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114DR: Te Drama Review 56:3 (215) Fall 2012. 2012New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of echnology

Between the Imageand AnthropologyTeatrical Lessons from Aby Warburgs Nympha

Kathleen M. Gough

I had acquired an honest disgust of aestheticizing art history. Te formal approach to the image devoid ofan understanding of its biological necessity [...] appeared to me to lead merely to barren word-mongering.

Aby Warburg (in Gombrich [1970] 1986:8889)1

Te theater I know, for all its activity and visual splendor, has become an imageless act.

Richard Schechner (1985:296)

In 1895, a little less than 100 years before Richard Schechner traveled to Arizona to witness theYaqui deer dance that he records in Between Theater and Anthropology (1985), Aby Warburg theprogenitor of an earlier model of performance studies developed in the discipline of art his-tory traveled to Arizona to witness the Hemis Kachinas dance (the dance of the growing

corn). Both Schechner and Warburg made this journey compelled by their desire to track ana-logical correspondences between actual social performances manifest in the Native Americanrituals, and the mediated aestheticized art products that had been their lifes work (forSchechner, it was the theatre; for Warburg, the art historical image). The epigraphs that beginthis essay also echo analogical correspondences between Warburg and Schechners projects:where Warburg is disgusted with the academic aestheticization of the image that says nothingabout the human action that created the work (its biological necessity), Schechner is similarlyfrustrated with a theatre that, in his imagination, seems closely aligned with word-mongering,an imageless act.

Kathleen M. Gough is a Lecturer in Teatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. She has published

in Modern Drama, Performance Research, Screen, and New Teatre Quarterly, as well as in edited

collections on performance and ecology, intercultural performance in the Caribbean and Southern US

contexts, and the South in the Atlantic World. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Haptic

Allegories: Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic. By examining how attention

to gender and performance revise historiographical practices in Atlantic Studies, Haptic Allegories also

revises, reimagines, and redeploys key concepts central to performance studies. [email protected]

1. Tis quotation, dated 17 March 1923, is from Warburgs notes for a lecture he delivered on the Serpent Ritual

almost 30 years after making the journey to the American Southwest. Warburg delivered the lecture at a neuro-

logical clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, where he had been admitted for depression and possible schizophrenia,

as a way of proving that he had been rehabilitated. Tese notes, translated by E.M. Gombrich and included in

Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, do not appear in the published lecture (for a full text of the published lec-

ture see Warburg [1923] 1995).


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2. Over the past two decades feminist performance studies theorists such as Elin Diamond, Rebecca Schneider, and

Diana aylor have tacitlycritiqued the restoration of behavior by returning to the question of mimesis. Tese

theorists make explicit how the body of woman like strips of film/behavior in Schechners theory gives

meaning a place to occur without becoming meaningful itself. By implicitly gendering the strips of film/behav-

ior metaphor and granting agency to the image/object, they differently highlight the gendered lacunae in the res-toration of behavior where it is the body of woman as image or construct that becomes the third term that

animates the between of theatre and anthropology, representation and social reality (Diamond 1997; aylor 2003

esp. 7993; Schneider 2011 esp. 13868).

With the publication of James Harding and Cindy Rosenthals edited collection The Rise ofPerformance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechners Broad Spectrum(2011), Schechner continuesto hold pride of place as one of, if not thepioneer of performance studies. I, too, wish to rethinkSchechners broad spectrum, and particularly his restoration of behavior, by turning backthe clock to a time that predates the film technology that animates Schechners theory in orderto explore the work of Aby Warburg.

Aby Warburg (18661929) is considered to be one of the most original art historians ofthe late 19th and early 20th century. Moving between the disciplines of art history, anthropol-ogy, philosophy, psychology, and theatre, Warburg developed a performance paradigm in thelate 19th century that he called the pathos formula, which was conceptualized around stillimages of the figure of woman-in-movement, who he referred to as Nympha. The most pro-found manifestation of this paradigm was his unfinished project,Mnemosyne(memory), a ges-tural knowledge-montage: an artistic composite of juxtaposed heterogeneous images intendedto illuminate what can be understood about historical transmission and recurrence by focusingsolely on gestural correspondences between historical and contemporary images. The images inthe montage comprise reproductions of works of art, or manuscripts, photographs cut out of

newspapers or taken by Warburg himself (Agamben 2009:28). At his death in 1929,Mnemosynecomprised almost 80 plates and over 1,000 images.

In tracking these analogical correspondences between Schechners restoration of behav-ior and Warburgs pathos formula, and in slowing down the moving image to focus on the stillimages of Warburgs Nympha, it becomes clear that there is a particularly gendered dimensionto the restoration of behavior theory that is obscured when one remains enamored by tech-nologys supposed originalities, and in thrall to thinking of the still as always a lag behind(Schneider 2011:144). By considering Warburgs theories as an antecedent to Schechners res-toration of behavior, it becomes apparent that the invocation of film strips as culturally neutral(Schechners strips of behavior) inflected performance studies from the outset with a gen-dering that has been reified, reflected, and contested ever since.2In looking to the archive as

the repertoire, I find that Warburgs Nympha has taught us, and continues to teach us aboutrestored behavior.

