I. Historical survey of theatrical forms

At the very basis of the phenomenon of theatre as it is found in a wide variety of cultures is the assumption of a particular spatial configuration suggested by the word theatre itself—a place where one sees. Many theorists and historians have emphasized the centrality of this configuration. Richard Southern’s The Seven Ages of Theatre undertakes to “peel off” the various “accretions” theatre has taken on over the centuries and to discover its “essence.” At the core he finds two separate pieces, the Player and the Audience. “Take these apart and you have nothing left” (Southern 1961, 21). Eric Bentley’s “minimal definition” of theatre makes a similar point: “A impersonates B while C looks on” (Bentley 1964, 150). Other approaches, such as David Cole’s anthropological analysis, bring us to this same dialectic by a different route. For Cole, theatre occurs in a mystic place where two worlds confront one another—the uncanny, dangerous, and fascinating space of the archetypical illud tempus inhabited by our representative shaman/actor while we watch from the duller but safer world of everyday reality. It is not these separate spaces for player and audience that make theatre, but their confrontation: “as against the Actor, we take on the collective character of the Audience” (Cole 1975, 71). For this confrontation to occur, of course, both actor and audience must be physically present.

Theatre as a cultural system is thus based on a given spatial relationship different from those involved in other spatial systems. Every culture has its own systems for the arrangement of space within a dwelling, for example, but the dwelling has no wide-spread relationship of spaces corresponding to the basic code of theatre; neither does a commercial structure, despite the given dialectic of buyer and seller. The church or temple has perhaps the closest systematic architectural relationship to the theatre, since it represents a meeting point of the secular celebrant and the sacred celebrated, yet the sacred may be only spiritually or symbolically present, not spatially, as a player must be. Certain religious structures, such as the traditional Quaker meeting house, are thus able to avoid the setting aside of “sacred” space within their confines. Certain modern experimental performances seek to extend the same freedom to the theatre. Among the “axioms” for “environmental theatre,” for example, Richard Schechner lists “actor and audiences employ the same space” (Schechner 1968, 43), but this tends to be literally rather than psychically true. Those who have been in audiences sharing the same physical space with actors in performance will have felt the tenacity of Cole’s observation—the actor almost always remains an uncanny, disturbing “other,” inhabiting a world with its own rules and which the audience, however physically close, cannot truly penetrate. A history of spatial signification in the theatre will thus be in large part a history of how different cultures have altered the location, size, shape, and exact relationship of acting and audience spaces according to changing ideas about the function of theatre and its relationship to other cultural systems.

A theatre was one of the architectural objects that defined a Greek city, an essential element in its repertoire of architectural objects according to Pausanius and others, though its size and the method of its construction normally placed it outside the city center. The heart of this theatre was the orchestra, surrounded on three sides by an amphitheatre so that the performance space was thrust forward into the audience space. It might be helpful at this point to consider the possible variations of actor-audience space, ranging from entirely separate (as in film and television) to fully integrated, as in Schechner’s environmental theatre, where each performer may create her own “pocket” of performance space. The most integrated form with clearly defined audience-actor space is what is sometimes called the arena form, with performance space entirely surrounded by audience. This is a natural arrangement in an otherwise undifferentiated area and is often found in theatrical performance outside physical structures. The thrust stage projects the performance space into the audience space; scenery may be behind an actor in such an arrangement, but the audience perceives the actors as spatially embedded in the audience world more than in that represented by the scenery. The confrontational model, which we will examine more closely in its historical context, clearly moves the actor from the audience space to within the space of the theatricalized world. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1

The Greek theatre, which probably began as an arena stage with audience surrounding the orchestra, retained the integrated thrust arrangement even when the development of the skene house as a dressing and scenic area had made a full arena arrangement impossible. Moreover, this theatre sought not only to integrate performance and audience but to integrate the audience itself. The architectural codes which would evolve in later periods to mark social differentiations in the public were not to be found in the Greek auditorium, with its sweeping curves of socially equal benches.

The development of the skene house at the beginning of the classic period provided another element in the repertoire of theatrical spaces to be variously encoded in subsequent periods. The basic function of this element was to provide an “offstage” area for actors to don and change costumes and masks, and which could provide rapid and easy entrances and exits for the acting area. These practical considerations remained the same for the great variety of tiring houses and backstage areas in later periods, but from the beginning this space was given additional signifying functions as well. In its first known appearance (in Aeschylus’ Orestia), the skene represented the palace at Thebes and the Temple of Diana. Its main door became a display area for scenic tableaux; its roof represented city walls, palace roofs, even the abode of the gods. So there developed a standard spatial feature of the thrust stage that would be shared, in time, by the confrontational (Italianate) stage. Behind the acting area there is commonly another area, with support spaces for the actors, the wall between these areas becoming a space for the display of scenic elements signifying the fictive world of the dramatic action.

Perhaps as early as the Greek theatre and certainly later, theatre structures offered a parallel “retiring space” for the audience, the lobbies and foyers. There are interesting connotative parallels in these two types of support areas (Figure 2). Each serves as a sort of transitional space between the outside world, where actors and audience mingle in different relationships, and the special world of the stage and auditorium. Both actors and spectators normally use these intermediate spaces to prepare themselves for their different “roles” in the central confrontational space. Actors get into costume and makeup and prepare themselves physically and psychologically for their contact with the audience. The spectators make more modest but similar adjustments in their support spaces. In a modern theatre they may check their coats, chat with others preparing to share the same experience, read programs and perhaps posted reviews, and generally remove themselves, as these spaces encourage them to do, from their extra-theatre concerns. At intermissions, both actors and spectators retire to their separate support spaces, where both may relax briefly with their fellows, away from the tensions and obligations of the stage/auditorium confrontation.

Figure 2

The theatre structure was not a part of the architectural repertoire of the late medieval city, though a great variety of other spaces, created for other purposes, were utilized for theatre, each contributing its own connotations to this experience. The liturgical dramas, staged in cathedrals and monasteries, drew upon the spatial and decorative codes of those buildings, utilizing specific shrines and chapels with appropriate symbolic overtones as well as standard features such as the high altar, the crypt, the baptismal font, and the architectural alignment of the cathedral as a whole with the East (Jerusalem and Eden) to West (death and resurrection) world axis.

In the great processional dramas the city itself became the space of performance, a visual and spatial equivalent of the mixing of Biblical and contemporary references in the paintings of the period and in the texts of the medieval dramas themselves. Thus the Viennese Passion of the fifteenth century that began in the markeplace doubtless assumed the secular and social connotations of that area, but when the actor portraying Christ subsequently bore his cross through the winding streets of the city to the distant cemetery where the crucifixion was to be represented, the city itself took on the connotations of the universal city, Jerusalem (Königson 1975, 95).

Reduced to the simplest of spatial elements, a populist theatre continued to thrive in secular form during the Renaissance. A raised platform was set up in a public square or at a fairground to set apart and make visible the performance area, the rear of this platform normally curtained off to form a simple backstage area, the front serving as a rudimentary scenic façade (sometimes nothing more than a curtain with slots for entrances). The actors on the platform enjoyed the sort of integration with the audience offered by the thrust-stage arrangement.

A very different sort of theatrical space was developed in the private theatres of the Renaissance princes, involving a totally different set of spatial and decorative codes. The first thing to be noted about this so-called Italianate stage is the implications of its location. The classic theatre was an independent structure, open to the populace at large and located in a site accessible to them. The medieval theatre, lacking a permanent structure, was offered in public areas such as the cathedrals or public marketplaces. The princely theatres of the Renaissance followed neither model. Normally not independent structures, they were built into princely residences and were thus an architectural part of them, like a kitchen, chapel, or audience chamber. As such, they were of course not readily accessible to outsiders, but could be attended only by invitation from the master of the palace. Wagner’s complaint that the Renaissance princes appropriated the arts for their private entertainment is nowhere more evident than in the theatre, where the physical space of the art was literally a part of the princely home.

Equally radical changes took place within the theatre space itself. The integrated actor/audience space of the classic and medieval theatre was here replaced by a confrontational model; the proscenium arch appeared as a “frame” (and a barrier) between the world of the audience and that of the actor, with the curtain to further reinforce the separation. Perhaps the single most important spatial feature of this theatre was the enormous symbolic influence of perspective in it. Instead of the façade backgrounds of earlier stages, the Italianate began employing a one-point perspective which could be perfectly enjoyed only from a single position in the auditorium, that of the sponsoring prince. Audience members along the sides of the auditorium had to imagine the effect from that point of view, to enjoy the performance, as it were, through the prince’s eyes. His position now rivaled or even surpassed the stage as a focus of attention (Murray 1977, 282). Those unaware of this double focus are often surprised to find that the auditoriums of Renaissance and baroque theatres were as a rule better illuminated than the stages themselves. The auditorium, as an area of display, was decorated at least as richly as the stage. The actors, removed from the intimacy of a thrust stage, lost the physical dimensionality such staging offered, a loss correspondingly offset by the prince, who was usually seated on a dais in the center of the auditorium, to be observed in his full dimensionality (Figure 3).

Of course the public theatres of the Renaissance developed very different spatial configurations. As commercial ventures, they priced different parts of their auditoriums differently, so that none could be said to have offered democratic seating. On the other hand, a commercial operation had no incentive to emphasize a particular part of the auditorium at the expense of all others as the princely theatres did. Thus, perspective scenery remained essentially a court phenomenon during the Renaissance, while public theatres in England, France, Spain, and elsewhere utilized neutral or multiple backgrounds.

Renaissance public theatres, architectural entities outside the princely palaces, had to find their proper place in the new urban systems, and this varied according to the place that theatre as an activity was assigned within the culture. The first public theatres (corrales) of Spain were founded as charitable institutions, and they remained generally respected elements in the society, often with close ties to the state religion. The corrales of Madrid’s Cofradía de la Pasion were located in the Calle del Sol and the Calle del Príncipe in the very heart of the city. Seville’s Coliseo shared a wall with the residence of the Marquis of Ayamonte, who furnished water from his private fountain for the establishment, and who was granted a private entrance from his home directly into a theatre box (Rennert 1909, 53).

Figure 3

In England, on the contrary, the social marginality of the theatre was echoed in the physical marginality of its structures, located in the “liberties”—contiguous to the city but not a part of it, and in the case of the south bank (the favored location), separated by the formidable barrier of the Thames. The neighbors in such locations were other culturally marginal establishments such as bear-baiting arenas and bordellos. When at least certain English theatres during the Restoration were accorded an official place in the social system, their position in the urban text at once reflected this change, with the companies holding the royal patents erecting houses in the center of London. During the following century the theatre was widely accepted in Europe as a cultural monument, and by the late eighteenth century city planners were regularly using theatre buildings as nodes for the convergence of the great boulevards that crisscrossed their new cities. Thus Baron Haussmann in Paris had huge new theatres built at the Opéra and the Châtelet to provide just such an urban focus.

The interior spaces of European theatres underwent various changes between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, but the auditorium remained rigidly codified in terms of social classes (and sometimes in other terms as well—Spanish theatres, for example, provided sexually segregated seating). The raised dais for the princely patron in the center of the auditorium was generally replaced by the elaborately decorated royal or ducal box located at the back and center of the auditorium. Other boxes, naturally of lesser status, extended to the right and left of this around to the stage, normally in three or four tiers. The possession of a box at the Opéra became a widely accepted sign of membership in the privileged classes. Indeed New York’s Metropolitan Opera was originally built not to satisfy a passion for this art but because the new wealth represented by the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Morgans was unable to obtain boxes at the old Academy of Music, where all the “aristocratic” space was already filled by older families. Rather than settle for symbolically inferior spaces, the new society felt compelled to build its own theatre (Eaton 1968, 1-2).

While the aristocracy filled the boxes of European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatres, with appropriate subdivisions according to rank, the area surrounded by the boxes, the pit (parterre) was traditionally the space for merchants, clerks, and professional men, while the gallery (paradis) above the boxes provided space for footmen, grooms, and the lower orders of society. Each class was assigned not only its own seating space, but usually its own support space as well, so that the patrons of each area entered by their own door, ascended by their own stairs, and during intermissions gathered in their own lobby or salon—each of these of course treated spatially and decoratively as befitted the class being served.

The French Revolution, a period of high official awareness of the signifying power of objects and spaces, completely remodeled the Théâtre de la Nation in Paris in 1794 to replace all boxes and balconies with a single democratic sweep of seats. This reform lasted only two years, until the Thermidorian reaction, when the social spatial divisions were restored, including, under Napoleon, even a restoration of the royal (now the imperial) box. Not until Wagner built his revolutionary theatre at Bayreuth did Europe see another major attempt at a democratic auditorium, this time a lasting one, with continual influence on subsequent design. Wagner’s often-mentioned reform of dimming the auditorium lights during performance is usually tied to his desire to concentrate focus on the stage, but this change had its social message as well. The auditorium was no longer to be treated, as it had been since the Renaissance, as a space for the display of aristocratic power and pomp.

The confrontational style of staging favored by the Renaissance court theatres remained predominant in most Western theatres until early in the twentieth century (and still remains the traditional arrangement of a Western theatre). Changes in theatre forms and practice during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries generally tended to reinforce this pattern. Early in the 1600s some aristocratic audience members invaded the sides of the Italianate stage, restoring for more than a century something of the actor/audience spatial relationship of the thrust theatres, but by the mid-1800s they had disappeared. The English forestage, another encouragement to this relationship, gradually disappeared too. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the baroque idea of the actor standing at the front of the stage presenting conventionally understood signs to the audience began to be replaced by another idea of acting, drawing more on the signs of everyday life and relating the actor more to his fellows (as in Diderot’s beloved tableaux) than to the dominant princely eye in the auditorium (Fischer-Lichte 1983, 2:131-33).

The concern of romantics such as Hugo for visual spectacle and historical detail, along with the subsequent realist emphasis on physical environment, carried this reinterpretation of the space behind the proscenium arch further still. From antiquity through the baroque, actors were displayed in front of scenery, whether that scenery was a neutral façade or a highly elaborate perspective. In the nineteenth century, actors were thought of as living within the scenic space, which was no longer displayed for the public but, as it were, accidentally observed by an audience of voyeurs through the transparent “fourth wall.” Wagner’s darkened auditorium was an important contribution toward the reinforcement of this separation of worlds (Figure 4).

Twentieth-century experimentation with theatrical form has largely been directed against this totally divided theatrical space. This experimentation has been extremely varied. It has included the conscious revival of earlier spatial arrangements, the conscious creation of new ones, both permanent and temporary, the development of spaces whose use can be varied, and the utilization of non-theatrical space which may suggest hitherto unexplored actor/audience relationships or bring external social or cultural connotations into the theatre experience.

During most of the periods briefly surveyed here, the spatial codes of the theatre were fairly limited and generally acknowledged; but today in theatre, as in much of modern culture, an enormous variety of codes are utilized, and theatrical competence now requires the knowledge of not just one of them but many. There remain certain general structural principles, however, to help viewers find their bearings. The general urban spatial codes for theatre still operate with remarkable consistency in most major Western cities. Here one finds three basic types of theatre, each in its own area, with its own type of offering in a fairly standardized space. First there are the generally wellsubsidized national theatres, the twentieth-century palaces of culture, found in sites befitting their role as national monuments, in landscaped parks or as central elements in modern building complexes. These have generous interior spaces, often including eating facilities. They may also contain a smaller theatre or two for experimental work, though their own fare tends to be traditional classics or major premières.

Figure 4

The second type is the standard commercial theatre, so closely identified with a certain urban area and a certain type of play that one may speak of a boulevard theatre or boulevard drama, a West End theatre or play, or a Broadway theatre, play, or musical. Spatially these are not free-standing monuments like the national houses, but façade theatres, part of the commercial rows which characterize their districts. They tend to cluster in a fairly limited area, with hotels and restaurants nearby, and their interior spaces are usually largely devoted to seating, often rather cramped at that, to maximize profits in an expensive location. Lobbies and other support spaces are correspondingly small. Their stages are almost invariably in Italian proscenium style, while the national theatres, many of them of more recent construction, are more varied. The third type of theatre, the “off-Broadway” or “fringe” theatre, may be found scattered throughout the city, sometimes singly but often in small groups, especially in the artistic quarters where recent performance experimentation has encouraged the collaboration of theatre with other arts. These theatres have often been converted from other spaces and tend to be small, intimate, and correspondingly the most flexible in actor/audience spatial relationships.

The theatre audience today is thus generally much better informed about the spatial codes operating there than the plurality of possibilities would suggest. Almost any large theatre is a fairly stable structure, and previous acquaintance with this theatre or another of the same general type will normally provide any necessary information. Certain theatres—both large (like the Theatre am Lehninerplatz in Berlin) and small (like the Performing Garage in New York City)—are designed with a completely neutral interior, the so-called “black box” that is organized differently spatially for each production, but that very flexibility becomes a part of the pattern of expectation for the audiences of these theatres. For those with an interest in contemporary theatre, the plurality of available codes has become itself a part of the experience of theatre. We select the proper anticipatory frame just as we select the proper wardrobe, and just as we wear suits, dresses, and jewelry to one theatre and jeans, slacks, and sneakers to another, so we bring to each an expectation of the spatial and performance codes our culture has led us to expect from that type of performance situation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eric Bentley, 1964, Life of the Drama, New York.

David Cole, 1975, The Theatrical Event, Middleton, Conn.

Quaintance Eaton, 1968, The Miracle of the Met, New York.

Erika Fischer-Lichte, 1983, “Vom ‘künstlichen’ zum ‘natürlichen’ Zeichen: Theatre des Barock und der Aufklärun,” in vol. 2 of Semiotik des Theaters, Tübingen.

Elie Königson, 1975, L’espace théâtral mediéval, Paris.

Timothy Murray, 1977, “Richelieu’s Theatre: The Mirror of a Prince,” in Renaissance Drama, NS 8.

Hugo Rennert, 1909, The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega, New York.

Richard Schectner, 1968, “6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre,” in Drama Review, 12, no. 3.

Richard Southern, 1961, The Seven Ages of Theatre, New York.

II. Sociology

1. Premise

Within the limits of the social sciences, it is the sociological perspective that has been that most extensively applied to the study of the theatrical event in its numerous aspects. This is not surprising when one considers the social characteristics of the theatre and the evidence that the theatre is a phenomenon deeply rooted in the fabric of a collective existence. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to maintain that there is at present or that there has ever been a sociology (or an anthropology) of the theatre, that is, a true and proper discipline worthy of the name.¹

In the first place, the extensive sociological material related to the theatre rarely presents the minimum theoretical and methodological homogeneity required. Besides, worse yet, the results of the various uses of sociology in the theatre field have always caused disappointment. Usually they end up being superficial statistical polls of the audience or abstract studies, sometimes even metaphysically oriented, on the relationship between theatre and society, both understood as static and monolithic entities.

To my knowledge, the first work explicitly devoted to this new approach appeared in 1956. It was by Georges Gurvitch, the great French sociologist, who, in his effort “to enumerate the different parts and branches that it could explore” (Gurvitch 1956, 202), said, “the sociology of the theatre is only at its very beginnings.” Ten years later, Jean Duvignaud started his ponderous and now classic volume Sociologie du théâtre with far more critical and pessimistic considerations: “In spite of being under-developed to date, the sociology of the theatre has already gained a bad reputation because it has left its doors open to many confusions and misunderstandings. The very intensity of the relationship between social life and theatre is responsible for the superficialities and the exaggerations which are often brought about. In this way, we usually feel satisfied simply reflecting the general social conditions in the dramatic creation while establishing a mechanical connection between cause and effect and between the appearance of collective life and dramatic experimentation. [ . . . ] Without doubt, the sociology of the theatre suffers from an extreme mediocrity since it is pleased with the parallels that it has established between a static society and a dead theatre, that is, two abstractions” (Duvignaud 1965a, 37).

During a conversation with Jean-Pierre Faye which appeared in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, Duvignaud confirmed his opinion a year after the publication of his book. On this occasion, the French sociologist explicitly questioned the perspective of idealistic historicism that, according to him, occupies a large part of sociological theatre research: “The sociology of the arts, and more precisely the sociology of the theatre, seems to lead only to impasses. This is due mainly to three causes: in the past one speculated about an “essence” of the theatre, or one was satisfied with evoking a continuous evolution that, for instance, would transform the contemporary theatre into a successor of the Greek theatre. Moreover, one would start from such a stiff and cadaverous image of social life that it was impossible to establish any relationships different from mechanical dependency on this cold and inert ‘milieu’” (Duvignaud and Faye 1966, 103).

2. Theatrum mundi

So, how do we go about studying the complex correlations “that are established between the diverse forms of the collective experience at its various levels and the multiple aspects of the theatre?” (ibid.). How do we avoid the traps of simple-minded and mechanical sociologism while aiming at escaping, however, from the opposite but equally serious risk of “pure aesthetics,” idealism, and formalism which claim the total autonomy of the work of art from the society and history?

