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"INTRODUCTION TO W"
Joris Lacoste & Jeanne Revel
Lecture held on October 17th, 2007 at L’École des Beaux-Arts de Paris
Joris Lacoste They’re not here to amplify, they’re here to record. Nevertheless, the hissing sound is a bit much. If it’s too annoying… I can see it’s going to get annoying. Are we going to have to yell all the time? Can you hear me all right? How’s that?
Jeanne Revel We can’t hear you.
JL There are two possibilities: either you come closer or we amplify. It’s just as well by me if we don’t amplify, because it’s a bit...
JR...solemn.
JL Yes. But if we can avoid yelling, that’s always a plus. And this noise, can’t we... Can’t we stop the noise of the...
JR So good afternoon. As you certainly know, this afternoon’s conference, here at l’École des Beaux-Arts (The Paris Fine Arts School) will serve as a preamble, if you will, to the seminar that Joris Lacoste and I are giving at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers every Tuesday evening at 7 P.M. starting next week until the end of January in collaboration with the Department of Dance at the University of Paris 8 and the Master’s Directing Program at the University of Paris 10. This is the continuation of work that began in 2004 with the Lisboan choreographer João Fiadeiro and which developed in other contexts, notably in 2005 during a seminar at the University of Paris 3 with the Théâtre de la Colline.
JL Today, it may seem a little odd to be holding this conference here at the École des Beaux-Arts. Actually, the work we’re pursuing is mainly centered on the performing arts, namely dance and theater. So we should probably begin by explaining why we’re addressing people who lean more toward the visual arts.
JR What we should start by specifying is that today we won’t be going into the matter of what we call W. It will be the goal of the seminar itself to progressively present, over 12 sessions, all of the notions, the tools, the nuts and bolts of what we’ve been trying to elaborate for several years. What we’d like to do today is merely to pose two or three general questions...
JL But first of all, thanks for coming. It always strikes us as kind of mysterious that people come out to attend things they know nothing about. I always find this kind of pure curiosity that consists in coming to attend an “Introduction to W” very moving. No one knows what W is... (Laughter in the room.) But we can still assume, we can still make certain hypotheses about the reasons that brought you here...
JR One reason could be, for example, that you attend all the seminars, or the entire École des Beaux-Arts course list. So you’re students at the school and you systematically attend everything that’s offered. That’s the conscientious student hypothesis.
JL Another hypothesis would be: you closely follow all of the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers’ activities. That’s the regular spectator hypothesis.
JR Or you’re quite simply a friend, a faithful supporter, or a...
JL Our mom... (Laughter in the room.)
JR Or else you got it completely wrong and you thought this was a conference on Georges Perec...
JL Or George Bush... That’s possible too. Or else... There must be other reasons we haven’t thought of.
JR I hope so.
JL Undoubtedly. But whatever the reason that brought you here, it’s necessarily a more or less inadequate one. We’ll see why “more or less.” But the idea of coming to devote several hours of your life to something you know nothing about is actually quite courageous of you. You risk losing an hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, five hours...
JR Six months… (Laughter in the room.)
JL …of your life, which is not nothing. Worse: there’s the risk that you’ll leave saddened, baffled or angry... Your day may be ruined on account of it.
JR Among the reasons we’ve cited - and it’s not an exhaustive list - we can identify two sorts: there are the more risky, and the less risky. In short, there are reasons tied to the goal of the conference, in any case it’s topic, and others that aren’t. It’s called W, which remains a little abstruse for the moment but if you’ve come for W we can assume your reason has something to do with the goal of what we’re presenting, at least with the idea you’ve fashioned of it. Let’s assume you have less reason to find it boring or to waste your afternoon if you’ve come because of W than if you’re here completely by accident, or in error...
JL If, for example, you walked in the wrong room or if, I don’t know, you were already here this morning for one reason or another and you happened to fall asleep, or you just couldn’t bring yourself to change rooms and have found yourself in the middle of this thing, the probability that you’d succeed in connecting what you do or your interests with what we’re going to talk about today might be smaller...
