Julia Jarcho and Martin Harries
JJ and MH, theater scholars and critical theory enthusiasts, have just taken their seats at the theater and are perusing their programs. The performance is a world premiere of Wretched Nobody by the up-and-coming downtown company Kangaroos of Reason. Our protagonists have arrived early, with a lot of time to spare.
MH: Did you read the Director’s Note?
JJ: No, I can’t stand those.
MH: It’s not so bad, just a couple of quotations.
JJ (reads): “By demanding that a work of art exert a direct impact, the prevailing aesthetics demand an impact that bridges all social and other differences between individuals. . . . Non-Aristotelian dramatic writing . . . is not interested in creating such a collective. It divides its audience.” Bertolt Brecht.1
MH: And: “There is no theater without separation.” Herbert Blau.2 Fancy that.
The lights change suddenly: a cool, reflective atmosphere.
MH: You know, this idea that theater separates or divides us. I wonder: don’t we assume that the individual is divided, from the start? What is there left for theater to divide? Is it that the audience simultaneously knows and doesn’t know, that it needs to be reminded that it is made of individual cells that are constitutively divided?
JJ: I do think something like that is what Blau has in mind. So then the naive reply to his remark would be: But isn’t there no anything without separation? What exactly is theater’s claim to fame here? And then a first answer might be that theater has traditionally been good at making us suspend the assumption that separation is inevitable—making us feel we’ve all finally come together. This aptitude would put theater in a relatively privileged position for deflating that fantasy and leading us back to the experience of separation. So even while Blau criticizes the enshrinement of “participation,” or communion, as theater’s highest aim, he also notes—
She rummages in her purse and whips out a copy of Blau’s The Audience.
“The intimacy of participation may preface or entail, however, a more radical separation; that is, interpenetration and exclusion may be played dialectically against each other.” And then as examples of this dialectic, he cites Grotowski’s work and his own.3
I mean, we do seem to need constant reminders of our own dividedness, even if we do “already know” it. How can I really believe that I’m divided? Sure, I keep pretending not to believe in my own integrity, sovereignty, etc., I’m a good posthumanist, but in fact—in practice—everything that isn’t my ego seems completely foreign to me, which means that for me it usually doesn’t feel like I’m divided at all. It usually feels like the division is between me and the rest of the world.
But presumably the pain that often attends this fantasy is a coded acknowledgment of the interior separation that I am still bearing, which is to say that a part of me was left outside me (outside the I) and I really am still living that wound. The problem is that whatever my psychoanalytic “knowledge” of this situation, the knowledge can’t ever really be adequate to the situation itself—a structural inadequacy. And I think Blau’s idea is that in the face of this inadequacy, theater can do something theory can’t: it can make me experience the inner division. Which would be, if nothing else, a kind of respite from the work my mind is constantly doing in order to keep that experience inaccessible to me.
If we’re thinking about audiences, though, it might be useful to distinguish between two different kinds of division: division within the subject and division between subjects. Even if we accept that the first, psychic or psychoanalytic dividedness is always lurking in the second, the social division—and especially in the desire to overcome it—we can at least imagine thinking about the two kinds of division separately, or differently. And there might be theaters that have a lot at stake in the second kind of division, regardless of what happens with the first.
MH: Sure. I would only add what may seem an obvious codicil: what motivates the desire to divide—or to be divided, for that matter—changes over time. There are moments when Blau’s statements about theater seem to knowingly, brazenly elide the historical. For instance—
“What Aristotle spoke of as the spectacle was already, in archaic times, not so much the affirmation of community but—in a drama already predisposed to/by fracture—the mark of separation, born of the loss of unity. When the theater appears to bring us together it is, out of essential isolation, with the remembrance of this loss.”4 The unity that Blau imagines the audience desires is a psychic wholeness that precedes individuation: he imagines isolation as “essential” because for him it is the product of an inevitable moment in everybody’s psychic history—the “wound” you just mentioned. But Blau concludes this thought by making a surprising turn to “the spectacle,” which he means very much in Guy Debord’s sense: the media dazzle that capitalism throws up to advertise itself. The spectacle, he writes, does what theater does, only more so: “It does with a dividend of alienation, far more efficiently, what the theater has always done: it brings us together as alienated.”5 This seems awfully quick to me, even as summary: an “essential isolation” thought in Freudian terms has suddenly become an alienation thought in Marxian ones. If isolation is an all but inevitable moment in psychic life, then of course we are occupying that moment from the start. But I’m not ready myself to think of isolation in this way. Or, maybe better: I am content with understanding isolation along with Freud if we can also grant, along with Marx, that alienation is historical, that it takes different forms, and that one of these forms is a sensation of isolation that is itself not essential. This is also to say that Aristotle could not have been writing about the theater or spectacle of which we are the makers or the audience or the critics.
