Archives and the gap

An archive is something more than a building in which one stores documents. In his book, Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida begins by relating the history of the word “archive”. He reminds us that the Archon in ancient Greece was something like a chief magistrate, and it was the Archon who had in his possession the most important documents of the polis. The archive was, then, the house of the Archon, the place in which these important documents existed. Derrida would like us to recognize in this morsel of historical information that the archive was, in addition to the site in which one could find important documents, a space controlled by a politician. The Archon devised the ordering system and could therefore access certain information more quickly than other members of the society. Derrida helps us to think of the archive as something more than a storage place. He helps us realize that an encounter with the archive is an encounter with a system of power, an encounter with a specific way of thinking about what it means to record one’s history.

More than abstruse information, Derrida’s words have a certain weight in the field of theatre history. The Archon was, in addition to being the proprietor of historical and political information, the primary organizer and financial backer of the festivals in which playwrights like Aeschylus and Sophocles performed their plays. Immediately, certain questions arise. What are we to make of this relationship between the political figure of the Archon and the medium of the theatre, which, even (or especially) in ancient Greece, constituted a major form of knowledge production? Was there a political objective behind the theatre festivals? Is it possible to find in the stories presented on the stage correlations between the moral of a story and a desired mode of behavior within the Greek polis? To offer a facile comparison between this situation in ancient Greece and our contemporary world, consider Rupert Murdock and his ownership of both Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. Are we to think that Murdock’s own ways of thinking in no way interfere or filter into the programming of Fox News? Without going to extremes or giving a knee-jerk statement and accusing Murdock of injecting a right-wing, megalomaniacal viewpoint of a curmudgeon billionaire into the broadcasts picked up by millions of American television viewers every day, we can at least acknowledge that there is some relationship between the man with the money “behind the scenes” and the material that appears “upon the stage”. The nuances of that relationship will develop differently depending on how you look at the situation. Regarding theatre in ancient Greece, I feel comfortable asserting that plays like Oedipus Rex, which played to an all-male, citizen-only audience, had as one of their goals the education of that audience. Eventually, when Aristotle brings up examples of the best plays and offers his reasons for why indeed they are the best (in chapter 13 of the Poetics), his rationale has little to do with the casual enjoyment he derives from watching theatre. Instead, Aristotle desired the construction and maintenance of a powerful polis, and to fulfill that desire he sought for ways to impress upon the citizenry an ethic of obedience and stewardship. For him, Oedipus Rex raised the question of how one can become the perfect citizen, i.e. he who would place all his energy toward the betterment of the city. The Archons backing the theatrical productions shared that desire. Consequently, we need to look at theatre in ancient Greece as a political stage upon which key concepts of citizenship and mastery-of-self (for more, see Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, volume 2) appeared repeatedly for hundreds of years.

Ancient Greece is not a unique case. A complex field of relationships, one that united politicians, religious figures, aristocratic audiences, commoners, and artists of all types, buttressed Venetian theatre from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The archive-theatre relationship continued to thrive even though the Archon disappeared from the political scene (though I should point out that he was absent only in title and actually remained on the scene in other positions). As I have described in recent blog postings, the politicians of Venice were invested in creating a specific image of Venice, and they utilized painting, architecture, literature, and theatre to mold that image. For me, there is something very interesting occurring in baroque Venice. There are two systems of archiving at work. Remember, “to archive” means more than to store information. It also means to organize space, to construct the rules of the (social, economical) game, to legitimize specific ways of thinking, and to privilege certain types of information over others. The two systems appear in two different forms, one discursive and the other in the form of the image. Political treatises, records of births, accounts of property ownership, reports from foreign ambassadors, and the like make up the materials of the first system. Many of those materials still exist within L’archivio di Stato, Venezia, and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, two places I have recently visited and explored. Scholars from many disciplines have been plumbing the depths of those archives for years, each one attempting to learn how Venice attained the powerful position it held for several centuries, as well as how it lost that privileged position. The other system, however, is infinitely more interesting. The paintings in the Scuole Grandi, the facades of the buildings within the city, the décors of church interiors, and trace materials left over from the active theatre scene all constitute a system of visual archiving. In one manner of speaking, I am trying to read these images, just as I read the documents. But “reading” does not quite cut it because the various artistic media, the varying scenes displayed, and the techniques used to render those scenes speak through different languages, ones that are not so easy to read and even less easy to understand. This is the cacophonic language of aesthetics. Again, questions arise. What is the relationship between visual media and the workings of society? From where do certain “styles” or types of design derive? What kinds of messages exist within visual media? Who can read them? How does one analyze the relationships that exist between the visible and the articulable, between what we see and what we say about what we see? One answer I can give that touches on each of those questions is that there existed in baroque Venice a visualism; that is, there was a concerted effort made by those in power to craft the way reality appeared to people, both within the Republic and without. Other scholars have investigated this important role of appearances and the visual in the baroque. A Spanish scholar named Maravall offers this idea, which cuts to the heart of my interests:

“[T]he culture of the baroque is an instrument to achieve effects…whose object is to act upon human beings. Human beings are the object of a determinate conception (to which the culture must be conditioned) that is designed to ensure that they behave among themselves and with respect to the society of which they are a part and the power that controls it, in such a manner that the society’s capacity for self-preservation is maintained and enhanced according to the way they appear structured under the political primacies in force at the moment. In sum, the baroque is nothing but a complex of cultural media of a very diverse sort that are assembled and articulated to work adequately with human beings such as they and their groups are understood in the epoch whose limits we marked off [i.e., basically, the 17th century], so as to succeed practically in directing them and keeping them integrated in the social system.” (From The Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, p.58)

This idea of visualism, more specifically baroque visualism, has been a primary goad during my research this summer. In Venice, I recognized an effect that, while arguably at work at all times in all places, seemed amplified in the Republic of Saint Mark. I can describe this effect in the following way. To a certain extent, Venice makes sense to my eyes. This sense was crafted by the thousands of images of Venice that I had encountered prior to arriving in that city. I have seen Guardi’s views of the Grand Canal hanging in many American museums. In those museums’ shops I would find gift cards bearing images of Venice reproduced from paintings by Guardi and Canaletto. And then there were the more abstract “images” of Venice that traveled to my ears in the form of story and myth. I had head of Venice with its canals and treasure trove of artistic works, and what I heard had transformed into a mental image of the city. In one way, I could say, “sure, there it is. That sure is Venice. What a crazy looking place.” In some way, the actual Venice gelled with the virtual Venice that I had created like a montage from the odd painting, gift card, and story. But, at the same time, in addition to helping the city makes sense to me, all of these images that I encountered prior to actually arriving in Venice also became challenged when I laid my eyes on the place for the first time. There was something disconcerting that occurred when the experience of seeing the city for the first time merged with the montage of it made from secondary sources that I carried around in my head. I began to realize major differences, each of which was made visible by contact with the materiality of being-there. My mental picture of Venice became distorted by what I experienced. This gave way to the overlapping that I referenced with the Magritte painting (see my last post about Venice and historiography). To sum it up in a slightly different way, I can say that, in some respect, there is a harmony between what I see in Venice and what people have said about what they had seen there; or, between what I saw as I stood on the Rialto bridge and what I had seen of that view in Canaletto’s veduti. At the same time, however, there was a profound dissonance between what I saw and the mental image I brought with me. That dissonance was formed by a profound disjunction between what I saw and what I had heard or “read”.

This disjunction, this chasm that exists between the visible and the articulable, has a corresponding historical dimension in the gap that formed between the archive created out of documents and the archive created out of images, both of which were created at the behest of certain people or groups of people at specific times in Venice’s past. It is usually the case, I believe, that we don’t investigate these gaps. Rather, we merge what we see and what we read as smoothly as possible, and we do this in order to make sense of the world. It seems safer to say, “I see. Venice. Yeah, this is a crazy place…just like people have said” — instead of leaving yourself open to an existential crisis by acknowledging that no, Venice is not o.k. Venice doesn’t make sense at all—a city perched upon a lagoon?—but here it is…so what am I to do with it? I choose the latter, and I am setting out to map that nonsensical place by looking at the concept of visualism, which I define as the set of practices by which images and the messages they bear become rationalized. We can think ofvisualism as a series of machines that act as instruments intended to smooth over our doubts, instruments that produce an intelligible image out of a non-intelligible invisibility.

All of this motivates my dissertation on Venetian history, theatre, and what I call sceno-historiography, or a history created through the staging of specific scenes. But Will, you will surely say, you don’t write about theatre. You write about churches and paintings on ceilings. And, I would consent, you would be right. So, here’s where the theatre comes into play. The theatre is a site/sight where the visible and the articulable meet. Authors use a text to present certain ideas and ways of seeing/thinking to an audience. Designers hurl a barrage of visual materials at their audiences, too, from actors’ bodies to the scenographic environment, all of which are materials that offer additional ideas. The visual materials won’t always propose the same ideas as the text. Sometimes the two fields will present different and opposing sets of ideas, but this opposition is frequently intended to produce a specific effect within the spectators. Then, in addition to the playwrights and the designers, the mass audience brings another component to the theatre experience. An audience marks an instant where people of diverse class systems come together to witness the same thing. Each audience member may see things differently, but the text and the visual materials often take that multiplicity of viewpoints into consideration. In sum, I look at theatre as a complex system of knowledge production that consists of texts, embodied performances, scenery, and audiences. These productions sometimes happen within theatre buildings, which belong to the scenic component of the knowledge production system, but they also happen outside of theatre buildings, in the streets. Both locations interest me. The productions that occur out of doors are part of what I often refer to as the performances of everyday life, and these performances, especially in Baroque Venice, had huge political and social stakes. I intend to analyze those stakes and the theatrical means by which specific goals were achieved. It seems to me that, while text was certainly important, the visual materials within theatre buildings and out on the streets comprised an extremely powerful source of knowledge production. Even illiterate peasants could read images, whereas only those with enough money for proper schooling could read texts.