Analogy and Aporia
The very title of this book, The Theatre of Death – The Uncanny in Mimesis, is a distillation of its enquiry, where what has been called (historically) “the theatre of death” may be understood in relation to what might be called (theoretically) “the uncanny in mimesis”. Rather than simply a statement (in which one term explains the other)—as if, for instance, to answer the question “what is ‘the theatre of death?’”—this relation of terms (conjoint yet separate) suggests a twofold analogy: as theatre is to the uncanny, so death is to mimesis; and (or) as theatre is to mimesis, so death is to the uncanny.
The relation between death and theatre, as that between the uncanny and mimesis, concerns human appearances staged, across a threshold, by the living. This threshold, or dividing line, evokes the very cognitive and affective ambivalence and ambiguity that it is supposed to delimit and which Kantor identifies with the possibility of a “metaphysical shock”:
The sense of who (or what) returns in the appearance of an actor “on stage” (in the “live effigy of Man emerging from the shadows”) may be thought through here in terms of a pair of fundamental oppositions—between death and life, and between fiction and reality—as, for example, in Kantor’s reflections on his own production of Wyspianski’s The Return of Odysseus (discussed below [Shock]). Relations between the terms of these oppositions, which are defined not simply by their opposition (and the analogies they make possible) but also by their aporia, offer a paradigm for thinking of theatre as a form of cultural memory. This paradigm is at once anthropologically general and aesthetically specific, in an iconology that relates it to questions of mimesis.The live effigy of Man emerging out of the shadows, as if constantly walking ahead of himself, was the dominating message of its new human condition…its tragic consciousness…of death…evok[ing] in the spectators a metaphysical shock…by the means and art of that actor. (Kantor 1993a, pp. 113–114)
While each part of the analogy in this book’s title makes its own claims upon understanding, they are no more to be condensed into a metaphor (as if each term could be substituted for the other) than expanded into a statement (as if each term defined the other). Indeed, developing a conceptual understanding of “the theatre of death”—at least, as proposed here—would distinguish this evocative phrase from the numerous metaphorical uses to which it has been put, as if its meaning were already understood (examples of which are given in the following section [Metaphor]). To qualify this analogy as heuristic, however, might seem to suggest that its form is simply literary; a ruse, perhaps, to evade the modernist injunction that “thou shalt not regress” from the rational thought of distinctions (or oppositions) into an irrational belief in affinities (Stengers 2011, p. 183)—as, for instance, between animate and inanimate, visible and invisible, reality and fiction, being and appearance; or, indeed, between the living and the dead.
There is, after all, an aporia in addressing the dead, whose mode of existence is, supposedly, their non-existence. The dead are not, for instance, discernibly subject to Cartesian co-ordination in space and time (even theatrically), in contrast to both actors and audiences. Despite the ubiquitous scholarly attribution of the qualities of persons to fictions (through the interpretation of “characters”)—often even in the name of (literary or dramatic) ghosts—it is supposed to be known that the dead don’t exist; indeed, that they live on (or survive) only through superstition. As disenchanted “moderns”, we recognise spectres or ghosts only as fictions, not as “real presences”; and yet our (non-)relations with these fictions, when we meet them (as at the theatre), remain surrounded by ritual practices, as if to contain the unsettling possibilities of a so-called suspension of disbelief.
Rather than address these doubles in terms of their fiction (affirming their existence in the name of interpretation), this enquiry—concerning the art of theatre, in the name of death—participates in an anthropology of such knowledge (or indeed prejudice) viewed as superstition. For the knowledge of superstition jealously commands not only its modern adherents, but universally aims to define in advance “our capacity to affect and be affected—that is to feel, think, and imagine” (Stengers 2011, p. 192) with respect to the possibilities of consciousness, not least (after Kant) through the imagination regarding the experience (and the thought) of time and space.
Concerning relations between concept and image, as also between body and appearance, must we presuppose that between the two formulations, “what do the dead want of the living?” and “what do the living want of the dead?”, only one of them presents a meaningful question? Here it is proposed that Hans Belting’s observation (Belting 2005, pp. 306–307) that “[w]e animate…media in order to experience images as alive”—where “[a]nimation, as an activity, describes the use of images better than does perception…”—could also apply in the reverse case of what allows us to experience “living” (embodied) images as dead. This is not to mistake the actor’s body for a corpse, however, for it is precisely as a living body (“emerging out of the shadows”) that it may represent the dead, as a question of (theatrical) appearance(s). Rather, it is to experience what we might call the becoming-image of the body, as this has been associated (at least by the theatre artists discussed here) with the appearance of the dead theatrically.
