Jan Motal

Anxious Affinities: How Theatrical Performance Can Generate a Platform for Interpersonal Dialogue

Abstract The article combines both philosophical and psychological approaches to argue that art and theatre performance especially can be grasped as a revelation of the universal and basic human concern, which is existential anxiety. The author presents an opinion, that via performative acts on stage, spectators and performers/actors are interconnected in hermeneutic situation (Hans-Georg Gadamer), in which they play their existential experience. Therefore, the universal death anxiety (Irvin D. Yalom) can be understood as a possible platform for interpersonal and intercultural dialogue (Martin Buber). The article concludes, that archetypes (Carl Gustav Jung) are such a place for mutual understanding, representing both mental and physical answers to the basic existential experience of humankind.

Cognitive phenomenology: the promising pragmatic marriage of methodologies in the field of theatre studies?

The post-war transformation of the humanities paradigm, concerned with art and theatre, should be characterized as a shift to communication theory. As Philippe Breton shows in his convincing theory, this so-called communication utopia is based on the debiologization of conscience. Based on Norbert Wiener’s mathematical vision of cybernetics, and on research on the principles of mass media, communication is connected with the perspective of control (BRETON 1997: 20). To understand communication means understanding the principles of social oppression, as shown in modern critical discourse analysis.1 To master communication is to master the tools of successful social engineering. Cybernetics was raised from new ontology, establishing new science. The new ontology grasps real within its relations to phenomena insofar as the very existence of phenomenon is defined by its relations (BRETON 1997: 25). The real is constituted by its reactions (feedback), and this behavioural vision of conscience is determined by the flow of inputs and outputs. The difference between information and conscience is confused, and knowledge is reduced to fact (BRETON 1997: 140). Experience as a basis for knowledge is abandoned, and the concept of ‘human’ is deprived of its biological and environmental context. This debiologization enables sign to become a major tool for the analysis of what is now widely recognized as discursiveness in society, politics and art. We can find the concept of an information system in the following fields: the study of art (in semiotics), in television studies (in the notion of code) (FISKE and HARTLEY 2003), and in poststructuralism (in the concept of discourse).