JR And that wouldn’t be our fault. In the sense that, right, what’s at issue isn’t, or isn’t exclusively, the quality of the conference we’re giving here, or W in general. But it wouldn’t be your fault either. Something didn’t connect, that’s all, didn’t click. So in your own life, in your own fields of interest, there’s something that doesn’t mesh with the content of our work, and the content of what we’re proposing here.
JL What we’re trying to explain, at heart, is that W considers that there isn’t a conference that is good in itself, just as there aren’t works of art that are beautiful or interesting or successful in themselves. There are only good, beautiful, exciting or fertile relations that we can succeed in weaving - or rather you, the audience can succeed in weaving - with the performance, or work, or conference being proposed. The only thing we can talk about in the end, the only thing we can qualify, are these relations.
JR Imagine you go abroad for a residency, for example to the capital of a country where you know no one. Before leaving, you spend an evening with your cousin and your cousin recommends a friend of hers, a certain Kristina. She tells you to call her, you’ll get along famously, she’s a good friend, she’s charming, cultivated, interesting, funny and nice... You say okay and don’t give it any more thought. Then one night in the foreign capital, one night when you’re particularly lonely or depressed, or you’ve had too much to drink, you find the little paper on which your cousin so kindly wrote down Kristina’s number. And since you’re feeling lonely or depressed, or you’ve had too much to drink, you decide to call her. You really hope you’ll like her, you really hope you’ll get along, you really hope that you’ll also find her charming and cultivated and interesting and funny and nice...
JL And the next day you find yourself in a pleasant café downtown across from a young blond who indeed displays all the trappings of charm, culture, humor and kindness. She is even prettier than you expected, with a way of smiling that is especially heart-rending. She is connected to the arts world of the foreign capital and is full of resources and curiosity. She seems overjoyed to meet you. She asks you lots of questions: what you do in Paris, since when and in what context. She seems to find your answers captivating. And then it’s her turn to tell you she’s a guitarist in a post-rock band, that she does installations or that she organizes Danish film festivals in the foreign capital... It’s all very, very interesting.
JR Very. Except after a while, after a round of mutual questions and statements of purpose, you find yourselves a little embarrassed, talking about the weather over and over, the comparative merits of her city and yours, of all the usual subjects of conversation that make you wish you were somewhere else and curse your cousin. You don’t click. You feel like two strangers and you want to stay that way. But it would be neither your, nor your cousin’s, nor Kristina’s fault because no one can say that Kristina isn’t objectively charming, interesting, funny and nice.
JL It’s just that you realize that “nice,” “funny,” “charming,” and “pretty” don’t qualify the intrinsic qualities of Kristina so much as the unique relation that your cousin entertained with her. So, fundamentally, there’s no reason to assume you’ll have the same type of relation with Kristina as your cousin does because a real relation probably touches on territory that is both more concrete and less palpable than generic qualities such as these.
JR Something didn’t click. A common rhythm is missing. Complicity is absent. You are mistuned.
JL There’s a defective stimmung.
JR You try your best. It’s obvious each of you is filled with respect for the other and you have the best intentions. It’s obvious that you would like to be friends but it just doesn’t click. There isn’t the smallest inkling of an understanding between you. Something won’t have occurred.
JL Well with works of art it’s the same way. There are always more or less two ways of interacting with a work of art. The first we might call aesthetic, or moral, or moral-aesthetic. It consists in developing a certain number of criteria or values and then relating our experience of the work back to these values and criteria: we judge the relevance, the strength of the work as a function of predefined canons. In his book on Spinoza, Deleuze clearly shows the difference between an ethic and a moral. The moral harks back to an essence and to higher values: the whole moral task consists in defining an essence and making it an end in itself, and that’s precisely what constitutes value.
JR For our purposes, the moral-aesthetic process consists in defining an artistic essence, then making that essence finality, and then transforming this finality into a value with which to judge works of art. It’s actually something we do constantly; it’s difficult to prevent oneself from applying all sorts of criteria or values to what we see. There are all sorts of more or less classical, canonical definitions: “art should imitate life,” “the essence of art is human expression,” “art should represent a new way of seeing,” “art should ask questions, should disturb...” All the definitions you can think of...
