Rayner, Alice

Rayner, Alice. Ghosts: Death's Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P., 2006.


Introduction:

In the introduction Rayner explains her idea of the ghost in theatre and gives an account of the theories that she relies on. She specifically focuses on phenomenology as a discipline that, like theatre, is concerned with the invisible and unspeakable ghosts of our reality. She claims that psychoanalysis does the same in a different way. The ghost in theatre, like Artaud’s double, is not a second world or an imitation of reality similar to the ideal of psychological realism, but is an experience of “a material reality of what is not, which is to say that theatre not only “unmakes mimesis,” as in Elin Diamond’s apt title; it also unmakes the ontological presumption of is.” (xv) The ghost in theatre makes us “perceive perception” (xxi) and remember things we never saw before.

Chapter 1, Tonight at 8:00: The Missed Encounter

Rayner begins this chapter looking at the starting time of a theatre performance, which is assumed to be a specific point in time, marked by the hour on the ticket and the ‘objective’ time on the watch. However, the beginning moment, as any moment cannot be pinned down to a single point. In Offending an Audience, Peter Handke shows that “time, especially in theatre, is almost always “out of joint” and that “it is not so easy for an audience to be in the present rather than in a dreamlike state of waking up.” (2) By following this “dreamlike state of waking up” through the analysis of dreams in psychoanalytic theory (specifically Freud and Lacan), Rayner shows how the moment of waking up from a dream is in fact a gap or syncopation between perception and consciousness. This gap exists also between our perceived present and our consciousness and is, therefore, “the present that is always missed.” (11) The repetition of this structural syncopation enables both intersubjectivity and the memory of the present. “Rather than a definitive division between perceptive wakefulness and imaginary dreaming, however, the more common state of quotidian life is already “somewhere between” perception and waking habits that keep us half asleep to reality.” (19)

Along the chapter, Rayner uses various examples from plays to demonstrate her points; notably: she uses Hamlet as an example of a character whose time is suspended through the length of the play—who lives the time of Others; she shows how Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days experiences the repetition of the moment of waking up (the gap) whenever the bell rings, and the audience with her. She claims that, like these characters who experience the gap so preeminently to the point of trauma, so do we live this gap as trauma and loss. “By going to the theatre as a certain time, I enter a space in which a repetition is planned but still open to accident. I make a bargain to be present at the site of a trauma that is being resurrected in the symbolic dimension of the real. By doubling the present, theatre represents the present in its own terms in as almost self-canceling mode.” (29)

Chapter 2, All the Dead Voices: Memorial and History

In this chapter, Rayner looks at memorials and at theatre as sites for invoking history as embodied experience of loss rather than as information. She claims that contemporary memorials create experiences of loss and absence and a remembering through repetition (in contrast with the “classic” statues that mimic the actual singular presence of the dead ones). Similarly, the repetitions that occur in theatre—of texts, actions, characters, and situations—have the potential to invoke the absent voices of the dead. Repetition, moreover, “does not come as an accustomed form of a historical knowledge. Repetition, like de Certeau’s notion of historiography, implies a gap and a difference between one instance and another. But instead of creating a phantasm of the other as an object of knowledge, repetition is paradoxically an instance of singularity.” (34) Rayner follows Žižek’s exploration of repetition (using Lacan) as that which presents the experience of the impossibility of repetition, as part of the failure to know the present. (36-38)

Focusing on a production of Waiting for Godot by an Irish theatre company, she claimed that the (distinctly Irish) voices of the actors encompassed Irish identity and tradition and (the ghosts of) unwritten, somatic history that is carried in the voice, the accent, the rhythm, the attitude. “The voices carry history through the body into the world. Such history is not a matter of documentation or information but a matter of imitation and performance that embody both material specificity and the gaps that arise in the process of imitation and repetition.” (42)

“The somatic memory, whose imitation and persistence over time constitute one dimension of history, is neither a topic nor an issue for discourse, because it is unwritten. It is a performative presence registered by the body and/or the textual unconsciousness of writing. It is a question not of being “about” the famine but of sustaining the trauma of famine among the living, which, rather than a topic or an argument, is a manifestation of the unavoidable facticity of all that is lost but maintained as “all the dead voices” are heard in the speaking body, the voices that “reflect absence”.” (47) However, performance and text haunt one another, words haunt the event they invoked, and realities haunt the words that records it, “realities that reappear as the repetition of structure, which has the uncanny effect of both familiarity and strangeness. Haunted space collapses temporal linearity among past, present and future. It suggests that the apparent permanence of words, a permanence that renders events intelligible, is haunted by loss and the unitelligibility of the Real, of the unrepeatable Now that constitutes the criminality of time and the uniqueness of what Maurice Blanchot calls “the disaster”.” (57) Text, hence, incorporates losses and absences from the reality it portrays; these are the ghosts of a human body that is encrypted.

