Between the Image and Anthropology

Theatrical Lessons from Aby Warburgs Nympha Kathleen M. Gough

I had acquired an honest disgust of aestheticizing art history. The formal approach to the imagedevoid of an understanding of its biological necessity [...] appeared to me to lead merely to barren word-mongering. Aby Warburg (in Gombrich [1970] 1986:8889)1 The theater I know, for all its activity and visual splendor, has become an imageless act. Richard Schechner (1985:296) In 1895, a little less than 100 years before Richard Schechner traveled to Arizona to witness the Yaqui deer dance that he records in Between Theater and Anthropology (1985), Aby Warburgthe progenitor of an earlier model of performance studies developed in the discipline of art historytraveled to Arizona to witness the Hemis Kachinas dance (the dance of the growing corn). Both Schechner and Warburg made this journey compelled by their desire to track analogical correspondences between actual social performances manifest in the Native American rituals, and the mediated aestheticized art products that had been their lifes work (for Schechner, it was the theatre; for Warburg, the art historical image). The epigraphs that begin this essay also echo analogical correspondences between Warburg and Schechners projects: where Warburg is disgusted with the academic aestheticization of the image that says nothing about the human action that created the work (its biological necessity), Schechner is similarly frustrated with a theatre that, in his imagination, seems closely aligned with word-mongering, an imagelessact.

1. This quotation, dated 17 March 1923, is from Warburgs notes for a lecture he delivered on the Serpent Ritual almost 30 years after making the journey to the American Southwest. Warburg delivered the lecture at a neurological clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, where he had been admitted for depression and possible schizophrenia, as a way of proving that he had been rehabilitated. These notes, translated by E.M. Gombrich and included in Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, do not appear in the published lecture (for a full text of the published lecture see Warburg [1923] 1995).

Kathleen M. Gough is a Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. She has published in Modern Drama, Performance Research, Screen, and New Theatre Quarterly, as well as in edited collections on performance and ecology, intercultural performance in the Caribbean and Southern US contexts, and the South in the Atlantic World. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Haptic Allegories: Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic. By examining how attention to gender and performance revise historiographical practices in Atlantic Studies, Haptic Allegories also revises, reimagines, and redeploys key concepts central to performance studies. katie.gough@glasgow.ac.uk
TDR: The Drama Review 56:3 (T215) Fall 2012. 2012 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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With the publication of James Harding and Cindy Rosenthals edited collection The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechners Broad Spectrum (2011), Schechner continues to hold pride of place as one of, if not the pioneer of performance studies. I, too, wish to rethink Schechners broad spectrum, and particularly his restoration of behavior, by turning back the clock to a time that predates the film technology that animates Schechners theory in order to explore the work of Aby Warburg. Aby Warburg (18661929) is considered to be one of the most original art historians of the late 19th and early 20th century. Moving between the disciplines of art history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and theatre, Warburg developed a performance paradigm in the late 19th century that he called the pathos formula, which was conceptualized around still images of the figure of woman-in-movement, who he referred to as Nympha. The most profound manifestation of this paradigm was his unfinished project, Mnemosyne (memory), a gestural knowledge-montage: an artistic composite of juxtaposed heterogeneous images intended to illuminate what can be understood about historical transmission and recurrence by focusing solely on gestural correspondences between historical and contemporary images. The images in the montage comprise reproductions of works of art, or manuscripts, photographs cut out of newspapers or taken by Warburg himself (Agamben 2009:28). At his death in 1929, Mnemosyne comprised almost 80 plates and over 1,000 images. In tracking these analogical correspondences between Schechners restoration of behavior and Warburgs pathos formula, and in slowing down the moving image to focus on the still images of Warburgs Nympha, it becomes clear that there is a particularly gendered dimension to the restoration of behavior theory that is obscured when one remains enamored by technologys supposed originalities, and in thrall to thinking of the still as always a lag behind (Schneider 2011:144). By considering Warburgs theories as an antecedent to Schechners restoration of behavior, it becomes apparent that the invocation of film strips as culturally neutral (Schechners strips of behavior) inflected performance studies from the outset with a gendering that has been reified, reflected, and contested ever since.2 In looking to the archive as the repertoire, I find that Warburgs Nympha has taught us, and continues to teach us about restored behavior. The intricacies of Schechners ideas and his interventions helped make possible the rise of indiscipline in the academy. Performance studiesas a field of exploration that brings disciplinary preoccupations into relationcame into visibility in the academy in the 1980s with performance constituted as a critical lens. This developing field joined a larger intellectual movement that sought to shift emphasis away from linear models of analysis that catalogue quantifiable differences as a way of understanding human behavior (differences between past/present, cause/effect, form/content) to an emphasis on the processes of framing, editing and rehearsing (Schechner 1985:33). This emphasis underscored a desire to move away from the tenacity of origin stories that often guide methodologies across disciplines, and direct attention to the immediate and ephemeral present of human activity, which Schechner referred to as actuals ([1970] 1977:335). Schechner elaborated this interdisciplinary intervention (and the importance of actualpresent, immediate, ephemeralreality) by demonstrating the points of contact between theatre and anthropology, and their shared interest in the study of human

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2. Over the past two decades feminist performance studies theorists such as Elin Diamond, Rebecca Schneider, and Diana Taylor have tacitly critiqued the restoration of behavior by returning to the question of mimesis. These theorists make explicit how the body of womanlike strips of film/behavior in Schechners theorygives meaning a place to occur without becoming meaningful itself. By implicitly gendering the strips of film/behavior metaphor and granting agency to the image/object, they differently highlight the gendered lacunae in the restoration of behavior where it is the body of womanas image or constructthat becomes the third term that animates the between of theatre and anthropology, representation and social reality (Diamond 1997; Taylor 2003 esp. 7993; Schneider 2011 esp. 13868).

