Essays on Theatre and Change

Towards a Poetics Of

Kélina Gotman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351598026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

If theatre is a way of seeing, an event onstage but also a fleeting series of moments; not a copy or double but more vitally metamorphosis, transformation, and change, how might we speak to – and of – it? How do we envision and frame a fluid reality that moves faster than we can write?

Arranged over two parts, 'Figurations' and 'Translations', Essays on Theatre and Change reflects on the animal, history, doubling, translation, and the performative potential of writing itself. Each fictocritical essay weaves between voices, genres and contexts to consider what theatre might be, offering a 'partial object' rather than a complete theory. Leaving the page radically open to its reader, Essays on Theatre and Change is a dazzling, multi-lensed account of what it is to think and write on theatre.

Part I

Figurations

1

Icarus falling, and rising (and falling, and rising again)

Here’s a little thought experiment – a schematic essay of linked propositions with several implications.

a)There is the shock of alterity. Or should be.

b)There is the pleasure of alterity. Or should be.

c)We humans with all our conversational structures have yet to invite enough alterity in.

d)Experiment is conversation with an interrogative dynamic. Its consequential structures turn on paying attention to what happens when well-designed questions are directed to things we sense but don’t really know. These things cannot be known by merely examining our own minds.

If there is or can be an experimental poetics, where “experimental” means something more interesting than the latest stylistic oddities, it will at least have to be an exploration of a), b) and c) by means of d).

Joan Retallack, from “What is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?” (Jacket Magazine 2007, http://jacketmagazine.com/32/p-retallack.shtml)

A

Deleuze and Guattari: “The animal does not speak ‘like’ a man but pulls from the language tonalities lacking in signification; the words themselves are not ‘like’ the animals but in their own way climb about, bark and roam around, being properly linguistic dogs, insects, or mice.”¹ What is the question of language being the dog, the insect or … not just “like” it? How do we invite “in” the alterity of the word within itself – and into what? What is the “in” within which (into which) language comes, like a host, to roam around, to turn plant pots over; to pee on the rug; to purr or to mew or to roar with and on. What is the preposition for this? If this chapter is an “experiment” of the sort Retallack suggests, what questions can be posed making enough alterity, bringing enough alterity in, and by which a conversational structure might arise? How do we do a conversation in writing? Are you there, my reader, my brother (lecteur, mon frère)? This was how Baudelaire opened Les fleurs du mal (1857). Except it was not exactly that way – he posed the problem of the mirror, the false mimesis, the interpellation that seeks to find a reader, perhaps, perhaps, as one “like” oneself, hypocritically so, a likeness never quite like. “ — Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!”² For what if the reader were not like one at all? What if the reader climbed about, barked and roamed around in the work read, and turned over the plant pots, pissed on the carpet? That would be an event. That would be to make a work that should be an act. That is also pure impossibility. It is the impossibility towards which however we must tend.

B

Another experiment in alterity (but is this juxtaposition? encounter? conversation? How many forms of conversational experimentation can we stage? How do we stage the encounter on the page? When the page has already been fixed, when it is silent, stubbornly, when the voices that waft from it are stiff, in their joints, from insufficient dialogue, when their tongues are parched, when the language that remains is for the eye alone, when even hand gestures that may accompany the eye movements are resting, when they are at rest): “It is as if determining the border between human and animal were not just one question among many discussed by philosophers and theologians, scientists and politicians, but rather a fundamental metaphysico-political operation in which alone something like ‘man’ can be decided upon and produced.” And he goes on, “the arrival at posthistory necessarily entails the reactualization of the prehistoric threshold at which that border has been defined. Paradise calls Eden back into question.”³ I have placed a little yellow post-it note next to this section of Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal: the first sentence is underlined, with the post-it directly across from it. A couple of sentences pass, and to the left of the latter part I have just quoted, there is a large exclamation mark: ! suggesting, what else, my surprise. I try to reconstruct this surprise. What had surprised me so? That he should suggest that we should be, in a posthistorical moment … that to which we are tending? Also reaching back to a prehistorical moment … somehow “history” is caught between two bookends, and the question is determining how and when these were or can be set: on the one hand, the bookend by which man became separated out from animal. And on the other hand (at the other end), the point at which man (and what of woman?) comes to be subsumed back into one umbrella thing, a post-species, a non-differentiated state (back) with the animal (again). It is an odd thought. So biblical: Paradise and Eden. What of a world without Messianism; for Agamben, it is all messianic, to think the space, the zone, the communion that takes place at what he calls “a critical threshold”:⁴ which is not to say that that is what makes the messianic. But there is something about the idea (the feeling?) of the messianic that suggests a passing-through. And on that other side is the historiless, the state of life outside countable time. This is not to say it is ahistorical, rather it is … well, posthistorical. And that is what comes after we have passed through, so there is a circle of sorts … yet it is not back to a prehistorical. This is quite thorny, indeed, and one wonders whether there really is or was a point at which this separation, this fall (and they appear to be the same) took or takes place. Whether across all peoples, etc.; because of course not. But even so, the western in this: is that what this is? And the border a thing to continue to be maintained? If not between man and animal anymore, then between people … treated like animals; put behind bars. Will it be possible one day to imagine – really to imagine – a world where that will no longer be the case? Not to imagine it in the way that we imagine when we indulge in the “blue sky thinking” of optimists (professional or otherwise), but really to think it is possible, a world in which that would not be the case – the borders and all the rest that comes with that, the checkpoints, the wars, refugees, and the bombing in response to floods of people seeking a safe haven. I do not think it is possible to imagine that yet. And perhaps therefore we are not yet in “posthistory.” Until then, perhaps, we are involved in what Agamben elsewhere calls désœuvrement – the désœuvrement (a nearly untranslatable term that can just barely be rendered worklessness, unworkingness, a term that cannot be rendered) proper to the “fullness of man at the end of History.”⁵ That is to say, at the end of History – an end that may last centuries still? – we are without work, properly; we work, but are not making a work (une œuvre). What then are we making, doing? We create experience: we make shows of ourselves. This is not the society of the spectacle, but it is a perpetual working-towards that, as Agamben explains, does not find its fulfilment in the creation of the thing.⁶ It does not become, where there is an end to becoming. It is then merely a perpetual becoming – the exhausting realization of that.