Chapter 3, Object: Lost and Found

In this chapter, Rayner follows the presence of objects onstage as both signs and phenomena, as both real and fictional. Props and objects may incorporate multiple meanings and may fall into their actual materiality. As objects that usually have no use outside of the stage, props on the prop table are in an “in-between space” that “breaks down the dualism between world and stage it what might be called an aspect of “readiness”.” (76) In addition, using phenomenology together with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Rayner shows how objects take part in the processes of establishing selfhood when “the first object is not known until it is lost.” (80) This loss differentiates between self and other while keeping the subject-object ambiguity in tact. “Ob-ject: to throw before or against and therefore, elsewhere, to oppose. The word contains the act of expulsion that is also presentation, a show or appearance, even a symptom (as in “presenting symptom”). The event of expulsion produces subject and object as reciprocal of each other: it is a point at which a subject also begins to emerge as an object.” (81)

Much like a souvenir from another place, that carries upon it tangible experiences and the facticity of that other place, props embody the presence of the fictional world. In The America Play, Suzan Lori-Parks uses objects that are suppose to have historical significance to embody the lost history of African American society. While the historical significance is clearly false, the somatic meanings of these artifacts remain. Added to that is the stage prop’s inherent doubleness: it is both not the object and not, not the object; i.e. it is both fictional and real. “The persistence of the object makes a claim to it’s sameness, resisting the narrative representation and variability and denying fantasy. Yet the materiality is also out of context, and thus the object is also alien to itself through its materiality.” (89) Thus, in the play, the objects pulled out of The Great Hole of History become elements of experiential memory rather than written history. Moreover, the object ““floats” as signifier of otherness in a space where the symbolic resides.” (93)

Rayner elaborate on Tadeusz Kantor’s use of objects in his work, claiming that by regarding objects “as folding time into their surfaces, we are able to see how objects then appeaer to shelter both past and future. They appear as dwelling places for objects between worldly use and representation.” (98) Furthermore, “distinct from history’s record of losses over the gaps of difference (between past and present, self and other, discourse and the body), theatre objects can offer yet another possibility for history as a matter of intersections and interactions that do not avoid the gaps of difference but incorporate them in a chronic emergence.” (102)

Chapter 4, Empty Chairs: the Memorial Double

In this chapter Rayner looks at chairs onstage, specifically the use of chairs by Ionesco and Kantor, and to a lesser degree of Robert Wilson, and in the Oklahoma City National Memorial. She claims that chairs are “intimately and thoroughly imbued with the specificity of human action, occupation, power, and identity, character, history, and technology.” (111) Moreover, chairs onstage are inherently doubled as both material and signification, implying the presence (or absence) of a human body, its history and memory, a cultural milieu, and can, therefore, be a site for experiencing unknowable events (such as death). Rayner’s overall aim is to show “the way that theatrical doubling is both simply the province of theatre and the model for an epistemology by which perceptual experience is transformed into knowledge of experience.” (114)

In Ionesco’s The Chairs the chairs become the substitution for the bodies of the invited guests, each with his or her own history and relationship with the Old Man and Old Woman. “The invisible occupants of the chairs are doubly representative of the process by which the longing for attachment transfers loss and absence into memorial objects.” (125) “What this play stages, in short, is the act of substitution that constitutes not only an essential element of theatricality but also its centrality both to the representation of the world and to the consequent behavior that orders the world.” (129)

In Kantor’s piece Today is My Birthday, presented a month after his death, Kantor’s own empty chair “provided the experience of loss and grief as a perceptible trauma, because it occurred in the conditions of an event. It was not simply a representation of loss; neither was it not not representation. The double negative is vital in a literal sense, which is to say it lives in the simultaneity of experience and knowing […] It is that space between the demarcation of difference through which slips the real, not as a state of being, but as a passage in which difference and sameness intersect and exchange places. The survivor knows only the undecidability of the sameness on the two sides of another’s death—before and after: a sameness that is nevertheless wholly different.” (133)

Chapter 5, Double or Nothing: Ghosts Behind the Curtain

The subject of this chapter is the curtain and its function in creating a doubling effect for both stage and backstage. The curtain is a marker/maker of spaces/worlds, both concealing and revealing. That dual function alone might be enough to undermine confidence in appearances, but as boundary markers curtains further create spatial divisions that correlate concepts of true and false, real and unreal, practical and imaginary.” (139)

