Genus Envy: Nationalities, Identities, and the Performing Body of ...

him as extraordinarily influential (Goethe’s disagreements with Linnaeus’ ideas about the morphology of plants aside). Thus, it is no surprise that we “order” the memorabilia of performance in particular ways. A postmodern historian no longer insists on the primacy of “factual” evidence, but when he or she develops an argument there will be an intellectual close-order drill of abstractions.¹¹ And consider the fascination that minutiae hold for certain new historicists, or the necessity of specifying exactly which type of photograph is being used in a discussion of theatrical iconography. Recently, Thomas Postlewait has offered a dazzling array of twenty-two “current designations,”¹² presented through the intellectual good offices of Foucault’s The Order of Things. Yet, the “wonder” Foucault expresses at the bizarre categorical chart of Borges seems an odd instigation for historical investigation, and Postlewait rather daringly notes the routine arrogation of primacy Foucault’s “ruptures” obtain. Foucault was after all a self-described genealogist.

Even if the Phrygian cap of Foucauldian power-seeking once seemed fitted for all aspects of performance, yet for old-fashioned theatre theorists Linnaeus‘ universal system has literary analogues such as Freytag’s famous pyramid,¹³ George Pierce Baker’s taxonomy of genre, or Polti’s thirty-six dramatic situations. A refreshingly unabashed taxonomy occurs in a recent essay by one of the leading historians of national theatre and its culture, Stephen Wilmer. Wilmer asserts four categories: “geography, language, ethnicity and aesthetics.”¹⁴ While postmodernist reflection insists on a guillotining of such confidently normative approaches, nevertheless, if, as the poststructuralist loves to insist, the rejection of theory is itself a theory, is not then the rejection of category itself a category? The, if I may, anti-categorical imperative of postmodernism is seemingly refuted by contemporary writers such as Robert Schanke and Kim Marra who caution