I Read a Book About The Enlightenment...

It's the period of history that everyone's talking about! It's either the moment when humans stopped acting like kids, or the reduction of all reality to a series of commodities... depends on who you ask, really. But here are five things about the Enlightenment that I pulled out of my critical rucksack.

It's the age of reason
This is the classic claim for the eighteenth century, and the one that sticks. Generally, this has been seen as a good thing: Enlightenment thinkers aren't interested in faith or authority, they like to think about stuff. However, this isn't as simple as it seems. The ambition to apply reason to ideas means that there was plenty of argument, and a fundamental belief - that reason is the best thing ever - doesn't receive that much critique. 'Reasonable' can end up being like 'Christian', a word that isn't always used to mean the same thing. 

They liked a bit of science
In the previous century, the scientific method had caused a revolution in the way that the Universe was being investigated. This encouraged the Enlightenment to apply a more scientific approach to sociology, frequently invoking science to justify their descriptions of human behaviour. 

They invented branding
Although the French philosophes did hang out together, Enlightenment was a buzzword, and writers would slip it into conversation to prove that they were in the gang. This did mean it was easy enough for its enemies to point out their opposition, but it also meant that the wider movement got more hits than individual thinkers. 

It was cosmopolitan
Being a cross-European business, there was less of the nationalism and more of the hands across borders - they were even pretty positive about African and especially Chinese culture. This respect for different societies - despite the odd racist freak-out - made the Enlightenment one of the first movements to have an inclusive philosophy (although Christianity, The Roman Empire and Islam might all dispute this, since they had Universal aims too).

It was about growing up
Kant said that it was about casting off the oppression of authority, of maturing. The rejection of tradition and religion was an attempt to make humans act like adults, and not cower in fear at a set of rules made up by a father-figure (like God or the King, or Aristotle)

He's Alright By Me, Episode One. With Rowan Williams

Today in He's Alright By Me, we have the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Apart from looking a bit like a hipster, before it was cool, Williams is one of those churchmen that atheists don't like to talk about, because he knows stuff and doesn't make stupid videos that try to prove that God exists because bananas. 

In his The Edge of Words, Williams gets all linguistic, and ponders the problems of talking about God. Since he is a member of the Welsh Gorsedd (a group of bards), Williams has a particular angle on langauage, and has even said a few things about Shakespeare. However, it's his comments on performance that makes him alright by me, so let's hear what he has to say...

In contrast to our own narrative about ourselves (a dramatic one)will - if it is a good narrative - be charged with significance moment by moment (whereas our self-narration will have to select from a background of not obviously significant material). Drama shows us what is going on in our self-construction... (page 83, Speech and Time)

Here Williams points out the difference between the kind of 'dramaturgy' employed in everyday life - the sociological model, as promoted by Goffman - and the dramaturgy of a performance. Simply, life is full of boring bits, which are better ignored: a play, on the other hand, is chock-full of moments that have meaning. It's a useful distinction, because after realising that Trump's campaign could be deconstructed dramaturgically, I was beginning to forget that there are two distinct ways of applying dramaturgy. However, he gets onto performance next...

We are hoping (when watching drama) to understand human agency and interaction... why this leads to that and so to become aware of larger possibilities for our own going on movement and transformation. (page 84)

A Bishop and A Buddhist Walk into a bar..

His point here is to give a reason for going to the theatre, and it's not a million miles away from Aristotle, who said that characters in a tragedy represent 'a type' and their behaviour is more 'philosophical' than 'historical'. Then Diderot, that time he wanted more plays about issues concerning 'real life', was suggesting something similar. This is theatre as a kind of mirror, opening up an engagement with the audience that allows them to see what they might be doing.

Moving away from dramaturgy as a way of explaining behaviour, Williams is using drama as a way for humans to consider their own narratives. It's like when I watch Jeremy Kyle and there is the all important lie detector test. I sit there thinking - if I was in that situation, I wouldn't be going on National Television to find out if I'd slept with four people in one night. But I probably would be shouting my head off, having made the call to the producers.

Next up, Williams thinks about ritual - and he has probably done his share of rituals, what with him being a bishop and all. This is something I've been really obsessed with in the recent past, mainly because Performance Studies (thanks to Tricky Dicky's speech in 1992. He wanted rituals to be part of theatre studies). And I have seen some terrible performances that claimed to be ritual - dull, pretentious and missing the entire point that Williams makes about drama, which is that every moment is freighted with significance.