JJ: Well, I think Blau would say that both Freud and Marx have purchase here: modern alienation refragments, in a particular way, the already fragmented subject; capitalist spectacle builds a certain kind of theater for a subject who comes to it already primed for some kind of theater. But of course even this description of alienation as a particular exacerbation of a prior and universal, or “essential,” separation won’t satisfy you, because it assumes a psychoanalytic truth that would obtain “before” capitalism’s intervention. As if we could simply excavate the situation in strata and find the theater “underneath” the TV set. Your current work on “theater after film” undermines this kind of assumption and shows ways in which since World War II “theater itself” has, on the contrary, been constituted on the basis of certain anxieties about mass media.6 These might be “separation anxieties,” in the sense that TV seems to atomize us, whereas live theater promises a kind of togetherness—the promise Blau wants to resist. But as the term mass media implies, there’s also a reverse threat: theater might be like those media in homogenizing us, forcing us to have the same experience—and in the same place at the same time, no less. And it’s here that the modernist interest in, on the contrary, dividing the audience, in theater as different because divisive, would seem to emerge. This is where Brecht’s vision seems to come into play.
JJ brandishes the program note.
MH: But can it really come into play? If we’re going to acknowledge that what motivates the desire to divide changes over time, then we also need to ask whether Brecht’s take on the audience still has force today. Or is it now part of a modernism that is no longer current because, at bottom, it assumes the possibility of producing enlightened collectives in the theater?
JJ: I really want to talk about this question of currency. But first: I’m not sure Brecht believes in the possibility of producing enlightened collectives in the theater. To take one example, in 1931 he’s discussing how the use of screens could bring about a theater “full of experts, just as you have sporting arenas full of experts.”7 Or much later in the “Short Organon,” this thoroughgoing insistence that the spectators are already the “children of a scientific age.”8 This is one reason why I’m skeptical when Jacques Rancière in The Emancipated Spectator lumps Brecht in with the pedagogical logic of theater that he’s critiquing: “The first thing it teaches [the student/spectator] is her own inability.”9 It seems to me that, on the contrary, Brecht mostly imagines his task as getting the medium (theater), not the audience, up to speed.
MH: But what about that moment in Walter Benjamin’s account of his conversations with Brecht where he describes the wooden donkey Brecht kept on his desk, with a sign around its neck reading, “Even I must understand it”?10 Maybe my reading has been naive, but I’ll admit I’ve always thought of that as a rather nasty, blunt allegory of Brecht’s attitude toward his audience. Or, more generously, Brecht imagines that the great popular audience he desires is already expert about sports or accidents on the street, but not yet about politics or the economy: the know-how they do possess needs to be a model for a political knowledge still to come.
JJ: That donkey has always bugged me too. It reminds me of Henry James complaining that a playwright has to write for “the biggest ass” that the audience “may conceivably contain.”11 I guess I think the donkey reflects a certain self-irony on Brecht’s part about his own commitment to making theater “accessible” (as we’d say today). But I also think it’s important that a donkey who understands the play is still a donkey—so it’s not about turning an audience of asses into something better by teaching, enlightening, transforming them; but it’s about making sure the play can reach them all as they are, so that they can embrace or reject what it offers. And those alternatives mark out the division he wants to activate, which will be a historical division: the subjects of the present versus subjects of the past, who will manifest not their stupidity but their obsolescence by not having fun at Brecht’s plays. There will probably be donkeys on both sides of this divide.
The problem is that if you purge this diachronic division of its reference to class, it’s just the logic of every TV commercial. But I wonder if there isn’t something worthwhile about this idea that art should reward not the non-asinine but those who are most willing to let go of the old forms—and maybe punish those who cling to them.
MH: It will not surprise you if I zero in on the contrast with television and its audiences. If I understand your point, you’re countering a common understanding of television as simply a medium that unites audiences, indeed as the exemplar of such a unifying, homogenizing medium: the commercial offers an imaginary solution to a real problem, or a real solution to an unreal problem, and the huddled masses yearning to consume take it all in, unquestioning. (“I’d like to teach the world to sing.”) But such a picture imagines television as a much simpler medium than it is, and doesn’t acknowledge the ways television, too, divides its audiences, or works inside divisions it doesn’t create but may well help to maintain.