The theoretical “gesture” that in the 1960s allowed the sociology of the theatre to overcome at least partially this double obstacle of sociologism and idealism consists of trying to think in a new, more fluid and dynamic way about the two categories of “society” and “theatre” in order to facilitate further assessment of the “deep and surprising affinity” (in Gurvitch’s terms) that exists between them. On one hand, indeed, the most advanced social theory and the “new history” have revealed in a very convincing fashion that a given society never represents a monolithic and immobile entity, but rather that it consists of a dynamic whole of levels (structural and suprastructural: economic, social, political, cultural, aesthetic, etc.) whose historical functioning is not necessarily parallel or convergent and whose steps for transformation (or “duration”) are not always the same. This explains the well-known phenomena of remnants and of contradictions between one level and another, and so forth. It is a matter of “transversal” stratification which obviously overlaps the canonic “vertical” stratification organized in classes, sub-classes, particular groupings, and so forth. Scholars such as Gurvitch and Ralph Linton have detailed the components, the typologies, and the diachronic functioning of this stratification. On the other hand, the progressive dilatation of the category “theatre” (a dilatation, it is important to remember, that is almost imposed by contemporary theatrical experimentation) has agreed to focus on the “dramatic” elements of which the life of social groups and of individuals is full, and to realize that the phenomena of performance, representation, and the mask (in the broadest sense of these terms) are not limited exclusively to the theatrical space.²

DRAMATIC CEREMONY AND SOCIAL CEREMONY

Duvignaud has certainly been the scholar to pursue this matching between social phenomena and theatrical phenomena with the greatest determination and the greatest esprit de finesse in the macrosociological plane (see especially 1965a, also Duvignaud 1970, 1971, 1973, 1977). In order to reveal the theatrical dimension of social life, Duvignaud applies, following Gurvitch’s suggestion, the Durkheimian notion of “ceremony,” while proposing to study the similarities and differences between dramatic ceremonies which take place in actual theatres and social ceremonies—those spontaneous dramatizations with which the history of groups and of nations is disseminated. Naturally, one of the principal goals of his approach is to show how difficult it often is to separate one from the other in a clear way. Besides, it is important to note that when he talks about social ceremonies he does not refer only to those great forms of “spontaneous” theatricalizations of rites and public celebrations performed in both so-called primitive societies and those considered civilized or historical: “In different degrees,” writes Duvignaud (1965a, 4-6), “a political gathering, a mass, a family, or a neighbourhood party are also dramatic acts,” as are a “court session, a competition jury, the inauguration of a monument. . . ”. In this respect, “they are ceremonies in which the people involved interpret a role according to a scenario that they are not able to modify since nobody can escape from the social roles that he or she must assume” (ibid.).

In fact, in this way, the Duvignaudian perspective gets transferred from the macrosociological plane to the microsociological one, meeting Goffman’s and other theorists’ areas, as I will soon discuss. However, still from the level of the large-scale phenomena, one wonders what the meaning of this diffuse theatricalization is and what the functions of ceremonies in social life are. Duvignaud’s answer is the following: “One could say that society applies to the theatre every time that it needs to assert its existence or perform a decisive act that might put it into question” (ibid.).

According to Duvignaud, social groups (like individuals) must represent themselves to each other in order to continue (or in some instances to start) to exist as such and principally, to be periodically put into question and to be transformed. This is a thesis supported by the incontestable historical circumstance that the “rate” of collective theatricality of societies, or of an entire civilization, increases enormously during crises or passages from one period to the next, from one socio-economic structure and from one political system to another. The social “effervescence” seems to produce theatricalization, or, more precisely, it seems to have an inherent need for representation and masking in order to manifest itself and to produce its effects. It so happens that in revolutionary periods—that is, in those historical moments in which the collective dynamism and the ability of a society to put itself into question reach their maximum degree—the diffuse theatricalization might even arrive to replace the actual theatre. In these cases, it is the social existence itself that becomes theatre, performance, and continuous “feast” as such (Duvignaud 1971, 59).³

EVERYDAY LIFE AS REPRESENTATION

When Duvignaud began dealing with the ceremonies of social life and their relationships with the theatre in the 1960s, the famous American sociologist Erving Goffman had already spent some time on the study of the theatrical elements implied in even the smallest rituals of everyday life, especially in interpersonal relationships. The hypotheses briefly summarized here are the bases of his work on the subject:

1) “The ordinary social relationship is by nature organized as a scene, with changes of actions theatrically swollen, counteractions, and final lines.” (Goffman 1959, 83)

2) “I am suggesting that often what talkers undertake to do is not to provide information to a recipient but to present dramas to an audience. Indeed, it seems that we spend most of our time not engaged in giving information but in giving shows.” (Goffman 1974, 508)

Although we are not always aware of our “public behaviour” (as Goffman calls another of his well-known findings),⁴ or at least not willing to admit it, our personal interactions—both public and private, and even the most banal—are always in some way related to the fiction of the “mise-en-scène.” It is not that all of us deliberately tend to lie or to fake (some people might do so incidentally, but this is a different subject altogether). It is rather our constant need to represent our self, our role, our social “persona” in front of others or, more simply, our need to give an image of ourselves that responds to the way in which we wish to be seen by others. To this effect, we—social actors—in a more or less conscious way bring into play a repertory of abilities and techniques similar to those of theatre actors: appropriate mimicry, tones of voice, gestures, pauses, and so forth. And for a piece of incontrovertible evidence, one need look no further than the role playing that is interwoven in the fabric of our daily behavior, according to Goffman and others, and to think of the embarrassment almost to the point of schizophrenia that we experience when we are in the combined presence of individuals to whom we usually exhibit very different images of ourselves, such as parents, friends, employers, and colleagues. What gets us in trouble in these cases is the conflict between our diverse masks or, more precisely, the impossibility of showing them all at the same time.

In reading Goffman superficially, there is a serious risk of believing that he makes no distinction between theatre and everyday life. This would be a distortion. He does not equate theatre with everyday life or propose that we are all inevitably liars and dissimulators. Goffman has tried to demonstrate something quite different through his analysis—that “performance is not confined to the realm of fiction but constitutes an essential device of everyday life as well” (Wolf 1979, 90).

Therefore, it is not a matter of identifying or confusing two distinct kinds of communicatory situations—theatrical performances and everyday performances—but to realize, as Goffman explains in the famous last page of The Presentation, that in both situations the actors must apply the same repertory of “real techniques”⁵ in order to succeed: “A character staged in the theatre is not in some ways real, nor does it have the same kind of real consequences as does the thoroughly contrived character performed by a confidence man: but the successful staging of either of these types of false figures involves use of real techniques—the same techniques by which everyday persons sustain their real social situations” (Goffman 1959, 291).

During the 1960s and 1970s Goffman’s dramatic perspective moved toward a non-substantialistic direction, without falling into hurried and abstract temptations for holistic systematizations. Even more clearly, theatre for him constitutes only a model, a paradigm, i.e., a method of analysis.⁶

THEATRE AS A BEHAVIOR MODEL

Independent of the fact that social and individual behaviors can be recognized or analyzed as theatrical, there exists (or, better, one can also postulate) a different kind of link between theatre and real life. Briefly, this consists of the fact that “the theatre provides usable paradigms for conduct” (Burns 1972, 34). It is a phenomenon that surpasses the explicitly and intentionally didactic level in dramatic texts and in performances (a non-specific level, however, since it can be present in every kind of artistic production). In European history we can observe that the theatre—understood mainly as representation and performance—after being born from the re-elaboration of cultural codes of its time, often ends up influencing and even modifying those codes, thus operating as a “secondary modeling system,” in the vocabulary of Lotman’s school of Russian semiologists. More specifically, the actor’s way of moving, gesticulating, and talking—his or her “style” on stage and off—is considered more or less deliberately as a model in certain social milieux. The history of the European actor, from the eighteenth century on, is full of examples of this sort, going beyond infatuation and fashion to point out a broader and deeper phenomenon, i.e., the possibility for the theatre to function as a “device for codifying human behavior [. . .] in the reality of life and costume” (Lotman 1973, 277f.).⁷

3. Sociology of the dramatic production

Up to this point we have dealt with a very heterodox sociology of the theatre, so to speak, because within its limits theatre illuminates certain aspects of the society and its functions; it is nonetheless obvious that at least part of this light will in turn reflect upon theatre itself. Now we must wonder, from a more orthodox point of view, how and whether society can, in turn, shed light on the theatre to help us study and understand it better. For the sake of clarity, I will divide the rest of this chapter into two parts, to discuss in the first place the sociology of production in its various aspects and levels, and in the second place the sociology of reception.

Among the different branches of the future sociology of the theatre that Gurvitch lists in his “program” (1956) there are three that could be usefully gathered under the label of the sociology of theatrical production:

SOCIOLOGY OF ACTORS AND COMPANIES

Gurvitch’s list of questions for study on this subject is still so precise and complete today that it does not seem to have been compiled more than thirty years ago: “The size and cohesion of different companies, their organization, the professional and extra-professional relationships among their members, and the social origin of the latter; the integration of the companies in the profession; the structuring of the actor’s profession into groups; the relationships of professional groups of actors with other professional groupings (writers, costume designers, directors, technicians, etc.), with their unions, and finally, with their social classes and the inherent hierarchies of social strata” (ibid., 203).

However, despite the numerous available works on this broad research field, we must admit that the response to Gurvitch’s questions about the life of professional actors and companies in Europe in the last few centuries, for instance, is still insufficient. Generally, one goes from overly abstract studies (Duvignaud’s brilliant sociology of the actor [1965b] is not an exception of this approach) to empirical surveys that deal mainly with our times, and usually limit themselves to the collection of a certain amount of quantitative data. In the first case, facts are considered from too great a distance, and in the second case they are watched too closely to seize the phenomenon of the actor and the theatrical profession in its specific historical complexity or to define with precision the place of the theatre in the cultural topography of modern Europe. It is important to remember that the biggest difficulty in this respect is our tendency to read or analyze the theatrical phenomena of the past (including the condition of the professional actor in the last few centuries) under the deforming light of the reality of our present time, which leads us to project on these phenomena the image of what they have become only later on.⁸ For instance, we risk understanding very little about theatrical professionalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its relationship to “amateur” theatre if we insist on considering it in the socio-cultural terms that it assumed only later on, after the institutionalization of the theatre in the eighteenth century. In this way, one forgets that before this time the professional actor was considered, with few exceptions, as someone who practiced an almost shameful trade, closer to the world of the charlatans and acrobats of the fairs than to that of “art and culture,” to which the non-professional theatre of aristocrats and academicians belonged. To deal with this issue, it is necessary to refer to the enlightening proposals of Ferdinando Taviani, particularly to the fundamental book he wrote on the commedia dell’arte in collaboration with Mirella Schino (Taviani-Schino 1982).⁹ Among his particularly interesting notions is that of microsociety—a term by which he attempts to define the hybrid socio-cultural status of the theatre companies who traveled in Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. These companies were always foreigners with respect to the environments in which they were periodically hosted. However, while being the carriers of an irreducible anthropological “difference,” they were consistently eager to integrate themselves with their hosts, and forever willing to hide or at least to reduce their difference through their eager adhesion to the ruling values.¹⁰

SOCIOLOGY OF THE DRAMATIC CONTENTS

What Gurvitch (1956, 203) calls “the sociology of knowledge applied to the theatrical production” is probably the theatrical/sociological area that is most dealt with. It mainly consists of the analysis of the relationships “between the kind of global society (for instance, the kind characterized by feudalism, absolute illuminism, economic liberalism, organized capitalism, communism, etc.) and the contents of the theatrical production” (ibid.). We shall limit ourselves to well-known examples.

THE SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF THE THEATRE

The considerations presented above in reference to the sociology of dramatic content are also valid for any kind of research on the social functions of the theatre (or of the actor): functions of support and propaganda in favor of the political system in power and of celebration of its values; subversion, transgression, and protest; evasion and entertainment, social and cultural animation, and so forth. It is obviously impossible to enumerate these functions exhaustively, especially when referring to the present, now that cultural and ideological fragmentation have produced an almost unstoppable multiplication of the concepts of art and in particular of the theatre. In any case, if one carefully avoids the risks of a simple-minded sociologism, the functional analysis of theatrical events can prove to be valuable when done with rigorous research on the historical environments of the production and reception of these events. Two examples from Gurvitch’s program (1956) are of particular interest here:

SOCIOLOGY OF THE DRAMATIC AND SCENIC FORMS

It is evident that it is not only the content of theatre pieces but also their form and style that can undergo sociological analysis of the type indicated in the previous pages. When I speak of forms and styles, I am obviously thinking of both dramatic-literary and scenic concerns. Therefore, I am referring to both the various ‘genres’ of texts and performances and to different types of signs and expressive means that can be used by theatrical representation, as well as the possible connections among all of these.

I will consider here only one of these sign systems, no doubt one of the most important of them all: this is the scenic space or lieu théâtral. With the exception of Duvignaud’s schematizations, often having little concern with historical data, there are no available global studies pursued from a sociological point of view that reveal the various scenic typologies that existed in the European theatre, from the mansiones of medieval performances to the Italian stage of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and modern playhouses, up to the revolutions of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, there are some interesting analyses done in this light, such as Rey-Flaud’s and Konigson’s on the medieval scenic space, quoted above. Also, there is excellent work by the sociologist of art Pierre Francastel on the Renaissance “figurative space” and especially on the social and intellectual conditions in fifteenth century Italy that promoted the spatial system of representation of linear perspective (a new “visual order” corresponding to the new socio-political order represented by the great commercial bourgeoisie and by the ‘Signorie’) and that led (at the beginning of the sixteenth century) to its passage from painting and architecture into theatrical scenography (see Francastel 1951, 1965, 1967, 1986).

4. Sociology of reception: from the audience to the spectator

As I said at the beginning of this chapter, a highly developed branch of the sociology of the theatre has been (and still is) the one that deals with empirical surveys of the audience. They are mostly studies using the techniques of sociography (i.e., various types of interviews and written tests) to gather quantitative data on the socio-cultural composition of the theatre audience and also to elaborate statistics relative to their tastes and preferences for performances. I have also reminded the reader of the long-standing opposition to this kind of research, even within sociology itself. Gurvitch, for instance, blames these investigations for the adoption of “overly mechanical techniques which do not allow for the recognition of the diversity of audiences, their different degrees of cohesion, the importance of their possible transformation into proper groupings” (1956, 202). Ten years after Gurvitch, Duvignaud (1965a, 42-43) blamed statistical analyses for considering only “the numbers of spectators in a theatre hall, with no interest in the reasons that attract them to the theatre,” without trying to address “the inclinations that should help define the real tendencies that characterize the general configuration of an audience, their expectations.”

This question of different perspectives gives us a fair idea of the “abyss” in the 1950s and 1960s, between the “theoretical sociology” and the “sociology of the passive observation of the facts,” as expressed again by Gurvitch (206). However, during the 1970s the situation started to change in this respect. In fact, the consistently closer encounter between the theatre and the human sciences began to produce studies on the theatre audience that were more theoretically grounded than ever before. There already exist a good number of multidisciplinary research projects on theatre reception in which the traditional sociographic methods are integrated with and enriched by the instruments of semiology and psychology. The most interesting among these studies adopt (although not exclusively), the theoretical and epistemological framework of semiotics. They attempt to translate the reflections produced today in semiology on the functioning of signification in the theatre, and on the relationship between the performance and the audience, into scientific operational terms, thus attempting to surpass the simplicity of descriptions and the rigidity of formulations drawn from traditional surveys on theatre “consumers” (see, for instance, Coppieters 1981; Schoenmakers 1982; Tan 1982; De Marinis-Altieri 1985).

In my opinion, there are two principal theoretical differences that counterdistinguish these recent investigations (even if they end up very different from each other):

The impossibility and the uselessness of an approach that isolates only one of the two poles of the theatrical relationship has forced the most recent studies to rethink the sociology of the audience in the more adequate terms of an analysis (which I propose to call “socio-semiotics”) of the entire theatrical circuit, which involves the production-reception of the performance and of the numerous processes and sub-processes that it implies (see, for instance, Pavis 1983). Within this circuit it is still possible to distinguish at least two principal components (the term ‘circuit’ itself indicates the possibility of a continuous movement back and forth in both directions, from the performance to the spectator and vice versa):

As for the presuppositions, it can be useful to structure them in a theatrical system of receptive preconditions in which the traditional sociological factors (social class, education level, profession, etc.) leave room mainly for the cognitive and non-cognitive psychological parameters. These parameters should particularly refer to:

With the type of theatrical reception model described briefly here,¹⁵ we are beyond the mechanical connections being made by some current surveys which focus on social class and the corresponding type of understanding achieved by a given spectator (see, for instance, Jaumain 1983; and Gourdon 1982, 130-31).

To conclude, I would like to suggest the need to leave room for the notion of theatrical competence right next to that of the theatrical system of receptive preconditions discussed above. This theatrical competence must be understood as the sum of everything that the spectator has at his or her disposal under the conditions of understanding a theatrical representation (attitude, ability, knowledge, motivations, etc.). Therefore, theatrical competence is not only knowing (i.e., the sum of knowledge and codes) but also and primarily knowing how, which is indeed the whole of the abilities, attitudes and other factors that allow the spectator to execute the diverse receptive operations.

The experimental socio-semiotic approach to the spectator’s reception in the theatre is still at its very beginnings, and many theoretical and technical obstacles stand in the way of its development. Think, for instance, of the problems presented by the somewhat crucial passage from an indirect reconstruction of the event and of the receptive processes that it implies through the results (and therefore only to the extent to which these results can be inferred from the answers given by the people interviewed, their questionnaires, and other types of verbal or audiovisual texts) to a direct research on these same processes by the mechanical recording, for instance, of the behavioral (external) and psychophysical aspects of reception while the performance unfolds. However, in spite of tremendous difficulties, there have already been a certain number of pioneering attempts in this direction: from the bizarre machine invented by N. C. Meier in the 1950s to measure the degree of spectator interest and appreciation (cf. Goodlad 1971) to the recent use of video to document the external reactions of the audience (Schoenmakers 1982; Tan 1982) and particularly to record the “trajectory” described by the spectators’ attention (Thorn 1986), to the current experiments by Schälzky, who studies the neurophysiological variations that take place during the reception of a performance event with the aid of the psychogalvanic response test and the electrocardiographic and electroencephalographic tracings (see, for instance, Schälzky 1980).

NOTES

1. In an interesting essay, Meldolesi (1986) maintains that the pretension of giving life to a socio-theatrical discipline, from the 1950s on, has always been based on an “illusion”—that of “being able to produce a true and proper integrated culture out of the theatrico-sociological experience” (111), thus systematizing Gurvitch’s and Goffman’s “disorganic acquisitions.” According to Meldolesi, the failure of every attempt in this direction (Duvignaud, the American theoreticians after Goffman, Schechner) would confirm the “impossibility of constituting a unitary theatricosociological culture” and would prove that actually the theatrical sociologies are two, one sociological and the other theatrical. These could interact and collaborate but never fuse, given their intrinsic “discontinuity” (130).

2. For more on the topic of theatrico-sociological relationships, see the chapter “Theatre and Everyday Life” in De Marinis (1988).

3. On theatre-feast-revolt-revolution connections, see also Duvignaud (1973) with socio-anthropological optics. For historical research on the subject in reference to Europe, see Bercé (1976), Ozouf (1976), Vovelle (1976) and Le Roy Ladurie (1979). In an essay written in 1976 (now in De Marinis 1983) and devoted in large part to traversing the stages of Duvignaud’s theatricological elaboration, I came to distinguish between a “first” and a “second” Duvignaud (which would start more or less with Spectacle et société [1970]) on the basis of a progressive dilatation in his work of the category of the “theatre” and of the emergence at one level of the notion of “feast” as a sort of anti-theatre (70-71). On that occasion, I pointed out, although briefly, how these theorizations of the second phase, far more important to my eyes, sometimes ended up short in the documentation and accuracy of the historico-ethnological information, while they appeared strongly indebted to the most radical experiments of theatre of the 1960s (happening, environmental theatre, street theatre, etc.) and to the polemics against the so-called “society of the spectacle” provoked by the French Situationalists (especially Guy Debord). Now Meldolesi returns to this division of Duvignaud’s theatrico-sociological itinerary into two moments, expressing himself in very negative terms about the second one, and seeing in two ambitious books—Spectacle et société and Le Theâtre, et après—which, in his opinion, missed the point, the confirmation of the “impossibility of culturally systematizing the relationships between the theatre and sociology” (114). Regarding these and other works by Duvignaud, he also discusses “an only apparent radicalism” that actually hides “a closed system of references, arbitrarily presented as the only possible one”: from this derives an “expository extremism” in which, due to “the lack of original links between one enunciation and the next,” “the ideas tend to become slogans while the connecting thread shows itself to be impregnated with commonplaces, and overly emphasized in order to maintain the level of the ideas” (ibid.).

4. Cf. Goffman (1963). But other references are extended to almost all the titles of Goffman’s bibliography; from 1961 (particularly, the chapter on “Distance from the role”) to 1967, 1971, 1974, and the last one, 1981.

5. On this point, see the chapter “Anthropology” in De Marinis (1988).

6. From this point of view, Goffman’s (1974) comparison of “theatrical performance” and “face to face interactions” on the basis of frame analysis appears interesting.

7. The example studied by Lotman (1973) is that of the Russian aristocracy in the first half of the nineteenth century, who in particular circumstances and mainly in their literary autodescriptions (letters, memories, etc.) used to model their behavior on the basis of codes of the stage and of the paintings of their times, both inspired, naturally, by ethic and aesthetic ideals of solemnity and heroism.

8. On the subject, see also the chapter “History and Historiography” in De Marinis (1988).

9. But cf. also Taviani (1978, 1979). Mariti (1978) is also very useful on the relationship between professional comedians and dilettanti in the Italian society of the seventeenth century.

10. One should not forget that, as Meldolesi (1984, 104) remembers when commenting upon Taviani’s notion of the microsociety of the actors, the world of professional actors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represented many internal differences quite evident from the socio-economic and cultural point of view. It actually constituted a pyramid with the great actors, cultivated and academicians (like Isabella Andreini) on the top, and the jesters and marketplace acrobats at the bottom.

11. In his fascinating and classic study, Lucien Goldmann (1955) realizes the “insertion” of Racine’s theatre and Pascal’s Pensées “in the currents of the thinking and the affectivity that are closest to them; this means, primarily, within what we will call Jansenist thought and spirituality, and then in the whole of the economic and social life of the group or, to be more precise, of the social class connected with this mentality and spirituality, what corresponds, in the specific case of our study, to the economic, social, and political situation of the aristocracy [noblesse de robe]” (110). The latter, in fact, had hidden behind Jansenism, often abandoning the world to live in solitude, as a reaction against the absolute monarchy and its affirmation throughout the seventeeenth century.

12. In this sense, it is interesting to note the study done by the director and theorist Richard Demarcy on the reasons for the popular success in France, during the 1950s and 1960s, of two genres apparently far removed from each other: the musical theatre (the musical and the “operetta”) on one hand, and the theatre of the classics on the other. The author finds the explanation in the fact that these two types of theatrical performances satisfy two fundamental aspirations of the audience (or, at least, of the French audience of this given period): evasion and entertainment, and the complimentary value of cultural elevation as a form of social promotion (Demarcy 1973, 21-22).

