FIVE
Performance Text, Cultural Context, and Intertextual Practices
I believe that if a dramatic work is well composed and performed, the stage offers as many real pictures to the audience as the action offers favorable moments to the painter.
Diderot, Conversations on "The Natural Son"
5.1. THE PERFORMANCE TEXT IN THE GENERAL TEXT: THE CULTURAL ROOTS OF CODES AND CONVENTIONS
In the last chapter I made some adjustments in my classification of the codes of the performance text and in the corresponding schema of code relations. These comments are still insufficient. I will now make some additional observations on the relations that the performance text establishes with the general text, and, within the general text, with its own cultural context.
We have seen how the codes of a performance text are to a large extent the result of the action exerted on the extra-performance cultural codes by theatrical conventions proper to the performance text in question. In this sense, we can say that the codes are determined and motivated by these conventions. But if we enlarge our perspective to include what I have designated as the /cultural context/ (see 2.7.) of the performance text, we will find that the extratextual cultural codes (later to be divided into aesthetic and nonaesthetic groups)3 also precede the performance text and its conventions (i.e., they are located "upstream"), and have a determining, motivating function on the performance text and its conventions. As ideological, epistemic, or axiological codes, they are in fact part of the general text to which the performance text belongs, and from which (as I already mentioned in 4.7.1.) its conventions "originate" (by analogy or by contrast).2 Therefore, if my understanding is correct, the extraperformance cultural codes feature twice—in contrasting circumstances—in the process of "generating" the performance text. In the first instance, "at the begirming,"
122
The Semiotics of Performance
they feature as determinants and motivators. In the second instance, "halfway/' they are determined and motivated (here, obviously,, in the specific guise of extra-theatrical codes affected by the action of the theatrical conventions). This process can be visualized as follows:3
General
Text
(cultural
and ideological
codes, period,
episteme, etc)
Theatrical
Conventions
(general,
particular,
distinctive)
General Text (extra-theatrical codes)
Performance
Codes
(general,
particular,
distinctive)
Yet, taking a closer look, it is not only theatrical conventions that interact with the codes of the cultural text. Performance codes are codes from the general text transformed (to a greater or lesser degree, or sometimes not at all) by the effect of theatrical conventions. These performance codes also retroactively affect the general text. They affect the codes of other texts that constitute it, whether performance texts or not, whether aesthetic texts or not, provoking changes and realignments within it. Taldng into account all possible interactions, including the interaction between theatrical conventions and performance codes discussed at length above, the diagram could be modified in the following way:
2
Theatrical Conventions
Performance Codes
Let us explpre just one very important example: the origins of Renaissance perspective. This immediately lends support to my model. In fact, the new optical, perceptive, and geometrical conventions created by artists and theorists in fifteenth-century humanist culture (General Text of Humanism), in their attempt to find a new way to represent space (linear perspective),4 were applied and eventually codified between 1400 and 1500 in painting, architecture, and theater (where new conventions appeared, and, as a result, new codes for stage scenery, iconograpy, and dramatic writing emerged). Finally) the conventions were stabilized and socially instituted by Renaissance culture (General Text of the Renaissance).5
The model I have devised here also has the capacity to record similarities and concordances that are often demonstrated (apart from obvious
mmmmmm.
