in private—favored, of course, with the queen’s knowledge and assent (Peters 2022:4n6). Upon sweeping aside the public’s fantasy of transparency and coownership, law’s reality can be seen for what it is: a matter of royal fiat, hidden in the mists of sovereign power—as befits one who rules by divine right. As Thomas Hobbes put it in his magnum opus, Leviathan (1651): “law in general, is not counsel, but command” (Hobbes Reference Hobbes1985:312).
Yet, Peters is right to leave space for ambiguity. For, as she writes, a “bit of theatre” truly does remain. After all, why perform such a visually spectacular absence of drama in the first place? Why is it necessary to stage royal fiat at all?
The staging paradoxically belies the message. Why would an all-powerful queen need to convince spectators they had no influence over the outcome if they had no influence over the outcome? The apparent need to invest such an exorbitant amount of performance capital to endow the sovereign’s will to power with validity makes visible the performance capital that is in play. The very act of performing power in public suggests its limit. Perhaps the people are not so powerless after all. What if they resist? What if they refuse to accept the validation of law that the queen is seeking?
And so, Peters’s grand theme is dramatically and rather brilliantly announced. Once again, the perennial battle of “law against theatre” has been engaged. Law’s paradoxical entanglement in theatrics seems inescapable.
Peters’s objective in the pages that follow is to historicize that battle—perhaps with the goal of declaring a truce: because, after all, can we not agree that “law’s aesthetic power is essential to its force?” (5).
This is the crux of the matter. Law must come to grips with its inextricable theatricality. The oft-repeated dichotomy that says either it’s real or it’s theatre, but it cannot be both at once is false and deserves to be disposed of once and for all. As the emergence of lawyering theory and the advance of clinical legal education attest, law ought to be studied as it is practiced, with an appropriately heightened awareness of how its performances are delivered (and received) (Sherwin Reference Sherwin1992).
That study, amidst the shifting of a vast panorama of culturally, historically, and technologically embedded styles of delivery, is precisely what Peters goes on to provide. Here, then, is what a fuller, more nuanced depiction of law looks like when freed from history’s antitheatrical blind spot and its false dichotomies that needlessly severed performance (i.e., the aesthetics of delivery) from reality.
In the less benighted world Peters presents, we can self-reflexively assess the role played by spectators and context, by different qualities of a performance (or delivery) and its reception, as well as by the politics of entertainment in which law is so often entangled. In short, Peters wants us to take very seriously indeed the essential elements of performance capital that become visible once we disown the rationalist biases that would sweep them off the theatre state’s stage of sovereign ritual.
Peters wants the humanities back in, because law is not, as legal formalists long insisted, just a matter of inherited texts, institutions, and rituals bound by an overarching rational and dispassionate discursive logic. Law is a living human drama. As such, it is filled with varied and contested feelings, in conjunction with diverse culturally and cognitively constructed experiences. “[A]ll the appetites and pains and pleasures of the soul, which we say accompany all our actions” (39)—and which antitheatrical thinkers from Plato to Jeremy Bentham would banish from law—are part and parcel of if not the letter, at least the spirit of the law, and certainly its day-to-day practice.
Peters’s ambitious framing of the historic scope of antitheatrical bias in legal studies is impressive, to say the least. In our digital age, with its torrent of seamlessly dissimulating simulations, a capacity to discern truth from fiction—not to mention con artistry from eloquence, and sophistic rabble-rousing from prudence—has never been more sorely needed.
Two reservations, however, may be noted regarding how Peters casts her anti-antitheatrical campaign. In her conclusion Peters describes her project as “the beginning.” But, of course, it is hardly that. The ancient and classical rhetorical tradition has long taught not only the essential role of aesthetics in the performance of law, but also the need for a nobler and sturdier foundation than mere entertainment. We hear this insight echoed in the maxim: eloquence without wisdom is blind, and wisdom without eloquence is mute. The rhetorical tradition, championed as well in early modernity by Giambattista Vico against the dominant rationalist spirit of Descartes (Vico [1725] Reference Vico1984; Descartes [1668] Reference Descartes1947), is worth remembering.
No less worthy of recognition are the modern champions of legal realism, legal pragmatics, and law as process, who knew that Oliver Wendell Holmes was right when he wrote:
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. (Holmes Reference Holmes1881:1)
Work over the past three decades by clinical legal theorists and advocates of various forms of cultural legal studies are also undoubtedly allied with Peters’s campaign. Their multidisciplinary, bottom-up studies of law as it is performed in a variety of contexts not only take Peters’s view for granted, but also, as a matter of professional practice, develop it a good deal further (see Amsterdam & Bruner Reference Amsterdam and Bruner2002; Sherwin Reference Sherwin1992).
