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UDK 7.038.531  
DOI 10.51937/Amfiteater-2023-1/18-34
Pojav novih oblik uprizoritvenih pisav v šestdesetih in sedemdesetih letih prejšnjega sto-
letja sicer ni odpravil tradicionalnih dramskih oblik, je pa korenito spremenil vlogo besedil-
nosti v gledališču. V članku zagovarjamo tezo, da je uprizoritvena pisava, osvobojena pravil 
dramske pisave in celo sintakse ter gramatike, v besedilno produkcijo vnesla ilokacijsko 
logiko. Članek zaključimo s preliminarnim razmislekom o razlikah med eksperimentalnimi 
strategijami pisave in najnovejšimi oblikami umetne inteligence za generiranje besedil. 
Ključne besede: uprizoritvena pisava, performativnost, besedilna produkcija, ideologija, 
Jean-Luc Baudry, Rastko Močnik, umetna inteligenca
Branislav Jakovljević je profesor na Oddelku za gledališke in uprizoritvene študije Univerze 
v Stanfordu. Njegov najnovejši knjižni projekt se imenuje Performativni dispozitiv: o ideo-
loški produkciji vedênja (Performance Apparatus: On Ideological Production of Behaviors). 
V njem zagovarja teorijo dispozitiva v uprizoritvenih študijih. Bil je tudi urednik in sopreva-
jalec knjige Filozofija parohializma (The Philosophy of Parochialism) Radomirja Konstanti-
novića v angleščino in je avtor nagrajene monografije Učinki odtujitve: performans in sa-
moupravljanje v Jugoslaviji, 1945–1991 (2016), katere slovenski prevod smo dobili leta 2021.
bjakov@stanford.edu
19
Uprizoritvena pisava: na strani,  
okoli nje in zunaj nje
Branislav Jakovljević  
Oddelek za gledališke in uprizoritvene študije, Univerza Stanford
1. Uprizoritev – besedilo 
Med dokumenti, povezanimi s praznovanjem dneva mladosti, ki jih hranijo v Arhivu 
Jugoslavije v Beogradu, je v dokumentu št. 114/II, mapa št. 21, predlog za stadion-
sko predstavo Titova mladina (Titova omladina), ki ga je spomladi leta 1972 predložil 
Rista Mitkovski, učitelj telesne vzgoje iz Makedonije. Libreto Mitkovskega kar preki-
peva od konvencionalnih podob, ki se uporabljajo v tovrstnih spektaklih, med drugim 
vključuje jugoslovansko zastavo, ki bi jo orisali s telesi telovadk, oblečenih v rdečo, 
belo in modro. Vendar pa predlog vsebuje tudi nekaj inovacij: kot izvirni prispevek 
Mitkovskega k repertoarju množičnih uprizoritev bi lahko šteli posebno prehodno 
vajo, ki jo je poimenoval »Obrat propelerja«. Ne glede na inovacije in klišeje pa gre 
nedvomno za drzen poskus neznanega navdušenca nad množičnimi predstavami. Na 
začetku sedemdesetih let so množične proslave ob dnevu mladosti vsako leto prire-
jali že več kot četrt stoletja in organizacija spektaklov, ki so se odvijali na stadionu 
Jugoslovanske ljudske armade v Beogradu, je delovala kot dobro naoljen stroj. Čeprav 
je bil vsako leto objavljen odprt razpis za predloge, se je izoblikoval nabor ustvarjal-
nih ekip piscev, skladateljev in koreografov, ki so se redno prijavljali na razpis in tudi 
dobivali naročila. Proti takšnim profesionalcem Mitkovski ni imel nobenih možnosti. 
Slaba tri leta prej, poleti leta 1969, je izšla druga številka revije Rok: časopis za književ-
nost, umetnost in estetsko preučevanje resničnosti, v kateri so predstavili še eno zvrst 
umetniškega dela, ki je za glavni vizualni material uporabljalo enega od državnih sim-
bolov. Slovenska umetnica Dreja Rotar je slovensko različico celotnega uradnega na-
ziva jugoslovanske države, Socialistična federativna republika Jugoslavija, uporabila 
kot nekakšno readymade besedilo za svojo likovno pesem / konceptualno delo. Nje-
no delo uvaja celoten razdelek revije, posvečen delovanju slovenske neoavantgardne 
skupine OHO. Blok, posvečen skupini OHO, je obsegal še strip Marka Pogačnika, članke 
Pogačnika, Rastka Močnika in Francija Zagoričnika, fotografsko dokumentacijo s pre-
20
lomnega hepeninga Triglav ter izčrpen nabor primerov likovne poezije članov skupi-
ne. Razdelek se je začel z delom Dreje Rotar na dveh straneh, končal pa z Zagorični-
kovo serijo Tapete. Tako kot Rotar je tudi Zagoričnik svoja dela ustvaril na bankpost 
papirju, vendar je v nasprotju z njo pri ustvarjanju vizualnih vzorcev uporabil samo 
ločila. Zagoričnik v delih raziskuje učinke ponavljanja, v prvi vrsti znakov na strani, pa 
tudi vzorcev, ki prehajajo z ene strani na drugo, Rotar pa na levi strani revije poudarja 
gibanje: sredino strani zaseda velik krog, tako da ostaja prostor za besedilo samo na 
obrobju, na desni strani pa je krog zapolnjen z besedilom, robovi pa so prazni.
Slika 1: Dreja Rotar: Brez naslova, Rok, št. 2 (1969)
Dela Mitkovskega in Dreje Rotar so nastala skoraj sočasno v Jugoslaviji, pri tem sta 
oba uporabila grafične strategije, ki presegajo in kljubujejo diskurzivnosti besedila. 
Vendar ima pri tem vsak od njiju drug namen, dosežeta pa tudi povsem različne rezul-
tate. Če začnemo z najočitnejšim: prvi prihaja iz najjužnejše, druga pa iz najsevernejše 
republike socialistične Jugoslavije. Čeprav bi lahko bila omemba izvora voda na mlin 
razpravi o neenakomernem gospodarskem razvoju in kulturnih razlikah med republi-
kami v jugoslovanski federaciji, velja opozoriti, da besedili sicer zastopata različni kul-
turi, ki pa ju ne opredeljuje geografija ali etnična pripadnost. Prvo delo pripada žanru 
množičnih proslav, ki jih je podpirala in spodbujala sama država. Kot take so bile de-
ležne izdatne podpore s strani državnih institucij, prek množičnih in elektronskih me-
dijev ter javnega izobraževalnega sistema pa so lahko dosegle najširše možno občin-
stvo: v idealnem primeru vse državljane Jugoslavije. Drugo delo pa je bilo objavljeno 
v obskurni reviji za književnost in umetnost, ki jo je ustanovil pisatelj Bora Ćosić, ki je 
bil tudi njen urednik skupaj z majhno skupino umetnikov in pisateljev, in se je v celoti 
financirala sama. Prvo delo je torej spadalo v glavni tok ideološke kulturne produkcije 
21 v Jugoslaviji, drugo pa se je nahajalo na njenem obrobju, na porajajoči se alternativni 
umetniški sceni. Kljub temu ne gre zanemariti podobnosti med obema besediloma, 
saj morda niso nič manj pomembne kot razlike. Tako, na primer, obe besedili izvira-
ta iz jezikovnih skupnosti, ki sta bili ločeni od prevladujočega srbohrvaškega jezika.
1
 
Obe sta tudi prevzemali simbole, ki so izhajali iz državnega ideološkega arzenala. Ne 
nazadnje se zdi, da pri obeh delih igra pomembno vlogo uprizarjanje: pri prvem gre za 
libreto, namenjen pripravi dejanskega živega spektakla, drugo pa združuje vizualno 
in verbalno gradivo z namenom, da bi doseglo performativne učinke na straneh revije. 
In to je šele začetek. S časovne razdalje polovice stoletja želim pokazati ne le, da ti 
besedili pripadata različnima uprizoritvenima kulturama nekdanje Jugoslavije, am-
pak kako sta bili vpeti v širše zgodovinske, umetniške in ideološke smernice, katerih 
pomen tudi dandanes ni zgolj antikvaren. Sami po sebi besedili pričata o dvoumno-
stih, ki so relevantne tudi za sodobno kulturo. Te dvoumnosti se tičejo odnosa med 
besedilom in uprizarjanjem. Med drugim se ob tem zastavljajo naslednja vprašanja: 
kako pri uprizarjanju pride do produkcije pomena, kaj tvori besedilo uprizarjanja, in 
morda najpomembnejše, kakšni so pogoji besedilne produkcije uprizarjanja (in pri 
uprizarjanju)?
2. Stožec ... 
Mitkovski v libretu na petnajstih straneh zasnuje vizijo množičnega spektakla, ki 
obsega sedemnajst enot, razdeljenih v tri glavne vaje, poleg tega pa še veličastne 
prihode in odhode nastopajočih, prehode, menjave pa tudi obvezne kompilacije 
folklornih plesov. Naslov je pod nekoliko konstruktivistično podobo na naslovnici 
knjižice izpisan z roko in v cirilici, ves preostali del dokumenta pa je napisan na 
pisalni stroj in v latinici. V pripovednem delu partiture avtor meša različna narečja 
srbohrvaškega jezika, napačno sklanja samostalnike, uporablja nepravilne spolne 
oblike in meša glagolske spregatve. Precej skrbneje so sestavljeni deli scenarija, 
v katerih ne uporablja diskurzivnega jezika in namesto tega posega po vizualni 
tipografiji. Tu se izogne konvencionalni naravi jezikovnega znaka; v ospredje postavi 
vizualno razsežnost črke ter zmožnost svoje naprave za zapisovanje, se pravi pisalnega 
stroja, za organiziranje tovrstnih elementov v večje geometrijske enote. Mitkovski ni 
bil izvedenec za književnost, temveč za telesno vzgojo, relativno malomarnost pri 
jezikovni in literarni plati scenarija pa je nadoknadil s spretnostjo v zapisu uprizoritve. 
Zato imamo lahko Titovo mladino za vzorčni primer uprizoritvenega besedila.
1 V Socialistični federativni republiki Jugoslaviji se je jezik, ki ga je govorila večina prebivalcev Srbije, Hrvaške, Bosne 
in Hercegovine ter Črne gore, imenoval srbohrvaščina ali hrvaško-srbščina. Po razpadu skupne države pa je vsaka od 
novonastalih držav svoje narečje razglasila za samostojen jezik: bosanščino, hrvaščino, črnogorščino in srbščino.
