This article was downloaded by: [University of York]On: 16 October 2014, At: 01:02Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: MortimerHouse, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Performance Research: A Journal of thePerforming ArtsPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20

Absorption and FocalizationMaaike BleekerPublished online: 06 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Maaike Bleeker (2005) Absorption and Focalization, Performance Research: A Journal of thePerforming Arts, 10:1, 48-60, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2005.10871396

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2005.10871396

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for anypurpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and viewsof the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information.Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs,expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly inconnection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Absorption and Focalization Performance and it.11 double

MAAIKE BLEEKER

Is deconstruction the enemy of theater or its double?

Barbara Freedman (1991: n8)

In contrast to performance, theatre cannot keep from setting up, stating, constructing, and giving points of view: the director's point of view, the author's toward the action, the actor's towards the stage, the spectator's towards the actor. There is a multiplicity of viewpoints and gazes, a 'density of signs' (to quote Barthes) setting up a thetic multiplicity absent from performance.

Josette Feral (1982: 178)

Foreshadowing Hans-Thies Lehmann's concept of the post-dramatic theatre as a non­teleological architecture (1997, 1999), Josette FEiral defines performance as a 'primary process lacking teleology' (Hiral1982). Performance involves a process of undoing pre-given points of view rather than constructing them. Since it tells of nothing and imitates no one, performance escapes illusion and representa­tion to reveal what remains hidden behind the symbolic mediation that takes place in the theatre. 'Performance rejects all illusion,' writes Feral (1982: 171). It 'presents, it does not represent,' writes her colleague Pontbriand in the same issue of Modern Drama (1982: 155).

Feral's definition of performance as the other, or, the underside of theatre, is characteristic of much discussion around the terms 'theatre' and 'performance' in the 198os and the early 1990s. In this discourse, as Elin Diamond said in her 1996 retrospective, 'theatre was charged with

obeisance to the playwright's authority, with actors disciplined to the referential task of representing fictional entities' while spectators are similarly disciplined and 'duped into identifying with the psychological problems of individual egos and ensnared in a unique temporal-spatial world whose suspense, reversals and deferrals they can more or less comfortably decode' (Diamond 1996: 3). Performance, on the other hand, has been honoured with 'dismantling textual authority, illusionism and the canonical actor in favour of the polymorphous body of the performer_ Refusing the conventions of role-playing, the performer presents her/himself as a sexual, permeable, tactile body, scourging audience narrativity along with the barrier between stage and spectator' (Diamond 1996: 3).

Diamond's description is ironic, indicating that, today, we tend to take a certain distance from the celebration. of unmediated presence and direct experience that characterized early performance theory. The term 'presence', when used at all, is placed between quotation marks or replaced by notions like 'presence effect.' 'Presence,' now, is understood as necessarily rhetorical and always relying on representation. That is, presence relies on other signifiers and thus remains within the realm of the already constructed. Derrida's 'always already' has left deep marks.

With his relentless deconstruction of meta­physical plenitude, Derrida unmasks the belief that signs are grounded in some ultimate origin

Performance Research 10!11. pp.48-60 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2005

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Y

ork]

at 0

1:02

16

Oct

ober

201

4

<= 0 •r

.... ro N

ro

0

u..

"0

<= ro

<= 0

.... '-0

"' ..0

<

49

experienced as full, self-validating presence. This illusion is at work in the assumed opposition of speech as originating self­confirming palpability, versus writing as secondary, an activity that comes after, represents or transcribes. But it is not only in conceptions of speech versus writing that traces of metaphysical thinking manifest themselves. The opposition of speech and writing is paralleled by many other oppositions, for instance identity/difference, presence/absence, reality/image, thing/sign and literal/metaphori­cal. In each of these categories there is assumed to be a degree zero: one of the terms is privileged as original, genei"ic and primary; the other is considered to be subsidiary and specified in relation to it. Derrida's strategy is to deconstruct each of these oppositions by showing that what appears to be the privileged originating term is as secondary and dependent as the so-called 'minor' term it supposedly gives rise to. The originating 'real to itself', the world before signs, is itself always already preceded by other signs, and constituted by them. This means that secondary signs, like texts repre­senting an a priori world, cease to be secondary. Instead, they become items in a world where signs can never be absent. Their 'meaning' (i.e., as a relation to that imagined sign-less world) becomes a phantom, a reification of an illusory presence.1

Derrida's ideas have been willingly adopted by theorists of theatre and performance. They have contributed to a conceptualization of new developments onstage in terms of a deconstruc­tion of the various conventions of dramatic theatre. In this line of thought, not speech but the text and conventions of the dramatic theatre have had to pay for it. Inspired by Derrida's analysis of the opposition of speech as originating, self-confirming palpability versus writing as secondary, posterior activity, theorists have pointed out (and rejected) the illusory character of dramatic representation, opposing it instead to performance as a 'primary process'. Performance as primary

process is characterized as 'revealing what remains hidden behind symbolic mediation' (Feral) or presenting instead of representing, thus 'showing the real without mystification' (Pontbriand).

But wait a minute. Is this not exactly the kind of binary opposition Derrida argues against?

Derrida's deconstruction, so it seems, inspires Feral and Pontbriand (and many others with them) to reconfirm rather than deconstruct binary oppositions. In their texts, as Auslander (1997) observes, deferral and displacement, rather than questioning the immediate presence of performance, serve to safeguard it against the illusion of theatre. In fact, Feral and Pontbriand use Derrida to further the modernist urge for reduction to an essence; in the search for timeless and immediate presence they dress up Greenbergian modernist aesthetics in post­structuralist clothing. (Auslander 1997: 56). Doing so, they threaten to reiterate precisely those notions of directness and immediateness that Derrida is so eager to deconstruct.

