Chapter-II

Folklore, Text and the Performance Approach

Folklore as a Discipline

The beginning of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of Folklore as

relatively a new discipline of learning. Ever since the term was proposed, there

has been much contention about the meanings and connotations associated with

it. Studies dealing with oral traditions of the people of various cultures of the

world appeared under different names in different times. The present scientific

term "folklore" was first suggested by William John Thoms, an English

antiquary. In his letter to the editor of Athaeneum in 1846, Thoms suggested the

use of a Saxon compound Folk-Lore, “the Lore of the people”, to replace the

relatively cumbersome and even slightly misleading phrase ‘Popular

Antiquities’ which was prevalent at that time to classify the rites, customs,

beliefs, superstitions, tales and myths of the rural peasants. "The term caught on

and proved its value in defining a new area of knowledge and subject of inquiry,

but it has also caused confusion and controversy",… as folklore, more often

than not, suggests both to the layman and the academician "wrongness, fantasy

and distortion" (Dorson 1972: 1-3). ‘Folklore’ came into universal acceptance

and usage but it also became a misunderstood and much-abused term.

As a matter of fact, this confusion was because oral traditions were not

understood and studied properly. There was widespread emphasis on the written

variety of literature which was greatly patronized in urban cultures. As such,

scholars did not even consider studying and understanding the meaning of any

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such literary tradition that survived in orality. Myths were considered as false

and it became a synonym for unreality and fantasy. These and other such

misconceptions stayed for a long time and ironically continued in those

countries which are rich in oral traditions, than the others that do not share such

a rich heritage. Apart from this there was also another reason responsible for the

perpetuation of these misconceptions. This was the sheer want of scientific

understanding among the early scholars who advocated folklore theories and

various methods of studying oral traditions. As Ben-Amos puts it,

“…while anthropologists regarded folklore as literature, scholars of literature

defined it as culture. Folklorists themselves resorted to enumerative, intuitive,

and operational definitions; yet while all these certainly contributed to the

clarification of the nature of folklore, at the same time they circumvented the

main issue, namely, the isolation of the unifying thread that joins jokes and

myths, gestures and legends, costumes and music into a single category of

knowledge”.

(Ben Amos 1971: 3-15.)

The many forms and genres of folklore such as fairy tales, ballads, myths,

proverbs, and rhymes have language as the principal medium of

communication; yet the nonverbal is also predominant, as is the case with many

games and innumerable customs and rituals.

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Folklore---Definitions and Approaches

In common parlance, Folklore was regarded as the lore of the illiterate rural

folk. There have also been tendencies to consider folklore as something set in

the past. There have been attempts to define the term folklore from time to time.

These definitions have contributed a lot towards the understanding of the sphere

of folklore and folkloristics. While considering these views, we should also

keep in mind that though the term folklore is comparatively a new creation,

nonetheless ‘folklore is as old as mankind’ (Handoo 1998:1). When Thoms

coined the term folklore, it seems he was very clear about the constitution of

folklore. His words and phrases such as “manners”, “customs”, “neglected

customs”, “fading legends”, “fragmentary ballads” etc. do give us a picture

about what folklore meant to him and his awareness of folklore which was

closely tied to currents of romanticism and nationalism (Dundes 1985:4).

Definitions of folklore are many and varied. In all these folklorists have tried to

describe and put in their views of the term Folklore. In the Standard Dictionary

of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, we find twenty-one definitions of folklore

offered by different folklorists. There were good deals of difficulties

experienced in defining the term, which are real and legitimate. This is because

as a new field of inquiry Folklore vacillated between Humanities and Social

Sciences. Also, the term folk appeared to be confusing and misleading. Because

in the 19th century folk was defined as:

“…a group of people (the peasants, non-literate or illiterate or rural people) who

constituted the lower stratum of the society”.

(Dundes 1978:2)

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If this definition is considered then one would have to conclude that folklore

would disappear as soon as the peasant society ceased to exist. If we accept the

above definition then one can also state that the urban dwellers are not folk, and

as such they have no folklore. But in truth folklore exists in all societies and

continues to do so. Folklore is something that is not invariable, but is subject to

transformation and progression.