22
Slika 2: Titova mladina, zapis uprizoritve
Prve teoretske razmisleke o uprizoritvenem besedilu kot posebni in edinstveni gle-
dališki obliki pisave je prispevala gledališka semiologija. Patrice Pavis je v knjigi Je-
ziki odra, enem prvih uspešnih semiotičnih poskusov vzpostavljanja dialoga z meto-
dologijami, ki se uporabljajo v gledališki zgodovini in uprizoritvenih študijih, odprl 
vprašanje »spektakelskega besedila« kot »partiture, v kateri so vsi scenski sistemi 
uprizoritve artikulirani v prostoru in času« (Languages 18). Meni, da se gledališka 
semiologija ne bi smela omejevati na obravnavanje dramskih besedil, temveč bi se 
morala ukvarjati z »diskurzom uprizarjanja, z načinom, kako uprizoritev zaznamuje 
sosledje dogodkov, dialog vizualnih in glasbenih elementov«. Skratka, Pavis trdi, da 
bi morala gledališka semiologija za predmet preučevanja vzeti »uprizoritveno bese-
dilo« in »način, kako je le-to strukturirano in razdeljeno« (prav tam 20). Precej let 
kasneje se je v kratkem geslu o uprizoritvenem besedilu v Gledališkem slovarju izkazal 
za precej manj programatičnega. Opredelil ga je kot »odnos med vsemi v predstavi 
uporabljenimi označujočimi sistemi, katerih razporeditev in interakcija oblikujeta re-
žijo«; k temu pomenljivo dodaja: »uprizoritveno besedilo je potemtakem abstrakten 
in teoretski, ne pa empiričen in praktičen pojem« (Pavis, Gledališki 741). Iz tega bi 
bilo mogoče razbrati, da se živa predstava v svoji diahronosti in časovni zamejenosti 
23 po eni strani inherentno upira odvisnosti semiotične analize od sinhronega pristopa 
k lingvističnim strukturam; po drugi strani pa tudi priznava degradacijo dramskega 
besedila kot določujoče značilnosti sodobnega gledališča.
Pojav uprizoritvenega besedila, ki je v nekaterih primerih privedel do preseganja kon-
vencionalnega dramskega besedila, ni odpravil procesa označevanja, ki se skriva v sa-
mem jedru tradicionalnega gledališča. Michael Kirby, pionir raziskovanja hepeningov 
in drugih zvrsti, ki jih je poimenoval »novo gledališče«, je tip gledališča, ki temelji na 
literarnem scenariju, poimenoval »referencialno gledališče«. Po njegovem mnenju je 
v »uprizoritvah, zgrajenih po takšnem modelu [...], namen vsakega elementa nositi 
pomen ali pripomoči k dekodiranju tega pomena,« zato je predlagal shemo v obliki 
trikotnika ali stožca, po kateri se pomen nahaja »na zgornjem oglišču. V prenesenem 
pomenu se torej dviga nad vsemi drugimi elementi ali vidiki predstavitve; vsi ostali 
so tu samo zato, da podpirajo pomen« (Kirby, A Formalist 33). Pri tem se »vsi ostali« 
nanaša na vse materialne elemente na odru, od rekvizitov in kulis do igralcev, ki se 
nahajajo pri dnu stožca, pomen pa se, nasprotno, zgošča v točki, ki presega material-
nost odra. 
Slika 3: Diagram stožca
Paradoks referencialnega gledališča je v tem, da gledalca vabi, naj gleda skozi 
materialne elemente gledališke reprezentacije in s tem ugleda nematerialno in 
povsem simbolno instanco. Kirby namiguje, da se v gledališču stožec prevrne na 
stran: »lahko bi rekli, da gledalec gleda skozi osnovno stranico trikotnika, skozi ves 
material, ki tvori uprizoritev, za vsem tem pa se skriva pomen, ki je najpomembnejši« 
(33). Teatrologija in uprizoritveni študiji druge polovice dvajsetega stoletja so umik 
dramskega besedila z vrha reprezentacijskega stožca razglasili za dehierarhizacijo 
gledališča. Vplivni teksti so drug za drugim za ta preobrat peli hvalo avantgardi. Naj 
zadošča zgolj nekaj primerov.
24 V ZDA je gledališki režiser in raziskovalec Richard Schechner v spisu »Drama, scenarij 
gledališče in uprizoritev« (»Drama, Script, Theater, and Performance«, prvič objavljenem 
leta 1973), enem od spisov, ki so utemeljili novo akademsko področje uprizoritvenih 
študijev (angl. performance studies), predlagal redefinicijo osnovnih gledaliških pojmov, 
ki se vsi nanašajo na različne oblike zapisov. Razlikoval je med »dramo« kot literarnim 
besedilom in »scenarijem« kot »nečim, kar obstaja pred vsakim udejanjenjem« 
(Schechner, Performance 70). Pri tem se scenarij opira na nebesedilno vrsto pisave: gre 
za »osnovno kodo dogodkov«, ki, drugače kot pri drami, ni posredovana prek medija 
pisave (in branja), temveč »od ene osebe do druge« (72). Na drugi strani oceana, 
predvsem v Nemčiji, kjer je državna podpora omogočala pogoje za razcvet drzne in 
dinamične gledališke scene, so raziskovalci v izzivu, ki ga je novo gledališče postavilo 
hegemoniji dramskega besedila, prepoznali širjenje izraznih možnosti odra. Najbolj 
znan med njimi je Hans-Thies Lehmann, ki je trdil, da »postdramsko gledališče ni samo 
novi način uprizoritvenega teksta (kaj šele novi tip gledališkega teksta), marveč je tip 
uporabe znaka v gledališču, ki obe plasti gledališča temeljito prežame s strukturalno 
spremenjeno kvaliteto dogodkovnega teksta« (Postdramsko 105, avtorjev poudarek). V 
vsej tej zgodbi o obračanju drame na glavo, ki prevladuje na obeh straneh Atlantika, pa 
nihče ne omenja, da to ni privedlo do strmoglavljenja hierarhije produkcije pomena, 
temveč je zgolj spremenilo njene pogoje. 
V spisu »Drama, scenarij, gledališče in uprizoritev« ter v številnih drugih spisih iz 
sedemdesetih in osemdesetih let prejšnjega stoletja Schechner trdi, da na vrhu Kirby-
jevega namišljenega stožca nimamo več dramatika, avtorja »drame«, temveč režiserja 
kot avtorja »scenarija«. Lehmann z natančno razdelavo strategij in tehnik postdram-
skega gledališča razširi položaj avtorja od režiserja tudi na koreografe, oblikovalce, vi-
zualne umetnike in uprizoritvene kolektive. V Postdramskem gledališču v tematskem 
sklopu, posvečenem izraznim sredstvom novih gledaliških praks, besedilo postavi ob 
bok drugim temeljnim prvinam uprizoritve, kakršne so prostor, čas, telo in mediji. V 
ta namen pa je bilo treba »besedilo« zreducirati na govorjeni jezik oziroma odrsko 
izreko in odsotnost le-te. 
V tem pristopu manjkata dve pomembni podrobnosti. Prvič, postdramsko gledališče 
ni posttekstualno. Detronizacija literarnega besedila v gledališču ni pomenila izlo-
čitve besedila iz uprizoritve, temveč ga je osvobodila omejitev, ki so na zahodu veljale 
za dramsko pisavo že vsaj od Aristotelove Poetike. V tradicionalnem gledališču lite-
rarno besedilo ni le nosilec pomena, je tudi posoda tradicije, ki jo vnaša v produkcijo 
pomena. In drugič, to, da literarno besedilo odstavimo z »vrha« stožca referencial-
nega gledališča, še ne pomeni, da odstranimo pisavo iz uprizarjanja, temveč jo samo 
sprostimo na doslej nepričakovane načine. Če postdramsko gledališče sploh kaj uki-
ne, je to enosmerno razmerje med pisavo in predstavo. V novih oblikah v živo izvaja-
ne umetnosti, kot so hepeningi in performansi, pisava poteka v vse smeri, vključno z 
25 neposrednim obratom konvencionalnega vrstnega reda med pisavo in uprizarjanjem: 
uprizarjanje se vrača v pisavo in s tem spreminja samo strukturo in namen produkcije 
besedila. Četudi nenadni razcvet novih oblik performativne pisave ni trajno spreme-
nil načina, kako nastajajo in se pišejo gledališke igre, je vnesel radikalno spremembo 
v razumevanje besedilnosti v gledališču. Iz literarnega dela in privilegiranega nosil-
ca pomena je bilo besedilo zreducirano na funkcijo strukturalnega sredstva. Resnič-
no dehierarhizirano gledališče ne nadomesti »drame« s »scenarijem« ali s kakšnim 
drugim privilegiranim besedilom ter ene vrste avtorja (dramatika) z drugo (režiser, 
producent itd.), temveč razglasi, da je kot tekst mogoče uporabiti karkoli: tako kot 
dramsko igro lahko za tekst vzamemo tudi kak vsakdanji uporabni predmet pa tudi 
posneto glasbo, kos oblačila, roman ali telesa nastopajočih, zbranih v prostoru, kjer pa 
v procesu nastajanja uprizoritve niso več odločilne njihove veščine, temveč njihove iz-
kušnje, vedênja, odnosi in želje. Ena najpomembnejših posledic razširitve razumevan-
ja pisave v uprizarjanju tako ni bila vzpostavitev nove hierarhije v gledališču, temveč 
izziv, ki ga je proces snovanja pomenil za »avtorsko« gledališče in hierarhizirane reži-
me odrskega uprizarjanja nasploh. 
