Ix-nay on the Navel Gazing

*****Part of this blog post I pulled from an answer to a question posted by John on his blog for our American Theatre class.  One of the questions he asked was about sociologists’ methodologies and foundational assumptions and whether or not we could find some common ground as theatre and performance scholars. But after I answered the question it got me thinking about why people value numbers more than other people. Thus, this post. ******

So what is it about humans that we value facts over experiences? Is it the age-old adage, “opinions are like ass-holes, everyone has one and most of them stink” that keeps humans from wanting to relate to other humans?  As scholars we are taught that experiences are not research and when in a seminar class one should be very careful not to navel gaze. Generally, I agree with these teachings. However, I am always a little fractured when I start a new research project. After all, I am a performance scholar and so a lot of my research involves examining and interpreting a performers experience.

Google Images: Navel Gazing

For performance scholars one of the fantastic freedoms and simultaneous tensions is the flexibility of the term performance. This flexibility allows performance scholars to interpret performance data in many different and possibly valid ways (with sufficient theoretical and historical support of course). It seems that performance scholars win the scholastic battle not by being accurate but by being convincing. Most of what we study are bodies and, bodies are quite often unpredictable and unwieldy. As performance scholars we examine a behavior and try to interpret that behavior using different theoretical structures.

Here is X phenomena, here is what I am interpreting about X and these theories that we as a discipline hold "true" help me make those interpretations. I must first convince the elders of my field that I am not some nut job but rather a well-trained scholar of performance and its theoretical underpinnings. Isn't that what peer review is all about?

We must first justify our research to each other and once we have done that we then face justifying our research to a larger more general population. Whether it is a tenure committee, dissertation committee, a publisher, or a funding board we have to tell them why our research is not only productive to the field of performance but also to other disciplines. We must justify our existence to people that half the time don't really understand what we do because we don't use the same kind of quantitative research components that sociologists do. We don't employ numbers and statistics in our research because those markers remove the bodies from the research.

Which is something I think I, and maybe other scholars, forget about when conducting our research. We deal with living breathing emotional bodies of the present or past and, that is a major component of the "so what?", and "why know?". There is always an initial spark that draws us as scholars into those performances and if we can for a brief moment escape the fundamentals of research and remember what that spark was we might be able to explain the importance of performance and theatre studies to those individuals who only find value in the inanimate numbers.

So again, I ask what is it about humans that we seem to be more moved to action by statistics on a page than a living, breathing human telling her story?

I feel like if uncle Foucault was around he would have something to say about discourse and discursive formations. 

But what do you all out there in the intertubes think?