G. Agamben’s Theatrical Models: Questioning Their Autocommunication Relevance

The theory of autocommunication in postmodernity acquires a new axiological, epistemological, and ethical disposition. We identify this using the example of Giorgio Agamben’s thought on social identity within historically contingent theatrical behavior. Theatrical paraphernalia and the theory of autocommunication are characterized by three concepts: mask, puppet, and pantomime. Autocommunication, in its classical manifestation, is a matter of realizing and concealing shame in front of the realized, the revelatory. Autocommunication is always a disclosure in which only those close to the person are involved. In Agamben, autocommunication as a phenomenon of the theatrical scaffolding also carries an educational moment, and it is demonstrative. The actor as actor is likened to the performance and his mask. Autocommunication on and from the stage makes the actor’s play a complete action. The autocommunication of postmodernism is characterized by its thunderous, demonstrative performance. It is no longer an internal mute speech. It is a sung or spoken monologue as a new social form of public speech. Autocommunication takes on vocalization; the actor’s voice is heard on stage. Giorgio Agamben has developed several models of autocommunication. The first is related to biopolitics and the stage of political action. The body of the victim or the aggressor, the witness, or the guard is included in the political pantomime. The second autocommunication is actorly, with the endowment of expressiveness to elements previously invisible, like the actor’s back. But the critique of Agamben’s models also exposes a third model of autocommunication, linked to the world of childhood. The puppet turns out to be a breakdown of desire and allows the child to welcome its corporeality for the first time and to adopt the language of pantomime as the primary language of adults. The dollhouse, the puppet, and the mask are working epistemological models, as they allow us to wrap auto-communication in a mirror image of inference: what Others say to you moves not only into an inner monologue but also into a dialogue with the puppets or the playing out of social masks in the dollhouse you have built as a model of adulthood.