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Thursday, 03 July 2008
Organum
Cross-posted to the theatre minima journal.
Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto (I am human; nothing human is
alien to me). The ameliorist theatre, a fully-paid subsidiary of
the culture industry, would prefer to think otherwise: that so many things
human are alien to its audiences, that so many human potentialities for
the experience of suffering and ecstasy are beyond their capabilities. An
insult to imagination of both audience and practitioner. "Evil" (a useless
distinction that distances the possibilities for our own behavior into
something outside of us, some amorphous abstract cloud) is particularly,
it says, beyond us as a collective and as individuals (though "good" is
always so conveniently inherent in us as a collective and as individuals,
we needn't worry about that). Heinous acts are always committed by others,
never ourselves: the deepest pain and abuse, the highest ecstasy and
pleasure are then excepted from our art. Because human they inevitably
arise in the artistic creation, but in a culture of laughter (and comedy,
in its effort to undermine all sublime experience with a joke that
releases rather than retains tension, is the truly cathartic form,
contra Aristotle) these experiences serve as fodder for amusement.
Instead of being a way into a deeper recognition, a joke is utilized as a
means of deflecting, defanging that recognition. Betrayal, abuse,
corruption, compromise, abjectness, ecstasy, pleasure – all human
individuals are capable of all these, all have a place in the theatre, but
the ameliorist theatre denies them, rendering them a part of the
non-human. In a politically progressive age dedicated to the ideals
of a corrupted enlightenment, the theatre is blind. It remembers the
humanist ideals of the beginning of the French and Russian Revolutions and
pretends to forget the rapid descent of both movements into grotesque
barbarism, though it's the high ideals that are abstract, the bloodied
barbarism that is bodied (cf. Büchner's Danton's Death). The
ameliorist theatre, the culture industry, dreams pretty dreams of the
human experience, condemns the spectrum of human experience to a pallid
monotonous mediocrity. The art of theatre awakens its practitioners and
audiences to the very real darkness – as well as the possibility for
imaginative and ecstatic freedom – that surrounds it.
Though a play must not be moralistic and therefore a sermon, it always
has a moral quality. The condition of a pallid and puritanical culture's
theatre is thus a reflection of its pallid and puritanical morality and
ethics.
Posted at 8.47 am in /Organum
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