Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Monday, 25 August 2008
Between the end of one empty delusionary spectacle and the beginning of another (a recent precis of the presumptive Democratic nominee's political positions is here), I repost this, originally written in May 2005; introductory text added May 2007 and revised August 2008.
In going through the archives here I've come across this essay, originally dated May 2005. If I had time enough, I'd suggest Adorno and Bataille as two thinkers who bring a Schopenhauerian idea of tragedy into the second half of the 20th century, thereby strengthening the historical basis of the thesis, and consider further the plays of Howard Barker and Sarah Kane, two central figures in the elucidation and creation of a 21st century concept of tragedy, not to mention a consideration of this work and similar trends that inform contemporary music. It stands as it stands, however, a brief, potted and sketchy historical framework for the Organum.
It has been slightly revised.
I
Superfluities readers will remember (if not complain or, for
that matter, ridicule) that I'm
dedicated to some writers to the point of mania: Schopenhauer, Beckett,
Foreman, Brecht, and so on. In one sense (and only one, very selective
sense), these names represent a tradition of one way of thinking about the
world, philosophically and dramatically. Specifically, they indicate a
tension between two schools of post-
Schopenhauer believed himself to be completing a philosophical line of
inquiry that, in the modern world, started with Descartes and Berkeley and
culminated in the Critique of Pure Reason. Descartes'
Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations on First
Philosophy (1640) fall historically and culturally in a radically
charged era of experimentation across all aspects of culture. Within the
span of forty years between 1600 and 1640, the scientific world was
undergoing a massive sea-
In one sense, and this one most unusual, drama and theater seemed to be
ahead of the curve. Descartes' recognition of the dynamic between
subject/
Kant set the limits of human reason and admitted that anything beyond
rationality is unknowable by the rational mind (in the Critique of
Pure Reason [1781/1787]). Now firmly in the Enlightenment, Hegel and
Schopenhauer in quite different ways did away with the traditional
Renaissance concept of a rational maker, but there's more than one way to
kill a God. Hegel, beginning with The Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807), eyes on the recent French Revolution, redefined human
responsibility and effort to the creation and perfection of the
industrialized Nation State, a very convenient body of thought for a
century which saw the rise of the Machine Age and the centralization of
European and American imperial powers. Schopenhauer, on the other hand,
found it impossible to create in the empirical world a replacement for the
metaphysical world, which remained unknowable but sensible through the
individual human body (that is, the driving force of a non-
The failure of the main character in Goethe's Faust (Part I,
1808; Part II, 1831) is the failure of the Hegelian world-
II
Hegel is on the ascendant in German philosophy, offering validity to academia, violence and the Nation State; Schopenhauer is muttering in the background, nonetheless continuing to explicate what Rudiger Safranski called "the three great affronts to human megalomania":
The cosmological affront: our world is one of countless spheres in infinite space, with a "mildew of living and sentient beings" existing on it. The biological affront: man is an animal, whose intelligence must compensate for a lack of instinct and for inadequate adaptation to the living world. The psychological affront: our conscious ego is not master in its own house.
The first of these might be called the Galilean affront and the second of these the Darwinian affront. The third, however, awaited a label, and it waited until 1900 and the publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. In the meantime, Hegel's project was taken up by Marxist studies: if not utopian, at least ameliorative, certainly a desire that mankind would thrust violently forward into history and wind up with something more than blood on its hands. Marx provided a rationale for this desire in an oddly sentimental picture of mankind every bit the product of Victorian and utilitarian industrialist thinking.
This isn't to say that Marxist analysis is entirely
off-
Freud reconceived for the scientific twentieth century (though not very scientifically) the same questions about consciousness that Descartes formulated in the seventeenth, and Kant and Schopenhauer shortly thereafter: How and why do we see what we see, and what is it exactly we're seeing? What is time and memory, and how do we manipulate these, consciously and unconsciously, to define ourselves as individuals? (See this for more about Freud's debt to Schopenhauer. And at about the same time, in Zurich in 1905, Einstein was overturning the Newtonian certainty about the way the world works with a much more skeptical approach to the picture of the cosmos that mankind presented to itself.) But Marx's aim to amelioration and redemption through social and political engagement and Freud's pessimistic assessment of the irrational drives of human existence (which he found explicated in the drama of Arthur Schnitzler; Marx didn't find much to say about theater in his major writings) were on some level incompatible.