Performance Text, Cultural Context, and Intertextual Practices 123
specific differences) between the codes of the performance text and those of other aesthetic texts belonging to the same cultural synchrony. In fact, just like theatrical conventions, the conventions of other aesthetic texts are ''determined" by the general text, upon which they, in turn, also exert an influence. An interesting example of this is offered in a recent study by Minonne (1979) which analyzes Almanno Morelli's Prontuario delle pose sceniche, a "handbook of theatrical poses." This volume was written in 1854 as a technical manual for actors, and Minonne compares the perspective that it offers on kinesic codes with Francesco Hayez's paintings and Tommaso Grossi's novel Marco Visconti.6 Minonne's goal is to prove the existence of a well-developed kinesic code in the socio-geographic area of Lombardy during the first half of the nineteenth century, a code clearly belonging to what he calls the "cultural code" of the period (I use the term /general text/). Having demonstrated the rather explicit and rigorous methods that Morelli used to codify the correlations between a series of kinesic expressions and their content, Minonne goes on to compare the kinesic expressions of different feelings and emotions offered in Morelli's Handbook with Francesco Hayez's paintings (65ff.). The similarities and parallels are so striking for Minonne that he views these as validating his hypothesis that "the kinesic sign [is] a function of the code system in a given culture." But the most unusual coincidences (unusual since "unexpected to such a degree") are those that Minonne manages to discover between the coding of gestural expressions in Grossi's Marco Visconti and Morelli's kinesic code. Careful to avoid hasty generalizations, Minonne concludes:
I believe that my arguments give validity to the hypothesis that the gestural code belongs to the wider cultural system of a historical period and environment, and that interpretants of its expressions can be found in different systems of communication, and, conversely, that its expressions function as interpretants of the expressions of other systems of communication. . . . The contents of a cultural system can be conveyed through expressions of different systems of communication when there is an element of homogeneity among them, or to use a term that cryptologists will now have no difficulty in deciphering, parallel convergence. (76)
A final confirmation of my general hypothesis as well as Minonne's more circumscribed one can be found in Lotman's 1973 study, which describes the very close ties and mutual influence between theater and painting—two important varieties of "artistic texts" (which I prefer to call /aesthetic texts/)—that existed in nmeteenth-century Russia. These texts functioned, in turn, as "regulators codifying the behavior of early nineteenth-century men and women in the reality of their lives and customs." Thus, on the one hand, we witness a "pictorialization" of the theater,
where the scenographic text had a tendency to be structured not as a continuous (non-discrete) flux, imitating the passing of time in the extra-artistic
124
The Semiotics of Performance
world, but as a set, neatly divided into individual, synchronously organized "cuts," each of which was placed among the stage decorations like a painting in a frame, or designed according to rigorous canons of figure composition on the canvas.
On the other hand, there is evidence of the "theatricalization" of painting, where canvasses "appear more like reproductions of theatrical productions than real-life events" (Lotman 278, 287)7 As for the function of "secondary modeling systems"8 that these texts perform, Lotman claims:
The coding of theater through painting, and of painting through theater, brings about the preponderance of a determined period code, which, while coexisting along with other codes, acquires a dominant position in the sector of aristocratic culture in a particular phase of its history, influencing poetry and aesthetic principles, or, more generally, the ideological principles linked to it, as has already been repeatedly observed.
There is a very interesting hypothesis that emerges in Lotman's essay regarding a type of aristocratic or "elite" cultural behavior that is compelled to describe itself by irnitating the model offered by scenographic and pictorial codes.9 Lotman's concluding claims are even more interesting, and conform closely with my own theory:
It follows from what I have already said that the code system that functions as a cultural "regulator" tends on the one hand toward unity, obtainable through the identification of some dominant systems that aspire to universality in the hierarchy of the coding process. (290-91)
On the other hand, however, it leaves open the possibility of making "choices at different levels, [allowing] the intersection of different kinds of organization."10
5.2. AESTHETIC AND NONAESTHETIC CODES: FROM CULTURE TO ART AND BACK ■
Minnone and especially Lotman were responsible for bringing to our attention two important, closely related problems which the diagram offered above does not make sufficiently clear: (a) the problem of the distinguishing between aesthetic codes (pictorial, literary, musical, theatrical, and the like) and nonaesthetic codes (codes of everyday behavior, and the like) within the general text, and more precisely within the cultural context of performance;13 (b) the problem of the relationship between aesthetic and nonaesthetic codes, and the relationship between the aesthetic codes themselves (this last aspect was better analyzed in the preceding pages).
The usefulness of making a distinction within the general text—which is "upstream" with respect to the performance (in the first version of my model)—between aesthetic and nonaesthetic codes (the latter could
Performance Text, Cultural Context, and Intertextual Practices
125
simply be called cultural codes) is linked to the rather obvious and often specifically proven fact that often the aesthetic codes constitute a (realistic, symbolic, abstract) re-elaboration or modification of the nonaesthetic. Also, if a given performance code were in turn "modeled"—as an effect of its own conventions—on another aesthetic code (pictorial, architectural, or sculptural, for example), the following situation would result:
Let us consider Decroux's body mime, for example. Decroux formulated and carefully codified his new grammar of physical mime in the 1930s and 1940s, using Auguste Rodin's sculptures, and hence Rodin's gestural and sculptural codes, as one of his principal sources. These codes, in turn, are the outcome of a re-working of kinesic cultural codes from the second half of the nineteenth century, within precise conventions of sculpture, and are based on late-romantic, pre-expressionist poetics which were characterized by a rhetoric of grandiosity and monumentality, as well as an attitude of intolerance toward classical models, especially the ancient Greeks and Michelangelo. Even if Rodin is only one of Decroux's sources (among others I must mention Craig's Ubermarionette, Copeau's research on physical expression, the theatrical and dance traditions of Asia, as well as nonarfistic sources such as sports and the gestures of physical labor), in some cases this influence is certainly the most dominant: consider, for/ example, the mime-plays (of the 1940s) such as Meditation, La statue, Sports, he combat antique, L'esprit matin (see De Marinis 1980a, 1981).