Curtains in theatre divide both audience and actors as well as stage and backstage. While the front stage curtain hides and creates desire to have the world behind it revealed “the backstage is theatre’s other, internal double […] that backstage world is in some sense doubly hidden. Not simply concealed beyond the stage scene, it hides also in its obvious necessity in the creation of that scene.” (142) It is thus a real world that is hiding behind a fictional one, and whose functionality is to create the stage’s fictional world. Like the revealing of the “man behind the curtain” in the Wizard of Oz and Oedipus’ revelation about his true self, the curtain assumes a desire to know the truth that hides behind it. This truth, however, is not only revealed spatially as a static piece of information. When temporality comes together with the spatial partition of the curtains “theatre undermines the implicit ontology of spatial concepts such as that true and false lose the force of their distinction.” (145)

The curtain itself is an object of the world yet in theatre it creates worlds by the act of partition. “The curtain is not a space one can enter, yet it creates such a space as a gathering place that makes visible the fact that what is there is also hare. It materializes the function and, like Heidegger’s Da-sein, is impossible to contain in representation, because it is the presence of a difference that belongs to and emerge from the very field that it differentiates.” (148) The partition created by the curtain is, nevertheless, permeable and can therefore be broken and reveal that the dichotomies between the real and unreal, true and false “are true and false.” (151)

A hole or gap in the curtain or the space where it is assumed to have been, through which two worlds can meet, can be described as the “no-thing, the chink in the division of space, […] more akin to time than to space in its intangible but real presence.” (152) And on either side of this divide there are “appearances whose source are present in time but also derive from time, whether past or future.” (153)

Chapter 6: Ghosts onscreen: the Drama of Misrecognition

Like the blackout in theatre, that separates the parts of the narrative, marking a potential return of the spectators to their selves even while the final image of the previous scene is still hovering in front of their eyes, the play of light and darkness in film creates place of dream that is between consciousness and perception. “Film is thus as almost ideal medium for projection, misrecognition, and transference, particularly those films that wear the guise of realism. The film is supposed to be complete and therefore “know” what it is doing, what it means. It appears before our eyes as an object. But a film is not simply an object insofar as it projects outwards a subjectivity—a “subject-supposed-to know”—onto which an audience can project its own subjectivity as though it were other. In other words there is a kind of mutual misrecognition of who is doing what to whom, which is a version of the analytic transference and countertransference. (163) Rayner analyses three films to exemplify and elaborate her claims: Gaslight, The Sixth Sense and Vertigo. These films “thematically and narratively trace the ghostly aspects of visual representation through a filter of characters who misrecognize their own ghostliness and confront death through the devices of representation and its return. Though visually realistic, the narrative emerge in concert with the phenomenal and formal absences that constitute the filmic medium, which is itself ghostly.” (182)

Zarrilli, Phillip

Zarrilli, Phillip B. "Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor's Embodied Modes of Experience." Theatre Journal 56.4 (2004): 653-66.

In this Article, Zarrilli theorizes the performer’s body and experience using phenomenological observations and models; specifically Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh and Drew Leder’s ideas from his book The Absent Body. His analysis follows various experience of the body in life and performance and he arrives at four different “bodies” that he calls: “flesh”, “blood”, “breath” and “appearance.” The “flesh-body,” also defined as the ecstatic body, is that from which we live in the world and experience it. It is our habitual sensorimotor being that includes our exteroception and prorioception, and that is (in Leder’s words) absent to itself. It is the surface body that is outwards-directed. The “blood-body” is the interoceptive body of our inner organs. It is “the deep, inner, visceral body of corporeal depths which in physical terms includes the mass of internal organs and processes enveloped by the body surface, such as digestion and sensations such as hunger.” (659-60) Like the surface body of “flesh” the recessive body is also defined by disappearance. “Our everyday experience of the lived body is a constant intermingling and exchange of "flesh and blood."” (660)

The bodies of “breath and appearance” are both “non-ordinary, extra-daily” bodies. The “breath-body” is the “aesthetic inner bodymind.” (661) It is the subtle embodied awareness—developed through various psychophysical techniques such as yoga or martial arts—to one’s bodymind as a dialectic whole. Breath, as the interoceptive process that is the closest to the outer surface of the body, creates, both figuratively and (in many techniques) literally, a connection and constant shift from inner to outer worlds. This body can be cultivated by training and be used in practice. The fourth body, “appearance”, is the aesthetic outer body that is available for the spectator’s gaze. This is a fictive body in which the actor’s perception is attuned to absent things (the “as if”) and is presented outwards. In both of these bodies, there is a constant shifting between the recessive body and the ecstatic body. “In the model proposed here, the chiasmic nature of experience as a braiding and intertwining is more complexly elaborated in the modulation of the four modes of bodily experience described above—the ecstatic surface, the depth/visceral recessive, the subtle inner bodies, and the fictive body of the actor's score.” (665)

Farleigh, Sondra

Farleigh, Sondra. “A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance through Phenomenology.” Dance Research Journal, 23, 1, (1991): 11-16.


