Martin Puchner

Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama

Contents: The Invention of Theatricality Richard Wagner The Modernist Closet DramaStephane Mallarme James Joyce Gertrude Stein The Diegetic TheaterWilliam Butler Yeats Bertolt Brecht Samuel Beckett

Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii INTRODUCTION: Manifestos--Poetry of the Revolution 1 PART ONE: MARX AND THE MANIFESTO CHAPTER 1: The Formation of a Genre 11 CHAPTER 2: Marxian Speech Acts 23 CHAPTER 3: The History of the Communist Manifesto 33 CHAPTER 4: The Geography of the Communist Manifesto 47 PART TWO: THE FUTURISM EFFECT CHAPTER 5: Marinetti and the Avant-Garde Manifesto 69 CHAPTER 6: Russian Futurism and the Soviet State 94 CHAPTER 7: The Rear Guard of British Modernism 107 PART THREE: THE AVANT-GARDE AT LARGE CHAPTER 8: Dada and the Internationalism of the Avant-Garde 135 CHAPTER 9: Huidobros Creation of a Latin American Vanguard 166 PART FOUR: MAN I FESTOS AS MEANS AND END CHAPTER 10: Surrealism,Latent and Manifest 179 CHAPTER 11: Artauds Manifesto Theater 196 PART FIVE: A NEW POETRY FOR A NEW REVOLUTION CHAPTER 12: The Manifesto in the Sixties 211 CHAPTER 13: Debords Society of the Counterspectacle 220 CHAPTER 14: The Avant-Garde Is Dead:Long Live the Avant-Garde! 241 EPILOGUE: Poetry for the Future 259 NOTES 263 BIBLIOGRAPHY 295 INDEX 309

Performing the Open Actors, Animals, Philosophers

Three scenes of performance, corresponding to a parallel effort by Giorgio Agamben in his critique of the anthropological machine, suggest a strategy of negative mimesis to counter the stubborn anthropocentrism of the Western philosophical tradition.

The Theater in Modernist Thought

It is the peculiar fate of the theater to find itself suspended between two types of art.1 As a performing art, it relies on the physical presence of human beings executing their artistry the way musicians play music or dancers dance. As a mimetic art, however, it turns these performing human beings, along with stage props and light, into material used for the purpose of representation. This double allegiance has given rise to many of the theoretical debates, schools, and practices of the theater. In particular, it has fueled the recurring fantasy that theatrical mimesis can be unmediated. Characters, objects, and speech need not be translated into a different medium?descriptive prose, a flat canvas, celluloid?but can instead be transferred directly onto the stage where they may act as what they really are. This fantasy does not describe the actual practice of the theater, which inevitably relies on forms of abstraction, displacement, condensation, and es trangement, but it nonetheless remains a promise or theoretical possi bility that has attracted the theater from its inception. Indeed, various poetic and aesthetic doctrines from the Aristotelian unities through naturalism to the rise of a new physical theater in the twentieth century legitimate themselves through the theaters supposedly direct mimesis of space, time, and action. Yet, despite its tendency towards the material, the theater has also fascinated a discipline that shuns immediate physicality: the discipline of philosophy or, more generally speaking, the domain of theory. From Plato to Hegel, there ranges a heterogeneous tradition of thought that is deeply intertwined with the theater, if in an often conflictual manner. Since the later nineteenth century, the interaction between theory and the theater seems to have reached a new level of intensity. Philosophers fascinated by theatricality, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but also theorists of the performativity of literature and of performance studies bespeak a new priority of masks over essence and theatricality over ontology. In order to examine the relation between theory and the theater, between theoretical meditation and theatrical spectatorship, one may turn to the common origin of these two occupations in the Greek word

Society of the Counter-Spectacle: Debord and the Theatre of the Situationists

This article examines the work of the Situationists and their leading member, Guy Debord, as it relates to theatre history and the history of the manifesto. The Situationists privileged the writing of manifestos over the production of art works in order to avoid the fate of the historical avant-garde, whose provocative art had been co-opted by the cultural establishment. Despite this pro-manifesto and anti-art stance, the Situationists drew on the theatre, envisioning the construction of theatrical ‘situations’ influenced by the emerging New York happening as well as modern theatre artists such as Brecht and Artaud. This theatrical inheritance prompted a recent theatrical representation of their activities based on Greil Marcuss Lipstick Traces . What this theatrical rendering demonstrated, however, is that the theatricality of the ‘situation’ is different from that produced on a stage, reminding us that the strategies of the neo-avant-garde cannot be easily transferred to a traditional theatrical form.

