SOURCE: "Postmodernism: Extension or End of Modernism? Theater between Cultural Crisis and Cultural Change," in Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodernist Controversy, edited by Ingeborg Hoesterey, Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 216-28.

The controversy surrounding postmodernism which has currently aroused fierce debate in various fields on different levels culminates in the persistent question of whether postmodernism has effected a complete break with modernist traditions, or whether it has, on the contrary, only radicalized the trends first formulated and pronounced by modernism and extended its conclusions. Both viewpoints are vigorously upheld. This is all the more extraordinary since the ground on which the controversy should be discussed is not yet clearly plotted: Does the modernism dealt with here begin with the Querelle des anciens et des modernes or with the Enlightenment? With the industrialization of Western Europe or with Nietzsche? Should one see the historical avant-garde movement as an integral component of modernism (as most European critics seem to do), or should modernism be defined by the exclusion of the avant-garde movement (as many American critics would argue)? In attempting to examine the question of whether the "true" Epochenschwelle [threshold of an epoch] is to be termed modern or post-modern, one must first secure agreement on these issues.

The most important arguments so far exchanged in the controversy have been collated in a most informative research report entitled "The Postmodern Weltanschauung and Its Relation with Modernism" by Hans Bertens. Rather than repeating those arguments here, which in the meantime have become sufficiently well known, I shall take as starting point those elements which refer to postmodernism in literature and examine them from a semiotic point of view.

There is a wealth of argument which concerns literary device. Distinctive characteristics are formulated whose opposites are held to be representative of modernism: indeterminancy, fragmentation, montage, collage, intertextuality, hybridization, the carnivalesque (in the sense of Bakhtin), constructivism, randomness, openness of the form, discontinuity, etc. This catalog which concentrates on the syntactic level of a work, has yet to be completed.

On the semantic level, the presentation of possible worlds, the redefinition of the relationship between time and space, and the dissolution of the self and its boundaries are most frequently referred to. The pragmatic level is conspicuously absent from the argumentation. Here the only discussion is concentrated on the shift of the focus away from the work itself and onto the reader, so that one can only speak of a literary object in the strictest sense as the interaction between the reader and the text.

In addition to this, a string of metasemiotic notions are appealed to, such as the shift of the dominant as epistemological question to the dominant as ontological one (McHale, 1987); from monism to pluralism; from representation to performance; from referentiality to nonreferentiality; or, yet again, the firmly held belief in the self-reflexivity of a literary text and its production. Still largely unclarified remains the status of the various arguments and the interconnections between them: Must all distinctive characteristics be listed in order to be able to speak of a postmodern work, or would it suffice to specify certain chosen ones, and, if so, which? Do they create a structure with one another, within which each fulfills a function, or does one simply enumerate them ad libitum? How can one relate the distinctive characteristics found on the different semiotic levels to one another? Does it make sense simply to list specific literary devices without having analyzed and differentiated their relation to the semantic, pragmatic, or metasemiotic levels?

Apart from these more systematic questions, others arise which stem from the actual methods of procedure. Thus as verification that it is indeed the distinctive characteristics given that differentiate postmodern works from the modern, a literary corpus is created which, despite all its differences in detail, is nonetheless homogeneous in two significant aspects: the examples are predominantly drawn from the narrative genres (short stories and novels) and exclude texts from the historical avant-garde almost entirely. Hence I should like to elucidate the systematic problem of the distinction between postmodernism and modernism by recourse to a body of literature which principally consists of texts of dramatic literature and which will include those of the historical avant-garde movement as it has recently been foregrounded by Peter Bürger (1984). Texts such as Sphinx and Strohmann (Kokoschka), Les mamelles de Tiresias (Apollinaire), Le coeur à gaz (Tzara), Methusalem (Yvan Goll), Le serin muet (G. Ribemont Dessaignes), and Hugo Ball's texts for the Dada soirées will therefore be referred to as examples of modernist literature. Since Dada was in existence at that time, one must also take it into account. The same of course applies to dramas such as Mysterium buffo (Mayakovsky), or Pobedr nrd solncem (Victory Over The Sun) (Kru enych), as well as to texts of futurist and constructivist performances.

