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 uses of the technologically produced image

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It seems to me
that one of the more interesting aspects
the process of displacing the human figure or puppet
into different media can accomplish
is to make it difficult to determine
what image is prior.

While I can posit the existence of the performer
before the image that is filmed or video-ed,
I also recognize that the demands of technology
require that the image I see is prior to the figure
as he/she/it now is present;
but that assurance can be shattered by revealing
that the video is image
is being produced by the operation of the video camera
at this very moment,
although it would be possible to construct
an image that appeared to be broadcast simultaneously
with the present image
then reveal itself
as prior to the present.

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.

Examples of Discursive Materialization of The Body

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Consider this sense of biology from The Problemes of Aristotle,
a well-used Elizabethan medical guide that emphasizes male procreativity,
sub-ordinating the role of the female:

The seede [of the male] is the efficient beginning of the childe, as the builder is the efficient cause of the house, and therefore is not the materiall cause of the childe….The seedes [ie both male and female] are shut and kept in the wombe: but the seede of the man doth dispose and prepare the seede of the woman to receive the forme, perfection, or soule, the which being done, it is converted into humiditie, and is fumed and breathed out by the pores of the matrix, which is manifest, bicause onely the flowers [ie the menses] of the woman are the material cuase of the young one.

_____

Nay, but this dotage of our general’s
O’erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,
That o’er the files and musters of the war
Have glow’d like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front: his captain’s heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gipsy’s lust….
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra. I.i.1-10

_____

When summer swims off, mild and pale, they have already sucked up love like sponges, and they’ve turned back into animals, childish and wicked, with fat bellies and dripping breasts, completely shapeless, and with wet, clinging arms like slimy squids. And their bodies disintegrate, and are sick unto death. And with a ghastly outcry, as if a new world were on the way, they give birth to a small piece of fruit. They spit out in torment what once they had sucked up in lust
Bertolt Brecht, Baal.

_____

Do you have a prayer book in your kerchief?
Do you have golden tresses down to your shoulders?
Do you lower your eyes quickly down to your apron?
Do you hold onto your mother’s skirts?
. . .
It is no good; were my arms as long
As pine branches or spruce limbs–
I know I could not hold her far enough away
To set her down from me unsoiled and pure.
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt.

_____

I wanted to create that pure woman in the form in which I saw her awakening on Resurrection Day. Not astonished at anything new or unfamiliar or unimagined, but filled with a sacred joy as she discovers herself again–unchanged–she, the woman of the earth–in the higher, freer, happier regions–after the long dreamless sleep of death.
Henrik Ibsen, When We Dead Awaken.

_____

her body was all wrong, the peacock’s claws. Yes, even at that early stage, definitely all wrong. Poppata, big breech, Botticelli thighs, knock-knees, ankles all fat nodules, wobbly, mammose, slobbery-blubbery, bubbubbubbub, a real button-bursting Weib, ripe. Then, perched aloft this porpoise prism, the loveliest little pale firm cameo of a birdface he ever clapped his blazing blue eyes on. By God he often thought she was the living spit of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede.
Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women.

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.