These intertextual influences, however, cannot always be documented with the kind of certainty that we witness in the case of Decroux's mime or, to give an example from a completely different genre, in the case of the Renaissance treatises on behavior (such as The Courtier, II Galateo, and De Carflinalatu) which exerted their influence on the everyday life of the aristocracy as .well as on the acting style of the sixteenth century. At other times, however, we must limit ourselves to noting points of convergence and similarity between the various aesthetic and nonaesthetic codes, without being able to discover the direction and the source of these influences, beyond the fact that they can all be explained within the synchrony of the general text. As I have shown, this is the solution that Minonne wisely adopted in the study analyzed above, Lotman also chose a similar approach in his study of the relationship between theater and painting in nineteenth-century Russia. After examining the similarities and points of
cultural code
extra-theatrical aesthetic code
performance code
theatrical conventions
126
The Semiotics of Performance
contact that can be observed between the two aesthetic texts in question, he does not attempt to explain the loans and influences in a clear-cut, unambiguous way, preferring to emphasize the "feedback" phenomenon, where the artistic codes, which are somehow "generated" by the culture that contains them, can in turn become "models" or "coding devices" of cultural behavior.32
5.3. FRANCASTEL: THE AESTHETIC TEXT AS MONTAGE OF CULTURAL OBJECTS
Pierre Francastel's anthropological-structuralist approach remains exemplary in many ways to the present day for its fruitful, up-to-date insights on the relationship between aesthetic and nonaesthetic texts (revealing points of agreement, borrowing, and exchange), and the relationship between these texts and the general text that encompasses all of them (and in some way "generates" them). Let us consider, for example, Francastel's concept of the work of art as a "montage of cultural objects," and—within the same theoretical perspective—his contribution to a deeper understanding and analysis of the relationship between different artistic practices (especially theater and painting), and of the relationship between all of these practices as a collective group and the cultural and social life of such a crucial time and place as fifteenm-century Italy (see especially Francastel 1951, 1965, 1967).
Taking as a point of reference Francastel's most important theoretical book, La figure et le lieu (1967), we can readily observe how his research developed along three principal lines: (1) an inventory and typology of the cultural objects often used in fifteenth-century pictorial texts, which, as a result of this use, become transformed into "figurative objects"; (2) a study of the different ways in which the various objects in the pictorial texts are combined, integrated, and transposed, and the different functions and values they acquire according to the textual structures of which they become part; (3) an acknowledgment of the relationships and points of reciprocity between the visual arts and theater.
Regarding the first point, Francastel offers the following taxonomy regarding: (a) real objects, taken from the concrete world without preliminary artistic or cultural mediation; (b) objects of civilization, which can also be divided into (c) traditional objects, constituting the "common basis of symbols" and over-coded images of classical or Christian origin (the "castle," the "tower," the "throne," the "arch," the "gate," the "ship," etc. [see also Francastel 1953]), and (d) contemporary objects, borrowed by the figurative arts from contemporary social life, especially from religious theater (miracle plays, for example) and from the whole ceremonial complex of ''paraliturgical" practices: traditional festivals (both religious and secular), carnivals, and new aristocratic celebrations (weddings, ceremonial entrances, etc.).13 In addition, Francastel also identifies original or imaginary objects. These are objects either invented anew
Performance Text, Cultural Context, and Intertextual Practices 127
or obtained through the transformation or reuse of "real objects" or of "objects of civilization." Paolo Uccello's paintings are full of these. The "mazzocchio" in The Flood and the many accessories associated with war that are found in his various Battle paintings provide sufficient examples.
As Francastel's work progressed from the 1950s to the 1960s (the years immediately preceding his death), the influence of structuralist and protosemiotic concerns became more marked. His scientific interest shifted gradually from a typological inventory of objects to the study of the textual rules according to which these objects are assembled, combined, and transposed in figurative art, and thus constituted as sign functions. It became increasingly clear to him that to understand a visual text, to find a basis for absorbing its meanings and values, one cannot simply limit oneself to the mere identification and classification of the text's various constitutive units. Instead he found it necessary to reconstruct the "order of combination" proper to that text, to retrace the "integrating sign-systems" that underlie the text and initiate the production of meaning (1967: 108-12).