As a starting point, I have selected a problem which has arisen on the semantic level, and through it, the relation to the syntactic, pragmatic, and metasemiotic levels can easily be established: the area to be examined is the presentation of the individual, the self in modern and postmodern drama.

By way of introduction, I shall cite a somewhat lengthy passage from Bertens's Forschungsbericht:

For Gerald Graff the celebratory mode of Postmodernism is characterized by a "dissolution of ego boundaries"; for Daniel Bell "the various kinds of postmodernism ... are simply the decomposition of the self in an effort to erase the individual ego," and Ihab Hassan notes that "the Self... is really an empty 'place' where many selves come to mingle and depart." For Hoffmann this movement in the direction of a less defined, less stable identity is even a shift of epistemic proportions: "The perceivable signs of a tendency toward the disappearance of a subjectivity in modern literature become a fact in postmodern works. Thus a radical gap between modern and postmodern literature is reflected in the opposition of two epistemes: subjectivity versus loss of subjectivity." The post-modern self is no longer a coherent entity that has the power to impose (admittedly subjective) order upon its environment. It has become decentered, to repeat Holland's phrase. The radical indeterminacy of postmodernism has entered the individual ego and has drastically affected its former (supposed) stability. Identity has become as uncertain as everything else. (Fokkema/Bertens 1986, 46f.)

Aside from the fact that the boundaries of the individual ego were dissolved as early as Strindberg's first dream play Till Damascus (1889), it is true to say that modern drama in the early twentieth century was constituted out of the negation of the individual, as the theory here proposes. Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, written and premiered in 1921, for example, can immediately be described as the "Spiel von der Unmöglichkeit des Dramas" (Szondi), since here the possibility of drama is called into question by dramatic characters who no longer have a definable individual ego at their disposal. The "Father" summarizes the problem in the following way:

My drama lies entirely in this one thing.... In my being conscious that each one of us believes himself to be a single person. But it's not true.... Each one of us is many persons. . . . Many persons . . . according to all the possibilities of being that there are within us. . . . With some people we are one person. . . . With others we are somebody quite different. . . . And all the time we are under the illusion of always being one and the same person for everybody. . . . We believe that we are always this one person in whatever it is we may be doing. But it's not true! It's not true!

Here we are faced quite clearly with self-reflexion as well as the shift of the dominant from an epistemological question to an ontological one: Since the 'being' (Sein) cannot be known or defined by the individual, the question arises how it can then be represented in drama?

Pirandello took recourse in the Baroque topos of role-play and the immanent problem of the Sein-Schein which he recast in special ways: Each individual does not only act but also is the different roles without the possibility of being defined either by the set role itself or even as a persona beyond the role. His being (Sein) is the "life that ceaselessly flows and changes" and thus one which knows no boundaries. His appearances (Schein) are the different roles which in each case function as the "form" which seeks to "detain it, keep it unchanging."

The literary devices which Pirandello employs to represent dramatically his concept of the self are, among others, intertextuality, irony, and hybridization. Similarly, another so-called classic author of modern drama, Eugene O'Neill, also denies a bound individual ego. In Mourning Becomes Electra (1929-31), the characters are introduced almost as replicas of replicas of replicas in a basically unendable stream back to the source. Individuality no longer exists. This characteristic is true on the psychical level and in the physical development of the action.

All the men in the Mannon family, Abe, David, Ezra, Adam, and Orin, share the same facial characteristics: "an aquiline nose, heavy eyebrows, swarthy complexion, thick, straight black hair, light hazel eyes" (Homecoming, act 1; The Hunted, act 1). The women who marry into the family like Marie Brantome and Christine, or those from the family itself like Lavinia, also share a number of similar physical features: they all have "thick, curly hair, partly a copper brown, partly a gold, each shade distinct and yet blending with the other," "deep-set eyes of a dark violet-blue," "black eyebrows, which meet in a pronounced straight line above her strong nose," "a heavy chin," and "a large sensual mouth" (Homecoming, act 1). Furthermore, the male and female members of the Mannon family seem so intertwined that their faces at rest give the impression of a "life-like mask." To these physical similarities, O'Neill ties psychical ones: all the members of the family are driven by incestuous desire. The men all suffer from an Oedipus complex, the women from an Electra or Jocasta complex.

