This essay has a simple thesis; that in order to understand a text we must experience its performance. The bible can certainly be illuminated through the best tools and practices exercised by higher criticism, but understanding only happens when one attempts to perform the text in one’s own life or see it performed in someone else’s life. I want to argue that understanding is dependent, almost entirely, on performance.
A version of this argument was made a decade ago by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza when, in her presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature, she argued that biblical interpretation needs an ethics, that it needs to be informed by ethics, that it needs to be trumped by ethics. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza initiated a small body of work with her essay and it is to this body of work that this dissertation responds to. This essay seeks to further develop the ethics of biblical interpretation through reflection on performance.
But Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has not been the only writer convinced that a tight integration of biblical interpretation and ethics is necessary. 20th century Anabaptist-Mennonite scholarship has been almost entirely concerned with ethics and biblical interpretation and the connections between them. I think—along with a small group of other Mennonite scholars — that performance serves as a useful development of Anabaptist Mennonite scholarship and it is within this tradition that I write.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Anabaptist Mennonite scholarship engage in similar projects in that they are both primarily concerned with ethics and biblical interpretation and in that they both seek a tighter integration between biblical interpretation and ethics. One one hand, this similarity is not surprising given the radical nature and marginal location of both discourses. One the other hand the similarity dissolves somewhat when the two projects are directly compared; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's project is at its root a liberal one and Anabaptist-Mennonite scholarship is at its root conservative. I don't want to focus on any of these dynamics—radical, marginal, liberal or conservative—for what interests me about both of these projects is not their politics but the ways in which they point towards theological reflection.
Both projects are suspicious of systematic theology. Though any engagement with either Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza or Anabaptist Mennonite scholarship quickly reveals good reasons for this discontent, the suspicion remains curious since both projects argue so forcefully for an integration of biblical interpretation and ethics. In this essay, I want to extend this integration to include attention to theology. I want to argue that attention to performance allows for integration between biblical interpretation, ethics and theology.
Performance is, for me, first and foremost phenomenological. When we look at an event as a performance, what do we attend to? In order to describe a performance, what elements of the performance need elucidation? In attempting to perform a text, what needs to be taken into account? In this essay I will consistently offer six elements in answer to these questions: selection, genre, action, place, risk, and relationship. These elements can be collected in pairs. Selection and genre are primarily concerned with the text that is performed. Action and place are primarily concerned with the praxis of the performer. Risk and relationship are primarily concerned with ways in which feedback is generated by the performance. Considered together these pairs—text, praxis and feedback—accomplish the integration I argue for above. Attention to text insures that the performer is paying attention to biblical interpretation. Attention to praxis insures that the performer is paying attention to ethics. Attention to feedback insures that the performer is paying attention to theology. Taken together these pairs form the matrix through which I describe performance and in which, I argue, understanding can occur.
So far I have attempted to show how performance yields a tight integration between biblical interpretation, ethics and theology. I think that integration—the need for it, how it happens, and what it yields—is one important result of performance. Integration gathers many things together. Good performances gather things together and offer them to an audience. The flip side of this integration is complexity.
Performances take many things into account. Only 6 elements form my performative matrix, but each of these six elements quickly expand, fractally, to create a complex way of attending to events and texts. For example, the biblical genre of apocalypse, only one of the several biblical genres, can be described in a myriad of ways. In fact, this degree of complexity may seem to pose an immediate problem for performance as a way of understanding since the amount of understanding necessary to perform seems immediately quite extensive. Complexity also seems a poor way to describe performance since many of the best performances we can quickly think of seem quite simple. How can performance both pay attention in a complex enough way, integrate in a thorough enough way, and yet remain simple. Put another way, how can performance render complexity and integration simple.
I think this happens when we attend to the site of performance. I want to argue that all performance is embodied. I want to employ a rich notion of the body that thinks of bodies as individual, social, and virtual. Bodies are very good at complex and integrative tasks. I think that bodies can often render these tasks simple. In the body, performance is both integrative and complex, yet simple. Bodies have a way of understanding that is highly performative.