A WIDE AND UNIVERSAL THEATER?
“The wise man’s folly is anatomized / Even by the squand’ring glances of the fool.”
―William Shakespeare, All’s Well, That Ends Well
Recently Twitter—excuse me, X—user zamadoma tweeted: “Reading a book in public is performative I don’t care what you say” and got a lot of reactions.
I have a lot of reactions, all by myself, from about thirty years of life. They are like small, stony tiles I’ve found or trimmed out from my experience. They’ve been accumulating and, for about a decade, increasingly swirling about. Now I hope to create a mosaic of them: something that makes sense, that they not only fit into but form. Something like a multivalent reflection of performance, audience, and functioning.
About twenty-eight years ago now, I went to a meet-up of people who mostly knew each other through irc (internet relay chat). Some of them were local to each other and knew each other before communicating on the channel. Others of us traveled to their community. I gradually realized that some of my chat friends were performing a physical-world version of a persona they’d assumed online. I found it utterly unnerving and ran away. It would have been more unnerving if I had thought that I was supposed to be performing some persona. Maybe I was—it didn’t occur to me. I was daunted enough by the certainty that This Is What to Do.
I’d already noticed, though I followed no sports then, that basketball players were continually telling reporters earnestly that they and their teammates “were trying to make a statement.” That seemed strange to me—wasn’t trying to win games enough? Why make statements through play instead of working to play toward winning, and make any statements separately? I mean, I expect they were explaining ex post that something about winning or about trying to win or about their play style said something, probably about their sense of personal or team identity, but it wasn’t a locution obvious to me. But I feel like the comedian who said, perhaps twenty years ago, that she didn’t want to make a fashion statement: her clothes didn’t have a big enough vocabulary.
It’s not that I object to all framing of life as performance. Roughly fifty years ago I read a chapter of Lewis Carroll’s less-known novel Sylvie and Bruno, in which a narrator explained watching the comings and goings on a railway platform he waited on, which he viewed as a form of theater. He applauded the unselfconscious aptness of those he was regarding as actors, of the actions that he read as performances, for his own amusement. I thought that charming—and it’s never troubled me. I suspect this is because the aesthetic choice of Carroll’s character ascribed neither intention nor responsibility to those he watched as a spectator. He was doing a reading for himself and he knew it.
Sometimes what’s message and what’s living becomes a question of law. In 2010 an organization named Citizens United brought suit that rose to the Supreme Court against the Federal Election Commission and a 2002 nonpartisan electoral reform act that made it illegal for a corporation or labor union to air “electioneering communication” within sixty days of an election and forbade them to air candidate advocacy (pro or con) at any time. (Corporations and labor unions were permitted to advocate on issues but not to promote or condemn any particular candidate.) The now-notorious five-to-four Citizens United decision said that those prohibitions violate First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and are therefore unconstitutional.
I think it’s a bad decision. A lot of people who agree say, “Money is not speech.” I’m an economist: I don’t think that’s right. Ancient and modern coins bear explicit political messages. When we learn where, say, Roman coins turn up, we learn a good bit about chains of connection between remote areas at times when travel was onerous. And I’m no anti-socialist absolutist, but I think that flows of money are very informative to many profit-maximizing firms. True, money says fairly crude things: “I want this,” “I need this,” “Here’s what my costs look like.” It’s enough information for market-driven production decisions to have a bunch of adjustment advantages over command production for many industries. But what seems obvious to me is that while flows of money are speech, it isn’t only speech. In the United States, in particular, we live in a monetary economy where funds are both used and required to obtain most goods and services. And because of this, money represents communication but, much more critically, represents resources and power. And because any one corporation or labor union has many more funds available than nearly any individual voter, treating corporation/union expenditures as equivalent to those of individuals tilts the tables of democracy.
A substance can be a medium of communication but, more fundamentally, something directly substantive. Monetary flows bear information, and fundraising has become a form of theater, but fundamentally, money buys things.
There is a Zen story in which a student’s teacher has taught the student, “When drinking tea, just drink tea,” yet the student comes across the teacher in the act of reading a newspaper while drinking tea. The teacher says, “When drinking tea and reading the newspaper, just drink tea and read the newspaper.” The more Zen angle on this story is about being conscious and mindful in one’s days, as practice and not as decree. But I also read it as speaking to a difference between engaging in an action in order to produce a particular effect, and engaging in an action for itself or to produce effects natural and predictable (one hopes) to the action. To me this is a distinction between show or message on the one hand, and substance that isn’t declarative on the other. Not that messages or performances are unimportant—I just find the idea that every action is a message both false and disheartening.
If every action is a message, what messages do I send to or through the sewers with every flush?
If reading in public is performative, then surely not-reading-in-public is equally performative?
How can one tell a performance of not-reading from a performance of not-going-naked or not-burning-down-houses? Those can look and sound identical.
I hold that while an observer—thinking of themselves as an observer—receives information from everything observed, that doesn’t mean that a person observed acting intends to broadcast information or opinion or persona or even purpose. And while an observer—casting themselves as audience—may view and interpret whatever they choose as a performance, the entities acting may not mean to conduct a performance, whether by action or inaction.
And still less do I think that nothing matters about actions and inactions but how they are observed, what meanings are read from them or intended by them. If you strike my arm with the intention only of expressing (un-nuanced) disapproval of my actions at the time, you are likely also to produce bruises, perhaps the breakage of a bone. I will count that injury as significant, and I want you to, too.
