Académique Documents
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MARVIN CARLSON
Abstract
Elams observation that during the past decade or so the semiotic approach
to theatre studies has lost its cultural and academic prominence seems un-
questionable, even though it should be qualied with the observation made
by Sue-Ellen Case and many other prominent theatre theorists that almost
all modern theatre theory is based on the semiotic project. Perhaps nowhere
was the attempt to move beyond semiotics more strongly marked than in
the various forms of poststructuralism, which, by their very assumption of
that name, attempted to develop a discourse both beyond and often in direct
opposition to semiotics.
In fact, the poststructuralist project did not produce a large body of sig-
nicant theatrical theory. Much more important have been the various types
of cultural studies, including various gender and ethnic studies, which never
attempted to similarly distance themselves from semiotics. Among the most
prominent of the various approaches to cultural studies that emerged in
the late twentieth century was postcolonial studies, an approach to theatre
studies that, like the various types of ethnic and gender studies that immedi-
ately preceded it, not only draws signicantly upon a semiotic background,
but is engaged in projects in which semiotic analysis provides perhaps
the most useful potential tools. Thus, after the anti-semiotic reaction in-
volved in at least certain aspects of poststructuralism, the reemergence of
questions of representation, of historical placement, and of authorial voice
in postcolonial studies provides a potentially rich new eld for semiotic
investigation.
There can be little arguing with the fact that, as Keir Elam and others
have noted, the semiotic approach to theatre studies, so widespread in the
1980s, came to lose its cultural and academic prominence (Elam 2002:
194) during the following decade. More than twice as many books specif-
ically devoted to theatre semiotics appeared in the earlier decade, and se-
miotic studies of particular plays, playwrights, or performances, common
enough in the standard journals in the eld during the 1980s, rarely if ever
can be found in more recent issues.
This by no means indicates that semiotics in general has disappeared
from the cultural and academic scene. Somewhat surprisingly, given its
diminished visibility in theatre studies, I found on a quick search of the
MLA listings that there were actually more books and articles listed with
semiotics in the title during the 1990s (more than 1100) than in the 1980s
(about 100 less). Rather more important, specically in the area of theatre
studies, is the fact that semiotics, while not always directly acknowledged,
nevertheless continues to serve as the grounding approach for a great deal
of current theatrical investigation and, as I hope to demonstrate, oers a
great deal of still not fully utilized potential for the pursuit of some of the
most interesting and challenging directions of contemporary theatre and
performance research.
In her Feminism and Theatre (1988), the rst book-length study devoted
to the theoretical foundations of a feminist theatre, Sue-Ellen Case, a pi-
oneer in this movement, called for a new poetics that would draw upon
a wide range of theoretical strategies to develop alternatives to the tradi-
tional patriarchal systems of analysis of dramatic form, practice, and
audience formation. For the reader who is unfamiliar with these new
theories, Case suggested, an eective starting-point for the intersection
of new theory with performance and feminist poetics may be found in
the eld of semiotics (1988: 115). Particularly important for Case as well
as for the generation of feminist scholars that followed her was the polit-
ical implications of semiotic analysis. Case called cultural encoding, the
process fundamental to semiotic analysis, the imprint of ideology upon
the sign the set of values, beliefs and ways of seeing that control the
connotations of the sign in the culture at large (1988: 116). Thus, Case
noted, the semiotic concept of encoding shifts the political implications
of a theatrical performance from the interpretative sphere of the critic to
the signication process of the performance, thereby assigning political
alliance to the aesthetic realm (1988: 115117).
Although semiotics provided an important inspiration for certain of the
cultural feminists, such as Linda Walsh Jenkins, who sought an authenti-
cally female drama based on female signs (1984: 6), the most important
use of semiotic theory by feminist theorists was within that tendency in
feminism represented by Case, Jill Dolan, and Elin Diamond, which em-
phasized the cultural construction of gender and was strongly inuenced
The road not (yet) taken 131
The eld of productive reception embraces all the production processes of a work
which are either occasioned by or strongly inuenced by reception. Through the
emphasis and activity of the subject dealt with, the aesthetic aspect of reception
predominates in contrast to the productive aspect, since the reception clearly
serves the production . . . The research of productive reception or receptive pro-
duction is dierent from former inuential research in its reversal of the perspec-
tive. (Grimm, quoted in Fischer-Lichte 1990: 284)
The former inuential research was clearly that of the early days of
modern semiotics, which in fact did reverse this perspective, concentrat-
ing on the theatrical production of signs for an essentially passive audi-
ence which interpreted but did not actively participate in the creation of
these signs. Indeed, as late as 1984 Marco De Marinis complained that
semiotic theory involving theatre had to date suered from a theoretical
void concerning the role of the spectator (1984: 128). The reversal of em-
phasis from production to reception had an enormous impact on modern
134 M. Carlson
theatre semiotics, and from the standpoint of this eld, a not particularly
positive one. As theatre theorists turned from the models of Saussure and
the tradition of European structural linguistics to the German reception
theorists like Jauss, Iser, and Grimm, they turned as well from matters
of sign production and communication to the cultural environment with-
in which the sign was interpreted, and thus away from what had been the
central concern of semiotics to the developing eld of cultural studies.
