The spectators are partly not connoisseurs, and in part too good natured, and they take the desire to please them for the deed.
Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy No.5
While I am reluctant to be as bold as Lessing - who is commenting on the habit of certain actors raising their voice as they exit a scene in order to ensure a round of applause - the good nature of audiences could be a fair reason for the critic to ignore their responses in the assessment of a performance's quality. Having endured a dismal evening at Wonderland - a new musical which takes liberties with Lewis C's fantastical tale of Mad Hatters and tyrannical queens, I pondered how this mismatch of story and song could attract such warm audience approval. In this matter, as in so many, Herr Lessing has anticipated my perplexity.
At one point, Alice (now transformed into a middle-aged divorcee) makes an apparently trenchant speech in which she realises that her ex-husband, previously her authority, is, in fact, a mean-spirited authoritarian. Love is replaced by hate, and this stands for some form of liberation. On cue, the audience interrupted the performance to vigorously approve her new-found independence.
And yet - leaving aside whether hate rather than indifference marks liberation from patriarchal oppression - Alice had not earned her attitude. In the magical world of Wonderland, self-realisation comes from jumping through a magic mirror. A symbol of Kierkegaard's 'leap of faith' perhaps, but an unsatisfying symbol that removes the need for either self-awareness or struggle. This is lazy writing, and the speech's feminism is poorly served by the easy resolution of Alice's long-term repression.
It is a signifier of a trenchant speech, rather than the thing itself. The significance is not within the words but the dramatic pause, the invitation for applause. The audience is invited to participate, to award the play with meaning.
Perhaps this is the training of television, with its laughter track teaching the viewer how to respond. Rewatching I'm Alan Partridge, the laughter track is briefly replaced after one character's monologue - about shooting up a friend with an attack helicopter - with a ripple of applause. Suitably equipped, the viewer is educated in the shape of 'important moments' without needing the shape to be further refined or contoured. While ignoring audience response is perhaps a step too far, this example suggests a place for suspicion, at the least.
Monday, 13 February 2017
Wednesday, 8 February 2017
Donald Trump is a Genius.
It must have been about a year ago that I decided that I was a genius. Boy, that was one of my worst ideas yet. Even though I pointed out that being a genius was a personality type rather than a guarantee of anything, like, getting done, it's not really the type of claim that makes me new friends. But I could add that the willingness to sound like an utter dick was exactly the kind of thing that a genius would do.
I feel less satisfied with my statement now that I have realised that Donald Trump probably also counts as a genius. See, it's not boasting. Does anyone really want to share a personality type with Donald Trump?
Being a genius wasn't always a thing. Pascal was quite upset when he was called a genius by Queen Christina of Sweden. He thought that it meant he couldn't be humble, and worried about God being annoyed by his presumption. Then he got tangled up when he realised that by trying to be humble, he was being arrogant about his humility. I guess he eventually tossed a coin to decide whether swanking about the place was okay.
Pascal, in around 1651, was one of the first people to be called a genius: according to Ray McDermott (Materials for a Confrontation with Genius as a Personal Identity, 2004), he is the first name trotted out by scholars who want to write a history of 'the genius'. Mainly because he lived on the cusp of a moment when the idea was becoming fashionable: during the 1700s, theorists displayed their descriptions of 'genius' like a hipster's sleeve tattoo. Diderot goes into detail about the nature of the genius (that's where I got my idea from that I'm a genius). Addison chatted about it in his magazine The Spectator, and Forkel's 1802 biography of Bach transformed Johann Seb from jobbing composer to Mighty Man of Music Magic.
Pascal comes out of it quite well: by the time of Wagner, being a genius was cool enough to be the subject of an opera. Die Meistersinger contrasts the genius with the mere craftsman (Edward E. Lowinsky, Musical Genius -Evolution and Origins of a Concept). There's no prize for guessing which character Wagner identifies with himself. But Pascal was a man of a modest age: God was still a big deal, and the official line was that the past was better than the present, art was an act of imitation and being 'original' was more likely to result in a visit to a dungeon than an honorary degree from Glasgow University.
