Carlson Marvin - Places of Performance the Semiotics of Theatre Architect

Cambridge Opera Journal, 2, 3, 321-29

Review Marvin Carlson. Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. 212 pp.

In December 1986, the French government inaugurated a new museum within the shell of the old Gare d'Orsay, Victor Laloux's beaux-arts railway station of 1900. The agenda of the new Musee d'Orsay was to trace French national self-formation and self-representation between 1848 and 1914. After much curatorial strife over whether such a process should be reconstructed in terms of social history or the history of art, the decision was made that the representation of history would best be accomplished through a history of representation. The Musee d'Orsay became an art museum, but one in which the history of art was reconstructed as a battle over cultural taste and cultural representation. The two sides of the museum's main-floor egyptoid promenade presented juxtapositions of, on the one hand, the academic painting that controlled the period's official taste and, on the other, the milestones of rebellion - from Daumier and Courbet to Manet - which, from our contemporary perspective, have usurped the pre-history of modern art. The promenade's lay-out recalled at once the railway track and platform it had once been, as well as a cathedral nave that drew pilgrims through a history of French high cultural identity. The juxtaposition of railway station and cathedral represented, like the placement of the paintings and sculpture, the ambivalence of the nineteenth century. Modernism competed with the neo-baroque; movement, machinery and modernity competed with stasis, form and control. The museum entrance was placed on the promenade's east end; the main floor's opposite end, the promenade's conclusion and the spot where its nineteenth-century cultural dialectic had somehow to be resolved, corresponded to the railway station's tunnel as well as to the 'altar' of the ersatz cathedral - the museum's focal point as well as an automatic symbol of both darkness and light, indeterminacy and absolute control. How should this spot be filled? The explosiveness and obviousness of the curators' choice should not obscure its ingenuity. The spot was dedicated to the Palais Gamier, the Paris opera house commissioned in 1860 and opened in 1875. A cross-sectional model of the theatre became the illuminated altar-piece, with the blackened archway of the tunnel entrance proscenium serving as backdrop. In front of the model, a glass floor covered a model of the Palais Garnier's urban context - the hub of Baron Haussmann's 'second network'. Walking on the glass surface, the museum spectator was thus invited to assume the totalising perspective consistent with Haussmann's neobaroque urban as well as political ideology. In the wings - or transept - of this operatic altar, rotating displays of operatic memorabilia were installed, including sketches and models of productions that had earlier been displayed in the Palais Gamier museum itself. Appropriately, the entire Orsay display was the work of set designer Richard Peduzzi, whose work on Patrice Chereau's Bayreuth Ring cycle (1976) had revealed a mastery of nineteenth-century theatricality and my thmaking as well as of their representability to contemporary spectators. The performative, playful character of the museum's operatic quarter made the point

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that theatricality in general, and the Palais Garnier in particular, hold the key to the character and contradictions of nineteenth-century cultural practice. The theatricality of the Orsay's display thus duplicates and represents nineteenth-century theatrical culture on three levels. First, there is the level of on-stage performance: the operas written for the theatre and performed there, their texts (music and words) and the productions in which they were given, as well as the history of their reception. Second is the theatre structure itself as a performative representation of cultural meanings and contradictions. Third is the urban, high-bourgeois culture which surrounded and supported the theatre, and which found in it the patterns of meaning that spoke to and even defined the manner in which the theatre shared in the self-representation of the Second Empire, with its combination of neo-imperial and bourgeois ingredients. (Thus the Palais Garnier serves as the spatial common denominator between, on the one side, the Louvre as seat of imperial, baroque power and theatre and, on the other, the bourgeois world of the Gare St Lazare and the 'grands magasins'.) The French word for performance is 'representation': at all levels mentioned above, the object of performance/representation is Second Empire culture itself. As places of performance, theatres such as the Palais Garnier represent their cultures on (at least) these three levels. The Orsay's success in transmitting these dynamics of representation follows from its own post-structuralist principles of visual display. The object of representation (the nineteenth century) as well as the method of representation incorporate a sense of culture and meaning as a contest in which battles are fought between stasis and dynamism, the neo-baroque and the modernist, museum and station, platform and tunnel, sign and process. The debate as to whether a poststructuralist approach radically supersedes the structuralist is intricate. Allowance must be made for the structuralist (or semiotic) position that the sign itself may be construed as a processual, potentially dynamic principle of relation between the signifier and the signified. It strikes me that a semiotics of 'theatre' 1 architecture that itself strives for cultural analysis must do two things. First, it must engage the three levels of cultural representation mentioned above. Second, it must declare its position with regard to the structuralist/post-structuralist debate in order to engage clearly questions of stasis and dynamism in the culture(s) concerned.

