Showing papers in "Substance in 2002"

Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language

Abstract: To define theatricality, or the specificity of the theater, is not only to attempt to define what distinguishes theater from other genres, but to define what distinguishes it from other kinds of spectacle-dance, performance art, or multi-media art. It is to bring the nature of theater itself into focus against a background of individual theatrical practices, theories of stage-play, and aesthetics. It is to attempt to find parameters shared by all theatrical enterprises from time immemorial. Although such a project may appear overly ambitious, its pertinence requires an attempt to establish such a definition. This article is such a step, seeking to establish points of reference for subsequent reflection. During the 20th century, the very foundations of theater were turned upside-down, as were those of other arts. What had been a clearly defined theatrical aesthetic at the end of the 19th century, outlining normative practice, was, during the 20th century, systematically reexamined. At the same time, stage practice began to distance itself from the text, assigning it a new place in the theatrical enterprise.2 Once under siege, the text was no longer able to guarantee the theatricality of the stage. Thus, it is understandable that those concerned began to question the specificity of the theatrical act itself, especially since this very specificity appeared to influence other stage practices as welldance, performance art, opera, and so on. The emergence of theatricality in areas tangentially related to the theater seems to have as a corollary the dissolution of the limits between genres, and of the formal distinctions between practices, from dance-theater to multi-media arts, including happenings, performance, and new technologies. The specificity of theater is more and more difficult to define. To the extent that the spectacular and the theatrical acquired new forms, the theater, suddenly decentered, was obliged to redefine itself.3 From that time on, its specificity was no longer evident. How then are we to define theatricality today? Should we speak of it in the singular or in the plural? Is theatricality a property that belongs uniquely to the theater, or can it also be found in the quotidian? As a quality-

The Politics of Discourse: Performativity meets Theatricality

Abstract: When discourses are in flux (of course from one point of view they always are in flux), in periods of unsettled meanings, political struggles exist at various sites of contestation. This productive dissonance is currently the state of play within discourses of performativity and theatricality. Their relationship to each other, and their meanings and uses within their own terms are equally in question. In this essay, I will argue that volatility within these discourses affords an opportunity for forging a new understanding of both their practices and of the consequences of their usages. Further, the identification of certain of these applications with specific nations or regions, what we might call "local struggles," enables a challenge to the limits of these discourses in light of an increasingly urgent imperative to rethink and resituate performance theory in relation to our contemporary transnational situation.

Nearly True: Forking Plots, Forking Interpretations: A Response to David Bordwell's "Film Futures"

Abstract: I would like to examine what is "nearly true." This phrase is not meant to characterize David Bordwell's exceptional essay, "Film Futures," which I would summarize with Orson Welles's film title, It's All True. However, since Welles never quite finished that film, perhaps I might supplement Bordwell's argument with a few thoughts about the matter of interpreting film, specifically, about interpreting what is "nearly true" in a plot. I believe that what is "nearly true" is an important kind of "fork" in a plot and has an impact on a film's future, that is, how a film acquires value after having been seen.

The Resistance to Theatricality

Abstract: So widespread and so productive has been this interpenetration of the formerly fairly discrete fields of theater studies and the social sciences that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in the study of social phenomena today metaphors of theater and performance are so common that they have become almost transparent, while conversely, in the study of theater, a similar critical dominance is currently held by the metaphors and the topoi of social analysis. Useful and productive as this cross-fertilization has been, it has not been without cost, for of course any new interpretative grid, any new critical paradigm, inevitably brings some distortion along with its clarifications, and when the clarifications have been as stimulating and productive as those resulting from the growing convergence of the analytical methodologies of theater and performance studies and of the social sciences, then the distortions involved are very likely to be overlooked in the general enthusiasm over important new insights.