O'Neill uses this system of psychical and physical similarities and equivalents to divest the characters of any individuality: each duplicates the other who is himself a duplication of yet another. There is no "original" and therefore no individual ego. Each repeats one who is repeating another who is repeating another and so on ad infinitum. In fact, not only do they appear as not individual selves, but also rather as seeming substitutes for someone who is absent—as Orin discovered in the war: "Before I'd gotten back I had to kill another in the same way. It was like murdering the same man twice. I had a queer feeling that war meant murdering the same man over and over, and that in the end I would discover the man was myself! Their faces keep coming back in dreams—and they change to Father's face—or to mine" (The Hunted, act 3, 304.). Equally, the characters act as if they are driven by an "other," or are recalling an action initiated by an "other" in the past. In this way, an earlier action is exactly recalled by others, as for example the small gesture used by Ezra, Adam, and Orin on many occasions to try and smooth Marie, Christine, and Lavinia's hair; or alternatively a whole action sequence is repeated as in the case of Orin and Lavinia in the third part of the trilogy (The Hunted, act 2, 355f.). In their nature, their desires, their words and deeds, the characters recall others who came before them; they are neither identical among themselves, nor to others—they have no individual self, no definable identity. The self is indeed an "empty place where many selves come to mingle and depart." The most important literary device that O'Neill uses is that of consistently setting the text in its relation to the intertext (Aeschylus's Oresteia) and thereby building up a meaning-generating system of differences.

The outstanding feature in both Pirandello and O'Neill of presenting the self as an "empty place" in which widely divergent "roles" (Pirandello) or "others" (O'Neill) can meet, is further radicalized in the Dada movement. Whilst Pirandello and O'Neill in part—principally in terms of language and dramaturgy—employ thoroughly "traditional" literary devices, the Dadaists turn the play into an antiplay, the theater performance into an antitheater; all the traditional devices are parodied, negated, thrown overboard.

In Tristan Tzara's Le coeur à gaz, which was premiered in 1921 in the "Salon Dada" in Paris, the dramatic characters are Oreille, Bouche, Oeil, Cou, Nez, Sourcil, a dancer and other characters, who "entrent et sortent ad libitum."

Whilst Strindberg questioned the idea of psychical wholeness in a character by introducing the Doppelgänger, and O'Neill by stressing physical similarities, Tzara on the other hand fragments the human body and defines these isolated parts as the characters of the action. The self becomes literally the "empty space" between the characters of the action. The dialogue between them proceeds as follows:

Oreille: C'est le printemps, le printemps

Nez: Je vous dis qu'il a 2 mètres

Cou: Je vous dis qu'il a 3 mètres

Nez: Je vous dis qu'il a 4 mètres

Cou: Je vous dis qu'il a 5 mètres

Nez: Je vous dis qu'il a 6 mètres

and so on up to 16 meters.

Alternatively, they confront each other with maxims and proverbs which follow senselessly on from each other:

Oreille: . . . Les hommes simples se manifestent par un maison, les hommes importants par un monument.

Bouche: Non je veux rien dire. J'ai mis depuis longtemps dans la boîte à chapeau ce que j'avais dire. (171)

Soucil: "ou", "combien", "pourquoi" sont des monuments. Par example la Justice. Quel beau fonctionnement régulier, presque un tuic nerveux ou une religion. (159)

Cou: Mandarine et blanc d'Espagne, je me tue Madeleine, Madeleine. (158)

The literary devices employed here can be described as indeterminacy, disconnectedness, randomness, fragmentation, montage, carnivalesque, hybridization; in short, the whole arsenal of distinctive characteristics belonging to postmodernism finds its realization on a syntactic level.