As always, it's The Enlightenment's fault. Starting with Addison, going through Diderot and this bishop called Douglas, who defended Milton's Paradise Lost from charges of plagiarism in 1751, up to Goethe in German and beyond him into the Romantic Era, the word 'genius' changed its meaning. In Latin, It had referred to the guardian spirit of the individual, before alluding to a moment of creativity up until the time of Pascal. But Diderot did (as he always does) a great job of defining it to his needs. Realising that he wasn't all that in the creative stakes - although he could churn out a perfectly acceptable article or two - he imagined a personality that could be both sensitive to nature but rational enough to express it coolly.
Materials for a Confrontation with Genius as a Personal Identity
Ray McDermott
Ethos
Vol. 32, No. 2, Theme Issue: Ethnographic Studies of Positioning and Subjectivity: Narcotraffickers, Taiwanese Brides, Angry Loggers, School Troublemakers (Jun., 2004), pp. 278-288
Musical Genius--Evolution and Origins of a Concept
Edward E. Lowinsky
The Musical Quarterly
Vol. 50, No. 3 (Jul., 1964), pp. 321-340
Originality, Genius, Plagiarism in English Criticism of the Eighteenth Century
George J. Buelow
International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music
Vol. 21, No. 2 (Dec., 1990), pp. 117-128
I feel less satisfied with my statement now that I have realised that Donald Trump probably also counts as a genius. See, it's not boasting. Does anyone really want to share a personality type with Donald Trump?
Being a genius wasn't always a thing. Pascal was quite upset when he was called a genius by Queen Christina of Sweden. He thought that it meant he couldn't be humble, and worried about God being annoyed by his presumption. Then he got tangled up when he realised that by trying to be humble, he was being arrogant about his humility. I guess he eventually tossed a coin to decide whether swanking about the place was okay.
Pascal, in around 1651, was one of the first people to be called a genius: according to Ray McDermott (Materials for a Confrontation with Genius as a Personal Identity, 2004), he is the first name trotted out by scholars who want to write a history of 'the genius'. Mainly because he lived on the cusp of a moment when the idea was becoming fashionable: during the 1700s, theorists displayed their descriptions of 'genius' like a hipster's sleeve tattoo. Diderot goes into detail about the nature of the genius (that's where I got my idea from that I'm a genius). Addison chatted about it in his magazine The Spectator, and Forkel's 1802 biography of Bach transformed Johann Seb from jobbing composer to Mighty Man of Music Magic.
Pascal comes out of it quite well: by the time of Wagner, being a genius was cool enough to be the subject of an opera. Die Meistersinger contrasts the genius with the mere craftsman (Edward E. Lowinsky, Musical Genius -Evolution and Origins of a Concept). There's no prize for guessing which character Wagner identifies with himself. But Pascal was a man of a modest age: God was still a big deal, and the official line was that the past was better than the present, art was an act of imitation and being 'original' was more likely to result in a visit to a dungeon than an honorary degree from Glasgow University.
As always, it's The Enlightenment's fault. Starting with Addison, going through Diderot and this bishop called Douglas, who defended Milton's Paradise Lost from charges of plagiarism in 1751, up to Goethe in German and beyond him into the Romantic Era, the word 'genius' changed its meaning. In Latin, It had referred to the guardian spirit of the individual, before alluding to a moment of creativity up until the time of Pascal. But Diderot did (as he always does) a great job of defining it to his needs. Realising that he wasn't all that in the creative stakes - although he could churn out a perfectly acceptable article or two - he imagined a personality that could be both sensitive to nature but rational enough to express it coolly.