What if we took Derrida one step further? What if we argued for a deconstructive reversal of Feral's definition of performance as the underside of theatre by saying: if performance is understood to be the underside of theatre, is it then also possible to understand theatre as the hidden underside of performance? What new understanding of the relationship between theatre and performance would follow? What possible understanding of what is at stake in the deconstruction of the teleological architecture (Lehmann) of dramatic theatre? What could this mean now that the influence of performance has been incorporated by the theatre to the extent that it has changed the whole notion of theatre, thus challenging the old opposition of theatre and performance? Could the distinction between theatre and performance still be useful here, but in a different way?

In what follows, I will perform such a decon­structive reversal, starting from Michael Fried's notorious article 'Art and Objecthood' (1968, originally 1967). This text was seminal in

1 See Jacques Derrida (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. D

ownl

oade

d by

[U

nive

rsity

of

Yor

k] a

t 01:

02 1

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

2 This is not to say that dramatic theatre necessarily aims at obscuring these points of view implied by what is represented on stage. Freedman (1991), for example, demonstrates how Shakespeare's plays question rather than confirm the implications of subjective points of view as they are part of the dramatic representation.

3 The term focalization was introduced by Gerard Genette to distinguish between two agents involved in the way events are represented in stories: the agent who 'narrates' and the agent who 'sees'. The concept was further developed by Mieke Bal upon whose work my use of the concept is based.

See Gerard Genette (1972) FigurelJ III, Paris: Seuil. Bal has demonstrated the usefu !ness of the concept of focalization for the analysis of both verbal and visual texts, in (among others) (1991) Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image OppolJition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and (1997) The Mottled Screen: Reading Prow,t Vi..wally, trans. Anna Louise Milne, Stanford: Stanford University Press. For an explanation of the theory of focalization, see especially 'Focalization' and 'Visual Stories' in Bal (1997) Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, pp. 142-74, and (2001) Looking in: the Art of Viewing G+B Arts International.

theorizing the point of view reflected by Feral and Pontbriand in exploring the difference between theatre and performance. Both of these authors refer to Fried's text. Both adopt his terminology in order to explain the intensities experienced in performance in terms of 'presentness' resulting from the deconstruction of dramatic representation, mediation and point of view characteristic of the theatre. I will confront their argument with a later text by Fried {1980) in which he, surprisingly, locates the origins of what he calls 'presentness' {as opposed to theatricality) in Diderot's theory of dramatic theatre. Here, Fried's theory is that it is not theatricality but the presentness associated with performance that is explained through reference to a historical theory of dramatic representation. As I will demonstrate, this opens up the possibility of an understand­ing of the presentness of performance not in terms of the absence or undoing of points of view {Feral) but as the effect of their remaining invisible. Furthermore, Fried's reading of Diderot suggests that the teleological architec­ture of dramatic theatre actually may be used to a similar end, namely, of absorbing {Fried) their audiences into an experience that erases the awareness of the relationship between what is seen and who is seeing, doing so by presenting­intentionally or unintentionally- the viewer with an address that responds to culturally and historically specific desires, expectations, presuppositions, and anxieties.2 Finally, Fried's later work illuminates the relationship between strategies of absorption {as represented by dramatic theatre and performance) and what might be called traces of metaphysical thinking in the field of vision, as well as the relationship between such traces of metaphysics in the field of vision and certain modernist traditions in art.

Whenever events are presented, they are always presented from within a certain 'vision.' A point of view is chosen, an angle -whether what are considered are 'real' historical facts or fictitious events. The narratological concept of

focalization describes the relationship between this vision and that which is 'seen.' Focalization is therefore comparable in many ways to perspective. But there are important differences. Perspective tends to focus attention only on what is seen and to direct attention away from the position from which things are seen. In this way the relation between the thing seen and the determinism inherent in where it is seen from is obscured. Focalization, on the other hand, describes the precise relationship between the subject viewing and the object viewed, as it is given within the particular construction of the visual, verbal or multimedia text.

Focalization, therefore, allows for a different approach to the question of points of view as they are contained in both theatre and performance, starting from: what kind of subjective point of view is implied by what is seen? How does that which is presented address a viewer as viewer? To what kind of desires, expectations, presuppositions does this address {intentionally or unintentionally) respond? This is an approach in line with a contemporary understanding of vision as an always already cultural and historical phenomenon. In this approach, the truth or immediateness of performance becomes a symptom rather than an ontological given; a symptom that indicates a match between the desires, expectations, presuppositions and anxieties that characterize an actual viewer and characteristics of the subject-position implied by what is seen. This match, and not the absence of any pre-given point of view, causes the jubilant experience of immediateness, directness, of being able to see it as it is.3

ART AND OBJECTHOOD

In 'Art and Objecthood' {1968), Fried argues strongly in favour of art that, as Feral puts it, undoes any pre-given points of view. Or, to be more precise, he argues against works of art that explicitly address the viewer. Such works, he says, simultaneously make the viewer aware of his or her position in relation to the work

so

, , " ,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Y

ork]

at 0

1:02

16

Oct

ober

201

4

c: 0 ·r .... ttl

N

•r

ttl u 0

u...

-c c: ttl

c: 0 ·r .... c. <-0

..c <(

51

seen, and of seeing itself as a process that takes time and involves the self as an embodied presence engaged in an interaction with the object seen. Such works he dismisses as 'theatrical'. Fried uses the notion of theatricality to criticize minimalism (or, as he calls it, 'literalist art') and to set up an opposition between the experience of minimalist works and that of modern art works that are characterized by instantaneousness and what he calls 'presentness.' 'Presentness is grace,' reads the final line of his text, for presentness lifts us above the perverted theatrical mode of being to which we are confined for most of our lives (Fried 1968:

147) . The explicitness with which a theatrical work

of art addresses the viewer makes the viewer a subject and establishes the experience of itself as something like that of an object, or as Fried wants to call it, of objecthood. This relationship is implied within the structure of a work, and as a result that work includes the viewer as part of a situation. 'It is, one might say, precisely this distancing that makeL. the beholder a subject and the piece in question ... an object' (Fried 1968: 126, italics in the text). Theatricality thus produces the beholder as subject, comparable to the way deixis functions to set up relationships in language.

The appearance of 'Art and Objecthood' in 1967 marks a turning point at which the emergence of minimalism and performance art gave rise to intense debates within the art world. In the visual arts, experiments with performance and theatricality inspired a rethinking of the presuppositions underlying modernist conceptions of art and the aesthetic experience. Here, theatricality and performance functioned as what Rosalind Krauss (1981: 240)

deemed an 'operational divide' alerting the viewer to the relational character of the art experience. The binary opposition of theatrical­ity and presentness, as introduced by Fried's essay, reflects the broader opposition of modernist and postmodernist positions that

were taking shape in art discourses at the time.

AFTER EFFECTS

Ever since its appearance, 'Art and Objecthood' has been subject to severe criticism. One might wonder to what extent the article itself is to blame for the vehemence of the attacks. In his 1997 review, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Fried's article, Philip Auslander observed that 'Fried's strident and intemperate tone, as well as his apparently virulent and under-explained anti-theatricalism, have made his article an easy target, especially for critics championing post-abstract art and post­modernist performance' (Auslander 1997: 49).

Fried's definition of theatricality gives rise to rather different interpretations and uses and is opposed to various 'others.' Theatricality can serve as a figure for an emerging post­modernism, threatening to an established modernism (Fried), but also as a figure for desiccated modernism against which an emergent postmodernism defines itself (Feral and Pontbriand). Theatricality became a polemical term both of condemnation (as exemplified by Fried's essay), and of praise (when used by supporters of postmodernism in the visual arts). For Fried, theatricality was the enemy of art, where art is understood from the perspective of Greenbergian modernism. Feral and Pontbriand argue, on very similar grounds, that theatricality is the enemy of art, where art is understood from the perspective of Derridean poststructuralism.4

Discussing the amazing flexibility of the concept of theatricality, Auslander reminds his readers of Rosalind Krauss, who observes that 'theatre', in Fried's essay, is an empty term whose role it is to set up a system founded upon the opposition between itself and another term (Auslander 1997: 52). Krauss calls this other term the 'nontheatrical' (1987: 62).

Auslander adds to this that in Fried's historical account the nontheatrical is clearly modernism.

4 Fried's anti-theatrical prejudice is not directed against the theatre per se. In Fried's usage the term 'theatricality' does not denote the essence, or even a quality, of the theatre as an art form. Indeed, Fried even mentions some theatre makers as being engaged in the same battle against theatricality as are the modernist arts, citing Artaud and Brecht as examples. Instead, Fried uses theatricality to describe 'the wrong sort of consciousness of an audience,' as he put it in 1987, reviewing his 1967 essay (Fried 1987' 57l-

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Y

ork]

at 0

1:02

16

Oct

ober

201

4

I agree with Krauss (and Auslander) that in Fried's essay theatricality is used to set up a binary opposition. In this opposition theatricality is clearly the negative pole. However, it seems to me that what is empty is not theatricality but its opposite. Fried uses almost all of the thirty-one pages of his essay to explain what he means by theatricality. This explanation is not always consistent- it raises many questions and is open to different interpretations. It is not always clear whether theatricality is a quality of a work, or an effect produced in the interaction between a work and a beholder, or a sensibility, either as something expressed in a work or by a beholder. Despite these confusions in Fried's conception of theatricality, if something has to be called empty, it is the opposite term- and this emptiness contributes to its status as the absolute. This opposite term he defines time and again as that which is not theatrical. Only in his later work does this term get a name: ab.Mrption. In this later work, the opposition between theatricality and absorption functions as an act of discernment between two possible modes of relationship between painting and viewer, rather than theatricality as a relation­ship versus presentness as the absence of such a relationship. This is a possibility already indicated in his 'Art and Objecthood,' a possibility that is however literally pushed to the margin, in a footnote.

In footnote number four, Fried takes issue with Greenberg's conception of modernism in painting as progressive development, fuelled by an empirical search for the 'irreducible working essence of art and the separate arts.' This progression consists of seeking paintings' own formal essence through the rejection of the 'dispensable, unessential' conventions of its own tradition, as well as elements of the other arts. Although Fried adopts Greenberg's idea of modernism, he also attempts to embed the successive developments in painting within the historical moments that they appear. He writes:

[T]he crucial question is not what these minimal and, so to speak, timeless conditions are, but rather what, at a given moment, is capable of compelling conviction, of succeeding as painting. This is not to say that painting hal! no essence; it i.A to claim that essence - i.e., that which compels conviction- is largely determined by, and therefore changes continually in response to, the vital work of the recent past.

(Fried 1968: 123-1:z4, italics in the text)

In this footnote, Fried rewrites Greenberg's timeless essences into effects on a viewer at a particular time and place, and turns the development of modern art into a continuous search for new strategies to compel conviction. Fried's account of the instantaneity of modern art thus puts the modernism he inherited from Greenberg into a temporal perspective, a perspective with which he does not seem to feel completely comfortable. Although he wants to make Greenberg's account of modernism more historical by building into it the idea that the essence of painting is historically contingent, he appears to be repulsed by art that he perceives as providing the viewer with an experience of such temporal contingency. This becomes the theme of his later work on the beginnings of the modern tradition in French painting.

