Theater

The last entry was really just a rambling reflection on my own approach to making sense of the idea of the Eternal Return.  Only loosely connected to Delueze.  Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that what he wants to accomplish with this section is to bring the idea he introduced in the first section -- the opposition between repetition and generality -- into focus as a real lived question, and not merely an abstract philosophical question.  Which of course is exactly what I was trying to do last time.  

I guess it's reflective of the sad state of modern philosophy that this needs to be a special detour.  As far back as the Greeks (at least) people understood philosophy as the quest to examine the world in order to live the good life.  Whatever happened to the idea of philosophy as practical wisdom?  Whatever happened to the idea that contemplating the world would naturally lead you to act differently in it, that, in fact, contemplation (properly thought of) is an action?

Given their literary styles, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are naturally going to be perfect exemplars of that great tradition that made philosophy important for life.  But of course the same question can't help but show up in the content of their concepts as well.  Indeed, one of the main points Deleuze is trying to make here is that there's not really a distinction between form and content, between concept and action.  I believe this is the basic thread that leads him into talking so much about theater in this section.

They want to put metaphysics in motion, in action. They want to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts. It is not enough, therefore, for them to propose a new representation of movement; representation is already mediation. Rather, it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind. This is the idea of a man of the theatre, the idea of a director before his time. In this sense, something completely new begins with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

The work itself is supposed to create movement, not just be a representation or a picture of an abstract movement.  Reading their books is supposed to be an experience.  The idea of philosophy cannot be to simply give us a different picture of the world .  The whole content of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard's philosophy is that this transcendently neutral third-party representation doesn't exist to begin with.  It has to be to give us a new experience of the world.  The writing and the reading are a "concrete" doing (subspecies of thinking).  Which also reminds me of my reflections on the preface regarding the evolution of Deleuze's style.  This isn't a mere literary flourish at work, but a stylistic change directly driven by the needs of the philosophy.  

What I've just described though doesn't sound much like philosophy, but it does sounds a great deal like theater.  Or better yet film, thought it seems that perhaps Deleuze hadn't yet come to the realization that film is an even better example of "thinking in action".  A good piece of theater clearly has ideas in it, the story clearly "means" something, but that isn't really why we watch it.  We watch it to feel something.  Sure, we watch to feel our identification with the actors to some extent.  This is kinda the lowest level of feeling that theater can bring us though, since in fact it's really the work as a whole that moves us when it's done well.  The goal is a real "dramatization of ideas" so that we don't think about them so much as live them directly and concretely, even though the idea itself may be very abstract.  

It's not completely clear to me exactly how Delueze sees theater and repetition as connected.  We get this bit:

When we say, on the contrary, that movement is repetition and that this is our true theatre, we are not speaking of the effort of the actor who 'repeats' because he has not yet learned the part. We have in mind the theatrical space, the emptiness of that space, and the manner in which it is filled and determined by the signs and masks through which the actor plays a role which plays other roles; we think of how repetition is woven from one distinctive point to another, including the differences within itself.

It still seems a little abstract to me though.  Since we are explicitly dissuaded from making the connection between an actor learning his lines and repetition, the only other concrete connection I see between the two is the peculiar relationship of a play as it exists on paper and in a performance.  The image of the model and the copy definitely does not do justice to the relationship between these.  Every staged version of a play is going to be a re-enactment of a thing that doesn't have an original version.  That's certainly along the lines of how we are supposed to understand repetition, but this doesn't seem to be quite what Deleuze has in mind here.  And this doesn't clear up for me when he later elaborates:

In the theatre of repetition, we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with nature and history, with a language which speaks before words, with gestures which develop before organised bodies, with masks before faces, with spectres and phantoms before characters - the whole apparatus of repetition as a 'terrible power'.

I get the "before" aspect he's referring to, both in reference to theater and especially to film.  In fact, I often find that way of experiencing things is the best way into a lot of very abstract film that often scares people off as too dense or complicated and makes them feel like they don't "get it", or lack some crucial insight to unlock a puzzle.  For example Tarkovsky.  There's certainly a lot to Tarkovsky, but the most important thing is just to watch the images.  Experience the flow of sight and sound, of rhythm and texture and color and, yes, also where the words take your head as one element of that whole.  This is actually how Tarkovsky wanted people to watch his movies.  They weren't made as a full employment program for film studies departments.

If I had to venture further than this, I'd say that theater and repetition are connected by the curious way in which repetition is paradoxically always something new.  The theater too doesn't transmit an experience so much as create it anew for the first time, every time.  I think this connection is going to require more development though.  Wait for the exciting conclusion!