1. ‘These groups…exist by the hundreds throughout the world. Their actors have never had professional training in the traditional apprenticeships of official theatre schools. They are autodidacts, self-taught, trying to find and build their own technical and artistic paths’ (Beyond the Floating Islands (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1986), p. 122).

2. Op. cit., p. 135–56.

3. See, for a representative sample, Mukarovsky, Jan, ‘Art as a Semiotic Fact’ (1936)Google Scholar, reprinted in Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik, eds., Semiotics of Art: Prague (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1984), p. 3–9; Bogatyrev, Petr, ‘Costume as Sign’ (1936)Google Scholar, ‘Semiotics in the Folk Theater’ (1938), and ‘Forms and Functions of Folk Theater’ (1940), op. cit., p. 13–18, p. 33–50 and p. 51–6 respectively; Brusak, Karel, ‘Signs in the Chinese Theater’ (1939), op. cit., p. 59–73Google Scholar; Honzl, Jindrich, ‘Dynamics of the Sign in the Theater’ (1940), op. cit., p. 74–93Google Scholar; Veltrusky, Jiri, ‘Dramatic Text as a Component of Theater’ (1941) and ‘Basic Features of Dramatic Dialogue’ (1942), op. cit., p. 94–117 and p. 128–33Google Scholar. See also Mukarovsky, Jan, Structure, Sign and Function (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, and Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Facts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979).

4. Kowzan, Tadeusz, Littérature et spectacle (La Haye: Mouton, 1975; first published in Poland, 1970)Google Scholar; Helbo, Andre, Sémiologie de la représentation (Bruxelles: Complexe, 1975)Google Scholar; Pavis, Patrice, Problèmes de sémiologie théátrale (Montréal: Les Presses de l'Université du Québec, 1976)Google Scholar; Ubersfeld, Anne, Lire le théátre (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1977)Google Scholar. Works by these semioticians in the ‘eighties will be listed subsequently.

5. Bassnett-McGuire, Susan, ‘An Introduction to Theatre Semiotics’, Theatre Quarterly X, No. 38 (Summer 1980), p. 47–53Google Scholar, and Pavis, Patrice, ‘Semiology and the Vocabulary of Theatre’, Theatre Quarterly, X, No. 40 (Autumn-Winter 1981), p. 74–8Google Scholar. In addition, for an intentionally non-specialist, ‘lay’ interpretation of semiotics see Esslin, Martin, The Field of Drama (London, New York: Methuen, 1987)Google Scholar.

6. The thirteen elements or sign systems are: (1) speech, (2) tone, (3) mimicry, (4) gesture, (5) actors' movement, (6) make-up, (7) style of hair-dressing, (8) costume, (9) props, (10) décor, (11) light, (12) music, and (13) sound effects. These are then grouped as follows: (1) and (2) for the spoken text; (3), (4), and (5) for body expression; (6), (7), and (8) for the actors outward appearance; (9), (10), and (11) for scenery; (12) and (13) for non-spoken sound effects (Kowzan, op. cit., p. 182–205 for the first division and p. 205–7 for the second).

7. For an illuminating summary of the Stoics as well as of Saint Augustine on signs see Eco, Umberto, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 29–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. There is no need here to explain the debate about whether Bakhtin actually wrote wholly or in part books and several essays which were published in the Soviet Union in the late nineteen-twenties under the names of V. N. Voloshinov and P. M. Medvedev. However, reference to the fact that a debate has occured will explain to my reader why some publications in English slash Bakhtin's name with Voloshinov or Medvedev, while others reproduce the name on the Russian original. (In French and Italian translations, for example, the so-called ‘disputed texts’ usually appear under Bakhtin's name, the alternative, when it is given, in parentheses.)

Clark, Katerina and Holquist, Michael argue, in their intellectual biography (Mikhail Bakhtin, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, that Bakhtin essentially wrote the ‘disputed texts’, basing this argument on written and oral evidence, including Bakhtin's alleged declaration shortly before he died in Moscow in 1975 that he was virtually the sole author. All things considered, and especially given the extremely close similarity not only in argument but also in voice, tone, and timbre between the ‘disputed texts’ and texts originally signed by Bakhtin, I see no reason for not assuming that Bakhtin elaborated the critique of Saussurean linguistics referred to in my text as well as the argument on social semiotics which will be broached shortly.