The intricacies of Schechners ideas and his interventions helped make possible the rise ofindisciplinein the academy. Performance studies as a field of exploration that brings disciplin-ary preoccupations into relation came into visibility in the academy in the 1980s with perfor-mance constituted as a critical lens. This developing field joined a larger intellectual movementthat sought to shift emphasis away from linear models of analysis that catalogue quantifi-able differences as a way of understanding human behavior (differences between past/present,cause/effect, form/content) to an emphasis on the processes of framing, editing and rehears-ing (Schechner 1985:33). This emphasis underscored a desire to move away from the tenacity

of origin stories that often guide methodologies across disciplines, and direct attention to theimmediate and ephemeral present of human activity, which Schechner referred to as actuals([1970] 1977:335). Schechner elaborated this interdisciplinary intervention (and the impor-tance of actual present, immediate, ephemeral reality) by demonstrating the points ofcontact between theatre and anthropology, and their shared interest in the study of human


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3. In order to keep the intellectual genealogy clear, Schechner developed the concept of actuals in an essay first

published in 1970 and later in his 1977 publication Essays in Performance Teory. Points of Contact was devel-oped, specifically, for his 1985 publication Between Teatre and Anthropology, and was developed after the concept

of restoration of behavior. Because my intention is to focus on the culmination of these concepts as they ani-

mate Between Teatre and Anthropology, I discuss them as part of the same formation.

action.3Thus, he writes, performance means: never for the first time. It means: for the sec-ond to the nthtime. Performance is twice behaved behavior (1985:36). In Between Theater and

Anthropology, Schechner discusses a near limitless number of performance practices from aroundthe globe (rituals, church ceremonies, happenings, theatre, dance, trance, etc.), and charts astunning range of interrelations between aesthetic and social behavior, between acting and non-acting, and between modes of framing and rehearsal processes. In this model, Schechner givesperformance the status of an ontological condition, and he develops this most fully in his theoryof restoration of behavior.

As Schechner explains:

Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of film. Thesestrips of behavior can be rearranged or reconstructed; they are independent of the causalsystems (social, psychological, technological) that brought them into existence. They havea life of their own. How the strip of behavior was made, found and developed may beunknown or concealed; elaborated; distorted by myth or tradition. (1985:35)

Redeploying Erving Goffmans strips of activity as outlined inFrame Analysis(1974),

Schechners use of the technological metaphor of film to fashion the restoration of behavioras strips of behavior is central to an understanding of how it works. This deployment of filmsuggests an even more radical break from origin stories and historicist foundations than are evi-dent in Schechners paradigm. Schechner is clearly invested in questions of historical transmis-sion through human action, aesthetic creation, and the rehearsal process, and he argues for abreak from historicist foundations in stating that strips of behavior have a life of their own.Yet if strips of behavior do, indeed, have a life of their own, what would happen if agency weregranted to the strips themselves (and not to the imaginary subject/film director who treats, rear-ranges, and reconstructs them)? Is the strip not actual? And, if not, why not?

Schechners reliance on the medium of film to animate how restoration of behavior workslocates performance in the fast-paced, technological, and morphological world of the late 20thcentury. Indeed, film becomes the third term that animates the betweenof theatre and anthro-pology, which, in this model, morph into living behavior strips (where aesthetic and socialactivities are indistinguishable). However, when he explains this theory at greater length, wefind that: the strips of behavior are not in themselves process but things, items, material (35).The strips of behavior are objects, material, and Schechner imagines the repertoire of humanbehavior to be externally manifested in objects that can be rearranged and reconstructed. I wantto remind the reader at this point that in common parlance this would be referred to as mon-tage a heuristic device that has, of course, also played a distinctive role in the development offilm theory and cultural theory. Similar to the way Walter Benjamin thinks of historiographicalmontage, or dialectical images that reveal invisible correspondences, this embodied knowledgepasses through objects, and then back into bodies, and then back again to objects, and so on.Just as living behavior in Schechners model does not distinguish between aesthetic and socialactivities, the strips of behavior that capture these behaviors make no distinction between osten-sibly real subjects and representational objects. In fact, these subjects and objects mobilize eachother. Similarly, the cultural construction of a social actor who has objective reality, and theproduction of images that purportedly represent social actors (and their behavior in the the-atre and everyday life) animate each other. The agency of the social actor and the agency of theimage compete for presence. They are both the actual.


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When Schechner writes that how the strip of behavior was made, found and developed maybe unknown or concealed; elaborated; distorted by myth or tradition, he writes with an his-torians mind a mind trying to animate acts of transmission that are found in the archive,one that is interested in an objects truth claims, and curious about the repetition of tradition.Schechner maintains his past/present distinction through his reference to film. In order to dis-tinguish how transmission of actual human behavior worked in the past and how it worksin the present, he writes: neither painting, sculpture or writing shows actual behavior as it isbeing behaved. But thousands of years before movies, rituals were made from strips of restoredbehavior: action and stasis coexisted in the same event (1985:36).

These two short explanatory sentences set forth two significant claims. First, Schechner sug-gests that movies show actual behavior as it is being behaved (for the sake of argument letus believe this is the case). Second, he places stasis in the past, for stasis as a category is onlymentioned in relation to painting, sculpture, and writing. Beforefilm, people relied on painting,sculpture and writing; but now, because theatre and social performance as living behavior areboth embedded in the strips of behavior, the actual becomes a (necessarily) slippery category.There is, of course, as much action in the moving image as there is stasis in the strips of film

that underscore the deconstruction/reconstruction of actualities (1985:33) that is the spring-board for Schechners theory. And just as all action is not located in the (film) repertoires of thepresent strips of behavior, stasis is hardly an ancient category: painting, sculpture, and writingare not simply ancient strips of behavior, but continue to be important acts for understandinghuman behavior, aesthetic process, and historical transmission.

