To hear and to listen to what was never said: Fragments regarding Robert Wilson’s theatrical theory of attention

“Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.” (1)

The theater makes the eyes and ears deteriorate. Its art makes people lose sight and hearing. At least that’s what Camille Desmoulins asserts in Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death. He illustrates this with artful words and theatrical descriptions, and Büchner makes us witnesses their effect on Camille's wife Lucile:

Camille. What do you say, Lucille?

Lucille. Nothing, I’d rather watch you talk.

Camille. Do you listen to what I say?

Lucille. Well, of course!

Camille. Am I right? Do you know what I was talking about?

Lucille. No, not really. (2)

Lucile is a good pupil. Whereas her teacher, like Socrates, praises reality theatrically with art while condemning theater and art, she forgets theater and art and only hears the words of her beloved, whose words she follows even while she does not follow their content. The “reality” that Camille puts forward against art is unmasked by her reaction to a merely beautiful word, a phantasm stemming from the realm of art and theater. Lucile, “someone who,” as Paul Celan writes, “hears and listens and looks ... and then doesn’t know what the talk was all about. But who hears the speaker, who ‘sees him speak’, who perceives language and shape, and also (...) breath, that is, direction and destiny,” (3) astonishingly appears to have become in Celan's Büchner speech the figure of "attention" of the “poem.”

            This “attention” of the poem has only marginally to do with what is commonly understood by the word “attention”: The “ability to take in sensory perceptions well, mental intensity, concentration; the state of all thoughts being directed towards something; care; amiable politeness; courtesy, consideration”. Lucile’s behavior seems to be in one part in blatant contradiction to this definition of attentiveness, and in another in all too literal agreement. For Lucile’s “attention”, her courtesy and consideration, goes hand in hand with distractedness, with not knowing, with the failure of cognitive recognition and with the inability to understand the meaning or the content. As unreservedly as she affirms here Camille’s speech, she also affirms its inner contradiction, which makes all attention appear as inattention. At the same time, her distractedness, even inattention, enables a different kind of attention, precisely that which Celan will describe a little later in his speech as the “attention” of the poem: a sharper “sense for detail, for outline, for structure, for color, but also for the ‘twitches’ and the ‘hints’ (...) a concentration that remains mindful of all our data.” Celan adds: “Attention – permit me to quote here a phrase by Malebranche, via Walter Benjamin’s essay on Kafka – “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.”

            In Celan, attention appears as a category that precedes all other categories and undermines them. It dissolves the hierarchies of Aristotelian poetics and logocentrism. It applies without distinction to man, animal and thing. “Every thing, every person,” according to Celan, is the poem’s “figure” of the Other, which it needs, which it seeks out and to which it addresses itself. Celan's “attention” in the poem can, I hasten to add, be described as an imperative of “responsibility” formed in awareness of the catastrophes of the 20th century, which, as one could say alongside Emmanuel Levinas, is older than the truth of being. In other words, attention represents the imperative in ethics of existence. (4)

            In another way, however, this imperative also appeared in theater in the late 1920s. With a radical affirmation of the text comparable to Lucile's attitude, Roger Vitrac and Antonin Artaud founded the Théâtre Alfred Jarry:

“From all that has been passed down to us in theater, we recognize a single element as irreplaceable, as true - that is the text. The text, however, only insofar as it is a purely external reality, exists for itself and suffices unto itself, not in terms of its spirit, which we are not in the least willing to concern ourselves with, but simply as a vibration of air that occurs when it is spoken.” (5)

Robert Wilson’s work, I hypothesize, exists in the same sphere as this affirmation. Following the examples of Artaud - and Lucile - he tries, as one might say in reference to a famous phrase by Hofmannsthal, to listen to and hear what has never been said. The realization that speech in theater—and not only there—is more than mere expression, mere sign or communication of content is fundamental to his theater. He investigates what - if speaking is more than the expression of a somehow given, objective reality - listening means. His theatrical research can be understood as an attempt to develop a theory of attention in theater that goes beyond any hermeneutics of meaning - or more precisely, its fragments. (4)