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action.3 Thus, he writes, performance means: never for the first time. It means: for the second to the nth time. Performance is twice behaved behavior (1985:36). In Between Theater and Anthropology, Schechner discusses a near limitless number of performance practices from around the globe (rituals, church ceremonies, happenings, theatre, dance, trance, etc.), and charts a stunning range of interrelations between aesthetic and social behavior, between acting and nonacting, and between modes of framing and rehearsal processes. In this model, Schechner gives performance the status of an ontological condition, and he develops this most fully in his theory of restoration of behavior. As Schechner explains: Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of film. These strips of behavior can be rearranged or reconstructed; they are independent of the causal systems (social, psychological, technological) that brought them into existence. They have a life of their own. How the strip of behavior was made, found and developed may be unknown or concealed; elaborated; distorted by myth or tradition. (1985:35) Redeploying Erving Goffmans strips of activity as outlined in Frame Analysis (1974), Schechners use of the technological metaphor of film to fashion the restoration of behavior as strips of behavior is central to an understanding of how it works. This deployment of film suggests an even more radical break from origin stories and historicist foundations than are evident in Schechners paradigm. Schechner is clearly invested in questions of historical transmission through human action, aesthetic creation, and the rehearsal process, and he argues for a break from historicist foundations in stating that strips of behavior have a life of their own. Yet if strips of behavior do, indeed, have a life of their own, what would happen if agency were granted to the strips themselves (and not to the imaginary subject/film director who treats, rearranges, and reconstructs them)? Is the strip not actual? And, if not, why not? Schechners reliance on the medium of film to animate how restoration of behavior works locates performance in the fast-paced, technological, and morphological world of the late 20th century. Indeed, film becomes the third term that animates the between of theatre and anthropology, which, in this model, morph into living behavior strips (where aesthetic and social activities are indistinguishable). However, when he explains this theory at greater length, we find that: the strips of behavior are not in themselves process but things, items, material (35). The strips of behavior are objects, material, and Schechner imagines the repertoire of human behavior to be externally manifested in objects that can be rearranged and reconstructed. I want to remind the reader at this point that in common parlance this would be referred to as montagea heuristic device that has, of course, also played a distinctive role in the development of film theory and cultural theory. Similar to the way Walter Benjamin thinks of historiographical montage, or dialectical images that reveal invisible correspondences, this embodied knowledge passes through objects, and then back into bodies, and then back again to objects, and so on. Just as living behavior in Schechners model does not distinguish between aesthetic and social activities, the strips of behavior that capture these behaviors make no distinction between ostensibly real subjects and representational objects. In fact, these subjects and objects mobilize each other. Similarly, the cultural construction of a social actor who has objective reality, and the production of images that purportedly represent social actors (and their behavior in the theatre and everyday life) animate each other. The agency of the social actor and the agency of the image compete for presence. They are both the actual.
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3. In order to keep the intellectual genealogy clear, Schechner developed the concept of actuals in an essay first published in 1970 and later in his 1977 publication Essays in Performance Theory. Points of Contact was developed, specifically, for his 1985 publication Between Theatre and Anthropology, and was developed after the concept of restoration of behavior. Because my intention is to focus on the culmination of these concepts as they animate Between Theatre and Anthropology, I discuss them as part of the same formation.

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When Schechner writes that how the strip of behavior was made, found and developed may be unknown or concealed; elaborated; distorted by myth or tradition, he writes with an historians minda mind trying to animate acts of transmission that are found in the archive, one that is interested in an objects truth claims, and curious about the repetition of tradition. Schechner maintains his past/present distinction through his reference to film. In order to distinguish how transmission of actual human behavior worked in the past and how it works in the present, he writes: neither painting, sculpture or writing shows actual behavior as it is being behaved. But thousands of years before movies, rituals were made from strips of restored behavior: action and stasis coexisted in the same event (1985:36). These two short explanatory sentences set forth two significant claims. First, Schechner suggests that movies show actual behavior as it is being behaved (for the sake of argument let us believe this is the case). Second, he places stasis in the past, for stasisas a categoryis only mentioned in relation to painting, sculpture, and writing. Before film, people relied on painting, sculpture and writing; but now, because theatre and social performance as living behavior are both embedded in the strips of behavior, the actual becomes a (necessarily) slippery category. There is, of course, as much action in the moving image as there is stasis in the strips of film that underscore the deconstruction/reconstruction of actualities (1985:33) that is the springboard for Schechners theory. And just as all action is not located in the (film) repertoires of the present strips of behavior, stasis is hardly an ancient category: painting, sculpture, and writing are not simply ancient strips of behavior, but continue to be important acts for understanding human behavior, aesthetic process, and historical transmission. Furthermore, how do we know that painting and sculpture represented action and stasis in the same event? That action and stasis did occur in the same event seems to be commonsense (after all, we all have to pause sometime). What painting and sculpture teach us, however, is how past cultures may have understood the significance of stasis and action, and how this was transmittedthrough aesthetic objectsfrom one epoch to the next (how one epoch dreamed the one before). Yet, these objects still needed a subject to activate their pedagogy. We owe our commonsense knowledge that stasis and action were recorded and depicted in still objects to Schechners predecessor, Aby Warburg. Thus, it is to Warburgan art historian with his own performance paradigmthat I now wish to turn (back) to in order to slow down the moving image. Warburgs Nympha, that female figure in rapid movement, holds the same place in Warburgs pathos formula as film strips do in Schechners restoration of behavior paradigm. In this respect, the Nympha is the ghost in Schechners restoration of behavior machine, where she is a part of the system, but not part of the image of the system. For Warburg, the pathos formulaas a forerunner of the restoration of behaviordoes not operate without her image.

