Making Sense of Sensation: Enlightenment, Embodiment, and the End(s) of Modern Drama

Making Sense of Sensation: Enlightenment, Embodiment, and the End(s) of Modern Drama LOREN KRUGER The end of the twentieth century may have postponed millennial fever, but it gives us a good opportunity to revisit prophecies for the end of drama, which, like those for the end of humanism or the end of modernity, have yet to be completely dispatched by any post-al delivery. We may be witnessing a postdramatic theatre, as Hans-Thies Lehmann argues in a recent magisterial study entitled Pastdramatisches Theater, but, as he concedes, the post-dramatic, like the postmodern and the post-structuralist, performs a double act, hedging its bets, as it were, in an ongoing engagement with the dramatic, the modern, the structure and form of the aesthetic object it deconstructs (I I).' I am not going to imitate the Hegelian gesture ofAufhebung (summary, but also supersession) borrowed by Lehmann, a gesture that is modern as well as magisterial in its claim to master its subject, but, rather, will press a little on the genealogy as well as the current and future implications of this double-talk. Before we declare drama dead and modernity passe, we ought to conduct a genealogical investigation of "drama," to track its modernity. and perhaps its obsolescence. If, as Raymond Williams suggested more than twenty years ago, "modern drama" has migrated to "fiction" and "non-fiction" television, is performance stiIJ dramatic? Or is the order of the day a "post-dramatic theatre" or a polymorphously metaphorizing performance, in which both "modern" and "drama" can expect only supernumerary appearances in antiquarian costume? Genealogies of drama in the West habitually begin with Aristotle, or at least take Aristotle as the source for habitual assumptions about drama, even if only as a prelude to dismissing thein. But Arislotle's conception of tragic action marginalizes elements whose central place in drama is still taken for granted: conflict, character, and the suspense and resolution of conflict that capture, sustain, and satisfy audience involvement in a plot. Aristotle's tragedy is "a representation (p,'J1-1J(n() of a serious, complete action which has magnitude [•••Jby people acting and not by narration" (Aristotle 49b25-29), but it can Modern Drama, 43 (Winter 2000) 543 544 LOREN KRUGER nonetheless exist without character (50a25) and without performance (50bI9).' Drama appears only on the margins of this definition - as the noun, TO opdll-a, meaning deed or act or "doing" (48a28), derived from the verb, Opall-B'P (Janko 204) - and is associated not with any playwright but with the epic poet Homer (48b36). Aristotle's text subordinates character to action - "tragedy is a representation not of human beings but of action and life" (50aI6-17) - and treats conflict not as collision of protagonist and antagonist but as elements of a logical structure, "parts of plot," whose reversals (peripeteia ) and recognitions (anagnorisis) (50a34) drive the action to an already determined goal. Despite Aristotle's authority, however, it is to Hegel's Aesthetics (and, in English, to his readers, from Coleridge and Carlyle on) that we owe the commonpiace but pervasive idea of drama as the representation of human characters and passions in conflict. For Hegel. tragedy involves not only "actual or current human actions and relationships [gegenwiirtige menschliche Handlungell ulld Verhiiltnissel" but also "persons expressing their actions" (Vorlesullgen 3: 475: Aesthetics 2: 1159).3 The emphasis on persons and their relationships (not "affairs," as the standard translation has it) - in short, on subjectivity as well as agency against the constraints of state and tradition - is distinctively modem and quite different from Aristotle's famous emphasis on plot over persons. It is to Hegel that we owe the idea of drama as such as the product of modernity, of "those epochs in which individual [subjektivel self-consciousness has reached a high stage of development" (3: 501: 2: 1179) and the modernity ofdrama as the expression of this subjectivity in collision with the complexity of this world as opposed to that of the ancients - as elaborated by Peter Szondi, student of Hegel and theorist of modern drama (''Theorie'' I II5 : Theory 3-6). Against Aristotle, drama for Hegel is less "the accomplishment of a specific aim" than the "collision...