The End of Theatre Semiotics? A Symptom of an Epistemological Shift Published in Semiotica, Special Issue (August 2007): 109-128.

Fernando de Toro Department of English University of Manitoba

The entities postulated by science are not found, and they do not constitute an objective; stage for all cultures and all of history. They are shaped by special groups, cultures, civilizations; and they are shaped from a material which, depending on its treatment, provides us with gods, spirits, a nature that is a partner of humans rather than a laboratory for their experiments, or with quarks, fields, molecules, tectonic plates. Social monotony that implies cosmic monotony or objectivity, as the latter is called today. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975).

I.

Introduction

When Kier Elam, in his Post-Script to the 2002 edition of his seminal book The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, first published in 1980, states that This volume, first published in 1980, was written at the end of the 1970s, and looks back over a body of work produced under the influence of an intellectual movement structuralism, together with its successor semiotics that has long since lost its cultural pre-eminence, and it goes on to say that why the semiotic movement which some years ago seemed so vigorous, came to lose its cultural and academic prominence, particularly with regard to drama and performance (2002: 1193-194) he is referring to an epistemological crisis that not only the semiotic approach to the theatre faced during the late 1980s, but which was also confronted by the whole epistemological edifice of formalism towards the end of the 1970s: that is, the end of the formalist paradigm that began with the Russian Formalists, and that reached its maximum development during the 1960s and 1970s with European, and particularly French semiotics and structuralism. 1 This end was
1

I will discuss further Keir Elams article in the conclusion of this article.

clearly and undoubtedly brought about by post-structuralism, but the signs of the crisis where there from the very beginning of the structural and semiotics enterprise. In 1991 I confronted this very crisis, first, in two theatre Congresses, one at the Catholic University of Washington and then in Buenos Aires, and the same year I published an article on this subject where I discussed why the project of theatre semiotics had, in my view, come to an end (de Toro: 1991).2 Since we are all fully cognizant of the theatre semiotics endeavours, I believe it would be redundant to provide any details here about the epistemological foundations of theatre semiotics, that is, the linguistic model (and in this was not different from narratology), and about its object of study, namely the theatre performance. On the one hand, the enterprise was to produce a new theory and methodology of the theatre that was not solely based on the theatre text as literary text, but one directed to the theatre as performance and to deal with all the complexities of such an event.3 The linguistic model provided the possibility to segment the object from a binary perspective, searching, with this segmentation, to establish clearly, controllable, classifiably and stable units. This type of approach rapidly showed itself to be unable to obtain the results desired, particularly when the attempt was to determine the minimal units of performance, and in this, Elam book was a perfect example: both of the attempt and, I would suggest, of the difficulties it confronted. On the other hand, because the theatre semiotics project was founded on a linguistic model, and on the developments of narrative semiotics, which preceded the theatre project by at least two decades, the analysis of the theatre object was carried out independently of its cultural and social context, and this was particularly detrimental to an art that perhaps, more than any other one, is much impacted by that context. These two aspects led theatre semiotics, early on, to detach itself from the linguistic model and at the same time to became more and more an speculative and theoretical construct quite divorced from its original object: the theatre performance. I believe that in order to understand the end of that type of theatre semiotics, one must understand the epistemological underpinnings of literary and theatre theory from the beginning of the twentieth-century until approximately the end of the 1970s. In what follows, I will explore these underpinnings and their relation to theatre semiotics and its eventual dead end, which in fact, came at the very same time that the whole edifice of structuralism collapsed with the advent of the Post-Modern condition. II. A Bit of History

At the beginning of the 1990 a new theatre theoretical discourse began to emerge under the name of a new theatrology, perhaps due to the fact the sense of an ending was already being felt. This new science of the theatre attempted to become the new discipline replacing what until then we have known as theatre semiotics or before it, as sciences of the theatre art. Seen from an epistemological perspective, this new theatrology, as was then suggested by Tim Fitzpatrick (1990), Andr Helbo (1990) and Marco De Marinis (1990), and myself (1991), seemed to reveal the symptoms of a crisis and, at the same time, pointed towards an
2

Also published in Intersecciones: Ensayos sobre teatro. Semitica, antropologa, teatro latinoamericano, postmodernidad, feminismo, post-colonialidad. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuerte Verlag, 1999. 3 See my book Theatre Semiotics. Text and Staging in Modern Theatre . Frankfurt am Main and Toronto: Vervuert Verlag and Toronto University Press, 1995. Also published in Spanish: Semitica del Teatro. Del Texto a la Puesta en Escena. Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna, 1987.