Walking and Other Choreographic Tactics: Danced Inventions of Theatricality and Performativity

Abstract: Imagine we are walking along the downtown streets of a major North American city, not strolling in the manner of the flaneur nor marching resolutely towards an urgent rendez-vous. Eventually, the goal is to arrive at two sites, not far from one another, called "performativity" and "theatricality." But we can't get there by taxi, and besides, we have enough time to enjoy the walk, to note the pedestrians around us, to perceive the ebb and flow of bodies along the sidewalk, to register the criss-crossing of trajectories that bodies accomplish so deftly at street corners. Mid-block, we walk into something that strikes a slightly odd note: a large, young man hovering behind an elderly shopper passes us just as we are overtaken by a short, young woman tailing a tall businessman. Each follows closely the rhythm, step, and posture of their unaware leader. Then, they stop, turn to face the street or gaze skywards, and adopt the pose of someone waiting. They check their watches; they shift from side to side. We scan the street. They are not alone. Bodies situated at irregular intervals stand waiting; then each falls in behind a new passer-by, exaggerating ever so slightly the demeanor of their new leader.

Theatricality: From Oral Traditions to Televised "Realities"

Abstract: Any concept of theatricality should be based upon the structural essentials of the specific cultural production of theater, in its most comprehensive sense. Theater is a type of social communication whose specificity is, first, the ostentatious display of audiovisual movements. The body's activities are their primary agency. This can manifest itself in innumerable forms. In oral societies, full-fledged theater occurs when a single body's facial expressions, utterances, gestures, and movements perform story-telling or praise-singing, demarcating and creating a particular space and a specific physical relationship with onlookers; the creative cooperation of several bodies is at the core of more complex theater forms. The presentation of bodies that interact in person is the most widespread, "classical" form of theater. Many types of theatrical performance employ and operate objects and techniques available at the time in order to represent the bodies' actual interaction, and to objectify their creative practice. Thus we see the use of puppets, marionettes, and of shadows in "pre-modern" and "modern" societies, and state-of-the-art audiovisual technologies in our time. Other forms combine both modes of theatrical production. Our attraction to theater rests on the ostentatious presentation of creative human skills, the demonstration of physical abilities, the intelligent timing of activities and the making of specific spaces; this includes the handling of technologized (cinematic, videotaped, computerized) movements, and screening the flow of audio-visually mediated images in contemporary "live theater." The staging of such abilities is the necessary-perhaps even primary-source of theater's aesthetic pleasure. Second, as communicative practice, the presentation of such movements, the interaction of bodies displaying skills and manifesting creativity, is inherently a symbolic action. In other words, performance always tends to be a semiotic process. The participants can denote and connote, and thus can refer to phenomena that are very different from the actual audiovisual movements. It is this potentiality that many discourses have established as the defining feature of theater. This applies not only to the western ? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2002 17 SubStance #98/99, Vol. 31, nos. 2 & 3, 2002

Theatricality from the Performative Perspective

Abstract: Theatricality versus Reality For a number of theater critics and scholars, the term "theatrical" still bears the imprint of Diderot's Paradox.' Consequently, criticism and research grounded in the French philosopher's conception of theater contribute to further widen the chasm between theory and practice, for Diderot's view implies disregarding the process-oriented nature of performance while emphasizing the duality between concepts such as the real and the fictitious, spontaneity and structure, the concrete and the abstract. Such a view is based on the premise that there is an unbridgeable division between body and mind, instinct and intellect, emotion and reason, and it therefore necessarily excludes the performer's perspective, which reconciles in practice what seems paradoxical in theory. Hence, paradox-derived approaches build upon Diderot's assumptions about performance, which oppose living and acting by pitting the spectator's presumed honesty and vulnerability against the actor's alleged powers of deception and dissimulation. Ironically, although they are founded on the conviction that head and heart can function separately, such approaches tend to generate passionate and emotional academic interpretations which, in turn, endow theater studies with a whimsical subjectivity, ranging from fantasy to superstition. In his Dictionnaire Encycloptdique du Thedtre, Michel Corvin evokes a fascination for theatricality in which delight and anxiety seem inextricably intertwined:

"That Fabric of Times": A Response to David Bordwell's "Film Futures"