This article, is Farleigh’s proposal for using phenomenological analysis to theorize and understand dance and meanings in it. She supports the validity of both dancer and spectator’s subjective accounts of dance that, in the spirit of phenomenology, strive to reach objectivity from their subjective points of view. In this analysis, “the essence of dance is not identical with its motion. It arises in consciousness as the motion reveals the intent of the whole and its parts.” (12)

Farleigh claims that a dance has an identity that can be revealed through the phenomenological stance in which form and content are not separate. She uses her own observations of Cunningham pieces (as spectator and critic) and her writing on her own dance experience to demonstrate these points. Thus, she shows how the body’s intentionality in dance differs from the everyday intentionality in that it takes on “aesthetic” spatiality and motility. This is particularly significant in the subject’s attention to his/her own body as an aesthetic phenomenon. Although Farleigh does not develop this, the implications of this attention of dancers to their own body can be further explored within the question of self objectification and subjection.

Farleigh’s last point, concerning imagination, connects her inner life and identity to a kind of freedom in front of the gaze of others through her moving body. Her final, and very pertinent, remark: “As I step back from my own processes to better understand them, I confess to giving myself up to a quest and questioning with the kind of blind faith that some thing in me already knows the answer, if I can somehow get out of my own way (remove my conditioning) long enough to glance them.” (14)

Young, Iris Marion.

On Female Body Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.

Chapter 1, “Lived Body vs. Gender: Reflections on Social Structures and Subjectivity.”

One of the most valuable things that Young starts with in this chapter is a survey of the way feminist writing developed along the years. Specifically, she follows the way major feminist theorists have positioned themselves in relation to the sex-gender distinction, focusing on Toril Moi’s critique of Judith Butler. Moi points to the fact that Butler’s distinctive theorization of sex and gender obscures the real life consequences of these definitions and, therefore suggests no real way of dealing with them or even understanding them in practice. Moi suggests an alternative to the theory of gender that would address those issues. She proposes the lived body as a definition that includes a wider range of lived experiences than does gender and pertains to concrete real life experience. “The lived body is a unified idea of a physical body acting and experiencing in a specific sociocultural context; it is body in situation. For existentialist theory, situation denotes the produce of facticity and freedom.” (16)

Youngs intervention at this point is in claiming that gender is important for theorizing larger structures and social forces et large rather than for looking at subjectivity and individual experiences: “an important conceptual shift occurs, however, when we understand the concept of gender as a tool for theorizing structures more than subjects. We no longer need to ascribe a single shared gender identity to men and women… On this account, what it means to say that individual persons are “gendered” is that we all find ourselves passively grouped according to these structural relations, in ways too impersonal to ground identity.” (22) She proposes to combine a phenomenological theorization of the lived body for individual concerns and gender theory for structural and social concerns through Pierre Bordieu’s theory of habitus (26).

Chapter 2, “Throwing Like a Girl: a Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality.”

Young’s starting point in this chapter is a description of the difference in the way young boys and young girls throw a ball. The questions she offers following this description are about the tendencies of the female body in its comportment, motility and spatiality, trying to figure out what are these tendencies and how they can be accounted for. Her focus is on body movements that include orienting one’s whole body in space in order to perform a specific task. She relies heavily on Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology and Beauvoir’s existentialist theory, suggesting that “the modalities of feminine bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality exhibit this same tension between transcendence and immanence, between subjectivity and being a mere object.” (32)

She begins with claiming that there is a specific ‘style’ of female bodily comportment, that when performing tasks—like running, throwing, climbing, hitting, etc.—females tend to (1) not incorporate the whole body and (2) not move and “follow through in the direction of her intention.” (33) This tendency comes from lack of faith in the abilities of the female’s own body to fulfill tasks and a fear of getting hurt. This is also the result of giving more attention to the body as the thing that needs to carry on the task rather than attention to the task.

Following the three modalities of feminine motility, Young claims that feminine movement exhibits: ambiguous transcendence—the female body is “overlaid with immanence” and does not fully acts upon the world; inhibited intentionality—each task that is enacted (“I can”) projects the sense of its own failure (“I cannot”); and discontinuous unity—unity within female body and with its surrounding is discontinuous. Young goes on to explore three characteristics of female experience of lived space (spatiality)—as enclosed or confining, as having dual structure and herself as positioned in it. She shows how female body motility leads to experience space as enclosed. The dual structure of female spatiality stems from seeing herself as observing the surrounding space but not being a part of it, creating a separate “here” and “there”. Being positioned in space means that a female experiences her body as rooted in a specific place, like an object, rather than as constituting space through perception and motility. In the last part of the chapter Young connects these female existential experiences to her social context as a woman in a patriarchal world, claiming that “women in a sexist society are physically handicapped.” (42) Some of the social forces that cause these modalities of feminine body existence are the objectifying gaze and the threat of invasion to her space.