Ritual includes elements of drama, but is not identical with it. Building on definitions offered by Richard Sennett, we could say that ritual is repetitive, transformative and publicly theatrical... it makes ordinary physical stuff (including words and gestures) carry meanings that are not intrinsic to themselves... effective ritual is a matter of holding myself to account, not of retreating to a comforting alternative time-track in which everything is resolved. (pages 84-85)

This gets to the hub of why Williams is on it. The intensity of the theatrical experience, in which each moment, each word and each gesture is full of meaning, allows a resolution - even in the case of examples like Waiting for Godot. Look, the lights are on, the play has ended. Give them a clap. 

He sees ritual as giving an alternative experience which, by repetition and insistence on identifying a 'broad canvas' of narrative beyond the individual, intensifies the mirror effect and forces a different kind of reflection. But there is no resolution. The individual is left pondering their relationship to themselves. 

Okay, I am not quite there with this: I can see how ritual and drama can be used to similar ends and how, like that one Fringe I kept going to see Iona Kewney dance, a performance can be used as a ritual experience. But Williams is checking out some interesting territory, and that makes him Alright By Me.

The Dialects of Having A Big Fight about Ideas

It's the battle of the millennium! 

In the Red Corner, that Terrific Tag Team of Cultural Marxism: Adorno and Horkheimer! These guys just don't know when to quit, and their Dialectic of Enlightenment has been blamed for everything from Hilary Clinton through to post-modernism! 

And in the Blue Corner, it's the entirety of Western Philosophy! When Addy and Horky hit out at the consequences of the Enlightenment, it wasn't enough for them to have a crack at the philosophes of the eighteenth century: they squared up against Martin Luther, Bacon, Plato - anyone who had done anything to undermine the animistic vision of the university and replace it with cold, hard facts (as long as they could be used for a profit!)! 

Round One

In The Concept of Enlightenment, the red boys have set out their stall early. 'The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths... Enlightenment is totalitarian' (pages 3-6). Pulling in references to Plato's preoccupation with Ideas as Numbers (page 7), Martin Luther's belief that knowledge without purpose is a bit of a slut (page 5) and the reduction of nature to the service of mankind (page 8), they point out that both the Jewish Genesis and the Greek philosophers were already staking out nature as the property of... the humans.

It's a beautiful, rhetorical and polemical attack: a blizzard of concepts that sketches out an entire history of oppression, but somewhere, the Enlightenment gets lost in the mix. It's a strange start, not to actually mention any of the big names of the eighteenth century in an essay intending to take down the underpinning of the Age of Reason. Rather, Adorno and Horkheimer have a right go at the evolution of a particular way of thinking which results, frankly, in capitalism. I'm not sure, in retrospect, that communists moaning about the exclusion of magic and metaphysics makes much sense, nor the dismissive attitude towards humanism. 

I'm an anti-humanist myself, but what would socialism be without the human dimension. Oh - that's right... a totalitarian state that subsumes personal freedom for the 'progress of history'. Any kulaks fancying commenting on how that works out? 

Result: bit of a below the belt reply there: the Stalinist purges weren't common knowledge when Dialect was first published in the 1940s, and it's not like they were advising Stalin. It's a all a bit - my system. love it or leave it, really. 

Still, Adorno and Horkheimer have got it all to do now. Fair play placing The Age of Reason within a broader context, but instead of being able to, say, have a crack at Voltaire and Diderot, they have some big additional players to consider. 

Round Two

Adorno and Horkheimer are standing in the centre of the ring and screaming. There's something about the difference between magic and science, representation and specifics... atoms, rabbits, ritual and plunder. 

The other philosophers are looking at their shoes. the words 'magic is utterly untrue' get a nod of recognition, but the whole of pages 9, 10 and 11 are incoherent, thanks to the density of the thought. They might be saying that magical rituals recognised individual objects as being representatives of a category. Maybe they are trying to expose the mythology that sustains the privilege of rational thought. 

In the meantime, Plato has wandered off to do some sums and Martin Luther is nailing his own foot to the canvas. 'It distracts me from the pain in the hoop this pair are giving me.'

Result: Derrida would have a field day with this. Unfortunately for me, the mentions of mimesis and representation means that this is probably part of the essay I am going to need to understand. They are probably trying to postulate two modes of thinking - magical and rational - and suggesting that magical thinking is less alienated than the rational, in so far as it offers the subject (some bloke dressed up) an identification with the object (the universe): the human is part of the cosmos. The Enlightenment, on the other hand, presents a power relationship between subject and object (the subject having replaced his funky shaman outfit with a white lab coat).