ABSORPTION

The central theme of Fried's Ab1>orption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot is the relation between painting and viewer in some of the most significant French paintings of the middle and late eighteenth century. Fried points out that in this period the relationship between painting and viewer becomes increasingly problematic. A certain tension makes itself felt between, on the one hand, painting as an object produced to represent something for a viewer, in other words, a representation, and, on the other hand, an uneasiness with the very condition of repre­sentation. Fried refers to the moment that this paradox appears as 'a momentous event, one of

52

"' "' "' ....,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Y

ork]

at 0

1:02

16

Oct

ober

201

4

c:: 0

+­ru N ·r

ru u 0

LL

"'CJ

c:: ru

c:: 0

+-0..

0

"' .0

<(

53

the first in the series of losses that together constitute the ontological basis of modern art' (Fried 1980: 61). This loss inaugurated a continuous search for representational strategies that direct attention away from the actual presence of a viewer.

In the early and mid 1750s this effect was achieved, for example, by depicting people sleeping, dreaming, reading or involved in other activities demanding their complete and undivided attention. These could be individuals but also compositions of more than one person all absorbed in the same activity. To demonstrate the effect of these (collective) states of absorption, Fried refers to descriptions like the one quoted below, describing the impact made by Un De..Minateur d'apre.A le Mercure de

M. Pigalle by Chardin in 1753:

How can one not be strongly moved by the truth, by the naivete of Mr. Chardin's paintings? His figures are said not to be clever people- fine. They are not graceful- fine. But on the other hand, do they not all have their own action? Are they not completely caught up in it? Take for example the replica of his draughtsman that he has exhibited: people maintain that the heads are vague and lack precision. And yet, through this lack of precision, the attention of both figures is apparent; one must, it seems to me, become attentive with them.

(Abbe Garrigues de Froment, quoted in Fried 1980: 13, my italics)

This description by Abbe Garrigues de Froment testifies as to how the characters depicted in Chardin's paintings function as internal focalizor.A. They present an address to a viewer, and this address can, again like deixis, be understood in terms of the setting up of positions. Yet, here the viewer is invited to take up the position not of the 'you' addressed but the position of the T that these internal focalizors represent, and to direct one's attention in such a way as to 'become attentive with them'.

Focalization helps me to understand the absorptive qualities of Chardin's paintings in terms of taking up a position as a subject of

vision. This subject of vision does not refer to an actual individual viewer, or to a subject represented in or by what is seen. Instead, it refers to a subject position implied within the visual address presented to a viewer. This position mediates the relationship between an actual viewer and what is seen. Focalization describes the relationship between this subject position and that which is seen. Absorption, then, describes the context in which the viewer takes up the position or point of view presented to him or her, and does so without giving it a second thought. The effect achieved is in a way similar to 'taking up' the position of a character represented on stage or empathizing with a performer convincingly presenting him or her 'self'. The result is a sense of directness, closeness and immediacy. We are invited, momentarily, to forget the relationship between ourselves and the other we are seeing. It is as if we experience directly what the other feels, seeing the world through his or her eyes. The description of Abbe Garrigues de Froment also testifies to the relationship between such a mode of looking and notions of truth and believ­ability. This becomes even more evident in Fried's description of a second strategy of achieving absorption, where he explicitly opposes this truth-effect to theatricality.

DRAMA AS A STRATEGY TO

DE-THEATRICALIZE BEHOLDING

In Ab.Aorption and Theatricality, Fried distin­guishes between three successive strategies aimed at achieving absorption. In the beginning, all that was needed was to depict characters who were themselves absorbed. By the first half of the 176os, however, having become too visible as a device, this composi­tional practice lost its power to compel conviction. At that moment, the recognition that paintings are made to be seen, and therefore presuppose the existence of a viewer, led to the demand for the actualization of the presence of the viewer in a way comparable to the manner in which perspective actualizes this presence

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Y

ork]

at 0

1:02

16

Oct

ober

201

4

5 Fried refers to Diderot's Saloru (11975] Saloru I, 2nd edn, [196ol Saloru II, [1963l Saloru III, eds Jean Seznec and jean Adhemar, and [1977l Saloru IV, ed. Jean Seznec, Oxford: Oxford University Press) and his OeuvreA eAthetiqueA ([1966] ed. Paul Verniere, Paris, includes £ntretieru Aur le fi/..6 nature/, Di.AcourA de Ia poeAie dramatique, £uai.A AurIa peinture, and PerueeA detacheeA AurIa peinture). My text is based on Fried's reading of these texts.

6 See, for example, Saloru I (64), II (197), IV (167, 359). As Fried points out, by Diderot's time the word the'dtral had, in addition to its meaning pertaining to the theatre, the pejorative one of a mode of action or expression which 'is suitable only for the theatre.' But it is only in Diderot's writings on drama and painting that the maniere and the the'dtral are in effect defined in terms of a positing of a beholder (see Fried 1989: 218-19).

