Category Archives: Philosophy

From the archives: The subterranean history of Europe and the martyrs of love

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Originally published 1 May 2012:

Beneath the known history of Europe there runs a subterranean one. It consists of the fate of the human instincts and passions repressed and distorted by civilization. From the vantage point of the fascist present, in which the hidden is coming to light, the manifest history is also revealing its connection to that dark side, which is passed over in the official legend of nation states, and no less in its progressive critique. …

Most mutilated of all is the relationship to the body. … Love-hate for the body colors the whole of modern culture. The body is scorned and rejected as something inferior, enslaved, and at the same time is desired as forbidden, reified, estranged. Only culture treats the body as a thing that can be owned, only in culture has it been distinguished from mind, the quintessence of power and command, as the object, the dead thing, the corpus. In humanity’s self-abasement to the corpus nature takes its revenge for the debasement of the human being to an object of power, to raw material. The compulsion toward cruelty and destruction stems from the organic repression of proximiity to the body, much as, according to Freud’s inspired intuition, disgust came into being when, with the adoption of the upright stance and the greater distance from the earth, the sense of smell, which attracted the male animal to the menstruating female, fell victim to organic repression. …

In the fiendish humiliation of prisoners in the concentration camps, which — for no rational reason — the modern executioner adds to the death by torture, the unsublimated yet repressed rebellion of despised nature breaks out. Its full hideousness is vented on the martyrs of love, the alleged sexual offenders and libertines, for sexuality is the body unreduced; it is expression, that which the butchers secretly and despairingly crave. In free sexuality the murderer fears the lost immediacy, the original oneness, in which he can no longer exist. It is the dead thing which rises up and lives. He now makes everything one by making it nothing, because he has to stifle that oneness in himself. For him the victim represents life which has survived the schism; it must be broken and the universe must be nothing but dust and abstract power.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 192-196.

From the archives: New Expressionism

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As I continue to write Erlkönig I’ll be republishing several entries to keep the fire here going.

Originally posted on 18 October 2010.

In Schopenhauer’s conception of knowledge and the world, mankind is phenomenon par excellence, the object through which subjectivity can be known and the will as thing-in-itself recognized, if not described or describable in the symbol-system of language available to the individual. The will itself, because it is not describable, can’t be characterized as tragic, but this locution is available to describe the phenomenal world in relation to that will. Only that which can be directly experienced by the individual can be said to exist: it is far preferable to the abstract concept as a valid recognition, as a valid object of knowledge. Just as color cannot be described to the blind, or music to the deaf (for the vibrations under foot and hand at the concert hall are not in essence dissimilar to the vibrations of the subway or the earth), one who does not experience an extreme or a quality cannot recognize it as something known. The individual body through which the will can be recognized, and the words with which it can be explored, become the instrument of exploration and experience.

This places particular weight on the theatre and drama as aesthetic means of this exploration of the phenomenon; it is a quality of the art which most theatre practitioners (dramatists, directors, producers and critics alike) and audiences today are loathe to admit. It makes of the art a far more urgent discipline than they’re comfortable with, in that it renders the entertainment, amusement and business that attaches to the form irrelevant, especially in the forms of mimetic social realism or ironic post-modernist distance that attach to its practice even today. Obviously, in this conception, theatre and drama are the truly experiential arts, for the mediation is through the body, not the page or canvas, and it is the body that is the primary vehicle for experience. Apart from music, tragic drama is at the apex of the aesthetic imagination as conceived by Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer was prophetic in more senses than one, inspiring many of the artists, writers and composers of the Expressionist school that arose in Austria and Germany beginning in the late 19th century. But there is a New Expressionism as well, and one which has its philosophical roots in the old. David Ian Rabey in his English Drama Since 1940 identifies a stream of post-war drama which he names a “New Expressionism,” which predated In-Yer-Face theatre, an off-shoot of this New Expressionism, by several decades, citing the work of David Rudkin, Heathcote Williams and other dramatists. “This involves a consciously heightened form of presentation which is unapologetic about its anti-conventional strageness, in which often ‘exterior facts are continually being transformed into interior elements and psychic events are exteriorized,’ in a passionate expression of, and search for, individual regeneration. … This form of renewal is prioritised as preliminary to epic theatre’s foregrounding of social relations to address the political collective. [Emphasis mine] … Unlike Absurdism, which may reflect a loss of faith in language, reference, action and consequence, Expressionism recreates an unconventional faith in consequence: the power of individual defiance to trigger wider seismic upheavals of power, countering ‘information’ and passivity with a demonstrative capacity for active transformation.” (Rabey 128) [1]