The Pathos Formula

About a century before Richard Schechner developed his notion of the restoration of behavior, Warburg moved through the fields of anthropology, art history, philosophy, psychology, and theatre in order to conceptualize his pathos formula. Unlike the associations of pathos in the English language with suffering and the pathetic, the German usage concentrated on its overtones of grandeur and sublimity. Thus the adjective pathetic in English means arousing pity, while pathetisch in the German evokes ideas not only of acting in the grand manner [e.g., gestures in rituals, and more quotidian gestures of a grand kind] but also of the theatricalaspects which are both relevant to Warburgs use of the word. (Gombrich 1986:17) Warburg, like Schechner after him, was interested in a montage of attractions (Eisenstein [1923] 1974) where he wished to explore correspondences between human action and aesthetic creation that kept slipping out of the picture frame, then onto the stage, then into social r ituals, and then continuing to moveboth forward and backwardin a non-teleological feedback

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loop. Thus, Warburg did not think formally about influences from one artist to another, and did not think about the history of art as a story of aesthetic progress. Instead, he created a gestural knowledge-montage and, thus, rejected the matrices of intelligibility on which so much intellectual work depends (see Didi-Huberman 2007:13). Georges Didi-Huberman explains that the pathos formula gave art history access to a fundamental anthropological dimensionthat of the symptom. Here the symptom is understood as movement in bodies, a movement that fascinated Warburg not only because he considered it passionate agitation but also because he judged it an external prompting. (2007:15)

Figures 1 and 2 (facing page). Hemis Kachina dancethe dance of the growing corn. Warburg discusses the dramaturgy of the Kachina dance in his 1923 lecture, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America. Oraibi, Arizona, May 1896. (Photo by Aby Warburg, courtesy of the Warburg Institute, University of London)

In Warburgs analysis, the object has agency: the subject is animating the object as much as the object is prompting the subject. This external prompting led Warburgs attention beyond the Quattrocento paintings of the early Italian Renaissance that he had studied and into the world of performance as it was occurring in his own lifetime. In recollecting a trip he made to Native American settlements in the 1890s (quoted in the first epigraph to this essay), Warburg stated that he had acquired an honest disgust of the aestheticizing of art history, and believed that the formal approach to the image [was] devoid of [an] understanding of its biological necessity. He took off for the American Southwest in the same year that he published a theatre history of sorts, an analysis of the Intermedi performed at the Medici court in Florence in 1589, on the occasion of the marriage between the Archduke Ferdinand I and Christina of Lorraine, who was greeted by the living compendium of Florentine festive pageantry (Warburg [1895] 1999b:350). Having located Buontalentis original designs and the account books for the theatrical costumes, as well as a number of engravings of the festival performances, Warburg wished to turn what, to the contemporary eye, appeared as dry and bizarre enumerations into vividly remembered images (350). Thus, he writes, it is a pleasure and an honour for me to take the opportunity which presents itself and, in an essay on art history, to attempt to describe the historical position of the Intermedi of 1589 within the evolution of theatrical taste (350). When Warburg made his American journey in 189596, he was attempting to locate an intermediary stage between image and text that he had found when examining theatre in the Italian Renaissance archives. He continued to trace the biological necessity of representative images by observing the ritual dances in the Native American repertoire (what Schechner would later describe as an actual, where art is an event [Schechner 1988:36]). While Warburg did go looking for survivals from the past that were still present among primitive cultures, his real interest was in conducting an ethnography of surfaces: an examination of what Alan Feldman

