Theater and life

We differentiate between “real life” and theater, like reality and fiction. Understanding more finely the entanglement of the two can undoubtedly allow one to better touch one’s own “truth.”

Protest against the separate idea we have of culture, as if there were culture on one side and life on the other; and as if true culture were not a refined means of understanding and exercising life.

Antonin Artaud (“The Theater and its Double,” 1938).

The theater, that is, stagings and roles, defines our reality: precise times and places of presence in professional contexts, costumes with standardized codifications in many fields of life, from the military universe to hotel restaurants, family relationships with defined roles (the joker, the intellectual, the scapegoat, the beauf, etc.. ), highly ritualized moments of daily life (the checkout in the stores, the physical places of each one in the dwellings, the recurrence of outings, different according to the socio-cultural contexts: the shopping mall, the museum, the cinema, or the theater!), civil and religious rituals, weddings, funerals, medals and diplomas, culinary rituals, rituals of the holidaymakers, etc. What I call “theater” here is most often called “culture”. I consider it here as theater, to find our power to act in it.

We are immersed in our culture, which forms our relationship to what seems to us to be our natural reality. Thus, the difference between what is perceived as fictional theater and what is perceived as veridical reality lies in our degree of awareness of the staging and its social role. Going to see any play or movie has a priori no impact on our life, while not respecting the rules and roles of the theater of our professional or family context can have great consequences.

Society is a human production. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social production.

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (“The Social Construction of Reality,” 1966).

On the proper use of theater

Perhaps the “professionals” of theater and film, whether artists or all those who work with them (production, diffusion, technical, administration, cultural policies) could be more aware that theater is as much about the stages they fill as it is about how they frame it, how they work.

Here are some examples in this sense, in the professional field that is mine:

• In order to produce and disseminate a show about feminism, have the question of sexism and relations of domination in the workplace been thought through?
• In order to produce and diffuse a show on social inequalities, were we interested in social inequalities within the work teams?
• How are social relationships organized among the staff of a humanities bookstore?
• During the ten months of the compulsory “health pass” in France (2021-2022), the cultural venues that offered shows on freedom and democracy did not, for the most part, stage or question the “health pass” scan at their entrance, worried about respecting the rules as best they could in order to stay open and not lose their subsidies. Yet, regardless of the medical opinion that anyone might have on the subject, this state-imposed ritual represented an attack on democracy and human rights, a discrimination, albeit temporary, but nonetheless very real. Not to have treated it as such in the protocol, itself theatrical, of entry into the place, made de facto hypocritical any democratic discourse within the show played inside the room (whose entry itself did not respect democracy; in Ariane Mnouchkine’s theater, for example, thus emptied of any political substance). Some non-cultural places, such as restaurants or cafés, by the humorous written mentions they could make about this ritual or the numerous exceptions they made to it, have, much more than the cultural places, used the theater in the service of democracy in this period.
• Another terrible example of a morbid dramatization that took place in 2020 and is now proven (in comparison with opposite choices in other countries, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Taiwan, New Zealand...): the choice of a dramatized staging of the reality of French citizens by the successive compulsory confinements almost everywhere, associated with a ban on medical treatments of Covid-19, in place of the WHO recommendation “test-isolate-treat”, had as an effect an accelerated contamination within families and retirement homes, followed by an absence of care, except in the terminal phase, leading to very many deaths, which would not have taken place without this “imaginary theater of war”. It has also prevented families from carrying out funerals, which is one of the fundamental rituals of humanity to define itself as such, as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has very well formulated in an article published in Il Manifesto in 2020. In France, the tests began a year later, although they could have been implemented immediately (see the article “Tests: why France was so late”, Le Monde, April 25, 2020).

Theater is present in all places of life itself. To become aware that all is theater and not objective reality can allow to build a critical thought, to give oneself the means to choose other stagings, more in agreement with the values of humanity that our democracy intimates us to defend, and this without exception. These last two examples are by design not consensual and can, I know, provoke strong reactions of disagreement. It is the nature of philosophy to be a space for real substantive debate.

The human being becomes human when he invents the theater.

Augusto Boal (“Theater of the Oppressed”, 1975).