epistemological exhaustion, to use John Barth (1967) well known statement, not only pertaining to theatre semiotics, but also to the entire field of knowledge of that time. Thus, pertaining this crisis and exhaustion, I would like to briefly underline where the discipline began and where it arrived. As I mentioned above, the original objective of theatre semiotics was the theatre as performance, and this approach was developed from the linguistic model and tailored along the lines of narrative semiotics. I should also mention that theatre semiotics was very much developed by the Prague School during the 1930s by scholars such as Petr Bogatyrev (1971, 1976, 1976a), Jindrich Honzl (1971, 1976, 1976a), Jii Veltusky (1976, 1976a,1976b, 1989, 1990) and indeed, later, by the seminal article by Tadeusz Kowzan (1968), not to mention tienne Souriaus Les deux cent milles situations dramatiques (1950). These scholars laid the very foundations for the theatre semiotics that was to be developed during the late 1970s and afterward. In fact, they created the very paradigm, and what we did later, was to expand on this foundation, but no important breakthrough came afterwards. They did the ground and seminal work, very much as the Russian Formalist did pertaining narrative and poetic analysis. If we do a brief review of the central areas of study carried out by theatre semiotics until the mid 1980s, namely, the theatre discourse, the dramatic/performance text, theatre reception, theatre semiosis, and theatre history, we can easily conclude that the end results with respect to the theatre object (performance) was not very productive. On the one hand, studies regarding the nature of theatre discourse or theatre reception, were not able to provide an effective method for the study and knowledge of the performance, since they mainly provided intelligent and valid theories which were not able to workout as method. For instance, studies on theatre discourse were principally based on the theory of speech acts and the philosophy of language (John L. Austin, 1975, Franois Recanati, 1979, John R. Searle, 1969). Thus, Elams dramatological scores are difficult, if not impossible to operate, since in the actual practice it would take an enormous amount of time to analyse a single dramatic text. Thus, theoretically the proposal is possible, but methodologically is impracticable. And this, I may add, was the very problem that semiotics and structuralism faced in all areas of study. Regarding theatre reception there never existed any consensus about what was the actual subject of study. This began with the Prague structuralists such as Jan Mukarovsk (1970, 1977, 1978) and Felix Vodia in the 1930s (1970, 1971, 1976) and later Hans-Robert Jauss, in the 1960s (1970, 1977), together with Roman Ingarden who published his work between 1939 and 1944 (1973, 1973a). In all these cases what was at stake was the reception of the literary text (not necessarily the performance), that is, an hermeneutic socially inscribed as in the case of Mukarovsk and Vodia or inscribed in a phenomenological foundation as in the case of Ingarden and Jauss. On the other hand, the analysis performed (when performed) appeared almost as a tautology, giving the impression that such analysis were the product of a mechanical nature. With respect to the theatre discourse, to point out that a given character performs an illocutionary or perlocutionary act, is irrelevant for the analysis of the theatre discourse, since what is important is rather to explain how the theatre discourse functions (as opposed to other discourses) or how it has functioned in various synchronies, since we are not studying the forms of linguistic usage, but rather an artistic discourse. With respect to theatre reception, theatre semiotics confronted the very same problem, since to underline that the spectator interprets from his/her cultural and social context and through its general spectatorial competence, is indeed also evident. In this sense, the efforts by

Marco De Marinis (1984, 1985, 1985a, 1985b, 1986, 1989, 1990), Schoenmakers (1982, 1984), Fitzpatrick (1990), and my own work (1987, 1999)4 offered something useful within the field of theatre semiotics. Briefly put, since the first (paradigmatic) book edited by Andr Helbo in 1975 (that is, if we do not wish to consider the studies by the Prague structuralists during the 1930s and 1940s [Matejka and Tintunik, 1976] to date, we have accomplished very little, and Helbos book already contained all the problems that theatre semiotics faced until the late 1980s. We theorised just too much, and the knowledge of the initial object of study was truncated, and what was even more serious, was that the object of study was indeed neglected and it became a mere pretext to produce theory. This led to a great divide between theory and practice. By saying this, I do not denied a discipline, such as theatre semiotics, to engage in theory and to establish a dialogue with itself. But this is not the point. The drive toward pure theory, in which the whole structuralist edifice finally ended up, emerged within the humanities as a scientific ideal, that is, that we, humanist, also could be scientists.5 And this drive, this total faith on science was already present in the Russian Formalist discourse, as well as in that of Ferdinand de Saussure and in all those that followed.6 However, a mayor error in judgement was made, since one thing is to be a scientist that deal with scientific problems, and quite another to adopt a scientific and rigorous perspective regarding cultural and literary inquiry. What was ignored here, was that the object of study of sciences have certain stability within a specific period of time (synchrony), and once it develops the theoretical, conceptual and analytical instruments, then those objects are accurately and precisely described, although always open to new modifications, due to the very nature of those objects. The cultural objects, instead, are heterogeneous and change rapidly. However, this does not prevent the elaboration of certain general patterns, but these are often contradicted. The scientific pretension also led to a conceptual tower of Babel, where there were as many theoretical concepts as were theoreticians, coupled with a wilful hermeticism which more often than not, hided serious theoretical deficiencies. Aloysius van Kesteren saw this problem by the middle of the 1980s and attempted to introduce some order in the Tower of Babel that theatre semiotics had become. There he stated something prophetic: [] our field is threatened by a lack of gardening and weeding of unavoidable and fast growing weeds. Theatre research is threatened by the same disease as Semiotics is, because both fields are young and appealing. All kinds of methods are introduced under the banner modern or semiotic, but they are not always relevant and they do not always constitute serious attempts to improve the field or to make a contribution to its development. The range of methods is too wide, the methods are neither interrelated nor brought into a proper theory or paradigm or science-philosophical ideology. (1984: 11)

