Modern Theater Does Not Take (A) PlaceAuthor(s): Julia Kristeva, Alice Jardine, Thomas GoraSource: SubStance, Vol. 6, No. 18/19, Theater in France: Ten Years of Research (Dec. 1, 1977),pp. 131-134Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3683988Accessed: 18/02/2010 06:29

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Modern Theater Does Not Take (A) Place

JULIA KRISTEVA

1. As a constructed model of a system of signs, semiology is a theory of the existent. Modern theater does not exist-it does not take (a) place-and consequently, its

semiology is a mirage.

2. To say that modern theater does not take place implies first that the speaking animal has reached a point in its experience which signifies that its only inhabitable

place-locus-is language (le langage). Since no set or interplay of sets is able to hold

up any longer faced with the crises of State, religion and family, it is impossible to

prefer a discourse-to play out a discourse-on the basis of a scene, sign of recognition, which would provide for the actor's and audience's recognition of themselves in the same Author. The Golden period of the Greek (or Classical) community failed to materialize in the twentieth century within existing theatrical communities, amongst totalitarians, fascist happenings and socio-realist productions. As its only remaining locus of interplay is the space of language, modern theater no longer exists outside of the text. This is not a failure of representation (as is often said), because nothing represents better than language (la langue)-that privileged fabric of identification and

fantasy. Rather, it is a failure of de-monstration, of the theater as de-monstration. Severed from its intra-linguistic production (le langage), this de-monstration can do

nothing but chain itself to the normative ideologies to which the failure of contempo- rary social sets, and perhaps, even the failure of the human race, affixes itself. Faced with the technocratic explosion, this is a failure to constitute a communal discourse of play (interplay). Mallarme was the first to recognize this situation when, cognizant of the unfurling of the Symbolist theater, he turned towards "music" and "letters." Or when he imagined the book-theater, which was never meant to have any other

place than in the archivist's records, destined for the incinerator. The surrealist at-

tempts to rekindle hope in a communal representation of play within the space of a theater-even Artaud's attempts-are only transient, more or less tragic or debilita-

ting, seeking to dodge the Mallarm6an statement. In short, Mallarme asserts first, the

disappearance of the sacred-of the communal sacred-, the absence of a sacred locus that is always the locus, the place, of theater; and second, he asserts the eventual retreat of this sacredness into language (la langue). Proof: the post-Mallarmean survivors of the modern theater are fantasies deprived of a public, while the most advanced experiments in writing address themselves uniquely to the individual uncon- scious, without speculating on the fantasies of the larger group.

3. Nevertheless, when a significance in play-interplay-does manage to come to light through an irresistible scopic drive (i.e., to see, to act, to know), it currently under-

goes two fates: either it does without language (le langage), and , like the double of Artaud's theater, implements color, sound and gesture-painting, dance, music in the

syncretic work of the silent theater; or, it speaks a discourse of verisimilitude, made up of stereotypes and edged with debility, as Beckett and Ionesco knowingly did, as any

Sub-Stance NO 18/19, 1977 131

self-respecting director hints at doing with a malice that aims at putting the text in

quotes so that it thus becomes a reported discourse, a quotation from an out-dated code, feeble, just good enough to make some communal sign, but debased. Or like so

many modern playwrights who innocently bury themselves in it with the condescend-

ing boredom of the sparse audience as their only consolation.

4. The first of these two modes, the silent theater of colors, sounds and gestures, sends the subject back to that region of the structure of the speaking being where a lethal drive operates, a drive of forgetfulness or of death, which I have called the semiotic (le semiotique). Threshold of identity and of language (le langage), edge of

primal repression, absence of the difference which makes sense, and thus, absence of sexual difference, primary narcissism. Two variants emerge from the articulation of this space in language-in the symbolic (which even if it remains silent is still undeni-

ably present in any undertaking): the first, more schizophrenic, which transforms into

metaphor the sound-color-gesture distribution by the theme of death; the second, more paranoid, which transforms the arrangement of sound-color-gesture into meta-

phor through the theme of passage towards action-towards the act-, by the theme of madness.

Independent American cinema seems to provide the best illustration of the first variant. In his film Wave Length, Michael Snow works towards a representation which is no longer the result of editing. No more psychological, ideological or narrative

sequences; almost no more words either. Rather, there is above all a play on colors; an infinite differentiation in chromatic wavelength (color to black and white, gradual return to color), focused on the same filmed object (a loft, a body). At the same time, a play on sounds, swelling and slowly dying, thus paralleling the increase and decrease in chromatic effect. All this make it seem that the projection of time of the sequences is nothing but a mad race behind objects of invariably mistaken identity, a time which has nothing to do with the a-chronic time of representation which dissolves itself and recreates itself over.again (this second "time" is closer to Freud's famous a-temporality in the unconscious). The only event within this semiotic limit of the representable (and thus of meaning and of time) is death; language is present only to proclaim through a woman's mouth that the body of the man is henceforth a corpse; words

spoken to us while, in effect, we experience a never-addressed but nonetheless present death; it enters through the retina, across an infinitely contracted or infinitely ex-

panded wavelength. For we accompany death by following the progressive extinction of the visible field; the camera focuses on a photo of ocean waves, and by approaching closer and closer, it transforms visual perception into tactile perception: chiaroscuro becomes a sharply jagged surface before blackness erases everything, thus coinciding with death. Theater/cinema (I will come back to this difference) of cruelty, to use Artaud's term, for according to him and in this kind of presentation, cruelty is a

technique: "cruelty is above all lucid, a kind of rigid control."1 How can we think this economy? We know that any signifying practice involves a

partial recovery and a relative independence of the two extremes of the signifying function S2 (semiotic) and S1 (symbolic). In the type of representation which I just described, S2 encompasses S1, but this inclusion remains outside of the representation. The symbolic (the meaning), which is included in the interplay of color-sound-gesture

132 Julia Kristeva

Modern Theater Misplaced

(the semiotic), remains foreign to them, does not name them, does not comment upon them; when it pronounces itself, when it names itself, this meaning is nothing but a

solitary signifier, uniquely and ultimately "death."

