ABSTRACT
The immanence of the world, instead, suggests a different and more brutal formulation: that of the 'theatre of the worldless'. Theatre came to signify 'theatrum mundi' – the theatre of the world – where theatrum no longer designated an assemblage, no longer designated 'the theatre'. Despite the separation of theatre as dispositif from the theatre as assemblage, many sought to bring both into alignment. Theatre's dispositif – a term associated with Michel Foucault – pre-dis-posed things; it arranged them in foreordained and predetermined ways: it aimed at producing an ordered, measured, and fundamentally administered world. Theatre provided him with a way of visualising the political world and man's place in the cosmological totality; but he also castigated it as a practice for staging problems at a human and mundane level. The theatrum metaphor thus exploits theatre, not just to represent, but in order to accuse the world; and it specifically condemns, as hypocritical, the world of human society.