In Places of Performance, Marvin Carlson has written an extremely engaging and varied book, in which compelling arguments and marvellous illustrations interpret the cultural meaning of theatre structures from Greek amphitheatres to - among other contemporary projects - London's Barbican complex. The examples are very well chosen. The book's weakness - at times significant enough to make individual discussions go awry - is its lack of self-conscious treatment of two questions regarding the semiotic practices it somewhat mechanically adopts. First, what is, for Carlson, the character of the sign function within semiotic theory? Second, how does a continued use of semiotic (struc1

The variation between the British 'theatre' and the American 'theater' itself engages the issue of performance and representation at stake in this discussion. To the American reader and writer, a category that includes both Marvin Carlson and myself, 'theatre' has an exotic aura, and itself takes on a glow of theatricality. Carlson uses 'theatre' throughout, and this choice is significant. I normally use 'theater', a practice which I also consider pertinent to my critical position vis a vis theatricality.

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tural) theory position itself with regard to the post-structuralist insistence on the interpretation of cultural meaning in terms of contestation and flux? Carlson does not engage the intricacies of semiotic theory. Nevertheless, it speaks implicitly in his favour that the semiotic literature includes longstanding attention to the theatre as a uniquely intense locus of semiotic activity. But the bridge between theatrical performance in the narrow sense and theatrical architecture is not so easily traversed as Carlson suggests. The applications of semiotic theory to theatre introduced by the Prague School in the 1930s focused on the intensification of signification in performance, where everything-words, gestures, furniture - is a signifier. A crucial point here is that the production of signs and the construction of signifier/signified relationships is deliberate. This does not imply that all meaning is controlled in a tight allegorical web, only that a playwright, actor or set-designer chooses signifying gestures and objects with care. Obviously, the same is true for theatre architects. But when the interpretation of culture is at stake, semiotic analysis raises problems through its implied treatment of the signified. A post-structuralist position would suggest that both culture and its analysis present issues of practice rather than ones of form or structure, and that semiotics remains a structural and formal mode of analysis. If the Palais Gamier is a sign system that represents French culture, then that signified culture must be conceived as a coherent system as well. But if cultural practice and the production of cultural meaning are seen as open, contestatory processes, then all systems are off and semiotic analysis is questionable. At its most dangerous, the system-based attributes of semiotic or structural analysis repeat the ideological control over the representation of cultural meaning as a totality which - so far as the nineteenth century is concerned - must itself become the object of critical analysis. One might even suggest that semiotics is itself neo-baroque in its implied relationship between a system of signs and a system of culture. Carlson organises his analysis, literally, from the outside in, beginning with a discussion of 'the city as theatre' and moving to discussions first of external architecture and finally of interior space and decoration. This movement suggests that cultural analysis is at the core of an analysis of theatrical structure - both in the literal, architectural sense and in the metaphorical sense of the expressive form through which a culture represents - produces - itself. Where the connections between theatrical politics and political theatre are powerful and clear - in medieval and early modern Europe - the resulting discussion is especially strong. Where such connections are more complicated and often submerged - in Europe and America after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution - the semiotic practice Carlson adopts is ultimately insufficient to penetrate the subtleties of modern political and theatrical mythmaking. In 'The City as Theatre', Carlson shows how control over representation became the prized instrument of secular power in the European city-state. In the medieval city, the cultural authority of the church was displayed by the placement of the church or cathedral at the semiotic as well as the physical centre of the city. The reorientation of urban space coincides with the emerging prerogatives of Renaissance and baroque politics, where the dominant perspective is that of the monarch and his (Henri II in Lyon 1548) or her (Marie de Medici, Lyon 1600) ceremonial entrance into the city. Arguing that 'perspective became a central sign device for the new princes of the Renaissance in Italy' (p. 22), Carlson quotes Ludovico Zorzi's argument that for the Medici, 'perspective became the methodological vehicle for a political discourse, which imposed itself on the objects elaborated by medieval culture (the city being a representative example) in order to modify and adapt them to the ends of its own egocentric ordering

