Moore, Mimesis and Documented Truth

Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man reads as ugly as its title sounds. Between repeating the same points about Michael Moore's duplicity - yes, he did wrong by his writers, by his subjects, by the notion of truth, but developing an argument is, like, a thing - authors Hardy and Clarke betray their obvious frustration at his success. Sure, the book was written before Moore lost his credibility, so their resentment at Moore's hypocrisy had currency back then. 

But being spiteful about his weight and wealth does get in the way of their thesis that Moore's documentaries are dishonest. Judicious editing, and reconstructions of events, allow Moore to play loose with the facts. His general arguments, that 'Merica is bad, okay, and that individual acts of violence are expressions of wider cultural values, are supported by half-truths and melodramatic posturing. In particular, the manipulation of chronology, and a conversation with Charlton Heston are called out again and again.

Moore defends his slap-dash approach by pointing out that he makes entertaining, popular film. To bring in Aristotle, he is not making history, but poetry, which is more about the universal than the particular. In other words, so what if the facts are mangled? There is a bigger picture.

It's the same problem that verbatim theatre has: the use of real life

people and events lends an aura of authenticity to the work, but then makes inaccuracies less forgivable. Poetry, as Aristotle explained, is better than history because it does not rely on specifics, tending towards broader ideals. 

For Aristole, mimesis was the thing. Roughly translated as imitation, it is the process whereby nature becomes art. Poetry has particular aesthetics and epistemologies (got it in!). The problem with Moore is that he fakes historical aesthetics. 

He's pretty much like most journalists, then. Hardly fair to pick on just him. Is it because he's fat?

Catharsis in Craiova

Katharsis @ DeadEndConversations.com

I think that I had a cheeky katharsis the other night at the opera. I can say it was involuntary - I spent the first two acts wondering if I could leave  -and that it involved physiological symptoms. 

Fans of Hellenistic philosophy will recognise katharsis as Aristotle's word for the audience experience at a good tragedy. Luckily, Aristotle's extant writing don't define the word that well, so it's open for argument. Leon Golden (Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis, 1992) has a whole chapter on it. Like Sifakis'  chapter on the same word, it's a run down and a running down of competing ideas, beginning with the popular medical interpretation by Jacob Bernays.

Tighten your seatbelts. I am going to join in and list all these amazing interpretations. Rather than give my own opinion at the end, like a proper scholar, I'll just say now that 'purging' is close enough, and that gives enough information for individuals to think about it, without all the cross-referencing and learned analysis. 

Katharsis is like puking your guts up

In 1857 - well after the enlightenment, so it is really trust-worthy  - Bernays said Aristotle was always banging on about katharsis, and it is a medical word, and so it's about the process of healing, featuring a good spew of excess bile. Golden counters that the vomit and shit school ignore that when Aristotle mentions it in The Politics, he is talking about education, not tragedy, and it's more appropriate to have a medical metaphor involving bodily fluids when kids are involved.

In The Politics, having a good emotional puke is good way of getting a balanced soul. He even mentions the right kind of music to induce it. Bernays, apparently, calls katharsis a necessary cure (this leads Sifakis to get way too literal, asking what the illness might be that requires a purging cure. Frankly, if you are asking why people have an excess of emotion that needs an outlet, you want to get out more. Or read Facebook, and all those posts about David Cameron having a good lie to the public. Then you'll see...).

No, the whole fish supper doesn't come back up

Getting away from the buckets of sick with all bits of fear and pity in them, like sweetcorn on a shit, Milton off Paradise Lost had a theory. You can read about it in Golden or Sifakis, they cover the same ground. To be honest, there's not much difference, only Milton and his followers think the purgation of katharsis aims to achieve a mean of emotion, while Bernays and the gang see it as a complete emptying of the emotions, like when you are really sick and end up spitting bile in the toilet because breakfast is already swimming with the fishes.

Actually, it's nothing to do with spewing

But Golden keeps going. He cites H. Otte and G. Else, who call katharsis the defining characteristic of tragedy: if you don't get some, what you are watching is not tragedy. Otte adds that katharsis happens not to the audience but to the plot: that is, it is about purging the story of 'possible moral pollution'. Else piles in with a more cerebral twist: the audience recognise that the protagonist in a tragedy (who has probably done something like fuck his mum) was ignorant in his behaviour and was basically a good bloke. It's the old 'why bad things happen to good people' trope, only this time, it has a specific emotional response which is triggered by an intellectual recognition. 

At least that katharsis doesn't get all over my shoes. 

That's Enough

There's plenty more, and I'll get back onto it another time - just like Aristotle, when the going gets tough, I'll say you can read about it later: most of the problems with interpretation came about because he promised, in The Politics, to deal with katharsis more fully in The Poetics, but he probably got distracted by whatever they had instead of Facebook in the fourth century BC and didn't. The way I used katharsis in the first paragraph is a good example of the problem. It's a synonym for a 'peak theatrical experience'. That's terrible scholarship. 

Unvisible Dramaturgy: Kirk King on reviving a cult classic comic

Following yesterday's press release for Unvisible, there has been considerable discussion about whether this is a hoax, or the kind of ambitious performance that will change Scottish theatre. Saturnalia productions have refused to reply to my emails all day - increasingly angry as I thought my desire to have an exclusive had led me to be fooled - until Kirk King agreed to some email questions. So, in the spirit of my dramaturgy database...

First of all, is this an April Fool's joke? 
Kirk King: First of all, have you read The Invisibles? One of the main points of the series is that reality is a consensual hallucination, a mad juggling act with the balls all kept in the air by faith. 

Then there was that time when Grant realised that DC were going to cancel the comic, and asked the readers to perform a ritual masturbation to save it. Chaos magic is a major theme through the books - fake it until you make it, honey. The membrane between prank and perception is thinner than you think. 

