Category Archives: Theory

Virginia Woolf: “Middlebrow”

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virginia-woolf-1912

To The Editor of the “New Statesman”

Sir,

Will you allow me to draw your attention to the fact that in a review of a book by me (October ) your reviewer omitted to use the word Highbrow? The review, save for that omission, gave me so much pleasure that I am driven to ask you, at the risk of appearing unduly egotistical, whether your reviewer, a man of obvious intelligence, intended to deny my claim to that title? I say “claim,” for surely I may claim that title when a great critic, who is also a great novelist, a rare and enviable combination, always calls me a highbrow when he condescends to notice my work in a great newspaper; and, further, always finds space to inform not only myself, who know it already, but the whole British Empire, who hang on his words, that I live in Bloomsbury? Is your critic unaware of that fact too? Or does he, for all his intelligence, maintain that it is unnecessary in reviewing a book to add the postal address of the writer?

His answer to these questions, though of real value to me, is of no possible interest to the public at large. Of that I am well aware. But since larger issues are involved, since the Battle of the Brows troubles, I am told, the evening air, since the finest minds of our age have lately been engaged in debating, not without that passion which befits a noble cause, what a highbrow is and what a lowbrow, which is better and which is worse, may I take this opportunity to express my opinion and at the same time draw attention to certain aspects of the question which seem to me to have been unfortunately overlooked?

Now there can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea. That is why I have always been so proud to be called highbrow. That is why, if I could be more of a highbrow I would. I honour and respect highbrows. Some of my relations have been highbrows; and some, but by no means all, of my friends. To be a highbrow, a complete and representative highbrow, a highbrow like Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Charlotte Bronte, Scott, Jane Austen, Flaubert, Hardy or Henry James — to name a few highbrows from the same profession chosen at random — is of course beyond the wildest dreams of my imagination. And, though I would cheerfully lay myself down in the dust and kiss the print of their feet, no person of sense will deny that this passionate preoccupation of theirs — riding across country in pursuit of ideas — often leads to disaster. Undoubtedly, they come fearful croppers. Take Shelley — what a mess he made of his life! And Byron, getting into bed with first one woman and then with another and dying in the mud at Missolonghi. Look at Keats, loving poetry and Fanny Brawne so intemperately that he pined and died of consumption at the age of twenty-six. Charlotte Bronte again — I have beep assured on good authority that Charlotte Bronte was, with the possible exception of Emily, the worst governess in the British Isles. Then there was Scott — he went bankrupt, and left, together with a few magnificent novels, one house, Abbotsford, which is perhaps the ugliest in the whole Empire. But surely these instances are enough — I need not further labour the point that highbrows, for some reason or another, are wholly incapable of dealing successfully with what is called real life. That is why, and here I come to a point that is often surprisingly ignored, they honour so wholeheartedly and depend so completely upon those who are called lowbrows. By a lowbrow is meant of course a man or a woman of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life. That is why I honour and respect lowbrows — and I have never known a highbrow who did not. In so far as I am a highbrow (and my imperfections in that line are well known to me) I love lowbrows; I study them; I always sit next the conductor in an omnibus and try to get him to tell me what it is like — being a conductor. In whatever company I am I always try to know what it is like — being a conductor, being a woman with ten children and thirty-five shillings a week, being a stockbroker, being an admiral, being a bank clerk, being a dressmaker, being a duchess, being a miner, being a cook, being a prostitute. All that lowbrows do is of surpassing interest and wonder to me, because, in so far as I am a highbrow, I cannot do things myself.

This brings me to another point which is also surprisingly overlooked. Lowbrows need highbrows and honour them just as much as highbrows need lowbrows and honour them. This too is not a matter that requires much demonstration. You have only to stroll along the Strand on a wet winter’s night and watch the crowds lining up to get into the movies. These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look like. Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living, they cannot see themselves doing it. Yet nothing interests them more. Nothing matters to them more. It is one of the prime necessities of life to them — to be shown what life looks like. And the highbrows, of course, are the only people who can show them. Since they are the only people who do not do things, they are the only people who can see things being done. This is so — and so it is I am certain; nevertheless we are told — the air buzzes with it by night, the press booms with it by day, the very donkeys in the fields do nothing but bray it, the very curs in the streets do nothing but bark it —“Highbrows hate lowbrows! Lowbrows hate highbrows!”— when highbrows need lowbrows, when lowbrows need highbrows, when they cannot exist apart, when one is the complement and other side of the other! How has such a lie come into existence? Who has set this malicious gossip afloat?

There can be no doubt about that either. It is the doing of the middlebrows. They are the people, I confess, that I seldom regard with entire cordiality. They are the go-betweens; they are the busy-bodies who run from one to the other with their tittle tattle and make all the mischief — the middlebrows, I repeat. But what, you may ask, is a middlebrow? And that, to tell the truth, is no easy question to answer. They are neither one thing nor the other. They are not highbrows, whose brows are high; nor lowbrows, whose brows are low. Their brows are betwixt and between. They do not live in Bloomsbury which is on high ground; nor in Chelsea, which is on low ground. Since they must live somewhere presumably, they live perhaps in South Kensington, which is betwixt and between. The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige. The middlebrow curries favour with both sides equally. He goes to the lowbrows and tells them that while he is not quite one of them, he is almost their friend. Next moment he rings up the highbrows and asks them with equal geniality whether he may not come to tea. Now there are highbrows — I myself have known duchesses who were highbrows, also charwomen, and they have both told me with that vigour of language which so often unites the aristocracy with the working classes, that they would rather sit in the coal cellar, together, than in the drawing-room with middlebrows and pour out tea. I have myself been asked — but may I, for the sake of brevity, cast this scene which is only partly fictitious, into the form of fiction? — I myself, then, have been asked to come and “see” them — how strange a passion theirs is for being “seen”! They ring me up, therefore, at about eleven in the morning, and ask me to come to tea. I go to my wardrobe and consider, rather lugubriously, what is the right thing to wear? We highbrows may be smart, or we may be shabby; but we never have the right thing to wear. I proceed to ask next: What is the right thing to say? Which is the right knife to use? What is the right book to praise? All these are things I do not know for myself. We highbrows read what we like and do what we like and praise what we like. We also know what we dislike — for example, thin bread and butter tea. The difficulty of eating thin bread and butter in white kid gloves has always seemed to me one of life’s more insuperable problems. Then I dislike bound volumes of the classics behind plate glass. Then I distrust people who call both Shakespeare and Wordsworth equally “Bill”— it is a habit moreover that leads to confusion. And in the matter of clothes, I like people either to dress very well; or to dress very badly; I dislike the correct thing in clothes. Then there is the question of games. Being a highbrow I do not play them. But I love watching people play who have a passion for games. These middlebrows pat balls about; they poke their bats and muff their catches at cricket. And when poor Middlebrow mounts on horseback and that animal breaks into a canter, to me there is no sadder sight in all Rotten Row. To put it in a nutshell (in order to get on with the story) that tea party was not wholly a success, nor altogether a failure; for Middlebrow, who writes, following me to the door, clapped me briskly on the back, and said “I’m sending you my book!” (Or did he call it “stuff?”) And his book comes — sure enough, though called, so symbolically, Keepaway, [Keepaway is the name of a preparation used to distract the male dog from the female at certain seasons] it comes. And I read a page here, and I read a page there (I am breakfasting, as usual, in bed). And it is not well written; nor is it badly written. It is not proper, nor is it improper — in short it is betwixt and between. Now if there is any sort of book for which I have, perhaps, an imperfect sympathy, it is the betwixt and between. And so, though I suffer from the gout of a morning — but if one’s ancestors for two or three centuries have tumbled into bed dead drunk one has deserved a touch of that malady — I rise. I dress. I proceed weakly to the window. I take that book in my swollen right hand and toss it gently over the hedge into the field. The hungry sheep — did I remember to say that this part of the story takes place in the country? — the hungry sheep look up but are not fed.

