The Surpassing Body
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14997915 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Herbert Blau (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1991 |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 74 |
| Publication date | 1991-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | TDR/The Drama Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1054-2043 • E-ISSN: 1531-4715 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1146090 |
| OpenAlex | W2335351371 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 5 |
When one breaks a hand or a leg, writes Trotsky in his chapter on futurism in Literature and Revolution, bones, the tendons, the muscles, the arteries, the nerves, and the skin do not break and tear in one line, nor afterwards do they grow together and heal at the same time. So, in a revolutionary break in the life of society, there is no simultaneousness and no symmetry of processes either in the ideology of society, or in its economic structure. The ideological premises which are needed for the revolution are formed before the revolution, and most important ideologic deductions from the revolution appear only much later (I960:159). If the critique of futurism is a symptom of the asymmetry, the final chapter of the book is an ideological deduction from the revolution that turns from a qualified defense of traditional forms (tragedy, e.g., without God, or submission to a mysterious authority) into a futuristic fantasy of psychophysical development-to which we've had, with more or less system to the fantasy, correlatives in the theatre. While the breaking and tearing continued, through the anatomy of modernism, as the structural principle of artistic forms, there were as a preface to postmodern performance various notions of body consciousness or disciplines of the thinking body or the signifying body or, amidst the baffling semiurgy of exchangeable signs, regimens of the body as its own authority in the rhetorical struggle to assure a future. One might have thought that Meyerhold's biomechanics was, in its articulation of signs, an important part of that struggle, but about that particular system in the theatre of his time Trotsky is not at all sanguine. And as he questions the historical necessity of this apparent innovation-which impressed both Brecht and Eisenstein-it's as if he were writing off in advance the body language of the American theatre of the '6os, when it was under the spell of Artaud and Grotowski and, in a more populist mode, the messianism of the Living Theatre. While passionate experimenter, Meyerhold was at the outset (unlike Stanislavski) a committed Bolshevik, he is referred to as furious Vissarion Belinski of the stage, who teaches the actors, inept as they are in dialog, a combinatory (or compensatory) set of semirhythmic movements: result is-abortive (I34-35). Despite the dismissal of biomechanics as a form of provincial dilettantism (I35), the body and the machine are embraced, and embrace each other, in the higher synthesis imagined by Trotsky in his exhilarating
Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Epistemology · Fantasy · Ideology · Literature · Modernism (music · Political science · Tragedy (event · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Law · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Theatre and Performance Studies
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2012 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |