Thinking/Tragedy/Thinking Tragedy: Remarks on the Fate of Theory on Stage

II

During the modern era, the great philosophical reflections on serious theatre, namely tragedy, have always emphasized the deep connection between tragedy and thought. However, this occurred in such a way that beauty was conceived of as the “sensual appearance of the idea” (Hegel 1965: I, 117, my translation). The formula is, you know it, Hegel’s, but it holds true for the bulk of theory in Europe. The ‘idea’ is for Hegel ‘reality’ as it has been penetrated conceptually, thus idea = reality, its concept and the unity of both. As long as it is not an ideal, in art, it is not allowed to appear but as sensualized, not in the milieu of conceptual thought. This really is a double-bind: First position: The ideal of beauty requires something theoretical as the core of beauty. (For Kant, beauty is the symbol of morality, “Symbol des Sittlichen” [Kant 2006: 253]). Second position, equally demanding: beauty must always avoid the appearance of thought, even – more broadly formulated – all conscious thought and intentionality, of the mechanisms which make up beauty. Beauty presents itself to the gaze, according to Schiller, “schlank und leicht, wie aus dem Nichts gesprungen” (Schiller 1943–2006: II, 114; “slender and weightless, as if sprung from nothing”).

According to this classical thought, theatre at its core is philosophy, and precisely for this reason must always be re-translatable back into the concept which it illustrates. It is exactly here, that we can pin down the fundamental, we may say, the founding inconsequence of classical aesthetics. It suppresses what it knows, namely that thought radically alters its character, its discursive status, and its consistence within the reality of the stage, as, indeed, within the frame of any aesthetic context. Stating whatsoever on the stage is always radically different from just posing facts. As a rule, onstage it appears as an intended effect, as, say, a justification, a dubious construction based on what the other does not know, an attempt to win over, to seduce etc. This aspect, rather than any attempt at presenting a truth, is dominant. If all language is at the same time expression of the speaking subject and posing of facts, then the rule of theatre says: on stage the dimension of expression systematically supersedes the dimension of posing.

What happens to thought is the same fading that befalls every serious element upon the stage. From the start, thought is undermined here; each inherent value crumbles or falters. Thought is enveloped by the stage and the statement holds: “Die Sinnlichkeit der Bühne ist von Hause aus dem Sinn nicht wohlbesonnen” (Lehmann 1999/2001: 366). Let me remark here that it is not necessary to be familiar with philosophical deconstruction in order to gain this insight. Stephen Greenblatt demonstrated in his Shakespearean Negotiations how all those social energies to which theatre refers (coronations, church rites, formal acts of reconciliation, etc.) are already hollowed out, chiseled out of their seriousness and truth, opened for critique by the simple fact of becoming part of the playful presentation on stage.

A further aspect of the fate of thinking on the stage of theatre should be emphasized, because it is easily underrated due to the fixation upon text, even when the consideration focuses on the way of viewing the theatrical situation. It is the specific temporality of the theatre as such which decisively modulates everything that is said. The time of a dramatic event metamorphoses all determined, fixed statements into a momentary event. But what comes to light clearly in the agonal, dramaturgical displacement that the statement experiences in the fascination we must understand as already given in the structural eventfulness of theatre as such which has as consequence the theatrical removal of seriousness from every truth. We noted before that each statement expressed on the stage, even if it is accepted as the most profound truth, is at the same time always laden with the possibility of being repudiated in the next instant. This questionable status of the statement is directly connected to the condition of theatre or performance being a ‘live art’, inasmuch as the temporality of the theatre unifies the time of the spectators with the time of the work (the performance) as a whole. Each utterance, and therefore each thought reveals itself as ‘speech-act’, but a speech-act whose context – and therefore whose meaning – is not, and cannot be, completed. It is radically dependent on the reality of the theatre situation: this incompleteness of context = meaning need not be imputed as a theoretical truth. It is already inscribed in the aesthetic condition of theatre as simultaneously being an aesthetic and a real process. This condition which is unique to theatre is responsible for the curious fact that, the acts on stage, including the speech-acts, are witnessed as being open to the future as real acts, as they are going on in the real life of spectators.