Furthermore, how do we know that painting and sculpture represented action and stasis inthe same event? That action and stasis didoccur in the same event seems to be commonsense(after all, we all have to pause sometime). What painting and sculpture teach us, however, is howpast cultures may have understood thesignificanceof stasis and action, and how this was trans-mitted through aesthetic objects from one epoch to the next (how one epoch dreamedthe one before). Yet, these objects still needed a subject to activate their pedagogy. We owe our

commonsense knowledge that stasis and action were recorded and depicted in still objects toSchechners predecessor, Aby Warburg. Thus, it is to Warburg an art historian with his ownperformance paradigm that I now wish to turn (back) to in order to slow down the mov-ing image. Warburgs Nympha, that female figure in rapid movement, holds the same place inWarburgs pathos formula as film strips do in Schechners restoration of behavior paradigm. Inthis respect, the Nympha is the ghost in Schechners restoration of behavior machine, whereshe is a part of the system, but not part of the image of the system. For Warburg, the pathosformula as a forerunner of the restoration of behavior does not operate without her image.

The Pathos Formula

About a century before Richard Schechner developed his notion of the restoration of behav-ior, Warburg moved through the fields of anthropology, art history, philosophy, psychology, andtheatre in order to conceptualize his pathos formula. Unlike the associations of pathos in theEnglish language with suffering and the pathetic,

the German usage concentrated on its overtones of grandeur and sublimity. Thus theadjective pathetic in English means arousing pity, whilepathetischin the Germanevokes ideas not only of acting in the grand manner [e.g., gestures in rituals, and morequotidian gestures of a grand kind] but also of the theatrical aspects which are bothrelevant to Warburgs use of the word. (Gombrich 1986:17)

Warburg, like Schechner after him, was interested in a montage of attractions (Eisenstein

[1923] 1974) where he wished to explore correspondences between human action and aestheticcreation that kept slipping out of the picture frame, then onto the stage, then into social rituals,and then continuing to move both forward and backward in a non-teleological feedback


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loop. Thus, Warburg did notthink formally about influencesfrom one artist to another, anddid not think about the his-tory of art as a story of aestheticprogress. Instead, he created agestural knowledge-montageand, thus, rejected the matri-ces of intelligibility on which somuch intellectual work depends(see Didi-Huberman 2007:13).Georges Didi-Hubermanexplains that the pathos formula

gave art history access toa fundamental anthropo-logical dimension that

of thesymptom. Here thesymptomis understoodas movement in bodies, amovement that fascinatedWarburg not only becausehe considered it passion-ate agitation but alsobecause he judged it anexternal prompting.(2007:15)

In Warburgs analysis, theobject has agency: the subject is animating the object as much as the object is prompting thesubject. This external prompting led Warburgs attention beyond the Quattrocento paintingsof the early Italian Renaissance that he had studied and into the world of performance as it wasoccurring in his own lifetime. In recollecting a trip he made to Native American settlementsin the 1890s (quoted in the first epigraph to this essay), Warburg stated that he had acquiredan honest disgust of the aestheticizing of art history, and believed that the formal approachto the image [was] devoid of [an] understanding of its biological necessity. He took off for theAmerican Southwest in the same year that he published a theatre history of sorts, an analy-sis of the Intermedi performed at the Medici court in Florence in 1589, on the occasion of themarriage between the Archduke Ferdinand I and Christina of Lorraine, who was greeted by

the living compendium of Florentine festive pageantry (Warburg [1895] 1999b:350). Havinglocated Buontalentis original designs and the account books for the theatrical costumes, aswell as a number of engravings of the festival performances, Warburg wished to turn what,to the contemporary eye, appeared as dry and bizarre enumerations into vividly rememberedimages (350). Thus, he writes, it is a pleasure and an honour for me to take the opportunitywhich presents itself and, in an essay on art history, to attempt to describe the historical positionof the Intermedi of 1589 within the evolution of theatrical taste (350).

When Warburg made his American journey in 189596, he was attempting to locate anintermediary stage between image and text that he had found when examining theatre in theItalian Renaissance archives. He continued to trace the biological necessity of representativeimages by observing the ritual dances in the Native American repertoire (what Schechner would

later describe as an actual, where art is an event [Schechner 1988:36]). While Warburg did golooking for survivals from the past that were still present among primitive cultures, his realinterest was in conducting an ethnography of surfaces: an examination of what Alan Feldman

Figures 1 and 2 (facing page). Hemis Kachina dance the dance of the growing

corn. Warburg discusses the dramaturgy of the Kachina dance in his 1923 lecture,

Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America. Oraibi,

Arizona, May 1896. (Photo by Aby Warburg, courtesy of the Warburg Institute,

University of London)


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4. Ninety of Warburgs American photographs half of those that survive are published in Photographs at the

Frontier: Aby Warburg in America 18951896 (Guidi and Mann 1998).

describes as the sites, stages,and templates uponwhich his-tory is constructed as a culturalobject (1991:2). In Warburgs1923 lecture on his visit to theAmerican Southwest, he tellshis audience that he is unableto give depth to my impres-sions, as I had not mastered theIndian language and a jour-ney limited to several weekscould not impart truly profoundimpressions ([1923] 1995:12).Instead, he took over 100 pho-tographs of the ritual partici-pants with particular attention

to costumes worn (see figs. 1 and2), of totemic objects used inthe performances, and of every-day objects depicting imagesthat to Warburg were akin tohieroglyphs.4

Warburg used the Native American ritual events to think through correspondences to hiswork on the Intermedi performances at the Florentine court (see Michaud 1998). This is notonly evident in Warburgs attention to the colors of costumes, sounds of the instruments, dra-maturgy of the events, and movement of the Kachina dances in Oraibi that he photographs anddiscusses in his 1923 lecture ([1923] 1995:2130), but quite explicitly in the lone image of a

young woman carrying a pot on her head, which depicts a bird in flight (see fig. 3). In discuss-ing both the object and its movement through an examination of the body of the woman, hestates, We have here an intermediary stage [...] between a realistic mirror image and writing(8). Thus, it is the body of the woman that mediates the betweenof image and text: she is theactual event.