Following this line of thought, it is perhaps possible to move from a purely paratactical stock-taking of the expressive units and codes to their functional positioning as a hierarchy within the structures of the text. Still on the subject of fifteenth-century painting, Francastel observes, for example:
The new figurative system brings together traditional objects and original objects, blending them with each other in a new network of understanding, in which the old elements remain externally the same while changing their importance, and the new elements take on a current value, yet without being stripped of the possibility of signifying other values at some future point. If artists like Masac-do, Masolino, Uccello, and Piero della Francesca created anew the art of painting, they did not do so by introducing new elements joined together, which we could readily assimilate as words in a dictionary. Their creative genius was manifest in a different way. To combine new and old elements, they had to rely on intellectual frames for associating forms that were unknown before their time. (343-45, emphasis added)
It is clear that the two elements that I distinguished at the beginning of this brief excursus (i.e., the work of art as a "montage of cultural objects," and the relationship between visual arts and theater in fifteenth-century Italy) are in fact linked very closely to each other. According to Francastel, the great pamting produced during the Renaissance was not created ex novo or ex nihilo by a few gifted individuals. Rather, it was the result of a learned appropriation and elaboration of objects, images, and themes from popular culture (distinguished in its own traditional stratification by a remarkable mixture of Christian elements and elements derived from the pagan world of Greece and Rome) within a system of spatial representation and sculptural reshaping (the new "visual order" in'which the new economic and political order was symbolically translated and
128
The Semiotics op Performance
reflected). In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, various aesthetic texts (particularly painting and performance) reveal strong reciprocal connections, and shed light on each other. According to Francastel, this is not only because of the reciprocal loans and influences that can actually be demonstrated between them, but also because they must be read as the result of a process of montage and transposition—in their specific expressive medium and according to the conventions and textual strategies proper to these—of the same "cultural objects," both those that belong to the over-coded repertory of late-classical and Christian iconography, and those produced first by the paraliturgical tradition of the Middle Ages, and later by the new secular liturgies of the fifteenth century.
If Francastel sometimes gives more emphasis to the use of these diverse iconographic and symbolic repertories in fifteenth-century painting,14 at other times—especially during his general survey—he prefers to stress the simultaneous, parallel development of the various aesthetic languages throughout the course of the century, as well as their different relationships to the general text as a background of symbols and images:
Public liturgies—of which the mystery play is only a single aspect—and high art developed along parallel lines, depending at the same time on both customs and theories. It is futile to look for a hierarchical relationship between them, or to ask which came first. Theater and art are simultaneous and parallel manifestations of the same spiritual state, except for the possibilities that each of them derives from its orientation and its own technical maturity at the time. Neither one can be understood without the other, or without referring to other systems of expression characteristic of the period: festivals and popular processions, dances and tournaments, ballets and athletic competitions, depending on the era. They constitute contemporaneous languages, and can never, in any age, be dissociated or subordinated to each other. (1953: 222, emphasis added)
dearly, the points of agreement between the different aesthetic texts of the fifteenth century are not limited to the use of a common store of cultural objects, but also extend to what Francastel calls the "montage system."
Even on the level of the order of combination, Francastel notes a ''reciprocal interaction" between art and theater. Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both in pamting and in theater (in the theater site itself as well as in scene painting), the slow and difficult development of a new system of spatial representation, now known as linear perspective, can be observed. Before achieving unified cubic figuration (linear perspective as such), Francastel notes (1951) that painting passed through a series of intermediate and very diverse solutions: from the succession of multiple cubes (Paolo Uccello's "The Flood"), to the "selection of planes," and the "differential representation of space," as Francastel terms it (see Piero della Francesca's Arezzo cycle).15
Performance Text, Cultural Context, and Intertextual Practices
129
A similarly complicated and difficult shift characterizes the theater of the time, since it is positioned as a cultural and ideological avant-garde between the rediscovery of the ancient world and the quest for visual perspective.
