The Theatre of the Virtual.

How to Stage Potentialities with Merleau-Ponty

EMMANUEL ALLOA

[out in Encounters between Performance and Philosophy, eds. Alice Lagaay & Laura Cull, Book Series ‘Performance

and Philosophy’, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2014 (forthcoming).]

I. Merleau-Ponty: The Primacy of Performance?

Richard Schechner, the founder of the 1960s New York avant-garde Performance Group,

considered that the performer only needed to bear one thing in mind if he wanted to overcome the

theatrical (i.e. instrumental, representational) mode in which performance had been entangled for so

long. This sole thing was : “Your body is not your instrument, your body is you”. Schechner’s

proclamation is striking, as it makes clear that thinking about performativity unavoidably means

thinking about embodiment. Unlike an instrument, the performer’s body cannot be separated from

him or laid aside after the performance. The performer is that living body through which he

performs and, as such, the performer cannot face his own body; he can’t act upon it as he would

upon an object. Any act will inevitably have to go through the body. Schechner’s argument seems to

imply that any performance is thus determined by the bodily disposition of its performer. The

performer exemplifies what the performance is about by means of his or her present body rather

than representing a character and thus simply denoting it, as was characteristic of representational

theater. What is performed does not preexist the act and can’t consequently be re-presented, but is

brought about in an expressive, corporeal gesture.

Such a conception of embodied performance has often been allied to a phenomenological account

of the expressive body, namely to the one sketched by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his

Phenomenology of Perception1, consequently turning him into a theoretical key for the performing

arts today 2. Already in the 1960s, performance practitioners such as Lygia Clark or Hélio Oiticica

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith, revised by Forrest Williams, New Jersey: Humanities, 1981. 2 Bert O. States (1992) ‘The Phenomenological Attitude,’ in Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach (ed.) Critical Theory and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 369-79. Stanton B. Garner (1994) Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Philip Zarrilli

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overtly understood their body art with reference to Merleau-Ponty.3 Performance artists like Vito

Acconci or Laurie Anderson also studied Merleau-Ponty intensively. His work had just been made

available in translation at this time.4

However, this infatuation with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is all the more surprising as he hardly

wrote about performing arts at all. Notably the emerging contemporary dance scene does not get a

single mention while the art of painting is an incessant interlocutor in the elaboration of his late

ontology of the visible and his phenomenology could not exist without its constant reference to

literature, from Proust to Claude Simon. Even cinema became the topic of a specific lecture5.

Theatre is only dealt with rather marginally. And yet, it seems that the arts of the stage exemplify

like no other what embodied expression could stand for. However, a number of questions arise

when transforming a thinking that follows the ‘primacy of perception’ into a thinking of the

‘primacy of performance’. Let’s briefly summarize two objections raised by Judith Butler and

Richard Shusterman.

In an early essay Judith Butler criticized the Phenomenology of Perception for still building on

residues of naturalism, while using some elements of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in the elaboration

of her own theory of performativity.6 Butler favors a discourse of construction as the only possible

way of avoiding a pre-existing or naturally given instance of the self rather than talking, as

phenomenology does, about the constitution of a gesture, a meaning or an identity through an

embodied act. What is achieved through an active performative construction is indeterminate and

yet, on the backdrop of a fundamental indeterminacy, there is agency which crystallizes this

indeterminacy and renders “such possibilities determinate”7. As a result, Butler’s body is not so

much a performing body as a continuously (socially and discursively) performed body, unlike that

of Merleau-Ponty. Or, put in a different way, while Butler puts forward good arguments why

Merleau-Ponty does not take the social and discursive determinations sufficiently into account, her

own description insists very much on determination, and (surprisingly enough) rather little on the

(2004) ‘Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor’s Embodied Modes of Experience,’ Theatre Journal, 56, 653-666. F. Elizabeth Hart (2006) ‘Performance, phenomenology, and the cognitive turn,’ in Bruce McConachie & F. Elizabeth Hart (ed.) Performance and cognition, London: Routledge, 29-51. Jens Roselt (2008), Phänomenologie des Theaters (Munich: Fink). 3 Stefan Kristensen (2012), ‘Le primat du performatif,’ in Emmanuel Alloa and Adnen Jdey (ed.) Du sensible à l’œuvre. Esthétiques de Merleau-Ponty (Brussels: La Lettre Volée). 4 Kate Linker (1994), Vito Acconci (New York: Rizzoli), p. 30 & pp. 46-47. Amelia Jones (1998) Body Art. Performing the subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 317. 5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty ‘The Film and the New Psychology,’ (1945) Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern UP, 1968), 48-59. 6 Judith Butler (1989) ‘Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,’ Jeffner Allen and Marion Iris Young (eds.) The Thinking Muse (Bloomington: Indiana UP), 85–100. 7 Judith Butler (1988) ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution. An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,’ Theatre Journal 40, 519-531, p. 521

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body as a space for active travesty, self-fashioning and transformation.

