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). 

Five Fantastic Facts about Lessing, the Father of Dramaturgy

Everyone knows that Lessing first used the word 'dramaturgy' in the 1760s, and gave birth to a field of study that has befuddled students of theatre ever since. However, there are many things about this great Enlightenment philosopher that are not well-known, and may or may not shed light on the reasons behind his attempt to develop a systematic framework for theatrical theory.

He was a right geek as a kid
In a letter to his mum, he straight up admits that he's thought his life would be spent with books, but as soon as he started to hang out with the cool kids, he realised that he wasn't making friends with that attitude. So he took up dancing and fencing, which meant that, even if no-one liked him, he could stab them up.
(Letter to Justina Salome Lessing of 20 January 1749)

He thought that The Bible was too long
Even in the post-modern world, where everything is everything and 'cross-discipline study' helps gets scholarships, Lessing the dramaturg and Lessing the theologian get treated like separate people. I actually have to keep checking that the Lessing who wrote in defence of what would now be seen as a 'liberal' Christianity is the same guy as the author of Laocoon. 

Grappling with the competing inspirations of his Lutheran upbringing and Enlightenment reason, Lessing stood up for 'the inner truth' of Christianity. Roughly, this meant that all that stuff in The Bible about history was too much information, and he hoped to find somebody who could teach the Christian message 'like Jesus would have done'. He wasn't exactly asking for A Beginner's Guide, but he is unlikely to have had much sympathy with the fundamentalist's insistence on the absolute truth of Genesis.

He was a Social Justice Warrior
Spend five minutes on YouTube, and a neckbeard will appear, explaining how the Enlightenment Project is being destroyed by Social Justice Warriors. Apparently, the worship of science, penis and playing computer games is the logical end of the Age of Reason, and those people who, like, promote feminism and are against Islamophobia are Cultural Marxists plotting to destroy civilisation. 

Only, Lessing was all about the egalitarian and the cosmopolitan. His play Nathan the Wise featured a wise Jewish dad who told a parable which explained the equality of the three monotheisms. In fact, Nathan even hints that the Jews are wiser than the Christians. It's a shame that this parable is still relevant today. 

He was the sweet talking son of a preacher man
Oh yes he was. His dad was a Lutheran pastor. 

Even after his death, he was causing a right ruckus
Following Lessing's early departure from this mortal coil, two of his mates, Moses Mendelssohn and Freddy Jacobi threw down over which one of them ought to be considered his philosophical heir. It was a controversy that lit up the German intellectual scene. To be honest, it all reads as a bit trivial to me - it seems to be about whether Lessing ended up supporting Spinoza's pantheism or retained a more orthodox position on theism. But it might have had some importance in the shift from Enlightenment to Romantic modes of thinking, so there's that.

Source: Lessing's Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment (OUP, 2003)
Toshimasa Yasukata

Why Dramaturgy Matters: Mark Chou and Michael Ondaatje

Last night I had the strangest dream. I was a character in a pilot for a situation comedy. I kept telling the other characters that the show had potential, but we had to get back control of the dramaturgy: otherwise, we'd be at the mercy of the executives. And they'd turn us into a generic narrative. 

Then I woke up and discovered someone had sent me this article.

The Drama of Politics: Enacting Trump's Presidential Self

Mark Chou and Michael Ondaatje say some nice things about the potential of the theatre critic ('Good theatre criticism, carried out by qualified analysts, can help peel back the theatrical facade and offer citizens a real glimpse into what it takes to campaign effectively and win votes in modern America'). They identify Trump as a 'performer' rather than a politician and reference a comment made by a former aide to Ted Cruz that Trump was turning the USA's election into a reality show.

They also point out that 'theatrics' are often ignored, and that

from Trumpageddon, Simon Jay

Robert Brown has encouraged the use of dramaturgy (following my old pal Goffman) in the analysis of political behaviour. Chou and Ondaatje do conflate the use of dramaturgy as a sociological tool and a theatrical discipline - something I have realised right now is not necessarily correct - but the argument is consistent. The democratic process has become similar to a theatrical performance, and can helpfully be examined like a play.

They go on to explain how dramaturgy operates as a critical tool, before exposing the dramaturgy of The Donald. Apparently, Trump maintained a consistent character throughout the election, drawing on a stock type ('the anti-politician'), leaving space to allow the audience (the media and the electorate) enough space to ponder the relationship between Trump's persona on the campaign and his 'real' self.

Written before Trump's victory, it attempts to explain how he became an attractive candidate through the use of a narrative and character development. It's also a strong argument for the use of the theatre critic as a commentator on political events.

Since I am so wishy-washy, I am not going to state that, as student and critic, I could be the greatest political commentator of the modern age. I would argue, however, that the process of theatre studies is, in this context, an important aspect of educating the citizen. It's not some liberal luxury, but a vital study that enables intelligent engagement with the activities of the political classes.

I might even go further: theatre itself becomes a place where the audience can practice the kind of thinking that encourages a way of interpreting the world. The ability to critique performance can be applied to other events, to see beneath the facade, and be aware of the manipulation enacted by both media and politicians (any anyone else who is acting up). 

In other words, my research into dramaturgy is the most important research being done in the whole world ever. Not in the sense that knowing how Frank Quitely and Grant Morrison fit into the history of Brechtian theory, or whether Lessing was a religious rather than a rationalist thinker, but in that it introduces a way of reading behaviour. 

Other research is available and is probably more interesting, though. I'd point to Carl Lavery, Dee Heedon and Anselm Heinrich, because Glasgow University. But how often do they start an article discussing a weird dream, eh?

It's Okay: Let Him Blather On and He'll Not Notice No-one Cares.