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Home > Tragedy
Wednesday, 03 March 2010
An audience for a theatre that does not yet go to the theatre.
Perhaps the worst advice ever offered in creative writing classes is:
"Write what you know." All too often, this leads to a paralysis of
imagination — that it is the immediate cultural world, the class,
the biographical anecdote that should be the inspiration for the dramatic
work. It values the knowledge of immediate personal experience over that
of the imagination; the knowledge won by a deep penetration of imaginative
experience is the knowledge proper to the theatre; the knowledge of
immediate personal experience, the anecdote, proper to the barroom
conversation. Perhaps this is an American trope; perhaps too this is a
reason for the paucity of imaginative political theatre on U.S. stages.
The denial of the knowledge provided by individual imagination keeps the
theatre in the immediate neighborhood. It does not create a larger
world.
Sarah Kane's statement "I am quite happy to aim at the smallest
audience possible, which is myself, because I am the only person who is
definitely going to see this play anyway. That's why I try to please
myself" is not a motto of artistic arrogance but more a motto of humility.
It speaks instead to common humanity, not an aristocratic conception of
imagination or the aesthetic project. If a British woman in her 20s with a
fairly conventional education and upbringing can draw parallels between a
middle-aged man and a developmentally-disabled woman in a Leeds
hotel room and a battle in a Bosnian city, her statement implies, anyone,
any audience, may be able to draw these same parallels. They are available
through the same imaginative power of the individual audience member,
should they be open to it and despite the efforts of the Culture Industry
to kill the individual imagination itself. But these parallels are won not
through personal experience but through an individual imaginative reach
inwards towards the core of their humanity and outwards towards the world
beyond the self. The resulting drama is an offering of this personal
imaginative experience to the audience, not an imposition of a perspective
that seeks to tie up loose ends — to teach or to entertain. The
Culture Industry's corporations through the media (its music, its
newspapers, its television channels, its plays and its films) increasingly
suffocate the individual imagination through this so-called education
and entertainment to provide the kind of puling, paralyzing resignation
(room for the natural disasters of Haiti and Chile, none for the genocides
of Rwanda and Bosnia) that is a far cry from Schopenhauer's conception of
the word. And yet, the products of this industry are what contemporary
American dramatists apparently "know" best.
David Ian Rabey on Howard Barker, although his comments offer a
perspective for other dramatists and theatre practitioners as well,
rather than being limited to Barker's individual body of work:
Barker aims to create an authentically theatrical art,
different in style and objectives from film and television; he sees no
point in the theatre trying to compete with these other media, or seek a
reflected glamour by what must inevitably remain a second-hand
association with their style and effects. He aims to move theatre onto a
different ground. He repudiates both entertainment and pedagogic
enlightenment (which both offer to answer all questions and resolve all
contradictions) as ultimate objectives of the theatrical experience.
Rather, he creates a theatre which offers a deeper imaginative opposition
to society through speculations involving a questioning relief from
prevalent social ideals. This theatre becomes a space which is resistant
to social pressures and necessities; and the suspension of these forces
and promises entails anxiety, rather than more conventional forms of
pleasure. Here the actor, through his/her diction, rhythm and movement,
has to mesmerise and fascinate the audience to continue and extend their
considerations of possibilities. It may be that the audience for this
theatre does not yet go to the theatre. But it might, if it
encountered a theatre ... which offered something more than what is
currently conventionally associated with "theatre." This is a theatre that
proposes that nothing is impossible.
"Raising Hell: Introduction"
Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard
Barker (pp 13-14)
Emphasis my own.
Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here.
Home > Tragedy
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Squaring the dark-suited, professorial librarian of Paris
with the first-person narrator of Story of the Eye or, for that matter, the
philosopher of Erotism or The Accursed Share is an
instructive affair. The wild imaginings of these writers are hard to find
in the demeanor of the interviewee. It points to a paradox of ecstasy and
reserve in the most radicalized of writers. If one aspires to explore the
farther reaches of imagination, it seems to suggest, one is
well-advised to keep one's nose clean: to avoid offense in appearance
or manner, in order to clear the way for the private imaginings conducted
behind closed doors. But this is not all, for in the world of the casual
week, never mind the casual Friday, this care in appearance and behavior,
this leaning towards formality even in friendships, seems almost
ostentatious. And so it is. However, there is ostentation too in the
self-conscious self-presentation of the apparent democratic
populist, the friend of the working man and the oppressed: one sees it in
Brecht especially, though Brecht, at least, retained some of that cultural
radicalism and ambivalence. The same can't be said for the
blue-jeaned, running-shoed individual of our day, iPod clicking
in his ears and tweets running over his iPhone or Blackberry. Inevitably,
this behavior and costume betray a philistinism of which its subjects are
proud: it is moral and aesthetic authoritarianism clad in a t-shirt,
but authoritarianism nonetheless, partaking gladly of the offerings of the
Culture Industry (whose products include styles of fashion and demeanor),
subsuming a blind self in mad consumption. And thirsting for the
power, influence and money to messianically change the world, always
in his own image, and kill the autonomous individual human being through
ignorance and distance. This is, today, the status quo, especially of
theatre.
