Theatre or Culture

      This category is to me the most important and the most difficult one; and, I suspect, the one where most  readers are of  the other opinion.  What, after all, is drama many say, but a chance to popularize certain political ideas by fashioning something that appeals to a mass audience?  The central argument I’ve been developing for as long as I can remember rests, in contrast, on the idea that art is an original and primary mode of cognition that (1) goes beyond the limits of other ways of knowing and thinking in (2) carrying out the office that defines it: the apprehension of history in terms of the traumatic events and conflicts that reveal its dark underside.  Again, my purpose here is not to burden you with a complex theoretical argument.  Suffice for now a simple sequence of  basic theses followed by an example that best illustrates them.  Theatre (or art in general) is crucial, I argue, because Culture is the most important formation in the ideological manipulation of individuals as mass subjects ruled by a system of core emotional and psychological needs and desires that determine what each subject thinks of and embraces as their private, deepest and freest Self.  In America we are all individuals—by rote.  The entertainment industry creates then reinforces all of this. Great works of art rip it to shreds, shattering the continuum of everyday life with the force of traumatic perceptions that work on us like a depth charge planted in the psyche, awakening it to what can no longer be contained or denied.  Such is the nature and function of any revolutionary work of art.  It is that act of mind whereby we free ourselves of ideology at the very foundations of our subjectivity.  But that freedom comes at a great cost.  For here is the simplest definition one can offer of authentic art: it is the liberation of the traumatic image in its power to haunt us as the nightmare that will now weigh on our consciousness every day.

      Among works of the past 50 years, few carry out this effort as radically as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.  But there’s the problem in a nutshell.  For this is a work as difficult as Hegel perhaps, but in a way that finally makes Pynchon the harder read.  For Pynchon’s effort is to change the very way in which we feel and the very forms through which we perceive the world. It is no accident that most professors of 20th century literature confess, though in whispers, that they’ve never read the book or only got 100 or so pages in it before bouncing it off the wall.  Genuine art is hard and demands hard work of us.  When great art succeeds, however, our internalization of it as self-transformation of how  we see and feel has a ripple effect that reaches back and transforms our first two categories.  Read Pynchon aright, I suggest, and one will see politics, the psyche and their dialectical connection—i.e., the force of one’s time in one’s psyche-- in a radically new way.  The task of art, as William Blake said, is “to cleanse the doors of perception.”  Never before perhaps has that task been more difficult or more necessary.

      In offering the foregoing as a program for the directions we must take in order to understand our historical situation I’m immediately struck by all the things  I’ve left out.  Philosophy.  Economics.  Subaltern consciousness.  The Environmental crisis-- and all the science we must learn in order to address it.  And, of course, that vast subject of our greatest ignorance: all the sands and winds of history, doctrine and ideology we must immerse ourselves in or be seduced by easy positions on Palestine or Iraq or Iran, etc,  The list is endless and serves as testimony to one compelling fact: how much we need each other and how much we have to teach each other.

      For that , however, one thing is required.  The key—and often the curse that defeats all our efforts.  As T.S. Eliot loved to say “I’ve gotta use words if I’m going to talk to you.”  Language --that’s the rub.  Our words so often irritate our auditors into tangents or carry unintended “messages” and connotations that defeat our purpose.  I say X and you read it in terms of a problem or hobby-horse that may have little or nothing to do with it.  Despite the best intentions we so often find ourselves in the situation that the movie Cool Hand Luke makes memorable in an unforgettable line: “what we’ve got here is failure to communicate!”  But it is impossible to locate the cause of the failure or to identify the responsible party.  I recently experienced this problem in a particularly painful way that also gave me considerable pause before accepting the offer to take on the job of Editor in Chief.  This example also will enable me to offer what I hope will become the contract we will share as a community dedicated to serious discussion.

      Two weeks ago I wrote a brief essay to commemorate the First Anniversary of MWCNews.  In it I developed a critique of the two ideologies that currently control much of thought on the left.  The essay attempted to present a fairly complex line of thought, which I’ve developed elsewhere in much more philosophic terms,  in a way that would make a basic ideological dilemma that we all face available to a wide readership. Thus my pain in reading the first comment it elicited from a reader: “ Wow! That was thick as a brick. Rarely have I seen so many 10 dollar words crammed into a two bit idea.”  Such comments are, of course, as easy to make as they are to dismiss.  It’s easy: all one has to do to be superior to anything one reads is charge any writer who exceeds the limits of one’s understanding with using big words to aggrandize himself.  Voila!, complex thoughts have shrunken to the reductive size suited to the restrictive contours of one’s psychological needs.  But having said that I want to agree with one implied point in my reader’s comment.  Our situation is too grave to be left to academics writing precious, self-inflated prose replete with the jargon of  coterie audiences.  (Having spent most of my life in the groves of academe I can here whisper its best kept secret: most professors are careerists who cover their suspicion that they’re not very bright by clothing themselves in the borrowed robes of high sounding words.)  But the situation is also too grave to be delivered over to the equally self-indulgent demands of an anti-intellectualism that insists we dismiss anything written by one who bears an academic title or who writes in a way that makes any demands upon the reader. 

       Reading is only valuable when something very special happens: when the mind is stretched by ideas that expand its scope and deepen its complexity.  Writing is valuable, accordingly, when it finds the words that activate that process.  Our times call for complex acts of thought not reductive simplifications. By the same token, the gravity of our situation calls for the effort on the part of anyone who writes to be as clear and direct and lucid as possible.  Here is perhaps the ideal to which we should all aspire: maximum lucidity –given the complexity of one’s subject.  Such is the ethic of writing I’ve aspired to, which is why, after a lifetime of working on this craft I have yet to write a page that satisfies me, why every day spent writing is an agony and a defeat.  I fail, and doubtless far more deeply and often than I realize, but not for lack of aiming my arrow at a goal that I hope we all share: the attainment of articulations that create structures of thought that cut right to the core of what we must think, experience, and undergo psychologically in order to take up the problems of our time. Lucidity is terror—of consciousness.  Writing is the effort to find words that will activate that level of awareness. This does not mean, I hasten to add,  that one must write in a way that boils all ideas down into statements so simple that the rudest reader can immediately grasp what one says without having to do any work in the process. Such writing is precisely what the mainstream media offer—in order to program us to become dull of mind and indolent of heart.  All our communications should be dedicated to a countervailing purpose: to write to one another in a way that sharpens and elevates our minds by asking us to think with the complexity and acuteness that our situation demands.