Theatricality as Medium

Introduction: Theatricality as Medium

Introduction: Theatricality as Medium T h e e s s a y s that compose this book seek to respond to two sets of questions. First, how does it come about, and what does it signify, that, in an age increasingly dominated by electronic media, notions and practices that could be called ‘‘theatrical,’’ far from appearing merely obsolete, seem to gain in importance? In other words, given that the medium of theater and the effect of theatricality presuppose, as one of their indispensable preconditions, some sort of real, immediate, physical presence, and given that the status and significance of such presence has been rendered increasingly problematic by the advent of the ‘‘new media,’’ with their powerful ‘‘virtualizing’’ effects, one might expect to find that practices relating to theater and theatricality would tend to diminish progressively in scope and significance. Yet the contrary appears to be the case. Theatrical practices, attitudes, even organizations seem to proliferate, in conjunction with if not in response to the new media. Why is this happening, and what are its possible consequences ? The notions of ‘‘theater’’ and ‘‘theatricality’’ are anything but selfevident or unambiguous. They have a vexed and complex history, and only by articulating some of the major traits and tendencies of this history can we begin to investigate the renewed significance these terms are acquiring today. This brings me to the second set of questions to which I seek to respond. Second, how has theater been conceptualized in the West? I limit myself here to the Western European tradition and its sequels, not because non-Western theater and theatrical practices lack importance, on the contrary. Non-Western theatrical practices have played a decisive and determining role throughout the long history of Western PAGE 1 1 ................. 11043$ INTR 11-04-04 08:08:49 PS T h e a t r i c a l i t y a s M e d i u m theater. In the twentieth century, they have inspired a critical reevaluation of this history, most conspicuously in playwrights and theatrical thinkers such as Brecht, Artaud, Deleuze, Barthes, and Derrida. This rethinking has a much longer history, however. It emerges perhaps most significantly in the early part of the nineteenth century, in what might be called the ‘‘aftermath’’ of the Hegelian philosophical system and the culmination of thought it entails—in a writer-thinker such as Kierkegaard, for example—and it continues to mark the work of many of the most radical writer-thinkers of that century, such as Marx and Nietzsche, to name just the most obvious and influential. In the wake of the exhaustion of a conceptual tradition based on a certain notion of identity, reflexivity, and subjectivity, theater and theatricality emerge as names for an alternative that begins to articulate itself in the writings of these thinkers, although it certainly has far more complex a progeny than this limited list would seem to suggest. To understand just how a certain questioning of theater and theatricality could assume this function in the nineteenth century, we must first examine that against which such thinkers and dramaturges were reacting. In this emergence of theatrical language, figures, and concerns, it becomes clear that a battle is being fought to redefine the meaning and value of words such as theater and theatricality, and that this battle has a very long history. It reaches back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle, in whose work the question of theater as medium is posed, but only to be rapidly disposed of in a way that was to determine much of the history—the thought and practice—of theater in the West. This tendency continues, even and perhaps especially today, to extend its influence in the world dominated by electronic media that have developed out of these same traditions. It is thus crucial to elaborate, as precisely as possible, just what the determining characteristics of this systematic conception of theater are, in order to discern alternatives to it, alternatives that have their own ‘‘history,’’ which is quite distinct from that associated with ‘‘mainstream’’ versions. We will discover that an alternative approach to the dominant Western concept of theater is already at work within the elaboration of the mainstream concept . It is not something simply imposed upon it from without, but accompanies it from the start—which is to say, from the initial efforts of Western metaphysics to appropriate theater for its purposes. To understand what is at stake in this effort of appropriation, one...