Staging as an Anthropological Category

Author(s): Wolfgang Iser

Source: New Literary History , Autumn, 1992, Vol. 23, No. 4, Papers from the
Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change (Autumn, 1992), pp. 877-888
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/469175

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 Staging as an Anthropological Category*

Wolfgang Iser

F WE TRY to fathom the historical necessity of the literary medium,

a medium that no longer monopolizes the field of entertainment
and leisure and is now dwarfed by the competition of the visual
media, we shall have to penetrate beyond its former, widely accepted
forms of legitimation: its autonomy, its mimetic reflection of social
conditions, and even its generative force in constituting reality, as
enlightened Marxism (Kosik) would have it.' What then comes into
focus is the anthropological equipment of human beings, whose
lives are sustained by their imagination.
Literature, then, also has a substratum, albeit one of a rather
featureless plasticity that manifests itself in a continual repatterning
of the culturally conditioned shapes human beings have assumed.
As a medium of writing, literature gives presence to what otherwise
would remain unavailable. It has gained prominence as a mirror
of human plasticity at the moment when many of its former functions
have been taken over by other media. If literature permits limitless
patternings of human plasticity, it indicates the inveterate urge of
human beings to become present to themselves; this urge, however,
will never issue into a definitive shape, because self-grasping arises
out of overstepping limitations. Literature fans out human plasticity
into a panoply of shapes, each of which is an enactment of self-
confrontation. As a medium, it can show all determinacy to be only
illusory. It even incorporates into itself the inauthenticity of all the
human patternings it features, since this is the only way it can give
presence to the protean character of what it is mediating. Perhaps
this is the truth through which literature counters the awareness
that it is an illusion, thereby resisting dismissal as mere deception.
If literature reveals that human plasticity is propelled by the drive
to gain shape without ever imprisoning itself in any of the shapes

*This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the Commonwealth Center

short seminar "The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology."

New Literary History, 1992, 23: 877-888

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 878 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

obtained, clearly it can bring

pological makeup.
The anthropological implicatio
erto received little attention.
I have been able to determine
as a thing that was invented b
other cultures does not appea
and sociologists."2 "[T]he que
Roberts stresses, "is not an idle
answers to more important q
a culture puts fiction by inten
device of this kind and thus exp
it? Which cultures have no use for it and remain indifferent?"3
If fictions do have any significance for cultural anthropology, how
far can this significance be gauged through what can be considered
the hallmark of literary fictionality: the coexistence of the mutua
exclusive?4 This inherent doubling of fictionality may be conceived
as a "place of manifold mirrorings," in which everything is reflecte
refracted, fragmented, telescoped, perspectivized, exposed, or r
vealed. In Nietzsche's terms: "If we try to observe the mirror i
itself, we finally discover nothing but things on it. If we want
grasp the things, we ultimately come upon nothing other than the
mirror."5 The mirror cannot be grasped in transcendental term
any more than it can be pinned to a dialectic that would elimina
interplay. The structural formula of fictionality entails not a synthe
but an endless unfolding of interwoven and interacting position
The lack of any transcendental reference and the impossibility
any overarching third dimension show literary fictionality to
marked by an ineradicable duality, and indeed this is the source
its operational power. Since the duality cannot be unified, the orig
of the split eludes capture, and yet it remains present as the drivin
force that constantly seeks to bring separated entities together.
If the coexistence of the mutually exclusive is the hallmark o
fictionality, it realizes a fundamental anthropological pattern th
manifests itself as the doppelgdnger. In either case-that of the dop
pelgdnger and that of fictionality -doubling turns out to be th
underlying pattern.
According to Helmuth Plessner, division is characteristic of huma
beings:

Our rational self-understanding can be formalized thanks to the idea of

the human being as a being that is generally related to its social role but

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STAGING AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CATEGORY 879

cannot be defined by a particular role. The role-player o

social figure is not the same as that figure, and yet cannot b
separately from it without being deprived of its humanit
means of the other of itself does it have-itself. With thi
structure in which role-bearer and role-figure are bound toge
we have found a constant which is open to every type of hum
and forms one of humanity's basic preconditions. The doppel
has the possibility of forgetting itself as such or of not actua
of its duality, and thus losing itself in its social figure, or .
and maintaining a balance-between the private and the
itself. ... Given the disposition of being a doppelganger-a str
allows the human being any kind of self-understanding--doe
imply that the one half of the other is to be seen as "by natu
The doppelginger merely has the possibility of making it so.