I suppose what we seek in the end of history (but who seeks?) is to rest. To stop all this business of transformation; of movement; to exit out left; to dig a hole into the ground; to pause all of it. Do we not all feel that way some days. If you could put a stop to it all for a bit.

C

And what of the essay composed of shards, like a Greek vase standing in for something lost and to be re-membered, after it was dismembered by looting, by the passage of time? Would that be a vase-essay, one into which thoughts might pour, just as it was offering itself as a container for them (and out of which their excess might spill)? But aren’t all essays that way? We break and rebuild; but the shape of the vase? What shape does the essay take, if it is to be an attempt, un essai, an experiment? That of a flask, a beaker? If it is to stage the agon at the heart of writing: that of the writer against herself? Do we not seek always to outdo ourselves in the writing, to find a passage beyond our own thought, into something else? And so to break our own tablets, more than those of others? What is that breaking and how can the performance of that be preserved? Why would we want it to be? Do we want it to be? As a way to honour the labour of thought; because that is at stake, when thought comes to be made fit to size, when it comes to be packaged, rendered consumable, when it has always already found its audience, before it has even begun. What of writing a work whose audience we have not yet found. What would that look like? Hannah Arendt writes, “thinking is always out of order, interrupts all ordinary activities and is interrupted by them.”⁷ The form of the essay, then, if it is to perform this, is to remain out of order; precisely not to become ordered, orderly. To continue to interrupt itself and to be interrupted; yet to read that? To read that?

Are we not bound to fail at the task of producing a work that should be so? A work created in the form of thinking? In the manner of thought? Not stream-of-consciousness, necessarily, like the surrealists; but that should capture a process (a performance) as much as an end. Because in the theatre, we are able to repeat; it is never done. And so we hit against the white wall that is writing, the page, that will remain fixed, in which there is no fissure, no time that remains to spin the line again another way, just this night, and maybe once more.

D

And then further, Arendt writes: “even in the darkness of the actual here-and-now – or Aristotle’s definition of the bios theōrētikos as a bios xenikos, the life of a stranger.”⁸ She has just cited Socrates, “‘turning his mind to himself,’” “breaking off” contact with others, “‘deaf to all entreaties’”; and Xenophon who remained immobile for twenty-four hours, “deep in thought, as we would say.” And to the idea of thinking as a kind of dying; or as a kind of participation in another, noumenal world, “even in the darkness of the actual here-and-now”:⁹ the sentence comes around to itself, it becomes what it had been, though in my quotation, I broke it off, to begin with the scene of darkness, as at a theatre: a theatre of thinking, though with Arendt we might imagine that is the greatest contradiction; in fact the only place where thinking cannot take place, because we must cut off from others, perhaps. In a certain sense. And so, in the darkness, we are left to our thoughts. This is why participatory art is the opposite of thinking; it is all agora; all contact and conversation, but not of the sort in which we might become lost, turn our thoughts to ourselves. The theatre then, as a darkened space, becomes a site where we might with images become mute, immobile, engaged in the work of thinking, as long as we might see and also retreat from what we see, arrive at a state of hovering, entre chien et loup, between dog and wolf, between contemplation of an external object and burrowing into our minds, in a space where language also (like image) dissolves.

E

Received an email following a talk on much of this: a gentleman had heard me say “between dog and wolf” and thought it had been “between dog and woof!” He still liked this version, he confided, as it suggested the performative dog – the dog’s performance (“woof!”). He also suggested I might think about the residual trace of props – how an object, given to an animal, becomes also theatrical; h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• By way of a prelude: Upon reading Rosi Braidotti
• Part I Figurations
• Part II Translations
• References
• Index