So you are serious?
The answer to that depends on which side you are on, doesn't it?

Okay. So, you have described five performances. How do these relate to the source series?
Well, these performances are happening now, and Barbelith landed in 2013. King Mob is the only character who is carried over from the comics, although Ragged Robin might be in the first play. You'll have to come and see to find out...

Basically, King Mob has spent the last three years trying to live a life in the aftermath of a phenomenal victory. He can't do it: he's addicted to danger. Like Coriolanus, off Shakespeare, he's a warrior who can't do peace. He tries to medicate himself, which is how he ends up in the pubic triangle. The heady cocktail of sex, performance and alcohol opens him up to a message from Barbelith, and he realises that, far from being over, the war is still going on.

Is it still the archons versus the invisible college?
Again, wait and see. We follow KM as he tries to get a cell back together in a world where some of Grant's predictions have come true, others, not so much. He realises that the real enemies are not the Conservative politicians who are doing their best to destroy civil society, but another set of archons, The Universals. They insist on purity rather than order. And Aristotle is involved, inevitably.

Hold on, the Greek philosopher?
Yes. In The Invisibles, Grant was dealing with queer theory and post-modernism. If you look at the themes - BDSM, alternative history - these things have become the mainstream now. It's possible to say that we are living in KM's world. What do you think all those YouTube videos are about?

So queer theory is busy getting The Scottish Government to recognise gender fluidity. That's great, only once you start talking to those people, your revolutionary potential is out the window. Grant is taking on the people who started it - Plato, Aristotle. This is a classical take on The Invisibles' mythos.

Plus there's a mad finale on Arthur's Seat, where massed ranks of Bollywood dancers use subliminal bass to attack The Universals.

Can I be one of the people giving lectures in the fourth episode, Flexin' Mentallo, please? 
I'm glad you've mentioned that, because that is the part that I'm most excited about. We realised that there were some heavy duty ideas floating about, and there was a book, a critical book, that accompanied the series. We have some wild ideas for that day - apart from the academics - to replicate the dynamism of the old Barbelith website.

Send me a CV.

Where does Bollywood fit into this?
Appropriation. It's a big theme in the whole thing. Bollywood has some of the least 'pure' music in the world. It can be like a history of sound in five minutes, everything gets chucked in there. Disco, metal, the lot. Who better to fight The Universals than the absolute opposite of their rigid purity? 

It looks as if the time of The Unvisible has come.
When Grant wrote The Invisibles, he was ten years ahead: The Matrix ripped off his plot and his interest in the esoteric. It's only fair that he gets a voice in the current debates around queerness, gender fluidity, sexual subversion and intersectionality. He's always been at the cutting edge, of comics and philosophy. 

Hmm -Art? A good thing? You are kidding, right?

Thanks to some half-baked reading about Diderot and the Quarrel Between the Ancient and the Moderns, I have become suspicious of Art. To continue the ridiculous simile introduced by King Tynan of BDSM, if theatre is my lover, it's like finding out that she has a job in marketing for UKIP.

The QBtAatA revolved around methods to assess art - whether, following Aristotle's guidelines, it was better to imitate classical sources (The Ancients), or strive after contemporary styling. Diderot, editor of the Encyclopedia was a Modern. He won, in the end. His influence on Saint Lessing, who coined the word dramaturgy, and Comrade Brecht, makes Diderot the Man. All that relevant theatre - that's his fault.

However, what the Ancients and Moderns shared was a conviction that theatre had a cultural importance, that the kind of plays that are produced reflect and support the values of society. This ought to be a straight 101 course in the Sociology of Theatre - Marx, for example, identifies the economic base (the political system, more or less) as defining the superstructure (culture and that).

Crites view on ancient and modern dramatist from Department of English

The Ancients did far more than claim Greek Tragedy as the Best Tragedy. They recognised that its order (reduced to Aristotle's Unities) reflected a Universal Order, that respect for tradition discouraged revolutionary thought. Happening just before The Enlightenment  (or, perhaps more accurately, as an early skirmish that kicked the whole thing off).

They were unapologetic about theatre as propaganda: equally, by the time Diderot got around to writing long justifications of his tedious scripts, he realised that a bourgeois theatre, with a new format known latterly as dram, could encourage different ways of thinking. His plays, which have never been satisfactorily integrated into canon, addressed matters like 'the role of the father'. All worthy issue plays owe their genesis to Diderot's dialogues. Plays dealing with wider, existentialist themes could owe as much to Greek Tragedy.

Of course, the two terms of the ruckus have never been that clear: Euripides was dealing with Athenian politics in The Trojan Women, and Beckett's Endgame speaks to cold-war paranoia, yet both are Aristotlean in format. As Diderot was smart enough t notice, theorists make labels after artists make work. Yet The Quarrel did have Racine storming out of the Academie Francaise when Perrault read a paper about how great the modern age is. Lines were drawn. Corneille's Le Cid, for example, was declared naughty by the Acadamie for not following Aristotle in its structure, even if audiences loved it. 

Being a Critic: Generosity

If not exactly reluctant, I am a little tentative about writing about 'how to be a critic'. I'm never shy to express an opinion, and do have a clear set of guidelines for my own practice - which I happily explain to students who join one of my various groups (latest sessions available: Young Critics at Manipulate).

But I also believe in the validity of all opinion, in that it expresses an individual's relationship to a work of art. And so, an incoherent scream of outrage is as informative as my increasingly obscure comparisons between French Revolutionary Theatre and The Glasgow Effect. They are part of a multi-perspectival discussion of aesthetics or, if I want to make sense, the general conversation about how art and society get along.

Besides, I critique for a living, and revealing my secret strategies can help readers understand where I am coming from. And I have to teach a class on this soon.

Oh yeah. And the whole of Glasgow is a critic now. 

Let me introduce the first principle and foundation.