JL “The essence of tragedy is to purge the spectator by provoking his terror and pity.”
JR “The essence of theater is the text, the poem, or the language...
JL In contemporary discourse it becomes, or has become, or could become, “The essence of art is being critical, or subversive, or political...” JR Or else, “art is celebration...” Whatever the definition, the process is the same. What is used to judge the work is an a priori criterion...
JL For example, in September, 2005, Dominique de Villepin declared during a speech at the Fiac: “Art should tell our society as it is in its dreams, in its hopes, but also in its moments of violence and injustice.” That’s a good definition of art. Well, it’s a definition of art... (Laughter in the room.) “This is art.” “Art has to do this or that.” These are moral-aesthetic definitions. We can imagine Dominique de Villepin walking down the aisles of the Fiac asking himself, “Does this art tell our society as it is in its dreams, its hopes, but also in its moments of violence and injustice?” Yes? No? More or less? A little?
JR True, we’ve given very general definitions as examples, but this process also works with much more partial or secondary definitions. We often hear for example, “it should have irony.”
JL Or just as easily, “it shouldn’t have irony.”
JR “It must be literal.”
JL “It must be pop.”
JR “Technically, it must be well-done.”
JL “It must be done badly, it’s better when it’s done badly...”
JR “It must be masterful.”
JL “It’s better when it’s over the top.”
JR “There must be movement.”
JL “It shouldn’t move.”
JR “It must have visual effects.”
JL The other day I went to a dance piece and afterwards I had a discussion with a lady who told me: “It was good, but it’s missing visual effects.” This lady had the idea that in this dance piece there had to be “visual effects” and so she hadn’t really been looking for anything else. But what I’m trying to say is that she dismissed the recital off the bat because it was missing something; there weren’t enough “visual effects.” There are others who consider, on the contrary, that a dance piece should have no “visual effects” whatsoever and if they see too many “visual effects” they’ll say: “It’s incredible! They can’t do that! Those visual effects are so vulgar!” Note that I don’t even know what a visual effect is. In the theater we have the same debate around characters: should there be characters or no characters?
JR Should there be psychology or no psychology? Pathos or no pathos? Illusion or no illusion? The examples are infinite. Whenever we judge based on preexisting criteria, we put ourselves in moral-aesthetic territory, and we prevent ourselves from relating. We have an ensemble of a priori values - whether they’re served up by Dominique de Villepin, our cousin, our own conformism, our education or our desire to belong socially is of little importance - we judge such and such a work of art by bringing it back to these values.
JL It’s like the parable of the judge who’s in love. One day a judge decides to find love. Since he’s a judge, he has a whole lot of ready-made ideas about the object of his love, a checklist of criteria applied beforehand to every encounter. For example, it must be a woman. This woman must be young. Single. White. Brunette. Pretty but not excessively so. Brought up right. Well-educated. She must speak at least two languages, know how to cook, like winter sports, be sexually forward, etc. Fill in the blank. So the judge will screen all of the people he comes across based on these criteria. He will test, ticking off his list... He will conduct his romantic trysts like job interviews. He’ll slip trick questions into the conversation: “Do you like Bartok quartets? Verstehen Sie Deutsch? The capital of Lithuania? Veal cutlets? Outdoor sex?” And he ticks, ticks, ticks, all down the list. And when he finds a woman who fits all his criteria, he falls in love. (Laughter in the room.)
JR And he marries. Obviously the parable ends unhappily because, as you’ve noted at this stage, he still hasn’t made even the slightest overture to a concrete relationship with the woman he loves...
