Third term and dramatic character - 'it's going to have to remain complicated'

Abstract

In this paper I wish to talk about Jacques Rancière’s notion of emancipated spectatorship from the perspective of text-based theatre. Despite the fact that the essay, “The Emancipated Spectator,” is specifically grounded in a conversation about theatre, Rancière’s work is most commonly taken up by theorists of contemporary visual and performance art (and indeed he himself draws on such examples). This is perhaps because, as Hans-Thies Lehmann argues, Rancière’s rather oblique image of emancipation, ‘passes by the concrete questions which theatre and performance practice, as specifically different situations from reading, viewing and telling, have to tackle.’1 Rancière’s defense of the interpretive work of the spectator as emancipatory labour, however, provides a rich point of departure for considering emanciatory aesthetic practice from the perspective of playwriting as a practice largely grounded in the contemplative mode. Is it in this present day – as Lehmann suggests – ‘worn out’?2 The desire to turn the spectator into an actor, which Rancière identifies as a core belief underlying modernist and postmodern theatre practice, presupposes their ignorance, he argues, and misapprehends the equality of intelligence between author and spectator. Emancipation begins, he argues, when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting and understand that […] “interpreting the world” is already a means of transforming or reconfiguring it.’3 What is required for a practice of emancipation, he argues, is the operation of what he calls the ‘third term,’ which he illustrates through the image of the relationship between an author, book, and reader.4 In the case of theatre he defines the spectacle of performance as the third term that mediates, ‘between the idea of the artist/s and the feeling and interpretation of the spectator.’5 The distinction between Rancière’s analogy of the author, book and reader, and the theatrical situation, however, – as Lehmann identifies – is immediately apparent to theatre scholars and practitioners in a number of regards; two of which I will focus on. Firstly, in text-based theatre, characters are both produced by and separated from the author by the actor, whose performance serves as a mediating force – a third term – between author and spectator. That is, the third term in the dramatic theatrical situation is already marked by a split consciousness which complicates the triangulated image established by Rancière. It is for this reason that I will focus on the construction of character in this paper, and the ways in which the split consciousness of actor/character is exploited by certain authors. Secondly, in elaborating the notion of an emancipated pedagogy, Rancière refers to both pupil and school master alike as, ‘entering into the forest of things and signs, to say what they have seen and what they think of what they have seen, to verify it and have it verified.’6 Jeremy Spencer summarizes: ‘Rather than a transmission of knowledge, the image [and we can say text that produces images in this case] emerges as an alien entity that the artist and spectator verify together.’7 What is distinctive about the theatrical medium is the sense in which although the act of creation, interpretation and reception are often separated in the performance of theatrical texts, the event of performance that draws them together is highly contingent. Anyone who has been involved in creating theatre, whether as author, director, actor or devisor, will testify to the shift in perception that happens when watching a work performed for/with an audience; meaning is always on the move, in any given performance and between performances. In this regard I am interested in examples where authors inscribe the very instability of their own ‘knowledge’ of the text into the play itself. To summarize, I have an interest in whether one can describe practices of playwriting where dramatic structures and dramatic language are emancipated. The paper therefore examines texts that invite a kind of ‘aesthetic break’ in the usual representative-interpretive schema of theatre whilst still working within conventional spatio-architectural paradigm. Because of the lack of theatrical specificity to Rancière’s aesthetic framework, I will draw on Maaike Bleeker and Isis Germano’s concept of an enactive approach to theatrical analysis. This approach focuses on positioning and perception and attempts to, ‘illuminate how staging and spectator are mutually implicated and draws attention to how a staging is constructed as an object of perception in relation to a position from which it is perceived.’8 I will employ Bleeker and Germano’s framework of analysis to consider the construction of multiple interpretive frames within dramatic texts as a kind of dramaturgy of perception, the movement between which – that Bleeker and Germano call ‘focalization’ – can be likened to the ‘unpredictable and irreducible distances’ and ‘unpredictable and irreducible play of associations and dissociations’9 that Rancière argues characterizes emancipated aesthetic practice.