3. ... in površina
O razmahu uprizoritvene pisave, ki je nastopil z razcvetom uprizoritvenih oblik, ki 
so izpodbijale referencialno gledališče, pričajo antologije, kakršna sta 700 strani 
obsegajoča zbirka Scenariji: predloge za uprizarjanje (Scenarios: Scripts to be Per-
formed, 1980), ki jo je uredil Richard Kostelanetz in je črpala predvsem iz ameriške 
neoavantgarde, ter Generator:: za proizvodnjo poljubnega števila dramskih komplek-
sov (2021) Blaža Lukana. Tovrstno pisanje zagotovo presega posamezno kulturo ali 
jezik in luč sveta bi lahko ugledale (in bi tudi morale!) še številne druge podobne an-
tologije uprizoritvenih besedil. Že bežen pregled na obstoječe antologije pokaže, da 
uprizoritvena pisava ni kak poseben slog, ki bi sledil nekemu predpisanemu naboru 
pravil. Prav nasprotno, kot kaže, so ta besedila dokaz vročičnega raziskovanja ne-
štetih načinov, kako se oddaljiti od konvencionalne dramatike. Uprizoritveno bese-
dilo je tako lahko vizualni, glasbeni zapis, načrt za hepening, eksperimentalna igra, 
strip (kot na primer Animacija rdečega konja (Red Horse Animation) Leeja Breue-
rja) ali kakršna koli kombinacija gradiv, ki jih uporabijo pri nastajanju predstave in 
njenem dokumentiranju. Pavis v kratkem geslu v Gledališkem slovarju predlaga, da 
uprizoritveno besedilo »predstavo pojmuje kot reduciran model, pri katerem opa-
zujemo obdelavo smisla« (741). To pa lahko trdimo za vsako besedilo, ki je namen-
jeno uprizarjanju, od Ikeinih navodil za sestavljanje pohištva pa do manevrskih na-
črtov v teatru vojaških operacij. Posebnost produkcije besedil, ki jih obravnavamo, 
je tako v razmerju med pisavo in uprizarjanjem.
26 Ni presenečenje, da Jean-Louis Baudry v pomembnem članku »Pisava, fikcija, ideolo-
gija« (»Écriture, fiction, idéologie«), ki pa je le redko predmet razprav, saj ga je napisal 
še pred vplivnimi besedili o filmskem aparatu, za ponazoritev »metafizičnega modela 
spoznavanja« (21) uporabi enak geometrijski lik kot Kirby. Tudi tu naletimo na lik, ki 
»bi bil podoben stožcu, katerega edini vidni del je osnovna ploskev, ki predstavlja za-
mejeno površino. Vse točke osnovne ploskve so povezane z eno samo, nevidno piko, z 
vrhom, ki pa je umeščen v neskončnost. Neskončnost se nahaja zunaj ploskve, onkraj 
nje. Vsaka točka zamejene ploskve je projekcija vrha na osnovno ploskev« (21). Zato 
spoznavanje, se pravi razločevanje pomena ali branje, »pomeni poskus prečenja črt, 
ki vrh povezujejo s točko na osnovni ploskvi« (21). Konica stožca označuje položaj 
»avtorja« in »dela«, ki ga podpira ne samo kultura, ampak tudi pravna ureditev. Prek 
kategorij, kakršni sta avtor in delo, se produkcija pomena neločljivo poveže z eko-
nomsko produkcijo. Vprašanje produkcije pomena, ki se odraža v gledališkem režimu 
referencialnosti, potemtakem ni omejeno zgolj na estetiko reprezentacije, temveč v 
precejšnji meri tudi na njeno politiko. V nasprotju s Kirbyjem (ki najverjetneje ni ve-
del za članek »Pisava, fikcija, ideologija«, ko je pisal knjigo Formalistično gledališče) 
in drugimi kritiki literarnega ali »dramskega« gledališča Baudry kot alternativo hie-
rarhičnemu modelu produkcije pomena predlaga ploskev. 
V tem modelu je neskončnost, ki se dotika vrha stožca, premeščena v brezmejnost 
nezamejene ravnine, ki vsebuje množico izjav. Po tej shemi pomen ne nastaja s pre-
hodom od neskončne ali transcendentalne točke k vidni in otipljivi osnovni ploskvi 
(z Gillesom Deleuzom bi lahko temu rekli ravnina imanence), temveč prek interakcije 
med besedili. Na ploskvi tako bližina in sorodnost nadomestita razdaljo in prenos. Tu 
je »vse izjavljeno, vsak tekst, ki ga razumemo prek razmerij, ki jih vzdržuje z drugimi 
izjavami, z drugimi teksti, se tako zdi kot razširitev ploskve« in je potemtakem »od-
govoren za vse izjave, s katerimi se mu križajo poti« (Baudry 22). Na tej »brezmej-
ni ploskvi«, ki nima »ne osi ne središča«, pisava ne reprezentira več »polja realnosti 
zunaj sebe«, temveč postane »aktivni del teksta, ki se nenehno izpisuje« (22). Ena 
glavnih posledic takšne preusmeritve produkcije pomena je izginotje »subjekta, vzro-
ka pisave« (22). To pa radikalno spremeni sam koncept pisave. To ni več »stvaritev 
izoliranega posameznika; ne moremo je več obravnavati kot lastnino tega posamezni-
ka, ampak se, nasprotno, [...] kaže kot ena partikularnih manifestacij splošne pisave« 
(22). Baudryjev pojem splošne pisave, ki je po eni strani brez avtorja, po drugi pa se 
neposredno povezuje z drugimi besedili in drugimi oblikami besedilnosti, je izjemne-
ga pomena za uprizoritveno pisavo. Kaj se torej dogaja na ploskvi? Kako deluje takšna 
besedilna in uprizoritvena produkcija?
27
4. Od ilokucijske k ilokacijski pisavi
Eden ključnih trenutkov v procesu spodkopavanja moči, tradicionalno pripisane av-
torju, je nastopil, ko je John Cage v proces glasbene kompozicije uvedel aleatorne po-
stopke. Podobno kot Merce Cunningham v plesu, Jackson Mac Low v poeziji in George 
Brecht v vizualni umetnosti je Cage postavil pod vprašaj primat odločujočega uma pri 
ustvarjanju glasbenih partitur. Po njegovem zgledu so Iztok Geister, Marko Pogačnik in 
Rastko Močnik, uredniki zvezka »Programirana umetnost« revije Problemi, ki je izšel 
januarja 1970, za določanje vrstnega reda besedil, ki so jih sprejeli v objavo, uporabili 
kar fizično težo besedil. »Prispevke (članke, fotografije, slike) smo dobesedno stehtali 
s kuhinjsko tehtnico starejše izdelave, ne elektronsko. Gradivo smo potem razvrstili 
od najtežjega do najlažjega« (»Breaking Point« 23). Pri sprejemanju naključnosti in 
drugih postopkov za odpravljanje ali omejevanje avtorskih odločitev poudarek ni bil 
toliko na anonimizaciji avtorske avtonomije, ki oblikuje umetniško delo, temveč bolj 
na spodkopavanju konvencionalne linije vzročnosti pri njegovi produkciji. 
To načelo je jasno razvidno iz Močnikovega prispevka v omenjeni številki revije, dela 
z enostavnim naslovom Drama. V preambuli v enem samem stavku razglasi: »Vsa-
ko dramsko besedilo je program« (Lukan 101). Dramska pisava se namreč od drugih 
literarnih oblik loči po pragmatični usmerjenosti k predstavitvi v živo. Sicer vsaka 
vrsta pisave predpostavlja določeno vrsto branja, a uprizoritvena pisava naslavlja me-
hanizem za dešifriranje, imenovan gledališče, ki ga sestavljajo izurjena telesa, arhi-
tekturne strukture, zapletena mašinerija in visoko specializirani predmeti. Močnik te 
osnovne lastnosti uprizoritvenega besedila ne postavlja pod vprašaj, temveč jo izpelje 
do njene končne posledice. Prostor, telo, kretnjo, glas in gib prepozna kot elementar-
ne lastnosti uprizoritve, v nadaljevanju pa vzpostavi osnovna pravila kombiniranja 
in urejanja le-teh v sintagmatske verige. Zvest cageovskim načelom kompozicije in 
uprizarjanja nakaže, da mora biti »program« njegove drame »kar se da tog«, obenem 
pa mora ohraniti naključnost, ki je v srčiki vsake predstave (101). Najnazornejši pri-
mer takšnega pristopa je znamenita skladba 4‘33‘‘, pri kateri je Cage s pomočjo na-
ključnih postopkov določil trajanje vsakega segmenta izvedbe. Vendar pa je odrekanje 
avtorstvu povezano z zahtevo po tem, da je treba tako nastalo skladbo izvajati neo-
majno natančno in zvesto slediti partituri. Čeprav mnogi menijo, da 4‘33‘‘ ne zahteva 
dejanske izvedbe in da lahko trajanje s pomočjo štoparice »izvede« kdor koli in kjer 
koli, je Cage vztrajal, da je treba skladbo izvajati z vsemi pritiklinami tradicionalnega 
klavirskega koncerta: z glasbilom, v primernem prostoru, z glasbenikom in pred ob-
činstvom. Le pod temi pogoji skladba 4‘33‘‘ v celoti izpolni zahteve Cageovega kreda o 
tišini kot vsakem zvoku, ki ni nameren. Z drugimi besedami, čeprav zelo široko odpre 
referenčno polje, je delo 4‘33‘‘ še vedno referencialno. Čeprav lahko partituro obrav-
navamo kot avtonomno umetniško delo, na primer vizualno, pri izvedbi (ali uprizo-
ritvi) ohranja vse lastnosti glasbenega zapisa, ki se iz enega medija (diskurzivnega, 
28 notnega, vizualnega) prenese v drugega (izvedba/uprizoritev). Na tej točki se Močnik 
oddalji od cageovske estetike. 
Drama in Generator spadata v konstelacijo uprizoritvenih besedil, ki se poslužujejo 
ponavljanja in variacije kot glavnih organizacijskih načel. Generator, ki je na področju 
deestetizacije uprizoritvenega besedila radikalnejši od Drame, po formalni plati spo-
minja na številna postcageovska in fluxusovska dela, ki so se posluževala novih oblik 
notnega zapisa in so bila skoraj brez izjeme namenjena uprizarjanju. Do nadaljnje 
radikalizacije razmerja med notnim zapisom in uprizarjanjem je prišlo s preobliko-
vanjem položaja teksta v konceptualni umetnosti konec šestdesetih in na začetku 
sedemdesetih let. Če so »besede« in »stavki« zmožni nadomestiti umetniške objek-
te, kot je trdil Sol Le Wit, to zagotovo velja tudi za uprizarjanje. Povedano na kratko, 
razlika med fluxusovskim delom Dicka Higginsa Vsemu svoj letni čas (To Everything 
Its Season, 1958) in konceptualnim umetniškim delom Vita Acconcija Dvanajst minut 
(Twelve Minutes, 1967) je v tem, da je v prvem primeru končna referenca še vedno 
uprizoritev v živo, tudi če delo ne bi bilo nikoli uradno uprizorjeno. 
Čeprav se poslužujeta enake permutacijske logike in sta si na papirju zelo podob-
ni, ti deli predstavljata dve zelo različni obliki razumevanja odnosa med besedilom 
in uprizarjanjem. Kot nekateri drugi konceptualni umetniki, na primer Dan Graham, 
tudi Acconci vzpostavlja »samogenerativno strukturo«, ki je neodvisna od kakršne 
koli materialne inscenacije (Kotz 135). Drugače od Higginsa, čigar uprizoritvena be-
sedila so bila, ne glede na formalne razlike med njimi – miniaturne igre, verzne drame, 
scenariji za dogodke, partiture dogodkov – namenjena uprizarjanju, je Acconci svoje 
performanse iz zgodnjih sedemdesetih let prejšnjega stoletja imel za nadaljevanje 
dela na področju poezije, s čimer se je ukvarjal neposredno pred tem. Performansov 
ni pojmoval kot predstavitve svojih pesmi v živo, temveč kot nadaljevanje konceptual-
ne prakse, ki jo je sprva razvil na papirju. Govoril je, da je zapis na strani uporabil »kot 
izhodišče dogodka, ki se nadaljuje zunaj strani« (nav. po Kotz 165). V referencialnem 
gledališču vsaka oblika zapisa, od literarne drame do vizualne partiture, predpostav-
lja proces prenosa iz enega medija v drugega in ta prenos udejanja inherentno meta-
forično razmerje med tekstom in uprizoritvijo. V praksi Acconcija in številnih drugih 
konceptualnih umetnikov in umetnikov performansa pa je tekst neločljivo povezan z 
uprizoritvijo, njun odnos pa je performativne narave. Pri tem tekst ni performativen 
zato, ker bi prevzel nekatere lastnosti performansa, temveč zato, ker se ne nanaša 
na objekt zunaj sebe, temveč se vedno vrača k sebi. S tem besedilo sprejme enega 
najzahtevnejših pogojev umetnosti performansa, ki od umetnika zahteva, da zavzame 
hkrati položaj tako ustvarjalca kot umetniškega objekta. Nasprotje referencialnega 
ni nereferencialni, temveč samoreferencialni performans. Močnikov Generator, ki se 
bolj sklada z Acconcijevimi pesmimi kot pa z libreti Higginsovih hepeningov ali parti-
turami dogodkov Georgea Brechta, je eno tistih besedil, pri katerih se dogodek začne 
29 na strani papirja, kasneje pa se oddalji od nje, s tem pa zabriše vrzel med besedilom 
in uprizarjanjem. S tem tekstualizira stvari in dogodke, ki mu prekrižajo pot, in se, 
ravno obratno, podvrže pogojem (umetniškega) objekta in (umetnosti) performansa. 
Čeprav ni nobene metode za takšno izmenjavo med besedilom in nebesedilnim, se 
zdi, da Generator ponuja opazen primer uprizoritvenega besedila, ki preizkuša robove 
reprezentacijskega polja (v tem primeru strani).
Močnik ni umetnik ali dramatik, temveč filozof in sociolog (in v tem pogledu ni nobena 
izjema: zavračanje referencialnega gledališča je odprlo uprizoritveno pisavo tudi negle-
dališčnikom: slikarjem, kiparjem, glasbenikom, filozofom, kritikom ...) Ko so Močnika v 
nedavnem intervjuju s Sezginom Boynikom vprašali o povezavah s skupino OHO in nje-
govem zgodnjem delu pri številki Problemov o programirani umetnosti, je to navezal na 
svoje poznejše delo na področju filozofije in sociologije literature. Pri tem je še posebej 
zanimivo ukvarjanje z delom francosko-litovskega semiologa Algirdasa Greimasa, čigar 
semiotično teorijo je Močnik uporabil pri sociološki analizi poezije Franceta Prešerna. 
V spisih, kakršna sta »Umetnostno v literaturi« (1983) in »K sociologiji slovenske knji-
ževnosti: Prešeren v nizu ideoloških menjav« (1983), Močnikovo nagnjenost k diagra-
matizaciji, ki je očitna že v Drami in Generatorju, prevzame posebno obliko Greimasove 
predelave Kleinove četverke, ki jo je lingvist uporabil pri raziskovanju kompleksnih se-
miotičnih razmerij, ki se upirajo osnovni strukturi znaka:
Slika 4: Algirdas Greimas: Elementarna struktura pomena
Razmerje med označevalcem in označencem načeloma temelji na opoziciji, Kleino-
va četverka pa ponuja možnost vzpostavitve mnogoterih odnosov v procesu ozna-
čevanja. Greimas je Kleinovo četverko predelal v elementarno strukturo pomena, pri 
čemer zgornji par sestavljajo predpisi (pozitivne zapovedi) in prepovedi (negativne 
zapovedi), spodnji pa označuje niz inverzij le-teh: ne-prepovedi in ne-predpise. Di-
namika znotraj te »elementarne strukture pomena« je organizirana okoli dveh vrst 
30 disjunkcije: disjunkcija nasprotij (ki jo označuje črtkana črta) in protislovij (ki jo 
označuje polna črta). Kleinova četverka ponuja alternativo binarni opoziciji kot ključ-
ni lastnosti jezikovnega znaka. Greimas to ponazori s preprosto semiotiko semaforja: 
če zelena luč pomeni predpis, rdeča luč pa prepoved, lahko rumena luč pomeni bodisi 
ne-predpis ali pa ne-prepoved, glede na vrstni red, v katerem se pojavi (Greimas 92). 
Binarni znaki se povezujejo v označevalne verige, Kleinova četverka, kot jo je zasnoval 
Greimas, pa je zmožna vzpostaviti polja označevanja. V tem smislu ponuja razdelavo 
procesov produkcije pomena, ki potekajo na ploskvi, se pravi v modelu, ki ga Baudry 
ponuja kot alternativo stožcu. Pri tem je pomembno, da se v Kleinovi četverki, tako 
kot v Acconcijevi poeziji, pritisk vrši na robove kvadrata. Če je Acconcijev performans 
nadaljevanje (in ne prenos) besedilne prakse, ki se začne na strani, Kleinova četverka 
omogoča vzpostavitev razmerij, ki se širijo prek meja izhodiščnega grafa, kot je po-
kazala Rosalind Krauss v razpravi »Kiparstvo v razširjenem polju« (»Sculpture in the 
Expanded Field«).
Močnik gre pri branju Prešernove poezije v nasprotno smer od raziskovalcev, ki Klei-
nov diagram uporabljajo kot splošno interpretativno shemo (med drugimi Krauss in 
tudi Greimas sam). Namesto da bi sledil trajektorijam, ki se širijo iz glavnih točk in se 
razraščajo v mreže pomenov, se, ravno nasprotno, zdi, da se osredotoča na ostanke 
binarnega znaka v tej shemi, ki se nahajajo na presečišču diagonalnih črt v središču 
grafa. S pomočjo takšnega pristopa Močnik prepozna in razvije specifično strukturo 
Prešernove pesmi, za katero je, kot trdi, značilno prazno polje v samem jedru. Pri tem 
predlaga, da je ta manjkajoči element »označevalec, ki bi lahko bil učinkovit«:
Tako je označevalec pesmi razglašen za neučinkovitega, estetskega, kar pomeni, da tam 
ne more delovati nič performativnega; ni nobene ilokucijske moči, diskurz je »etio-
liran«, kot bi rekel Austin, ima zgolj to estetsko, blokirano označevalno delovanje. Po 
moji takratni teoriji naj bi se celotna pesem vrtela okoli tega označevalnega elementa, 
okoli nečesa, kar se ne oznanja [...]. (Močnik, »Breaking Point« 25)
Močnikovo Dramo in v še večji meri Generator lahko razumemo kot popolno inverzijo 
strukture estetskega označevalca, ki jo je razkril v Prešernovi romantični poeziji. Tu 
ilokucijsko moč nadomesti določena ilokacijska logika, logika permutacije in multipli-
kacije, ki uprizoritev postavlja kot podaljšek in nadaljevanje besedila (in vedno tudi 
obratno). 
Permutacijske operacije so ključni element tudi pri obeh primerih uprizoritvene pisa-
ve, ki smo ju omenili na začetku članka. Kljub temu pa vsako od besedil predpostav-
lja drugačen, če ne celo povsem nasproten status uprizarjanja. V libretu Mitkovskega 
spektakel doseže vrhunec z vajo pisave, v kateri se abstraktni liki, ki jih oblikujejo 
telesa telovadcev na nogometnem igrišču, spremenijo v prepoznavne oblike in bese-
de. Podobi zastave, ki jo izoblikujejo telesa gimnastičark, sledi ime predsednika re-
31 publike, ki ga izpišejo telesa nastopajočih moških: »Moški izoblikujejo besedo TITO« 
(Mitkovski 8). Raba teles nastopajočih za ustvarjanje besedil je bila uveljavljena kon-
vencija v socialističnih množičnih uprizoritvah vse od začetkov v Sovjetski zvezi pa 
do Jugoslavije in drugod. Tej osupljivi literarizaciji uprizoritvene pisave so razisko-
valci performansa posvečali razmeroma malo pozornosti. V enem redkih poskusov, 
da bi jo umestil v širši kontekst estetskih pojavov, jo je Bora Ćosić v knjigi Mešani 
mediji (Mixed Media, 1970), ki se precej zgleduje po Fluxusu in je, tako kot revija Rok, 
samostojna avtorska publikacija, opisal kot »telopis« (7). Diskurzivno organizirana 
telesa so telesa, ki ne pišejo in ne berejo, temveč so napisana in dana v branje. Tekst in 
uprizarjanje združujejo tako, da ustvarijo vrtinec, ki se upira logiki označevalca, obe-
nem pa tvorijo še posebej vpadljivo utelešenje pisave. Kar pa še ne pomeni, da delo 
Rotarjeve in druga podobna dela poskušajo doseči raztelešenje pisave. 
Telo ni samo po sebi odporno proti moči jezikovnega znaka in ravno telopis to dokazuje. 
V tovrstni tekstualizaciji telesa lahko prepoznamo prazno formo uprizoritvene pisave. 
Končni rezultat ni tekstualnost, ki bi jo tvorila telesa, temveč ravno nasprotno: podre-
ditev uprizarjajočih teles označevalnim strukturam, ki so jim tuje. Gre za demonstraci-
jo estetizacije teles, katere rezultat je »manjkajoči element«, prazen prostor v središču 
označevalne strukture, identičen tistemu, ki ga je Močnik prepoznal v romantični poe-
ziji (in v tem lahko vidimo, kako zelo pomembna je tesna povezava med romantiko in 
določeno vrsto množičnih performansov). Delo Rotarjeve pa ta proces obrne, saj lite-
rarizira in naredi viden prav manjkajoči element v središču ideološke reprezentacije. 
Telopis predstavlja lažno uprizoritveno pisavo, besedilo Rotarjeve, prikrajšano za živo 
prisotnost teles, pa vzpostavi uprizarjanje pomena s pomočjo dislokacije ideološkega 
teksta. Ilokacijska moč tega gibanja tvori njegovo uprizoritev. Kolikor se v njem besedilo 
uprizarja neodvisno od vsake možnosti in potrebe po transmediaciji, gre pri brezimnem 
besedilu Dreje Rotar za zgleden primer uprizoritvene pisave. 
5. Postscriptum: O novi generaciji generatorjev
Ko sem na začetku oktobra 2022 na Amfiteatrovem simpoziju ob izidu antologije Ge-
nerator Blaža Lukana predstavil zgodnjo različico tega članka, se mi še sanjalo ni, da 
se je začela razvijati povsem nova industrija, ki temelji na ustvarjanju jezikovnih, vi-
zualnih, zvočnih in kodirnih vsebin. A prvi znaki so se že kazali. Avgusta istega leta 
je odjeknila novica, da je na tekmovanju likovnih umetnin na državnem sejmu v Ko-
loradu zmagal neki oblikovalec iger z delom Théâtre D‘opéra Spatial, ki je nastalo s 
pomočjo generatorja podob umetne inteligence DALL-E. Nekaj tednov po simpoziju v 
Ljubljani je OpenAI, prav tisto zagonsko podjetje, ki je pripravilo tudi DALL-E, pred-
stavilo ChatGPT , jezikovni generator, ki je po moči in učinkovitosti brez para. ChatGPT 
daleč presega podobne klepetalne robote, kot sta Siri in Alexa, in dokazal je, da je spo-
32 soben ustvariti znanstvene članke na ravni dodiplomskega študija, pesmi, osnovno 
kodiranje in celo glasbene kompozicije. Naslednjih nekaj mesecev so mediji obširno 
poročali o dogajanju na področju umetne inteligence. Kot številne druge visokošolske 
ustanove je tudi moja univerza pohitela in pripravila nove smernice, ki naj bi prepre-
čile ali celo onemogočile goljufanje pri izpitih in seminarskih nalogah (ironično pri 
tem je, da je univerza, kjer sem zaposlen, odločilno prispevala k zagonu in ohranjanju 
digitalne industrije, znane kot Silicijeva dolina). Zdi se, da bodo akademski članki, kot 
jih poznamo, kmalu končali na smetišču zgodovine. Ni presenečenje, da sem zadnjih 
nekaj mesecev večkrat razmišljal o Močnikovem Generatorju in novih programih za 
generiranje besedil. Ali vstopamo v strukturalistično utopijo samogeneriranega bese-
dila brez avtorja, ki se producira v neskončnost? Ali tako deluje tisto, čemur Baudry 
pravi splošna pisava? 
Tečejo šele prvi meseci strojno generirane besedilnosti, zato je prezgodaj, da bi lahko 
ponudili dokončne odgovore na ta in številna druga vprašanja. Kljub temu pa nekaj 
stvari že lahko razberemo. Umetna inteligenca, ki generira besedila, slike, video in 
zvok, se od Generatorja in drugih praks konceptualne umetnosti razlikuje po tem, 
da deluje po načelu pregledovanja in sortiranja ogromnih količin podatkov, ne pa 
po načelih permutiranja omejenega števila informacijskih enot. Umetna inteligenca 
omejuje in izključuje naključnost, cilj umetniških praks, ki jih raziskujem v članku, pa 
je povečati obseg kombinacij s tem, da naključje postavi v ospredje (ChatGPT sicer 
lahko napiše pesem v dadaističnem slogu, vendar pa ne ve, kakšen je njen namen). 
Pri tem se je pomembno zavedati, da so generatorji umetne inteligence mimetični 
stroji; odlikujejo se v »igri imitacije« Alana Turinga, ne razumejo pa, kaj daje živost 
antimimetičnim praksam. Naslednje nič manj pomembno dejstvo je, da se umetna in-
teligenca priklaplja na človeško potrebo po produkciji pomena, tako da tudi vsebina, 
ki je sama po sebi nesmiselna, začne izžarevati pomen ob srečanju z bralcem. Namen 
konceptualne umetnosti in besedilnih praks je bil tovrstni avtomatizem pri produkciji 
pomena postaviti pod vprašaj. V tem smislu je umetna inteligenca centripetalna, kar 
pomeni, da razpršene informacije zbere v eno samo žarišče pomena, nasprotno pa je 
bil cilj Generatorja, kot smo videli, preizkušati konceptualne meje besedila in pri tem 
razsrediščiti pomen, se pravi, da gre za centrifugalno delovanje. Umetna inteligenca 
ne odpravi ideje avtorstva, temveč idejo avtorske funkcije aktualizira do mere, kakrš-
ne prej nismo poznali. 
Ker so generatorji umetne inteligence mimetični, skušajo ljudem ugajati, kot so opazili 
že prvi uporabniki. Odlikujejo se pri odgovarjanju na vprašanja s tem, da povzemajo 
prejete ideje, shranjene v gigabajtih spletnih podatkov, ki jih pregledujejo. Ko pridemo 
do kritičnega poizvedovanja, pa se izkaže, da so le okorni stroji. Z drugimi besedami, 
znajo izvrševati, ne znajo pa uprizarjati. Novi programi umetne inteligence se zdijo kot 
tisto prazno, čisto estetsko središče Greimasovega diagrama, le da razširjeno do ne-
33 slutenih razsežnosti. V bistvu gre za ideološke stroje in kot taki so sorodnejši poreklu 
stadionskih spektaklov kot pa besedilnim in umetniškim praksam, s katerimi jih druži 
zgolj formalna podobnost (pomislimo na libreto Mitkovskega in vizualno pesem/per-
formans Dreje Rotar). Nekaj pa je gotovo: v trenutku pisanja tega članka, marca leta 
2023, je vprašanje »generiranja« kakršne koli vsebine (besedilne, vizualne, zvočne, vi-
deo itd.) veliko zapletenejše, kot je bilo še, ko sem ta članek začel pripravljati. 
34 Bibliografija
Acconci, Vito. Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci, ur. Craig 
Dworkin, The MIT Press, 2006.
Baudry, Jean-Louis. »Écriture, fiction, idéologie.« Tel Quel, št. 31 (jesen), 1967, str. 
15–30.
Ćosić, Bora. Mixed media. Samozaložba, 1970.
Greimas, A. J., in F. Rastier. »The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints.« Yale French Stu-
dies, št. 41, 1968, str. 86–105.
Higgins, Dick. Jefferson’s Birthday. Something Else Press, 1964.
Kirby, Michael. A Formalist Theatre. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.
Kotz, Liz. Words to be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art. The MIT Press, 2007.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramsko gledališče. Prev. Krištof Jacek Kozak, Maska, 2003.
Lukan, Blaž, ur. Generator:: za proizvodnjo poljubnega števila dramskih kompleksov. 
SLOGI in AGRFT , 2021. Dokumenti Slovenskega gledališkega inštituta, 103.
Mitkovski, Rista. Titova omladina. Neobjavljen rokopis. Arhiv Jugoslavije, fond št. 
114/II, fascikel št. 21, 1972.
Močnik, Rastko, in Sezgin Boynik. »Breaking Point of Structures: From Concrete Poe-
try to Partisan Print. Interview with Rastko Močnik by Sezgin Boynik.« OEI, št. 90–
91. Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology: Concrete and Visual Poetry in Yugoslavia, 
1968–1983, ur. Sezgin Boynik, 2021, str. 19–25, 30–32.
Pavis, Patrice. Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre. Performing 
Arts Journal Publications, 1982.
—. Gledališki slovar. Mestno gledališče ljubljansko, 1997.
Rotar, Dreja. [brez naslova]. Rok: časopis za književnost, umetnost i estetičko ispitivanje 
stvarnosti, Beograd, 1969, n. p.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Routledge, 1988. 
36
UDK 7.038.531  
DOI 10.51937/Amfiteater-2023-1/36-52
While the emergence of new forms of performance writing in the 1960s and 1970s did not 
eliminate traditional forms of drama, they radically transformed the role of textuality in 
the theatre. This article argues that when liberated from the rules of dramatic writing and 
even syntax and grammar, performance writing brings an illocationary logic into textual 
production. The article concludes with a preliminary consideration of differences between 
experimental writing strategies and the latest text-generating AI.
Keywords: performance writing, performativity, textual production, ideology, Jean-Luc 
Baudry, Rastko Močnik, artificial intelligence
Branislav Jakovljević teaches in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford 
University. His most recent book project is Performance Apparatus: On Ideological Production of 
Behaviors, in which he argues for an apparatus theory in performance studies. He edited and 
co-translated into English Radomir Konstantinović’s The Philosophy of Parochialism and is the 
author of the award-winning book Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in 
Yugoslavia 1945–1991 (2016), which was translated into Slovenian in 2021.
bjakov@stanford.edu
37
Performance Writing: On, Around  
and Off the Page 
Branislav Jakovljević  
Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University
1. Performance – Text
Among documents related to Youth Day celebrations held at the Archive of Yugoslavia 
in Belgrade, in File 114/II, Folder 21, there is a proposal for the stadium performance 
Titova omladina (Tito’s Youth), which Rista Mitkovski, a physical education teacher 
from Macedonia, submitted in the spring of 1972. Mitkovski’s libretto brims with 
conventional images used in these kinds of spectacles, including the Yugoslav flag 
outlined with the bodies of female gymnasts dressed in red, white and blue. There 
are some innovations in this proposal, too: Mitkovski’s contribution to the repertoire 
of mass performances could have been a special transition exercise, which he called 
“The Propeller’s Turn”. Novelties and clichés notwithstanding, this was a long shot for 
an unknown mass-performance enthusiast. By the early 1970s, massive Youth Day 
celebrations had been staged annually for more than a quarter of a century, and the 
organisation of live spectacles that took place at the Yugoslav army soccer stadium 
in Belgrade worked like a well-oiled machine. While an open call for proposals 
was issued every year, a select group of creative teams of writers, composers and 
choreographers routinely applied for and won these commissions. Mitkovski stood 
no chance against these professionals.