JL The W-lover is a horse of a different color because the W-lover can literally fall in love with anyone. Not with everyone, because there’s no particular reason he should be able to create something with everyone. But he knows he can’t know until he’s tried. He has no predefined criteria: male / female, young / old, attractive / ugly, fat / skinny, etc. He doesn’t function in terms of large binary categories, but based on the singular reality of each relation. So he is obliged to try, to experiment... The W-lover won’t begin with over-reaching a priori values, but with the actual relations he establishes with the people he meets. These relations will prove to be more or less fertile, more or less conjugal, more or les sexual, more or less long-term...
JR This other process is what we might call the ethical process. The ethical process, or the W process, is that which consists in temporarily suspending all higher values and all preexisting formal criteria, in order to try to create, or recreate oneself directly with the work, on the same plane. That is a very different process than the moral judgment process. It supposes that I enter into a process. The idea that W is advocating isn’t that one must abdicate or check all one’s knowledge at the door, all one’s experience, everything one knows about dance, theater, performance art, the history of form, etc. Far from it. But W considers these merely materials, tools, and not as the goal of the operation. Because if I do indeed remain on moral-aesthetic territory, I don’t commit myself to doing any work. And when we don’t work we run the risk of being bored. Utterly bored. W proposes considering the receiving end of a work of art as its own kind of work, in other words a process of production. The production of significations and interpretations. The production of meaning.
JL Indeed the more significations I am capable of producing, the more the relationship I construct with the work will be compound and complex.
JR And unique.
JL So, in general, the objection we hear right away, or that we expect to hear anyway, is that W is relativist: if there are only relations, doesn’t that mean there are only personal or subjective experiences about which nothing can be said? Obviously not. First of all this isn’t a general truth: W doesn’t say that a work’s own value is an idea deprived of meaning. What W advocates is a method. There are different ways of relating with a work of art. There is the moral-aesthetic method obviously. W proposes another method that consists in working at the level of the relation first.
JR Actually, it would be relativist if we limited ourselves to the most basic level of reception. Namely the level that says, “it’s good,” “it’s not good,” “it’s interesting,” “it’s not interesting.” We could call the least articulate level relativist. But as soon as we begin a process of producing meaning, as soon as we enter into relation with the work, there is the idea, which we’re going to try to demonstrate in the course of the seminar, that the meaning that I produce can be expressed and, thus, shared.
JL Indeed we will see that for W, too, the work can have a kind of intrinsic value, but presently by an altogether different route than a moral-aesthetic operation. It will no longer be expressed in qualitative terms at all, but in quantitative ones. It will be less a value than a power. A work is no longer evaluated as a function of formal qualities associated with extrinsic criteria, but with regard to the quantity of unique relations it can elicit. For W, a work will be considered all the more powerful if it gives rise to a greater number of possible unique significations.
JR We can obviously never calculate this number, or even estimate it.
JR So there are two major ways of considering the process of reception. On the one hand we have a vision of the work as a thing in itself, a kind of sun diffusing its warmth and light on the spectator. And on the other, W sees the work of art as an apparatus that I can enter into relation or connect with, which obviously assumes we have something to do together and means my interpretive process pivots on the processes at work in what’s being presented.
JL And now we come to the theater, to the question of the theater. Why does the theater come up here? Because we’re going to define the theater as just such a relation. That’s a definition, true, and like all the definitions we’re going to put out there during the seminar, it’s a nominal one, meaning it’s more or less arbitrary. It’s not an essentialist definition. It’s a W definition: an operative definition.
JR So W will define the theater as an apparatus that puts someone who acts in the presence of someone who watches, or, more precisely, puts someone who acts with the awareness of being watched in the presence of someone who watches this someone who acts with the awareness of being watched.
JL We’re going to represent this situation in a very simple manner: for now we’ll call the one who acts X, and the one who watches Y, and we’ll represent the relationship between X and Y like this (Joris Lacoste gets up and draws a diagram on the board):
JR So W calls any situation that puts someone who acts in contact with someone who watches in the same space and in the same lapse of time “theater.” For W “theater” designates things that, in genre terms, include the canon of dance, performance, theater, concerts, conferences, classes, etc. Wherever there is coexistence, we postulate that this coexistence is the condition of a shared experience represented here by two parallel lines. Theater, for W, simply means that an action-process and a reception-process coincide in parallel, in the same lapse of time. What is an action-process? It’s a process by which a situation is modified. He who acts modifies the situation. What is a reception-process? It’s, as we’ve seen, a meaning-producing process.