Abstract: David Bordwell's essay, "Film Futures," reveals Bordwell's remarkable capacity to recognize the underlying patterns and structures on which films depend to make their narrative worlds. Like an Aristotle of film, he sees these patterns, names them, and hypothesizes about why they exist. In this piece, Bordwell is interested perhaps most broadly in what can be "held in mind," or how we make sense of a narrative, and in particular in how we hold in our minds how a film forks or proliferates multiple alternative futures. Bordwell delineates over the course of the essay seven conventions on which forking-path films rely. His subsequent structural analysis of how those conventions shape the particular films that portray them demonstrates Bordwell's "holding in mind" how these films make sense to him. In his final remarks, he comes to postulate that the more future alternatives a film presents (i.e., the more radical its potential portrayal of the future), the more it must rely on "cohesion devices," "repetition," and "schemas for causality and time and space" (22), (i.e., reminders, presumably, of what about each alternative has remained the same, even as the futures shift). Bordwell's closing claim highlights the thread that I think weaves its way throughout his argument: forking-path films are narratives that reflect the limits of what we can hold in mind or how we cognitively manage. One of the central problems of the piece is the uncovering of the "clues to the way forking-path narratives actually work and work upon us" (4). Bordwell uses "folk psychology" as the primary means to uncover and make sense of those clues because of his understanding of narratives to be essentially built upon "the ordinary processes we use to make sense of the world" (4). Folk psychology, in the essay's allusions to it, seems to carry with it an understanding of cognition that is fairly monolithic and quick to shut down alternatives. Bordwell's description of our film watching/ comprehending tendencies-to reason from a single cause, rely on first impressions, predict a particular rescue outcome because we desire itsuggests a cognitive portrait of the film viewer that makes us by nature

The Emperor's new clothes: The naked body and theories of performance

Abstract: In the past few decades, naked bodies have taken the stage to aggressively signal the power of theater and performance. In the experiments of The Living Theater and productions such as Dionysus in '69, as well as in much of the body art of the 1980s, and early 1990s, the naked body was presumed to organize a dramaturgical site from which both a political charge and a seductive promise could be launched. The body bared was perceived as enabling the stage and the social. Looking back at these naked bodies from the perspective of the new millennium, we can understand the hyperbolic proclamations of the body's significance as a kind of last hurraw of the capabilities of the flesh to establish public and civic powers as well as sovereign semiotic ones. However, rather than bathing in the rosyfingered dawn of a new age, as they imagined, these bodies were actually washing up onto the stage, like whales and dolphins now do on our beaches, to offer an image of their demise. As it turns out, they were prescient in their insistence. By the late 1990s, the body could no longer set the site for the generation of meaning; instead, it had become a theater of operations where medical, genetic, and virtual systems took it as their stage. Moreover, the attendant practices of theater, or performance, were challenged by the critical analogue of the virtual. Staging the naked body both provoked and was inscribed by revolutionary attitudes toward the gender and sexual systems it signified. Within the past decades, new theoretical and performative strategies concerning gender and sexual practices have redefined our understanding of how performance, even more, representation itself may mean. Moving alongside the parade of nudes, from Julian Beck to Tim Miller, we might review just how the notions of theatricality, performance, and performativity were formed, both on stage and in the culture at large. Hopefully, this close encounter of the three kinds will provide an understanding of how, in the late twentieth century, a revitalization of the sense of performance has signaled its demise.

Acting: The Quintessence of Theatricality

Abstract: Within the category of the dramatic arts, is it the immediate experience of the body of a human actor on stage that produces the distinctive feature of theater? Indeed, no other dramatic art, such as cinema, TV drama or puppet theater, equals such an experience. Even if we accept that in employing the body the ultimate aim is to decode the text inscribed on it-an aim shared by all dramatic media-direct experience nonetheless remains typical only of theater. Furthermore, in principle, there is no problem in defining a medium-meanings being the same-by its material carrier. It would appear, therefore, that there is no reason to reject the thesis that the direct experience of the body of the actor is typical of and, to use a somewhat controversial term, perhaps even "essential" to theater. The problem, however, exists nonetheless, and is three-fold: a) in acting, the body on stage fulfils at least two different functions: producing signs and carrying signs; b) a human body on a stage does not necessarily engage in acting; and c) not only human actors are engaged in acting. The question is, therefore, whether the presence of a human body on a stage, or acting itself is the sufficient and necessary condition of theater.

