Persona, skènè, drama: the great transformation of theatre and sociology
This article presents the relations between three schools of sociology and three figures of contemporary avant-garde theatre (Gertrude Stein and the Chicago School, Antonin Artaud and the Collège de sociologie, and Bertolt Brecht and the Frankfurt School). These relations are presented with respect to the transformations affecting the categories of « persona », « skéné » and « drama », that belong to the tradition of theatre, but that have been radically redefined through the experimentation of theatre, and through sociological analysis. In pragmatism, psychoanalysis and Marxism, each of these categories have been respectively redefined according to specific domains of practices and (re)presentations, that have focussed on the person, the body and the action, with respect to new dispositions. These transformations occurred through the revision of the categorical divisions between the soul, consciousness and mind that belong to the Hegelian philosophy, and through the passage from modern bourgeois society to postmodern mass society.