Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Civic Theater for Civic Education

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/15512160590907630

1551-2177

Bernard Bray, Larry W. Chappell,

Critical and Liberation Pedagogy

ABSTRACT This study illustrates the special value of theater for conducting civic education. It begins by identifying the features of good citizenship in the United States. Citizenship in America includes rights, interests, affections, duties, and virtues. We focus on one duty, civic respect, and the virtue most necessary to meet that duty—civic attention. Unless citizens pay respectful attention to one another, some will be left in civic bondage—voiceless in the political community or consigned to second-class citizenship. One remedy to the problem of civic bondage is civic education that teaches civic respect through civic attention. We argue that two basic pedagogical strategies are required to teach civic attention: (1) civic hermeneutics (interpreting other citizens with the aim of granting them civic respect) and (2) civic staging (organizing public space to allow citizens to better communicate). We then argue that theater—including classical and experimental varieties—is especially valuable for teaching civic attention. Theater is uniquely valuable for understanding, criticizing, problematizing, practicing, transforming and even for resisting politics. The quality of our political lives can be dramatically improved by careful attention learned through civic theater. Acknowledgments This essay is a shortened version an essay by the same title that won the 2004 Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award for best paper at the 2003 meeting of the American Political Science Association. The two authors are completing a book entitled For Theater: Approaching Politics through Performance. Notes “Public” is an elastic term. For Jeff Spinner, the stark distinction between “public” and “private” is inadequate to capture the theory or practice of liberal politics. He contends for a tripartite division. Along with public and private spaces, there is “civil society.” Civil society refers to “institutions and associations that are not controlled by the state but serve the public in many ways, institutions like the media, stores, factories, and corporations” (1994, 40). One difficult question liberal regimes face is the extent we may regulate non-liberal institutions. We allow them to exist, but they exist in a mutually wary relationship with the regime. Bob Jones University is an example of a non-liberal (indeed anti-liberal) institution that, nevertheless, provides the point of access of many citizens to public life. See Bob Jones University v. United States (Citation1983). Patricia J. Williams (Citation1991, 146–165), a staunch critic of American racial injustice, concludes that the proper focus for remedying injustices must be on rights. The Supreme Court maintains that the “taking clause” of the Fifth Amendment permits a “public purpose” in helping some people (e.g., poor people who need assistance with housing) without directly benefiting everyone. Berman v. Parker (Citation1954). We use the term civic love to avoid the sexist connotation of “patriotism.” There is a spirited debate concerning the possibility of affirming patriotism as a virtue. See MacIntyre (Citation1993); Nussbaum et al. (Citation1996); Viroli, (Citation1995); Tamir, (Citation1993); and Lind (Citation1995). Jean Bethke Elshtain captures the kind of love and loyalty we endorse: “We can be patriots…. But it is a chastened patriot I have in mind, men and women who have learned from the past. Rejecting the counsels of cynicism, they modulate the rhetoric of high patriotic purpose by keeping alive the distancing voice of ironic remembrance and recognition of the way patriotism can shade into the excesses of nationalism; recognition of the fact that patriotism in the form of armed civic virtue is a dangerous chimera. The chastened patriot is committed and detached: enough apart so that she and he can be reflective about patriotic ties and loyalties, cherishing many loyalties rather than valorizing one alone.” (1987, 252–53). Stephen Darwall (Citation1977) distinguishes recognition respect from appraisal respect. Recognition respect is what we owe all people while appraisal respect reflects a high regard for the manifest character of another. Civic respect is recognition respect. For a good general introduction to the requirements of full respect, see Lightfoot (Citation2000). Hobbes notoriously argued that a social contract instigated through threats is valid. Once a government is instituted, the sovereign may then prohibit coercive contracts. Rejecting Hobbes’ theory of social contract would not invalidate the important insight that securing just cooperation may sometimes require force and threats of force. (Hobbes Citation1991[Chapter 14]). See also Locke (Citation1980 [Section 176]). See also Geertz (Citation1973). Anthropology is rooted in the missionary position. The impulse to go abroad begins with adventure, trade, and imperialism. It also builds on the hope of Christianizing the four corners of the earth. For a discussion of the ill effects of anthropology on a particular culture, see Deloria, Jr. (Citation1988, 86–92). Both intentions and anticipated satisfactions are important in staging, but thinking about staging politically requires us to explore the unconscious dimension of staging as well. See Foucault (Citation1978, 95; Citation1980, 134–46). For critiques of the role of spectacle in American politics, see Edelman (Citation1977 Citation1980 Citation1988); Esquith (Citation1994); Hale (Citation1998, 199–239). Hale writes on lynching as a political spectacle. Jerzy Grotowski argues that the minimum condition for theater is an actor and an audience (2002, 28–33). It is possible to have a theatric performance without actors. Puppet Theater and Toy Theater are examples, but, as Grotowski notes, the puppet or toy has an actor behind its actions. Samuel Beckett's “Breath” almost totally avoids the hint of a human presence on stage during the few seconds of its performance. There are exceptions such as Augusto Boal's “invisible theater” where actors perform in public spaces drawing unsuspecting people into the play. Boal (Citation1985, 142–55; Citation1992, 6–17). As Jerzy Grotowski puts it, experimental theater aims at “detailed investigations of the actor-audience relationship” (2002, 15). See also Curtis (Citation1999). We do not endorse Spinoza's claim that this growth in the power of being is principally, perhaps exclusively, open to the philosopher; nor do we accept his argument that a growth in knowledge requires us to abandon imagination. We make this point cautiously, however. Surely he did not know he was killing his father, but he knew that he was killing a man at the crossroads. The two-ness of African American experience is an important theme in W. E. B. Dubois (Citation2003). On signifyin(g), see Gates (Citation1988). See also Weigler (Citation2001). Lawrence v. Texas (Citation2003) invalidated a law that specifically forbade homosexual sodomy while permitting heterosexual sodomy (leaving the legal status of persons with unclear gender status—intersexed persons—unclear). Sandra Day O'Connor was, thus, able to take the coherent position of striking down the Texas Law while denying a privacy right to sexual intimacy. The dissenters were left in the awkward position of explaining why acts traditionally deemed immoral for all persons can reasonably apply to only one class of persons. John Grisham (Citation2004), in A Time to Kill, has his lawyer build sympathy for a black man who killed men that brutally assaulted his daughter by asking the white jury to imagine a similar assault on a white child. We are following a similar strategy of enlarging the imagination. We doubt that a single student would object to being asked to playing Iago. They could easily follow Stanislavski's instruction to “remember your jealousy” and apply their experiences to an intense and evil role. Most students would not object to being asked to play a rapist in a Stanislavskian way. Playing a man engaged in a homosexual act would be strangely different for many male students. For insight on the role of respectability in African American politics, see Glaude (Citation2000). Eric Voegelin stresses the in-between status of human existence by recovering the platonic symbol of the “metaxy,” the middle state between perfection and nothingness that characterizes human life in tension (1987, 29–31). We are addressing the intentional dimension of power here. There is an impersonal dimension to power that we address elsewhere. See Foucault (Citation1978, 94–98).