Classical Indian Dance, to mention only a few such examples. The act of witnessing,
however, raises the stakes of audience engagement, sometimes making the audience
members uncomfortable, sometimes providing highly charged responses to the
work. This is particularly true of dances that foreground issues of social, political
and sexual difference in ways that make the spectator aware of the performer’s
cultural identity as well as his or her own cultural positioning.
(Albright 199 7 : xxii)14 Goffman was also much influenced in his early career by Simmel.
15 Issues of vision and visuality are clearly important, but I have set an extended treatment
aside in this chapter for reasons of space (see Phelan 1993; Thrift 1998).
16 Thus ‘the modern faculty of daydreaming means that people are able to imagine
themselves performing in front of other people and also imagine the reactions that others
will have’ (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998: 103).
17 This is in line with Deleuze’s chief principle that his work is a ‘logic of multiplicities’
but the multiple is never given in itself, it must be made. Thus works of art, for example,
are machines for producing nonpreexistent relations (cf. Rodowick 199 7 ).
18 Though I am drawn to Deleuze and Guattari’s work, it does have significant problems.
Five of these seem important. First, Deleuze and Guattari tend to evacuate the social.
Robert Castel says that Freud had two ‘lines’ on the question of cathexis. Sometimes
he placed it in a social structure; but elsewhere, he reduces institutions to forms of
psychic cathexis, and explains social organisations in terms of psychological conflict.
The second direction leads to a dead-end, but the first shows the importance of
individual investment in social and political structures. Deleuze and Guattari have
taken more from Freud than they think. They obviously believe in collective desire
and social-historical desire, but they also adopt the second line, albeit in a less crude
form. They interpret history from the point of view of desire, and therefore miss
the social qua social. The non-metaphors of machine, flow and coding end up
having a reductive effect, desire eats society away.
(Lecercle 1990: 192–198)Second, on one reading, they insist on singularities, on individual arrangements of desire,
rather than mediate generalizations, on particular historical situations rather than a
global class analysis.But even when they assert the value of singularities, they are bound to use general
concepts, such as fascism. Even if schizo-analysis makes no claim to be a science
in the ordinary sense of the term, it has to conform to certain general rules, and the
rule which forbids rise to general rules of interpretation is itself a form of
interpretation. A familiar paradox.
(Lecercle 1990: 1 4 2)Third, Deleuze and Guattari’s attitude to history is similarly paradoxical. They want to
be both more and less historical. For example,the critique of those unhistorical concepts used by Freud (the unconscious, the
family.. .) is a powerful one. But... their own critique ultimately takes back an
unhistorical concept: like ideology, fascism is both historical and unhistorical.
Nomadic trides, we are told, forever fight the state, and their war machine eventually
captures it. Which tribe? and which desert? The price for such sweeping generalities
is high: the disappearance of concrete historical analysis.
(Lecercle 1990: 1 4 3)266 Notes