George J. Buelow - who dug up Bishop Douglas from the depth of literary history - has plenty to say about how the genius became a thing, even giving a four step description of genius. Step one - something that Diderot and my secret love Lessing confirm - is that the genius doesn't need to pay attention to the rules. In fact, actually knowing stuff is a bit of an impediment to genius. Edward Young (1759) was like yeah, a genius is much cooler if they are also a bit thick. Or, as McDermott puts it when he talks about Adam Smith's notion of genius: if less goes in than comes out, it's the capitalist's wet-dream of a factory, only in the brain.
McDermott also mentions that the idea of genius is a bit of a problem. It ignores the way that ideas are often developed in a collective, and it heads up a hierarchy of intelligence. It's not like Einstein wasn't smart, but the cult of his personality (or that applied to anyone these days who isn't a drooling fool) ignores the necessarily collaborative progress of scientific thought. History becomes a litany of Great (usually) White (usually) Males. So it's got that going against it, too.
It's not like the time before 'The Age of The Genius' was much better in that regard: they tended to say that the classics provided the model of excellence: fortunately, Quintilian and Aristotle justified this attitude by pointing back to the epic poems and tragedies as examples (while being classical texts themselves). So it has been pretty much a canon of DWM right the way down. But they didn't mind imitation or, to dress it in its Sunday Best, mimesis. The thing about the genius would be originality.
Now, this isn't going to get me back to Donald Trump any faster, but it might be worth noting that the genius, originality, plagiarism and copyright claims all became a thing in the eighteenth century. Lessing, for example, got really pissed off when pirates sold cheap copies of his Dramaturgy. You know, with a bit of thought, I bet I could get Walter Benjamin's notion of the 'authentic aura' of an artwork into this, somewhere.
The 'genius' creates more than previously existed - an original object - which is special because it was made by a genius - and copying it is bad because that removes the specialness - which makes it less original - and worth less money - and it's a plot of words to assign financial worth to specific objects and create a market - for ideas as well - and the genius...
Anyway, Donald Trump is a genius. Donald Trump knows he is a genius. And that is a problem. I am just too bored to prove it now. Maybe tomorrow, if anyone actually reads this far.
Materials for a Confrontation with Genius as a Personal Identity
Ray McDermott
Ethos
Vol. 32, No. 2, Theme Issue: Ethnographic Studies of Positioning and Subjectivity: Narcotraffickers, Taiwanese Brides, Angry Loggers, School Troublemakers (Jun., 2004), pp. 278-288
Musical Genius--Evolution and Origins of a Concept
Edward E. Lowinsky
The Musical Quarterly
Vol. 50, No. 3 (Jul., 1964), pp. 321-340
Originality, Genius, Plagiarism in English Criticism of the Eighteenth Century
George J. Buelow
International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music
Vol. 21, No. 2 (Dec., 1990), pp. 117-128
Tuesday, 7 February 2017
Trump or something
Despite my triumphant assertion that dramaturgy now provides the answer to political analysis, I had a proper nightmare last night. Then I woke up and remembered that Walter Benjamin off the Frankfurt School identified the 'aestheticization of politics' as a feature of fascism. If life becomes art, and politics gets treated like a show, it's a good bet that totalitarianism is happening.
I'm not keen on assessing the psychological condition of public figures, or throwing about comparisons to Hitler. Putting Trump's antics down to the Dunning-Kruger effect, or making lists of how his policies imitate Nazism seem like reductionism, and the latter is too easily dismissed as hysteria. But using a system that I vaguely understand allows me to make similar judgements and pretend that I am on top of the issues. Welcome to the blog of hypocrisy.
If dramaturgy is a valuable tool for the critique of politicians - and this goes beyond Trump, because Hilary Clinton, Putin, Boris and the gang can all be interpreted as petty players - then isn't that admitting that politics has become an aesthetic display? And following Benjamin, doesn't that mean that the trappings of totalitarianism are in place? Rather than being a celebration, the use of dramaturgy to critique Trump becomes a despairing acknowledgement that democracy is in trouble.
It almost makes me sentimental for the time when Christianity was the moral standard for socio-political standards. Hear me out... it didn't work out, but at least Christianity offers certain rules and standards by which politicians can be judged. There's a meme going around that has a picture of Theresa May, asking how she can claim to be a Christian and enact policies that attack the most vulnerable members of society. That's what I'm talking about.