My glorious and sporting son read this work for me and said abruptly, “But basketball is a performance.” He’s not wrong, of course. In particular, professional and collegiate basketball games are watched, and people pay to watch them because of the pleasure in seeing something or things about a game as a performance. Maybe the displays of individual character, or the teamwork, or a hero struggle akin to the battles between Achaeans and Trojans. Maybe an exposition of the shape of basketball, which can be read in terms of tactics, or in the context of sets of rules that have changed over decades, or as meaning-filled metaphors.
Though maybe the gameplay is just read as pretext for bets, for those who “make the game interesting” that way.
Professional and collegiate basketball players, along with some high school players, understand that their fans and their opponents’ fans come for spectacle, and the players assent to the performance. Players hoping to be scouted embrace it and perform to it. This is less true of amateurs playing pick-up, by and large. Playground players can be deeply engaged in performing rivalries or displays, but surely quite a few play just for fitness and love?
Even though most elite athletes necessarily consent to be seen as performers, supreme basketball player Nikola Jokić was desperate to get back to his Serbian home and horses in the wake of the Denver Nuggets’ 2023 NBA championship win. He seemed less like someone interested in presenting himself as a performer to the public and more like a man who did his job, helped get the win, and was tired. Professional hockey players, unlike basketball stars, are notoriously modest people who truly do generally let their play speak for itself. Commentators, including National Hockey League alum John Scott, sometimes regret this reticence—big personalities make for big press and promote the sport, they say. (Of course, as a specialist fighter, John Scott’s play was more explicitly performative than that of many others.)
It seems to me more and more frequent, among the primarily English-speaking humans I encounter, to act as if all human action in their environment is a sort of show presented for those speakers to evaluate and critique. As if what humans do had no physical consequences, or physical consequences didn’t matter. Incidentally, as if all the nonhuman world were mere scene-setting. Certainly not as if we were all part of a universe of intertwined fellow-beings deserving respect.
To act purely as critic of the passing world is to act as judge, for whom the passing world is merely a spectacle submitted to one’s judgment. As if one were above and beyond one’s fellow-humans and all one’s fellow-beings, a lofty sort of authority and not a person making a tiny part of an incredibly complex and interactive world.
Standing back to observe someone else as a performer is a power claim. The judge can’t often lose, particularly outside a court system, can they? Grab a casual status as social justice, and you don’t need to present a case or to give reasoning. You can just reject with a firm, indulgent, “You haven’t convinced me.” I’ve experienced that and also kindly head-pats intended to reduce me to a petitioner when I’d thought I was having a conversation.
The world’s most heedless political discourse and choices come out of this framing too—what character is a candidate presenting, how effectively?—and not do I endorse the candidate’s stated aims, and do the candidate’s avowed policies work effectively toward those aims? Journalistic raves and pans make easy reading compared with policy analysis and discussion.
We are notoriously and regularly invited to think of candidates as auditioning for the role of Guy I’d Like to Have a Beer With, or Guy of Trustworthy Character, or Smart Magician, when we will never meet them for more than a handshake, if so much.
We are used to reading about this politician or that being “a bad candidate” purely in the sense of having received fewer votes than another candidate who isn’t being mentioned or evaluated—a framing in which voters (and those who don’t vote) are immaculately infallible.
“And the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players,” playwright William Shakespeare’s character the melancholy Jaques says in As You Like It. Of course, he says it on a stage, the words spoken by an actor with an offstage life in which they drink tea and read newspapers. And he embodies the part of a theatrical character who, unusually for Shakespeare, doesn’t act except as critic of the onstage action. Unlike, say, fellow playwright Luigi Pirandello, Shakespeare did not write in Jaques a character who thinks he’s an actor, despite his detached and judgmental stance. He’s a bit of a type, a sort of precursor of zamadoma, outside and, in some sense, above those around him.
We, formal audience to All’s Well That Ends Well, may evaluate the actors or production, or think “How true!” Or we may just be waiting to learn what happens to the disguised aristocratic characters whose actions drive the central plot. Or we may be taking notes so we can write a class-assigned essay.
Performance can be present in mutual understanding between actors and audiences, spectators and athletes. Performance can be intended and come across as message-bearing or as life itself.
Performance can be in the perceptions of an idler who mentally transforms a railway station into a stage, without harm to anyone. Performance can be in the perceptions of witnesses who may condemn people going about their lives for failing effectively to convey some message to the witness’s mind.
I have two concerns about what feels like an increasing tendency to view human and nonhuman acts as merely forms of theater. I worry about the reduction of activity—words or deeds—to message alone, ignoring our entanglement with a genuinely external world in which we have effects that may not be small. And I’m genuinely repelled by a perspective that reduces everyone but oneself to players for one’s solipsistic eye.
Of course, when someone wants to act the part of a Jaques on a stage that is the world, that’s their choice. But I think it’s as well if we reckon that as a stance, and one that, in setting the judge outside the action, renders them irrelevant to action. They may choose to rate our aims or styles, but we don’t have to play for their approval.
So here I am, taking a set of disparate experiences from life and reading and theater-going, and trying to find from them a mosaic. I must not decide on my own performance, as Miss Elizabeth Bennet says to Mr. Darcy, but to me it looks as if the picture shows that what’s performative is multivalent, a product of sender, receiver, and intention, of channels that can be composed principally of action, with meaning emerging from them as a byproduct, and of channels that are meant for communication but that have physical or social effects. If we, observers or actors, try to deny those complexities, the analytical reduction of data has gone too far.