Remember

There are always rules. Total freedom is total annihilation. This is true in theatre and in life.

Performance is movement in relation to rules. What is produced by the dissonance is an idea. The idea is that that is a way of doing, and maybe a way it has always been done.

Theatricality is the space in which one can see an apparatus in its entirety, and subjects working in relation to that apparatus. (Because onstage, anything can happen, and so a whole different set of rules may be established.) This is true, of course, because theatre is itself an apparatus.

It’s not that originality and revolution don’t exist. It’s just that they don’t come from outer space. It’s not that rules can’t be changed. It’s that they can’t be abolished altogether.

Actors knows this, but dancers know this better: Freedom comes from constriction (or, one might say, structure), not from its annihilation. The more the better.

Shakespeare's Bohemia and Happy Endings

Having just come from Michael Greif’s Shakespeare in the Park production of The Winter’s Tale at the Delacorte, where he got acts 4 and 5 right (1 and 2 were a bust thanks to a weak Leontes, things began to improve in act 3), I’m struck by how useful this play might be to a discussion of aesthetic resolution and the politics of the happy ending.

The play, it seems, doesn’t just offer the pleasure of a happy resolution to a terrible series of injustices and failures of judgment - it makes that resolution the subject of the play’s philosophical inquiry. It defamiliarizes it, in other words, thus making its pleasure unique from other happy endings. By leaving the Bad News (acts 1-3, culminating in that dastardly bear) so awkwardly disjointed from the Good News (acts 4-5) through the clunky device of Time, the aesthetic artificiality of the latter is underscored. This is further effected by the roundabout means of the plot’s resolution—olyxenes’s random decision to spy, Autolycus’s random acts of intervention, the timing of Camillo’s desire to return home, etc.—all of which underscore the artificiality of the ending.

The scene with the statue, then, can be read as a represented wish fulfillment—of the audience’s desire for the represented to become the Real, for life to be just like a play with a happy ending. The statue, of course, being a work of art, offers only the image of happiness. Its transubstantiation brings the image into the real—with the simultaneous fact, of course, that it’s all still contained within a play. It would be as though we were staring at the shadows in Plato’s cave, wishing them to come to life, only to watch them suddenly walk free of the cave wall and walk into the light by their own accord. Curious to think of Winter’s Tale as concerned with similar thematic territory as the theatricalist Tempest, but perhaps that’s a useful avenue to pursue.

Can Winter’s Tale be related to other plays that seek for the represented to become the real—The Seagull, for example, or Sondheim’s Follies, or even, in the terms I argue in my published article, Gypsy? Not to mention much of the theatricalist tradition (I’m thinking particularly of Lope de Vega’s Acting is Believing).

What, then, to make of the pairing of fulfillment with melancholy in the play’s conclusion—fulfillment in that Hermione is brought to life, sadness in knowing that we have reached the limits of theatrical representation? Seduced as we may be by the theatrical illusion, we know that the dead do not, and never could, walk again.

An Idea for Oral Exams

MAJOR ORAL: Music and Theatre

-examines various forms of musical or “lyrical” theater from opera and operetta and ballet to ballad opera and vaudeville and popular musical theatre to nondramatic musical performances, consider the relationship between music and drama, music and character, music and plot, music and the self, music and performativity etc; not to mention music and performance

MINOR ORAL 1: Theory and Politics

-examines the relationship between critical theory and politics (and theory and sociology, I think as well) - what is the relationship between thinking and doing, between feeling and acting, and how does one judge individual behavior from a lens that is both left-leaning and theoretical? - might want to also consider the relationship between representation and the political

MINOR ORAL 2: Melodrama

-though probably outside of my dissertation field, this will allow me to A) become expert in a period of theatrical history that I want to be able to teach but currently can’t (i.e. both the melodrama form and 18th/19th-century theatrical culture; B) allow me another cite to think about the relationship between dramatic form and politics; and C) make available an important historical precursor to the plot structures of many musicals

