OPTM Call for Papers

For it is apparent, that children (even from their infancy almost) are delighted with pictures, and willingly please their eyes with these sights : and it will be very well worth the pains to have once brought it to pass, that scarecrows may be taken away out of wisdom’s gardens.

p. 8

[...] since the senses are the most trusty servants of the memory, this method of sensuous perception, if universally applied, will lead to the permanent retention of knowledge that has once been acquired. For instance, if I have once tasted sugar, seen a camel, heard a nightingale sing, or been in Rome, and have on each occasion attentively impressed the fact on my memory, the incidents will remain fresh and permanent. We find, accordingly, that children can easily memorise Scriptural and secular stories from pictures. Indeed, he who has once seen a rhinoceros (even in a picture) or been present at a certain occurrence, can picture the animal to himself and retain the event in his memory with greater ease than if they had been described to him six hundred times. Hence the saying of Plautus: “An eye-witness is worth more than ten ear-witnesses.” Horace also says: “What is entrusted to the fickle ears makes less impression in the mind than things which are actually presented to the eyes and which the spectator stores up for himself.”
[...]
If the objects themselves cannot be procured, representations of them may be used. Copies or models may be constructed for teaching purposes, and the same principle may be adopted by botanists, geometricians, zoologists, and geographers, who should illustrate their descriptions by engravings of the objects described. The same thing should be done in books on physics and elsewhere.
[...]
If any be uncertain if all things can be placed before the senses in this way, even things spiritual and things absent (things in heaven, or in hell, or beyond the sea), let him remember that all things have been harmoniously arranged by God in such a manner that the higher in the scale of existence can be represented by the lower, the absent by the present, and the invisible by the visible.

chapter: Didactica Magna; p. 96-98

[...] Zum einen geht es um die Affinität zwischen dem ”transitorischen Ereignisraum gegenwärtiger Kultur” und dem flüchtigen, ereignishaften Wesen von Theater. Zum anderen aber geht es um folgendes: Theater funktioniert seit jeher geradezu modellhaft als ambivalentes Zusammenspiel von Wahrnehmung, Bewegung und Sprache. In diesem Sinne können wir davon ausgehen, daß “Theatralität” drei entscheidende Faktoren kultureller Energie – Aisthesis, Kinesis, Semiosis – auf spezifische Weise in sich bündelt. Darin könnte ein Schlüssel liegen für die Neuerschließung theaterhistorischer Gegenstandsfelder im Rahmen eines interdisziplinären, dezentral angelegten Geschichtskonzepts.

S. 44

The global capitalistic interior, usually referred to as the West or the westernized sphere [...] rises over the ground as a web of corridors of comfort that are, at strategically and culturally vital hubs, enlarged to dense work- and consumption-oasis – normally in the guise of the open metropolis and the uniform suburbia, though ever more commonly in the form of rural residences, holiday enclaves, e-villages and gated communities. An unparalleled form of mass mobility has been poured for half a century through theses corridors and junctions. Habitation and traveling have entered into a symbiosis in the big installation. [...] Numerous entertainers, singers and masseurs offer their services as travel companions for the liquefied life. If today tourism is to illustrate the top phenomenon of the capitalistic way of life [...], so just because the biggest part of all traveling movements occur in the pacified space.

p. 304-305

Es besteht also eine ursprüngliche Dialektik zwischen lebensweltlicher Erfahrung, metaphysischer Welterklärung und ästhetischer Vergegenwärtigung auf dem Theater mit ihren Vermittlungen in andere Künste und Sozialbezüge hinein. Da die Deutung des theatrum mundi höchst umstritten bleibt und je nach Standort unterschiedlich verstanden wird, kann seine Vorführung auf der realen Bühne gegenüber einem metaphysisch verklärten Phantasma oder einer als lügenhaft empfundenen gesellschaftlichen Maskerade durchaus als “wahre” Darstellung gelten, die einer täuschenden Wirkllichkeit den kritischen Spiegel vorhält. 

S. 104

[…] Images are like living organisms; living organisms are best described as things that have desires (for example, appetites, needs, demands, drives); therefore, the question of what pictures want is inevitable.

p. 11

The second law is that the iconoclast believes that idolaters believe their images to be holy, alive, and powerful. We might call this the law of “secundary belief”, or beliefs of other people. Iconoclasm is not just a belief structure but a structure of beliefs about other peoples’ beliefs. As such it depends upon stereotype and caricature (image repertoires that reside on the borders of social difference).

p. 20

The central thesis of this study is that in several regions considered - wrongly - to be on the margins of the world, the domestication of world time henceforth takes place by dominating space and putting it to different uses. When resources are put into circulation, the consequence is a disconnection between people and things that is more marked than it was in the past, the value of things generally surpassing that of people. 