It took the experience of the First World War to demonstrate the
incompatibility of these ideas of human definition and suffering. Far from
the War to End All Wars, World War I seems in retrospect to have been only
the War to Begin All the Rest. It marked not only the failure of the
Nation State conceived as empire but also the failure of ameliorative
revolution: all the French and 1848 Revolutions, all the labor-
Odd thing about that year 1918: it was also the year in which Bertolt
Brecht, perhaps the most talented and Shakespearean (at least in terms of
theatrical ambition, scale and variety) playwright of the early- and
mid-
Sometime in the early 1920s, though, somebody gave Brecht a copy of Das Kapital, and that was that. Since the late 1980s, Brecht's career has been in eclipse – a major tragedy, since Brecht's career exemplifies better than any other theatrical career of the century the conflict between the Hegelian and Schopenhauerian world views in Western drama, the conflict which is at the core of my thesis. His life's work also offers interesting parallels to Freud's own, for 1920 also saw the publication of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a work seemingly conditioned in part by Freud's response to the First World War. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud revised the theory of libidinal and egoistic drives to include a dynamic structure of the mind itself, driven by the irrational urge to dissipation, death and destruction.
Reconceived in this light, even Brecht's later plays, especially his masterpiece Life of Galileo, take on interesting new metaphysical features. While Brecht had little time for metaphysics in his drama (though his poetry is a rather different story), plays like Galileo, Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle can be read as the repetition of unconscious conflicts between desire and knowledge, appetite and satiation, the urge to permanence in an ephemeral objective world. The Hegelian dialectic demonstrated in the structure of these plays is undermined by their remarkably ambivalent poetry (which here too strives toward Shakespearean heights; of all twentieth century playwrights with the possible exception of Heiner Müller, Brecht seems to have been most haunted by the Bard, producing at least four adaptations or revisions of Shakespeare and Marlowe's Edward II, as well as taking a crack at John Webster with The Duchess of Malfi).
III
Four years before Brecht died in 1956, Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, that metaphysical vaudeville, and in 1957 Harold Pinter adapted Beckett's technique and worldview for a more traditional, naturalistic voice with The Room. Beckett, the subject of several years of Jungian psychoanalysis and a keen student of both Descartes and Schopenhauer, was in the midst of exploring the limits of Cartesian rationalism and just beginning to creep beyond it in his series of three postwar novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. At the end of his career, Brecht got what he wished for, a theater in a socialist state, only to find it less the workers' paradise than he'd expected. Beckett and Pinter, in apparently turning away from a Hegelian, dialectic point of view, became playwrights for the latter half of the 20th century by recognizing the bloodbath of suffering and seeking a new means of perception for a contemporary world that history had failed.
When a modern world disappoints, mankind looks back. Mythology and mysticism, interpreted in such books as The Golden Bough, had re-emerged in the Modernist years between the two World Wars in the work of its two greatest poets, Eliot and Yeats, who found that this solution was no solution in the face of the hydrogen bomb. (Yeats died in 1939, having foreseen the end of the world in "The Second Coming"; Eliot's response to the war years was the Four Quartets, a retreat to contemplative Christianity.) Beckett and Pinter gained no such comfort from these products of mankind's imagination. They looked instead not to the past, nor to the future, but to the dynamics and intracacies of the ways we perceive the present moment.
[NOTE: In another post from around the same period, I also
defined the changed historical context which differentiated the work of
the pre-
To reach the essence of this moment, Beckett stripped the phenomenal world to its bare elements: nature (a tree, a sky, a mound), simple machines to serve its inhabitants (bicycles, a tape recorder). All else was the product of his characters' imagination, his characters' ongoing perception through the duration of a play's staging. The past infested the present moment, as did the future, but in exploring the shifting dynamic of consciousness he brought the structural concepts of the Schopenhauerian and Freudian experience to the stage. Mythology and mysticism were extrinsic to an individual, conscious, physical body, which had more than enough to torture it in its own past, its tendency to forgetting and decay, and the foreknowledge of its death.
