Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
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Thursday, 06 November 2008
Archives: On Reading Howard Barker's Gertrude
Originally published on 27 November 2006. It has been lightly revised.
Statements of intent. There are practical outcomes and effects
in approaching theatre as sensual lyricism, one such effect a growing
realization of contemporary theatre's death (and not a tragic death that
contemplates the ends of ecstasy and the decay of the body, but a psychic
death of numbed, anaesthetized nerve endings and cold shallow eyes of
glass). Death inhering in unquestioning acceptance of the falsehoods of
meaning-
I no longer ever ask questions about meaning aloud, questions about meaning invite that hideously vapid death. René Char: "No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions." Especially the question, "What does it mean?" Which is attempted homicide and should be prosecuted and punished as such.
I would prefer (dramatist as composer) not untrained performers but
performers trained as musicians (actress and actor as joined with
instrument, that instrument the body, speaking, as musical instruments are
beautiful and profoundly integral and sovereign in their histories and
construction when silent but most beautiful when sounded); as with
soloists or chamber ensembles, the director or conductor utterly
unnecessary; the text itself director enough, the score itself conductor
enough. (Directors are meaning-
Continual, renewed recognition of the need for secret conspiracies, among spiritual co-conspirators, in darkened rooms. This is also as political as it sounds.
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Monday, 20 October 2008
Archives: Changing the Subject
Originally published on 28 October 2005. It has been lightly revised.
Again and again these days I see films and plays being promoted to audiences on the basis of the many "interesting" real-
life subjects presented in those works. It seems we live in a world where everyone is interested above all else in "interesting subjects." But shockingly – I maintain, that the desire for subjects of "interesting subject matter" is, in fact, an avoidance of the REAL subject of real art, which is – What?
The real subject is presence itself, the scintillating "presence," of any and all selected items – but presented in such a way that one's primary experience (the aesthetic experience) is to realize that the SUBJECT ITSELF doesn't matter – but is always in fact the TRIVIAL aspect of the art event.
That trivial aspect (the "subject") is what we focus on when we choose NOT to be deeply engaged with what art is deeply about – the full, multi-
dimensional "presence" of whatever subject is being obliterated by the power of "present- ness." However, by the usual gluing of our attention onto the ostensible "subject matter" – we try to protect ourselves from the deep ego- shattering experience of art. Richard Foreman
"Notes on Zomboid!"
Traditional metaphysics from Plato on suggests that our perception of
the world is rooted in a formal subject/
The object par excellence in the theater is the speaking human
body, of course, and it relates philosophically speaking to our own
somewhat schizophrenic status in the world. Hopping onto my
Schopenhauerian/
Foreman is right to locate the aesthetic experience in "presence" rather than "subject matter," that is in the perceiver's experience of the object rather than the perceived object itself. What is interesting to me is in how this relates specifically to the theatrical experience of the body: the body of the actor, but also the body of the individual audience member, or the perceiver. And in a way this suggests an association with Grotowski's "selfless" actor.
One of the aims in Grotowski's project is to train the actor to use his
body "selflessly," that is, to discipline his technique to the extent that
this Kantian thing-
Far from cold and academic, far from theoretical, the bodied
experience is on the contrary warm, accessible, passionate. And it
must be so, for two reasons: suffering and sex, Thanatos and Eros. Our
bodies are vehicles for the Thing-
Where does the playwright come in all this – in this Grotowskian,
Foremanesque theater? As I mentioned above, the speaking human body is the
essential element of the theater, as the moving human body is that of
dance, the sound-
I'm trying, at the moment, to consider the craft of playwriting contemplated by the Grotowskian or Foremanesque project of theater, and I've come to no firm conclusions, except that as a dramatist I have to train myself as the actor trains himself or herself: to work to minimize, discipline or eliminate that self so that this will, as a linguistic construct, can emerge through the work. This does not lead to a concept of anything like automatic or extemporaneous writing as a text for the theater. Instead, it leads to the need to allow those complex linguistic constructs, as we've experienced them through our interactions with myth, character and narrative ourselves, free and unfettered rein through our own personal experience and consciousness; by discipline I mean the ability to strip away everything that is linguistically extraneous to our expression of the will as reflected through myth, character and narrative, as the performer him or herself struggles against all the blocks and restraints that prevent a full bodily expression of that will.
