Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
|
Thursday, 22 April 2010 From the archivesOriginally written in 2006; from Organum I. Let x equal x. In Negative Dialectics Adorno retracted what he'd said earlier about the possibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz. "A perennial suffering has just as much right to find expression as a victim of torture has to scream," he wrote. "For this reason it may have been wrong to write that after Auschwitz poetry could no longer be written." ("Poetry" a stand-in for artistic expression generally, Adorno engaging in synecdoche here: plays no longer staged, music no longer composed, dance no longer choreographed, paintings no longer executed.) We might be tempted to excuse Adorno's earlier hyperbolic, mandarin edict from the mountain as a reaction to the circumstances of sudden exile, not only from Europe but also from the Enlightenment that Europe represented. But he was right in both respects; the poetry and culture that came after the events of the 1940s could not but recognize those events as symptoms of a new, dark culture, the portal into the dark through which the race as a whole had willingly stepped. (And Wagner, and Brecht, and Schönberg, and Webern, and Schiele, and so many others foresaw this step, and we are still unwilling, many of us, to grant them that: the artists of Weimar become urgent messengers of what is being lost.) To say that these events were mere repetition of events of the past is a willing suspension of historical consciousness itself (never mind a suspension of disbelief, this is a suspension of belief): to posit that the cannon, the gallows, the single-shot rifle, the guillotine and the musket were only the death camps, the Ukrainian famine and the atomic bomb writ small is a value- and history-free conclusion that has excused all the continuing suffering that has followed in its wake: the development of napalm, Cambodia, Darfur, and I speak here only of the suffering that humans have visited on other humans, let alone the life of nature generally. That the bureaucratic, post-capitalist corporation, in the form of business and government entities, had taken the place of the church and the feudal system in organizing this suffering along lines laid out in organization charts, rationalized by advances in the social sciences, was a qualitative, not quantitative, change in the culture that the race had built up around it. It seems to be generally recognized that the consciousness that created the suffering of the 1940s must be radically realigned if that suffering is to be prevented once again. But even as we repeat the cliche that it must not happen again, the culture industry burrows the race deeper into darkness. It also makes the division of ideologies, the labelling of ourselves as progressive, or liberal, or conservative, or reactionary within that consciousness, a rearrangement of deck chairs on the Hindenberg, already alight and burning. If it hasn't crashed yet, its destruction is inevitable. Or we engage in the algebra of suffering and amelioration, looking at science and culture as a continuing quantitative balance: let x equal the suffering that science has brought to the race, y the amelioration of suffering via medicine and agriculture. Is the product of 2x (x representing here the summary execution of a homosexual, or Gypsy, or Shiite Muslim, or an afternoon at Abu Ghraib) equal to that of 1.5y (y representing here a mother's love, or the courage of a man who leaps upon another who has fallen into the path of a subway train, or the boon of digital communication)? This is a Swiftian endeavor straight out of the third book of Gulliver's Travels. It fails in that it ignores historical consciousness entirely, a historical consciousness that is a proper element not only of culture, but most certainly of theatre, music, dance, poetry, and painting. This isn't to say that all post-Holocaust art must somehow reference the Holocaust. But it must look back to that suffering and our role in it, and not merely in our ancestors' and our roles as victims, but as torturers as well. To paraphrase Adorno: You desire evidence as to the darkness of the world that culture has created; now you have the twentieth century. What more evidence do you need? "The concept of a resurrection of culture after Auschwitz is illusory and senseless," Adorno continues, "and for that reason every work of art that does come into being is forced to pay a bitter price. But because the world has outlived its own demise it needs art as its unconscious chronicle." (Emphasis mine -- GH) The poet, composer, performer elicits this unconscious in the service of recognition: the expression of suffering is a form of remembrance of its victims past and acknowledgement of its victims present. Or the poet, composer, performer buries that unconscious more deeply, in trivia and spectacle and the detritus of a culture industry that is peppered through it, the artist excusing its presence as a form of contemporeity or youth, in denying historical consciousness again: not only rewriting history, but erasing it, as Soviet newspaper editors, with their airbrushes, erased inconvenient personages from archival photographs. A new revived consciousness, an exploration of unconsciousness, may provide hope, even if it's illusory, even if it's impossible. But all conventional morality and ethics and culture, which we have pretended to rebuild since 1945, as if this same morality and ethics and culture didn't lead directly to the events of 1945 themselves, will need to be undermined and overturned, from the most basic unit of human contact and communication (that between two human beings) to the most complex (that between individual and community). Art its expression, irreducable to alegbraic equation. (A corollary: Use of language, sound, body in art must also be ruthlessly re-examined, changed, shorn of ease and convention. A post-Holocaust art will not sound or look the same as pre-Holocaust art, in any case; it can't, if it's to provide that unconscious chronicle of what has changed, is changing: through our bodies, what passes through them, and the sounds we make, the words we use, the images we paint. Intelligibility of artistic expression is the construct of culture as well.) Those who call themselves artists need to take all this into consideration at every moment of creation. An apology (or apologia), then, for dour seriousness, or for an anti-illusory aesthetic. But I think I was right. The stakes are higher now. Posted in /Archives |