The Improvised Shakespeare Company

Re: our conversation on improvised comedy and Shakespeare, here's the link to the Improvised Shakespeare Company website.

Keywords: Re-enactment

Brianna Beehler

ENGL 660: Studies in Genre

Prof. Emily Anderson

Keyword Presentation

Re-enactment

Re-enacting Kursat’s methodology from last week, I, too, turned to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to find a way into my selected keyword. However, unlike “ghosts” with its eerily appropriate 13 entries, “re-enactment,” I found, had relatively few––in fact, just two. The first entry, surprisingly, does not directly relate to theatrical performance at all, but rather points to the legal use of the word, which it gives as “a further enactment of a previous law, regulation, etc.; a law or regulation which is brought into effect again.” While this definition may not seem immediately relevant to our class’s use of the term “re-enactment,” it does, in fact, point to two important elements of the word. One is the relative power of re-enactment––that is, that it enacts, or signifies the bringing of something into effect, as opposed to the sometimes futile gestures of repetition. The other is re-enactment’s relationship to time––in other words, it does not just bring something into effect, but rather brings it into effect “again.” In this way, re-enactment collapses the distance between the “then” and the “now,” which, as Rebecca Schneider argues, “punctuate each other” in the “syncopated time of reenactment” (2). For Schneider, re-enactment is about disrupting linear, ephemeral, and immaterial notions of time, in bringing “prior moments” to the “very fingertips of the present” (2).

Turning to the second OED definition brings us to the more predictable definition of re-enactment as “the action or process of reproducing, recreating, performing again; the action or process of acting out a past event.” This entry also apparently brings us back to ghosts, who––as Kursat outlined for us last week––are defined by a Freudian urge to repeat. More specifically drawing the connection to ghosts and ghosting is one of the instances that the OED lists under this entry. This instance, from Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel, Jude the Obscure, describes two characters as “ghosts” who find themselves repeating motions that they performed once before: “It was like a re-enactment by the ghosts of their former selves of the similar scene which had taken place… years before.” This line refers to Sue’s re-marriage to Phillotson, a sober affair after many years of suffering by both. Unlike Kursat’s translucent and bodiless ghosts, however, these “ghosts” are the physical, older bodies of Sue and Phillotson, re-enacting past motions. The material bodies present in, and, I think, necessary to re-enactment––no matter how ghostly––distinguish re-enactment from other forms of return or haunting. Returning to Schneider’s description of prior moments being brought to the “fingertips” of the present, we find that here past fingertips literally touch once again as Sue and Phillotson’s hands are joined in marriage.

Additionally, this instance from Hardy’s novel also usefully demonstrates that the OED’s two definitions of re-enactment are actually not so separate, since the re-marriage and re-signing of a contract subjects the two characters once again to previously held legal duties and responsibilities (as well as re-establishes their social standing). Re-enactment appears closely linked to shifts within a social order, suggesting an awareness of the law and rules of governance, whether within a domestic arrangement or a public one.

But this understanding of re-enactment is not sufficiently different from repetition, which, while enfolded within the meaning of re-enactment, does not pick up on its additional implications of change. For, as Emily points out in her article “Theatrical Tristram,” re-enactments “revise even as they replicate their source” (emphasis added 12). Sue and Phillotson’s remarriage, then, is not just a repetition of the same vows that they previously made, but an attempt to alter a decision now perceived as a mistake (that is, Sue’s decision to leave Phillotson––with his permission––for Jude). In this way, the relationship between the then and the now are, arguably, even more complex in re-enactment then in moments of repetition.

This anxiety underlying the urge for re-enactment leads Schneider––quoting Roach––to describe re-enactment as a form of rather “‘desperate’ repetition and revision” (96). While desperate, however, re-enactment’s possibilities for revision are empowering, allowing re-enactors a certain capacity to enact change and movement that is withheld from those repetitive, translucent, immaterial ghosts, helplessly fixed to a certain spot. Rather than fading and reappearing in one place, re-enactment and those who do the re-enacting, are marked by a freeing mobility that is able to “move,” “step,” “shift,” and “jump across bodies, objects [and] continents” (Schneider 96). This ability for re-enactment to carry performance across large distances and periods of time liberates it from the various forms of enclosure that limit the movement and efficacy of ghosts and ghosting. In this way, re-enactment is more capable of transmitting or (as Hamlet finds) testing knowledge than ghosts, who so often fail to successfully communicate their messages.

