Rude mechanicals and the Specters of Marx

Theatre Journal

Volumn 54, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 535-554

  Rayner, Alice ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950259244     PISSN: 01922882     EISSN: 1086332X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tj.2002.0133     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Bertolt Brecht, from "On the Everyday Theatre," in Poems on the Theatre, trans. John Berger and Anna Bolstock (Lowestoft, Suffolk: Scorpion Press, 1961), 6-7
2. Quoted in Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), 108
3. Herbert Blau, The Dubious Spectacle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001)
4. Marvin Carlson's book, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2001) uses the image of haunting or ghosting to describe the constituent elements of repetition and memory in the "production dynamics of theater." The difference between materiality and signification that I am drawing out here is another version of haunting, but one which does relate to time, repetition, memory, and death. To Carlson's very clear historical delineation of this structure of repetition I hope to add primarily the affective element of uncanniness that produces both an emotional frisson and an epistemological condition of doubt that undermines empirical certainty and definitive ontology
5. See the classic work on Kabuki by Earle Ernst, The Kabuki Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956) particularly chapter V, "The Elements of Performance," 105-26
6. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 211-12
7. See Heinrich von Kleist, "On the Marionette Theater," trans. Roman Paska in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Urzone, 1989), 415-20
8. Ernst, The Kabuki Theatre, 111
9. As Derrick writes farther, ". . . (it is invisible, intangible, inaudible, and odorless), but this transcendence is not altogether spiritual, it retains that bodiless body which we have recognized as making the difference between specter and spirit. What surpasses the senses still passes before us in the silhouette of the sensuous body that it nevertheless lacks or that remains inaccessible to us." Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 150-51
10. ". . . The commodity haunts the thing, its specter is a work in use-value. This haunting displaces itself like an anonymous silhouette or the figure of an extra [figurante] who might be the principal or capital character. . . . Marx must have recourse to theatrical language and must describe the apparition of the commodity as a stage entrance (auftritt). And he must describe the table become commodity as a table that turns, to be sure, during a spiritualist séance, but also as a ghostly silhouette, the figuration of an actor or a dancer. . . ." Specters, 151
11. Marx and Engels, "The Possessed," in The Complete Works, vol. 5, The German Ideology, III.4.B (New York: International Publishers, n.d.)
12. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 163. In this passage about the wooden table, Marx even suggests the performative aspect in the mystical character of commodification: "But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will."
13. Specters, 149
14. Jacques Derrida, "The Theater of Cruelty," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), 235
15. The example of the maker of a bed in distinction to one who only paints or imitates a bed is basic to Plato's critique of mimesis in Book X of The Republic
16. Frank Kafka, "Before the Law," in The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1961)
17. Jacques Lacan, "The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis," in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977)
18. As Sheridan glosses the terms, "It [the real] then became that before which the imaginary faltered, that over which the symbolic stumbles, that which is refractory, resistant. Hence the formula: 'the real is the impossible.' It is in this sense that the term begins to appear regularly, as an adjective, to describe that which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic" (x)
19. Specters, 11
20. Ideology defined by Althusser also has these theatrical elements insofar as he notes that it is "a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence." Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus," in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971)
21. G.W.F. Hegel, "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage," in Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111-19
22. Specters, Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, "Note on the Text," xii. For a variety of responses to Derrida's book, see Michael Sprinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx" (London and New York: Verso, 1999)
23. Emmanuel Levinas, "The Other in Proust," in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 164
24. Specters, 6
25. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
26. Michel Foucault, "What is An Author?" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124-27
27. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992)
28. Specters, 9