In a similar manner, Richard Shusterman has engaged with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of

embodiment. He criticizes what he considers a model not sufficiently open to transformations,

although for other reasons than Butler.8 While widely accepting Merleau-Ponty’s account of

somatic experience, Shusterman considers it to be narrowly restricted to a description of the body

such as it actually is, without exploring its potential improvements. In the perspective of

Shusterman’s “somaesthetics”, a performing body is a body aware of the potential of its own

enhancements, whereas the problem with Merleau-Ponty is his “commitment to a fixed, universal

phenomenological ontology based on primordial perception”.9 Husserl’s epistemocentric ego would

then only apparently be left behind with the kinaesthetic embodied self of Merleau-Ponty, since no

pragmatic transformation is envisioned; no doing better but only a knowing better about the body

and its functions. One could adapt Marx’ dictum to Shusterman’s meliorist body pragmatics here:

Philosophy has only interpreted the body in various ways – the point is to transform it.

Although from very different standpoints, both Butler and Shusterman thus criticize Merleau-Ponty

for assuming fixed, actual determinations of the body, leaving no space for potential

transformations. For Shusterman, Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of conscious awareness of the body as

a means of improving its actions and for realizing its latent abilities precludes him from accessing a

practical somaesthetics, i.e. practical methods for actors, musicians, sportsmen or just any

individual to improve their somatic awareness and thus their somatic functioning.10 However, the

claim that a reflective consciousness of bodily functions improves their efficiency is debatable:

Outside of learning situations, it seems most somatic practices work all the better if they are

habitualized and go unnoticed. Shaun Gallagher cites the case of a patient who has lost

proprioception from the neck down and needs to consciously monitor (through visual control) every

single gesture. As a result, movements such as walking appear robotic and require more time as the

“silent” spontaneous synthesis of movement Merleau-Ponty talks about is not feasible.11 My focus

here is to question the notion of transformation that tends to be narrowed down to an actual physical

practice, not to discuss Merleau-Ponty’s and Shusterman’s divergent notions of operativity, which

I’ve done elsewhere12. The opposition Shusterman makes between the purely implicit self-

organization of latent somatic processes and the actual and explicit improvement of the gesture

8 Richard Shusterman (2005), ‘The Silent, Limping Body of Philosophy,’ in Taylor Carman and Mark B.N. Hansen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (Oxford: Blackwell), 151-180. 9 Ibid., p. 168. 10 Ibid., p. 175. 11 Shaun Gallagher (2011), ‘Somaesthetics and the Care of the Body,’ Metaphilosophy 42, 305-313. 12 Emmanuel Alloa (2009), ‘Le corps est-il silencieux ?’ in Barbara Formis (ed.) Penser en Corps: Soma-esthétique, art et philosophie (Paris: L’Harmattan), 113-132.

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through practicing seem to run roughshod over an essential dimension of somaticity: that of the

“virtual body”. Located between the description of how things are at present and the prescription of

how things should become, the virtual space is a space for exploration which does not necessarily

require an actualization.

As it shall be shown, there is a reflection in Merleau-Ponty on this third, virtual body, which has so

far received scant attention. Like Gilles Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty intensively read Bergson and his

problematization of the question of ontological “possibility”. Although not as thoroughly elaborated

as Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty has enthralling arguments to contribute to a non-deterministic notion of

possibility or, rather, of virtuality. I shall make clear that this notion has distinct effects upon how to

consider the embodied performance of the actor. The essay will end with a brief “speculative postil”

about the potential political implications of such a conception of the stage.

2. The possible and the virtual

What is “virtuality”? What is the virtual? This term, used so widely today, finds its roots in

Medieval Scholasticism, where it is still essentially coextensive with the notion of possibility. That

which possesses virtus, possibilitas, or potentialitas is, literally, that which can be. Only what is

capable of coming into existence will eventually come into existence. This amounts to claiming an

ontological precedence of essence over existence: whether something effectively is (what in Latin is

called an sit) has no influence on the essence of it (on its quid sit). In its purely potential state, the

essence is already entirely present in the thing and its realisation does no more than consolidate

what was already contained within it, to such an extent that the existence should be held to be

“accidental” in relation to the essence of the thing13. In other words, the concept of being can do

without the existential determination. In the words of A.G. Baumgarten, existence is merely the

“complement of the essence” (existentia est […] complementum essentiae)14. This intuition would

be radicalised even further by Kant, when he demonstrates that existence cannot be considered a

predicate: it adds nothing to the haecceitas, to the “thisness” of the thing. From the standpoint of

their essence, one hundred real Florins are hardly more than one hundred possible Florins15, as

common sense will learn to its detriment.

By positing existence as radically exterior to essence, the task remains of justifying why it is that

some beings become real and others do not. Such logics of causality require to posit that what

13 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones quodlibetales II, q. II, a. 3. 14 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica, § 55. 15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B627.

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eventually happened must have at least been possible before, although it might not have been

anticipated. Following Bergson, we may speak of a “retrograde movement of truth” that projects

into the past that which, at the very same moment, reveals itself to have been the condition of its

own realisation: “as reality is created as something unforeseeable and new, its image is reflected

into the indefinite past”16. In such time sub specie aeternitatis, the real is always already “ideally

pre-existing” – a form of existence that amounts to a purely thinkable or logically representable

existence which does not yet possess any effectivity. The possible is thus reduced to a non-

impossibility. But how to account for the sudden occurrence of realisation which irrupts into the

heart of a purely logical order?