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describes as the sites, stages, and templates upon which history is constructed as a cultural object (1991:2). In Warburgs 1923 lecture on his visit to the American Southwest, he tells his audience that he is unable to give depth to my impressions, as I had not mastered the Indian language and a journey limited to several weeks could not impart truly profound impressions ([1923] 1995:12). Instead, he took over 100 photographs of the ritual participants with particular attention to costumes worn (see figs. 1 and 2), of totemic objects used in the performances, and of everyday objects depicting images that to Warburg were akin to hieroglyphs.4 Warburg used the Native American ritual events to think through correspondences to his work on the Intermedi performances at the Florentine court (see Michaud 1998). This is not only evident in Warburgs attention to the colors of costumes, sounds of the instruments, dramaturgy of the events, and movement of the Kachina dances in Oraibi that he photographs and discusses in his 1923 lecture ([1923] 1995:2130), but quite explicitly in the lone image of a young woman carrying a pot on her head, which depicts a bird in flight (see fig. 3). In discussing both the object and its movement through an examination of the body of the woman, he states, We have here an intermediary stage [...] between a realistic mirror image and writing (8). Thus, it is the body of the woman that mediates the between of image and text: she is the actual event. This fascination with live performance in both the historical archives and the Native American repertoire was prompted by Warburgs earlier research for his dissertation in the early 1890s, in which he turned to theatre to study Botticellis The Birth of Venus and Spring. In that study, he attempted to find evidence for how the depiction of running Nymphs in early Italian Renaissance art had their origins in theatrical performances that were, perhaps, witnessed by early Renaissance artists: Once we assume that festive performances set the character before the artists eyes as living, moving beings, then the creative process becomes easier to follow. The program supplied by the humanist adviser loses its taint of pedantry: the inspirer is not imposing an object to be imitated, but simply facilitating its articulation. ([1893] 1999a:125) This was Warburgs first attempt to take the image out of the frame, to analyze it outside of the prescribed methods of tracking influences between artists and theories of aesthetic progress and into the actual world of theatrical spectating. When he witnessed Native American rituals in the American Southwest, the phenomena he had studied in Florentine Intermedi reappeared in effective form in the Native American performances as representations of enigmatic forces that

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4. Ninety of Warburgs American photographshalf of those that surviveare published in Photographs at the Frontier: Aby Warburg in America 18951896 (Guidi and Mann 1998).

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borrowed human form to find expression (Michaud 2007:33). It was the theatre that first made painted figures and then social rituals actual and real to him. However, before embarking on his careers as theatre historian and amateur anthropologist (or performance studies theorist), Warburg began with the question of the imagean image that was unmanly and that unmanned him throughout his career: a rapidly moving female figure performing acrobatic flights across disciplines, historical epochs, and a vast geographical and theatrical terrain.

The Figure of Woman in Movement

While doing archival research on the Quattrocento art of the early Italian Renaissance, and attempting to understand how artists had interpreted antiquity in their paintingshow that epoch had dreamed the one beforeWarburg began to notice something that no art historian before him had fully considered: he started to notice that the paintings were moving (see Figure 3. Young woman with pot depicting a bird in flight. This Gombrich 1986). While analyzimage is analyzed by Warburg in order to illuminate how the body ing Botticellis The Birth of Venus of the woman mediates the between of image and text: she is the and Spring he began to see a lot actual event. Arizona, 1896. (Courtesy of the Warburg Institute, of fluttering: the fluttering of University of London) draperies, of curls in the hair, andmost significantlythe fluttering of the dresses on the female models used to depict the nymphs (figs. 4 and 5). He started to refer to these fluttering objects as accessory forms in motion ([1893] 1999a:117), and this material (used quite literally here) can be considered as a forerunner to strips of behavior. Philippe-Alain Michaud explains this transition from the canonical view in art history that Renaissance paintings of antiquity were modeled on the motionless, well-balanced body to Warburgs theory that the body was caught up in a play of overwhelming forces: By placing the emphasis on the phenomena of transition over the treatment of bodies at rest, on what divides the figure over what pulls it together, and on becoming over the motionless form, Warburg [...] replaced the model of sculpture with that of dance, accentuating the dramatic, temporal aspects of the works. (2007:2728) In many respects, Warburgs thinking was prompted by The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), in which Nietzsche outlines an intellectual dichotomy between Apollonian still-

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ness and Dionysian ecstatic movement (see Gombrich 1986: 25758; Michaud 2007:30). This is one of the contexts that allows for an understanding of why Warburgs eyes kept seeing the movement of nymphs and thinking about their destabilizing force. However, even in this early dialogue with Nietzsches ideas, there is the seed of another question. In notes from September 1890, grouped under the title spectator and movement, he writes: With the introduction of the forward-moving figures, the spectator was constrained to exchange comparative for anthropomorphic [i.e., analogical] observations. The question was no longer What does this expression mean but Where is it moving to? [...] Figures whose clothing or hair is moved can receive this movement from their own bodily movements [their agency], or else from the wind [external prompting], or from both together. They move on a plane parallel to the spectator, so that the spectator can believe in forward movement only when he moves his eyes. (in Michaud 2007:82)5

Figures 4 and 5 (below). Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, c.1486, and Spring, c. 1482. In Botticellis The Birth of Venus and Spring Warburg began to see the fluttering of drapery, of curls in the hair, andmost significantlyof the dresses on the female models used to depict the nymphs that he refers to as accessory forms in motion.

When Warburg shifted the question from what does this expression mean? to where is it moving to? he opened up a labyrinth that he continued to move through over the next three decades. For him, it was not that the expression did not have meaning, but that the objects on which that meaning was predicated were not stable. The female figure in rapid motion was not simply a symbol that referred to a higher level of meaning other than itself. That is, it was no mere allegory. As Peter Brger has written, the insertion of reality fragments in the work of art fundamentally transforms that work. The parts are no longer signs pointing to reality, they are reality (1984:78). It is only in taking seriously the female figure in rapid motion (not what she

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5. This passage, taken from Aby Warburg, Grundlegende Bruchstucke zu einer pragmatischen Ausdruckskunde (Ground-laying fragments for a pragmatic study of expression), is an unpublished work translated and excerpted in Michaud (2007).