Re-enactment, then, is a powerful word, motion, or gesture that carries so much more meaning than simply “doing something again.” In its unique puncturing of the then and the now, its possibilities for revision, mobility, and the transmission of knowledge, and, finally, its destabilization––as Emily points out––of the permanent and the ephemeral, re-enactment offers a new way of understanding time, history, and the archival of both.

Works Cited

Anderson, Emily. "Theatrical Tristram: Sterne and Hamlet Reconsidered." N.d. MS. University of Southern California, n.p.

"re-enactment, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 26 February 2015.

Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.

more bibliography suggestions

Kate Eichhorn, "Past Performance, Present Dilemma: A Poetics of Archiving Sound"Mosaic 42/1 (March 2009)


http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_12/eichhorn/eichhorn.pdf

Keywords: Ghosts

Kursat on Ghosts

Kursat K. Pekgoz

“Ghosts” and “Ghosting”

Freud began his inquiry into the unheimlich by consulting the dictionary: in imitatio Freudi, I would like to do the same. The Oxford English Dictionary enumerates a total of thirteen entries under “ghost (n).” -- as if in playful deference to triskaidekaphobia. OED begins with equating “ghost” to “the soul or spirit, as the principle of life,” but soon complicates and muddies this picture by listing alternative meanings: “ghost” can apparently signify both “person” and “corpse” (the latter being “obscure”). As if this were not paradoxical/chiasmatic enough, we are soon told that the word can signify either “a good spirit” or “an evil spirit.” The commonsensical meaning, however, seems to be “the soul of a deceased person, spoken of as appearing in visible form, or otherwise manifesting its presence, to the living” [cf. εἴδωλον in Greek; also σκιά, similar to the Dantean ombra]. There is a parenthetical comment warning us this is the “prevailing sense” today. The final entry, which is the 13^th, supplies the following: ghost is a person “who secretly does artistic or literary work for another person, the latter taking the credit.” Ghosts are banished from the copyright regime: they must lurk in the shadows while god-authors who can sell their names bask in full incarnate glory.

But when this most canonical of dictionaries fails to supply some of the more contemporary meanings of “ghost,” I had to turn to the Wiktionary, which enumerates, among others, the following meanings under “ghosting:”

1.           The practice of hiding prisoners from inspection from (possibly hostile) outside inspectors.

2.           Ghost imaging [backing up a hard drive]

3.           A form of identity theft in which someone steals the identity, and sometimes even the role within society, of a specific dead person (the “ghost”) who is not widely known to be deceased.

While the premodern “ghost” is a treacherous creature wandering with the neutral angels or amidst the fires of purgatory, the (early) modern ghost is not only quite metropolitan but also seems to be preoccupied with questions emanating from the Shakespearean text.  Prisoners. Inspection. Identity theft. Copies. Copyright. Dictation. Espionage. Dictatorship. In attempting to interpret Hamlet, it is impossible not to think of these ghosts trapped in the dictionary. But perhaps the opposite is also true. “Shakespeare” is a name with such a superlative, hypercanonical author-function behind it that we may perhaps advance the slightly perverse claim that the “modern” ghost is a dictation of Shakespeare. Marjorie Garber reminds us that it is the ghost of “Shakespeare” (to use Garber’s scare quotes) whereby the Western “canon has been fixed against self-slaughter:” it is a far less ambitious claim to make that Hamlet’s ghost dictated his own dictionary entry.

Another observation: while the word “ghost” is surrounded by many semiotic rivals in and out of the thesaurus, its most immediate opponent is a word which has haunted Western metaphysics from its very foundation: this is spirit, from Latin spiritus (breath), similar to πνεῦμα in Greek. What separates spirit from spectre, or ghost? Spirit is pure abstraction, the plaything of every idealist from Plato to Descartes to Hegel. But Derrida warns us in his introduction to the Specters of Marx “that the spectre is a paradoxical incorporation,  the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some “thing” that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other” (9).

