Lessons in Modernity

Abstract

WHEN HE PORTRAYED SHYLOCK in an 1879 production of The Merchant of Venice, the actor Henry Irving was committed to foregrounding the character’s dignity and soliciting the audience’s sympathy, especially in the scene where the moneylender recognises the painful loss of his daughter. The opening of Julia A. Walker’s Performance and Modernity dwells on this choice, unusual at the time, and the wider cultural commentary, including by Karl Marx and John Ruskin, that followed. Some 250 pages and numerous star turns later, Walker’s ambitiously itinerant monograph nears its close on Pandora, the extrasolar moon of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), locating there another instance of how a distinct style of performance – in this case, CGI technology – can precondition certain kinds of audience response, whether felt or articulated. Walker’s erudite work sets great store by such counter-intuitive voyages – between disparate media, centuries, and continents – as it seeks to propose a new theory of performance that locates its ontology in the materiality of bodies in motion. As signalled by its subtitle, Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage, this book finds the forces of globalisation, modernisation, and cultural habituation to be not only represented, but also constituted by the kinesthetics of performance. Walker’s ‘cultural history of modern performance’ (p. 14) vigorously maintains that performance, along with culture, history, and modernity, is the stuff our contemporary societies and subjectivities are made on. The central question animating Walker’s project is this: how does the experience of modernity become palpable and enter our collective consciousness? In response, she proposes a five-step heuristic for the process by which new cultural meanings come into being. The first stage of her schema involves the shock of the new, a modernising phenomenon that ‘changes the material experience of everyday life’ (p. 16). This triggers a shared ‘sensation’ (step two) or, in Raymond Williams’s terms, a new ‘structure of feeling’. In the third step comes an embodied response through performance, which gives visible form to the experience of change as such.