I would like to underline that the criticism I made in 1991 and today, also applies to my own work. However, from my very first book, Brecht en el teatro hispanoamericano contemporneo (1984, 1987) I made the particular effort to make the theory work, to readapt the various operation functions to something manageable and effective. And this was also the very enterprise of Theatre Semiotics. 5 However, this drive was indeed contested at the very time of its manifestation by V.N. Voloinov in the early 1920s (1986) and also by Mikhail Bakhtin. 6 For instance, Boris Aikhenbaum seala que Cest le principe de spcification et de concrtisation de la science qui tait le principe organisateur de la mthode formelle (Aikhenbaum, 1965 : 37).

What I think it took place was a confusion about the role of theory. If theory is a manner to guide the inquiry in the production of knowledge, a manner to channel research in a given moment and in relation to a set of objects, that is, theory as the introduction of heuristic models, then theory indeed occupies a central place in the study and knowledge of the theatre. But, if theory becomes only a self reflexive and self sufficient act, whose object is nothing but the production of new theories, then, I believe, one loses any relation with the production of theatre knowledge, since knowledge becomes theory itself. With this, I do not intend to deny the existence and the practice of such an intellectual activity, since it exists and it is practiced as such, since I am not attempting to perform an ideological or axiological act, but to simply place two different epistemological positions facing the common question: why theory? If we examine other areas of research, such as the relationship between dramatic and performance text, we also observe that the work accomplished by the semiotician, in order to explain the passage from one to the other, does not correspond with the process of transcodification operated by the theatre director. The fundamental problem, that was always confronted, is that the theatre is never only text or performance, it is rather two things at the same time, that is, it can be studied simply as a literary text, as it was very much the case until the advent of theatre semiotics (an in fact it is still the case) or rather studied as a performance activity, the organization and the functioning of the sign in the performance and the various levels such as the actor, the scenography, the dialogue, the performance space, etc. This multiple dimension of the problem is what the director faces when he/she reads an elaboration regarding the text and the performance, he/she can only be surprised and he/she does not recognizes anything in common with such elaboration. Some semioticians, without having ever directed a performance, take the liberty to point out which are and are not the tasks of the director or how he/she should or should not stage. I am not suggesting by this at all that in order to speak about the performance one must be a theatre director, actor or scenographer, this would amount to an aberration, but I do maintain that in order to speak about the performance one should have some idea about the theatre practice. I believe that the former attempt of a new theatrology did not reside on laying down new areas of investigation as Marco De Marinis proposed (1990) and much less to return to a textology founded on the relationship between text and para-text as Andr Helbo suggested (1990), but rather in the attempt to overcome the dichotomy between text and performance, and theory and practice. Having said this, I do not wish to deny the accomplishments of theatre semiotics, since it was this discipline the one that made possible, for the very first time, to approach the theatre as performance, founded on a rigorous theoretical apparatus, and to study it theoretically with conceptual tools pertinent to the object. It was certain that theatre semiotics suffered greatly due to conceptual fragmentation, to the cleavage between the theatre fact (as performance) and other artistic practices, and also its lack of accounting for the social and cultural context, and these problems became even more evident as the theoretisation of post-modern culture began in earnest after the publication of La condition postmoderne by Franois Lyotard in 1979. However, at the time of the crisis, toward the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, some attempts were made to move the discipline forward, for instance, attempting to move toward a transdisciplinary semiotics, as I suggested in 1986 (1988, 1999), and basically, moving away from the strictly semiotic field, particularly in the field of reception where, for instance De Marinis (1985), Fiztpatrick (1990), Schoenmakers (1985), myself, an others, began to move towards the more empirical receptive