Similar findings can be confirmed on the metasemiotic level. Indeed, here it is more a question of approaching pluralism—to the point where "anything goes." The trend toward loss of referentiality is also clearly to be seen. In Tzara's La première aventure céleste de Mr. Antipyrine we find, for example, the following dialogue:

La femme enceinte: Toundi-a-voua Soco Bgai Affahou

Mr. Bleubleu: Farafamgama Soco Bgai Affahou

Pipi: amerture sans église allons charbon chameau synthétisé amerture sur l'église isisise les rideaux dodododo

Mr. Antipyrine: Soco Bgai Affahou zoumbai, zoumbai, zoumbai, zoum.

Mr. Cricri: il y a pas d'humanité—il y a les réverbères et les chiens dzinaha dzin aha bobobo Tyaco oahiii hii hii héboum iéha iého

Mr. Bleubleu: incontestablement. (77)

Here it is clear that the trend toward performance outweights that toward representation. This is of course also the case to a certain extent of the Dada soireés and activities which took place rather like happenings. Hausmann, among others, has recorded:

On Sunday, 17th November 1918, Baader attended the morning service at the cathedral in Berlin. As the court chaplain, Dryander, was about to begin the sermon, Baader called out in a loud voice, "Wait! What does Jesus Christ mean to you? Nothing . . ." He wasn't able to go on, there was a terrible tumult, Baader was arrested and a charge of blasphemy held against him. Nothing could be done with him in the end, however, since he was carrying the whole text of his outburst with him in which it continues, "for they do not heed his commands etc." Naturally, all the papers were full of this incident. (Huelsenbeck 1984, 226)

In conjunction with the performative character of the Dada productions and soirées, the concept of the audience as an integral component of the performance was deliberately planned. The Dada chronicler, Walter Mehring, who had himself participated in the sixth performance of the Dada soirée in November 1919, describes how the audience uprising stage-managed by the Dadaists was provoked. Mehring was reciting Goethe's poem Wanderers Sturmlied in Dadaist style,

up to a pre-arranged cue when the whole Dada tribe burst onto the podium and bellowed "Stop!" "Stop that rubbish!" they roared, and "Walt" snarled Böff, his monocle jammed in place, "Walt, you're not going to throw these—ah—pearls to such swine?" and "Stop!" yelled the Dada chorus simultaneously: "Get out! Ladies and Gentlemen, you are kindly requested to go to hell .. . if you really want amusement, go to the whorehouse, or (said Huelsenbeck) to a Monas Thann lecture!" and they stepped down from the podium arm in arm in a chain to face the enraged stalls. (52, German)

From here to Handke's Offending the Audience no longer seems such a giant step.

The literary devices which constitute the syntactic level and the trends realized on the semantic and metasemiotic levels stand in clear relation to the pragmatic level which decides and fixes their respective functions: the intended effect on the reader/spectator is the underlying structural moment. All the Dadaist activities were directed at an audience. Since the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 in Zürich, they utilized newspaper advertisements and leaflets as an important instrument of self-publicity, to draw public attention. While at first they only aimed to "épater le bourgeois," these ventures occurred increasingly in the form of an organized assault on the audience, a "strategy of revolt." The devices shown above were directly aimed at challenging and re-examining the purely passive attitude of expectation and customary practices of reception in the audience. In this way, they attempted to dissolve the discrepancies between art and society for the duration of the performance. Theatrical conventions and habits of audience perception were deliberately abused, indeed utterly destroyed. In the end, it was left to the audience to decide how to react to the Dadaist activities and happenings, how to arrive at a new understanding of "art" and how to create a different kind of receptive attitude: the Dadaist performance "work" only existed in the (mostly aggressive) reaction of the audience; it was the product and result of a process of interaction between the agents of the action and the audience.

The Dadaist devices not only operated in the pragmatic dimension, but also in the semantic dimension. These devices enabled the presentation of the concept of the world, which they saw as disordered, as chaos.

Reality seemed incalculable, and thus nonrepresentable. Even if one could admit a fundamental ordering principle to reality, this was in essence beyond human perception. Life was interpreted as a "vital chaos," and man a clown hopelessly trapped within it. Only a work which is random, incoherent, hybrid, indeterminant, and nonsequential can function as an adequate reaction to, or possible way of representing the condition of the world. The Dadaist activities and the techniques and devices employed to achieve them should thus be seen in relation to the so-called "culture crisis" (Kulturkrise) which, at the beginning of this century, principally after the First World War, shook the middle classes in Europe. While the majority of the audience which participated in the Dada soirées, as members of the educated middle class, still firmly held to the idea of the world and works of art as ordered wholes, the Dadaists attempted to "decondition" them by leading them to specific reactions through their actions and thus to force new attitudes on them.