Following Bergson, Merleau-Ponty criticised the subordination of the possible to a mere “logical

possibility17”. The bifurcation of essence and occurrence, which is the natural result of the

hypostasizing of Nothingness, opens the door to a possibilism, in which numerous possible worlds

co-exist: whatever is incompossible in one and the same world gets distributed among numerous

possible worlds, the series of which is, in principle, infinite. In this way, extended to cosmology,

even Leibnizian thought remains under the rule of the principle of logical non-contradiction.

Against such a possibilist position is opposed, at first sight, thought that conceives of no concept of

the possible outside the strict framework of its realisation, after the example of the Megaric

philosophers for whom there is no potency that is not co-extensive with an act18.

Thinking “the possible on the basis of the real”, as Merleau-Ponty advocates along with Bergson,

would mean breaking with the philosophical attitude that seeks, from some independent standpoint,

in some “other world”, the reasons for this one. And yet, while this “actualism” may place thought

back into the reality of experience, it nevertheless remains derivative of what Merleau-Ponty calls

the “necessitarian ideology”: the possible must necessarily realise itself, insofar as a possibility that

never realises itself loses its status as possible and is quite simply transformed into an impossibility.

In such a vision, the possible and the real come to converge in the image of an over-determined

world without lacunae. While possibilism is uninterested in concrete realisation, actualism excludes

any becoming. Both possibilism and actualism fall victim to an “ideology of the intrinsic” incapable

of conceiving contingent becoming except as “irrational, as opacity, as residue19”. To summarise,

worlds that, in abolishing contingency, also evict all otherness if we define the contingent as that

which could also have been otherwise. Addressing either a possible world or a world of pure act:

16 Henri Bergson, ‘The Possible and the Real’ (1930), trans. Melissa McMahon, in Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (eds.), Key Writings (New York/London: Continuum, 2002), 223-232: p. 229. 17 Unpublished manuscript from 17 September 1958, entitled ‘Labyrinthe de l’ontologie’. Fonds Merleau-Ponty, BNF Paris, vol. VI. Part of this manuscript is published in The Merleau-Ponty Reader (2007), Leonard Lawlor & Ted Toadvine (eds.), (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), p. 415 sq. 18 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Theta III. 19 Ibid., p. 416.

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insofar as they both already entail (ideally or empirically) constituted objects, it is no longer “in

progress”.

To no longer think on the basis of identity, but rather on the basis of becomings differentiating

themselves, means on the contrary simultaneously to rethink latency and movement, reserve and

tension. The challenge here now is to re-articulate the possible and the real according to a different

dynamic of forces; not so much a matter of abandoning thinking about potentiality as of having

done with a purely logical determination of these. Having learnt the Bergsonian lesson, Merleau-

Ponty refuses any notion of possibility that would take “the real” as its antonym and looks rather to

develop “a new notion of the possible20”, one which “against actualism and possibilism”, would

already entirely be the “ingredient of being21”, thus relating it to Aristotelian dynamis or to virtus

understood as force. In placing oneself from the outset in the territory of the real, hollowed and

pleated into actualities and virtualities, numerous problems following from the opposition between

the possible and the real are revealed to be, in the Bergsonian sense, false problems: as opposed to

the position of the demiurgic God, the position of praxis prevents, by the very nature of its

incompressible perspectivality and partiality, a representation of all possibilities. Merleau-Ponty

illustrates his point with the example of a short film showing in slow-motion how Matisse proceeds

with the realisation of a painting. The painter was himself overwhelmed by this capacity to

apprehend how the work was constituted, stroke by stroke, from an empty canvas. Still, as striking

as it may be, such a documentation still falls prey to a retrospectivist illusion, positing an initial

nothingness and the pictorial gesture as supervening upon it afterwards, reduced to a mere selection

of possibles:

In his mind’s eye, Matisse did not have all the possible gestures, he did not have to eliminate all but one of them, in

order to make his choice rational. The camera and the slow motion make all the possibilities explicit. Matisse, settled in

man’s time and vision, looked at the actual and virtual ensemble of his canvas and moved his hand toward the area

which called for his brush so that the painting could be what it became in the end. He solved with a simple gesture the

problem which, on analysis and reflection, seemed to contain an infinite number of givens.22

Being wrapped into bodily becoming means overcoming from the start the idea according to which

potency is integrally reabsorbed into the movement of actualisation, but also understanding on the

contrary the incompleteness that Aristotle assigned in principle to all being-in-movement. It may

thus be stated with confidence that,Merleau-Ponty’s thought is placed entirely under the auspices of

20Merleau-Ponty (1968) Résumés de cours, Collège de France 1952-1960 (Paris: Gallimard), p. 137 21 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Labyrinth of ontology’, The Merleau-Ponty Reader (2007), loc. cit., p. 416. 22 Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (1969), trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 44.

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a kinesis of this sort, that transcends local movement – which is itself still beholden to the idea of

completion: “movement is not above all a change of place, but the internal formulation of a doing,

the internal breaching of a body towards that which it departs from and towards that which it

approaches23.” Such non-positionality, or even better, such eccentricity of sensible being, is already

associated with a reflection on the virtuality of bodies as early as The Structure of Behaviour, and

especially in the Phenomenology of Perception24.

3. The Virtuality of the Body

To have a body – The Structure of Behaviour already insists on this point – is to be traversed with

virtualities. The fact that objects are visible in actuality – and therefore that I am able to see them –

presupposes that I contemplate them from a certain point of view which is not itself outside the

visible realm. I can only grasp them virtually, just as I can never have anything more than a virtual

or mediated representation of my back25. If another viewer can have an actual grasp of my own

blind spot, my own actual vision will be simply virtual for that viewer.