This fascination with live performance in both the historical archives and the NativeAmerican repertoire was prompted by Warburgs earlier research for his dissertation in theearly 1890s, in which he turned to theatre to study Botticellis The Birth of Venus and Spring. Inthat study, he attempted to find evidence for how the depiction of running Nymphs in earlyItalian Renaissance art had their origins in theatrical performances that were, perhaps, wit-nessed by early Renaissance artists:

Once we assume that festive performances set the character before the artists eyes as liv-ing, moving beings, then the creative process becomes easier to follow. The program sup-plied by the humanist adviser loses its taint of pedantry: the inspirer is not imposing anobject to be imitated, but simply facilitating its articulation. ([1893] 1999a:125)

This was Warburgs first attempt to take the image out of the frame, to analyze it outside of theprescribed methods of tracking influences between artists and theories of aesthetic progress andinto the actual world of theatrical spectating. When he witnessed Native American rituals inthe American Southwest, the phenomena he had studied in Florentine Intermedi reappeared ineffective form in the Native American performances as representations of enigmatic forces that


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borrowed human form to findexpression (Michaud 2007:33).It was the theatre that first madepainted figures and then socialrituals actual and real tohim. However, before embark-ing on his careers as theatrehistorian and amateur anthro-pologist (or performance studiestheorist), Warburg began withthe question of the image animage that was unmanly and thatunmannedhim throughout hiscareer: a rapidly moving femalefigure performing acrobaticflights across disciplines, histori-

cal epochs, and a vast geographi-cal and theatrical terrain.

The Figure of Womanin Movement

While doing archival researchon the Quattrocento art of theearly Italian Renaissance, andattempting to understand howartists had interpreted antiquityin their paintings how that

epoch had dreamed the onebefore Warburg began tonotice something that no art his-torian before him had fully con-sidered: he started to notice thatthe paintings were moving (seeGombrich 1986). While analyz-ing Botticellis The Birth of Venusand Springhe began to see a lotof fluttering: the fluttering ofdraperies, of curls in the hair,

and most significantly thefluttering of the dresses on the female models used to depict the nymphs (figs. 4 and 5). Hestarted to refer to these fluttering objects as accessory forms in motion ([1893] 1999a:117),and this material (used quite literally here) can be considered as a forerunner to strips ofbehavior. Philippe-Alain Michaud explains this transition from the canonical view in art historythat Renaissance paintings of antiquity were modeled on the motionless, well-balanced bodyto Warburgs theory that the body was caught up in a play of overwhelming forces:

By placing the emphasis on the phenomena of transition over the treatment of bodiesat rest, on what divides the figure over what pulls it together, and on becoming over themotionless form, Warburg [...] replaced the model of sculpture with that of dance, accen-

tuating the dramatic, temporal aspects of the works. (2007:2728)

In many respects, Warburgs thinking was prompted by The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit ofMusic(1872), in which Nietzsche outlines an intellectual dichotomy between Apollonian still-

Figure 3. Young woman with pot depicting a bird in flight. Tis

image is analyzed by Warburg in order to illuminate how the body

of the woman mediates the betweenof image and text: she is the

actual event. Arizona, 1896. (Courtesy of the Warburg Institute,

University of London)


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5. Tis passage, taken from Aby Warburg, Grundlegende Bruchstucke zu einer pragmatischen Ausdruckskunde

(Ground-laying fragments for a pragmatic study of expression), is an unpublished work translated and excerpted

in Michaud (2007).

ness and Dionysian ecstaticmovement (see Gombrich 1986:25758; Michaud 2007:30).This is one of the contexts thatallows for an understanding ofwhy Warburgs eyes kept seeingthe movement of nymphs andthinking about their destabiliz-ing force. However, even in thisearly dialogue with Nietzschesideas, there is the seed ofanother question. In notes fromSeptember 1890, grouped underthe title spectator and move-ment, he writes:

With the introduction of the

forward-moving figures, thespectator was constrained toexchange comparative foranthropomorphic [i.e., ana-logical] observations. Thequestion was no longerWhat does this expressionmean but Where is it mov-ing to? [...]

Figures whose cloth-ing or hair is moved canreceive this movement fromtheir own bodily movements[their agency], or else fromthe wind [external prompt-ing], or from both together.They move on a plane par-allel to the spectator, so thatthe spectator can believein forward movement onlywhen he moves his eyes. (inMichaud 2007:82)5

When Warburg shifted the question from what does this expression mean? to where is itmoving to? he opened up a labyrinth that he continued to move through over the next threedecades. For him, it was not that the expression did not have meaning, but that the objects onwhich that meaning was predicated were not stable. The female figure in rapid motion was notsimply a symbol that referred to a higher level of meaning other than itself. That is, it was nomereallegory. As Peter Brger has written, the insertion of reality fragments in the work of artfundamentally transforms that work. The parts are no longer signs pointing to reality, they arereality (1984:78). It is only in taking seriously the female figure in rapid motion (not what she

Figures 4 and 5 (below). Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus,

c. 1486, and Spring, c. 1482.In Botticellis Te Birth of Venus

and SpringWarburg began to see the fluttering of drapery, of curls

in the hair, and most significantly of the dresses on the femalemodels used to depict the nymphs that he refers to as accessory forms

in motion.


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6. In Flesh of My FleshKaja Silverman writes: analogy is the correspondence of two more things witheach other[...] Since we cannot affirm analogies linking us to other people unless we acknowledge that we are bound by the

same limits, we are reluctant to do so (2009:40). For a wider discussion of the importance of analogy in critical

and philosophical thought see Orpheus Rex, in Silverman (2009:3758).

represented but the realbody, and those real accessories in motion, depicted in the paintingsat the moment of the paintings making), that we can divine meaning at all.

