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?

Why Shakespeare is not 'for the ages'

Pompeo Molmenti: Death of Othello

Before he opens up a can of academic jibber-jabber, Tom Cohen introduces Anti-Mimesis (CUP, 2004) with a brief meditation on the speech made by Othello as he commits suicide. Noting the bathos of Lodovico's response to the Moor cutting his own throat, Cohen ponders whether the farewell speech itself is rather an odd thing to say on a death-bed, being a bit too rhetorical from a man who has all blood coming out of him. 

Cohen draws attention to the wordiness of Shakespeare, and the tension between the visual and verbal. Here's the speech, with Lodovico's comment.

Set you down this; 
And say besides, that in Aleppo once, 
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk 
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, 
I took by the throat the circumcised dog, 
And smote him, thus.

           [Stabs himself.]

LODOVICO: O bloody period!

I defy anyone to perform that in front of a group of school-children without causing hilarity. Mind you, it probably set off the groundlings in The Globe if they weren't busy getting sucked off in the back row.

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

Dead Celebrity Chat Show with Jacques Derrida

C: So, we haven't done this for a while but I am delighted to be back with the Dead Celebrity Chat Show. Tonight’s special guest, summoned from the higher spheres of the kabbalah’s Tree of Life, is Jewish mystic Jacques Derrida. Good evening, Jackie boy.

JD: Bon soir. And may I say how enchanted I am to be back. Enchanted… enchained… enabled… enlisted.

C: And this is a special show tonight, because you requested to be called up as soon as you heard the subject of the debate…

JD: Yes, the so-called work in progress. I've noticed it has become quite a thing of late.

C:Indeed. Now, your work has always been concerned with unravelling the apparent coherence of definitions: it was this that led to you being pegged, so to speak, as a nihilist by some philosophers.

JD: My approach may appear idiosyncratic, but I can assure you it has roots in the dialogues of Plato. Indeed, I imagined the father of philosopher writing a series of postcards… and his approach to pharmacy inspired both my work and that song by The Prodigy.

C:We’ll come back to your antecedents later, but let’s begin with the work in progress. I believe you have identified it as an emerging genre?

JD: Mais oui. I have always been troubled by the Aristotelian tradition which claims a proto-scientific observational methodology but is actually more about – how would you say – putting stuff in boxes. And ticking them. The fashion for works to be named in this way suggests that a new box is being designed. I must deconstruct it.

C: So the designation itself is the problem.

JD: D’accord. In a real sense, every work is in progress. The nature of performance, its location in a physical and temporal location ensures that when it is being performed, it is in progress. To extend this, the notion of the performance, both in expectation and after-thought, continues the work’s progress.

C: So you question the validity of the term? It is so large that it is useless?

JD: Bien sur, it applies to all performance… as we can say that the event is reconfigured at different points on the hermeneutical spiral, it is always in progress.

C:Er, you mean, no play ever really finished because it exists in the mind of the audience, who keep on interpreting it, making it new.

JD: It is a platitude, but yes. The final meaning – the end of progress – to an event is always deferred and any reading is partial and tentative. Even the reviews of the critics on The Daily Mail.

C:And so it becomes a broad and meaningless statement, since it applies to everything?

JD: Exactement. But that is not my concern here. It is obvious and easy. What sort of a post-modernist would I be to offer so tawdry a truth?

C:Please, go on.

JD: My worry is that the designation ‘work in progress’ has come to mean a particular attitude to performance, and one that I do not care to promote. It is used most often in devised theatre, in live art – all categories that bear the finger-prints of the criminal Aristotle and would not bear my scrutiny – to denote a performance that is not yet complete in the sense of a product ready for the market.

C: I notice you are using a commercial term here…

JD: Bouf, times drive us to hard uses. The language of neo-liberalism has infected us all. If we had time, I would perhaps argue for a correct form of government, based on the triumph of the rational, but… since money changes hand, we must speak the language of the bad daemon.

C:So the work in progress is a form of public rehearsal, perhaps?

JD: That will suffice as a working definition, mon ami. And this public rehearsal is all too acceptable.

C: Something you find objectionable?

JD: The job of the philosophe is not to condemn the artist, although there are grounds to run them out of the city-state. However, there is a duty of care, to assess the artists’ social consequence.

C: And the work in progress is morally suspect?

JD: If it is not offered at a reduced price, or incorporates some form of audience dialogue – even the humble and mind-bendingly boring post-show conversation – very much so. I am concerned that it is used as a defence, a strategy to confound the process of critics… if they complain about the show’s quality, why, then, it is merely in progress.

C: Some critics review anyway… one example got five stars…

JD: And here the critic is morally culpable. To tell an audience that an incomplete drama is perfect is to undermine public trust, and deceive the artist.