7 Artifact, Ballet in 4 parts. Choreography: William Forsythe. Music: Johann Sebastian Bach and Eva Crossman-Hecht. Staging, lighting and costumes: William Forsythe. Premiere: 5 December 1984, Ballett Frankfurt, Frankfurt.

through presenting the viewer with a composition that signifies his or her absence. At this point, Fried brings in Diderot.S

In Diderot Fried finds an historical predecessor to his notion of theatricality as the explicit address to a viewer, and also for his anti-theatrical prejudice. According to Diderot nothing is more damaging to the act of persuasion than when a painter's dramatu per.llonae- or dramatu per.llonae on stage- seem by virtue of the character of their actions and expressions to evince even a partial conscious­ness of being seen. When this happens, the figures depicted will appear mannered and false, their actions and expressions will be seen, not as natural signs of intention or emotion, but merely as grimaces- feigned posings addressed to the beholder. The work then, far from projecting a convincing image of the world, becomes what Diderot deprecatingly called un

theatre: 'an artificial construction whose too obvious designs on its audience made it repugnant to persons of taste' (Fried 1990: 7l-6

And while 'le theatral' in Diderot's writings refers to the consciousness of being beheld and is synonymous with falseness, drama appears as a means to direct attention in a way that prevents theatricality. To be more precise, drama for Diderot is a means of de-theatricaliz­ing beholding, to guarantee the absoluteness of the picture or representation on stage relative to the viewer.

Central to Diderot's aesthetics is the tableau, and his dramatic theory has to be understood in this context. Drama, for him, is a means of constituting internal unity among the elements seen. As a result these elements become a separate segment, separated from their surroundings. In this Diderot's conception of drama is comparable to Lehmann's ideas of framing (Lehmann 1999). But Diderot's account has something to add to Lehmann's, because Diderot draws attention to the relationship between an act of framing and the point of view. In a well-composed tableau, all elements are brought together in accordance with a single,

unifying point of view. The viewing point implied within the tableau functions as an external focalizor. Like the vantage point in a perspectival drawing, this position of the subject of external focalization does not mark any position within the representation. Instead, it marks the position from where the world is seen as it should be seen. Its invisible logic, however, can be made visible. Here, William Forsythe's Artifact can serve as an example.

STEP INSIDE

In Artifact7 several figures on stage act as internal focalizors, directing the attention of the audience by means of visual signs like arms and looks pointing in specific directions. Focaliza­tion also happens through what might be called bare-bones dramatic construction. At the beginning of the performance, a woman in a Louis XIV-like period dress comes forward, claps her hands, and the music starts to play. Slowly, she approaches the audience, throwing kisses, making theatrical gestures of invitation and honouring the audience with elegant bows. Her dress brings to mind the Baroque theatre organized in relation to the vision of the king, and her salutation is certainly worthy of a king. With it, she performs the address called for by the architecture of a Baroque theatre. Having reached the front of the stage, she halts, stretches up, looks at the audience and says, 'Step inside'. The woman thus literally becomes an internal focalizol"; explicitly inviting the audience to do what many performances implicitly assume, namely to abandon the observer's position in the auditorium by imagi­natively projecting yourself into the world on stage. This makes her invitation an ambiguous gesture. It threatens to undermine what it pretends to instalL For to project successfully into and become absorbed by the onstage world depends on the seeming absence of just that relationship that is highlighted by her performance. With her invitation she highlights the theatricality of the situation. She reaffirms that this is theatre by performing the critical

54

OJ

ro ro

ro

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Y

ork]

at 0

1:02

16

Oct

ober

201

4

c 0 .,

+-1'0

N

1'0

u 0

u..

"0

c 1'0

c 0

+-0.

t­

o

.£l

<{

55

gesture of Brechtian theatre, closing the gap separating stage and audirnrium in order to create distance .

The woman literally invites the audience to see what happens from her point of view, to step into her shoes and see it as she does. At first, she seems to be self-confident, not to say self· satisfied. Her text, entirely made up of constative statements and orders, gives her an air of authority. Her voice, amplified by a microphone, is loud and clear and surrounds the audience from all sides. After a while she is joined by a man dressed in a late-twentieth· century suit. The relationship between the man and the woman is constructed along the lines of various binary oppositions: man/woman, history/present, extravert/introvert, constative/interrogative and distance/closeness. The man, being a true antagonist, sets out to undermine the woman as wisdom broker. While the woman stays stationary, the man walks around, asking questions like 'Which?' and 'When?' and 'Where?' and 'How?' through a megaphone. The megaphone, like the microphone, amplifies his voice, but instead of suggesting omnipresence, the source of the sound is firmly located in relation to those whom he addresses with it. Furthermore, the megaphone amplification does not obscure the distance between speaker and his audience but stresses it. With his vocal address coming from different angles he undermines the totalizing effect of her voice.

Apart from the internal focalizing positions presented by the man and the woman, the performance as a whole also presents the viewer with a position in relation to what is seen. Artifact demonstrates that for the viewer to take up this position and thus 'step inside,' the position needs to be marked by absence. The vision presented on stage can only appear to be simply 'there to be seen' while the viewer remains unaware of the way his or her seeing is mediated by the theatrical apparatus. When at one totally unexpected moment the safety curtain comes down, we are made sharply aware of our position in relation to what is seen and how this position mediates how we see what we see. Thus, Artifact exposes the perspective at work in the vision presented on stage. The piece shows how ways of staging support suggestions of visibility and accessibility of what is there to be seen on stage, and also how, as a result, the attention of the audience is directed in such a way that the viewer is unaware of what he or she does not see, and unaware of her or himself in relation to what is seen. When, after only a few moments, the safety curtain goes up again, the scene on stage is radically altered. Just before the curtain comes down, a whole group of dancers move simultaneously in a symmetrical composition. When the curtain goes up, the dancers are still moving as if nothing had happened. Their formation in space, however, is completely different. As is the case with film montage, the transformation from one situation

• Artwork by Maurice Bogaert

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Y

ork]

at 0

1:02

16

Oct

ober

201

4

to the next remains invisible. This device is repeated several times.

