The Scene Before Philosophy

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THE SCENE BEFORE PHILOSOPHY / 81

Theatre Journal 55 (2003) 8197 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Memory, Mimesis, Tragedy:

The Scene Before Philosophy

Paul A. Kottman

Life is the non-representable origin of representation.Jacques Derrida

The historical complicity of Greek tragedy with the emergence of the Athenianpolishas interested political thinkers and classicists alike for some time.1 Among classicists,this interest has tended to manifest itself either in an analysis of particular dramatists;2

or certain thematic, conceptual, or linguistic patterns within individual tragic works.3

In short, the political stakes of the theatre have derived from the exegetical analysis ofthe theatrical works themselves in relation to their context of origin.4 The pre-dominance that this sort of exegesis continues to enjoy is due not only to thephilological care and attention with which classicists, especially, tend to proceed butalso to a tendency to understand the dramatic work itself (both the textual artifact, andwhatever the archives retain of its context of origin) as the repository of political orsocial meaning. And this means, consequently, that the political nature of tragedy isimplicitly regarded by such a methodology as an effect of the mimetic character of the

Paul A. Kottman is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Albany, and Adjunct Professor of

Performance Studies at New York University. He is currently revising his first book, tentatively entitled

Between Actors and Witnesses: A Politics of the Scene. His recent publications include the

Introduction toRelating Narratives, by Adriana Cavarero, and articles on Shakespeare and literary

theory that have appeared inShakespeare Studies andThe Oxford Literary Review.

1

See, as a start, Karen Hermassi, Polity and Theater in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1977), and J. Peter Euben, ed., Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1986), and The Tragedy of Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1990); some of the essays in John Winkler and Froma Zeitlin, ed., Nothing to Do With Dionysus?:

Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).2 See, for example, Charles Segals work on Euripides. I will return to Segal later in this article.3 One might think, for example, of the various political readings ofAntigone over the past thirty years

or of Froma Zeitlins and Nicole Lorauxs work on gender, myth, and ritual in the Greek context.4 For a good account of the German roots of this philological methodology, as well as its relation to

more archaeological approaches to interpretations of Greek tragedy, see Simon Goldhill, ModernCritical Approaches to Greek Tragedy, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P. E.Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 32448. Even the most philosophically

inclined classicists tend to insist upon the exegetical character of their labor. Notably, Jean-PierreVernant has offered a number of eloquent and convincing defenses of careful contextual analysis ofclassical Greek works. See especially Jean-Pierre Vernant, Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpreta-tion, in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1970), 27395.


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82 / Paul A. Kottman

dramatic work. The determination of tragedy as first and foremost a mimetic work inturn reduces the political essence of tragedy to the legible features of this or thatproduction.

Among political thinkers, the situation is perhaps more complex. Hannah Arendt, inan exemplary and influential discussion of the origins of tragedy, declared that thetheater is the political artpar excellence; only there is the political sphere of human lifetransposed into art.5 For Arendt, the political essence of the theatre arises from itspre-philosophical presentation of human affairs.6 By pre-philosophical, Arendtsimply means that the theatre is an experience of speech and action as pure actuality,through which each actor reveals who s/he is by speaking and acting among others.Indeed, from Arendts perspective, the theatrelike thepraxis it imitatesis also pre-political, for it is precisely the interaction that adheres in speaking and action amonga plurality that opens the space of thepolis.7 Thus, what makes the theatre political, in

Arendts view, is not the imitative or mimetic quality of the work as such; rather it isthe fact that tragedy imitatesman in his relation to others.8 Put simply, it is therelationality of the scene that lends the theater its political sense.

Given these seemingly contradictory approaches to the problem, one is thus left towonder: does the political essence of the theatre arise from a pre-philosophicaltheatrical experience as such? Or, does the political nature of theatrical experiencecome from the mimetic or imitative quality of the dramatic work, as the philosophicaltradition since Plato defines it?

Before addressing these questions myself, it may be helpful to recall that alreadywith Aristotle, one finds significant resistance to the Platonic definition of tragedy aspoetic production (poiesis) or mimeseos en ontos. Indeed, it was precisely in order toassert a political sense for tragedyover and against Platos banishment of thetragedians in the Republicthat Aristotle defined tragedy in the Poetics as mimeseospraxis.9 For unlike the mimeseos en ontos which, for Plato, made the theatre a poeticproduction or work, based on mere appearances that lead its audience astray from theonto-theological order of IdeasAristotle sought to orient the theatre toward praxis.This is why, as Jacques Taminiaux has demonstrated, Arendts take on tragedy might be read as a partial recuperation of Aristotles rejoinder to Plato.10 It is thereforeimportant to note that the debate over how to account for the political essence oftragedyis it a function of the mimetic, poetic work, or does it adhere in the scene of

action?is a problem that is inscribed in Aristotles agon with Plato over the termmimesis itself. For this reason, and others, the terms mimesis and mimetic can hardly be

5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 188.6 I take the phrase pre-philosophical from Hannah Arendts The Life of Mind (New York: Harcourt

Brace, 1971), 12940.7 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 17989. For an excellent discussion of Arendts views on

action and the theatre, see Jacques Taminiaux, From Aristotle to Bios Theoretikos and Tragic Theoria,in The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 89

121.8 Arendt, The Human Condition, 188.9 See Aristotle, Poetics, tran. Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

1998), 1449b, 25.10 See note 5.


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used in any univocal way; where I use them in what follows, I have in mind primarilyPlatos use of mimesis in RepublicX.

It is not my intention here to rehearse Aristotles riposte to his teacher in any detail;

it has already been the topic of numerous studies.11

Nor am I interested in taking sidesin order to simply privilege Aristotles views over those of Plato. Given the history andcharacter of the problem, which I would like to bear in mind throughout this essay,one can hardly hope to offer anything like a final solution.

