Last time I was pondering the connection between theater and repetition. Another angle would be to follow this section more explicitly and understand how Deleuze has given us a, "theatrical confirmation of an irreducible difference between generality and repetition". In other words: what's the connection between theater and generality?
This approach seems to come more easily, since we already have a distinction between types of theater:
The theatre of repetition is opposed to the theatre of representation, just as movement is opposed to the concept and to representation which refers it back to the concept.
and even an exemplar of the theater of representation:
Hegel substitutes the abstract relation of the particular to the concept in general for the true relation of the singular and the universal in the Idea. He thus remains in the reflected element of 'representation', within simple generality. He represents concepts instead of dramatizing Ideas: he creates a false theatre, a false drama, a false movement.
We might sum this up by saying that theater is not meant to be a treatise. If your goal is to take a clear conceptual picture of the world, built from concepts that represent how it works, and then transmit these concepts to a recipient so that the same picture somehow appears in their head, then you want to write a treatise; you should write an essay, not a play.
I find myself criticizing a great deal of art, film, theater, and fiction for failing to understand exactly this point. If you have something to tell me, some information to convey, some point of view or fact that you'd like me to be aware of, just freaking tell me what it is! Just write down what you'd like to say in an essay. Don't try to dance your architectural thesis, or code the message into symbols and hide them in a novel, or paint your political opinion in 62 shades of mauve on the gallery wall. Just write it down. Ask yourself what part the "art" contributes. Is it basically just an ad to make people swallow your opinion without thinking about it? Or is it building an argument for convincing people of your view? Is it art, or is it propaganda? In short: does it represent or symbolize a concept or does it dramatize an Idea?
Good theater, art, film, etc ... goes way beyond trying to communicate some general concept. It gets you to feel something specific. It creates an experience. Yes, it has an Idea, but it's the sort of idea that you can't represent in words. This is why it has to be "dramatized". The opposition is between using some general concepts (often words) to represent the world versus using a whole set of sensory modalities to guide someone towards a new experience in this world. Deleuze is using the concept of theater to summarize the latter, and stand in for our experience of any art.
With this connection between theater and generality in place, I find it easier to understand the relationship of theater to repetition and to novelty. Consider the relationship of what the author thinks to what the audience thinks after either the play or the essay. The essay transmits a picture of the authors thought that the audience is supposed to receive, or "get". The information sent and the information received are supposed to be "the same". If they aren't, then there's been some sort of failure or distortion somewhere along the line. We're aiming for a reflection of the thoughts of the author in the reader, a sort of mind mirroring effect where both heads end up with the same picture. Some mention of Heidegger's essay The Age of the World Picture belongs here.
This isn't how we imagine theater to work at all though. We don't see it as a question of the transmission of ideas, but more as one of stimulus and response. We revel in the fact that we can draw new meaning for the modern world from an old play. We love how it has a different impact on different people or that they "interpret" it differently. And unless we're one of those people who have a crushing pedantic biographical obsession, we're not that concerned with whether our picture is the same as the one that was in the author's head.
At first it seems that repetition would describe what happens in the case of the essay. Isn't the picture in the author's head repeated in that of the audience? Yes, but it's not repeated exactly. It would be better to say that it is reproduced, or "reflected", like, say, the way two symmetrical objects are reflected around a central axis. We presume there are actually two distinct forms involved. Sender and receiver. And we say that the message was "understood" not only when the forms are exactly them same, but when they are similar in enough respects, or with respect to some particularly salient dimension. Hegel's understanding of his philosophy and my understanding of it are not going to be exactly the same. We do expect them to land in a similar neighborhood however. They are supposed to resemble one another, and ultimately be able to be substituted for one another in the variable "what Hegel meant". This is exactly the formula we saw in the first part about the relationship between general and particular in the Law.
Exact repetition would involve something other than the transmission of generalities we expect from a fully comprehended essay. But given how I've explained what happens between author and audience with theater, at first it seems hard to call that repetition either. This is exactly where I think the key insight lies though -- what's repeated exactly in theater isn't the thing, but the process of its formation. In the case of the essay, we assume the packed-up concept in the author's head to be a fully distinct and articulated form unto itself, ie. a thing. This things was supposed to be repeated exactly, but as we've seen the end package is only generally similar to the starting point. With art or theater, we feel better saying that the author had some Idea which he "set in motion" (I don't think the terms are crucial here, but so far Deleuze has been opposing Idea to concept, so I'll follow suit). There's no packaged input that we are waiting to see repeated in the output. Instead, what's repeated is the process of the motion. Motion itself is a process and true theater. And this process can actually be repeated exactly in the author and in each member of the audience with different things appearing each time as a result.
In other words, repetition is a process. The process, the movement, is what's repeated. And this repetition doesn't produce the same, it produces novelty every time. Deleuze is most definitely a "process philosopher" even if, unlike his big influence Whitehead, he never seems to self-apply the term.
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