13. It is clear that these productive strategies must be explicated and reconstructed from the work, thus, in our case, from the performance text, and only as long as they are inscribed in it. Consequently, they are independent from the empirical authors’ extratextual intentions (either implicit or explicit). In other words, these strategies refer to the intentio operis and not to the intentio auctoris (to see the difference between the two, see Eco 1986).

14. On “para-texts” in the field of the mass media, cf. Casetti, Lumbelli, and Wolf (1980-81). In reference to the literary field, see Genette (1987).

15. For further information, see De Marinis (1984, 1986).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Bakhtin, 1965, L’œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au moyen âge et sous la Renaissance, Paris, Gallimard.

Yves-Marie Bercé, 1976, Fête et révolte, Paris, Hachette.

Elisabeth Burns, 1972, Theatricality. A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life, London, Longman.

F. Casetti, L. Lumbelli, and M. Wolf, 1980/81, “Indagine su alcune regole di genere televisivo,” Ricerche sulla comunicazione, 2-3.

Giulia Ceriani, 1988, “‘Oversights’: Notes on Theatrical Montage,” in New Theatre Quarterly, 4, 15.

Frank Coppieters, 1981, “Performance and perception,” in Poetics Today; 2, 3.

Roger Deldime, 1986, “La rémanence théâtrale” (paper presented at the First Congress of Sociology of Theatre, Rome), 27-29 June.

Roger Deldime and Jeanne Pigeon, 1988, La mémoire du jeune spectateur, Brussels, De Boeck Université.

Eric De Kuyper, 1979, Pour une sémiotique spectaculaire, thèse de troisième cycle, Université de la Sorbonne, Paris (unpublished).

Richard Demarcy, 1973, Eléments d’une sociologie du spectacle, Paris, UGE.

Marco De Marinis, 1982, Semiotica del teatro, Milan, Bompiani.

1983, Al limite del teatro, Florence, Usher.

1984, “L’esperienza dello spettatore: Fondamenti per una semiotica della ricezione teatrale,” Documenti di lavoro, 138-139, Centro di Semiotica e di Linguistica, Urbino.

1986, “Processi cognitivi nella comprensione dello spettacolo: Teoria dei frames e competenza teatrale,” (paper presented at the International Congress Gedächtnis und Repräsentation von Wissen, Stuttgart, 17-20 November); 1989, in Versus, special issue on the reader.

1988, Capire il teatro: Lineamenti di una nuova teatrologia, Florence, Usher.

M. De Marinis and L. Altieri, 1985, “Il lavora dello spettatore nella produzione dell’evento teatrale,” Sociologia del lavoro, 25.

Vincenzo Di Benedetto, 1972, Euripide: teatro e società, Turin, Einaudi.

Jean Duvignaud, 1965a, Sociologie du théâtre: Essai sur les ombres collectives, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.

1965b, L’acteur: Esquisse d’une sociologie du comédien, Paris, Gallimard.

1970, Spectacle et société, Paris, Denoël-Gonthier.

1971, Le théâtre, et après, Paris, Casterman.

1973, Fêtes et civilisations, Paris, Weber.

1977, Le don du rien, Paris, Stock.

J. Duvignaud and J. P. Faye, 1966, “Débat sur la sociologie du théâtre,” Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie.

Umberto Eco, 1986, “Appunti sulla semiotica della ricezione,” Carte semiotiche, 2.

V. Ehrenberg, 1951², The People of Aristophanes, Oxford.

Pierre Francastel, 1951, Peinture et societé, Lyon, Audin.

1965, La réalité figurative, Paris, Gonthier.

1967, La figure et le lieu: L’ordre visuel au Quattrocento, Paris, Gallimard.

1987, Guardare il teatro, Bologna, Il Mulino.

Gerard Genette, 1987, Seuils: Le paratexte, Paris, Seuil.

Erving Goffman, 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Garden City and New York, Doubleday.

1961, Encounters, Indianapolis, Bobbs Merrill.

1963, Behavior in Public Places, London and New York, The Free Press of Glencoe.

1971, Relations in Public, New York, Basic Books.

1974, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, New York, Harper and Row.

1981, Forms of Talk, Philadelphia, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.

Lucien Goldmann, 1955, Le dieu caché, Paris, Gallimard.

J. S. R. Goodlad, 1971, A Sociology of Popular Drama, London, Heinemann.

R. Goossens, 1962, Euripide et Athènes, Brussels.

Anne-Marie Gourdon, 1982, Théâtre, public, perception, Paris, CNRS.

A. J. Greimas and J. Courtés, 1979, Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage, Paris, Hachette; 1980, Engl, trans., Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, Bloomington, Indiana Univ. Press.

Georges Gurvitch, 1956, “Sociologie du théâtre,” Les Lettres nouvelles, 35.

André Helbo, 1983, Les mots et les gestes, Lille, Presses Universitaires de Lille.

1987, Theory of Performing Arts, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, Benjamins.

Ingvar Holm, 1972, “Il pubblico di Ferai,: in Biblioteca teatrale, 5.

Michel Jaumain, 1983, “Théâtre et public: Approches méthodologiques de l’audience théâtrale,” in Cahiers théâtre Louvain, 49.

Heinz Kindermann, 1980, Das Theaterpublikum des Mittelalters, Salzburg, O. Müller.

Elie Konigson, 1975, L’espace théâtral médiéval, Paris, CNRS.

Elie Konigson, ed., 1980, Les voies da la création théâtrale, Paris, CNRS, vol. VIII.

Jurij M. Lotman, 1973, “Le scena e la pittura come dispositivi codificatori del comportamento culturale nella Russia del primo Ottocento”; 1975, in Tipologia della cultura, Milan, Bompiani.

Luciano Mariti, 1978, Commedia ridicolosa: Storia e testi, Rome, Bulzoni.

Claudio Meldolesi, 1984, “La microsocietà degli attori: Una storia di tre secoli e più,” in Inchiesta, 14, 63/64.

1986, “Ai confini del teatro e della sociologia,” in Teatro e storia, 1, 1.

Mona Ozouf, 1976, Le fête révolutionnaire (1789-1799), Paris, Gallimard.

Patrice Pavis, 1983, Production et réception au théâtre,” in Revue des sciences humaines, 60, 189, 1985², reprinted in Voix et images de la scène, Lille, Presses de l’Université de Lille.

Emile Poppe, 1979, Analyse sémiotique de l’espace spectaculaire, thèse de troisième cycle, Université de la Sorbonne, Paris (unpublished).

H. Rey-Flaud, 1973, Le cercle magique: essai sur le théâtre en rond à la fin du moyen âge, Paris, Gallimard.

H. Schälzky, 1980, Empirisch-quantitative Methoden in der Theaterwissenschaft, Munich.

Henri Schoenmakers, 1982, “The Tacit Majority in the Theatre,” in E. W. B. Hess-Lüttich, ed., Multimedial Communication, II: Theatre Semiotics, Tübingen, Gunter Narr.

Lawrence Stone, 1965, The Crisis of Aristocracy (1558-1641), Oxford.

Ed Tan, 1982, “Cognitive Processes in Reception,” in E. W. B. Hess-Lüttich, ed. (cited at Schoenmakers, 1982).

Ferdinando Taviani, 1978, “Ideologia teatrale e teatro materiale: Sugli attori,” Quaderni di teatro, 2.

1979, “L’acritica, gli attori,” Quaderni di teatro, 5.

F. Taviani and M. Schino, 1982, Il segreto della Commedia dell’Arte, Florence: Usher.

George Thomson, 1946², Aeschylus and Athens, London.

Benjamin Thorn, 1986, “What They Looked At: Two Studies of Audience Attention and Perception,” Italian Department, Sydney University (unpublished).

J.-P. Vernant, and P. Vidal-Naquet, 1972, Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne, Paris, Maspero.

Michel Vovelle, 1976, Les métamorphoses de la fête en Provence de 1750 à 1820, Paris, Aubier-Flammarion.

Mauro Wolf, 1979, Sociologie della vita quotidiana, Milan, Strumenti Espresso.

III. Theatre anthropology

Preface

“Theatre anthropology” is an expression used to cover very different fields of research. In this essay we shall deal only with theatre anthropology as a science. This preface is therefore to be read from a “negative” point of view, i.e., as a list of the things (necessarily simplified) with which we do not intend to deal.

The most widely known field of theatre anthropology is the one that we shall call phenomenological, in which one tries to identify the anthropological aspects pertaining to theatre, and the theatrical aspects pertaining to anthropology. “Theatre” and “anthropology” remain in this field clearly separate: the attention is focused on their points of contact. Its fundamental notion is that of the ritual, inasmuch as it represents a performance which has its own code, which is externalized into a public spectacle, and which is socially rooted. The notion of festa (“feast”), which has had a wide, although erratic, diffusion in the theatre field, derives from that of the ritual, even though it essentially differentiates itself by the origins of its codes and by its particular milieu and social rooting.

There is then another field of research that we shall define as ontological. Here we explore the vocation and even the anthropological essence of theatre. Rather than speaking of a specific field here, one ought to speak of a distinctive mark which characterizes all theatrical thinking, especially in the twentieth century, one which emerges unprompted every time economic, political, and market forces become more pressing. The underlying assumption is a sort of Utopia in negative, in which theatre, if exempt from those forces, would rediscover its anthropological “heart”: thus a community of actors not dependent on (or in opposition to) their “professionality,” their “doing theatre” independent of (or in opposition to) their duty to produce a show, a community of spectators not restricted by (or in spite of) their being a paying audience, the community of actors/spectators freed from the contingencies of the law of supply and demand within a market. Within the competence of this field we shall also add the opposition didactics/pedagogy seen respectively as training practice connected to the devising of a show and to “doing theatre.” Within this field we can also include those attempts (theoretical or practical) aimed at breaking down the actor/audience division, at pursuing “involvement” and meaning, at destabilizing the traditional theatre space, searching for an “original” spectator or for an “original” means of expression through theatre: all these instances share a craving for a more intense and genuine communion between actors and spectators during a performance.

There is finally a field that we shall define as practical. If we compare a typically “ontological” instance, that of Copeau for example, to a typically “practical” one, we shall discover that they are the specular opposite. Copeau starts off from the theatre, from an eminent position in the theatre. He acknowledges (by rejecting them) all those economic and market forces which we mentioned earlier: his Utopia—a kind of negation of “theatre”—sees the actors organized “in a community” experimenting with elementary forms of spectacle outside the commercial circuits. This is obviously a wholesale assumption that cannot take into consideration potential problematic elements. In the practical field many events have developed in reverse: starting off from forms of relationship which are not necessarily theatrical ones, drawing on the “community” for theoretical and practical strength, and making its way, in certain instances, to the “theatre-theatre.” A similar pattern of events can be witnessed in many groups of the “third theatre,” i.e., in that theatre which by definition is neither “institutionalized” nor avant-garde theatre, and whose official appearance dates back to the Belgrade International Workshop organized by Eugenio Barba in 1976. We cannot here give the history of this theatre or consider it in detail. In any case, the notion of group and that of group culture are acquisitions without which it is now very difficult to study any theatre, either past or present. Although the “third theatre”—as alive as ever in today’s reality—no longer enjoys that critical attention it received during the 1970s and early 1980s, it remains a fruitful experience for the aesthetic and ethical standards it established.

Each of these areas of theatre anthropology has its own bibliography and its own protagonists, and is of vital importance for an adequate comprehension of theatre: none of them, however, has addressed with clarity or with any order of priorities the problems of “how to do theatre.” The questions have certainly been numerous and very important: Why, for whom, in which forms, where, in which conditions should one “do theatre”? All of these explore, in a way, the direction and meaning of theatre but not the (possible) science of theatre.

In this essay we shall deal with the scientific aspect of theatre anthropology. In so doing we shall operate a drastic selection, setting forth, as organically as we can (and integrating with other authors’ contributions), the ideas that Eugenio Barba has formulated in various writings over the years. My choice is neither accidental nor arbitrary. Eugenio Barba, director and founder of the Odin Teatret, has for many years been concentrating his research on identifying and formulating a science of theatre and above all science of acting, to which Barba himself gave the name “theatre anthropology.” The main source of this paper is an articulate bulk of material which was discussed and debated at the five public sessions of ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology) (Bonn, 1980; Volterra, 1981; Paris and Blois, 1985; Holstebro, 1986; Salento, 1987), sessions which in themselves turned out to be great experimental laboratories.

Barba’s research, just like any other, owes much to other studies which have explored parallel fields of research without necessarily sharing the same objectives. We shall here mention Richard Schechner and above all Jerzy Grotowski, who paved the way for theatre anthropology as a science. Apart from its aesthetic and practical importance, Grotowski’s notion of “negative way” represents the methodological pivot for any scientific study on the actor.

“Rigorous” science and “pragmatic” science

Theatre anthropology as a science deals with human behavior in a performance situation. Before we go any further we ought to define the term “science” as we intend to use it in this context. This is to avoid being accused, on the one hand, of scientism by those who (quite rightly) argue that there are aspects of the actor’s work that cannot be formalized, and, on the other, of superficiality by those who regard only the “mechanical” aspects of an actor’s work (i.e., physiology, biochemistry, etc.) as fit subjects for scientific scrutiny.

In a period of scientific rigor, the term “science” is antagonistic to both the purely intellectual exercise of philosophy, and the empiricism of certain methods which, although based on facts, fail to accommodate (and simply do not use) scientific explanation. While philosophy’s permanent statement is that from a one deduces b, and that of pragmatic empiricism is that to a one can associate b, “rigorous” science states “from a necessarily follows b” as a law of cause and effect. Scientific explanation consists in identifying the cause (or the causes) and understanding its (their) functioning. In the light of this definition, theatre anthropology is not a science. It becomes science in the light of what we called earlier “pragmatic empiricism.” It was Jerzy Grotowski who drew attention to the pragmatic character of the laws of theatre anthropology. We can argue that if “scientific science” (in the most rigorous sense of the term) declares its validity by showing why b follows a, pragmatic law declares its validity by showing that and how b follows a. Pragmatic law states “what to do” and “how” to obtain a specific result; it does not explain why this result occurs. If we look at the notion of “law” we can identify two aspects of pragmatic science which mark its difference from “rigorous” science.

The first aspect concerns the rapport between law and facts. “Rigorous” science piles up facts until they enable one to formulate and verify a law; from then on, the facts are no longer necessary: they are forseen, implied, and therefore embraced by the law. Pragmatic science operates in a different way. The accumulation of facts is never neutralized by a law, and in any case the period of phenomenon-gathering is much longer for pragmatic science than it is for “rigorous” science.

The second aspect concerns the notions of truth and generality. A scientific law does not have degrees of truth. Unless contradicted by fresh evidence, it remains true. We can argue that the “evolution” of a scientific law is a sequence of formulations which are all true within different boundaries. The truth of the law consists in explaining why b necessarily follows a; the different truths in the “evolution” of the law concern the different boundaries of a and b. A pragmatic law evolves in a completely different way: we can describe it as an evolution by successive approximations. Pragmatic law does not enunciate the cause of a given rapport, but only its existence and its modalities. As the facts accumulate and vary, it keeps updating its formulation without nullifying the previous “approximations.” In scientific law the facts are organized vertically; in pragmatic law they are lined up horizontally. New facts and further investigation might lead, in scientific law, to proving a formulation false and to establishing a new, true one. In pragmatic law, new facts and further investigation can lead only to a more accurate approximation.

Pre-expressivity and presence

Now that we have clarified our use of the term “science” we can move on to consider the key notion of theatre anthropology: the notion of preexpressivity. It is generally assumed that in the situation of performance outside the demands of daily life, the actor’s only task is that of expressing (feelings, passions, concepts). Theatre anthropology has however identified another level which is also outside daily life, but which cannot be described as expressivity. It is the pre-expressive level whereby the actor expresses nothing but his presence. This level, then, although it belongs to the situation of performance outside daily life, precedes (logically, if not chronologically) the ultimate task (and outcome) of expressivity. For the time being, we shall leave to the word “presence” all its ambiguity and therefore all the richness of meaning that common usage has attributed to it. The actor’s presence strikes us every time we watch a form of theatre with conventions unfamiliar to us and whose meaning we find difficult to understand. On the other hand the actor’s presence escapes us when it is hidden by conventions we all know and by meanings we can all understand. Our ability to comprehend overshadows, almost to its total disappearance, the seduction of presence. But the fact that this presence (and the pre-expressive level in which it is situated) escapes our attention does not mean that it does not exist, or that it is not an integral part of that same process of comprehension that is obscuring our view of it. It is worth pointing out now that the presence has nothing to do with the elements of charm that the actor might have in his/her daily life, and which s/he will retain (magnified) in performance; nor has it anything to do with the seduction of being in the audience’s eye. The presence we are talking about is a scientific datum: something which is pragmatically verifiable and independent of the contingencies that compel the spectator’s attention, regardless of the actor’s sex-appeal and the mere fact of being the center of attention on stage. From this point of view we can say that the pre-expressive level is the level at which the actor builds his/her own “intrinsic stage.”

The pragmatic laws of presence

After more than twenty years of research on Oriental theatre—a theatre in which unfamiliar conventions and difficulty of comprehension tend to lay bare the pre-expressive level—three “laws” (or lines of action) related to the actor’s presence have been formulated. It is worth remembering that these are pragmatic laws (or lines of action): they do not explain why, but declare that and in which conditions this presence is verified. The three laws are (1) alteration of balance, (2) the dynamics of oppositions, and (3) the use of “coherent incoherence.” In daily life, balance is regulated by the principle of minimal effort: one tends to widen as far as possible the area of support, to keep the center of one’s body well within this area, and to “reduce” one’s height by allowing the spine to bend, surrendering to the law of gravity. In non-everyday behavior, on the contrary, we can observe the tendency toward unstable, precarious balance, in opposition to the principle of minimal effort. The actors of the above “unfamiliar” theatres show us different means of achieving this precarious or “de luxe” balance, as Eugenio Barba calls it. In Balinese theatre, the actor makes the median of his body slant and lifts his shoulders while raising his toes. In so doing he increases his height, narrows the base of support and pushes his centre of gravity to the limit of his base of support. The Kathakali actor who stands on the outer edge of his feet, a ballerina on point, and a European mime en déséquilibre achieve in different ways the same result. The fact that all these different ways are codified in their respective forms of theatre does not imply that they are the only possible ways: on the contrary, despite the fact that they are codified, their variety shows that the same law (the same principle) can be realized in very different, personal and original ways by each actor.

Balinese theatre of Topeng (ISTA, 1980). Photo © Nicola Savarese

Demonstration by the Japanese teacher Azuma and her Indian counterpart, Saniukta Panighrai (ISTA, 1980). Photos © Nicola Savarese

The second law is the “dynamics of oppositions.” In daily life these dynamics are manifested only in situations which require an exceptional use of energy: for example, pulling back one’s arm to deliver a stronger punch, or crouching down in order to jump higher. In non-everyday behavior this technique is applied even in small actions that do not require a great deal of energy. A typical rule of Peking Opera style is to begin an action in the direction opposite to its intended one, and all the forms of Balinese theatre are built around a series of oppositions between kras (hard, strong) and manis (soft, tender). According to the law of oppositions, a static position is the result of opposite forces, just as movement is characterized by abrupt acceleration and deceleration, by sudden changes of direction, and so on.

Finally the law of “coherent incoherence” shows that “incoherent” actions (i.e., actions regarded as illogical in everyday life)—which effect an alteration of balance and a dynamic of oppositions—must be used “coherently” (i.e., logically according to the “illogical” non-everyday behavior). We shall return to this crucial point later in this chapter.

Artificiality and artifice

So what is the actor’s presence and how can it be defined? Let us here resort to physics. The law of the alteration of balance may be interpreted (not explained) as an opposition to the force of gravity. In daily life balance is regulated by favoring the force of gravity: we respond to the downward pull by expanding our base of support, verticalizing the median of our body, and decreasing our height. In stage behavior, on the contrary, balance is regulated by opposing the force of gravity, using resistance, so that the balance becomes unstable, precarious.

The law of the dynamics of oppositions may be interpreted as an opposition to force of inertia. In daily life we obtain a static equilibrium by applying a null force, not by applying a number of non-null forces which will give a null resultant; the motion tends to maintain its velocity and trajectory, starting off with an impulse in the same direction of the motion. On the whole, one favors inertia. In stage behavior, on the contrary, one tends to oppose inertia in a number of ways: by rendering the static positions dynamic by means of opposite forces, by adding impulses opposite to the direction of the principal motion, and by changing the velocity and trajectory of the movement.

The law of “coherent incoherence” can be interpreted as the law of the conservation of energy. Let us take the following example. If a stone is subjected to certain forces (such as gravity, inertia, and others) the overall resultant will determine a certain trajectory. It will be one and one only, definite. It makes no sense, as regards the stone, to ask oneself whether this trajectory is coherent: it is what it has to be; therefore, by principle, it is coherent. This is because the stone cannot deliberately alter the forces to which it is subjected; it is compelled to conserve them. The same happens with a “passive” human body (i.e., the body in daily life). But in stage behavior, the body is in opposition to the forces to which it is subjected. The law of “coherent incoherence” says that these dynamic “artificial” conditions must be maintained, so that the behavior (=trajectory) can be coherent despite the incoherence of any forces taken separately. Eugenio Barba talks about a “new colonization of the body,” of “new culture.” The important point is that the “anomalous” forces of the actor presence must become a “norm,” an “anomalous norm.” What conclusion can we draw from this parallel with physics? First of all, we can say that the actor’s presence is a condition of “artificiality.” Secondly we can say that this artificiality is related to a surplus of energy. Thirdly, that this surplus must be controlled and must not degenerate into an indiscriminate waste. This conclusion may appear so banal that recourse to physics would seem unnecessary. It is obvious that the laws of alteration of balance and oppositions determine a condition of artificiality of the body, but the ways through which the two pragmatic laws manifest themselves (especially in Oriental theatre) might indicate that this artificiality is only the adjustment to some strange convention. In actual fact, underneath the many varied forms through which the actor is present, there is a common principle which defines (and qualifies) the resulting artificiality of the body. This common principle is a surplus of energy. The artificiality of the presence, in whichever way it is realized, entails an energetic surplus if compared to the sphere of daily life: we can say that the presence, its force of seduction, is precisely this surplus of energy. The actor’s presence is uneconomical: it costs more, it is a condition of luxury. This “de luxe” quality, however, must not degenerate into ostentation or waste. There is a certain economy in the uneconomical stage behavior; there is a coherence in the incoherence, naturalness in the artificial opposition to the everyday principle of minimal effort.

