Criticism as a Creative Act

Criticism as a Creative Act Reading texts is a matter of reading them in the light of other texts, people, obsessions, bits of information, or what have you, and then seeing what happens. Richard Rorty Interpretation and Overinterpretation The Rorty quote above raises two issues on the process of “reading texts” that I will extend to the process of “reading” performances. The first is the use of “light” as a way of exploring texts via other texts, people, and obsessions, an image which carries with it connotations of eradicating darkness through analytical illumination. Oedipus’ blindness and insight, Plato’s allegory of the cave, idea-generated light bulbs precariously dangled over head – are all useful images of enlightened consciousness, which tend to include the notion of truth, reality, and/or inspiration. The second point, which may take some time to address, has to do with “seeing what happens.” I have an interest in light not merely as a symbolic tool, but as an artistic medium. I come to the world of theatre criticism from the practical world of the theatre. I say this not to brag, or apologize, but to situate my critical aesthetics within the currency of usability that comes with practical theatre training. I was reared in an environment where one makes of things what one can given the perpetual looming deadline of opening night. My training has touched on a number of distinct areas, including acting and directing, but the most prominent field is that of lighting design. What initially attracted me to this field was not that it can be used symbolically, but, as someone with an interest in stage design but limited drawing skills, the intangible medium of light offered an area in which thought, language, and description were as useful as artistic skill.

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Without delving into too much terminology, light is essentially energy, invisible and immaterial, that needs a surface to animate it. Objects within a field of vision both absorb and reflect light and it is this symbiotic relationship that allows the object to become visible, the light to become “material.” Unlike light, which has the quality of dissemination, objects are finite, they have contours, limits, boundaries, and are used to define spatial relationships. They present specific information, like color, which is produced, or rather revealed, by light reflecting off a surface, thus creating the highlight and shadow that enables us to apprehend the elements that constitute the visual world. This process is compounded by a further reflective process in which surrounding objects also absorb and reflect light that in turn falls upon other objects. This nearly invisible process of reflection upon reflection upon reflection animates the entire visual field. Shadows, which can best be defined as “an outgrowth of the object that cast it,”1 help situate the object in space and thus in relation to other objects (including the viewer). Objects, then, are never seen in isolation, but always in contrast with other objects, their shadows, and their reflected light. Training as a lighting designer I quickly discovered that the process of manipulating the illumination within a performance setting is not as simple as turning on a light, rather it is a complex process of interaction between objects and energy. Within the theatre we approach what Roland Barthes might call “multi-dimensional space” in which a variety of elements, a seemingly inexhaustible list of signifying elements: text, body, gesture, setting, properties, costume, lighting, make-up, etc, “blend and clash”2 to create the performance. As a young designer I was fascinated by the fact that while light could not substantially alter objects on the stage, it could, through the manipulation of color, angle intensity, contrast, and movement, alter the appearance of objects on the stage.

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It is this notion of a dynamic interaction between elements that I see in relation to Rorty’s shining of people, obsessions and texts upon other texts. The light of these texts are not intended to be more truthful, especially not for a Pragmatist like Rorty, but merely to provide an illuminating energy for the current reading. It is here where interaction, contextualization, illumination, tension, and contradictions between elements are all possible outcomes. Rorty’s light does not alter the substance of the text, but it does alter the appearance; an idea that developed as the focal point of my design work and as the analytical grid that I lay upon performance. The following is an attempt to mine this intersection of theory and practice. It is with this mind-set of convergences, whether I was capable of articulating it at that time or not, that I initially encountered the theoretical perspectives offered by semiotics, feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, and phenomenology. As my training began to focus less on practical matters and more on theoretical positions I wondered how far this idea of convergences could be taken. Where are the limits of this interaction when it comes to literature, theory, history, and performance description? I became fascinated with the ideas and techniques developed by studying lighting design in a theoretical as opposed to a practical sense. Despite the fact that there is often a clear line drawn between theory and practice (even though all practice demonstrates a theoretical perspective whether articulated or not) I feel that they are bound together not necessarily by process, but by something more fundamental in their construction. I recall that once in graduate school I was told, “theorists write about what we do.” Although I saw the gesture as one of commonality as well as separation, it underscored the rift between theory and practice that dominates the fields of theatre and performance studies. Aside from evoking a kind of phenomenological chasm between thinking and doing this statement seemed to suggest that somehow criticism, theory, analysis were like light, intangible and

