ridout, the vibratorium electrified, in vibratory modernism book, 2013

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Vibratory Modernism

Anthony Enns; Shelley Trower

ISBN: 9781137027252

DOI: 10.1057/9781137027252

Palgrave Macmillan

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215

10The Vibratorium ElectrifiedNicholas Ridout

Towards the end of the famous passage in which his young narrator

attends the theatre for the first time, Marcel Proust offers what looks like

a peculiar account of the physical and emotional effects of real events

on groups of people:

It would appear that certain transcendent realities emit all aroundthem a kind of radiation to which the crowd is sensitive. Thus it is

that when any great event occurs, when on a distant frontier an army

is in jeopardy, or defeated, or victorious, the vague and conflicting

reports from which an educated man can derive little enlighten-

ment stimulate in the crowd an emotion which surprises him and

in which, once the experts have informed him of the actual mili-

tary situation, he recognises the popular perception of that “aura”

which surrounds momentous happenings and which may be visible

hundreds of miles away.1

This account is peculiar for several reasons. First, it suddenly expels

the reader from the particular situation of the novel’s theatrical scene,

to suggest, it seems, that emotional effects the narrator is experienc-

ing in the theatre may also be experienced outside it, as a kind of

‘radiation’. Second, it offers an account of the transmission of ‘news’in which technologies of communication (such as, perhaps, the tel-

egraph) seem to generate ‘something in the air’ which may be detected

by the uneducated, even when the educated man can make nothing

of the actual news in circulation, as though a confusion of different

convictions might in their mingling magically approximate the truth.

Third, it suggests that there exists around ‘momentous happenings’ an

aura which may be seen at improbable distances. Why step outside the

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216 Vibratory Modernism

theatre at this point, why attribute mystical powers of perception to

the ‘uneducated’, and why speak of this ‘radiation’ as a process which

produces something ‘visible’? The answers to these questions may be

deduced from what follows:

But this immediate recognition of the crowd being mingled with

a hundred others, all erroneous, the applause came most often at

the wrong moments, apart from the fact that it was mechanically

produced by the effect of the applause that had gone before, just as

in a storm, once the sea is sufficiently disturbed, it will continue to

swell even after the wind has begun to subside. No matter, the moreI applauded, the better, it seemed to me, did Berma act.2

The point, it now seems, was to explain a theatrical effect. The

applause of the ‘uneducated’, coming haphazardly and in no relation

to the significance of any particular dramatic moment or high point in

Berma’s performance, generates an eddying of physical and emotional

activity, a kind of turbulence out of which confusion emerges a rhyth-

mic logic which is the applause’s own. This rhythm then transmits itself

to the performer, in such a way that she is carried to apparent heights

of performance which appear to be the logical cause of the mechani-

cal applause. The apparent heights of the performance are similar to

the imagined ‘aura’ of the distant momentous event, created not by

the event itself, but rather by the ‘radiation’ emitted by the people

who respond to it. ‘Transcendent realities’ only ‘appear’ to emit such

radiation. In fact they merely bask in its glow, for it is produced by thecrowd. The crowd captivates itself. That is how ‘transcendent realities’

happen; they are the productions of ordinary people, gathered together.

‘The more I applauded, the better, it seemed to me, did Berma act.’

The audience–performer reciprocity imagined here is not ‘merely’

imaginary. It is real, it is constitutive of the performance and its recep-

tion, and it generally escapes the attention of theorists of the theatre.

If, as Proust seems to suggest in his extra-theatrical excursion towards

a ‘distant frontier’, this kind of radiation between people is something

that can be observed in the so-called ‘real’ world, then perhaps the

theatre itself might be imagined as an experimental apparatus for the

exploration of intersubjective or social affect and its transmission. If

theatre theorists were to direct their attention towards the behaviour of

such radiation in the theatre, they might perhaps find ways of saying

something about the nature of social experience and about how popular

understandings of the particularities of social experience – including the


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The Vibratorium Electrified 217

communication technologies that help constitute it – might also con-

tribute to popular understandings of theatrical experience. If people are

coming to think of their social world as one in which they both receive

and transmit information in the form of radiation across long distances,then they may also come to understand the theatre as a place in which

such transmissions circulate with particular intensity. Hence this essay’s

invitation to the theatre, as a space from within which to contemplate

‘certain transcendent realities’. Welcome to the Vibratorium, where

these ‘realities’ are experienced in the tremors of the spectatorial body.