Merleau-Ponty seems to adopt the Bergsonian distinction when, faced with the Sartrean opposition

between the real and the imaginary, he instantiates the virtual as a strategic concept, making it

possible to overcome what turns out to be a bad reformulation of the pair possible/real26. In order to

establish that the imaginary is not outside the real, but already inhabits its inactual folds, Merleau-

Ponty refers specifically to Wertheimer’s experiment. In the experimental situation, the psychologist

places the subject in a room whose contents the person can only see by means of a mirror inclined

at a 45° angle27. Wertheimer notices that after a few seconds of disorientation, proprioception as the

foundation of space is abandoned in favour of an orientation founded in the virtual specular image.

After a few moments, it is as if the referential system displaces itself, allowing perception to regain

its verticality. What is happening here under laboratory conditions is nothing more than the

inversion of retinal images carried out by the new-born in its spontaneous ontogenesis. The lived

body is thus redoubled by a virtual body which – and this is the main point – does not just add itself

as a supplement to the lived body, but places itself even before the lived body, like a primordial

23 Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours, p. 172. 24 For a fuller development of what follows, see Marcello Vitali Rosati (2009) Corps et virtuel. Itinéraires à partir de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: L’Harmattan). 25 Merleau-Ponty, La Structure du comportement (1942) (Paris: PUF, “Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine”, 1977), p. 234), The Stucture of Behaviour, trans. Alden Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). 26 James Steeves (2001) ‘The virtual body: Merleau-Ponty’s early philosophy of imagination’, in Philosophy today, n° 45/1, p. 370-380. 27 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), tr. Colin Smith (London/New York: Routledge, 1962) p. 291.

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body defined by its tending toward a “task”28.

The embodied condition implies that man is no longer in-the-world in the Heideggerian sense of In-

der-Welt, but rather that the être-au-monde, as the French translation goes, has to be read in terms of

“being-toward-the-world” in the sense that any posture is polarized and oriented toward the world,

and as a result the subject is always exceeding its own proper place. In a certain way it is not so

much the physical body that projects a virtual body out before itself as an anticipation of its future

actions, it is rather the “virtual body” that “displaces the real body to such an extent that the subject

no longer has the feeling of being in the world where he actually is”29 Thus is it necessary to define

the body as a somatic virtus, as an operating force always exceeding its concrete actualisations.

Numerous analogous cases are also analysed in the Cours de psychologie et de pédagogie at the

Sorbonne, notably concerning phantom limbs, children’s drawings, and even cybernetics. Merleau-

Ponty even goes so far as to extract an anthropological thesis on the notion of the virtual: the ability

to point with one’s finger to a projection in space presupposes “already inhabiting the virtual30”.

This is an ability that is inaccessible to most animals and to people suffering from apraxia. Virtual

space is a “centrifugal or cultural space31”. Here, the idea of the virtual leads to the beginnings of a

theory of intersubjectivity: the gesture of pointing out simultaneously marks both the place from

which the pointing is done (its hic et nunc) and an elsewhere as is its correlate. According to the

notes from the lectures on Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, the gesture constructs a

“‘virtual network’, a system of correspondences between the properties of my actual field and what

would be the properties for me as another, elsewhere, or for another. To point out [montrer] is

already to presuppose this virtual or cultural space32”.

Each one of these cases – and the latter thesis in particular – deserve more in depth analysis than

can be carried out here. The notion of the virtual cannot however become autonomous so long as it

remains imprisoned in the strait-jacket of a philosophy of subjectivity which still favours the

Phenomenology of Perception. Within Merleau-Ponty’s early texts, the virtual body remains

beholden to a projective teleology: the body, even when delivered from the res extensa, remains the

instrument of a “possession of the world”, and the “possession of the world by the body33” remains

28Recent experimental research only confirms these observations, when they dissociate from the notion of the body as that which the subject owns alone as it’s propriety a notion of the body as agency. For the results of this empirical research and their contextualisation in a Merleau-Pontian perspective, see especially the work of Shaun Gallagher and in particular, Gallagher (2008) ‘Action and Agency’, in Shaun Gallagher & Dan Zahavi (eds.), The Phenomenological Mind. An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (London/New York: Routledge), p. 153-170. 29Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 291, translation modified. 30 Merleau-Ponty (1962) ‘Un inédit de Merleau-Ponty’, Parcours deux, op. cit., p. 43. 31 ibid. 32 Preparatory manuscript for the course at the Collège de France Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression (1952-53), Fonds Merleau-Ponty, BNF Paris, Cote I 6 23. Transcription: Stefan Kristensen 33 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 291.

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unilateral. While the Leib can no longer be defined by simple possession [propriété], its effectivity

remains oriented by an I can and the notion of the virtual that of a “system of possible actions34”.

The Husserlian displacement of the Cartesian I think towards an embodied I can (Ich kann), but it

never questions the priority of an ego that possesses all its resources within itself. The question thus

remains open as to the degree to which Merleau-Pontian philosophy truly reaches a notion of the

virtual that is still implicitly actualist or possibilist. How to reconcile the tension toward the act

without its actualisation becoming a task to be fulfilled, already established ahead of time?