Reading and Writing

Today I finished Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet for the first time, and I also read Annamarie Jagose’s and Wayne Koestenbaum’s memorial essays on Sedgwick in PMLA 125, no. 2. The book was empowering - I feel, thanks to Sedgwick, that I have a firmer grasp on the possibilities and the methodologies of cultural studies than I did a month ago. The essays were stinging, because in reading them I saw two professional scholars script their responses to that book, and to the rest of Sedgwick’s career, in language I am not capable of invoking for myself. In short, Jagose and Koestenbaum are better writers than I am (it goes without saying that Sedgwick is equally beyond my reach). I thought: “Who taught you to write like that?” and I also thought “When did you have time to write this essay? Don’t you have reading and teaching to do?” These experiences are leading me toward a conclusion that I have spent, and continue to spend, my waking hours resisting. Perhaps I need to think of myself less as a reader and a learner than as a writer? The consequence of this would be: More writing, less reading. If I don’t read something, oh well. If I don’t write something, disaster. This would be a radical shift in priority and possibly in lifestyle. I wonder if it’s the way to go, and I wonder if I’m capable of it.

Another anecdote, to refract the first: I am in my fourth week of a German for Reading Language summer intensive course at Columbia, and the other day I found myself writing an email to my professor, my DGS in the Columbia English department, and two senior professors in the German department. In this email, I wanted to describe my satisfaction that something had taken place, and so I wrote “Das gut.” I figure, it’s the easiest sentence in the world to write “That’s good” in German, and I swear I’ve heard that phrase uttered colloquially to mean precisely “That’s good.” And I had just learned about relative pronouns and thought “das” could mean “That’s” if I wanted it to badly enough. Within seconds my professor wrote back to tell me I had just written “‘property’ or ‘holding,’” not “That’s good.”

The moral of both stories in the same: There is a vast difference between reading and writing, even though my massive and ever-growing library of read and unread books testifies to my aching desire to elide that difference.

On Seeing Hotel Modern’s "Kamp"

Representing the Holocaust remains an important political task. It must continue to be done because of the constant danger of forgetting, ignoring, or consigning the event to an irrelevant history. For these same reasons, the way we represent the Holocaust is more important than the mere fact that we do so, and no congratulations are required of any work that shows a concentration camp on screen or stage, or in prose or verse. Instead, what is required is critical interrogation—how does this representation refresh and re-imagine, and in so doing re-enliven the Holocaust for a generation that wants to make the Holocaust into a melodrama, a sad story told in order to reframe the sacrifice of the Jews as a necessary sacrifice for the betterment of mankind. They had to die in order for us to learn never to do that again. It is this fundamental position that must be guarded against, carefully and systematically, with each new “go” at representation.

This is true because all aesthetic representation, and by extension all acts of theatrical creation and reception, are acts of reconstruction. They are intensified refractions of the very processes by which meaning is made every day of our lives—with every shape we pull out of the darkness, we make possible knowledge and political change, and we do this through the violence of making impossible other shapes and other knowledges. We gain only by losing. What saves meaning is its necessary incompletion, and it is this incompletion that is underlined by the social frame of the aesthetic. Because every interpretation, every ounce of knowledge, is available to deconstruction and critique, there is always the possibility for new knowledge. But in the “everyday” world—the world we pretend has nothing to do with theater—we carry forward with the belief that what we know is true, is not subjective and transcendental and, if not eternal, at least “the way things are today.” When we doubt, we go to art. When we want nothing to do with doubt, we go to science. And when we are sick of doubt but know we can’t be rid of it forever, and so need to manage it in some way, we go to philosophy and critical analysis. Religion participates, at various times, in all three categories of experience, though the boundaries among them are nonetheless reinforced by each instance of relation with religion.

The guest I saw Kamp with was frustrated by the piece because, as he said, “it left me cold.” He wanted a greater emotional pay-off for the time he spent in the theatre, though he was quick to admit he did not want “the tears of Schindler’s List,” but he did want an emotional release or catharsis or arc of some kind. He wanted, again in his own words, an experience that was “not merely intellectual.” This policed boundary between intellection and emotion is indicative of a common misconception of the role that art has to play in human cultures. It is to assume, falsely, that ideas cannot pleasure, or hurt.

Kamp presents a day in the life of Auschwitz by re-creating the entire camp in miniature and moving a series of tiny puppet-figures around the stage. In some parts of the performance, the audience watches three puppeteers push and pull the puppet pieces around the stage. In other parts, we watch on screen close-up video of activities of the puppets. Sometimes these filmed scenes take place in spaces that are unavailable to the naked eye—for example, a gas chamber, or Nazi barracks—and sometimes these scenes are also available to plain view—for example, a hanging of three prisoners witnessed by a crowd of their peers, or a solitary prisoner’s suicide-by-electric-fence in the dead of night. The combination of all these perceptual experiences dramatize the very challenge and impossibility of seeing “the Holocaust.” We are made aware of a series of ironies— 1) that the only way to represent in a live space the entire camp in one view is to use tiny puppets, which are of course a step removed from “real” human beings, and also 2) that even in this case, the mediating device of video is necessary to see what is given to be seen. Other ironies follow of course—that we can only see one day, that we can only see one camp, that we can only see what the puppeteers allow us to see because we are at the whims of both their dramaturgy and their research.

What we do see, though, is the camp as its own aesthetic creation. By seeing the camp as a landscape—and by using a dramaturgical structure that resembles, though because of its reliance on minimal narrative does not fulfill, a Steinein/Wilsonian landscape—we are able to consider that this, too, was something that was made, as all architectural products are made. We are able to enter the consciousness of a concentration camp architect and consider what aesthetic choices were made here—in what way was this camp designed so as to resist appreciation as art (unlike, say, the Reichstag)? Who was the intended “audience” for the camp? The prisoners? The Nazi soldiers? Hitler? The German volk? Suspicious international neighbors whom the Nazis need to 1) ignore the camps, and 2) if they cannot ignore them, to see them as working cities that are best left alone? The camp, of course, negotiates all these audiences in their aesthetic design. But by being aware of the camp as a created thing, we become aware of the relationship between more familiar acts of creation and the foreign-ness of the concentration camp. At one point in the event I found myself thinking, “Look how old and un-advanced the technology of this place is. Imagine what we could do today. Think of how much sleeker, more efficient, and more sterile would be a concentration camp made today.” And to be put in the position of the designer is to be removed from the position of the spectator of a melodrama, where the given to be seen simply “is”—is beyond our control, is someone else’s fault, is behind us.

And it is not ugly or evil. It is banal. And it was designed and constructed. And it can be torn down. And it can be rebuilt differently. And as the sun set on one day in the life of the camp, with no sound of liberators in the distance, and no proffered “hope” or emotional release for the spectator, not even the consolation of a resilient human spirit that “cannot be destroyed,” nor of a moral superiority for those of us watching (all these constructions only serve to make the camps less dangerous)—we are left with the disturbing and also empowering image of a work of art (the camp) rendered as a work of art (Kamp), and therefore no longer finished, but forever incomplete.

Note: This post is unedited. I guess that's the point, right?

Question of Focus

I wonder if my ultimate concern is a return to one of the most classical, and now most out-of-fashion, questions about the theatre—the possibility that it can, or should, be efficacious for its spectators. Can the theatre heal the individual? Can the theatre heal the world?

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.

On Reading Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club"

What a stroke of fortune that I read this book, which I probably wouldn’t have touched for years if I hadn’t been home sick and in need of something to hold my attention. I am moved by both the accomplishment of Menand’s book and by the philosophy of pragmatism, which is its main subject.

On the book…

Menand’s book is maybe one of the first great models I’ve encountered of how intellectual history can work as scholarship. That he is able to weave a story of intellectual influences and rivalries over nearly a century, and clearly articulate complex philosophical nuances and make sweeping assertions about the way American cultural thought became modern, all without ever being general or glossing over details, is stunning. I’m frankly humbled that I could ever compile and process the amount of research he clearly needed to do to write the book.

I remember Chris Grobe and his (now ex-)girlfriend Michaela discussing Greenblatt-style New Historicism, and complaining about how it led to lazy scholarship in which the existing of a particularly engineered map or cultural object on one side of the continent can be seen to justify and explain an otherwise unrelated cultural object on the other side of the continent. Anyway, while Menand’s work is historicist in a general sense (it’s not a work of literary criticism), he shows how the influence of biographical, cultural, and historical context can be traced precisely and without generalizations. He literally shows how the terms of an argument John Dewey, say, had with Jane Addams about “antagonisms” reappeared twenty years later in a philosophical treatise he wrote, showing without room for skepticism that that arguing actually made a substantive difference in his thinking and his ultimate philosophy. That’s amazing.

What’s more, content meets form, as Menand essentially bases his work on pragmatist principles. His implicit argument is that pragmatist philosophy is no more exempt than any other belief system from the principle that all ideologies are derived from cultural need, rather the other way around (as Menand summarizes: “First we decide, then we deduce”). By showing why pragmatism was born in its particular social, historical, and biographical context, Menand gives credence to the philosophy itself, arguing that all ideologies are contingent, and that that’s okay.

A downside is that in being exhaustive, the book is at times exhausting. Menand complex web demands his primary mode to be that of discursiveness: Three pages on one thinker leads to three pages on another, five pages on another, two pages on another, all without a clear sense of where he’s going. Menand usually ties his various strands loosely together by the end of each chapter, but it’s not until the last couple chapters of the entire book — starting around page 350 or so — that he actually ties all of his work together and explains just what exactly pragmatism is. It’s a hugely rewarding pay-off, inspirational in its accomplishment, but it takes a long time to get there. And, as a corollary, since the book is designed for a general audience, to be read straight through, it doesn’t have the advantage of being easily skimmable, like most academic books (read the Intro, visit the chapters that are relevant to your interest, done). So, you really have to stick with Menand. But, if you’re willing, the results are rewarding. I can’t imagine a better introduction to American pragmatist philosophy than this.

On Pragmatism…

I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this philosophical movement before. How fascinating. On the one hand, I can see how it can be especially exciting and invigorating, in that it reconciles the individual, psychological, and cultural need for belief with the maxim that external reality is inaccessible at best.

I will never forget the letter I wrote, or tried to write, to the bishop of the catholic diocese to which I was about to be confirmed. My opening sentence read something like: “I don’t know if there is in fact a God out there watching over us, but I do know that the belief in such a God, that the faith in Christ’s love, has benefits that justify that faith in themselves. Believing in Chris helps me to get through the day, and so long as religion helps us to get through the day, to live better with each other, to be loving and tolerant and all that, then I am pleased to be confirmed a Catholic.” I’m paraphrasing because I lost the original letter and, more important, my parents forced me to rewrite anyway because they were afraid I would offend the bishop.

Still, I’m seeing in pragmatist principles a justification of the very position I took that day as a youngster contemplating the value of religion, writing to the pope. I see also a response to the questions I’ve been mulling over for the past few months: In the face of modern and postmodern philosophy, and the realities of modern and postmodern life, how do we get through the day? Does philosophy help us or hurt us in that endeavor? In a world in which there is no objective truth, objective value, stable identity, or general teleology—on what basis do any of us act? I called the inability to act, in an earlier blog entry, the experience of the suffering spectator, with which I identify Nietzsche’s angst.

Pragmatism seems to complement Nietzsche’s frustrated assertion that all philosophies are merely the prejudices of individuals. Where that discovery drove Nietzsche’s nuts, it seems to calm and even empower the pragmatists, because it gives license to individual ideologizing. Furthermore, it justifies a pluralist democracy in which many, varied, often opposing ideas are allowed to coexist and, not compete, so much as complement and enrich the possibilities of human prosperity.

At the same time, as Menand acknowledges on page 375, pragmatism still, ultimately, leaves us empty. In asserting that we should feel free to embrace whatever ideologies work for us, it doesn’t give any guidance to determine what “works for us” means. Pragmatism discredits metaphysics, but it still leaves behind a general determining factor for all action and all belief, but it leaves that determining factor ambiguous and shadowed. It leaves us to the Judith Butler question: What does it mean, after all, to thrive?

I of course don’t know how to fill in the blank, or if it’s necessary to do so, but I suspect that pragmatist philosophy does not account for a human individual and cultural need for metaphysics, a need to believe that there are objective truths and values worth dying for. If for nothing else, we need them to turn to when the difficulty of actually making a decision proves too difficult. I suspect it goes even deeper than that: We need to have stable identities, stable truths, stable values, and teleologies, or perhaps at least the potential for all these things, in order to act in the world at all.

