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Thursday, 31 July 2008
Organum
Cross-posted to the theatre minima journal.
 Slush puppie. Like Proust's madeleine,
any object or image experienced in the noumenal aesthetic moment is seized
by the senses and rendered as a possession of the subject, along with its
emotional and psychic resonances. A man comes across in his
mid-twenties a seemingly innocuous logo, associated with a popular frozen
treat, and he finds that it haunts him for the next twenty years,
quite dissociated from the object it was originally meant to signify. What
is it that haunts him so? The cheery smiling face of the dog, licking his
lips and his head covered by a jaunty knit cap (the dog himself
anthropomorphised, standing on his two hind legs and holding in his left
paw a delicious refreshing drink). The man is overwhelmed by a deep
sadness, the rendering of an emptiness, associated not with the advertised
product but with the dog's quest for happiness on a hot day; for relief.
No doubt this too had its origin in his childhood liking for dogs, for the
companionship of dumb but sympathetic animals. But what he has done
himself (and quite involuntarily) has been to internalise an image and lay
claim to it beyond what its creators originally had in mind. In his
contemplation of the image he sees his childhood and experiences (in that
Proustian manner), a complex of emotions associated with his boyhood, and
a strange loneliness envelops him, moved by the dog's cheerful visage to
tears. "Experience puppie love," a company slogan goes. No love sated by
the sip of a product. ("Why settle for any treat," the company explains,
"when you can satisfy all your senses with a Slush Puppie?") The image
does not divorce the man from himself, but drives him further inward.
I am old enough to remember too that the Ritz
cracker (an advertisement for which I saw on the side of a truck this
morning) was not arbitrarily named. They first came on the market in 1934,
during the Depression years; those who purchased them and served them to
their guests were attracted by and aspired to the glamour of the name
"Ritz," originally the name of a series of high-priced hotels
catering to the upper-classes. Detached from the product itself
(which may be the best cracker in the world, or the worst; ironically, it
is rumored to still be available at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel;
perhaps it is the American version of the madeleine), the word echoes with
a touching aspiration.
The observer seizes the signifiers for his own internal contemplation,
for the echoes within. When a composer calls a work a "symphony" or a
"sonata," the aspirations and the emotions associated with these generic
titles draw personal associations to the fore, for the composer, the
performer and the listener. With discipline and precision, composer,
performer and listener explore the signifier together, but it is always
the individual who defines the signified for himself. The same is true of
the designations "comic" and "tragic," or any narrative tropes exploited
in their construction and experience.
The greatest and most provocative subversion is to wrench the image,
the word, from its signified: to allow the imagination to play among the
signs that surround him: to create an individual world, leaving himself
open to the unexpected resonances of an image to which he brings his own
personal history. This is the only truly subversive and revolutionary act
of the post-capitalist Western consciousness: to render even unto the
most common objects (an advertisement on the side of a truck; a dog)
the luminance of Schopenhauer's thing-in-itself, conceived
aesthetically; aesthetic contemplation, as John Cage knew, emerges from
within the consciousness of the perceiver, not necessarily the artist. The
world and quotidian experience itself is suddenly richer. A radical
tearing of the plant at the roots – an individual, not a community,
project. So our greatest dramatists, from Shakespeare to Beckett to in our
own time Foreman and Barker and Kane have testified, in laying out these
challenges first to themselves, then to their audiences. (In art, the only
true community is the community formed by an artist and the individual
auditor.) So a simple word, or a simple drawing, quite innocuous itself,
can cut deep enough to let blood, engender laughter, and draw tears. But
without our freedom to perceive and imagine, the world remains veiled.
The most common things of this world are sufficient, as Brecht wrote in
what was perhaps his final poem:
And I always thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough. When I say what things are like
Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.
That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself
Surely you see that.
Only to add: For, surely, no one else will stand up for you.
Posted at 9.11 am in /Organum
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