Instead, having outlined the problem of how to relate the theatre to politics in abroadalbeit cursoryfashion, I would like to approach it from another perspective,for it may become clear along the way that the parameters of the ancient debate itselfcan be shifted. In this spirit, I would like to consider another way in which to articulatea pre-philosophical (i.e. not simply imitative or representational) political essence oftheatrical experienceone which would be irreducible to the mimetic work, and

adhere in the living scene as suchby returning to an ancient anecdote.

Around 493 BCE one of the very first works of Greek tragedyThe Fall of Miletus bythe tragic poet Phrynichuswas staged in Athens only two years after the events withwhich it dealt actually occurred.12 No script of the play is extant, but it appears to havebeen a theatrical representation of a military defeat that the Milesians suffered at thehands of thePersians.13The play was therefore received not as a representation of afamiliar myth, or distant legend.14 Rather, the play presented something that theaudience members themselves remembered, and in so doing both brought about andconfirmed this living recollection.

Indeed, so unsettled were the Athenians by what they saw that they were reducedto weeping. Herodotus provides the following account of the audiences reaction tothe performance:

The Athenians . . . showed their profound distress at the loss of Miletus in a number ofways, but in none so clearly than in their reception of Phrynichus play; for whenPhrynichus produced his Fall of Miletus, the audience in the theater burst into tears, and theauthor was fined a thousand drachmae for reminding them of a disaster which touched themso closely [hos anamnesanta oikeia kaka]. A law was subsequently passed forbidding anybodyever to put the play on stage again.15

While this account is, as far as is known, the first surviving report of the earliest

performance of a tragedy of which we are informed, The Fall of Miletus was certainly

11 Two good places to start are: Gerald Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1986), 7488; and Stephen Halliwell,Aristotles Poetics (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1986), 10938, 33136.

12 For more on the date, see Joseph Roisman, On Phrynichos Sack of Miletus and Phoinissai,Eranos 86 (1988): 1516. The timeline at the end of Easterlings The Cambridge Companion listsPhyrnichusFall of Miletus as the first tragedy on record, 352.

13 See William Ridgeway, The Origin of Tragedy (New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1966), 66. See also,

Malcolm Heath, The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (London: Duckworth, 1987), 67.14 See Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Problems of Early Greek Tragedy, in The Academic Papers of Sir HughLloyd-Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 23033.

15 Herodotus, The Histories, tran. Aubrey de Selincourt (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), 366,emphasis mine.


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not the only play of its time to represent historical events within living memory.16

Phrynichus himself returned to historical material about fifteen years later with ThePhoenician Women (476?) and AeschylusThe Persians (472), the oldest extant work oftragedy, portrayed the defeat of the Persians at Salamis in 484. The obvious difference

between The Fall of Miletus and these later historical plays, of course, is the fact that thelatter did not (as far as is known) lead to this sort of weeping; additionally, theirauthors were not fined and the plays were not banned.

Although it is true that Herodotus says that this reminder then led to the ban andfine, I shall be more concerned in what follows with the weeping of the Athenians thanwith the fine and the ban that were subsequently imposed, since the act of weepingspontaneously occurred on the scene itself. The fine came next, according to Herodotus,while the ban came later; they may have been anything but spontaneous.17 Thus, forthe moment, I would like to focus on the scene of the actual performance that

Herodotus describes: namely, the performance of The Fall of Miletus and the tearsproduced by the reminder of catastrophe. This may seem a counter-intuitive way toproceed, given that the ban and the fine have received the most attention from readersof Herodotus account. However, given how little we know about the actual motivesfor the fine and the ban, I would like to focus instead upon the more immediateconnection, manifested on the scene described by Herodotus, between the Atheniansmemory of the catastrophe and their tears.

It is, of course, hardly surprising to find an audience weeping at the close of atragedy. What is striking, however, is the way in which the tears described byHerodotus do not appear to be a manifestation of katharsis, nor do the tears seem to

result primarily from the mimetic force of Phrynichus play. Indeed, already a certainrevision of Aristotles account of tragedy in the Poetics is in order; for the tears thatresulted from the performance of The Fall of Miletus are not reducible solely to theeffect of its imitation of action let alone to the plot or script of Phrynichus play.Evidently the lamentation was not kathartic; it didnt appear to have educated,instructed, or instilled some moral; nothing was learned from Phrynichus play.18 Nordoes it seem, according to Herodotus, that the audience wept because they weresimply affected emotionally by what they saw, the way a contemporary audiencemight be affected by a play about the Second World War. Rather, it seems that theirlamentation was the result of a shared recollection of a suffering that was theirsoikeia

16 For more on the authority of Herodotus account, see Joseph Roisman, On Phrynichos Sack, 1617, especially n. 7.

17 Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones has suggested that the ban and fine were imposed because of an eventconnecting Phrynichus with the archon Themistocles, who wanted the Athenians to prepare for waragainst the Persians (Problems, 23338). Joseph Roisman has suggested that this interpretation ofthe Phrynichus affair in terms of the politics of the time has proved unsatisfactory . . . nothing is knownof the play to indicate whether it was pro- or anti- Persian in tone and message (On PhrynichosSack, 16). In any event, the ban and finelike most acts of censorshipmay likely have had motivesthat extend far beyond the performance of Phyrnichus play itself. My interest here, rather, is thespecific interaction of the scene as such.

18

Obviously, the term katharsis would require a more lengthy interpretation than can be providedhere. For a good overview of the problem, see Stephen Halliwell,Aristotles Poetics, 35057; AndrewFord, Katharsis: The Ancient Problem, in Performativity and Performance, ed. A. Parker and Eve Sedgwick(New York: Routledge Press, 1995), 10932; also see Jonathan Lears contribution to Essays on AristotlesPoetics, ed. Amlie Oksenberg Rorty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 31540.


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kaka, something bad that touched home; the play reminded them [anamnesanta] ofwhat they already remembered.

