"Staging as an Anthropological Category"

The scene of human culture is not found in nature; it is staged. Each of the utterance forms of language is a staging, whether it *be the ostensive that stages an element of the real world ("Fire!"), the imperative that forces the world to realize the staging implicit in the linguistic sign, or the declarative that allows us to construct in our imagination a fictive staging of this world. It is this latter category that most concerns Wolfgang Iser, but the imaginary construction of the fictive is conceivable only on the basis of the more elementary forms that link the world of signs with the world of originary experience.

"Staging as an Anthropological Category" is the title of the last section of Iser's major work of literary anthropology, The Fictive and the Imaginary. ¹ In the epilogue, Iser puts aside his categories of fictive and imaginary, first for those of "mimesis" and "performance," and finally for that of "staging." All these last are "anthropological" categories in the sense that they explicitly abandon the dual subject-object relation of metaphysics for a scenic configuration in which the sign mediates among the members of a collective audience. A staged performance, the classical locus of mimesis as it has been understood since Aristotle, takes place before the representatives of the community, who observe the generation of a transcendent world of meanings out of human interaction. To refer to the fictions that we enjoy in the privacy of our imagination as "staged" is to remind us of the communal source of these as of all representations.

I would contend that the transcendence of reality through representation implicit in the categories of mimesis, performance, and staging, a transcendence that is for Iser the raison d'être of the human as a literary being, can most parsimoniously be explained by means of a generative hypothesis of origin. The impossibility of attaining the "real" otherwise than through representation--an impossibility that defines humanity from the beginning--is at the same time the basis of the imagination's capacity to liberate itself from the culturally given to explore the implicit potential of new, hypothetical "realities." Generative thinking observes this process of liberation from the minimally disruptive standpoint of its hypothetical scene of origin.

One way of characterizing the difference between human language and even the most sophisticated animal communication systems is that language allows us to combine or "stage" ideas in our minds independently of the real-world situation in which we find ourselves. But this mental process in itself does not suffice to justify the metaphor of "staging." How then does our capacity to combine ideas in our minds lead us to the idea of the stage, with its reference to the public scene of dramatic and, before that, of ritual performance? The answer is that it does not. If the human gift of language were adequately understood, as the majority of social scientists would have us believe, as our individual mental capacity for generating "symbolic" signs that permit us to formulate ideas independently of direct stimuli, then there would be no plausible explanation of how phenomena like ritual and, subsequently, literary staging could ever have come into being.

Hence it is not surprising that, with all the recent advances in cognitive psychology, neurology, primatology, and paleoanthropology, no plausible explanation has yet been provided for the co-origin of ritual staging with language. ² Although paleontologists often cite evidence of ritual practices (cave art, burials, statuettes) as the sole proof that those who engaged in them possessed human language, they inevitably attribute the selective value of language itself to its use in seeking food, avoiding predators, maintaining and developing tool kits, or, at best, creating solidarity within the group. ³ The originary interdependence between language and the ritual that stages it has not yet been assimilated within positive scientific discourse. In contrast, Iser's humanistic conception of literature offers insight not only into this interdependence but into its inaccessibility to positive...