The fundamental perception of a far-reaching crisis in Western culture is also characteristic of the "classic" authors of modern theater such as Pirandello or O'Neill as well as for the members of the avant-garde theater before and after the First World War such as Craig, Meyerhold, or Artaud. Artaud thus writes in his third letter "On Language" (9 November 1932):

Nous vivons une èpoque probablement unique dans l'histoire du monde, où le monde passé au crible voit ses vieilles valeurs s'effondrer. La vie calcinée se dissout par la base. Et cela sur le plan moral ou social se traduit par un monstrueux déchainement d'appétits, une libération des plus bas instincts, un crépitement de vies brûlées et qui s'exposent prématurément à la flamme. (112)

Our thoughts and argumentation so far have led us to three general conclusions:

1) The factors that can be called the distinctive characteristics of a postmodern literary work can partly (e.g., Pirandello, O'Neill) or wholly (Dada) be found in works dating from the early twentieth century.

2) These factors, which can be related to very different semiotic dimensions, are not separate from each other, but rather create such relations with one another that a structure is formed.

3) This structure is in its turn related to the circumstances of the culture crisis, and most particularly to the immanent consciousness of standing at the "threshold of an era" which will either lead to the birth of a new mankind and a new world, or which will lead to catastrophe.

If, therefore, postmodernism cannot be sufficiently distinguished from modernism by the criteria evidence/absence of certain distinctive characteristics, other criteria must be sought. The conclusions of our examination open at least two possibilities. Postmodernism can be differentiated from modernism on the basis of:

a) the relations made by the distinctive characteristics situated on the different levels, i.e., on the basis of the structure they form,

b) the historical, social Zeitgeist of the age to which the structure of relations corresponds.

In this way, Beckett's later dramas (Play, Not I, That Time, Ends and Odds), Heiner Müller's plays since Germania Tod in Berlin, and the dramas of Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard can actually be identified through the very distinctive characteristic (which describes postmodern literature in general) that they are open to the reader/spectator: the disintegration of the dramatic characters on a semantic level, for example, or incoherence, randomness, fragmentation, hybridization on the syntactic level, are leveled at the reader/spectator who must himself decide how he will deal with the components offered to him. This can be observed in a very acute way in Robert Wilson's postmodern theatre. In Wilson's mammoth project CIVIL warS (1983/84), separate parts of which were produced and premiered in Rotterdam, Marseille, Lyon, Nice, Rome, Cologne, Tokyo, and Milwaukee, different ways of treating language were realized and performed. The texts of the characters' speech, for example, might consist of ready-made phrases from everyday life, ("are you alright," "just leave me alone," "oh come on"), phrases which are on the one hand presented as set scenes in the process of which the text is disconnected and there is no meaning in the dialogue, or on the other hand they are broken up into separate words and phonetic sounds ("are," "you," "alright," "a") and spoken alternately by the dramatic characters often many times over (CIVIL warS act 1, scene A).

Here, the manifest refusal to employ language in such a way that the sequence of sounds, words, or sentences yields a cohesive dialogue that will thus make sense, is based on yet another device. In act 4 of CIVIL warS, for which Heiner Müller was responsible, literary readymades, quotes from world literature are compiled together, (e.g., from Hamlet, Phaedra, Empedocles). Single parts of text are broken away from their original contexts and placed nonsequentially next to one another. In fact, the isolated fragments do yield meaning, but not, however, the sequence as a whole.

