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JAN L. HAGENS aesthetic and a social function, its integration into theatrical performance should increase theaters ability to achieve extra-theatrical effects, such as solutions in the social realm.° Another side-glance into ritual theory may support this view. Turner labeled structured social conflict as “social drama,” and he recognized a pattern of events, a recurring course of action: “breach, crisis, redress, restoration of peace through reconciliation or mutual acceptance of schism,” i.e., violation ofa social rule, conflict, attempts at solution, and finally either acceptance of division or, preferably, reintegration; in the crucial phase of this process, the action of redress, ritual plays a major role.” Note how Turner’s view of ritual is decidedly different from the view that is now prevalent in performance studies and on the contemporary stage, which is dominated by conflict and destruction and which stops short of considering reintegration. Note also that in Turner’s view ofritual, negativity and obliteration are important phases, but are mostly to be considered as integrated parts of a comprehensive process. Altogether, Turner’s sequential template for social drama, especially through its telos of reintegration, suggests that ritual may be able to support the project of conflict resolution in artistic drama as well. Braungart emphasizes that ritual and literature are not fundamentally different: he insists that, on the one hand, “ritual is not simply a forced social event,” and on the other hand, “literature is not autonomous and selfdetermined." Or, to formulate the relation in Victor Turner’s terms: social drama and artistic drama imply each other, because artistic drama unfolds according to the basic pattern of social drama, but we best understand such social drama by applying the interpretive categories of artistic drama: “The processual form of social dramas is implicit in aesthetic dramas (even if only by reversal or negation), while the rhetoric of social dramas — and hence the shape of argument — is drawn from cultural performances.”® This mutual implication does not mean that social drama and artistic drama are identical — quite the contrary: Turner even branded ritual, in contrast to drama, as regressive and totalitarian. One way to describe the development of Western theater over the course of the past century would be as an attempt to connect or re-connect with ritual, and Turner was quite adversarial toward such attempts. For him, the ritual theater, as for instance represented in a director such as Grotowski, “wishes to ‘reliminalize’ or ‘retribalize’ if not all modern Wolfgang Braungart: Ritual, in D. Weidner (ed.), Handbuch Literatur und Religion, Stuttgart, Metzler, 2016, 431. Turner, Victor: Acting in Everyday Life and Everyday Life in Acting, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology, in From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York, Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982, 102-123, 111. 8 Braungart: Ritual, 429. Victor Turner: Dramatic Ritual / Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology, Kenyon Review 1.3 (1979), 81. * 60 °