process. However, this also resulted impossible to carried out due to the financial implications of such enterprise. Nevertheless, this change was necessary, since the models proposed before (Pavis, 1983, 1980 and De Toro (1987) were based fundamentally on Mukaovsk (1970, 1978) and Jauss (1977, 1977a) and of course in Ingarden (1973, 1973a) and they did not address, in any shape or form, the actual performance reception process and basically we witnessed the production of non verifiable hypothesis and generalities. I personally believed then, and I still do today, that the performance reception process is an extremely complex one, since the attempt to establish a theory of performance reception has the risk to fall into the same relativity and impracticability of the text Rezeption Theorie of the School of Constance. Allow me a clarification: the German reception theory, as before the work of Ingarden and Vodia, have an enormous importance in order to understand theoretically how the reception process functions, but this does not mean that we can really factually speak about how actually the reading process operates in reality. Thus, if the intent is to have at least some theoretical knowledge of the reception process, then this is indeed valid. However, as De Marinis proposed then, an anlisis global y unitario total o sinttico it is simply impossible (1990: p. 44) With respect to another issue discussed during the crisis, namely the change of the object, that is, the performance as a product. Here we did not really experienced any change whatsoever, since the passage of the text to the performance always implied the performance as process and product. It was peculiar what took place then: facing the end of the discipline (and I would suggest of all disciplines), De Marinis took a different position, and spoke about la irracionalidad multidisciplinaria (1990: 45). However, then as today, the most advanced studies in any field of knowledge was (and is) precisely the transdisciplinary approach that predominates, not with the objective to produce, as it was suggested, an eclectic mix of various disciplines, but rather to allow common issues from simultaneous perspectives, in a sort of disciplinary dialogism. What I realised then, fifteen years since I initially confronted the very problems that today we are discussing in this issue of Semiotica, is that something had change, and I stated that For those who are much up-to-date about the last developments of theatre semiotics, we observe that we have arrived at a point zero and because of this, perhaps, we are beginning to speak about new theathrologies (1991: 29). I would like to provide a factual example of what I meant by the point zero problem. During the course of my own theoretical endeavours, very early on, when I was still a master student in the early 1970s, and I began to enter into the field of semiotics and semiotics of the theatre, I encountered a number of problems in terms of the relationship of the theory to the actual analysis of either dramatic or performance texts. These problems had to do with the operativity of the theory in relation to the object of study. A case in point is the seminal article by Roland Barthes, Introduction lanalyse structural des rcits (in the very seminal issue of Communications entitled Lanalyse structural du rcit, No. 8, 1966) where he attempts to refine the Russian Formalist segmentational notions of narrative. There, Barthes refers to the cardinal functions, and its segmentation is so minute, that when this notion of cardinal function is to be applied to narratives such as James Joyces Ulyses or Cervantess Don Quixote, it really becomes ineffective to say the least. He faced the same problem with the seminal text of Anne Ubersfeld Lire le thtre, where the notion of actantial function is so minute that again it becomes impossible to operate. And this is also the case with the proposals by Patrice Pavis (1976) and Keir Elam (1980), particularly the later whose model, based on tienne Souriaus Le deux cent milles situation dramatiques (1950), becomes impracticable in terms of the extension and minute detail of the analysis. Thus, it was absolutely necessary to re-define the very notion

of function in order to have an adequate analysis. As I said before, the many problems confronted by theatre semiotics were part and parcel of a larger problem contained in the very formalist enterprise that originated at the beginning of the XXth Century. III. The Formalist Epistemology