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immaterial, until they encountered something solid, like practical action. As I began to think about this underlying connection between the two I continued to return to the notion that without light all objects remain invisible, and that without objects the materiality of light remains at the level of imperceptible energy. I would agree that it is an odd position, that of the theatre critic, to reflect upon and write about the practical endeavors of others. Interpreting and analyzing that which was (often) created without our input is generally interpreted as a peripheral or supplementary action at best. Yet, to write critically about one's own practical work seems somewhat redundant. So, we are almost always “outside” the text, peering in, entering into this process, at least, once removed. Our tools are observation, description, theory, and analysis, none of which we can point to in the concrete manner that one can point to work on the stage and say “this is solid, this is performance, this is something that I have done.” As the subject of this essay is not performance but performance analysis I feel compelled to ask a few leading questions. Is it possible, without apology or long-winded explanations, to refer to a performance as “an object,” not a simile, but something tangible, something solid? It is temporal, yes, but does it have enough form and structure to imagine you can hold it, rotate it, and examine it from multiple perspectives? I wonder if I can push this idea a bit further and assume that if a performance is an object then, based on what was discussed above, it needs illumination to become visible. It is here where, perhaps, I am finally reaching the crux of this essay and contextualizing all this nonsense about light and objects. If the performance is the object in this scenario then it seems obvious that analysis is the light. I have no intent (no matter how tempting it may be) to argue that a performance remains “invisible” until the light of analysis shines upon it. My hope with the technical jargon above is

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to establish a symbiotic relationship between light and object in which both are fundamentally invisible until they are combined. There is no hierarchy intended here, neither is more important than the other. In fact, they are interdependent, a comment that is meant to indicate a physical process, nothing more. Light shines upon objects and they reflect light and can be seen – which reveals color, shadow, gaps between objects, spatial context, and interaction between elements. One of the things that attracts me to theoretical positions is that they are fundamentally abstract ideas, as intangible as light, in need of a surface to be made visible. In short, analysis needs objects of inquiry, tangible, practical examples to animate theoretical concerns. Deconstruction, for example, is essentially a parasitic enterprise in which one needs something a text, a philosophic premise, a work of art - to de-construct. I deliberately use the term parasite not in the pejorative sense of a destructive virus, but in the manner that J. Hillis Miller describes in which, “the parasitical virus would be a friendly presence carrying the same message already genetically programmed within its host”3 The analysis is not completely external, but like light, reveals what is already there, altering, perhaps, the initial appearance. As a theoretical perspective deconstruction brings nothing to the object of analysis that isn’t already contained within the target text. It is a form of intellectual jujitsu fully dependent upon its subject since the “’obvious or univocal reading’ always contains the ‘deconstructive reading’ as a parasite encrypted within itself as part of itself.”4 This is, like any theoretical approach or artistic activity, a process animated by the process itself. Similar to the light of other texts mentioned by Rorty, Barbara Johnson points out that Derrida’s approach is conditioned by that fact that his writing “is always explicitly inscribed in the margins of some preexisting text” and that he is “first and foremost a reader who constantly reflects on and transforms the very nature of the act of reading.”5 If Derrida is first and foremost

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a reader presumably this involves an active process of interpretation, of struggle, of encountering and assaulting problems, of “doing,” which is, I suppose, a comment best supported by the fact that many many people have written about what he has done. Theatrical lighting, through the manipulation of the elements mentioned above, helps to establish location, time of day, mood, and atmosphere. But, more importantly, it provides focus. Through highlight and shadow light directs the eye, it tells the audience what to look at, what to pay attention to. Isn’t this what Derrida does by exploring a text, direct the eye by asking certain questions and reading in a specific manner? Both design and analysis share, not the light of truth, but a fundamental basis in asserting a choice of focus. The argument here is that the arbitrary division between theory and practice, between analysis and doing, is not as solid as it appears. What links these two processes, the “practical” and the “analytical” is that method of doing, a procedure that operates through such techniques as interaction, contextualization, tension, and contradiction to illuminate specific ideas. One of the things that I enjoy most about designing for the theatre is the trial and error process of technical rehearsals. While I was taught to have a fairly good idea of what the production should look like prior to entering the performance space, imagination can only go so far. The question “what happens if I do this?” presumes that hidden messages may be as shallow as a hasty decision made while any number of people wait to move on to the next section of the rehearsal. Theatre is certainly a great deal more complex than a work by a single author if for no other reason that there may be, despite all the lip-service paid to collaboration and directorial authority, multiple agendas at work within any given moment. This is not to suggest that all practical choices are arbitrary since, like the process of performance analysis itself, they are inevitably judged against the production to assess if the