The new composition of dancers in space no longer respects the conventions of visibility and frontality typical of ballet. Sometimes the dancers face the back wall or the wings. Sometimes compositions are partially or wholly invisible because they take place in the wings. At some point the dancers lie on their backs and perform their movements towards the ceiling. The grouping of the dancers in space is still a unitary composition and in that sense comparable to Diderot's tableau. However, the point of view implied by this tableau no longer matches the desires, presuppositions and expec­tations of the viewer seated in the auditorium. The perspective presented by the performance becomes visible as sign and loses its power to evoke absorption. It becomes theatrical.

POINT OF VIEW

The concept of point of view is central not just to Diderot's vision of painting and drama but to his epistemology. As he writes '(t]he universe, whether considered as real or as intelligible, has an infinity of points of view from which it can be represented, and the number of possible systems of human knowledge is as great as that of points of view' (Oevre-6 Complete-6, VIII, 211,

quoted in Fried 1980: 216). For Diderot the concept of intelligibility seems to entail the concept of point of view: something may be said to be intelligible only from one or another of an infinite number of points of view. This means that, for Diderot, the claim to understand a given phenomenon, or to recognize its truth, involves accepting the responsibility, not just for the explanation itself, but also for the point of view implicit in that explanation. In this respect Diderot's observation links up remarkably well with postmodern, feminist and postcolonial critique of the unified and supposedly universal point of view implied by the grand narratives. Such critiques have taught us that the deconstruction of this unitary point of view does not result in the absence of point of

view or perspective per .6e, but rather in a multi· plication of viewpoints.

Diderot makes another important observation with regard to intelligibility, vision and point of view, namely that in order to appear as truthful, the points of view implied within visions of 'how it is' must not appear too obvious. Otherwise, the effect will not be truthfulness but artificial­ity. Diderot thus presents an account in which what is experienced as truthfulness is in fact the effect of the invisibility of very specific points of view, rather than that of an absence or undoing of a point of view. Here again the comparison with perspective is helpful. Perspec­tival images present a viewer with a very specific reading on what is there to be seen. Moreover, the promise given in a perspectival image is that by taking up this position, the viewer is granted an 'objective' image of how things are, independent of any specific viewing position. And although today the technique of linear perspective has lost its power to compel conviction, having become all too visible as a technique originating from a specific time and place, it appears to be much harder to acknowledge the historical character of the promise given in perspective: that of an objective world existing independently of our subjective point of view. Absorption as a strategy of persuasion plays into precisely this promise of metaphysical plenitude.

Importantly, absorption does not refer to an ahistorical quality of-a work but is the effect of the interaction between a work of art produced at a particular time and place and an historical and culturally specific viewer. The eighteenth· century paintings Fried discusses may have rather different effects on twenty-first-century viewers or on viewers from a cultural background that differs in important respects from that of the French upper-class audience for whom they were originally intended. Fried, therefore, refers to the accounts of eighteenth­century art critics to point out how and why these paintings, at the moment of their production, were conceived of as absorptive. He

s6

Ill

Ill

"' Ill

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Y

ork]

at 0

1:02

16

Oct

ober

201

4

c: 0

.... ru N

ru u 0

u...

-o c: ru

c: 0

.... c.. '-0

.J:l

<(

57

also uses these critical responses to demonstrate how strategies aiming at absorption eventually lost their power to achieve absorptive effects, were denounced as theatrical, and had to be replaced by new strategies that were not yet visible as such. Who has not experienced this effect when again seeing moments of great performance from, say, ten years ago? Suddenly we start seeing the historical and cultural specificity of what, before, seemed so self-evident, convincing, even 'natural'. Times have changed, and so have we; we have seen other - new - work and, as a result of this, have gradually changed our ways of looking. No longer able to a>mpel conviction, these older works now appear as theatrical.

This does not mean, however, that 'theatrical' is simply that which has outlived its efficacy. The conceptual pair of theatricality and absorption itself gets its meaning within a particular cultural and historical context. Its meaning is part and parcel of a broader discourse that entails all kinds of assumptions about what will count as a convincing represen­tation of 'how it is'. What Diderot calls for, as Fried points out, 'is at the one and the same time the creation of a new sort of object- the fully realized tableau- and the constitution of a new sort of beholder- a new 'subject'- whose innermost nature would consist precisely in the conviction of his absence from the scene of representation' (Fried 1980: 104, italics in the text). Surprisingly, drama here appears as a means to do precisely what Fried earlier, in 'Art and Objecthood' dismissed as theatrical, namely the setting up of a relationship between work and viewer. But, importantly, drama appears as a means to set up this relationship in such a way that the relation itself remains obscured, as a result of which the effect is the opposite of theatricality, namely absorption. That is, for both Fried and Diderot, compelling conviction requires the ability to direct attention away from the viewer in relation to the work of art. For both Fried and Diderot, to compel conviction means to convince the viewer of the non-

relational character of what is seen, and this then is connected to notions of truth and believ­ability (and opposed to theatricality understood as artificiality and falseness).

Precisely this non-relationality was questioned with the emergence of minimal ism, when theatricality started being used as an 'operational divide' (Krauss) to expose a different kind of truth: the truth of the relation­ship between what is seen and the subjective point of view from where it is seen the way it is seen. From a relational point of view the question is not whether a point of view is absent or not, but how focalization mediates in the relationship between the visual address presented by a painting or performance and an actual viewer as subject. Seen this way, theatri­cality and absorption both describe the effects of such mediation, where theatricality indicates a situation in which the viewer is addressed in a way that highlights (aspects of) focalization, whereas absorption indicates a situation in which such mediation remains invisible. From a relational point of view, neither absorption nor theatricality indicates truth in the sense of some kind of 'givenness' independent from a particular point of view. Instead, each in its own way, theatricality and absorption can alert us to elements of subjective 'investment' in what appear to us as convincing (re)presentations of 'how it is'- with the world or with someone on stage. They alert us, that is, to the relationship between our subjective desires, presuppositions, fears and anxieties and the way these are or are not met by the visual address presented to us.