Garner, Stanton B.

Garner, Stanton B. Jr. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1994.

Introduction

In the introduction Gardner explains his approach that relies heavily on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. He explains his choice to follow a variety of plays from different moments in the 20^th century as meant to demonstrate different facets in the phenomenology of theatre and, by rooting the discussion in particular historic-artistic moments, to show that the questions phenomenology asks are relevant to a variety of such moment and to their experiential specificity. He defends post Husserlian phenomenology from accusations of essentialism, claiming that phenomenological investigations “are designed to indicate the field of variables that constitute the very possibility of difference and individual manifestation.” (12) He goes on to claim that even Derrida can, and should, be used alongside phenomenology and proposes a dialogue of phenomenological investigation with semiotics as well as poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories.

Chapter 1: Phenomenology and Performance

In the first part of the chapter Garner shows how Beckett’s drama, particularly his late plays, is emphatically phenomenological. That is, in Beckett’s plays, as in phenomenology, the body is put forth as that through which the subject exists in the world. The body’s existence, however, is fraught with ambiguity--experiences of absence, estrangement, disappearance and fragmentation. Thus Beckett mirrors phenomenology’s concern with the body’s thing-ness. “As Beckett’s middle and late work gradually abandon the naturalistic body, with its physiological integrity and recognizably anthropomorphic environment, they more directly confront the phenomenological body, with its decentered field of subjectivity and its ambiguous modes of absence and presence.” (38)

In the second part of the chapter Garner claims that theatre’s as-if-ness pervades the entire experience of being in the theatre. Full darkness, for example, rarely occurs in the theatre yet it can be experienced, and it can even be created, in fact, through spoken text, as in Shakespeare’s plays. Theatre’s imagined reality, therefore, pervades actuality. Moreover, “the theatrical field offers itself in terms of an irreducible oscillation between perceptual levels, and though spectatorial vision is thus bifurcated, the theatrical mode of this presence, or givenness, is oriented in terms of an experiential actuality that transgresses (while never fully erasing) the boundaries between the “is” and the “as if”.” (42) Theatrical presence exists through this play of actuality. In addition, the phenomenal presence of objects on stage change the moment an actor goes onstage, from being merely an observable they become an object for the actor. Their presence become presencing. In addition, due to its livedness, the actor’s body on stage both embodies the dualities of reality/illusion, sign/referent and threatens to break these dualities back into the “real” real. In addition the spectator’s body in its particular orientation and positionality, is invisible for the actor’s virtual gaze yet visible for the actor’s actual gaze. The actor’s ability to gaze back onto the audience makes theatre experience different from most other arts, including (notably) cinema. All these variables of presence and absence show that “embodiedness is subject to modification and transformation. Multiple and varying modes of disclosure, and that the forms of ambiguity that characterize the phenomenal realm represent experience in flux, oscillating within and between modes of perceptual orientation.” (51)

Chapter 2: (Dis)figuring Space:Visual fields in Beckett’s Late Plays

Garner show how Beckett’s plays from the 1970s and 80s focus mostly around the stage image as relationships between the body and all other elements of theatre: movement, space, objects, light, text etc. Garner initially contextualizes Beckett’s concerns within the modernist tradition of scenographic artists—most notably, Adolph Apia and E.G Craig—who had an ambivalent approach to the body on stage. On the one hand, the presence of the body was necessary to create live space around it; and, on the other hand, “the actor’s body threatens the stages formal autonomy through its non aesthetic physiology, its independent sentience, the various ways in which it registers its living presence.” (57) Beckett’s late plays further complicate this tension between artistic formalism of pure image and the live, unstable corporeality it creates. Thus Beckett exposes “the perceptual dynamism of the theatrical image as it reflects and (dis)embodies the seeing eye; the dialectic of living body and aesthetic form; and the problematic status of perceptual (or any other) formalism within the theater’s bodied space.” (63)

Garner goes on to show how the image in Beckett’s late plays “reveals conflicting perceptual inclinations; it is an image in flight, caught between a theatre of human bodies and the depersonalizing outlines of abstract shape.” (64) Particularly, through the play of light and darkness, that keeps the illumination level low and leaves parts of the actor’s body in (full or half) darkness marks the body as belonging to both light and darkness, makes it “a kind of visual “ghost,” caught in its emergence from one perceptual world to another.” (69) It also creates an almost black-and-white world on stage, leaving only faded colors. “As with so much else in these late plays, the color represented by these isolated appearances is of a certain order, inhabiting the in-betwenness of imperfect articulation. Beckett’s performance field may reach toward black and whit while recalling a world of reds, greens, and blues, but it falls short of both, and the promises of color and its absence that reach out so teasingly further, consign the performance image to its flight from visual stability to the no-man’s land of “not quite”.”