My own assessment of Saussure echoes Bakhtin's critique, though I am no longer sure just how much I owe to it. Bakhtin's critique is to be found (you will see the reason for mentioning the debate immediately) in Voloshinov, V. N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Matejka, Ladislav and Titunik, I. R. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press, 1986; original Russian, 1929)Google Scholar. The theory of ‘translinguistics’ or of what I have called ‘social semiotics’ in this article is extended in Bakhtin, M. M./Medvedev, P. M., trans. Wehrle, Albert J., The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press, 1985; in Russian, 1928)Google Scholar, and in works originally signed by Bakhtin, , notably Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929, revised 1963), trans. Caryl, Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)Google Scholar, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael, trans. McGee, Vern W. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986Google Scholar; essays predominantly of the nineteen-fifties and early 'seventies), and ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (1934–35) in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 259–422Google Scholar.

9. See Course in General Linguistics, trans. Bakin, Wade (London: Peter Owen, 1974Google Scholar; original French, 1915, from lectures delivered by Saussure and assembled and edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye). Bally and Sechehaye stress that ‘Saussure never approached linguistics of speaking (parole).…We recall that a new speech form always owes its origins to a series of individual facts.…We might say that an isolated act is necessarily foreign to language (language) and its system, which depends only on the set of collective patterns (habitudes collectives)’. See Course, op. cit., p. 143.

In stressing here, as elsewhere in their notes, that langue changes, although individual subjects cannot change it, Saussure's editors point to how Saussure envisaged parole as an ‘isolated act’, making speech aleatory, ‘necessarily foreign to language’. It will be important to keep these observations in mind when we turn to Bakhtin's social semiotics and his inclusion (necessary, in his view) of speech in language.

In the light of the discussion in Part Two on Duvignaud and Durkheim, and on the Durkheimian foundations of the former's sociology of theatre, it is also important to note that Saussure's linguistics of langue has a sociological dimension comparable to Durkheim's thesis that ‘social facts’ constitute the social system which precedes individuals; individuals are ipso facto outside the system of ‘social facts’ as such. It will shortly be clear that, for Bakhtin, society cannot pre-exist individuals, and the latter therefore cannot be outside society.

10. Essays by Pavis, Patrice, translated into English in Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982)Google Scholar, are not here singled out for special attention. My point is a general one insofar as language analogies are shared by theatre semiotics as a whole.

11. Gianfranco Bettetini provides an example of a ‘seventies semiotician who is concerned with the issue of meaning beyond that of ‘signification’, and also queries the notion of ‘arbitrariness’. See Produzione del senso e messa in scena (Milan: Bompiani, 1975; especially p. 118–29).

12. As does Durkheim, for example — arguably the major influence on positivist methodologies in the social sciences. See also in relation to these issues Note 9, above.

13. Corvin, Michel, ‘La Redondance du signe dans le fonctionnement théátral’, Degrés, XIII (1978), p. 1–17Google Scholar; Serpieri, Alessandro, ‘Ipotesi teorica di segmentazione del testo teatrale’, Strumenti critici, Nos. 32/33 (1977), p. 90–135Google Scholar.

14. Ruffini, Franco, Semiotica del testo, l'esempio leatro (Rome: Bulzoni, 1978)Google Scholar.

15. Merquior, J. G., From Prague to Paris: a Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought (London: Verso, 1986)Google Scholar gives an excellent analysis of the language and reading models (and their relation to each other) elaborated by structuralism. Since, in my view, semiotics generally has adapted these models, Merquior's argument is very relevant to my discussion here and in preceding pages. His chapter on Roland Barthes (p. 107–88)— who, in many respects, may be held to be the doyen of textual analogies, concepts, references, and the like in theatre semiotics — is most illuminating (besides being very witty). Merquior's acerbic critique of structuralism's scientific aspirations make mine of their counterpart in semiotics look too genteel by far. I do not, however, share his universalist approach to history and society, which is comparable, to a large extent, to the universalist vision of Claude Lévi-Strauss, if not to the latter's methodology (cf. Part Two of this essay).

16. Voix et images de la scène: vers une sémiologie de la réception (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, second ed. 1985), p. 9 (preface to first ed., 1980); see also, for an example of Pavis, 's direction in the ‘eighties, ‘Production, Reception, and the Social Context’, in Issacharoff, Michael, ed., On Referring in Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 122–37Google Scholar. For some movement away from her earlier preoccupations, see Ubersfeld, Anne, L'Ecole du spectateur: lire le théâtre, 2 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1981)Google Scholar. Here Ubersfeld includes actors, directors, and spectators in what were formerly exclusively abstract, depersonalized ‘actantial models’, etc.