Lafayette's Children: The American Reception of French Liberalism

Abstract: In 1994, Princeton University Press launched with considerable fanfare an auspicious series of translations called "New French Thought," edited by Thomas Pavel, Professor of French at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Mark Villa of the Political Science and French Studies Departments at New York University (both recently transplanted to the University of Chicago) Pavel, the author of an earlier critique of structuralist and poststructuralist thought, and Lilla, best known until then for his book on Vico as an anti-modernist, were not coy about their agenda' Their aim was to introduce "the younger generation of philosophers, historians, and social commentators who represent the new liberal, humanistic bent of French intellectual life"2 In so doing, they hoped to break the stranglehold in the English-speaking world of what had come to be called "French Theory" in the quarter century after the events of 1968 Tacitly allied with the historian Tony Judt and the political philosophers Charles Larmore and Stephen Holmes, Pavel and Lilla boldly set out to compel the Zeit to find a new Geist (or rather the temps a new esprit), permitting us to recover from what they see as the dire effects of too much ill-digested Barthes, Blanchot, Bataille, Levi-Strauss, Lyotard, Debord, Foucault,Althusser, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Levinas, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe For there has been, they hasten to inform us, an alternative and healthier tradition of "continental philosophy" and post-1968 politics emanating from France that should now command our serious attention

Witnessing Woyzeck: Theatricality and the Empowerment of the Spectator

Abstract: Introducing the Witness By which analytical strategies can the specific and distinctive features of theatrical performances and performance events-what we usually refer to as their "theatricality"-be most fruitfully examined and analyzed? How can these features be isolated from the other features of such an event? This is no doubt a classical formalist or structuralist question-in line with the attempts to define the literary or aesthetic qualities of a verbal text, what the Russian Formalists termed its "literariness"-and it has in one way or another been the point of departure for most of the existing semiotic approaches to theater and performance studies as they developed, in particular during the 1980s. My aim here is to re-examine this issue on the basis of the notion of "witnessing" as a device used in performances, through which the spectator is "invited" to view the particular performance. I will argue that the notion of witnessing can serve as one (but certainly not the only) point of departure for understanding theatricality, enabling us to understand what makes a certain event theatrical. An examination and analysis of this notion will also enable us to establish an empirical basis for this specific aspect of theatricality. Furthermore, it is my hope that the analytical strategies introduced and employed here will confront the crisis, which the semiotic approaches to theater and performance have been grappling with for more than a decade, introducing a moral as well as an ideological perspective into the seemingly neutral arena of the theory of signs. One of the defining characteristics of a theatrical event is the fact that it takes place in the presence of spectators, in front of a live audience. What I wish to show here is that this basic situation, of a spectator watching a

Could the world become a stage? Theatricality and metaphorical structures

Abstract: The concept of theatricality has taken many forms during its history, and-perhaps because of this-its meaning may seem difficult to grasp when one is to make a theoretical approach to the field. Often theatricality shows itself as a metaphorical relationship between the theater and the world. The Shakespearean metaphor "all the world's a stage" (87) is an expression of this. With this as a point of departure, I will read some theatrical phenomena metaphorically, as "metaphorical structures," to see if the well developed theories on metaphor can help us better understand the concept of theatricality. The thesis of this paper can be summed up in the following analogy: theatricality relates to real life in the same way that the metaphor relates to literal language. Comparing mankind to marionettes directed by the Gods, Plato already saw similarities between the world and the stage (644-45, 803). This notion became even more popular throughout the Christian Middle Ages: the world is a theater, and God its director and spectator. According to Thomas Hobbes it is no more than an illusion to believe that there is any difference between expressing one's personality and playing a role. He reminds us that the word "person" is actually nothing but a dead metaphor, which originally-premetaphorically-meant "mask:"

The Fall of Theatricality in the Age of Modernity

Abstract: The above title' maintains that a breakdown has taken place within theatricality. So it would appear at any rate, from a post/late-modernist point of view.2 The aim of this article is to illustrate that this is the case. During the period 1890-1930 the same claim was made by a number of Modernist theater directors. The Russian theater figure Nicolas Nicolaievitch Evreinov posed the question of whether certain periods were more theatrical than others (1930). His opinion was that the Renaissance in England and Spain, and the French Rococo period were distinctly theatrical, while Evreinov's own time was the most de-theatricalized of them all: not even the theater itself was theatrical. Evreinov was not alone in this view of the

Repeating the Rhizome

Abstract: The concept of the rhizome, as articulated by Deleuze & Guattari in Mille Plateaux, offers us a way of thinking and theorizing hypertext1 within the new technologies. I would like to explore the creative implications of this concept and to suggest that with the coming of hypertext, the classical model of text as "arbre de connaissance" is more appropriately replaced by the rhizome, in order to "grow" a concept of differentiation.

