The Theatre of Death: The Uncanny in Mimesis Tadeusz Kantor, Aby Warburg, and an Iconography of the Actor; Or, must one die to be dead. Twitchin, Mischa The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/8626 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] The Theatre of Death: The Uncanny in Mimesis Tadeusz Kantor, Aby Warburg, and an Iconography of the Actor; Or, must one die to be dead? Mischa Twitchin Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 1 The Theatre of Death: the Uncanny in Mimesis (Abstract) The aim of this thesis is to explore an heuristic analogy as proposed in its very title: how does a concept of the “uncanny in mimesis” and of the “theatre of death” give content to each other – historically and theoretically – as distinct from the one providing either a description of, or even a metaphor for, the other? Thus, while the title for this concept of theatre derives from an eponymous manifesto of Tadeusz Kantor’s, the thesis does not aim to explain what the concept might mean in this historically specific instance only. Rather, it aims to develop a comparative analysis, through the question of mimesis, allowing for different theatre artists to be related within what will be proposed as a “minor” tradition of modernist art theatre (that “of death”). This comparative enquiry – into theatre practices conceived of in terms of the relation between abstraction and empathy, in which the “model” for the actor is seen in mannequins, puppets, or effigies – is developed through such questions as the following: What difference does it make to the concept of “theatre” when thought of in terms “of death”? What thought of mimesis do the dead admit of? How has this been figured, historically, in aesthetics? How does an art of theatre participate in the anthropological history of relations between the living and the dead? In this history, how have actors been thought to represent the dead – not in the interpretation of fictional “characters” (from the dramatic canon), but in their very appearance, before an audience, as actors? How might (a minor history of) modernist theatre practice be considered in terms of an iconography of such appearances – as distinct from a question of actor training, still less as a question of written drama? 2 The Theatre of Death: The Uncanny in Mimesis Tadeusz Kantor, Aby Warburg, and an Iconography of the Actor; Or, Must one die to be dead? The events surrounding the historian, and in which he himself takes part, will underlie his presentation in the form of a text written in invisible ink. The history which he lays before the reader comprises, as it were, the citations occurring in this text, and it is only these citations that occur in a manner legible to all. To write history thus means to cite history. It belongs to the concept of citation, however, that the historical object in each case is torn from its context. Walter Benjamin [Arcades Project, N11,3] 3 Table of contents Introduction: Thinking of the dead through a concept of theatre Part one: Art and truth (p.5); Analogy and aporia (p.17); Pathos (p.20); Tragedy (p.26); Metaphor (p.28); Part two: Séance (p.34); Reality (p.41); Shock (p.46); Major and minor (p.50); Elimination (p.54). Part One Chapter 1: Precedents (Craig and Artaud, Maeterlinck and Witkacy) (p.60) Chapter 2: Survivals and the uncanny (p.90) Chapter 3: Superstition and an iconography (p.120) Part Two Chapter 4: What do we see in theatre – in theory? i. “To establish that theatre thinks...” – thought and event (Alain Badiou) (p.148); ii. “...through the medium of its concept” – theatre and aesthetics (Theodor Adorno) (p.152); iii. “Often what a word expresses...” – theatre and theory (Martin Heidegger) (p.164) Chapter 5: A question of appearance – enter the actor i. In the mirror of the uncanny (Sigmund Freud and Jean-Pierre Vernant) (p.176); ii. “As if for the first time...” (Tadeusz Kantor) (p.183); iii. “A sign charged with signs...” (Jean Genet) (p.192); iv. In the image of the photograph (Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Nancy) (p.198) Part Three Chapter 6: Tadeusz Kantor – An avant-garde of death Introduction: analogies and aporias of a concept (p.208); i. What is remembered of the Cricot 2 theatre practice – between actors, objects, and photographs? (p.210); ii. What particular conditions of production of the Cricot 2 are remembered in exhibitions? (p.219); iii. What returns in the impasse between formalism and naturalism? (p.230); iv. “Once again I am on stage...” How is Kantor’s theatre of death informed by the thought of demarcation and participation? (p.235); v. How does the past of Kantor’s theatre, with