Baffling Dramaturgy: Between the Obvious and the Obtuse

In thinking about dramaturgy, the question of a dynamic oscillation between the obvious and the obtuse is not only posed by Barthes, but also applies to the reading of him. Barthes’ evocation of a contemporary dramaturgy – albeit still presented with a vocabulary drawn from Greek – goes by way of painting rather than drama. He highlights gesture in composition, exploring the manifold implications of a ‘left-handed’ poetics in a cultural economy oriented by and for the ‘right-handed’. Nonetheless, the potential of and for the neutral means to avoid simply defining one term by another within the conventions of their opposition, but rather to keep open a field of the ‘between’ – as it offers a ‘third meaning’ (or, indeed, a dramaturgy) of its own. This chapter explores the resonances of a ‘staged reading’, as it were, of Barthes’ writing on Cy Twombly as indicative of this potential.