Bursting Flusser's Bubble: Titus Andronicus and the Impossibility of the Third Position

No fancy pictures in mine.  Sorry, guys.  

In his discussion of conceptual versus imaginal reading, Flusser first invokes the metaphor of a theater to describe how, as subjects, we participate in the different types of thinking he outlines.  Distinguishing between dancer, actor and author, he suggests that while the dancer is simply enacting a ritual demanded by reality, and to stray from this enactment would be to sin, the actor knows that his role is determined by convention which he is at liberty to modify and that, finally, the author (depending on whose viewpoint we assume) is alternately a devil, an authority, or a puppeteer and creator of forms (32).  Flusser then reneges this metaphor, asserting that the theater “does not adequately display the third position, because this does not truly exist in the theater as yet; it is too recent” (ibid) and proceeds to hilariously imagine a future potential in which a spectator films a scene of himself and projects it to become both spectator, actor and author (i.e. a YouTube video).  I would argue, however, that Flusser was right the first time, but in a way that rather demonstrates the impossibility of “imaginal thinking [succeeding] in incorporating conceptual thinking” (34).  To demonstrate, I invoke Titus Andronicus. 

            Alas, this is not a discussion of that “crimson river of blood” I mentioned in class.  Rather, I would like to consider how Titus, the character, successfully embodies that cherished third position by both acting in a drama that he constructs and also watching it unfold before his eyes.  After Lavinia is raped, Titus plots his revenge, falling into an awfully convenient and efficiently deployed madness that persuades his enemies (Tamora and her rapist sons) to disguise themselves as the personifications of “Rape,” “Murder” and “Revenge” in an attempt to dupe the old man into his own downfall.  Titus ever the wiser enacts madness and convinces the mother (disguised as Revenge) to leave her sons in order to invite Empress Tamora to return later for a banquet: “I knew them all,” he says in an aside, “though they supposed me mad, / And will o’rreach them in their own devices” (5.2.145-6).  Once gone, he succeeds in murdering them, cooking them in a feast and serving them to Empress.  As author of his own revenge plot, he also acts a part in order to manipulate the other players.  After his plot is revealed, he then orders the other spectators as much as himself to “Witness my knife’s sharp point” (5.3.64) as he stabs the Empress.  Titus, then has become an early modern precursor to that YouTube auteur—until he, too, is killed off as a consequence of his own revenge plot.  He is quickly murdered by the Emperor, who is then murdered by Titus’s remaining son. 

           The problem here is not whether Titus can occupy that third position, but rather whether this occupation successfully subverts or improves upon the other two positions by incorporating conceptual thinking (that of the line, of history, of the actor’s role) into imaginal thinking (that of the picture, the posthistorical, the YouTube creator’s role).  As the play illuminates, such a position still falls prey to the conventions it seeks to control: Titus, as author of the revenge plot, must also succumb to the full realization of the plot, which requires his own demise—he is just as much subject to a system as are the characters in his plot.  When Flusser self-consciously admits that “the third position cannot be conceptualized; it must be imagined with the kind of imagination that is now being formed” (33) simultaneously pointing out his failure to do so through the conceptual medium of text, he points out the crux of the problem, but fears the implication that perhaps what he wishes for is simply an impossibility.  The reality of Titus and of media in general is that synthesis of linear and surface media will not result in a new civilization.  The best we may hope for is, as he urges, to learn to read imaginal fictions as we have learned to read conceptual ones, and then to move towards a type of supplementarity, rather than synthesis.