Special Features,

MANIFESTO FOR A PROGRESSIVE THEATRE 
Walter A. Davis 

“The Director’s first task is to cast the audience.”
Grotowski 

{mos_sb_discuss:15}

      In two recent essays (see: here) I discussed some of the central issues raised by the Rachel Corrie controversy.  I want now to develop these issues further, freed of that example.  What is the role of art—and specifically theatre—in the thought and struggle of the left?  Why have most social and political theorists and commentators on the left become so estranged from the understanding of art’s significance that they see it as little more than a means of popularizing ideas or giving an audience a quick fix on some controversial issue.  What the left thereby sacrifices of its own history is the understanding of art developed by the most important theorists in the Marxist tradition: i.e., Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Raymond Williams, Slavoj Zizek, etc., not to mention Leon Trotsky and Karl Marx.  For these thinkers art is absolutely central both to our knowledge of history and our struggle because radical art performs a unique function in exposing the ideological blinders that control the left as well as the right.  Art alone perhaps proves capable of this task because art is a primary mode of cognition or knowing which offers us something unique: a comprehension of History in terms of the velocities of irreversible historical change.  As Hamlet said of the actor’s art (and implicitly of the playwrights): the task is to show “the very age and body of the time its form and pressure.” (Hamlet, 3.2:l 22) 

      The following Theses constitute an effort to reintroduce this way of critiquing and thinking beyond ideology into leftist political and social thought.  (In a subsequent essay I will discuss the current ideological barriers on the left to such an understanding of the role of culture—and especially theatre—in the critique of our current historical and theoretical condition.  The best introduction to that discussion of why we must break free of the core assumptions that currently control leftist though is the recovery of an experience of how and why art—and with it what is dismissively termed “the culture wars”—is not peripheral to our understanding and our struggle but the very heart and soul of it.  A recovery of art’s significance has the power to activate troubling reflections on the current state of leftist thought.  Capitalizing on that possibility will be the task of the subsequent essay.  Preliminary to it a return to what Hegel would call the concrete—an experience of art as a primary way of knowing that when it succeeds tears open in us the true space of thought and praxis.  
       

1.

      The commercial theatre needs no manifesto.  It gets its from season-ticket sales: Do nothing that will make the evening’s entertainment harder to digest than the fine meal the audience consumed an hour before as prelude to the after-dinner sleep in which they dream their way toward final curtain.  Everything passes through the cuisinart of an overriding need: to create those feelings that relieve and resolve whatever is troubling.  “That’s entertainment.”  This motive, which has always been the bane of our theatre, became in the wake of 9-11 a national imperative.  A traumatized nation called out for healing and the arts responded with a virtually single-minded effort to produce works distinguished by nothing other than the attempt to bathe the collective psyche in the Lethe of happy talk, heroic posturing, sentimentalism, and nostalgia.  Affirmative culture today apes the spirit of Lynne Cheney’s NEA in giving us a theatre at home in its polis, one that caters to its emotional needs.  Such a theatre knows what it is and why it is; and, more importantly, what kinds of plays and productions must be cancelled as “inappropriate at this time.”  Our problem is that we’ve lost the ability to distinguish ourselves from this theatre.  We’ve lost it because we’ve lost an understanding of our foundations, an understanding of what the purpose of theatre has been since its origin.

2.

      From its inception theatre has had a unique cultural function.  It is the one public forum where people come together to witness the exposure of things that they don’t want to know—about themselves.  Other public forums exist to celebrate the ideological beliefs that protect us from ourselves.  The public sphere is, by and large, the space of ideological interpellation; i.e., the hailing operations that tell us what we believe and feel as subjects subjected by the social order to share articles of faith and meaning which have as their primary function the blinding of subjects to their historical situation.  The purpose of public forums—the Sunday sermon, the media, presidential addresses—is to offer rituals of pseudo-deliberation that always move to the triumphant reassertion of the unchanging truths that constitute the collective affirmation of who we are and what we value.  We come together as an audience in public space to participate in a group psychology in which conflict is overcome and calm of mind restored.  Public space, in late capitalism, is the arena in which we are put collectively to sleep. 

      Authentic theatre is the exception.  A primary constituent of the magic that attends it is the will of an audience to sit in rapt attention before the public airing of secrets that expose them to themselves.  When a play does its work the audience finds itself, like Claudius, caught in a mousetrap as the characters on the stage reveal the hidden conflicts of the audience.  Such is the true measure of our responsibility and of how deeply an audience can find itself delivered into our hands.

3.

      The purpose of theatre is to move an audience from the comfort of secondary emotions to the agon of primary emotions.   

      Secondary emotions (pity, fear, contentment) constitute the defenses that the ego has developed to displace and discharge anxiety.  The motives the ego requires for its maintenance—safety and self-esteem—find in secondary emotions the means to resolve  conflict in a way that distances and protects the ego from the threat of all disruptive experiences.  (I am, of course, aware that Aristotle taught us that pity and fear are the deep, tragic emotions.  One may take the continued hegemony of that view as a sign of how far we are from the kind of theatre we must create.)

      Pity—the effort to short-circuit anxiety by turning suffering into something one can only experience passively as undeserved misfortune that comes as a result of factors over which one has no control and limited responsibility

      Fear—the effort to externalize anxiety by displacing inner conflict into concern with matters outside the psyche.

      Contentment—the feeling of well-being that banishes all sources of anxiety through the obsessive-compulsive iteration of the sentiments that tranquilize the subject’s relationship to itself.

      Primary emotions (anxiety, humiliation, envy, cruelty, melancholia), in contrast, burden the subject with an agon in which it finds that its being existentially at issue and at risk.  Such emotions are defined by the absence of any inner distance between what one feels and who one is.  One is assaulted from within by the force of the conflicts that are central to one’s being.  

      Anxiety—existence as the awareness of responsibility to reverse the control that the other (parents, social and ideological forces, religious authorities) has over one’s psyche.

      Envy—the need to destroy anything that makes one feel contempt for oneself or that activates the memory of possibilities one has squandered.

      Melancholia—Keats’ “wakeful anguish of the soul;” the desire to engage the core-conflicts of one’s psyche in active reversal.

      Compassion—love as the refusal to succumb to the appeals of pity and the fixations of desire so that one may conduct one’s relationship to others on the basis of uncompromising psychological honesty.