p. 23

In this study we are interested in a specific form of domestication and mobilization of space and resources: the form that consists in producing boundaries, whether by moving already existing ones or by doing away with them, decentering or differentiating them. In dealing with these questions, we will draw a distinction between Africa as a “place” and Africa as a “territory”. In fact, a place is the order according to which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. A place as Michel Certeau points out, is an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies stability. As for a territory, it is fundamentally an intersection of moving bodies. It is defined essentially by the set of movements that take place within it. Seen in this way, it is a set of possibilities that historically situated actors constantly resist or realize. 

p. 24

Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.

p. 24

Looking at the moon, the convert to Copernicanism does not say, ‘I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite.’ That locution would imply a sense in which the Ptolemaic system had once been correct. Instead, a convert to the new astronomy says, ‘I once saw the moon to be (or saw the moon as) a planet, but I was mistaken’.

p. 115

History must be detached from the image that satisfied it for so long, and through which its anthropological justification: that of an age-old collective consciousness that made use of material documents to refresh ites memory; (...) that has several consequences. First of all, there is the surface effect already mentioned: the proliferation of disconinuities in the history of ideas, and the emergence of long periods in the history proper. (...) The problem now is to constiute series, to fix the boundaries, to reveal its own specific type of relations (...) Second consequence: the notion of discontinuity assumes a major role in the historical disciplines

p. 7-8

Hence worldpicture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.

p.130

The worldpicture doesn’t change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence ofthe modern age [der Neuzeit].

p. 130

When accordingly, the picture character of the world is made clear as the representedness of that which is, then in order fully to grasp the modern essence of representedness we must track out and expose the original naming power of the worn-out word and concept “to represent” [vorstellen]: to set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself. Through this, whatever is comes to a stand as object and in that way alone receives the seal of Being.
That the world becomes picture is one and the same event of man’s becoming subjectum in the midst of that which is.

p. 132

One after another, I should like to explore the many paths that lead to the heart of these challenging tests. As Deleuze has said to me, however, this metaphor is misleading: there is no heart, but only a problem-that is, a distribution of notable points; there is no center but always decenterings, series, from one to another, with the limp of a presence and an absence-of an excess, of a deficiency. Abandon the circle, a faulty principle of return; abandon our tendency to organize everything into a sphere. All things return on the straight and narrow, by way of a straight and labyrinthine line. Thus, fibrils and bifurca_tion (Leiris’s marvelous series would be well suited to a Deleuzian analysis). 

see web-link

Are all philosophies individual species of the genus “anti-Platonic”? Would each begin with a declaration of this fundamental rejection? Can they be grounded around this desired and detestable center? Should we instead say that the philosophical nature of a discourse is its Platonic differential, an element absent in Platonism but present in the discourse itself? A better formulation would be: It is an element in which the effect of absence is induced in the Platonic series through a new and divergent series (consequently, its function in the Platonic series is that of a signifier both excessive and absent); and it is also an element in which the Platonic series produces a free, floating, and excessive circulation in that other discourse. Plato, then, is the excessive and deficient father. It is useless to define a philosophy by its anti-Platonic character (as a plant is distinguished by its reproductive organs); but a philosophy can be distinguished some_what in the manner in which a phantasm is defined, by the effect of a lack when it is distributed into its two constituent series -the “archaic” and the “real"-and you will dream of a general history of philosophy, a Platonic phantasmatology, and not an architecture of systems.

see web-link

Moreover, this series of liberated simulacrum is activated, or mimes itself, on two privileged sites: that of psychoanalysis, (...) and that of the theater, which is multiplied, polyscenic, simultaneous, broken into separate scenes that refer to each other, and where we encounter, without any trace of representation (copying or imitating), the dance of masks, the cries of bodies, and the gesturing of hands and fingers.

see web-link

The relative positioning of visual and verbal representation (or sight and sound, space and time) in these mixed media is, moreover, never simply a formal issue or a question to be settled by “scientific” semiotics. The relative value, location, and the very identity of “the verbal” and “the visual” is exactly what is in question.

p. 90

The image-text relation in film and theatre is not a merely technical question, but a site of conflict, a nexus where political, institutional, and social antagonisms play themselves out in the materiality of representation. 

p91.

The image/text problem is not just something constructed “between” the arts, the media, or different forms of representation, but an unavoidable issue within the individual arts and media. In short, all arts are “composite” arts (both text and image); all media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive models.

p. 94-95

Von 1548 in Vicenza an werden Theater in stabilen, überdachten Baukörpern errichtet […] Scamozzi [verbindet dabei] […] die Voraussetzung des Horizonts in der Horizontalen und das Prinzip der frontalen Gegenüberstellung. Die Amalgierung dieser beiden Prinzipien kann nur in einem stabilen Theater gelingen, dessen Abmessungen bekannt und dessen Einrichtungen dauerhaft sind. Nur so lässt sich der Horizont auf einen bestimmten idealen Sichtpunkt im Zuschauerraum beziehen. Der Zuschauer wird vorstellbar. Und er wird dies, entsprechend dem perspektivischen Paradigma, das ihn in einem Punkt voraussetzt, notwendig im Singular.

p. 268

Part of the difficulty is that one tends unconsciously to hypostasize the existence of Nationalism-with-a-big-N — rather as one might Age-with-a capital-A — and then to classify ‘it’ as an ideology. (Note that if everyone has an age. Age is merely an analytical expression.) It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion’,’rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism’. In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. _It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

Introduction: p. 15

In the preceding chapters I have tried to delineate the processes by which the nation came to be imagined, and, once imagined, modeled, adapted and transformed. Such an analysis has necessarily been concerned primarily with social change and different forms of consciousness. But it is doubtful whether either social change or transformed consciousnesses, in themselves, do much to explain the attachment that peoples feel for the inventions of their imaginations — or, to revive a question raised at the beginning of this text — why peoples are ready to die for these inventions. In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism,’ it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. The cultural products of nationalism — poetry, prose fiction, music, plastic arts — show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles. On the other hand, how truly rare it is to find analogous nationalist products expressing fear and loathing. Even in the case of colonized peoples, who have every reason to feel hatred for their imperialist rulers, it is astonishing how insignificant the element of hatred is in these expressions of national feeling. 

chapter: Patriotism and racism; p.129

No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. [...] The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order.

p. 31

“La verité est image mais il n’y a pas d’image de la verité.” (Truth is image, but there is no image of truth.) What has happened that has made images (and by image we mean any sign, work of art, inscription, or picture that acts as a mediation to access to something else) the focus of so much passion? To the point that destroying them, erasing them, defacing them, has been taken as the ultimate touch-stone to prove the validity of one’s faith, of one’s science, of one’s critical acumen, of one’s creativity?

p. 14

What has been the most violent? The religious urge to destroy idols to bring humanity to the right cult of the true God or the anti-religious urge to destroy the sacred icons and bring humanity to its true senses? An iconoclash indeed, since, if they are nothing, no one knows whether those idols can be smashed without consequences (…)

p. 19

The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-mediatechnologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.

p. 7; paragraph 5

It is apparent that the decline of the dramatic is by no means synonymous with the decline of the theatrical. On the contrary: theatricalization permeates the entire social life, starting with the individual attempts to produce or feign a public self- the cult of self presentation and self- revelation through fashion signs or other marks designed to attest to the model of a self (albeit mostly borrowed) vis-a-vis a certain group , as well as vis-a-vis the anonymous crowd. Alongside the external construction of the individual there are the self-presentations of group and generation-specific identities that represent themselves as theatrically organized appearances, for want of distinct linguistic discourses, programmes, ideologies or utopias. If we add advertising, the self- staging of the business world and the theatricality of mediated self-representation in politics, it seems that we are witnessing the perfection of what Debord described as emerging in his Society of Spectacle. [...] The totality of the spectacle is the ‘theatricalization’ of all areas of social life.

p. 183

The state (of something/circumstance; Zustand) is an aesthetic figuration of the theatre, showing a formation rather than a story, even though living actors play in it. It is no coincidence that many practioners of postdramatic theatre started out in the visual arts. Postdramatic theatre is a theatre of states and od scenically dynamic formations.

p. 68

Da die Deutung des theatrum mundi höchst umstritten bleibt und je nach Standort unterschiedlich verstanden wird, kann seine Vorführung auf der realen Bühne gegenüber eigenem metaphysisch verklärten Phantasma oder eine lügenhaft empfundenen gesellschaftlichen Maskerade durchaus als - wahre - Darstellung gelten, die einer täuschenden Wirklichkeit den kritischen Spiegel vorhält.

S. 104

“Performance: A Critical Introduction” was the first textbook to provide an overview of the modern concept of performance and its development in various related fields. This comprehensively revised, illustrated editition discusses recent performance work and takes into consideration changes that have taken place in the study of performance since the book’s original publication in 1996.  Marvin Carlson guides the reader through the contested definition of performance as a theatrical activity and the myriad ways in which performance has been interpreted by ethnographers, anthropologists, linguists, and cultural theorists.
[…]
with reference to a metadiscourse ... making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning…

p. i

Performance is not something ancillary, accidental, or superfluous that can be distinguished from the play proper. The play proper exists first and only when it is played. Performance brings the play into existence, and the playing of the play is the play itself…. It comes to be in representation and in all the contingency and particularity of the occasions of its appearance.

p.153