By Timothy Scheie
Throughout his profession, famed serious theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) had a fancy and sometimes uneasy dating with theatre and function. From his early theatre feedback, via his abrupt and enigmatic silence on theatre, to the theoretical 'stagings' of his suggestion within the Seventies, Barthes devoted numerous wonderful reversals along with his critiques on theatrical functionality.
In Performance measure Zero, Timothy Scheie argues that Barthes's physique of labor needs to be thought of a lifelong engagement with theatre. Exploring his altering serious methodologies, Scheie presents a brand new knowing of the swift shifts in severe modes Barthes traverses, from a Sartrean Marxism within the Nineteen Fifties, via semiology, to French post-structuralism and the mournful introspection of his later years. The theatrical determine illuminates Barthes's bills of the signal, the textual content, the physique, homosexuality, love, the voice, images, and different very important and contested phrases of his thought.
Performance measure Zerooffers the 1st complete account of Barthes's lifelong engagement with theatre and function and fills an important hole in Barthes feedback. it's crucial examining for all Barthes students, theatre historians, and function theorists.
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Additional info for Performance Degree Zero: Roland Barthes and Theatre
Example text
Barthes again admires the mask as both the figurative emblem of this exteriority of character and situation – larvatus prodeo – and the very literal staging device that guarantees this exteriorization. Were theatre content merely to indicate its masks for the spectator it would act similarly to Flaubert’s self-conscious writing. However, ‘Pouvoirs de la tragédie antique’ houses a vision of a utopian performance that not only signals the mask but at moments removes it to reveal a less alienated expression underneath.
The only escape Barthes proposes is to destroy literature altogether, to pare the conventions of the literary down to their zero degree, to strip away the signs of literature to reach the pure literality of a ‘white writing’ with no literary shadow. Barthes counts Albert Camus, Jean Cayrol, and a few years later Alain Robbe-Grillet among the few authors who flirt with this ideal, but even then he cautions that the zero degree remains a utopia, a virtually unattainable horizon that, as with all horizons, will forever recede into the distance: ‘Malheureusement rien n’est plus infidèle qu’une écriture blanche’ (‘Unfortunately, nothing is more fickle than a colourless writing’) (I 180; WDZ 78).
The three requisite elements of the new theatre for a new age therefore appear to be at hand: sporting events confirm the existence of a popular audience, a rich choice of classic texts awaits the stage director, and Barthes articulates the principles of new dramaturgy founded on a semiologically informed consideration of all aspects of a mise en scène. It remains to be seen if any director can seize this propitious moment, bring these elements together, and realize Barthes’s envisioned theatre, or if this ideal will continue to hover out of reach, relegated to a mythic past of ancient Greece or, as with the zero degree of writing, to the utopian future of a post-revolution, classless society.