Theatre Journal

Abstract:

As a technology, theatre both absorbs and represents the technologies it deploys, and so is defined by the multiple temporalities of its instruments. The signifying embodiments, signifying materialities, and signifying narratives constitutive of theatre as rhetoric and practice articulate, depend on, and are altered by the changing emergence of a conceptual “human” (or the dispersion of a conceptual “posthuman”) inseparable from the technological inscription of its definition and representation. So, too, consensually licensing terms like “the discipline” and “the field” share with their object—particularly with that slippery congeries, the formal study of drama, theatre, and performance—a vivifying multiplicity and mobility, as well as a notable temporal instability. Like theatre, like any technology, the condition of theory, of critique, and of scholarship is a consistent struggle with passing into pastness as the inseparable trailing edge of innovation. On the occasion of the 75th volume of Theatre Journal, this brief essay reflects on the intertwined fortunes of theatre and the fashioning of the “disciplines” of its formal study, their passing implication in mutually-sustaining technologies of cultural representation.