JL What allows for a theatrical apparatus, as we’ll see in the course of this seminar, is, first of all, establishing a duration, in other words getting the two processes - the action and reception processes - to coincide in a real relation. By real we mean that the relation is not projected from one side or the other. Indeed we consider that that there is something indivisible about the theatrical relation: it can’t be divided into two parts. We can’t imagine someone over here doing something as though he were alone, without an audience, and over there an audience that receives this thing as though it were inanimate, already existent, or recorded. The theatrical relation is indivisible in that we can’t separate the X and Y processes without destroying the theater itself.
JR What constitutes the fundamental difference between what we call theater - these production and reception apparatus that coexist in a lapse of time - and works that exist in other types of communicative media (film, books, photography, sculpture, installations, etc.) is that with these other media there is always a delay; the relationship doesn’t occur in real-time.
JL The theater apparatus allows us to develop a kind of protocol for studying this relation. That’s what W is proposing. In the course of the seminar we won’t consider the theater in its aesthetic or historical dimensions but as a protocol for studying the X/Y relation.
JR This semester’s work will consist solely of a study of this relation, of the relation between the one who is doing and the one who sees done. Obviously, we’ll sometimes work from examples, but we could just as easily be talking about a play as a dance recital or an everyday social interaction.
JL We’re going to try to consider all of the forms that emerge from what we call the theater apparatus in the same light, whether the are artistic forms or not. Indeed they could just as easily be seminars or religious ceremonies as a Chekhov play, a classical ballet, a sales pitch, a speech at the National Assembly, a defense plea, a keynote address by Steve Jobs, a Britney Spears concert, a strip-tease, a job interview, a conversation in a bar, a prize fight, or a magic show...
JR Or asking an old woman for directions in the street...
JL All these relations are for our purposes theatrical. They undoubtedly don’t work the same way and it will be our job to differentiate them, but they all share the coexistence of the X and Y processes.
A man in the audience When you ask for directions in the street, is someone necessarily watching?
JR Of course. Even when there’s no third party watching, there is at least the relation between the old lady and me. At the moment that I ask her the way, the old lady looks at me and produces meaning, without which she would be at pains to answer me: she is the Y to my act of asking for directions.
JL That’s why we insisted on considering this a relation not between people but between what W calls X and Y instances. Why? Because it allows us to assign positions to the actor and the spectator, and in certain situations these instances can switch, reverse or change flow. Obviously in performance settings like theater or dance the places are more or less fixed by a convention that dictates that what happens tends to happen on stage. We watch from the audience or the bleachers, but not always. We know that in the history of the theater there have been attempts at foiling or redefining these conventions.
JR The theater is one example among others. We’ll see that the diagram has to hold up in all the other situations, which are more social situations than artistic ones, as well...
JL With different modalities…
JR The question W asks is “what is the nature of the relation that is represented on this diagram?” What makes the relation between X and Y parallel is that it is a relation without contact. There is no contact possible between the actor and the viewer because we consider that these two instances or processes are of a different nature. In other words, it is completely impossible and quite possibly useless, parasitical or, at the very least, disabling for the viewer to have access to the “intentions” of whoever is acting before our eyes. Inversely, for the actor, it is illusory and certainly exhausting to develop hypotheses about the audience’s possibilities of reception, interpretation, signification, fiction-making, etc. These are two instances that we consider absolutely separate and implacably unrelated.
JL And we’ll even consider that many unnecessary problems and difficulties come from a confusion between these instances. For example, from the actor’s point of view a poor or abusive application of Y occurs when the actor projects the meaning of his action by putting himself in Y’s shoes...
JR ...and from the audience’s point of view, when it tries to get at the “real intentions” of the actor by trying to put itself in his shoes.
JL This produces, on the one hand, a discourse on the necessity of “transmitting a message...”