But to say even this may be to assume too much. Do television and theater do things to audiences? And does this doing have anything to do with the making or dissolution of collectives? As for Brecht: does he get away from the phantasm of education? What about those utterly Aristotelian moments where he celebrates the pleasure in learning? I grant the ambivalence, and Brecht’s respect for kinds of expertise, but I am not sure that he anticipates Rancière in picturing so thorough an equality of intelligences.
JJ: It’s true that for Brecht much of the time there seems to be a right choice and a wrong choice: “the militants know where they stand in the battle.”12 But there’s also something like a general commitment to dialectics or determinate negation, where the goal is to maximize the degree to which we can experience everything as being what it is instead of a concrete something else—the famous “not, but” he puts at the center of the epic performer’s task: “Whatever he does not do must be contained and conserved in what he does.”13 It seems to me that this could lead to a pretty wild experience—shadows swelling, possible worlds proliferating. The point here is exactly not to just lop off the “wrong choice” like the bad half of an apple, though you might have to Take those Measures later . . . I mean for sure there are losers in the Brechtian theater, as there are in TV commercials (the poor sucker who chose the wrong, old-style car insurance/laptop/burger—that’s really all I meant). But obviously, the old burg(h)er is there mostly to help us identify with the newer, better thing we’d all rather be. That’s really still the “common understanding of television” you’re talking about, right? Brainwashing? And if there’s a parallel with Brecht’s pedagogical project here, then that’s also the point where the “vulgar” or “instrumentalist” Brecht shows up and threatens to look like just another salesman—as he sometimes does look to critics like Theodor Adorno.
The thing is, I think I basically do subscribe to that knee-jerk model of media culture as homogenizing. And I think both of us are drawn to certain modernist visions of theater that want it to resist—that think maybe it can in some special way resist—what seems to be a fundamentally homogenizing tendency of mass culture. At the same time, your commitment to historicizing would also make us interrogate that “homogenizing” assumption, since what mass media “are” (let alone “is”) is always shifting. But there are other problems with the “homogenizing” model too, some of which I find it’s no picnic to acknowledge. How would you feel if I put on my “theater-maker” hat now and launched into a confessional monologue?
MH (gallantly): By all means.
JJ: OK. So: I want theater to be a haven for singularity, which brings people together in order to let them be different. This ideal has been articulated by a number of people; one place I come back to a lot is Hans-Thies Lehmann’s vision of postdramatic theater as a space for “a common contact of different singularities who do not melt their respective perspectives into a whole.”14 I find this vision very appealing, personally, and it corresponds to my own deepest sense of what I want the theater I make to be like. Especially with laughter: usually at my plays I can’t predict what lines will get laughs on a given night, and that’s partly to do with the variations in performance of course but also, I hope, because my collaborators and I are managing to create a structure with enough spaciousness and indeterminacy inside it that the audience’s minds will necessarily creep off to different nooks. And in practice this really does seem to involve a negative procedure, that is, sort of battering away at the forms of pop-cultural sense making in order to make them relax their coercive hold on us. As someone who watches a lot of television, I do think that most of our lived experience—and not only when we’re “just watching”—is rationally managed in a way that calibrates it for exchange.
But especially in my lifetime, these calibrations have gotten more sophisticated and variable, so that it seems there are almost no desires that don’t find increasingly “visible” possibilities of satisfaction already available for purchase. We actually are better consumers and producers as “singularities”—well, pseudosingularities. I know this is old news. But in this country anyway, it seems we’re coming to the end of the period in which one generation’s counterculture is the next generation’s corporate culture (the punk rock dialectic) and arriving at a stage where the very concept of counterculture is basically senseless because no one really experiences official culture as monolithic or oppressive. Anyway, I think this is true for my students. Which is not to say that they don’t confront horrendous, crushing bigotry in their immediate environments. But to the extent that they have access to global information systems, they can find images that will valorize their difference courtesy of capital.