Theatre theorist Gay McAuley includes as a key constitutive element

in what she terms ‘the basic apparatus of the theatre’ the experience of‘energy exchange’:

In the theatre, due to the live presence of both spectators and per-

formers, the energy circulates from performer to spectator and back

again, from spectator to performer and back again.3

McAuley points to a number of anecdotal and autobiographical acc-

ounts of this process, while observing that these expert-practitioner

testimonies rarely enter the scholarly discourse. As McAuley indicates,

in much performance theory and historiography the anecdote is neither

valued in itself nor subjected to an analysis that might lead it towards a

more general theory of theatrical experience:

Performance analysts have hardly begun to explore the factual basis

for such anecdotal evidence, and much work is needed to understandhow the complex and subtle interchanges occur, but what is evident

from the scattered references in published sources such as actors’

memoirs is that the spectators in the theatre are far from passive, that

the live presence of both performers and spectators creates complex

flows of energy between both groups, and that it is even questionable

whether what is going on can be discussed in terms of stimulus and

response. At the very least questions need to be asked about who is

doing the stimulating and who is responding.4

As Proust suggests, the stimulation appears to be mutual, and

response may determine the performance. The experience itself is one

which is constituted by a movement between, a back and forth in

which back and forth are not fully differentiated one from another. It

is an experience which is both intimate and individual (experienced

within the body as the impact of radiation) and social at the same time


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(experienced when we find ourselves part of the body that is the audi-

ence). Its intimacy depends upon its sociality, as the radiation described

by Proust only seems to function when there exist reciprocal bodies

through which it may be conducted or transmitted. It is the individualexperience of social reciprocity, apprehended physiologically. For

Teresa Brennan, this seems to be why what Proust calls ‘radiation’ is

best thought about in terms of vibration. In Brennan’s account of ‘the

transmission of affect’, it is the idea of vibration that allows us to think

of this movement between bodies as social and physical at one and the

same time, and to do so in a way that allows us to continue to insist,

as Gay McAuley does in her account of theatre spectatorship, upon the‘primacy of the social’.5 In Brennan’s account

In the last analysis, words and images are matters of vibration, vibra-

tions at different frequencies, but vibrations. The significance of this

is easily underestimated in that we have failed to consider how the

transmission through physical vibration of the image is simultane-

ously the transmission of a social thing; the social and physical

transmission of the image are one and the same process, but (once

more), if we have to make a distinction pro forma, the social, not the

physical is causative.6

The social relation is apprehended as physical experience, and the

apprehension of word and image – the act, one might imagine, of

theatrical spectatorship – is ‘in the last analysis’ physical, vibratory

and social. That is to say that the relation itself vibrates. The theatricalact of becoming someone for the other – an entry into a rudimentary

sociality – is accompanied by, or, rather, consists in, a vibratory adapta-

tion of the body to the social relation, and that something similar hap-

pens in the body of the other, for whom one is becoming something.

The theatre is where we create the conditions in which we heighten our

sensitivity to our mutual becoming-for-others.

It is a widely accepted narrative of theatrical modernisation – often

related in a melancholy key – that the darkening of the auditorium

towards the end of the nineteenth century pacified the audience, and,

in ruthless disregard for ‘the primacy of the social’ in the theatre, inter-

rupted the ‘circulation of energy’ between stage and house, between

performing and spectatorial bodies. In the light, action; in the dark,

increasing passivity. This view, most strongly associated with Bertolt

Brecht’s polemical and modernist critique of bourgeois realist theatre

and the demand that its spectators be reactivated into thought, might


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be regarded as a dominant motif in modernist accounts of the theatre.