Generosity

Because I read a few pages of Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, I believe that there are two approaches to criticism. One of these examines a text within the context of a (predetermined and external) set of rules. The other attempts to see what the text is trying to say, and assesses its success in terms of its intentions.

I belong to the latter school of thought, even as I realise that this

isn't what the chapter on The Conflict Over History actually says. 

Gebauer and Wulf actually identify a period of French history during which a traditionalist approach to criticism - using Aristotle and the ancients as a rule-book to the value of a work - battled with an idea that would become crucial for both romantic and modernist* artists: that the reader's taste could define the quality. The former is an attempt to set up a stable pattern for analysis, while the latter allows a more subjective interpretation.

I like the subjective version. For the French who agreed with me before I thought of it, this subjectivity allowed them to imagine a French culture, one that progressed, challenged the authority of the past and recognised how art could still be amazing and not conform to any idea of what it 'should' be.

These French guys tended to be the philosophes, who wrote about everything and used their wisdom to undermine the power of the monarchy. 

The other French guys tended to like the monarchy, and social stability, and feudalism and classicism and baroque architecture and that. 

But in brief, I am a bit more on the side of those who understand art as an individual event, that defines its own terms of reference. I call this generosity to the art. I flatter myself that I can apply this same logic to people, and treat them as individuals, too.

There are a few problems, though...

*romanticism and modernism are subdivisions of bourgeois theatre

The Overlap Between Journalism and Criticism

The reanimated philosopher ran a finger over the parchment, flaking skin and dripping blood on its rumpled surface. His left eye-ball slipped slightly from the socket as he swivelled to face his tormentor.

"What the hell are these circles supposed to represent? All the elegance has gone out of psychic cartography," he moaned.

"It is a Venn Diagram representing the overlap of criticism, journalism and reviewing," I replied. "It reveals that the three disciplines are not exclusive domains."

"You might as well draw any three placements of the circles, make 'em concentric, air bubbles in a body of water, three parallel lines that intersect. If we're making shit up..."

"I wouldn't have sacrificed a goat to you if I'd known you wouldn't help."

"Drawing nice pictures and pretending that they map reality isn't my business," Aristotle snarled. "That is the stock in trade of the charlatan Plato. Big statements and no evidence."

"He's busy working as Russell Brand's ghost-writer." I snapped. "I wanted to continue my thoughts on the difference between critics and reviewers."

"That's bloody simple, sunshine. A reviewer reviews: they look at an event, and comment on it. A critic uses a broader frame of reference, maybe context, maybe some half-baked idea he stole from the pocket of a corpse."

"Isn't it a question of naming activity, rather than ascribing functions to already established categories?"

"Along with most of your readership, I have no idea what that means. Hang on, is this a dialogue?"

"I thought it was the best dramatic format to engage you..."

"Dialogues are Platonic. Send me back to hell, right now."

"Nay, thou shalt stay within thy circle and enumerate for me the qualities and nature of the critic."

It all went wrong with the Greeks

Miss Julie @ The Citizens

 Although Strindberg's Miss Julie is recognised as an important moment in the development of 'naturalism' in theatre, Dominic Hill's direction of Zinnie Harris' updating owes as much to Brecht and classical models of tragedy. The sparse, neutral set and the broad characterisations of the central couple, servant John and the daughter of the master Julie firmly define the story as the tragic destruction of a woman, drawing out both the proto-feminism of Strindberg's source script and the oppressive society that defines individuals less by potential or personality than by their status.

The heart of the plot lies in the seduction of Miss Julie by the servant, John: although Louise Brearley plays Julie with an initial haughtiness, Harris' John is clearly in command, his changes of mood less capricious than the calculated attacks of a bully intent on getting his way. There is a palpable lack of sexual frisson between this John and Julie: Keith Fleming performs John with a consistent brutality, rarely swaggering, never sensual. That Julie can be seduced by a braggart and a bully  - his confession of love for her is unconvincing but calculated to appeal to her romantic dreams - is alienating and uncomfortable.

It is here that Hill's Brechtian influence is most evident.  In his attempt to make theatre that has a socialist

message, and can promote political change, Brecht developed the idea of an audience that is more intellectual than emotionally engaged. By encouraging a distance between the performance and the audience, Brecht hoped to exposed the structures beneath the action, and allow the audience to observe how the events could have played out differently. With Fleming's brutish performance, it becomes difficult to understand why Miss Julie would be erotically fascinated by the servant: his kisses are rough, not in any animalistic sexual manner, but like an attack. When he suddenly drops her, after having had her, it is clear that he is interested in her as a means to satisfy his own ends.

Without the sexual chemistry that has made Miss Julie a morally ambiguous study of sexual and social power-plays, it is clear that Brearley's Miss Julie is not seeing the same John as the audience. Her clumsy flirtations in the early scenes suggest less maturity than she claims: the scripts descriptions of her father's savagery and Julie's treatment of her fiance imply that she is familiar with violence and is attracted by her seducer's thuggishness. From his scenes with his fiancee Christine (Jessica Hardwick), John is revealed immediately as arrogant and chauvinistic. Even before John confesses his love of Miss Julie - which he describes as a virus in a bluff, antagonistic complaint - it is clear that he is a bully.

Hill's production exposes Miss Julie's mistake: and it is here that the plot takes on a tragic tone. Miss Julie does follow some of Aristotle's 'guidelines' for tragedy: there is a unity of location, time and plot, and there are three actors, just as in the golden age of Athenian drama. Miss Julie's story  - like a tragic heroine, she is high-born - follows the predictable path towards her doom. Her failure to recognise John for what he is become her 'tragic flaw' (hamartia).