At the very dawn of the Western theatrical tradition, therefore, it is possible to

glimpse an effect of tragedy that differs markedly from the way in which theatricalexperience gets described by Plato and Aristotle more than a century later, descrip-tions which have characterized thinking about the theatre ever since. That is to say, itmay be possible to discern a singular, unrepeatable and un-representableandtherefore pre-philosophical scenethe features of which are irreducible to the workthat is performed.

Clearly, Herodotus is describing a highly unusual scene. Were Phrynichus playperformed today, or even one hundred years after Phrynichus death, weeping from ashared memory would be an unlikely result. This is not simply due to the fact thatsuch historical tragedies gained wider acceptance among the Athenians; the point here

is not simply that Phrynichus or the archon Themistocles failed to make the materialpalatable to the audiencealthough it is true that, after a perhaps tactful interval offifteen years or so and after the defeat of the Persians themselves in 480479,Phyrnichus, and then Aeschylus were able to stage historical dramas successfully.19

Rather, according to Herodotus account, the tears had to do precisely with theuniqueness of that audience. Apparently the tears were the manifestation of a livedrecollection of a traumatic event, a memory that of course died with the people whobore it. The memory in question is, of course, not an individual or private recollectionof a psychic injury or trauma but rather a shared, public, mortal memory of acatastrophe [kaka]. The term memory therefore needs to be understood in this

context as designating an essential part of the singular, finite relation of thespectatorshipfor it is this shared memory that, in large part, distinguishes them fromall other potential audiences of the play. Indeed, what Herodotus description of thescene makes clear above all else is the singularity of this relation among witnesses.

Thus, although Phrynichus was fined and the play censored, we ourselves mighthesitate before blaming the tears exclusively on the play or dramatic work itself.Phrynichus production no doubt imitated a complete action (to use Aristotlesdefinition) that called to mind something that those Athenians who saw it wished toforget. But this imitation of action in and of itself would, again, not result in anidentical reaction were it performed elsewhere, or at another time, before a different

group of spectators. What is decisive in Herodotus account is not the work by the poetPhrynichus, nor the form or content of the theatrical oeuvre, but rather the scene of itssingular performance as it is recounted by the historian.

Moreover I would like to suggest that this makes possible an analytical distinction,which I will try to elaborate in what follows, between the scene and the work. That isto say, by relying upon Herodotus testimony we can see clearly that the scene itselfthe actual enactment of the play and spontaneous weeping that followedis ulti-mately irreducible to the work that was performed, to any archival content or remnantthat could survive the lives of those on the scene.

19 But then, what would explain the fact that no known Greek tragedy after AeschylusPersiansdealt with a contemporary theme centered on historical events? See Paul Cartledge, Deep Plays:Theatre as Process in Greek Life, in Easterling, The Cambridge Companion, 2425.


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We are dealing, therefore, with a scene wherein the political identity of theparticipants is not simply defined through a pre-existing membership, class, ornational affiliationalthough those attributes clearly play a role herenor throughanything that they might have in common outside remembering the fall of Miletus and

witnessing its theatrical representation. In fact, this is borne out of a close reading ofHerodotus own accountin which the nature of the recollection itself (hos anamnesantaoikeia kaka) hinges upon how one reads oikeia kaka, their own catastrophe. As DavidRosenbloom points out, in the period in question (478456 BCE), the relation betweenthe inside and the outside of the city, between oikeia and allotria was undergoing akind of transformation; what ones own means here is very much in question.22

Indeed, the very fact that the Athenians could identify themselves so strongly with theMilesians, such that the Milesians catastrophe (kaka) refers to the Athenians owntroubles and misfortunes, underscores the extent to which the polityin its emergentformis defined not by fixed borders, allegiances, or blood-ties.23 Rather, the polis

emerges here, to borrow Arendts phrase, as a kind of organized remembrance.24 Putsimply, what defines and distinguishes that spectatorship of Athenians from all otherpotential (or actual) spectatorship of the play is the remembrance they shared, andtheir ability to confirm that remembrance to one another.25 Or better, what defines theirrelationship is not something that could be abstracted from, or that is foreign to, thescene itself; rather, it arises from the living confirmationthe actual relationof ashared remembrance made possible by the scene.

Now, it could be objected that my choice of Phrynichus The Fall of Miletus issomewhat disingenuous, given both its peculiar content and the fact that the text didnot survive. What about, at the very least, AeschylusThe Persians, which is an entire,extant example of a tragedy whose subject matter was within the living memory of itsaudience? In a sense, they make a natural pair. And admittedly, any comparison of thetwo ought to begin by asking why the earlier work was banned and its author fined,while the later work won first prize at the festival? What was it that made The Fall ofMiletus so disagreeable in comparison to the well-received Persians?

Interesting as they are, however, I would like to refrain from pursuing them heresince my aim is not to analyze the works themselves, but rather to focus on the sceneof one particular performance. Indeed pursuing these questions presupposes that thetears produced by The Fall of Miletus can be attributed, at some level, to the content or

the form of Phrynichus workand that Aeschlyus play succeeded, as it were,because of some discernable difference between the works themselves.26 This is, again,

22 See David Rosenbloom, Myth, History and Hegemony in Aeschylus, inHistory, Tragedy, Theory,ed. Barbara Goff (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 102. Roisman points out that oikeia ispatently contrasted with allotria throughout Herodotus, which makes Rosenblooms argument allthe more pertinent for the passage in question here (On Phrynichos Sack, 1718).

23 Roisman, On Phrynichos Sack, 1819.24 Arendt, The Human Condition, 198.25 It has been suggested that the Athenians wept not just out of memory, but in anticipation of a

similar disaster. However, there is no evidence to support such a view. On the contrary, a close readingof Herodotus own text appears to suggest, precisely, that the conflation of memory and politicalbelonging are very much at stake here. See, again, Roiseman, On Phrynichos Sack.

