Prolegomenon for a Theory of Drama Reception: Peter Brook’s Measure for Measure and the Emergent Bourgeoisie

Prolegomenon for a Theory of Drama Reception: Peter Brook’s M easure for M easure and the Emergent Bourgeoisie Wolfgang Sohlich I This is an attempt to define the audience of Peter Brook’s 1979 Paris production of Measure for Measure at the Bouffes du Nord by defining its style. The production of the text in modem French translation was not vintage Brook; however, there are at least two good reasons for submitting it to closer scrutiny. First, it is a production which addresses itself to a relatively new public—not popular audiences, not the intellec­ tual left, not sectors of the traditional French bourgeoisie, but emergent and dynamic sectors of a bourgeoisie which have generally been associated with the structural mutations French society has experienced since the sixties.1 Secondly, I wish to apply, at least in its general outlines, the premises of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste to the study of the relationships between styles of productions and audiences.2 Reception criticism, which has almost exclusively been applied to the novel and to poetry, is not a unified critical position. The knowledge which establishes the object of recep­ tion criticism, i.e., the role readers play in constituting a text, the kinds of readers texts apparently imply, the status of the reader’s self, may be of a psychological, phenomenological, deconstructionist, or structuralist order. Bourdieu uses a strucWOLFGANG SOHLICH teaches courses in modem French and European theatre at the University of Oregon. His previous publications include studies on Genet, Girau­ doux, and Audiberti. 54 Wolfgang Sohlich 55 turalist-sociological approach which seems particularly suited for the study of theater since a production must have some identifiable social base, must address itself to some collective norms, shared dispositions or values, if it is to be an emotionally and intellectually meaningful experience for a given audience. In fact, Bourdieu would argue that theater always reaches a predetermined audience, some fraction of dominant social groups, because the social mechanisms of linguistic production and reception coupled with the tacit censorships and sanctions in force in a competitive marketplace make the relationship between styles of productions and audience preferences or tastes a relationship of amor fati. Bourdieu has modified the premises underlying structuralist reader response criticism significantly.3 There is no abstract linguistic treasure belonging to a linguistic group and no abstract perfect competence to be attributed to the speaking subject. Linguistic production cannot be defined independently of its social conditions of production. Every com­ munication situation is an exchange where power relations between interlocutors or their respective groups are being actu­ alized. A sociology of styles, artistic or “life styles,” must examine the relationships which unite the structural differences of styles with structural differences of social class. Style is primarily social, a product of habitus4 and market sanctions. Style is never intrinsically good or bad because the criteria by which styles may be judged to be distinguished or vulgar, natural or pretentious, worldly or pedantic, or subtle or facile, are them­ selves products of the dialectic of social conditioning and market sanctions.5 This extrapolated and surely simplified version of Bourdieu’s theoretical position is nevertheless rich in implications for the study of theater productions. The following observations should provide, if not an intricate theoretical frame, at least an angle of vision from which to approach productions: a production mediates between a dramatic text and an audience. Mediation is neither produced by a disinterested will to achieve esthetic integrity nor by a cynically calculated surrender to audience expectations. Performance mediation is an objectively consti­ tuted relation between the producers of a text—directors, actors, set designers, etc.—and a socially specifiable audience. The form and content of a production, the style which characterizes its relationship to the text, and the expectations of its audience are overdetermined by the interests of fractions of dominant social 56 Comparative Drama groups in the struggle for the appropriation of culture products. Mediation produces a structural homology of styles. A produc­ tion reaches this audience because its mode of signifying the text is structurally homologous to the audience’s mode of signi­ fying the social world; it is homologous to the audience’s socially determined dispositions...