When analyzing movement, Garner claims that locations rather than the movement itself become the focal points in Beckett’s late plays. This focus on fixing the characters in particular points onstage gives movement a more formalized sense while endowing it with dramatic tension. The image, thus, “involves a motion within stillness, confirming in its relative fixity the spatial geometry of the broader performance image.” (73) Furthermore, in these plays Becket’’ creates depth that is ambiguous and “indeterminate—both itself and not itself.” (74) He thus focuses on the frontality of the image (like that of a picture) and highlights “the positioning of the character and object off-center in relation to the invisible vertical line bisecting the stage.” (75) This “ex-centering” of Beckett’s dramatic characters create an experiential affect, making the audience perceive (even if they do not conceptualize) these characters’ eccentricity and imbalance.

Through all of these elements, however, “the locus of Beckett’s theater of the image remains the audience [...] Beckett foregrounds his spectator not as the disembodied eye/I of a theatrical voyeurism, but as a body situated with its own positionality and material presence.” (81) As a result, “Beckett’s audience finds itself both disembodied towards nonexistent viewing points and uncomfortably embodied in the seats they cannot escape, “clawed” by the perceptual dissonances of Beckett’s stage which preclude the satisfaction of spectatorial centrality.” (84)

Chapter 3: Object, Objectivity, and the Phenomenal Body

In this chapter Garner analyses the way subject/object duality of the body of the actor on stage is exposed and treated in relation to the world of objects that surrounds it. The phenomenal body’s inherent duality is further problematized in modern drama by the way objects are written onto the stage as the body’s environment and extensions. Prior to the realism/naturalism revolution of stage image, objects on stage belonged to the character – as an extension of their action in and upon the world or as part of their characterization. Naturalism’s “verisimilitude inaugurated a new conception of the stage world as material field, replicating the external world in its visual and tactile particularity, and it made possible a liberation of the “thing”, as prop joined setting in a new “objectness”, a materiality increasingly freed from the illustrative and the instrumental. As stage objects proliferated and asserted an increasing density, manipulatability gave way to an independence from—and eventually, an antagonism toward—the human subject’s attempt to appropriate and humanize its spatial surroundings.” (91)

The materiality of the world of objects as things in themselves, juxtaposed to the actor’s body, is most apparent in naturalism and most notably commented by Brecht. Nevertheless, by observing the work of later playwrights, such as Sam Shepard, Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter, Garner shows how this use of the object became one of the main phenomenal themes in 20^th century drama.

Shepard’s plays often present a world cluttered with objects, many of them never utilized or broken. This overabundance of uselessness deconstructs and defamiliarizes the objects and, at the same time, it is meant to “reinstate the human within its field, an arena now stripped of its functional objectivity and available to more primitive, physiological modes of habitation.” (98) In Beckett’s Happy Days and Ionesco’s The Chairs the objects are pushed even further into a particular realm of “objectness,” wherein the actor’s body is either incapable of manipulating them (as in Happy Days) or overcome by the objects’ taking of space and “erasing” the character’s subjectness (as in The Chairs). Objects, thus, “abandon their humanizing instrumentality” and “the body itself reverts to the status of quasi object within its field of awareness.” (108) In Pinter’s The Caretaker, the focus of the main character on the world of objects and his failed attempt to make sense of their un-usefulness creates “an environment that asserts itself not as a functional system, but as phenomenal field, foregrounding—even heightening—the entanglement of the subject in its perceptual world.” (114) In addition to that, the constant gaze that follows the main character contributes to his objectification.

Wilshire, Bruce

Wilshire, Bruce. Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.


1. What is Theater?
In this chapter Wilshire defines theatre as a place where two processes take place: standing-in and authorization. The actor embodies the character before the audience and enacts all the character’s actions for the audience, thus standing-in for the audience members, living, for the time of the performance the life of the character for them to experience through the actor. This authorizes the existence of each member of the audience both as “beings of inexhaustible particularity as well as indefinitely extendable horizons of human concern and identification.” (10)

2. What is Phenomenology?
In this chapter Wilshire compares theatre and phenomenology, showing some of the phenomenological elements in theatre. He also sets his phenomenological grounds as based in Merleau Ponty and Heidegger.

3. Theory of Enactment
Theatre only happens when the fictional “time” and “world” of the play intersect with the prescribed performance time and world in which actors and audience meet.
Theatre happens because identification with others happens both in life and, more consciously, in art. Through theatrical enactment we “discover our power over possibility. Together the audience and the actors engage in incarnated imaginative variation on the meaning of human being and doing. Together they experiment on the nature and extent of mimetic involvement, identification, and sympathy—and on how these relate to the individual’s identity.” (24) Moreover, theatre enable us to acknowledge our experience of being “by-for-with-in” others and, thus, to experience variations of being others than our own (26).

