Performance as Paradigm: the Example of Bali

Abstract

Thomas Kuhn, who gave us the term as cultural Weltanschauung or ideological "mindset", was sure: "The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another." Either he was wrong (at least about revolutions in the Humanities) or else the contemporary crisis in Western culture inscribed in the terms Post-modernism and Deconstruction is only a hiccup after all, and the heavily battered Text-paradigm of Modernism will soon re-emerge not only intact but even strengthened by the impotence of its critics and their boomeranging weapons (for did they not attack it in words ... ?). The attack on Logocentrism and Modernism and all they imply — the Enlightenment Project, Metanarratives, Metaphysics, Causality, Teleology — has been the major academic growth industry of the last twenty years during which, it is true, we have been given some tantalising glimpses of an alternative episteme. It is one which has delighted those of us who had already moved away from drama-as-literature to theatre and even further on — to perfonnance, for so many of them gestured in that direction: Lyotard's "perfonnativity", Baudrillard’s "scenodramas", Ihab Hassan's "process, play, perfonnance", Calinescu's neo-Baconian "Idols of the Theatre", Mellard's "act, ritual, play", Andrew Ross's "philosophy of praxis", Derrida's "Ereignis" and hymns to Artaud ... the alternative appeared clear: the only possible replacement for the Modernist Text-paradigm was/is Perfonnance.