Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
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Panayiota Chrysochou
Panayiota Chrysochou (b. 1982) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cyprus 〈pollyn@live.co.uk〉. Her research interests include performance theory, Shakespearean drama and the Renaissance, trauma studies and psychoanalysis, and Victorian and Gothic literature. Her publications include “The si(eye)ght of trauma: Oedipal wounds, tragic visions and averted gazes from the time of Sophocles to the twenty-first century” (2012); and “In-between states: Twilight horror in Jean Rhys'After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie & Djuna Barnes'Nightwood ” (2013).
Abstract
My paper draws on Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari and the work of the French multimedia performance artist Orlan in order to bring together the various theoretical strands that examine the body as a phenomenological and speculative entity that has the discursivity and potentiality to function as a performing body within a spatio-temporal framework (a body that is always already scripted within performance and society at large), as well as those theories that move from a Western metaphysics of presence to a de-subjectified semiotics, such as was evidenced in the 1980s and 1990s, and to show what is at stake in that politico-theoretical shift, as well as the implications of this for the performing and viewed/viewing body. Can a theatrical and performing body be confined to a purely visual semiotic framework? What is lost when semiotics – with its poststructuralist (or, in my view, almost antitheatrical) bent, views theatre (and of course the body) as imbricated in semiology or a system of cultural signs rather than perception? This work sets out to pressure these questions. At the same time, it seeks to examine how the performing body can break free from spatio-temporal boundaries and fixed identities and exceeds and even resists any definitive attempts at hermeneutic representation, in effect defying semiotic and semantic systems of representation.
About the author
Panayiota Chrysochou (b. 1982) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cyprus 〈pollyn@live.co.uk〉. Her research interests include performance theory, Shakespearean drama and the Renaissance, trauma studies and psychoanalysis, and Victorian and Gothic literature. Her publications include “The si(eye)ght of trauma: Oedipal wounds, tragic visions and averted gazes from the time of Sophocles to the twenty-first century” (2012); and “In-between states: Twilight horror in Jean Rhys' After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie & Djuna Barnes' Nightwood” (2013).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
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- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
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- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
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- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
- How to do things with websites: Reconsidering Austin's perlocutionary act in online communication
- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
- The types of codes and their combinations: Visual perception and visual art
- Minimal acting: On the existential gap between theatre and performance art
- Visual semiotics and the national flag: A Kenyan perspective of Anglo-America's globe-cultural domination through mainstream music videos
- Dinner is ready! Studying the dynamics and semiotics of dinner
- Linking transculturality and transdisciplinarity
- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