French cultural studies : criticism at the crossroads

Abstract: Substance # 97, Vol. 31, no. 1, 2002 the “tortuous,” “exquisite” prose Hanson loves to read, it also fails to account for the decidedly non-decadent prose he now loves to—make that has to— write: boring if not nauseating prose I’d call style-free insofar as it represents not so much the critic’s unconscious as his repression of the erotic body in writing, his unfortunate unwillingness to play with language and form anymore. So I say, to hell with it. One final possible reason has nothing to do with either seriousness or sensuality. Most critics don’t try to write like Barthes because they know they can’t. Many don’t even though—like Hanson—they can, because they know they’ll be discredited as mere stylists; or worse yet, as charlatans. Which, of course, is the very last thing I’d ever do to either Hanson or Bersani. Kevin Kopelson University of Iowa

Theatricality as Estrangement of Art and Life In the Russian Avant-garde

Abstract: "We, too, will show you life that's real-very! / But life transformed by the theater into a spectacle most extraordinary!" writes Vladimir Mayakovsky in the prologue of his famous Mystery Bouffe. This transformation of life "into a spectacle," both on stage and in reality, is one of the most distinct features of the phenomenon of theatricality. It is to some extent the metamorphosis of the real, the habitual, the ordinary into the theatrical. The parallel between theatricality and the ideas of the Russian Formalist school of literary criticism has often been pointed out, particularly in relation to the Formalist concept of literariness.1 Nevertheless, the affinity between theatricality and the phenomenon of making the familiar strange, central to Russian Formalism, has rarely been addressed. In 1917, Russian Formalist scholar Victor Shklovsky coined the term ostranenie to describe the artistic strategy of presenting the well-known as if seen for the first time. The term is translated into German as Verfremdung, which became the cornerstone of Bertolt Brecht's anti-Aristotelian dramaturgy of estrangement. The traditional means of estrangement in theater are epic devices central to Brecht's strategy of breaking theatrical illusions. Theatricality, however, can be present in the context of illusion without a self-referential aspect, but whenever theater's conventions and processes become its own topic, theatricality turns into a conceptual approach, often expressing its potential to make the familiar strange. This was the case with Meyerhold's, Tairov's and Evreinov's concepts of the theatricalization and re-theatricalization of theater in the Russian avant-garde. Moreover, these directors practiced the strategy of distancing the familiar using devices of theatricality in ways much closer to the notion of ostranenie as elaborated by Russian Formalists than to Brecht's Verfremdung. Thus theatricality functions as a distancing device when it foregrounds what is immanent to theater, calling attention to the fictionality and incompleteness of the representation. Brecht's concept of Verfremdung, Shklovsky's ostranenie, as well as practical and theoretical works of the Russian theatrical avant-garde suggest that there are several

The Invention of "Theatricality": Rereading Bernard Dort and Roland Barthes

Abstract: At the opening of Gordon Craig's The Art Of The Theater (1912), the Stage-Director, who has just shown the Playgoer around the theater in order to give him an idea of the "machine" ("general construction, together with the stage, the machinery for manipulating the scenes, the apparatus for lighting, and the hundred other things" [137]), invites his guest to "rest here in the auditorium and talk a while of the theater and of its art..."(137). This lesson merits attention: one should never address any of the questions pertaining to theatrical aesthetics without having first faced the stage itself, even if only mentally. Prior to developing critical thinking about theater, it is necessary to take note, once more, of the fact that this confined, flat area, in spite of its being destined to become the pedestal of an entire world, appears absolutely deserted when not in use. In the past, the red curtain spared the audience the sight of this void; it was only drawn back in order to let through mirages formerly devised back stage. Now purely functional, the "iron curtain" seems to set the spectators and the artists apart, at the outset of a performance, only to endow the absolute, gaping void of the modern stage with greater power. Behind the velvet curtain, our elders were able to conceive of the munificence and plenitude of a theater founded upon illusion. Nowadays, as soon as the curtain rises, we become aware of the inadequacy of the set and scenography, given that these can never quite fill the void of the stage nor fulfill the audience's expectations. The stage, even when particularly burdened, remains utterly empty-and possibly more so in this case. It is precisely this emptiness-this non-representativeness that the stage seems bound to exhibit to the audience. I somehow suspect Gordon Craig and his Stage-Director of having confronted the Playgoer with the unredeemable vacuity of the stage in order to impress him with the idea that the Art of the Theater' was no longer supposed to provide us with a sense of plenitude and overwhelming life,