The knocking of the other

What does listening mean - in theater, but not only there - and how is it possible? Robert Wilson’s theater poses these questions in an unprecedented way, and his starting point is the practical experience of the equiprimordial aphony and polyphony. Wilson raises this question very early on in the following play without words, which he submitted to the drama competition at Waco High School at the end of the 1950s. It can be read as the primal scene of Wilson’s theater:

Two people in white sat in a room. Now and then there would be a knock on the door. One of them would get up and open it, but there was nobody there. That was all. It became a key piece; I keep going back to it. (6)

Many of the aspects that would later occupy Wilson’s interpreters are already laid out in this “key piece,” prime scene or cornerstone: First of all, the coldness of abstraction and the emptiness devoid of meaning: two people, one room, the act of sitting. Secondly, the structuring through a sound, a preceding rhythm, the “knocking.” Thirdly, the demarcation of the binary order. A possible drama, an antagonism, a dialog between the two people is traced back to a third element, which exists outside and gives the scene its time and space through the choice of “now” and “then”, delimiting simultaneously both preconditions of imagination and perception through its unpredictability and invisibility. Only this third element places the two people in a relationship, creates a kind of interaction, but at the same time it is precisely this third element, which gives meaning and sense to this entire assembly that remains outside. This leads us, if one may freely quote Artaud and Derrida, (7) to the fourth aspect: Wilson’s scene expels God from the stage, relating the visible, physical to a meta-physical void, to “nobody.” Fifthly, this results in the oft-described incomprehensibility: the scene is not explained, it has no point, no climax, no development, no linearity, no center - or two of them. The “key piece” unlocks nothing, the “foundation stone” is more of an abyss or an initial leap. From this follows, in Wilson's narrative, the sixth point, the repetition: the lack of an origin in the ghostly knocking scene, the blank space, forces a return, a return to the theater as a process of repetitions without an end. (8)

       The initial reactions to Wilson's theater included not only eulogies to his images and visions, but above all discussions surrounding the absence of interpretation, meaning, continuity and causality. Both spontaneous reactions have since given way to more nuanced discussions. The monographs on the phenomena by Brecht, Graff, Holmberg, Maurin, Shyer, Weiler and others have provided rich material for a contemporary reflection on his work. In essays by Finter, Heeg, and Lehmann, Wilson's use of images and voice was rightly described as a deconstruction of the theater of images (Bildertheater) of the 1970s and the logocentric straight plays and opera of the past 200 years. Lehmann's study of post-dramatic theater can also be described as an attempt to conceptually catch up with the change in the perception of time, space, sound, movement, acting, text and music that Wilson’s work has—not solely, but certainly significantly—brought about in theater. (9) An extensive literature has lent Wilson’s work a wider resonance across writing and image that remains unparalleled. Nevertheless, two assertions suggest that the previous analyses require definitive amendments: According to one, which is frequently read especially at the beginning, Wilson's theater is one of arbitrary, meaningless images (and sounds); according to the other, complementary one, his art is created in the eye (or ear) of the viewer, which is supposed to be where the great freedom of interpretation that Wilson allows lies. Both assertions converge in the rejected or welcomed formula of “anything goes.” Both ignore Wilson's insistence that his actions have no “aleatory character,” indeed that in the long run nothing he does is arbitrary. (10) They forget that what was at stake in Wilson's work from the beginning, was a quasi-ethical postulate of this theater. (11) It is inherent in the seventh aspect of the primal scene, in the precedence of hearing and listening: what the small scene presents are two people who hear and listen, who are moved by their listening, who formally belong - gehören, as we say in German - to an outside impulse. What will continue to move Wilson's theater forward, give it form, and incessantly deconstruct its forms, is this hearing in listening.

