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Mimmi Woisnitza: The Stakes of the Stage: Piscator’s Scenography  as a Practice of Critique and Benjamin’s Discontent with the “Zeittheater”
The Stakes of the Stage: Piscator’s Scenography as a Practice of Critique and Benjamin’s Discontent with the “Zeittheater”
(p. 297 – 324)

Mimmi Woisnitza

The Stakes of the Stage: Piscator’s Scenography as a Practice of Critique and Benjamin’s Discontent with the “Zeittheater”

PDF, 28 pages

  • criticism
  • aesthetics

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English

Mimmi Woisnitza

is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Philosophy and Sciences of Art at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She holds a PhD from the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago for a dissertation on the intersection of eighteenth-century German theater praxis and aesthetic theory, forthcoming in 2020 as Dramaturgies of the Imagination. The Theatre as a Laboratory of Spectatorial Imagination in Lessing and Kleist with Rombach Verlag. More recently, she has been doing research on the history of theater rehearsal, and staging practices and scenography as a form of critique, in the works and lives of theater practitioners of the historical avant-gardes.
Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

Critique is a form of thinking and acting. It is determined by its objects, yet never accesses them immediately but is always mediated through its own forms of (re)presentation. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as topoi such as the break, the marginalization, the tearing and opening indicate. However, these multifarious attempts to “build on the structure through demolition” (Benjamin) testify to the dependence of all articulation on the forms of (re)presentation [“Darstellung”]. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated which generate their critical statements less argumentatively than through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene—whereas the theatrical scene as a stage of critique has been contested intensively during the 20th century. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.

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