Theatre and the Virtual

Genesis, Touch, Gesture

Zornitsa Dimitrova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000557299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Theatre and the Virtual lays out a set of conceptual instruments for the articulation and engendering of the forces of theatrical potentiality.

Creating a passage towards a reconstitution of the given, a theatre of the virtual opens bodies in motion to a region of an ongoing genesis of forces. The outcome: regimes of constraint are abandoned through a radical practice of ecological attunement. Violence is eschewed through an onto-ecology of touch. Closed systems are repotentialised to become co-constitutive of their environments. A logic of spectrality settles in—not so much entities as atmospheres, not so much a being as a style of being, not so much a body as multitudinous milieus of response. This is the task of a theatre of the virtual—to safeguard the possibility of the extra-epistemological and uphold one's right to offer accounts of oneself from outside of being, all the while creating a fractured record of the wondrous mutations of a moving, gesturing body.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, philosophy, new materialisms, environmental humanities, gesture, and the ontology of response.

1 Potentiality and the Virtual

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231080-1

This section takes a closer look at the concept of potentiality and its implications for the work of performing. This should be understood in Aristotle’s sense, but not quite. Potentiality is, first of all, openness. Traditionally, potentiality’s counterpart—the concept of actuality—pertains to entities that are fully available to recognition, fully formed, and known as such to the senses. When we speak of potentiality, we choose to foreplay indeterminacy—that which has not been made final yet. With the introduction of indeterminacy, we shift to a region that has little to do with things available to the cognitive faculties. This region is more speculative than epistemologically informed. It busies itself with that which can be—not even in the sense of forming an entity but in the sense of generating various networks of ecological attunement. Speaking of this region is an exercise in ontology. It is yet to be seen how this region relates to the concept of being.

At the same time, a departure from the actual shows something extra-ontological—even more difficult than dealing with “being” is this touch of an atmosphere that is not even an “is” anymore. Hardly is it solely a matter of genesis, of an individuation as a being yet to be. Within this region,

potentiality does not become actuality, because in that case one would have an infinite reduplication of the potentiality actuality relation. Rather, it is the entity that actualizes potentiality, or that expresses its own potentialities. Potentiality and actuality are not entities in a reciprocal, intrinsic, and necessary relation; rather, they are principles of the entity that are really distinct, so that their ontological consistency is their relation. They are, therefore, transcendental relations: actuality is a determining and determined principle, whereas potentiality is a determinable and undetermined principle.

(Diodato 2012, 88)

In order to show how this concept of potentiality is shaped, I begin with the classical ontology of drama. Here we still deal with something familiar—albeit complex—the actual. Classical dramatic theory has the actual as its goal. Its stuff is motion, but at the same time, it foreplays the extinguishment of motion in reaching a formal attainment, a final cause. The drama comes to be because of motion, interweaving potentiality and actuality. There is openness, chance, and shifts of extreme intensity. In the end, however, it turns out that the drama is crystallised in the actual. The concept of drama, across a variety of traditions, appears to maintain an ambiguous relationship to potentiality. Aristotle, whose views on tragedy are tightly related to the cosmological scenarios sketched out in Physics and the prescriptive ones presented in the Ethics, shows us how the classical plot thrives on the emancipation of potentiality. This, however, has one actual goal: completion and attainment. The concept of potentiality is thus accessory to that of the actual, a stepping stone—that which is habitually called “development”. A “situation” “develops” in order to be properly “realised”, that is to say, in order to yield a result. In accordance with the ontology of the Poetics, the drama is constructed around entelechial scenarios whereby potentiality is largely exhausted in the actual. This ontological practicality is everywhere to be encountered in classical examples of dramatic theory.

Even at the level of its very ontology, that is to say, at the level of its relationship to being, dramatic theory is permeated with such practicality. The plot has a purpose—the extinguishment of potentiality—and it works in its orderly fashion to achieve this purpose. It is the concepts of action and motion, as defined in the Physics, that carry the plot and help it to express this purposiveness. Both action and motion are, to certain degrees, defined by the ambiguity within and juxtaposition of the concepts of potentiality and actuality. The Poetics is permeated with the ideas articulated in the Physics to such an extent that it can be said to exemplify Aristotle’s understanding of natural science. And Aristotle does trust “the subject matter of natural science to be motion … any transition from potential to actual being” (Schmitt 1987, 3). Even more so, the Poetics expresses and extends Aristotle’s views on the very processes of nature marked by growth, decay, extinguishment, and an irreversible determinism—one thing can only become that one certain thing. In short, we have the view that there is a natural substance characterised by an inner principle of change and stasis (Waterlow 1982). Motion is the expression of change; action is its carrier.

The very fabric of the drama is permeated with action and motion of the most complex type, suitable only to beings “living and knowing”. In a manner of speaking, drama is among the most anthropocentric of the arts as it makes “human nature” its sole subject—all the while knowingly showing that “humanness is profoundly unnatural” (Kirby 2011, 74). But then again, we also have a certain extra-personal thrust within this highly personal engagement with the human. The evolvement—or motion—of “human” “action” is realised through the advancement of a plot. The plot itself, however, follows an extra-human entelechy that, in turn, exerts its doings on the drama. One can speculate that, because of this complexity, the plot itself becomes an agency in its own right. It is an entity in action, a separate being of a peculiar formal sentience, one that motions away towards a final cause. Perhaps because of this constructed proximity to the “living”, Aristotle declared the drama to be “the most satisfying of the arts” (Schmitt 1987, 5)—we have the principle of entelechy at work, and then again, there is the concept of motion that allows us to express this principle.

