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‘The Art of Putting Oneself on Stage before Oneself’: Theatre, Selfhood, and Nietzsche's Epistemology of the Actor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2011
Abstract
This article offers a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's treatment of the actor and the concept of selfhood in The Gay Science and other works as an intervention in contemporary discussions of theatrical performance and the self, particularly Philip Auslander's critique of the logocentrism at work in various twentieth-century schools of acting. It argues that rather than representing an unproblematized or underproblematized constitutive selfhood, as Auslander suggests, the actor in Nietzsche's formulations becomes a prime vehicle for communicating the necessary but impossible fiction of the self. Nietzsche's vision of theatrical performance aligns with a number of recent theories of performance and agency as well as with the ideas on selfhood put forward in the stage work of director Tim Etchells and is explored for the way in which it offers contemporary theorists an avenue for moving beyond an epistemological critique of stage performance towards a greater appreciation of the theatre's potential for radically unsettling our notions of identity.
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References
NOTES
1 Tim Etchells, interview, in Giannachi, Gabriella and Luckhurst, Mary, eds., On Directing: Interviews with Directors (New York: St Martin's Press, 1999), pp. 24–9Google Scholar, here p. 26.
2 Ibid., p. 26.
3 Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Ibid., p. 117.
5 Auslander, Philip, ‘“Just Be Your Self”: Logocentrism and Difference in Performance Theory’, in Zarrilli, Phillip B., ed., Acting (Re)Considered: Theories and Practices (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 59–67Google Scholar, here p. 60.
6 Ibid., p. 60.
7 Ibid., p. 59.
8 Ibid., p. 60.
9 Barthes, Roland, Image/Music/Text, trans. Heath, Stephen (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 74–5Google Scholar, quoted in Auslander, ‘Just Be Your Self’, p. 63.
10 Auslander, ‘Just Be Your Self’, p. 63.
11 Ibid., p. 65.
12 Ibid., p. 65.
13 Ibid., p. 59.
14 Stanislavski, Constantin, An Actor Prepares, trans. Hapgood, Elizabeth Reynolds (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1936), p. 88Google Scholar, quoted in Auslander, ‘Just Be Your Self’, p. 62.
15 Auslander, ‘Just Be Your Self’, pp. 65–6, p. 62.
16 Ibid., p. 66.
17 Ibid., p. 65.
18 Quoted in Lyn Gardner, ‘We Are Waging a War’, The Guardian, 23 February 2009, p. 22.
19 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, ed. Williams, Bernard, trans. Nauckhoff, Josefine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 225Google Scholar.
20 Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 225.
21 Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in idem, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Breazeale, Daniel (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1999), pp. 79–91Google Scholar, here p. 79.
22 As Eric Blondel has observed, the focus on bodily drives as interpretive instruments in Nietzsche does not represent ‘the introduction of unity: if the body interprets, it does so as affects, and if affects interpret, they institute a certain simplicity only in order to pluralize it’. See Blondel, Eric, Nietzsche, The Body, and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Hand, Séan (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 206Google Scholar.
23 It is important to note, as Kristen Brown does, that Nietzsche's focus on the body does not mean that the human corpus is simply an ideal instrument for receiving or recognizing truth; rather, it is the very vehicle by which truth is manifested. As Brown writes, ‘Concepts are coarse assimilations of the body's manifold signs. They are not forms that exist prior to or separate from physical valuations’. See Brown, Kristen, Nietzsche and Embodiment: Discerning Bodies and Non-dualism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 107Google Scholar.
24 Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 189. In Stanley Corngold's words, the self for Nietzsche is ‘a generative word, a generative concept’, one that forces on the subject ‘an endless writing’. See Corngold, Stanley, ‘The Question of the Self in Nietzsche during the Axial Period (1882–1888)’, in O'Hara, Daniel, ed., Why Nietzsche Now? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 55–98Google Scholar, here pp. 85, 86.
25 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in idem, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 103–439, here p. 147.
26 Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Diethe, Carol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 26Google Scholar.
27 In Corngold's words: ‘When the term of self is introduced, it is as a supplement to the body, a “name” that confers prestige on the body’. See Corngold, ‘The Question of the Self in Nietzsche’, p. 62.
28 Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 225.
29 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, in The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 661–83, here p. 683.
30 Nietzsche, Gay Science, pp. 225–6.
31 Nehamas, Alexander, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 175Google Scholar.
32 In his essay on Nietzsche's treatment of the actor in The Gay Science, ‘Nietzsche and the Problem of the Actor’, Paul Patton focuses extensively on this aspect of the ‘problem of the actor’, explaining that for Nietzsche ‘one must avoid becoming a mere actor with no commitment other than the faith in one's ability to assume any given role’ and contrasting the figure of the actor against the figures of the ‘unconscious artist, the believer in destiny for whom the individual is solid’, and ‘the “great architects” endowed with the strength to build, those with the courage to make plans that encompass the distant future and those with a genius for organization’. See Patton, Paul, ‘Nietzsche and the Problem of the Actor’, in Schrift, Alan D., ed., Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 170–83Google Scholar, here pp. 182, 181, 179.
33 Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 216.
34 Ibid., p. 189.
35 In Nehamas's words, ‘the self can be what one is before it comes into being itself, before it is itself something that is’. It is ‘the product of creation rather than . . . the object of discovery’. She Nehamas, Nietzsche, pp. 174–5, 174.
36 Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 164.
37 Nietzsche says relatively little in The Gay Science on the bad actor, but the figure emerges in portraits of Wagner within that work, appears again in Thus Spake Zarathustra, and becomes fully formed in The Case of Wagner.
38 Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 232.
39 Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, p. 667.
40 Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 216.
41 Ibid., p. 78.
42 Ibid., p. 79.
43 Corngold, ‘The Question of the Self in Nietzsche’, p. 85.
44 Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 195.
45 It is significant that throughout his writings Nietzsche condemns the dramatist who thinks like an actor – who thinks only of creating the trappings for a show-stopping performance, shirking what seems to be a heavy responsibility towards literary craftsmanship. Consider the vehemence with which Nietzsche accuses Wagner not just of being an actor – and a bad actor at that – but also of not being a dramatist: ‘In projecting his plot, too, Wagner is above all an actor . . . Wagner would think approximately the way any other actor today thinks about it: a series of strong scenes, one stronger than the other – and in between much shrewd stupidity . . . With such a sense of theatre for one's guide, one is in no danger of unexpectedly creating a drama. Drama requires rigorous logic; but what did Wagner ever care about logic? . . . Wagner is no dramatist; don't be imposed upon!’ See Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Case of Wagner, in idem, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), pp. 153–92Google Scholar, here p. 175.
46 Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 79; Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, in idem, Unfashionable Observations, trans. Gray, Richard T. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 169–256Google Scholar, here p. 213.
47 Nellhaus, Tobin, ‘Critical Realism and Performance Strategies’, in Krasner, David and Saltz, David Z., eds., Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 66–93Google Scholar, here p. 87.
48 Nellhaus, ‘Critical Realism and Performance Strategies’, p. 87.
49 Suzanne M. Jaeger, ‘Embodiment and Presence: The Ontology of Presence Reconsidered’, in Krasner and Saltz, Staging Philosophy, pp. 131–50, here p. 143.
50 Auslander, ‘Just Be Your Self’, p. 67.
51 Etchells, interview, p. 26.
52 Gardner, ‘We Are Waging a War’, p. 22.
53 Nellhaus, ‘Critical Realism and Performance Strategies’, p. 87.
54 Ibid., p. 87.
55 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 146.