As their own doppelgdngers human beings are at best

traveling between their various roles that supplant and
another. Roles are not disguises with which to fulfill p
they are means of enabling the "self" to be other than e
role. Being oneself therefore means being able to do
Of course the individual role will be determined b
situation, but while this adaptability of individual ro
the form of the roles, it does not condition humankind'
status. By putting its stamp on the division withou
eliminating it, the social situation unfolds humanity's d
multiplicity of roles. This duality itself arises out of ou
position-our existence is incontestable, but at the s
accessible to us. Plessner does not conceive this fundamental dis-
position of the human being in Lacan's psychoanalytic term
decentered subjectivity, not least because he cannot subscribe to
view that an originary core-self perceives itself as divided in
mirror image of itself, for he does not accept the idea of the
as a coming to itself. The decentered position of human beings al
excludes the accessibility of the self to itself that emerges from
continual boundary-drawing and boundary-lifting of the self's o
self-fashioning.7
Furthermore, roles are not a form of self-availability; they me
indicate what one is in the particular gestalt of the particular ro
without allowing one to "have" oneself. Desirable though it ma
to "have" oneself as what one is, it would be fatal to be compress
into a single role, both because of the narrowness of any role
because any change of role would be precluded. We ourselve
separated from ourselves by the very fact that we exist but cann
know what existence is. The fact that we cannot capture ours

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 880 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

in any absolute role lifts all l

be played.
The doppelgdnger status of human nature can be understood in
different ways. The current philosophy of subjectivity contends that
the self is present to itself only insofar as it is aware that its ground
is withheld from it, and therefore in each of its manifestations,
consciousness of this inaccessibility has to be inscribed. The subject
becomes a subject by maintaining a balance on this vertex as the
only way in which it can achieve conscious life.8 Diametrically opposed
to this view is the androgynous myth of the divided being, whose
longing for integration is in many ways mirrored by the doppelgainger.'
While the philosophy of subjectivity speaks of the unfathomable
ground, the anthropogenic myth deals with one that is always
occupied. Social anthropology by contrast does not reach behind
the unfolding of the different roles, but has recourse to the human
being's decentered position as the core of its changing shapes. The
doubling structure of literary fictionality, however, does not deal
exclusively with the unfathomable ground, role playing, or the
attempt to integrate irreconcilable divisions, although every one of
these may constitute individual manifestations of the structure. The
structure is, rather, an abstraction from the various results of dou-
bling, which the philosophy of subjectivity would see as conscious
life, the anthropogenic myth as longed-for unity, and social an-
thropology as changing roles. The advantage of literary fictionality
over all these is the simultaneous presence in it of doubled positions,
which makes it representative of the nature of doubling itself.
Representing such doubling entails rendering conceivable the
genesis of possible worlds and indeed the whole process of generation
itself. This kind of representation differs markedly from represen-
tation as conventionally conceived. Like Freud's idea of "represen-
tation of drives" that was meant to designate something inaccessible
to cognition, representation of doubling points to an anthropological
disposition that eludes grasping and that manifests itself only by
way of its kaleidoscopically changing effects. Literary fictionality as
a representation of doubling discloses itself as pure semblance; in
other words, inscribed into the modes of representation is the denial
of any correspondence to anything existing. By revealing itself as
semblance, literary fictionality distances itself from all the specific
manifestations of doubling-such as those set out by the philosophy
of subjectivity, by anthropogenic myth, and by social anthropology.
In so doing, it deprives them of the authenticity necessary for them
to be representative. It is this unauthenticated representation that
enables us to conceive of doubling in all its limitless variety.

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STAGING AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CATEGORY 881

II

This applies above all to the decentered position of human bei

who are but do not "have" themselves. For if human beings
be present to themselves, this does not necessarily mean tha
are driven to "have" themselves. Indeed, the insurmountable distan
between "being" and "having" oneself is one of the discover
literature, highlighted by its explorations of the space between
discovery would be gambled away if literature were to follow
of thought pertaining to the pragmatics of human life, in
unavailabilities are generally done away with by hard and
definitions. Instead of doing so, however, and thereby elimi
the space between, literature makes itself into a setting in
that very space launches into multifarious patternings. The
unavailability of human beings is manifested in a welter of unf
seeable conflicts, which can only become tangible by runnin
whole gamut of play. Such play is endowed with endlessness, be
staging allows the otherwise impossible state that one can exper
one's own inability to have onself. This again becomes conce
through a trace of inauthenticity that remains inherent in the r
of unavailability, so that staging becomes truthful because it dis
with the compensatory character of the images presented. For
is staged is the appearance of something that cannot become pr
Since every appearance, however, is imbued with an eleme
determinacy-otherwise it could not appear-it inevitably pale
areas of indeterminacy, which on the one hand point to what e
the grasp and on the other stimulate the desire to lure into pre
what has been excluded.
Staging in literature makes conceivable the extraordinary plast
of human beings, who precisely because they do not seem to
a determinable nature, can expand into an almost unlimited r
of culture-bound patternings. The impossibility of being present
ourselves becomes our possibility to play ourselves out to a fulln
that knows no bounds, because no matter how vast the range, no
of the possibilities will "make us tick." From this we may in
lead as to the purpose of literary staging. If the plasticity of hu
nature allows, through its multiple culture-bound patternings, l
less human self-cultivation, literature becomes a panorama of
is possible, because it is not hedged in either by the limitatio
the considerations that determine the institutionalized organizat
within which human life otherwise takes it course. To monitor
changing manifestations of self-fashioning, and yet not coincid