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choices “work” within the current performative context. This is something that Umberto Eco might call an “interpretive cooperation.”6 Thus, the question “what happens if I do this?” is always qualified by the performance as an object that pushes back, provides resistance, dictates whether the choice fits within the current context or not. While we may anticipate that performative choices are designed to cohere by serving a common goal, if there is too clean a fit between theory and practice the work of the critic seems somewhat redundant, as if the production had done the analytical work already and the job of the critic was to point out the obvious. If the purpose of analysis is to illuminate a performance in a specific way then does the use of performance material necessitate that examples animate, but also, push back, provide resistance for the theory? Is this Barthes’ intent when he likens the process of reading to hammering a nail into a piece of wood which has “a different resistance according to the place you attack it”7? If a performance can be constructed in a multitude of ways then it can be analyzed in a multitude of ways. Does one attack the narrative, the plot structure, the visual structure, the contradictions between signifying systems, the intended or received messages, the performance style, or explore a single defining moment? Do each of these avenues for analysis provide different areas of resistance that suggest different theoretical approaches? It is not that theory simply exposes a hidden meaning, as Miller’s parasitic comments indicate, but that through the interaction of object and analysis actually creates meaning. Analysis, like light, cannot change the object, but it can change how it is viewed. It is this statement that finally brings me to Rorty’s other point in the opening quotation, the “seeing what happens” part. I find that I understand the point of an essay by writing it as opposed to merely outlining it or thinking about it. This is the same trial and error process

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utilized in theatre practice by exploring performance elements to ascertain if they will support a specific choice. In both performance and analysis ideas can be tried out, components rearranged, added, cut, with the eventual shaping of the work into a “finished” product. While I may see the role of the critic as having a responsibility to both the work and the reader, providing background or historical material and placing the performance into a particular context, I am often more interested in what a performance can be used to do. Analysis is not limited to what meaning can be drawn from an object, it is about “seeing what happens,” seeing what can be made out of a performance, what resistance it will provide, and how the process of reading this complex text will affect the act of reading itself. Purists, of course, will argue that if a work is created with a specific intention that reading it in a different way entails a process of misinterpretation or overinterpretation. This is a point discussed by Eco in assessing the role of the reader where he stresses the difference between interpretation and use. For Eco, “to critically interpret a text means to read it in order to discover, along with our reactions to it, something about its nature.” To use a text, however “means to start from it in order to get something else, even accepting the risk of misinterpreting it from the semantic point of view.”8 What qualifies this process is the Pragmatist’s skepticism of ever being able to discover anything specific within a text at all, let alone its “nature.” As Rorty points out, “having read Eco, or having read Derrida, will often give you something interesting to say about a text which you could otherwise not have said. But it brings you no closer to what is really going on in the text than having read Marx, Freud, Matthew Arnold or F.R. Leavis. Each of these supplementary readings simply gives you one more context into which you can place the text – one more grid you can place on top of it or one more paradigm to which to juxtapose it.”9

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This is not to suggest that performances should be viewed as fodder for what Eco calls “interpretive drift,”10 but the boundary of a performance may be as convoluted as the process by which it was created. While a “text” may appear to have defined terminus points, this is a much trickier proposition when addressing a performance that is encountered by an audience within a specific space and constructed by many varied hands. In discussing his role as a reader Eco feels that “my initiative stars to become exciting when I discover that my intention could meet the intention of that text,”11 which indicates a process of assertion, resistance, and cooperation between the object of analysis and a particular illumination. But, if a performance is a unified whole built from a wide array of parts, and possibly agendas, then the notion of intention may be as multi-faceted as the text itself. Recently, I have become fascinated with the subject of hypertext – essentially non-linear linked text and images – the most visible example of which is the internet (or, to take advantage of the Barthes’ references above, S/Z is often thought of as an early printed hypertext) – which offers a wonderful metaphor to discuss the creative role of the critic. Like performance it is a fluid medium that is never approached the same way twice but constantly built up from a collection of links and reader oriented choices. I have worked my way through a number of hypertexts (novels, collections of poems, critical works) in which the burden of meaning and organization was placed squarely on my shoulders. The author’s “job” is to provide the raw material and the fundamental organization for the project, the process of assembling, of organizing, of “doing” is left up to the reader. Since individual readings vary widely according to who is reading and what choices they make, the reading process continually feels like a scripting process in which one is an active as opposed to passive participant. Certainly most readings, as Johnson indicates with her discussion

