Frankfurt Lecture – 2nd Fragment

30 September 2007
Plane Window

Officially I am here to speak about dramaturgy and will do so in a voice that lends itself to such a task, here, sat at the desk, perhaps with some quotations and examples, making statements or constructing theories. Unofficially though I might well slip or break the ranks I establish…

As if all discourse were a matter of surfaces. A surface being a code, an agreement, a formal instruction expressing expectations about what will be said or otherwise expressed here and how. And as if our dramaturgy might be the controlled and deliberate setting up and then cracking of these surfaces, the slow and/or rapid breaking of these agreements, the dynamic play between what is legally, officially said here, and that which is not meant to be said, that which is denied in the situation, that which is too much or too little for the context, that which is illegal, literally ‘obscene’,

As if now, having said this much of my lecture I might say without further warning, that at the airport this morning I was suddenly and unaccountably extremely tired of all this travel and that I would have paid good money then and there for the flight to be cancelled which would have provided an excuse that I could not be here now to speak about dramaturgy. Or as if I might say now that I scrolled thru the texts in my phone as I sat there at the airport, looking for something and that by accident I read what X wrote me as she sat in a café on such and such a street in such and such a city and that I was suddenly thinking of her…