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of knowledge' (p. 22). 'The theatre ties geometry to urbanism', Carlson suggests, with reference to Foucault's invocation (in L'ordre du discours) of geometry as the science of oligarchy, 'since it shows proportions in inequality'. 'The theatrical appropriation of the city-scape by Renaissance princes' (p. 25) is exemplified in Medici Florence, specifically in Giorgio Vasari's archway on the extension of the Uffizi, which creates a proscenium arch through which the tower of the Ducal Palace and Brunelleschi's cathedral dome are unified as theatrical performers in a theatrum mundi controlled by the Medici. Descartes's Discours sur la methode (1637) contained a brief discussion of city planning and architecture, and suggested that buildings and cities are more ordered and beautiful when planned by a single mind (p. 70). Carlson logically extends a principle of Cartesian rationalism into one of political control: 'New "rational" districts, even new cities, sometimes called "Cartesian cities," began to appear in France, laid out according to the principles of order, symmetry, and focus' (p. 73). This discussion parallels Stephen Toulmin's recent argument of 'the hidden agenda of modernity', especially the connection of Cartesian rationalism and its drive to philosophical certainty with the political drive for security and control in the wake of the Thirty Years War. 2 Thus the convergence of political control, urban design and theatrical representation generates what can be described as an international baroque ideology. Carlson is thus able to retain his Cartesian context and at the same time identify Frederick the Great's Berlin Opera House as the first theatre built in modern times as a 'cultural monument' (p. 73). The connection is reinforced by Voltaire, who participated in the design and suggested that Frederick's public architecture was transforming Berlin from a new Sparta into a new Athens. The drive, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to move the Comedie Franchise into an autonomous structure was spearheaded by the due de Richelieu (grand-nephew of the cardinal), Voltaire's patron (pp. 76-8). 'By the end of the century', Carlson argues, 'the concept of the theatre as public monument was firmly established' (p. 79). The argument remains vague, however, on the point of political control. A public forum does not necessarily imply a decentralised power structure, but rather the allowance of public (i.e., middle-class) access to a network of cultural and political representation, whose function is precisely to remind that public of who is in control — of politics, planning and representation. The nexus of political control and theatricality mastered by the medieval church and reasserted by the Catholic baroque did not dissipate with the secularisation and revolutions of the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, politics enters Carlson's discussions of modern theatre only through a conventional opposition of the 'monied classes' against a 'truly populist theatre' (p. 89). There are two problems here, which I would like to address briefly in terms of a discussion of modernity that departs from Carlson's account by raising both the political and the theatrical stakes. The first is the modern persistence of baroque - now neo-baroque - theatricality as a principle of totalising cultural representation and political control. The second is the highly ideological, and hence problematic, character of the elite/popular distinction, which cannot be taken at face value. An understanding of the baroque and neo-baroque syntheses of theatrical representation and political control, with the principle of totality as the common denominator, might encourage sympathy with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's anti-theatrical social theory, which cannot be dismissed as a cranky and perverse act of censorship. (Carlson suggests 2

Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York, 1990).