26 Such differences could be characterized in any number of ways. Vernant, for example, suggeststhat the events presented by Aeschylus were not regarded by the Athenians, in contrast to their


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precisely the presupposition that I wish to challenge. By focusing on Herodotus narrative about a non-extant playas opposed to reading The PersiansI would liketo strip bare some of our assumptions about locating the political sense of tragedy inthe legible features of any given work. The point, from my perspective, is not finally to

determine why the Athenians wept at seeing The Fall of Miletus, while The Persians waslauded. Given how little we know about the former, any explanation would bespeculation anyway. Put simply, I am interested instead in the fact that they wept, andthe fact that this is the focus of Herodotus account of the scene. Rather than comparethe two plays, therefore, it seems to me that a certain analytical purchase can be gained by insisting here on the difference between a singular scene, like the one to whichHerodotus draws our attention, and a particular work like The Persians.

Obviously, it is not always (though it is sometimes) the case that the performance ofa dramatic work stages something that corresponds so recognizably to the lived

memory of the spectators. Admittedly, the story that Herodotus provides is hardly themost typical sort of theatrical experience. Nor for that matter, is Aeschlyus ThePersians. Indeed I might imagine an ulterior objection to my guiding example: What isthe political sense when what is performed, while it may recount a familiar story, doesnot correspond to anyones living memory, for instance, in the case of a legend likeOedipus, or a morality play like Everyman, or for that matter, one of Samuel Beckettsenigmatic short works? One might safely assume that Becketts Waiting for Godot orLuigi Pirandellos Sei personaggi in cerca dautore does not actively recount actual eventsthat any potential spectator could remember as part of their own lived experience. 27

What, then, could be saidfrom the position proposed in this essayabout the

political or communal significance of a performance of a purely fictional work? Doesit even make sense to speak, politically, of a rigorous distinction between historicalworks (like The Fall of Miletus or The Persians) and manifestly fictional works?

What I would like to argue is that the political sense of the theatre is not to be foundin the distinction of any genre, form, or content of the work, nor even in any possiblereferential relation between the play and an outside reality or history upon which it isclosely or loosely based. As far as the political essence of tragedy is concerned, therelation between the artwork and reality, or between discourse and its outside, is notdecisive. What is decisive is the relation that is brought into being by the scenethrough the action and speech of those present, or through the performed affirmation

of a shared recollection.

Consequently, it does not matter whether a play is pure fiction (Beckett) or a historyplay (Shakespeares Richard IIIor Henry V). The genre of the work it is not essential

reaction to The Fall of Miletus, as their own (Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet,Myth andTragedy, tran. Janet Lloyd [New York: Zone Books, 1990], 245). My point, however, is that whateverdifferences one traces, the fact remains that the singular scene recounted by Herodotus is not reducibleto any describable features of Phrynichus work.

27

Symptomatically, motion pictures produced in the United States still make disavowals of this sortby claming that any relation between the characters and events of the film and actual persons or eventsare coincidental. This disavowal, of course, seeks in principle to affirm (or hide behind) a rigorousdistinction between fiction and truthwhile at the same time admitting, or responding to, its possibleconfusion.


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here, nor is the dramatic work itself. For the Athenians, at least in Herodotus view, thepolitical value and significance of that peculiar early performance of Phrynichus playlay in the relation among those gathered, rather than in the Aristotelian elements of theperformance itself (mythos, lexis, opsis, etc.) or the historical meaning of the capture of

Miletus. Indeed, the relation that is inaugurated by a shared remembrance of theoriginal scene is the theatrical scene that Herodotus describesquite apart from anyconsideration of the artistry, representation, or imitative quality of PhrynichusThe Fallof Miletus.

It is clear, after all, that the scenes recounted by Herodotus, both the battle itself andits ill-fated theatrical resurrectionlike any singular scene worthy of the namearenot reducible to representation, imitation, or artistry. While this may seem counter-intuitive, given the fact that we tend to think of a scene as that which is representableor repeatable by definition, it is nevertheless the singular unrepresentability of the

scene that distinguishes it from the work or the artifice. Indeed, it could even be saidthat a scene becomes a work or an artifice precisely when it is abandoned to repetitionor re-presentationthe work being in some sense the consequence or effect of thisiterability or continual re-staging.28

In contrast, while the events of the battle of Miletus (or, for that matter, the Trojanwar, the French Revolution, or the killings in Jenin) can be re-staged or represented(theatrically, verbally, televisually) ad infinitum, well beyond the lives of those whowere there, the lived relation of those on the scenewhich results from the actionsthemselves, and the shared memory they leave behindabsolutely resists representa-tion or repetition beyond their life span. Put formulaically, while any word or deed

( praxis, lexis) can be archived, recorded, or even re-enacted (visibly, audibly) wellbeyond the time and place of the event itself, in a potentially infinite way, the relationof those on the scene is mortal and cannot be archived. It resists representation.

For this reason, I wish to argue, it is the relationalways unique, each time broughtinto being either through words and deeds, or through a shared, living (and thereforepotentially utterable) memorywhich constitutes the scene as such, and is the mostessential condition for any political sense. In short, a political account of theatricalexperience ought to begin not so much with an analysis of what is performed (whetherthe play is fictional or historical)but rather with an understanding of the relationalaspect of the scene itself. In the same way, what happens in a historical or journalistic

sense ought not to be the final place for contemporary political meaning, for it isprecisely the reduction of politics to the representable content of this or that event,which obscures the mortality and fragility of the political relation, the lives, which areat stake.

Back to the place of theatre in all this, it could be said that the performance of afictional play or theatrical workas witnessed by this or that spectatorshipis alsofirst and foremost itself an actual event that is immediately political regardless of itsform or content. In other words, prior to any consideration of its form or content, a

28 Here and throughout this discussion, I have in mind Jacques Derridas work regarding theconstitutive nature of repetition or representation, particularly as in regards to the literary work. See,for instance, Derek Attridges interview with Derrida inActs of Literature (New York: Routledge Press,1992).