Barely three years earlier, in the summer of 1969, the second issue of Rok: časopis za 
književnost, umetnost i estetičko ispitivanje stvarnosti (Rok: The Journal for Literature, 
Art, and Aesthetic Examination of Reality) featured another kind of artwork that adopted 
one of the state symbols as its primary visual material. Slovenian artist Dreja Rotar 
used the Slovenian variant of the full official name of the Yugoslav state, Socijalistička 
Federativna Republika Jugoslavija, as a ready-made text of sorts for her pattern poem/
conceptual piece. This work opens an entire section of the journal dedicated to the 
activities of the Slovenian neo-avant-garde group OHO. The OHO block included Marko 
Pogačnik’s comic book, articles by Pogačnik, Rastko Močnik and Franci Zagoričnik, 
38 photographic documentation from OHO’s landmark happening Triglav, as well as 
extensive examples of pattern poetry by the members of the group. While the section 
started with Rotar’s two-page piece, it ended with Zagoričnik’s series “Tapete” (“Wall 
Papers”). Like Rotar’s, Zagoričnik’s pieces were produced on bankpost papir [Ed. note: 
most likely bank paper or bond paper], but unlike her, he used only punctuation marks 
to create visual patterns. While in his work, Zagoričnik explores the effects of repetition, 
the first of signs on the page and then of patterns from one page to another, Rotar 
emphasises movement: on the left-hand side page of the journal, a large circle occupies 
the centre of the page, leaving remnants of the text in its margins, while on the right-
hand side, the circle is filled with text, leaving the margins empty.
Figure 1: Dreja Rotar: Untitled work, Rok, No. 2 (1969)
Mitkovski’s and Rotar’s works were produced in Yugoslavia within a short period, and 
they both deployed graphic strategies that go beyond and defy the discursivity of the 
text. However, they do that for different purposes and with entirely different outcomes. 
We can start from the obvious: the first came from the southernmost republic of 
socialist Yugoslavia, and the second came from the northernmost republic. While 
this mention of their points of origin could lend itself to a discussion of the uneven 
economic development and cultural differences between republics in the Yugoslav 
Federation, it is worth noting that these two texts represent two cultures not defined 
by geography or ethnicity. The first text belonged to the genre of mass performances, 
a form that the state favoured and promoted. As such, it received massive support 
from state institutions and was disseminated through mass and electronic media and 
the public education system to the largest possible audience: ideally, all citizens of 
Yugoslavia. The second text was published in a small, completely self-funded literature 
and art journal initiated by the writer Bora Ćosić, which he edited with a small group 
39 of artists and writers. So, while the first one belonged to the mainstream ideological, 
cultural production in Yugoslavia, the second one was situated at its fringes, on the 
fledgling alternative arts scene. Still, we should not neglect the similarities between 
the two texts, as they can be as important as their differences. For example, both texts 
came from linguistic communities outside the dominant Serbo-Croatian language.
1
 
Also, both of them adopted symbols from the state’s ideological arsenal. Finally, 
performance seems to be prominent in both of their works. While the first is a libretto 
to generate a real live spectacle, the second integrates visual and verbal material to 
produce performative effects on the page.
That is just the beginning. Speaking from a distance of half a century, I want to suggest 
that these two texts not only belong to two distinct performance cultures that existed 
in the former Yugoslavia but that they were engaged in broader historical, artistic and 
ideological trajectories whose significance today is not purely antiquarian. In their own 
right, these two texts speak about ambivalences relevant to contemporary culture. These 
ambivalences concern the relationship between text and performance. Some of the 
questions they elicit include but are not limited to: How does the production of meaning 
take place in performance? What constitutes performance text? Most importantly, what 
are the conditions of textual production of (and in) performance?
2. The Cone … 
Mitkovski’s 15-page libretto envisions a mass spectacle of 17 units divided into three 
main exercises, plus the performers’ grand entrance and exit, transitions, changes, 
and an obligatory compilation of folk dances. While the title underneath a vaguely 
constructivist image on the cover of the booklet is inscribed by hand and in Cyrillic, 
the rest of the document is produced on a Latin typewriter. In the narrative part of the 
score, the author mixes different dialects of Serbo-Croatian, misses noun cases, uses 
incorrect gender forms and mangles verb conjugations. More carefully composed 
are those sections of the script in which he does not use discursive language and 
deploys visual typography instead. This writing eschews the conventional nature of 
the linguistic sign. It foregrounds the visual dimension of the letter, as well as the 
capacity of the inscription machine – the typewriter – to organise these elements into 
larger geometrical units. Mitkovski’s expertise was not in literature but in physical 
education. He made up for his relative negligence towards his script’s linguistic and 
literary side with his proficiency in performance notation. That makes Tito’s Youth an 
exemplary performance text.
1 In the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, the language spoken by the majority in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and 
Herzegovina, and Montenegro was referred to as Serbo-Croatian, or alternatively, as Croato-Serbian. With the country’s 
disintegration, each new state declared its dialects as an independent language: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian.
40
Figure 2: Tito’s Youth, Performance Notation
Initial theoretical considerations of the performance text as a distinct and uniquely 
theatrical form of writing came from theatre semiology. In Languages of the Stage, one 
of the earliest successful attempts to engage semiotics in a dialogue with methodologies 
used in theatre history and performance studies, Patrice Pavis brought up the 
question of a “spectacle text” as a “score where all the scenic systems of performance 
are articulated in space and time” (18). He suggests that theatre semiology should 
not limit itself to considerations of dramatic text but should instead engage with 
the “discourse of staging, with the way in which the performance is marked out by 
the sequence of events, by the dialogue of visual and musical elements”; in short, he 
argues that it should take as its object of study “performance text” and “the way in 
which it is structured and divided” (20). Years later, in the short entry on performance 
text in his Dictionary of the Theatre, Pavis was much less programmatic. He defined it 
as “the relationship of all signifying systems used in performance, whose arrangement 
and interaction constitute the mise en scène” significantly adding that “the notion of 
performance text is, therefore, an abstract and theoretical one, not an empirical and 
practical one” (Pavis, Dictionary 261). This can be read to mean, on the one hand, 
that in its diachronicity and time-boundedness, live performance inherently resists 
41 the dependence that semiotic analysis has on the synchronic approach to linguistic 
structures; on the other hand, it also acknowledges the demotion of the dramatic text 
as the defining characteristic of contemporary theatre.
The emergence of the performance text, which in some instances led to its surpassing 
of the conventional dramatic text, did not eliminate the process of signification at the 
core of traditional theatre. Michael Kirby, the pioneering scholar of Happenings and 
what he called “new theatre”, referred to the kind of theatre based on the literary 
script as “referential”. Suggesting that in a “performance built on this model […] 
every element is intended to convey meaning or to aid in the process of decoding 
that meaning”, he proposed a schema in the shape of a triangle or a cone, in which 
the meaning is located “at the upper vertex. Figuratively, it rises over all the other 
elements or aspects of the presentation; all the rest are there only to support the 
meaning” (Kirby, A Formalist 33). Here, “all the rest” refers to all of those tangible 
elements on the stage, from props and coulisses to actors, located at the base of the 
cone. At the same time, meaning is concentrated in the point, which transcends the 
materiality of the stage.
Figure 3: Cone Diagram
The paradox of referential theatre is that it invites the spectator to see through 
the material elements of theatrical representation to glimpse an immaterial and 
purely symbolic instance. Kirby implies that in the theatre, the cone is flipped on 
its side: “[W]e might say that the spectator looks through the base of the triangle, 
through all the material that is the performance, and behind it all is the meaning, 
which is the most important” (33). Theatre and performance studies scholarship 
of the second half of the twentieth century proclaimed the removal of the dramatic 
text from the apex of the representational cone as a dehierarchisation of theatre. 
One influential text after another praised the avant-garde for this overturn. A 
couple of examples will suffice.
42 Stateside, in his essay “Drama, Script, Theater, and Performance” (first published 
in 1973), one of the foundational scholarly essays of the new academic field of 
Performance Studies, theatre director and scholar Richard Schechner proposed a 
redefinition of the basic terms of the theatre, all of which pertain to different forms 
of inscription. He made a distinction between “drama” as literary text and “script” as 
“something that preexists any given enactment” (Schechner, Performance 70). Here, 
the script relies on a non-textual kind of writing: it is the “basic code of the events”, 
which, unlike drama, is not transmitted through the medium of writing (and reading) 
but “person to person” (72). On the other side of the ocean, mostly in Germany, 
where state subsidies provided conditions for the flourishing of an adventurous and 
dynamic theatre scene, scholars saw in the challenge that the new theatre presented 
to the hegemony of dramatic text an expansion of expressive possibilities of the stage. 
Most famously, Hans-Thies Lehmann argued that “postdramatic theatre is not simply 
a new kind of text or staging – and even less a new type of theatre text, but rather a 
type of sign usage in the theatre that turns both of these levels of theatre upside down 
through the structurally changed quality of the performance text” (Postdramatic 85, 
second emphasis added). What this narrative of the upending of drama prevalent on 
both sides of the Atlantic neglects to mention is that it did not bring an overturn of the 
hierarchy of meaning-production but its renegotiation.
In “Drama, Script, Theater, and Performance” and many other texts from the 1970s and 
1980s, Schechner argues that the playwright, the author of the “drama”, is no longer at 
the apex of Kirby’s imaginary cone but rather the director, the author of the “script”. In 
his meticulous elaboration of the strategies and techniques of postdramatic theatre, 
Lehmann expands the author position from directors to choreographers, designers, 
visual artists and performance collectives. In the thematic block of Postdramatic 
Theatre dedicated to the expressive means of new theatre practices, he places the text 
side by side with other fundamentals of performance, such as space, time, the body 
and the media. To do that, the “text” had to be reduced to spoken language or the stage 
utterance and the absence thereof.