French Fascism: An American Obsession?

Abstract: If it is true, as Susan Sontag said, that Fascism is fascinating,' and if that applies to French Fascism as well, why is it that only Americans-so it seems-find it fascinating? How do French critics and historians resist its fascination? While there has been a plethora of articles, books and theses written about it in the United States in the last ten years,2 in France there have been only a few sporadic texts.3 Why this transatlantic gap between American obsession with French Fascism and the complete lack of interest in it in France? This is what I would like to investigate. Since this question is wide-ranging, I can only sketch out the major influences in the two countries' very different approaches to French Fascism. I will first look into the history of American French "fascistology"-a word coined by Stanley G. Paynein order to point out which work, theory, group or event brought about the recent obsession. This history unfolds like a play in four acts, with a growing number of characters. If the stage at first had an avant-garde appearancealmost deserted and preoccupied with a gloomy idea-nowadays it is as crowded and verbose as a musical comedy. I will try to explain why there is so little interest in fascist studies in France, examining what were and are the major obstacles preventing its expansion, and which school of thought dominated and restricted it. Far from being as rich in new developments as its American counterpart, it has taken on the role of a "ressassement 6ternel." The first act of my play, "How America Became Obsessed with French Fascism," could be called "Fascism gets a Culture," and is divided into three scenes. Act I, scene 1 begins in the late 1960s with the crisis of the avantgarde. It is then, as Andrew Hewitt has shown, that "the possibility of at least thinking a fascist Modernism was opened up" (38). The calling into question of the relation between aesthetics and politics, or more exactly, the loss of the supposedly "natural" conflation of progressive aesthetics and progressive politics, paved the way for the re-evaluation of Fascism's mingling of the artistic and the political. Even if art historians and theoreticians like Poggioli refused to fully acknowledge the legacy of Italian

Major and Minor: Crossed Perspectives

Abstract: Over the last few decades, the influence of French thought on North American literary studies has been strong and widespread, especially in French-speaking Quebec, where conceptual borrowings from the French critical corpus have been frequent. Consequently, one might expect to find Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "minor"' to be an important borrowing in literary studies, since Quebec, for historic and linguistic reasons, finds itself among "minority" and marginalized cultures. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari use it as an example in their demonstration.2 However, despite the pertinence of this concept to the Quebecois cultural context, the theoretical rendez vous has clearly not happened. Admittedly, the expression "minor literature" has been a big hit in Quebec, but without its accompanying conceptual framework. The philosophers' theses act as a sort of theoretical unconscious, a blind spot in Quebecois perspectives on the minor. I believe this stems from the impossibility for a minority culture to subscribe to Deleuze and Guattari's statements about the very meaning of minority. Further, this resistance seems strengthened by the fact that in Quebec a number of intellectuals already had a specific conception of "the minor" that invested Deleuze and Guattari's categories in a totally different perspective. Using the example of Quebec, I will attempt here to grasp the meaning of this missed rendez vous, where the gazes of the major and minor cultures did in fact meet, but with no outcome, with no encounter on a theoretical level.