(Yes, I know, there is a flip-side to that: Christianity used as a way to object to Islamic immigration, for example, or the persecution of homosexuals. It's all very well to argue that these behaviours are not Christian according to a liberal interpretation, but there's a tradition of Biblical justification for some terrible behaviour.)
But I am using Christianity as a contrast to dramaturgy: it is a system with an integral moral system. Dramaturgy merely answers questions about presentation. Approaching Trump's campaign as if it were theatre might even mean praising it, since it achieved its intentions.
I'm not keen on assessing the psychological condition of public figures, or throwing about comparisons to Hitler. Putting Trump's antics down to the Dunning-Kruger effect, or making lists of how his policies imitate Nazism seem like reductionism, and the latter is too easily dismissed as hysteria. But using a system that I vaguely understand allows me to make similar judgements and pretend that I am on top of the issues. Welcome to the blog of hypocrisy.
If dramaturgy is a valuable tool for the critique of politicians - and this goes beyond Trump, because Hilary Clinton, Putin, Boris and the gang can all be interpreted as petty players - then isn't that admitting that politics has become an aesthetic display? And following Benjamin, doesn't that mean that the trappings of totalitarianism are in place? Rather than being a celebration, the use of dramaturgy to critique Trump becomes a despairing acknowledgement that democracy is in trouble.
It almost makes me sentimental for the time when Christianity was the moral standard for socio-political standards. Hear me out... it didn't work out, but at least Christianity offers certain rules and standards by which politicians can be judged. There's a meme going around that has a picture of Theresa May, asking how she can claim to be a Christian and enact policies that attack the most vulnerable members of society. That's what I'm talking about.
(Yes, I know, there is a flip-side to that: Christianity used as a way to object to Islamic immigration, for example, or the persecution of homosexuals. It's all very well to argue that these behaviours are not Christian according to a liberal interpretation, but there's a tradition of Biblical justification for some terrible behaviour.)
But I am using Christianity as a contrast to dramaturgy: it is a system with an integral moral system. Dramaturgy merely answers questions about presentation. Approaching Trump's campaign as if it were theatre might even mean praising it, since it achieved its intentions.
A plague on both your houses?
I'd really like to stop talking about the Enlightenment. I've got this piece about the relevance of theatre that will hopefully cause a real shit storm but every time I try to get out, they pull me back in. I guess I am lucky... my academic research is all about (at the moment) how dramaturgy is an expression of Enlightenment thought, through the medium of theatrical critique. And the Enlightenment has become a battle-ground between the progressive left and the religious right. I go onto YouTube to distract myself with some sarcastic responses to Blackpool Grime Media, and I get stuff like this recommended.
The real magic of YouTube is when both sides don't know what they are talking about. Penny Nance and Cenk Uygur have fixed ideas about what the Enlightenment was, and their only commonality is a lack of depth in their thought.
Nance is advocating a day of prayer, and rejects the possibility of a 'day of reason' as a companion event. Uygur calls her unamerican for her critique of the Enlightenment, which she blames for the holocaust.
Uygur makes a spirited defence of the Enlightenment, pointing out that it advanced scientific research (correctly: the thinkers of the Enlightenment were inspired by the scientific method, especially through the discoveries of Newton). Unfortunately, he seems to think that the Enlightenment came before the scientific revolution, when it is usually seen as earlier, encouraged by Francis Bacon's assertion of method and observation.
It's fair to say that the Enlightenment did encourage an already dynamic scientific investigation: but it consolidated rather than generated scientific advances. It's a small correction for Uygur, but crucial when he is trying to dispute Nance's chronological chain of causation.
