The problem of a loss of the theatre, Herbert Blau brilliantly engages in The Impossible Theatre, is neither the possibility of a concomitant loss of a private, community or social space, nor that of a civic or national identity, but introduces the possibility of the loss of the individual’s public identity: the individual loses a chance at producing a public identity; the public space, in turn, loses the individual. The audience indeed performs in this view, it observes a rite, participates in a ritual, a mystery, which goes back millennia, which affirms in the duration – of its being an audience sensing as an audience – the distinct, albeit often obscure, exactly mysterious, theatre of difference, the particularity of each of its members. Again, this is a non-representational theatre. Individuating occurs here through intuiting the duration of the theatre, its particularity, and such individuation enacts both a differentiation and a differenciation, the latter, because in producing a process of difference in the duration, the generation of the public identity of the individual, it gives rise to processes creating difference, as in, whole social milieux, which in turn make theatre, making differences.This image implies an architecture, or rather transversal movements in architectures, perhaps an architectonics, of the civic space inhabited by individuals, public identities who organise and spread, encouraging fields of heterogeneity, part-whole societies. However, without theatre, without this chance, the possibility of the individual differentiating into a public identity, there is still the rite and ritual, and the mystery, wherein the identity of the individual is forged: war and terror, capital and celebrity. The persistence of theatre in this displaced form amounts to its non-existence: more effective than losing the ritual, than abandoning it altogether, is substituting for it a theatre of blood, money and images.
For the latter, there is a new architecture, Eyal Weizman describes it. [http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0507/weizman/en] But in it architecture is deterritorialised in the image of the theatre of images, or theory: it is exactly about maintaining the hierarchy of representation.