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represented but the real body, and those real accessories in motion, depicted in the paintings at the moment of the paintings making), that we can divine meaning at all. For Warburg, pictorial allegories depicted in Italian Renaissance painting had haptic qualities. If we could come to understand where they were moving to, how they touched us, and how they were a part of our own movement, we might better come to understand ourselves. Warburg suggested this possibility when he sought to animate the figures on the same plane as himself, as the spectator. When the figure steps out of the picture frame and starts to inhabit the world, he posited that the spectator can now believe in forward movement because he moves his eyes. Yet how did Warburg experience this movement? The haptic movements of the image took on various forms and lives in Warburgs thinking between 1890 and his death in 1929. As he kept asking the question where is the figure moving to? he found himself following it across geographical space and historical times. He linked Quattrocento painting to theatrical performance through the image of the running Nymphs, used theatrical pageantry as the basis to understand Florentine art, connected the contemporary Native American rituals in the American Southwest to the movement he saw in Renaissance pageantry, and then returned to the figure of woman-in-movement in his last project, Mnemosyne (see fig. 6). Thus, while he movedand his temporal and geographic frames of reference movedthere was one movement that stayed constant: he never lost sight of the Nympha. The female figure in rapid movement accompanied Warburg throughout his nomadic and peripatetic wanderings. Whether he looked backward or forward, she held his hand and walked with him the whole time. Warburg was not content to discover the return of pathos in motion in the works in question; he surrendered himself to the pathos of movement he invented (Didi-Huberman 2007:13). Thus, on the most profound of analogical levels, Warburg understood that the Nympha was not just a part of him, but that he was a part of her.6 In the next section I explore how the fin de sicle epoch in which Warburgs own movements took place enabled his imagination of the Italian Renaissance. Furthermore, his dreams of/for the past, activated through movements in his lifetime, enable my dreams of/for the future by attempting to articulate the political possibilities that the Nympha suggests when she finally befriends her long lost kin: those strips of living behavior that animate the restoration ofbehavior.

Lessons from the Nympha

Although attuned to the Nymphas movement across continents and vast historical trajectories, Warburg is quieter on the subject of how her movement in his own lifetime inspired his intellectual imaginings of the Italian Renaissance. What sort of connection did he fail to see because he felt them so nearmoving through them, in them, and with them? In the year 1900, when Warburg was still trying to grasp the challenges of thinking with and through the female figure in rapid motion, he and his friend Andre Jolles exchanged a series of fictitious letters to free Warburg from having to think through the project in solely academic terms. It was a short-lived correspondence, but Jolless first letter to Warburg, written on 23 November 1900, begins the process of making a series of correspondences that illuminate the fin de sicle preoccupation with the images of the New Woman and the question of womens suffrage that animated political and social life at the turn of the century. Because Jolless letter elucidates this relationship between contemporary women and the classical image, I quote it at length:

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6. In Flesh of My Flesh Kaja Silverman writes: analogy is the correspondence of two more things with each other [...] Since we cannot affirm analogies linking us to other people unless we acknowledge that we are bound by the same limits, we are reluctant to do so (2009:40). For a wider discussion of the importance of analogy in critical and philosophical thought see Orpheus Rex, in Silverman (2009:3758).

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Figure 6. Warburgs interdisciplinary search for correspondences between aesthetic and social activity culminated in his last project, Mnemosyne, a gestural knowledge-montage comprised of over 80 plates and 1,000 images. Plate 39 of Aby Warburgs Atlas of Images, Mnemosyne, c. 1923. (Courtesy of the Warburg Institute, University of London) Behind them, close to the open door, there runsno, that is not the word, there flies, or rather there hoversthe object of my dreams, which slowly assumes the proportion of a charming nightmare. A fantastic figureshould I call her a servant girl, or rather a classical nymph? [...] This lively, light-footed and rapid gait, this striding step, which contrasts with the aloof distance of all other figures, what is the meaning of it all? [...]

