MWC News - A Site Without Borders - - Beyond The Corrie Controversy

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cruelty—the desire to poison what is vital in another’s psyche so that one can watch the other bring about their own destruction.

Primary emotion shatters the ego and awakens the psyche. The ego is the system of defenses whereby an illusory identity is maintained through vigorous opposition to two things: reality and the inner world. Psyche is the agon that is joined whenever that system breaks down and the subject is forced to engage the conflicts of its inner world. Secondary emotion is the system of feelings we construct in order to deliver us from that process. The purpose of theatre is to activate the latter process.

“The director’s first task is to cast the audience.” (Grotowski) Something I want from you is opposed to something you want from me. That is the essence of drama. It is also the relationship between any worthwhile play and the audience. The theatre event is what happens between an ensemble and the audience as the former work upon the latter to activate a group psychology of a unique kind. A written play is nothing but a score that is only actualized when in performance an audience begins to move as one to the urgencies of a collective psychology. We don’t create in front of an audience; we create by working on an audience. They give us their defenses and we give them back to them as primary emotions.

That dynamic is the main difference between cinema and theatre. Cinema is oneiric: the projection of private fantasies by subjects sitting alone in the dark. Theatre is communal: lived and living because it is built in performance out of the responses that the ensemble seizes upon in order to take an audience in directions it fears to tread. At the movies audience members try to be unaware of one another; in theatre they desperately depend upon and solicit one another’s responses in the effort to evolve a collective psychology. Theatre takes on its inherent danger when the ensemble uses this condition to activate an agon that shatters the ideological beliefs that hold the audience together. When we cast the audience in ways that flatter their self-esteem and reinforce their beliefs we create a theatre in which nothing happens. When in casting them we seek out the agons that will engage what is buried most deeply within them we create a theatre that shimmers with existential possibility. To bring that about our task is to overturn the wisdom of Stoppard’s Player-King: “audiences know what to expect and that is all they can believe.” Most productions, unfortunately, bank on that fact, drawing their mandate from the pleasure associated with repetition of habitual operations whereas for us the purpose of playing must be to make what happens on the stage become for the audience what the Archaic Torso of Apollo was for Rilke: “For here there is no place that does not see you/You must change your life.” The paradigmatic status of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh for an understanding of the theatre event derives from O’Neill’s effort of that work to dramatize the essence of this process. Hickey engages the audience on stage in a process that represents the agon that any great play strives to activate in the theatre audience.

The art of acting is defined by this agon. That art can be condensed into an aphorism: “something must break within you with each line.” (Angelina Jolie) In exploring the inner world actors don’t discover their “true self” and their “true feelings.” They discover the inner conflicts that must be engaged in order to uncover what one does not want to know about oneself. When one acts from that place acting becomes, as Jack Nicholson said, “the process of dripping acid on the nerves.” For when something breaks within you with each line it breaks too within the audience who see their world represented in a way that unmasks it. Robert DeNiro’s great description of acting is only as good as its hidden major premise. To quote DeNiro: “Actors are like people. They don’t express their emotions. They conceal them. And it is in the process of concealing them that the emotions are revealed.” An audience experiences the shock of recognition when they are confronted with action and gestures that perfectly mimic their characteristic ways of fleeing themselves. The question marks that the Brechtian actor places within and at the end of each line are addressed, contra Brecht, not just to the intellect but to the psyche: they plant in the head the time-bomb that explodes in the heart as primary emotions erupt from long concealment engaging the audience in the struggle to confront and reverse their lives. The purpose of acting is not to entertain, but, borrowing from Albee’s George, to “get the guests.”

Here is a story revealing where drama begins. Recently, by chance, I saw on television a dinner party held by Oprah Winfrey for six members of her Book Club and Toni Morrison. Among the guests where several obviously wealthy socialites (including one named Celeste). At the end of a bountiful dinner, Toni Morrison reads from the passage toward the end of The Song of Solomon in which Pilate mourns her dead grandchild Hagar. During the reading Celeste breaks down and weeps uncontrollably. Comforted by Morrison, that great-souled presence, who holds her, Celeste, still weeping, tells her story. Her first child was still-born. She never saw the child nor did she ask to hold it. “I was always taught that I should be protected from such things.” But now something different has come into being, thanks to Morrison’s work. “I never held my baby. I’m so ashamed.” A drama has begun. A work of art has put a subject in touch with a depth in her psyche that she did not know existed. One can only imagine the struggle later that night to resume the mask and cover her embarrassment when Celeste returns to her suburban home and, one imagines, the wealthy friends gathered together to watch her on Oprah and celebrate the occasion. She can’t go home again—and yet she must. Such is the power, however momentary, of art to cut through our defenses and “make us ashamed of our existence” (Sartre). As Celeste learned, art restores us to the past that matters by revealing that past as the forgotten duties that we bear to our own humanity. Through art they are imposed on us in the violence of the claim they make upon us. And so our anxiety for Celeste is that she will succeed, helped by her group to say what Heidegger says we always saw once anxiety passes: “it was nothing.” Theatre is the attempt to bring that nothing into being.