Let us now consider a few of the select definitions listed below---

• "The common idea present in all folklore is that of tradition, something

handed down from one person to another and preserved either by

memory or practice rather than written record." (Stith Thompson 1972:

28)

• "Folklore is that art form, comprising various types of stories, proverbs,

sayings, spells, songs, incantations, and other formulas, which employs

spoken language as its medium." (Richard Waterman 1972: 45)

• "Folklore is very much an organic phenomenon. . . . It is possible to

distinguish three basic conceptions of the subject underlying many

definitions; accordingly, folklore is one of these three: a body of

knowledge, a mode of thought, or a kind of art. . . . Folklore is not

thought of as existing without or apart from a structured group. . .its

existence depends on its social context. . . . As an artistic process,

folklore may be found in any communicative medium; musical, visual,

kinetic, or dramatic. . . . In sum, folklore is artistic communication in

small groups." (Ben-Amos 1972: 12-13)

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• "[I see] folklore as action. My argument here is that this kind of focus

on the doing of folklore, that is, on folklore performance, is the key to

the real integration between people and lore on the empirical level. This

is to conceptualize the social base of folklore in terms of the actual place

of the lore in social relationships and its use in communicative

interaction." (Bauman 1972: 10)

• (Folklore)…denotes expressive forms, processes, and behaviours that

we customarily learn, teach and utilize or display during face-to-face

interactions and judge to be traditional because they are based on known

precedents or models, and because they serve as evidence of continuities

and consistencies through time and space in human knowledge, thought,

belief, and feeling. The discipline devoted to the identification,

documentation, characterization, and analysis of traditional expressive

forms, processes and behaviours is folkloristics (alternatively identified

as folklore studies or folklife research). Those who are trained in that

discipline and who pursue its objectives in their work are folklorists.

(Georges & Jones 1994:1).

• (Folkore refers to)…any group of people whatsoever who share at least

one common factor. It does not matter what the linking factor is---it

could be a common occupation, language or religion---but what is

important is that a group is formed for whatever reason will have some

traditions which it calls its own. In theory, a group must consist of at

least two persons, but generally, most groups consist of many

individuals. A member of the group may not know all other members,

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 but he will probably know the common core of traditions belonging to

the group, traditions which help the group to have a sense of group

identity (Dundes 1978:7).

Most are in agreement with the above definition of Dundes. However, some

recent observations consider folk life as the universal, diverse, and enduring

values of community life, artfully expressed in myriad forms and interaction,

thus enriching the nation and building a commonwealth of cultures.

As Sims and Stephens says,

“Folklore is folk songs and legends. It is also quilts, Boy Scout badges, high school

marching band initiations, jokes, chain letters, nicknames, holiday food… and many

other things you might or might not expect. Folklore exists in cities, suburbs and rural

villages, in families, work groups and dormitories. Folklore is present in many kinds of

informal communication, whether verbal (oral and written texts), customary

(behaviors, rituals) or material (physical objects). It involves values, traditions, ways of

thinking and behaving. It’s about art. It’s about people and the way people learn. It

helps us learn who we are and how to make meaning in the world around us”.

(Sims & Stephens 2005: 1-2)

According to Noyes,

“Folklore is a metacultural category used to mark certain genres and practices within

modern societies as being not modern. By extension, the word refers to the study of

such materials. More specific definitions place folklore on the far side of the various

epistemological, aesthetic and technological binary oppositions that distinguish the

modern from its presumptive contraries. Folklore therefore typically evokes both

repudiation and nostalgia”.

(Noyes 2004: 375-378)

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The American Folklore Society in its official website says,

“Folklore is the traditional art, literature, knowledge, and practice that is disseminated

largely through oral communication and behavioral example. Every group with a sense

of its own identity shares, as a central part of that identity, folk traditions–the things

that people traditionally believe (planting practices, family traditions, and other

elements of worldview), do (dance, make music, sew clothing), know (how to build an

irrigation dam, how to nurse an ailment, how to prepare barbecue), make (architecture,

art, craft), and say (personal experience stories, riddles, song lyrics). As these examples

indicate, in most instances there is no hard-and-fast separation of these categories,

whether in everyday life or in folklorists’ work”.

(www.afsnet.org)1.

The word folklore thus projects a vast and greatly remarkable aspect of culture.