Many of these studies also actively explore ethical constraints and aspirations to which any aesthetic of law as performance is subject—appropriately so, given these are performances whose outcomes are backed by the power of the state. And so, in addition to a felt need to recognize allies in the campaign against antitheatrical bias, a second concern comes to the fore, namely: the absence of any discernible ethical or moral dimension to Peters’s aesthetic embrace of juridical performance.
Crucial to judging law as performance in aesthetic terms is whether the performance has achieved a preferred outcome. But determining whether a particular preference (in terms of entertainment or artistic value) or a particular outcome (say, an actual jury verdict or court ruling) is right, is an ethical or moral question. For example, whether a lawyer should have used mockery to sway the jury, or whether the behavior at issue should be punished, is not an aesthetic issue.
Peters never really grapples with how to address the tension in law between the aesthetics of performance and the ethical and moral concerns that surround law’s exercise of state power. Narrating facts in the search for truth may be inevitably entangled with aesthetics. But law also requires a separate act of judgment once the truth of the matter is settled.
It may be that feelings at least to some extent play a role in matters of conscience and judgment, but are we prepared to reduce such matters to feelings alone? Something important gets lost when we try to describe or enact prudence and wisdom exclusively in aesthetic terms.
Plato’s fear of theatrocracy as a promise of descent into mob rule centers precisely on splitting the aesthetic apart from a proper moral foundation. One may reject Plato’s response, but the question remains crucial to any consideration of sovereign rituals and authorized public ceremonies of governance.
In what denomination is performance capital being marketed? From the sacred oil that upon touching the king’s head during ceremonial anointment creates a second, immortal body bound to the divine; to the transcendent bond of a sovereign constitution that renders a union of states forever indissoluble (as the US Supreme Court proclaimed in Texas v. White in 1868), we ask not only what elements of performance capital are in play in sovereign rituals of governance; but also, on what moral or principled basis (if any) is it right or just to submit to an actor’s (including the state’s) claim of legal authority?
Logan’s study of “awkward rituals” addresses precisely this issue under the useful rubric of “rituals of governance.” The story she tells is compelling, not least for the ominous implications to which it gives rise.
Expressed in Logan’s terms, the legal performance the queen of England produced in Tothill Fields in 1571 constitutes a sovereign ritual designed to make royal power “feel real” (Logan 2022:2). In a democracy, however, embodying authority is a tricky business. Sovereignty, at least in principle, derives from and expresses the will of the people. As Logan writes: “Governing rituals allow people to behave ‘as if’ they were sovereign, or to take on and then shed a mantle of sacred authority” (3).
Logan’s key insight here derives from her focus on early American performances of civic authority through rituals that “cannot be neatly divided between secular and religious authority” (3). Turning from more familiar rituals of civil religion and the charismatic personalities of its leaders, Logan directs our attention to ordinary people who “enacted quotidian demonstrations of power in the context of American civil society” (3).
It is here that Logan teases out overlooked aspects of ritual governance. Along the way, she makes visible a curious and disturbing phenomenon: sovereignty in early American governance was strangely conflicted—at odds with its own revolutionary principles of freedom and equality. In fact, Logan identifies an antirevolutionary (illiberal) source of authority operating within many early American rituals of governance. The true nature of that source is often disguised, and passed over—experienced, if at all, as a feeling of awkwardness that disturbs the veil of inert regularity.
According to Logan, when the American colonists revolted against England, throwing off the ceremonies and institutions of the crown, a powerful residual force remained. Sovereignty, as understood from medieval Christian sources, derived from the king’s two bodies (Kantorowicz [Reference Kantorowicz1957] 2016). The secular, mortal body passed away, but a transcendent, immortal body sustained divine royal sovereignty from generation unto generation (“The king is dead, long live the king!”). Footnote 2
Political theorists have grappled with the conundrum of sovereignty in the aftermath of America’s democratic revolution. How might we understand the people’s immortal body? For example, in his important study of how symbolic authority is made to feel real, Eric Santner introduces the notion of the “People’s Two Bodies” (2011:xvi, xix). In his analysis, the transcendent source of law’s sovereign authority persists in a transformed state, a new sublime surplus. In Santner’s words: the “royal remains” live on in a “new locus of representational corporeality in the national community” (50).
Logan sees it differently. She argues, contra Santner, that the problem has been falsely framed (Logan 2022:7). There is no need to transform the king’s immortal body if it never really disappeared in the first place. And that is precisely what Logan claims to be the case for postrevolutionary America. The “royal remains” live on in the feudal institution of the “immortal” corporation.
According to Logan, the medieval concept of the “Body Corporate” perpetuated the king’s transcendent sovereign body through a corporate surrogate (4). That surrogate, Logan claims, was the bedrock of early America’s social organization in the northeastern United States. In this view, all corporate bodies in the US—from towns and guilds to companies, religious organizations, and voluntary associations—participated in the transcendent authority of kingly perpetuity.
Little wonder then that participants in early American corporate rituals were wont to encounter feelings of awkwardness. Awkwardness, it seems, was the price to be paid for engaging an illicit source of sacred power. After all, they were retailing a denomination of performance capital suffused with a counterrevolutionary, antidemocratic animus.
It is important to note that the awkward rituals of civic governance that Logan describes differ from the rituals described by anthropologists like Victor Turner. Awkward rituals are not knowing or intentional enactments of communitas—the symbolic bonding force that makes social structures cohere (Turner Reference Turner1969). Instead, these rituals reflect an unwitting or, at most, partially conscious enactment of a feudal structure characterized by a starkly unequal, rigidly hierarchical distribution of power (Logan 2022:9). How else but through strategies of disguise or diversion could such an undemocratic authority be maintained in an outwardly democratic state?
Logan offers four illustrative case studies to support her argument.
After the American Revolution, Freemasons used secret initiations to demonstrate that their exercise of civil authority over others was warranted. To appease a sense of bad faith in the performance of highly esoteric ceremonies, Freemasons inhabited masonry’s symbols only for the duration of the performance. Afterwards they could be left behind in the temple or hall. A similar strategy of diversion accommodates the question of legitimacy regarding the Freemasons’ claim of authority over others: they could always look away.
The waning of Freemasonry in the 1820s occurred on the heels of a surge in Protestant evangelical spiritualism. This new movement generated yet another set of solemn private rituals also structured by the trappings of corporate governance. Members of organizations, such as the American Bible Association, gathered in zealous communal meetings meant to model and authorize governance both within and beyond their ranks. Like the Freemasons before them, members looked away from the real source of corporate authority—an authority that had been invested not in the membership but in a board of directors that operated behind the scenes. The empty rituals of opaque bureaucratic corporatism disguised the reality of corporate power: the resolutions participants ritualistically approved were preauthorized decisions authored by corporate managers.
In the 1830s, private evangelical benevolent societies performed the function of providing social welfare to the needy. In this way, they acted as surrogates of the state. Their rituals of governance assumed that those they served were “marginal bodies” uniquely available for “cultural appropriation” (18). Members of these charitable organizations sympathetically identified with the abject, gripped by fantasies of alterity (76). But like the benighted evangelicals who delighted in agreements they lacked the knowledge or power to author, these surrogates ventriloquized marginalized groups that in reality “had no seat at civil society’s table” (85).
Logan’s last case study presents the domestic ideology of Catharine Beecher, who reimagined the home as a private haven that could serve as an incubator for public virtue. Mothers, through the administration of household chores, were championed as performers of yet another model for civic leadership and sovereign governance. But here, too, notwithstanding the piety surrounding the home, female domestic workers remained ritualized bodies without meaningful social or political status. Mothers were said to govern “like a queen,” but in reality they remained domestic servants. Outside the home these household matriarchs commanded no authority at all.
In all these case studies, a sense of awkwardness prevails. Awkwardness serves as a measure of false consciousness, if not outright bad faith. The real authority behind the corporate rituals being performed remains hidden or disguised as something else. Acting as if they were “kings and queens within the limits of their own territories” (11), these deluded players in the theatre of civil governance are in reality retailing the false coin of illicit performance capital.
In contrast to Peters, Logan forces us to confront head on the moral challenge inherent in public claims to sovereign authority. The uses of performance capital she exposes are like letters in Melville’s dead letter box, or rumors emanating from the upper echelons of Kafka’s mysterious castle. The medieval “Corporate Body” that structures the civic organizations she describes, along with the ceremonies and rituals of governance that they model, are skeuomorphs of democracy. Their outer trappings of agency and equality are belied by a corporate structure that is authoritarian to its core.
If Logan is right, many early American models and practices of civil governance were borrowing against a bankrupt account. Inert performers of awkward rituals appear to lay claim to no more than a semblance of authority through an empty, perhaps disingenuous repetition of rituals that, as Marko Geslani puts it (parsing Frits Staal’s definition) “do not refer to anything but themselves” (in Logan 2022:122–23).
A note of caution may be in order here. Logan seems to treat awkwardness as if it were a static condition rather than part of a larger historical, social, and political dynamic. To the extent this is so, her analysis misses the larger panorama of historically contested extrastructural norms that compete for belief in the public square. This contest is particularly acute in the face of defective or counterproductive rituals of governance, including those flagged by feelings of awkwardness. Indeed, the hidden, illicit nature of the performance capital in which these performances trade might well serve as a bellwether for their ensuing transformation.
For example, the rise of evangelicalism in the 1830s, which Logan associates with various “benevolent societies,” has also been described as part and parcel of a larger populist movement in the era of Jacksonian democracy. The so-called Second Great Awakening saw a profusion of new religious innovations that featured radical democratization and diversity. A growing sense of frustration with unacceptable levels of inequality gave rise to populist resistance to entrenched hierarchies held in place by an intellectual elite (Paul Reference Paul2022:146–47).
Viewed in this light, rather than perpetuate a static condition of social inertness, feelings of awkwardness may herald transformative social and political action. New denominations of performance capital rush to endow newly emerging rituals of governance when existing forms reach a maximum threshold of frustration and disappointment. As putatively democratic ceremonies and institutions continue to decay, awkwardness may be converted into feelings of anger or exuberant rebellion fomenting social experimentation.
Like the performance of law more generally, every awkward ritual pivots on its own normative assumptions. Transforming the denomination of performance capital requires access to extrastructural possibilities. As Harold Berman has written: “Law—in all societies—derives its authority from something outside itself” (1983:16). This kind of openness exposes the limits of self-posited systems, including the closed systems of “validated” law described by legal positivism. Faced with any self-enclosed system, including aesthetics, other viewpoints, whether aesthetic or moral, are needed to test the assumptions that constrain the system in question. Lack of self-reflection—the state of “inertness” and “looking away” that Logan describes—inhibits the kind of critique or renewed social imagination required to creatively project new norms, institutions, and practices of civic governance.
In her postcolonial analysis of British theatre at the height of empire (1656–1833), Kathleen Wilson brings into compellingly sharp relief the story of how normative worlds change. The cross-temporal sweep of Peters’s treatment of law as performance finds its spatial match in Wilson’s ambitious assessment of Great Britain’s efforts to export sovereign rituals of “Englishness” across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. In this monumental work, Wilson depicts dramatic, interculturally negotiated transformations in the constitutive myths and identities retailed by performance capital.
Wherever these itinerant exporters of English empire went they staked a claim to sovereignty. The exchange of performance capital their performances created proved catalytic. As Wilson puts it, the far-flung stages on which these actors played “mobilized competing ideas about authority, cultural difference and national belonging […] across the flow of practices of everyday life in Britain’s expansive domains” (2023:5).
As it turns out, these imperial performances of culture and identity made visible the operative terms of hierarchy in a variety of local social and political contexts. In so doing they created a public space in which the abject, the aspiring, and the privileged could confront one another and challenge the putative truths of hierarchy and stability long cherished by propertied English people.
In tracing the ensuing tide, exchange, and transformation of performance capital, like Peters and Logan, Wilson also depicts the two-way street across which such capital flows. The strolling players of the British empire enacted social and cultural norms of sovereign governance for subaltern spectators who responded with counterperformances in their own countertheatres of power.
Along the way, we see the formation and reformation of publics become visible not simply through the movement of printed texts and the burgeoning rational/discursive practices that Jürgen Habermas ([1962] 1989) famously located in European coffee houses. Independent of Habermas’s bourgeois literary class, we now encounter competing registers of performance, ethnicity, class, and legal status rippling among members of itinerant, hybrid acting companies and their audiences. As Wilson puts it, “a non-European alterity” was also directing the flow of performance capital on its own behalf, retailing myths and identities and knowledge competencies through oral, visual, and embodied media (including dance and song) (see Elliott Reference Elliott, Richard and Celermajer2019; Parker Reference Parker, Richard and Celermajer2019).
The drama of hybrid publics competing in “multiple negotiations of empire” (Wilson 2023:51) attests to a larger shift in the nature of performance capital itself. Medieval sources of sovereignty (i.e., the king’s mortal and transcendent bodies) have migrated from religious to secular locations. Practices of power and polity follow suit as the action shifts from clerics to lay citizens.