As I indicated above, the problem that theatre semiotics faced, was an epistemological one, faced in all the areas where this approach was introduced. Yes, Theatre semiotics was the very last to developed, and that is why the end was more noticeable, since its duration was rather short, no more than twenty years, at the most. But what was the epistemological obstacle that this discipline faced:?: the attempt to make the literary analysis into an exact science. One only has to remember seminal works such as those by Boris Eikhenbaums Comme est fait le Manteau de Gogol or Valdimir Propps Morphologie du conte (1970), or the Preface by Roman Jakobson to the Thorie de la literature (Todorov, 1965: 9-13), or Ferdinand de Saussures Course in General Linguistics (1959) to understand this attempt, which it will be developed during the decades that followed until the late 1970s. Examples of this type can clearly be seen later in the work of Greimas (1970), 1970a), and Chomsky (1966, 1976) to cite to iconic cases. However, this drive toward scientificity was challenged from the beginning by Bakhtin (1990) and Voloinov (1973) at the same time that Saussures theory of language and the Sign, and the Russian Formalists literaturwissenchaft were being developed. The latter, in his book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, written in 1929, and translated for the first time, into English in 1973, challenges the most rigid aspects of Formalism. I strongly believe that the course of formalism would have been much different if a number of events would have taken place: a) Scholars from the West decided, particularly at the beginning of the 1960s, to concentre exclusively on the most rigid aspects of formalism, ignoring what was actually happening within Formalism itself at the beginning of the XXth century. For instance, right from the very beginning the Russian Formalist paid attention to literary history, an area that was going to be widely ignored by the Formalism of the 1960s. J. Tynianov wrote a seminal article on De lvolution littraire (1965: 120-137). Here he proposes a revolutionary new way to approach the question of literary history and recognises the importance of paying attention to this aspect, stating that [] le lien de lhistoire littraire avec la littrature contemporaine vivante, lien profitable et ncessaire la science, se trouve ntre pas toujours ncessaire et profitable l littrature existante. (1965 : 120-121) and he adds that: Lhistoire littraire doit rpondre aux exigences de lauthenticit si elle veut devenir enfin une science. Tous ses termes, et avant tout le terme d histoire littraire , doivent tre examins nouveau. (1965 : 121)

The innovate aspects resided in a formal approach to the literary history, that is, how literary devices changed in the series, and how they could be segmented with a synchronic and diachronic approach. It is no accident that many decades later, Hans-Robert Jauss will fundamentally based his well known proposal on literary history on this proposal made by Eikhenbaum (Jauss: 1977).7 It is also important to note that in this proposal important aspects of reception theory are already in a developmental state. As we well know, the Russian Formalist were eliminated by the communist bureaucracy, and I have no doubt that if they would have had time to develop their new approaches to the literary event, they would have indeed extended formalism to other areas of inquiry, as was indeed the case with the Prague School who inherited much of the work of the Russian Formalists in the person of Roman Jakobson; b) If the seminal work of Bakhtin and Voloinov would have been known at the time it was written, I believe that the Saussurian linguistics, and the whole edifice that was mounted from it, would have never been developed in the same manner, that is, the so called science of language and semiology would have had a very different outcome; c) If the social aspects of the Prague School and their studies on reception theory would have been better known, again, I believe that would have been difficult to have arrived to a semiotic dure, or at the least there would have been other alternatives. However, the questioning of the hard formalism present during the first half of the XXth Century was going to be squarely confronted by the post-structuralist. IV. The Post-Structuralist Shift

Keir Elam criticises my position with respect to post-structuralism, basically because I argued, in the Foreword to the 1995 publication of my book (published in Spanish in 1987) Theatre Semiotics, that was post-structuralism that brought to an end the formalist epistemology, and by now this is an extremely known fact. I believed then as I believe even more so today, that this was indeed the case. First of all, we should remember that the so called post-structuralism was named in this manner because at the time no one new how to called the writings of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, and, more importantly, nobody understood what was really happening. All we knew was that they were speaking against the notion of the sign and structure (Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari), about a new notion of textuality and discourse (Foucault), about a new notion of representation (Baudrillard), in fact, they were dismantling the whole Western logos, which included the sacrosanct disciplines of metaphysics and history, to mention two well known untouchables, at the very time that the structuralist/semiotic enterprise was at its highest level of development and had taken over all the cultural space. What is also pertinent to remember, is that at the very same time that structuralism and semiotics were at their highest point of development during the 1960s and 1970s, some of the authors mentioned above had already written or were writing some of their major works on these issues, as was the case of Jacques Derrida in criture et diffrcence (1967), De la grammatologie (1967) and Dissemination (1972), all of them directed to the systematic dismantling of the formalist epistemology. At the time very little attention was paid to these authors who are going to become
7

Jauss criticises the Russian Formalist in this article, but there is no doubt that many central components of his proposal come directly from the former.

