Digital Oedipus: de-structuring the theatre of the subject (original) (raw)
Related papers
ACT Oedipus: Digital theatre and the apocalyptic structure of re/presentation
Apocalyptic Cybernetic Theatre: ACT Oedipus, was performed by Studio for Electronic Theatre at Tate Britain in November 2011. The piece, a re-working of the Oedipus myth for the digital age, involves a combination of physical performance and audio-visual media, including projections of digital images taken in real time from the live performance, which create an effect of doubling the action. This simultaneous presentation of body and image highlights differences between them, the digital technology allowing for the images to be manipulated in various ways, and for multiple perspectives to be presented in the same space and time. This paper uses ACT Oedipus as a jumping-off point to explore how the use of digital technology in a live performance environment produces a complex experience of the image, and argues that this reveals an apocalyptic structure inherent to representation. “Apocalypse” – which means both revelation, the act of showing, and a coming end or limit – is proposed as the sign of a double temporality that generates intensity through an indeterminate play between imminence and immanence. The digitally mediated performance stages the internal rupture that constitutes this apocalyptic movement, complicating the relation between presentation and representation and distorting the theatrical space that re/presentation presupposes. The internal division exposed within re/presentation reflects an ontological rupture in the structure of subjectivity that is symbolised by the figure of Oedipus. It will be shown that, although in this instance digital technology is the medium that reveals this rupture, it is an intrinsic division that can be seen, in different forms, in both Sophoclean tragedy and in psychoanalytic accounts of the subject. Digital logic, because it dispenses with the need for a point of origin, allows us to conceive of the rupture as an opening in subjective identity which re-structures the audience/performer relation, transforming the theatrical enclosure into a fluid, network space.
Sound and the Sublime in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus: The Limits of Representation
American Journal of Philology, 2019
This article undertakes an analysis of the deployment of sound in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus that is grounded in a material aesthetics. Oedipus' blindness elevates sound's significance, and the play simultaneously emphasizes the power of voice (sunthe\ mata, here termed "auditory recognition tokens") and the ineffable (the aphatos thunderbolt of Zeus), phenomena that serve, respectively, to draw the audience into a close sensory sympathy with the dramatic world and to emphasize its ultimate inaccessibility. This exaggerated distance and proximity evokes an ambivalent affective experience, identified here with "the sublime" à la Longinus but also Lyotard, with a corollary in Kristeva's abject.
The Hand of Oedipus: The network of Body imagery in OT
This article aims to demonstrate how Sophocles uses the concept of hand (in Greek χείρ, pronounced kh e –r) and other body parts thematically throughout Oedipus Rex (OT) and how this merges into Oedipus’ investigation of the murder he committed himself. To illustrate the effect of this theme on the original audience’s experience of the drama, I substantiate my study with modern cognitive theories of memory, lexical salience and priming effect. Thus I hope to show how Sophocles consciously plays with the spectator’s mind throughout the performance, in order to make way for a new imagery, hands, within the story of Oedipus.
Performativity and Visualisation: A Critique of Mimesis in Odysseus' Scar
Revista Transilvania, 2024
The representation of reality in the Homeric Odyssey has spurred many conflicting interpretations due to the question of its orality. The awareness of the oral tradition can be traced in the history of Homer criticism and it starts with the Analysts (19 th century higher criticism) that sought to determine how fragments of earlier poems had been layered together and culminated with Milman Parry's (1928) discovery that the Homeric epic exhibits oral methods of composition (Ong, 18-20). The oral quality of the text and the oral culture that produced it demanded a new type of criticism that shifted the focus from text as product to text as a transcript of a process, at the end of the last century (Rabel, Bakker). This type of criticism addressed issues of representation not in terms of sign-referent (a structuralist mode of reading), but in terms of action-model, as we will see. It also distances itself from the oral-formulaic theory that views the epic poetry of Homer as a set of formulae coupled with performance as improvisation; instead, it understands oral culture as a fundamentally different way to perceive the world in regards to heroic events of the past (kleos) in the memory of their previous performances. Such an oral-oriented reading also draws from the archeology of mimesis as it appears in the pre-literate Greece, and subsequently problematises both ancient "narratological" approaches (Plato and Aristotle) and modern narratology (De Jong). The present study will address two aspects of mimesis: 1) performance, not only representation, imitation, but enactment, presentification (Spăriosu); and 2) visualisation, starting from Auerbach's stance that the Homeric world is "brightly and uniformly illuminated" and that "everything is visible" (3) and placing this stance near or against oral-oriented criticism (Ong, Bakker). This type of emerging criticism in classical studies in the last century paralleled the general changes the conceptual apparatus of literary theory faced when explaining postmodernist self-reflexive literature. See Linda Hutcheon's (1981) observation that metafictional literature recovered the performance ("mimesis of process") that was already embedded in Aristotle's mimesis (18).
PERFORMING THE MIND: AESCHYLUS' SUPPLIANTS AND THE THEATRE OF 'DEEP THOUGHT'
The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens, 2023
This chapter examines a scene from Aeschylus' Suppliants that offers a sustained and sophisticated depiction of the 'inner workings' of the hero's mind. The chapter begins by revisiting Bruno Snell's provocative arguments in The Discovery of the Mind, where Pelasgus' deliberations, contrasted with those of his Homeric predecessors, are said to inaugurate a 'European' sense of self. While subsequent critics have rightly rejected Snell's evolutionary thesis, and affirmed a continuity of 'decision-making' between Homer and Aeschylus, the chapter emphasizes a number of developments, as Homeric cognitive ideas are translated into the psychological idiom of the tragic stage. The claim is not, as Snell would have it, that the mind is 'discovered' as a source of action, but rather that the mind finds new forms of expression: as Aeschylus brings the mind into the theatre, the mind becomes theatrical. Tracing, in turn, how the mind of Pelasgus is socially embedded, emotionally embodied, and spatially extended, the author proposes that it is specifically 'dramatic', in the fullest sense of the word, depending for its articulation upon the special features of theatrical mimēsis: chorus, spectacle, and performance space. The mind in the theatre is itself a theatre.
Opsis: the visuality of Greek drama
2011
How were Greek plays viewed in the fifth century BCE and by deepening our understanding of their visual dimension might we increase our knowledge of the plays themselves? The aim of this study is to set out the importance of the visual (opsis) when considering ancient Greek drama and provide a basis for constructing a form of "visual dramaturgy" that can be effectively applied to the texts. To that end, this work is divided into five sections, which follow a "top-down" analysis of ancient dramatic visuality. The analysis begins with a survey of the prevailing visual culture and Greek attitudes about sight and the eye. Following this is an examination of the roots of drama in the performance of public collective movement forms (what I have called "symporeia") and their relationships to the environments they moved through, including the development of the fifth century theatre at the Sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus in Athens. The focus then falls on the dramatic mask and it is proposed here that operating in this environment it was the visual focus of Greek drama and the primary conveyer of the emotional content of the plays. Drawing on new research from the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience relating to facial processing and recognition, gaze direction, foveal and peripheral vision and neural responses to masks, movement and performance, it is explained how the fixed dramatic mask was an incredibly effective communicator of dramatic emotion capable of eliciting intensely individual responses from its spectators. This study concludes with a case study based on Aeschylus Oresteia and the raising of Phidias' colossal bronze statue of Athena on the Acropolis and the impact that this may have had on the original reception of the trilogy.