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theatrical performancelike any combination of action and speechis political onlyif, and insofar as, there remains ex post facto more than one person who can speaktogether in memory of having been on the scene with others.

To return to the essentiality of the scene, therefore, means to return to the relationthat is brought about by the shared, living memory of what is collectively witnesseda memory that is, through a paradoxical temporality which will need to be explored,constitutive of the scene itself, even as it appears to be merely its consequence.Whereas a work or representation survives through its radical indifference to the livesof the witnesses, the scene is nothing other than a lived relation that islike the wordsand deeds from which it springsabsolutely mortal and contingent. Unpredictabilityand mortality are in fact constitutive of the scene, for in order to be what it is a scenerequireswithout any prior guaranteethat someone speak in its memory, especiallyto and for another who also bears that memory. Therefore, this subsequent testi-

monythe speech that follows actionis not ontologically separate from the scene,no matter how much time passes between scene and testimony. Rather, the subsequenttestimony is the scenes most essential trait.

With all of this in mind, I would like now to situate that anomalous performancerecounted by Herodotus within the distinction between scene and work that I amelaborating. For, in my view, this is a distinction whose emergence is contemporane-ous, both historically and conceptually, with the birth of tragedy in the traditionalsense. Tragedy is born, according to tradition, precisely when the work breaks with theliving scene and appears to stand alone as mimetic, over and against the sociality oflifein tension with life, but always at some distance from it.

Where does the performance of Phrynichus play, which occurred alongside thebirth of tragedy, fit within this history? Is there something within the logic of the sceneHerodotus describes that resists the conventional wisdom regarding the bond betweentragedy and thepolis? Let me first give a brief summary of the dominant view.

Now, at first glance it might appear that the sort of common grief (koinon achos)provoked by Phrynichus play resembles the sort of public weeping that has come tobe understood as one of the defining characteristics of Greek tragedy, as it developedespecially in the works of Euripides and Sophocles.29 According to Charles Segal, forinstance, the staging of rituals of lamentation marks the emergence of a polis that

recognizes and confirms itself through the theatrical performance of communalpractices, such as collective grieving.30 The difference between this sort of performanceand the scene recounted by Herodotus, of course, lies in the fact that Phrynichus playdid not (as far as we know) stage this common grief within the performance itself;rather the performance actually produced it spontaneously among those gathered. Inthis sense, the response of the audience is itself part of the action of the scene, over and beyond the unpredictable character of the performance itself. In other words, therewas no artifice, no ritualistic character to their grief.31

29

Koinon achos is a phrase taken from the chorus at the end of EuripidesHippolytus,tran. Rober Bagg(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 1462.30 See Charles Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).31 Again, this is why we are more interested in analyzing the singular scene that Herodotus describes

than we are in interpreting the particular character of Phrynichus work.


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Nevertheless, it is worth pausing briefly to consider the difference betweenHerodotus account of Phrynichus play and more contemporary accounts of subse-quent works of Greek tragedy, which often contain scenes that explicitly perform orimitate acts of communal lamentation. This will help make clearer the difference I am

trying to articulate between what I am calling the scene and the work to which itremains irreducible.

The connection most frequently drawn among modern scholars between theevolution of tragedy and the theatrical appropriation or representation of communallife begins from the fact that a number of Greek tragedies appear self-consciously toappropriate communal rites of lamentation, or burial.32 In SophoclesAntigone andEuripidesHippolytus, for example, we find climactic scenes in which lamentation isboth performed within the drama and implicitly elicited from the audience as well.33

To tarry with the example offered a moment ago, we might briefly recall Segals

analysis of EuripidesHippolytus. In Euripides play, as Segal argues convincingly, theperformance of rituals of lamentation can be regarded as characterizing andreflecting an emergingpolis that is conscious of itself as a community and cognizantof the theatre as an artifice through which that community is both represented andconstituted. Segal suggests, for instance, that the chorus at the close of Hippolytusreveals that koinon achos is the emotion proper to a theater that has become consciousof itself as a uniquely communal form. Indeed, the shift inHippolytus from the privategrief of Phaedra that opens the play to the common grief with which the play closesseems to suggest, as Segal puts it, that personal grief is lifted from the level ofindividual response to the level of self-consciously communal reaction.34 What Segalwants to underscore is the fact that tragedy represents an important moment in theformation of thepoliss own self-awareness, an awareness that only emerged throughthe work of tragic representation. Ritual commemoration or suffering, he argues, wasimitated in order to reflect on the ways in which Greek society represents itselfthrough such collective expressions as myth, rituals, festivals.35

Now, what is important for our purposes is not so much Segals ostensible focus onrituals of lamentation or the fact that the Greeks represented their own rituals tothemselves through the performance of tragedies. Again, the perspective I am

32 As a start see Charles Segal, EuripidesAlcestis: How to Die a Normal Death in Greek Tragedy,in Death and Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elizabeth Bronfen (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1993), 21341; Charles Segal, Lament and Closure in Antigone, inSophocles Tragic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 11937; Nicole Loraux,Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

33 Charles Segal has written about the cues within bothAntigone andHippolytus that call the audienceto respond with pity and fear at appropriate moments in the play (Lament and Closure, 120, andCatharsis, Audience and Closure, in Tragedy and the Tragic, ed. M. S. Silk [Oxford: Clarendon Press,1996], 14972). See also P. E. Easterlings response to Segals piece in the same collection.

34 Segal, Euripides, 127. See also Segal, Catharsis, Audience and Closure, in Tragedy and the Tragic:Greek Theatre and Beyond, ed. M. S. Silk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 157. In this latter piece, Segal

seeks to expand Aristotles notion of katharsis by giving greater emphasis to the collective . . .communal experience. That is, Segal seeks to understand the participatory nature of lamentation assomething that opens up katharsis beyond the individuals experience of pity and fear, examined byAristotle in the Poetics.

