Franz-Jose Deiters. Die Entweltlichung der Bühne: Zur Mediologie des Theaters der klassischen Episteme. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2015. 264 pp.

Summary

As Franz-Josef Deiters's title signals, his book offers a sophisticated reading of theater carefully located between theater history, media theory, Michel Foucault's “classical episteme,” and Walter Benjamin's “Entweltlichung.” Not clear from the title, but equally important, are its exceptionally thoughtful readings of five representative dramatic texts of the first half of the Goethezeit. Both the theory and the readings are presented with a clarity and concreteness that belie the abstraction of the title, yet also precisely illuminate the insights to be gained from the major epistemological shifts delineated by media theory and intellectual history of the last several decades. This structure already emerges in the table of contents, where all the chapter titles are quotations from the work at hand, and, in the crucial historical second chapter, most of the sub-section titles as well.

Die Entweltlichung der Bühne makes a double argument: first, theater is a medium in the sense of media theory, and not exclusively performance, and second, as such, it is an important symptom of the shift identified in Foucault's Order of Things from an analogical world-view to the “classical” regime of signs. Deiters lays out the general argument in his “Medienkritische Vorrede,” more accessibly than its title might suggest. Here he politely debunks Erika Fischer- Lichte's influential view that performativity is the essence of theater, using Foucault to relocate the theater into the context of media theory and identifying the shift from analogy to the primacy of signs as “Entweltlichung,” a process of abstraction whose formulation owes, I suspect, something to Deiters's previous engagement with Benjamin on allegory in drama (Drama im Augenblick seines Sturzes: Zur Allegorisierung des Dramas in der Moderne. Versuche zu einer Konstitutionstheorie, 1999).

The second chapter reviews pronouncements about the theater from Gottsched to Schiller and the Romantics. Thankfully, Deiters does not proceed chronologically by summarizing the usual suspects. Instead, he surveys categories that demonstrate exactly how leading thinkers wrote about Entweltlichung and semiotics. Deiters considers here changes in the meaning of truth in philosophy; the new priority of the printed text over performance; the shifts in the triad of communication between author, actors, and audience (the depersonalization of the actor, the silencing of the spectator, the withdrawal of the author behind the curtain);