JR And on the other the necessity of “understanding a message...”
JL To “make meaning...”
JR To “uncover meaning...”
JL ...which always goes back to the idea that there is a single signification contained in the production process and that it befalls the audience to decrypt or simply to apprehend it.
JR Of course that brings up several issues.
JL First of all, the issue of the moment when the relation begins, which is not predetermined or eternal. In the context of artistic performances, that brings up the issue of the code.
JR We specify the context as artistic because in the street or in daily life we generally share the so-called social code. And if I suddenly start displaying behavior that is completely outside the code, I run a good chance of being called original, or crazy, or an artist... That’s part of the judgment we were talking about earlier. But if we look at the history of form, the history of spectacle, we find several strategies for creating just such a relation.
JL For example the avant-garde’s strategy is one of total departure. I propose a new code unilaterally, I impose it, decide it’s this or that. The audience accepts or doesn’t. That’s why it’s a total departure, with all the particular effects that follow... It’s a strong but risky option, because the relation runs the danger of being destroyed before it begins...
JR And inversely, we can choose to begin with the current code - with the common code - with the most obvious code in a given social or institutional context, or at least what we know of it. In this eventuality, the relation evolves only gradually over time, in stages, by smaller deviations, and the code is modified until it attains new levels of fiction.
JL This is another strategy, which we could call a drift strategy: how do we constitute or create small drift when given a shared and pre-accepted situation, which is already a relation? That’s the second point that W will try to elucidate: once instituted, how and in what conditions can the relation develop?
JR And the very specific question that we’ll try to pose, and which is not at all an easy one is, do immanent criteria exist that will allow us to guarantee a relation? In other terms, do criteria exist from the point of view of the action - so if we use the example of theater, from the point of view of the actor, dancer, performer, or whoever it is - allowing us to continue, develop, or perform an action while guaranteeing that the relation, i.e. the representation, will be maintained?
JL Why imminent criteria? Because we’d like to avoid having recourse to these ensembles of preexisting values, to these formal values to which we refer a great deal in general because it’s very difficult not to – values that make us say, “it’s pretty interesting,” “it’s beautiful,” “it’s intense,” “it’s cool,” etc. We can find tons of them. They are ways of judging, as we said earlier. So can we determine criteria that are neither ideas, nor desires, nor tastes, nor visions, nor institutions? Can we develop a kind of logic, but which would be the logic of a process and not a sort of private source of inspiration?
JR To put it another way, to talk about X’s work, we’ll try not to reason in terms of what is said or what it means, but in terms of doing, acting, or modifying situations. We can generalize that artistic activity – theatrical activity in this case – is never a gift, it is never an epiphany, and it’s never an idea that just comes to us.
JL It’s always a task, it’s always a process that is pushed or carried to a certain limit. So it’s something we can try to express. It’s something we can try to talk about. It’s something we can justify, we can try to think about, we can try to understand and we can try to say. We should be able to explain what we do. We shall always try to avoid sinking into the discourse of the ineffable, the felt, the intuitive and the visionary...
JR All these metaphorical discourses are implicit or vague. And we’ll try to understand - it’s the question Nietzsche asked - in whose interest it is deep down that we not speak clearly about what we do. We’ll see that, deep down, the one who profits most from this fuzziness is probably he who legitimates his power with a certain knowledge that he alone bears. That’s exactly what we’ll try to undo or demystify.
JL Indeed, in a collective creative process like the theater or dance, it’s also a practical way of warding off the effects of power. In a collective process, if there is the one who knows and the ones that do, and if the one who knows never justifies his knowledge or, in any event, justifies it solely by the fact that he has “ideas,” “visions,” or “desires,” as is often the case; he establishes a system of inequality that prevents other participants from grasping the central issues at play. They are not equipped to understand them and, as a result, can’t make propositions, take initiative, or be creative in whatever their job is. That’s what W will always try to undo, it’s this power dynamic that goes part and parcel with a poor distribution of power.