C:This is a difficult question with devised work. With a script, it is possible to get closer to a definitive version…

JD: D’accord, the complete version is elusive. The atmosphere, the temporal peculiarities, the spatial variations…

C: The date and the place it happens…

JD: But this is not unique to the work in progress. That is not the question… the question is what a culture of works in progress would mean… a kind of mimesis of theatre, a series of rehearsals that perform the idea of performance…

C:Getting further and further from the pure form…

JD: Exactement.

C: Of course, mimesis itself is suspect.

JD: Oui, as we see in the parable of the mime who tickles himself to death.

C:You are not Derrida, are you?

JD: Mon ami, c’est incroyable…

C:Let’s go back to a few things you have said… ‘in a real sense’. Your distaste for mimesis just now, and the dismissal of Aristotle. The mention of the city-state… don't you get enough time already on the blog?

JD: Derrida agreed with me when we met in kether… he lent me his beret and these black tobacco cigarettes.

C:That’s kether on the Jewish Tree of Life?

JD:I influenced their mystics.

C:So, is this work in progress thing just another attempt to defeat Aristotle?

JD:No. I think that it is confusing audiences. They ought to get cheap tickets if they are part of the creative process.

C:I think they always are…

Plato's Performance Problem

It is pretty easy to just ignore Plato's thoughts on theatre. Both the printing revolution - which brought his works to international attention - and the internet - which allows clowns like me to give their opinions on them - could be regarded as having changed the relationship between the self and the world to such an extent that Plato's understanding of consciousness belongs to an earlier, and defunct paradigm.

Equally, there are plenty of tricks to get past his objections to theatre: made in his Republic, they are related to his metaphysics of Perfect Forms, a system that has been rejected. Instinctive rejection aside, it is possible to deconstruct the Ideas Realm Plato develops as a foundation for knowledge (I think I am right in calling it an epistemology, a system of understanding) on Plato's own terms. This is a battle that I don't have the correct weapons to wage (like a sharp understanding of Plato's dialectic), but I shall take the possibility on faith.

However, as a theatre critic and someone with a sympathy for Plato's majestic project and ambition (I won't call myself a Platonist, lacking the necessary appreciation of his complex thought), I can't just leave it. It bothers me that Plato, while respecting the skill of the actors, and knowing plenty of the the great classical dramatists' work, would banish them from his ideal state... even if his ideal state is one I would not fancy inhabiting.

Tom Stern identifies three objections to theatre. 

In one: as a work of art, they are detached from the Forms and are just not good enough. If the Form of a chair is the perfect version beyond understanding, the chair made by a carpenter is an imitation - but at least you can sit in it. The chair in a painting, or a poem, or a king in a tragedy, doesn't even fulfil the purpose it was intended for.

In two (and one can be dismissed as a consequence of Plato's metaphysics, which no-one uses anymore): the artist doesn't really know about what they describe, except on the surface.  So they are giving false information.

For bully's special prize: people are stupid and use the arts to define their understanding of life. It's a bit like those people who copy soap opera characters.  Theatre can be a bad influence.

I don't think Plato can be ignored for being a spoilsport. His worry about humans mistaking the surface for depth are consistent in The Republic, and if his belief in truth is a bit old fashioned, it calls to a high respect for human potential. His distrust of theatre is a distrust of distraction - and just like his famous cave story predicts television (sort of), his worries about theatre as deception are trenchant in an era when surface often trumps depth.

On one level, I can imagine Plato's opinions on Strictly Come Dancing. All the celebrity nonsense, the voting, the pairing up of acts, the tacky choreography and the objectification of the dancers would drive him to a rage. He'd hate the false 'liveness' of the weekly event, and decry the artificiality of the project.

But he would be more than a disappointed contemporary dance fan (or, to switch to X-Factor, a fan of Eric Clapton bemoaning the product line of modern pop). He is questioning the notion of authenticity itself itself - and finding it absent in the material plane.
It is a simple step from Platonism to a gnostic vision of reality, in which materiality itself is suspect.

So Plato isn't just picking on theatre: it is a symbol of a problem

with all arts (you can't get off with Botticelli's Venus) and, from here, reality itself. And he is taking theatre seriously: it does change people's minds. In this sense, he respects art more than those defenders of video games who argue that playing Grand Theft Auto doesn't turn players into wannabe gangsters.

The problem is mimesis: theatre is an impersonation of the real. Mimesis - again, as Stern describes - is tough to translate, but includes the ideas of copying and imagination. And Plato is quite correct: the king in a tragedy is not fit for purpose, and can tell the audience nothing.