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My condition varied between a bad dream and a fairy tale [...] Sometimes she was Salome dancing with her death-dealing charm in front of the licentious tetrarch; sometimes she was Judith carrying proudly and triumphantly with a gay step the head of the murdered commander; then again she appeared to hide in the boy-like grace of little Tobias [...] Sometimes I saw her in a seraph flying towards God in adoration and then in Gabriel announcing good tidings. I saw her as a bridesmaid expressing innocent joy at the Sposalizio and again as a fleeing mother, the terror of death in her face, at the Massacre of the Innocents. I lost my reason. It was always she who brought life and movement into an otherwise calm scene. Indeed, she appeared to be the embodiment of movement [...] but is it very unpleasant to be her lover? [...] Who is she? Where does she come from? Have I encountered her before? I mean one and a half millennia earlier? Does she come from a noble Greek lineage, and did her great-grandmother have an affair with people from Asia Minor, Egypt or Mesopotamia? (in Gombrich 1986:1078) Thus, Jolles begins to help Warburg chart two seemingly contradictory impulses at play across a spectrum of contemporary and classical images representing the female body in movement. On the one hand, his discussion turns on different figures of a generic image that seems both singular and ubiquitous. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the generic image constitutes the connecting link between ideation and conception.7 Taking conception by its literal definition as the action of conceiving, or fact of being conceived, in the womb,8 Jolles ends his letter by asking, Does she come from a noble Greek lineage, and did her great- grandmother have an affair with people from Asia Minor, Egypt or Mesopotamia? What Warburg is attempting to understand, and what Jolles is attempting to help him imagine, is how the generic image connects our understanding of an idea and its conception. Warburg, himself, struggles with his historical training, which demands that he look for origins and meaning through the particularity of a single discipline, and his interest in performance and movement, which obliges him to think not of origins, but recurrence, of seconds that are firsts, of copies that are original, of citations, of doublesi.e., the restoration of behavior. This history of a generic image in movement is the acknowledgement that images that appear as singular are repeated across time and space (they have a life of their own). They are bound together through their analogical movements, and they are, in turn, bound to us if we have the capacity to behold them. Beholding them requires us to think history as action, to externalize psychology so that action and not character becomes the locus of inquiry. Because of the fact that this research was conducted through the medium of images, Giorgio Agamben writes, it was believed that the image was also its object. Warburg instead transformed the image into a decisively historical and dynamic element (2000:53). The movement of the imageseemingly unrestricted by time and spacethat Warburg found simultaneously fearful and full of liberation and emancipation (Gombrich 1986:127) was rendered visible less through the machinations of photography and early film (as it is often theorized), than through the fin de sicle New Woman asserting her right to unrestricted movement most evident in the change from tight-laced and restricted respectability of fashion to free flowing garments (Gombrich 1986:109). That is, accessory forms in motion were not simply an art historical conceit. The issue of womens dress was at the center of debates regarding social reform and suffrage at the turn of the centuryin the form of conduct books, journalistic editorials and cartoons, and most significantly, it was manifested in the actual dresses worn by women,
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7. OED Online, s.v. generic image, www.oed.com/view/Entry/77527?redirectedFrom=generic%20image #eid132862923 (21 March 2012). 8. OED Online, s.v. conception, www.oed.com/view/Entry/38137?redirectedFrom=conception#eid (21March2012).

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which allowed them unrestricted movement in sport and dance, that was very much a live issue at the time (109; emphasis added). This is not, of course, to say that photography and early film were not important to his thinking, but that they have played a large part in obscuring some fundamental material details. For instance, Michaud writes: Warburgs methodthe application of which ranged progressively from the analysis of static figures in 1893 to the generalized montage of Mnemosyne, to which he devoted himself from 1923was entirely based on an aesthetic of movement that was expressed at the end of the nineteenth century by the nascent cinema. (2007:39) Michauds own methods in this sentence belie a progress narrative that is not only enamored with technologys supposed originalities (Schneider 2011:144), but also one that does not account for living behavior. The details that Warburg concentrated on in theorizing his pathos formula (the Nympha, accessories in motion) suggest that his thinking did not follow a straight line from the still image to the moving image. In fact, like Schechners decades-long project of attempting to name the restoration of behavior, Warburg continued to thinkin a usefully circuitous fashionthrough the pathos formula in a way that was both syncopated and punctuated by the spectacular display of living bodies on which the argument for film technology is predicated. Between the painted (and photographic) image and the film projection lies the theatre in all of its meta manifestations: the changing of costumes, the brandishing of placards, and the movement of bodies on the street and on the stage. Through the bodies of contemporary women changing their dress, and in the politics of his own lifetime, Warburg began to see a decisively historical and dynamic movement depicted in artistic images. Warburgs biographer, E.M. Gombrich, suggests that the female figure in art was naturally drawn into this conflict (1986:109). While it is important that he acknowledges that political and aesthetic movements at the fin de sicle were a part of the same conversation, Gombrich (like Michaud in a different context) fails to acknowledge that shethe Nympha, the New Woman, the dancer, the actress, the activistmade her first bodily appearances in stage melodrama and in the tableaux vivant before taking up residence, quite naturally, in the theatrical world of stage naturalism where playwrights attempted to come to terms with the New Womans appearance in social life. Given Warburgs interest in the theatre (he attended the early dance performances of Isadora Duncana fin de sicle paradigm of the Nympha if there ever was one); his professed kinship with the playwright George Bernard Shaw (Warburg wrote a play on Hamburg social reform in 1896 which he and his family performed for his fianc, the artist Mary Hertz9 ); and his ethnographic fieldwork in the American Southwest in 1895 (where he began to see in Native American rituals the impulse he noticed in Italian Renaissance art that depicted theatrical scenes), the theatrical routes for his own performance theory bear someremark. It was via theatrical routes that he was able to conceptualize his pathos formula, which he then manifested in his vast and ambitious gestural knowledge-montage, Mnemosyne. Major studies of Warburgs theories, as evidenced by Gombrich and Michaud, operate by way of a tacit antitheatrical prejudice. This is because of theatres lack of medium specificity, an inability for theatre to stay within a clearly demarcated disciplinary framework so that the spectator can enjoy sole agency over the object in question. In this respect these studies echo Michael Frieds comments in his 1967 essay, Art and Objecthood. In this essay, Fried states that the concept of quality and valueand the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itselfare meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theater ([1967] 1995:142). Of course, wherever anti-theatricality looms, we find its

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9. For a thorough discussion of Warburgs play see Russell (2006).