Merleau-Ponty entrusted Gilles Deleuze with the essay on Bergson in his collection Les philosophes

célèbres. Deleuze is unquestionably the philosopher who of anyone in the 20th century best

identified the aporiae of the virtual. It is also Gilles Deleuze who chose to refer to theatrical art in

his attempt to approach the virtual which, as with Merleau-Ponty, would fade into the background

before cinema and painting. Here I will briefly reconstitute what is at stake in the Deleuzian

“dramatisation” in order then to ask in what sense a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology, from

the point of view of a theatrical paradigm, makes it possible to uncover not only some interesting

new ways of reading stage aesthetics, but also in what sense the act of the actor allows a new

reformulation of the notion of embodiment.

4. Gilles Deleuze: Embodiment and counter-effectuation

In “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” Deleuze defines the actual as the result of an

embodiment (“What is actual is that in which structure is embodied or rather what the structure

constitutes when it is embodied”35). Deleuze’s philosophical effort can be described as deflating

both embodiment, described as basically unifying and identifying, and the possibilism which is its

transcendent form, opposing them on the contrary to the forces of the virtual. The virtual, Deleuze

says following Bergson, “is not opposed to the real, but to the actual36”, and he relies also on Proust

to add that virtual states are “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract37”. The virtual

is always ready to be actualised; as a force that always already “orientates, conditions,

engenders38”, it possesses a propensity to be productive of new series. This generative process can

be termed “drama”, the inspiration for which is found in the organology of Raymond Ruyer.

34 Merleau-Ponty, ibid., p. 290. 35 Gilles Deleuze (1972) ‘A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?’ in L’Île déserte et autres textes. Textes et entretiens, ed. D. Lapoujade (Paris : Minuit, 2002, 238-269, p. 250; Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 178. 36 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968), tr. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 208. 37 Marcel Proust (1927) In Search of Lost Time, vol 6: Time Regained, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Andreas Mayor, Terence Kilmartin (London: Folio Society, 1981), p. 450. 38 ibid., p. 212

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According to Ruyer, drama articulates the relation between a “role” that depends on the theme that

it plays and a “theme” that exists only in the variations that instantiate it39. Deleuze emphasizes the

theatricality of these concepts when he describes life as virtuality that presents itself as if it were

actual. “The world is an egg, but the egg itself is a theatre: a staged theatre in which the roles

dominate the actors40.”

It is in analogous passages that we come to understand the real difficulty of the Deleuzian project of

conferring some consistency on the virtual, an effort that left him dissatisfied though the end of his

life41. At any moment, the example that had seemed the most capable of leading to it – the theatre –

seems at any moment to risk veering towards one of the two poles that are to be kept apart. For,

while the role may have priority over the actor, and precedes its actualisation in the body of the

actor, this is because the role was written, and thus possible beforehand. The “method of

dramatisation” is revealed properly to be the pharmakon of the virtual: if the virtual only acts like it

is actual, without really being so, the virtual is safe, but one falls back into the most complete

possibilism, and loses the efficiency of the virtus. How then are we to think about the mutual

belonging of the virtual and the actual, of the actualisation which belongs to the virtual42, or of a

virtuality that is the strict co-relation of the actual43. If we accept that the virtual (as opposed to the

metaphysical possible) tends to produce actualisations, we then have to counter this clinamen of

effectuation with what Deleuze calls a “counter-effectuation”: “to be the mime of what effectively

happens, to double the effectuation with a counter-effectuation, the identification of a distance, like

a true actor or like a dancer”44. Pushing back against this force that pushes towards identification,

means amplifying another force, this drân at the basis of Greek drama, which will come to supplant

the order of identification, which is itself at the basis of a reductive conception of actualisation,

replacing it with a principle of intensification45.

However, although the theatre seems to have served as a catalyst for thinking about the virtual, the

theatre as an art eventually ceded its place to cinema. In his rare writings on theatre, Deleuze seems

39 Raymond Ruyer (1946) Éléments de psycho-biologie (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France), chapter IV. 40 ibid. p. 216. 41 Cf. David Lapoujade’s note, which recalls that ‘Immanence : une vie’, published in the journal Philosophie just before his death on 4 November 1995 and ‘The Actual and the Virtual’ edited as an annex to Dialogues II (with Claire Parnet), New York: Columbia UP, 2002 148-152, were intended to be a part of a larger whole entitled “Ensembles et multiplicités”. As Lapoujade continues: “Deleuze wanted to elaborate the concept of the virtual, which he thought he had not gone far enough in explaining,” Gilles Deleuze (2003) Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 388. 42 Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Virtual and the Actual,’ trans. Eliot Ross Albert, in Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet (2002) Dialogues II (New York: Columbia UP), p. 113. 43 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 141. 44 Deleuze (1969) The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia Unversity Press, 1990), p. 185 (translation modified). 45 Cf. Gilles Deleuze (1967) ‘La méthode de dramatisation,’ in Bulletin de la Société française de. Philosophie (July-september 1967), p. 89-118 (reprinted as Deleuze (2002), ‘The Method of Dramatization,’ in Desert Islands and other texts 1953-1974, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles:Semiotext(e), 2004), pp. 94-116; cf. especially p. 95-96.