It is therefore unfair to say that fifteenth-century Italian painting provided sixteenth-century theater and figurative art with a ready-made framework which artisans of the theater awkwardly and hesitatingly straggled to impose with vmiformity on subsequent generations. (1953: 229)16
Clearly, this is not to deny that painting on the whole arrived much closer to achieving a representation of unified perspective than theater, which assigned this task to scene painting between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century.17 But we are dealing with the culmination point in a complex development that was far from linear, in which pamting, architecture, and theater participated through continuous interaction and reciprocal influence, not only because the same artists frequently worked in both fields, but especially because these fields shared the same cultural issues and ideological characteristics, chief among which were concerns about the projection of the ideal city. The contiguity and osmosis that characterized painting, architecture, and stage scenery during the Renaissance is usually analyzed and explained in terms of the relationship of contiguity/continuity that links the theater and the urban environment during this period, giving rise to continuous transfers from the theater to the city, and vice versa. This is well illustrated by Zorzi (1977) in reference to the development of sceno-graphic perspective and performance in Renaissance Italy.18
In order to analyze a concrete example from the tight network of relationships linking aesthetic and nonaesthetic texts in fifteenth-century Italy, I would like to refer to an essay by Francastel on the Medici festivals (1952a). This study demonstrates that it is impossible to take into account literary texts like Foliziano's Canzoni a hallo and "Stanza' and figurative works like Botticelli's "Primavera" (as well as Faolo Uccello's paintings of battles and hunts) in all their richness and complexity of signification without first comparing them to each other, and then to such traditional types of performance as the carri carnascialesschi, May feasts, spring festivals, and others. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries these still constituted the most important examples of popular secular entertainment, and also inspired the mythological feasts of Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici ■("triumphs/' jousts, hunting expeditions). To be more precise, Francastel regards the Medici festivals as a result of the encounter and transposition of many different cultural phenomena; popular traditions linked to the cycle of the seasons (carnival, the rites of May, St. John's night, and the like); secular liturgies that seemed to become much more prevalent than mystery and miracle plays during the course of the fifteenth century; the tendency
5.3.1. The Example of the Mythological Festival
130
The Semiotics of Performance
toward neo-Platonism common to intellectuals of the Medici circle (Mar-silio Ficino, Pulci, Poliziano, Botticelli) who were interested in the pagan elements of that tradition; and finally, the populist, even demagogic, political line that Lorenzo de' Medici pursued right up to the Pazzi conspiracy.19
The most famous of the festivals is the final Giostra or tourney which took place on January 28, 1475, and concluded with Giuliano de' Medici's "triumph" in honor of Simonetta Vespucci. According to Francastel, Botticelli's Primavera must be linked to this "triumph" (according to some sources, the figure of Venus was intended as a portrait of Marco Vespucci's young wife, Simonetta) as well as the "Stanze per la giostra" which Poliziano abandoned before completion, both because of Simonetta's death on April 26,1476, and Giuliano de' Medici's own death two years later on April 26, 1478.30
These works are related to each other through a particularly interesting and complex intertextual network of echoes, references, and reciprocal connections. Although the chronology of these texts (which is still somewhat disputed) imposes a certain procedure, we must also bear in mind that each of them in turn becomes a site for the reception, filtering, and specific re-elaboration of a great number of disparate elements (on the basis of precise "rules of genre"). As I have already pointed out, the Medici jousts (like all the mythological festivals of the fifteenth century)21 have their roots in the same terrain of Horentine intellectual life which was deeply imbued with neo-Platonism (Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino), and which nourished the literary development of Poliziano from a very young age, as well as the artistic development of Botticelli.22 We should also remember that, according to Vasari, Botticelli himself collaborated in the 1475 giostra by pamting the standard of Pallas Athena for Giuliano de' Medici (see Francastel 1952a: 247, referring in turn to G. Poggi).
Botticelli's Primavera, a visual text of extreme ideological and philosophical complexity, became the site for a coherent, refined transposition of this long process of intertextual activity. These intertextual influences include the popular rites of May (widely overemphasized in this case by folklorists such as A. Varagnac), and neo-Platonic allegories (Venus — Huxnanitas, on which critics interested in iconological elements, such as Gombrich,23 have focused their attention). Francastel points out that we should add to these influences the memory of the Medici festivals, along with Poliziano's refined literary reinvention of the same festivals in the Stanze,24 and, last but not least, preexisting pamtings that offered similar representations of para-liturgical rituals of period {see especially Paolo Uccello's cycle of Hunts and Battles), and contemporary paintings representing the theme of "ideal woman" (such as Verrocchio's Dama dal mazzolino, or the painting of Simonetta Vespucci inj the Mus6e Conde, which is sometimes attributed to An-gelo del Pollaiolo, and sometimes to Piero di Cosimo). And this is still within the scope of strictly recent or contemporaneous references. Natu-
Performance Text, Cultural Context, and Intertextual Practices 131
rally, the Primavera also contains elements ("objects of civilization") that hark back to the iconographic tradition of the Middle Ages; for example, the trope of the "garden in bloom" (hortus clausus), echoing, in all probability, Poliziano's reworking of this theme. Poliziano had also borrowed many other elements from medieval culture, from the tradition of the giants and the hunts to the trope of the "angelic woman" (Simonetta as Laura or Beatrice).