Nance's belief that the Enlightenment led to the holocaust isn't as random as Uygur tries to claim: it's the subtext to the argument put forward by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Given that Uygur is often accused of being a 'cultural Marxist', it is surprising that he doesn't seem to be aware of the Ur-Text of cultural Marxism. Of course, the phrase is slung about by his opponents, and often has a nasty antisemitic subtext, suggesting that it's more a dog-whistle than a serious analysis of anyone's political position.
Nevertheless, Nance is a surprising advocate of a position first suggested by Marxist atheists. It undermines her religious intentions - Dialect does not encourage a return to Christian values, and even includes Martin Luther in the list of 'rationalist' activists who caused the Enlightenment. Rather than address the scholars who have taken up this claim seriously, Uygur goes for the 'low-hanging fruit', a woman on Fox News banging on about religious morality.
Uygur correctly counters that the USA itself is a product of the Enlightenment - the good example he doesn't give is that Jefferson, one of the founder fathers, hung out with the philosophes in Paris, had a special copy of the Bible with all the miracles crossed out and subscribed to the deism that was big with chaps like Voltaire (who caught it from Newton). His description of the USA's disestablishment of religion in the constitution, however, is partisan: far from being a complete freedom from religion, it was a necessary decision in a country that was full of religious sects.
There's a superb discussion of it in the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund's compilation (which I shall dig out and cite later). While Nance might be against freedom from religion (she does see it as leading to moral relativism, which leads to state sanctioned slaughter), her claims aren't against the freedom of religion that the constitution was written to protect.
The irritating thing is that Uygur picks up on the incoherence of Nance's argument and then counters with an argument that is equally incoherent. He's trying to win an argument by appealing to the opinion of his viewers rather than discover the common ground in the debate and suggesting a compromise.
I might agree that he is right to defend secular rationality and, yes, I want to live in a world that offers me a longer life and better health, but he fails to back up his opinion with... reason. I know complexity is hard to handle on YouTube, but he is just throwing together half-understood histories and ideas to befuddle his opponent.
It seems unfair to hammer Uygur when Nance is equally culpable of nonsense - and she started it. But her arguments have been taken down so many times (moral relativism is less dangerous than absolutism, yep) that a supposed champion of reason ought to be using it.
The real magic of YouTube is when both sides don't know what they are talking about. Penny Nance and Cenk Uygur have fixed ideas about what the Enlightenment was, and their only commonality is a lack of depth in their thought.
Nance is advocating a day of prayer, and rejects the possibility of a 'day of reason' as a companion event. Uygur calls her unamerican for her critique of the Enlightenment, which she blames for the holocaust.
Uygur makes a spirited defence of the Enlightenment, pointing out that it advanced scientific research (correctly: the thinkers of the Enlightenment were inspired by the scientific method, especially through the discoveries of Newton). Unfortunately, he seems to think that the Enlightenment came before the scientific revolution, when it is usually seen as earlier, encouraged by Francis Bacon's assertion of method and observation.
It's fair to say that the Enlightenment did encourage an already dynamic scientific investigation: but it consolidated rather than generated scientific advances. It's a small correction for Uygur, but crucial when he is trying to dispute Nance's chronological chain of causation.
Nance's belief that the Enlightenment led to the holocaust isn't as random as Uygur tries to claim: it's the subtext to the argument put forward by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Given that Uygur is often accused of being a 'cultural Marxist', it is surprising that he doesn't seem to be aware of the Ur-Text of cultural Marxism. Of course, the phrase is slung about by his opponents, and often has a nasty antisemitic subtext, suggesting that it's more a dog-whistle than a serious analysis of anyone's political position.
Nevertheless, Nance is a surprising advocate of a position first suggested by Marxist atheists. It undermines her religious intentions - Dialect does not encourage a return to Christian values, and even includes Martin Luther in the list of 'rationalist' activists who caused the Enlightenment. Rather than address the scholars who have taken up this claim seriously, Uygur goes for the 'low-hanging fruit', a woman on Fox News banging on about religious morality.