Artificiality; however, must not be artifice. Economical waste, coherent incoherence, natural artificiality are all still metaphors, small logical paradoxes whose truth reveals itself only when we witness the actor’s presence in action, when the seduction it exerts on us as spectators is neither boneless pleasantness nor mere provocation. These paradoxes exist; they are the “norm” for the exceptional situation that performance is.

Apart from the test de visu, the notion of surplus energy can be analyzed by looking at the difference between amplification and distortion of organic tensions. We shall do this by looking at actors of the past, belonging to that familiar “unfamiliar” reality called “Commedia dell’Arte.”

Amplification and distortion

F. Taviani has attempted to reconstruct the acting style of the commedia dell’arte actors of the second half of the sixteenth century through an analysis of the illustrations in the Recueil Fossard, which date back to the period 1575-89 (“Un vivo contrasto”: Seminario su attrici e attori nella Commedia dell’Arte, in Teatro e Storia, 1, 1986). These illustrations are the work of different hands, and they present the most popular commedia dell’arte characters: Harlequin, the Old Man, the Lovers. Each of these characters is captured in different “expressions.” Let us examine Taviani’s analysis of Harlequin. Despite the fact that the character is represented in different attitudes and drawn by different artists, one can notice in every illustration a kind of standard position, presenting an elongation of the neck, a lowering of the shoulders and tension of the spine, which forms an arch that goes from the head to the tip of the toes when standing, from the head to the waist when sitting or kneeling.

A similar phenomenon—that is, the recurrence of a standard position—is to be noticed in all the “expressions” of Tristano Martinelli as Harlequin in the illustrations in the booklet Compositions de Rhétorique addressed by Martinelli to the French royal family in 1601. This time the standard position is completely different from the one described before. The position is here based on a raising of the shoulders resulting in a hollowing of the neck and elongation of the torso which is accentuated by a belt worn very low.

What can be deduced from these illustrations? First of all, the existence of “artificial” positions which are independent from “expression.” Second, the variety of these positions; and third, their “energetic” character: they require more effort than is required for the “relaxed” position of daily life.

But there is another, more important aspect—crucial we should say at this stage of our analysis. If we compare the Harlequin of the Recueil Fossard (certainly based on real actors seen in performance during the first flourishing of commedia) to the Harlequin of Callot’s Balli di Sfessania (more widely known, but fictional), what strikes us at first sight is an identical artificiality in the disposition of the body. After a thorough examination, however, we perceive that Callot’s “imaginary” Harlequin distorts the organic tensions like a contortionist trying to show the “impossibility” of his positions, their almost nonhuman quality; the artificiality of Callot’s Harlequin demonstrates itself as an artifice. In contrast to this, the Harlequin in the Recueil Fossard and that of Tristano Martinelli amplify the organic tensions: their artificiality is “natural.”

We can say that if in daily life man is “erect,” the Harlequin of the Recueil Fossard continuously and energetically forcing himself to be erect (just like an aging Don Giovanni, if you will excuse the irreverent parallel), unfolds his “presence” by holding back his breath and his belly, thrusting his chest forward, and therefore tightening his spine.

Obviously the “artificial” position of both Harlequins requires energy: the surplus energy of the Fossard Harlequin, though, is not employed to distort the tensions of daily life, but to expand upon them, to amplify them, retaining their natural functioning. The opposite happens for Callot’s Harlequin.

While the body of the contortionist or the acrobat strikes us with the unnatural quality of its artificiality, the body of an actor having “presence” seduces us with the natural quality of its artificiality. Barba’s “new colonization of the body” is incoherent coherence, the natural functioning of the actor’s “dilated body”: a body which opposes everyday laws without contradicting them. The “de luxe” condition of the “presence” is not “against nature,” but a condition of “another nature”: literally, “second nature.”

Presence, expressivity, acting

Now that we have talked about the characteristics of the actor’s presence, let us go back to Taviani’s study to enquire into its “function.”

Taviani proposes a curious experiment: erase all signs of physical expressivity in the illustrations of the Recueil Fossard by “beheading” Harlequin and the Old Man in particular, and the result is amazing. Once you have eliminated the white hair and the wrinkly skin of their faces, every sign of physical decadence disappears from their bodies. Those same bodies which—“exceedingly” bent and topped with white hair—looked like the caricature of old age, now appear, without these conditioning suggestions, vigorous, athletic bodies. The bent position now shows the opposite of feebleness or lack of energy: it shows, in fact, a stooping achieved through a surplus of energy. The exceedingly long steps are not the senile wavering of a loss of balance, but the powerful amplification of a “search” for unbalance. The same is true for Harlequin: if we forget his motley as well as his face, we see statuesque postures, energetic but not grotesque.

What conclusion can we draw from this experiment, which is obviously the result of laborious documentary and historiographic research? That the performance style—and, in this particular case, the comic strength (vis comica)—of the commedia dell’arte actors was based neither on caricature nor on generic grotesque but on the dialectic between an energetic pre-expressive presence and an expressive comic gesturing. The vis comica of commedia actors (we are here referring in particular to characters of servants and the Old Man) derived precisely from the grafting of a comic “expressivity” onto a vigorous presence, completely independent of the repertoire of gestures and positions related to expressivity. What is revealed here is the great scientific relevance of the pre-expressive level. The presence is not only the actor’s “scenic nature,” something that precedes expressivity and is independent of it. It is above all the dialectic complement of expressivity, the other pole with which expressivity interacts, giving shape to the acting. The practical and methodological implications of this important result have not yet been fully explored. Acting is not expressivity alone, but the result of a dialectic between expressivity and presence, between the expressive and the pre-expressive level.

Similarly, from the spectators’ point of view, reception is not only comprehension or seduction, or some mixture of both (depending on options of theory or taste). Once again it is the result of a dialectic between the seduction (of the presence) and the comprehension (of expressivity). It is not a case of privileging the expressive or the pre-expressive level: ultimately there is no acting without expressivity, just as there is no acting without presence. From the spectators’ point of view, there is no reception without comprehension, just as there is no reception without seduction. The seduction is not part of the reception: it is an essential and integral condition for it in exactly the same way that comprehension is. The accompanying figure is a synopsis of the argument developed so far.

Second nature and training

Let us go back to the actor’s presence. We defined it as “natural artificiality” or artificial nature. We mentioned that non-everyday behavior opposes the conditions of nature but does not contradict them. It is, in Taviani’s proposed terminology, the “stage” equivalent of that “first nature” which, in daily life, is one’s psycho-physical character. A “second nature,” then, is not an occasional, accidental behavior. Let us go back to examine the example of the “Don Giovanni” who unfolds his presence. What makes him so un-seductive is the fact that he shows no acquired nature, only an extemporary posture.

Just as in daily life the action springs from the dialectics between one’s actions and one’s personal nature, in the same way in the non-everyday sphere the stage action (i.e., acting) springs from the dialectics between “expressivity” and “presence.” But the “presence” must be “second nature”; it must have constant characteristics just as first nature has.

The presence as second nature (and the stress here falls, almost paradoxically, on “nature”)—if it irreparably condemns the stupid illusion of being able to produce, as an impromptu manufacture, one’s own stage presence—shows that the pragmatic laws that determine stage presence are literally lines of actions. The actor wants to “re-colonize” his/her own body, not alienate it by command. In actual fact, alienation by command is precisely a condition against nature: even if the pragmatic laws are closely followed, the result cannot but be an inorganic distortion, a waste (even if it seems economical) of one’s energy.

The pragmatic laws, in all the possible ways they can be put into practice, show themselves to be the analytic equivalent of a continuous activity which is independent of expressivity and is a fortiori independent of the performances in which the actor might be engaged. Thus, lines of action: lines (i.e., something continuous, uninterrupted, without a programmed ending) and action (i.e., something concrete, something that materially engages one’s activity).

This (macro) line of action of the actor, this continuous practice independent of performance, has a name: it is called “training.”

There have been a number of misunderstandings about training, mainly because of the undeserved indentification with only the exterior aspects of that practice of self-pedagogy and self-identity adopted in the recent years by the “third theatre.” The athleticism of this type of training, its spectacularity, its (sometimes) effective “usability” as performance, and, last but not least, the lack of performances that show a high aesthetic standard, all these factors (each of which deserves to be dealt with in much greater detail) have generated a widespread attitude which we shall summarize as follows: (a) training is purely physical activity related to a “theatre of the body” and a “rejection of the word”; (b) training is of no benefit for performance, and the evidence is that the actors of the “institutionalized” theatres do not train.

Leaving aside the truthfulness that these statements may have (or may have had) in specific circumstances, we can say that, in general, these statements are both false, and that they spring from want of recognition and evaluation of the pre-expressive level. First: training is also (but not only) a physical activity, and in any case its physical component does not entail the athleticism which characterized, on the whole, the training of the “third theatre.” As a corollary, training has nothing to do with the “poetics of the theatre of the body” and the “rejection of the word,” unless we want to indicate with this poetics the importance of the body in the whole of the actor’s work. Second: training is independent of performance, but not useless to it. On the contrary, the performance, any type of performance, is established in the dialectic rapport between expressivity and a presence which is unachievable (as second nature) without continuous training. As a corollary again, one should understand that all actors, including those of the “institutionalized” theatres, must train. The problem, if anything, will then be to identify the methods, without regard to those adopted by the “third theatre” under the specific name of training. We cannot dwell on this extremely important point, but let us ask ourselves this: When the actors of the “institutionalized” theatre, who take as their starting point the psychology of the character they are about to perform, practice in a continuous way to transform their bodies, what are these actors doing if not training themselves? From this point of view, the relationship of the “third theatre” to the “tradition” is not different from that of the “institutionalized” theatre: it is only more explicitly marked by a systematic point of departure from the physical aspect.

It might seem at this stage that training, as we have been describing it so far, should go beyond the pragmatic laws of presence, and in fact, nullify them. In other words, if the relevance of pragmatic laws is their proposed role as continuous activity (lines of action) aiming at the acquisition of a “second nature,” what seems to disappear is the specificity of these same laws: the alteration of balance and dynamics of oppositions. And all the more so inasmuch as the activity that realizes them need not be exclusively physical.

But one should observe, first, that the relationship between pragmatic laws and presence is not necessarily a bi-univocal one. If the application of certain laws determines presence, that does not mean that presence can be obtained only through these laws. Second: one has to bear in mind that pragmatic laws express only the minimal (and therefore essential) core of presence: a core that points out that the minimal conditions of artificiality consist in opposing gravity and inertia. Third, and finally: it is argued that pragmatic laws are lines (of action) not only for their temporal continuity but also (and perhaps above all) for their intrinsic cohesion: a kind of “spine,” a deep line that directs much more diversified activities (including the non-physical ones) toward the acquisition and use of that surplus of energy which characterizes the presence.

Physical and non-physical

We now come to a point of extreme importance, but before dealing with it, it is worth recapitulating the main argument.

The pre-expressive level is that in which the actor’s presence is situated. Step by step in our analysis we reached the definition of “second nature”: second because it is different from everyday nature; nature, however, because it does not contradict a natural functioning. The artificiality of the second nature consists in a surplus expenditure of energy, deriving from the opposition to the principle of minimal effort. Its naturalness consists in not allowing this surplus of energy to degenerate into waste, in expanding natural tensions without distorting them. The acquisition of presence, in order to become “second nature,” requires a continuous activity independent of performance. Although also physical, training is not only physical, and it may or may not be athletic.

What emerges from the argument so far is an element which was present from the start but that only now stands out with clarity. This element is the non-physical or, if you like, the mental. Training reveals that presence, although physical, does not have exclusively physical roots: there must be a non-physical, mental equivalent of the pre-expressive level.

We can say that the physical side is the most exposed part of the preexpressive level: “exposed” because “most visible” and therefore more immediately susceptible to attack; and “exposed” because it is at the same time a “weakness” of the pre-expressive level inasmuch as it distracts us from perceiving less obvious points. It is only when we have penetrated the pre-expressive level through its more obvious physical side that we are able to discover the less obvious non-physical one. On the latter lie the present frontiers of theatre anthropology. We need to understand that the physical and the mental are only the two ends of a single bridge, and to grasp how these two sides are linked up: the structure and the functioning of the bridge. The shores of the mental and the physical—and the bridge that links them—are the terms with which Eugenio Barba tackles this still unexplored field in his study “The Dilated Body” (1985). We shall here limit ourselves to giving some directions and asking some questions.

At first the mental side seems to emerge by simple transposition of the notions related to the physical side. There is a “minimal physical effort” which occurs (essentially) by favoring gravity and inertia; by transposition there is a “minimal mental effort,” which occurs by favoring mental gravity and inertia. If on the physical side one can resist the principle of minimal effort, the same can be done on the mental side.

First question: How can this opposition to minimal effort occur at a preexpressive level? And, more radically, is it right to speak of a pre-expressivity of the mental activity? And if so, in what terms?

There are pragmatic lines of actions to contrast the “minimal physical effort”, and here the transposition to the mental side becomes difficult. What would be the mental equivalents of the laws of alteration of balance and the dynamics of oppositions?

The body, we can say, is naturally in a realm of constraint; the mind is naturally in a “realm of freedom.” Let loose, the body succumbs to all its constrictions; so too does the mind succumb to all its freedom. Probably then the “bridge” between mental and physical must be sought not by considering the superficial opposition between freedom and constraint, but by considering the profound identity of their subjection.

Both the body and the mind can be subjected, and this is the pertinent datum of minimal effort: the norm of everyday life. The body’s minimal effort, however, realizes itself in the subjection to limits (gravity and inertia are only the most basic of these limits), whereas the subjection of the mind realizes itself in the subjection to total freedom. If the body’s opposition to minimal effort is obtained by freeing oneself from limits, one would think that the mind’s opposition to minimal effort would be obtained by limiting one’s freedom.

Is this only a metaphor? Or does the logical chiasm “freeing oneself from the limits” / “limiting one’s freedom” indicate that we will have to look for an analogous anti-symmetry even for the pragmatic lines of action. As regards mental pre-expressivity, Eugenio Barba speaks of a “creative pre-condition.” If the prerogative of physical pre-expressivity is the “dilated body,” the prerogative of “creative pre-condition” is (on the other side of the “bridge”) the “dilated mind.” In the creative condition (the mental equivalent of physical expressivity) the essential factor is orientation; in the creative pre-condition, dis-orientation. In the creative condition meaning is essential; in the creative pre-condition precision is essential.

Dis-orienting oneself means denying the orientation of the creative condition without either falling into that “freedom without limits” of everyday life or simply replacing it with another, different orientation: it is “a negation which has not yet discovered the new entity which it affirms,” according to Eugenio Barba. It is, on the other hand, a renunciation of meaning without either falling into the chaos of “the mind in freedom” or simply substituting another, different meaning: it is, rather, a condition which allows meaning to emerge without (pre)determining it.

As regards orientation and precision, how do they relate to that limitation of freedom which we have postulated as the essential condition to oppose the principle of minimal effort? These are all stimulating questions which have not yet been given answers. It is important, however, to have pointed out the vital relationship between the physical and the mental in the actor’s work. In the light of this acquisition one can look back with a different awareness at the traditional dichotomy between the physical and the mental (psychological) which has divided the ideological (more than the practical) options in the actor’s work. The physical and the mental are not two different paths, but only two different starting points which necessarily have to meet. Ultimately, it is irrelevant whether the actor starts from the physical or the mental since there is no dilated body without a dilated mind, and vice versa.

Presence reveals itself even more clearly as a second nature, which—just like one’s first nature—is intrinsically psycho-physical, mental and physical.

Actor and director, actor and spectator

The identification of a mental equivalent to the physical side puts the actor-director and actor-spectator relationships in an entirely new light.

The shores of the physical and the mental are no longer linked by the bridge which is the actor, but by a bridge which links the actor’s physical performance with the mental activity of the director and the spectator.

From the perspective of production: How does the actor’s physical performance relate to the performance that the director has imagined? How does the one reflect or influence the other? From a spectator’s point of view: How does the actor’s physical performance relate to the performance in the spectator’s mind?

Here is disclosed, from the point of view of research, a whole field which overcomes the dynamics of performer/spectator and encoding/decoding or even fascination/seduction, and which forms the scientific bases for exploring the deeper rapport of consonance that every spectator has at least once experienced and which a lack of research has so far relegated to the level of the unrepeatable and unpredictable personal experience.

Perhaps it is not accidental that, almost like a transcultural and metahistorical topos, literature should often present one’s encounter with the performance as associated with a deep, almost mystical shock in which one re-lives the meaning of one’s own life. And this happens also to spectators who (like Wilhelm Meister) are by no means strangers to theatre.

Literature is art, and it may consider mysterious what it would not talk about (or does not consider interesting) in terms other than those of intimate, secret experience. But the science of theatre cannot do so. If the performancespectator consonance occurs, it is necessary to look for its pragmatic laws, to try to discover what to do and how to do it in order to bring such consonance about, even if we do not yet know why it occurs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eugenio Barba, 1981, La corsa dei contrari. Antropologia teatrale, Milan, Feltrinelli.

1982, “L’Archipel du théâtre,” in Bouffonneries, Carcassonne.

1982, “Anthropologie théâtrale,” in Bouffonneries, 4, Carcassonne.

1982, “Intercultural Performance,” in The Drama Review, 26, 2, New York.

1985, “The Dilated Body,” in New Theatre Quarterly, 4.

1985, The Dilated Body, followed by The Gospel according to Oxyrhincus, Rome, Zeami.

1985, Aldilà delle isole galeggianti, Milan, Ubulibri.

Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, 1985, Anatomie de l’acteur. Un dictionnaire d’anthropologie théâtrale, Caeilhac-Roma, Bouffonneries-Zeami; 1988 (Spanish version), Anatomia del actor, Mexico City, Gaceta.

Jerzy Grotowski, 1970, per un teatro povero, Rome, Bulzoni.

1982, “Techniche originarie dell’attore” (lecture given at Instituto del Teatro e dello Spettacole dell’Università di Roma).

Franco Ruffini (dir.), 1981, La scuola degli attori. Rapporti dalla prima sessione dell’ISTA, Florence, Usher.

1984, “La trasmissione dell’esperienza in teatro,” in Quaderni di Teatro, 23.

1988, “L’attore e il dramma. Saggio teorico di antropologia,” in Teatro e Storia, 5.

forthcoming, “La danse du théâtre,” in Bouffonneries.

Nicola Savarese (dir.), 1983, Anatomia del teatro. Un dizionario di antropologia theatrale, Florence, Usher.

Richard Schechner, 1983, Performative Circumstances from the Avant Garde to Ramlila, Calcutta, Seagull Books.

1985, Between Theatre and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.

Sipario, 1980, 404, Jerzy Grotowski e il Teatr Laboratorium, special issue.

Ferdinando Taviani, 1986, “Un vivo contrasto” (Seménario su attrici e attori della Commedia dell’arte), in Teatro e Storia, 1.

IV. Semiotics

1. Introduction

Theatre semiotics is a part of general semiotics and will necessarily draw from this broader conceptual basis in any study of drama and theater production. The subsequent aim of this chapter is to introduce a few basic semiotic concepts: text, sign, discourse, semiosis, structure, reference and referent, code, and so forth.

But none of these concepts is so overarching as to guarantee both a sufficiently precise and universally applicable analysis. In order to ensure this theoretic precision and analytic relevance, each respective concept must be considered in direct relation to the scientific theory establishing it and to the domain in which it will be applied.

Semiotics, as applied here, should be taken in its broadest sense, as the general framework within which we shall establish the basic characteristics of certain concepts. It is not our intention to let the definition and exposition of these concepts follow one specific semiotic tradition; on the contrary, we seek a mediation between two different and equally important tendencies: continental structuralism headed by Saussure in company with Russian formalism on the one hand and Peirce’s semiotic conception on the other. We deem this mediation necessary since both traditions have their strengths and weaknesses: the strength of Peirce’s semiotics lying in its generality and its dynamic conception, the strength of its transatlantic counterparts in a high degree of textual intimacy so far as linguistic texts are concerned.

These few concepts are presented with this as a background in order to show more clearly their relation to theatre semiotics and their relevance for its object—the theatrical or spectacular event.

2. Text and sign

The concept of the text is the point of departure for this presentation because, at first glance, it seems to be the most concrete and because the other concepts can be understood only relative to it. Yet a definition of the concept of text proves difficult for several reasons. In the first place, a more precise definition depends on which semiotic theory one presupposes, and, secondly, a consistent definition of “text” is hindered by everyday language usage. Indeed, “text” is used in reference to a confusing array of phenomena: written or spoken linguistic communications, pictures, road signs, carnivals, towns, costumes, and so forth. It is used in drama as well, both about the linguistic text and the theatrical rendition of this text (cf. Peirce’s definition of the sign below).

The relationship between the concepts text and sign presents another difficulty. The semiotic tradition deriving from and related to linguistics typically distinguishes between these two concepts. Hjelmslev, for example, equates the concept text to a linguistic process, the syntagmatic, which is in opposition to the paradigmatic or a linguistic system. Hjelmslev views the text as a manifestation of an underlying system; it may exist as a concrete manifestation, and it is this possibility which interests us here. A given (linguistic) system need not, however, be realized in a process, a text; it can exist as mere possibility and is thus said to be virtual. For Hjelmslev it is essential that a text always manifest a system (Hjelmslev 1966, 16).