Another device used to the same effect is that in which the text spoken by the actor is employed as an element of a collage of recorded sound which is as much composed of different but simultaneously spoken text as it is of shreds of music, sound, and speech. Now, in this context, even the single words and speeches are no longer understandable, but instead solely identifiable as elements of language. To a large extent they are reduced to the distinctive quality of a sound perceived as noise. In this way, the linguistic sign is more or less wholly deconstructed as sign. At first this seems to be a comparable kind of device to that which we have identified in the constructivist, dadaist, and futurist theater experiments: language is almost wholly desemanticized and no longer acts and functions as a sign within the context of the performance. However, while there the desemanticization of language creates a concentration on the quality of sound, in Wilson's case, language is allowed to decay into noise, which because of its multiple and simultaneously transmitted phonetic phenomena can no longer be perceived as a meaningful sign. The desemanticization of language which all three devices considered here effect—even in different ways—is even further advanced through the dissolution of the spoken language on the one hand from a "character" and on the other from the actor's body. The sounds, words, or texts are spoken by the actor at the same time as they are transmitted on tape through a loudspeaker. In this way, they are disengaged from the body of the actor—the language creates its own acoustic space. In so doing, however, language becomes incapable of functioning as the sign of character: speech is deconstructed not only as part of a meaningful dialogue but also as the sign of character. Speech is presented as phonetic phenomena and fragments of text which can neither be linked to one another nor to the body of the actor in a meaning-generating semiosis.

Alongside the desemanticization of language, Wilson presents the desemioticization of the body. Here again he has developed different devices to achieve it. The most important, and one which is especially typical of Wilson, is that he directs the actors to move so slowly that the impression of a slow-motion picture is created. Through this extremely slow motion the spectator's attention is drawn to the process of the movement itself. The spectator perceives gesture as movement, that is, as part of a moving body, and there is no possibility of perceiving it as or interpreting it as the sign for something else (as for example the expression of a role type). The slow-motion technique puts the actor's body on the same level as the objects presented on stage. The actor's body no longer represents or means anything, and finds satisfaction in being presented next to its co-objects. Another device shows the particular use of costume and make-up. In so far as the actor's body can suggest a specific character—as in the German part of CIVIL warS, for example, the character Frederick the Great, his mother Sophie Dorothée, an angel, a soldier, the tinman, and Lincoln, or in the American part, Admiral Perry, or a Japanese basket-peddler—it is employed as a quotation, so that characters are barely suggested and do not even begin to be built up dramatically. The separate elements presented by the actor's body such as costume, make-up, gesture, movement in space, and voice do not relate to one another, and thus cannot be integrated by the spectator with one another to provide internal relations that will produce any meaning. On the contrary, they create the potential of many random associative external relations which are almost wholly dependent on the spectator's own universe of discourse. A further device consists of simply employing the actor's body on the stage as bearer or prop of an object being presented, as for example, the bird in Knee Plays. Although Wilson has adopted this device from the Japanese theater, where the stagehands dressed in black hold ready the necessary props for the actor, or a glass of water should the actor grow hoarse, or stand ready to light the actor's face when the mime is particularly important, Wilson, in contrast, uses this device to show the unity between the object presented by the actor and the actor's body, thus demonstratively underlining its nonmeaning. The actor's body becomes part of a dream-like image floating by, in that it contains no semantic cohesion.

The single image can now be received on two levels: 1) on the syntagmatic level of the process on stage, which through the lack of internal relations is received as an incoherent sequence of ready-made linguistic and bodily quotations, or meaningless sounds and movements, or at best as a chain of information transmitted in bits; to discover a coherent meaning in the sequence of which is utterly impossible, or 2) on the paradigmatic level of the subjectively triggered chain of associations which integrates the single elements into subjectively asserted and structured areas of meaning and thus allows it to change back into subjective carriers of meaning.

The first level of reception can be linked to the flood of communication brought about by the mass media in that it allows the words to decay into noise and breaks up the succession of events into incoherent pictures so that they can only be perceived as information in bits whose sequence is meaningless. The second level of reception, on the contrary, opens the spectator to the possibility of perceiving the process on the stage as he would his own dream images—as a wonderful, unique, at first foreign world, the single elements of which seem wholly familiar without, however, admitting the possibility of being tied to one another into a superior unit of meaning. If the spectator admits the idea of the concreteness of this world, without needing to bring instant interpretation to it, the associative connections which he can now make release him to new experiences and unlock new possibilities of meaning. This level of reception thus initiates new kinds of perception and constitution of meaning, and is diametrically opposed to the "consumer habit" promoted by the mass media. Similar to the Dada soirées, the work can only be constituted in the interaction between text and spectator.