We should not forget that all of this occurred within the framework of a cultural and philosophical project definable as the "rediscovery of antiquity," a project common to all of Italian humanism, but most especially to the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent. In this regard, Botticelli's Primavera, the first great painting of a nonreligious subject—as Gombrich reminds us with due insistence—undoubtedly performs the function of a manifesto.25
5.4. TYPES OF THEATRICAL INTERTEXTUALITY
Largely through a discussion of the studies by Lotman and Francastel, I analyzed in the preceding sections some examples relevant to the relationship that can occur within a given general text between the various cultural, aesthetic and nonaesthetic texts. The relationship between the performance text and other texts is of particular interest in the present context. At this point I am in a position to offer some clarifications on the phenomenon of intertextuality which can be added to my comments in 2.7. on Kristeva and Verdn.26
It is necessary first of all to distinguish (to a greater extent than the theorists of intertextuality already cited actually do, and more than Lotman and Francastel do either) between two undoubtedly very different phenomena: (a) involuntary similarities and influences (meaning "unconscious," or "not desired in a conscious way") between aesthetic texts belonging to the same cultural synchrony (the phenomenon can be explained by the common cultural origin and, at least to a certain degree, by factors of conditioning exerted on different superstructural levels by the socioeconomic structure through various forms of mediation); (b) voluntary references, whether explicit or variously disguised, by a given aesthetic text (by its author) and other aesthetic texts whether contemporaneous or not, whether of the same genre or not, whether of the same cultural tradition or not. Phenomena of the second kind can sometimes be located within the category of aesthetic quotations. The time has come for a typological theory which would develop the insights already offered by Kristeva (1969, 1970, 1974), and more recently by Compagnon (1979), whose work however is limited to the literary field.
In the examples cited above, these two phenomena (involuntary similarities, voluntary references) seem interwoven and can be separated only with difficulty. Minonne (1979) was careful to verify with certainty the lack
132
The Semiotics of Performance
of contact between Morelli and Hayez, and their mutual ignorance of each other's existence, and he was thus able to assert that "the personal distance between the two artists would lend validity to the hypothesis that the artistic 'pose' is a cultural sign." This case would provide us with an example of "involuntary agreement." Yet it is impossible to make a similar claim for the affinities between theater and painting in nineteenth-century Russia and for their influence on everyday cultural behavior. In fact, the examples given by Lotman (1973) involve cases of unconscious "modeling'' as well as phenomena of conscious, explicit imitation. Voluntary intertextuality seems prevalent in the examples that Francastel takes from fifteenth-century Florentine art and culture. In fact, as I have already pointed out, the Medicis' mythological festivals constitute a refined transposition— consciously undertaken on the basis of classical, pagan or neo-Platonic inspiration—of the popular, secular liturgies already widely practiced in Florence at the time. The intertextual phenomenon that Cruciani and Tavi-ani perceive in the work of Poliziano and Botticelli also seems voluntary and conscious:
The entire intellectual and emotional life of Florence can be found reflected in the Medici circle. The reflection of customs, images, and figurative objects that appear in the Florentine festivals and move from there into poetry and painting [is intertwined] with the recuperation of classical images and forms. (Cruciani and Taviani 1980: 45)
To recapitulate, I would like to propose the following general typology, which also takes into account the diachronic dimension of intertextual phenomena:
(1) synchronous / intertextuality \,
(a) involuntary
(b) voluntary
(i) explicit
(ii) implicit
(2) diachronic / intertextuality \
(a) involuntary
(b) voluntary
(i) explicit
(ii) implicit
Obviously, this is simply a provisional diagram that can be modified and adjusted to fit the specific characteristics of the subject of research. Ex-plicitness, in particular, is considered a graduated concept (allusion, reminiscence, paraphrase, plagiarism, quotation, and so forth) rather than a binary one, as I have visualizedit in the diagram for the sake of convenience. A phenomenology and typology of theatrical intertextuality would take too much space if adequately treated at this point. I will limit myself simply to some observations which can be added to the points developed during the last two chapters. Only the first two of these observations concern the theater.
Performance Text, Cultural Context, and lntertextual Practices
133
(a) In the case of theater we can speak of a multiple (or multidimensional) intertextuality. Since the basic materials of the partial texts that constitute theatrical performance are multiple and heterogeneous, citations and references (whether voluntary or involuntary) from the most varied aesthetic texts (and nonaesthetic texts as well) can be discovered within it. Some examples of these include one or more partial texts from another performance (scenery, costumes, music, gestures, and the like), paintings, musical works, literary texts, sculptures, or architectural works. There is no other signifying practice that sets itself up as a "field of transposition of different signifying systems" (Kristeva 1974: 64).