By presenting Julie as naive, and John as vicious, Hill's production both highlights the tragic line of the plot and alienates the audience from an easy emotional engagement with either character. It's a remarkable trick: Brecht regarded his approach as an antidote to the aristocratic bias of Aristotelian tragic theory. Naturalism - a theatrical movement led by Ibsen and Strindberg (which concidently overlapped with their mutual interest in the role of women in society) - is less of a bridge between the two modes than a specific response to the rise of science in the nineteenth century, rejecting supernatural interventions (like the gods of Greek tragedy of Hamlet's father's ghost) and following Darwin's ideas about evolution (exposing human personality as a product of natural selection).

This naturalism is a far cry from the 'gritty realism' of contemporary drama, and Harris' adaptation builds on the psychological depth of Strindberg's characterisation to explore the specific dilemma of a woman, like Miss Julie, who has been encouraged to act like a man (by her mother) and beaten (by her father). By delineating this characterisation so precisely, Harris reveals Strindberg's talent for expressing the motivations of his characters and allows the production to create the emotional distance between audience and performers without forcing the actors to slip into caricatures.

By updating the play into 1920s Scotland, during a strike, and recasting the Lord as a mill-owner determined to break a strike, Harris doesn't so much lend a contemporary relevance as locate the sexual battle within a wider set of social changes. John, like many bullies, is cowed by the master's presence - suggesting that his attitude towards women is based in insecurity - and Christine voices a conservative and religious faith in the rightness of hierarchy. Off-stage, the striking mill-workers celebrate (and are defeated): a reminder that the upsetting of the sexual hierarchy expressing in the tryst reflects wider conflicts.

It also adds to the claustrophobia of the final scenes, when Miss Julie realises that she cannot escape. Strikes
are preventing travel, and the father's guards are poised to prevent her leaving the estate. Both the old and new social orders are restraining Miss Julie: that John talks proudly of the workers' resistance (while failing to actively support them) is a reminder that supposedly radical political change may not address the oppression of women.

True to the tragic influences, the unfolding of the plot is pessimistic: only through death can Miss Julie escape. But Fleming's John provokes her suicide, turning back into the lowly servant on the return of his Lordship and using the threat of his wrath to terrify Julie. The lack of compassion from both Christine and John isolates Julie - Christine's sudden aggression is an explosion of emotion from beneath the placid acceptance she displays in the early scenes. It is only in the final moments that the mesh of Brecht, naturalism and tragedy is betrayed: the suicide is presented as a sudden black-out, Brearley holding the knife to her throat in a melodramatic pose.

The final is an act of bad faith in Hill's sophisticated direction: the subtle interaction between the subtext of the seduction and the performances is undermined by crass emotionalism. Fleming's John is reduced to a melodramatic villain, and Julie is stripped of her dignity as a tragic heroine. Throughout the play, there are shocks - the rough kisses, the sudden reversal of John's enthusiasm when he realised that he can't use Julie to fulfil his fantasy of being a businessman. Yet the last image is contrived to surprise, to present horror rather than fear and pity (as in Aristotle's strictures) or intellectual analysis (per Brecht).

Aristotle: Poetics Part 2 - 4

Part II
Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting. Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are, Pauson as less noble, Dionysius drew them true to life. 

Hack, hack, hack. I'll take his word for the three artists mentioned. 

Now it is evident that each of the modes of imitation above mentioned will exhibit these differences, and become a distinct kind in imitating objects that are thus distinct. Such diversities may be found even in dancing, flute-playing, and lyre-playing. So again in language, whether prose or verse unaccompanied by music. Homer, for example, makes men better than they are; Cleophon as they are; Hegemon the Thasian, the inventor of parodies, and Nicochares, the author of the Deiliad, worse than they are. The same thing holds good of Dithyrambs and Nomes; here too one may portray different types, as Timotheus and Philoxenus differed in representing their Cyclopes. The same distinction marks off Tragedy from Comedy; for Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life. 

Finally: he talks about the content of comedy and tragedy. I am not entirely sure that the 'better' idea stands up: most of the characters in tragedy reach levels of naughtiness rarely attained in real life. The worst that the average ned can do is twock a car and burn it out in the woods. Oedipus does some incest, Medea kills all her kids, Orestes knacks his mother (who did his dad...). These actions are not impossible but they are outstanding. 

He also needs comedy as an opposite: the idea that tragic heroes are better than real life depends on sitting them next to comic heroes. He must mean 'more grand' for 'better,' which I can accept. Larger than life, symbolic representatives of a type: although I am not sure that Euripides or Sophocles was interested in this... in fact, I like Sophocles for his psychological realism.

Furthermore, he is looking at representation rather than content. And character, which I believe is less important than plot...
Part III

There is still a third difference- the manner in which each of these objects may be imitated. For the medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration- in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged- or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us.

These, then, as we said at the beginning, are the three differences which distinguish artistic imitation- the medium, the objects, and the manner. So that from one point of view, Sophocles is an imitator of the same kind as Homer- for both imitate higher types of character; from another point of view, of the same kind as Aristophanes- for both imitate persons acting and doing. 

That was my problem with the earlier assertion, too, honest. The content of tragedy is no different to Epic poetry.

Hence, some say, the name of 'drama' is given to such poems, as representing action. For the same reason the Dorians claim the invention both of Tragedy and Comedy. The claim to Comedy is put forward by the Megarians- not only by those of Greece proper, who allege that it originated under their democracy, but also by the Megarians of Sicily, for the poet Epicharmus, who is much earlier than Chionides and Magnes, belonged to that country. Tragedy too is claimed by certain Dorians of the Peloponnese. In each case they appeal to the evidence of language. The outlying villages, they say, are by them called komai, by the Athenians demoi: and they assume that comedians were so named not from komazein, 'to revel,' but because they wandered from village to village (kata komas), being excluded contemptuously from the city. They add also that the Dorian word for 'doing' is dran, and the Athenian, prattein. 