Let us pause here and assure ourselves of the double result of our inquiry: in all thinking about theatre – and all this applies a fortiori to thinking about tragedy – a peculiar ambivalence is visible. For one – and this is a legacy from Antiquity – it is claimed that as the basis of theatre, its core must contain, illustrate, and manifest a thought. At the same time, however, thought is also viewed as an area of taboo, as a ‘red light district’, a forbidden land upon which theatre may not set foot without losing its purity as art. (It is this problem which created famously for Kant the utmost difficulty to define beauty in such a way that he had not to exclude practically all the great works from it because of their after all unmistakable relation to concept and understanding.)

We should remember at this point for a moment the interesting circumstance that philosophy and theory themselves always found their undertaking beset by a dimension of rhetoric, mise-en-scène, and theatricality which they could never shake off. What is drastically manifest in the dialogic character of many philosophical texts from Plato to the Renaissance, to Diderot and onwards, only helps to reveal a much further reaching problem with theoretical discourse: its fundamental, innate theatricality – essentially, the constant scenic presentation of thinking – which Foucault may have had in mind in his remark about philosophy as theatre.

For Aristotle, who had a profound effect upon European discourse on art, tragedy is essentially a para-logical reality. Admittedly, it cannot be pure logos, but its value arises from its proximity to logos. All the categories belonging to the structure of tragedy – peripeteia, metabole, anagnorisis, proper magnitude, etc. – can be read as being parasitic upon concepts of logic. The theory of dramatic progression, as it is found in the Poetics, is in the service of the logical. The narration of tragedy stands under the law of the law: the law of revealing a logical structure. Following Aristotle, one can say, tragedy reveals a hidden order of things, a logos of necessity or probability, which would not appear in a simple account, in information given, in the tale, in the mythical ‘story telling’, despite the latter’s not at all a-logical nature. Rather, this logos of necessity or probability can only appear in the mythos – as Aristotle baptizes the plot – of tragedy. It articulates an order of thinking and is, in this way, the cause and already the formation of mathesis, of learning. It does, by the way, not only guide the spectator to such mathesis. With the term ‘recognition’ (anagnorisis), Aristotle also constitutes the subject of tragedy, the heros himself, his fate, essentially as a moment of insight. Tragedy, again, is – at its core – theory, shaped on the model of theory.

It is easy to discern today from the modern and postmodern perspective that the Aristotelian laudatory gesture extended towards art, and particularly towards tragedy, amounts in many ways to a ‘Trojan horse’. One knows the famed assertion of the Poetics that tragedy is “more philosophical” (Aristotle 1987: 41) than historiography. According to Aristotle, this is so because history only retains what really happened; while tragedy retains what always happens – or what happens as a rule – according to necessity or probability (Aristotle 1987: 41). That is to say, tragedy does not retain the merely empirical; it retains a logical order. “Thank you, philosopher!”, we might expect tragedy to call out full of joy. However, this gesture subordinates tragedy all the more irresistibly to the jurisdiction of the abstract general concept by seemingly elevating it. Ultimately, the worth of tragedy can only be appreciated by the primary and superior discourse of philosophy. Dramaturgy, the ordering, arrangement, construction of events (systasis pragmaton), mythos (as Aristotle understands the term in his Poetics), has the function to render visible the law and the logic of the events and to offer them for contemplation. It is a matter of the ‘logification’ of aesthetics, which for art as a para-phenomenon of logos. Secondly, this praise works as an obligation for tragedy to live up to its more philosophical nature. Thirdly, the paradoxical consequence – which is only paradoxical at first glance – that in the Poetics the theatre, which represents tragedy, is literally purged from the notion of tragic art. The famed catharsis occurs, as Aristotle expressly noted, completely without performance, reading a tragedy is enough (Aristotle 1987: 38–39). The performance itself (opsis) – that is to say, that which is theatrical about theatre, that which is not textual in it – pertains, in fact, for the author of the Poetics to the artless and worthless aspects of tragedy. Theatre is nice, many of us still today believe, but there is something disturbing about it: the theatre. Theatre is superfluous, and Aristotle is quite straightforward in saying (1987: 34–36) that one only actually needs theatre for the less smart citizens. They will be seduced into thinking, as it were, by the childish fun in recognition, while a philosopher is in no need of such stimuli and will think on his own.

