Theatricality as Medium

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Such privileging is at work even today, in the development of a term such as television to designate a medium that involves sound as much as sight, and its fascinating power persists in the vogue of what is blithely called ‘‘visual culture.’’ 2. Plato, The Republic, book 7, trans. Paul Shorey, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 747ff. 3. See the discussion of ‘‘Being John Malkovich’’ in Chapter 13 of this book. 4. On the relation of ‘‘medium’’ and ‘‘transparency,’’ see my discussion of Aristotle in ‘‘The Virtuality of the Medium,’’ Sites 4, no. 2 (2000): 297–317. 5. Nowhere perhaps is the theatrical singularity of the event more clearly staged than in the first act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when the Ghost of King Hamlet pursues his son and the other spectators by moving invisibly under the floorboards of the stage, thereby setting a farcical, undramatic, but eminently theatrical counterpoint to his appeal to be remembered—and perhaps to the entire tragic drama that responds to that appeal. I will return to the theatrical significance of ‘‘farce’’ in Chapter 7. 6. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 21–22. See also J. Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 16ff. 7. Ibid., p. 17 et passim. Judith Butler, in a series of incisive and influential writings that build upon Derrida’s emphasis on iterability, has shifted the focus of ‘‘performativity’’ from its initial dependence on an informing intention to the social and political effects produced by linguistic performances. Noting that ‘‘we have yet to arrive at an account of the social iterability of the utterance’’ (Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative [New York: Routledge, 1997], p. 150), she sees the direction of such an account proceeding from the insight that ‘‘speech is bodily, but the body exceeds the speech it occasions’’ (p. 156). One question raised by such an assertion is whether PAGE 367 367 ................. 11043$ NOTE 11-04-04 08:08:59 PS N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 1 – 1 4 the enabling conditions of such excess are to be related primarily to ‘‘the body’’ or to its situation, construed as the staging of a theatrical medium, of which, in English at least, the present participle and gerund provide exemplary (although by no means exclusive) articulations. Such an approach is, of course, by no means absent in Butler’s work, as when name-calling in hate speech is described as ‘‘producing a scene of agency’’ (Excitable Speech, p. 163). 8. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 14. 9. ‘‘The sun . . . never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe’’ (ibid., p. 15). 10. ‘‘The spectacle is self-generated, and it makes up its own rules: it is a specious form of the sacred’’ (ibid., §25, p. 20). 11. ‘‘La Double Séance,’’ in: J. Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 220. English translation: ‘‘The Double Session,’’ in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 193. Future references to this work, first English, then French, are given in parentheses in the body of the text. The translation has been modified where necessary . 12. This is why ‘‘deconstruction’’ cannot be equated with ‘‘criticism’’ or even with ‘‘critical theory’’ in the strict sense. It is also, however, why it is not ‘‘performative,’’ but rather trans- or de-formative. It is the staging of a textual encounter—here, of the entre—and hence is theatrical. Two recent essays dealing with ‘‘The Double Session’’ make this point in differing ways. Gerald Wildgruber traces a trajectory that leads ‘‘From the Notion/Performance of Theater to the Theory of the Text’’ (‘‘Von der Vorstellung des Theaters zur Theorie des Textes,’’ in G. Neumann, C. Pross, and G. Wildgruber, eds., Szenographien: Theatralität als Kategorie der Literaturwissenschaft (Freiburg i. Breisgau: Rombach, 2000), pp. 113–44). Whereas, as his title indicates, Wildgruber reads Derrida’s text as moving ‘‘from’’ a notion-performance of theater ‘‘to’’ a ‘‘Theory of the Text,’’ Geraldine Harris reads a contemporary play, Rose English’s The Double Wedding, as a theatrical repetition that, among other things, repeats and transforms ‘‘The Double Session’’ and thereby calls into question the origin of all repetition, including its theoretical origins. Harris notes that...