Philosophy underwent a corresponding theatrical shift in the modern era, most importantly through the work of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus.

This essay situates Wittgenstein's Tractatus and other writings of the Vienna Circle in the context of various political and artistic avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. Despite the Circle's emphasis on logical analysis, its writings were drawn into the polemics that characterized avant-garde groups, in particular their reliance on manifestos. The essay uses the manifestos of the Vienna Circle as a lens through which to uncover the polemical and performative nature of central texts of logical positivism, including the Tractatus, (...) whose condensed, numbered, and pointed sentences echo central features of twentieth-century manifestos. (shrink)

This essay introduces a Common Knowledge symposium on the relationship between texts (for instance, musical scores or dramatic scripts) and performance in the arts by drawing out its implications for the interpretation of publicly consequential texts (such as constitutions, legal statutes, and canon law). Arguing that judges and clerics could learn much from studying the work of Philip Gossett and other practitioners of textual criticism in the arts, the essay suggests that a wider array of choices exists for legal interpretation (...) than the usual alternative between originalism or literalism, on the one hand, and intuitionism, on the other hand. Contributions to the symposium (titled “Between Text and Performance”) emphasize what Roger Moseley calls “improvisatory fluency in historical idioms,” and this introduction recommends that jurists develop for the law the kind of “ear” that musicians must have when a score invites or demands improvisation. (shrink)

In theater studies, the dramatic text tends to be treated as a remnant of an older and even old-fashioned type of theater that has now been replaced by a “post-dramatic” theater, answering only to the logic of performance. Against that view, the article argues for the continuing importance of the dramatic text across different types of theater, including those termed post-dramatic. For what has changed in the case of theater groups such as the Wooster Group that are associated with post-dramatic (...) theater is not that they discard the dramatic text, but rather that they envision a different relation to it. In order to capture the different functions of text in theater, the essay proposes three models and touches on their historical manifestations. The first assumes that the dramatic text dictates theatrical performance; the second, that the dramatic text needs to be supplemented by theatrical performance; and the third, that the text needs to undergo a process of adaptation. This third model is then applied to two case studies, the production by the Wooster Group of Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and the production by Big Dance Theater of Mac Wellman's Antigone. (shrink)

Early on in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein lists various examples of the term Sprachspiel. He begins with “commanding and following commands” and ends with “asking a favor, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying,” all familiar ingredients of what we would now call a speech act theory of language. In the middle of this list, however, is an example that has received little attention: “playing theater”.1 With this formulation, Wittgenstein moves away from a focus on games such as chess, which have unduly dominated (...) the discussion of his late philosophy, and toward an expanded notion of play that includes theater.Once one approaches Wittgenstein’s conception of language through the.. (shrink)