5. The second variant of the silent theater-a production through a minute semio- tic assemblage of the acting-out and of "madness"-is without doubt best typified by the theater of Bob Wilson. Whether it is the deaf man with his surrealist reminis- cences, Queen Victoria, Stalin or Einstein, there emerges the identity of a represen- tation, but only as a blurred ensemble, the identity of a precise arrangement of sound, gesture and color. Like traces of a rhythm which the content will only summarize, like the lines of force underlying the conflict which Einstein was already teaching to his students, traces of a perpetually blurred and faulty signifiable articulate them- selves on stage; lektonic traces in sound, gesture, color. That they be carried by a lethal drive here does not prevent, contrary to the preceding variant, an interplay of

acting elements (actants), and therefore, of signified elements (signifies) from mani-

festing itself. The discovery of an object (by the deaf man's sight) or of a scientific

object (by Einstein), the exercise of power, etc., thus appear as acts of violence, as

bursting forth, as enjoyment (jouissance) which has finally arrived from this lethal

drive, infinitely repeatable as aphanisis and aphasia. Therefore, we have an acting- out-a passage towards the act-such that no act, no identity nor character is taken for granted, but rather, remains problematic as crisis, as catastrophe. Whence the fact that the only real character in this representation is the Madman, no longer the comic and reassuring Crazyman of the Carnival, but the Madman-truth of each utter-

ance, neither tragic nor comic, the Madman as necessary element of the spoken, as threshold from aphanisis to enjoyment, from aphasia to action, from repetition to No.

The representation of this economy necessitates a theory of catastrophe: each

specular-spectatorial identity is a passage, fold, threshold between at least two spaces (S1 and S2).

6. Less explicit experiments on the same psychosemiotic plane use the same economy: the theater, dance and cinema of Yvonne Rainer, for example. What is represented here as "catastrophic" does not take on the identity of the Madman, but of the

contestatory Other (the other sex). "Feminist" theater, "psychedelic" theater, "black" theater; they all draw from the same structure in order to effect a more

directly social and political project.

7. These two variants of a radical experiment show first that it is henceforth impossi- ble to separate "theater" from "cinema." Reconstruction of the subjective space experienced by our modernity demands recourse to all means of representation, and therefore, to film, to explore the limits of the representable, and in order to include the visual in the acoustic or the gestural. This new subjective space in search of itself

through, among others, the two structural variants which I have just outlined, in effect profoundly modifies the way in which contemporary man sees, listens, acts. The old cinema/theater distinction disappears, a new coalescence begins to emerge. .. "Listen to what you see; act out what you hear. . ." Here, the work of Connie Bently

133

Julia Kristeva

asserts itself; for Bently, film is gaining a more and more dominant role, to the point where, perhaps one day, it will eliminate theater, if not become definitively integrated into it.

These two variants indicate also that the stage/audience separation, which weighed so heavily on the theater of the preceding generation (because it froze identities which were thereafter unacceptable), is merely a superficial problem; the new locus of

representation no longer develops out of a mechanical mixture of actors and audience, but by a different articulation of the semiotic and symbolic elements, through the

pursuit of a different syncretic assemblage (like the two examples given above) where the crises of the speaking would be recognizable.

8. Thus, two spaces (of explosive inclusion and of catastrophe) appear to me to have

emerged in contemporary American experiments with representation. Can we, how-

ever, call them the beginnings of a modern replica of the classical notion of the "sa- cred"? In any case, it is evident that these spaces constitute or harbor a new subject, which only a particular socio-economic context can favor. Aided by the development of productive forces, this socio-economic context lends itself easily to a certain power whose abuses we know only too well, but which, rather than polarizing itself when faced with an Opposition, tolerates multiple oppositions instead. Therefore, poly- topical in power, poly-logical in discourse: a multitude of stories (histories) and spaces where totalitarianism cannot extend its grasp (a tactic which only reinforces partisan dogmatism) but rather, where it is weakened by a plurality of loci and discourses.

Thus, it is within this overwhelmingly protestant society that the necessarily instinc- tual and maternal "repressed" makes its return, asking for new spaces, and therefore, new representations to enjoy. Process analogous to that which occurred in Europe during that virgin and Jesuit explosion which gave rise to the Baroque.

The fact that the United States is proposing a radically new locus of representation today implies also and finally that a new political body is growing here; a supple subjectivity, finding its catharsis in the deepest psychic clouds, capable of seeing and thus of abre-acting its death and its catastrophes, and thus of facing the ever-

present constraints of power in society with less resentment, and thus, less dogmatism. For if modern theater does not take (a) place, it is only as of late, as a new subject

and a new society, here and especially in France, are running up against too many archaic constructs (economic and ideological). This obliges playwrights and actors either to play complacently with the verisimilitude of an antiquating society's anti-

quating fantasies (a narcissistic and debilitating accommodation), or, in the best situations, to develop a technical arsenal of "alienation" (the "Ontological Hysteric Theater" of Richard Foreman), of Brechtian distance, thus keeping the audience's lucidity removed from a criticizable discourse or ideology, all the while waiting for the

coming of a "place": the remaking of language.

Translated by Alice Jardine and Thomas Gora

Notes

1. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double. New York: Grove Press, 1958, p. 102.

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