Britain in the 1970s, a post-emancipation era seeking to mediate between late 1960s revolutionary sediments and its own disillusionment with tough socio-economic realities, can be categorized in the budding postmodern condition, via a series of terms like “industrial society,” “information society,” or “late capitalism.”
The last of these is the theoretical model I use to illuminate ways of cultural production related to this novel. As Fredric Jameson claims, “in postmodern culture,
‘culture’ has become a product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for its self and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself” (x).
In other words, the “fundamental feature of . . . postmodernism [is] the effacement . . . of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass of commercial culture” (2).
This commodified and aestheticized postmodern culture might be best reflected in dramatization of daily life. “[T]he media rush in with a host of ‘temporary master narratives.’ . . . Anchors intone, while reporters sensationalize ordinary life. The arts themselves take a back seat because ordinary life is framed so ‘artistically.’” In such a media society people receive “hundreds of fragmented stories and compressed dramas” (Schechner 131). Main characters as cultural workers in Buddha witness and join this process of postmodernization, when more and more things become culture and capital for sale at once. Critics and readers both are also impressed by performative or dramatized events in this novel. As if names of novels, plays, magazines, TV series, bands, lyrics, thinkers, singers, writers and commodity brands are not enough to show how the world has been transformed into fragmented micro-dramas, the protagonist-narrator weaves these raw materials into his performative narrative, reprocessing them to create a world where he performs himself for other characters and his audiences.
The dramatization of postmodern culture, from business, sports, rituals, everyday life and the performance arts in its narrow sense, invites us to consider multi-layered meanings in the very keyword “performance.” In Performance Studies, Richard Schechner has a succinct yet useful answer to “What is Performance:”
In business, sports, and sex, “to perform” is to do something up to a standard—to succeed, to excel. In the arts, “to perform” is to put on a show, a play, a dance, a concert. In everyday life, “to perform” is to show off, to go to extremes, to underline an action for those who are watching. (28)
While everyday life and art permeate one another, the realm of business translates both into various forms of capital, deciding whether performers gain prestige or money. This does not mean that performance is more economical than art or daily life.
Nor does it mean that art and daily life are mere reflections of a material base. In fact, through all phases of capitalism and human history, cultural performance has redefined and enriched the idea of capital, something best exemplified by Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital.” For him, this illustrates the spiritual, emotional and desirous dimensions in modern and postmodern capitalism. Just as performance in business, sports and sex are raw materials for media representation, practices in everyday life can be reprocessed into cultural capital to gain social agents success and excellence.
When main characters as cultural producers are engaged in the professional field of cultural production and leisure lives, it is critical to understand how performances are performed differently in different fields—that is, how different levels or dimensions of performance interact, impede, or rely on one another to participate in the culture of late capitalism. Distinction between performativity and performance, as Judith Butler shows, provides a useful theoretical framework for understanding why leading actors and actresses in Buddha sometimes seem endowed with a certain subjectivity or initiative in their performance, while often appearing trapped in changing social contexts. In her 1993 essay “Critically Queer,” Butler asserts performance is “a bounded ‘act’,” while performativity is “a reiteration of norms
which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’” (24, original emphasis).
Performance is thus “ theatrical in the sense of miming or hyperbolizing existing signifiers” (Lloyd 202). When certain signifiers are appropriated and re-signified
under certain conditions, performances are like theatrical activities, occurring in a certain time and space, with referents that characterize them. As the performer is able to hyperbolize or imitate a person, situation or object, performance becomes “an expression of the ‘will’ or ‘choice’ of the performer” (Lloyd 202), gaining him or her a certain degree of subjectivity. In comparison to the grand power relation that performativity represents, the idea of performance resembles Foucauldian micro-power a social actor may put to use.
Butler’s most notable example of performativity is gender, “an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity, instituted through a stylized repetition of acts”
(“Performative Acts” 519). “Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it; but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again”
(“Performative Acts” 526). Therefore, there is no “preexisting identity”
(“Performative Acts” 528), except for inscribed performatives, like known scripts, according to which gender roles are rehearsed repetitively. Performances in this sense are related to performativity: “Surely, there are nuanced and individual ways of doing one’s gender, but that one does it, and that one does it in accord with certain sanctions and prescriptions, is clearly not a fully individual matter” (“Performative Acts” 525, original emphasis).
It is a naturalized gender identity that Butler criticizes most, along with the possibility of escaping from that essentialization she follows with interest. As acts/performances are themselves “internally discontinuous, . . . the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style” (“Performative Acts” 520). Therefore, even performativity related to social-constructedness and uncontrollability beyond individual anticipation, invites an
inevitable changeability for identities. Similarity and difference between performance and performativity remind us, in studying how ethnicity and class are (per)formed in
Buddha, that intentionality and social construction must be taken into consideration.
Given that different theorists have unique power in ways of explaining certain social phenomena, it is useful to introduce Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, performative/performativity, the field of cultural production, and various forms of capital to supplement and balance Butler’s performative theory.31 For Bourdieu, a
“field” is “a structured space of positions in which the positions and their interrelations are determined by the distribution of different kinds of resources or
‘capital’” (Thompson 14). Major fields considered by Bourdieu are ones we can easily recognize in our everyday worlds: economic and political fields, (i.e., fields of power), and various cultural fields. A field of power requires high levels of economic capital and low levels of cultural capital, while the field of cultural production asks for the opposite arrangement of capital. Though each field is to a certain degree independent, they are also “systems of relations” (Bourdieu, Reflexive Sociology 106), since the field of power funds cultural production and the latter must either find creative strength in criticizing the field of power, or resemble a cultural industry in Adorno’s sense, dominated by the powerful. Discrepancies in the cultural field also find expression in the antagonism and interdependence between the “alternative”
(Bourdieu’s “small-scale or restricted production”), and “mass or large-scale production,” e.g., the “pop ‘mainstream’” in the realm of music (Hesmondhalgh 217).
31 I indebt a lot to Terry Lovell’s insightful paper: “Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu,”
which “argues that a positive engagement between Bourdieu’s sociology of practice and contemporary feminist theory would be mutually profitable. It compares Bourdieu’s account of the social construction of the human subject through practice with Butler’s account of subjectivity as performance” (Lovell 11). As Lovell claims, “Bourdieu’s strength lies in his insistence upon the well-nigh permanent sediments and traces which constitute embodied culture, but he draws attention away from those other areas of social space where the constructedness of social reality may be tacitly acknowledged or exposed. Butler, like a number of postmodernists, particularly valorizes these, often ‘less serious’, spaces–of play, masquerade, carnival – because it is here that cultural constructions become visible as such and therefore open to challenge and to situationist-style political interventions” (16).
If the idea of field seems to be too objective or determinist in explaining the identity formation of social players, Bourdieu’s habitus provides a useful tool in mediating between subjectivism and objectivism. Habitus, defined most simply in
Reproduction in Education as ‘the system of schemes of . . . perception, thought,
appreciation and action which are durable and transposable” (35), also representsdispositions of social agency acquired in the process of socialization. In response to
fields as systems of social positions taken by social agents, habitus is not only a subjective “structuring structure” of the agent, but a “structured structure”internalizing distinction between social class within individuals (Bourdieu,