(b) Theatrical intertextuality is multiple in an additional sense, which concerns the conditions of utterance rather than the statement. In theatrical performance the subjects of the intertextual utterance are also multiple: the playwright, the director, the actors, the set designer, the costume designer, the musician. We can observe how the burden of the intertextual process tends to shift from one of these subjects to the other according to genre, historical period, or theatrical tradition. For example, with the rise of director's theater, the primacy accorded to the writer up to that time shifted instead to the director (as is well known) and, to a lesser degree, to the actor. Indeed, the search for references and citations is a favorite exercise of critics who are often more interested in displaying their culture than seriously committed to coherent, comprehensive interpretations and analyses. Newspaper reviews are full of expressions such as "Grotowski-style gestures," "a ritual quality reminiscent of the Living Theater," "puppets in the manner of Bread and Puppets," "an acting style reminiscent of Carmelo Bene" or "reminiscent of Eduardo," etc. Not to mention the continual attempts to include a literary or artistic allusion. In doing this, the theatrical reviewer confirms and often overstates a real fact, bringing to light in a particular way the network of relationships that inevitably surrounds the theatrical work, whether this is intentional or not, whether this is conscious or not. Leaving aside the objections often provoked by this kind of approach—since it tends to emphasize a single aspect of the text (usually in an impressionistic way as well)—it nevertheless appears completely legitimate from a theoretical standpoint, particularly if we conceive of intertextuality as active intervention and as the "construction" of the receiver (see (f), below).
(c) As for my observations that do not solely and specifically concern theater, it is clear that often quite a large number of identifiable references in a performance—from the point of view of both the directing style and the acting—really amount to self-quotations. The director alludes to one of his or her previous productions, reprising some element (costumes, a particular emphasis in the acting, the accessories, a particular actor). The actor, in turn, can allude to one of his most famous roles. The phenomenon of self-quotation develops, often in an exaggerated way, in the case of famous writers, directors, and actors, who thus attempt to impose a "style,"
134
The Semiotics of Performance
a genre, sometimes even a school, or who attempt to conceal their creative crisis or the loss of their commitment to try new elements behind manner-istic, affected self-absorption.27
(d) Another distinction neglected by the diagram offered above concerns the serious or even ironic, satiric, or parodic nature of intertex-tual transposition. Obviously we are dealing with fundamental differences, even if there is not enough space here to examine them adequately. A typological theory of intertextuality and citation should nevertheless give very careful consideration to the various relationships that can occur between the citing text and the cited text. More precisely, it should analyze the diverse modalities according to which the sender of a text takes on another text, referring to it in a more or less specific manner, through paraphrase or the like. In theater, a director may cite the work of another director as a gesture of esteem or, conversely, as a gesture of criticism, to note his distance from the other director through ironic allusion or parody. The same can be said of the actor whose imitation of another actor-depending on the stylistic modalities chosen—may be a gesture of admiration for the other actor's masterly interpretation, or may be offered as satiric slap in the face, caricaturing a particular mannerism. We would need to develop a separate discussion on the degrees of explicitness in such a reference, since it is the issue of degree that permits us to distin-" guish between a paraphrase, a citation, or a genuine case of plagiarism when witnessing the intertextual practice of a set designer, a musician, or an actor.
(e) Still on the subject of the relationship between citing text and cited text, I must add that even in the extreme case of so-called literary citations (cases that in fact are rather hard to find in theater for the reasons that concern the fact that the performance text is unique and unrepeatable, as I explained in 2.2.), the unit of expression introduced into the citing text can never be considered identical to its counterpart in the source text. There are two explanations for this. In the first place, the,new context changes its function, and hence its meaning, providing it, in addition, with new illo-cutionary and perlocutionary goals. Consider, for example, Kristeva's notion of intertextuality as transposition (1974). Second, a citation, in addition to being a statement, is also, above all, an utterance; that is, an act that is unique and unrepeatable (in the same form):
The claim that a citation is only a repeated statement is part of the reductive approach habitually taken by the kind of linguistics that bases everything on the speech act, the utterance. An act of citation is an utterance of repetition or the repetition of a denunciation. But redundancy, tautology, is a logical concept that concerns the statement, not the enunciation. As for the act of utterance, the single event, this cannot be redundant. To the extent that there is no statement without utterance . . . two texts, even if their statements are identical, would remain irretrievably different in relation to their utterance. (Compag-non 1979: 55-57)
Performance Text, Cultural Context, and intertextual Practices 135
(f) Up to this point I have mentioned intertextual enunciators but not intertextual addressees, the receivers of intertextual production. In other words, we must distinguish-—and not only in the case of theatrical performance—between the intertextuality of the sender (or senders) and the intertextuality of the receiver. The inevitable noncoincidence between the two is proved by the differences that occur, as we have seen, on many levels between productive (active) competence and receptive (active) competence. We are thus dealing simply with an example of the more general phenomenon of an aberrant decoding (a phenomenon that should not be understood in the purely negative sense, as I have already said). There are intentional or explicit references that the spectator cannot grasp because of gaps in his encyclopedic knowledge, and conversely, the spectator may discover in the performance nonexistent—or at least unintentional—-citations (which he believes to be intentional). It is in fact the oUstinction between transmitted citation and received citation that theoretically legitimates a concept like the notion of "involuntary intertextuality" mentioned above. What holds true for reading (meaning ordinary reception) also holds true for analysis, and with greater reason. As I have already pointed out, intertextuality is not only the passive recognition of given facts but also, above all, their active production: a construction and not simply a confirmation.