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as much by attributing to Wagner a 'Rousseauesque note of hostility to urban centers' - p. 86.) Rousseau's argument in the 'Letter to d'Alembert' in favour of keeping Geneva theater-free expressed a Platonic as well as a neo-Calvimst disdain for false systems of representation. Originally, on the Calvinist side, a theological argument that rejected the usurpation of representative power from God, the argument also had a political dimension, in that the theatricality of traditional Catholic power controlled a political as well as a theological cosmos. Rousseau's argument led him to distinguish between formal theatre and popular, open-air festivals, of which he approved. But here perhaps even Rousseau underestimated the reach of political control. It is misleading to accept this distinction in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European festivals, which have tended - in Clausewitzian terms - to pursue theatrical power by other means. The modern open-air impresario par excellence is Max Reinhardt, whose most famous open-air festival production (of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Everyman) inaugurated the Salzburg Festival in 1920. But this production, as I have argued elsewhere, embodied the baroque claim of total cultural representation and control, a claim that was to serve the reconstruction of Austrian identity after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. At work here was an extension of baroque theatricality and totality into urban and meta-theatrical urban culture, not the loosening of theatrical practice.3 Theatrical planners who have chosen to abandon the city altogether have not escaped constructing the political identity of the spectators. Thus the planning of festivals often accompanied an anti-urban ideology of purification and the restoration of natural order and authentic culture, antidotes to the alleged urban threats of pollution - industrial, but also cultural. The festival becomes a cultural pilgrimage; quite brilliantly, Carlson calls Bayreuth the 'Santiago de Compostela of late nineteenth-century Europe' (p. 88). The Salzburg Festival emerged according to a similar ideology of cultural renewal; the absence of Wagnerian megalomania makes the representations of that ideology more intricate. In Bayreuth and in Salzburg, the cultural and spatial rhetoric of pilgrimage intensifies the neo-religious control over public behaviour, as it severs its rituals from the profane everyday life and space of the capital city. The stakes involved in relating political power to public life and cultural representation are thus particularly high in the context of the nineteenth century. As Marx pointed out in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, modern bourgeois life was born in the theatre, or at least in theatricality. The French revolution of 1789 was a toga party, in that images of Roman republicans and regicides served to articulate Jacobin positions. The second Bonaparte, who seized the French state in December 1851 and declared the Second Empire a year later, combined neo-imperial politics with neobaroque theatricality - and theatres. In dubbing his reign a farce, and that of the first Bonaparte a tragedy, Marx recognised the modern alliance of power and theatre, as Rousseau had before him. Just who had political control in the nineteenth century continues to be a matter of significant historiographical debate, with two of the most provocative models remaining Jiirgen Habermas's post-1789 'public sphere', which argues for a definition of modernity in terms of the participation and communicative power of the middle classes in political life, and Arno J. Mayer's 'persistence of the old regime', which asserts the continuing dominance, until 1918, of the European aristoc-

See Michael P. Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890-1938 (Ithaca, 1990).

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racy (the actual persons, not merely their tastes).4 Nineteenth-century cultural historians are working to refine these models, so that bourgeois culture can be discussed according to the appropriation of aristocratic custom, postures and politics. The category of culture is thus more flexible than the structural category of class, but must at the same time retain the centrality of political and social power on which traditional, classbased arguments relied. These questions inform the historical discussion of the nineteenth-century opera house as representation of the claims and contradictions of the urban and political culture that produced it. What better place for the nineteenth-century cultural historian than the opera house? As Jane Fulcher has recently demonstrated, grand opera in nineteenth-century Paris provided 'the nation's image' through its participation in the production of cultural meaning along a broad spectrum from official ideology to contestation and resistance.5 Carlson also reads the nineteenth-century opera house in terms of high bourgeois cultural representation. He quotes journalist Cesar Daly's comment of 1860 (the year of Charles Garnier's commission): 'in Paris the monument which best symbolizes this state of civilization and which most satisfies its needs is the opera house', which 'offers in architectural language the truest expression of the taste, mores, and genius of Paris' (pp. 82-3). If the Palais Gamier represented the strategy for cultural control in the neo-baroque Second Empire (the level of ideology in Fulcher's tripartite scheme), it also expressed a sense of play and movement that is the baroque's gesture to cultural contestation. Sitting between the Louvre and the 'grands magasins', the baroque opera palace did admit to a certain dialogue with the commodified world of the nineteenthcentury bourgeois city. (So much cannot be said for Vienna's Court Opera House, commissioned in 1861 in envious imitation of the Paris project.) This sense of architectural and cultural play is an attractive quality of some urban monuments, and Carlson's juxtaposition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatrical monuments reminds us of the cost, in our own time, of the loss of the sense of public play in monumental architecture. In view of this last issue, Carlson's discussion of the modern opera house and 'arts complex', from the Palais Gamier to New York's Lincoln Center and London's Barbican and South Bank complexes, should be extended to include political transformations of bourgeois cultural representation: from an alliance with neo-imperial politics and representation to the rationalised practices of contemporary capital and real estate interests. The incorporation of theatres into massive urban developments (the Barbican) suggests the abandonment of the baroque, totalising modes of cultural representation that informed the monumental opera house. How does this development accompany the dissipation of cultural symbolism in contemporary bourgeois culture? One potential line of argument might involve the collapse of the public sphere as a necessary dimension for the legitimation of power. The decline of public culture suggests (as Habermas would have it) the decline of public communication, including that of cultural symbolism and the play of semiotic meaning - the level of contestation referred to by Fulcher. Theatrical symbolism, from the Renaissance to the Second Empire - or even to the 1960s and the building of Lincoln Center - involved a duplication of the political cosmos as seen by the monarchs, planners or real estate tycoons in control of theatre politics 4