Rabey’s description takes in a broad swathe of post-1970 drama in his book, but it is also a useful corrective to the characterization of a dramatist like Samuel Beckett as “absurdist,” especially when it comes to Beckett’s prose and drama after 1960, when the novel How It Is and the play Play marked a division between his early work and his later; especially in the late plays Catastrophe and What Where, political and ideological considerations are secondary and founded upon a metaphysical ground. What’s more, all of this later work, especially pieces like Not I, are experiential rather than discursive, and the subjective psychic events are those which provide the necessary sensation. Because they also exhibit “a demonstrative capacity for active transformation,” they are immediately relevant to a consideration of the plays of Howard Barker, David Rudkin and Sarah Kane.

The later work of Beckett and the plays of Barker, Rudkin and Kane are beyond considerations of optimistic and pessimistic. Or, more accurately, they may be both. A capacity may exist, but it may or may not be fulfilled, and possibility may or may not become probability or ever realized: it is these that are demonstrated in the theatre; it remains to the individual spectator to fulfill or realize these capacities and possibilities in their own lives, having first recognized them through the aesthetic experience. But it is this capacity and possibility that is demonstrated in the theatre, and because it is beyond the currently fashionable Procrustean formal beds of social realism or post-modern irony, it remains marginalized, however awesome may be its power to transform both the art of theatre and the experience of those who attend it.

The “In-Yer-Face theatre” that emerged in the 1990s, and of whom Sarah Kane is a common (if inappropriate) exemplar, is described by Aleks Sierz; it is interesting to note in this context, since it too is a theatre founded in experience:

[In Yer Face theatre] is any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation. … Questioning moral norms, it affronts the ruling ideas of what can or should be shown onstage; it also taps into more primitive feelings, smashing taboos, mentioning the forbidden, creating discomfort. Crucially, it tells us more about who we really are. Unlike the type of theatre that allows us to sit back and contemplate what we see in detachment, the best in-yer-face theatre takes us on an emotional journey, getting under our skin. In other words, it is experiential, not speculative. [Emphasis mine] (Sierz 4)

This is correct in so far as it goes, but I would insist that it is this theatrical experience itself that becomes the object of speculation; it must do so, if it is not to remain a solipsistic sensual experience which ends at the theatre door. Howard Barker’s conception of theatre as a crucible for moral speculation certainly does not obviate the practice of extreme and excessive stage activity and dramatic language. Indeed, speculation and experience revolve and feed upon each other on the New Expressionist stage. The theatre remains an arena of contemplation and speculation, even as this is generated by the experiential events that take place between performer and spectator, mediated by the symbol-system of dramatic language.

It is my hope in this series of posts to explore this conception of New Expressionism as described by Rabey and Gritzner, and trace its development back through the original Expressionist movement to its philosophical origins in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and aesthetics. This is not to say that Beckett, Barker, Rudkin and Kane share much beyond these bare outlines. Beckett’s constricted, de-eroticized landscape is a far cry from Barker’s expansive, even excessive, re-eroticized imagination, and they are barely recognizable, perhaps, as exemplars of the same school. But it seems to me that their emphasis on the subjective experience, their deliberate intent to operate as far outside the Culture Industry as it may be possible to do, is a critique of the same metaphysical, moral and aesthetic stance in which that Industry stands as was Schopenhauer’s opposition to the ameliorist Enlightenment of his time.

All four dramatists begin with dislocation: dislocations of narrative and character. These dislocations are similar, if not identical, to the freeing of dissonance — that is, the thing-in-itself allowed liberty to express itself phenomenally — that defines the work of Arnold Schoenberg, that twentieth-century composer who provided the underscore to the Expressionist movements of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Footnotes
  1. Rabey’s discussion is the basis of Karoline Gritzner’s 2008 essay “(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment,” which is crucial to the start of any discussion of this dramatic and theatrical mode. It was published in Contemporary Theatre Review: 18:3. [↩]

Pre-birth of tragedy

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greek_music_dramaI have written before of my difficulties with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, but obviously this doesn’t mitigate against its importance for any study of Greek drama and theatre. Now a new book from Contra Mundum Press provides a unique look at the basis for Nietzsche’s first major work.