But to have done with fiction and its tendency to lapse into poetry — I will now report a perfectly prosaic conversation in words of one syllable. I often ask my friends the lowbrows, over our muffins and honey, why it is that while we, the highbrows, never buy a middlebrow book, or go to a middlebrow lecture, or read, unless we are paid for doing so, a middlebrow review, they, on the contrary, take these middlebrow activities so seriously? Why, I ask (not of course on the wireless), are you so damnably modest? Do you think that a description of your lives, as they are, is too sordid and too mean to be beautiful? Is that why you prefer the middlebrow version of what they have the impudence to call real humanity? — this mixture of geniality and sentiment stuck together with a sticky slime of calves-foot jelly? The truth, if you would only believe it, is much more beautiful than any lie. Then again, I continue, how can you let the middlebrows teach you how to write? — you, who write so beautifully when you write naturally, that I would give both my hands to write as you do — for which reason I never attempt it, but do my best to learn the art of writing as a highbrow should. And again, I press on, brandishing a muffin on the point of a tea spoon, how dare the middlebrows teach you how to read — Shakespeare for instance? All you have to do is to read him. The Cambridge edition is both good and cheap. If you find Hamlet difficult, ask him to tea. He is a highbrow. Ask Ophelia to meet him. She is a lowbrow. Talk to them, as you talk to me, and you will know more about Shakespeare than all the middlebrows in the world can teach you — I do not think, by the way, from certain phrases that Shakespeare liked middlebrows, or Pope either.

To all this the lowbrows reply — but I cannot imitate their style of talking — that they consider themselves to be common people without education. It is very kind of the middlebrows to try to teach them culture. And after all, the lowbrows continue, middlebrows, like other people, have to make money. There must be money in teaching and in writing books about Shakespeare. We all have to earn our livings nowadays, my friends the lowbrows remind me. I quite agree. Even those of us whose Aunts came a cropper riding in India and left them an annual income of four hundred and rfifty pounds, now reduced, thanks to the war and other luxuries, to little more than two hundred odd, even we have to do that. And we do it, too, by writing about anybody who seems amusing — enough has been written about Shakespeare — Shakespeare hardly pays. We highbrows, I agree, have to earn our livings; but when we have earned enough to live on, then we live. When the middlebrows, on the contrary, have earned enough to live on, they go on earning enough to buy — what are the things that middlebrows always buy? Queen Anne furniture (faked, but none the less expensive); first editions of dead writers, always the worst; pictures, or reproductions from pictures, by dead painters; houses in what is called “the Georgian style”— but never anything new, never a picture by a living painter, or a chair by a living carpenter, or books by living writers, for to buy living art requires living taste. And, as that kind of art and that kind of taste are what middlebrows call “highbrow,” “Bloomsbury,” poor middlebrow spends vast sums on sham antiques, and has to keep at it scribbling away, year in, year out, while we highbrows ring each other up, and are off for a day’s jaunt into the country. That is the worst of course of living in a set — one likes being with one’s friends.

Have I then made my point clear, sir, that the true battle in my opinion lies not between highbrow and lowbrow, but between highbrows and lowbrows joined together in blood brotherhood against the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between? If the B.B.C. stood for anything but the Betwixt and Between Company they would use their control of the air not to stir strife between brothers, but to broadcast the fact that highbrows and lowbrows must band together to exterminate a pest which is the bane of all thinking and living. It may be, to quote from your advertisement columns, that “terrifically sensitive” lady novelists overestimate the dampness and dinginess of this fungoid growth. But all I can say is that when, lapsing into that stream which people call, so oddly, consciousness, and gathering wool from the sheep that have been mentioned above, I ramble round my garden in the suburbs, middlebrow seems to me to be everywhere. “What’s that?” I cry. “Middlebrow on the cabbages? Middlebrow infecting that poor old sheep? And what about the moon?” I look up and, behold, the moon is under eclipse. “Middlebrow at it again!” I exclaim. “Middlebrow obscuring, dulling, tarnishing and coarsening even the silver edge of Heaven’s own scythe.” (I “draw near to poetry,” see advt.) And then my thoughts, as Freud assures us thoughts will do, rush (Middlebrow’s saunter and simper, out of respect for the Censor) to sex, and I ask of the sea-gulls who are crying on desolate sea sands and of the farm hands who are coming home rather drunk to their wives, what will become of us, men and women, if Middlwbrow has his way with us, and there is only a middle sex but no husbands or wives? The next remark I address with the utmost humility to the Prime Minister. “What, sir,” I demand, “will be the fate of the British Empire and of our Dominions Across the Seas if Middlebrows prevail? Will you not, sir, read a pronouncement of an authoritative nature from Broadcasting House?”

Such are the thoughts, such are the fancies that visit “cultured invalidish ladies with private means” (see advt.) when they stroll in their suburban gardens and look at the cabbages and at the red brick villas that have been built by middlebrows so that middlebrows may look at the view. Such are the thoughts “at once gay and tragic and deeply feminine” (see advt.) of one who has not yet “been driven out of Bloomsbury” (advt. again), a place where lowbrows and highbrows live happily together on equal terms and priests are not, nor priestesses, and, to be quite frank, the adjective “priestly” is neither often heard nor held in high esteem. Such are the thoughts of one who will stay in Bloomsbury until the Duke of Bedford, rightly concerned for the respectability of his squares, raises the rent so high that Bloomsbury is safe for middlebrows to live in. Then she will leave.

May I conclude, as I began, by thanking your reviewer for his very courteous and interesting review, but may I tell him that though he did not, for reasons best known to himself, call me a highbrow, there is no name in the world that I prefer? I ask nothing better than that all reviewers, for ever, and everywhere, should call me a highbrow. I will do my best to oblige them. If they like to add Bloomsbury, W.C.1, that is the correct postal address, and my telephone number is in the Directory. But if your reviewer, or any other reviewer, dares hint that I live in South Kensington, I will sue him for libel. If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me “middlebrow” I will take my pen and stab him, dead. Yours etc.,

Virginia Woolf.

Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1931

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Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose.

From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men —above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellowmen, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received. My peace of mind is often troubled by the depressing sense that I have borrowed too heavily from the work of other men.

I do not believe we can have any freedom at all in the philosophical sense, for we act not only under external compulsion but also by inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying— “A man can surely do what he wills to do, but he cannot determine what he wills”—impressed itself upon me in youth and has always consoled me when I have witnessed or suffered life’s hardships. This conviction is a perpetual breeder of tolerance, for it does not allow us to take ourselves or others too seriously; it makes rather for a sense of humor.

To ponder interminably over the reason for one’s own existence or the meaning of life in general seems to me, from an objective point of view, to be sheer folly. And yet everyone holds certain ideals by which he guides his aspiration and his judgment. The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.

Without the sense of collaborating with like-minded beings in the pursuit of the ever unattainable in art and scientific research, my life would have been empty. Ever since childhood I have scorned the commonplace limits so often set upon human ambition. Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury—to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.

My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women. I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work. I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or state, to my circle of friends, or even to my own family. These ties have always been accompanied by a vague aloofness, and the wish to withdraw into myself increases with the years.

Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it, to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions, and prejudices of others, and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations.

My political ideal is democracy. Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized. It is an irony of fate that I should have been showered with so much uncalled for and unmerited admiration and esteem. Perhaps this adulation springs from the unfulfilled wish of the multitude to comprehend the few ideas which I, with my weak powers, have advanced.

Full well do I know that in order to attain any definite goal it is imperative that one person should do the thinking and commanding and carry most of the responsibility. But those who are led should not be driven, and they should be allowed to choose their leader.

It seems to me that the distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force. I am convinced that degeneracy follows every autocratic system of violence, for violence inevitably attracts moral inferiors. Time has proved that illustrious tyrants are succeeded by scoundrels.

For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to such regimes as exist in Russia and Italy today. The thing which has discredited the European forms of democracy is not the basic theory of democracy itself, which some say is at fault, but the instability of our political leadership, as well as the impersonal character of party alignments.

I believe that those in the United States have hit upon the right idea. A President is chosen for a reasonable length of time and enough power is given him to acquit himself properly of his responsibilities. In the German Government, on the other hand, I like the state’s more extensive care of the individual when he is ill or unemployed. What is truly valuable in our bustle of life is not the nation, I should say, but the creative and impressionable individuality, the personality —he who produces the noble and sublime while the common herd remains dull in thought and insensible in feeling.

This subject brings me to that vilest offspring of the herd mind—the odious militia. The man who enjoys marching in line and file to the strains of music falls below my contempt; he received his great brain by mistake—the spinal cord would have been amply sufficient. This heroism at command, this senseless violence, this accursed bombast of patriotism—how intensely I despise them! War is low and despicable, and I had rather be smitten to shreds than participate in such doings.

Such a stain on humanity should be erased without delay. I think well enough of human nature to believe that it would have been wiped out long ago had not the common sense of nations been systematically corrupted through school and press for business and political reasons.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms— this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.

It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.

De-centering the idea of the originating subject versus the perception of performance as an act of human agency

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J.M. Coetzee

I recognize the potential silliness of thinking about performance texts sustaining their existence as texts by making noise; and that sort of academically “correct” thinking conjures up images for me of texts marching off shelves or committing unmentionable acts on themselves or other texts.  And yet, I recognize that language voices certain cultural predications within the most unique and singular texts, predications that constitute part of the conceptual vocabulary within which an individual text operates.  This recognition prompts me to continue, for the moment, writing sentences that pretend that texts do things, even though that pretense seems increasingly facile and evasive.

There’s Foucault’s coercive voice of the sixties and seventies working to disintegrate the fixed point of origin in the consciousness of the writer and removing the idea of a text as significant because of authorship.  In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault discusses discourse as a sequence of statements that can be spoken by a series of different subjects as these individual voices temporarily occupy that discursive space.  The dissemination or distribution of statements in the world constitutes the authenticity of the text, not its function as the expression of a single subject.  In this sense, the speaker becomes the subject of the text in a process of subjection not as the agent of the text as an instrument or agency to be used by her/him.  For the following reasons that idea of text, agent, agency should be meaningful:

(1) As I [re]produce a text in performance, I do speak it, occupy its space, and am subject to its structure, logic, biases, vocabulary, relational systems even though I am, at the time in which I am involved in production conscious of the text as something I metamorphose.  Like an army of occupation those performing the text are changed by the native populace to whom we are alien.

(2) I recognize that what I consider to be my transformation/ deformation / appropriation / reconfiguration of the text is, in itself, subject to the theatrical and theatrical/cultural systems in which such texts are produced within the theater as an institution–as an “experimental” institution, a commercial institution, an academic institution, etc.  Even when I think that I am “allowing a text to play outside of over-determined interpretation,” I am exercising, consciously or unconsciously, aesthetic strategies that originate both outside of the text and outside of my use of the text.

Despite a skepticism toward the idea of an originating subject and a skepticism toward myself as an originating interpreter of texts for performance (or criticism), I continue to work within a framework that identifies Hamlet with the highly impacted proper noun, Shakespeare, Hedda Gabler with Ibsen, and  Fin de partie with Beckett.  This skepticism prods me to exercise those fashionable circumlocutions in which I shift intention from the “implied” authorship of Beckett, to the “texts of Beckett.”  When I identify predications as the action of a text, I facilely elude the fact that I have elected to address a text made significant by its attribution to a famous subject and I less facilely mask the fact that I am making the predications I pretend to “fall upon”, by chance, in the text.

For me there is an almost erotic appeal of returning to a sense of the presence of human agency within a text. I love thinking of texts as unique, idiosyncratic, solipsistic phenomena whose value derives, at least in part, from their singularity rather than their implication within sign systems that plays upon the absence of an ever receding signified.

Assumptions

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I’ve come to assume the following important historical exchanges between theory and praxis that I find lacking in both the commentary and practice of performance today.

Peter Brook’s King Lear (1971): Alan Webb as Gloucester, Paul Scofield as Lear

(a) New forms of dramatic writing and performance often provide models of perception that criticism re-represents and appropriates within the methodologies that direct its own argument.

(b) Both new modes of writing and performance encourage theatrical and scholarly re-interpretations of “classics” that appropriate analytic structures that developed in response to such avant-garde work.  Yet, such crtiques/interpretations become more fully articulated and valued when applied to documents within the established canon.

(c) Certain modes of experimental performance extend and develop the critical strategies in which they are discussed in a dialogic relationship that informs both a continuation of new writing and a development of theory.

I recognize the inherent difficulties in identifying these interactions within a clear sequential scheme of history.  Each of these activities is subject to conflicting influences and sometimes responds to antithetical stimuli simultaneously.  For example, in the early 1960s productions at the newly re-titled Royal Shakespeare Company used selected visual techniques of Brecht’s epic theater–especially an elegant sparseness of scene in combination with properties that invoked the materialism of the objective world.

At the same time, the company used this simplified aesthetic to develop self-consciously Beckettian images of an isolated subject.  Peter Brook, Peter Hall, and John Bury, for example, responded to both the visual stimuli of the productions of the Berliner Ensemble that arrived in London in the late 1950s and, as well, reacted to a growing interest in both Brechtian and Beckettian dramaturgy stimulated by and reflected in the publication of Martin Esslin’s critical biography, Brecht: A Choice of Evils, (1959), and The Theatre of the Absurd (1961); as well as  the influence of Jan Kott’s conflation of King Lear and Endgame upon Brook’s production and film of the Shakespearean tragedy is emblematized in theater history.  While the absurd and the epic seemed to mark antithetical directions in the contemporary theater, Shakespearean production assimilated aspects of each as the RSC marked out its aesthetic course in the 1960s and 1970s.

John Cage Centennial

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Does the foregrounding of indeterminacy in Cage

presuppose a non-random,
non-accidental other;
or,
does it bring to our awareness of the non-difference
between the random and the non-random,
the degree of arbitrariness and accident
within the rational sequence which is debunked
or exposed by the aesthetic viability of the random?

Confronting the Technology of The Actor, part III

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The differences among film, video, and live performance are distinctive peculiarities in the technology of the recording and playback apparatuses. The recording and playback apparatus that the actor constitutes is both more sophisticated and more idiosyncratic than its electronic counterparts.

