Michal Kobialka
Department of Theatre Arts & Dance
University of Minnesota/USA

As homage to Belle Van Zuylen and her "no talent for subordination", this lecture deals with the contested nature of historical knowledge and the eighteenth-century representational practices in London.

"Theatre/Performance Culture in Eighteenth-Century London: A Prolegomenon to Theatre Historiography of the Enlightenment"

The current status of historical knowledge can be bracketed by two distinct positions.  On the one hand, there is archeo-historicism in pursuit of workable truth and realism through the analysis of empirical data.  On the other hand, there is radical constructivism promoting experience and discursive formations which have replaced objectivity with performativity, subjectivity, fictionality, and relativism.
 
The contested nature of historical knowledge has chiefly been viewed in terms of epistemology—what happens to and with the outcome of research.  However, that which is glossed over by this expediency matters just as much: are there experiences of the past that cannot be captured by the methods of the discipline; is it possible that one historicizes insofar as one is "disenchanted with the world"; what representational practices are employed to secure this and not that category of thought as the basis of Euro-American historical or theatrical knowledge? 

The theoretical investigation of the status of historical knowledge is a prolegomenon to an exploration of a series of performance events, operating within and without theatre, through which social relations and new economic policies of the Industrial Revolution—sexual practices and new forms of personhood—were normalized and put into discourse in eighteenth-century London. The fact that this was to be achieved by placing actor’s image and actor’s body, occupying an ambiguous social position, under close scrutiny, points to a shift in performing cultural and societal norms which were delimited by the new economic action that now determined and controlled representational practices on and off the stage.