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Cultural Theory

Cultural Theory. Discussion topics Sept 2006. SM202 Cultural theory topics. “In Prisms (1955), Theodor Adorno wrote that 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarous.' The alternative, however, may be no less so.” – Bruce Fraser

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Cultural Theory

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  1. Cultural Theory Discussion topics Sept 2006

  2. SM202 Cultural theory topics • “In Prisms (1955), Theodor Adorno wrote that 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarous.' The alternative, however, may be no less so.” – Bruce Fraser • Choose ONE of the following topics to research, and lead a discussion in seminar on the implications of the concept for modern performance.

  3. A Deconstruction • ‘In his two early essays on Antonin Artaud, Jacques Derrida writes about Artaud's virulent reaction to and banishment of the prompter from his proposed theater. Artaud, as Derrida describes him, bitterly imagined the prompter as an intervening voice set on the margins of the stage to whisper into the ears of the meekly receptive performer, "receiving his delivery as if he were taking orders, submitting like a beast to the pleasure of docility"’ (Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. ) • From:http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3612/is_200207/ai_n9119402#continue In the name of Coriolanus: The prompter (prompted) Comparative Literature,  Summer 2002  by Lunberry, Clark University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. (see also Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance ~Alan Read: Routledge, 1995)

  4. B Interculturalism • “Reflection on translation confirms a fact well known to theatre semioticians: the text is only one of the elements of performance, and here of translating activity. The text is much more than a series of words: grafted on to it are ideological, ethnological and cultural dimensions. Culture is so omnipresent that we no longer know where to start investigating it….. Culture intervenes at every level of social life, and in all the nooks and crannies of the text…. Theatre translation is never where one expects it to be: not in the words, but in the gestures, and in the ‘social body’, not in the letter, but in the spirit of culture, ineffable but omnipresent” • Pavis, P: Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture Routledge 1992 • See: The Intercultural Performance Reader by Patrice Pavis (Editor)

  5. C Postmodernism • Twenty-five years ago, inspired by a theatre conference, (Francois) Lyotard published his famous 'report on knowledge'. The Postmodern Condition was the new state of contemporary culture. Since then many have been living a life of fragmentation, our certainties destabilised and relativised, our judgments forever qualified, with dramatic implications for performance and theatre. • (http://www.rhul.ac.uk/drama/news/beyond_postmodernism.html)

  6. D Structuralism • Literary philosopher Roland Barthes (1915–1980), arguably one of the most influential postmodern theorists, presented his theory of semiotics as a way of deconstructing dominant ideologies, or mythologies. Before becoming what was to be known as a semiotician – one who deconstructs ideological signs connoted through texts – Barthes was a theatre critic. He observed Brecht’s plays and was aware of his experiments in both playwriting and staging practices – activities that would foreshadow the postmodern theatrical deconstructionists of the later twentieth century and, to some extent, Barthes’s own semiotic theories. …

  7. D Structuralism (cont.) • This distortion, whereby an idea is used to manipulate an image, constitutes what Barthes calls mythology: “everything happens as if the picture naturally conjured up the concept, as if the signifier [the image] gave a foundation to the signified [the concept]” (129–30). In Barthes’s definition of mythology, the concept becomes the dominant ideology, which is born when specific ideas are used to manipulate images. For example, in the theatrical world at the beginning of the twentieth century, the dominant ideology of theatre maintained “slice of life” naturalism and realism, as promulgated most prominently by Stanislavsky. (This ideology still dominates most of Western theatre, as well as television and film.) • Theatrical Deconstructionists: The Social “Gests” of Peter Sellars’s Ajax and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach KURT LANCASTER Published in Modern Drama - Volume 43 Number 3.

  8. E Authenticity • Walter Benjamin wrote on Brechtian theory and practice, and aesthetic theory more generally, from a Marxist perspective. In 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (1950), Benjamin notes the uncomfortable relation between the arts and the society they reflect: 'There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.' In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), he points out how the technology of mass production makes mimesis reproducable, so art becomes a product, subject to the commercial laws of supply and demand. The aura and authenticity of the original, ritualistic, work are lost in the distance created between art and audience, yet a new intimacy emerges between the art and the world it represents: reproduction is a close-up technique. Benjamin's argument gives a useful framework in which to consider differences between theatrical and cinematic representation. • Bruce Fraser's classical links: The Influence of Greek Tragedy A discussion of philosophical and theatrical responses to Greek tragedy blf. May 1997: revised 2005

  9. F Carnivalesque • In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, (Mikhail)Bakhtin points to the pre-Lenten Medieval Carnival - a period of festivities like our modern Mardi Gras that might test for weeks or even months as a time in the life of the community when the spirit of liberation was set free. He says, “What is suspended [in carnival] first of all is hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it - that is, everything resulting from sociohierarchical inequality or any other form of inequality among people (including age).” (122-23) • During that moment the normal constraints and conventions of the everyday world are thrown off. Democracy reigns while commoner and aristocrat rub shoulders in the marketplace and all social distinctions are erased: master and servant trade places, the high and the low are reversed. The crude and vulgar are enshrined. The fool reigns.

  10. F Carnivalesque (cont) • Another aspect of the festivities was the enlarging, exuberant laughter at the arbitrariness of the manners and mores that lock people in their social spaces, It filled the air and gave rise to feelings of change, perhaps even revolution. Parody, satire, and insult directed at the authorities upholding the norms appeared everywhere - in ballads, plays, skits, and jokes told on street corners. Understandably, in the Middle Ages the satirical barbs fell largely on the church and the feudal aristocracy - all those for whom maintenance of the status quo was important. • Bakhtin's "carnivalesque" in 1950s British Comedy by Tom Sobshack

  11. Further Reading • Eco, Umberto: Travels in hyperreality • Baudrillard, Jean: The precession of simulacra

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