“An image is true insofar as it is violent.” (Artaud) The task of the playwright is to find traumatic images and then create a dramatic structure that will unleash their power so that the emotional dynamis implicit in the image becomes an agon that transforms the audience’s relationship to itself. Theatre must preserve the violence of the image because without that violence nothing happens. Change only becomes possible when an image stays alive and works within the psyche, when another’s suffering becomes one’s own and one gains no relief from that suffering through fine thoughts and airy platitudes. Our task is to create a theatre that knows, with the artist R. B. Kitaj that “reducing complexity is a ruse,” that the goal of art is “to create images that will sit in the Unconscious” for it is there, where nothing sits still, that change begins in psyches delivered over to everything they hoped keep repressed. Such a theatre can be as grand as Weiss’ Marat/Sade or as intimate as Chekhov’s dream of that actor who reveals his fate (and ours) in the way he lifts his coffee-cup or turns the pages of his newspaper. The choice does not lie between an “epic” and an intimate theatre. It lies between exploring the truth of primary emotions or indulging the evasions of secondary emotions. The lesson Artaud taught visits our consciousness daily. It has become what Hegel called the newspaper: “the morning prayer of modern man.” On rising one turns on the TV and is awash in traumatic images, as in a six year old child mimicking the dance and gestures of an adult woman in a “beauty pageant” soliciting our voyeuristic complicity in the illness that tells parents they have a right to do such things to children. And so we look again and see what gives the image its true violence. It’s there—in the deadened eyes, and the broken, frightened gestures that rupture the performance from within, giving it a Brechtian function that is one with the ability of JonBenét Ramsey to “signal through the flames.” In such images we recover the lesson we most need to recover: that drama is the truth of everyday life; because agon remains the being of the subject. In the image of a child violating herself in a desperate effort to win her parent’s love we are offered a way back into Aristotle’s recognition that tragedy has the family as its primary subject because cruelty is most terrible when we find it where we had expected to find love. For we then suffer the recognition that one sign of our disorder is the pleasure the culture took—and continues to take—from such images. In the traumatic image the suppressed truths of our world assault us in their inherent violence. To articulate their meaning requires a descent into the heart of our collective disorders.

“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.

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.

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.

Drama has a unique cognitive and ontological status. Freud said “the tragic poets knew it [the unconscious] first.” We can now see that they also know it best; know it in a way that goes beyond the limits of other ways of knowing. Authentic drama is that representation of concrete, lived experience that comprehends what happens when we are delivered over to ourselves. In destroying those structures of feeling that protect us from ourselves, drama opens the psyche to an order of self-mediation that becomes possible only when traumatic conflicts are sustained in agons equal to them. As C.S.Peirce said “experience is what happens when our ways of knowing break down.” Drama is that happening. It is what breaks within us when all ideological blinders, all rationalistic guarantees, are submitted to an agon in which we exist as at issue and at risk in the struggle to mediate the burden of primary experiences. The proper relationship between the image and the order of the concept is thereby established. The world of the image, of concrete experience, is our way of apprehending realities that exceed the limitations of the concept. The cognitive power of literature subject Plato’s argument banishing the poets to a complete reversal. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators” in a world that reason knows little of, a world in which traumatic images are sustained in agons that prove equal to a representation of experience engaged at a level that is visceral, primary, and existentially exacting. Literature is not the translation of abstract concepts and themes into temporal, narrative terms; it is the world as it is lived existentially in structures that are prior to reason and beyond its range of comprehension.