This approach leaves out two important details. First, postdramatic theatre is not post-
textual. The dethroning of the literary text in the theatre did not result in the elimination 
of the text from performance but liberated it from the constraints imposed upon dramatic 
writing in the West, at least since Aristotle’s Poetics. In the traditional theatre, literary 
text not only carries the meaning but is also the container of tradition, which it brings to 
bear on the production of meaning. Second, deposing the literary text from that “vertex” 
of referential theatre’s cone does not remove writing from performance but unleashes 
it in hitherto unexpected ways. If postdramatic theatre abolishes anything, it is the uni-
directional relationship between writing and performance. In new forms of live art, such 
as happenings and performance art, writing goes in all directions, including directly 
43 reversing the conventional order between writing and performance: performance flows 
back into writing and, in doing so, changes the very structure and purpose of textual 
production. Even if the sudden proliferation of new forms of performance writing did not 
permanently change how plays are written and produced, it introduced a radical change 
in the understanding of textuality in theatre. Namely, from being a literary work and a 
privileged container of meaning, the text has been reduced to its function as a structuring 
device. A truly de-hierarchised theatre does not replace “drama” with “script”, or with any 
other privileged text, and one kind of author (playwright) for another (director, producer, 
etc.). Instead, it proclaims that anything can be used as a text: an object of everyday use 
is no less a text than a play, and so can be a piece of recorded music, an item of clothing, a 
novel, or the bodies of performers gathered in a space, where it is not their skills that are 
decisive in the process of making of the performance, but their experiences, behaviours, 
relationships and desires. One of the most significant outcomes of the expansion of the 
idea of writing in performance was not a new hierarchy in theatre but the challenge that 
the process of devising presented to the “authorial” theatre and the hierarchised regimes 
of staging in general.
3. … and the Surface
The upsurge of performance writing that came with the proliferation of performance 
forms that challenged referential theatre is evidenced in anthologies such as the 700-
page Scenarios: Scripts to be Performed (1980), edited by Richard Kostelanetz, who drew 
mainly on the American neo-avant-garde, and Blaž Lukan’s Generator:: za proizvodnjo 
poljubnega števila dramskih kompleksov (The Generator:: for Manufacturing Any 
Number of Drama Complexes, 2021). Indeed, this kind of writing exceeds any individual 
culture or language, and many other similar anthologies of performance texts could 
(and should!) see the light of day. Even a cursory inspection of the existing collections 
suggests that performance writing is not a style and does not follow any prescribed set 
of rules. Quite the opposite, these texts seem evidence of a feverish exploration of the 
innumerable ways of departing from conventional drama. A performance text could 
be a visual, a musical notation, a score for a happening, an experimental play, a comic 
book (as in Lee Breuer’s Red Horse Animation), or any combination of material that 
went into the making of the performance and its documentation. Taking the broadest 
take possible, in his short entry in Dictionary of the Theatre, Pavis suggests that the 
performance text “considers performance as a scale model in which the production 
of meaning may be observed” (261). That much can be said about any text geared 
towards performance, from IKEA assembly instructions to plans for manoeuvres in 
military theatres of operations. What distinguishes the textual production we are 
looking at is the relation between writing and performance.
44 It is not entirely surprising that in his essential and rarely discussed article “Writing, 
Fiction, Ideology”, which preceded his influential texts on the cinematic apparatus, Jean-
Louis Baudry uses the same geometrical figure as Kirby to depict a “metaphysical model 
of knowledge” (21). Here, we again find the figure that “would be similar to a cone whose 
base, being a limited surface, is the only visible part. All points of the base are linked to 
a single, invisible dot, the summit, located at infinity. Infinity is exterior to the surface, 
beyond it. Each point of the limited surface is the projection of the vertex onto this base” 
(21, translations by author). So to know, which is to say, to discern the meaning or to read, 
“will be to try to traverse the lines which connect the vertex to the point of the base” (21). 
The apex of the cone marks the position of the “author” and the “work” that is not only 
culturally but also legally reinforced. The production of meaning becomes inseparable from 
economic production through the categories such as the author and the work. Therefore, 
the question of meaning production, reflected in theatre’s regime of referentiality, is not 
limited to the aesthetics of representation but also to its politics—and in a significant way. 
Unlike Kirby (who was most likely unaware of “Writing, Fiction, Ideology” when he wrote 
A Formalist Theatre) and other critics of literary or “dramatic” theatre, Baudry nominates 
the surface as an alternative to the hierarchical model of meaning production. 
In this model, the infinity that touches the cone’s vertex is displaced into the limitlessness 
of an unbounded plane, which contains a multiplicity of statements. According to 
this schema, the meaning is not produced through the passage from the infinite, or 
transcendental, point to the visible and tangible base (we can say with Gilles Deleuze, 
the plane of immanence) but through the interaction between texts. At the surface, 
proximity and contiguity replace distance and transfer. Here, “everything is stated, every 
text, being understood by the relations it maintains with other statements, with other 
texts, and thus appearing as an extension of the surface” is therefore “responsible for all 
statements it crosses path with” (Baudry 22). On this “limitless surface” that has “no axis 
nor centre”, writing no longer represents “a field of reality outside of it” but is instead an 
“active part of the text that is written incessantly” (22). One of the main consequences of 
this re-orientation of the production of meaning is the disappearance of “the subject, the 
cause of writing” (22). This disappearance radically transforms the very idea of writing. 
It is no longer the “creation of an isolated individual; it can no longer be considered as 
the property of that individual. On the contrary, […] it appears as one of a particular 
manifestation of general writing” (22). Baudry’s notion of general writing, that, on the one 
hand, is authorless and, on the other, engages directly with other texts and other forms 
of textuality, is of singular importance for performance writing. So, what happens on the 
surface? How does this textual and performance production operate?
45
4. From Illocutionary to Illocationary Writing
One of the signal moments in the process of subverting the power traditionally assigned 
to the author was John Cage’s introduction of aleatory procedures into the process of 
musical composition. While Cage questioned the primacy of a commanding mind 
in creating musical scores, so did Merce Cunningham in dance, Jackson Mac Low in 
poetry, and George Brecht in visual arts. In this vein, Iztok Geister, Marko Pogačnik and 
Rastko Močnik, the editors of the “Programmed Art” section of the journal Problemi 
published in January of 1970, used the physical weight of texts accepted for publication 
to determine their order in this issue. “We were literally weighing the contributions (the 
papers, photos, pictures) with a kitchen balance, one of the old type, not electronic. We 
organised these materials from the heaviest to the lightest” (“Breaking Point” 23). In 
adopting chance and other procedures that eliminate or curtail authorial decisions, the 
emphasis was not on anonymising the authorial agency that shapes the work of art but 
on subverting the conventional line of causation in its production.
This principle is observable in Močnik’s contribution to this issue, a piece entitled 
Drama. In a single-sentence preamble, he declares that “every dramatic text constitutes 
the programme” (Lukan 101). Indeed, dramatic writing’s pragmatic orientation 
towards live presentation sets it apart from other forms of literature. If all writing 
anticipates a certain kind of reading, then performance writing addresses itself to a 
deciphering mechanism called theatre, which consists of trained bodies, architectural 
structures, complex machinery and highly specialised objects. Močnik does not 
question this fundamental property of the performance text but pursues it to its final 
consequence. He recognises space, body, gesture, voice and movement as elementary 
performance properties and then establishes basic rules of their combinations and 
ordering into syntagmatic chains. True to Cagean principles of composition and 
performance, he indicates that the “programme” of his drama should be “as rigid as 
possible” while preserving the randomness at the heart of each performance (101). 
The most obvious example of this approach is the famous composition 4’33’’ in 
which Cage determined the duration of each performance segment through chance 
procedures. However, this renunciation of agency comes together with the demand 
that the composition produced this way should be performed with an unwavering 
exactness and fidelity to the score. While it has been suggested that 4’33’’ does not 
require an actual performance and that these durations can be “performed” with 
the help of a stopwatch by anyone, anywhere, Cage insisted that this composition 
requires the trappings of a traditional piano concert: the instrument, an appropriate 
space, a musician and an audience. Only under these conditions does 4’33’’ fully meet 
the demands of Cage’s credo about silence as any sound not intended. In other words, 
even if the field of reference is wide open, 4’33’’ is still referential. Even if the score can 
be seen as an autonomous work of art – for example, a visual piece – in performance, 
46 it retains all of the properties of musical notation that are transferred from one 
medium (discursive, notational, visual) to another (performance). It is at this point 
that Močnik departs from Cagean aesthetics.
Drama and A Generator are a constellation of performance texts that use repetition 
and variation as their main organising principles. As a more radical departure in the 
de-aestheticisation of the performance text than Drama, A Generator bears formal 
resemblances with several post-Cagean and Fluxus works that employed new forms 
of notation and, almost without exception, were geared towards performance. A 
further radicalisation of the relation between notation and performance came with 
the transformation of the position of the text in Conceptual art practices of the late 
1960s and early 1970s. If, as Sol Le Wit argued, “words” and “sentences” can replace 
art objects, they certainly can do the same with performances. To put it succinctly, the 
difference between Dick Higgins’s Fluxus piece To Everything Its Season (1958) and 
Vito Acconci’s Conceptual artwork Twelve Minutes (1967) is that the former still has a 
live performance as its ultimate reference, even if it never gets a formal staging.
Although they deploy the same permutational logic and have a similar appearance 
on the page, these two works represent two fundamentally different forms of 
understanding the relationship between text and performance. Like some other 
conceptual artists, such as Dan Graham, Acconci sets up a “self-generating structure” 
independent of any material staging (Kotz 135). Unlike Higgins, whose performance 
texts, regardless of their formal differences – mini-plays, verse dramas, scenarios 
for happenings, event scores – were aimed at performance, Acconci approached his 
performances from the early 1970s as a continuation of his work on poetry, which 
directly preceded them. He did not conceive of his performance art pieces as live 
presentations of his poems but as an extension of the conceptual practice he first 
developed on the page. He spoke of using the inscription on the page “as the start of an 
event that keeps going, off the page” (Acconci qtd. in Kotz 165). In referential theatre, 
any form of notation, from literary drama to visual score, presumes the process 
of transposition from one medium to another. That transfer enacts an inherently 
metaphorical relation between the text and performance. In the practice of Acconci 
and many other conceptual and performance artists, the text is contiguous with 
performance, and their relation is performative. Here, the text is performative not 
because it takes over some performance properties but because it does not refer to an 
object outside of itself but instead always returns to itself. In doing so, the text adopts 
one of the most challenging conditions of performance art, which demands that the 
artist simultaneously adopt the position of the creator and the art object. The opposite 
of the referential is not a non-referential but a self-referential performance. More in 
line with Acconci’s poems than with Higgins’s happening librettos or George Brecht’s 
event scores, Močnik’s A Generator is one of those texts in which the event starts on 
47 the page to depart from it and, in doing so, obliterates the gap between the text and 
performance. In doing so, it textualises the things and events it crosses paths with 
and, conversely, subjects itself to the condition of the (art) object and performance 
(art). While there is no method to this exchange between the text and the non-textual, 
A Generator seems to provide an observable instance of the performance text that 
pushes against the margins of the representational field (the page, in this case).