Because of the principles of action and motion, the drama achieves its entelechial end. This “end”, however, also means a depletion of potentiality. Motion carries potentiality only up to a certain point. Even more so, motion incessantly works towards the exhaustion of potentiality. Potentiality, however, is the distinguishing condition of motion. Because of this, the cessation of potentiality—while it may contain attainment—simultaneously becomes the cessation of motion. It is interesting to observe how the scenarios sketched out in Physics, mostly observations from the natural world, have left their imprint on the way Aristotle constructs a dramatic theory. The Aristotelian ontology is entelechial at its core. And accordingly, the drama at its most abstract becomes a motion coming to an end. This motion, starting from a wealth of potentialities, becomes the transition from the potential to the actual. And the actual signals the maximal depletion of potentiality in an outcome.

This book sets out to speak of a theatrical ontology that relies on an intensive engagement with potentiality for its effects to take place. Cases of postdramatic theatres of the 1990s and beyond as well as New European Drama are already classic examples of a more thorough engagement with the productive zest of potentiality. At the same time, there are both far less conspicuous and far more exuberant instances of performances that are entirely constructed around and thriving on an engagement with a fundamental openness. This openness signals a radical orientation towards an ongoing genesis of forces that simply does not cease. In such cases, we observe an engagement of potentiality with actuality that plays itself out in such a way that potentiality enfolds to become ever more varied. Actuality is retained in the shape of little islands of consistency within an overarching conceptual field of potentiality. This field of potentiality operates as an ongoing individuation occurring at various localities at different speeds and within multiple levels of intensity. Actuality is still there, but now, it primarily points to the overarching constitutive region; it becomes a gesture leading beyond itself. The field of potentiality becomes an “atmosphere” of ontological constitution. This playground for the tensions between tendencies appears to generate a region of actuality while the various tendencies persevere in their own constitutive processes yet not leading anywhere in particular. In denying themselves an outcome, these forces and tendencies become profoundly “nonsensical”, supreme examples of ontological impracticality.

So we have a concept of actuality that is not self-contained but continually gestures beyond itself. But then again, we also have a potentiality that is infinitely dissipative yet self-contained insofar as it thrives within its own processes of constitution. These latter tendencies cannot so easily be pronounced to be “unreal” as they press their reality status on any “spectator” and, in a manner of speaking, appear to put on display a “reality” more candid in its senseless arbitrariness. The field of tendencies generates atmospheres of potentiality that do not move from the potential to the actual. The movement, rather, is dispersive, taking place from all directions and in all directions. Its course, to the extent that we can speak of one, is extra-linear.

Yet the qualification “extra-linear” is not an apt way to describe a motion that is, indeed, “spectral”—overlapping several localities and times simultaneously, retroactive and proactive at once, zigzagging between levels of being as well as across thresholds of nonbeing. Gilbert Simondon has a way of describing one such situation as “metastability” (Simondon 1992, 300–303). A metastable locale is a region that is dynamic and ever-shifting in its internal structure yet “solid” and “fixed” enough to allow us to speak of a quasi-entity. The presence of a metastable entity invariably invokes a cognitive dissonance as we deal with something lucid and available to our cognitive faculties yet ever so slippery. When I speak of potentiality, I think in terms of this productive relation between an entity and a nonentity, between being and the extra-ontological, outside of being yet real. The theatre of the virtual plays itself out at this very interface between the actual and this region of tendencies and forces, between the almost fully formed and the dynamic multiplicities.

The Depletion of Potentiality: Motion and Action

Let us take a closer look at the classical ontology of drama. Aristotle is at the core of the development of a wealth of dramatic traditions and, for this reason, I take a moment to summarise some of the points put on display in the Poetics. These include the concept of plot, the concepts of motion and action, and the concept of entelechy. These concepts are seen to form “a systematic doctrinal whole, marked as Aristotelian by a core of pervasive substantive methodological conceptual constants” (Husain 2002, 3) elucidated in the Metaphysics and shaping a particular concept of being and categories of being. The latter entail the categorial priority of ousia, immanent causal form-matter constitution in the category of ousia, and the ontological and cognitive priority of the object (Husain 2002, 10–17).

“Plot” is the overarching term weaved out of intricate interrelations between motion, action, and entelechy, whereas these, in turn, are composed of ever-changing grades of potentiality and actuality. Traditionally, the plot is a progression of incidents built up according to laws of probability and necessity. The unfolding of a plot is expressed, in turn, by motion, action, and entelechy. First, motion is the interplay of various levels of potentiality and actuality. Second, we have the concept of action as the driving force within the plot. Third, the plot advances not only by dint of laws of potentiality and actuality but also because potentiality and actuality interweave in such a way that the plot moves towards a purpose, towards its own unravelling. The Physics already defines entelechy as actuality and completion, the bringing to a close of a certain motion. Even the most radical transformations and events that are difficult to pin or fathom have an orderly place within this cosmology and are made lucid: “‘change is the entelechy of that which is potentially’ … for as long as the potentiality is preserved, so also is the change which completes the potentiality” (Edwards 2014, 14). That is to say, that which is potentially has one purpose and its purpose is to be transformed into something else, non-potential. The concept of entelechy entails an annihilation of potentiality and the b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the Virtual as a Theatrical Force
• 1 Potentiality and the Virtual
• 2 Genesis and the Virtual
• 3 Violence and Touch
• 4 Organism and Gesture
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index