A recent account of modern disruptions to this orderly state of affairs

is typical in taking the accomplishment of this process of pacification

as a given:

During the nineteenth century the behaviour of audiences in the

western non-musical theatre grew increasingly subdued, and for

the better part of the twentieth century, spectators sat quietly in the

dark, not applauding, let alone speaking or shouting, until the end

of the performance. Thus when what we call modern theatre began

in the 1880s, norms of behaviour were shifting toward but did notyet dictate, unprecedented restraint.7

There is plenty of truth in this story, and, indeed, relevant anecdo-

tal evidence, recorded by theatre historians, of how this interruption

was experienced. For example, in the specific circumstances of late

nineteenth-century theatre in Paris, with which this essay is primarily

concerned, Frederick Hemmings reports the recollections of a celebrated

actress for whom the replacement of gas with electric light was clearly

experienced as a reduction in the ‘energy exchange’ which McAuley

places at the heart of the performer–spectator relation:

Older actors too found it difficult to adjust, ‘to move around’ as

Jenny Thénard wrote in 1909, ‘in front of a black hole, dazzled by the

garish footlights and aware of nothing but, from time to time, a few

bursts of applause’. The give-and-take that used to exist betweenactors and audience, ‘this intercommunion of minds called, I believe,

telepathy’, had been lost. Henceforth a chasm was to yawn between

the world of the stage and the world the spectator inhabited; there

was loss as well as gain, but whatever the balance of advantage might

be, going to the theatre was no longer the experience it had been.8

However, in what follows I want to offer an analysis of the vibration

described by Proust in order to suggest that the ‘telepathy’ of which

Jenny Thénard laments the loss was not entirely eradicated, and that

instead it may have been transformed, manifesting itself less obviously

but nonetheless powerfully in the electrically illuminated theatres of

modernity. Might this also change our historical understanding of a

later avant-garde conception of the theatre, such as Antonin Artaud’s, in

which the ‘hearts and nerves’ of the audience are worked upon directly

by a performance whose shocking power awakens an otherwise passive


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public from their sedentary slumbers.9 In order to do so I must consider

the material circumstances of the late nineteenth-century theatrical per-

formance which Proust, writing in the second decade of the twentieth

century, describes in the novel. In particular, I wish to focus on a tech-nological development which did much to complete the process by

which the auditorium was darkened, and in which it might be possible

to detect the grounds for a new and distinctly modern understanding of

the social transmission of affect. The technological development I wish

to consider here is the rise of electricity, and its use for a range of com-

munications technologies from the telegraph to stage lighting.

The performances upon which Proust based his account of Marcel’svisit to the theatre, to see ‘Berma’ reprise her role as Phèdre in Racine’s

play, were, according to Proust’s biographer Jean-Yves Tadié, either a

special gala performance by Sarah Bernhardt (who was the model for

‘Berma’) at the Opéra in May 1892, or those which she gave at the

Théâtre de la Renaissance on the Boulevard St Martin in November

1893. The Opéra had been built in 1875 (with a substantial infrastruc-

ture for gas lighting), but had been refurbished with electrical lighting

in 1887. The Théâtre de la Renaissance had been built in 1873, and

by 1889 it was certainly using electricity, since two items in the ‘faits

divers’ section of the journal La Lumière Électrique early that year refer to

an incident in which a member of the public had received a mild elec-

tric shock from an exposed wire. In the second ‘faits divers’ appearance

of this news item – quite probably included at the request of the theatre

management in order to affirm that they could not be held responsible

for the incident – it is made very clear that, since the installation ofthe electrical system had been completed by Clemançon (Paris’s lead-

ing electrical installation company of the time) in full compliance with

the relevant police regulations, the shocked spectator must be regarded

as ‘le premier coupable’: ‘that will teach him not to play around (faire

joujou) with electricity’.10 So, in either case, we can be confident that

the performance in question was illuminated by electric light: indeed,

in a survey of the state of the art in theatre arts and technology in Paris,

published in 1893, Georges Moynet reports that ‘all theatres ... are today

lit by electricity; there are just a few rare exceptions which, day by day,

are confirming to the general rule’ and that ‘at the Renaissance, we

may count 34 footlights ... 184 lamps on battens (horizontal bars) ... 52

lamps on vertical bars’.11

There is no overwhelming internal evidence to suggest that Proust

based his account on a performance or performances at one or other of

these theatres. However, there is some basis for supposing that it was


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the Renaissance. The performance at the Opéra appears to have been a

one-off event, while the performances at the Renaissance constituted

a run of ‘twenty exceptional matinées’ of a new production especially

mounted for the theatre, which Sarah Bernhardt had taken over earlierin the year.12 Given that the fictionalised performance described by

Proust was a matinée, and that there were twenty more opportunities

for him to have seen such performances than there were to have seen

the gala at the Opéra, I think one may reasonably take the Renaissance

performances as the more likely source of material for Proust’s account.