Here is a task for a dramaturg of the future. We don’t need censorship, we have interpretation. The history of dramatic criticism from Aristotle to the present is a monument to the effort to superimpose the guarantees upon drama by constructing theories and interpretations that take the tragic, explorative energy of great works and bend them to our needs. Thus Aristotle: offering us the catharsis of emotions that are themselves a defense against the tragic. Milton: “calm of mind/all passion spent” so that we can leave the theatre assured that nothing will change. And in our time, the many varieties of ritual theatre (Burke, Girard, Frye, etc.) that turn drama into a group psychology in which social conflicts are transcended through the imposition on experience of patterns that are held to be universal and a-historical. By and large the history of dramatic criticism constitutes so many conceptual shields before the Medusa, ways of letting us get close enough so that we can slay what we can’t look upon directly. What we need is a dramaturg who will reverse that tradition by exposing all the ways that the guarantees are sequestered in interpretations. We need a method of interpretation that will prepare the way for radically new productions through concrete demonstrations of how great works undermine the interpretations that have been foisted upon them. Scholarly research would then itself become a drama of a-lethia, of wresting from concealment. We’d thereby learn, for example, that virtually everything that has been written on Hamlet constitutes an attempt to avoid the play. Despite different frameworks of meaning, the interpreters of Hamlet share an identical goal: to turn the most radically open-ended and emergent exploration of the tragic in our literature into something cabined, cribbed, confined in the narrow house of our needs and desires.

And of course we need a theatre of the oppressed, a theatre that will be feminist and gay and multi-cultural, for these are the places where the contradictions of our historical situation are most apparent. We need a theatre that honors every subject-position. But in liberating such voices our purpose cannot be the celebration of diversity as an end in itself. For we live in one world—now more than ever. And so our task remains dialectical—to apprehend the contradictions that define the social order as a whole and thereby discover the necessary connections that bind us to a common task. No subject position can be excluded from this search for we can never know when the contradictions of the whole won’t become apparent and assault our psyche in a way that tears our world to tatters: as in the eyes of JonBenét Ramsey and what they reveal about our most cherished institution, the American family.

And of course we need a theatre that is grandly experimental. But all experiments must derive from a single rationale: to shrink the space between us and the audience to that the audience is forced to become a participant in the performance. Thus I envision a theatre in which every device is exploited to make actors and audience inseparable. As when, for example, the actors, with the play in some way already begun, would form a queue the audience must join and move along in order to get to their seats; or when at points during the performance the lights would go up in the house so that audience members would become painfully aware of one another; or when perhaps they would at intermission find the doors of the theatre locked and a discussion of the work already begun among the cast and actors planted in the audience, a discussion they would be invited to join. What has become one of the most deleterious conventions of recent theatre—the post-play discussion—would thereby become the itch of an anxiety felt at the time it should be. We have only begun to explore all the ways we can break the fourth wall through experiments that will be disciplined because they serve a single end: to activate an agon in the audience. That is the purpose of playing, the concern that informs everything we do from the moment we first begin to write or read a play and search for ways to activate the most radical of encounters.

Here, then, in summary is an ideal realization of the action that a great drama performs on the audience. (1) Social identity is maintained through the public, legitimation rituals through which shared ideologies are celebrated. Drama reverses that process by exposing those rituals: by blocking their function and turning them back against themselves. (2) As group psychology the agon thereby engaged has the following structure. The audience, as group, tries to resolve conflict by coalescing around a shared need (laughter, pity etc) which offers a collective identity. The ensemble’s task is to destabilize this structure. Defenses must be activated; the sores of discontent rubbed raw; projections turned back against themselves. (3) The collective psyche then regresses to a more primitive state in an attempt to ward off deeper underlying conflicts. With the fragmentation of group identity each individual is delivered over to the drama of primary emotions. As in King Lear “close pent up guilts” break loose in an audience confronted with the return of buried conflicts. (4) The miracle has happened: an audience has been transformed from a group seeking pleasure through the discharge of tensions and the affirmation of common values to anxious agents existentialized in a solitude that has arisen, in the midst of others, as the space of a fundamental concern. Tragic recognitions ensue, destroying the possibility of regaining the psychological identities that existed prior to the play. (5) The audience now experiences in the characters on the stage the fundamental truth: that what we don’t know about ourselves is what we do—to the other. They experience it in sufferance as the imperative to deracinate everything that hides one from oneself.

(6) The purpose of authentic drama is to destroy the ego in order to awaken the psyche. The ego cringes in the theatre because it witnesses the staging of its informing motive. Flight from inner conflict is its reason for being. (7) Our job is to reverse that process; to represent an audience to themselves so that they will, in the shock of recognition, see and suffer what they want to deny. Thereby the smooth functioning of secondary emotions gives way to an agon of primary emotions in subjects who now find themselves in fundamental conflict with themselves. (8) Once that has happened, the task of the ensemble is to bring that audience to the recognition that there is only one choice: radical change or the extinction of consciousness; persistence in inner paralysis and the deadening of affect or the effort to reverse oneself totally through the struggle to overcome everything that protects one from confronting one’s deepest conflicts.