For Warburg, pictorial allegories depicted in Italian Renaissance painting had haptic qual-ities. If we could come to understand where they were moving to, how they touched us, andhow they were a part of our own movement, we might better come to understand ourselves.

Warburg suggested this possibility when he sought to animate the figures on the same plane ashimself, as the spectator. When the figure steps out of the picture frame and starts to inhabit theworld, he posited that the spectator can now believe in forward movement because he moveshis eyes. Yet how did Warburg experience this movement?

The haptic movements of the image took on various forms and lives in Warburgs think-ing between 1890 and his death in 1929. As he kept asking the question where is the fig-ure moving to? he found himself following it across geographical space and historical times.He linked Quattrocento painting to theatrical performance through the image of the run-ning Nymphs, used theatrical pageantry as the basis to understand Florentine art, connectedthe contemporary Native American rituals in the American Southwest to the movement hesaw in Renaissance pageantry, and then returned to the figure of woman-in-movement in his

last project,Mnemosyne (see fig. 6). Thus, while he moved and his temporal and geographicframes of reference moved there was one movement that stayed constant: he never lost sightof the Nympha. The female figure in rapid movement accompanied Warburg throughout hisnomadic and peripatetic wanderings. Whether he looked backward or forward, she held hishand and walked with him the whole time. Warburg was not content to discover the return of

pathos in motionin the works in question; he surrendered himself to the pathos of movement heinvented (Didi-Huberman 2007:13). Thus, on the most profound of analogical levels, Warburgunderstood that the Nympha was not just a part of him, but that he was a part of her.6

In the next section I explore how the fin de sicle epoch in which Warburgs own move-ments took place enabled his imagination of the Italian Renaissance. Furthermore, his dreams

of/for the past, activated through movements in his lifetime, enable my dreams of/for thefuture by attempting to articulate the political possibilities that the Nympha suggests when shefinally befriends her long lost kin: those strips of living behavior that animate the restorationof behavior.

Lessons from the Nympha

Although attuned to the Nymphas movement across continents and vast historical trajectories,Warburg is quieter on the subject of how her movement in his own lifetime inspired his intel-lectual imaginings of the Italian Renaissance. What sort of connection did he fail to see becausehe felt them so near moving through them, in them, and with them? In the year 1900, whenWarburg was still trying to grasp the challenges of thinking with and through the female fig-

ure in rapid motion, he and his friend Andre Jolles exchanged a series of fictitious letters to freeWarburg from having to think through the project in solely academic terms. It was a short-livedcorrespondence, but Jolless first letter to Warburg, written on 23 November 1900, begins theprocess of making a series of correspondences that illuminate the fin de sicle preoccupationwith the images of the New Woman and the question of womens suffrage that animated polit-ical and social life at the turn of the century. Because Jolless letter elucidates this relationshipbetween contemporary women and the classical image, I quote it at length:


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Behind them, close to the open door, there runs no, that is not the word, there flies, orrather there hovers the object of my dreams, which slowly assumes the proportion of acharming nightmare. A fantastic figure should I call her a servant girl, or rather a classi-cal nymph? [...] This lively, light-footed and rapid gait, this striding step, which contrastswith the aloof distance of all other figures, what is the meaning of it all? [...]

Figure 6. Warburgs interdisciplinary search for correspondences between aesthetic and social activity

culminated in his last project, Mnemosyne, a gestural knowledge-montage comprised of over 80 plates and

1,000 images. Plate 39 of Aby Warburgs Atlas of Images, Mnemosyne, c. 1923. (Courtesy of the Warburg

Institute, University of London)


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7. OED Online, s.v. generic image, www.oed.com/view/Entry/77527?redirectedFrom=generic%20image

#eid132862923 (21 March 2012).

8. OED Online, s.v. conception, www.oed.com/view/Entry/38137?redirectedFrom=conception#eid

(21 March 2012).

My condition varied between a bad dream and a fairy tale [...] Sometimes she wasSalome dancing with her death-dealing charm in front of the licentious tetrarch; some-times she was Judith carrying proudly and triumphantly with a gay step the head of themurdered commander; then again she appeared to hide in the boy-like grace of littleTobias [...] Sometimes I saw her in a seraph flying towards God in adoration and then inGabriel announcing good tidings. I saw her as a bridesmaid expressing innocent joy at theSposalizioand again as a fleeing mother, the terror of death in her face, at the Massacre ofthe Innocents.

I lost my reason. It was always she who brought life and movement into an other-wise calm scene. Indeed, she appeared to be the embodiment of movement [...] but is itvery unpleasant to be her lover? [...] Who is she? Where does she come from? Have Iencountered her before? I mean one and a half millennia earlier? Does she come from anoble Greek lineage, and did her great-grandmother have an affair with people from AsiaMinor, Egypt or Mesopotamia? (in Gombrich 1986:1078)

Thus, Jolles begins to help Warburg chart two seemingly contradictory impulses at playacross a spectrum of contemporary and classical images representing the female body in move-ment. On the one hand, his discussion turns on different figures of a generic image thatseems both singular and ubiquitous. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the genericimage constitutes the connecting link between ideation and conception.7Taking conceptionby its literal definition as the action of conceiving, or fact of being conceived, in the womb, 8Jolles ends his letter by asking, Does she come from a noble Greek lineage, and did her great-grandmother have an affair with people from Asia Minor, Egypt or Mesopotamia? WhatWarburg is attempting to understand, and what Jolles is attempting to help him imagine, is howthe generic image connects our understanding of an idea and its conception. Warburg, him-self, struggles with his historical training, which demands that he look for origins and meaningthrough the particularity of a single discipline, and his interest in performance and movement,which obliges him to think not of origins, but recurrence, of seconds that are firsts, of copiesthat are original, of citations, of doubles i.e., the restoration of behavior.