ABSORPTIVE ENCOUNTERS OF

A THIRD KIND

For Diderot, drama has an additional purpose to that of making what is seen readable in the service of a single goal, what Lehmann in his account of the transition from dramatic to post­dramatic theatre describes as telo.J.. In Diderot, drama also appears as a means of compelling conviction: the conviction that what the viewer is looking at is organized according to a logic

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Y

ork]

at 0

1:02

16

Oct

ober

201

4

8 For this reason Barthes compares the tableau as it functions in Diderot to a fetish-object (Barthes 1977' 71). For Barthes, Diderot is the theorist of the dialectics of desire as it is at work in representation. Representation, as Barthes points out, is not defined by imitation and therefore cannot be understood from the relation between the representation and the reality it is supposed to represent. Instead '[t]he "Organon of Representation" ... will have as its dual foundation the sovereignty of the act of cutting out [decoupage] and the unity of the subject of that action' (Barthes 1977: 69-70). This duality, and not mimesis, is what constitutes representation. Here the tableau functions as the fetish-object where displacement seems to come to a halt in an image that can be seized by the eye.

that appears convincing as a 'law of nature' rather than as human invention. 8 Drama is not the only means by which to achieve this effect; absorption can be evoked in different ways using different strategies. What works and what does not work have to be understood in relation to a culturally and historically specific viewer responding to the address presented. Diderot's account of a third strategy of absorption as used by painters of his time helps explore these 'natural' ways of compelling conviction through what Fried terms the 'pastoral conception' of absorption. This strategy is related to landscape painting, and it seems that there may well be ways of relating it to the 'textual landscapes' on the contemporary post-dramatic stage as welL

Lehmann introduces the term 'textual landscapes' to describe profound changes in aesthetic logic resulting from the transition from dramatic to post-dramatic theatre. He char­acterizes the logic at work in dramatic theatre as teleological and logocentric, and he compares this logic to that of perspective in painting. Both perspective and drama guide the audience, direct their attention and help them to see and read what is there in the right way. Both perspective and drama present the audience with a specific point of view in relation to what is seen. On the post-dramatic stage, such perspective is deconstructed, perverted or completely absent. As a result, the audience is granted more freedom to wander around and 'see for themselves'. A 'landscape effect' is achieved by means of strategies of defocusing that result from the deconstruction of fixed meaning and unity.

Similarly, the pastoral conception of absorption results from paintings that do not position the viewer by means of a clear focus. Instead, the viewer is free to 'wander around'. This fiction, according to Fried, is 'conspicu­ously at odds with the doctrine of radical exclusion of the beholder that I have argued his [Diderot's] writings expound' (Fried 1980: n8).

Diderot describes these absorptive paintings of the third kind as if he is actually walking

around in a landscape. In this description, the relationship between viewer and what is seen is not denied but very much present. But who is actually present here, and in what way?

It is only after many pages of description that the reader realizes that Diderot is in fact talking about a painting. This is a critic truly absorbed in the work of art! Absorbed, yet in a different way. Diderot is not absent, as was the case with the other paintings. He seems to be very much present, and describes himself as looking around freely, engaging with the landscape. However, it is exactly the character of his presence and engagement that, as I will argue, is key to the understanding of what absorption might mean here.

What is absent from Diderot's descriptions is precisely his interaction with the painting lU

painting, as well as his physical presence as viewer in relation to the painting as object seen. The T in Diderot's text interacts with the landscape represented, not with the painting. This T is completely absorbed into the painting, in the sense that for this 'I,' the landscape does not appear as a representation but rather as a real landscape that he has entered by stepping into the painting. This is not to say that Diderot did not know that he was looking at a painting. What I want to draw attention to is how, according to his own description, his experience of being absorbed in the painting involves the absence of awareness of the painting as repre­sentation. Again, tn.rthfulness equals the seeming absence of a relationship between viewer and what is seen, the absence of awareness of representation qua representation so typical of the 'subjectless' representations of the world of modern science. And again, this truth-effect implies a very specific- yet invisible -point of view, rather than the absence of any point of view.

Here it is not the well-composed tableau that brings his desire to a halt. The effect of absorption is not achieved through fixing the viewer in place as in perspectival painting or in the dramatic model of absorptive painting. On

OJ

rD

rD

rD --,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Y

ork]

at 0

1:02

16

Oct

ober

201

4

<: 0

·r ..... IU

N

·r

IU u 0

u..

"C

<: IU

<: 0 ·r ..... c.. '--0 VI

.0

<(

59

the contrary, Diderot's description testifies as to how it is in this case precisely a lack of focus that supports the illusion of unproblematic and direct access to what is there to be seen. This lack of focus seems to respond to a longing to exceed the limitations of his temporal, spatial, and physical being and does so by presenting the viewer with a subject-position similar to the Cartesian disembodied 1/eye. The T in Diderot's text seems to prove Descartes remark that 'it is certain that I am truly distinct from my body, and I can exist without it' (Descartes 1977: 235). Liberated from the bodily locus that is Diderot, Diderot can wander around freely and see everything 'as it is', experie"Tice the landscape seen in the painting as a spectacle before his own vision.

ENEMY OR DOUBLE?

