Abstract:

As a technology, theatre both absorbs and represents the technologies it deploys, and so is defined by the multiple temporalities of its instruments. The signifying embodiments, signifying materialities, and signifying narratives constitutive of theatre as rhetoric and practice articulate, depend on, and are altered by the changing emergence of a conceptual “human” (or the dispersion of a conceptual “posthuman”) inseparable from the technological inscription of its definition and representation. So, too, consensually licensing terms like “the discipline” and “the field” share with their object—particularly with that slippery congeries, the formal study of drama, theatre, and performance—a vivifying multiplicity and mobility, as well as a notable temporal instability. Like theatre, like any technology, the condition of theory, of critique, and of scholarship is a consistent struggle with passing into pastness as the inseparable trailing edge of innovation. On the occasion of the 75th volume of Theatre Journal, this brief essay reflects on the intertwined fortunes of theatre and the fashioning of the “disciplines” of its formal study, their passing implication in mutually-sustaining technologies of cultural representation.

摘要：

作为一种技术，戏剧既吸收又代表了它所采用的技术，因此是由其工具的多重时间性来定义的。作为修辞和实践的戏剧构成的象征性体现、象征性物质性和象征性叙事，依赖于与技术密不可分的概念“人类”（或概念“后人类”的分散）的不断变化的出现，并被其改变。其定义和表示的铭文。因此，像“学科”和“领域”这样经过双方同意的许可术语也与它们的对象共享——尤其是与戏剧、戏剧和表演的正式研究——一种令人生机勃勃的多样性和流动性，以及引人注目的混合体。时间不稳定。就像戏剧一样，就像任何技术一样，理论、批评和学术的条件是与作为创新不可分割的后缘的过去进行持续的斗争。值此《戏剧杂志》第 75 卷之际，这篇简短的文章反思了戏剧的交织命运及其正式研究“学科”的形成，以及它们在相互维持的文化表征技术中的短暂含义。