Inutilious Propaedeutics: Performances in Theatre and Law
| Author | Peter Goodrich |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663919900270 |
| Date | 01 August 2020 |
| Published date | 01 August 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Review Essay |
Review Essay
Social & Legal Studies
2020, Vol. 29(4) 596–606
Inutilious Propaedeutics:
ª The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
Performances in Theatre
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663919900270
and Law
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Peter Goodrich
Yeshiva University, USA
MARETT LEIBOFF, Towards a Theatrical Jurisprudence. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020, pp. 182, ISBN
978-1-138-67278-9, £120.00 (hbk).
Introduction
The tralatitious tradition of early common law was self-consciously a static and suppo-
sedly seamless one. Despite the popular satirical argot of lawyers as tramplers, perpe-
tually in motion, chasing fees, the law itself was specifically designated as dead letters.
The litera mortua that Francis Bacon (1630: fol A2r) famously references in his excava-
tion of legal maxims are the bookish, Gothic black letter texts of an unchanging, melan-
cholic, juristic perpetuity, frozen in time, hypostatic rather than quick in form. The
statute, from the Latin stare, is something that stands, an immobile representation, a
status, a statue, an unchanging form. The code is etymologically a block of wood and the
immutable Tables of Law were inscribed on bronze, while commandments, as we well
know, are set in stone. Sir Edward Coke (1610/1671: fol 5.a), no less, supports the point
in observing that the profession of law was sedentariam vitam, a seated and sedimented
form of life, and further remarks that for this reason, common lawyers were ‘not com-
monly long-lived’.
The profession of law, according to another early commentator, ‘wastes the greatest
part of the verdour and vigour of youth’, and elsewhere the advice for neophytes is of
‘temperance . . . restraint’ and avoidance of all excess. Physical passivity, a reverence
embodied in downcast eyes and dull decorum, seems to have been the prevalent desi-
deratum by which to mirror a law that once writ moves on, ‘nor all your piety nor wit
shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a single word’. It is this
textualist, fundamentally literary perception of a sedentary profession, lost in books,
dormant in libraries, locked up in linguistic obscurity that comes under sustained critical
scrutiny in the new materialism and for current purposes in Marett Leiboff’s (2020)
recent opus Towards a Theatrical Jurisprudence. It is a work that seeks to recover the
sensible life of the law, the art of the legal actor as thespian, the play and the performance
of the trampler being wrested from its sillographic sense and returned to an active
theatrical mode of emancipated encounter and embodied presence.
Goodrich
597
Openings
Ironically, for someone who would move beyond books, the narrative starts with a
memory and a tactile text. Over 30 years old, stained, battered, pages coming loose and
edges worn away, the disintegrating text is a copy of Jerzy Grotowski’s (2002 [1968])
Towards a Poor Theatre. The work is emblematic of post-dramatic theatre and sets out to
establish a performative method that moves beyond the acting out of an essentially
literary text towards a more transgressive, sensual enactment of the presence of both
players and audience. Representation is replaced by montage, confrontation, noticing,
connecting and responding to embodiments of injustice. A meeting takes place without
any necessary props, staging or script. Affect rules, bodies manifest in encounters, the
excitations of flesh, incarnadine action and the prudence of knowing exposure.
The text returned to, after three decades of hibernation, is found decomposing in a box
that had survived numerous moves. The frayed cover revives a flood of haptic memories,
flashbacks to Leiboff’s time as a drama student and latterly part of a theatrical troupe.
There are notes and scribblings, marginalia on pages that are now detached from the
spine and in an ordering of their own according to the poetry of chance. With self-
effacing skill and diffident artistry, Leiboff inscribes the motif of poor theatre into her
autobiographical sketch of the rediscovery of her antique copy of the book. More than
that, her act of reclamation is of an artefact that is falling apart, of a text that is literally
unwinding, shredding, atomizing and turning to dust. The work is becoming fragments,
joining the earth and entering life in the very moment that its materiality dematerializes
from ocular view. The recollection of the original purchase, use, annotation and then
decay of the book serves the purpose of embodying and also dramatizing the encounter
with the past, with knowledge and the exposure or ‘self-sacrifice’ of a reader who opens
up to the event of the text, just as the work opens up to her.
The notion of self-sacrifice, taken from Grotowski, relates principally to the intensity
that the actor brings to living their part in the here and now of the dramaturgical event.
The ‘holy actor’ gives of herself, self-sacrifices for her audience in the sense of baring
herself and in the proper etymology of holiness, she makes herself ‘whole’ for the
audience and she becomes the intensity of affect that is the misery, joy, injustice or
other humour of the play. The thespian or probably more accurately the histrion, like the
disheveled book, is entering life, falling apart so as to become different through a total
act, a revelation deep in the body, a laying bare at the level of the organism so as to
embody the affectivity of subjectivity, to hold corporeally, as an image, as a material
form, the feeling, the love, despair, hope or misery that is to open to view in the dialectic
between actor, action and audience members. In sum, the sedentary, passive and inac-
tive, cerebral image of the lawyer as an abstract manipulator of black letter rules
divorced from time, place, bodies and persons is excitingly displaced by an incarnadine
inscription of meetings, occasions, encounters, actors and actions which of course
include that between Leiboff and Grotowski, reader and book opening in mutual recog-
nition and in expansion into the novel domain of poor law or theatrical jurisprudence.
Two features to the shift that Leiboff advocates merit attention or noticing. The first is
the sense of return, to an earlier self, to an old and dog eared book, to the imaginal site of a
previous career as an actrice, joining and infusing this theatrical practice to her
598
Social & Legal Studies 29(4)
contemporary space and place as lawyer and jurisprude, co-author, among other ventures,
of a textbook in jurisprudence, titled Legal Theories (Leiboff and Thomas, 2014). As Vico
(1993: 126) puts it, knowledge is a unity, a holy whole, holistic and it becomes ours,
embodied, personal, an incorporated practice only when we go back and learn it again and
for ourselves. We first learn law, Vico opines, in his inaugural orations On Humanistic
Education for reasons of filial devotion, for financial advancement, out of admiration for
iconic juridical figures, for honour, office and respect, but such studies are generally
undertaken ‘unwillingly, with disdain and do not cultivate them seriously or with enthu-
siasm’ (1993: 126). Others have said the same of legal education: ‘here there are tears, here
there is misery’ is common enough, but few take the next step beyond mere criticism,
complaint and lament, to acknowledge, from experience, that we have to return and learn
law for ourselves, make it ours. Similarly, we have to discard the ‘abnormal growth of
abstract intellectualism’ that disciplining harbours and express instead of a passive rela-
tionship to knowledge and to law, an engagement that uses the agitations of the soul to take
responsibility for our...
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