Looking at Forsythe's Artifact one more time, it seems that it might now be possible to read the 'drama' taking place between the two speaking characters as a theatrical response to where I began this text, with Barbara Freedman's question: is deconstruction the enemy of theatre or its double? In Artifact, a man and a woman are involved in what seems to be an ongoing series of attempts to present the audience with a truthful account of what is happening on stage. But what does this mean? Is showing it 'as it is' done by means of the (historical) theatricality of the woman, who shows us the act of showing it 'as it is?' Or is showing it 'as it is' achieved by the man who, with his deconstructive interventions, casual clothes, and down played acting sets out to undermine her self-confident and highly theatrical gestures? The man in the late-twentieth-century suit, who sets out to look for forgotten stories and asks questions, who literally draws attention to the forgotten 'other face' or 'under side' of the theatre by opening a trapdoor in the stage floor and inspecting the wings?

The man and the woman, in their attempts to make sense of what is going on on stage, represent conflicting points of view. The woman

represents the Cartesian cogito with a transcen­dental vantage point from where everything can be seen 'as it is_' The man presents a postmodern critique of these universalist pretensions as they characterize her point of view. He sets out to question and deconstruct her vision of the world. Their conflict reaches a climax in the third act when the woman starts to knock over pieces of the cardboard set showing perspectival drawings of theatrical space_ In the fourth act, these drawings are placed side by side on the back wall of the theatre, simultaneously presenting differing representations of theatrical space as seen from various but equal points of view.

What will count as a convincing manifesta­tion of 'how it is' for the man will most probably not be recognized as such by the woman, and vice versa. Each character frames what is 'there to be seen' in a different way and according to a different logic_ Nevertheless, both the explicit theatricality of the woman and the undermining gestures of the man are shown to be driven by a similar longing, a longing which Artifact recognizes as the motivating force behind both drama and its deconstruction. The goal of this quest is not represented by something within the fictional world. There is no riddle to be solved or princess to be won. The goal is discovering and showing 'how it is'. In their attempts to achieve this, the performers make use of a limited selection of words. In the program, these words are printed accompanied by dictionary definitions, as if to ensure their meaning. In the performance, however, reference becomes something of a desperate plea, a demand to the sign to convey Presence, Being, Meaning- which the sign simply will not deliver.

In showing the man and the woman as rivals, as antagonist and protagonist, Artifact presents theatre and its deconstruction as two different manifestations of the same quest. Such a relationship between theatre and its deconstruc­tion is at odds with accounts of deconstruction in the theatre in which deconstruction is

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Y

ork]

at 0

1:02

16

Oct

ober

201

4

9 This reading of Derrida corresponds to john Caputo in his (1997) The Prayer A and TearA of ]acquM Derrida: Religion without Religion, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. I want to thank Petra Halkes for bringing this reading to my attention in her dissertation (2ooo) AApiring to the Landuape: InvMtigationA into the Meaning of Nature in Work.\ by Wanda Koop, Stephen HutchingA, SUAan Feindel and £/eanor Bond, as well as in the inspiring discussions we had about her dissertation.

understood to be opposed to presenting points

of view. But it is not at all at odds with Derrida's

own account of the way teloL. is inseparable from

our involvement in the world that surrounds us.

In Limited Inc (1993), he writes:

This teloA or 'fulfillment' is constitutive of inten­tionality: it is part of its concept. Intentional movement tends towards this fulfilment. This is the origin or the fatality of that 'longing for metaphysical plenitude' which, however, can also be presupposed, described, or lived without the romantic, even mystical pathos sometimes associated with these words.

(Derrida 1993: u1)

Longing is the movement of intentionality

and therefore a structural and ineradicable

aspect of intentionality itself. It is a structural

part of the way we relate to what we are

confronted with. As such, it is an integral part of

the project of deconstruction. But this longing

should never be confused with its cultural

expressions, which are so often, as Derrida

writes, tinged with romantic and even mystical

pathos. How this longing manifests itself in

cultural articulations, and what may appear as

telos giving direction to this longing, is

culturally determined. It is therefore never

beyond any point of view. Furthermore, what we

are yearning for can never be adequately

represented. Herein lies the fatality of theatre's

longing, and one of deconstruction's most

important lessons.9

REFERENCES

Auslander, Philip (1997) From Acting to Perfonnance, London and New York: Routledge.

Derrida, Jacques (1993) Limited Inc, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

BJorn, John J. (1977) Rene DeAcarteA. The £Mential WritingA, trans., with introduction and conceptual index, John J. BJorn, New York: Harper and Row.

Diamond, Elin (1996) 'Introduction', in Elin Diamond (ed.) Perfonnance and Cultural PolitiCJ>, London and New York: Routledge, pp.1-13.

Feral, Josette (1982) 'Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified', Modern Drama, XXV, 170-80.

Freedman, Barbara (1991) Staging the Gaze: PoM­modernwm, PAychoanalyAiA and ShakeApearean Comedy, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Fried, Michael (1968) 'Art and Objecthood', in Gregory Battcock (ed.) Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, pp. 116-47.

- (1980) AbAorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley and London: University of California Press.

- (1987) 'Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop', in Hal Foster (ed.) Dia Art Foundation, Di..\cUMioru in Contemporary Culture, Number One, Seattle: Bay Press, pp. 55-8.

Krauss, Rosalind (1981) PaMageA in Modern Sculpture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: MIT Press.

- (1987) 'Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop', in Hal Foster (ed.) Dia Art Foundation, Di..lcUMioru in Contemporary Culture, Number One, Seattle: Bay Press, pp. 59-64.

Lehmann, Hans-Thiestl.997l 'From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy', Perfonnance ReAearch, 2(1), 55-60.

- (1999) PoAtdramatwcheA Theater, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren.

Pontbriand, Chantal (1982) 'The Eye Finds No Fixed Point on Which to Rest .. .',Modern Drama, 25, 154-62.

6o

CD

(l)

(l)

ro ...,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Y

ork]

at 0

1:02

16

Oct

ober

201

4