At the same time, Jacques Lacan was postulating an abandonment of Jung
and a rediscovery of Freud. Like Beckett, Lacan in revising Freud
perceived the structure of the unconscious in language itself; moreover,
he posited the idea of an integrated self as an impossibility, finding a
sort-
As French students were rioting in the streets of Paris in 1968,
Richard Foreman in a small theater down a New York side-
Like Joyce, who imagined himself (through his character Stephen
Dedalus) standing to the side of his creation, paring his nails, Foreman
was present at every performance, controlling each light and sound cue
through a patched-
IV
So-
Another instinctual thought was that Western philosophy following Kant divided into two streams, one which sought to find redemption and salvation in entering into the phenomenal world fully (Hegel) and another which sought to find redemption and salvation in retreat from and renunciation of the phenomenal world (Schopenhauer). Because we most readily and directly experience this phenomenal world through our physical senses, the question of the origin of the experience and the ability to conceive of a world find their greatest artistic possibilities in live performance. Since Wittgenstein, the 20th century has been struggling to find the underlying structure of this experience through language itself. Spoken language remains the domain of drama and the embodied performer remains the domain of theater.
The cultural revolutions of the 1960s and the absorption of Marxist studies into the academy have validated the Hegelian point-of-view at the expense of Schopenhauer's approach to the world. The American playwrights that this social and academic perspective has produced – everybody from Amiri Baraka and Megan Terry through August Wilson, Tony Kushner and Chuck Mee – have tended to obscure texts and theatrical performances informed by a non-Hegelian approach. The inclusion into the plays of these writers of historical figures and settings, popular culture "texts" and instrumentalist rhetoric reveal this search for meaning and significance in a strictly phenomenal world at the expense of noumenal aesthetic experience. Theater audiences, because they can recognize these figures, "texts" and rhetoric more readily than a more demanding aesthetic experience that denies these moorings in the real world, have tended to validate them more readily than a non-Hegelian approach.
Theater and drama are in aesthetic crisis. Even among smaller, more experimental companies, one finds mission and program statements that increasingly mean nothing. If you've found some of the writing in this series of posts difficult to parse, I have to maintain that you can't find a better example of meaninglessness than in the mission statements of non-profit theater companies. Here are two, the names of these companies deleted to protect the guilty:
[Name of theater] is dedicated to providing a creative environment that fosters imagination and risk-taking in its artists. Through the production of classical texts, contemporary plays, and new works, [theater] hopes to shed light on some of the nuances, trials, and triumphs of being human.
*****
Founded in 1979, [name of theater] produces challenging and unpredictable new theatre and fosters the creative work of artists with whom we share a vision. With a community of artists and audience members, we explore perspectives on our collective history and responses to the events and institutions that shape our lives.
[Theater] is dedicated to nurturing artists at all stages of their careers and to developing provocative and thrilling new works. In addition to staging full productions, we maintain a series of programs specifically designed to provide artists with the support they need and a venue within which to hear their works.
Such statements to me are impenetrably meaningless; they can be used to describe any kind of theater, from Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi to Neil Simon's Jake's Women. Phrases like "hopes to shed light on some of the nuances, trials, and triumphs of being human" and "explore perspectives on our collective history and responses to the events and institutions that shape our lives" are, carefully examined, so broad and general as to be useless in determining aesthetic practice and dimension, making a mockery of the word "mission" itself. It's an anything-goes philosophy, throwing plays at the wall to see if any of them stick.
As generous as this language is to those who choose to call themselves artists, its vacuity lacks any vision for a theatrical future that will have meaning to audiences real or potential. It will take more than good intentions and self-congratulation to create a significant theater and drama for the 21st century.
Posted at 4.36 pm in /Archives
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