Uygur correctly counters that the USA itself is a product of the Enlightenment - the good example he doesn't give is that Jefferson, one of the founder fathers, hung out with the philosophes in Paris, had a special copy of the Bible with all the miracles crossed out and subscribed to the deism that was big with chaps like Voltaire (who caught it from Newton). His description of the USA's disestablishment of religion in the constitution, however, is partisan: far from being a complete freedom from religion, it was a necessary decision in a country that was full of religious sects.
There's a superb discussion of it in the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund's compilation (which I shall dig out and cite later). While Nance might be against freedom from religion (she does see it as leading to moral relativism, which leads to state sanctioned slaughter), her claims aren't against the freedom of religion that the constitution was written to protect.
The irritating thing is that Uygur picks up on the incoherence of Nance's argument and then counters with an argument that is equally incoherent. He's trying to win an argument by appealing to the opinion of his viewers rather than discover the common ground in the debate and suggesting a compromise.
I might agree that he is right to defend secular rationality and, yes, I want to live in a world that offers me a longer life and better health, but he fails to back up his opinion with... reason. I know complexity is hard to handle on YouTube, but he is just throwing together half-understood histories and ideas to befuddle his opponent.
It seems unfair to hammer Uygur when Nance is equally culpable of nonsense - and she started it. But her arguments have been taken down so many times (moral relativism is less dangerous than absolutism, yep) that a supposed champion of reason ought to be using it.
Monday, 6 February 2017
Comédie-Française and National State Propaganda
Anwen Jones (National Theatres in Context, 2007) considers the establishment of the Comédie-Française in 1680 by the king as an attempt to undermine the growth of the 'public sphere' - the space defined by Habermas as emerging in the sixteenth to eighteenth century as the location for debates about politics and society. While I doubt her depiction of a gleeful Louis XIV and Cardinal Richelieu rubbing their hands together at their fiendish plot to defeat an idea that wasn't noticed until the twentieth century, the idea that a national theatre could be instituted as a way of controlling performance (to the ends of the state) isn't unattractive.
Jones contends that the activity of the actors in the subsequent century reveals a tremendous ambiguity about the role of state support: when they were awarded citizenship, for example, by the revolutionary government under Robespierre, they were equally worried that the all-new, all-democratic state would allow any clown to set up a rival theatrical venture...
And when I say clown, I'm not kidding. They'd already had one legal skirmish with Théâtre de la foire - which was more like a big festival - and got legislation that banned performers from - hold on, this can't be right - using words... la foire had loads of acrobats and harlequins and clowns, and the CF didn't mind that, as long as they... didn't chat about what they were doing... or told a story... or something...
Anyway, even though being the national theatre wasn't all sunshine and chuckles - the king made them move out to the west end of Paris, which isn't as convenient as the west end in Glasgow - the CF managed to sustain itself even after the revolution kicked off and started having these weird parades and fêtes which were like the revolution's big idea for replacing theatre and establish popular acceptance of the new regime.
It's not that other national theatres are likely to start prosecuting circuses to maintain their cultural dominance - probably a bit late for that, now - but does the example of the CF suggest a potential for the medium of theatre as a medium for state propaganda? And how far can the notion of 'state' theatre be extended? Does state funded count?
Jones contends that the activity of the actors in the subsequent century reveals a tremendous ambiguity about the role of state support: when they were awarded citizenship, for example, by the revolutionary government under Robespierre, they were equally worried that the all-new, all-democratic state would allow any clown to set up a rival theatrical venture...
Anyway, even though being the national theatre wasn't all sunshine and chuckles - the king made them move out to the west end of Paris, which isn't as convenient as the west end in Glasgow - the CF managed to sustain itself even after the revolution kicked off and started having these weird parades and fêtes which were like the revolution's big idea for replacing theatre and establish popular acceptance of the new regime.
It's not that other national theatres are likely to start prosecuting circuses to maintain their cultural dominance - probably a bit late for that, now - but does the example of the CF suggest a potential for the medium of theatre as a medium for state propaganda? And how far can the notion of 'state' theatre be extended? Does state funded count?
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)