Entanglements: The Histories of TDR

Taking stock of TDR in 1983, on the occasion of the release of T100, Brooks McNamara mused: “How long TDR will continue to exist is anybody’s guess. As little magazines go it is positively antediluvian” (1983:20; T100).1 More than 20 years later, TDR is still alive and kicking. Its 50th anniversary is a cause for celebration. The journal’s 50 years of continuous publication provide us with a unique record of the profound changes in the world of theatre and performance that have taken place in the past half-century. To be sure, the record is anything but neutral. TDR has been an engaged and, at times, polemical participant in the debates about performance, and has frequently changed its own modes of engagement. Should TDR represent new and experimental theatres or rather focus its attention on changing methods of analysis such as structuralist or performance studies analysis? Should it primarily record and analyze performance practices or seek to intervene and shape these practices as well? Should it be wedded to an antiacademic and antidisciplinary stance or become the official organ of a new discipline with a tradition and canon of its own? Taking into account the complex ways in which TDR has acted as a kind of participant-observer of the theatre scene, I will offer a layered history, isolating four distinct dimensions: 1. A history of the kinds of theatres and performances represented in the pages of TDR, a history of its objects of analysis; 2. A history of the changing methods of analysis that were brought to bear on different objects of study; 3. A history of the different functions the journal wanted to fulfill with respect to the theatrical culture it engaged; and 4. A history of TDR’s changing institutional relations and affiliations. What emerges from this analysis is that the journal was crucially shaped by the conflicts among these four dimensions, conflicts about the relation between objects, methods, functions, and institutional

Goethe, Marx, Ibsen and the Creation of a World Literature

“The age of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” This is what Goethe famously said to Eckermann in 1827, launching the career of the term “world literature” (Eckermann 1955). The formulation contains a paradox or at least a tension that would continue to characterize world literature to this day: world literature is at hand, it is ready to be grasped, and yet we cannot quite get hold of it yet; we cannot take it and its arrival for granted. On the contrary, we, every one of us, must strive to hasten its approach. Without such striving, which is reminiscent of Faust’s most salient feature, the arrival of world literature will be delayed, perhaps indefinitely. This future-oriented temporality of world literature seems to have disappeared when Marx and Engels pick up the term just a few decades later, in 1848, in their account of the bourgeoisie. Now world literature has arrived, through a process described in one of the Communist Manifesto’s most famous paragraphs. The revolutionary effects of bourgeois capitalism are rendered in the dramatic present tense, as culminating in the arrival of world literature: “and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature” (Marx and Engels 2005). But despite the dramatic present tense, the Communist Manifesto, too, describes an ongoing process, one that has not quite played itself out yet, and the two authors speculate about its future course. In 1848, world literature is still in the process of emerging. q This essay was first presented at an Ibsen workshop at the Center for Ibsen Studies in Oslo in 2011 and further developed as a keynote address at the XIIIth International Ibsen Conference in Tromso in the summer of 2012. Participants in both events helped me significantly develop this piece, including Tore Rem, Frode Helland, Narve Fulsa us, and Lisbeth Pettersen Waerp.

It's Not Over ('Til It's Over)

The essay argues against the widespread assumption that avant-garde art is something that is irretrievably lost to history, that the original fervor of avant-garde practice is impossible today. Instead of a history of decline, it proposes a history of repetition, according to which new avant-gardes make use of their predecessors without being trapped in the past. Two recent manifesto publications and the reuse of two historical avant-garde locations serve as examples of how artists respond to the challenge of creating avant-garde events today.

Wittgenstein's Language Plays

Wittgenstein included “playing theater” among the meanings of Sprachspiel, an association obscured by the translation of that word as “language game.” Suggesting that we translate Sprachspiel as “language play,” I argue that Wittgenstein developed a dramatic vocabulary by describing language as acts performed by actors in particular scenes and settings. In his own writing, he invented dramatic scenarios that are populated by characters and centered on sequences of action. These scenarios—Wittgenstein’s “language plays”—with their flat characters and minimal stages, resonate with the theater of the absurd and influenced later dramatists such as Tom Stoppard.

The Problem of the Ground: Martin Heidegger and Site-Specific Performance

Theatre and philosophy share the problem of the ground. For the theatre, the ground is an existential problem: theatre must take place somewhere. As a consequence, the theatre takes over existing ground and installs itself there, or else it creates its own grounds, laying the foundation for specifically designed theatrical spaces. The question of where theatre takes place has been a highly charged matter.1 Greek tragedy originated in religious sites, around the altars to the God Dionysus. Japanese Kabuki theatre, by contrast, originated in the dry riverbeds of Kyoto, a place of disrepute. In London, the Globe Theatre, along with most other theatres, was forced to take residence outside the City of London on the South Side of the Thames.