            In the first phase (12) of Wilson’s work, the knock on the door is replaced, as it were, by the perception of the so-called deaf Raymond Andrews. In a movement workshop, the members of Wilson’s School of Byrds copy Andrews’ way of communicating and body language. They reverse the therapeutic process of teaching a person with disability the language of society. (13) The result, the legendary production Deafman Glance, a “silent opera,” as it was paradoxically called, is well-known. (14) Wilson would later say: “The experience with the deaf-mute gave me a more intimate knowledge of the vocal experience.” (15) It is striking that Wilson and his troupe wanted to learn to listen and speak from a deaf person. It is precisely what fails that is at the center of the work, at the beginning of its form. If, as was once remarked, all great inventors try to start with an empty table, (16) then Wilson's work with “structured silence” (17) can be described as his empty table, the prerequisite for an exploration of listening that takes its starting point from the radical questioning of normal hearing.

            In the second phase of Wilson's work, beginning in 1973 with The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, the language of Christopher Knowles similarly represents the knock on the door. The starting point of the work is a cassette entitled Emily likes the TV, on which Knowles arranged excerpts from recordings of his voice using two tape recorders, while Wilson analyzes with an equally musical sense of arrangement and geometry. The “words continually scattered like molecules in all directions.” (18)

            Knowles was often characterized as “limited in his capacity for speech,” “autistic” or, more briefly, “speech impaired.” It wasn’t long before these labels turned to moral outrage at the supposed exposure of a mentally retarded man. In fact, however, Wilson’s theater differs fundamentally from the display of freaks and monsters at fairs as well as from the linguistic interest in speech disorders and from the presentation of medical cases. What is striking about Wilson’s staging of the language material is the way in which he orients his own play to that of Knowles. He not only imitates Knowles’ text but also adopts his posture, his diction, and his pitch. His production seems to be dedicated to the “sounds within the sounds and the different energies of the words,” the “other things” that, as he says, you suddenly hear “after listening to all these tapes for a long time.” (19) Like Andrew’s silent language before it, Knowles’ speech on Wilson’s stage does not appear as an unsuccessful special case regarding a language of communication, as an erroneous or pathological form of expression, but as a unique, singular language. The “special case” is granted the same validity as the “normal case.”

            An obvious question illustrates this: If, according to Bergson, the replacement of a living thing by a mechanical, stiff thing seems funny, (20) then Knowles’ mechanical, stiff language should seem funny. Why does Knowles not seem funny? Perhaps because the doubling of strange speech reveals something about the strangeness of all speech: Knowles’ singular organization of speech material and his unique language highlight the difficulties that the singular presents to hearing. The so-called “autistic” and “linguistically diminished” speaker sharpens our ears for a necessary moment of autism and of not-finding-oneself-in-language in each utterance. (21) The “sounds in the sounds” and “word energies,” whose perception allowed Wilson to recognize meaning and structure in Knowle’s initially meaningless and confused-sounding utterances, are a special case of what I have called elsewhere the polyphony and aphony of all speech. Wilson’s theater is an attempt to enable listening that does justice to the aphonic and polyphonic.

            “What you see in the theater,” says Wilson, “can help the audience to listen. That’s the most important thing in theater - to be able to listen. I don’t mean ‘listening to the text,’ but that the actors listen to each other on stage and the director listens to the actors.” (22) This constant listening to each other as well as to themselves and their own bodies leads to the audience listening and watching just as closely. A large part of the actor’s work lies in contrasting “the aural score and the visual picture,” in separating the elements into “silent movie” and “radio drama” (23): His motto in rehearsals was, “The world of sound is a world of its own. No reference point is needed. The syllables should be uttered accurately with some sense of the continuity of the cycle, the chanter should feel the self-sufficient and unique quality of the sounds and words.” (24) Only on the basis of the sound component separated and contrasted in this way does the comprehensive listening that Wilson wants to help achieve seem possible.