In a classic structuralist sign theory such as Hjelmslev’s, the difference between text and sign is not that the text belongs to the syntagmatic and the sign to the paradigmatic. For, strictly speaking, the sign itself is a unit of the process or of the manifestation, which is constituted by the solidarity between the elements from the most important paradigms in linguistic analysis: the planes of expression and of content. Consequently it is only below the sign level—among the elements representing the “building blocks” of the sign at these two respective planes (for example, the expression plane’s phonemes and the content plane’s sememes)—that elements are realized which (in theory) are purely paradigmatic, which differentiate meaning but which in themselves do not bear meaning. The sign, on the other hand, is defined functionally. It is the smallest meaning-bearing unit generated by the combination of elements of content and expression. This means that the concept of the linguistic sign covers not only whole words but also endings, prefixes, suffixes, and so forth. Words can be composed of several signs, and the sign need not be independently manifested. One of Hjelmslev’s examples of a sign is the Latin inflexional -ibus, which can not be analyzed into further signs. It can, however, be resolved into smaller units on each of the two planes: into the four phonemes /i/, /b/, /u/, and /s/ on the plane of expression and, on the content plane, into the sememes “dative/ablative” and “plural.”

The functional definition of the sign as the smallest meaning-bearing unit realized through the combination of elements of expression and content means that sign and text can in concrete instances coincide perfectly. If, for example, we find the linguistic expression “poison” on a bottle, we can speak simultaneously of a sign and of a text. This is not strange, since the same expression can be analyzed at several different levels. An example of this is the Latin /i/, where the same expression can be analyzed as phoneme, syllable, sign, and sentence (the latter in the present imperative, second-person singular of the verb “ire”). Normally, however, one would see a text as the product of a combination of signs and hence as a phenomenon analyzable into an inventory of elements, of signs and their combination rules (for example, syntactic and semantic rules).

The relevance of this point of view is demonstrated in the fact that even if a very large number of signs exist in a given language and even if new signs appear continuously, the number of signs remains finite and, more important, only a very limited number of signs are necessary for the production and comprehension of a modern text. This is evidenced by the fact that 80.5% of actual discourse uses the same basic vocabulary of 1000 words (see, for example, Kondratov 1966, 106-19). This means that even at the level of the sign, where the inventory is very large (compared, for example, to the repertory of about 20 phonemes common in many languages), there is, on the one hand, good cause for distinguishing between signs (the lexical and morphological entities) and, on the other, their combination into texts (longer or shorter processes), whose number is practically infinite. For even though it would be possible to calculate mathematically the number of texts possible in a given language at a given time, the resulting figure would be akin to the number of particles in the Milky Way. Roman Jakobson explains the reason for this difference between sign and text as follows:

In the combination of distinctive features into phonemes, the freedom of the individual speaker is nil; the code has already established all the possibilities which may be utilized in the given language. Freedom to combine phonemes into words is circumscribed, it is limited to the marginal situation of word-coining. In forming sentences out of words the speaker is less constrained. And, finally, in the combination of sentences into utterances, the action of compulsory syntactical rules ceases, and the freedom of any individual speaker to create novel contexts increases substantially, although again the numerous stereotyped utterances are not to be overlooked. (1963: 47-48)

Although Jakobson emphasizes the ever-increasing degree of freedom we are given in combining units, from sign elements to texts, this need not imply that texts are not subjected to various types of codes. In the first place, the codes to which signs are subject are not suspended when the latter are combined into longer linguistic chains (texts); secondly, the texts will be governed by other codes as well—by discursive types and genre conventions, for example.

In pragmatics, the other great semiotic tradition which stems from Peirce, there is no operational distinction between sign and text. It is very characteristic of Peirce to apply the term “sign” to phenomena which could just as well be called texts. This is confirmed in the following definition of the sign concept:

Signs in general, a class which includes pictures, symptoms, words, sentences, books, libraries, signals, orders of command, microscopes, legislative representatives, musical concertos, performances of these. . . . (MS 634, 1909, ISP 18)¹

This very open-ended definition of sign does not, however, mean that Peirce makes no distinction between signs of different complexity: it means simply that it is not a linguistic distinction between the sign elements, signs, and texts, but that used by logicians between term, propositional function (Peirce’s Rhema), proposition, argument, and discourse:

Discourse consists of arguments, composed of propositions, and they of general terms, relative and non-relative, of singular names, and of something that may be called copulas, or relative pronouns, etc. according to the family of speech that one compares the discourse to. (MS 939, 1905, ISP 27)

Common to both traditions is the conception of the textual process (the text or the discourse) as being composed of classes of elements which are analyzed through a consistent division or segmentation of the process. The difference in these two processes of analysis and these two systems of classification is a function of the objective of the analysis. This latter point is essential for the establishment of the minimal elements of analysis. For the logician, the entities entering into the proposition (i.e., the terms and propositional functions) will be the smallest elements of analysis. Within linguistics the nearest equivalent to a propositional function would be the smallest meaning-bearing unit, the sign. Linguistics, on the other hand, carries the analysis further, thus registering inventories of the smallest meaning-differentiating units, which are not meaning-bearing as such.

Neither of these traditions is very precise when it comes to specifying the distinction between the sign and the text, since a single element can be both (for example, the word “poison,” the iconic sign depicting a skull and crossbones, and the Latin /i/). The difference between sign and text is not primarily one between signifying elements which manifest the two categories (even though a text most often consists of several signs). Instead of examining the difference between sign and text on the basis of the elements which constitute them, we suggest a distinction based on their different functions: the sign then becomes the smallest meaning-bearing manifestation in a given semiotic (a language, iconic system, etc.) capable of entering into a virtually unlimited number of syntagmas formed in compliance with the combination rules of a given semiotic. The sign is thus conceived as a virtual entity invested with a definite meaning potential (otherwise we could not discern an unusual or incorrect usage of the sign), but which—in principle—cannot be exhausted by the contexts in which it has appeared at any given moment. This is not of course to imply that the sign lacks a definite stability, for, if this were true, all communication would be impossible. On the contrary, this means that this stability is relative, in the sense that a gliding or displacement of the sign’s meaning can and often does occur. This is an essential idea in Viggo Brøndal’s semantics, where the word is posited as the linguistic sign.

The text, in contrast to the sign, can be conceived of as a concrete manifestation—Brøndal would say an occasional usage—of a syntagma in a communicative context, as an utterance. Contextualization, as the characteristic trait of the concept text, can be illustrated by the bottle bearing the sign “poison” because here the linguistic sign together with the bottle is best understood as a text containing the utterance “This bottle contains poison.”

Some of the characteristics attributed to the concept of text in our commonsense understanding have already been demonstrated. We in fact generally regard the text as something which can be localized in time and space, produced in a given place at a given time. In the same way, we think of the text as a phenomenon received and perceived at certain moments which can be localized within a spatio-temporal system. From the fact that a text is perceivable it follows that it has or has had material character and, from the fact that it is localized, that it can be described, given qualities which, according to its spatio-temporal situation, make it distinguishable from other phenomena (one can presumably find thousands of bottles marked “poison,” that is, thousands of identical texts but which enter into different situations of communication).

3. Text, object, context

What we have said until now concerning the concept text has distinguished it from the concept sign by emphasizing its occasional material character. But these determinations are not wholly sufficient for differentiating between a text and a material object. It must be emphasized that in either sense a text always possesses a material substratum and thereby an objective character. The difference, moreover, between the object and the text depends on the point of view and the description to which a given phenomenon is subjected. The text, however, as contrary to the object, is characterized by its reference to something outside itself: aliquid stat pro aliquo thus becomes the sign’s fundamental definition, which also characterizes the text. When a given object, for example an alpine landscape, is designated as a text, this designation is a legitimate usage if it is supposed that the landscape serves some referential function, for example, as a sign of God’s might and omnipotence. In the discussion, on the other hand, between two typographers about the formal and material characteristics of the typeface for an editorial, the referential function is suspended. Hence, the text is viewed as an object characterized by a number of material qualities. These examples should demonstrate that the difference between the object and the text depends more upon the context in which a given phenomenon is placed rather than a number of previously attributed qualities (placing them in one of the two categories). This potential duality, as text and object, characteristic of all phenomena is essential for the theatrical production because it is precisely this which provokes a perpetual shifting in the spectator’s point of view (see below).

Although the above has clearly shown that any phenomenon can be understood as a potential text even if not produced with a communicative intent based in a conventional semiotic system (i.e., a sign system), let us commence by concentrating on the type of text with these two characteristics: to be produced based on a conventional semiotic system and with a communicative intent. A book or a play, for example, meets both conditions; however, before offering a more detailed description of our common-sense understanding of such a text, one difficulty must be pointed out, that of the upper limit of the individual text, of how a given text can be delimited in relation to other, surrounding texts.

A moment’s reflection suffices to show that the answer immediately presenting itself, that of the text as a materially delimited unit, is insufficient, however, indispensable it may be as a helping tool. For example, an anthology is a collection of texts written by different authors at different moments, usually published separately in various publications. So even though they are presently bound in a single volume, it can very well be doubted that they constitute one text. The problem is not resolved through simply referring the texts to their respective authors because this same problem can again be met at the level of individual authorships. If we limit ourselves for instance to Shakespeare, we meet this problem of upper delimitation in a collective production. For example, it is supposed that Pericles is the work of two authors, though Shakespeare scholars stand divided as to the other’s identity. We may ask, however, whether this dual, collective production make Pericles two different texts. Furthermore, Henry VI comprises three parts intended to be staged independently. Are we then to treat these parts as three independent texts or as one? Even more interesting is the question of whether Shakespeare’s royal tragedies and, in particular, the two tetralogies (Henry VI to Richard III, and Richard II to Richard V) constitute eight texts, two texts, or one text. And what about Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More? The incomplete, fragmentarily transmitted texts requiring reformulation and restructuring in association with concrete productions present delimitation problems, too. Which version of Büchner’s Woyzeck is more authentic and which is more effective on stage? And which of these two considerations is more appropriate in a given dramatic model?

It is no doubt possible to give reasonable answers to the above questions; however, the mere fact that such questions are relevant makes it clear that every definition of a linguistic process as a delimitable, independent text must be well founded. It is therefore interesting to note that in each of the two great semiotic traditions (for example, among scholars so different as Hjelmslev and Peirce), we find a text concept radically differing from our everyday understanding. This understanding yields a generalized concept of the text so that, instead of being applied primarily to definite delimited units, it is applied to all the textual processes produced in conformity with a given semiotic system.

The linguist Louis Hjelmslev defines text as a (semiotic) process and, as concerns natural language, considers it one, continuously expanding text. Even though this definition runs against the grain of common, everyday understanding, it accords particularly well with the linguistic objective, as it must necessarily transcend the individual text and any limited body of texts. It must be able to account for all utterances in a given natural language in order to trace the generative principles which allow us an unlimited production of linguistic meaning.

The logician and philosopher Peirce arrives at the same conclusion by combining the sign concept with the idea of a continuously expanding argument:

There is a science of semiotic whose results no more afford room for differences of opinion than do those of mathematics, and one of its theorems increases the aptness of that simile. It is that if any signs are connected, no matter how, the resulting system constitutes one sign; so that, most connections resulting from successive pairings, a sign frequently interprets a second in so far as this is “married” to a third. Thus, the conclusion of a syllogism is the interpretation of either premise as married to the other, and of this sort are all the principal translation processes of thought. In the light of the above theorem, we see that the entire thought-life of any one person is a sign; and a considerable part of its interpretation will result from marriages with the thought of other persons. So the thought-life of a social group is a sign; and the entire body of all thought is a sign, supposing all thought to be more or less connected. (MS 1476, ca. 1904: 38)

Hjelmslev and Peirce’s conception of the text as an expanding syntagma is counter-intuitive but possesses obvious advantages compared with our common-sense understanding (even if we cannot dispose of the latter in our practical analysis). Their conception makes it evident that in establishing a particular corpus of texts as the research object we impose limits on an ongoing production of meaning. It is imperative that the foundations of this operation be made explicit. Hjelmslev and Peirce’s inclusive conception of the text demonstrates moreover that the limits evinced in the choice a given text or a corpus of texts are, so to speak, semi-permeable because the production, transmission, and interpretation of a passage (e.g., a single text in the ordinary sense) in the formation of meaning, conceived as a historic process, always occur on the basis of a greater textual corpus not necessarily mentioned in the individual text, its transmission, or in its interpretation. Both the production and the transmission of the individual text occur in a dialogical context: a dialectic movement between question and answer (according to the German hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer), or as a simultaneity of reading and writing.

If the frequently misused concept of intertextuality is to be used in connection with the generalized and dynamic(al) conception of the text, then our notion of intertextuality must include at least three elements: (1) If Hjelmslev and Peirce’s conception of the generalized text is incorporated, then the individual text’s dual affiliation in the broader context is emphasized. On the one hand, there is a formal relationship between different individual texts by virtue of their common linguistic codes and the logical rules of inference which are used. (2) On the other hand, Peirce’s discussion of thought-life as an argumentative process also stresses the text’s referential character (Hjelmslev’s “content” or “substance”) because the thought-process, or the text, refers to a universe. This universe can be understood socio-materially, fictively, physically, ideally, etc., without any of these dimensions being given a privileged status beforehand. Such a juxtaposition of “forms of representation or intuition” also constitutes an essential part of Brøndal’s semantics. (3) From this follows the importance of immediately emphasizing that the interdependence of the text with other texts is not solely a question of a code-community but also of a total or partial community with respect to the universe, thereby relating it to a certain intersubjectivity (which has been discussed particularly in hermeneutics and psychoanalysis, and which in linguistics and semiotics is often articulated in the concept of discourse).

As theater spectators, directors and actors, or critics and scholars, our interest naturally lies only in the finished text, the dramatic text as a completed linguistic process or the performance as a limited theatrical event. However, it is only in the interplay between the common-sense notion of the text and the generalized concept of the text (as described, for example, by Hjelmslev and Peirce) that the semiotic analysis of the text can be fruitfully effected, since the isolated text can be understood only as a meaning-bearing unit on the basis of the general production of meaning.

The problem of the delimitation of the individual text and of its interpretation are obviously closely related. In fact they presuppose each other, in the sense that every interpretation constitutes a new text in which elements from the interpreted text are registered. Hence each interpretation is a contextualization of the object text. This means that it is through the interpretation of the text’s meaning potential that the textual boundaries are drawn. Our common-sense understanding of the text renders it a limited material entity, and it is not until the moment that its sign character—its reference to something else—comes into play that it is differentiated from objects in general; its boundaries are therefore indeterminate until an explication of its meaning has occurred. Thus it would be impossible to determine if a text is a fragment or a relatively completed whole without taking both its structure and content into consideration.

4. The dimensions of the text

If we limit ourselves here to linguistic texts or texts in which linguistic structures are present and, furthermore, if we disregard the monkey at the typewriter and the fire-ravaged word-processor and presuppose a communicative intent, then it is possible to represent the dimensions of the text in the diagram, based on Peirce’s semiotics. According to this model, the text (i.e., the text materially present, the token or type) has four different references: it refers to or manifests (1) an immediate interpretant, or a plurality of interpretants, that is, a code or a collection of codes lending it comprehensibility; (2) a discursive universe (the immediate object), that is, the “world” (factual, possible, or fictive) presupposed or referred to by the text (cf. the sign definition aliquid stat pro aliquo); (3) the utterer of the text, its sender or its author; and (4) the receiver of the text, its reader or audience. Furthermore, it seems that each of the five instances connected to the production of meaning, the semiosis, can be divided into internal and external aspects.

The theatrical performance in this connection evidences a number of complicated problems with respect to the dramatic text conceived as a linguistic process. The question is in fact how many of the elements and events of the performance’s spatio-temporal process can be interpreted as a coded expression and which ones are contingent (i.e., incidental in relation to performance considered as textual process). In other words, how much of what is visible is also legible (that is, subject to interpretation as meaning-bearing)? This problem seems in fact to become even more significant in the analysis of performance than in literary analysis, which is of course due to the fact that, during the performance, the linguistic text is encased in a concrete situational context. Thus the task becomes not only one of interpreting a series of linguistic utterances based on linguistic competence, but also of a delimited, focalized, and stylized physical scenic space.

The interpretation of the actual phenomenon as a text presupposes its being conceived as a meaning-bearing object. This means, among other things, that its expressive elements are differentiated from their background in such a way that they become identifiable and mutally combinable so that the ensuing coded expression can be related to a content. This we define simply as its translation into another text which refers to the same universe as that of the original (the text’s reference to an interpretant). The interpretant is a concept from Peirce’s semiotic generally defined as an interpretation or translation of one sign (or text) into another; for example, the French lexeme homme may have the English lexeme man for its interpretant and vice versa. The essential in Peirce’s concept, however, is the distinction between various types of interpretants, one of the most important of which being the difference between the immediate interpretant, dynamical interpretant, and final interpretant.

The immediate interpretant is defined differently in different places in Peirce’s work, but the following definition will be retained here: “My immediate interpretant is implied in the fact that each Sign must have its peculiar interpretability before it gets any interpreter” (Peirce 1977, 111). The sign or text’s interpretability thus exists, according to this definition, as a possibility which is realized in the dynamical interpretant, that is, the objective content of the concretely realized interpretation: “The dynamical interpretant is the actual effect produced upon a given interpreter on a given occasion at a given stage of his consideration of the sign” (MS 339 [d], 346). The final interpretant is the interpretant that will result from an exhaustive and unlimited study of the sign, and it will be accepted as a true interpretation of the sign (or text) by an unlimited community of investigators.

The immediate interpretant can then be understood as that domain of possibilities existing for an interpretation of a given text. This domain is limited for the respective linguistic texts by the meaning potential of the signs entering into the text, their combination in the concrete textual process, the genre of the respective discourse as well as the presuppositions concerning the nonexplicit qualities of the discursive universe to which the text refers. All of these determinations can be considered codes of the given text.

5. Discourse: process and subjectivity

The conception of discourse that we meet in the linguist and language philosopher Viggo Brøndal can contribute to a presentation of the concept of discourse in its relevance for theater semiotics. He places the discourse on an autonomous plane between the concrete linguistic process (here called the text) and the virtual repertoire of sign and the elementary linguistic unit which, following Saussure, he links to language “as system” (Fr. la langue). Concerning discourse in this position, he says:

“Discourse, in this sense, is a rhythmical totality, an order in time (hence irreversible) where each element (phonic or semantic) has its place and plays the role determined by this place. Through this positional value, words transcend the limbo of the dictionary, enlivening themselves, acquiring a precise meaning and, at the same time, a real and personal character. (Brøndal 1943, 55)

In his concept of discourse, Brøndal maintains that the condition for the realization of the virtual elements in a meaningful text is that one admits an independent level for the irreversible logic governing the textual process. This reflection was not particularly well received in classic linguistic structuralism. This is for the most part due to the fact that one adhered to a concept of the sentence modeled after Aristotelian logic; the textual process was already determined by the limits of the sentence, and the ideal structure of the textual process was hence determined through structures reducible to logical rules of inference. There is another reason an independent level of discourse was denied: a level of this nature—verifiable both at the level of the virtual form and the concrete textual manifestation—did not fit into the binary logic of classical structuralism.

The necessity of working with an independent discursive level becomes evident when one can no longer take the limit of the sentence or the sentence’s ideal primitive form as an immediate given and when one can no longer accept as a given the identity of the basic unit in the different media of manifestation. It is in fact not given that the same type of sign relation exists in verbal, visual, or multi-dimensional medias. Whether one works with film, theatre, or literature, the limits of a relevant processual unit will be dependent on the medium and its concrete forms of manifestation, and likewise upon the establishment of elementary or fundamental units.

Considering the particular nature of the theatrical event, an independent reflection on the processual logic and its irreversible nature will be especially important in respect to a segmentation of the textual process. In the narrative genres, there will always be a narrator who creates a distance between the reader and the events spoken of, even in diary fiction. The reader is never contemporaneous with the events, no matter how absolutely enraptured by the reading. The theatre, on the other hand, is from start to finish a here-and-now phenomenon. The happenings on stage and the experiences among the spectators are simultaneous; the physical existence of actor and spectators in a simultaneous now is the heart of the theatrical event. This means that, unlike the spectator, the reader enjoys a certain freedom in controlling the experiential process; one has similar liberty with a novel, a picture, or a video recording, where one can stop, disrupt the action, skip parts, or begin at the end. The theatrical experience is irreversible as it rolls on. Neither can it be repeated in quite the same form, as is possible with a film or video recording; nor can it be replaced by an actor who relates what shall or what has happened on the stage. The theatrical event is at all times a present, concrete activity bound to the specific situation. And this means that the processual logic which dictates the concrete development of these events possesses exactly that mediary position which Brøndal assigns it between the concrete manifestation and the virtual meaning elements which enter into the process.

Every segmentation of this process will have to depend on the situation. The criteria for any given segmentation will be explicated in relation to this situation of presence. The literary reception in the reading also clearly depends on the context. But it is possible to abstract from this and still complete a significant part of the analysis. But such an abstraction is not possible in the analysis of the theatrical event. It would be to reduce the actor to words without a body. Thus segmentation and its criteria is of crucial importance for analysis.

The irreversible and positional logic of the process is one of the two important general characteristics which Brøndal ascribes to the concept of discourse. The other he expresses thus:

What above all characterizes this asymmetrical totality that we call discourse is the goal toward which it always tends, its sense or orientation, its constant will of expression, in a word, its intention. (Brøndal 1943, 55)

Brøndal uses the word “intention” in direct reference to phenomenology, with a tacit understanding that consciousness is always a consciousness of something, always directed toward an outside world which is simultaneously not only an object world, but a potential universe of meaning. It is this relation which is expressed in the discourse’s irreversible logic, that which indicates that language is directed toward something. On the other hand, the introduction of intentionality as a general characteristic of discourse implies that the manifested textual process cannot be analyzed as a process without the instances which mark the subjectivity and the referentiality of language and which belong to the very logic of the process.