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 882 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

any of them, makes the int

as the postponement of the
The need for staging does n
position of the human bein
cardinal points of our existen
their inaccessibility is not som
They have always been pres
because their very certainty
certainties, especially of so
unbearable, we ceaselessly try
This is equally borne out by
balance impenetrable beginn
religions that transform inev
is made between the continge
through the stories narrating
impermeability of the end i
the promise is meant to tra
beginning and prophecies are t
which always bears the inscrip
offer a glimpse of the ina
possibility that staging may a
happens, literature turns into
of make-believe, whose emerg
mode itself has become the
The more definitive the ve
by myth or religion, the m
between them: the multifariousness of human life. This will then
seem to be no more than the fulfillment of something predetermi
and ritually secured, for what has long been decided upon m
not be altered by the vicissitudes of life. Therefore literary stagi
does not aim primarily at capturing beginning and end in sto
or pictures; instead, it seeks to unfold what has been fenced in
the cardinal mysteries. As boundaries of life, beginning and e
can equally mobilize life's unforeseeable multifariousness, which t
emerges as if it could offer us access to the inaccessible, with
ever enabling us to chart it definitively. Since we cannot reco
our lost beginning and cannot survive beyond our inevitable e
the reenactment of life in literature entails "genuine repetition,"
repetition that is "recollected forward,"'" in order to make t
inaccessible areas of life appear as the immediacy of its divers
Play as the infrastructure of representation then becomes the driv
force behind the phantasmic figurations of staged life.
Since the ever-expanding range of life defies completion, th
is no final limit to what is possible. But it appears that we still w

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STAGING AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CATEGORY 883

access to this infinity of possibilities, and such acce

staging. Precisely because it does not provide answer
knowledge or experience, staging allows us to co
empirical life appears to be-a continual emergin
of features and patterns that, in the final analysis,
inexhaustibility. Staging thus becomes a mode that f
maximum effect when knowledge and experience as
up the world come to the limits of their efficacy. I
of affairs that can never have full presence, for
such is as closed to knowledge as it is to experience.
this inaccessibility into all its exemplifications, allow
the whole range of patternings that appear to give p
can never be present. Staging therefore cannot be an
category, but it is an anthropological mode which
status to that of knowledge and experience insof
to conceive what knowledge and experience canno
This need for staging should not be taken to m
is primarily a process of completion. Simply "having"
cannot be compensation or completion, let alone a m
that-when taken seriously-could only reprodu
inaccessible also varies from one case to another, and thus is not
to be mistaken for a kind of hidden or unfathomable substance
that would qualify what remains evanescent. For not being accessibl
to oneself is something different from the unknowable and ine
perienceable range of empirical life. The kaleidoscopically shiftin
inaccessibilities as well as the reenactments of life in literature are
triggered by what is, and staging is not meant to eliminate this, as
it would if it aimed at completion or compensation. Instead, staging
gives rise to simulacra of the inaccessible, which equally cast the
latter in changing patterns and as pictures fantasize hidden regions.
Strikingly, a similar situation is to be observed even when human
beings are in full possession of what is or of what they are in. This
applies to all evidential experiences of life, which, characterized by
instantaneous certainty, embody the exact opposite of inaccessibility.
Evidential experiences are in the nature of an epiphany.
Love is probably the most intense of these experiences, and it is
also the most central topic of literary staging. It is far from being
excluded from experience, but it is excluded from knowledge,
because there is no knowledge of what evidential experience actually
is, or because evidence seems to make all knowledge redundant.
Evidential experiences evince indubitability, which obviously tempts
us to start asking questions. Is this simply because we would like
knowledge of what is guaranteed by other certainties? This would
give special priority to the thirst for knowledge, in particular since

