Poststructurism

Poststructurism  The first premise

It remains to the sign to be legible, even if the moment of its production is irredeemably lost, and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor meant consciously and intentionally at the moment he wrote it, that is, abandoned it to its essential drifting.

As soon as I speak, the words I have found ... no longer  belong to me ... Henceforth, what is called the speaking subject is no longer the person himself... The speaking subject discovers his irreducible secondarity, his origin that is already eluded; for the origin is always already eluded on the basis of an organized field of speech in which the speaking subject vainly seeks a place that is always missing. This organized field ... is ... the cultural field from which I must draw my words and syntax.

The subject ... is inscribed in language, is a "function" of language, becomes a speaking subject  only by making its speech conform ... to the system of rules of language as a system of differences".

A text is on its own. Beardsley and Wimsatt wrote in "The intentional fallacy" that "the poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend or control it)". In very much the same language Derrida writes:

To write is to produce a mark which constitutes in its turn a kind of productive mechanism, which my absence will not ... prevent from functioning and provoking reading ... For writing to be writing it must continue to act and be readable even if what we call the author of the writing be provisionally absent or no longer uphold what he has written, what he appears to have signed... This situation of the writer or underwriter is, with respect to the writing fundamentally the same as that of the reader. This essential drift ... a structure cut off from any absolute responsibility, orphaned and separated since birth from the support of the father, is indeed what Plato condemned in the Pheaedrus.

Second Premise
The second premise of the argument for indeterminacy of meaning is that no structure of rules of grammar and meaning determine or close down the meaning of an utterance.

De Saussure writes: "Just as the game of chess consists entirely in the combination of the different chess pieces, language is characterized as a system based entirely on the opposition of its concrete units".
"In language", de Saussure writes, "everything boils down to differences". A term acquires its value as a separate element of language "only because it stands in opposition to everything that precedes and follows it".

Of the two signs "father" and "mother" he writes:
Between them there is only opposition. The entire mechanism of language ... is based on opposition of this kind and on the phonic and conceptual differences that they imply ... When isolated, neither Nacht nor nachte is anything: thus everything is in opposition ... Language, in a manner of speaking, is a type of algebra ... Some of its oppositions are more significant than others; but units and grammatical facts are only different names for designating diverse aspects of the same general facts: the functioning of linguistic oppositions.

In  the absence of determinate meaning the traditional project of criticism that was "to determine a meaning through a text, to pronounce a decision on it, to decide that this or that is a meaning" cannot be accomplished. "The life of the signifier is produced within the anxiety and the wandering of language always richer than knowledge, the language always capable of movement that takes it further than peaceful and sedentary certitude".

Aesthetics

For Kant, the organization of random stimuli into perceived objects is the work of the imagination, and the production of conceptual organizations of those objects is the work of the understanding.

Aesthetic is a source of a certain sort of delight to the individual. The questions then become what the mind must be like to make that sort of delight possible and why that pleasure and delight is important to us.

The origin of aesthetics delight is a free play between imagination, which organizes the randomly bombarding stimuli,  and understanding, which imposes conceptual understanding on that organization.

The words of a poem or the sounds of music constrain and shape our imaginings. The "play" to which Kant refers occurs because in imagination we push the limits of those constraints. But the understanding lodged in those words and sounds pushes back. The "purposeless purposiveness" of the beauty of natural things, as when we marvel at the way a snowflake seems to be wrought like a jewel. The imagination plays with finding a purposefulness where the understanding knows there is none.

An interest in the aesthetic is "disinterested", meaning not interested in the real existence of the object contemplated. An example of a personal judgement is "I like it". Here one expresses one's purely private interest. But for Kant, the example of an aesthetic judgement would be "this is beautiful". The claim that a thing is beautiful does appear to assert that others should like it too. Our interest in art would not be practical or utilitarian.

On Kant's account, whenever imagination fuses the bombardments received by the senses into the perceived object it does so by forming a representation. It helps to think of representing something in this way as like creating a representational picture. Consider Turner painting a sunset. The sensory input he receives from the sunset is fused by him into his picture. Or consider looking at a flower. The imagination creates the representation of a flower. Then either we can take an interest in whether there is some such flower, or alternatively we can just enjoy the representation as we may enjoy any representational picture, that is, without asking whether what it represents really exists. We simply attend to the look of a flower.So what makes a disinterested response possible is the power to form representations and the possibility of ignoring questions about the real existence of what is represented. One may be interested in the real existence of something because we want it, or we have hopes and fears that would be affected by real existence. These binds an interest in real existence to something that is not disinterested but partial.

If we could show that our attention to the aesthetics was interested, in some way impersonal, then we would have some right to expect more agreement. The aesthetic judgement, though rooted in my subjective likings, there is more hope of agreement because no partiality gets in the way.