35 Segal, Catharsis, 157.


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proposing is neither anthropological nor hermeneutical. Rather than focusing on whatwas represented, or how thepolis represented itself to itself through dramatic works, itis important to recognize simply that Segals thesis presupposes that the polis founditselfthat is, it seems to have accomplished a certain self-identification and organiza-

tionthrough whatever was represented to it. Indeed, Segals analysis leads us toconclude that the emergence of Greek tragedy marks a fundamental shift in theformation of community, a shift that is manifested especially in the city s nascentreflection upon itself through tragic representation. Put simply, the very fact thatGreek tragedy develops through a self-conscious appropriation of the communalexperience of lamentation signals, for Segal, a shift away from a community that wasconstituted through the spontaneity of lived ritual as such, towards a community thatgathers around a shared representation of the act of mourning.

The peculiarity of tragedy, from this perspective, is that it emerges as a communal

experience in which the communal itself is ex-propriated by the dramatic work orspectacle.36 Or put another way, with the birth of tragedy, communal life itself appearsto have been given over, and henceforth subjected to, the order of representation. 37

With the birth of tragedy the community of spectators begins to find itself in, and infact to constitute itself through, the work of a shared self-representation.

Of course, this self-representation is more than a mere self-reflection. For the Greeks,according to Jean-Pierre Vernant, tragedy did not simply offer an uncritical mirror ofthepolis; rather tragedy was the putting-into-question of thepolis itself. That is to say,tragedy depicted the city rent and divided against itself in at least two senses38: first,insofar as the tragedies themselvesin both form and contentpresented the polis

undergoing various crises, and second, insofar as the dramatic representation itselfcould be seen as taking on a life of its own, quite apart from the lives of the spectators,even as that representation also played a crucial role in the social life of the polis, atcity-sponsored competitions and festivals.39 In other words, the order of tragicrepresentation played a constitutive role in the organization of social life, paradoxi-cally by maintaining an essential distance from, or indifference to, that living reality.

36

For this reason, the phenomenon of Greek tragedy already brings about the expropriation of livedcommunity that Guy Debord postulates as the mark of contemporary society. At the beginning of histreatise, Debord claims that all that once was directly lived has become mere representation. Is thisnot also the very shift that defines the emergence of Greek tragedy, for instance as it is traced in thework of Jean-Pierre Vernant? See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, tran. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 12.

37 It is true that, in the context we are discussing, this order of representation is manifestlyspectacular or dramatic. However, it ought to be understood as implicitly discursive as well. Indeed,Aristotle himself is already disposed toward considering the dramatic or theatrical as reducible todiscourse (lexis), especially where the question of mimetic representation is concerned. See AristotlePoetics, chapter 3; Halliwill,Aristotles,128; and Domenico Pesces excellent introductory essay to theItalian translation of Aristotles Poetics (Milan: Bompiani, 2000), 26.

38

Vernant and Vidal-Naquet,Myth and Tragedy, 33.39 Vernant and others have shown that the very form of Greek tragedy, for instance the lexicaldifference between the chorus and the protagonists, depicts the structural distance between the sociallife of the polis and the dramatic representation that is essential to tragedy. See Vernant and Vidal-Naquet,Myth and Tragedy, 2948 and passim.


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Vernant has offered perhaps the most articulate account of this phenomenon,regarding the origins of Greek tragedy. For him, thepolis acquires its democratic formprecisely at the moment in which it learns to find itself through what it represents toitself. But this self-finding now has the paradoxical character of a putting into crisis.

For that which is found is now at once the most familiar and intimate being of thecommunity and its ex-propriated representation.

Indeed, Vernant claims that the newly democraticpolisturned itself into a theaterthrough the performance of tragedy in festivals or contests, at the same time puttingitself into question.40 Like Arendt, or Aristotle for that matter, Vernant sees thepolisitself as emerging like a sort of stage whereupon the cultural phenomenon of tragedyserved to open the city up for debate.41 Noting, for example, that Greek tragedy takesheroic legend as its material, Vernant emphasizes that tragedy presents the hero notas a model, like in epic, but instead as a problem or subject of debate.42 First of all,

Tragedy does this, of course, by setting the heroic or tragic figure on stage, before theeyes of the spectator, as opposed to relying upon verbal narration. Thus, the tragicheroes are made to seem present, characters truly there, although at the same timethey are portrayed as figures who cannot possibly be there since they belong tosomewhere else, to an invisible beyond.43 The tragic performance is thereforeregarded as in some way both familiar to and distant from the spectatorshipfamiliarenough to allow for identification and distant enough to allow for reflection, critique,and subsequent discussion.

In this way, too, writes Vernant, tragedy played a decisive role in mans apprehen-sion of fiction,44 for the characters that were presented on stage, before the eyes of

the public, were afforded at once a phenomenal reality and a fictitious status.According to Vernant, a certain consciousness of fiction emerged in fifth-centuryAthens; one that remained essential to the dramatic spectacle, such that it seems to be both its condition and its product.45 That is to say, while it is impossibleunconditionally to locate the origin of tragedy in a nascent consciousness of fiction,or vice-versa, it is nevertheless impossible to dissociate fully the former from the latter.Each appears as the condition for the birth of the other.46

40

Although tragedy appears rooted in social reality, he writes, it does not merely reflect thatreality, but calls it into question. See Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Tragedy, in Essays on AristotlesPoetics, ed. Amelie O. Rorty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 36.

41 Ibid.42 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet,Myth and Tragedy, 2329 and passim.43 Ibid., 243; Segal makes a similar claim: Tragedy combines the distancing effects of myth and

fiction, with the agonistic model of debate and conflict. It speaks to the assembled citizens of thepolisin the here and now of a time full of crises, dangers and conflicts; but it uses a frame of remote,legendary events that enables the poet to look far beyond the passions and anxieties of the presentmoment (Euripides, 5).