In the embryonic years of structural linguistics, this aspect of the discursive nature of language went completely unappreciated with the exception of a few notables such as Karl Bühler, Viggo Brøndal, Eric Buyssens, and Emile Benveniste. But since then the analysis of speech acts and enunciation has given the analysis of discourse some dimensions which accentuate the factors of enunciation (pronouns, for example) and the modalities of language (doubt, belief, demand, etc.) which have not been completely absorbed by the dominating assertive form (A is B / A is not B). The accentuation of the discursive process underlines its connection to the concrete textual process and its situational dependence. By an emphasis placed on the factors and modalities of enunciation, discourse is anchored in the inventories of the virtual signs and elements of language. Discourse then is intentional and coded textualization. At the same time, the analysis of discourse needs to be specified in semiotic systems other than those of natural languages—in theater semiotics, for example.

The quality of presence in the theatrical event was pointed out above, emphasizing the necessary co-presence of actors and spectators and the simultaneity of production and reception. We then argued in favor of a specific status for the processual logic of the theatrical event. However, it is not until the factors entering into speech acts are foregrounded that this concrete and physical character of simultaneity takes on its true perspective. It is important to emphasize that the actor and the spectators do not enter into the theatrical event solely by virtue of their simultaneous physical presence, but also because this presence means that they, as actor and spectator, become factors in the discursive dimensions turning the theatrical event into a text. Thus the spectator—by representing a certain dramatic competence with certain pre-established knowledge, ideology, imagination, desire, etc.—is an active constituent of the processual logic of presentation.

While the linguistic (eventually socio- or psycholinguistic) analysis of discourse can analyze a single discursive dimension by emphasizing the subjective factors (in a discourse in which the constituents of enunciation lie on the same logical level), theatrical discourse is distinguished by the fact that there are always at least two discursive dimensions. If a speech-act analysis isolates an everyday conversational situation, a discursive dimension can be delimited. Irony, misunderstanding, and Freudian slips can be analyzed and organized in temporal order or in a logical structure of antecedent and consequent. It is this analysis that allows a homogenization of the implied discursive levels so as to arrange them in a discourse where the factors of enunciation are situated at the same level.

When a line is spoken on stage, it is always addressed simultaneously to another character and to the spectator. When a soliloquy or an aside is addressed beyond the footlights, the explicit dialogue on stage is of course disrupted; however, these two types of monologic expressions are still bound to the discursive dimension constituted by the dialogues: the orientation of the scenic discourse toward the spectator will never be eliminated. The murmur also conveys meaning, eventually inviting conjecture on what could have been clearly communicated. These two orientations in the context of theatrical communication are fundamentally different from the situation of everyday communication as they cannot be temporally and logically separated. They are simultaneously and reciprocally interdependent.

Theatrical communication situations are not, however, fundamentally different from other forms of fiction, but in theater they appear in a radicalized form. In written fiction, every conversation is filtered through a sort of narrative instance before it reaches the reader. In film, a camera and editor sort the events before we see and hear them. These active, distance-creating factors are manifested in the text at the time of its reception. In theater, on the other hand, we will obviously have an interpretation, a script, a long series of rehearsals, and so forth prior to performance before an audience, a pre-scenic dimension of the scenic text. But in the actual reception there is an absolute simultaneity between the discursive dimension on stage and the discursive dimension encompassing the stage and the auditorium. The director, stage manager, etc. are active constituents in the text only so long as their labor is transformed to scenic elements functioning in this simultaneity and according to its conditions.

If, in the semiotic analysis of theater, we are to incorporate some of the concepts established by discourse analysis along with those of speech-act and enunciation analysis, then we must be mindful of these specific traits of the theatrical event. One cannot—like Deirdre Burton, for example (Burton 1980)—be content with analyzing the scenic dialogue that has been isolated with the aid of speech-act concepts without considering the conditions generated by the very nature of the theatrical event.

André Green, points in another context to the fact that even though the theater to a large degree is a phenomenon of presence, it is also a phenomenon of signification, because it refers to other things represented in the universe of signs in the theatrical event. He emphasizes that theatrical language is dual and articulates thereby an absence of something giving theater its significant character in general and, according to his own optics, accentuates the relation to the unconscious in a psychoanalytic sense:

The theater takes up the challenge of evoking this absence in the most outrageous way, since nowhere else does language maintain the discourse of presence with such brilliance. Thus, the theater of representation alone is tempted to annul this presence, but is forced to recognize the impossibility of such an attempt. One must seek rather the locus of absence in the theater in the duplication of respoken speech. It constitutes a differential replication of the exchanges of spoken language. The production of the statements that unfold before us has passed through writing, and a theory of writing for the theatre is therefore inevitable. But such a theory cannot afford to forget that this writing is intended to be respoken. Therefore, a dual theory of writing is necessary, that of the writing of speech and that of respoken writing. The specific effect of the theater lies perhaps in the fusion of these two processual aspects. The spectator becomes entirely caught up in the work of decoding what—in spoken language—the actor means. The spectator believes that he has registered the translation of this spoken language, whereas he has encoded his own displacement. And it is by means of this difference, bearing on reduced statements and forming an integral part of an uninterrupted chain, that the absent signified has slipped into his mind. (Green 1969, 243)

This duality of “spoken language” and “respoken language” is an essential point in the discursive analysis of theater. Green stresses that the scenic dialogue as “spoken language,” functions in a simultaneous fusion with the “respoken language,” constituting the dialogue between stage and auditorium. But the spectator cannot bridge the gap between the two aspects of theatrical speech that Green mentions by rendering respoken language, as the voice of the narrator, superior to “spoken language.”

Everyday dialogue, written fiction, and texts lying outside a scenic representation or those texts which reflect on it afterward, each in its own way possesses the possibility of forming a linear hierarchy. In this hierarchy, a fundamental meaning—possibly complex or contradictory—will organize the means of expression, deviations, and misunderstandings in the speech acts, etc. But such an ordering does not exist during the theatrical event. The concepts of discursive analysis for the analysis of the ideal speech acts mentioned above therefore cannot directly analyze the simultaneous presence of spoken and respoken language in the theatrical event. But they do allow a more precise evaluation of where the analysis of the theatrical speech can come into play.

Here our interest centers upon the implicit part of the utterance, presupposed (présupposé) and inferred (sous-entendu) (cf. Ducrot 1969, 1972, 1978). If, in a melodrama, a young blonde in a white crinoline says, “I am a sinner,” the other characters presuppose, among other things, “She possesses a certain moral conscience,” and this is readable in their verbal and non-verbal reactions. This presupposition holds true even if the heroine denies the selfcharacterization (“I am not a sinner”), formulates it as a question (“Am I a sinner?”), or renders it in a conditional (“If I can do what I want, I’ll be a sinner”). To such generally presupposed semantic rules are also attached non-linguistic rules such as genre, the distinction between fictional and nonfictional speech acts, speech acts determined by an institution or ceremony, etc. These codes can also function as presuppositions.

But the young woman’s utterance can also lead the others to infer, “She is honest,” “This is a joke,” “She is lying,” etc. which will induce a multitude of different reactions to the situation. What is inferred depends on whether the utterance is formulated positively, as here, or contradicted, and will necessarily be related to the concrete situation. This leads to the fact that the use of the selfsame presupposed code (e.g., a moral code) can function as a part of the inferred code. In the ironic text, or the text understood ironically, the observation that “one utilizes a double semantic code” is a part of the inferred even if each of the codes used belong to what is supposed.

It is this possibility of shifting between verbal and non-verbal dimensions—together with the possibility that the presupposed and the inferred can shift roles in the discursive process—which makes the theory of speech acts relevant for theatre semiotics. This can be expressed as follows: in stage dialogue one may analyze the implicit aspects as being respectively “the presupposed” and “the inferred,” provided that at the same time we establish the shifts of position in these dimensions within the dialogue between the stage and the auditorium, including the total number of non-verbal scenic elements.

If, leaving the actors, we now turn to the spectator, s/he will as a presupposition relate the blonde’s utterance to a general theatrical convention, “She’s the heroine,” which is to say that s/he will presuppose certain elements which, on stage, would be inferred. And the spectator infers “her moral conscience is presented with irony” from the contrast between the color and the verbal code. And, finally, the use of certain presupposed codes will appear as the inferred; therefore, the spectator sees at the same time that she is the very example of a genre convention: “She signifies honesty.” It suffices here to point to the different representations of La Dame aux Camélias.

Thus, the entire repertoire of the implied semantic elements may intervene in the changing discursive positions and therefore indicate the possibilities of interpretation both for the actors, directors, and spectators. The specific duality of scenic speech is thus the necessary point of departure for an analysis of theatrical enunciation.

6. The code: position and transformation

This shift between discursive positions and the meaning with which they are invested is rule governed, which is why in analyzing them it is necessary to institute a code concept relevant to theatre semiotics. This concept may point to traits other than those found in a purely linguistic code theory (e.g., Eco 1976, 1977).

In contrast to the general code theory, we shall be only preoccupied with semantic codes. For, where theatre is concerned, we must accept the fact that, on stage, there are no non-significant elements, none independent of all sign relations, for instance, no purely physiological codes. And we accept that we are in a particular discursive universe where the elements have been chosen specifically for the spectator to observe and interpret them during the theatrical event. They enter into two fundamental discursive dimensions (the scenic dimension and the dimension encompassing the relation between the stage and the auditorium). The fundamental sign relation is established before the curtain rises, as all the elements which constitute the representation (words, props, scenery, choreography, etc.) have been pre-selected with a specific goal: the words are, as affirmed by André Green above, respoken.

In contrast to the linguistic code theory, the distinction between a first articulation (one-to-one relation between content and expression, as, for example, in a traffic signal) and a second articulation (arbitrary relations between content and expression, as in the linguistic sign) is of as little importance as the general problem of the sign relation. We presuppose that the elements on stage are already significative and that we are dealing with pre-established sign relations. Again, in contrast to linguistic theory, we cannot accept a single code—the verbal, for example—as being fundamental, but will have to employ a multitude of codes, changes in codes, and levels of codes.

Thus the general definition of the code in theatre semiotics is a rule for the choice and the combination of already-significant elements. To be able to specify specific codes, we must operate with various types of codes and various code functions. Thus we have to combine the code concept with the theatrical event as a dynamic and discursive process.

The code is constituted by the rules through which a set of elements is mutually combined. It will then define an object immanently, by virtue of the particular laws by which the elements are mutually connected. It is obviously possible and, where the objective is descriptive, quite often useful to isolate different aspects of the theatrical event, thus making of them semiotic objects having a relational coding. The colors of the actor’s costumes, for example, can be specified as an independent textual aspect by the code combining them. The code is in this sense static and closely related to the structure concept in classical structuralism. One can, in agreement with Umberto Eco, speak of a code system or an S-code.

The essential is not however the establishment of a series of S-codes but rather their reciprocal relations and the change they undergo through these relations. Consequently the S-code alone is not sufficient. The codes proper or simply the codes then, still in company with Umberto Eco, are the transformation rules which exist between at least two objects defined by way of an S-code. They are related and perhaps modified through these transformation rules. But in any case, the static systems—for example, colors as one system, gestures as another—are activated, thereby creating meaning.

The general code definition is thus manifested in two code types: the static S-codes delimiting what belongs in a given context to the pre-given meaning, the dynamic transformation rules or codes simply combining the textual aspects delimitable by an S-code. And, since the theatre operates with preinvested meaning elements entering into a discursive process, both types of codes will be equally relevant.

It must be emphasized further that the two code types designate not only the qualities of the determined objects, but the different discursive functions. Any part of the theatrical event may be delimited through an S-code and thereby serve as the point of departure or the end-point of a discursive transformational process. And any part may also become the bearer of transformation codes. In La Dame aux Camélias, white and red are related in an S-code with other colors, expressing different values. But at the same time the change of the white flowers with the red flowers and vice versa creates relations between systems by transforming them (for example, between moral values and corporeal and sexual behavior). Thus, colors may also function as the code.²

In the analysis of theatre, we do not place ourselves in relation to the general rules—or to general code-types or general functions of the codes. We here place ourselves in relation to coded significations.

7. The structure: code and interpretant

Since the breakthrough of structuralism in France in the 1960s, the concept of structure has been greatly defined, discussed, applied, defended, and rejected. It has proved relevant in the discussion of epistemological problems and those encountered in interpretation theory. Both these problem areas would, however, be best approached through an application of the concepts we have introduced here.

The structure of an object is usually defined as the internal network of relations defining it, regardless of what elements are in interrelationship (cf. the S-code).

In an extension of the above definition, the ontological status of this concept has been taken up: as an immanently defined set of relations, is it in the final analysis identical with the object’s own inherent structure? If the answer is no, then the referent problem is simply put in brackets. If yes, it is taken as given that the referent problem is concerned solely with the object and thus expressible in the so-called assertorial propositions which are univocally true or false (A is B / A is not B). In either case, this concept will not be of interest in the theatrical domain, where the reference problem cannot be discarded but where at the same time it must be understood as a number of relations between several types of reference.

We are thus led to another problem associated with the structure concept, namely that articulated in interpretation theory. Here the structure can be understood as the unspecified presupposition that the given object—such as a theatre performance to be seen or produced—is a cohesive whole, that it is delimitable as a text.

This understanding of the structure concept lacks descriptive content but is tenable if we accept in advance to place an object in a communicative context, implicating it thereby in the concept of the immediate interpretant or the presupposition of an object’s interpretability. But, in contrast to the structure concept, the concept of interpretant implies that this a priori hypothesis leads necessarily to a specification of the object in a discursive interdependence of coding processes.

Structure understood as a construction of the object according to specific presuppositions coincides with the dynamic and final interpretants of the text. But what these concepts emphasize (in contrast to the structure concept) is, first, that the construction enters into a continuous interpretation process and that the object (i.e., the theatrical event) must itself be understood as a dynamic exchange between discursive dimensions and code positions. Second, it follows from the concept of the contextualized text (as opposed to the concept of structure based on immanence) that the actual delimitation of the object and the minimal units upon which the structure of the text is built depends on a choice made in relation to the given context. This is why we here abandon the concept of structure in favor of the concepts of text, discourse, and code. But of what importance are these for theatre semiotics?

8. The code, the text, and the discourse

The code considered as an aspect of the text implies that everything occurring on stage and entering into the theatrical event can, in principle, function as a code or S-code. But, at the same time, always in such a way that everything is not coded in each concrete interpretation situation. Therefore we shall not simply suppose that the stage production is, as a text, a totality, as would be the case in accordance with the structure concept. Instead we introduce a distinction: on the one hand, the texts contain characteristics which are coded, which enter into different, mutually related rule-governed transformation processes. On the other hand, the texts contain a long series of elements which, for different reasons (e.g., technical error, actor forgetfulness, production possibilities overlooked either by the director or the spectator), do not enter into relevant codings which are analyzed via the delimitation of the text. Finally, there is a long series of elements which principally cannot be coded in connection with the chosen delimitation of the text (i.e., the actor’s body cannot be totally coded in relation to the production; the scenic material and the theatre proper are not completely transformable to the requirements of the individual production). Such non-coded phenomena can influence and interrupt the coded text without it ceasing thereby to be a coded and distinctively delimited text. The characterizing of certain elements as non-coded does not mean they are disregarded but, on the contrary, that they are given status in relation to the coded text, in relation to which they are also efficacious.³

An important aspect of this dynamic is the shifting between code positions within a single production—from non-coded to the code or S-code positions. It is through such a process that the pre-coded meanings serving as the production’s historical foundation are given the impetus to be seen. In the version of Büchner’s Woyzeck beginning with the scene where Woyzeck and Andres cut straw, the knife is a neutral element, a tool whose appearance and gestural presentation need not be subscribed to a particular code. But a subsumation to a code occurs later on during the play (cf. Larsen 1985). It is also possible, by comparing the different scenes, to see just how the elements can be adopted or rejected, subsumed under specific codes or treated neutrally. This applies, for example, to the use of the coffee grinder in the first act of Callers at the Child Bearer (1723) by the Danish moral philosopher, comedy writer, and man of letters Ludvig Holberg.

If the code concept is to be thus unified with a descriptive analysis (the S-code) and a functional analysis (code), then such an analysis should specify the rearticulation which the existing repertoire of pre-established meanings undergoes in the discursive logic of theatre. Again, the knife in Woyzeck can serve as example. A number of characteristics, deriving as much from the knife’s role in the play as from its use as a practical tool and its placement in a pre-established but not always well-known symbol structure, can enter into a characterization of the knife’s S-code and invite its induction into parallel S-codes in the meaning universe of the given drama. There will, in such an S-code, enter elements from a general historical repertoire of meaning (such as Ad de Vries’s Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery), including its association as an instrument of revenge, a manifestation of power, a sexual symbol, and a combination of an aggressive and defensive weapon possessing magical overtones. However, elements from the specific text will at the same time also come into play. Hence, particularly in Woyzeck, the knife’s connection to dance and its consequent association with aggressive and lascivious body language. All these elements exist as open dramaturgical possibilities for a given production. They constitute a part of the written text’s sign-structure which can enter into the discourse-dominated transformations with a greater or lesser force dictated by the actual codes responsible for the production of a specific meaning. In the production in Bochum, West Germany (1980-1981) the knife is given such a dominant role that in the opening scene a knife-thrower appears in the market place, with Maria as the victim.

Here we would like simply to emphasize the discursive determination of the coding process. In one of the scenes, the captain and the doctor meet Woyzeck in the street before Woyzeck’s knowing anything of Maria’s infidelity and hence before his murder plans (Büchner 1969, 40ff):

In the dialogue on stage, the captain’s replies are ambiguous: he speaks at one and the same time about Woyzeck’s great agitation and his wife’s fidelity, with hair and beard serving as the link. And Woyzeck is clueless. Yet it is not an ordinary revelation or jest which the captain delivers here. Normally, Woyzeck understands very well—and has accustomed himself to—the captain’s manner of speaking. But here he meets a fatal revelation changing his life. And his understanding does not come until later on. He answers “Yes, sir” yet expresses in the same breath that he understands nothing. In other words, Woyzeck can establish neither the S-code to which the captain refers nor the transformation rules the codes are subjected to so that the mentioned elements can be brought into relation.

Consequently we must take the inferred and the presupposed into consideration. In any event, “Woyzeck is married to Maria” (which in the play will imply only a relation resembling marriage) and “Woyzeck is a subordinate to the captain” are presupposed. The latter aspect is linked to the situation and expressed linguistically in the spontaneous “Yes, sir,” in the use of the title “Cap’n,” and in Woyzeck’s accepting the boundaries that the captain sets for meaningfulness. The inferred in the captain’s reply is, among others, “Woyzeck is dangerous,” “Woyzeck is dumb” (has not discovered Maria’s infidelity), “Woyzeck’s agitation is in vain” (has to shave the castrates), “Maria has a relation with the drum major.” The indirect character of the utterance, moreover, will cause us to note, “A double semantic coding is being used,” and this enters into the inferred. Woyzeck understands this and only this aspect, as his answer shows; he cannot simply connect this duplicity with a concrete content, since the double coding hinges upon the union of these two aspects of the presupposed. The witnessing of this ignorance on Woyzeck’s behalf is part and parcel of the captain’s intent and an affirmation of his power.

It is precisely the lapse in communication in the dialogue on stage which turns the dialogue between the stage and the auditorium into an independent factor. For it is this discursive dimension that the cohesion that is incomprehensible to Woyzeck can be found by virtue of certain dramaturgical choices of general frames of the production’s semantic universe (in relation to the text’s meaning potential). In the brief example provided here, the elements which function as the presupposed on stage are introduced as parts of the inferred in the dialogue between stage and audience. If now in this production we choose an element presupposed in the dialogue, for example “love and social power are mutually related,” this lies outside Woyzeck’s knowledge (at least at this point in the text), which is why he does not understand anything. An element not belonging to the presupposed in the dialogue between the stage and the audience but, on the other hand, to its inferred, can only be “social power relations can be changed.” But the presence of such an element in this and only this dialogue will, among other things, depend upon the use of such S-codes constituted in the knife, so that it enters as a creator of cohesion in the dialogue between audience and stage, and it is there that a specific S-code can be interjected: the knife articulates the relation between power and nonpower since the ultimate manifestation of power (the murder of Maria) is at the same time self-destructive and gives rise to powerlessness (Woyzeck’s possibilities for personal and social development are destroyed)—hence the quotation’s reference to both the beard and castration. In the position as code (i.e., the transformational factors in this process) social power, love relationships, and body language (dance and eye-contact) are particularly prevalent in a simultaneous relation in this play (cf. Larsen 1985). In the dialogue on stage, the knife does not necessarily serve this function: it can enter into the verbal and gestural or the practical and symbolic dimension without having to take on a particularly synthesizing role in the scenic inference.

What is important to stress here is that there is a necessary solidarity between the presupposed and the inferred in the two discursive dimensions of theatre, owing as much to verbal as to non-verbal elements in the production. Without such a solidarity, there can be no dialogue between the stage and audience (see the discussion of the stage-production universes below). But besides this solidarity, there is a possibility of the presupposed and inferred appearing in one dimension and not in the other, and for the presupposed to appear in the one which is the inferred in the other and vice versa. It is this difference which contributes to the dramatical discourse’s dual character and the theatrical event’s communicative effectiveness.

It is at the same time important to emphasize that the determination of the distinctive aspects of the presupposed in the dialogue between stage and audience rests in certain contextually determined dramaturgical choices.

Thus, if—in reference, for example, to Woyzeck—one gets the idea of letting the knife serve as the cohesion-creating factor in the scenic inferred, then at least two things must be taken into account. We must first consider the relation to the text and the nature of its characters. Will it in general be possible to let the scenic space represent a space wherein the persons can be attributed with a discerning consciousness, or will this run contrary to the semantics of the drama? (See below concerning scenic and narrative space.) Second, we must consider the relation to the efficiency of communication between stage and audience. Thus, in the example of Woyzeck and his tormenters, we have emphasized that Woyzeck’s difficulty in establishing the level of the inferred on stage highlights the autonomy of this implicit level in the other discursive dimension.