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kinsman, anti-feminism, holding its hand tightly (see Diamond 1997). For Warburg, however, what productively lies (and moves) between mediums is precisely the theater, and that theater is animated by the figure of woman in movement. The New Womanas she appeared on the Ibsenite stage, in the dances of Isadora Duncan, on bicycles, and in political ralliesin all of her vast incarnations at the turn of the c entury, was the paradigm of the Nympha, while the Nympha was a paradigm for these ubiquitous incarna tions. She was that force that allowed Warburg to see haptic qualities in the pictorial a llegories, while pictorial allegories allowed Warburg to see the real force of a political m ovement that could never be separated from aesthetic movements. This is performance as twice-behaved behavior, where that move between the image and anthropology comes into view not through the technology of film, but through the pervasive political and theatrical movements of women. This long historical view traces a path from Warburgs theorizing of the still image in rapid motion, to the image that still ghosts the strips of behavior that lie between theatre and anthropology in Schechners restoration of behavior. As Gombrich has written in regards to Warburgs reaction to the female figure in rapid motion, the period flavor of his thinking about the Nympha is unmistakable, but it should not blind us to the possibility that the special situation in which [he worked] enabled him to see more than we see today (1986:110).

Mnemosyne
Warburgs philosophy of the Mneme appeared to justify that what he called a ghost story for the fully grown-up could be told in pictures alone. E.M. Gombrich (1986:287) What does a document of a womans pose document? Can a pose stand as evidence of active agency if the essential action of a pose is theatrical, citational, or always in an anachronistic or temporally syncopated relationship to action? Rebecca Schneider (2011:15253) At the time of his death in 1929, Warburg had not finished his Mnemosyne project. He left a series of almost 80 plates that montaged over 1,000 images revealing gestural correspondences that could be understood as prototypes for Schechners strips of behavior. Warburg collected reproductions of works of art, or manuscripts, photographs cut out of newspapers or taken by Warburg himself (Agamben 2009:28). To make clear the complexity and ambition of Warburgs project, Giorgio Agamben discusses, in detail, plate 46 (see fig. 7) based on the theme Pathosformulen (the pathos formula). The plate is made up of 27 images where what is in question is the origin and history of the iconographic theme figure of woman in movement. Agamben explains that one way of reading the plates is to try to arrange the individual images in chronological order by following the probable generic relations that, binding one to another, would eventually lead us back to the archetype, to the formula of pathos from which they all originate. However, a closer look reveals that there is no one origin. That is, none of the images are original, just as none is simply a copy or repetition. In this way, just as it is impossible to distinguish between creation and performance, original and execution so Warburgs formula of pathos comprises hybrids of archetype and phenomena, first-timeness and repetition. The figure of the Nympha, which at first glance seems to be the originary image reveals itself to be both original and copy. Or to be more precise, in accordance with the constitutive ambiguity of Platos dialectic, the nymph is the paradigm of the single images, and the single images are the paradigms of the nymph (Agamben 2009:29). What Agamben does not discuss in this brilliant formulation and articulation of Warburgs plate is that the theory used to understand what the plate is doing is inextricably tied to the content. The content is not incidental. The figure of woman in movement is the condition of possibility for a discussion that elucidates the impossible source of the formula of pathos, for

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Aby Warburg and Performance Studies

Figure 7. Plate 46 of Aby Warburgs Atlas of Images, Mnemosyne, c. 1923. (Courtesy of the Warburg Institute, University of London) being neither archaic nor contemporary, and for underscoring the constitutive ambiguity of Platos dialectic. As Nicole Loraux succinctly argues in regards to the place of woman in Greek philosophy and myth as theorized by Plato, Out of the earth, the illustrious lame one modeled a being exactly like a chaste virgin. In this is all the truth of the female: woman resembles virgin, woman resembles woman, which is to say that she is entirely and essentially a semblance. Thus, for the Greeks false woman is not a disguised man but woman herself (Loraux