As John Stokes notes in his account of Bernhardt’s management of the

Renaissance, she saw the theatre as an opportunity to respond to someof the most recent developments in Paris theatre, specifically the launch

of the Théâtre Libre by André Antoine in 1887 and of the Théâtre de

l’Oeuvre by Lugné-Poë in 1893.13 These two innovations – understood

both as ‘modernisations’ of theatre practice, and as constituting distinc-

tive strands in theatrical ‘modernism’ – involved a new relationship

between actors and spectators in the theatre, with a particular emphasis

on a kind of intimacy and proximity which had not been possible in

the larger theatres, such as the Comédie Française (where Bernhardt

had first performed as Phèdre in 1874) which still dominated the the-

atrical landscape of Paris. On the smaller stage of the Renaissance and

for an auditorium ‘intended for up to 1,200’, Bernhardt could hope

to generate her own version of a more intimate relationship with her

audience.14 It is interesting to note, in considering the ‘social’ aspects of

this theatre, that despite its use of electric light, and, thus, presumably,

a darkened auditorium, the audience, as reported by a distinctly trou-bled Marcel, was far from silent and passive in its reaction to events on

stage. Indeed it is precisely the simultaneity of the relationship between

his own and others’ applause and Berma’s acting which characterises

the ‘energy exchange’ he describes. This audience is not waiting ‘until

the end of the performance’ to make its contribution to the vibratory

encounter. The ‘telepathy’ is still happening. Might it be the case then,

that this ‘telepathy’, understood as a vibratory communication, driven

by an electrified theatre in an electrified city, does not actually require

the audience to do anything other than sit quietly in the dark; that

even if no one seems to be doing anything, their ‘hearts and nerves’ are

awake and vibrating, all the same?

While the narrative in which the theatre audience gradually accom-

modates itself to sitting quietly in the dark contains, as I have suggested,

some truth, it is also, I will suggest now, slightly misleading, in that it

assumes that this silence may invariably be equated with passivity. This


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is precisely what Jacques Rancière, in The Emancipated Spectator (but

drawing on earlier work on theatrical performance and spectatorship

in nineteenth-century Paris, too), seeks to challenge. For Rancière, the

opposition between activity and passivity is not logical but political. Toprivilege one over the other is a matter of what he calls ‘the distribution

of the sensible’. In modern theatre, he suggests, ‘the spectator is discred-

ited because she does nothing, whereas actors on the stage or workers

outside put their bodies in action’. But in other historical moments the

hierarchy of this opposition has been different: ‘in the past property

owners who lived off their private income were referred to as active citi-

zens, capable of electing and being elected, while those who worked fora living were passive citizens, unworthy of these duties’. What Rancière

proposes is that this hierarchical opposition may be undone ‘when

we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations

between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of

domination and subjection’, and when we come to recognise that

the spectator also acts ... she participates in the performance by

refashioning it in her own way – by drawing back, for example, from

the vital energy that it is supposed to transmit in order to make it a

pure image and associate this image with a story which she has read

or dreamt, experienced or invented.15

Rancière’s argument would gain further traction were scholarship to

act on McAuley’s suggestion that it pay more attention to anecdotes,

in which, she suggests, plentiful evidence will be found that even thoseunseen and unheard audiences of the modern theatre are ‘far from

passive’.

