Circus play, circus talk, and the nostalgia for a total order.

Publication: Journal of Popular Culture

Publication Date: 22-DEC-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Studies of humor and play in general emphasize the creative potential of play activity and play communication in learning and negotiating social reality. These activities and communications are generated and constrained through what Bateson described as a paradoxical framing--by the joking communication being identified as not really meant.

The literature deals with the precariousness of the play frame (e.g. Handelman, 1990), with the subversive potential of a joke, with the significance of breaking the play frame (as in football hooliganism), and with the chaotic potential imminent in the carnival (Bakhtin; Stallybrass and White). The case I wish to discuss is neither chaotic nor revolutionary. It deals with the condition in which, rather than taking a reflexive, higher-order vantage point, vis-avis the playing act or communication, the actor is perceived as captured and played by the self referential paradox of playing. I will argue that in this case, of which the circus player and spectators are examples, the Zeno-Bateson paradox is shifted from its implicit position as a parameter of communication to being explicated as a play of the totality of the player. Rather than textualizing or violating the social order, this total play seems to deny its own framing. Rather than communicating playful messages, this play brings up the problem of commu nicability and conjures up a unique dissociation between player and audience. I will also claim that this play form has its own particular historical context (see Bernstein). If play free of ritual, or what Turner called the liminoid, first emerged with the rise of the industrial individualistic world, then the total play of the circus, which was crystallized in the late 18th and early 19th century, is typical of the same era. Through the dissociation and exclusion of a player who is totally played, an illusionary totality is conjured for the circus spectators, a totality for which the spectators in the fragmentary, industrial order nostalgically yearn. This totality is also sustained, so I will suggest, in the circus talk itself.

Circus-type art and performances were exhibited for centuries in the side shows of the traditional European fair. Performers were presented by showmen behind a curtain, and sometimes as freaks in cages, excluded from the public (e.g. Frost). Taking place according to seasons and holidays (Judd), the fair event placed the community in a whole cosmic cycle. Constituent categories of the "human" and the "social" were symbolically ritualized by the presence of the freaks, as well as by their isolation and exclusion. During the economic and political struggle of the industrial revolution, the fair and its popular entertainment became a main target for bourgeois attacks, a battlefield for the legal and moral taming of lower classes (Malcolmson; Cunningham). The fair's entertainments underwent various transformations. The circus came into being as various acts and displays were gathered into one program,...

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