5

See Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Darmstadt, 1962), trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York, 1981). See Jane Fulcher, The Nation's Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge, 1987).

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and city/national/imperial politics. The neo-baroque architectural autonomy and symbolism of theatres reflected the autonomy and hegemony of the big world. But that same world included a public sphere that drew urban populations into the nexus of political power, to some extent sharing that power, but at the same time reinforcing the existing hierarchy. The Barbican thus emerges as a significant embodiment of the Thatcherite dismantling of the public sphere. Its theatres and their potential communicative, public symbolism are swallowed by space-efficient office and residential structures - by the enclosed, private living and private money-making of late twentieth-century London's recapitulation of early nineteenth-century Manchester.

In his programmatic sketch for a massive (never written) work called 'Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century', Walter Benjamin suggested that the power of the theatre as a locus for bourgeois self-representation extended into the private sphere of home life. The bourgeois salon or living room was constructed as a 'box in the world-theatre', from whose controlling perspective the bourgeois looked at the outside world - most often, presumably, through the lens of a newspaper. The association suggests that bourgeois behaviour at home and in the literal theatre was itself theatrical, and that the behaviour of the spectator plays an integral role in the culture of the theatre. The image of the bourgeois in a theatre box is an important clue to the appropriation of aristocratic, even royal, custom. When the curtain is down, the inhabitant of the box is the spectacle that attracts the attention of other, less centrally placed spectators; when the curtain is up, the box-holder commands the best perspective on the stage, duplicating the controlling perspective that the Renaissance prince commanded in the 'city as theatre'. The changing interiors of nineteenth-century theatres thus provide rich clues for changing modes of bourgeois self-representation and identity. Here, as elsewhere, semiotic analysis must negotiate the possibility that the signs may lie. Whether or not the semiotician accepts the usual structuralist assumption that cultures are coherent, no matter the amount of conflict they exhibit, the sign systems have to be analysable in terms of conflict, censorship and what Victor Turner called 'compromise formations'.6 The sign may represent ideology (a discourse of power masked as a discourse of truth) as well as cultural reality. In this respect, Carlson's discussion of the nineteenthcentury changes in interior theatrical organisation and decoration is weakened by a tendency to read signs as truthful indicators of coherent cultural meaning. The disappearance of royal boxes and the implied homogenisation of the audience may indicate a modern 'embourgeoisement' of the theatre-going public, but that process is not the same as one of equalisation or democratisation. It is, for example, surely mistaken to read the amphitheatre arrangement of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus as a 'Wagnerian auditorium with its democractic seating' (p. 156). The volkisch ideology of the Bayreuth Festival rested on the denial of cultural difference and an ideological projection of a homogenous German cultural identity - a different phenomenon entirely from one of democratisation, and the very opposite of the pluralism that such democratisation suggests. Carlson mistakes ideological cultural representation for social reality here, as he does in reference to Reinhardt's productions for Salzburg and Venice, which were 'popular' only a la Bayreuth: in the ideological sense of reinforcing the idea of the Volk. In reality, they were elite spectacles whose high ticket prices allowed entry 6

See the introduction to The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, 1975).