Hermeneutic concerns took precedence over semiotic ones.
This shift need not have led to a general abandonment of a semiotic
perspective, or even to a diminishment of its analytic usefulness. In partic-
ular, Americas leading pioneer in semiotic studies, Charles Peirce, of-
fered a model that would have been potentially extremely useful in this
shift of emphasis from production to reception. His often-quoted deni-
tion of a sign as something which stands for something to somebody in
some respect or capacity, by emphasizing the receiving somebody and
the context of reception, obviously looks in this direction. Peirce was
careful to distinguish, as did few of the pioneers of modern theatre semi-
otics, between the sign itself and what the sign stimulates in the mind of
the receiver. This result of the sign Peirce calls the interpretant, and as
usual he considers it in three aspects, which he calls the immediate, the
dynamic, and the nal. In brief, the immediate is the innate interpretabil-
ity of the sign before it reaches the interpreter and the nal is the ultimate
interpretation, a kind of Aristotelian complete form reached only when
all possible considerations have been assimilated. The immediate was al-
most universally the concern of traditional theatre semiotics, reinforced
by the assumption that this meaning should be given prominence since it
was what the author or artist intended. The second aspect, the dynamic,
comparatively neglected, had the potential to bring Peircian semiotics
into a close working relationship with reception concepts like Grimms
productive reception. In his most extended description of the dynamic,
Peirce calls it that which is experienced in each act of interpretation and
is dierent in each from that of any other, and a single actual event
(Peirce 1997: 111), leading to precisely the sort of analysis involved in cul-
tural reception studies.
Unfortunately, although Peirces division of signs into icons, indexes,
and symbols circulated widely among theatre semioticians, little of the
rest of his extensive theory had much impact especially, as one might ex-
pect, among European theorists like De Marinis, Pavis, and Fischer-
Lichte. It is hardly surprising that Fischer-Lichte, in particular, in at-
tempting to come to theoretical terms with the new intercultural theatre
of the 1980s would turn to the recent reception theorists of her own coun-
try than to a much less known and less accessible American semioticians
The road not (yet) taken 135
within semiotics, if it were allowed its full potential, the concerns occupy-
ing Fischer-Lichte could in fact have been more fully explored.
Unhappily, this was not to be. Even the essays in Pavis Intercultural
Reader are singularly lacking in any reference whatsoever to semiotic
theory. Actually, the title of one section of Erika Fischer-Lichtes book
The Show and Gaze of Theatre, which appeared the following year in
1997, might seem to suggest that she was in some measure responding fa-
vorably to Pavis critique: Changing theatrical codes: Towards a semiot-
ics of intercultural performance. In fact, however, a central part of this
chapter includes the same championing of the new approach of produc-
tive reception, along with the same supporting quotation from Grimm,
as appeared in the earlier Das eigene und das fremde Theater. Indeed, in
the new book Fischer-Lichte is even more explicit in denying semiotics,
as was normally understood, as oering any potential insight into inter-
cultural performance. In such work, actors bodies, objects, and scraps
of language, sound, and music are no longer oered as signs that should
represent something, mean anything, but rather as objects that refer only
to themselves and which delight in their very objectness . . . There is no
longer a sign process, meaning, or orientation. In fact there is meaning,
but it is the meaning generated within reception: Since the audience is
presented solely with objects that are not culturally bound to a specic
meaning, any spectator from any culture can receive the objects presented
in the context of his or her own culturally specied experience and deduce
meaning (Fischer-Lichte 1997: 139140).
This then was the position almost universally held among those theatre
theorists who considered the intercultural operations of theatre in the late
twentieth century. When artists like Peter Brook or Robert Wilson uti-
lized gestures, sounds, images, or objects from cultures outside their own,
these became objects which refer only to themselves rather than signs
that represent something, mean anything. Thus there is no longer a sign
process, and no longer any role for semiotic analysis. In my opinion, this
position, though widely held, represented a serious reduction of both in-
tercultural theatre and semiotics. The concept that in a Wilson or Brook
production intercultural images become objects that refer only to them-
selves is merely a more sophisticated version of Michael Kirbys (in my
view) illusory vision of a non-semiotic theatre in the 1970s. As I argued
in my response to Kirby (1982), nding and presenting objects that refer
only to themselves (Carlson 1985: 107) is an almost inconceivable task,
and even were this possible, one would escape the operations of semiosis
only if one excluded reception from semiotics, which as I have already
noted, has been all too often the practice of the theorists of intercultural
theatre.
The road not (yet) taken 137
Balme cites the work of two scholars of South Africa performance, ethno-
musicologist David Coplan and theatre scholar Temple Haupteisch as
the most comprehensive attempts to apply the concept of syncretism
to the performing arts, and approvingly quotes Coplans denition of
this phenomenon: the acculturative blending of performance materials
and practices from two or more cultural traditions, producing qualita-
tively new forms (Coplan, quoted in Balme 1999: 1314).
In fact, this denition, as stated, does not seem to me to exclude the
European intercultural experiments of the late twentieth century that
Balme feels took precisely the opposite approach from syncretic theatre.
In Balmes own discussion of this term, the distinction is made much
more clear, as is the reason that Balme feels that semiotic theory, even if
in substantially revised form, could bring useful insights to the study of
syncretic theatre even though he feels it was of no use to the exoticized
intercultural theatre. In the latter, non-Western elements, Balme argues
were neither used nor perceived as texts in their own right, while in syn-
cretic theatre, cultural texts retain their integrity as bearers of precisely
dened cultural meaning (1999: 5). This provides Balme with the means
to reestablish semiotics as an analytical tool by reestablishing the theatre
as involved with the communication of these precisely dened cultural
meanings. The substantial revision Balme requires is that future semi-
otic theorists must recognize the syncretic or hybrid nature of post-
colonial theatre and replace the monocultural communication model of
The road not (yet) taken 139
Davis. Davis rst drama to achieve major recognition was his 1983 The
Dreamers, basically written in English, but containing characters who
sometimes speak in the Aboriginal language Nyungar. A central symbolic
gure, the Aboriginal Dancer, who can be seen by the audience but not
by the characters in the play, speaks only Nyungar.
The climax of Davis play is a Nyungar chant by the Dancer, in a pool
of light. For a non-Nyugar speaking audience member this gure is reas-
suringly recognizable, even if its language cannot be understood. It signi-
es both Aboriginality and the universal grief appropriate to a mo-
ment of death. For Nyungar-speaking audiences, however, the message
communicated is much dierent: The white man is evil, evil! My people
are dead. Dead, dead, dead. The White man kill my people. Kill, kill, kill,
kill (Hodge and Mishra 1991: 206). In this closing chant, the writers sug-
gest, Nyungar speakers are separated from the non-Nyungars alongside
them in the theatre and incorporated into a community with the Dancer.
But simultaneously, and equally importantly, a counterstrategy of mis-
direction is being utilized: Meanwhile the White audience will have the
illusion of having been welcomed without reservation into an inner circle
of universal human feelings (Hodge and Mishra 1991: 208).
It is to this meanwhile that I wish to draw particular attention. One of
the things that makes semiotic analysis so potentially important for the
study of modern intercultural analysis is that if it considers the entire pro-
cess of sign usage, both its production and its interpretation, it can deal
precisely and clearly with this sort of multiple, even contradictory signify-
ing operation. What the Nyungar speaking dancer is doing is not merely
presenting a culturally specic message to a monolithic audience, but
consciously dierent messages to dierent elements of a diverse audience.
It would be false to say that there is no message being communicated to
the white audience. There is a very conscious message which, reviews
of the play conrm, was correctly received by that audience. Thus,
even if we reject the arguments of Peirce and restrict semiotics only to
the study of communication, it is surely essential to realize that in the
hybrid work of modern intercultural and post-colonial theatre, drama-
tists, performers, and audiences are so varied in their communicative rela-
tionships that only a very complex and dynamic analysis can begin to
articulate the varied, and sometimes contradictory nature of these
relationships.
In fact, semiotics is an analytic tool that is extremely well suited to un-
dertake this important critical task, and it is to the credit of post-colonial
theatre theorists like Balme that they have begun again to recognize its
potential after a decade or so of comparative neglect. The important
thing now is not to arbitrarily limit the usefulness of this tool, as Balmes
The road not (yet) taken 141
approach threatens to do, but allow it the freedom to explore the highly
intricate and challenging patterns of signication oered by the modern
multicultural work, with its constantly shifting congurations of audi-
ence, artists, and cultural contexts.
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142 M. Carlson
Marvin Carlson (b. 1935) is the Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre and
Comparative Literature at the City University of New York 3mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu4. His
research interests include theatre and performance theory, Western European Theatre from
1700 to present, Arabic theatre, and experimental theatre. His major publications include
Performance: A Critical Introduction (1996); Voltaire and the Theatre of the Eighteenth Cen-
tury (1998); The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory-Machine (2001); and The Play of Lan-
guage (forthcoming).