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884 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

the staging of evidential ex

deficiencies of knowledge. I
writes: "For the object of un
the alternativeness of huma
end of interpretations."" If
periences is concerned with la
certainty. Such a display, how
since with evidential exper
experienced from the appear
lessly proliferating, as is prov
experience is almost like an
inside it. But the experience
has happened to us, and th
alternatives. The alternatives
they remain linked to the e
to gain access. But this means
the need for staging in exactly
Now, however, we can see t
being in a somewhat differen
now only one of the spurs
certainty it springs from t
onself. However, if certainty
for unavailabilities, this asymm
even to those experiences tha
Since evidential experiences a
springs from the endeavor to
This brings another alterna
teach us that consciousness
riences;13 that may even ex
dential certainty. Staging th
form can only be a simulacr
form when it comes to provi
which far exceeds the capaci
In the final analysis, all alter
simulacra that feign objectivit
character. This holds not on
riences, but also for highlig
life as well as for the enactm
human being. What defies
pearance as a possibility tha
possibility of. Therefore the
apparent representation in o
a faked mode of access to w

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STAGING AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CATEGORY 885

picture, which does not merely reproduce but also,

can redeem what craves for presence, the simulac
of sophisticated invention that reveals the artific
phantasmic figuration with form. One of the reason
as a contrivance for staging does not degenerate i
is the infrastructure of presentation, which is play. T
regulates the degree of contrivance required by
which, because it is invented, can be abandoned
then the negated and obsolete contrivances will imp
on those that follow, imbuing the changing requirem
with traces of history.
Staging must always be preceded by something
to give appearance. This "something" can neve
covered by the staging, because otherwise staging its
its own enactment. In other words, every staging
is not. For everything that materializes in it stands
something absent, which, although given presenc
thing else that is present, cannot be present itsel
the absolute form of doubling, not least because
awareness that this doubling is ineradicable.
What enables staging to make such a presentatio
separation between the mode and the "somethin
given appearance. Since this ineradicable division is a
unlike the symbol, for example, staging prevent
from being occupied. It does give form to the i
preserves the status of the latter by revealing itself
This dual character gives rise not only to its fascina
impenetrable worlds, but also to its potency, sinc
vivid presence to intangible states of affairs tha
the conscious mind as if they were an object of p
can never become present, and what excludes cognit
edge and is beyond experience, can only enter consc
representation, for consciousness has no barrier
ceptible, and no defence against the imaginable. Con
can be brought forth in consciousness from an as y
of affairs, indicating that the presence of the latter
on any preceding experience. Something similar may
dream. Here, too, the dream thoughts are stage
something through into consciousness that is not id
selves. This applies irrespective of whether the d
be seen as a recurrence of the repressed (Freud) or a
creation of a world (Globus).'4 Only what has bee
resentation, in the dream and in literature, has the chance to

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 886 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

penetrate into consciousness,

in the mind without being af
human beings are ordinarily
Staging can be regarded as
that, precisely because of it
constantly to expand the play
archaic representation, as G
the external world. If anythi
in order to copy what was th
welter of givens the life-supp
from the realm of space an
For Gehlen this is "one of
which by representation achi
... for one's own ability to en
and exposure of being hum
to keep what has been selec
the irrational welter of given
will not only help to stabil
voice. And this means that
is concerned, it becomes, i
phrase""17 that is eventually
of its individual units when the "stabilization of the external world"
begins to speak.
This archaic structure of representation is also inherent in staging,
except that the phantasmic figurations no longer serve to stabilize
the external world, but are concerned with what is withheld, un-
available, and inaccessible. Consequently, staging is always a simula-
crum that does not even pretend to be copying anything pregiven.
For it feigns to be a form of something that defies shaping, and it
shatters all conceptions of the human being as a monad, subject,
self, or transcendental ego--not least because the simulacrum always
bears the inscription that what it is forming is unformable. In other
words, the simulacrum reveals the human being as a fractured
"holophrase" that shows the self-presence of human beings as some-
thing permanently lost. It follows that there could be no staging,
if historical definitions of human beings actually were their "nature,"
for it is their undefinability that provides the source for staging.
Never being finally present to ourselves is the mechanism that allows
us to keep changing in the mirror of our possibilities. As a result,
being one's own other does not mean being one's own opposite,
and self and otherness as conceptualizations of the human being
are nothing but transcendental postulates, indicating at best a his-
torical situation out of which they have arisen.