All this is very confusing for poor me, since I seem to have been built for a constant pursuit of againstness that now seems not just mystified but incoherent; and it’s the only way I know how to think, feel, want, talk, or make anything.15 So my interest in revisiting Brecht’s—and Blau’s—insistence on division is motivated partly by this real urgent sense of disquietude I feel, and really, a desire for someone to show me that there is (“today”) a noncompliant aspect to divisions of the kind that theater—certain kinds of theater, maybe modernist theater—is able to provide for.
A moment of eeriness.
MH: Your interest in revisiting? Did you write this program note?
JJ: You’re the one listed in “special thanks,” not me.
They look at each other quizzically.
But anyway, as you point out, Blau’s “no theater without separation” refers to a separation that is supposed to be ineliminable from subjectivity, rather than a contingent, “subversive” division, so in this sense he seems to be farther away from what I’m after than Brecht. Though it’s also the case that Brecht himself, the world he is able to see, is often unbearably far from where we are.
MH: I share your sense that these are urgent questions: Has theater become residual by continuing to resist a past structure of hegemony? We agree that the theater that matters to us has been the theater that participates in the countering of the culture industry. But is the culture industry intact, if, indeed, it ever was the behemoth that Adorno and Horkheimer and just about every other postwar intellectual imagined it to be? Well, I’m tempted to insist that official culture now is just as oppressive as ever, even if it’s less monolithic. I remember being surprised, five years ago, to find that my undergraduates thought the argument of the culture industry chapter of Horkheimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment accurately described their world, today’s world, or the world of five years ago anyway. I expected them to possess that savvy postideological sense of mass culture you describe: they didn’t.
JJ: Thank god.
MH: So I am skeptical enough about claims regarding revolutionary changes to the superstructure that I am quite willing to assert that there is still a basic official culture for theater to resist. Venues for expression multiply, on certain platforms anyway, and inequality, paradoxically or otherwise, grows more or less in direct proportion to this proliferation. This is partly what Benjamin meant by the aestheticization of politics: the substitution of expressive opportunities in the form of mass rallies and so on for any genuine alteration of property rights. The current state of affairs may represent yet another triumph of such wholesale technologically mediated aestheticization.
Still, it’s important to acknowledge that our sense of mass culture as the enemy—and of the artist as the one who resists this culture—is the product of a particular postwar moment. Blau, for all his savvy, tends to take this picture of mass culture as, simply, true. Take this sentence.
MH reads, yet again, from The Audience.
“The social ideal is unitary, desiring fusion, while the perceiving subject moves, desiring, into the collective representation.”16 So what we have is a split subject again and again encountering a social world that always desires one thing, fusion; a social world that the subject invests with the potential to suture her own psychic divisions. Maybe theater can interrupt the subject’s attachment to that fantasy, allow her to see, in theater’s difference from “the social,” that there are ways of imagining collectivity that don’t fantasize about fusion. Again and again, this is one of Blau’s themes.
And again and again, too, Blau invests the solitary and separate with a kind of heroism that likewise seems to me a product of his long Cold War moment. Like here, on the penultimate page (reading again): “I can see the immaculate conception of an idea of performance in a lone man walking a tautened rope between the twin towers of advanced capitalism, not unlike the Platonic Ideas that Artaud saw in the strange figures crossing high over an abyss in The Daughters of Lot.”17 And then here—
MH takes a wad of notes from his coat pocket.
This is from a 1993 essay:
When the French equilibrist Philippe Petit stretched a line in the middle of the night and, virtually without an audience, walked between the two towers of the World Trade Center, it was as if he had lifted to its meridian dispossession itself, the notion of a “public solitude” (Stanislavski’s term) that had receded with unstable identity and the costliness of space and production into the meditative or solipsistic element of “solo performance.” Up there in the awesome draft, what you would have seen if you saw was a body so adept it hardly seemed carnal; it was more like an ideograph of the mind aloft at its extremity. And while we hardly see such theater every day, it is very close, I think, to the solitary discipline and rigor of desire that (with a certain feeling for gravity) materializes culture, high culture, in the vertigo of a theater space.18
Thinking about what we’re thinking about, I zero in on that phrase: “virtually without an audience.” I don’t know whether Blau means that very few people saw it—and I don’t think this is true: see Man on Wire—or whether he means that because of the distance between Petit and those who witnessed his performance the astounding adeptness of the body was available only after the fact, in photographs. But this passage seems to me a fair demonstration of something worth noting about Blau as a writer—his habit of revising in public—and, more important, his insistence on the solitary and on risk. For Blau what makes art in Petit’s exemplary and unrepeatable performance is its heroic separateness from its public, but that distance is rarely large enough to satisfy the demand for the truly extreme: what we want is the splendor of “solitary discipline”; what we get, more often than not, is immersion in the “solipsistic element” typical of the “solo performance,” from which Blau distances Petit with those suspicious quotation marks.