4. Theory of Appearance
Here Wilshire’s main argument is that “theatre allows us not only to see and to grasp an appearance of what something is when the actual thing is not present, but to see it better.” (32)

5. Variations of the Theatrical Theme of Standing In and Authorization.
In this chapter Wilshire looks at three major plays—Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, and Waiting for Godot—and follows up on the way standing in and authorization take place within the “world” of the play and the world in which the play was originally conceived and performed (i.e. the world of its original audience). He claims that in Greek time theatre blended into the life of its audience, in its structure, location and themes as well as in it being a part of a larger ceremonial tradition. When analyzing Hamlet, Wilshire explores the questions it arouses in the viewers on the one hand, and the structure of the theatre encompassed “social, historical and cosmic articulations.” (83) Contemporary theatre With the destruction of traditional interpretation in its contemporary “realistic” incarnation—the cliché of the living room or the drawing room—we are left with the stark realities of space, time, and the interrogation of those irreducible human capacities presupposed by any factual account of persons.” (83)

6. Theatre as Metaphor and Play as Disclosure
Wilshire claims here that “theatre is a physiognomic metaphor” (110) and a bracketed part of human existence that demonstrates and discloses existence’s potentialities. Emotions, for example, are felt and acknowledged at the same time. One always has an attitude toward and an understanding of the emotional state he or she is physically going through. In the theatre this is enacted, and bracketed as a real acting of a fictive act (103). That is, the actor’s emotional state is a physical metaphor of the character’s emotional state which discloses for the audience member the potential state they can experience.

7. Second Set of Variations on the Theatrical Theme of Standing In and Authorization
In this chapter Wilshire looks at three examples of contemporary theatre—Ionesco, Robert Wilson, and Grotowski. According to him The Chairs exemplify the existential role of roles we play in relationship to others and the potentiality of being with others: “Ionesco set up a model—however negatively ironically or indirectly—for human being; he does not merely reflect what is already there.” (116)

Wilson’s theatre, says Wilshire, reveals to the audience the conditions of their individual existence by presenting nonlinear, deconstructed actions, events and characters. “Must not we, who must make sense in order to be, also make sense to some degree of our making sense, and how can we do this without an art-form that returns to us the strange ones, with their strange ways of making sense, as an ineluctable foil for us? Contrast presupposes kinship.” (124)

Grotowski’s theatre (specifically in Apocalypsys cum figures) exposes the actor’s so that the body lets the self, with its impulses and emotions, be in more direct contact with the audience. Through this exposure there is a sense of both fragmentation and fusion: “it confirms a fragment of the community in the very dissonance and changeableness of its members’ impulses, in its fractionalization, and in the disturbance of the question with which it is left.” (134-5)

8. Theatre and the Question of the Truth in Art

In this chapter Wilshire summarizes the first part of the book. I chose two quotes that give the gist of what he asserts: “But we can say here that the work pertains to out identity because it mediates us and reveals us and as essentially natural and essentially idealizing and conventional; and because it sums up, funds, and gives presence to more absence than our daily acts ever could. Thus, since the self—as we shall see—is an activity of cumulatively giving presence to absence art pertains to our identity as selves. We need art or at least the art-like to be ourselves.” (137)
“We can now see how it is possible for theatre to be true of actual life while being iself a fiction. It can be true if it can exemplify the essences, sorts, types, universals which make actual persons and things what they are.” (138)

9. Space Time and Identity of Self

Wilshire’s concern in this chapter is the question of identity of self, how it can be determined and how it pertains to theatre. He claims that theatre, as practically a phenomenological investigation, or theatre-like activities play a role in returning the subject from the perceived back to itself and its identity. He determines that identity is in large part embodied and that by observing how theatre constructs identities on stage we can learn about the construct of identity in life.

In chapters 10-12 Wilshire discusses the construction of self as body-self that is always intersubjectively structured (i.e. in relation to others), mimicking the other’s expectation of one’s behavior. When people enact their habitual body-self, they in fact play “roles” that are defined through their relationship to the others. Roles operate latently and people self deceive them selves about their true roles. “In order to conceptualize this falling into pre-set and common ways of behaving and being, and into prescripted and prescribed attitudes toward others and oneself, we find that the most fitting and natural idea is the theatrical metaphor of “role”. To begin to become a self one must play a “part” designed by others. To be at all one must be with others. And to do this one must learn a language of bodily “expression” that is only partially and occasionally verbal; fundamental structures are silent.” (186)

