Where is the performance in Joseph Roach's "Culture and Performance"?

I’d like to ask for some help, both in sorting out an essay, and in answering the question, “What is performance theory for?” I’ve been struggling with Joseph Roach’s essay in Performativity and Performance. At first reading, it seemed to be a clear tracing of three funeral performances as examples of social memory. Stepping back from it, though, I feel like it wanders over lots of territory, and I’m having difficulty finding the main point he is arguing. I believe one of his main theses is that literature and orature are interrelated, “that these modes of communication have produced one another interactively over time” (45). Another thesis is that performance allows culture to change.

I don’t see how these arguments are supported with the analysis of different funeral performances, though. The literature he refers to is the libretto of an opera (an obvious aesthetic performance form) or a newspaper. How is performance related to what has traditionally been considered literature, such as novels? How is orature implied within these forms? When he claims that “performance offers itself as a governing concept for literature and orature alike” (47), either that claim is obvious, if orature is defined as cultural forms invested in performance (45), or weak, if no examples of literature are provided or analyzed through a lens of performance.

This absence of what I usually think of as literature makes me question the object of study. I have a recurring unease about the role of performance in scholarship, but nothing I have yet formulated into a clear question or objection. This unease is sparked by Roach’s statement that “genealogies of performance approach literature as a repository of restored behaviors of the past” (48). Is literature to be approached only as an archive? Does it only have an instrumental purpose? With this doubt, I turn to performance, especially the performances Roach describes. Are they only to tell us something about society or culture? One of my justifications for placing myself in performance studies is that I want to talk about what performance, especially theater, does in society or in the world. But can that focus overwhelm the performance itself?

In the past few weeks, I’ve wanted to make a distinction between the craft of the performance and its politics, though I doubt that distinction is useful or even possible. Nevertheless, I think it would often be useful to pay more attention to the craft of the performance. Roach tells us what jazz funerals can do. They are “a vehicle for the covert expression of officially discouraged solidarity” (58). But this description has been used for many phenomena. Why a funeral? And why this unique type of funeral? “Its genius for participation resides in the very expandability of the procession” (59); surely, though, the fact that many people can join in is not enough. What makes people want to join in? And when they do, what makes them behave in this way? Why the elaborate costumes? How would the procession be different, and perhaps not as effective at “affirming the rites of collective memory” (59), without the costumes or the excellent music?

Are performance, literature, and art only modes of communication? Are they just another method? There are certainly important distinctions between the libretto of an opera and a society journal such as Tatler. Aren’t there similarly significant distinctions between a daily performance of a waiter, a religious ritual, and a theatrical production? Does the broad frame of performance risk overlooking the materiality which makes a performance so effective?