Dramatic Dispositives On the Place of the Play before the Time of the Theatre

The sketch proposes to use the metaphor of the dispositif for historical conceptualizations of the phenomena of play, early drama and theatre. The suggestion is: The performative mediality of the play phenomena between voice and gaze as well as word and image can be grasped as a double concept via the dispositive if the media-theoretical understanding of the dispositive as a theatrical framework according to Jean-Louis Baudry is combined with Michel Foucault's discursive concept of the dispositif, which can be understood as a dramatic-textual one. In the correlation of the two contrarotating conceptions, it should then be possible to observe more closely the place which, due to the mutual transgressions of both dispositifs, emerges aesthetically again and again on this side of fixed terminological definitions and which medieval research in particular has always presupposed when constituting its concepts and findings. The proposal thus pleads for a stronger consideration of the paradox of aesthetic concepts with regard to the early forms of play, drama and theatre and their aesthetic gaze regimes.