Space in paintings

The effect of space in a painting is primarily the creation of the illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface. It is concerned with the width and depth, and with the interval and distance surrounding solid objects rather than their own volume. Artists use various techniques to help them achieve this, a key one being the geometrical system known as linear or single-viewpoint perspective. Diagonal lines of direction, called orthogonals, converge at what is called the vanishing point, which is most usually placed on a horizontal line about two-thirds of the way up the picture. Parallel lines are then drawn across at intervals which get smaller as they get nearer to the vanishing point. These create what are known as planes, and the surface of the picture itself is referred to as the picture plane. When objects are placed on these planes at different angles and in diminishing size, they appear to recede, and so an illusion of space is created. The front of the picture becomes like a pane of  glass through which you look as if into a box. The basic geometrical arrangement was originally discovered by Euclid in classical times and then formally revived by the architects Brunelleschi and Alberti during the Renaissance in fifteenth century Italy.

Another related technique, that of aerial perspective, was developed later in the same century by Leonardo da Vinci. Here, cool, recessive colours, like blues, greys and greens, are used in the backgrounds of paintings to increase the effect of distance. It was also discovered that a feeling of space can be enhanced if the larger objects in the foreground are painted in greater detail and the smaller ones in the background are made more blurred. Tonal variations can also help, by making the foregrounds or backgrounds of pictures darker or lighter in relation to one another.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was an increased interest in the relationship between foreground and background, and in space that is more closely connected with the surface of the picture. Spatial distortion, multiple-viewpoint perspective and colour were used to create space. Also, there was exploration of the spatial possibilities of the area in front of the picture plane rather than behind it. In the work of Cezanne and Picasso, for instance, the space is demonstrated by the way that the angles of objects and the direction of their planes relate to one another, rather than to an overall geometrical structure, as in linear perspective. For this reason, they were able to incorporate many viewpoints at the same time and to delineate the space on the surface of the picture with little or no strictly perspectival recession.

Whilst the space in the picture itself is important, so also is the spectator's relationship to it. In single-viewpoint perspective, as the name implies, the spectator is expected to see from one angle only although this can be from above or below, as well as on the same level. Sometimes, artists employ multiple-viewpoint perspective, where one is made to see from several angles at once, and sometimes the space is between the spectator and the surface of the painting, rather than behind the picture plane.  And sometimes, as in illusionistic ceiling decorations, for instance, the spectatorno longer quite knows where the dividing line is between real and artificially created space.

Pictorial space, as it can be called, will vary, like everything else in painting, according to the artist's individual way of seeing.The different types of spatial interpretations are :
Linear perspective
Geometrical space
Imaginative space and illusionism
Aerial perspective
Space to walk about in : landscape
Spatial distortion : ignoring the middle distance
Multiple-viewpoint perspective
Space in front of the picture
Spatial disorientation
Historical and memorial space

Composition in Paintings

Composition is the artist's method of organising a subject, of deciding what to put in and what to leave out in order to make an effective picture. The different types of compositions are :
1.  Horizontals and verticals
2.  Harmony and balance
3.  Rhythm and the spaces between objects
4.  Curves and diagonals
5.  Colour
6.  Asymmetry
7.  Apparently random composition
8.  Collage
9.  Composition and installation
Whatever shape it takes, composition is one of the most powerful means the artist has of communicating with the spectator. It is the skeleton or backbone of the picture. The other elements then add to the total expression of the original idea and the creation of layers of meaning. To work really well, each part must interact with the other parts to create the emotional impact of the picture. It is by forming relationships between the composition and all the other elements that the artist creates a whole.

Literary and Theatrical Approaches

From The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama

"Literary" approaches to drama focus our attention initially, sometimes, exclusively, on the text of a play and train the complex strategies of poetics and poetic interpretation on it. Such interpretation regards the dramatic text as incomplete and specifies the text's range of possible meanings by placing it in various textual and cultural contexts; in a sense, the negotiation between the text and these contexts determines what we can say the play means.

"Theatrical" approaches to drama tend to see a play in terms of stage practice, both in terms of the play's original production and in the light of performance practice today. This approach interrogates the play's staging: how it can be set, what obstacles it presents to acting and casting, what the dramatic effects of costume and design will be. "Theatrical" interpretation regards the dramatic text as an incomplete design for performance and trains the complex machinery of stage representation - directing, acting, design, costuming - on the task of fleshing the script out as performed action.  The meaning of the play in this regard emerges from what we can make the play do.

The literary and theatrical approaches to drama and theatre share the assumption that plays are not fully meaningful in themselves; they share the sense that the meaning of drama emerges from the kinds of questions we ask of it, the contexts - literary, historical, theoretical, theatrical - in which we can make it perform, and make it mean something in particular. Although each approach can seem needlessly mysterious, involving its own specialized language and critical practice, its own set of "right" questions and "right" answers, this book has been assembled with the belief that the literary and the theatrical approaches are necessary complements to each other.

Tragedy

From The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama

Tragedy is usually considered to concern the fate of an individual hero, singled out from the community through circumstances and through his or her own actions. Comedy, on the other hand, focuses on the fortunes of the community itself. While the hero of tragedy is usually unique, the heroes of comedy often comes in pairs - the lovers who triumph over their parents in romantic comedies, the dupe and the trickster at the centre of more ironic or satirical comic modes. While tragedy points towards the hero's downfall or death, comedy generally points towards some kind of broader reform or remaking of society, usually signalled by a wedding or other celebration at the end of the play.