The myriad definitions and descriptions of folklore contend the vastness and

complexity of the subject. However, what is specific about these definitions and

descriptions is that they thwart any notion of folklore as something that is

simply old, old-fashioned, exotic, rural, peasant, uneducated, untrue, or dying

out. Folklore connects people to their past, nevertheless it is a predominant

constituent of present life, and is at the core of all human cultures throughout

the world.

The coinage of the term folklore by William Thoms became significant for two

reasons. Firstly, it led to the foundation of an academic discipline known as

Folklore in many parts of the world. Twenty two years after the coinage of the

term Folklore, in 1878, the British Folklore Society was established with Thoms

as its first director. The American Folklore Society followed suit ten years later

47
in 1888. And by the twentieth century, many national and international folklore

societies emerged in Europe and other countries across the globe.

Secondly, Thoms’ coinage of ‘Folklore’ induced a long and unending debate

about the exact definition of the discipline and the aspects to be included within

it. Since the beginning, the inquiry in folklore had been found to be overlapping

and repetitive; it is being regarded as duplicitous in the sense that the same

cultural situations are studied by different disciplines and at times in identical

manner. This in turn leads to the controversies regarding the boundaries of each

area of inquiry. For example, both literary scholars and folklorists study folk

literature, sometimes on similar line and sometimes in different ways. Folklore

studies were considered as a part of literary studies before giving it the status of

a separate discipline which has its own distinctive characteristics. Similarly, the

way a folklorist studies a physical artifact of culture, anthropologists do exactly

the same; literary scholars follow a similar line in case of text based folklore.

Thus, folklore definitions had to deal with diverse perspectives which often lead

to different and even conflicting approaches. In spite of this expansion,

following Ben Amos, we can characterize three basic conceptions of Folklore

which makes it any one of the following three:

• a body of knowledge,

• a mode of thought, or

• a kind of art.

However, these categories are not mutually exclusive; very often the difference

between them is a matter of emphasis rather than of essence. For example, when

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the emphasis is put on knowledge and thought, the concentration is on the

contents of the materials and their perception; whereas the focus on art puts the

stress on the forms and the media of transmission. Nevertheless, each of these

three foci encompasses different extent of ideas which connects to a distinct set

of folklore theories, thus leading to divergent research directions.

Folklore as Performance

The existence of folklore depends on its social context, which may be either a

geographic, linguistic, ethnic, or occupational grouping. It cannot exist apart

from a structured group. This enables the distinction of three types of

correlation between the social context and folklore: possession, representation,

and re-creation. The literal interpretation of the term “folklore” sets up the first

type of relationship. Folklore is the sum total of knowledge in a society, “the

whole body of people’s traditional beliefs and customs” (Ben-Amos 1971: 6).

Secondly, the communal possession can be expressed by the group at large in

“collective actions of the multitude,” as Frazer defines it, including public

festivities, rituals, and ceremonies in which every member of the group partakes

(Frazer 1919: vii) And lastly, folklore can be recreated in customs and

observances that each individual chooses to, provided all the people in the

society adheres to and abide by them. It represents a particular mode of

collective customs, rituals and other observances as represented in the mode of

thought that underlies them. It is thus not an aggregate of things, but a process--

-a communicative process, to be exact.

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In this sense, Folklore becomes a performative social process. It is an artistic

action which involves creativity and aesthetic response, both of which converge

in the art forms themselves. The approach of Folklore and ethnography

underwent a shift during the 1960’s. From mere collection, folklorists tried to

synthesize and comprehend peoples and their creations in their own terms. Such

re-creations initiated the performance turn in folklore. Through performance

human beings expressively and aesthetically create their cultural worlds through

interaction with others and convey meaningful messages to those around them.

Performance is applied as an analytical tool to examine human behavior. The

performance aspect of folklore involves a social interaction through art and

differs greatly from other modes of speaking and gesturing. This distinction is

based upon sets of cultural conventions, recognized and adhered to by all the

members of the group, which separate folklore from other non art

communication. The locus of such conventions marking the boundaries between

folklore and non folklore can be found in the texture, text, and context of the

forms, to apply Dundes’ three levels for the analysis of folklore. He says,

“In most of the genres (and all those of a verbal nature), the texture is the language, the

specific phonemes and morphemes employed. Thus in verbal forms of folklore,

textural features are linguistic features… The study of texture in folklore is basically

the study of language (although there are textural analogs in folkdance and folk art),

(as such) textural studies have been made by linguists rather than by folklorists…

The text of an item of folklore is essentially a version or a single telling of a tale, a

recitation of a proverb, a singing of a folksong. For purposes of analysis, the text may

be considered independent of its texture. Whereas texture is, on the whole,

untranslatable, text may be translated…

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 The context of an item of folklore is the specific social situation in which that

particular item is actually employed. It is necessary to distinguish context and function.

Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of

contexts. Usually, function is an analyst’s statement of what (he thinks) the use or

purpose of a given genre of folklore is”.

(Dundes 1980: 22-32)

One view of performance theory concentrates on interpreting texts so that the

artfulness of a particular depiction may be embodied on the paper and the

aesthetic disposition of the performance act are to be discovered according to

local understanding of language, speech patterns, genre, etc. This method is

called Ethnopoetics and Tedlock, Hymes, Bauman, Sherzer, Gossen2 and others

credibly demonstrates that artful oral texts can be represented on the page as

poetry according to rhythms, repetition, etc., by transcribing with meticulous

details the pauses, loudness, and patterns of speech. We may regard this

approach to poetics as a kind of anthropology of art (which might be another

definition of folklore).

Towards Performance as Text

The shapers of the performance theory persistently reiterate the significance of

context. Bauman states, “The kind of focus on the doing of folklore, that is, on

folklore performance, is the key to the real integration between people and lore

on the empirical level” (Bauman, 1972: 33). Ben Amos says, “In sum folklore is

artistic communication in small groups” (Ben Amos, 1971: 13). Similarly,

Abrahams urges on the necessity for a close observation of individual

performances in their social context (Abrahams 1972: 29). Essentially, the

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event, setting and the group in which a folklore action happens form the

parameters of context. Songs and music have occasions when they are

performed. Although such conditions may have other purposes, like keeping

folklore to recreation and ritualistic pursuits, they also make a division of the art

from nonart in cultures that usually lack a complex segregation of time, space

and labor. In a sense, they provide a spatial, temporal, and social definition for

folklore in culture. Thus, the performance situation, in the final analysis, is the

crucial context for the available text. The particular talent of the artist, his mood

at the moment of his recital, and the response of the audience may all affect the

text of his performance.

The thrust on context seeks to interpret folk ideas, customs, tales and songs in

their integration with the life, thought, language, and action of the people that

perform, observe and act upon them in their own society and time. A valid

interpretation, therefore, is an interpretation of a text in context. The contextual

approach does not assume an opposition between text and context; rather it

supposes that folklore exists in a contextual state. Each situation is a unique

integrated whole and the entire context is the text. While no two contexts are

alike, people follow cultural rules and social patterns that are discoverable and

that reveal the dynamics and poetics of folklore in society.

Malinowski distinguished between ‘context of culture’ and ‘context of

situation’. The context of culture is the broadest framework for the perception

and interpretation of folklore. It comprises the knowledge shared by the

speakers, their conventional behavior and ethical principles, their history, their

52
beliefs, and their speech metaphors and genres. In contrast, the situation is the

narrowest, most direct context, for the folklore performance and, therefore, a

key for its interpretation. It comprises a speaker, a musician or a designer

(sender), a message in the appropriate medium, and a listener or a viewer

(receiver). Any understanding of folklore can be achieved only by analyzing the

relationship between the sender, the message, and the receiver. The deciphering

of the intricate relations and nuanced attitudes, past experiences, mutual

perceptions, and purposes of speaking is the key for its interpretation. Thus, the

different components interact upon one another, having the capacity to redefine

and renegotiate constantly the framework for communication.

(Malinowski1946: 296-336).

Thus, the significance of performance theory lies mainly on meaning in a

specific context and a specific culture. As such, it puts less stress on the text.

Both the historical study “across time periods” and the comparative study

“across cultural boundaries” are replaced by descriptions of folklore

performances in their present setting (Ben-Amos 1977: 36). The performance

theory locates stories to a specific event and accredits the narrator who

undertakes responsibility for the performance. Each performance is

distinguished, and hinges on a performer’s assumption of liability for the

emergent event. Folklore becomes in this way not a disembodied "text" but

rather a rich convergence of performer, situation, setting, audience, and society.