The recording and playback apparatus of the human actor is more fallible, more vulnerable to error, more subject to variation as the recording process, accomplished in the repetition of rehearsal, works upon the complex psychic and neurological systems of the human body. When theatrical performance incorporates both live performance and technologically generated images of human figures and when the integration of the previously recorded and the presently performed constitutes part of the performance, that combination heightens an awareness that the live performance is subject to the same kind of predetermination as the technologically performed. The interaction of the human actor and the technologically represented actor exposes that both constitute technologies that function to recover artistic material previously generated. The stability of the technologically produced record demands that the actor approximate its predetermined rhythms.

The spectator plays a kind of game, exercising the illusion that the actions of the actor are spontaneously generated, immediate, original (rather than a repetition of the past), but the spectator is almost always self-consciously aware that this performance is one in a serial sequence of performances: it is not an original but a reproduction. This reproductive process, in essence, is the activity the technology of film and video imitates and appropriates. In the theater’s use of various forms of playback, the nature and quality of the transmitting medium is significant. My aesthetic experience is formed by the artifact produced by the technology of the acting or the technology of the film or video. My claim here is that the theatrical artifact is, almost always, an embodiment of the past in a complex process of imperfect recovery. If my assertion is true, the activity of performance uses the presence of the actor as both the site of the recovered past and the instrument of its return, a phenomenon that tends to erase the presence of the actor as a discrete subject with which I share space and time. I need to stop sentimentalizing my notion of the actor in humanistic claims and see that the actor is merely one technological device among others. The significant presence in which performance plays is always the consciousness of the spectator whether the stimulus to that image production is the empirical reality of the actor, video, film, or an interaction among media. I can, of course, celebrate the potential of the technology of acting to excite compelling aesthetic images within the spectator’s imagination–a potentiality that is justification enough to continue supporting the practice of live performance in this age of its mediatized counterparts.

Confronting The Technology of The Actor, part II

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Contemporary performance often integrates live performance and media.  When film or video segments display the image of the actor, the projection–as a manifestation of a moment prior to performance–qualifies the work of the live actor interacting with it.  I recognize that the actor’s interaction with the video has been pre-determined and reenacts material generated prior to the moment of performance.  The live actor may play the game of being in the same time frame as the video, in a time frame that I, as a spectator, know is prior to the performance, and the performance then vacillate or oscillate between here and then.  Also the clarity of the status of the projection as image suggests that the live actor interacting with it also functions in the performance space as image

This phenomenon of making reference to the past may be even more intricate than I had hoped. The film or tape may be the product of a series of rehearsals in which someone eventually declares that the preparation is finished and a performance segment is ready to be recorded on some media.  I must work backwards from the manifestation of the work–the film or performance–to an idea of its source in the imagination and the labor of the director/creator.   I must recognize that it recovers moments that were created in a previous collaboration of actor and director.  As well, technology has developed to the point at which an edited medium may also collate a series of performances and may then manipulate them digitally or otherwise to make reference to an original that is itself a fiction because these recorded moments never existed as a sequential whole in time.

The recorded image makes reference in my mind to the following:

  • first to those specific moments performed before the camera;
  • second to a series of moments of rehearsal preceding that performance that established the work recorded;
  • and third to the creative period of editing that creates this record of an non-existent “original” performance.

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I could not with any certainty fix the references to all of those preceding moments but I can relate the recorded segment to a notion of an original (existing as the work performed before the camera) that is itself a recovery of the labor of earlier moments.  The consequence of this way of thinking, of course, builds an idea of a series of receding moments that have difficulty coming to rest in any specific reference to the past.   Even though I recognize that the work embodies the labor of the past in the present display.

My realization that the ontological presence of the actor is inaccessible is intensified by my understanding of the performative nature of human presence itself.  My awareness that any human figure that shares my space and time may be manifested to me through a kind of performance.  I realize the degree to which many of those categories by which I identify the human figure–ethnicity, gender, class, for example–may be performances and, at some level, as Judith Butler reminds us, are always as performative as ontological.   Presence is always, to some degree, an enactment undertaken to stimulate the construction of an image in the consciousness of the beholder.  When human beings are self-consciously the object of another’s viewing or listening, the observed almost inevitably shapes the signs of this presence to project the image of the figure they desire to be perceived.

The display of one human figure to another or a group of others certainly becomes even more complicated when that display is aesthetic, when the behavior of the observed is acting.  Here observed figures self-consciously set out to build illusions, to project some character different from their own, to lie as an aesthetic act. Illusion and lie are, however, inexact terms for what I am discussing, as both actor and spectator know from the outset that deception will not be one of the consequences of the performance.   However, the spectator evaluates the actor on some criteria that help to determine how well the actor’s lie mimics the literal truth, and the spectator may also make judgments about the truthfulness of the performance on some allegorical level.  In any case, the aesthetic frame of performance transforms what, in other circumstances, would be deception into the ludic, the playful.

In many instances, whoever is in charge of the aesthetic event chooses a performer whose body, voice, and mannerisms correspond as closely as possible to the fictional figure to be performed.  At the other extreme, there are performers (such as Anna Deavere Smith) who deliberately perform against the categories by which they would ordinarily be identified and perform a wide range of figures with extreme social, racial, and generic differences.  In this case, part of our aesthetic pleasure comes from our awareness of the performer’s virtuosity, the technical skill through which the fundamental image created by the performer’s physical presence is transformed to accommodate these differences.  In the process of perceiving the human actor in an aesthetic event I subordinate my sense of the actor as human being to my sense of the actor as human being functioning as image or stimulus to the formation of an image in my consciousness that combines in a intricate way my awareness of the presence of the actor and the actor’s presence as a theatrical entity.

The director relies upon the psychic and kinesthetic memory of the actor to record behavior generated in rehearsal.  In rehearsal persistent repetition writes a sequence of movement and vocal patterns in the actor’s memory that performance plays back almost automatically.  Later performances attempt to recover or to regenerate the details of the previous performances in a serial repetition.  Changes occur, often in an attempt to realize an idealized and unattainable notion of perfection; but the actor’s work remains one of recuperation, recovery, repetition, the reenactment of the work of the past in the labor of the present, the production of the performance that is a re-production of earlier work.

The actor’s body constitutes the primary technological instrument of the live theater, and I struggle to think clearly about performance I think it is helpful to conceptualize acting as a technology that functions to reproduce voice and gesture recorded earlier.  Performance always depends upon the function of systems of memory.  One could make the distinction between live performance as the reenactment of the past and the medium of either film or video as the record of the past.  This difference would take into consideration the distinction between the self-generated use of memory of the actor to reembody the work of rehearsal and the recording of images on some medium.  However, the point I am emphasizing is that the actor’s body is, indeed, imprinted with material by extensive repetition to respond in performance as closely as possible to some predetermined, previously generated sequences of behavior.  Whereas we celebrate the immediacy of live performance, we also return to performances of music, drama, and dance to experience the satisfaction of a repetition, the reoccurrence of formal patterns that have, in some way, been inscribed into our memory as well as the actor’s.  The pleasure of these aesthetic experiences derives, at least in part, from the anticipation and satisfaction of experiencing the fulfillment of a familiar formal structure.  Freud’s theories of repetition may be useful but not wholly necessary to understand this enjoyment.

 

Confronting the Technology of The Actor, part I

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I’m interested in the relationship between two kinds of presence:  the presence of the live actor and the presence generated by a video or film image of the actor.   Can the actor be viewed as a technological instrument, with the capability of recording speech and action through rehearsal, then playing this behavior back in performance?