JJ: I’m glad to see you’re carrying pages of Blau around too. I thought I was the only one.
MH: Never leave home without ’em.
JJ: So much for my heroic individualism! But what you call Blau’s “insistence on the solitary” is particularly meaningful in the context of a theater discourse that most often seems to want to celebrate the overcoming of solitude: copresence, communication, witnessing, or even just “dialogue.” It’s tempting to think, too, about the ways Blau continually performs a certain resistance to the reader in his prose—or maybe even something analogous to the past conditional of Petit’s performance: what you would have read if you’d been able to read this . . . maybe I’m just wondering if Blau’s writing is “virtually without an audience” in the way Petit’s act was, or—since you raise the question—vice versa. And this is not just about the ways Blau’s writing is hard to get copresent with, but also the way its particular difficulty seems to call forth a certain self-division in the reader.
It’s a little cheesy but inevitable, I guess, to keep pointing out that Blau’s writing is “like” theater, or like the theater he likes. But: here he’s in league with Brecht, who also suggests that theater can make the individual experience herself as internally split: “imagine a man standing in a valley and making a speech in which he occasionally changes his opinion or simply utters sentences that contradict one another, so that the accompanying echo brings them into confrontation.”19
MH: Did you just quote the “Short Organon” from memory?
JJ: No, it’s tattooed in the crook of my elbow—see? Evidently Brecht is saying that this internal self-difference is conducive to the more obviously political mode of breakup, into classes. Bringing this back to Blau’s psychoanalytic frame, we might say that the fact that each of us enters the theater as a big heap of parts pathetically clinging to its own fantasmatic wholeness seems in itself to imply at least a possible vulnerability, hence availability, to more exciting, contingent, socially significant modes of division.
Which would be great, right? I’m incredibly relieved that your students recognize the culture industry. But it might be that even in the last few years our students, real experts in metropolitan living (not to mention global capitalism), have gotten savvier at finding what they want in the matrix, hence more optimistic about its inclusiveness. They already know that every “difference” is recuperable as exchange value. So what kind of fractiousness do they—do we—still need?
MH: I persist in thinking that there remain differences that official culture can’t do anything with—at any rate, differences for which there is no translation into exchange value. There’s a lot of talk of the absolute subsumption of culture into capital at this moment, and I don’t buy it. The situation of some of the art I care about is horrific, but it’s not utterly scorched earth.
JJ: But isn’t the feeling of scorched earth—of wretchedness or catastrophe—one of the things that lets you know some such difference must be possible?
Around them, an impatient rustling: when is the show going to begin? Our protagonists lower their voices and pick up the pace.
MH: Maybe we are moving away from Brecht and toward Beckett. If anyone embodies the attempt to inhabit, through staging or writing—and however tentatively—that scorched terrain, it would be Beckett, no? The late works—say, “Imagination Dead Imagine”—are so precise in their delineation of these spaces. I wonder if part of the point of these increasingly impossible spaces isn’t to divide the audience from its very empathy, from its confidence that it might have some idea of what it is to inhabit that space, that sort of space. What determinate negation follows from this cul-de-sac? Somehow, after all, some utopia?
JJ: So if Beckett in a piece like “Imagination Dead Imagine” is trying to create an uninhabitable space (which we’ll experience as uninhabitable because the piece is sort of explicitly an exercise in trying to inhabit it), then the division that’s taking place is no longer between those who can go the distance to revolution and those who can’t, as in Brecht. With Beckett, none of us are getting there. One could be a good Brechtian but not a good Beckettian.
MH surreptitiously pulls the cuff of his sleeve down, covering up the “It’s a rare thing not to have been bonny—once” tattoo on his left wrist.20
Any identification with what’s happening onstage serves mostly as a point for the work to pivot away from. The truth is, I never really feel like talking about Beckett’s late work; it seems to throw up little walls around me, making me potentially suspicious of and grouchy toward my peers. You don’t feel this way (about that work) I guess?
