The Illuminated Theatre

Studies on the Suffering of Images

Joe Kelleher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317481218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

What sort of thing is a theatre image? How is it produced and consumed? Who is responsible for the images? Why do the images stay with us when the performance is over? How do we learn to speak of what we see and imagine? And how do we relate what we experience in the theatre to what we share with each other of the world?

The Illuminated Theatre is a book about theatricality and spectatorship in the early twenty-first century. In a wide-ranging analysis that draws upon theatrical, visual and philosophical approaches, it asks how spectators and audiences negotiate the complexities and challenges of contemporary experimental performance arts.

It is also a book about how European practitioners working across a range of forms, from theatre and performance to dance, opera, film and visual arts, use images to address the complexities of the times in which their work takes place. Through detailed and impassioned accounts of works by artists such as Dickie Beau, Wendy Houstoun, Alvis Hermanis and Romeo Castellucci, along with close readings of experimental theoretical and art writing from Gillian Rose to T.J. Clark and Marie-José Mondzain, the book outlines the historical, aesthetic and political dimensions of a contemporary 'suffering of images.'

1 The interpreters (on the birth of images)

Ernst Bloch, ‘Images of déjà vu’ (1924); Marie-José Mondzain, Homo Spectator (2007); Dickie Beau, LOST in TRANS (2013)

In a spot

Scene one. We open on a conversation between two friends, two writers from Germany, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin. The conversation took place in 1924 in a bar on the Italian island of Capri and lasted, Bloch recalls, ‘a September night, until the return of the fishing boats from the sea at dawn.’¹ Benjamin would note later of his stay on Capri, which ended the following month: ‘I am convinced that to have lived for a long time on Capri gives you a claim on distant journeys, so strong is the belief of anyone who has long lived there that he has all the threads in his hand and that in the fullness of time everything he needs will come to him.’² The particular thread that I want to draw out here is a slender one, and doubtless a fragile thing compared with the sort of tapestries that both Bloch and Benjamin will put together in later life. I trust, though, there is a virtue at the start of things in working in close-up like this. There will be journeys to come, distant enough I hope. The topic of the friends’ discussion this September night: a sort of literary folk tale that is familiar to them both called ‘Blond Eckbert,’ written over a hundred years earlier by the eighteenth-century author Ludwig Tieck. Bloch takes up the narrative in a postscript to his essay ‘Images of déjà vu’:

Here Berta, the wife of Eckbert, may be found narrating her own strange story about the old woman for whom she used to tend animals as a child. There was a little dog, as well as a songbird that each day laid an egg containing a pearl. The story does not proceed in a very moral fashion. Berta yearned to see the wider world, and so decided to run away. Weeping, she departed: she patted the dog and tied it inside the hut, then took the bird and a jarful of its pearls with her to the city. There she lived splendidly for a time, yet was compelled finally to strangle the bird, for its singing tormented her with feelings of remorse. She met Eckbert the knight, who became her husband; in his castle she lived happily and peacefully, though occasionally she was oppressed by thoughts of the abandoned hut and the old woman’s fate. She told all this to Walter, a knight who was her husband’s friend, one Autumn evening in Eckbert’s castle. What is extraordinary in Tieck’s fairy tale is Walter’s response to Berta’s confession. ‘Many thanks, noble lady,’ he says. ‘I can well imagine you beside your singing bird, and how you fed poor little Strohmian.’ Now Berta, in telling her story, had never mentioned the little dog’s name; yet Walter speaks the name quite casually and matter-of-factly, as if he had seen the dog with his own eyes. That night Berta told her husband, ‘I was seized with great horror that a stranger should help me to remember the memory of my secrets.’ And the story continues in the same meandering style. It goes forward even while standing still and always comes back again to the interrupted situation, even in its final sentence: ‘Faint and bewildered, Eckbert heard the old woman speaking, the dog barking, and the bird repeating its song.’³

As Peter Krapp notes in his study of the history of the topic since Freud, déjà vu – the not uncommon experience we have when we recognize, or feel that we recognize in what is happening in the present, something of what has already happened, in the past – ‘exemplified for Bloch the popular “metaphysics” of his contemporaries.’ But for Bloch that was not, Krapp remarks, its most interesting aspect.⁴ In fact, Bloch proposes Berta’s situation as a special case; an example of what he calls ‘déjà vu of the other,’ although he will go on to insist that it is not because of a stranger that Berta has unlocked the memory of her secrets. The forgotten secret is all her own – except, of course, to the extent it is exposed here to the rest of us, passerby readers and lookers in, whoever might come upon Berta’s tale and make something of it, to interpret as it were.