Wooster Group, Hamlet (2006). Photo Paula Court

Performance invariably references the past work of actor and director and attempts to recover that work within the game of the representation of immediate action.  I have the idea of an “arrest” from film theory to identify two aspects of time:  first, the extended period of rehearsal in which the actor’s memory is imprinted, and secondly, the moment in which the actor is filmed or videotaped.  The interaction of live actor and technologically represented actor encourages the spectator to address both as images, or as agents that stimulate image production in the imagination.

The question of what constitutes presence in the theater or, perhaps, more accurately, what presence in the theater constitutes formulates the critical issue I am struggling with.  I consider the actor’s presence as it relates to and differs from the technologically produced image of the actor.  The components of the phenomenon I address are the following:

  • first, the body and the voice of the actor used to construct an image of a dramatic figure; second, the dramatic figure produced by the actor’s work ;
  • and finally the image produced in the spectator’s consciousness that mediates the perception of the body of the actor as actor and the body of the actor as fictional persona.

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As I do not confuse the concrete materiality of pigment with the object represented in a still life painting, I am aware that the corporeal presence of the actor is the medium of the representation of the fictional persona and not identical with it even though I perceive both actor and character simultaneously.   I both conflate and differentiate the body of the actor and the body of the character because I see the body of the actor as the body of the character and yet I know that one is not the other.

The technologically produced image functions as a sign of a corporeal body that was present to the camera at the moment of filming.  The projection of that film or video in performance seems to metamorphose the lens of the camera into the eye of the spectator even though the filming occurred  prior to the event of performance.  Metz writes:  “…[the] primary identification with the camera has the effect of transforming it into a retroactive delegate of the spectator to come.”   When spectators see the technologically produced image of an actor, they believe that the camera “saw” an actual human body that was present to it at that moment and that their present seeing reproduces the perception of an actual body.  Metz’s discussion exposes the temporal complexity of this identification with the imagined eye of the camera.

While the actual body of the actor–its tangibility as corporeal presence–may give the empirical reality of the live actor a special privilege, the persona of the actor will always remain, in some sense, inaccessible because it is masked by the performance and because the fictive persona will always be more accessible, more comprehensible than the actual.  Some theorists locate special value in the human actor in live performance because this presence is ephemeral.   Peggy Phelan writes:  “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance  cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.”  In this argument, film and video operate as strategies to arrest the inevitable disappearance of human presence.   The empirical reality of the human actor, which may appear to us as more substantial in performance because palpably there in its corporeality, becomes, in the retrospective moment of theorizing, the more fragile in contrast to the greater recoverability and stability of the recorded image of the actor.

While the prerecorded video representation of the human figure, like the picture on film, signifies primarily as a reference to an event in the past, we also realize that this process does not wholly recover the prior event but merely marks a moment that has been lost.   In Roland Barthes’ now familiar essay on the rhetoric of the image, the French theorist claims that when we study a photograph, we do not see a presence “being there,” but rather a presence that “has been there.”  Barthes identifies a peculiar conflation or “illogical connection of here and then.”  Because we recognize that the photograph displays what is not really here, the still photograph has no projective power.  According to Barthes, because the projective cinema employs narration, fiction, the audience identifies the film not as the experience of what “has been there,” but, rather, responds to the experience as “There it is.”

The Acting Problem

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I don’t think it would be truthful to make a claim that acting has not changed in the past twenty years. However, I do think I can argue that the transformations in the ways in which we think about texts for performance have accelerated more rapidly than the ways in which we approach acting.


I find two fundamental systems of theorizing human behavior inform my assumptions of acting: the idea of the individual psychological subject reified by the actor’s assimilation of the character of the drama into her or his on subjectivity and the idea of the group as defined by Gestalt psychology that demands that the students explore the dynamics of the here and now constituted by the group itself.

In terms of the ways in which schools or programs structure the sequence of an acting curriculum, the focus upon the training of the actor’s body and imagination in the context of work functions as an introductory material. The notion of building a “text-based” character constitutes a later stage in the sequence.


In terms of pedagogy and directing practice, the improvistory exercise often introduces the work with the text although the sequence may proceed from the determination of an emotional scenario, to the improvisation of a moment from that scenario, to the rehearsal of that moment with text.
This use of improvisation often builds upon techniques gained in the introductory or fundamental courses, but this use of improvisation differs from the theater games system in which the actor responds from the coordinates of his or her own persona or an invention drawn from his/her own imagination, not from a text.

This last statement needs some qualification since the situations, emotions, characterizations that actors tend to draw upon in her or his invention tend to come less from the creativity of the actor and more from an increasing stock of situations, conventionalized displays of emotion, and universalized characters that the experience of group work builds. This repertory operates as a kind of backlog of texts to the degree that it functions as a library of representations. As the group develops, they become increasingly more facile in accessing and varying these texts.

One of the issues that I want to confront is the fact that a very significant theoretical apparatus that drives most approaches to acting (I’m thinking specifically in regards to the United States) is the notion that the aesthetic work of the theater is the representation of the real. That assumption becomes extremely problematic when I recognize that I exercise it unselfconsciously.

I assume, for example, that I can recognize when theatrical behavior is real, truthful, grounded in an authentic emotion and, in that sense, natural.

I celebrate the actor’s behavior when I can identify its naturalness. What I don’t always recognize is that what I perceive as natural is not based upon a correlation between the world of my experience and the actor’s behavior but, rather, upon the actor’s implementation (by craft or accident) of a series of conventions that I read as natural.

I also identify as style that which departs from that convention of naturalness: the extended vowel, the sharply articulated consonant, the self-conscious posture, the turning of the leg, any one of a series of artifices that I implement to historicize or distance a performance from the natural.

I recognize, but rarely discuss, the fact that the shorter distance between actor and auditor in film has exposed certain theatrical artifices that I previously read as natural and requires a mode of behavior that was less extended vocally and physically.

I recognize that this shift in the perception of what is natural in film has influenced my reading of stage behavior. The stage actor, now, is perceived as natural when her or his behavior approximates more closely the behavior of the film or video actor. The style reinforced by the dominant media of film and video certainly influences the style of the less popular medium of live performance.

Notes on the Phenomenon of Acting

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Thinking of categories of identity as performative rather than either biological or ontological tends to qualify or modify my perception of the actor’s physical presence.  When the criteria by which I distinguish the identity of the actor are themselves fluid or transitive, capable of being enacted rather than merely being, I sense that within action, performing or acting, the actor or performer–the human agent beneath the mask of character–becomes an equivocal rather than an easily apprehended presence.  The problem with this recognition, or with this claim derives from the fact that those theorists, like Judith Butler, who develop the concept of the performative nature of human presence use the term performative as a metaphor that is drawn, at least in part, from the theater.

I do recognize the performative aspect of behavior, and I can make a clear distinction between my regular experience and aesthetic performance.  The Shakespearean metaphor, “All the World’s a Stage,” is, after all, a metaphor; and the comparison of actual experience to the theatrical representation of experience makes sense only if there is an understood difference.  The point that I make here is a kind of convolution of the metaphoric quality of the term performative.  I recognize the performative nature of human behavior, or, assuming the point of view of the beholder, I recognize that I base my identification of the other on differences that the other may enact rather than embody.  However, as Butler notes, even my conception of that embodiment is directed by the discursive; and I cannot deny the performativity of the materialization of something as purely `bodily’ as the sexual.

