Textuelle Infrastrukturen des Theaters. Dramaturgie als Vermittlung
Authors: Etzold Jörn 
Published: July 2023

This article examines the institution of dramaturgy in theatre as an agency of mediation. The term »dramaturgy« still has a double meaning in most European languages. In many situations, it continues to designate the art of writing plays, and a dramaturge in French or Spanish is also a playwright. However, a few years ago, the originally German notion of the dramaturge also started spreading into other European languages and into theatre in Europe and around the world. This article traces the evolution of dramaturgy from its first appearance in the works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to its use in contemporary independent theatre – especially in the sector that is referred to as the Freie Szene in German.

Dramaturgy came into existence during the transition from the episteme of »representation« to the episteme of »man« diagnosed by Michel Foucault (2003). Once the sovereign had exited the stages of theatre and politics, Lessing, the first dramaturge in history, searched for another affective bond between the isolated »subjects of interest« (Foucault 2004b) in civil society. Lessing translated Denis Diderot’s treatise on a theatre of intimate scenes into German; these scenes, hidden behind an invisible fourth wall, were to be watched by a public consisting of mere »witnesses one does not know about« (Diderot 1996, 336). It is especially remarkable how Lessing’s interpretation of Diderot as well as his own work as a dramaturge was shaped by Protestantism. His theatre was supposed to mediate a clear message that concerned each of the individuals assembling in the theatre directly. A comparison between Lessing’s reading of Aristotle’s Poetics and Luther’s brief notes on Protestant liturgy shows that both understood the proceedings – the performance of a play or service – not as a ritual that is temporally structured by poetics or liturgy but as an event that conveys a certain message. For Luther, the clear reading of the translated bible and the sermon were central to the service; Lessing, who fiercely fought Johann Christoph Gottsched’s attempts to write a new poetics of the theatre, translated and reinterpreted Aristotle’s concept of kátharsis into a concept centered on feeling pity for human beings »of the same stamp and grain« (Lessing 1988, 422). Theatre, like the service, became an event that concerns each visitor directly. Dramaturges exercise what Foucault calls »pastoral power« (cf. Foucault 2004a, 173–200, and passim) and become the herdsmen of the spectators assembled to cry for their own kind. Their regulative position is thus related to that of the police (Schiller 1982; Vogl 2006; 2008; Müller-Schöll 2020).

But the post-sovereign and – not just in Lessing’s case – eminently Protestant governance of affects is again and again confronted by the persistence of the representation of sovereignty despite the epistemic transformation to »man« analyzed by Foucault, not only in the colonies of European states (Spivak 2008) but also in a playful, but not always harmless way in state and city theatres, where it takes the form of (artistic) directors acting as eccentric and intrusive »berserks«. The dramaturge is assigned to those sovereigns as a consultant and mediator who has the rehearsal schedule at hand and communicates with the media und the public. Due to his or her knowledge of post-sovereign techniques of government, the dramaturge can escape the tyrannic rule of the berserk directors. In his analysis of the German baroque Trauerspiel, Walter Benjamin finds that the Janus-headed, double figure of the sovereign and martyr is always assigned an intriguer, who he analyzes as the »forerunner of the ballet master« – and thus also of the dramaturge, who does not decide himself, but mediates and plays the »human affects as creature’s calculable mechanism« (Benjamin 1997, 274).

After discussing the historical definition of dramaturgy as a means to mediate civil society to itself, this text addresses the textual infrastructures of contemporary independent theatre in Germany, where the scene, due to sizeable public funding, is somewhat different to similar scenes in most other countries. The notion of infrastructure is put forth to designate the persistent dispositions that furnish environments (Peters 2015) and constitute what can and cannot be perceived. Hence, as long as infrastructure functions, it tends to escape perceptibility. Theatre depends on electricity, a water supply, streets, and the like, but as Jean-Jacques Rousseau already remarks in his long letter to Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, it does not just require infrastructure but also generates it (Rousseau 1978). However, in this text, the notion of infrastructure will not only be limited to technological facilities but will also be used to describe the modes of subjectivation, the basic assumptions, and the silent convictions that keep the theatre business going. As one example of textual infrastructure, the text will examine tender offers for independent theatre projects. This money handed out by cities, regions, or the state is essential for their funding. The proposals and applications generally written by dramaturges are required to be essentially new and innovative, but should also run to schedule (cf. Klug 2021). Textual practices of reading, revising, copyediting, and translating inscribe artistic work into the discourses of the funding institutions and the underlying models of artistic subjectivity. Again, dramaturgy serves to mediate civil society to itself. All these practices address the isolated individuum with its competences of communication, innovation, and commiseration. The outlook given at the end tries to sketch other dramaturgical practices that acknowledge the fragility of all mediation. On the one hand, aesthetic experience can never be fully mediated. On the other hand – and maybe more importantly – not all Earth inhabitants are members of civil society or can be approached by means of the regulating arts of governance that pastoral dramaturgy practices: the question of who can be a member of Western civil societies and appear on their not only theatrical but also political and juridical stages is determined by the harsh and brutal politics of exclusion that neither enable nor require mediation.