On Art and the Self?

Stasis. Static. Image. Icon. Effigy. Form. Structure. The language of aesthetics is stuffed with the utopia of immutability. Something about art makes things frozen, and therefore stable, and therefore both attractive and unreal. I am struck by this.

I am struck by Joe Roach’s concepts of surrogation and effigy, and I wonder if they are relevant not just to cultural studies but to identity theory. Do we only know ourselves as images? Are we attracted to the theater because it dramatizes the process by which the fragmented self (actor) is transformed into a stable essential self (character, form, effigy)? Do we really ever “know” someone, or for that matter ourselves, except as fictionally stable entities?

I think about Derrida (and Foucault, Lacan, et. al.)’s discovery of the slipper signifier and the resulting problem of the unstable, fragmented self. I wonder if, by turning Saussurean semiotics into a dramatic ficture, he has turned life into theater. For, indeed, all meaning, it would seem, is but the occupation of a theatrical role, since every signifier defers its meaning except in which the moment that meaning is cohered for use. Meaning is made. We can only know things, including ourselves, as stable, and therefore as theatrically (or aesthetically?) fictive. That’s the only way we can function (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche: “The best life is lived aesthetically”).

When we ask, “What is the meaning of life?,” we’re looking for the transcendental signifier, to turn theatre into life (hence the anti-theatrical, Platonic prejudice: We don’t like believe that the things we know are mere shadows on a wall). To accept the “truths” of deconstruction is to accept that all being is role-playing, theatre.

Is this part of what’s so hard about being oneself? We are asked, from a young age, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” What is being asked is not what do you want to do, but rather what effigy/essential form one would like to occupy. I like the word “occupy” because it suggests temporaneity—we can’t be there forever. And this is what’s so hard about our lives, that we never “live up” to the role-icons we create for ourselves. The entire project is faulty, of course, but also a part of having a human psyche, and we love celebrities because they seem to have “made it”—to have made successful effigies for themselves. Except, of course, all celebrities feel they don’t “live up” to their own effigies—hence the drugs and the psychic breakdowns and the need for radical privacy, etc.

Musical theatre (and music generally) offers transcendence: A fictive world in which theatre is life and life is theatre? A fictive world in which fragment human beings can rise the level of souls, effigies, stable selves?

Stasis and Esthetics

From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin, 1964), pgs 204–206

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

…A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions.

…You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to posses, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

…The desire and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really unesthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.

…Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.

…Rhythm is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part.

…We are right to speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art.

On What I'm Doing Here

After I presented my paper at ATHE today, on the Illusion of Presence in the Musical Theatre, my dear friend and colleague Joseph Cermatori asked me a lot of really important questions. Given that he’s way smarter than me, a lot of what he was trying to say flew past me, though a few things I remember he mentioned:
• My paper argues that there is something significant about the switch back and forth between speech and song in the musical that is different from a continuous one or the other, but baroque theory suggests otherwise – read Mark Franco and also Matt Wilson-Smith’s chapter on Brecht in his Total Work of Art
• I really need to spell out my argument in terms of form. Bring Pirandello front and center
• Importance of interacting with the neo-Platonists. Alain Badiou, Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, etc

I wonder if perhaps, the larger project here really is an intervention in philosophy, not just in theatre and performance studies. I think I have a broad view of all the fields I’ve been immersed in—queer theory, musicology and reception, performance studies, twentieth-century continental philosophy, theatre history criticism—and find the very idea of essential, stable, self-present form as a problem/unifier among all these differences. Maybe my really big argument. Like, my intervention in the Humanities Field at large, is an investigation into the role of form in shaping our lives, perceptions, epistemologies, identities, experiences, etc. I disagree with Derrida that the human species is capable of, at some indeterminate future, being able to live without metaphysics, and without need to relate to the world in terms of binaries and essentially self-present language, subjects, etc. I disagree—mostly based on experience and intuition, not on empiricism—and I think the implications of this are quite large. I think we need to rethink our relationship to essentialism, as something we have to live with, as the only way we can make sense of the world. Implications for:
•Joe Roach’s theory of surrogation – the very possibility of a “copy” or an “original” necessitates a “form” that must be filled or emptied but can never be erased; we can’t live without it
•Realism: Is realism really so inherently conservative and evil as Barthes and Lyotard make it out to be?
•Musical theatre and stardom and celebrity (and for that matter RELIGION and ETHICS)
•The anti-theatrical prejudice, and (neo)-Platonism
•Activism and politics (how different are my theories from Gayatri Spivak’s?)
•Performance studies: Is not this field an attempt to get around Derrida’s argument that all meaning is deferred meaning, by instead articulating modes of knowing that are embodied and not semiotic/linguistic? But isn’t the very idea of a form to be
“per” fundamental to Performance Studies itself?
•is Derrida the end of philosophy? Is Performance Studies an attempt to replace philosophy by going around but not through it?
•The question: Are there ways to make meaning without sign systems? If so, this is very important to know.