This differs from the strictly literary project of poetry or prose in that it presents an opportunity for the dramatist to further eradicate that self and to enter into a new relationship with the performer and the audience: a new sympathetic, compassionate relationship.
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Tuesday, 30 September 2008
The problem and the joy of the Internet, some wag once said, is that
trying to remove anything from it, once there, is like trying to get pee
out of a swimming pool. So, though I have no control over it, I can still
see, via The Internet Archive at www.archive.org, the home page of Superfluities as it appeared on 1 October 2003,
the unofficial debut of the blog you're reading now. Though apparently
I had been writing Superfluities off-
Though at the time theatre and drama had a relatively small role to
play in the writing there, that would change very rapidly, and six months
later nearly all of the postings had something to do with theatre and
drama, as they do now. Looking back over that half-
And some things haven't changed. In 2008, as in 2003, I write without a
journalistic, academic or professional portfolio, and advertising
continues to have no place on these pages. This latter has been constant,
but the former hasn't always been so. In 2006 I wrote a few
dozen reviews on a freelance basis for the New York Times, an
association that ended when fellow blogger and Times freelancer Rob
Kendt turned in a positive review of my play In Public, which was
ex post facto spiked by the editors as representing a
"conflict-
Oh well. And as I've continued to maintain the blog my time has been
less and less entirely my own, with a current full-
Superfluities and its successor Superfluities Redux were never places to share my political opinions (why anybody should care about those – though I do have them, like everybody else – is beyond me), nor my personal life (about which they should care even less, it being, after all, none of their business). Everything I have to say publicly about either can be found in my plays and in the Organums One and Two. I'm glad to say that I've regretted nothing I've said here over the past five years. Outside of that, I have been glad to do my small bit to encourage other theatre bloggers and take note of some productions and dramatists that have been of particular significance for me, especially if they might have gotten a little lost in the hysteria and hype that contribute to the background noise of the New York theatre world. And I've tried to be constant about this; the only substantive break I've taken was last September, when I took a month off to indulge in my Albee Foundation fellowship and write the first draft of What She Knew.
That said, Superfluities has changed my life in countless ways. No need to go into these here, but it has changed not least in that it has brought to me a few new friends who have broadened my world and my imaginative life, and whose acquaintance I cherish. They know who they are. Some of them I haven't met in person. I hope to do so one day, though this in no way lessens the tremendous affection and regard I hold for them already; those days on which I find their emails in my inbox are a little brighter than all the rest. And I find as my conceptions and reconceptions of theatre and drama becoming more and more radical, these friends have become closer and closer (even if they agree or disagree with what I write here, find it more or less valid), rendering the dividing lines between the art of theatre, the fashioning of self and the conduct of life more and more invisible. This is perhaps inevitable, if the urge to dramatic creation is felt as deeply as it should be. They have seen me through many difficult times, wittingly and unwittingly. To them this work is dedicated, and because of them I look forward to what might be accomplished here, and on whatever stages I may haunt, in the next five years.
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Wednesday, 24 September 2008
Originally posted on 8 September 2006.
Adorno | Sontag | Müller (Past | Present | Future)
The eternity of Wagnerian music, like that of the poem of the Ring, is one which proclaims that nothing has happened; it is a state of immutability that refutes all history by confronting it with the silence of nature. The Rhine maidens who are playing with the gold at the start of the opera and receive it back at the end are the final statement both of Wagner's wisdom and of his music. Nothing is changed; and it is the dynamics of the individual parts that reinstate the amorphous primal condition.
Theodor Adorno
***
The self, or spirit, discovers itself in the break with "the world" ...
only when morality has been deliberately flouted is the individual capable
of a radical transformation: entering into a state of grace that leaves
all moral categories behind. ... Founded on an exacerbation of dualisms
(body-
Susan Sontag (on Antonin Artaud)
***
He who is identical with himself might as well have himself buried, he doesn't exist any more, isn't moving any more. Identical is a monument. What we need is the future and not the eternity of the moment. We have to dig up the dead again and again, because only from them can we obtain a future.
Necrophilia is love of the future. One has to accept the presence of the dead as dialogue partners or dialogue-disturbers – the future will emerge only out of dialogue with the dead.
Heiner Müller
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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.
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