III

I hope I have made clear that we have not undertaken an idle stroll through the garden of knowledge in the history of aesthetics. Rather, I tried to draw to our attention the notion that although recent history may be read as a chain of revolts and shifts that reinterpret these thoughts on tragedy common knowledge about art is nevertheless still acutely bound to this Aristotelian logic. The force of this way of reasoning may be measured in the difficulties every attempt at performance – even today – must fight against to dismantle the precedence of logical order as the paradigm for aesthetic form. These attempts must fight to secure the right to exist of play, chance, the sheer materiality, that which in all thinking remains un-thought. In other words, one could say that it is still an unfinished task to concede a theatrical playing space to another way of thinking, to the thinking of the other, of the other of thinking in thinking itself. But if we do not allow ourselves to be led astray by the polemics, which demand assiduously from theatre the beautiful costuming of what is actually only the duplication of everyday thought, then we find that in the light of postmodernism it is more often the reverse: that the function of art is rather to disorient seemingly ordered thinking, to disturb abstract categories, regulations, and classifications. In Minima Moralia, Adorno writes that it is the function of art to introduce chaos into order (2001: 428). This naturally does not mean advocating a non-thinking theatre but rather a theatre that traces the dialectical adventures and the aberrations of ‘logification’. Adorno has in mind a kind of thinking which consists essentially in depotentializing the concept, not in its negation.

For Aristotle, theatre is not only superfluous, it is also harmful. Although this is not as clear in Aristotle as it had previously been in Plato, this second gesture (alongside the para-logical figure of beauty) is also of the utmost importance for the contradictory relationship and conflict between theory and theatre. Once again, I will take a step back, this time to Plato, and in doing so I make reference to Ulf Schmidt’s research (Schmidt 2006). Interestingly, Plato already speaks of an old quarrel, palaia diaphora, between philosophy and tragedy. Tragedy must be barred from the truly righteous city, that is to say a city guided by logos. With beautiful candor, Plato explains – not in the Republic but in Book VII of the Laws (1926: 817 ff.) – that the righteous and good political constitution must itself be the “most truthful tragedy”, that the citizens, by shaping the life of the polis, are themselves poets and must look upon the tragedians as rivals and antagonists, as competitors for the prize for the most beautiful drama. This peculiar rivalry between politics and theatre is no mere punch line or metaphor. Much more, it reflects a basic problem of Platonic philosophy and, subsequently, the European theoretical tradition. Already in Plato, in the work where one attempted to think about the cognitive process itself, theory becomes entangled in a perhaps insurmountable problem. Plato categorically separated opsis (viewing) from nous (cognitive understanding); this is in contrast to the belief during the Homeric Age, when seeing and thinking were treated more as two parts of a continuum. Whereas opsis is fundamentally subject to errors, nous – with its inner logic – is the site of possible truth. It is with this, however, that the problem arises that a certain amount of activity of and capability for envisioning, contemplating something in one’s mind, phantasia, imagination, is nevertheless indispensable for knowing something. How can the relation between the two still come ‘into view’? For its part, theatre is, of course, an ‘arrangement for viewing’, a ‘Schauanordnung’ to quote Ulrike Haß (2005). But inasmuch as theory and cognition have essentially been thought of since Plato, as lying beyond the act of viewing, beyond the image, as noematic, as purely logical, etc., the history of the tense rivalry, parallel nature, and reciprocal denunciation between theory and theatre may indeed find its origins in the unresolved question of how one should actually ‘see’ in theory the act of seeing.