Indeed Rancière’s thought would encourage such attention to the

unofficial and the non-expert, precisely as a way of struggling against

the homogenising tendencies of ‘the distribution of the sensible’ – that

organisation of perceptible events (sounds, sights, feelings) according to

which some are paid attention and others never even register as events

in consciousness. The narrative of pacification is itself simultaneously

a product and productive of a distribution of the sensible in which

owners and managers of theatres, and the journalists, scholars and,

indeed regular theatregoers sustain a consensus in which those who

do not speak are assumed neither to think, nor to count. My ambition

here, then, is to place some pressure on the familiar narrative, and to

wonder what would happen to a history of modern theatre if, instead

of being understood as having consigned the audience to passivity, the


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modern theatre, with its electric light and its darkened auditorium, may

instead be understood to have facilitated a vibratory mode of sensory

communication between actors and groups of fully active, even perhaps

electrified spectators. In other words, in attending to the vibrations thatprecede speech itself, a different distribution of the sensible might be

made, through the production of a revised historical account of the

transmission of affect in the theatre.

The idea that theatre might involve modes of sensory communica-

tion that precede or exceed language is, as I have already suggested,

more readily associated with modernist experimental practice in the

second and third decades of the twentieth century than it is with latenineteenth-century productions of classical theatre, influenced by the

recent success of such projects as Antoine’s naturalism. It is an idea

familiar, for example, from the writing of Antonin Artaud, for whom

the ideal theatre should work directly upon the bodies of its spectators:

Snakes do not react to music because of the mental ideas it produces

in them, but because they are long, they lie coiled on the ground and

their bodies are in contact with the ground along almost their entire

length. And the musical vibrations communicated to the ground

affect them as a very subtle, very long massage. Well I propose to

treat the audience just like those charmed snakes and to bring them

back to the subtlest ideas through their anatomies.16

Artaud is one of the two emblematic modernist ‘reformers’ of the

theatre (the other, of course, is Brecht) whose assumptions of audiencepassivity Rancière wishes to move beyond, on the basis of the radically

different assumption in which theatrical spectators are active partici-

pants in a ‘scene of equality’, even amid the apparently pacifying and

stratifying social conventions of the bourgeois theatre.17 The Théâtre

de la Renaissance does not need to be reformed in order for this sen-

sory and intellectual participation to be possible: the vibrations of the

pre-linguistic may be felt here too, as electrified telepathy or wireless

telegraphy.

For it is not just the theatres that are electrified, nor is it just the single

‘coupable’ spectator who received a shock at the Renaissance: the city

in which the spectators of the 1890s lived, worked, ate, drank, shopped

and went to the theatre was undergoing a process of electrification.

This process had begun in 1878, when, in conjunction with the Paris

Exposition of that year, the municipal council had decided to illuminate

the Avenue de l’Opéra all the way from the Opéra itself down to the


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Comédie Française at the lower end. This illumination was powered by

steam-powered dynamoes located in the basement of the opera house

itself, by two at 28 avenue de l’Opéra and one at rue d’Argenteuil which

would supply power for the installations around the Comédie Française.The lights were illuminated from May to October, from dusk to half

past midnight, when the gas lighting would be turned back on. The

Société Générale d’Electricité (SGE), which provided these facilities, for

which it charged the municipality, extended this provision until 1882,

at diminishing costs. Eventually the facilities were withdrawn, however:

the SGE had failed to secure a ten-year contract from the municipality

and was losing money. For five years the issue of electrification in Pariswas the subject of inconclusive debate, as potential suppliers failed to

get the municipal council to commit to issuing concessions.18 However,

the issue became more urgent after 1887. A fire at the Opéra-Comique

on 25 May, caused by a batten of gas lights catching fire, led to an

estimated 170 deaths.19 The official response included the replacement

of gas lighting in theatres with electric lighting, with the municipal

theatres leading the way.20 The following year the municipal council

voted to approve the issue of concessions to six companies who wanted

to establish electricity supplies across the city, and the electrification of

the city would now proceed apace. The centenary Exposition of 1889,

for which the Eiffel Tower was constructed, and at which modern tech-

nologies, many of them electrical, took pride of place in the Galerie des

Machines, gave additional momentum to this process, generating an

irreversible association between the new source of light and Parisians’

sense that they lived in the most modern city in the world.The theatre was one of electricity’s special places, not least because it