I will now advance the claim (however precarious) that there have been three persistent predicates which often affixed themselves to “ghosts” through the history of Western metaphysics. The first predicate would be translucence. As delineated by Derrida, if spirit is invisible and transparent and flesh perfectly opaque, spectre/ghost must exist on a dimension of semiotic translucence. The contrast between Geist and Gespenst in German, spirit and ghost in English, pneuma and psyche in Greek all indicate the same dichotomy. What does the ghost in Hamlet signify? The message seems straightforward enough: avenge thy father. But the spectral medium resists the simplicity of the message. Ghosts live shady lives in perpetual exile. Granted, translucence as a semiotic concept has been much valorised in Western thinking, from St. Paul (“we see through a glass, darkly”) to Coleridge’s ταυτηγορικον and to Derrida himself on différance. But the ghost/spectre enjoys a far less glorious form of embodiment than incarnation proper: the Christ is both flesh and spirit, enjoying the fullness of both hypostasis and parousia, whereas ghosts are marked by vacuity and absence.

The second ghostly predicate would be enclosure. Like actors bound to the stage, ghosts are unable to escape their haunted mansions: perhaps this is why they are so suitable to the tragic sentiment? This predicate is surprisingly consistent, and one may pick up examples ranging from the Antigone of Sophocles, where the unburied body of Polyneices causes his ghost to roam without rest, to the Tim Burton classic Beetlejuice, where the ghosts of Barbara and Adam cannot leave the boundaries of the house they had occupied before death. At some point in Western history, even the representational space on the stage was woefully limited, thanks to the Aristotelian unities.

The third predicate would be repetitiveness. Ghosts are Freudian neurotics who feel compelled to repeat their actions until an external agency can intervene and make things right. It is perhaps amusing to think that the ghost of old Hamlet would keep haunting the same haunt, not unlike a sentry in eternal patrol, had not young Hamlet eventually confronted him. On the level of metaphor, ghosts are particularly suitable creatures to drama if we accept Carlson’s claim that the theatre is necessarily more repetitive than other forms of art: not only does he claim that “the theatre’s reuse of already familiar narrative material is a phenomenon seemingly as old as the theatre itself,” a phenomenon which has “involved retelling stories from sacred and secular writings,” but also that “the ubiquity of and extent of such recycling is distinctly greater in the tradition” as opposed to “narrative cycling” in literature (44).  One might perhaps claim that in literature, recycling occurs in a Derridean fashion, in a never-ending vortex of difference and differentiation. But the spectre of spectacle which presides over the stage is less Derridean and more Freudian: it is a repetition which threatens to recoil upon itself, and Carlson warns us that too much repetition, especially in the recycling of actors familiar to the audience, can lead to loss of relevance and critical weight in the performative arts.

Ghosts abound in all writing, of course, but Carlson’s peculiar claim is that it is the metaphor par excellence for dramatic representation. While it is impossible to accept any such claim in an absolute sense, when we compare the dynamics of literature and drama, the metaphorical antagonism between spirit and spectre becomes apparent. Literature is not bound spatially and is far less dependent on individual performance. I would also agree with Carlson that drama is inherently more repetitive than writing. One might perhaps assert, if with a touch of Derridean playfulness, that if literature is the domain of spirits, then the stage is full of ghosts. 

Works Cited

Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: the Theatre as Memory Machine. The University of Michigan Press. 2001. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Trans. P. Kamuf. Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. Routledge Press. 1994. Print.

Freud, S. (1919). “The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, pp. 217-256.

"ghosting." Wiktionary, The Free Dictionary. Dec 2014. Web. 22 February 2015.

"ghost, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 22 February 2015.

"ghost, v." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 22 February 2015.

Shakespeare in LA

This website lists local performances and Shakespeare-related events in LA.

Maybe we could find a performance to see as a class this semester?

AKR

On Auteurs and Actors

This interview with Wes Anderson reminds me of our discussion of actors and authorities today:

Memory strikes again.

http://www.hypable.com/michael-gambon-dumbledore-retires/

Relevant to a couple of our discussions:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/uthor

Hi all,

The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies will be holding their annual conference in downtown LA this year, during our spring break. I'm posting a link below as there may well be panels of interest to you?  And if anyone does plan to attend let me know and I can help with registration fees.

http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/general%20site/2015%20Annual%20Meeting.html

In light of our conversation about Bert Rodriguez, the artist who has turned his apartment into a gallery, I wanted to follow up with some of the media produced by and about him.  I'm eager to keep tabs on him and especially his "rebirth"!  

Link to Bert Rodriguez' Website

LA Times Article about Bert

Hi all,
I thought this New Yorker article, on "can the internet be archived," might be interesting to you:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb