Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater

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Thursday, 18 March 2010

Jonathan Swift

[The] chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it, and if I could compass that designe without hurting my own person or Fortune I would be the most Indefatigable writer you have ever seen ... Since you will now be so much better employd when you think of the World give it one lash the more at my Request. I have ever hated all Nations professions and Communityes and all my love is towards individualls for instance I hate the tribe of Lawyers, but I love Councellor such a one, Judge such a one for so with Physicians (I will not Speak of my own Trade) Soldiers, English, Scotch, French; and the rest but principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I hartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth. this is the system upon which I have governed my self many years (but do not tell) and so I shall go on till I have done with them I have got Materials Towards a Treatis proving the falsity of that Definition animal rationale; and to show it should be only rationalis capax. Upon this great foundation of Misanthropy (though not Timons manner) The whole building of my Travells is erected ...

Mr. Lewis sent me an Account of Dr Arbuthnett's Illness which is a very sensible Affliction to me, who by living so long out of the World have lost that hardness of Heart contracted by years and generall Conversation. I am daily loosing Friends, and neither seeking nor getting others. O, if the World had but a dozen Arbuthnetts in it I would burn my Travells. ...

Jonathan Swift
Letter to Alexander Pope, 29 September 1725
Greenberg/Piper edition, Norton, 1973

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Wednesday, 03 March 2010

Quotes: Howard Barker and Morton Feldman on indifference

I do these things
Oh how I persist I am at least persistent
And I ask
Does anybody want them?
The answer comes back
Nobody at all
So I go on.

Howard Barker
The Forty

I never felt, for example, that I was remaking society, but I felt that my work demonstrated a kind of intellectual atmosphere of the most formulative, creative part of my life, my early twenties. I was in a society of painters and writers, that were absolutely free, but for another reason, [had] nothing to do with politics. They were free, I was free, because nobody cared. And maybe that not caring is the best type of freedom possible, either for society or composer. Nobody cared. My father cared, because he didn't want me to be a composer, but no one else cared. I gave performances, people really didn't care. They didn't have the energy even to hiss or boo, that's how disinterested they were. And I always felt that that was the best type of environment to be an artist — indifference — I don't mind indifference.

Morton Feldman
In conversation, 1972

Tonight, Wednesday, 3 March, at 8.00pm, Marilyn Nonken performs the 95-minute Morton Feldman piano solo Triadic Memories at the Players Theatre, 115 Macdougal Street. Tickets are $20.00 and available online here.

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Friday, 25 September 2009

Quotes: Horkheimer and Adorno on things and souls

Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things. On its own account, even in advance of total planning, the economic apparatus endows commodities with the values which decide the behavior of people. Since, with the ending of free exchange, commodities have forfeited all economic qualities except their fetish character, this character has spread like a cataract across the life of society in all its aspects. The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent and rational one. Their criterion is self-preservation, successful or unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function and the schemata assigned to it. Everything which is different, from the idea to criminality, is exposed to the force of the collective, which keeps watch from the classroom to the trade union. Yet even the threatening collective is merely a part of the deceptive surface, beneath which are concealed the powers which manipulate the collective as an agent of violence. Its brutality, which keeps the individual up to the mark, no more represents the true quality of people than value represents that of commodities. The demonically distorted form which things and human beings have taken on in the clear light of unprejudiced knowledge points back to domination, to the principle which already impaired the qualities of mana to spirits and deities and trapped the human gaze in the fakery of sorcerers and medicine men. The fatalism by which incomprehensible death was sanctioned in primeval times has now passed over into utterly comprehensible life. The noonday panic fear in which nature suddenly appeared to humans as an all-encompassing power has found its counterpart in the panic which is ready to break out at any moment today: human beings expect the world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by a universal power which they themselves are and over which they are powerless.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, 1947 [21-22]

Below, a video of Adorno from a German documentary. Narrated in German, Adorno's remarks themselves, which begin about 55 seconds into the clip, are subtitled in English:

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Next 3 entries

Superfluities Redux home page

George Hunka home page

theatre minima home page

Theory and polemic
95 Sentences About Theatre (2007)
Organum I (2006-2007)
Organum II (2008-2009)
Critique of Tragedy (2010-continuing)

Notes
Howard Barker 1
Howard Barker 2
Samuel Beckett 1
Samuel Beckett 2
Bertolt Brecht
Richard Foreman 1
Richard Foreman 2
Je Suis Sang
Sarah Kane
Music
Marilyn Nonken
Saint Oedipus

Contact
geh@panix.com