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only to the rich. Conversely, many unashamedly elite bourgeois theatres have chosen to emphasise the box. The first Metropolitan Opera House (1883) and its resident company were financed precisely to provide boxes for New York's nouveaux riches, and the new house (1966) boasts all the boxes it could fit. If concern with cultural history is to be at the core of a semiotic analysis, then the interaction between culture and signs must respect at least two kinds of particularities: nuances of cultural place and period, and the penetration of those nuances into semiotic practice. Another example from Carlson's discussion of theatre interiors is relevant here; he describes the Palais Gamier as 'the theatre that socially and historically most embodied the high bourgeois aesthetic of which The Phantom of the Opera [the musical] is a central contemporary example' (pp. 201-2). Mention of the Broadway/West End Phantom of the Opera is by no means superfluous, but Carlson neglects to rally its archaeology to the cause of his argument. The phantom's history begins, of course, in Gaston Leroux's 1911 novel, which Walter Benjamin (in 'One-Way Street') called one of the greatest depictions of the nineteenth century. The novel and, to an extent, the movies and the musical that followed it, explore precisely the theatricality and neo-baroque symbolism of the Palais Gamier as a system of cultural representation, and they do so by seizing on the symbolism of ruin and decay. The paradox of the Palais Garnier as a system of cultural representation can be understood via the historian's calendar. The opera house celebrated and embodied the conceits of the Second Empire, but it opened in 1875, five years after the empire's ruin. Thus the physical language of the neo-baroque building and its celebration of a more glorious, authentic, baroque past is intensified by the fifteen-year period of the Garnier's construction, during which the «eo-baroque also receded into the past, as the Second Empire gave way in the national humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1870-1. As a cultural icon, the Palais Garnier is thus the mirror image of the Phantom's masked and desecrated face. Why is the face beneath the layers of mask ugly, and why is it invisible? The answer to both questions lies in the realm of the political. Leroux's novel has a crucial political dimension which no later version - so far as I know has preserved. The phantom, like his opera house, embodies the ruin of a revolutionary past as well as a baroque one, but this past is submerged in the opera house's (the nation's?) depths. As the novel's hero learns about him, he discovers that the phantom 'had found, all prepared for him, a secret passage, long known to himself alone and contrived at the time of the Paris Commune to allow the jailers to convey their prisoners straight to the dungeons that had been constructed for them in the cellars; for the Federates had occupied the opera house immediately after the eighteenth of March and had made a starting place right at the top for their Montgolfier balloons, which carried their incendiary proclamations to the departments, and a state prison right at the bottom.' 7 By 1875 (the year the house opened) or 1881 (the year of the novel's events), the revolutionary past, like the baroque and neo-baroque ones, was in ruins. All these contexts must be restored to Carlson's invocation of a remark of Charles Garnier, made in 1871, the year of the Commune and the transition to the republic. Garnier proposed that (in Carlson's paraphrase) 'all buildings eventually become ruins, and thus objects of study to future historians. Important public structures such as theatres must thus be clearly marked with signs of their use, in Garnier's words, "to assure the accuracy of these future documents and make certain that our descendants, when they study our monuments, as we study those of the Greeks, are quite certain as to 7

Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera (New York, 1987), 248.

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their purpose"' (p. 187). But how indeed are such buildings 'marked'? When cultural artifacts become functions of history, their cultural meaning does as well. One might thus amend Garnier's remark, as well as the spirit in which Carlson alludes to it, with the proposition that a semiotic study of culture and of cultural representations must be attentive to the overdetermined historical and political dimensions of both. MICHAEL P. STEINBERG