Frankly, I do not care at all who invented it: the only interesting thing is that Aristotle doesn't know, and this is a few years - maybe a century or so - after the scene blew up. Already lost in the mists of time. And etymology - the research of the autodidact, who never recognises that language shifts meanings according to use. Malcolm X was into etymology, and that was the least impressive part of his autobiography.

This may suffice as to the number and nature of the various modes of imitation.

Part IV

Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated.

Is mimesis rooted in our nature - childhood play suggesting the high arts in embryo? And we learn through copying. This could make a strong defence for theatre as a moral force, against Plato's objections (and I am reading this as a response to Plato's anti-drama sentiments).

We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies.

Wait a minute - isn't David Cameron trying to ban that sort of mimesis?

The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he.' For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the colouring, or some such other cause. 

Pleasure is caused by the exercise of critical faculties: a chance to be judgemental. 

Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for 'harmony' and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry. 

We like things to be harmonic - to resolve. That doesn't explain why I went to that Mainliner gig last night: it didn't so much resolve as repeat the heaviest riffs again and again. And Lea Cumming's set: it resolved into shouting. I don't think Aristotle would like Noise Poetry.

Poetry now diverged in two directions, according to the individual character of the writers. The graver spirits imitated noble actions, and the actions of good men. The more trivial sort imitated the actions of meaner persons, at first composing satires, as the former did hymns to the gods and the praises of famous men. A poem of the satirical kind cannot indeed be put down to any author earlier than Homer; though many such writers probably there were. But from Homer onward, instances can be cited- his own Margites, for example, and other similar compositions. The appropriate meter was also here introduced; hence the measure is still called the iambic or lampooning measure, being that in which people lampooned one another. Thus the older poets were distinguished as writers of heroic or of lampooning verse. 

An association of certain poetic styles with the nature of the content: this might reveal how little material Aristotle had to consider. The association of content with form is intriguing

As, in the serious style, Homer is pre-eminent among poets, for he alone combined dramatic form with excellence of imitation so he too first laid down the main lines of comedy, by dramatizing the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire. His Margites bears the same relation to comedy that the Iliad and Odyssey do to tragedy. But when Tragedy and Comedy came to light, the two classes of poets still followed their natural bent: the lampooners became writers of Comedy, and the Epic poets were succeeded by Tragedians, since the drama was a larger and higher form of art. 

Again, the line from Epic to Tragedy, the close association of the two forms of poetry... tragedy is an evolution of the epic poem because of the content. Now, I thought that the first plays emerged from dithyrambs, or hymns. I know they had the same content, even intent as epic (big subject, religious awe) but they were about the performance...

Yes, I know Homer is part of an oral tradition, but the oral tradition was just a guy telling a story. A dithramb needed to be composed, to have a tune, and maybe choreography. They don't come from a literary, or 'verbal' tradition. 
Whether Tragedy has as yet perfected its proper types or not; and whether it is to be judged in itself, or in relation also to the audience- this raises another question. Be that as it may, Tragedy- as also Comedy- was at first mere improvisation. The one originated with the authors of the Dithyramb, the other with those of the phallic songs, which are still in use in many of our cities. Tragedy advanced by slow degrees; each new element that showed itself was in turn developed. Having passed through many changes, it found its natural form, and there it stopped. 

Ah, the optimism of the philosopher: Tragedy has found its natural form, and the rest of history will involve variations on a theme. Riiiiight. 

Aeschylus first introduced a second actor; he diminished the importance of the Chorus, and assigned the leading part to the dialogue. Sophocles raised the number of actors to three, and added scene-painting. Moreover, it was not till late that the short plot was discarded for one of greater compass, and the grotesque diction of the earlier satyric form for the stately manner of Tragedy. The iambic measure then replaced the trochaic tetrameter, which was originally employed when the poetry was of the satyric order, and had greater with dancing. 

Once dialogue had come in, Nature herself discovered the appropriate measure. For the iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse; rarely into hexameters, and only when we drop the colloquial intonation. The additions to the number of 'episodes' or acts, and the other accessories of which tradition tells, must be taken as already described; for to discuss them in detail would, doubtless, be a large undertaking.

Aristotle: The Poetics (part 1)

I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each, to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry. Following, then, the order of nature, let us begin with the principles which come first.

Note: it is all of poetry that is under consideration, not just theatre. So theatre is, before we even start, just a bit of a genre - and that is literature, not performance.

There is this bit, right, in Aristophanes, when Dionysus is reading a play on a boat. He is supposed to be in the army, but he is slacking off. He decides he wants some Euripides, so nips down to Hades to get him back. But when he arrives there, he finds that while Euripides might read better, it is Aeschylus who is the master of the art. 

So Aristophanes knew that reading and watching were very different. I'll bear that in mind when I read on.
Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one another in three respects- the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.

Here's the broader categorisation: all very Aristotlean. Imitation here is 'mimesis.' That harks back to Plato, I think: the imitation of the pure form that resides in some heavenly, metaphysical zone.

For as there are persons who, by conscious art or mere habit, imitate and represent various objects through the medium of colour and form, or again by the voice; so in the arts above mentioned, taken as a whole, the imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or 'harmony,' either singly or combined.

Thus in the music of the flute and of the lyre, 'harmony' and rhythm alone are employed; also in other arts, such as that of the shepherd's pipe, which are essentially similar to these. In dancing, rhythm alone is used without 'harmony'; for even dancing imitates character, emotion, and action, by rhythmical movement. 

Aha! At least Aristotle acknowledges the idea of physical theatre and a more abstracted version of mimesis. 

There is another art which imitates by means of language alone, and that either in prose or verse- which verse, again, may either combine different meters or consist of but one kind- but this has hitherto been without a name. For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar meter. People do, indeed, add the word 'maker' or 'poet' to the name of the meter, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all to the name. Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the meter, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all meters, as Chaeremon did in his Centaur, which is a medley composed of meters of all kinds, we should bring him too under the general term poet. 