The election of Barack Obama, whose inaugural address turned on the words, “These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history,” lends truth to this credence. We elected Barack Obama because we needed to believe again. And, since the pragmatists were generally distasteful of passionate belief, of holding onto our ideologies as though they were lifeboats from the heavens (rather than tools from the workshop), I don’t know how they would feel about Obama Mania, and I don’t know how they would account for the general morass of the 21st century.

Rethinking Postmodernism

This rehashes some of what I said in my last note, and it’s also influenced by Terry Eagleton’s The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction, which I’m halfway through right now. I’m clarifying my position, I think, on postmodernism and post-structuralism. It’s not that I feel these theories and cultural attitudes need somehow to be resurrected. I feel that they have created a problem, not just for philosophy but for our culture, and for the role of the humanities in that culture. The problem is that the deconstructionists and post-structuralists have finally smashed all hope for objective truth, deep meaning, grand narratives and illusions. They’ve cut so deep they’ve even erased the idea of the self as a unitary stable being. They’ve killed metaphysics, and they’ve killed the self. No God. No Earth. No us. Just language and culture, and fiction.

They’ve created this crater of meaning because, I think they believed, it would free us from the constrictions and the injustices inevitably created by all grand narratives, and all institutions (literal and metaphorical) that support them. And there is a great deal to be said for the validity of such a project.

Where they have failed us, I feel, is that they have not offered us any advice on what to do when we’re free, of how to live as free people. Sure, now we’re free of all illusions, but it is illusions (O’Neill: pipe dreams) that permit us to move forward and to act in the world, to believe that our lives are worth living. I fear they’ve, quite without intending to, finally cleared the way for nihilism to sweep the world.

HOWEVER, the problem with the post-structuralists is that they’re right. Or at least, they’ve yet to be seriously disproven. Ammended, sure. Abhorred, sure. But disproven? Not yet. And I think it would be unwise for the intellectual community to ignore or put aside Foucault and Derrida simply because the implications of their work are, as I’ve said, discomforting at best.

I think what we need—or, I should say, I think what I need, and I’m just going to assume everyone else does too—is a revival of the existentialist movements. In general, we need a revival of the concern with how to live that informed Nietzsche’s work, and the American pragmatists’, and the existentialists, and others besides. It seems to me that these questions of how to survive inside the ontological black hole of modernity was of much greater concern to philosophers—and playwrights (not so much other artists of other mediums?)—in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second. Maybe because everyone what post-structuralist crazy. But now it’s time to go back and ask the question of how we can move forward and make our way in a Godless, narrative-less world.

This sounds so pretentious, but I think that the underlying project of my work/career may be, if not to find that solution (I’d love to, but something tells me I may never be equipped), at least to clarify the problem, and to bring the academic community’s attention to it, and to demand solutions from artists and from academics.

ENOUGH with celebrating meaninglessness. ENOUGH with placing all art that troubles meaning on a great pedestal, and all art that reifies and suggests and confirms meaning in the “lowbrow” category. FUCK YOU to Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman and the fucking German postdramatic directors. Their time is done. There are new questions to ask in the wake of what they and their pet philosophers have done to our culture, and that is, what now?

[it could be that Elinor Fuchs’s observation that the postdramatic may be on the wane in Germany is an indication that at least certain Western culture makers are already coming to this conclusion]

As a side note or illustration, I saw Judith Butler give a talk at Yale, called “What Does Gender Want of Me?,” back in April. The speech was a lengthy and obscure argument with a French theorist I’d never heard of whose book, which she was arguing against, hadn’t even been published yet. Anyway, after it was over, she took questions from the audience and was very generous (and, surprisingly, clear and accessible) in her answers. One of the questions involved transsexualism and the value of surgery. Butler was arguing that the question of one’s gender-location is ongoing for every one of us, and that surgery does not solve that problem or that questioning process. She said that the basis for any decision about surgery, or any decision about determining self-identity, is to do what makes one “thrive.”

“Thrive.” What does that mean? Suddenly the deep purpose of Butler’s entire work on gender, its social and personal and psychological value, opened itself up. What does Judith Butler want of me? She wants me to thrive.

But Butler never offered a theoretical explanation of the term. What does it mean, after all, to “thrive”? I wanted to ask her but didn’t get the chance, but it seems to me the most important question to ask of her and all philosophers who employ post-structuralist methods and views. What does it mean to thrive??

Another note from 4/7/2009

I must remember that my own work on the theatre and philosophy must acknowledge and respond to the fact that I learn as much, or more, about philosophy and how to live from, say, Pirandello or Kushner or Chekhov, as I do from reading theory, philosophy, history, etc. One possible question for study could be, then, how do I learn differently in the theatre from nonfiction theory/philosophy books?

4/7/2009: Thoughts While Sitting in Jury Duty and Reading Pirandello's "Henry IV"

How is it possible to live in a world where it is impossible to know? This must be the great question of drama in the 21st century. The theatre today must not simply try to present new knowledges or arguments without acknowledging that all stable meaning is inherently impossible (this is most “social” or “political” drama). Nor must it take as it entire task to deconstruct the possibility of stable meaning, to destroy the comforts we find in knowledge/meaning, without simultaneously acknowledging and accounting for the suffering that being bereft of the chance for meaning causes. This is the flaw of much of the late avant-garde — cf. Richard Foreman’s Astronome. The twenty-first century theatre must inhabit both sides of this dilemma and articulate a way through without denying need or potential.

“There is no theory, but you have to have a theory” is the best articulation of the position of the new theatre that I am yearning for. A theatre that knows the former and also the latter.

For that matter it must be the position of the new journalism, the new art, the new filmmaking, the new music, the new criticism, the new theory, and, certainly, the new philosophy. This should be the project of the 21st century, and maybe beyond—newly enlightened, can we rebuild a new world out of the ashes of the old without simply rehashing the old forms of ignorance?

If Nietzsche’s “God” is finally and irrevocably, or almost irrevocably dead, then, in a way, the project of modernity (from Copernicus forward) is nearing its completion. Hence, perhaps, our instinctive sense of impending apocalypse. Because the question is—what now? And there has never been a more urgent time for our civilization to ask such a question.

The theatre has a special place because it is the place where illusion and truth, flesh and knowledge, and all the contradictions of modern existence are given bodily form. This is why Pirandello was attracted to the theatre. Because there, we have always faced these darkest and most important questions of our time (as we still do in church), and we must return to the theatre to face these questions, to reckon with these dark truths, all over again.

Those who point the way (or, writers who care about this conflict):
Shakespeare
Nietzsche
Chekhov
Pirandello
Kushner
(the Attic Tragedians?)
(O’Neill’s last plays?)

After Reading "Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction" in March 2009

I find Nietzsche riveting, transforming in a way that I have not found in a thinker in a long time. I yearn to read all this books, although this little book has presented, so it seems to be, a great enough summary that I can already begin to feel that I know the man.

What stimulates me about Nietzsche is his awareness and articulation of a particular kind of suffering this is special to the human condition and, particularly, to modernity. That is the suffering of the great philosophical skeptic. The suffering of the one who cannot make meaning, who cannot trust knowledge, who has no metaphysics, who has seen or faced the dark Dionysian truth of existence and its ultimate failure to offer deep or higher meanings. I have always been concerned and interested in this dilemma, but I have never thought of it in terms of suffering before, but it is the suffering that defines Nietzsche’s psyche and informs all his work and ultimately contributed to his insanity (the syphilis surely helped).

There is a necessary corollary that I think would be pertinent to theatre and performance studies, and that is the necessary study of the suffering spectator. It would be useful to reconsider all the studies of audience and spectatorship and consider what kind of spectator is assumed in each of these studies (the Lockean blank-slate spectator? The mass public non-individualistic spectator? Most famously, the feminist spectator?). I wonder if we have considered the role of the theatre for the spectator who is suffering as Nietzsche suffered, the spectator who is undergoing an ontological crisis. For, indeed, isn’t this crisis increasing in magnitude and desperation as 21st century proceeds? That fewer and fewer people are willing to engage the question, to look into the abyss, suggests the growing pandemic of nihilism that threatens, I feel, to engulf us all.

What does the theatre offer the suffering spectator? How does reconsidering the attitude of the audience member force us to rethink our concepts of spectatorship, of performance, of artistic and aesthetic value, of the purpose of the theatre and the responsibilities of the art form?