Yet, I do make a distinction in my experience between the intentionality of the performer in a theatrical situation and the less than conscious implementation of the performative in ordinary behavior.  I rely upon on speech, gesture, syntax, or distinct mannerisms that signify cultural categories of difference.  Even if the category I assign the other is not solely based upon a cultural system of differences, I recognize that, at the very least, I may find it difficult to distinguish between the ontological and performative, between the signs of a type of human presence and the actual embodiment of that presence, between what seems to be and what is.  Because of the difficulty, in ordinary experience, to differentiate between the real and the imitated, I often find others to be enigmatic and inaccessible, and I am vulnerable to deception.

The Shakespearean text makes frequent reference to the dichotomy between being and seeming.  Remember that the Duke, Vincentio, in Measure for Measure, discusses the possibility of testing the moral integrity of Angelo:  “…hence shall we see,/ If power change purpose, what our seemers be (I.2/53-4).”  And recall Hamlet’s response to Gertrude’s question about the apparent particularity of his grief for his father.

Seems, madam! nay, it is; I know not “seems.”
‘Tis not along my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,                           1/2/80
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief,
That can denote me truly: these, indeed, seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
(I.2.76-86)

The character of Hamlet makes the assumption that there is some essential center of being that can be represented in external signs but which has an existence that may surpass or exceed these signifiers.  The signifiers themselves may make false reference as in seeming or playing, while the identical signifiers may also function to manifest an authentic emotional state even if the intensity of that condition exceeds the signs that represent it.  Hamlet claims that his body suffers in excess of the signs that display that grief.  Butler’s sense of the ways in which culture regulates the materiality of the body, would erase or diminish the being component of Shakespeare’s dichotomy, and behavior manifesting physical presence would, therefore, become as much a seeming, a playing, as a manifestation of being–although that seeming would not be intentional but performative in Butler’s sense.  Seeming would not be playing in the sense of a deliberate intentional deceit but the display of signs would be an unconscious enactment of imposed systems of difference determined by the discipline and regulations of a culture.

For me, what is real is what is in question, as I play with theorists like Fredric Jameson whose ideas of postmodernism include the notion that the present moment deals primarily with the exchange and circulation of images.  Performance foregrounds this circulation of images and presents the live performer as theatricalized image on the same level as the technologically produced image.  To paraphrase Ms. Stein, an image is an image is an image.  The performance exposes the fact I read the body of the performer as constructed image in any case, because I have been trained, through the intensely mediatized nature of cultural experience, to respond to all stimuli as though I were receiving that data through a media event.  The boundaries between technologically experienced information and information received without that frame have become permeable and, to a strong degree, seamless because the mediatized operates as the real and I tend to process all information as if it were transmitted by the media.

“What difference does it make who is speaking?” to “What difference does it make what is being said?”

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Is it possible to free performance from the idea of the statement or the idea the discourse?

Once the originating subjectivity of the playwright/creator has been displaced or problematized, I can’t help but imagine other “agents” crashing in to claim the voice of the performance:  ideology, culture, dominant or subversive interests so that even the chaotic, unprocessed sequence of acts becomes a statement or a pseudo-statement proclaiming freedom from expression, intention, convention, tradition, formal values of any kind.  Roughly the non-assertive performance (or the non-discursive performance) becomes analogous to the statement:  “the speaker is a liar.”   And, of course, in the terms of structuralism, any definable unit seems to invoke its opposite so that this chaos before me becomes a challenge to form and, hence, an aesthetic “statement” about form.

Whether I identify the originating impulse in the unconscious or in the unconscious inscription of culture embedded in language and visual image, more often than not I view the organizational structure of a work of art as the implementation of a structure that itself implements a grammar, using the model of structuralism that searches out an “underlying” organizational pattern that is cultural but implemented unconsciously.

What Derrida calls “hermeneutic compulsion” makes me see any structure or sequence of images as an encoding of some sort and a challenge to my ability to de-crypt the implicit statement.  So, if I attempt to produce a text, performance, or event that attempts to make no statement, I expect the following to be said about the result:

  • My very avoidance of intention and the randomness of selection of elements may make my audience even more vulnerable to operation of non-consciousness paradigmatic structures from culture or their own unconscious;
  • My attempt to make no statement, like the response “no comment,” makes a in my opinion a rather disingenuous statement:  “I intend no statement.”  As well, because modernist literature and performance contains gaps or interstices, disjunctions, audiences have become adept at bridging the illogical separations of text and performance and extrapolating a unity.  Look at Wolfgang Iser’s notion of indeterminacy in The Implied Reader.  His analysis of a series of texts from Tristam Shandy through Beckett’s Endgame asserts that they demand active participation by the reader who shares in the process of creation with the writer.  This idea is related to Barthes distinction, “readerly” versus “writerly” texts.

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I think I have to shift the terms of my thinking to focus upon that phenomenon of current performance that intends, at least, to play itself free of referentiality–or a referentiality that excludes self-referentiality.  One of the questions here, of course, focuses upon the issue of whether or not when Marina Abromovitch “performs herself”.  Does her performance constitute a character that, while it sustains direct self-reference, still functions as an aesthetically generated “figure”.  The same question, of course, relates to many performance artists.

Phenomenological Poulet

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The idea of writing as a project informs Poulet’s criticism, the concept that each text operates as one in a series of mediations of reality that, as they accrue, produce an essential strategy of accommodating the world.  Poulet conceives that strategy as an essential dynamism.

Consider, for example:

…for Hugo the self is found amongst an engulfing reality.  The Hugolian being comes suddenly to consciousness when the formidable mass of things breaks over him and feels everywhere its moving and multiple contact….suddenly the object is no longer an object, and the spectacle is no longer a spectacle.  How can one describe this situation in which a human being appears all at once to himself, not in the sanctuary of his consciousness, not in a solitary thought that assures him of his sole existence, but in so total an envelopment and penetration by things that he cannot detach himself from the, cannot distinguish himself from them, cannot abstract himself from them?  He is, but he is in things.  He is athwart things, and things are athwart him.  He is, but like a wrestler so tightly entwined with his adversary that the same heat and the same lock seem to animate both of them. [Interior Distance, p. 163.]

Or consider:

To love without ceasing is to be reborn without creasing; it is also `to die more than once.’  At each instant it seems that the whole of life is found again, but that it is also lost again.  Time `pulls away the ladder behind us as soon as we reach a halting-place; nay it breaks under our feet, rung by rung…’  Musset’s existence would therefore appear to be doomed to being a series of systoles and diastoles, of dilations and contractions, if the absolute character of each one of these deaths and rebirths did not furnish an unseen hope.  For at this point we touch on something than which there is nothing more essential for Musset, something to which he returned with the greatest insistence in his writings, and yet without ever being able to explain himself fully, since, to tell the truth, at this point one perhaps leaves the domain of the explicable.

Or, for example:

What the Mallarmean poem proposes to us…is at the same time a sacrifice and an identification.  By `his death as so and so’, one arrives at being nothing other than this general being in whom the human desire is realized and typified.  One becomes apt at recognizing, no longer outside of oneself but within oneself, him whose figure first outlined itself, unreal and remote, at a distance, beyond the void, in some mythical place.  That doubt is abolished, that void is filled.  One becomes the place in which the spiritual universe is attested and incarnated. Man, then, his authentic terrestrial sojourn, exchange a reciprocity of proofs….And so the Mallarmean poem can exist only in this `reciprocity.’ It furnishes the reader with a text which has meaning and even existence only if the reader projects his own thought into it.  There is no Mallarmean poem except from the moment when there is no longer on one side the poem, and on the other a thought, with, between the two `the vacant space facing the stage.’ It is necessary that there should no longer be anything other that the one self same place, that in which one sesame being sees himself and thinks himself, in which he recognizes himself in a spectacle which is none other than the `spectacle of Self.'[Ibid., 283.]