prominent and occupy the space left vacant by structuralism and semiotics towards the end of the 1970s, but particularly, I could argue, during the 1980s onwards. To prove this point one has only to remember what we were reading as university students in the 1970s (which was my case) and the date of the English publication of their works. In fact, much of the post-structuralist position regarding the text, structure, language, the sign, etc., was present in the 1941 work of Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones (1956). Suffice to mention Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1956), Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote (1956), and the Brodies Report (1953) as pertinent examples of how, decades later, post-structuralism will question the notion of the sign and the internal relationship between the signifier and the signified. The well-known Saussurian formulation of the sign = signifier/signified and its binary opposition is radically challenged by Borges throughout his work, and this is also why Borges became such an important referent for post-structuralist scholars. In Brodies Report we read:8 The word nrz for example, suggests dispersion or spots of one kind or another; it may mean the starry sky, a leopard, a flock of birds, smallpox, something splattered, with water and mud, the act of scattering, or the flight that follows a defeat. Hrl, on the other hand, indicates that which is compact, dense or tightly squeezed together; it may mean the tribe, the trunk of a tree, a stone, a pile of rocks, the act of piling them up, a meeting of the four witch doctors, sexual congress, or a forest. Pronounced in another way, or with other facial expressions, it may mean the opposite. We should not be overly surprised at this: in our own tongue, the verb to cleave means to rend and to adhere. Of course, there are no sentences, even incomplete ones. (1999: 406) What Borges states here is that the signifier is irrelevant, and not only the external relationship of the sign to the referent is obliterated, but also the internal relationship between signifier/signified. In Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges introduces the act of simulating writing detached from the referent, and in Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, the very notion of palimpsestic writing, and in both these texts, intertextuality as a mechanism to eliminate the author and any possibility of origin is introduced. Many of these aspects will be present, much later, in many plays and narrative, whether in Edward Bonds Lear, in Stoppards Guildestern and Rosencrantz are Dead, in Heiner Mllers Hamletmachine or in John M. Coeetzes Foe, etc. In fact, writers such as Borges could only be read in context within the poststructuralist epistemology. Post-Structuralism not only ended the Modern condition, 9 but it provided the very epistemological and theoretical foundations to the Post-Modern Condition (Andreas Hyssen, 1987 and Hans Bertens, 1986), and within it, to Post-Feminism (Judith Butler, 1990, 1993, Chris Weedon, 1987, Diane Elam, 1994) and to Post-Colonialism (Homi Bhabha, 1994, Stuart Hall, 196, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, Edward Said, 1979, 1983, 1993, Gayatry Chacravorty Spivak, 1987, 1993, 1999). What post-structuralism did, if nothing else, was to introduced a radical critique of the whole Western logos, including Modernity (1886-1945), and at the same time decentred the
8

See my book New Intersections. Essays on Culture and Literature in the Post-Modern and Post-Colonial Condition (2002), pp. 107-160. 9 From my perspective, Western Modernity starts at the end of the Nineteenth Century, perhaps with Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry in 1886, and ends towards 1925 in what some have called High Modernity. From this date until the 1950s what constituted the experimental vanguard becomes formal science (Kuhn, 1970), that is, the very extension and development of aesthetic, literary and artistic Modernity. Shortly after the Second World War, Modernity ends and it inscribes itself in one of the most salient representatives of Late Modernity: Samuel Beckett.

European culture, making it possible for the excluded Other to have a voice, as it has well documented, during the past twenty and so years by post-colonial and post-feminist scholars. And part of this decentring was the formalist edifice. So, it would be impossible to assert, then and today, that the semiotic enterprise, as we new it until the late 1970s, could continue unscathed by the advent of the post-modern condition (Lyotard, 1979). It is also important to remember, that post-structuralism reached its notoriety thanks to American scholars, and later by post-feminist and post-colonial scholars. Any one cognisant of the theory of culture, theatre, arts, literature and cultural studies knows this. Something fundamental shifted, and this shift brought, almost over night, a total silence of the once prominent structuralists and semioticians. It would have been quite in imaginable (although probable) in the 1990s to have found someone writing la Bremond, or la Greimas, or la Genette! In fact, we could already felt the approaching shift in the extraordinary work of Roland Barthes. Later, others, like Julia Kristeva (1980) or Tzvetan Todorov (1982) went in very different and productive directions within the post-modern and post-structuralist paradigm. Both are examples of how the semiotic thinking changed and endured in a different manner. V. The Post-Modern Condition