At issue here is a mimetic play (or “drama”) between actor and audience, rather than that between characters within a fictional world on stage. That this theatre, despite the title of its concept, has to do with the dead, rather than with death, may become more clear if we contrast this “becoming-image” specifically with a more general sense of becoming, for instance, in the following observation from Catherine Malabou, concerning the plasticity of the organic:
Dying is not aesthetic (a creation of form), but to see “death”—for instance, in the iconological appearance of its becoming in the withdrawn gaze of the dead (discussed in Part III, Chap. 6 with Heidegger and Rilke)—is to evoke more precisely an underlying philosophical question concerning the relation between concept and image as one of “animation” (Belting).While dying is natural, death nonetheless has yet to occur, it has to come, to find its possibility, and this possibility can only be accidental. Illness, collapse, malaise. Even someone who dies in their sleep does not die naturally. Death is dual: biological, logical. Unexpected too, accidental, creating its own form. An irregularity must occur for the form of death to be created there, in an improbable time that separates becoming from its own end. (Malabou 2012, p. 64)
In the wider sense of a corporeal iconology, addressing the practice of theatre (including its afterlife), it is important to bear in mind that the mimetic need not presuppose or prejudge what kind of “likeness” constitutes the anthropomorphic. As manifest, for instance, in the varieties of mask, the diversity of iconological human forms—not least, in relations between the living and the dead—is itself as diverse as the cultures that such forms help to identify. The sense of likeness between actor and audience need not, then, be supposed in terms of what is familiarly imagined to be “life-like”. That the living are not unlike the dead (in that their image “becomes” them, most familiarly in terms of masks) need not necessarily mean that the dead are like the living. In the question of mimesis then, as concerns the object of study in this book, analogy has, indeed, to do with aporia. Here the sense of the familiar becoming unfamiliar, in Freud’s account of the uncanny, might be supplemented by an account oriented by the emergence of such aporia within the analogies presented in this book’s very title.
Although Belting’s discussion of iconology (within an anthropology of images) remains founded on the exemplary relation between the face and the skull (in the mimetic potential of the gaze or the “look”), it has at its heart the analysis of a cultural transformation in which “our experience with images of the dead has lost its former implication” (Belting 2005, p. 307). In archaic societies, Belting writes, “the experience of images…was linked to rituals such as the cult of the dead, through which the dead were reintegrated into the community of the living” (Belting 2005, p. 307). It is the claim of this book that in their conceptualisation of an art of theatre—as that “of death”—various twentieth-century theatre artists attest to the survival of this historical memory within contemporary cultural practice (albeit bearing witness to the isolation or separation of the dead within modernity).
In the oscillation between a specifically modern understanding of an art practice and an ostensibly archaic understanding of life (as figured in that “of death”), we may hear an echo of the mordant lesson that Lévi-Strauss draws from the attempts to induce a reciprocity between culture and nature in the example of Bororo funeral rites. As if to explain them rationally (at least to himself), Lévi-Strauss compares these rites to an “emotional and intellectual” puppet play, noting (with the wholly disenchanted sense that “men die and do not come back”) that “every social order has a similarity with death in that it takes something away and gives nothing in return for it” (Lévi-Strauss 1976, p. 318). The modernist aporia of the opposition between animate and inanimate (as supposed in that between nature and culture) could not be clearer than in this sense of a lack of reciprocity by analogy, with its attendant pathos.
That the ethnographer nonetheless felt that this lack had to be affirmed, that it needed to be reasserted against the claims of the very example—puppet theatre—by which it is made, is what gives his commentary its uncanny force. Indeed, the theatrical analogy attests to a latent cognition (or animation) that is otherwise referred to as superstition (a theme explored in Part II, Chap. 4). It is precisely with puppets (not least as providing a metaphor), where the oscillation between the animate and the inanimate produces an uncanny play of anthropomorphic images, that the art of theatre most evidently unsettles culturally familiar categories of human mimesis. As Roland Barthes observed [with the “lesson” of Bunraku in mind (Barthes 1982)], the meaning of this theatrical analogy is equally that of its metaphysical aporia, manifested in the relation of antinomies that conditions the modern sense of stage fictions as a dynamic between an “interior” and “exterior” life—as between the real and apparent, the enduring and ephemeral. The elision of these modes of existence in traditional actors’ theatre cannot, however, subsume what is given form by puppet theatre—the uncanny mimesis between these poles of perception. The fundamental relation between the lesson of puppets and Lévi-Strauss’ conclusion—that the Bororo, in their “fallacious impersonation of the dead”, have “been no more successful than other societies in denying the truth that the image a society evolves of the relationship between the living and the dead is, in the final analysis, an attempt on the level of religious thought, to conceal, embellish or justify the actual relationships which prevail amongst the living” (Lévi-Strauss 1976, p. 320)—will be returned to at the end of this chapter (Elimination). 1
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Although the title of this enquiry refers to a manifesto of Tadeusz Kantor’s (which gives its name to a specific development within his own theatrical research), Kantor is not the author of the concept of “the theatre of death” in the terms offered here. Initially published by the Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, in November 1975 (including in an English translation by Piotr Graff), Kantor’s manifesto accompanied the Cricot 2 company’s production of that year, The Dead Class. This iconic performance (discussed below [Séance], as well as in Part IV) toured the world, in changing versions, up until Kantor’s death in 1990; and was even performed “posthumously” during 1991–1992, alongside the Cricot 2 performances of the “last rehearsal” of Today is my Birthday, the p...