Bauman notes, "Oral literature (until now) has been conceived of as stuff –

collectively shaped, traditional stuff that could wander around the map, fill up

collections and archives, reflect culture, and so on" (Bauman 1986: 2). He

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further recognizes that the symbolic forms we call folklore have their primary

existence in the action of people and their roots in social and cultural life. The

texts we are accustomed to viewing as the raw materials of oral literature are

merely the thin and partial record of deeply situated human behavior. One’s

concern should be to go beyond a conception of oral literature as disembodied

superorganic stuff and to view it contextually and ethnographically, in order to

discover the individual, social, and cultural factors that give it shape and

meaning in the conduct of social life (ibid: 11-16 ).

Divorced from the context, texts become insubstantial, incomplete and less

meaningful, so goes the argument. A text is like a fabric, entwined together with

the situation of a given performance, the audience, the performer, the social

group, and culture of the performer and the audience. Performances are

patterned in culturally-specific and cross-culturally variable ways (Fine 1994:

34-45). Thus, the meaning of a particular performance can only be understood

by studying it in context, integrally related to its immediate social,

psychological, and physical surroundings.

This shift from structure to process in folklore studies moved the object of study

from texts to texts-in-context. Poetics became more important in the late 1970s

and early 1980s as “a new emphasis on performance directed attention away

from study of the formal patterning and symbolic content of texts to the

emergence of verbal art in the social interaction between performers and

audiences” (Bauman 1990: 2-9). This shift is exemplified by the change in

terms from text to entextualization and from context to contextualization.

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Paying attention to contextualization involves looking at the way participants

(which includes performers and audience) examine the performance and how

the performance emerges as a result (ibid: 12-23). On the other hand,

entextualization describes the process that makes text into a coherent unit.

Bauman says that entextualization analysis involves “exploring the means

available to participants in performance situations to render stretches of

discourse discontinuous with their discursive surround, thus making them into

coherent, effective, and memorable texts” (ibid: 31). The textual details retain

importance in the analysis of context. In this view, performance is inseparable

from its context. With the processes of entextualization and contextualization,

ethnographies of performance have uncovered the dialogue between what is

said, danced, sung, or played and the cultural context in which it occurs.

Thus we see that through a selection of different actions and representations, the

text of a performance constructs and communicates meanings at different levels

of life and living. A text can be scripted or unscripted; it may be composed of

written or spoken words. In whatever form it may exist, texts provide a frame

that invites critical reflection on the communicative processes. Context on the

other hand is integrally related to its immediate social, physical and

psychological surroundings, and it imparts a spatial, temporal and social

definition to the performance act.

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Performance and Psychoanalysis

Literary studies have long identified the importance of psychoanalysis as a

method for analyzing texts in a new way. But the relationship between

psychoanalysis and performance has seldom been designed, either for

examining the nature of performance itself, or for labeling distinct performance-

related activities. If we consider the relationship between literature and

psychoanalysis, it implies a mutually dependent relationship that is crucial for

an analytic communion. Similarly, if we regard performance as a process in

which individuals are physically present, and think, speak and relate with other

individuals, then that same activity must evidently address essential queries

about human behavior. Therefore, to inquire into the latent arena of the mind

and lay bare its hidden landscape, its fears and desires through a range of

signifying practices, psychoanalysis is vital for performing arts.

Several of these connections had been duly noted by Freud when he considers

the audience reaction to a range of theatrical experiences. The dramatist’s

avowed function in what Freud calls ‘religious’ or ‘social’ drama is to allow the

spectator ‘to take the side of the rebel’; to enter into a collusive pact, along with

the playwright, with the character(s) on stage. So too with ‘psychological

drama’, the drama of ‘character’, where we can identify with the struggle

‘between different impulses in the hero’s mind’ that inevitably lead to the

suppression of one of these impulses in an act of enunciation. But, as Freud

advocates, ‘the series of possibilities grows wider’ when the impulses involved

are both conscious and repressed (Freud 1905-06)3.

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Andre Green made significant contributions towards the development of this

theory. He specifically characterizes performance as occupying a ‘transitional

position’ in mediating between the individual and the social, making possible

the ‘displacements of sublimation’ that commute neurosis into theatrical

pleasure. The ‘sentient, corporeal space’ of performance constitutes a world of

objects ‘that both are and are not what they represent’ for the spectator, setting

into play ‘the inevitable disguising and indirect unveiling’ that the fantasy

structure of the work undertakes. For Green, as for Freud, performance

contributes to the ‘assuaging of unsatisfied or insatiable desires’ by providing a

‘yield of pleasure’ from deeper psychical sources’---a ‘partial discharge’

emanating from the commerce between revelation and the threat of further

repression4 (Campbell & Kear 2001: 45-78).