MH: Throwing up little walls: that’s what it does! When does the late work begin? I suppose, whenever it begins, that period would have to include Ohio Impromptu, What Where, and Catastrophe. When I was a college student, an evening of those three plays together in September 1983 at the Harold Clurman Theater on 42nd Street, with a cast that included David Warrilow, who was just stunning—that evening made me think about Beckett and about theater differently. And I feel that I have been working toward being able to write about the experience of that evening for some time. Part of the shock of that evening had to do with what we’ve been talking about: with the experience of a division that is very hard to describe. Those plays exclude the audience in a way I had not experienced. I was used to the kinds of divisions through distinction implicit in a lot of theater and of course in a lot of the other kinds of art I took in. But the address to the audience, the formal derangement of Beckett’s plays, was something different, and differently divisive. For Blau that kind of formal derangement had everything to do with an essential link between performance and mortality: think of his famous claim that the “person you see performing in front of you is dying in front of your eyes,” which comes (of course, at least in one of its iterations) from an interview called “Remembering Beckett.”21 But I resist this line of thought: I don’t think that the divide between performance and everything else is that performance as such makes us more aware of mortality. I’m also really not sure what it means to say that the performer “is dying in front of your eyes.” Very likely that person is doing a whole lot of other things there as well.
JJ: Yeah, but isn’t there some particular way in which, when I watch a play, my imago gets enlivened and hence imperiled? The thing onstage isn’t an image, it withholds itself, it moves. It leaves, maybe forever; it reappears, definitely not forever. Doesn’t that give theater a kind of special relationship to the death drive?
MH: Blau also suggests something like that: “There is something in the theater, I’ve said, which resists being theater, as if the factitious energy of appearances—what is most entertaining, beguiling, seductive about it—were the recursive fascination of the death drive itself.”22 The word factitious overloads this sentence with a Platonic suspicion of the power of the image as such: it’s not that the images themselves are factitious; their energy itself is somehow bogus. This “factitious energy,” however, represents, for Blau, a salutary antitheatrical impulse inside the theater: like the disappearing and reappearing toy in Freud’s scenario, the image, empty and unimportant in itself, acts “as if” it were—what?—a fascination that belongs to the death drive. But I also want to ask: why the death drive? I don’t see why theater is, now, an especially apt venue for going beyond the pleasure principle. Yes, I suppose those we see onstage are dying in front of us, but an encounter with mortality is not necessarily a confrontation with the death drive: on the contrary.
JJ: But Fr—
MH: Yes, Freud links the death drive to tragedy, but he discovers it in the fort/da game and not in Hamlet—not there at first, at any rate.23 Blau wants the theater to be the place of a certain knowledge, and this is the knowledge for which philosophy has long claimed to train us—knowledge about death. Small wonder, given all it was asked to do, that the theater remained, for Blau (and others), “impossible.” I find myself thinking of that very sympathetic moment in Derrida’s last interview when he claims always to have resisted that calling, failed at learning how to die.24 At the very least I would want to put the brakes on the idea that “the” theater has pursued some transhistorical project, wants to do something to its audiences. What does theater want? That’s not a question that will get us anywhere, I don’t think. Or let me rephrase that: thinking of theater in this way has gotten people very far, and there is no denying the alluring challenge in, for instance, Blau’s ongoing construction of a dialogue between Beckett and Greek tragedy. But there are histories of death and histories of theater, and I find myself wanting to know more about the peculiar interactions of these histories, about the historical situations of cities of the dead.
JJ: Couldn’t we set out just a few cans of hemlock at the theater bar, between the glasses of wine and the damp little sandwiches?
MH: Hmm. And in Britain you could order your hemlock in advance, just in case you really, really want to leave at the intermission.