This history of a generic image in movement is the acknowledgement that images thatappear as singular are repeated across time and space (they have a life of their own). Theyare bound together through their analogical movements, and they are, in turn, bound to us ifwe have the capacity to behold them. Beholding them requires us to think history as action,to externalize psychology so that action and not character becomes the locus of inquiry.Because of the fact that this research was conducted through the medium of images, GiorgioAgamben writes, it was believed that the image was also its object. Warburg instead trans-formed the image into a decisively historical and dynamic element (2000:53). The movementof the image seemingly unrestricted by time and space that Warburg found simultaneously

fearful and full of liberation and emancipation (Gombrich 1986:127) was rendered visible lessthrough the machinations of photography and early film (as it is often theorized), than throughthe fin de sicle New Woman asserting her right to unrestricted movement most evidentin the change from tight-laced and restricted respectability of fashion to free flowing gar-ments (Gombrich 1986:109). That is, accessory forms in motion were not simply an art his-torical conceit. The issue of womens dress was at the center of debates regarding social reformand suffrage at the turn of the century in the form of conduct books, journalistic editorialsand cartoons, and most significantly, it was manifested in the actual dresses worn by women,


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9. For a thorough discussion of Warburgs play see Russell (2006).

which allowed them unrestricted movement in sport and dance, that was very much a liveissue at the time (109; emphasis added).

This is not, of course, to say that photography and early film were not important to histhinking, but that they have played a large part in obscuring some fundamental materialdetails.For instance, Michaud writes:

Warburgs method the application of which ranged progressively from the analysis ofstatic figures in 1893 to the generalized montage ofMnemosyne, to which he devoted him-self from 1923 was entirely based on an aesthetic of movement that was expressed atthe end of the nineteenth century by the nascent cinema. (2007:39)

Michauds own methods in this sentence belie a progress narrative that is not only enam-ored with technologys supposed originalities (Schneider 2011:144), but also one that doesnot account for living behavior. The details that Warburg concentrated on in theorizing hispathos formula (the Nympha, accessories in motion) suggest that his thinking did not followa straight line from the still image to the moving image. In fact, like Schechners decades-longproject of attempting to name the restoration of behavior, Warburg continued to think in a

usefully circuitous fashion through the pathos formula in a way that was both syncopated andpunctuated by the spectacular display of living bodies on which the argument for film technol-ogy is predicated. Betweenthe painted (and photographic) image and the film projection lies thetheatre in all of its meta manifestations: the changing of costumes, the brandishing of placards,and the movement of bodies on the street and on the stage.

Through the bodies of contemporary women changing their dress, and in the politics of hisown lifetime, Warburg began to see a decisively historical and dynamic movement depicted inartistic images. Warburgs biographer, E.M. Gombrich, suggests that the female figure in artwas naturally drawn into this conflict (1986:109). While it is important that he acknowledgesthat political and aesthetic movements at the fin de sicle were a part of the same conversation,Gombrich (like Michaud in a different context) fails to acknowledge thatshe the Nympha, theNew Woman, the dancer, the actress, the activist made her first bodily appearances in stagemelodrama and in the tableaux vivantbefore taking up residence, quite naturally, in the theat-rical world of stage naturalism where playwrights attempted to come to terms with the NewWomans appearance in social life. Given Warburgs interest in the theatre (he attended theearly dance performances of Isadora Duncan a fin de sicle paradigm of the Nympha if thereever was one); his professed kinship with the playwright George Bernard Shaw (Warburg wrotea play on Hamburg social reform in 1896 which he and his family performed for his fianc,the artist Mary Hertz9); and his ethnographic fieldwork in the American Southwest in 1895(where he began to see in Native American rituals the impulse he noticed in Italian Renaissanceart that depicted theatrical scenes), the theatrical routesfor his own performance theory bearsome remark.

It was via theatrical routes that he was able to conceptualize his pathos formula, which hethen manifested in his vast and ambitious gestural knowledge-montage,Mnemosyne. Majorstudies of Warburgs theories, as evidenced by Gombrich and Michaud, operate by way of atacit antitheatrical prejudice. This is because of theatres lack of medium specificity, an inabil-ity for theatre to stay within a clearly demarcated disciplinary framework so that the spectatorcan enjoy sole agency over the object in question. In this respect these studies echo MichaelFrieds comments in his 1967 essay, Art and Objecthood. In this essay, Fried states that theconcept of quality and value and the extent that these are central to art, the concept of artitself are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only withinthe individual arts. What lies betweenthe arts is theater ([1967] 1995:142). Of course, wherever anti-theatricality looms, we find its


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kinsman, anti-feminism, holding its hand tightly (see Diamond 1997). For Warburg, however,what productively lies (and moves) between mediums is precisely the theater, and that theateris animated by the figure of woman in movement.

The New Woman as she appeared on the Ibsenite stage, in the dances of Isadora Duncan,on bicycles, and in political rallies in all of her vast incarnations at the turn of the century, was

the paradigm of the Nympha, while the Nympha was a paradigm for these ubiquitous incarna-tions. She was that force that allowed Warburg to see haptic qualities in the pictorial allegories,while pictorial allegories allowed Warburg to see the real force of a political movement thatcould never be separated from aesthetic movements. This is performance as twice-behavedbehavior, where that move between the image and anthropology comes into view not throughthe technology of film, but through the pervasive political and theatrical movements of women.

This long historical view traces a path from Warburgs theorizing of the still image in rapidmotion, to the image thatstillghosts the strips of behavior that lie betweentheatre and anthro-pology in Schechners restoration of behavior. As Gombrich has written in regards to Warburgsreaction to the female figure in rapid motion, the period flavor of his thinking about theNympha is unmistakable, but it should not blind us to the possibility that the special situation

in which [he worked] enabled him to see more than we see today (1986:110).

Mnemosyne

Warburgs philosophy of the Mneme appeared to justify that what he called a ghost story for the fully

grown-up could be told in pictures alone.

E.M. Gombrich (1986:287)

What does a document of a womans pose document? Can a pose stand as evidence of active agency if the

essential action of a pose is theatrical, citational, or always in an anachronistic or temporally syncopated

relationship to action?

Rebecca Schneider (2011:15253)

At the time of his death in 1929, Warburg had not finished hisMnemosyneproject. He left aseries of almost 80 plates that montaged over 1,000 images revealing gestural correspondencesthat could be understood as prototypes for Schechners strips of behavior. Warburg col-lected reproductions of works of art, or manuscripts, photographs cut out of newspapers ortaken by Warburg himself (Agamben 2009:28). To make clear the complexity and ambitionof Warburgs project, Giorgio Agamben discusses, in detail, plate 46 (see fig. 7) based on thethemePathosformulen(the pathos formula). The plate is made up of 27 images where what is inquestion is the origin and history of the iconographic theme figure of woman in movement.Agamben explains that one way of reading the plates is to try to arrange the individual images

in chronological order by following the probable generic relations that, binding one to another,would eventually lead us back to the archetype, to the formula of pathos from which theyall originate. However, a closer look reveals that there is no one origin. That is, none of theimages are original, just as none is simply a copy or repetition. In this way, just as it is impossi-ble to distinguish between creation and performance, original and execution so Warburgs for-mula of pathos comprises hybrids of archetype and phenomena, first-timeness and repetition.The figure of the Nympha, which at first glance seems to be the originary image reveals itself tobe both original and copy. Or to be more precise, in accordance with the constitutive ambigu-ity of Platos dialectic, the nymph is the paradigm of the single images, and the single images arethe paradigms of the nymph (Agamben 2009:29).

What Agamben does not discuss in this brilliant formulation and articulation of Warburgsplate is that the theory used to understand what the plate is doing is inextricably tied to thecontent. The content is not incidental. The figure of woman in movement is the condition ofpossibility for a discussion that elucidates the impossible source of the formula of pathos, for


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being neither archaic nor contemporary, and for underscoring the constitutive ambiguity ofPlatos dialectic. As Nicole Loraux succinctly argues in regards to the place of woman in Greek

philosophy and myth as theorized by Plato, Out of the earth, the illustrious lame one mod-eled a being exactly like a chaste virgin. In this is all the truth of the female: woman resemblesvirgin, woman resembles woman, which is to say that she is entirely and essentially a semblance.Thus, for the Greeks false woman is not a disguised man but woman herself (Loraux

Figure 7. Plate 46 of Aby Warburgs Atlas of Images, Mnemosyne, c. 1923. (Courtesy of the Warburg

Institute, University of London)


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10. In addition to Schneiders Performing Remains,see Schneider (2001 and 2004) for further interventions

into the ways that Platonic thinking has linked antitheatricality to antifeminism in an array of artistic and

technological contexts.

2000:6). Here, we return to the deconstruction/reconstruction of actualities that is the spring-board for Schechners restoration of behavior by other means: means that make it possible toconsiderMnemosyneas a ghost story for the fully grown-up that both echoes and anticipatesRebecca Schneiders question, What does the document of a womans posedocument?

Schneiders question usefully captures the lacunae in the restoration of behavior that I am

discussing. In herPerforming Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, Schneiderilluminates the relation between the still, the live, and the still live, by thinking photog-raphy and theatre together. While she cites Schechners broad spectrum on a number ofoccasions, she also advocates an increase in analysis less enamored of technologys supposedoriginalities (2011:144). In many respects, her project is so successful because she shuttlesbackwards and forwards, montaging reproductions of works of art from the 15th century; pho-tographs taken from newspapers; 19th-century theatrical stills; and 20th-century photographicstills that are theatrically staged, alongside pictures taken by the author herself (where the stilllive is brought together by means of contemporary Civil War reenactments).

Schneiders capacity to begin by way of analogical correspondences to bring together a mul-titude of unlikely kin in such a dexterous way makes one feel at home (but no less haunted and

uncomfortable for being there), peering into a world where Civil War reenactments, CindyShermans photography, a discussion of Abu Ghraib photos of torture, the plays of Suzan-LoriParks, a Ghent altar piece from 1472, and the Wooster Group share the same time-space. Whatis, to me, equally fascinating is that in a book that reconceptualizes the restoration of behav-ior by means of interanimating the still image and the live body, the photographic and the the-atrical, Warburgs project is never mentioned; yet Schneiders thinking is deeply Warburgian.Similar to Benjamin, whose dialectical images reveal invisible correspondences, Schneiderexamines the repertoire as the archive in a way that is the counterpart of Warburgs examina-tion of the archive as repertoire an examination that, in her words, takes kaleidoscopic turnsin intersecting directions, touching on multiple times, variant places, and overlapping fieldsof academic inquiry (2011:1). That those running Nymphs would finally find kinship with

those strips of behavior through the work of a feminist performance studies theorist who hasprofoundly movedour thinking in regards to the constitutive ambiguity of Platos dialecticseems in hindsight completely fitting.10

In fact, Schneider is telling a ghost story for the fully grown-up, a story that is able tomove ahead of itself by moving behind, pausing the tape, and watching the still. I felt thathaunting, that recurrence, when I saw that the Nympha had flown in multiple directions, run-ning into herself in Cindy Shermans photographs where she was actress, artist, director, andphotographer singular and ubiquitous, seemingly still and always in motion. Alongside ahandful of other female photographer/artists in the 1970s, Sherman was a game changer.Interestingly, her 19771980 series Untitled Film Stillsin which Sherman photographed her-

self in a series of images that appeared to be stills from B-grade movies (Schneider 2011:151)occurred while Schechner was working out the prototype for what he eventually called the res-toration of behavior theories of performance that were printed throughout the 1960s and1970s in the pages of TDR, and then in his 1977 publicationEssays on Performance Theory, beforeculminating in his 1985 paradigm-shifting study Between Theater and Anthropology.

During the decades that Schechner was working on theatres relationship to actualhuman behavior, female photographers became both subject and object by eventually think-ing strips of behavior as strips of film that a film director could treat, rearrange, and recon-struct: operating the system and becoming the image of the system. Of course, that still was


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also live and in stereo, as the new NewWoman, or the newoldwoman, was back on the politicalagenda and out on the streets in a way not seen, felt, or heard since that earlier feminist wave.This is the Nymphas most profound politicalgesture: her first wave at the turn of the cen-tury when Warburg theorized his pathos formula was felt, echoed, reverberated, and returnedduring her second wave when Schechner was establishing his own performance paradigm. AsSchneider through Warburg, or Warburg through Schneider illuminates, while the Nymphadoes not appear in the image of the restoration of behavior system, she was always and every-where the condition of possibility of its movement. It is not only Schechners passionate agita-tion that is manifest in the pages of TDR,Essays on Performance Theory, and Between Theater and

Anthropology, but, like Warburg, Schechners theory was also informed by a feminist externalprompting (Didi-Huberman 2007:15).

Performance studies desire to undo or resist historicism does so at the risk of reifyingthe very notion of origin stories that it seeks to dismantle. The interrelationship betweenthe visual arts and objects of performance studies research is typically theorized as begin-ning around 1968. This is the same moment that is cited as fomenting the antagonistic rela-tionship between theatre and performance studies (see Bottoms 2003). By taking a longer and

wider view, it becomes clear that the theatrical real through the figure of woman in move-ment has been mediating the actual relationship between aesthetic and social performanceacross the disciplines for at least a century. What the Nympha teaches us when we look backis that she is still here because shes been there marching, walking, performing, directing,and embodying paradigms in performance theory the whole time. As Warburg knew only toowell, the movement that he saw and feltbegan long before he arrived on the scene, andwould continue long after he left the performance. Or, as Rebecca Schneider moves us out ofher moving and haunting work, Never, Again. / And, now, again (2011:186).

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Notes on Gesture. InMeans without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti

and Cesare Casarino, 4859. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. What Is a Paradigm? In The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca

DIsanto with Kevin Attell, 932. New York: Zone Books.

Bottoms, Steve. 2003. The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the Performance Studies/TheatreStudies Dichotomy. Theatre Topics13, 2:17387.

Brger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw, foreword Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Theoryand History of Literature, vol. 4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Diamond, Elin. 1997. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre. London: Routledge.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2007. Forward. InAby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes,719. New York: Zone Books.

Eisenstein, Sergei. (1923) 1974. Montage of Attractions: For Enough Stupidity for Every Wiseman.Trans. Daniel Gerould. TDR18, 1 (T61):7785.

Feldman, Allen. 1991.Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland.Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Fried, Michael. (1967) 1995. Art and Objecthood. InMinimal Art, ed. Gregory Battock, 11647. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1974.Frame Analysis. New York: Harper Colophon Books.

Gombrich, E.H. (1970) 1986.Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress.

Guidi, Bernedetta Cestelli, and Nicholas Mann, eds. 1998.Photographs at the Frontier: Aby Warburg in

America 18951896. London: Merrell Holberton Publishers in association with The Warburg Institute.

Harding, James, and Cindy Rosenthal, eds. 2011. The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking RichardSchechners Broad Spectrum. New York: Palgrave.


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Loraux, Nicole. 2000. Born of Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens. Trans. Selina Stewart. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press.

Michaud, Philippe-Alain. 1998. Florence in New Mexico: The Intermezzi of 1598 in the Light of IndianRituals. InPhotographs at the Frontier: Aby Warburg in America 18951896, eds. Bernedetta Guidi Cestelliand Nicholas Mann, 5363. London: Merrell Holberton Publishers in association with The WarburgInstitute.

Michaud, Philippe-Alain. 2007.Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. Trans. Sophie Hawkes. New York:Zone Books.

Russell, Mark A. 2006. Aby WarburgsHamburg Comedy: Wilhelmine Culture from the Perspective of aPioneering Cultural Historian. German History24, 2:15382.

Schechner, Richard. (1970) 1977. Actuals. InEssays on Performance Theory. New York: Drama BookSpecialists.

Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Schechner, Richard. 1988.Performance Theory. New York: Routledge. Revised and expanded fromEssays onPerformance Theory.

Schneider, Rebecca. 2001. Well Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The Double and Its Theatre. InPsychoanalysis and Performance, eds. Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear, 94114. New York: Routledge.

Schneider, Rebecca. 2004. Solo Solo Solo. InAfter Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, ed.Gavin Butt, 2347. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Schneider, Rebecca. 2011.Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York:Routledge.

Silverman, Kaja. 2009.Flesh of My Flesh. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham,NC: Duke University Press.

Warburg, Aby. (1923) 1995.Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America. Trans. Michael P.Steinberg. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Warburg, Aby. (1893) 1999a. Sandro Botticells Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts ofAntiquity in the Italian Early Renaissance. InAby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, intro. KurtW. Forester and trans. David Britt, 89156. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the Researchof Arts and Humanities.

Warburg, Aby. (1895) 1999b. The Theatrical Costumes for the Intermedi of 1589. InAby Warburg: TheRenewal of Pagan Antiquity, intro. Kurt W. Forester and trans. David Britt, 349401. Los Angeles, CA:Getty Research Institute for the Research of Arts and Humanities.

Documents

Warburg Theatre