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to have given up on seeing in the theatrical stage a possible scheme for the coherence of the

virtual46. And even though Merleau-Ponty is hardly more prolific on the subject, one can find a

more precise description of what it means for an actor to embody a role, allowing finally for a

rethinking of the notion of embodiment not only in light of a possible that is already over-

determined in its essence, but on the basis of a fundamental separation from the given.

5. Merleau-Ponty: Reversivisibility

In his lectures on the Psychologie et pédagogie de l’enfant, Merleau-Ponty turns to the notion of

“drama”. What is called drama is the fact that the sense of the actor’s acting is never positively

given, but is only given by contrast, and is only ever to be found “in the virtual centre of his

gestures47”. Although appearing to be marginal in the works of Merleau-Ponty, the theatre alone

seems capable of stitching together the early writings with the late ontology of the visible.

In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty invokes the relation of the actor’s expressive

body to that of the role expressed, relying on an episode from Proust, (without, however, giving the

details)48. How disappointed is the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, when he sees “la Berma”,

whom he had long anticipated in his dreams, on stage for the first time, in the role of Phèdre in

Racine’s eponymous play. The experience goes awry, as the narrator has previously internalised the

text in order to be all the more able to capture the singularity of la Berma’s acting, independently of

the pre-text provided by Racine: “I listened to her as though I were reading Phèdre, or as though

Phaedra herself had at that moment spoken the words that I was hearing, without its appearing that

Berma’s talent had added anything to them”49. One might speak, along with Merleau-Ponty, of a

dissecting gaze, that would attempt to separate out from the pre-established sense its physical vessel

whose task would then consist in nothing more than translating the former.

When, much later, he returns to the theatre to see another production of Racine’s Phèdre, the

narrator once again rests his gaze upon that which constitutes the stage as such and proceeds with a

veritable meditation on what we might describe as the transcendental of the theatre. During his

second visit, doubtlessly anticipating a second disappointment, this time the narrator turns his

attention away from la Berma’s acting as well as from the play as such, and turns his gaze toward

what is going on in the half-light of the theatre house. Here, the analytic of the actor’s acting that

46 Cf. especially Gilles Deleuze (1979) ‘One Manifesto Less’, trans. Alan Orenstein, in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), p. 204-222. 47 Merleau-Ponty (2001) Psychologie et pédagogie de l'enfant, cours de Sorbonne 1949-1952 (Paris: Verdier “Philosophie”), p. 562. 48 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 202. 49 Proust (1927) In Search of Lost Time, vol. 2: Within a Budding Grove, trans. C.K Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin, (London: Folio Society, 1981), p. 18.

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took place on first visit gives way to a contemplation of the situation of the spectators as condition

of possibility of any theatrical representation. However – and this is the decisive aspect – the

audience, distributed among the parterre, the galleries, the boxes, is precisely incapable of being

reduced to what Diderot liked to call the “fourth wall”, i.e. a purely logical and, therefore, invisible

condition of the representation: Proust instead describes how the house is, in all its richness, as the

condition of the stage, itself also a stage for an audience that is always already conditioned by the

representation that it nevertheless itself institutes. The theatre house is not the reverse or invisible

side of the stage, but rather a threshold where the potency of the acting is already foreshadowed, a

pre-stage on which, despite the darkness, the spectators are inevitably already actors. Such is the

Princess of Guermantes in her box, who “ceasing to be a nereid, appeared turbaned in white and

blue like some marvellous tragic actress dressed for the part of Zaïre, or perhaps of Orosmane”.50

We might conclude from these few remarks that the theatre is always ahead of itself, having latently

begun even before it explicitly becomes a theatrical representation. Its condition of possibility is its

having always already begun, even though nothing is yet to be seen. “If I imagine a theatre with no

audience in which the curtain rises upon illuminated scenery, I have the impression that the

spectacle is in itself visible or ready to be seen, and that the light which probes the back and

foreground, accentuating the shadows and permeating the scenes through and through, in a way

anticipates our vision”51. Merleau-Ponty dedicated important pages of the Phenomenology of

Perception to the question of the transcendental without coming to a satisfactory conclusion. Here is

to be found the theatrical pre-figuration of its solution, given in his last writings: the transcendental

and that which it makes possible can only be rigorously described in terms of reversibility and

reciprocal inversion. The visible and the invisible mark less the dividing line between the two

metaphysical realms than an implicative rolling of the visible over into itself that we might call

reversi/visibility. “My body as a visible thing” Merleau-Ponty explains, “is contained within the full

spectacle. But my seeing body subtends this visible body; and all the visibles with it. There is a

reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other”52. The sensible chiasm indicates an

inextricable relatedness which cannot ultimately be stabilized and impedes finding an ultimate

standpoint – be it physical or metaphysical – from which to organize the spectacle of the world.

Coming back to Proust, an analogous discovery seems to be at work when the narrator of In Search

of Lost Time turns his gaze once again toward the stage in order to re-evaluate the expressiveness of

la Berma’s acting. The expressive operation, Merleau-Ponty writes, “brings the meaning into being

50 ibid., vol.3, Guermantes Way, p. 34. 51 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception, p. 278. 52 Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), The visible and the invisible; followed by working notes, trans. Adolpho Lingis, (Evanston, Ill. : Northwestern UP, 1968), p. 138.

