The practice of association.
Item
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Title
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The practice of association.
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Identifier
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AAI9807908
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identifier
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9807908
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Creator
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Bousquet, Marc.
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Contributor
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Adviser: John Brenkman
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Theater | American Studies
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Abstract
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The nineteenth century sponsored a theatricality as varied and vital as today's cable television and internet, a vivid culture of performance and participation conducted face-to-face between small groups and large crowds. More often than not, this theatricality of everyday life took place in masonic temples, barrooms, workplaces, streets, churches, schools and homes--and not in a theater. Schoolroom exhibitions, fraternal ritual, benefit productions, and the amateur performances of every sort of voluntary association (temperance advocacy, abolition, trade unionism, utopian socialism, and the like) all contributed to a vital performance culture sustaining a complex associational life well into the twentieth century, supporting habits of civic participation, social activism, and collective being. These often-humble productions of ordinary persons were generally subcultural events, establishing a subordinate group's cohesion and locating its aspirations to social agency. These theatrical "practices of association" completely saturated social life: through them, persons and groups sustained alternate and even oppositional lifeways--even as a national consciousness and the logic of possessive individualism ascended to cultural dominance.;The performance culture of this associational life was chiefly a drama of participant-observers: the spectators were equally performers and belonged intimately to the social scene of the performance in a complex field of relationships. It tended to depress individualism, encourage combination, and enable resistance to the Benthamite, claustral theater of mastery and control--offering a "technology of the subject" which foregrounds intersubjectivity and needs to be understood as countersurveillant. Even as minoritarian structures, the practices of association and their subcultural inventions serve as the cement and the ground of an alternate order. Where the theatricality of nineteenth century prose is traceable to collective theater practices--versions of the "pleasure room" which Louisa Alcott describes her autobiographical Nurse Periwinkle establishing in a civil-war Sanitation Commission hospital ward--the subjectivities articulated in those scenes can often be seen as mutually constitutive, multiple, even overlapping and, as Homi Bhabha says, "an after-effect" of intersubjective experience.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