There is no need here to elaborate on the post-modern condition, a subject which by now has been exhaustively studied. However, my intention here is to show why the semiotic project, in its hard aspects, came to an end. This was no accident or gusto for another fad or trend: something changed and this change was to be permanent. The fundamental change in my mind is the epistemological shift operated between Modernity and Post-Modernity, that is, between the formalist approach to culture and literature initiated at the beginning of the XXth Century by the Russian Formalists and by the School of Geneva, and poststructuralism, which provided the very epistemological and theoretical foundation to Post-Modernity. Between these two paradigms, a complex play of circumstances took place, which will connect some aspects of formalist thought with societal issues which until Post-Modernity were located basically within Cultural Studies in Britain, and sociological and political studies of culture in many European centres such as in Germany with Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and also Walter Benjamin, in Italy with Gramsci, and I would include here some of the work of Roland Barthes, and indeed in many places in Latin America a clear Marxist approach to culture and literature as can be found in the work of Enrique Dussel or Arturo Andrs Roig. In the same manner that formalism exhausted itself by the end of the 1970s, also the Marxist populist approach to culture exhausted itself by the very same time. Formalism, particularly structuralism, could not answer fundamental issues which were emerging, such a question related to subjectivity, the subject, ethnicity, identity, displacements, issues of power and centrality, but by the same token, the cultural studies approach, anchored in the binary structure of infra and superstructure as a method to explain culture and society could not respond to those very same questions. I believe that it was post-feminism and then post-colonialism that produced the fundamental change. I cannot here discuss at length the advent of Post-Modernity, however, I believe that everyone is most familiar with this debate. I would just like, at this point, place the relationship between Post-Modernity and the resurgence of Cultural Studies in a globalised context. At least three fundamental events took place in Post-Modernity: a) the Fall of the Master Narratives

which concretely meant that the epistemological space has been pried open, and the very notion of an hegemonic discourse was discredited; b) the decentring of the West as a central and superior culture, which meant a certain equalisation between cultures; c) the erosion of a central theoretical thinking and the very questioning of methods, which meant that we could now approach cultural objects from various epistemological positions simultaneously, and this alone was enough to depart from pure formalism. From within the Postmodern Condition emerges Post-Feminism and Post-Colonialism, two cultural approaches to questions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, identity, multiculturality, which are going to alter radically and dramatically the very approach to culture and literature used until then. It is here, at this juncture, where societal approach to culture are going to link up to the theoretical thinking of Post-structuralism. What took place was the need to resort to theory in order to be able to face and deal with complex societal issues which could no longer be approached from the narrow perspective of a particular theory or grand narrative. This is why, both, in the new Cultural Studies in England, and particularly in the United States, post-structuralism are going to provide the theoretical foundation to a new approach to cultural issues. By this I mean, the work of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, etc., are to become central in both Post-Colonialism and Post-Feminism. One can only refer to the work of Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chacravorty Spivak, Judith Butler, Chris Weedon, Hlne Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Jill Dolan, Laura Donaldson, Jonathan Rutherford, Diane Elam, Iain Chambers, Robert Young, Barbara Frey Waxman, in order to objectively account for this fundamental epistemological change. As I mentioned before, this shift takes place under Post-Modernity, where both Post-Colonialism and Post-Feminism are inscribed. What really changed in cultural and literary studies in general is the convergence of theory and societal issues, and with it, the distinction and the borders between theory and the so called practice, fiction and reality, literary versus non-literary, began to be blurred as well as the disciplinary boundaries of the academia, as I indicated in my work on Post-Theory (1999a). Literary texts become only texts, without any attempt to adhere to genres, but in fact avoiding and de-structuring genre, and in almost, if not in every instance, present a specific problematic, an issue to be rustle with. This is the case of Foe by John Coetzee, Le livre de Promethea by Hlne Cixous, El permanente estado de las cosas by Antonio Tenorio, Don Quixote by Cathy Acker, East,West by Salman Rushdie, Places far from Ellesmere by Aritha van Herk, La frontera de crystal by Carlos Fuentes, The Passion by Jeanette Winterson, Beloved and Sula by Toni Morrison, Yo el supremo by Augusto Roa Bastos or El beso de la mujer araa by Manuel Puig. In the theoretical field the situation is not very different, one has only to think of Glass by Derrida, LA by Cixous, or Invisible Ink by van Herk. With Postmodernity, a dialogue between the artistic and theoretical, between fiction and theory takes place where one cannot be separated by the other. This is, in my mind the fundamental change that took place between the so called formalism and post-structuralism. Thus theory not only was not being produced from a given centre as in Modernity, but from a plurality of places, but at the same time that production is marked by a transdisciplinarity. Within this new epistemological paradigm, semiotics will have its place, but in a very different manner, and not as a closet semiotics as Elam has stated.

VI.