For Bloch, what is interesting about déjà vu, or false recognition as it is sometimes called, is what it allows us to glimpse of unfulfilled potential. It is not the ‘content’ of an earlier experience that is recognized, but rather an ‘act of will,’ an ‘intention’ that has not been realized, an ‘orientational’ or ‘wishful act with respect to a situation that the subject at one time might have hoped to experience.’ The experience of déjà vu, Bloch writes, is ‘tantamount to awakening with a shock to all the past disruptions of this kind, all the aborted beginnings of our life in general.’⁵ I should say already that in evoking the act as such – in particular, the potential act awoken in the image – I am looking ahead already to a theme that will be brought into fuller focus by the final chapter of this book. But we will get there in time. For now, everything else apart from the unlooked for recurrence of this ‘pure experiential potential’ is so much mental scene-painting. Or so it is for Berta. As Bloch and Benjamin develop the theme in the conversation that Bloch records, Berta has only ‘apparently’ left the old woman’s hut, ‘while her conscious forgetting, her neglect of duty have remained behind with the dog. Walter’s voice, therefore,’ Bloch’s account continues, ‘is like a face appearing in the hut’s window at night to announce where she is: Berta occupies the scene of her own story, and her happy marriage is just a rainbow in oily water, there in the animals’ stable.’⁶ It is as if for Berta, her life – her own distant journey from there where she started to here where she finds herself looking back on it all – has not even begun. In this light, ‘as if illuminated from above,’ as Bloch puts it, Berta ‘does not cast the least shadow into which she might flee.’⁷ She is, we might say, in something of a spot: a violent spot as it happens, subject to a pervasive moralism that not only punishes her, it kills her. The same night as Walter’s revelation of the dog’s name, Berta takes to her bed and she dies shortly after (this is only the first catastrophe of several to follow, in a rather fantastically fruity story that will climax with revelations of sibling incest).

Although it is not entirely clear where the offence is supposed to lie, it appears that Berta (Berta first of all) is guilty of something. As Bloch – or Bloch and Benjamin – interpret it, ‘Berta’s true offence is that she abandoned the dog, which comes to represent all that she has left behind.’ Bloch goes on: ‘Her true guilt lies in the omission of an action, leaving something behind in a place that has been abandoned forever.’⁸ And Berta is still there ‘where she is,’ fixed like an image by the face and comment of a passerby, a latecomer stranger. However, to be there still – in the image – is also to be there in all her potential, guilt-ridden or hopeful as the case may be, but anyway to have that potential in readiness: a potential to desire, to decide and to do. This is what Bloch comes around to, or hints at anyway: ‘There is another, brighter shock that comes not from forgetting,’ he writes, ‘but from anticipation; it is manifested bodily as a shiver.’ It may be we know no more than this: that something is happening for no good reason we can discern, or that nothing at all is happening – although that is something we can shiver at too. Bloch again: ‘In any case, we cannot see the exact instant as it is being lived: neither the self that lives it, nor the immediate content that it presents. But this obscurity is also the place of a continual “forgetting” of I-know-not-what; animals that frighten or repel us dwell visibly there and a single barking dog can bring us back to it.’⁹ So it is that we return to the spot, or somewhere like it. And so it is too that we find ourselves, ‘as if illuminated from above,’ like figures in a theatrical scene, self-interrupted, or interrupted by a face at the window.¹⁰ A stage situation where so much has already been done and decided – scripted and enacted indeed – but where the actor herself is still to make her first move. So it is, facing the stage – or else facing out from it like the actors do – one attempts to grasp where one is right now. As if we might grasp the present historically, glimpsing something of ourselves (the barking dog must be alerting us to something) amongst the animals and all of the other creatures in range, actors and objects we can never read well enough (ourselves included), but to whom we make our attachments – fools that we are – even so.

Bloch’s essay, I should say, came, as many of these things do, as an accidental gift, wrapped up as a reference in another text that had been recommended to me. The source was a parenthesis in contemporary philosopher Paolo Virno’s reading of Henri Bergson’s thoughts on déjà vu from the 1850s, which we shall come to in another context in a later chapter. Virno, I must admit, is not impressed: he refers briefly to Bloch’s text as ‘not without interest, but too generic and rhapsodic.’¹¹ Anyway, I became attached to the material: to Tieck’s strange story (which concludes, by the way, after much further wandering, with Eckbert encountering the old woman from the hut and finding out that he and Berta were in fact brother and sister, at which point everything just collapses); and attached also to the thought of a scene (Berta in the hut, Bloch and Benjamin in the bay) bitten into by a sound: in this case the sound of a barking dog. I can imagine a dog barking that summer night of 1924 in the Capri marina, infecting the talk of the two German intellectuals. There was, as it happens, a dog barking outside most mornings, somewhere out of sight if not out of hearing, where I was staying at a friend’s house for a week to begin work for this book, and where I was thinking as I did so that this is how it had felt much of the time following theatre, mainly in the UK and continental Europe, in the early twenty-first century. There would often be some sort of unaccountable sound leaking in from outside the stage picture there too, an immediate and invasive pressure of sorts on the one who had to be there: an actor, like Berta, who was dealing with the problem of what is happening and what happens next. A problem – or so it seemed to me – that had something to do with images, the allowance of images, the putting on and abandoning of images, the suffering of images as I came to think of it. That of course begged the question what sort of thing an ‘image’ might be. Something conjured, something promised from what falls into view? Something to be reckoned with that isn’t really there, not yet, not quite? Some sort of ‘nothing’ after all?