was, in a sense, the place through which electricity made its entry into

the infrastructure of the modern city. Although the modern theatre had

long since gone indoors, closed itself in against the world outside the

better, perhaps, to fabricate a second nature within – a nature no longer

illuminated, as in the past, by the sun – the installation of electricity

plugged the theatre back into the world against which it had enclosed

itself. A theatre lit by electricity might be felt and imagined by its occu-

pants to be simultaneously enclosed and connected, and may have

given spectators a sense of being right where the electricity was hap-

pening, offering them a conceptual model for thinking about theatre

as a place where energy circulated with a particular intensity. In linking

the energy exchange between spectators and actors to the transmission

of the radiation of distant events, Proust seems to point to a sense that

the charged atmosphere of the theatre auditorium is an ideal medium


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for feeling how new technologies of transmission and communication

work. In harmony with the movement of the telegraph, the humming

of the generators, the buzz of the filaments, the theatre functions as a

sort of data hub, drawing in the experience of the world and intensify-ing it, almost as though it were in fact a bulb. In the semi-darkness of

the theatre its occupants still participate in the back and forth of feel-

ings between people, no longer so frequently spoken or shouted now,

but felt all the same, tremulous beneath the skin, and this way senti-

ments of all kinds are conducted from body to body, before anyone

has to speak or even announce themselves as a character in a story.

The theatre vibrates at the heart of the vibratory city of light. And itis this vibration, hovering just below the threshold of the languages of

speech and image, that holds all its participants together, equally, for

a moment.

Notes

1. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove,trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Vintage, 2002),p. 24.

2. Ibid., p. 24. 3. Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 246.

4. Ibid., pp. 247–8. 5. Ibid., p. 248.6. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca and London: Cornell

University Press, 2004), p. 71. 7. Neil Blackadder, Performing Opposition: Modern Theatre and the Scandalized

Audience (Westport CT: Praeger, 2003), p. xi. 8. F.W.J. Hemmings, The Theatre Industry in Nineteenth Century France

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 45–6.

9. Antonin Artaud, ‘Theatre and Cruelty’, in The Theatre and Its Double, trans.Victor Corti (London: John Calder, 1993), p. 60.

10. ‘Faits Divers’, La Lumière Électrique 31 (1889): 398–9.11. Georges Moynet, La Machinerie théâtrale: Trucs et décors, explication raisonnée

de tous les moyens employés pour produire les illusions théâtrales (Paris: Librairieillustrée, 1893), p. 252.

12. John Stokes, Michael R. Booth, and Susan Bassnett, Bernhardt , Terry, Duse:The Actress in Her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 23.

13. Ibid., p. 23.14. Ibid., p. 23.15. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator , trans. Gregory Elliott (London

and New York: Verso, 2011), pp. 12–13.16. Artaud, ‘Theatre and Cruelty’, p. 61.

17. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator , p. 22.


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18. Alain Beltran, ‘La difficile conquête d’une capitale: l’énergie électrique à Parisentre 1878 et 1907’, Histoire, économie et société 3 (1985): 369–71.

19. Rachel Maines, Asbestos and Fire: Technological Trade-Offs and the Body at Risk

(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 85.20. Beltran, ‘La difficile conquête d’une capitale’, p. 377.

References

Artaud, Antonin, The Theatre and Its Double, translated by Victor Corti (London:Calder Publications Ltd, 1993).

Beltran, Alain, ‘La difficile conquête d’une capitale: l’énergie électrique à Paris

entre 1878 et 1907’, Histoire, économie et société 3 (1985): 369–95.Blackadder, Neil, Performing Opposition: Modern Theatre and the Scandalized

Audience (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).Brennan, Teresa, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca and London: Cornell

University Press, 2004).‘Faits Divers’, La Lumière Électrique 31 (1889): 397–400.Hemmings, F.W.J., The Theatre Industry in Nineteenth Century France (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1993).Maines, Rachel, Asbestos and Fire: Technological Trade-Offs and the Body at Risk

(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005).McAuley, Gay, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 2000).Moynet, Georges, La Machinerie théâtrale: Trucs et décors, explication raisonnée

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