The pursuit of tragic experience, which takes us to the outer reaches
of imagination, paradoxically flourishes in this formal milieu, which in
the twenty-first century is subversive all on its own. The ladies and
gentlemen of tragedy, then: even as their behavior, manner and mien seem
to partake of high-bourgeois culture, it is a high-bourgeois
culture of almost a hundred years ago, and so radical in our time. It
denies the desire for power and influence, seeing through its transparency
and smilingly shrugging at its vanity. (Money it wants too — so do
we all — but earned rather than as its due merely for existing.) It
partakes of glamour and style, even in behavior: moderation and a
good-natured personability, a tendency towards self-control and
restraint (an absence from projects which create new forms of
individualized white noise, like virtual social networking within arenas
owned by corporations; besides, we need the time and silence for the work)
rather than an excess of personality; we keep our counsel; an eye towards
how we are seen. And not seen — we are gathered at cocktail parties
on the side. We are comfortable even in our uncomfortable though carefully
chosen clothes, our costumes which hint at the elegant bodies beneath; our
recognition of each other makes us community; our imaginations soar in the
tragic theatres we make. An elite, if self-elected for all that: but
there are enough of us.
Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here.
Home > Tragedy
Monday, 22 February 2010
Schopenhauer's radicalism did not lie in the metaphysics laid out in
the first book of The World as Will and Representation — it
is a distilled and corrected Kantianism that can be found there, and
Schopenhauer paid his debt to it. Apart from his personal example as
explored by Nietzsche in "Schopenhauer as Educator," it lay instead in three
things: first, his identification of the will as the thing-in-itself (as
dark and pessimistic as this was, it is not for that reason invalid or
untrue); second, his placing of aesthetic experience above that of science
or abstract philosophy as the means to experience of the noumenal; and
third, his integration of Eastern philosophies into his own Western
tradition. But it is the ironic fate of visionary radicals like
Schopenhauer that history has its joke: for it is necessarily incomplete
at the time of its writing. Schopenhauer had completed the first volume of
his magnum opus in 1818/19, a time during which the bloody recognitions of
the French Revolution were fresh in the European mind, and the Industrial
Revolution was just beginning. As newly industrialized cities experienced
their explosive growth in the following two decades, Modernism itself
emerged as a peculiarly democratic and urban response in the work of
Baudelaire and Büchner, both of whom were likely directly influenced
by Schopenhauer's philosophy (see, for example, Shehira Doss-Davezac's
essay "Schopenhauer according to the Symbolists: the philosophical roots
of late nineteenth-century French aesthetic theory," in this volume). The poet and the playwright set out to
accomplish in art what Schopenhauer had accomplished in philosophy: an
event which Schopenhauer, with his favoring of art over science, would
certainly have approved.
But this urbanization and industrialization also called for new
economics and new psychology which emerged with the formal theory of
communism and class struggle of Karl Marx and the exhilarating
psychological findings of Sigmund Freud. The years 1818-1914 were a time
of relative peace in Europe; Marx's surplus value (which Bataille would
then reconfigure as excess or plethora) was absorbed by the growth of the
cities and capital itself. But, as Bataille would suggest, this excess
energy created by industrialism and capitalism would burst from their
limits: too large for the cities and the banks, it would then emerge as
war or in some other manner. Ultimately, in 1945, its energy would
literally explode, laying waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Asia; its
administrative energy in the system of the concentration and death camps
scattered through central Europe.
These were phenomenal manifestations of the Schopenhauerian
thing-in-itself as well, and in their wake the place of art and
community needed to be wholly reconceived (the sociological, psychological
and aesthetic project of the Frankfurt School under Horkheimer and
Adorno). But this reconception would take place in a culture in which
Schopenhauer's visions had come to obvious fruition. It was Adorno's
project to suggest how to philosophize and make art in the shadow of these
manifestations; Bataille's to reconceive art and community. In both, Eros,
not Thanatos, provides the guiding spirit of any possible redemption, in
the dark shadows of the drive to death that Freud described. This is the
historical and philosophical situation in which tragedy's necessity became
more and more acute, as both Adorno and Bataille well recognized. It was
an urgent call for music and drama, the two greatest art forms, to be
reconceived under these new shadows. Married to Schopenhauer's radical
thought, it suggests a new tragedy for the 21st century.
In comedy the anxiety of the self is dissipated in laughter; in
melodrama, in tears; in agitprop, in anger. In tragedy it finds a silence
in which the self is forced to turn inward, its anxiety pure and
complete; it is faced full, without escape.
Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here.
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