9. Object and reference

We have touched upon the referent of the text in two contexts in the preceding discussion. It has been designated as the “object” of the text in the semiosis model based on Peirce’s sign theory, and it has been presupposed in pointing out the intentionality of the discourse, its direction toward “an outside world.” The questions concerning the reference of the text, its referential function, or its indexation are numerous and complex, and in the continental semiotics (Saussure, Hjelmslev, etc.) a refusal to face this problematic has dominated. Indeed, Saussure’s dictum: “The linguistic sign does not link a thing and a name, but rather a concept and an acoustic image” can be considered the point of departure for the immanent mode of thought which has characterized strutural linguistics up to recent times.

With Peirce, the triadic conception of the sign serves as the cornerstone of semiotics. In this conception, the object is an indispensable element of semiosis (i.e., in the production of meaning) since the condition for the sign’s functioning as an interpretant of another sign is that it be conceived of as referring to the same object.

It is however important to emphasize that the designation object, at least at first, occupies a position in the semiosis, that it is a condition for the production of meaning and not a specific ontologically determined collection of objects (such as material objects or fictive objects). The object is therefore related largely to a (common) universe of experiences and actions, the communication partners’ so-called common ground, the material foundation of the cultural community necessary for the promulgation and communication of meaning.

The reason for these suggestions (and we shall not mention more) of Peirce’s conception of the object of the sign or of the text is twofold. First, it seems important to us to point out an alternative to the dyadic conception of the sign; second, the determination of objects plays a decisive role in the conception of the universe of the text.

10. The universe of the text

That to which a text refers is often called the discursive universe. According to Peirce (C.P. 2.536), the discursive universe is first and foremost conceived of as a net of presuppositions giving the text comprehensibility, that comprehensibility which is the condition for the transmission of meaning between the parties in communication.

The definition of the universe as something which can be pointed to, but which can only with difficulty be described, implies two things. First, that the foundation of the universe is constituted of presuppositions which are so basic that only in quite extraordinary circumstances can they be made objects of reflection (suppositions such as reflections on space and time, the relation between cause and effect, etc.). Second, it follows from this definition that the discursive universe is not merely a notion related to the text conceived as an autonomous, context-free entity, nor merely something related to the codes manifested by the text. Peirce’s emphasis on indexicality must be understood in this connection; for there are not only deictical elements in the text (pronouns, indicators of time and place, etc.) which delineate a spatio-temporal field within which something happens, but this very delimitation necessarily implies a place and a point in time in relation to which the universe can be perceived. Tempus and modus and the other shifters mark the referential and communicative functions at the heart of morphology and syntax.

It seems reasonable to suppose that all the different types of discursive universes which can be produced by human speech emanate from experiences acquired within a living social and material world and that, in the final instance, these various universes therefore become understandable by relating to the interplay between interaction and linguistic communication in social activity, in the interaction of external nature together with actions and interpretations ultimately grounded in our inner nature. In other words, it is through the coupling between the discursive universe and the universe of action that meaning arises and becomes intelligible.

This conception of the conditions of the appearance of meaning is a fundamental postulate underlying our entire exposition, and it implies several things. It requires, first of all, an interference between two or more expression systems (S-codes in Eco’s terminology) and, second, an interference between this interconnection of the semiotic systems and the everyday world within which they receive meaning by virtue of their function as interpretation schemata and rules of conduct. This point of view implies, negatively, a rejection of all attempts at explaining meaning through a reduction to a single function or source, be it the connection between expression or content and form, or a reduction of symbolic signs to iconic signs. Positively, this point of view means that meaning is supposed as a function of the interplay between all five poles of the semiosis model and the internal and external aspects of these. It follows moreover that meaning is a social and communicative phenomenon, something which at least two instances, a sender and a receiver—in principle—can come to an understanding of.

The difference between a text referring to a fictive universe and a text referring to a social and material universe lies in the indices contained in the text or in the situational context. Indeed, it would not be possible to decide whether an ordinary descriptive text lacking clear indexical anchorage in a given space presents a fictive or a historical universe. This means that a minimum of specific information is required in order to determine a text’s reference. For example, if we find the expression “Romeo loves Juliet” as graffiti on a wall, without any further information, we cannot in principle determine whether we are faced with a (true) proposition on the fictive persons in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (or another fictive work with the same motif) or whether it concerns two neighborhood adolescents, a statement which can be either true or false.

11. The universe of the performance

The theatrical performance is characterized by a plurality of universes. In order to define this plurality it is useful to stipulate a difference between the spectacular and the theatrical. Let us designate the spectacular as the events which separate the socio-material reality into two partial universes, one comprising the actors, the other the spectators. Such a halving of our everyday world is not uncommon and most often occurs spontaneously, as for example the ring formed on the school playground by a group of children surrounding combatants. A more formalized version of the spectacular is the sporting event (e.g., a boxing or a wrestling match), where the demarcation between spectator and actor is enforced by a formal authority and, if necessary, by the use of public force. The fight in the schoolyard and the combative sport share a characteristic feature: the attention of the actors and spectators is concentrated on what is happening right now. Other spectacular events (such as parliamentary debates or court trials) are also characterized by a separation between spectators and actors. But here the actors’ own partial universe is divided into a present space, in which they act, and an absent space, which is spoken of or imagined.

Even though the development of a court case or a parliamentary debate (like the institutionalized sporting event) requires a sharp distinction between actor and spectator, a distinction marked in the construction of the physical room, the spectators are essential for the spectacle’s development because in both cases we speak of the ceremonial practice of a social institution’s function which, by definition, is public, and this practice will completely change character if this public aspect is left out (cf. court-martial and arcane political disputation). Even though one may not associate anything spectacular with the phenomena mentioned above, they nevertheless possess the essential spectacular characteristic: that of being a delimited, rule-governed event-process presented by a group of actors and in which both parties (in large part) are familiar with and accept their roles; furthermore, the actors delimit and occupy a specific physical locality which is constituted as an arena, platform, or podium for the duration of the performance process.

If we turn now to other events which would at times be characterized as spectacular, for instance, the circus or the bullfight, we cannot glean any departures from the criteria we have posited forthwith. Of course from other points of view there are very great differences; among others, that the bullfight is characterized by reproducing at the surface level traces of archaic rituals: they are defined as recreative (just like a sporting event) in contrast to the courtmartial and political debate, which represent the organs of legislative and judicial government, etc. It is essential in this context that in each of these cases, the actors act within and refer to the universe to which both they and the spectator belong: a historic, socio-material universe. Given this background we can now add yet another criterion to the definition of the spectacular: The spectacular (in contrast to the theatrical) is characterized by NOT constituting a universe categorically different from the spectator’s.

The carnival becomes an interesting phenomenon in the above context, as we could imagine: a sort of transition between the spectacular and the theatrical which can ultimately be ceremonial, as in the courtesans’ masked ball. Whereas to be an athlete, judge, prime minister, etc. is a part of the actor’s social identity, to dress as Harlequin, Mandarin, Domino, etc. (or as a soccer player, referee, or bullfighter, if one is otherwise not one of these) is to claim another role through costuming, make-up, and masking, a role not a part of one’s normal social identity. The difference in the carnival experience as opposed to others is that if one meets a person acting in one of the above spectacles, he would, in another context, present himself as a professional athlete, judge, minister of state, etc., whereas the person who has been dressed up as a Mandarin at the carnival the previous evening would hardly introduce himself as “Maurice Dupont, Mandarin”; the person one has just seen in the role of Hamlet in “The Barbican,” will not introduce himself as Hamlet but as “NN, actor.”

Thus far we have provided examples of spectacular events which were not theatrical and of one event, the carnival, which brought the spectacular and theatrical together. We concluded from these examples that the spectacular was a far more comprehensive concept than the theatrical because the spectacular demanded “only” one of the two, either a dividing of the physical space into two partial universes, the actor and the spectacular, or a pseudofictivization of the social interaction which is spatio-temporally delimited (the carnival). In order for an event to be theatrical, one further characteristic must be added: the distinction between a social and a fictive universe. In order to better determine the specificity of the theatrical, it will be practical to introduce some diagrams illustrating the relation between interaction and dialogue in relation to space and time. The simplest illustration will be a situation in which two partners in the dialogue are simultaneously present within a welldefined physical space, with their dialogue and interaction reduced to a simple treatment of what is simultaneously present (themselves as they are at that instant, the objects, and the surroundings) (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Figure 2

In this case, which is highly stylized and only rarely occurs, the dialogue and the interaction of the actors is intended solely for themselves and the two elements included in their commonly defined universe. A, however, is not content with a reference to B, s/he interacts with it (s/he refers linguistically or gesturally to a glass of water and then drinks it). It is essential that unless we are A or B we will never, in a historical universe, be able to experience this situation; we will only be informed about it later in the form of an account from one of the actors. We will naturally be able to imagine the action while it occurs (e.g., the jealous husband suffering the pangs of imagining his wife’s placid moments with the lover, while she in fact is doing just that), but we are generally excluded from perceiving this situation.

In Figure 2, a supplementary actor (C) is introduced; s/he is marked neither as interacting nor referring, but his/her isolated existence is important because s/he is in any circumstance an observer, and we presuppose that C is not present for A or B—neither in their consciousness nor in their field of perception. We assume the situation of an outside observer, maybe even a spy. If C is present for the actors, their interaction will be influenced and their communication with one another will at the same time be an indirect communication to a “deaf” third. As there is no mention of a sub-partition into partial universes, C will potentially be interacting, and if we imagine several Cs, the diagram can represent the scuffle in the schoolyard which can end in a free-for-all.

If we divide the universe formally into two parts—into a space for interaction and a space for spectators—we have the sporting event, the bullfight, etc. (Figure 3).

The very space of the dialogue and interaction, the space for the actor’s physical presence must in everyday communication and interaction be supplemented with a dimension of time, transcending the dimension of the corporeal present in the space of physical interaction. This time must also be tied to a space, and the interaction space must be further supplemented by a simultaneous but not-present space (Figure 4).

Figure 3

This figure should present the division of a dialogic discursive universe delineated by two parameters: physical presence vs. physical absence and contemporaneity vs. non-contemporaneity (subdivided into past and future). This representation however is highly incomplete at one essential point, for it most definitely respects tempus, but not modus, it thus represents a discursive universe which is abbreviated to facticity (or to a supposed facticity) and a possible future. An utterance such as “If we had married back then, we would be celebrating our silver anniversary two years from now” can be placed readily enough in relation to the timeline, but it represents an imagined event which cannot be situated within the factual universe and must therefore split the respective space into two universes, a factual and a counter-factual (Figure 5).

Figure 4

If one asks how it is possible to divide the future into a counter-factual and a possible space, the answer is provided in the latter part of the utterance: “. . . we would be celebrating our silver anniversary two years from now.” Here reference is made to a future event which by definition cannot occur; one can therefore maintain this division of the future.

Figure 5 should roughly illustrate a division of the references in the dialogue; the seven localities must not be confused, however, with the discursive universes in the ordinary sense, since several of these localities belong to the same universe (in Peirce’s terminology). If we combine Figures 3 and 5, we get a model which could represent the discursive and interactional relations in, for example, a court case or in a parliamentary debate, and it seems clear that the division of the respective space into factual and counter-factual universes is also necessary in these concrete instances where both places are argued contra-factually. Thus the model for this type of communication situation (Figure 6).

With this division we approach the plurality of space and universe that is characteristic of the staging of a theatrical production; but the simple fact that a court case can be (and in fact very often is) presented on the stage (where both actors and audience are represented by actors) points to the fact that this model must be supplemented with yet another dimension in order to encompass the specific character of theatre production. Obviously this is not effected through a mere distinction between “the spectators” in the interaction space and the spectators in the auditorium (a combination of Figures 2 and 3 would exemplify this), for if a person cracks open the door of a courtroom in session we have precisely this situation of a spectator observing spectator and actor, and even if with the help of an infinite number of doors this situation becomes an endless embedding which no theatrical event would produce.

Figure 5

Figure 6

Even if the presence of the spectators is essential to the theatrical representation for other reasons (see below), the production’s differentia specifica must be connected between the stage (mimetic space) and the diegetic space. This dividing of the diegetic space, illustrated by Figure 6, must also apply to the interaction going on stage. When at the end of Hamlet Fortinbras concludes, “Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage, / For he was likely, had he been put on, / To have prov’d most royal . . .” (V, ii, 401-403), he refers then to a non-factual future space in relation to the absolutely identical postulation of the following hypothetical statement: “If Mozart had lived longer than 36 years, he would have composed more works.”

The specificity of theatrical production, distinguished on the one hand by normal social interaction and on the other by the reader’s construction of an epic or dramatic fictional universe, lies in the uniting elements from both of these categorically different universes. A more precise description of this categorial interrelation will begin with the actor’s dual presence on stage, the duality of that real physical presence in conjunction with the spectator in the auditorium who also personifies or is an incarnation of a character in a dramatic fiction. This ties into the actor’s relation to the fundamental definition of the sign: aliquid stat pro aliquo. This has already been hinted at conceptually in that we did not infer that the actor refers to a character in the dramatic fiction but instead personifies or incarnates. The actors playing Hamlet or Richard III refer not to a fictive or historical person; they personify them by virtue of their presence.

Figure 7

It may seem unnecessary to take this detour around the diegetic space in order to give a more explicit formulation of what occurs on the stage, but this detour is necessary if we are to distinguish between a pseudo-theatrical event, such as the carnival, and the theatre production as such. The following passage from Hamlet should make this clear. Hamlet: “My lord, you played once i’ th’ university, you say?” Polonius: “That did I, my lord, and was accounted a good actor.” Polonius’s earlier career as an amateur actor is of course fictive, and through reference to this, the physically present person, Polonius, allows the incarnation of the textual entity in a non-realized fictional universe. As spectators, we are in the same situation as when reading Hamlet; if this reference is to be realized it can be only in the reader or spectator’s own imagination. Even if the actor’s physical presence on the stage can rightly be determined as essential for the theatre, the iconic, cardboard representation of Polonius in a puppet production of Hamlet also implicates him both in a mimetic and a diegetic space.

This very distinction between a factual universe and a non-factual universe holds true in the fictional as well, as the latter can also refer to something imagined (cf. Fortinbras’s reply). This means that Figure 6, which depicts localities in the spectacular space (constructed with a diegetic space), applies as well to the theatrical production, but with the essential difference that the diegetic space and the spectator space correspond respectively to fictional and to socio-material universes, whereas the stage is located in both universes. It therefore applies to both action and dialogue on stage: they always assert themselves in two contexts as the communication and the action occurring within a fictional universe and as a performance addressing an audience (cf. discussion of discourse, above). In order to mark this duality of Figure 6, we supply Figure 7.

Thus we get the following five universes: (1) universe of concluded objective experiences (PFS); (2) universe of actual experience (A, SS); (3) universe of contemporaneous events, not directly experienced (perception) (SFS); (4) universe of future possibilities (FPS); and (5) counter-factual universe (PCFS, SCFS, FNRS, and FPS). That FPS both figure in universe five and are marked as independent universes (four) is due to the fact they are possibly not realized, and, until we know this, it must belong thus to a counter-factual universe. Therefore, what specifically characterizes the theatrical production’s plurality of universes is that four of the five universes conjectured here are fictional, and that universe number two (the universe of actual experience) is divided so that, even though that which occurs on stage naturally takes place within universe two, it still attains meaning by being seen as part of the four fictional universes. This also means, of course, that what is produced and narrated on stage needs by no means to respect the conception of what is valid in a historic universe. So, for example, what could belong to a counter-factual universe in association with a historical universe might very well extend to the previous factual space or even the mimetic space.

12. The sign and the object in the mimetic space

The genesis of a theatrical performance is the production of a fictional universe. If we limit ourselves to the staging of drama, the comparison to the construction found in reading can be shown. Here, in the imaginary realization, a connection between non-symbolic (in Peirce’s terminology, “icons” and “indices”) and symbolic signs emerges. Icons are not particularly natural or purely visual signs but contain conventional elements in such a way that the iconic sign refers through its signifier, among other things, to an object, something which a symbolical sign does not do because of its arbitrary signifier. The similarity between iconic sign and object which is ordinarily attributed to this relation is thus more complex in semiotics than in everyday conception. There is a specific similarity with respect to certain chosen aspects—manifested structurally or qualitatively—so that this selection is ruled by a rational functionality in the relation between sign and object.

In reading, it is possible to relate an infinite number of iconic representations to a linguistic fictional text. But the scenic representation must be one single concretization of the meaning potential of the linguistic text. This more rigorous selection will be governed in part by the material frames of the representation, earlier productions, conventions, etc., and in part by the necessity we have to represent what would otherwise be inaccessible outside the linguistic text, i.e., that which is encoded, uncoded, or not coded, to what cannot be coded (see discussion of codes, above) with the possibility of creating meaning structures which do not agree with the semantics of the linguistic text.

It is in this way that the scenic space, its characters, and its objects are understood as signs, for meaning arises only when the object becomes a sign, that is, when it refers to something else (see introduction to this chapter). This duality of object and sign characterizes our entire life—naturally—the forest floor telling the hunter of a certain kind of animal—or socially—the bureaucrat’s imposing desk relating his social status.

It is sometimes asserted that the objects on stage lose their function as objects and function merely as signs. It is an incorrect assertion and a hindrance to a real insight into the complex interplay between sign and object in theatrical representation. The duality must be retained, not only because every prop can be a genuine object, not a stage prop, with a sign function outside theatre (the imposing desk), but because the scenic space and especially its boundaries, its “walls” and entries and exits, will always encompass it: the space of the physical stage is always contiguous with a diegetic space, i.e., a simultaneously fictional and physical space—hallways, stairways, closets, and the spectator space. From a semiotic point of view it is of no consequence what kind of scene we speak of (simultaneous, naturalistic, etc.).

The discontiguity between discursive space and a universe of social action has already been pinpointed as the decisive characteristic of the theatrical (as opposed to the spectacular) production. Another difference, also owing to the sign’s deictic aspect, concerns the role of the actor, concerns, that is, what is essential in the theatrical representation. When the mercury rises above normal in the sick patient’s thermometer, we have a deictic sign because the quicksilver is directly influenced by the patient’s temperature. The sign has an iconic aspect because the mercury maintains a relational and proportional identity with body temperature. Finally, the sign possesses a symbolic aspect because the two phenomena are combined in an interpretation owing to a presupposed knowledge and, on the thermometer, to a critical zone.

Another of Peirce’s examples of a deictic sign is the lurching gait of the individual, which can be interpreted as an index of his being a sailor, this manner of walking caused by the movements of the ship’s deck. The serpentine walk and hesitant slur of the inebriated is likewise an index. If we see a person with a lurching walk or the noted symptoms of inebriation in the actor, we also identify it immediately as belonging to a sailor or a drunkard. Or will we? Because of our knowledge of the drama’s fictionality and the theatre as a physical realization of the fictive, we would be more inclined to interpret the person’s behavior as an actor playing sailor or drunkard. Then, in the terminology of sign theory, both the actor in the representation and the spectator in his/her reception would be distinguishing the iconic aspect from the deictic. The sailor’s lurching walk and the drunkard’s behavior are iconic in that they are characteristic qualities which resemble (in the sense that they have a great number of elements in common with) certain qualities of the sailor or the inebriant; and therefore their presence in an individual permits a hypothetical classification of the person as belonging to this or that class. The deictic aspect of the sign, the real relation between object and sign—that is, between the mariner and the tippler and the lurching walk and the drunken state respectively—is, however, absent in the actor’s representation of the fictive seaman or drunkard.

We have stressed the differences between deictical signs as they are produced, utilized, and interpreted in a historical universe and on stage: they correspond to Peirce’s division of the indexical sign into two types: designations and reagents (cf. C.P. 8.368). The designations are known as shifters in linguistics (e.g., personal and demonstrative pronouns, proper names, etc.); whereas the reagents are phenomena given sign status by being directly influenced by the object (e.g., the thermometer influenced by the patient’s temperature). The reality of the person with the lurching walk or in a drunken state is, or is interpreted as, a reagent, but the actor playing the role is not. What actually occurs in the actor’s presentation is not that the indexical aspect disappears—because the character’s behavior on stage should ideally still be interpreted as a visualization of a state of consciousness motivated by the character’s (fictive) history—but rather that reagents are replaced by designations. The difference between the reagent and the designation is, in the former instance, that the object determines the sign by means of an existential influence (sorrow and onions provoke tears) and, in the latter case, that one uses a sign in order to draw attention to an object (“See, there goes Jean”), not so that the sign influences the object existentially, but in such a way that the sign draws the object into the discursive universe. Basically, we most often combine designations with symbolic signs (e.g., language’s shifters and deictic expression) but, in the actor’s representation, the designations of the dialogue are supplemented by iconic designations, and therein lies the actor’s art: the very fact that tears of the actor can function as reagents, provoked by sorrow, that the tears of the actor may function as an iconic designation which refers to, or rather is interpreted as referring to, sorrow. The actor has been duly characterized as an iconic exemplification in the preceding, and the use of these two types of indices in the analysis has supported this determination. Yet one problem remains to be resolved: An iconic exemplification of what?

We have already rejected the idea that the actor should be an iconic sign if this is to be taken in the sense that he is a reproduction of a copy of an original just as a cast of a copy of the Venus de Milo or drawings by students at l’Académie des Beaux-Arts are exercises in the reproduction of classic works. Surely the actor playing Napoleon can achieve a resemblance to Napoleon through make-up and costuming, which is similar to students’ drawings of an original, but—only because it is a specific instance, because there exist iconic representations of characters before the production—this form for iconic representation cannot be essential. It must be asserted instead that the actor is an iconic representation of the fictive person represented symbolically in the drama. In the dramatic text, the character is constituted partly through his/her lines, in part through the company. Inasmuch as the actor lends body and voice to the corporeal realization of a process of symbolic signs, he embodies one of the enunciative instances of the text; but, in order to do this he must naturally have read, memorized, and interpreted it, that is, he becomes the interpretant of this part of the text. So the actor’s role can also be determined as an iconic exemplification of an interpretation or, perhaps better, an interpretation in the form of iconic exemplification. The plausibility of this determination can be seen in that whereas it would be absurd to say, for example, that Lawrence Olivier and Derek Jacobi reproduced the character Hamlet in two different ways, it would be reasonable to assert that their roles are two different interpretations of the drama Hamlet and particularly the meaning potential of the character Hamlet, interpretations that take on the form of iconic exemplifications.