To speak of genre in this way, though, is to suggest that these ideal critical abstractions actually exist in some form, exemplified more or less adequately by particular plays. yet, as the very different genres of Japanese or Indian theatre suggest, terms like tragedy and comedy, or melodrama, tragicomedy, farce, and others, arise from our efforts to find continuities between extraordinarily different kinds of drama: between plays written in different theatres, for different purposes, to please different audiences, under different historical pressures. When we impose these terms in a prescriptive way, we usually find that the drama eludes them or even calls them into question. Aristotle's brilliant sense of Greek tragedy in The Poetics, for instance, hardly "applies" with equal force to Greek plays as different as Agamemnon, Oedipus the King, and Medea, or Kan'ami's elegant Noh drama, Matsukaze, let alone later plays like Hamlet or Endgame. In his essay, "Tragedy and the Common man", Arthur Miller tries to preserve "tragedy" for modern drama by redefining Aristotle's description of the hero of tragedy. Instead of Aristotle's hero, a man (not a woman) of an elevated social station, Miller argues that the modern hero should be an average, "common" man (not a woman), precisely because the "best families" do not seem normative to us or representative of our basic values, a goal he pursued in his classic American tragedy, Death of a Salesman. Our exemplary characters are taken from the middle classes. Yet to redefine the hero in this way calls Aristotle's other qualifications - the idea of the hero's character and actions, the meaning of the tragic "fall" - into question as well, forcing us to redefine Aristotelian tragedy in ways that made it something entirely new, something evocative in modern terms.

In approaching the question of genre, then, it is often useful to avoid asking how a play exemplifies the universal and unchanging features of tragedy and comedy. Instead, one could ask how a play or a theatre invents tragedy or comedy for its contemporary audience. What terms does the drama present, what formal features does it use, to represent human experience ? How do historically "local" genres - Renaissance revenge tragedy, French neoclassical drama, modern theatre of the absurd, kabuki, or even the kathakali of southern India - challenge, preserve, or redefine broader botions of genre ? 

Literary Drama and Popular Theatre

From The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama

This split between the "literary drama" and the "popular theatre" has become the condition of twentieth-century drama and theatre: plays of the artistic avant-garde are more readily absorbed into the canon of literature, while more conventional entertainments - television screenplays, for instance - remain outside it. The major playwrights from Ibsen to Luigi Pirandello to Samuel Beckett first wrote for small theatres and were produced by experimental companies playing to coterie audiences on the fringes of the theatrical "mainstream". This sense of modernist "art" as opposed to the values of bourgeois culture was not confined to drama and theatre. Modernist fiction and poetry, cubist and abstract painting and sculpture, modern dance, and modern music all developed a new formal complexity, thematic abstraction, and critical self-consciousness in opposition to the sentimental superficiality they found in conventional art forms. This modernist tendency has itself produced a kind of reaction, a desire to bring the devices of popular culture and mass culture into drama, as a way of altering the place of the theatre in society and changing the relationship between the spectators and the stage. Bertolt Bercht's alienation effect, Samuel beckett's importation of circus and film clowns to absurdist theatre, Heiner Muller's pastiche of Hamlet in his postmodern Hamletmachine, or Wole Soyinka's interweaving of African ritual and fourth-wall realism in Death and the King's Horseman are all examples of this reaction. For the theatre has been challenged by film and television to define its space in contemporary culture, and given the pervasive availability of other media, theatre has increasingly seemed to occupy a place akin to that of opera, among the privileged, elite forms of "high culture". As a result, innovation in today's theatre often takes place on the margins or fringes of mainstream theatre and mainstream culture : in smaller companies experimenting in many parts of the world, and in theatres working to form a new audience and a new sense of theatre by conceiving new forms of drama. And yet, as David Hare's Stuff Happens suggests, it's still possible, even for a major institutional theatre like London's Royal National Theatre, to use the space of the stage to interrogate the sphere of contemporary politics.

Reading vs performing a play

From The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama

Theatre audiences are bound to the temporality and specificity of the stage, but readers have the freedom to compose the play in much more varied ways. A reader can pause over a line, teasing out possible meanings, in effect stopping the progress of the play. Readers are not bound by the linear progress of the play's action, in that they can flip back and forth in the play. looking for clues, confirmations, or connections. Nor are readers bound by the stringent physical economy of the stage, the need to embody the characters with individual actors, to specify specfy the dramatic locale as a three-dimensional space. While actors and directors must decide on a specific interpretation of each moment and every character in the play, readers can keep several competing interpretations alive in the imagination at the same time.

Both ways of thinking about drama are demanding, and students of drama should try to develop a sensitivity to both approaches. Treating the play like a novel or poem, decomposing and recomposing it critically, leads to a much fuller sense of the play's potential meanings, its gaps and inconsistencies; it allows us to question the text without the need to come to definite conclusions. Treating the play as a design for the stage forces us to make commitments, to articulate and defend a particular version of the play, and to find ways of making those meanings active onstage, visible in performance. As readers, one way to develop a sense of the reciprocity between stage and page is to think of the play as constructed mainly of actions, not of words.