The Greek Music Drama offers for the first time in English translation a lecture that Nietzsche delivered in 1870 at the Basel Museum. The publisher describes the book:

[It] was the first public enunciation of the great themes that would echo throughout Nietzsche’s philosophy: the importance of aesthetic experience for culture, the primacy of the body and physiological drives, and the centrality of music to Greek tragedy. Here we see Nietzsche’s genealogical methodology in embryonic form alongside the anti-humanist aesthetics that will bloom in his later work. …

Addressing the material conditions of Greek theater in detail, Nietzsche repudiates the abstract scholarly approach to the art of classical antiquity, proposing that in its stead we cultivate different emotional and intellectual powers in order to gain greater insight into that art. This seminal lecture offers an account of tragic experience from the sole perspective of the Dionysian, presenting a reading of nature of startling and far-reaching implications.

The Greek Music Drama presents the lecture in both its original German and in a new translation by Paul Bishop. More information about the book can be found here, and it’s now available via amazon.com here. The publisher is also offering a sample of the book and its introduction by Jill Marsden.

Books: Arthur Schopenhauer by Peter B. Lewis

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Arthur Schopenhauer by Peter B. Lewis. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. 181 pages; 27 illustrations. Available from amazon.com.

It’s a surprise to find a life of the Sage of Frankfurt, a defiant product and defender of bourgeois and conservative social values, in Reaktion Books’ series of short biographies “Critical Lives.” Other volumes in the series include books on the likes of Bataille, Baudelaire, Burroughs, Chomsky, Foucault, Lenin, and Marx. A certain leaning to the radical left, this — a group of writers to whom Schopenhauer would likely not appeal, and they certainly wouldn’t appeal to him. When late in life he finally did receive a measure of success, it was not from the academic quarter, Peter B. Lewis writes:

While academic reviews … were dismissive, the few enthusiastic readers of Schopenhauer at this time came, for the most part, from the professional middle class outside the universities. Judges and lawyers, together with a private scholar, constituted the vanguard of admirers with whom he was in contact in the late 1830s and ’40s …

Schopenhauer was a stout bourgeois himself, the son of an upper-middle-class merchant of distinctly republican values, and his philosophy, unlike his arch-rival Hegel’s, was unlikely to attract the attention of the young rebels who arose in Europe in the wake of the French Revolution and the upheavals of 1848. Indeed, in that year, Schopenhauer admitted Austrian soldiers to his second-floor apartment in Frankfurt and allowed them to fire upon working-class protestors below.

He was a piece of work, as Lewis’s biography attests — any warts-and-all biography of the philosopher concentrating on the life rather than the work reveals far more warts than all. A misogynist, Schopenhauer never married but carried on a series of seedy dalliances with chorus-girls and actresses, fathering two children who died in infancy. Despite his expertise in the physical and empirical sciences and his natural skepticism if not cynicism, he was a sucker for things like mesmerism, “spirit-seeing,” and other Madame Blavatsky style fraudulence. He and Goethe spent several years developing a crackpot anti-Newtonian scheme of vision and colors. While charges of anti-Semitism and racism against Schopenhauer may be excessive, they arise from passages which justify those charges. And, finally, for all his celebration of abstract aesthetic experience as a release from the pain of the world, he most admired the novels of Walter Scott and the operas of Rossini, utterly failing to recognize the musical revolution launched by his acolyte Richard Wagner, who dutifully sent the philosopher scores of his Ring cycle and Tristan und Isolde, this latter perhaps the work which most remarkably reflects the Schopenhauer worldview. Despite his conception of personal ethics as based in compassion rather than duty, Schopenhauer treated most people abysmally. While he admitted that he was unable to practice what he preached and that his philosophy proved why this was so, the stink of rationalization rises like a heavy fog from this particular apologia.

But Schopenhauer’s work was radical in the progressive years following the 18th and 19th century revolutions, and is still so today. His 1818 The World as Will and Representation counsels, in a prose style which among German philosophers is radically clear itself, compassion and renunciation in the face of a world driven by a violent unconscious will. Progressive and amelioristic public projects are doomed because the evils they seek to eradicate will only emerge elsewhere in the culture and human behavior. Sexual desire, he was among the first modernists to say, was the most significant influence on human activity. Collective thought — whether we call it groupthink or the hivemind these days — is by its nature conformist, destructive to the individual consciousness. This life is, as he defined it, a “pensum,” the only peace to be found in ascetic self-denial, as Schopenhauer describes in a paragraph justly characterized by Lewis as one of “his most beautiful passages”:

Nothing can distress or alarm him any more; nothing can any longer move him; for he has cut all the thousand threads of willing which hold us bound to the world, and which as craving, fear, envy, and anger drag us here and there in constant pain. He now looks back calmly and with a smile on the phantasmagoria of this world which was once able to move and agonize his mind, but now stands before him as indifferently as chessmen at the end of a game, or as fancy dress cast off in the morning, the form and figure of which taunted and disquieted us on the carnival night. Life and its forms merely float before him as a fleeting phenomenon, as a light morning dream to one half-awake, through which reality already shines, and which can no longer deceive; and, like this morning dream, they too finally vanish without any violent transition.

It is no wonder that Schopenhauer’s writing appeals far more to artists than to academic philosophers. There’s not much to parse here, not much to string out. The lucid style lends authority to the thought, and the thought itself thereby begins to appeal to those of a certain mindset — including Samuel Beckett’s (another “Critical Lives” biographee), when he said that he wasn’t so much interested in the validity of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics than he was in his work as the greatest justification for pessimism ever attempted.

Lewis’ biography is an excellent introductory book to Schopenhauer’s life, if not his work, largely because it doesn’t adequately tease out the radical dimensions of his thought. The best introduction to that remains Bryan Magee’s magisterial treatise or David Cartwright’s  biography published a few years ago, the length of which may be forbidding to the newcomer to Schopenhauer’s thought. But Lewis’ life is still a welcome introduction, as clear and well-structured as one could ask for. A longer reconsideration of Schopenhauer is due; fortunately a handsome new uniform edition of the philosopher’s work is under way from Cambridge University Press. In the end this reconsideration of Schopenhauer might find him even more radical than most of the writers in Reaktion Books’ series. But for that one needs to turn to the thought, and not the rather objectionable life.

The tragic and its limits

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Simon Critchley.

Simon Critchley.

In a new interview published at The White Review, philosopher Simon Critchley engages in an interesting discussion of tragedy and the modern world. His book on tragedy, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine, co-written with Jamieson Webster, will be published next year by Pantheon. The wide-ranging conversation touches on what we know (and what we don’t know) about ancient Greek tragedy, Nietzschean conceptions and misconceptions of the form, and the possibility of a theatrical tragedy in the contemporary world. From the interview:

We are as we speak in what seems to be a state of permanent war.  Can we still access the tragic?  If so, what is it that tragedy gives us that is useful or can help us to better contemplate the current order of things?

Those are very good questions. The answer to the first, can we access tragedy, is yes. The answer to the second is that it does illuminate the situation we’re in. Those are the short answers. This is where I turn to and lean on someone like Raymond Williams. There’s a view we can associate with someone like George Steiner that tragedy is dead, that’s the classical, reactionary, formalist aesthetic position, the glory that was Greece is gone and we live in a decaying modernity. The first thing to say is that makes very little sense of the extraordinary theatrical creativity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from people like Ibsen and Chekhov through to Brecht and Beckett and beyond into people like Sarah Kane and Heiner Müller. Theatre is still fecund it seems to me, the theatrical is still fecund. I’m not a death of tragedy person at all and that means looking in different places, we could look at different media, film, TV as places to access tragedy. People have written very well about series like The Wire as a modern American tragedy, I won’t go into that now, it can be a bit boyish and obsessional but it is fascinating. What it can show us, and this is where I want to bring in Williams, who in his book Modern Tragedy makes a link between tragedy and revolution and it’s a kind of melancholic link. He says, for example, something like: “We need to understand revolution tragically.” …

So, yes tragedy is accessible, the world needs to be understood in tragic terms in the name of realism. Lastly, once we do that, we throw off a certain naïve, optimistic, progressivist view of history in the name of something much more bracing and much more pessimistic. But there’s still a glimmer of hope. For me, the intellectual discipline of the left has to be to take the long historical view and to see events of oppression in the context of liberation and to see events of liberation in the context of their reversal and to see the long view and the big picture. Which means we can still hope but there’s no point in hoping blindly.

I recently wrote about the position of tragedy in the contemporary American theatre here. Again, the full interview with Critchley is available here.