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STAGING AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CATEGORY 887

Yet even if we understood ourselves as the plenu

sibilities in the Leibnizian sense, the question of w
about the unfolding of these possibilities would a
interaction with our empirical environment, then th
act as a filter, converting the "plenum" to a store
For such a process, staging could only supply a k
ground, whereas it tends to be a kind of institution t
all institutionalizations by exhibiting what both instit
and definitions have to exclude in view of the stab
meant to provide. Instead of being the "plenum" of o
we can step out of what we are, because abandoni
playing away of what we appear to be will open u
possibilities. If we are our own otherness, then, st
of exhibition in which such a disposition comes t
Ontogenesis provides corroborative evidence for this
human beings from early infancy onwards exper
patternings of themselves that never issue into a fin
of what they are. And the need for staging testifies
the patternings we undergo release the impulse to
patternings by bodying forth our own otherness i
possibilities. Ultimately, this may even be the ro
aesthetic pleasure springs. Staging is the indefatig
confront ourselves with ourselves, which can only be d
ourselves. It allows us, by means of simulacra, to l
the fleetingness of the possible and to monitor th
folding of ourselves into possible otherness. We a
ourselves, though this transposition does not make us
what we are able to observe; it simply opens up to us t
of such self-transposing. The fact that only by be
human beings be linked with and present to them
staging to an alternative that runs counter to all avai
of humankind.
The need for staging is marked by a duality that defies cognitive
unraveling. On the one hand, staging allows us-at least in our
fantasy-to lead an ecstatic life by stepping out of what we are
caught up in, in order to open up for ourselves what we are otherwise
barred from. On the other, staging reflects us as the ever fractured
"holophrase," so that we constantly speak to ourselves through the
possibilities of our otherness in a speaking that is a form of sta-
bilization. Both apply, and both can occur simultaneously. Precisely
because cognitive discourse cannot capture the duality adequately,
we have literature.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

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 888 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NOTES

This essay contains portions of my forthcoming book The Fictive and th

Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, 1993). It was part of a lecture se
at the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change fr
through 31 March 1992. I should like to express my sincere gratitude
Ralph Cohen, Director of the Center, for the invitation and the splendid
he provided for me to present some of my ideas to an impressive
community at the Center.
1 See Karel Kosik, Die Dialektik des Konkreten (Frankfurt/M., 1967).
2 Thomas J. Roberts, When Is Something Fiction? (Carbondale, Ill., 1
3 Roberts, p. 105.
4 This formula is one of the major theses of my forthcoming book,
in-depth analysis of fictionality is given.
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenr6te (vol. I of Werke), ed. Karl Schlechta (M
p. 1172; here and elsewhere, unless otherwise noted, translations are
6 Helmuth Plessner, "Soziale Rolle und menschliche Natur," in Schriften
und Sozialphilosophie, vol. X of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Guinter Dux et al.
M., 1985), p. 235.
7 For details see Gabriele Schwab, Entgrenzungen und Entgrenzungsmyth
jektivitdt im modernen Roman (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 35-61.
8 For details see Dieter Henrich, "Selbstbewusstsein. Kritische Einle
Theorie," in Hermeneutik und Dialektik I, ed. Ruidiger Bubner, Konrad
Reiner Wiehl (Tiabingen, 1970), pp. 257-84; see also his Selbstverhdltni
und Auslegungen zu den Grundlagen der Klassischen deutschen Philosophie (St
pp. 83-130 and Fluchtlinien. Philosophische Essays (Frankfurt/M., 1982),
9 For details see Renate Lachmann, "Doppelgingerei," in Individualitdt
Frank and Anselm Haverkamp (Munich, 1988), pp. 421-39, and furt
the same volume. On the doubling of the unconscious there are pertinen
in Elisabeth Lenk, Die unbewusste Gesellschaft (Munich, 1983), pp. 31, 33
92.

10 Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hon

1983), p. 131.
11 Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. 53.
12 See Arnold Gehlen, Urmensch und Spdtkultur (Frankfurt/M., 1977), p. 153.
13 See Peter Sloterdijk, Literature und Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der Zwanziger
Jahre (Munich, 1978), p. 12.
14 See Gordon G. Globus, Dream Life, Wake Life: The Human Condition through Dreams
(Albany, 1987).
15 Gehlen, Urmensch und Spdtkultur, p. 54; hereafter cited in text.
16 Irenius Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Der Mensch-das riskierte Wesen. Zur Naturgeschichte mensch-
licher Unvernunft (Munich, 1988), pp. 243 f., has a similar view, despite his implied
criticism of Gehlen: "For us humans, it is a matter of continuing to keep cultural
and biological possibilities of development open for ourselves. The chances for this
are unique."
17 Sir Richard Paget, "The Origins of Language with Special Reference to the
Paleolithic Age," Cahiers d'Histoire Mondiale, 1 (1953/54), 408, 414.

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