17. Semiotica del teatro: I'analisi testuale dello spettacolo (Milan: Bompiani, 1982), p. 9–23.

18. Op. cit., p. 10 (my translation); see also, on the notion of spettacolo as text, p. 60–98.

19. See p. 11 and, especially, p. 182–6 on reception aesthetics.

20. Jan Mukarovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Facts, op. cit., p. 89.

21. Op. cit., p. 109. To paraphrase de Marinis, ‘analysis’ is the descriptive and explicative approach of scholars, especially of semioticians (what he also calls ‘scientific analysis’), whereas ‘reading’ is the common or simple (ingenua) analysis which is the spectator's reception when theatre communicates to him or her. It is worth noting that the notion of ‘cultural text’, elaborated in far greater detail by de Marinis than I am able to convey here, draws on certain aspects of Jurij Lotman's theory. See, for example, essays by Lotman in Lucid, Daniel P., ed. and trans., Soviet Semiotics (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

22. Sociological Poetics and Aesthetic Theory (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 148.

23. Julian Hilton, in the framework of another although closely related discussion, states: ‘In deciding what and how to perform, director and producer will be influenced by many non-aesthetic factors. These are (1) size of venue, (2) overall financial position, (3) expected box-office appeal, (4) venue image, (5) political influence, and (6) technical facilities’ (Performance (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 138).

24. See especially The Shifting Point (New York: Harper and Row, 1987). Note the difference between the term ‘popular’ as applicable to Brook's theatre and as Dario Fo conceives it — that is, as working-class theatre which also retrieves peasant culture.

25. For a detailed study within the framework outlined here, see my ‘La Sociologie de la mise en scene: le cas d'Ubu aux Bouffes de Peter Brook’, Recherches sociologiques, XX, No. 2–3 (1988), p. 195–220. This article also raises the issue of whether an individual's interaction with a performance is an adequate indication of its social-aesthetic meaning in relation to audiences who are composed of individuals coming from different social groups and classes. Since individuals are social beings, individual interaction is not less social for being singular and, in this sense, ‘unique’ though not isolated.

However, this does not solve the problem from a larger sociological perspective — namely, how a production may articulate a world-view (here thinking of Goldmann's concept and methodology briefly summarized in Part Two of this essay) that, at the same time, incorporates, refracts, and dialogues with (now thinking of Bakhtin) a definable world-view which may be held to be the world-view of a particular social group or of a ‘manysided plural self which defines itself through communicative interaction and practice with others’ (Swingewood's words in preceding pages here).

This problem can probably be best handled through an approach that weaves Goldmann's main principles as developed in Le Dieu caché into the social semiotics developed by Bakhtin, and as they are worked through his detailed study of Dostoevsky and through his examples in ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (op. cit.). The whole would have to keep in mind that one is not dealing with literature but with theatrical action, with works that are productions performed.

In addition, while it would be possible to make an accurate assessment (as accurate as any social, or, for that matter, physical or technological science may be), this assessment would benefit from further empirical exploration of the kind provided through questionnaires, interviews, and discussions — not only with spectators, but with theatre workers (managers included) as well. It should be clear from reference here to Goldmann alone that a myriad of ‘non-aesthetic factors’ such as, for example, those detailed by Hilton (Note 23 above), intervene in production-performance works.

26. See my interview with Efros which raises some of these points, in The Theatre Practice of Anatoly Efros: a Contemporary Soviet Director, Theatre Papers, Second Series, No. 6 (1978). Efros's observations highlight what can be described as the contrapuntal composition of The Cherry Orchard, and, though this was not his intention, illustrate a viewpoint not far removed from Bakhtin's concept of ‘polyphony’ (artistic structures where multiple voices intercept each other, each filled with the overtones of other ‘single’ voices as well as the overtones emerging from the whole). Efros's observations on his staging of Othello (1977), where he states that Russians tend, even unconsciously, to see Shakespeare through the eyes of Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, also suggest how cultural context, broadly speaking, shapes both productions and audiences’ interaction with them (more ‘polyphony’).

27. I have borrowed this phrase from Bradby, David and Williams, David, Directors' Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among the fine chapters relevant to this discussion, of particular relevance are those on Joan Littlewood and Peter Brook.

28. This three-part essay is dedicated to Wendy Cobcroft, a true friend of many years, who, besides putting it on her magic machine, was my first interpretive reader. Her queries helped me clarify a number of points, for which I thank her most warmly. I also wish to thank Simon Trussler and Clive Barker for taking on such a long piece, and for being exemplary editors in all ways.