But I want to think about the division of the audience from another point of view. I have in mind a wonderful passage from the chapter on double plots in William Empson’s Some Versions of the Pastoral. The passage begins with an account of the Elizabethan power of sympathy, and this leads Empson not to some account of communion but to a broadly suggestive account of how plays, in our terms, divide their audiences, or, more exactly, play to audiences already divided. For Empson, this division begins with questions of character: “This fulness in the audience clearly allowed of complex character-building; one need not put hero and villain in black and white; though not everybody in the audience understood such a character they did not object when they understood only partial conflicting interpretations of it.”25 This would seem banal, maybe, were it only for the characterization of hero and villain. Empson, however, implies that there was no single operation of sympathy in the Elizabethan theater. It’s unclear to me if he means to imply that the audience knew that its understanding amounted to only “partial conflicting interpretations,” and that this partial interpretation was enough for it. In any case, Empson grants that almost everyone would have understood a certain complexity: “few people in the audience would get it in only one way, and few in all. And even the man who saw the full interpretation would still use the partial ones; both because he was in contact with the audience the play assumed and because he needed crude as well as delicate means of interpreting it quickly on the stage.”26 From Elizabethan theater, Empson moves backward to Greece, and he offers this generalization:
The whole point was to play one part of the audience against the other, and yet this made a superb “complete play” for the critic who felt what was being felt in the whole audience. The total aesthetic effect would not be “in the play” if it was only a clever secret attack. But the plays are not addressed only to the few; the choruses are straightforward religious poetry; all shades of opinion were to be fused by the infection of the theatre into a unity of experience, under sufficiently different forms to avoid riots. On a smaller scale I think this is usual in the theatre.27
The “partial conflicting interpretations” resulting from this ambiguity are, Empson I think implies, all partial, yes, but they are also all correct. The “complete play,” indeed, is the sum of these partial interpretations—and Empson means “conflicting” in the strong sense of contradictory, irreconcilable. This isn’t a milquetoast celebration of the possibility or likelihood of ambiguity but an assertion of the way plays positively, by design, “play one part of the audience against the other.” Empson’s play on play here is pretty cool, no? As if the play of plays were itself essentially a mode of dividing the audience. What strikes me as so important here is that Empson, very different from Blau, is pointing toward the historicity of the divided audience.
Despite this emphasis on the dividing of the audience into parts, Empson also insists on the wholeness of these plays. This insistence culminates in this really mind-boggling formulation: “all shades of opinion were to be fused by the infection of the theatre into a unity of experience, under sufficiently different forms to avoid riots.” Is the “unity of experience” itself something that takes these “different forms”? Empson at once uses a Nietzschean language of theater’s power of contagion, and imagines this contagion as controlled by the diversity of interpretations that it includes. What Empson seems to have in mind is some common consciousness of theater’s fusion of contradictions; an audience knows it is divided, and doesn’t riot. But why should it, why might it riot?
JJ: The audiences I’ve been in were never going to riot. Like, no way.
But it’s true: Empson, Brecht, Nietzsche, Artaud all sensed the theatrical audience as a potential riotous mass. Even Blau, who faced down the fear of riot in his famous San Quentin production of Waiting for Godot, imagines something like a riot when he starts his first book, The Impossible Theater, by proclaiming, “The purpose of this book is to talk up a revolution. Where there are rumblings already, I want to cheer them on. I intend to be incendiary and subversive.” Of course that kind of riot-theater—the salutary, world-changing, all-around kick-ass-awesome kind—seems to be the dream that keeps the “impossible” (as you’ve already noted) lodged in Blau’s title. And what’s more, the first-person singular pronoun keeps proliferating throughout those first paragraphs (“I feel like the lunatic Lear . . . I respect and despise . . . I want . . . I want . . .”), as if to anticipate the insistence on inevitable separation that The Audience will bring into focus a quarter of a century later. For Blau, theater isn’t where I get to dissolve into the riotous mob; in fact, in that earlier moment, it’s the site at which I can affirm my self, my very singularity (“My friends, wanting to spare me my murderous impulses . . . tell me to calm down”) as He Who Desires the Riot most strongly.28
Beckett’s own imaginary relationship with the theatrical mob is another story. “Estragon: Beat me? Certainly they beat me!”29 Beckett, that is, always seems to position himself as the potential victim of that mob, perhaps like Empson and Brecht. . . . I was going to say “and perhaps unlike Nietzsche and Artaud,” but given their intense ecstatic masochism, I don’t think I want to say that actually.
MH: You can add me to the list: one day I want to be inside a Dionysian throng. Is that too much to ask?
JJ: Maybe not, since Empson’s “unity of experience” seems to propose that we actually do have radically different responses to a work and yet we experience those different responses as the same response. And we’re not necessarily making a mistake: the differences themselves are maybe what we all experience, not instead of the work, but woven throughout it and, oddly, giving it its cohesiveness. But—forgive me—isn’t that basically the fantasy of every teen movie? The Breakfast Club: we’re all so different, but we can totally come together when it matters.