the “example” of the Cricoteka as a “living archive”, resist the claims of what is “post”- modern? (p.245); vi. How do claims for the autonomy of art resist those for their historical specificity – whether as avant-garde or anachronistic? (p.253); vii. In place of a conclusion: how might “the return of Odysseus” offer an image of and for the concept of the theatre of death, in the testimony that Kantor’s appearance “on stage” offers to the short twentieth century? (p.266). Bibliography (p.272) 4 The Theatre of Death: The Uncanny in Mimesis Introduction: Thinking of the dead through a concept of theatre (part one) When I speak of truth, I’m not thinking of the weight of moral significance attached to this word, but of the formal consequences of it. Truth, for me, is the counterbalance to the stylisations employed in theatre and literature... Cricot has always had a very precise artistic-conceptual programme: a programme precisely defined at each stage of our investigations... The artist “creates” more or less within the artistic conventions dominant in a given period. I would cite the example of Wyspianski, who has an impeccable individuality, but whose art lies entirely within the period of the Secession, Art Nouveau, and Modernism... – Tadeusz Kantor1 These three observations made by Tadeusz Kantor (in conversation with Krzysztof Miklaszewski, in 1981) offer particular, historical instances of general, theoretical concerns that are addressed throughout this thesis. Principally, that the theatre in question, in its concept, is not one of entertainment simply, but one that explores the meaning of an aesthetic and anthropological truth – concerning what it is that theatre makes apparent, visible, or known about human being(s) within cultural memory; specifically, as a form of mnemotechnics that addresses the dead. Theatrical research in this context (as concerns a “precise artistic-conceptual programme”) distinguishes art from kitsch, form from mere style, and performance from simply professional production or the applications of technique, however effective for an audience these might be. The question of truth is rarely posed in a context in which success, in practice, is typically understood in terms of command over resources, as an inscription of ambition within institutionally mediated relations with audiences, and as conformity to prevailing “standards” of production. By contrast to these conditions of practice, questions of “formal consequence”, “artistic-conceptual programme”, and the relation between “creativity” and “convention” or “period”, will inform the 1 Tadeusz Kantor, “On the State of Things, the Avant-Garde, Innovation, Luck, Truth, and Success” (1981), in Krzysztof Miklaszewski, Encounters with Tadeusz Kantor, trans. George Hyde, London: Routledge, 2002, p.86 and p.87. 5 thought of theatre in this thesis, as these resonate, specifically, through Kantor’s concern with what is avant-garde.2 With respect to “professional” criteria, an art of theatre concerns the exception – not in an abstract sense, but as it occurs historically (as indeed a question of theatre history); not least, that of the modern (or so-called experimental) theatre of the last century, in the thought of an aesthetic avant-garde in a Europe still divided by the Cold War. Although it is a quarter of a century since the “fall” of the Berlin Wall, this – divided – European history informs much of the reception of Kantor’s theatre that will be cited here, a history that generated a sense of period (and of artistic convention) that cannot be simply relegated to a “dispensable” past for an understanding of what remains present of that work today. It sometimes seems as if the “victory” of the former West (the formerly proclaimed “end of history”) now extends backward to rewrite the past from the point of view of a future was not then part of its present.3 After all, the walls of the former Eastern Jericho did not come tumbling down at the blasts of the neo-liberal ram’s horn, but crumbled through the friability of their own mortar.4 2 This could be compared with Kantor’s friend, and one of the co-founders of the Cricot 2, Maria Jarema (cf. Laurie Koloski, Painting Krakow Red: Politics and Culture in Poland, 1945-1950, PhD Thesis, Stanford University, June 1998, pp.254-56). 3 This retroactive (or revisionist) attempt to write out of history any sense of an “alternative” to what now appears as a universal “post”-modernity was already anticipated by such German writers as Günter Grass and Heiner Müller at the time of the European “reunification”; and has been subsequently remarked within art history, for instance, by Hans Belting (cf.