Two things have been emphasized thus far: (1) that the introduction of objects into the stage’s double universe of fiction and physical spatial reality does not mean that they lose their character as objects, and (2) that the transformation of reagent into designation was characteristic for the play on stage. Now these two relations can be formulated more precisely in relation to the actor. To speak of the actor (and the production as a totality) as an iconic exemplification of the character (the drama) is to accentuate the fictional aspect of what happens on the stage. But, at the same time, the actor is also concrete and physically present, and this bodily presence in the same universe and at the same time with the spectators is the differentia specifica of the theatrical performance, compared to the realization of dramatic forms in other media (film, TV, radio, etc.). This means that the actor is present for the public in three ways: as a fictive person, as a professional exercising his/her practice, and as a physical individuality. In this latter characteristic s/he is present in his/her own element, so to speak: s/he is his/her own assertion of a bodily reality which cannot be reduced to a vehicle of fiction; and it is precisely this reduction which takes place in the moment that one asserts that objects lose their objective character on the stage and become signs. The actor’s bodily presence thus has a triple function: (1) as an incarnation of the textual process (as its dynamical interpretant) s/he makes possible (along with the staging as a whole) a social community of fantasies; (2) as a person exercising his/her profession at a given historical moment, the actor transposes the symbolic process into para-linguistic signs, gesture, mimic, etc., based on a theatrical code which renders them meaningful; and (3) as a constant bodily presence, s/he functions as the anchor point for the spectator’s libidinal preoccupation in the fiction (see the section on identification). Precisely because the actor has the world in common with the spectator, his/her physical presence on the stage seem to promise or, rather, mirror the possibility of transcending the limits of social existence by passing into the fictive universe. But the contrary is equally valid, as the actor also manages to go beyond the fiction, to achieve interaction in the world s/he has in common with the spectator; s/he is therefore viewed as bringing the aura of the spectacle and the apparent inexhaustibility of the theatre with him/her.

13. The identification of the spectator: the divided subject

A character in one of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories naïvely questions the true legitimacy of the theatre, since “a good narrator can express anything, regardless of how complicated it is.” According to this point of view, there is no difference between the experiences of the reader/listener and those of the spectator; theatre strikes this character as a kind of superfluous “translation” of the story. In this attitude—which, in trying to deny theatre its specificity, refuses to abstract from a specifically literary way of thinking—one not only recognizes the restrictive but blatantly anti-theatrical aesthetic we meet in Plato, who at least knew what theatre was. For him, its danger lay in its ability to provoke an identification among the spectators, whom he thought should be controlled and manipulated through a sort of repressive tolerance.

The notion of identification is a constant which reappears in dramatic criticism under different names at different times. It is particularly in periods when a new dramatic aesthetic confronts another that the question arises: What happens to the spectator’s identity after the performance? Does s/he turn into a socialist/terrorist/homosexual, etc.? Does s/he become another person? The question can be formulated in many ways, all according to the situation and the dominant preoccupation at the time, but in any case it is clear that in every age the theatrical genre has been deemed as having, among other things, the potential to change people and their reality, a quality shared naturally with all artistic genres, but which shines out in a particularly direct and urgent form in theatre.

As a technically simple genre (compared, for example, to film), theatre lives by virtue of the characters who carry the action forward and who at the same time are models of all the men, women, and children we can/could/would (have) be(en). We will not contend from this, however, that identification with the character is a theatre-specific phenomenon, nor that the character is the sole object of identification, but only that here the character constitutes the central sign in the complex, polysemie experience of the theatre-goer. The encounter with the “other-worldly” aspect of the play is concretized for the spectator in the character, who obliges the former to define or identify himself.

It must be confessed that the word identification is a vague term, banalized by everyday usage and by dramatic criticism in general. Nevertheless, we will not give up using it, because it is perhaps this same obscurity that best allows us to clarify the peculiar ambiguity of dramatic reception. We shall be using this term in the two determinations given it by J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis in Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse:

Laplanche and Pontalis distinguish between these two meanings by applying the linguistic term “transitive” to the former and “reflexive” to the latter. Yet this terminology can give way to misunderstanding. These two linguistic terms are not mutually exclusive since reflexive action must be conceived as a subcategory of transitive action. Just as one can define another’s identity, so can one identify or define oneself through an action which is transitive and reflexive (subject = object) without implying thereby an identification with another. One can identify oneself positively with another by “being identical” with him or, negatively, by perceiving a difference from him.

We shall appeal to these designations of positive and negative identification in the following. Theatre reception, as shall be seen, is characterized precisely by the interplay of these two types of identification.

A. THE SPECTATOR AND THE CHARACTER

During the performance, the spectator is bombarded incessantly with images offering the possibility of either a positive or negative, conscious or unconscious identification. At the same time s/he identifies negatively with the character, thinking, “I am not like that person—selfish, cowardly, weak, etc.,” s/he can also identify unconsciously with those qualities which, to him/her, and to the society in which s/he lives, are unacceptable. On the one hand s/he is able to sympathize with those who take rightful revenge on Don Juan while, at the same time and in utmost secrecy, s/he admires and envies his lawlessness and brazen disdain for the social norms.

In this situation, the spectator is not simply a witness to the conflict which unfolds on stage between duty and desire. The conflict is extended in the spectator, splitting him/her in two and begging him/her to choose—Is s/he Don Juan or Elvira?—confronted with a series of events leading inevitably to death for one and victory for the other.

In his famous article on dramatic illusion, Octave Mannoni defines the theatre as the place of the return of the repressed, a return made possible through denegation, that is, through the spectator’s consciousness of being at a theatrical play and not in a scene from real life (Mannoni 1969). The spectator identifies with the character; of course not in the sense of assuming the character’s place, which would be a precise denegation of the negation. But in the sense that the viewer receives his/her repressed identity, so to speak, through the image given of the other.

In the following we will add some reflections to this idea which, since its appearance in 1969, has been an essential source of inspiration for dramatic criticism.

In his treatment of the fundamental idea that the liberating power of theatre lies in denegation, Mannoni treads too lightly over the complexity, which, in our opinion, is essential to dramatic reception. If the spectator’s repressed “I” is freed by the images on stage, then this occurs only through a struggle with the conscience from which in any case s/he will be unable to completely free her/himself. In spite of all the theatrical artifice tending in this direction, denegation does not imply absence of consciousness. On the contrary, denegation is the product of the consciousness, a defense mechanism which allows the spectator to reunite with the repressed “I” in its negated form.

Regardless of the difficulty of illuminating theatre’s liberating force, one must not fail to consider the spectator’s ambivalence, split as s/he is between the powers of the conscious and the unconscious which, in a sense, divide the character into “hero” or “villain”—just like a well-known Little Red Riding-Hood doll whose skirt is transformed (with a simple movement of the hand) into the wolf’s furry coat.

By conscious identification we mean the identification which confirms individuals in their conception of their own identity in their social, political, and cultural conditioning. This identity is not necessarily in complete accordance with the person’s social identity as it is manifested in working life, family life or engagement for example in politics or union work. Rather it is his/her self-definition, that opinion s/he has formed of her/himself, regardless if this corresponds to his/her external identification. Through this identity, perhaps unrealized, perhaps recognized by the individual her/himself as a contraidentity, s/he confirms her/himself as being somebody, as a entity in the middle of the stream of events. The conscious identification is tautologic: I am like him/her because I have told myself I am like him/her.

Unconscious identification entails confrontation with everything having been repressed by the individual in constructing an effective identity, at least in his/her self-understanding. This is the very point at stake for self-understanding, the theatre’s somewhat malicious challenge to the spectator if not to surrender his/her conscious identity, then at least to reflect upon its arbitrary nature.

Figure 8 depicts the spectator’s possible identifications (A, B, C, and D) with the character.

Figure 8

Establishing the four poles offers the possibility of the dichotomic combinations A = D or B = C; positive identification at the conscious level corresponds to negative identification at the unconscious level and vice versa.

Let us take as an example the character of the mild, resigned mother. The female spectator can consciously identify here: “I am like her” or “I am not like her.” But her identification can also be of a complex and completely illogical nature, split between the conscious and the unconscious: “I am like her, BUT I am not like her” or “I am not like her BUT I am like her.” These two negative and positive reactions to the identification object can take place at both the conscious and unconscious level, depending on a number of factors stemming from the socialization of the spectator who, in attempting to defend her/himself, cannot do so without self-contradictions:

1. I am like her. She corresponds with my ideas of a good mother who lives for and through her children. I am tired of “the modern woman.” I have no desire to go to work and participate in social life. I want to stay home and play with my children (A or C).

BUT

2. I am not like her. I am tired of “the good mother,” I have no desire to stay home and play with my children. I want to go to work and participate in social life (B or D).

Other investments of the characters could be the dutiful revolutionary who awakens “bright and early,” ready to contribute to the reconstruction of his/her country, the tolerant husband who leaves his wife in peace with her lover, the old woman who gracefully accepts her declining beauty, etc. All these characters, as if by a diabolical mechanism, open the possibility of their own negation and thereby of a dual identification—often, but not necessarily concretized in an antagonist: the sybarite, the jealous husband, the eternally repressed woman—just as the presence of these same characters would. In a way, we could say that the dialectic which is established and visualized through Brecht’s distancing effect, is always already present as an innate characteristic of theatre.

The theatre is not a simple representation of stereotypes, frozen images, but of an action—perhaps an action rendering the character’s identity problematic—and the spectator’s task lies in following this action. But in theatre “to follow the action” is also to pursue oneself, to discover oneself in contrast to and in the characters, to ask oneself: Am I or am I not like him/her? Would I do the same thing given the same conflict? And is this conflict true or false for me? Have I ever wished to be a revolutionary? Or a sybarite?

The spectator, in his conscious and unconscious identification, represents an opposition, a certain inertia, in contrast to the logic which is established in the development of the scenic events. This resistance to abandoning oneself to the fiction’s premises is not specific to theatre, but it is in theatre that it is most strongly manifested because at every moment the spectator is confronted with a virtual model of his/her ego.

The darkness of the theatre (in which we can nonetheless make out our own hands, together with the heads and shoulders of other spectators) does not institute, as by some magic spell, the realm of the unconscious, but an interregnum between the conscious and unconscious. That liberation which the theatre offers the spectator rests in our opinion not in the reawakening of the repressed as in a sort of generous dream-state rendered by denial. It rests rather in the confrontation between the repressed and the conscious identity which is deposited in the pocket of an overcoat in the cloak room. The person setting himself down to assume the role as spectator carries out a courageous action, placing himself at the mercy of a ping-pong game with identification, not knowing the result.

The theatre is not—as Plato opined, and as Mannoni seems likewise to believe, albeit in a more sophisticated and fascinating manner than Plato did—the place of identification, but rather the place for the struggle of identifications which, through a sort of neutralizing effect, establishes a free-zone, a space of non-identity, where nothing is yet defined once and for all.

In this no man’s land created by the characters, the spectator is finally absolved of his own contradictions.

B. THE SPECTATOR AND THE ACTOR

Until now, we have treated dramatic identification exclusively in connection with the character, the genre’s dominant sign. We have distinguished the character from its substratum, the actor. Before we treat this “other half” of the stage’s human element, we will, in order to avoid misunderstanding, explain this crude distinction.

Whenever we speak of the character, we refer to the totality of the signs generated by the actor and which constitutes for the spectator a human entity in the fictive universe. The actor is not merely a “channel” or a “material” through which the dramatic text’s character is transmitted, but the incarnation—in process as well as product—of the character, with its multiplicity of signs, of which, among others, are included speech acts (Ubersfeld 1981).

The actor’s physical presence then is inseparable from the constitution of the character. A part of him/her is absorbed, rendered so to speak invisible by the character, whereas the other part—the character’s utterances—remains visible to the spectator, who is aware that that which s/he views is theatre. This leads now and again to the actor’s physical presence implying a reinforcement of identification with the character as compared to the other genres. We will not reject this tempting thesis, but instead of venturing into an uncertain domain, examine the relation between the spectator and the actor.

The co-presence of actor and spectator in the same physical space is an indispensable condition when speaking of theatre—but not the only one. It is just as necessary that the spectator be conscious of the situation’s fictionality, that s/he recognize his/her own status as spectator. For this reason a phenomenon such as a happening cannot, in our opinion, be included in the theatrical genre, because it is a staging that negates itself as such in working without a “frame” (in Erving Goffman’s sense of the word) and in calling for the participation of the spectator, who, in this case, ceases to be a spectator. Such a staging is difficult to distinguish from many other real-life stagings which one would most likely hesitate to call “theatre” (Schwanitz 1977).

It is precisely the spectator’s consciousness of witnessing a fiction—a little slice of life—which, associated with the actor’s actual presence, embodies the distinctive trait of dramatic reception. The physical presence of a living body in the aesthetic object may reinforce identification with the character, but, in our opinion, its most obvious effect is the transformation of the aesthetic object by constituting itself (the living body) as an aesthetic object and as an object of identification. The play on stage is split in two, the played reality and the real play, which leads to a dividing of the spectator’s ego, split between two objects of identification, a splitting further reinforced by the conflict between the conscious ego and the unconscious.

The circumstance of theatrical reception implies for the respective spectators a renunciation of all external activity except for the codified utterances (laughter, whistling, applause, etc.) which accentuate his/her position as a spectator. Apart from these utterances, the spectator is non-existent, has so to speak no share in physical existence. S/he suppresses the need to cough, and if s/he gets up and leaves the theatre, it is with a shameful feeling of having broken the law. The darkness of the auditorium and the light on the stage divide the room into two zones, of which one is characterized by the possibility of infinite and unforeseeable actions and the other by the exact contrary. The cultivated spectator who sits placidly observing the rules for good behavior in the theatre has deliberately chosen this situation in which s/he is forbidden to speak, move, or exist for a few hours, except as witness to a series of events from which s/he is excluded from the start.

In this respect the situation of the theatrical spectator resembles that of the movie-goer, but differs from the latter in that there is a body in the same room which is just as alive and actual as the spectator, but which is simultaneously inscribed in another universe. The actor lends his/her body as a sign of the fiction by assuming the body of the character, while at the same time exhibiting her/himself as a body belonging to the real world facing another body of the real world.

Besides the task of identifying with the character, the spectator contracts a relation of identity with the actor, determined by their common affiliation in the real world and by the contrast between speaking and not speaking, doing and not doing. The spectator is conscious of the fact that what happens on stage is a fiction but, at the same time, knows that this fiction is a part of real life and that the liberating of his/her potential for identification is dependent upon a player. This fact is incessantly reinforced by the speech on stage, words which (as in real life, precisely because of the mimetic character of dramatic fiction) are strongly marked by deictical signs (I, you, here, now, yesterday, this, etc.), which have meaning only through their reference to the sender, the physical source of the message. Without the mouth pronouncing these words they are but a series of meaningless sounds. The theatre’s “I” is not only spoken, but is at the same time performed, and every “you,” “here,” and “now” is organized around this visible ‘I.’

The division between character and actor in the spectator’s identification is reinforced by the profusion of deictical entities which swarm him/her from the stage and thereby highlight the dual dimension of the theatre’s “here and now” that of enunciations inserted in speech acts. The “you” expressed by the character never addresses the spectator, and the latter may not come on stage to become the object of this “you.”

Even in the instances where the words on stage are directed to the audience, the spectator is well aware that this is not a summoning of his/her real self, but of his/her character, which is preconceived and determined by the play, and that the entity apparently addressing him/her does so neither as an actual “I,” but as the character registered in another modality, that namely of the play. It is not the actor who is speaking to him/her, not the living being of flesh and blood, which breathes the same air as him/her, but a character which has been produced by an actor. It is perhaps just in this case of “going beyond the limelight” that the spectator is most strongly confronted with the theatricality of theatre, rejected by the fiction and referred to his spectator-reality.

If the theatre, through the effect of denial, offers the spectator a possible freeing of his/her identification potential, it also reminds him/her constantly, through the confrontation with the actor, of his/her place in the world, of his/her identity, whether this identity be imposed by others or self-imposed as protest, defense, or self-confirmation. In this way the theatre reinforces in the spectator the very concept of identity in everything it implies for the individual concerning stability, immutability, and continuity, even the demand of being somebody, being ONE all the time.

While theatre gives the spectator liberation and relief, it at the same time points out the prison of identity, showing him/her human beings who transcend the limits of their own identity.

We will not, however, assert that the actor should enjoy a greater liberty than the spectator in the concrete theatrical event. Both are responsible for keeping the theatrical contract, the actor more so than the spectator since the actor cannot leave the theatrical event. But whereas the spectator’s situation physically reflects the notion of identity, the permission to view “the other world” and simultaneously prohibition on creating it, the actor is the living embodiment of the transcending of this law. The liberating potential of the play is contradicted by the reality of the theatrical event, where the actor and the spectator acquire status as a sign, as protagonist and antagonist in the spectacle of “to play or not to play.”

The spectator’s identification with the actor is a complex and disturbing experience. Even if s/he recognizes her/himself at the unconscious level in the actor, thinking, “I am basically like him, multifarious, acting, experimenting with my Richard III, my Dame aux Camélias, my vagabond, waiting for Godot,” s/he is immediately thrown back into his/her fixed, frozen identity and to the nostalgic reminiscing on a distant time, wherein it is still allowed to act “another.” In the actor’s body, which adopts the character, s/he sees the victory over the tyranny of identity as s/he recognizes his/her own reality, the ego, the little straw which s/he clings to like one drowning. The old metaphor of “All the world is a stage” is given an ironic twist, and the spectator is sent back to his place in a world which will not be theatre, except when people hide their own confusing complexity under the masks of identity.

Perhaps the spectator goes to the theatre intending to “drown his/her ego” in order to be free, to find an alternative identity because, as Mannoni says in a quotation from Freud “nothing ever happens to him,” and maybe to rediscover her/himself at the level of the story, in identification with the character, a repressed identity.

But the actor presents him/her with quite another project: the play, discontinuity, and identity’s anarchy, pointing all the while to the inertia in the spectator’s life, his identity—a repressive, mediocre, and mundane existence, but not the only one, nor perhaps the final one.

NOTES

1. Peirce’s manuscripts are indicated by the numbering found in Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce by Richard S. Robin, University of Massachusetts Press, Orcester, Mass., 1967. The pagination follows that of the manuscripts of The Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas (e.g., MS 634, 1909. ISP 18” indicates Robin, ms. no. 634, written by Peirce in 1909, page 18). The manuscripts have been microfilmed (see bibliography).

2. Eco himself invites such an interpretation when—in the chapter on visual semiotics in the first edition of La struttura assente—he distinguishes between analytic and synthetic codes, hence indicating different discursive positions which can be invested in the same code (Eco 1979, 35f.).

3. One might take the liberty of seeing in Eco’s distinction between strong and weak codes a distinction between codes within a limited (strong) text and codes which cannot be precisely determined in relation to the given textual demarcation, consequently acquiring the status of a non-coded phenomenon which, nonetheless, has an effect in the coded (weak) text (cf. Eco 1981, 652f.).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jorge Luis Borges, 1974, “La busca de Averroes,” in El Aleph, Buenos Aires.

Viggo Brøndal, 1943, “Langage et logique,” in Essais de linguistique générale, Copenhagen, Munksgaard.

1950, Théorie des prépositions, Copenhagen, Munksgaard.

Georg Büchner, 1953, Théâtre complet, Paris, L’Arche.

1969, Woyzeck, New York, Avon Press.

Deirdre Burton, 1980, Dialogue and Discourse, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Oswald Ducrot, 1969, “Présupposés et sous-entendus,” in Langue Française, 4.

1972, Dire et ne pas dire, Paris, Hermann.

1978, “Structuralisme, énonciation et sémantique,” in Poétique, 33.

Umberto Eco, 1970, “Sémiologie des messages visuels,” in Communications, 15.

1976, A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana Univ. Press.

1977, “The Code: Metaphor or Interdisciplinary Category,” in Yale Italian Studies 1, 1.

1981, “Segno,” in Encyclopedia Einaudi, 12, Turin, Einaudi.

Erving Goffman, 1974, Frame Analysis, New York, Harper and Row.

André Green, 1969, The Tragic Effect, London, Cambridge Univ. Press.

Louis Hjelmslev, 1966, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, Madison, Univ. of Wisconsin Press.

Roman Jakobson, 1956, Fundamentals of Language, The Hague, Mouton.

1963, “Deux aspects du langage et deux types d’aphasie,” in Essais de linguistique générale, Paris, Minuit, 43-67.

A. Kondratov, 1966, Sounds and Signs (trans, from Russian by G. Yankovsky), Moscow, MIR.

J. Laplanche et J. B. Pontalis, 1967, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, Paris.

Jean Laplanche and Jean Baptiste, 1973, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, London, Hogarth.

Svend Erik Larsen, 1985, “The Symbol of the Knife in Büchner’s Woyzeck,” in Orbis Litterarum, 40.

Octave Mannoni, 1969, Clef pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre scène, Paris, Seuil.

Charles Sanders Peirce, 1931-1958, The Collected Papers of Charles Peirce, I-VIII (ed. Chr. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. Burks), Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Press.

1966, The Charles S. Peirce Papers (microfilm edition, thirty reels, with two supplementary reels recently added), Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Library Photographic Service.

1977, Semiotics and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby (ed. Charles S. Hardwick), Bloomington, Indiana Univ. Press.

Plato, 1963, The Republic, III, X, Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Press.

Dieter Schwanitz, 1977, Die Wirklichkeit der Inszenierung und die Inszenierung der Wirklichkeit, Meisenheim am Glan.

Anne Ubersfeld, 1981, L’école du spectateur, Paris, Editions Sociales.

Ad de Vries, 1976, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, Amsterdam, North-Holland (1st ed. 1974).