Performances not only provide a link with the everyday life of a man, but also

with his inner psyche. Just as in Aristotelian catharsis a spectator’s experience

of tragic drama generates emotions of pity and fear; in psychoanalytic cure

revelations of a character’s past might prompt the therapeutic release of buried

feeling and discharge of emotion. At a later stage, Freud introduced the concept

of ‘transference’. He says that a consulting room can become a theatre in which

a patient may be given the opportunity to revisit past conflicts, by ‘transferring’

the repressed feelings for parents or sibling on to the supposedly detached

figure of the analyst. As Freud puts it, “The patient does not remember anything

of what he has forgotten or repressed, but acts it out… He repeats it, without

knowing he is repeating it” (Freud 1987)5.

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Strauss follows the Freudian notion about symbolic associations (metaphoric

and metonymic), latent and manifest formations, together with the structure of

the human mind, made of layers of consciousness, unconsciousness and

preconsciousness. He focused on ‘the unconscious nature of collective

phenomena’ (Strauss 1963: 18).

Lacan agreed with Freud and reaffirmed that dreams and their symptoms not

only exert figurative tropes of condensation and displacement, but also

correspond to metaphoric selection and metonymic combination (identified by

Roman Jakobson as the twin axes of poetic language)6. Such concepts are

helpful in understanding any artistic activity, including text-based theatre that

involves the deployment of words in the act of creation. In fact, Freud likened

the imaginative artist to a daydreamer, maintaining that ‘the writer softens the

character of his egoistic daydreams by altering or disguising it and bribes us by

the purely formal, that is aesthetic yield of pleasure that he offers us in the

presentation of his fantasies (Freud 1907-08)7.

Freud also held the belief that not only can dreams be likened to drama, but the

dramatization is in fact the primary activity in dreaming. It follows then that if

dreams resemble drama, drama too can partake of the stuff of dreams. While the

theatre may mirror the world of external appearances, it may also, in Ellman’s

words ‘give external form to the internal dramaturgy of the mind, where

anything may be involved and brought to life’. If we go by this definition of

theatre, then we can assume that the spectatorial process is one both of decoding

what is being staged, but also of reaching down into the unknown, of getting

involved in the interpretative business of ‘dreamwork’. If the techniques of

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dramatization are ‘designed to hide us from ourselves’, then the role of the

watcher is to ‘discern the words encoded in the pictographic script of dreams’

(Ellman 1994: 14-23).

Not that it is always that simple or straightforward. Dreams operate by yoking

together apparently disparate images in order to create a new reality. Similarly,

most traditional drama exists as a kind of matrix which makes it difficult to

comprehend. There are a number of links and connections that make up the

framework of a performance. Thus, psychoanalysis in a performance situation

seeks to investigate these interconnections and examine the relationship

between the terms as well as their extension into the social, political and

ideological domain.

Things have definitely moved on since Freud, and in raising our consciousness

in terms of artistic and critical practice, recent theories have challenged the very

nature of performance and created an uneasy bedfellow---performativity. In

these debates, the single voice of Lacan and the collective voice of feminism

have dominated the discussion. We have already seen that in asserting that

symbolization was central to dreams, Lacan both reiterated and enlarged on

Freudian principles. In considering the unconscious, he went further. Not only

structured like a language, it was also part of a subject identified by a chain of

signifiers, a subject created by language who engages both with the self and the

external world by operating first in the imaginary and then in the symbolic

mode. Lacan further adds that language has its roots in absence: the awareness

of this lack is the price that we pay for our sense of self 8. Based on this idea,

Feral distinguishes between theatre and performance. The former is a linear,

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narrative and representational medium that inscribes the subject in the

Symbolic, in ‘theatrical codes’, whereas the latter subverts these codes and

competencies allowing the subject’s flows of desire to speak. In this kind of

performance, he says, the actor neither ‘plays’ in role nor ‘represents’ himself

but is a source of ‘production and displacement’ (Feral 1982: 17-31).

