DANIEL SACK

INTERPRETATION AND THE WOOSTER GROUP

In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag argues that interpretation translates an already written text into the second-order meaning of the present reading. The past document is re-written as a present formulation of what the original “really means,” a hermeneutics that excavates the marrow of meaning in the textual skeleton. But after the death of the author, isn’t all reading, in a sense, already an act of contemporaneous re-writing? Sontag seems to propose an impossible quest towards the innocence of reading without writing…One can certainly point to the Wooster Group’s staging of the “historical” texts in the various incarnations of LSD (both the readings of Leary and company in Part One as well as the re-enactment of the historicized “Crucible” in Part Two) as the kind of interpretation that Sontag argues against. Here the Wooster Group seems to state, according to Sontag’s designation that “Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers.” The texts are repeated because it is presupposed that there is a difference between original text and read text that bears re-figuration.

But the Wooster Group’s approach to the material it interprets is directly at odds with the singular distillation of Sontag’s definition. The “discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers” is presupposed not as the cue for a directorial elucidation of the material, but rather as a source for meaning’s diffusion, a distance that problematizes the easy codifications of their source texts. In part, the Wooster Group accomplishes this presentation against interpretation by approaching the material first from a series of formal positions that prefigure content. In this respect, the Group answers Sontag’s call for a more formalistic treatment of the art object. Part One’s random one-minute selections, Part Two’s high-speed delivery, and Part Three’s reproduction of the drugged rehearsal session represent formal elements that complicate an easy transmission of meaning by foregrounding the aleatory and the arbitrary.

Interpretation is often guided by the voice of the writer or director, the critic made substantive in the work itself. Le Compte speaks of the Nancy Reilly character as an authoritative voice in Part One, the most recognizable, quotidian, but also relates the incoherence and frustration that her reproduced address provokes in this expectation. She emerges as the least consistent of voices as she struggles with mis-remembered events and the disconnect of an interpreter “out-of-the-loop”. Putting this spectator on display is just one more method for dismantling the critical voice.

The Group seems committed to following Sontag in “making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be…just what it is.” The constant barrage of material does not offer an authoritative perspective, instead appearing as a smooth, haptic space (Deleuze) in direct contact with the spectator. In this sense, all the mediated material-the viideo and audio reproductions-combine with the live in an unmediated interface with the body of the viewer. Sensation is not filtered along legible channels into meaning, but immerses the audience in its depth and breadth. Here, perhaps, we can find a second revision of Sontag’s critique of interpretation (the first being the valorization of the reading of a text from the past in a present re-figuration as an interpretation). Sontag argues for a sensorial “transparence” where-in “what is important now is to recover our senses” so that we may “learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more” in order to “see the thing itself.” Rather than this clarification of phenomenalogical experience and its associated knowing of the particularized erotic body, the Wooster Group’s aesthetic seems more concerned with overwhelming the spectator’s body in an orgiastic hysteria of experience.

Finally, the Wooster Group manages to present interpretation itself as the object of art. Each configuration of the source text is a reading arranged according to a code that has been lost or is not accessible to the audience. Removing the audience from meaning’s key, the Group puts its own reading on display, evincing the corruption of any and all interpretative acts in the media age.