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of Derrida, have the potential to be active and critically engaged, but this process, via hypertext, a medium that often allows the reader to add their own comments, links and material, is greatly magnified. Absorbing the fragmenting strategies of the historical avant-garde, contemporary computer technology offers a widely flexible medium in which the boundaries of “object” and “light” are often blurred. As Lev Manovich points out, “one general effect of the digital revolution is that avant-garde aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde became materialized in a computer.”12 The internet exists as both a performative and critical space in which readers can share their own personal pathway through this type of material, bringing in their own ideas, obsessions, and questions to bear upon creative work, thereby further blurring the line between theory and practice. Charles L. Mee, perhaps best described as a postmodern historian/dramatist, has created a web site that offers exactly this type of activity for his published texts. Known as “the (re)making project” in which he advocates that the reader not only freely use his work as a resource for their own work, but to “pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new piece.”13 This iterative gesture illustrates the creative process as one that both interprets and uses texts of all kinds to arrive at a “final product” that is then offered up for the same cannibalistic process. Mee’s comments about pillaging could serve as sage advice for the process of performance analysis in which the critic weaves together multiple sources to build an “entirely new” work. More recently, the term “postdramatic” theatre has been adopted to help define a genre that further blurs the notions of text, interpretation, theory and practice. Writing about such

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artists as Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, and The Wooster Group, Hans-Thies Lehmann explains that postdramatic theatre “most definitely does not mean a theatre that exists ‘beyond’ drama, without any relation to it. It should rather be understood as the unfolding and blossoming of a potential of disintegration, dismantling and deconstruction within drama itself.”14 While works labeled postdramatic may offer commentary and criticism on specific texts or styles, as well as on the performance itself, they are not closed onto a specific meaning. Working within drama, and outside the traditional notion of “text,” postdramatic works collapse the categories of doer, maker, and spectator creating what Eco might refer to as an “open work.”15 So, if folks like The Wooster Group offer “deconstructions” of works by Chekhov and Gertrude Stein is the only difference between theory and practice then the method of delivery? If the artist’s role and the critic’s role is to make something out of something else, then the line dividing these activities is as permeable as the one dividing life and art. For those unable (or unwilling) to accept the role of “explainer” of the text what remains is criticism as a creative act in which elements of performance and theory combine to create a new text which in turn contributes to the chain of light observed by Rorty. This is the space in which analysis takes place, between the performance and its interpretation, between the practice and the theory, between the object and the light in which each animates the other and then is reflected outward to further animate other texts. I am a firm believer that any act of criticism is a creative act. The same interpretive problems arise in transferring a text from page to stage that arise in transferring a performance from the stage to the page. As critics we make choices, focus attention, draw on metaphors, and conduct the viewpoint of our readers in the same spirit as actors, designers, and directors. In writing about performance we employ similar strategies of focus, rhythm, pace, and juxtaposition that

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dominate the historical and contemporary stage. As we reflect upon the work of others we, in a very real sense, create our own performances, objects placed into the world to shine upon and reflect off other objects. Our goals, like that of the practitioner, are active, to make something out of something else. We perform the same tasks only in a different medium. I say this not to defend the actions of those who are thought to “write about what others do,” but to underscore the commonality of process between theory and practice, between performance and analysis. ENDNOTES: 1

Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 317. 2 Roland Barthes, Image – Music – Text (New York: The Noonday Press, 1988),146. 3 J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host” in Deconstruction &Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), 222. 4 Ibid., 224. 5 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, Translated, with an introduction by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), x. 6 Umberto Eco, Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 45. 7 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 36. 8 Eco, Limits of Interpretation, 57. 9 Umberto Eco, with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 105. 10 Eco, Limits of Interpretation, 52. 11 Ibid., 59. 12 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), xxxi. 13 Charles L. Mee, The (re)making Project (www.panix.com/~mee jr). 14 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (Routledge: London and New York, 2006), 44. 15 Eco Umberto, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989).

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