Ancient Greeks possessed a wide array of words, denoting the act of seeing under varying aspects (amongst them blepein, horan, and skeptomai) and included the verb theorein, theasthai. Paradoxically, this is the act of seeing most distant from philosophy, although it gave its name to ‘theory’. Schmidt cites Bruno Snell: “Theasthai is, as it were, looking with one’s mouth wide open, such as ‘gawking’” (qtd. in 2006: 176, my translation). One is quasi ‘all eyes’, raptly gazing rather than clearly distinguishing (which is, for example, denoted by skeptomai, from which ‘skepticism’ derives). Thus, the mode of ‘seeing’, which is found in the word ‘theoria’ as well as in ‘theatre’, is in effect, on one level, marveling entirely removed from making sense; it is ecstatic viewing, staring without understanding.^[3] However, with Plato, the word recurs quasi at the other end of the spectrum; and there, theoria denotes the highest point in thought, the divine contemplation of truth. In order to spare ourselves what would be a necessary comprehensive reading on the issue, I confine myself to just putting forth the assertion that philosophy is necessarily imprinted with some kind of opsis, a necessary moment of marveling before a performance, a ‘spectacle’. This ‘theatre’ already makes ambiguity insurmountable within the process of understanding itself. The moment of fantasy, sensory contemplation, the imagined concept of that which is absent is in principle doomed to err. And at the same time, it is absolutely necessary to enable the perceiving of truth. This has the consequence that the perception of truth can never wholly detach itself from the deceptive appearance of theatre. Theoria can never be separated from theatron. The performative character of thinking translates into the dramaturgy of philosophical discourses and also – consistently since Plato – in an explicitly scenic and dialogic depiction of philosophy, ultimately in the rhetorical nature of the language itself that can never be shaken off. Theory remains, in its attempts to stage an a-sensual theatre of the mind, always bound to a certain theatricality of contemplation. And this being the case, the thesis may be justified that it is precisely the intrinsic theatricality of thought itself – or more precisely, thought’s attempt to shake off this theatricality – which in European theatre discourse only admits the sensory as the double of logos: and usually a deficient double, at that. The theatre is the scapegoat of theory. The old and new quarrel between theory and theatre thus also gives the basis for the grand history described by Jonas Barish as the ‘antitheatrical prejudice’ (cf. Barish 1985). Hatred of the theatre is woven in as a common thread throughout European theatre theory from the philosophers of antiquity’s and Plato’s fury against the theatrokratia, from the Church Fathers up to Rousseau and into the present day. Philosophy (or theology) recognize their own distorted image in theatre, which they must chase out of the polis of logos (or out of the Church) in order to save thought, order, morality, propriety, or faith.

On the other side the proximity of theatre to philosophy is likewise a difficult problem. Indeed, tragedy in Antiquity – and the majority of the leading theatre afterwards – has always been concerned with essential questions of the polis (often in the medium of mythological tradition); with fundamental questions of society, of politics (from which philosophy cannot really be separated). From its very beginning, theatre is a kind of thinking on the stage. However, if tragedy were to take the Aristotelian praise too much to heart, that it is so very philosophical, it would tragically disappear as theatre. What would tragedy be, would it be nothing more than an illustrated theoretical paradox? If it posed as a mere double? With good reasons, much theory of tragedy has taken pride in finding pointed dialectical and other contradictions in tragedies, contradictions pushed to the limit of paradox. But would it not be completely redundant just to heave an intellectual problem up to the stage? With that said, is it not rather a certain ‘stupid’ materiality, as it were – an element of circus and gawking, of aimless curiosity and sensation – which protects tragedy from being a mere poor relative of philosophical discourse, which theory has long wanted to make theatre into? Theatre feeds on the element of purposeless and poorly controlled affects, on the dull material that thought will not ‘aufheben’. This theatrical reality or ‘theatReality’ (to which I refer in Postdramatisches Theater; cf. Lehmann 1999/2001: 370) proves itself as precisely that dimension which prevents – or which may potentially prevent – that thought reduces tragedy to being an insignificant, theoretical ‘glass bead game’. The social, political dimension is tied to this moment of a-significant materiality. In the Renaissance, when the subject discovered itself as the potential creator of his/her own history and in the same moment as history’s powerless victim, and when the connection between tragedy and theatre was again re-constructed, tragedy was regarded with good reason as a kind of historiography. Thus, Shakespeare’s plays are not at all called by the names by which they are commonly known – Hamlet and King Lear. They are rather, The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. In our age, Heiner Müller stated that tragedy only exists upon the basis of historical material which must also be present in the consciousness of the spectator or reader. The ‘opaqueness’ of this material is actually the site upon which tragedy takes place. That is to say, it takes place precisely in a suspension of thought, in its dimming, not in recognition, only in a moment of insight but in – as it were – an unreasonable truculence.