Das Drama des Sehens: Auge, Blick und Buhnenform.
Gil, Daniel Juan
Ulrike Hass. Das Drama des Sehens: Auge, Blick und Buhnenform.
Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005. 406 pp. illus. bibl.
[euro]48.90. ISBN: 3-7705-3978-8.
In her dense and often suggestive study, Das Drama des Sehens:
Auge, Blick and Buhnenform, Ulrike Hass traces a connection between
historically variable structures of perception and the physical
structures of theaters in Europe from classical antiquity to the
eighteenth century. Her methodological approach is to begin with a
detailed theoretical account of historical changes in visual perception
and then to use this account to bring to light a Buhnenform, or
structure of theater, that she calls the "unknown variable" of
her study. In the first half of her book, therefore, Hass develops a
sophisticated and idiosyncratic theoretical account of structures of
visual perception and in the second half she applies that account to a
series of architectural case studies of planned, and actually existing,
theaters. Hass's broadest theoretical claim is that a
culture's most basic modes of perceiving and understanding the
world on the one hand, and the structures of a culture's theater on
the other, are so intimately linked that they in fact constitute two
sides of the same coin. Hass's goal in this book is to document the
history of the interconnection of visual perception and theater history
in Europe.
Hass develops her theoretical account of a historically variable
structure of perception by means of two, somewhat difficult, terms of
art that appear in her title, Blick (view) and Auge (eye), which she
uses to refer to basic styles or modes of seeing. While Hass says that
she cannot offer any straightforward definitions of these terms, she
associates the notion of Blick with a subjective point-of-view that
defines a background and a foreground, and focuses on a small number of
highly individualized objects in the foreground. By contrast, Hass
associates the notion of Auge with a free-floating perception of a whole
world of objects that are all equally engaging and simultaneously
present to the observer. Hass suggests that the mode of Blick is
recognized and theorized in Italian Renaissance investigations of
perspective and the illusion of depth in paintings, notably including
the famous discussions of this issue by Alberti and Brunelleschi.
According to Hass, the theoretical recognition of the more free-floating
perceptual mode of the Auge is a byproduct of the discovery of the human
retina, which early modern anatomists thought of as a kind of passive
mirror reflecting all objects in the field of vision without privileging
any.
Having defined these two modes or styles of perception, Hass does
not posit any simple historical transition from one to the other.
Rather, she insists on a complex and subtle dialectic in which these two
modes of perception support and complicate each other. For Hass, it is
this dialectic that accounts for much of the history of perception that
she tries to bring to light. Though Hass's account is sometimes
difficult to follow, it is immensely suggestive in inviting us to
imagine historical change in basic patterns of visual perception that
typically feel spontaneous, natural, and universally human.
In the second half of the book Hass offers a survey of the theory
and practice of theater-construction from Vitruvius in the first century
BCE to Pozzo at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In these
chapters, Hass reconstructs the vital role that commitments to theories
of perception and sight played in the design of theaters and stages. One
of the real pleasures of Hass's book are the sixty-eight
beautifully reproduced images of theater and stage designs that provide
telling evidence of the ways in which theater architects aimed to
harness the geometries of perception and perspective as they understood
them. Though Hass's account of theater history is characterized by
a proliferation of historical narratives, it is nevertheless possible to
detect a central argument. Drawing on some speculative reconstructions
of ancient Greek and Roman theater, Hass suggests that the aural or
vocal dimension was still central to this ritualistic theater since it
treated the human voice more as a rhythmic instrument for forging
collective community than as a mode of communication. Hass argues that
in late antiquity this aural dimension in theater was gradually lost as
more and more emphasis was placed on visual spectacle. (Hass makes the
interesting side argument that the rise of opera is a late byproduct of
this transition, and that it preserves the centrality of the aural
dimension.) Within the ensuing visual era of the theater--essentially
the era of theatrical modernity--Hass sees a gradual shift from an
emphasis on fully-situated spectacles that integrate drama with the
specific place in which a theater is located (for example, a town
square) to an emphasis on the theater as a relatively autonomous space
that can reflect a whole world from nowhere.
Since her book is focused on theater architecture and design, Hass
does not examine the implications of her account for literary
interpretation of early modern drama. But her effort to place theater
history within the context of a history of visual perception fits well
with recent important attempts to develop a phenomenological approach to
early modern theater, as Bruce Smith does, for example, in The Acoustic
World of Early Modern England. In essence, Hass's book invites us
to imagine the theater not merely as a literary and narrative phenomenon
but as a complex visual phenomenon. Hass suggests that this complex
visual phenomenon is characterized by a dynamic interplay between, on
the one hand, a perspective that focuses on the characters who occupy
the foreground of our perception and who demand our attention as
individuals and, on the other hand, a very different perspective that
luxuriates in the world of objects, including the objects that are human
bodies, that the theater, in its visual generosity as a medium, places
before our eyes.
DANIEL JUAN GIL
Texas Christian University