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and makes it effective, and does not merely translate it”53. The theatrical role does not pre-exist

what Merleau-Ponty calls, in Cezanne’s word, its “realization”; similarly music, where the musical

phrase can in no way be dissociated from the physics of the sounds that carry it and in which it

resides entirely. Not a single material aspect of the actor’s body, not a single change in her gait, not

a grain in her voice: in a word, no physis can in principle be marginalised from what is taking place.

Having abandoned his analytic gaze, Proust’s narrator suddenly hears “Berma’s voice, in which

there subsisted not one scrap of inert matter refractory to the mind.”54

In his 1949-51 Cours de psychologie et pédagogie, Merleau-Ponty has an often overlooked

discussion of theatrical expression. Just as he shall later on speak of the “enigma of visibility”

(énigme de la visibilité) regarding the appearance, on the painter’s canvas, of something that was

not yet there and is yet nowhere else, Merleau-Ponty here evokes the “magic” of the theatre55.

Distancing himself from Diderot’s paradox of the actor, which remains too dualistic, he notes the

fact that never “is the role...given in advance”56 and that “any production of the sense of a play is

always a recreation”57. In this way Merleau-Ponty distances himself from the theatre of

representation. For there is indeed an overlapping between the two orders between Phèdre and la

Berma: it is almost impossible to see Phèdre without la Berma, as much as it is to see la Berma

without Phèdre. We find ourselves further removed from Deleuze’s structuralist thesis of the

priority of the role over the actor58, but also from the Sartrean division between the real and the

imaginary. No doubt, “the actor entrusts himself to his body” (l’acteur se fie à son corps), as

Merleau-Ponty says, echoing Paul Valéry who underscores that the painter engages his entire body

in the pictorial act59. But the body of the actor coincides with a real body to no less an extent than

does the body of the painter, a real body that must, for the length of the performance, negate its

actual historicity in order to become an imaginary body. The actor’s body is much rather a virtuality

which, being always already real, possesses the ability to detach itself from the actual. Expression

through acting means for Merleau-Ponty “to make the body play a certain role insofar as it is

capable of allowing itself to be taken up by other roles it habitually plays”60

We can refer to the beginnings of Greek theatre and of Thespis, considered to be the first tragic

author/actor. According to tradition, Thespis experimented, in the second half of the 6th century

B.C., with different sorts of masks in order to maintain both the plasticity and the indeterminacy of

53 Phenomenology of Perception, p. 213. 54 Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol.3, Guermantes Way, op.cit., p. 38. 55 Merleau-Ponty, Psychologie et pédagogie de l'enfant, p. 557. 56 ibid., p. 560. 57 ibid. p. 559. 58 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 216. 59 Merleau-Ponty, Psychologie et pédagogie de l'enfant, p. 561. 60 ibid., p. 559.

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the face61. The mask – this persona that Boethius interpreted according to a popular etymology as a

per-sonare, a resonating-through – consisted for Thespis in a fine layer of white lead applied to the

face, transforming the actor into a receptacle of possible figures. The actuating body comes then to

resemble a medium, in the sense that Aristotle attributed to this word, i.e. the ability to take on a

form without losing the ability to take on other forms. That which becomes manifest in this virtual

appearing is the simultaneity of compossibles in act, presenting themselves in their inextricable

overlapping. By taking on an ontological sense, Wertheimer’s “overlapping” points toward a new

concept of potential being. Fundamentally, this is a being of dimensional depth: the actual and the

inactual no longer allow themselves to be distinguished in principle but are permanently

overlapping, rolling over and reversing themselves in a space that is defined by its inexhaustible

depth. Potential being resonates with a notion of pregnance (prégnance) that is reciprocal

enshrouding, co-implication and unfolding62.

As a result, the notions of incarnated existence and “flesh” (la chair) are categorically transformed:

far from being a mere irruption ex nihilo whose “mystery” must then be explained, embodiment is

not a unique and resounding event of incarnation, but rather remains among what Nietzsche’s

Zarathustra called all those “silent events”. Taken in a theatrical perspective, embodiment is freed of

its soteriological rags and rather stands for an ongoing “embodiment”63. The experience of the stage

shows that, insofar as the human being appears for others, he is always elsewhere than in his own

place. At the same time as he sees, he is always also virtually visible for others to whom he gives

himself as a spectacle. To think the reversibility of the visible and the invisible is then to think the

reversibility of vision in act and visibility in potency: the order of visibility is an order of

specularity or, rather, of spectacularity.

6. “This immense virtual audience that was waiting” (speculative postil)

Starting from the virtual and its theatrical stage is also a strategy which could eventually allow –

and this is the speculative hypothesis derived from the preceding analyses – to redistribute several

instituted distinctions, first of all the one between real and imaginary of which Sartre had affirmed

the unsurmountability. To say that the imagination is a world in which nothing happens and which

remains exempt from any ingredient of reality amounts to making a sanctuary of it and, by

61 A reference of sources concerning Thespis can be found in Arthur W. Pickard-Cambridge (1968) The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 190. And more generally on the beginnings of Greek theatre: Jennifer Wise (2000) Dionysus Writes. The Invention of Theatre in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). 62 Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours, p. 167. 63 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 194.