JR Sometimes there is nothing to share; that happens too. Sometimes the discourse of the ineffable or the metaphorical is merely there to mask the fact that the things that could be said are, in truth, not substantial enough to be said...
JL ...or are difficult to admit. (Laughter in the room.)
JR The first thing W will try to do is to build a toolbox for action: namely, a group of notions, an operative lexicon or a collection of terms that will help us to be more precise, more concrete, clearer and more efficient in our collective work. That is what we call the W-method. What’s more, these terms enter into a game-like concept: there are rules, techniques and situations that serve to make things, in particular shows or performances.
JL The second thing W is attached to is the development of an analytical practice that can serve the spectators we are, including of our own work. How do we develop the tools allowing us to construct the meaning we talked about earlier? How do we escape from prejudices, from preconceived ideas, from morals, to give ourselves the possibility of forming multiple, singular and complex significations?
JR In both cases, W will propose a certain number of operative terms that are at play in performance, either from X’s point of view, or from Y’s. For example, that thing we talked about a great deal today, the relation between X and Y, designated by two parallel lines. W will call it “representation.” Of course the term “representation” can have other significations in other contexts. But for W, representation designates specifically the relation between action and meaning.
JL Another example: W represents the moments of a representation with Greek letters. The beginning of the representation is α, the end of the representation is ω, between the two is β, γ, κ, δ, each letter corresponds to an event, an accident, a choice, the beginning of a new action, etc.
JR Or else, what X performs W calls “axis,” and what Y performs W calls “grid,” and so on. We’re not going to get into that now or else we’ll have nothing left to say on Tuesday.
JL We might call this ensemble of terms and notions “W-Lexicon,” because it’s purpose is first and foremost to find words for things, in a practical scope. But we quickly realized that in order for these terms to be operative they had to be logically articulated side by side. Once we pose the question of the logical articulation of the terms among themselves, we enter into a theoretical dimension. We enter prudently, but we necessarily enter.
JR That’s why we call this third activity theory: it’s W-Theory.
JL We distinguish three activities because at different times we work on different sections. At the same time it’s obvious that the practical, critical and theoretical dimensions must develop in close interrelation, continually feeding off each other.
JR What we’ll be exploring this year, in the course of this seminar, is principally this last dimension called W-Theory. Meaning we’ll continue to develop this necessarily arbitrary lexicon, on which we’ve already made quite a bit of progress, but which continues to grow and become clearer as needed. But most importantly, we’ll talk about the logical implications that follow from the relations between these words.
JL If only by starting with the simple definition we gave, by which a representation is a relation without contact between the actor and the spectator, we can deduce a certain number of propositions. What can we do with this paradox? What logistical snares does it represent? How does it play into such and such an artistic practice?
JR For example, we are obliged to wonder, if there is no contact between X and Y, what remains in common between them: is it the space, the duration of the spectacle, a shared code? How are these codes constructed, formed or deformed?
JL More generally, this definition of representation as a relation and a parallel one, will allow us to reconsider the same old questions of presence, character, role, fiction, realism, originality and invention from a fresh angle.
JR There is also another thing we would like to demonstrate - we’ll see if we get to it by the end of the seminar - which relates to the function of... I don’t know if it’s the function of art, the function of theater, or the function of the theatrical apparatus as we’ve defined it...
JL It’s the idea that if, as W postulates, art creates freedom in the strictest sense – flexibility, the creation of new possibilities – it resides as much in he who makes it, as in he who receives it, correlatively. That’s what the theatrical apparatus, as a real time relation between one who does and one who watches, will hopefully allow us to demonstrate. We’ll see.
JR Any questions?
Transcribed by Grégory Castéra Translated by David H. Pickering
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Le séminaire W, proposé par Joris Lacoste et Jeanne Revel, est organisé par Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, en partenariat avec le département de danse de l’Université Paris VIII – Vincennes / Saint-Denis et le mastère de mise en scène de l’Université Paris X – Nanterre. Il se tient chaque mardi aux Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, du 23 octobre 2007 au 31 janvier 2008.
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