In his letter to Fliess Freud states, “I am working on the assumption that our

psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the

material present in the form of memory traces being by a process of

stratification: the material present in the form of memory traces being subjected

from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances to

a retranscription. Thus what is essentially new about my theory is the thesis

that memory is not present once but several times over that it is laid down in

various kinds of indications9. (Masson 1985:106-142). Foster draws attention to

the critical possibilities made available by positing the psychic processes of

‘rearrangement’ and ‘retranscription’ as material social practices. By insisting

on the productivity of linking ‘turns’ in critical models with ‘returns’ of

historical practices, Foster attempts to demonstrate how ‘a reconnection with a

past practice’ might ‘support a disconnection from a present practice and/or a

development of a new one.’ For example, he locates in Lacan’s famous ‘return

to Freud’ the desire to perform a rigorous rereading of the foundational texts of

psychoanalysis that not only seeks to ‘restore the radical integrity of the

discourse but to challenge its status in the present, the received ideas that

deform its structure and restrict its efficacy.’ This, he argues, is a ‘contingent

strategy’ which ‘reconnect(s) with a lost practice in order to disconnect from a

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present way of working felt to be outmoded, misguided, or otherwise

oppressive’. In this respect, the key to Lacan’s endeavor is the identification of

an implicit connection between Freudian theory and structural linguistics, a

connection unavailable to Freud but crucial to the renewal of psychoanalysis as

a paradigm. By introducing one field of critical inquiry to another, by explicitly

staging the implicit dialogue between them, Lacan is able to effect a

‘retranscription’ of psychoanalytic discourse (Foster 1996: 31-40). He reiterated

that there exists a general unconscious structure that regulates social reality. It is

in fact the symbolic function that defines human social order. Whereas, Sapir

contends that ‘It is the culture of a group that gives the meanings to symbolisms

without which the individual cannot function, either in relation to himself or to

others (Sapir 1994: 244).

The focus here is on performance, ‘how the gestures of symbolization are

entwined with and embedded in the process of collective practice’ (Zizek 2006:

15). Most of the tradition reflects that social reality is not just an extension of

the individual psyche, but in fact the two are intrinsically entwined. The psychic

world of the individual extends itself to the outer social reality which in turn is

governed by the symbolic order.

Psychoanalysis thus assumes the psychic unity of mankind in so much as we

can infer an interaction between mental and social events as they are

characterized in ways which are intuitively plausible which we attribute as

belonging to the plasma of cultural traditions. Culture is the basis of all social

identity and development. In case of popular culture meanings are constructed

at the moment of consumption. Such meanings become the locus of discourses

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on cultural and political values. Human life, seen from a psychoanalytic

perspective, is doomed to an irreconcilable contradiction between desire and

reality. Folklore and other artistic expressions come into existence to overcome

the contradiction through creation. Psychoanalysis can provide a productive

framework for understanding the work of performance, and performance itself

can help to investigate the problematic of identity. Therefore, a more modest

attempt in the subsequent chapters is to deploy a similarly contingent strategy in

exploring a range of connections between psychoanalysis and performance,

both as concrete historical practices and as conceptual modes of enquiry.

Notes:

1. In www.afsnet.org>page=WhatIsFolklore

2. From ‘Fieldwork/Ethnography and Performance Theory by Mary Magoulick

(https://faculty.gcsu.edu>performance

3. See ‘Psychopathic Characters on the Stage’ (composed in 1905-06, published in 1942),

translated by James Strachey, PFL XIV, 121-27.

4. From Campbell & Kear’s Psychoanalysis and Performance.

5. See ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’ Vol. 1 (1987) in The Pelican Freud Library
published by Penguin Books.

6. See Roman Jakobson’s ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ in T. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language (350-
77). Cambridge: Massachussetts Institute of Technology Press.

7. See The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham 1907-1925
transcribed and edited by Ernst Falzeder, and translated by Caroline Schwarzacher with the
collaboration of Christine Trollope & Klara Majthenyi King, and Introduction by Andre
Haynal & Ernst Falzeder. First published in 2002 by H. Karnac (Books) Ltd. London.

8. From Patrick Campbell’s ‘Beyond Blind Oedipus’ in Cambell & Kear’s Psychoanalysis
and Performance.

9. ibid

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