44 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet,Myth and Tragedy, 24243.45 Ibid., 244.46

As if to drive this point home, Vernant notes that this new experience afforded by the tragicspectacle (ibid., 242) was most likely a decisive impetus behind the theory of mimesis-as-imitationarticulated by Plato and Aristotle. Not surprisingly, theatrical experience turns out to be prior, so tospeak, to the conceptual determination of mimesis-as-imitation; indeed, the theatrical scene deter-mines the mode of its philosophical emergence.


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Now, in my view, what is decisive in Vernants analysis is the way in which tragedyworks as an imitative reflection, or self-conscious performance only insofar as itportrayed something that was already historically or temporally distant from theaudience.47 Interestingly, Vernant notes that this distance had less to do with the mere

passage of time than with the fact that the events represented by Greek tragedy did notbelong to the living memory of the Athenian spectators. Likewise, he suggests that therepresentational, fictitious, or mimetic quality of the play was not simply due to thetechnique of the production, the labor of the actor, or the fact that tragedy comprisesspectacle, not just speech. To be sure, all of these things played a role in the becoming-fiction of tragedy, its break with epic, and its emerging place as the problematicreflection of thepolis. But Vernants analysis allows us to direct our attention beyondthese more formal qualities of tragedy to the fact that theatrical experience exceedsmyth and becomes a fictional representation (mimesis) only insofar as the eventsportrayed are, a priori, understood as happening somewhere else or belonging to a

mythical past that is by now beyond the grasp of living remembrance.48

Put another way, it is precisely by becoming a workgiving itself over torepresentation, repetition, and reproductionthat tragedy simultaneously differenti-ates itself from myth, which is to say, differentiates itself from the immediacy betweenliving memory and communal life in which myth finds its home.49 The birth of tragedysignals, if we follow Vernants logic, an irreparable rift between the work as it appearsbefore the community in dramatic representation, and the living memory of what isbeing represented.

In the terms of my argument here, Vernants account leads to the following

conclusion: the birth of tragedy lies in nothing other than the radical separation ofwork from scene. Interestingly, it is in the light of this division that Vernant namesPhrynichusThe Fall of Miletus as somewhat anomalous. While we know of other plays

47 An important exception to this account of tragedy is the chorus. Vernant and Vidal-Naquetsuggest that the chorus embodies the collective truth . . . of thepolis over and against the othernessof the tragic hero (ibid., 243). More recently, other scholars have argued that the chorus is even moredemocratic than the Athenian polis in that it included old men, women, slaves, and foreigners;therefore, the chorus represents an ulterior and complex set of problems with regard to the relation

between the emerging democracy and dramatic practices. Given the inevitable limits of scope,however, I cannot include a discussion of the chorus here. The interested reader could see, as a start,the following: Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy; Oddone Longo, The Theater of thePolis, in Nothing to Do with Dionysus?: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context , ed. John Winkler andFroma Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 1219; John Gould, Tragedy andCollective Experience, in Tragedy and the Tragic, ed. M. S. Silk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996),21743, and Simon Goldhills response to Goulds piece in the same volume.

48 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 246 and passim. In contrast to tragedy, thetransmission of myth through epic was tantamount to the transmission of memory itself; livingremembrance, in short, is absolutely essential to epic song.For more on this, see Eric Havelock, The

Muse Learns to Write (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), especially 7073; Albert Lord, EpicSingers and Oral Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) and The Singer of Tales (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).49 I am indebted here and throughout to Jean-Luc Nancys analysis of myth in The InoperativeCommunity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), especially 4547, which has helped meto understand the stakes of Vernants analysis in ways I otherwise would not have seen. Especiallyrelevant here is Nancys elaboration of the relation between myth and scene in the third chapter.


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whose subject was historical, Phrynichus is the first tragedy of which we areinformed.50 For Vernant, Phrynichus playperhaps because it lies at the beginningof the traditionrepresents something like an alternative to the trajectory that Greektragedy, in his view, seems to have followed.

On the one hand, we have the dominant tradition described by Segal, Vernant, andothers, which establishes tragedys emergence as fiction or mimetic art through theappropriation of communal rituals or heroic legends that already belonged to animmemorial past. This view, which is recognizable in nearly every theory of perform-ance that has its foundations in classical Greek philosophy, tends to regard thedevelopment of theatrical experience as dependent upon a fundamental mimeticdistance between the spectacle and the lives of the spectators.51 Vernants and Segalsanalyses would belong to this tradition, even while attempting to account for it. Theycould even be said to be the very productof this tradition, for this mimetic distance is,

according to the philosophical and critical tradition to which we belong, the mostessential feature of any artwork or discursive representation. And this distance isgenerally thought to be commensurate with its foreignness to the living memory ofthose who encounter the mimetic performance.

On the other hand, we have Phrynichus play, which was not a legendary tragedy,as Vernant notes, but rather a tragedy of contemporary events.52 Now, Vernantconcludes that the public condemnation of The Fall of Miletus resulted from the factthat the play portrayed events, which he says were too close to the lives of thespectators. The play, he writes, did not allow for the distancing, the transposition thatmade it possible for feelings of pity or terror to be displaced into a different register, no

longer experienced in the same way as in real life, but immediately apprehended andunderstood as fiction.53 Vernant thus imagines Phrynichus play to be an irregularity,which did not meet the criteria for fiction or mimesis to which the Athenians weregradually becoming accustomed. The scene was too close to real life. AlthoughVernant does not say so, the logic of his argument leads one to conclude that the sceneHerodotus describes cannot properly be understood as an artwork or discursiverepresentation. Indeed, for Vernant the censure of Phrynichus work was a conse-quence of an already accepted and established consciousness of fiction, which wasin fact offended by a play that was too-close-to-the-bone.54 What made the playexceptional, it would seem, was that it could not be received as mere fiction. For

Vernant, of course, this is an exception that only serves to confirm the rule, that is, toconfirm the account of tragedy as commensurate with the distance between fiction andlife.