            Wilson offers paradoxical descriptions of this kind of listening, in which the deaf begin to listen and the hearing become deaf. “Someone may be deaf in the technical sense. But he still hears. His body hears. So it is stupid of us to say he is deaf,” (25) he remarks. Elsewhere he continues: “People don’t just hear with their ears, they hear with their eyes, their hands, their feet - with their whole body. I always describe this using the example of a cat sneaking up on a bird - if you watch it, you can see how it hears with its whole body. That is fascinating. Listening with the body, speaking with the body - that's how my theater is created, ...” (26) Conversely, he describes how his productions begin with listening: “I have to get to a certain point before I can see or hear anything. And sometimes I even close my eyes before I look, or I don't listen before I hear. (...) Because it has to get to the point where I can hear it first. And it’s so difficult to reach that point where you can hear something. And only then, when I can really hear it, can someone tell me what the content is. I just don't want to start with the content, that would be like making myself blind and deaf.” (27) Hearing, one can conclude, is for Wilson tied to a long phase of not listening. And it is not initially hearing content, but rather hearing the aphone and polyphone, or, in Wilson’s words, the knocking or the sounds within the sounds. “And it's only when I hear it,” Wilson continues, “that I can create a space around it and then all the other things can come into it. I can't even really see it until that happens.” (28) The aphone creates the possibility of content without anticipating it. “Only then does the possibility for the content arise, when it is not forced in advance.” (29)

     Inasmuch as Wilson's theater is departing from the aphone, its basic element is not the image, the word or the sign, but the gesture in all of them. “In my theater I try to create gestures,” he says, “It’s not necessary to see them, but there is a language of gestures.” (30) And he adds that it is always a gesture “that helps to hear or feel a text.” (31) The separated sounds, images and movements are each more than mutual illustration, contain a surplus potential, open up a space beyond what the audience sees and hears through their contrast. With the signs and their meaning, a third element is conveyed that demarcates the signs and enables excess meaning without itself disappearing in any realization of what is made possible. In the images that he cites, Wilson is interested precisely in elements that supposedly carry no meaning – for instance the specific way that Einstein held his fingers or Friedrich's gaze on his deathbed. (32) When they want to turn left, Wilson suggests to his actors that they should turn right. (33) They are invited to show their feelings when they speak a certain text, but without forcing those feelings, as a kind of secret garden into which intrusion would mean destroying the code. (34) In singing, the body should speak: “When you sing in a certain way, you can hear and feel the posture in your voice.” (35) This third, aphonic moment, which also opens up a polyphony, can be called gestural if we remember the origin of the word gesture: it is derived from the Latin gerere (to carry, to lead, to display, to behave) and must be distinguished from the similar verbs ferre, which describes passive transportation, facere (to bring forth, to make), which describes a production, and agere (to drive, to lead), which describes the actor's role play, for example. It stands for the carrying itself, describes a fulfillment, taking on and taking over. As an expression for the carrier, the material basis of the drawing process, which is inaccessible as such, Wilson's a- and polyphonic gesture is similar to what Walter Benjamin calls allegory, writing or trace in his Trauerspielbuch. It infinitely devalues and at the same time valorizes that which is manifest. Everything that appears is devalued because it has no meaning in itself. Wilson formulates this when he describes sound as a continuity that precedes speech and points beyond it, describing it as the most difficult task of the stage “to maintain this continuity in movement, space and sound that surrounds us.” (36) That which appears is valorized by the fact that it only refers to its specific arrangement:

“If you show a Japanese actor something, for example, if you say: Can you take the pencil and put it down again, he will do it. If I show a German actor how to pick up the pencil, they say "Ah yes", because they take it as an intellectual idea that I have just picked up the pencil and put it down again. But they didn't see that I took it like this: with my thumb here, while these fingers are gripping this, and that I put the pencil down parallel to the glasses.” (37)

An insistence on the referential potential, however - and not merely on reference itself -of any given element means that, as in Japanese Noh-theater, no element is confined to a mere service function. (38) In Wilson's theatrical ethics, any given element has the right to its own existence. “I believe that in theater all elements have the same significance,” (39) Wilson affirms.