(9) Theatre has become a place of total exposure, with no “catharsis” available to relieve the audience of the burden that has descended upon it. Aristotle was right in this—reversal and recognition are the essence of tragedy. They are what happens to the audience when they prove equal to the agon that a great play activates within them. When that happens the space of theatre has been totally transformed. The audience isn’t looking at the play. The play is looking at them with a look that has the Sartrean power to expose us to our bad faith and reestablish our contact with our existence. (10) The purpose of theatre is to awaken this possibility and bar all exits that would deliver us from it. Theatre is not the space in which a content—a body of themes or preexisting ideas—is communicated. It is the space in which an action is performed. That action is the attempt to act on the psyche of the audience in order to bring about a reversal in the relationship that they live to themselves.

“Always historicize.” A trauma cannot be resolved until it has been constituted. That is why one cannot write a play that will resolve the trauma of 9-11, for example, without being untrue both to drama and to history. Which doesn’t mean we won’t be deluged with plays and productions dedicated to healing the national psyche. That has, after all, been the national mandate since 9-11. As such it reveals the persistence of the root assumption we must deracinate: the assumption that trauma is only resolved through the restoration of guarantees; concretely, in this case, through dramas of pathos followed by a triumphant reaffirmation of the a-historical ideals that constitute “the American character” and America’s unique role in history. Therein lies the ideological formula for pseudo-drama: our innocence, our unexampled suffering, our triumphant recovery. Any representation of 9-11 that does not serve this structure is forbidden. And so here, as prologue to a drama that will not exist, I offer these “fragments shored against” our “ruins”—a primer toward the recovery of what the image reveals about history and our collective unconscious.

Image is the native language of the psyche, the language in which the truth of history and the impact of history upon the psyche is expressed in a logic which, like the logic of the dream, establishes hidden and unexpected connections in which the present speaks to and reawakens the past in the re-emergence of everything that ideological consciousness strives to deny. Ground-zero. What’s in a name? The term now used to designate the rubble of what was once the World Trade Center was the term coined in Alamogordo, New Mexico to identify the epicenter where the first Atomic Bomb was detonated. It was then used to locate the same place in Hiroshima and Nagasaki so that we could measure with precision the force of the Bomb and gauge its effects. Through a grotesque and cunning reversal it now designates what was done to us. But in doing so it also reveals an unwritten history. Hiroshima, a repressed memory deep in the American psyche, returned on 9-11 as we experienced in diminished form what it must have been like to be in Hiroshima city on August 6, 1945 when in an instant an entire city disappeared abandoning the hibakusha, the walking dead, to a landscape become nightmare. For us, however, repressed memory only returns to serve the defense mechanisms of projection and denial. The term Ground-zero thus offers no entry into our past; instead, it gives us a new identity as the innocent victims of a terror we have the temerity to claim is unprecedented and that we demand the whole world acknowledge as such. In doing so we reveal our relationship to history. History is hagiography, the assertion of our virtue through our triumph over the forces of evil. From which follows the parade of heroic images whereby we rise phoenix-like from the ashes, united as a Nation that has recovered its essence and thus goes forth to reaffirm the ideals it represents by undertaking the actions needed to cleanse the world of terror. John Wayne lives—and he’s been called upon once again to provide the American imaginary with the images it needs to deliver it from images of another order.

For the images blazed into our consciousness on 9-11 are terrifying precisely because they embody anxieties that open up the psychotic register of the psyche. A plane embedded surrealistically in a building; bodies falling from the sky; that great granite elevator going down; the black cloud rushing forth to engulf a fleeing multitude; and then the countless dead, buried alive, passing in endless queue across the shattered landscape of the nation’s consciousness. The dark dream of psychosis—of falling endlessly, going to pieces, collapsing in on oneself, losing all orientation, being delivered over to a claustrophobic world of inescapable, ceaseless suffering—found in 9-11 the objective correlative that awakened images buried deep in the national psyche; images of things forgotten, ungrieved, vigorously denied.