In other words, poetry is not just defined by having a metre: it is the content that is crucial. Let's see what content is appropriate for tragedy.

So much then for these distinctions. 

There are, again, some arts which employ all the means above mentioned- namely, rhythm, tune, and meter. Such are Dithyrambic and Nomic poetry, and also Tragedy and Comedy; but between them originally the difference is, that in the first two cases these means are all employed in combination, in the latter, now one means is employed, now another.

Such, then, are the differences of the arts with respect to the medium of imitation

Plato versus Aristotle

Ladies and Gentleman, It's The Throwdown Of The Ages. The One Size Fits All Battle Of Minds In Which Everyone Must Take A Side. We Have Seen Them Fight Over Theology, The Ideal State, The Nature of The Ideal And Just About Every Other Topic That Would Define Western Civilisation: The Individual Blows Of Their Fights Have Become The Paths Of Western Philosophy. Against These Two Men's Epic Ruckus, Aquinas's Entire Corpus Is Merely A Kick In The Balls Of Monism. Betrand Russell's Complete Works Become a Sneaky Punch In The Ribs.

In this specially arranged amphitheatre, modelled on Herod Atticus' patch up job on the one at the bottom of the Athenian Acropolis, these titans of though meet to sort it all out for all time.

In the red corner, carrying the weight of Abstract Ideals and a City State of Philosopher Kings on those broad shoulders, heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee's PLATO.

And in the blue corner, dragging along the categorisation of everything he could get his hands on, the late tutor to the Great Alexander: iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt's ARISTOTLE.

Plato saunters to the centre of the ring, nonchalant yet determined. He fixes his eyes upon his opponent and begins to speak, slowly and carefully.

"Why is it exactly that we are fighting?"

Aristotle looks at his feet. "In The Republic, you make the claim that the actor is a dangerous character. In your ideal society, a man who changes his roles at will upsets the balance of the state, in which everyone has their predetermined place. However, you do say that you'd be happy to hear a counter argument, since theatre remains pretty popular. I've got your answer."

Plato is nonplussed, but keeps his tone even. "It could be that," he drawls. "Or maybe Vile is messing about again, reluctant to actually do his essay."

"Interesting split infinitive there," Aristotle counters. "From the man who is acclaimed for his prose elegance."

"I split my infinitives far less than you split the entire Universe into categories."

"And it is just like you to get metaphysical about the battle, rather than look at the cold, hard material facts."

"Here's another characteristic of my thought." Plato chuckles. "I'll ask the questions. Why did you slip The Poetics onto the end of your Politics?"

"You started it. Your condemnation of theatre comes as part of a description of the perfect society. I am following your lead, and examining the social impact of theatre. Neither of us has a particular interest in pure aesthetics."

"Probably because the discipline doesn't turn up until Kant has a crack at it. His idea of the sublime - perhaps followed by Heideigger's interest in the uncanny - goes some way to account for the popularity of theatre that neither of us could acknowledge."

"You claim that the theatre has two weaknesses, two dangers. One is that it presents the gods as doing bad stuff, the other the problem of the actor's art. The first applies as much to Homer, Epic Poetry: you rememdy that by making up your own myths whenever you need them. That suggests a rather pragmatic attitude to religious narrative, especially for a philosopher who frequently invokes the divine."

"Neither of us had much time for the state religion. I was burned when they killed Socrates for 'corrupting the young' and encouraging belief in strange gods. You ended up running away from Athens to tutor a barbarian prince."

"Abstractions, again. Back to the fight. Where you argue that drama is a form of mimesis, an imitation, you make it bad by definition. Since you are already claiming that the physical universe is a mimesis of a pure form, an artistic copy is a further remove from the truth. I make a few strikes against that."

"So, the man who loves biology so much makes a stand for lies?"

"Not lies. Drama - and this goes for poetry in general - can use the myth to get away from the specifics of history, the detail, and look for more general patterns: the universal. A good play -  and I mean Sophocles' Oedipus Rex  - doesn't tell the history of a particular mother-loving monarch, but suggests how such a matter could play out."

"For most of us, contrary to a line in the play itself, sleeping with mummy isn't a concern. Are you making these mythological stories some kind of psychological drama?"

"I am not that interested in the content of the stories: it is more the structure that intrigues me. The way that Sophocles works through the process of revelation. That is universal."

"Let's hear about the complex plot, then."

"That's when two ingredients are added to the catastrophe - which every tragedy needs. The 'reversal of intention' (peripeteia) and the recognition (anagnorisis)."

"If we stick with Oedipus, I guess  the peripeteia is when Oedipus tries to get information about his past: he thinks it will clear his name, but it goes a little wrong... then he recognises who he is. That's why the play is so good: it is essential a horror story, and the climax is when the hero looks in the mirror, and realises that he was the villain all along."

"Precisely."

"And this is the best way of doing it? The protagonist - the hero - experiences reversal and recognition? Where does that fit into Medea?"

"Er... well, Theseus intends to reconcile with his ex-wife and it goes wrong?"

"He's the antagonist. What about The Oresteia?"

"It's a trilogy."

"Yet it has something at the end that fits your description.It resolves various plot threads in a coherent manner."

End of Round One. A victory on points to Plato.

One of Aristotle's Lot Liked Jim Davidson

I'm jumping past Aristotle in Theories of the Theatre. I have had enough of The Unities and All That Jazz for the moment. When I taught Classics, it was assumed that Aristotle would be taught before the students were even allowed to look at an actual play. Never mind that his theories fail to hold up to the closest inspection. It's like being nagged until you admit that you love Oedipus more than he loved his mother.