Wilson's staging of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine exemplifies this kind of gestic theater. An “audiopartiture” for the performance assigns the text given by Müller to “Ophelia [Chorus/Hamlet]” to six separate voices differentiated by pitch, speed, emphasis, intonation and volume. In addition, the audience from time to time hears other sounds: an oft-repeated minimalist musical motif, the occasional soft rattling of a machine gun, wolf howls, clucking, the sound of fingernails scratching across a table surface, and sounds at the very margins of human speech. These include laughter, whispering, screeching, screaming, babbling, gurgling, stammering, coughing. Textual elements are spoken sometimes by one speaker and other times by several speakers in different ways, with their ordering and distribution following no obvious rule. The words “SNOW ON THE LIPS,” (40) which are emphasized in Müller’s text by capital letters as a (self-)quotation, form a kind of leitmotif similar to the musical motif. The sound composition on stage is governed by the clicking of two wooden sticks located in the rear of the auditorium. This clicking causes noticeable effects in words and events on stage; it can cause performers to stop speaking or suddenly turn their heads.

The scene is part of a scenography that traces Wilson’s development from pounding on the door to working with the “structured silence” (41) and breaking down sentences and words into syllables and sounds to experimenting with predetermined texts and film. A silent scene at the beginning illustrates what Wilson means when he cites John Cage: “There is no such thing as silence, but motion is always there.” (42) Because of the dehierarchization of noises, sounds, syllables, words, and sentences in the scenes that follow, the potential for meaning is multiplied while the fixation on one single meaning dissolves. The text spoken by Ophelia’s text [Chorus/Hamlet] disappears, but at the same time its particles emerge, with refractions, allusions, and references: Everything that is lost to speech, when texts are reduced to one particular meaning. Because of its indifference toward a single meaning, Wilson’s staging manages to uncover something that is absent but present, unconscious or preconscious in Müller’s text. It allows voices to sound as if they were doors or animals. Animal voices reveal moods. Thus, intuitively, Wilson enables his audience to hear a motif underlined by Müller through a reference to Brecht’s verse “You’ll die with all animals /And nothing will come afterwards.” (43) This is the acknowledgment of a finitude that connects human beings as mortal bodies to animals and things, in contradistinction to an idealist philosophy of consciousness in which human beings are paramount. Whereas the separation and independence of the elements may at first glance appear to be a purely formal approach, it ultimately becomes clear that Wilson is in fact aiming at a reformulation of Karl Marx’s vision of a sociability “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” (44)

Conclusion

Wilson’s question of hearing is concerned with what imaginative thinking, like playing, had to forget in the interest of objectification or representation. Starting from the aphonic and polyphonic in every utterance, he radically questions the reduction of the human being in the tradition of humanism. (45) He explores in the bearer, or in the gesture, that which resists all formalization and historicization. He demonstrates that the relationship between language, voice and movement is one of a reciprocal attempt at erasure: the voice as voice only becomes clear where language recedes into the background, language as phone appears in relation to motion as the intersection of two movements which alternately threaten to throw each other out of step. He therefore not only takes up Artaud's concept of the text as vibrations in the air, he also continues it: he discovers, loosely based on Benjamin’s essay on surrealism, the “everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday” - which may explain Aragon’s enthusiastic hymn from 1971 to “Deafman Glance” as the fulfilled dream of surrealism and his praise of the "marriage of gesture with silence, of movement with the inaudible.” (46)

Wilson describes a listening that disrupts the almost perfectly calculated calculation of his theater as listening to the singular event, hearing the unheard in the repetition. Everything that can be historicized and structured in his theater merely prepares this event. But this also leads to a fundamental doubt about the methodical, structured, systematic study of theater. In and beyond all necessary formalization, it would have to develop a quasi-transcendental attentiveness as its highest virtue, the willingness, for the sake of the singular moment that demands to be heard, to say goodbye to all preset categories: an attentiveness comparable to that which is described by Paul Celan in his Büchner speech.

Wilson’s emphasis on listening suggests that the history of the theater, all the histories of the many different theaters, should be expanded to include a history of listening. It would have to examine, for example, how the dictates of understanding - the word in the commonly used as well as the literal sense, understood as communication and perpetuation – have systematically suppressed the aphony and polyphony of singular speech in dramatic theater and beyond. It would have to deal with the comic return of the repressed, for example in the unintentional, lightning-fast polyphony and multiple voices involved in misunderstandings, jokes and physical outbursts. And it would have to consider its own limitations in the unheard and inaudible that accompanies everything we listen to. (47)