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2000:6). Here, we return to the deconstruction/reconstruction of actualities that is the springboard for Schechners restoration of behavior by other means: means that make it possible to consider Mnemosyne as a ghost story for the fully grown-up that both echoes and anticipates Rebecca Schneiders question, What does the document of a womans pose document? Schneiders question usefully captures the lacunae in the restoration of behavior that I am discussing. In her Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, Schneider illuminates the relation between the still, the live, and the still live, by thinking photography and theatre together. While she cites Schechners broad spectrum on a number of occasions, she also advocates an increase in analysis less enamored of technologys supposed originalities (2011:144). In many respects, her project is so successful because she shuttles backwards and forwards, montaging reproductions of works of art from the 15th century; photographs taken from newspapers; 19th-century theatrical stills; and 20th-century photographic stills that are theatrically staged, alongside pictures taken by the author herself (where the still live is brought together by means of contemporary Civil War reenactments). Schneiders capacity to begin by way of analogical correspondences to bring together a multitude of unlikely kin in such a dexterous way makes one feel at home (but no less haunted and uncomfortable for being there), peering into a world where Civil War reenactments, Cindy Shermans photography, a discussion of Abu Ghraib photos of torture, the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, a Ghent altar piece from 1472, and the Wooster Group share the same time-space. What is, to me, equally fascinating is that in a book that reconceptualizes the restoration of behavior by means of interanimating the still image and the live body, the photographic and the theatrical, Warburgs project is never mentioned; yet Schneiders thinking is deeply Warburgian. Similar to Benjamin, whose dialectical images reveal invisible correspondences, Schneider examines the repertoire as the archive in a way that is the counterpart of Warburgs examination of the archive as repertoirean examination that, in her words, takes kaleidoscopic turns in intersecting directions, touching on multiple times, variant places, and overlapping fields of academic inquiry (2011:1). That those running Nymphs would finally find kinship with those strips of behavior through the work of a feminist performance studies theorist who has profoundly moved our thinking in regards to the constitutive ambiguity of Platos dialectic seemsin hindsightcompletely fitting.10 In fact, Schneider is telling a ghost story for the fully grown-up, a story that is able to move ahead of itself by moving behind, pausing the tape, and watching the still. I felt that haunting, that recurrence, when I saw that the Nympha had flown in multiple directions, running into herself in Cindy Shermans photographs where she was actress, artist, director, and photographersingular and ubiquitous, seemingly still and always in motion. Alongside a handful of other female photographer/artists in the 1970s, Sherman was a game changer. Interestingly, her 19771980 series Untitled Film Stills in which Sherman photographed herself in a series of images that appeared to be stills from B-grade movies (Schneider 2011:151) occurred while Schechner was working out the prototype for what he eventually called the restoration of behaviortheories of performance that were printed throughout the 1960s and 1970s in the pages of TDR, and then in his 1977 publication Essays on Performance Theory, before culminating in his 1985 paradigm-shifting study Between Theater and Anthropology. During the decades that Schechner was working on theatres relationship to actual human behavior, female photographers became both subject and object by eventually thinking strips of behavior as strips of film that a film director could treat, rearrange, and reconstruct: operating the system and becoming the image of the system. Of course, that still was
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10. In addition to Schneiders Performing Remains, see Schneider (2001 and 2004) for further interventions into the ways that Platonic thinking has linked antitheatricality to antifeminism in an array of artistic and technologicalcontexts.

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also live and in stereo, as the new New Woman, or the new old woman, was back on the political agenda and out on the streets in a way not seen, felt, or heard since that earlier feminist wave. This is the Nymphas most profound political gesture: her first wave at the turn of the century when Warburg theorized his pathos formula was felt, echoed, reverberated, and returned during her second wave when Schechner was establishing his own performance paradigm. As Schneider through Warburg, or Warburg through Schneider illuminates, while the Nympha does not appear in the image of the restoration of behavior system, she was always and everywhere the condition of possibility of its movement. It is not only Schechners passionate agitation that is manifest in the pages of TDR, Essays on Performance Theory, and Between Theater and Anthropology, but, like Warburg, Schechners theory was also informed by a feminist external prompting (Didi-Huberman 2007:15). Performance studies desire to undo or resist historicism does so at the risk of reifying the very notion of origin stories that it seeks to dismantle. The interrelationship between the visual arts and objects of performance studies research is typically theorized as beginning around 1968. This is the same moment that is cited as fomenting the antagonistic relationship between theatre and performance studies (see Bottoms 2003). By taking a longer and wider view, it becomes clear that the theatrical realthrough the figure of woman in movementhas been mediating the actual relationship between aesthetic and social performance across the disciplines for at least a century. What the Nympha teaches us when we look back is that she is still here because shes been theremarching, walking, performing, directing, and embodying paradigms in performance theorythe whole time. As Warburg knew only too well, the movement that he sawand feltbegan long before he arrived on the scene, and would continue long after he left the performance. Or, as Rebecca Schneider moves us out of her moving and haunting work, Never, Again. / And, now, again (2011:186).
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Loraux, Nicole. 2000. Born of Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens. Trans. Selina Stewart. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Michaud, Philippe-Alain. 1998. Florence in New Mexico: The Intermezzi of 1598 in the Light of Indian Rituals. In Photographs at the Frontier: Aby Warburg in America 18951896, eds. Bernedetta Guidi Cestelli and Nicholas Mann, 5363. London: Merrell Holberton Publishers in association with The Warburg Institute. Michaud, Philippe-Alain. 2007. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. Trans. Sophie Hawkes. New York: Zone Books. Russell, Mark A. 2006. Aby Warburgs Hamburg Comedy: Wilhelmine Culture from the Perspective of a Pioneering Cultural Historian. German History 24, 2:15382. Schechner, Richard. (1970) 1977. Actuals. In Essays on Performance Theory. New York: Drama Book Specialists. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schechner, Richard. 1988. Performance Theory. New York: Routledge. Revised and expanded from Essays on Performance Theory. Schneider, Rebecca. 2001. Well Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The Double and Its Theatre. In Psychoanalysis and Performance, eds. Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear, 94114. New York: Routledge. Schneider, Rebecca. 2004. Solo Solo Solo. In After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, ed. Gavin Butt, 2347. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge. Silverman, Kaja. 2009. Flesh of My Flesh. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Warburg, Aby. (1923) 1995. Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America. Trans. Michael P. Steinberg. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Warburg, Aby. (1893) 1999a. Sandro Botticells Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian Early Renaissance. In Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, intro. Kurt W. Forester and trans. David Britt, 89156. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the Research of Arts and Humanities. Warburg, Aby. (1895) 1999b. The Theatrical Costumes for the Intermedi of 1589. In Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, intro. Kurt W. Forester and trans. David Britt, 349401. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the Research of Arts and Humanities.

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