The French Sociological Revolution from Montaigne to Mauss

Abstract: There exists a longstanding tradition of French critical thought that has been bypassed in the recent importation of French theory, but which remains viable.' I refer to the sociological revolution sparked by Montaigne's 1580 essay on cannibalism, where he denounced certain European practices and behavior as undeniably more barbarian than any recounted by travelers who had observed New World "savages." In this way, the New World served as foil to the old, prompting a scrutiny of social and cultural assumptions as well as practices. A central reason for promoting what Claude Levi-Strauss has referred to as "anthropological thinking" is that it addresses the nature of cross-cultural contact by providing an alternative to the more familiar French versus America dichotomizations. The utopian textual space resulting from the comparative perspective allows for innovative critical thinking that is irreducible to the influence of any one group or society. From the Renaissance to Rousseau, the sociological revolution became a distinctive feature of French intellectual life. The notable precedent to Montaigne was the Protestant Jean de Lery's 1578 account of his sojourn among the Brazilian Tupis. Unlike most contemporary compendia of exotic practices, Lery's descriptions fed his denunciations of French society, including its brutally exploitative and racist representatives from whose aborted colonizing venture he had sought refuge among the Indians.2 Although Spain's colonial horrors provoked the indignation of Las Casas, the specificity of the French critical discourse was not replicated within other countries or cultures. Its exceptional development can be attributed to the monarchy's initial reticence to subsidize official expeditions. One could also point to Catholic repression of the reform movement that led to civil religious wars. Not surprisingly, the strongest impetus to venture new settlements arose among the persecuted Huguenots, whose humanistic tolerance toward Amerindians was prepared by ideology as well as by their own experience.3 Lery's memoir of life among the Tupis enjoyed popular success, especially among his Protestant peers. But its consecration within the history

The Structure of Theater: A Japanese View of Theatricality

Abstract: The Western concept of "theater" did not exist in pre-modern Japan. Engeki was the word chosen to translate "theater" when it was introduced to Japan in the second half of 19th century.' It still sounds a little foreign to Japanese people. Traditionally Japan had a word shibai, which was almost equivalent to "theater," but was, and still is, applied only to Kabuki and Bunraku (puppet theater) and not to Noh. The modern westernized theater is not usually called shibai, either, for this sounds too colloquial or too nonliteral. The adjective forms of shibai, shibai-jimita or shibai-gakatta, imply "pretentious" or "insincere" behavior, a definitely pejorative nuance, equivalent to the negative meaning of the English term "theatrical." "Theatricality," on the other hand, is rendered in Japanese as engeki-sei. The suffix -sei makes an abstraction of the preceding noun. The foreignness of engeki is reinforced by this suffix, for the abstraction of theatricality is also a Western way of thinking, imported into Japan only in modern times. Grammatically, it would be possible to add -sei to shibai as well, but shibai-sei sounds odd and is not in common usage. This means that there is no Japanese word that is exactly equivalent to the slightly pejorative "theatricality." Instead, engeki-sei (theatricality) is used to mean the spectacular quality of theater, or the qualities unique to theater-i.e. particular qualities that construct the kind of performance we could call theater. It is in this sense that the word was often uttered to describe the new trend of Japanese theater since the late 1960s. But some representatives of this "underground" theater would like to call their activities shibai rather than engeki, as a revolt against "modern theater." They have even declared themselves to be closer to the old conception of performance art in Japan, geinoh. Geinoh ("gay-noh") is another Japanese word, fairly equivalent to "theater" but covering the broader or narrower realm of performance arts, depending on the context. (I will return to this issue later.) Though the word itself first appeared in literature in the 10th century,2 much earlier than shibai, today the word is also commonly used, and obviously intersects with engekisei. The distinction between engeki, shibai and geinoh is not a clear-cut one, ? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2002 73 SubStance # 98799, Vol. 31, nos. 2 & 3, 2002

Theatricality and Cognitive Science: The Audience's Perception and Reception

Abstract: Cognitive science is a real umbrella term covering the various disciplines that investigate human communication and information processing: first of all cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, certain branches of linguistics and recently discourse analysis (used to describe the mechanisms of natural conversation as well as dramatic discourse, very long neglected). These various disciplines explore the psychological processes involved in the acquisition, organization, and use of knowledge. The debate between socioand cognitive pragmaticists is still going on. The former are more interested in the inter-personal sphere, in the standards of social behavior, since in interactions linguistic (as well as other) behavior is often assessed socially. Conversely, for cognitive pragmaticists, more important than any social contract underlying interactions is the role played by personal beliefs, assumptions, inferences, and inner mental representations involved in the communicative event. Nevertheless, both share many common methods and basic views, and their specific concept of communication may help to define more convincingly the still quite vague notion of "theatricality." I would like here to attempt a first step toward understanding how theatrical language, as well as the audience's responses, are constrained and shaped by human information processing and communication, and how the various tools offered by cognitive science could be employed to analyze them in a relatively new way. In earlier attempts to deal with the thorny problem of theatricality, theater scholars tried to define it within a binary opposition to the performance arts. Thus performance, while deconstructing theater's essential features, allowed these features to be seen more clearly. Thought of as the flip side of theater, performance was called a phenomenon of the here-andnow, with no other referent than itself. Since it distances itself from representation and rejects any codes and structures permitting signification, materials on which it works are used only to present; they are indexes, and not symbols or icons as is the rule in conventional theater. As a non-narrative ? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2002 225 SubStance # 98/99, Vol. 31, nos. 2 & 3, 2002