Močnik is not an artist or a playwright but a philosopher and sociologist (and in that 
respect, he is not exceptional: the rejection of referential theatre opened performance 
writing to non-theatre professionals: painters, sculptors, musicians, philosophers, 
critics, etc.). When asked in a recent interview with Sezgin Boynik about his ties with 
OHO and his early work on the “Programmed Art” issue of Problemi, Močnik made 
a connection between these activities and his subsequent work on philosophy and 
the sociology of literature. Here, of particular interest, is his engagement with the 
work of French-Lithuanian semiologist Algirdas Greimas, whose work on semiotics 
Močnik used in his sociological analysis of France Prešeren’s poetry. In essays such as 
“Umetnostno v literaturi” (1983) and “K sociologiji slovenske književnosti: Prešeren v 
nizu ideoloških menjav” (1983), Močnik’s propensity for diagramatisation, which was 
evident in Drama and A Generator, adopts a specific form of Greimas’s elaboration 
of the Klein Group, which the linguist used in his exploration of complex semiotic 
relations that resist the basic structure of the sign:
Figure 4: Algirdas Greimas: The Elementary Structure of Meaning
Whereas the signifier-signified relation is based on the opposition, the Klein group 
offers the possibility of establishing a multiplicity of relations in the process of 
signification. In Greimas’s adaptation of the Klein group into the elementary structure 
of meaning, the upper couple consists of prescriptions (positive injunctions) and 
interdictions (negative injunctions). The lower designates a set of their inversions: 
48 non-interdictions and non-prescriptions. The dynamics within this “elementary 
structure of meaning” are organised around two types of disjunction: that of contraries 
(indicated by the dotted line) and of contradictories (indicated by the full line). The 
Klein group offers an alternative to the binary opposition as the key property of the 
linguistic sign. Greimas illustrates this with simple semiotics of traffic lights: if the 
green light signifies prescription and the red light interdiction, the yellow light can 
be either a non-description or non-interdiction, depending on the order in which it 
appears (Greimas 92). Whereas binary signs engage in signifying chains, the Klein 
group, as reimagined by Greimas, can establish signification fields. In that sense, it 
offers an elaboration of the processes of meaning production that takes place on 
the surface, that is to say, in the model Baudry offers as the alternative to the cone. 
What is significant here is that in the Klein group, as in Acconci’s poetry, the pressure 
is on the edges of the square. If Acconci’s performance is a continuation (and not a 
transposition) of textual practice that begins on the page, the Klein group allows, as 
Rosalind Krauss has demonstrated in her essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, 
establishing relations that extend beyond the limits of the initial graph. 
In his reading of Prešeren’s poetry, Močnik goes in the opposite direction from scholars 
who have used the Klein diagram as a general interpretational schema (including, 
but not limited to, Krauss and Greimas himself). Instead of following the trajectories 
that extend from the cardinal points and proliferate in networks of signification, he, 
conversely, seems to focus on the remnants of the binary sign in this schema located 
at the point of intersection between diagonal lines at the centre of the graph. This 
focus helps Močnik recognise and elaborate a specific structure of Prešeren’s poem, 
which is, according to him, characterised by an empty zone at its core. He suggests 
that this missing element “is the signifier that would be efficient”:
So the signifier of the poem is proclaimed as non-efficient, as aesthetic, which means 
that nothing performative [is] able to perform there; there is no illocutionary force, the 
discourse is “etiolated,” as Austin would say, it only has this aesthetic, blocked signifying 
action. My theory at the time was that the whole poem rotates around that signifying 
element, something that does not declare itself […]. (Močnik, “Breaking Point” 25)
Močnik’s Drama and, to even a greater degree, A Generator can be seen as a complete 
inversion of the structure of the aesthetic signifier that he uncovered in Prešeren’s 
romantic poetry. Here, the illocutionary force is replaced by a certain illocationary 
logic, the logic of permutation and multiplication that sets up performance as an 
extension and continuation of the text (and, always, vice versa).
Permutational operations are key elements in two examples of performance writing 
from the beginning of this article. Still, each of these texts assumes a different, if 
not completely opposite, performance status. In Mitkovski’s libretto, the spectacle 
49 culminates with an exercise of writing, in which abstract figures formed by gymnasts’ 
bodies on a soccer field turn into recognisable shapes and words. The image of the flag 
formed by female gymnasts’ bodies is followed by the name of the President of the 
Republic spelt out with the bodies of male performers: “The men form the word TITO” 
(Mitkovski 8). The use of performing bodies to produce texts was a well-established 
convention in socialist mass performances, from their birthplace in the USSR to 
Yugoslavia and beyond. This stunning literalisation of performance writing received 
relatively little attention from performance scholars. In one of the rare attempts to 
position it in relation to broader aesthetic phenomena, in his Fluxus-inflected 1970 
book Mixed Media, which was, like Rok, an independent author’s publication, Bora Ćosić 
described it as “bodywriting” (7). The bodies organised discursively are the bodies that 
are not writing or reading but are being written and given to be read. They conflate the 
text and performance, thus creating a vortex that resists the logic of the signifier while 
forming a particularly striking embodiment of writing. That does not mean that Rotar’s 
and other similar works are invested in the disembodiment of writing.
The body is not inherently resistant to the power of the linguistic sign, and bodywriting 
is there to prove it. This textualisation of the body amounts to an empty form of 
performance writing. Its final outcome is not textuality generated by the bodies but 
precisely the opposite: a submission of performing bodies to signifying structures 
that are alien to them. It is a demonstration of the aestheticisation of the bodies that 
results in a “missing element”, an empty space at the centre of the signifying structure 
that is identical to the one that Močnik identified in romantic poetry (and here, the 
close ties between the Romantic movement and a certain kind of mass performance is 
of utmost performance). Rotar’s piece reverses this process by literalising and making 
visible that missing element at the centre of ideological representation. If bodywriting 
engages in a false performance writing, Rotar’s text, deprived of the live presence of 
bodies, stages a performance of meaning through a dis-location of the ideological text. 
The illocationary force of this movement constitutes its performance. Insofar as in it, 
the text performs independently of any potential of and the need for transmediation, 
Rotar’s nameless text is an exemplary case of performance writing. 
5. Postscript: On the New Generation of Generators
Little did I know that in early October of 2022, at the time when I presented an early 
version of this article at the Amfiteater symposium occasioned by the publication of 
Blaž Lukan’s anthology The Generator, a whole new industry based on the idea of the 
generation of linguistic, visual, audio and code content was in the offing. The early 
signs were already there. That August, the news broke out that a game designer won 
a competition at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition for the work Théâtre 
50 D’opéra Spatial produced with the help of AI image generator DALL-E. A few weeks 
after the Ljubljana symposium, OpenAI, the same startup that produced DALL-E, 
launched ChatGPT , a language generator of unprecedented power and efficiency. 
Far exceeding similar chatbots such as Siri and Alexa, ChatGPT demonstrated the 
capacity to produce undergraduate-level scholarly papers, poems, basic coding and 
even musical compositions. In the months after, the media was abuzz with reports 
from the AI frontiers. Like many other institutions of higher education, my university 
scrambled to come up with new policies that would prevent or even curtail cheating 
on final papers and exams (here, the irony being that the university where I work was 
instrumental in initiating and sustaining the digital industry known as Silicon Valley). 
The academic paper, as we know it, seems to be out the window. Unsurprisingly, I 
frequently thought of Močnik’s Generator and new text-generating programmes in 
the past couple of months. Are we entering a structuralist utopia of self-generated, 
endlessly produced, authorless text? Is this how Baudry’s general writing operates?
We are only in the first months of machine-generated textuality, and it is too early to offer 
definitive answers to these and many other questions. Still, some things are already 
discernable. Textual, image, video and sound-generating AI differs from A Generator 
and other conceptual art practices insofar as it works on the principle of surveying 
and sorting enormous amounts of data and not on the principle of permutation of a 
limited number of information units. Whereas the AI limits and excludes randomness, 
the goal of art practices I have examined here is to increase combinational range by 
foregrounding chance (yes, ChatGPT can write a poem in the style of Dada, but it does 
not know its purpose). Importantly, AI generators are mimetic machines: they excel in 
Alan Turning’s “imitation game” but do not understand what animates anti-mimetic 
practices. Further, and no less important, is the fact that AI latches onto our need for 
meaning production: even content which is in itself nonsensical begins to emanate 
meaning in its encounter with the reader. The purpose of conceptual art and textual 
practices was to question this kind of automatism in meaning production. In that 
sense, AI is centripetal, which is to say, it gathers dispersed information into a single 
focal point of meaning, while, as we have seen, the aim of A Generator was to push 
against the conceptual boundaries of the text and, in doing so, de-centre meaning. It is 
centrifugal. AI does not do away with the idea of authorship; instead, it actualises the 
idea of the author-function to an unprecedented degree. 
Being mimetic, AI generators are, as their early users observed, “people pleasers”. They 
excel in answering questions by summarising the received ideas stored in gigabytes 
of online data they are canvassing. When it comes to critical inquiry, they are just 
clunky machines. In other words, they execute, but they do not perform. These new 
AI programmes appear as that empty, purely aesthetic centre of Greimas’s diagram 
but expanded to unprecedented proportions. They are, essentially, ideological 
51 machines. As such, they are closer to the lineage of those stadium spectacles than 
to the textual and artistic practices with which they bear only formal resemblance 
(think of Mitkovski’s libretto and Rotar’s visual poem/performance). One thing is for 
sure: at the moment of this writing, in March 2023, the question of “generating” any 
content (textual, visual, audio, video, etc.) is far more complex than it was when I 
began working on this article.
52
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