8.

      “Always historicize.” (Frederic Jameson)  Theatre in its origin is wedded to this principle.  The contradictions of its time are its subject matter.  That is why the task of theatre is always the same—and always different: to expose ideology by creating dramatic forms and dramatic experiences that cannot be subsumed under the guarantees that ideology superimposes on experience in order to assure us that traumatic realities and conflicts cannot alter or destroy what we desperately need to believe: that we possess an identity that is one with the goodness of a human nature that cannot be lost and that guarantees the persistence of values that are universal and a-historical.  In combating ideology we face a redoubtable task.  For these assumptions and guarantees are not the property of a single ideology.  They go much deeper, forming a common heritage.  Insofar as we are creatures of the logos, the western ratio, we structure experience in terms of a system of guarantees.  They form the a priori frame of reasoning, explanation, and emotional response that we impose upon events so that nothing traumatic can impinge upon the ego-identity that the guarantees provide.  The logos or ratio can be defined, for our purposes, as the system of intellectualizing operations that give experience a structure that is conceptually transparent and that marginalizes—as irrational, neurotic, unintelligible, irresponsible—anything that fails to correspond to reason.  Such a system offers us an essentialized identity that frees us from contingency and that provides a way, especially in times of national crisis, to transcend particular political and factional differences and unite as subjects on the basis of a shared, universal humanity.

      We discern here the true reason Plato banished the poets from the perfect state.  The agons drama explores and the primary emotions it engages exceed the forms of mediation that the ratio provides.  Drama offers knowledge of ways of being that are lived concretely by agents who act from principles of psychological and existential self-mediation that exceed reason and its founding desire—to submit experience to that which can be rationally conceptualized.  Drama is our way of representing and apprehending all that exceeds that framework.  In that effort reason is no more than the cutting edge of passion and oversteps its bounds whenever it presumes to legislate over that which it must humbly serve.  

9.

      Fortunately there is a concrete way to pursue this theme, a way that dialectically connects history and drama.  History under the ratio is the explanations that are constructed to deprive events of their contingency.  History thereby becomes the parousia of Geist (Hegel), the story of liberty (Croce), the triumphant march of the essential ideals that constitute the American experience, etc.  History is that which is written so that the past will not be known; or will be known only insofar as it finds fruition in the future.  Traumatic events that would enervate the national consciousness—Hiroshima for example—are justified by explanations invented after the fact.  History is the narrative written retrospectively to wash the blood from our hands.  And as such it is a discourse whereby a collective ego-identity is forged through the banishment of nagging doubts and fears—a melodramatic allegory play, rife with resentment, whereby a collectivity triumphs over time and contingency.  Plays that offer resolution and “catharsis” perform a similar function by creating structures of feeling that cleanse the psyche by bathing it in the pleasure and release provided by secondary emotions.  Aristotle’s famous distinction between poetry and history misses the main point.  Within the system of guarantees history and drama are fictions that perform the same function in different ways.  As the two arts dedicated to the exorcism of existential contingency, they give the metaphysical need that informs the ratio with a “local habitation and a name.”  That name is Humanism: the set of essentialistic beliefs about human nature that we use to assure our transcendence of historical, existential, and psychological contingency.

      Drama is the agon that erupts whenever those guarantees are shattered.  One then exists in the knowledge that conflict is the essence of being human not the temporary departure from the essence.  Psyche is its conflicts; nothing within protects us from the need to act and through action to submit ourselves to a world that estranges us forever from the paradise of  the guarantees.  Humanism is that wing of the ratio that is of most concern to us because it is the application of the ratio to our psyche and our experience.  Once we have internalized the humanistic ethos, conflict can only be experienced as the movement from and to the recovery of an identity that we cannot lose, an identity fitted with the added benefit of assuring our goodness, our psychological health, and our correspondence with fundamental, unalterable values.  Such is the experience that theatre within the system of guarantees offers its audience.  It does so by violating the essential thing that theatre incarnates.  Representation exceeds intention.  Any halfway decent play engages conflicts that exceed the guarantees.  Unfortunately, the latter then far too often come to impose themselves upon the emerging drama so that it can end—as every play of Arthur Miller’s does—with the re-assertion of every belief the play has thrown into question.  Playwriting within the orbit of the guarantees is the clash of contradictory imperatives.  This is so not because we are faint-hearted in the face of experience, but because the traditional forms and principles of dramatic structure are the aesthetic realization of  the guarantees.  The pull toward resolution embodied in traditional dramatic forms is one with the underlying ideological and emotional guarantees that are thereby satisfied.  Genuine experimentation and newness in the theatre thus begins only when we write and perform in ways that deracinate all conventions and artistic principles that wed us to the guarantees.  Arthur Miller argues that “every drama is a jurisprudence.” The law of drama however is not the translation of abstract thought into temporal terms.  It is the submission of guarantees to their reversal and the liberation of what emerges when experience is represented cleansed of their intrusion.

10.

      Against catharsis.  Historical explanation within the system of humanist guarantees and catharsis within the emotional dynamics of form are two different ways of fulfilling the same metaphysical need.  Aristotle was Plato’s apt pupil in one regard.  He knew that the disruptive power of drama had to be contained.  What better way than to impose secondary emotions (pity and fear) upon it and then argue that the logos of dramatic structure was the movement of those emotions to their purgation.  He thereby invented Tragedy in order to banish the tragic.  The limit of theatre is the limit of our will to explore agons that will not be bound by the need to produce catharsis.  But to get there we have to become aware of all the ways in which we remain bound to that desire; as, for example, in messianic aesthetics and the belief in the redemptive power of art.  To know history we must experience our situation without deriving succor from the aura that the desire for redemption casts over it.

      Against irony.  But to achieve our goal we must overcome something that is for many of us far more binding than the guarantees.  We must overcome our misplaced confidence in the postmodern exaltation of irony and the “death of the subject” as the last word in liberation.  A theatre of free play sounds experimental and historically liberating only if one forgets that  the last word on irony was pronounced long before the aporias of the self-ironizing sensibility began to strut and fret their hour across the stage of culture in an effort to conceal an underlying despair.

“Irony.  Don’t let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.  When you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of life.  Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn’t be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it; if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless.  Search into the depths of Things: there, irony never descends.” (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

Nor does the cant offered by a slew of ideologues that 9-11 marks the end of post-modernism and the return to “reason and moral clarity.” What we need, in opposition both to dogmatic deconstructionism and moral posturing, is to press on and constitute what has long slumbered in the post-modern condition as its true contribution to our historical awareness—the supersession of irony by the tragic and with it the recovery of a genuinely existential way of thinking about concrete experience.

      Incipit Tragoedia.  For it is in a frank opening of ourselves to despair that we find our way back into an authentic relationship with the grave and serious things, a  way to live in the temporality of the fundamental questions not as prisoners of nostalgia but in the confidence that such a relationship alone gives us the courage to once again explore agons that derive from the depth of  human inwardness.  Being a subject will then become again what it was for Hamlet—not an illusion to be deconstructed in the deferral and delay of endless  signification (“signifying nothing”) but the agon in which “the human heart in conflict with itself” (Faulkner) endures the existentializing claims that tragic experience makes upon us: “for I have heard/That guilty creatures sitting at a play/ Have by the very cunning of the scene/Been struck so to the soul, that presently/They have proclaim’d their malefactions.” (Hamlet II.ii.588-92).  Our task is to do everything in our power to make that happen.