Digital Baroque: Via Viola or the Passage of Theatricality

Abstract: Such are the principal traits by which musicologists have been unable to define a Baroque music: music as expressive represent-ation, expression here referring to feeling as if to an affect of accord. What has happened to cause the answer-or rather, the quite diverse range of answers-to change since the Baroque musicians? Solutions no longer pass through accords. It is because the conditions of the problem itself have changed: we have a new Baroque and a neo-Leibnizianism. The same construction of the point of view over the city continues to be developed, but now it is neither the same point of view nor the same city, now that both the figure and the ground are in movement in space. Something has changed in the situation of monads... To the degree that the world is now made up of divergent series (the chaosmos), or that crapshooting replaces the game of Plenitude, the monad is now unable to contain the entire world as if in a closed circle that can be modified by projection. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

Michel Foucault: Literature and the Arts: A Report from the Colloquium at Cerisy-la-Salle, June 23-30, 2001

Abstract: Foucault is never exactly where we expect him. The power of his language undermines and compromises the constancy of his thought and his being by linking them to other thoughts, other beings. And despite numerous rapports with writers, painters, musicians, and philosophers, concretized in texts, interviews, demonstrations, etc., the virtual horizon of his encounters seems endless. Since his death, his oeuvre has continued to be unfolded by unpublished connections, sometimes untimely, which often are born and exist only at the moment of their expression. Thus Foucault becomes a sort of cross-roads constantly traversed by thinkers and artists, a perpetually moving nerve center that opens aesthetic and intellectual experiences into countless interpretations. This is what was experienced at Cerisy in June 2001. Despite this, it is easy to detect a common denominator in the heterogeneity of the papers given, a common thread in the disparity of the encounters that have been staged with varying degrees of success. In fact, the speakers have attempted to present the principles of Foucault's thought, as though they had been directed to find the origin of his knowledge. Paradoxically, this urge is perhaps involuntary, for don't the peripheral objects of the conference ("literature and the arts") naturally take his thought back to its origins? Nonetheless, one thing is certain: the sobriety with which

Judith Schlanger: Explorer of Lettered Space

Abstract: Over the last 30 years, Judith Schlanger has devoted a dozen books to the exploration and description of the intellectual world as it consists of invention, of works-a dynamic space that moves and reconfigures itself. Intellectual invention, which is Judith Schlanger's object, is a far-flung reflection: the mathematician, philosopher, historian, sociologist and literary theorist, however different their objects and methods, have in common the same professional obligation: they are required to invent ideas, or at the very least to displace old ideas, to present them and array them in an original fashion. Consequently, Judith Schlanger's oeuvre does not fall into any one domain, field or discipline; she is "transdisciplinary." Nevertheless, if one considers her work, from the 1971 Metaphores de l'organisme to the 1997 La Vocation,' one has the impression that the same space is deployed from one book to another, although here one meets Henri Poincard, there Popper or Bachelard, elsewhere T.S. Eliot. If one comes to Judith Schlanger via literary theory (as I did) and if one is unfamiliar with epistemology (as I was), one is surprised, in moving through her oeuvre from one book to the next, to always feel at home. This feeling is not the result of an exceptional talent for popularization, nor of a mixing of intellectual fields (Judith Schlanger does not confuse literature and philosophy), but is the result of a point of view, of a perspective taken that reveals the existence of a common space, which could be called "lettered space," in keeping with the old usage of the term, which includes arts and sciences.