50 David Rosenbloom, Myth, History, 102. For a list of other non-extant tragedies that allegedlydealt with historical subjects, see H. D. Broadhead, Introduction,Persae of Aeschylus (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1960), xvii.

51 In a sense, this claim calls for no justification. Since Plato and Aristotle, at least in the tradition ofthought which this article attempts to analyze, mimesis has been the key to the question of the relation

between artworks (especially dramatic works) and the world or nature.52

Vernant,Myth and Tragedy, 244.53 Ibid.54 Ibid. Malcolm Heath makes a similar assumption, claiming that Phrynichus play was censured

because the tears were shed over misfortunes that touched the audience too closely, reminding themof their own troubles. See Heath, The Poetics of Greek Tragedy, 9.


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But are things so clear? Given that Phrynichus play (494 BCE) is the first tragedy ofwhich we have any record, can it be certain that the censure of The Fall of Miletus afterthis early performance was a consequence of its failure to be immediately appre-hended and understood as fiction? Particularly what if, as Vernant himself claims,

this consciousness of fiction itself emerged partly as a consequence of the intensify-ing consumption of tragedy? What, after all, accounts for the appetite for fiction asopposed to real life that Vernant supposes to have existed? Why must the history oftragedy begin with the self-reflective apprehension of mimesis?

Might it not be the case that the trajectory outlined by Vernant, Segal, and all thosewho follow in Aristotles footstepswhich equates tragedy and the emergence of aformal theatrical consciousness with the contemplative apprehension of tragedy-as-imitationpresupposes a prior recognition of fiction that may in fact be the conse-quence of a lived remembrance that distinguishes, without thought or reflection,

between the real and the imitation? Perhaps the scene described by Herodotus forcesus to consider the living scene as a condition without which something like imitationor a consciousness of fiction would not emerge.

After all, it seems clear that those Athenians who banned Phrynichus play wereaware that the play was not the same thing as the events that it portrayed. That is, theyrecognized the performance for what it was and quite naturally did not confuse it withthe real capture of Miletus. Indeed, this recognition is what was manifested in theplays censure. After all, one can only censure a work, not historical events.

And it is equally clear that this recognition of the play as an imitative performancewas not the result of a formal convention or consciousness of fiction. Still less doesthe plays reception seem to suggest that the performance of this tragedy signaled aquestioning of the city or anything like Aristotles phronesis. It could even be said,without exaggeration, that the recognition of Phrynichus play as an imitation ofreal events came to those Athenians without reflection, without a consciousapprehension of fiction. Indeed, the apprehension of theatrical mimesis by theAthenians in the scene Herodotus describes is utterly foreign to the sort of theoreticalcontemplation that will come to characterize the philosophers noetic grasp of mimesisin Platos work a century later.

First of all, therefore, this scene marks the dissociation of the apprehension of

mimesis from the act of thoughtful debate, understanding, or collective wisdom(phronesis) that, according to Aristotle and Vernant, characterizes theatrical experi-ence.55 Indeed, to paraphrase Arendt, it could be said axiomatically that theatricalexperience in fact antedates the vita contemplativa presupposed by classical philosophysaccount of the theatre,56 for Herodotus account presents us with a scene in which theconscious recognition of theatrical artifice fails to result in, or coincide with, thefictional distance that characterizes Aristotles definition of theatrical experience.Instead, the artifice presented calamaties that were, as Herodotus says, too close to

55 Aristotle underscores the way in which the pleasure of watching or hearing an imitation coincideswith a sort of consciousness or knowledge regarding the imitative nature of the spectacle itself. SeePoetics 1448b1415.

56 See Arendts discussion of Pythagoras in The Life of Mind, 93.


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home (oikeia kaka), too close to allow the play to stand as a subject for debate, or forthe feelings that it inspired to mature into detached, deliberative reflection. Therecognition of the plays artifice, therefore, appears to be a result of the immediacybetween the mimesis of Phrynichus play and the living remembrance of its spectators,

rather than the result of the plays distance from their living memory, as Vernantsupposes. It is as if the mimetic aspect of Phrynichus play lay not so much in theartifice of its theatrical manifestation, but rather in the plays function as a witness forevents that the spectators had themselves seen. The theatrical scene Herodotusdescribes is constituted most essentially through the very relation between livingmemory and mimetic performance that, according to tradition, characterizes myth asopposed to tragedy.

Thus, something like an alternative account of the origins of the theatrical scene,and consequently of the relation between mimesis and politics as well, begins to

emergean account whose origins lie at the very outset of the political and theatricaltradition that we inherit.Rather than focus on a nascent consciousness of fiction orimitation, or on the self-conscious representation of the polis in a dramatic work, it isinstead the singularity of the scene that comes to the fore here, from which the politicalsense of the event (both the battle itself and its representation) arises. RevisingAristotles account of tragedy in the Poetics, we could say that the mimetic character ofthe scene does not lie necessarily in the event of the performance (opsis), or in thestructure of the artistic work (plot, diction, mythos, lexis). Likewise, the habit ofreducing the term mimesis to a general, essentially Platonic, determination of therelation between art and nature or imitation and reality often obscures the termsown ambiguity. The problem lies in this: the political sense of mimesisthat whichrelates the theatrical experience of being on the scene to political lifecannot be fullygrasped in terms of the fictional or artistic character of performance or work, and itsrelation to an outside reality. Rather, mimesis acquires its political sense in theatricalexperience insofar as it corresponds to the living relation of the scene. A radical politicsof mimesis, in sum, would therefore need to move beyond the centrality of representa-tion, of what is represented, and begin to take account of this correspondence.

The Scene Before Philosophy

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