So, onto the Romans: I love Latin literature, but they don't have any great playwrights. The consensus is that they basked in the Glory that was Greece. I reckon they had a choice - lions eating Christians or theatre. And lions eating Christians had more bang for the buck. It's the same problem for contemporary theatre when it comes up against Iron Man III.

My opposition to Aristotle is such that I was on the side of the bad guys in The Name of The Rose (they were trying to destroy Aristotle's lost work on comedy). Now it turns out that a late manuscript called the Tractatus Coislinuianus comes from the Roman era, and might even be that very text - more likely to have been a fanzine, though.

Aristotle's ponderous analysis is totally evident, alas: poetry is divided into the mimetic and the non-mimetic. The mimetic into narrative and dramatic... and so on. Comedy gets the definition it really needed.

Comedy is an imitation of an action that is imperfect and ludicrous... through pleasure and laughter effecting the purgation of the like emotions.

If that isn't the best justification for a Jim Davidson marathon, I am not sure I'll ever find a reason to buy the complete series of Big Break. And I mean it: Jimbo is certainly ludicrous and imperfect, and by laughing at his jokes, I am purging the emotions that they appeal to. It's obvious: all those jokes about Chalky were cleansing the United Kingdom of racism.

Notes from Carlson (Theories of Theatre - the bit about the Greeks)

So - the earliest theories of theatre appear to be found in Aristophanes. It's not the best start: nice and early (the Big Three of Athenian tragedy have already done their thing, but it is close enough to the beginning to make it a prime source), but from the pen of a comedian. Sure, Aristophanes wrote plays, but I don't trust him. Look at the hatchet job he did on Socrates in The Clouds.

There are a few places where Aristophanes explores the idea of theatre: The Acharnians, Peace, The Frogs... most of the time, he is having a crack at his contemporary, Euripides. He is more sympathetic to Aeschylus, an earlier, now dead, author (in The Frogs, he wins what Carlson claims to be the most serious discussion debate about the function of drama). It fits in with Aristophanes' socially conservative attitude. Aeschylus had a genuine vision of Athens as a the locus of an inclusive, just society (The Oresteia is like an advert for Athenian jury duty) and was part of the generation who kicked the Persians out of Greece in a moment of panhellenic enthusiasm.

Marner goes on to connect Aristophanes' critique of Euripides to Plato's notorious joke in The Republic (when he says that he's kick actors out of his ideal city. Notice he is going to kick them out after they have done the performance...). Both Plato and Aristophanes express concern at the impact of 'poetry' (that is roughly equivalent to drama, at least as far as this study goes) on the moral character of the city. For Aristophanes, this means liking Aeschylus better than Euripides - prescribing the correct sort of theatre. For Plato, it means watching the plays, thanking the actors, then sending them off to another city.

Sorry, I can't take either of these critiques seriously. First of all, Aristophanes is chiefly known in the twenty-first century as the author of a bunch of plays about sex. There have been attempts to claim that his Lysistrata is some kind of feminist classic, but the main scene involves a striptease routine outside a temple. It is a bit like Benny Hill pausing as he chases his Angels around a park in their skids, turning to the camera, and reminding the audience that they better not cheat on their wives.

As for Plato - didn't he start his career as a playwright? Then a wrestler (or vice-versa)... and have you noticed the format of his dialogues? Very familiar to anyone who has read a play. While there is a more serious explanation for Plato's fundamental dishonesty that invokes his concept of the Noble Lie, the nature of dialectic and the form of The Republic itself, I'm happy enough to say that the quality of Plato's prose, as well as his persistent use of allegory, would get him kicked out of his ideal state.

To be honest, although I am a big fan of Plato, I don't have much interest in his aesthetics, such as they are. He is subsuming a genuine discussion about the nature of poetry to his broader agenda - and slips in critiques of contemporary pagan religion to bolster his attempt to get a rise out of the reader. The same for Aristophanes - he is playing to the crowd.

Like everyone else, I have to start with Aristotle. But, as Carlin points out, that's a pain too. The text we have is a mess (all those books of Aristotle are pretty much notes by his students - and looking at the way I take notes, we are lucky that he doesn't have a few more chapters that repeat 'I am so bored' in different font sizes). I also think that Aristotle was just trying to argue with Plato, and make a case for the 'morality' of drama.

It's not that I don't think the Greeks are worth reading (well, Aristophanes and Plato are)... it is more that I don't think these are serious attempts to grapple with theatre. But I shall recite the Aristotle theories in my next post, for the sake of form...

Aliens in the Arches: an Aristotlean Appreciation

The strict interpretation of the three unities - time, place and action - may not have been respected by the ancients (even Aeschylus liked the occasional change of scene), but the structure of Alien War pays careful respect to Aristotle's strictures. Located in the basement of an arts venue, the site of an alien incursion some twenty years earlier, the script is admirable in its simplicity. The protagonist, a burly marine, short on personality but big on ammunition, guides naive thrill seekers to the safety of the merchandising area.

The central agon, when the aliens breach a secured vessel, is concise: a burst of machine gun fire replaces the verbiose speechs, and the resolution is worked out not by the philosophical meanderings adored by Euripides but the true power of this world, the bullet. The traditional role of the chorus is taken by the audience - shades of Brecht in the comprehension rejection of the fourth wall - and the prologue becomes a series of safety announcements.

Despite the short running time, catharsis is, at least, partially achieved: there is no lack of fear when the big fucking alien emerges out of the wall, and the pity for the two teenage girls next to me is relieved only when I realise that their terror is ephemeral. Stripping away the expected features of theatre - the stage, the characterisation - allows this site specific -performance to attain an unusual intensity.
While a t-shirt may be a fine souvenir at the end, a better marketing tactic might be underpants featuring the distinctive alien logo, to replace the ones I just shittted.