While Poulet’s conceptualizations of the essential dynamic that drives a writer’s work are reductive, they base themselves upon a careful, detailed reading of an oeuvre that discovers this dynamic in recurrent manifestations and variations of certain images in a relational structure.

What do I find attractive in this method of reading?

First of all, it demands a slow, careful processing of a series of texts, an insightful, penetrating reading that sees the text as a rich resource to be mined.  To balance the notion of penetrating the text, the process provides the illusion of one’s imagination being assimilated into the text, of opening one’s consciousness to an other, and becoming available to that other.  That paradoxical appropriation of the text and assimilation by the text constitutes what Bachelard calls transsubjectivity.  The process requires a slow, progressive building of an image of consciousness as reading and re-reading familiarizes you with the key images and relational dynamics of the oeuvre.  The demand to see a writer’s total work as a whole requires a painstaking study of many texts and the kind of satisfaction that only a comprehensive project can bring.  In other words, the interpretative project brings the pleasures of reading, the pleasures of playing with words and the virtual worlds of consciousness they establish.

The method seems to be both responsive to the text and responsible to the text.

The phenomenological reading focuses upon the text as the material of one’s immediate experience; and while one internalizes the dynamics of the text, the text as external object directs that process of incorporation.  One submits to the energy of the text.  As one deals with the text as a phenomenon, this method provides the satisfaction of having encountered and, in some sense, encompassed that phenomenon.  While the experience of reading and study remains a private event or series of events, this critical strategy gives one the sense that you have actually engaged yourself with another consciousness, that the body of texts has allowed a transaction between the subjectivity of the writer and the subjectivity of the reader.  The process of spatializing an author’s oeuvre, of perceiving the individual text as a manifestation and variation of an essential dynamic gives one the illusion of comprehending the work.  As well, because the interior space that reading creates is not finite, continued re-reading expands and deepens the space in which the text plays.

The phenomenlogical readings of Georges Poulet and others depend upon a modernist notion of the subject, the sense of the unique, self-reflexive individual whose self-conscious mediations of the world constitute the primary reality, the reality of consciousness.  While Poulet does not negate the presence of culture as the basis of certain forms of thinking and conventions of expression, his notion of the writer as self-reflexive subject provides an image of a transcendent subject that eludes the specific space and time of its historical origin.  The virtual reality of the writer’s interiority, in which the reified objective reality plays in an ambient field, may be informed by culturally specific objective presences, but this temporal specificity loses its authority in the process of reification.

In Poulet’s sense of language the individual writer infuses language with an idiosyncratic variation and a syntax (or relational structure of images) that becomes a cultural artifact.  The text is not merely the manipulation of a given vocabulary within a grammar provided by culture.

Text as Consciousness

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Looking back at the analyses of difficult texts performed by people such as Georges Poulet, Jean Richard, Jean Starobinski, and Roland Barthes, I can easily recognize the significance of the image of the author as a self-reflexive subject and the image of the text itself as a form of consciousness.

Phenomenological criticism assumed that the language of a text forges an idiosyncratic mediation of objective reality, that the text as logos is both this mediation and the constituting field of that reification of reality.   In Poulet’s defense of phenomenological criticism in The Structuralist Controversy, he introduces a material image of reading, based upon the physical sensation of holding the actual book.  He describes a situation that is essentially private in which the consciousness of the reader opens itself to the dynamics in which the texts produces or reproduces images in the reader’s consciousness.

The text functions as a complex body of stimuli that, in the process of “transsubjectivity”1 creates an interior space in the consciousness of the reader that approximates the field of consciousness in the writing itself took place.  The spatial organization of this interior field determines the consciousness of the reader at the moment of reading.

Every thought…is a thought of something.  It is turned invincibly toward the somewhere else, toward the outside.  Issuing from itself, it appears to leap over a void, meet certain obstacles, explore certain surfaces, and envelop or invade certain objects.  It describes and recounts to itself all these objects, and these accounts or these descriptions constitute the inexhaustible objective aspect of literature.  But every thought is also simply a thought.  It is that which exists in itself, isolatedly, mentally.  Whatever it objects may be, thought can never place them, think them, except in the interior of itself.  If it is necessary for it go searching through the exterior spaces for one or another of the thousands of objects which offer themselves there, it is no less necessary for it to constitute itself as a sort of interior depth which the images from outside come to populate.  My thought is a space in which my thoughts take place, in which they take their place.  I watch them arrive, pass on, wander aside or sink out sight, and I distinguish them at spatial and temporal distances which never cease to vary.  My thought it not made of solely of my thoughts; it is made up also, even more perhaps of all the interior distance which separates me from, or draws me closer to, that which I am able to think.  For all that I think is in myself who think it.  The distance is not merely an interval; it is an ambient milieu, a field of union.  Thus there is revealed another aspect of literature, a hidden aspect, the invisible face of the moon.  Objectively, literature is made  up of formal works the contours of which stand out with a greater or lesser clarity.  They are poem, maxims, and novels, plays.  Subjectively literature is not at all formal.  It is the reality of a thought that is always particular, always anterior and posterior to any object; one which, across and beyond all objects, ceaselessly reveals the strange and natural impossibilityit finds itself, of every having an objective existence.  The studies which follow…seek to bring to light that interior vacancy in which the world is redisposed.2

The first three sentences of Poulet’s introduction to The Interior Distance describes what one would call the literal function of a text, the references to an “objective reality,” what, in performance, operates as mimes.  This function constitutes thinking, the turning of a mind toward objects that are external to it.  Notice the verbs Poulet employs to characterize this process:  meet, explore, envelop or invade.

Thought, in this sense, is a confrontation with the external world, an issuing forth from the center point of a perceiving subject toward the objects it apprehends.  At the same time, however, the process of thinking constitutes a movement into an interior space or, in Poulet’s words, an interior depth.  In the experience of meeting, exploring, enveloping or invading the objective world, a writer’s thought constitutes itself as interiority into which the mediated images of these objectivities are assimilated. Notice that Poulet’s idea of consciousness depends upon the presence of a spatial figure–an interior distance that separates the I from the individual thought or draws him/her toward it.

My interpretation of Poulet identifies this individual thought as a mediated image of an object perceived initially as external to consciousness.  The thought is reified in the writer’s consciousness in the process of writing and the dynamics of its relationship to the subjectivity of the writer determines any distance between it and the I of the writer, and the constellation formed by it and other reified images constructs the interior space.  The reader reincorporates this space in his/her own interiority.  This space, in which the consciousness of the reader plays (and, thereby, constitutes itself) is produced by the reader’s incorporation of the dynamics of the text. In Poulet’s words, he “seek[s] to bring to light that interior vacancy in which the world is redisposed.”

The critical task is the revelation of the unique structure of consciousness (state of mind is too static a figure) produced by the writer’s mediation of his/her perception of the world.

1 Gaston Bachelard, “Introduction,” The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1964 [originally published in France as La poˇeatique de l’espace in 1959), p. xv.

2.  Georges Poulet, The Interior Distance, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959 [originally published as La distance intˇearieure in France in 1952, as the second volume of Etudes sur le temps humain]) p. vii-viii.

Turner’s Theory of Ritual in Cultural Performance

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Turner’s theory of ritual in cultural performance begins with his investigation of ritual within African villages and culminates with the application of ritual to modern day cultural performances. The term ritual is replaced by the more inclusive term social drama which encompasses more varied forms of cultural expression.

By investigating the social infrastructure of primitive societies and the representations of these societies through cultural performances, such as ritual, Turner concludes that “through the performance process itself…the depth of sociocultural life is drawn out” for “ritual is a manifestation of life itself”. (13) Within primitive African societies social dramas begin with a “social breech”, an expression of a societal antagonism made public. When the breech is not dealt with immediately this escalates into crisis. To resolve this crisis redressive actions are taken by the village through various channels such as judicial process, exorcism, sacrifice or ritual. The conclusion of this social drama, or the “last act”, is the resolution which can be either the correction of the crisis, or the agreement not to agree. In which case factions leave the main body to create their own social entity.

 

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Turner draws parallels between primitive and modern social dramas. Contemporary social dramas arise with crises ranging from war and revolution, to gender and generational differences. Like its primitive counterpart, modern social dramas cut across all *subcutaneous levels of social structure”(10) and form alliances based on coalitions of ideology. But, unlike primitive cultures, modern society’s new symbols and mastery of technology enable them to cope better with crisis. And redressive action is exclusive of either political or religious influence. Therefore modern social drama calls out societies weaknesses, makes leaders accountable, and offers solutions. And like ritual and primitive social drama, is a “means for the intercultural transmission of painfully
achieved modalities of experience”.(18)

The Pain of Beckett

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What I find painful in Beckett’s Rockaby is the same phenomenon I find painful in Krapp’s Last Tape. A listener detached from the biographic plenitude of a narrative, a narrative that grows into a rhythmic exercise with no sure relation to an “I” that can encompass it and link it to the present.

The represented decisions or mental acts I witness in a production of Beckett’s late works are part of the recorded narrative that both the figure on the stage and I as audience hear.

In Rockaby it is…

the decision to stop searching the streets for another creature like herself,
the decision to stop seeking for another creature in a window in the flats opposite,
the decision to stop seeking for the evidence of another creature in those windows that would be indicated by a raised blind,
the decision to descend the stairs and sit in the rocking chair in which the mother died,
the decision to function as another creature for herself (the ostensible impetus to the construction of the third-person, self objectifying narrative itself),
and the decision to stop the narrative process, the process of “saying to herself.”

This narrative marks the movement of a woman identified as she through three locations–the streets, an upstairs room, the space occupied by a rocking chair in a downstairs room.  The text to which I and the woman in the rocking chair listen brings us from the implied past of the figure to a time perhaps approximate to the present moment, but the narrative constructs this moment as a segment of the narrative itself initiated by the final imperative “More” spoken by the figure in the rocking chair. The separation of figure and recited narrative suggests that the narrative is not being formed at the moment but is, rather, a text revolving in compulsive repetition.

The convention of stage figure and recorded text here is not identical to the technique of the voice over we grown familiar with since Olivier’s film version of Hamlet.  There the words of the soliloquy “To be or not to be…” appear to be forming themselves within Hamlet’s mind at that very moment in which he stares over the parapet in apparent silence.

I reduce the communicative force of Beckett’s later drama if I interpret the juxtaposition of voice and stage figure merely as a conventional dramatic monologue enhanced with the technology of recording to allow the actor to represent both the subtle inflections of speech and the signifying responses to listening.

Conventions of live performance stimulate the spectator to inscribe the narrative onto the actor/character while the text itself (and its dislocation from the figure) work both to supply the details of that narrative and to complicate or equivocate the relationship between narrative text and stage figure.  It is this conflict between the mimetic impulse and its frustration that constitutes the action of Beckett’s late dramas. These works push the conventions of performance radically to the limit and provoke a mimetic reconstruction of its physical figures only to deplete that reading of character.  The established emptiness prompts me to confront more fundamental problems than either existential alienation or a stoic acceptance of death.  The gap between figure and narrative works towards the recognition that the narrative past is unrecoverable and unverifiable as history, memory or invention.  Simultaneously, the past is inescapable as it provides the only available material for narration even as its attenuation transforms this material into traces of its ostensibly prior form as history, memory, or invention.

Confronting the process of saying leads towards the recognition of having been said. Being not merely the agent but also the product of that speech.  Being a narrative subject whose presence always recedes immediately into the phenomenon of the text, with all of the complexities and indeterminacies attendant on textuality.  Framing oneself in a narrative or being framed in a narrative is as much a depletion of subjectivity as it is an assertion of subjectivity.

In Beckett’s work a particular kind of speech act recurs:  a speaker/writer focuses upon a textual image of a figure in space that relates to a possible visual image, a “figment”.  Then, almost immediately, that figure questions the validity, reliability, or veracity of the speech/writing that posits that image.  As visual image, the figure holds no real stability but appears to come and go in the mental field the text sets up.  While the textual image in which the visual is represented feels more grounded, the indeterminacy or inaccuracy of language diffuses any sense that words can adequately represent it.  The principal figure on stage becomes equivocal and elusive, both as a visual image subject to the difficulties of perception and as a rhetorical construct subject to the problematics of language.

As I am dealing with the concrete, material presence of the actor (a stable visual image) the narrative becomes not a sequence of read words but an acoustic presence.

I recognize that the structure formed by the performance constitutes a confinement for the firgure yet at the same time the repetition and attenuation satisfies. To respond to these performances primarily as mimetic representations of character without attending to their disturbing questioning of the status of the voice or speech and the ways in which it complicates subjectivity both trivializes and sentimentalizes important theatrical experiments.  Experiments that thirty years ago represented already failed attempts to capture the present and the presence that theatre claims as its own. 

Fredric Jameson: “cognitive mapping”

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Fredric Jameson’s discourse on “cognitive mapping”,
in my opinion,
forms a brilliant, seductive, intellectual web.

He captures the slippery and elusive
proliferation of images
in the postmodernist work
and figures them in a design
authored by the production modes of late capitalism.
While the design is not specifically authored
–that is by a subject—
and the design does not consist of languages
that hold specific, unequivocal referents,
a design,
however openly suggested and provocatively diffused,
remains a design,
an imposition of a map upon a territory.

I don’t make maps,
cognitive or otherwise,
I prefer to not establish boundaries,
avoid territorial claims,
or promote or deny immigration/emigration.

Map-making is always a political act—
disguised as the search for knowledge.

I read Jameson’s analysis of the Gehry house
an attempt either to control my perception
of that site or its photographs.
He infuses his perception into my perception;
and his analysis of Alien NATION
in which the aesthetic artifact
remains outside of the reader’s range of vision
a reification of the object
only in his terms.

The cleverness of his rhetorical strategy:

“For the reader this [the video itself] will remain an imaginary text; but the reader need not ‘imagine’ that the spectator is in an altogether different situation” (79).

As with the map,
I see the cognitive chart,
not the actual territory as mass:
the simulacrum
not the geography
itself experienced as
the traversing of space in time.

I fear that this process
constitutes a kind of
aesthetic totalitarianism.

I prefer an image of
a treasure map
allowing me to dig
but defers my discovery of the treasure infinitely.
Within my strategy,
one can continue to shovel it….