For a historical consciousness incapable of agon, however, the only operation traumatic images permit is evacuation. And so, for the media and those comfortably seated in the places of ideological power, the projector had already started running and on the screen of the national psyche flashed old, familiar images of a movie full of patriotic sentiment and patriotic gore. Flags a-bursting, the heroic dead of ground-zero are resurrected in the acts of war we undertake in their name, their image blending and fading into the images of our triumphant military action in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in North Korea, in any place we designate a haven of “terrorism,” that term the blank check on which we draw to do whatever it takes to restore us the way we were restored by the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And restored we were as witnessed by another image from the past that flares up here to confirm what Walter Benjamin defines as the mission of the dialectical historian: “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” Navy Day, October, 1945, a crowd of 120,000 gather in the Los Angeles Coliseum to celebrate a simulated reenactment of the Bombing of Hiroshima, complete with a mushroom cloud that rises from the fifty yard line to the joyful cheers of that rapt throng. The first Super-Bowl: the new American collectivity as it gains orgasmic release in hymn of praise to the burgeoning cloud that ushers in its hour upon the stage of human history, a collectivity in Hosanna before the image of its inhumanity as it blossom before them, big with the future.

Einstein said “the Bomb changed everything except the way we think.” It didn’t change that because no drama was written with the power to implode/explode the fact of that Event in the psyche so that the Bomb would be internalized as a crisis for the soul and not just another fact to justify, before capping that justification with the claim that the one nation that used the Bomb has the moral right to determine who should have it.

And so the parade of images that echo and exorcise other images creeps on apace. As after Gulf Storm, the Nintendo war, a war represented on TV as a video game. No images of the 100,000 Iraqui dead were permitted entry into the national conscience; nor subsequently any images of the million Iraqui civilians that have now died as a result of our sanctions. (Yes, Saddam bears a lion’s share of the blame. So do we!) Instead with victory the proclamation of George H. Bush—“we’ve finally put an end to Vietnam syndrome”—and so can safely confine that war and its vast body of traumatic images to oblivion and the dust-bin of history. We thus repeat over time the same Pyrrhic victory—a victory over those traumatic images that call the psyche to a knowledge of itself. Which is why such images can only return from without as violent and unwarranted assaults on the “innocence” of a people who refuse to know their actual position in the world.

Five percent of the world’s population consume 25 percent of its resources—and they do so by exerting control over the destiny of other countries. But that fact finds no image in our consciousness. And in Rio de Janeiro, at the one ecological conference he attended, George H. Bush delivered a proclamation even more chilling than his crowing about Vietnam syndrome: “The American way of life is not negotiable. ” As long as that dogma remains in place, there will be many more ground-zeroes.

And so for some of us traumatic images remain the weight that weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. A drama that would be adequate to 9-11 would resolve nothing. It would, instead, deliver the audience over to a history that would reveal the historical, dialectical connection of the pattern of images presented in this section in order to awaken that audience from its collective slumber. For those of us who work in the theatre, Walter Benjamin’s great aphorism about the task of culture—“the dead remain in danger”—must be emended thus: the dead remain in danger—of being sacrificed to the needs of the audience.

The previous sections have offered fifteen ways of making a single, complex point. All are different and all are necessary. For they are dialectically connected. It is in that dialectic that theatre finds its rationale and its mode of being. Our first job and our last is to cast the audience. But the only way to do so is by first casting ourselves in a way that deracinates within ourselves everything that stands in the way of the most radical act—the engaging of primary emotions in mediations that remain true to the agon that primary emotions activate within us. For the ability to perform such an action on an audience is only given to those who first perform that action in themselves.

All our efforts depend on a single circumstance. Kafka at 24 offered this as the task of reading/writing.

“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.”

We will get the kind of plays we need only when we have become the kind of audience who come to the theatre demanding plays that perform such an action within us.

Biographical note:

Walter A. Davis is an actor, playwright, and cultural critic. His primary theoretical book on theatre is Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama and the Audience (U of Wisconsin P, 1994). His plays include An Evening With JonBenét Ramsey (Authors Choice P, 2004). His most recent work of cultural criticism, Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9-11, (London: Pluto Press) has just appeared and may be ordered at http://www.amazon.com or by calling (800)621-2736. For further description of his work see http://www.walteradavis.com/. He may be reached at: davis.65@osu.edu.

Write Comment

Please keep the topic of messages relevant to the subject of the article. Personal verbal attacks will be deleted. Please don't use comments to plug your web site. Such material will be removed. Just ensure to Refresh your browser for a new security code to be displayed prior to clicking on the 'Send' button. Keep in mind that the above process only applies if you simply entered the wrong security code.
Name:
E-mail
Homepage
Title:
BBCode:
Comment:
Code:*
	I wish to be contacted by email regarding additional comments