Time for some theory. Time, for instance, to consider what image theorist Lambert Wiesing calls ‘artificial presence.’ For Wiesing, a fundamental effect of images as such is what he calls an ‘artificially produced presentness.’¹² Wiesing, a contemporary thinker working in the phenomenological tradition established by the early twentieth-century philosopher Edmund Husserl, distinguishes between the ‘image carrier’ that ‘exists as a piece of the world’ – for instance a two-dimensional picture or a three-dimensional representational sculpture, or indeed at one point in his argument a two- or three-dimensional stage set – and the ‘image object,’ something that the picture or sculpture or stage set makes visible, or we might say acknowledgeable, but which is itself ‘a nothing, not part of the world but an object for a consciousness.’¹³ The way Wiesing explains it, the image carrier – picture, sculpture, stage set and so on – is subject to the laws of physics, and potentially at least available to all of the senses of someone who encounters it, whereas the image object, the thing depicted, displayed, presented – and by extension acknowledged and interpreted – ‘cannot be heard, smelled, touched, or tasted’: it is never ‘quite present’ but rather ‘merely artificially present, that is, reduced to visibility.’¹⁴ In one of Wiesing’s more catching phrases: ‘Things in images are exclusively visible and never collect dust.’¹⁵ A kind of visual echo of what is collecting dust already. A sort of remaining potential for sense and significance, of what crumbles under the weight of speech, of what we have already let go, back into privacy and fading, back to whatever it may have meant or intended before we came to the scene.

And we keep coming to the scene, to enjoy those echoes, to recoup that potential, or to corroborate it at least. Later in his book, as he considers more contemporary image media – abstract photography, virtual reality and the like – Wiesing modifies what might be taken for ‘visibility’ in these contexts. He introduces the term ‘validity’ to discuss how it is that the medium of language enables human beings to share understandings with each other, more precisely how it is possible to ‘think and mean not only something equivalent but also the very same thing’ in different places and times; or in different parts of the same place at the same time, as we might in the cinema or theatre.¹⁶ Validity, which Wiesing defines as the ‘artificial self-sameness’ of the novel that you and I read in our different times and places, or the image that we see, or even ‘the very same judgement’ that each of us makes, occupies a similar place to that of the visibility of image-objects in the earlier formulations, except that now the potential exposure to all is a given. Wiesing: ‘it can no longer be said that what, thanks to media, comes about as validity is a private affair. Medial validity exists only in communal form: “The number five is not my own.”’¹⁷ The number five, indeed, is a shared ‘inter-subjective’ matter, shared between you and I along with everyone else who counts. For Wiesing there is liberatory potential here, for humans anyway. ‘Humans are part of the world – but precisely not just that, since by means of media they participate in realities that do not behave like the world of physical things.’ The image-making media that enable us to generate and validate such non-physical realities, according to Wiesing, ‘are the only means humans have to disempower physics. That is why without media no human existence that is more than the presence of stuff can emerge.’ ‘Media,’ Wiesing concludes, ‘liberate humans from the ubiquitously present dictates of the physical world.’¹⁸ For Berta, this is what it was all about: liberation indeed, from some sort of reality. To emerge from the hut so to speak, and not just ‘so to speak.’ Except Berta – Berta in the story, Berta in the image – is still in something of a spot; and nor is it just the dictates of the physical world that constrain her.

Berta is exposed – and to that extent embarrassed, as it turns out catastrophically so. She is exposed in her relations to others, to the animals in the hut and the old woman her guardian, to her husband and his friend, exposed also to herself. As I have ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Rosemary Lee, Melt Down (2011); Sam Shepard and Field Day Theatre Company, A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations) (2013)
• 1. The interpreters (on the birth of images): Ernst Bloch, ‘Images of déjà vu’ (1924); Marie-José Mondzain, Homo Spectator (2007); Dickie Beau, LOST in TRANS (2013)
• 2. The borders of the marvellous (on reconstruction and returns): Desperate Optimists, Helen (2009); Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition (1843)
• 3. Darkness and doubles (on theatrical recognition): Kinkaleri, Nerone (2006)
• 4. Is there anybody there? (on the crimes of representation): Bock & Vincenzi, The Invisible Dances (2004–2006); Simon Vincenzi, Operation Infinity (2008–2013)
• 5. Climates of attention (on the imaginary theatre): Alvis Hermanis, The Sound of Silence (New Riga Theatre, 2007); Fathers (Schauspielhaus Zurich, 2007); The Ice. Collective Reading of the Book with the Help of Imagination in Riga (New Riga Theatre, 2005)
• 6. Everybody acts (on friendship): Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, The Art Show (1963–1977); Split Britches, Lost Lounge (2009); Forced Entertainment, The Thrill of it All (2010); Wendy Houstoun, Pact with Pointlessness (2014)
• 7. The writing on the wall (on images and acts): Romeo Castellucci, Four Seasons Restaurant / Giudizio, Possibilità, Essere (2012–2014); On the Concept of the Face Regarding the Son of God (2010); Orfeo ed Euridici / Orphée et Eurydice (2014); Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law (1996); T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death (2006)
• Bibliography
• Index