The Postcript

I would like to conclude by addressing some of the very substantial comments made by Keir Elam in his Proscirpt. First of all, I do not believe that there was an outright refusal of semiotics in its structuralist guise (2002: 194). It was a refusal to the scientificity attempted by semiotics in its later days. However, Roland Barthes today is as read as he was then, and this precisely because his semiological inquires to a variety of cultural objects illuminated them rather than make them inaccessible. I would also like to underline that the semiotic thinking is very much alive, and all the post-structuralist thought operates from the field of signs. In addition, when Elam claims that The desire to do justice to such complexity [the performance] within a combined, if not necessarily unified, investigative enterprise may be in the view of postsemiotic theory a positivistic dream or an imperialistic fantasy, but it has not altogether lost its appeal. (2002: 194) he is perfectly right for at least two reasons: first, semiotics in general made a valid and powerful contribution to a great variety of studies, from literature to film to economics and history. Today, what I call, the semiotic thinking is present in any post-structuralist theory, since the very concepts, as Elam correctly underlines, were absorbed into the new paradigm (2002:195), and this is an undeniable fact. Secondly, in terms of the theatre, it provided solid basis for analysis and contributed to name the signification process as has never been done before. Theatre semiotics, at least in Latin America, changed forever how theatre is approached; it provided possibilities of inquiry where before were merely anecdotal or pseudo-critical approaches. One of those contributions was made by the translation into English of Pavis Dicctionaire du theatre, as Elam correctly indicates, for the English speaking world, and by the Spanish translation of Pavis Diccionario del Teatro (1984), along with contributions by many others, including Marco De Marinis, Tim Fitzpatrick, Andr Helbo, Alfonso de Toro, etc. And this thinking has remained and made an enduring contribution to the study of culture in general. What it was rejected, I believe, was what Elam himself points out, that is, the type of tools which were used and how they were used: Whether these tools, with their sometimes baroque complexities of method and terminology, offered a convincing way of dealing with the riches of theatrical discourse is another matter, and one that this chapter proposed to ponder. (2002: 195) Elam also takes issue with the reactions from the journalist critic as well as those from the actual theatre practice. Here, I believe, one must be clear. Elam states that The declared reason for the directors scepticism is analogous to that of the reviewers [], namely that semiotics, semiology does not provide him with the tools for his trade: it doesnt help me at all (2002: 199). First of all, theatre semiotics was not developed to help reviewers or theatre practitioners. This has been, from day one, a fundamental error, and Elam is justified to take issue with them. The attempt was to study the theatre from a performance perspective and with pertinent theoretical tools. The attitude of both these groups is as absurd as if someone knowing nothing about linguistics, would argue that linguists explanations does not help her/him to speak and understand language! This requires an intellectual formation that most theatre critics do not

have it, except for some rare exceptions. Secondly, theatre semiotics was not an evaluative system, but a descriptive and procedural one, that is, the objective was to study the functioning of the performance in its many complex levels. Thirdly, regarding the practitioners, theatre semiotics was the very first theatrical approach to name the functioning of the sign systems, that cybernetic machine, as Barthes called it (1964), and many other areas such as reception, textuality, space, etc. And in this, the contribution, when was clear, was substantial. But I would also take issue with the many academics who entered the field without having the minimal training in the field, and this also led to gross misrepresentations of the discipline. I would like to conclude by saying that what I wrote in 1991 when I first problematised the crisis and later in the Foreword to the English publication, in 1995, of Theatre Semiotics, was not intend to discredit a well established and productive discipline, but rather to acknowledge that something had radically changed, as Elam himself recognises at the beginning of his Proscript. I believe that we are still very much working with the semiotic thinking albeit in a quite different manner, one that relates to issues in culture, literature and theatre, one that attempts to connect with the whole of society and its realities, and one that indeed had and will continue to have an enduring legacy. References Austin, John L. (1975). How to Do Things with Words . Second Edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. (1990). Art and Answerability. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translation and notes by Vadim Liapunov. Supplement translated by Kenneth Brostrom. Austen, Texas: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays . Translated by Vern W. McGee. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson. Introduction by Wayne C. Booth. Menneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barth, John. (1967). Literature of Exhaustion. Atlantic Monthly, (August): 29-34. Barths, Roland. (1966). Introduction lanalyse structural des rcits. Communications, 8 : 127. Barths, Roland. (1964). Essais critiques. Paris: ditions du Seuil. Bertens, Hans. (1986). The Postmodern Weltanschauung and its Relation to Modernism: An Introduction Survey In Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens (eds.). Approaching Postmodernism. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 9-48. Bhabha, Homi. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bogatyrev, Petr. (1976a). Forms and Functions of Folk Theatre. In Ladislav Matejka and Irwing R. Titunik (eds.). Semiotics of Art. Prague School Contributions. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, pp. 51-56. Bogatyrev, Petr. (1976a). Semiotics of Folk Theatre. In Ladislav Matejka and Irwing R. Titunik (eds.). Semiotics of Art. Prague School Contributions. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, pp. 32-50. Bogatyrev, Petr. Les signes du theatre. Potique, 8: 517-530.

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