Blog #3 [Sara], Davis -- Theatricality is a process for spectatorship

In her Theatricality and Civil Society,”  Tracy Davis takes the Oxford English Dictionary to task, interrogating its entry on theatricality” that, in her view, critically misreads the historic usage of the neologism coined in the writing of  Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881), a Victorian-era Scottish satirist and historian. Dependent on what she calls a tautological construction”  (127), the definition employs the root word “theatrical” to define Carlyle's creation as a quality pertaining to the stage or exhibiting a self-conscious showiness, simulation, or extravagance. According to Davis, the OED’s error lies in its misreading of context both in the personal and historical writings of Carlyle and his successors. Rather than an “ aesthetic effect” or a relationship of theatre to lived reality,” Davis characterizes theatricality as a process for spectatorship” (149) that goes beyond the cliché of mere dramatic spectacle to address the commensurability of  [the act of] spectating to civil society,” (151). 

I had to turn to the dictionary myself at this point, noting that "two concepts or things are commensurable if they are measurable or comparable by a common standard." So, it's important to note that Davis finds spectating to be capable of being directly compared to what she calls "civil society." This is immediately confusing, as spectating is a gerund that describes a process of doing and civil society seems, at least at first glance, to be a collection of people, or as Davis later stresses, a public. Where exactly are the common standards?

According to Davis, although theatricality is dependent on inauthenticity in phenomenology,” (that is to say that the spectator must not be carried away by the illusion of the picture, stage or otherwise), it is not necessarily this inauthenticity that makes the crucial distinction between illusionism and theatricality, but rather the spectators’ choice to engage in critical discourse within the public sphere (149-51). Citing Jürgen Habermas, Davis characterizes this "volitional spetatorship" as capable of breaking the spell that collective public viewing oftens casts on audiences, letting them forget their individuality in a pursuit of common attention on an object exterior to the private self. Within theatricality, one is actively aware of his own "dédoublement" or acting in the reception of the performance, and can thus consider a reaction that is detached from his own sense of self, but this awareness is centered on the active denial of sympathy to objects in the performance frame (153-54).

The foundations of Davis’s argument lie in her efforts at philology and her research into etymology. She effectively traces the coinage and use of theatricality in its many derivations from its genesis in notions of the theatrum or elevated realm of public interest through the late twentieth century associations with spectacle and conscious mimeticism, though, by focusing on an historicized analysis of Carlyle, she traces a genealogy that consistently brings her back to notions of comparing critical spectatorships in civil society. Finding that Carlyle’s notions of theatricality extended from the theatre to the gallows, she suggests that theatricality is neither a state nor a relationship but rather the process of that “dédoublement” or active self-awareness that translates into the revelations of social injustices. (142-43)  She acknowledges her relationship to Brecht, calling for enabling the effects of active dissociation, or alienation, or self-reflexivity, in standing aside from the suffering of the righteous to name and thus bring into the self-possession of a critical stance,” but notes that her notions of theatricality are not synonymous with Brecht’s V-effect, but rather the process that make his “epicness” (or at least dialectism) possible (152). Her theories also jive with Handke’s manifesto in their shared awareness that the basis for theatricality lies in the intellectual efforts of the spectators rather than strictly in the hands the artists, asserting that it is “ the spectator, who by failing to sympathize and instead commencing to think, becomes the actor,” (151). Like Handke, in Davis's view, the onus lies on the spectator to engage, not the artist to be politically engaging, for it is the only way that art might "show us new ways of seeing, being, thinking" instead of perpetuating familiar and potentially problematic ways of knowing in the world. This is a revolutionary statement that, though it does not share the violent aggression of Debord, at the very least, hearkens to his cynicism of a spectacular machine. The only way to do harm to the oppressive regime of the spectacle, Davis might say, is to be always aware of it.