In chapters 13-14 Wilshire deals with engulfment, or identification, as taking part in the ambiguous process that creates the sense of self. On the one hand, mimetic identification takes part in constructing a child’s behavior and, hence, her self. On the other hand, as individual subjects we may become aware of these habitual patterns and change them. He also adds that using theatre as a metaphor for life “begins to break down just where we would expect it to do so: the dailiness of life, the dailiness of caring (or failure to care), the stickiness of our personae, their relentless, monotonousness, and momentousness—the mood of satiety with self—all this can find no direct parallel on the stage with its actors and characters shining there for a few hours. Moreover, there is something unspeakable in day by day living—unspeakably particular and private—and all art can do is to show in revealing was that and how there is the unspeakable; it cannot live it in the way we must offstage.” (211) There are, however, parallels between theatre and life: “language, verbal and non-verbal, […] role, onstage literally, and offstage as those common ways of being together mimetically […] there is understanding as the projection of possibility […] theatrical art’s disclosure of the belongingness of mood to situation lets us see this pervasive, difficult to see belongingness offstage.” (211)

Merlau Ponty

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968.

In the first two chapters of this book, Merlau-Ponty follows “perceptual faith” as the main subject or interrogation. He connects perception to ontological questions and tries “to re-examine the definition of the body as pure object in order to understand how it can be our living bond with nature; we do not establish ourselves in a universe of essences—on the contrary we ask that the distinction between the that and the what, between the essence and the condition of existence, be reconsidered by referring to the experience of the world that precedes that experience.” (27) MP, thus, tries to bring into his ontological theory both thought and language while further braking away from dualistic language and breaking apart the distinction between subject and object. The first chapter Reflection and Interrogation focuses on complicating the distinction between truth and false, reality and imagination/dream/illusion. The second chapter Interrogation and Dialectic tries to find a way for philosophers to talk about Being without the use of dualistic language. He shows how negative philosophy, i.e. skeptic philosophy that seeks the absolute truth in things, changes our perception of the world buy its mere attitude. “Philosophy is the perceptual faith questioning itself about itself. One can say of it, as of every faith, that it is faith because it is the possibility of doubt, and this indefatigable ranging over the things, which is our life, is also a continuous interrogation. It is not only philosophy, it is first the look that questions the things.” (103)

In the third chapter, Interrogation and Intuition, MP connects the concerns of philosophical interrogation with the phenomenological stance on intuition and with its concerns regarding perception. Through this he attempts to show how both analytic philosophy and Husserlian reduction cannot account to the ontological place of perception. E radically claims that the questions philosophers ask are leading them to the wrong answers. “But already when I say “What do I know?” in the course of a phrase, another sort of question arises: for it extends to the idea of knowing itself; it invokes some intelligible place where the facts, examples, ideas I lack, should be found; it intimates that the interrogative is not a mode derived by inversion or by reversal of the indicative and of the positive, is neither an affirmation nor a negation veiled or expected, but an original manner of aiming at something, as it were a question-knowing, which by principle no statement or “answer” can go beyond and which perhaps therefore is the proper mode of our relationship with Being, as though it was the mute or reticent interlocutor of our question.” (128-9)

In the fourth chapter, The intertwining—the Chiasm, Merlau-Ponty presents a theory of being in the world that, in a sense, completes and complicates what he started in Phenomenology of Perception. MP constructs the relation of a person to the world as an intertwining that is a thickness of flesh through which we perceive and live in the world. In the thickness of perception subject and object become indistinguishable. Observing vision, MP claims that “one cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that command;” (133) that is, it is impossible to show that the subject has control over the perceived object. Moreover, when observing the tactile experience of one hand touching the other, MP shows how this difference between subject and object becomes even murkier as one hand becomes object for the other hand while both are of the same subject. He goes on to equate visual and tactile experience: “We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out of the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it, as, conversely, the tangible itself is not a nothingness of visibility, is not without visual existence.” (134) In both vision and touch there is a double perception from within and from without: seeing and being seen, touching and being touched. In hearing as well, we hear ourselves both from without and from within. Perception, hence, is reciprocal: “there are two circles, or two vortexes, or two spheres, concentric when we live naively, and as soon as I question myself, the one slightly decentered with respect to the other.” (138)

MP uses the word Flesh “the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relationship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass.” (146)

When considering ideas, thoughts and language, MP claims that these are part of the invisible in and of the world, which can only exist as part of the world and can primarily be ‘understood’ only through carnal experience: “it is the invisible of the world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own an interior possibility, the Being of this being.” (151) When dealing with words and signification, MP claims that there is an intertwining of the word (as a sensible in the world) and its meaning so that the word refers back to itself, creating a unity of signifier and signified, similar to the unity of seer and seen: “the siginification rebounds upon its own means.” (154) Furthermore, “the meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of “psychic reality” spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear. And conversely the whole landscape is overrun with words as with an invasion, it is henceforth but a variant of speech before our eyes, and to speak of its “style” is in our view to form a metaphor.” (155)