Here we find a dynamic counterpoint to Logan’s narrative of awkward rituals in which inert participants disconsolately engage the remains of illiberal knowledge/power. According to Wilson, performance capital may have flowed out from the heart of the empire to aggrandize, legitimate, and celebrate the British monarchy together with its medieval notion of transcendent sovereignty. But in practice, the strolling players of empire helped to endow new publics with forms of knowledge and governance practices that stoked the formation of a liberal democratic imagination. As Wilson writes, the very act of performance bestowed actors and audiences “with the agency of recognition and memory” as well as the “capacity to stimulate identification and affiliation among those present” (14).
In short, these theatrical performances formed a “School for the People,” not simply shaping and civilizing its audiences into “the mores and niceties of British manners,” but also serving as “a testing ground of moral progress” (11). Just as Britons had been taught which people and practices were valued and which were not, so, too, locals situated within far-flung colonies were assembled to consume “a national performance culture” in the service of English cultural hegemony (15).
Hence the paradox that lies at the heart of Wilson’s story. It is not simply that the retailed export of “Englishness” masked its syncretic nature by eliding and superceding a broad sweep of regional and provincial identities (including Irish, Scottish, Jewish, and Indian members of the Commonwealth). The further paradox is that the imperial craving to subdue otherness in the colonizers’ synthetic image (of English identity and national culture) belies a surprising, coexistent appetite for alterity itself. In the end, it seems that the very hybridity of Englishness—its “inquisitive, syncretic nature” (15)—is precisely what helps to transform performance capital from an imperial denomination to one capable of expressing “alternate values and subjectivities” (24).
Britain sought to conquer the world in its own image, and its image empowered others to reconstitute the world.
There is an additional lesson here suggestive of what the study of performance capital can offer. By bringing to light how performance capital endows identity and culture with a sense of reality, spectators—including colonial audiences supposedly primed for subjecthood—learn how to reconstitute political, cultural, and psychological realities of (as) their own (43). This suggests how we might not only supplement Peters’s highly aestheticized (amoral) treatment of law as performance, but also counter awkwardly inert (demoralized) corporate social networks that, according to Logan, marred early America’s liberal democratic aspirations.
If Wilson is right, the British appetite for, and empathy with, otherness not only drove its imperial culture, but, paradoxically, also fueled the kind of liberal imagination on which popular democracy itself depends. On this account, alterity constitutes and teaches sovereign ritual practices by which hybrid publics openly engage and contest the myths and identities that constitute civic governance. Performance capital thus may be viewed not simply as an agency of governance fulfilling preexisting (self-posited or inertly enacted) preferences and expectations—whether aesthetic or ethical. It also makes visible the dynamics of political change.
The political world in which performance capital is collectively and self-reflexively—rather than imperially or mechanically—endowed with meaning and value is called liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is a political theatre in which the audience is the final arbiter of what constitutes an appropriately authoritative sovereign ritual of governance. In this dispensation theatre may be commended as “the best medium through which to impart ‘moral knowledge’” (61). This is not simply a matter of process. It is a matter whereby process is also substance.
To the extent that the lawful world-making function of performance capital remains hidden or disguised (as per Logan), or rigidly enclosed within its own self-proclaimed aesthetic boundaries (as implied by Peters, consistent with the tenets of legal positivism), the self-reflexivity required for meaningful (ethical) agency remains stymied. By illuminating the retailing of myth and identity in terms that may be actively contested and transformed, Wilson’s work shows how we might understand performance capital as an ethical aesthetic. This is consonant with many of the core philosophical aspirations that shaped and informed ancient and classical rhetoric as well as modern and late modern liberal theory (see Sherwin Reference Sherwin2008, and forthcoming).
This may well be the strongest argument for deepening our study of performance capital. The tools and responsibility for self and political construction are the sine qua non of the liberal imagination. The study of performance capital teaches us what those tools are, how they may be put to use, and what are their political, cultural, and psychological consequences. Forged in the crucible of contested myths and identities, the liberal imagination takes shape in a perennial give-and-take between insiders and outsiders, the abject and those who would have them remain so.
Performance quickens the generation of new forms, including new forms of social and political life. Being mindful of performance capital is how we attend to the generation (or degeneration) of discrete ways of thinking, feeling, and living together. In this dispensation, performance capital, through its fertilizing contact with others, produces “the fruitfulness of interaction, the fecundity of dialogue” (Nye Reference Nye1989:48). In so doing, it actualizes the progress of Eros from bodily love to friendship, knowledge, and politics (46). In the process of staged public interaction, the possibility of performing a common good becomes real. It is a responsibility every generation is obliged—no matter how awkward it may feel—to take up anew.
These three volumes point the way toward a vibrant future for an emerging subfield of performance studies—and for liberal democracy itself. It may well be that their respective fates are entwined.