Still, the idea that theater can be an occasion for us to come together as separate, and thus to experience the fact that we don’t need to annihilate our differences in order to come together, would be the basis for the idea of theater as a training ground for nontotalitarian social solidarity. And I take it that this is the implication in accounts like Lehmann’s, which I quoted before: “a common contact of different singularities who do not melt their respective perspectives into a whole.” I guess we could also phrase this as a respite from competition and domination—although, again, it’s not at all clear to me that we don’t find that respite within capital culture too. I think what made the tightrope walker such a compelling figure for Blau’s theater is that this act, and the forms of solitude it harbors, was difficult—phenomenologically difficult, hard to inhabit at all. And I do think this is the point of aesthetic practice, to discover a mode of experience that is almost not experience because it’s incompatible with the frameworks within which modern experience takes place. Like the daredevil on the wire, this practice always risks falling into nothingness because the structures of our subjectivity might just completely fail to support it. And then my question would be: If this is the challenge of the aesthetic, then can we even use the vocabulary of individuality to discuss it? I mean, can the figure of the individual, the solitary, still be meaningful for describing this possibility?
MH: I think the point is that art can try to address us differently—in a different way or with a different urgency than the kinds of hailing to which we’re usually subject. And what addresses us makes us. Identify, disidentify, oscillate between identification and disidentification: it’s not that we get to choose, but we all differently experience ourselves as subjected to what speaks to us, what speaks us. That’s where we are. We see stuff, we miss stuff, that’s okay. These forms of address are elaborately classed, racialized, coded in so many ways: that’s another, crucially important ongoing conversation. The phenomenological and medial situations of address—the scenes of address—have changed radically over the past century. Thoroughly to trace Blau’s responses to these changes might well require producing an encyclopedic account of his work. A truism, yes—but maybe because these apparatuses (radio, movies, TV, and so on down the line to video games like World of Warcraft) are so obviously fundamental to the restructuring of experience that we are still catching up with what changes in the apparatuses of address mean for where and what and how we are. I am reluctant to say that “the” theater does this or that or the other thing, but I’ll get over this reluctance—for the moment anyway, for this moment—and say that this restructured landscape of address has changed the role and importance of theatrical address. May I risk a summary? Here: theater divides its audience from a second nature built on technologically mediated modes of address.
JJ: So then, would we want to say that something theater can do is hold my self, and the world, open? How about that?
MH is about to reply when the house lights finally bump to black and the real play begins.
1. Bertolt Brecht, “Notes on The Mother” [1933], in Brecht on Theatre, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, trans. Jack Davis et al. 3rd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 92 (hereafter Brecht on Theatre).
2. Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 10.
3. Ibid., 149.
4. Ibid., 124.
5. Ibid.
6. See Martin Harries, “Theater after Film, or Dismediation,” in Medium: Essays from the English Institute, special issue of ELH 83.2 (Summer 2016): 345–61.
7. Bertolt Brecht, “Notes on The Threepenny Opera” [1931], in Brecht on Theatre, 72.
8. Bertolt Brecht, “Short Organon for the Theatre” [1949], in Brecht on Theatre, 235.
9. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 9.
10. Walter Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht,” trans. Anya Bostock, in Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1997), 89.
11. Quoted in Anne T. Margolis, Henry James and the Problem of Audience: An International Act (Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1985), 85.
12. Bertolt Brecht, The Decision [1931], trans. John Willett, in Brecht: Collected Plays, Three, ed. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1997), 89.
13. Bertolt Brecht, “Short Description of a New Technique of Acting That Produces a Verfremdung Effect” [1940], in Brecht on Theatre, 185.
14. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 83.
15. For what I think is a related discussion, see the articles in Queer Theory without Antinormativity, in differences 26.1 (2015).
16. Blau, Audience, 10.
17. Ibid., 382.
18. Herbert Blau, “Spacing Out in the American Theater,” in The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 51–52. Blau had previously published a version of this passage, with significant differences, in “Spacing Out in the American Theater,” Revue française d’études américaines 36 (April 1988): 210.
19. Brecht, “Short Organon,” 241.
20. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958), 42.
21. Herbert Blau, “Remembering Beckett: An Interview,” in Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 158.
22. Herbert Blau, “Astride of a Grave; or, the State of the Art,” in Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 176.
23. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990), 17.
24. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: An Interview with Jean Birnbaum, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007).
25. William Empson, Some Versions of the Pastoral [1935] (London: Hogarth, 1986), 64.
26. Ibid., 64–65.
27. Ibid., 65.
28. Herbert Blau, The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 3.
29. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot [1954] (New York: Grove, 2011), 2.