I'd Skip this One, if I Were You

Most of the time, I call myself a Platonist  - which makes those frequent comments by women that they would like to remain “platonic friends” all the more ironic. In reality, this means that I once read The Republic and got over-excited by the deconstruction of ideas: in practice, I wander about shouting that we are all living under a delusion enforced by the tyranny of television, which Plato clearly predicted in his parable of the cave.

Quite how this impacts on theatre criticism is open to question. Apart from those difficult paragraphs where Plato explicitly rejects the presence of actors in his perfect state - luckily, I think he was joking most of the time – Plato didn’t set out a specific approach to performance. It is a far cry from his jilted student Aristotle, who ruined theatre criticism by insisting on all sorts of perfections and strictures, mainly to get back at Plato for dismissing theatre, but also to justify his subjective opinion that Oedipus Rex is the best play ever written.

Oedipus is a great play, but there is no need to make up an entire system of analysis to prove it. Sadly for Aristotle, he couldn’t get a gig writing reviews for The Scotsman and his opinions needed to be made of sterner stuff before they could irredeemably influence generations of makers and audiences. Slapping down “the unities” of time, place and plot, and slicing the possible plots into moral categories is fine for an afternoon’s drinking conversation, but there is no reason for playwrights or critics – or teachers of Classical Civilisation – to take it seriously.

Perhaps the reason that Plato didn’t spend time deciding how to analyse and undermine theatre is that he was a bit touchy about his past. It says on the internet somewhere that Plato had been an unsuccessful playwright before meeting Socrates, who tried to cheer him up by taking him to a party. Given that he went on to write most of his philosophy as dialogues – so similar to the central scene in most Greek tragedies where the competing visions fight it out before someone’s mother rips their head off – and that his writing is littered with allusion to poetry and tragedy, it’s not unreasonable to think that Plato’s anti-drama stance is more notional than serious. Frankly, it is just a relief that Plato didn’t leave us with a huge body of dogmatic opinion to test performance.

The little Plato that I read in the Beginner’s Guide, however, is instructive. He does blather about the age-old battle between poetry and philosophy every so often, but that seems to me an unnecessary division between genres - the sort of thing Aristotle was far better at, anyway. His most famous pronouncement, that he would ban theatre from his ideal state, mostly on the grounds that it is a lie, deserves a little investigation.

First of all, Plato explicitly admits that the actor is a skilled professional: he even goes so far as to say that he would praise them before booting them out of the city. He then acknowledges that the theatre’s threat is in the impact it might have on the citizens, what with its portrayal of good men being done over by the gods, or the promulgation of ideas that don’t fit in the proto-totalitarian machine that he appears to be advocating.

Since he said all this in the context of defining his perfect society – and contradicting himself from chapter to chapter on everything from women’s rights to the right place for dancing girls at a dinner party – it strikes me that Plato took theatre far more seriously than most modern political thinkers. I checked out most of the manifestos at the last election, and they contained platitudes about the necessity of state support. Assuming that we can count politicians as “thinkers” in any meaningful respect, they accept the liberal idea that “art is a good thing”. They probably have some theory that it can be used to promulgate social cohesion.

I’ve watched a great deal of performance, had a few tragedies in my life, and agree with Plato. Art is fucking dangerous. Music persuades youngsters that rebellion is a good idea. Pop music sells shoddy consumer products. If art had no impact on our behaviour, there would not be adverts in the cinema. The very environment of art makes us vulnerable to persuasion.

As it goes, I don’t believe Plato wanted to kick the artists out: even if he did, his ideal government is pretty much the model for complete state control, so we can reject many of his conclusions. If he hated tragedians so much, he wouldn’t have quoted them so often, and imitated their style. It is better to think of him as a satirist than a philosopher, and have the salt handy. I think that this passage is more a melodramatic allegory, emphasising the importance of art in shaping opinion, and also its potential as a counter-cultural force.

So this is where my Big Theory comes in. When I taught Plato – once, in a last minute panic revision session at a Masonic School in Hertfordshire – my students suggested that the “Noble Lie” is the clue to Plato’s entire philosophy. I was drinking wine in a cloister, watching the sunset and surrounded by occult symbolism cast in stone: the perfect moment to adopt a teenager’s hunch as a foundation for my entire belief system.

Having spent most of The Republic detailing the hierarchies of a super state, based on reason, Plato slips in this little cheat. Social cohesion will not be developed through rationality. Instead, he makes up a major bullshit, something to do with DNA and precious metals, and some character having a daytrip to the afterlife.

Never mind that the story is less plausible, and open to less amusing jokes, that the ones about Zeus seducing women disguised as a golden shower: Plato has just undermined his entire project for a rational state. If a philosopher did that these days, he’d get a bad review in The Guardian, get an article in the Daily Mail with the headline EXPERT SAYS THINKING INCREASES CANCER RISK and end up as a MEP for UKIP. Back in the day, it meant that thousands of earnest men in bed sheets built their world view around it, ignoring Plato’s early invention of surrealism.

Reading Plato is like having a big argument with a dead man. You can’t negotiate details, push him on finer points and, after a while, it starts to stink. The Republic is an infuriating mess of contradictions, all of which are internally coherent. It makes you think.

And that, I contest, was his point. The Republic isn’t a handbook for the ideal state – even Plato mistook it, had a little political adventure and nearly ended up dead. It is a text-book for teaching dialectic – resolving problems through argument. Frankly, the dialectic in the book is terrible: Socrates and a bunch of cheerleaders. It’s the dialectic in the mind of the reader that is the point.

So that’s it. Platonic criticism is about a dialogue. I needed a thousand words to say this, claim a heavy duty precedent just to prove I am not a moron. And a Platonic Performance Criticism engages with the relationship between form and function, grapples with the issues of a Performance not its relative quality – which is why I either ignore things like “good direction” or get names wrong – and exists in the point of contact between audience and event.

Discuss.