In the case of Dada, the interaction was aimed at a predominantly educated middle-class audience which was used to tracing specific, if not eternal then at least fixed, meanings in works of art, with the intention of upsetting this expectation and attitude of reception: The audience must be shocked, attacked, and provoked into aggression to get it to engage in any activity at all.

Interestingly, the Dada performances did not even achieve the desired effect in an audience composed mostly of workers who did not bring such expectations with them, and it was for this reason that experiments of this kind were discontinued. The audience at which postmodern drama/theater aims has, on the contrary, long since departed from the expectations and attitudes of reception characterized and fixed by the educated middle classes. It is—as a metropolitan audience—not easily shocked, or made aggressive. Consequently the interaction between text and spectator is realized quite differently: Either the spectator overlays the single elements and their incoherent sequence with meanings which stem from his own historical, social and private, autobiographical experience (he knows in this case that meanings have no fixed, intersubjectively valid values to be conveyed, but that they rather consist of the products of his own imaginative and associative activity); or he refuses to constitute any meanings at all and perceives the bodies, objects, words, and lighting in their concreteness as bodies, words, and lighting without interpreting them as signs of something else, so that, free of the need to bring any meaning to them, he finds satisfaction in the very concreteness of the items presented.

On the basis of these changed attitudes of reception in an audience (as opposed to those brought about by Dada) the distinctive characteristics found on the syntactic, semantic, and metasemiotic levels also take on another function. Fragmentation and collage should not, for example, shock the spectator into perceiving the world which he assumes is interconnected and causal as in fact ruled by incoherence and randomness. Rather, the device should encourage the spectator already oriented toward the principle of randomness to apply his own meaning to the randomly presented single object, without looking to possible links to the meaning he brings it, or to perceive it simply as an object in its concrete fact.

The dissolution of the boundaries of the self on the semantic level should not shock the spectator who believes he has an individual personality by demonstrating the fact that such a supposition of the individual personality is a middle-class fiction, but should rather expose the spectator who is already conscious of the instability of the self to different possibilities of its projection.

The shift of the dominant as epistemological question to the dominant as ontological one does not pursue the goal of sensitizing an essentially rational spectator to the view of the imbalance between the self and the consciousness, but rather confirms to the spectator who has already begun to question his rational consciousness, his rather more concretely directed perceptions.

Thus although we can observe the same distinctive characteristics in modern theater of the early twentieth century as we find in the postmodern, and although in both instances the distinctive characteristics on the syntactic, semantic, and metasemiotic levels only fulfill their function in their relation to the pragmatic dimension, the phenomena we are dealing with are clearly dissimilar. The Zeitgeist to which they belong is fundamentally different.

Whether these differences, however, constitute another Epochenschwelle in transition toward postmodernism has yet to be answered. Personally, I believe that the underlying changes on which postmodernism was built had already been fully executed by the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries: the new perception of time and space, the dissolution of the boundaries of the individual ego, the relativism of rational, logic, causal thinking which in its entirety as conditio sine qua non are all evident in postmodern writing and suggest the point of transition into the twentieth century and with it the beginning of modernism.

The essential difference between modernism/avantgardism and postmodernism seems to lie far more in the fact that the postulate formulated at the beginning of the century as an expression and consequence of a far-reaching culture crisis has in the eighties long been a reality: since the sixties, cultural change has occurred de facto. Thus I would suggest on the one hand to date the Epochenschwelle at the outbreak of the culture crisis in art, and on the other hand, plead not to equalize the vast differences between modernism and postmodernism with reference to their very real similarities. Instead, considering that cultural change has long since been effected, it will prove illuminating to define and judge these differences through a kind of functional examination that has been neglected heretofore.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Artaud, Antonin. Oeuvres Complètes IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1978.

Bürger, Peter. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Transl. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

——, and Douwe Fokkema, eds. Exploring Postmodernism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1987.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. "Jenseits der Interpretation." Kontroversen, alte und neue. Proceedings of the 7th International Congress of Germanists. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986.

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