Ruinous Textures

Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, and René Pollesch are some of the most innovative and influential German-language playwrights of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is remarkable that all three of them have chosen to inscribe the ruinous in their texts. Therefore the research project, scheduled for a two-year stay at the Dept. of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and a subsequent year of follow-up work at the Dept. of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna, will explore the manifestation of ruinous structures in these writers works. The project will examine how the ruinous has undergone a transformation and find out if the concept has gained a new meaning in the wake of catastrophes, such as 9/11, hurricane Katrina, Fukushima, and the global financial crisis. It will seek explanations for the fact that primarily western, U.S.- American urban sites are connected to the ruinous, and discuss how the cityscapes are portrayed, and what specific constructions of the subject/self are linked to those. Furthermore, it is important to establish whether the selected texts themselves represent something like waste lands and whether this kind of spatial notion of text has been shaped by other artistic disciplines. For the purpose of analyzing texts by Müller, Jelinek, and Pollesch, the project will place these amidst relevant materials from philosophy, architecture, sociology, economics, and urban development. In addition, the combination of Walter Benjamins concept of translation and Mieke Bals travelling concepts will allow a careful reconstruction of the translation processes of the notion of urban waste lands, the development of which can be discerned in the selected texts. This scholarly undertaking can be placed in the context of ruin studies, an intellectual area of inquiry spearheaded in the U.S., particularly by Julia Hell, whose studies have demonstrated that increased interdisciplinarity is conducive to new findings and an appropriate response to the complexity of discourse about the ruinous. Due to the fact that Prof. Julia Hell will be serving as mentor, the applicant, Dr. Teresa Kovacs, is convinced that she will be able to acquire the latest knowledge and methods in this area and bring this expertise back to the German-speaking community of scholars. The proposed investigation is innovative in its theoretical and methodological approach and will be the first to correlate the works of Müller, Jelinek and Pollesch.

My research project evolved from the observation that a considerable number of contemporary performances and theatrical works show great interest in decay and in the decline of urban structures. Considering that the theater looks back on a long tradition of the representation of such processes, my goal was to demonstrate that contemporary theater in the German-speaking countries is shaped by a ruinous practice. This practice connects with historical forms and conceptualizations of theatrical text and performance, which we find among others in Kleist, Büchner, AND Gertrude Stein. While Stein describes her pieces as landscapes that are supposed to convey an atmospheric present, I speak of THE PHENOMENON (PRACTICE?) OF ruinous landscapes in contemporary theater. In so doing, I seek to emphasize the discontinuities, fractures, and irritations of the present, which are an essential part of the works I consider in my analyses. The ruinous practice that I describe not only changes the way we perceive space in the context of a theatrical event, but also the quality of the presence of hu- man actors and objects. Finally, I ask why such a ruinous practice is gaining in importance in our pre- sent day and how it relates to the human condition of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I argue that the ruinous responds to the state of crisis that shapes our present like no other. The works deal with what it means to live in a post-Fordist, neo-capitalist society experiencing crises at various levels (e.g. mass migration caused by war, violence, economic or ecological reasons; natural disasters; rising xenophobia, populism and totalitarianism; precarity etc.). I illustrate my theses on selected works by Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Christoph Schlingensief, Heiner Goebbels, Dimiter Gotscheff, René Pollesch and the performance collective theatercombinat. In order to describe new methods in the use or non-use of actors, as well as to de- scribe altered theatrical spatial qualities, I focus on the following core characteristics common to ruinous practice: 1) ill-timed dwelling, 2) coexistence, 3) still act. With ill-timed dwelling I highlight a corporeality that is aware of past, present, and future inhabitation of a landscape and that makes the body of the actor always appear as too late and too early. Coexistence refers to a dramaturgy that is organizing time and space not on the basis of causality, but instead emphasizes the simultaneous presence and relationship of objects and humans. With still act I point to the fact that seemingly silent objects take center stage and inspire an interrogation and interruption of a linear, ongoing succession of time. While most scholars describe contemporary works negatively by emphasizing the absence of character, narrative through line, action etc., I introduce the aforementioned terms to positively describe the structure and form of those work. 1