(g) Finally, on the subject of the distinction between synchronous intertextuality and diachronic intertextuality, this must be examined in the light of what has already been said in this volume on the concepts of "cultural synchrony" and "synchronous text" (see above, especially 2.4.2.). The problem is, of course, the following: what is (or what must be considered) /synchronous/ in a given general text, in a given culture? The reply can only be this: the word synchronous does not apply to everything that belongs chronologically to the same period, but rather to everything that is validated by the given culture (by the general text), everything to which a given culture bestows the status of a text. According to the Theses formulated in 1973 by the semi-oticians of the Tartu school (headed by Lotman), not all messages that concretely coexist within a cultural space (consider, for example, the messages of natural language) can be considered texts "from the standpoint of that culture":
Of all the messages that are found in natural language, the culture distinguishes and takes into consideration only those that can be defined according to a certain discursive genre, for example, "a prayer," "a law," "a novel," and so on, meaning those that possess some comprehensive meaning and fulfill a common function. (Ivanov, Lotman, et al. 1973: 42)
On the other hand, Lotman and his colleagues claim that a given cultural synchrony may recognize as its own (and hence consider culturally contemporary, or synchronous) texts that belong to a previous historical period or to other cultures. This phenomenon is called "cultural multilingual-
136
The Semiotics of Performance
ism" or "multiculturalism." I will give one brief example. Works from classical antiquity such as Vitruvius's De architectura or Aristotle's Poetics can be considered synchronous texts (culturally synchronous) for humanism, and for the Renaissance, but not for the late Middle Ages (nor for the eighteenth century, unless in a very limited way).
As I already mentioned, all this demands a broadening of the concept of cultural synchrony, also developing the link between this concept and Lot-man's notion of the "nongenetic collective memory." Apart from its status as a "hierarchy of particular semiotic systems" or as a "given apparatus that generates texts," culture can also be understood, according to the Tartu school, as a particular apparatus for the conservation and development of information:
The semiotic structure of culture and the semiotic structure of memory are functionally identical phenomena located on different levels. This thesis does not contradict the dynamism of culture: theoretically constituting a concentration on past experience, it can appear to be both a program and an instruction for the creation of new texts. The assimilation of texts from another culture leads to the phenomenon of multiculturalism: to the possibility, while staying within the limits of a single culture, of adopting conventional behavior in the style of another, (57-58)
Obviously this does not mean putting aside the specific problems connected with the diachronic dimension (selective transmission of culture, the tradin^n/innovation dialectic, the evolution of phenomena, and so on) but only that we must consider them in a different light, connected in a less rigid way to models of a chronological or geographic type. Lotman's notion of "multiculturalism" or "cultural multilinguahsm" allows us to broaden the range of the intertextual network and the process of contextualization in order to include within it texts from other periods or different areas than the text being analyzed. On this subject, Ruffini has made the following remark, while questioning himself on the limits of contextualization:
The reference text is "surrounded" by other texts, integrated into the same cultural text only for the brief but arbitrary span that the analyst has identified as the synchrony of the i-T. The texts are of different geographical origins, different foundations, of recent origin, or the result of "rediscoveries," "returns," and so on. The path of contextualization can take off (and this is what usually happens) on the basis of selections of affinity, of already proven connections, of explicit references present in the reference text. But it cannot and should not limit itself to these steps-. This means that the structural relationship can precede (or indeed ignore) philological, causal recognition of the connection. (Ruffini 1976a: 19-20)