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extension, denying it any efficaciousness. Anything can go in the imagination then, as soon as

whatever happens there has no effect on the outside. Jacques Rancière, who subtly revealed the

consequences of making such a sanctuary of the imagination, remarks that in this way, we could

then enjoy ourselves with novelistic or theatrical fiction “without trouble since they do not leave the

frame of the fictional situation64”. To concede on the contrary the virtual character of any stage, is

to admit that its delimitation is not of a logical order, but rather a horizontal one, always implying

its own lateral overflow, always biting at its own edges. Leaving behind the dialectic of presence

and absence that still structures the distinction between the real and the imaginary for Sartre,

Merleau-Ponty’s formulations attempt rather to circumscribe a being of imminence65, always ready

but never fully deployed, in brief: an “overlapping-being”.

Associating the virtual and the overlapping opens up a reformulation of the political stage to which

Merleau-Ponty was sensitive – as his circumstantial texts attest. While being above all a homage to

Greek thought, the introductory text “The Founders” contained in the collection Les philosophes

célèbres criticises Greek political thought for having conceived the world in terms that were still too

static. Politics was indeed instituted in the Greek city as a theatrical stage, but was nevertheless still

dominated by the idea of presence: the political actor addresses other actors, present in actuality

because the other half of society (women, slave, metics, etc.) are at work in their absence. The

limits of the city coincide with the limits of the voice and, as a result, with the limits of the actors66.

What must be thought, following the path opened up by the political thought of St. Paul of Tarsus, is

this “immense virtual public (still) waiting at the gates of the culture of the State67.” The task to be

thought then presents itself in the following terms: how to enlarge the common stage, without

establishing an insurmountable divide between actors and spectators, or between those who do the

representing and those who are represented?

The Merleau-Pontian meditation on this public waiting at the gates is historically concretised in

what Rancière calls the “edges of the political”. These margins, these spaces in front of the stage

previously kept out of the space of the action, can claim visibility and make its voice heard. The

conjuncture between a theatrical architecture and a political architecture becomes sensible in the

genesis of the “spectator’s gallery68”. Even though certain groups like women and metics did not

have the right to speak in the Athenian assembly of the pnyx, this place was conceived as basically

64 Jacques Rancière (1998), The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 89. 65 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 245. 66 Aristotle, Politics 1326b5 sqq. 67 Merleau-Ponty (1956) ‘Les fondateurs,’ in Maurice Merleau-Ponty (ed.), Les philosophes célèbres (Paris: Mazenod), p. 44. 68 Ludger Schwarte (2005) traced out its history in “Parliamentary Public” in Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel (ed.), Making Things Public – Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press), p. 786-794.

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open and permeable around the edges, allowing the excluded to participate as spectators69.

Abolished in the earliest modern parliamentary architecture, the spectators’ galleries reappear in the

revolutionary assemblies. When the Third Estate met on 19 June 1789 in the Jeu de paume hall of

the Versailles palace, the spectators’ gallery was maintained, as if the inclusion of the excluded

demanded the counter-constitution of a new excluded “third”, both witness to its own constitution

and at the same time reservoir of future actors70. But whether these limits be thought from the start

as virtually crossable thresholds (by means of demonstrations or interjections) or whether they be

on the contrary an instrument of the immunization of the inside, is ultimately of secondary

importance. Rather, what emerges is that politics is by essence a domain that is permanently in

excess of itself and therefore remains always – as Castoriadis repeats after Merleau-Ponty – a work

in progress, a task to be done (à faire). This is also why in the end, one could argue that utopia itself

as an ideal to be realised remains prisoner to the wrong kind of idea of the possible71. If José Luis

Borges said that the essence of art was “the imminence of a revelation that never comes about”, we

might conjecture that is the same with the political, for which any re-routing of imminence to

immanence amounts to denial of its lines of flight, its self-escaping character.

Although the virtual scenes or stages that then arise are indeed virtual, this does not mean that they

are illusory72, they are not so much unreal as they tend as it were to “superimpose” themselves on

what is given73. Far from simply transcribing the given, term for term, the virtual stage allows us to

see that which within the given was previously unseen by “positing as possible that which was

supposedly impossible74”. The stage de-identifies subjects with their actual attributes, and

reconfigures the figure of the visible by disfiguring the resemblance of the identical to itself. In this

way, theatre and politics sketch a certain convergence and reveal a stage that is one of irreducible

imminence, a stage on which the modalities of what is “to come” appear in such a way that they

cannot be deduced from any pre-text and whose open future does not preclude prolongations. Such

openness is perceptible, in an inchoate form, in Merleau-Ponty – a thinker whose entire reflection is

placed under the sign of a “reversibility always imminent and never realised in fact75.”

69 Oddone Longo (1989) ‘La scena della città. Strutture architettoniche et spazi politici nel teatro greco,’ in Lia De Finis (ed.), Scena e spettacolo nell’Antichità (Florence: Olschki), p. 23-42. 70 Ludger Schwarte, ‘Parliamentary Public,’ loc. cit., p. 791. 71 Cornelius Castoriadis (1989) ‘Done and To Be Done,’ in David Curtis (ed.) The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 367-417. 72 Jacques Rancière (1990) On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007), p. 50. 73 Jacques Rancière (1995) Dis-agreement. Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minn. Press, 1999), p. 56-57. 74 Deborah Cohen (2004) ‘Du possible au virtuel : la scène politique,’ Labyrinthe 17. URL : http://labyrinthe.revues.org/index170.html. 75 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 147.

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Trans. John Rogove

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