Gritzner, Karoline - Adorno and Modern Theatre (2015, Palgrave Macmillan)

Adorno and Modern Theatre

Also by Karoline Gritzner Daddario) ADORNO AND PERFORMANCE (ed (ed . with Will Daddario) EROTICISM AND DEATH IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE (ed (ed .) .) THEATRE OF CATASTROPHE: New Essays on Howard Barker (ed . with David Ian Rabey )

Adorno and Modern Thea Theatr tre e The Drama of the Damaged Self in Bond, Rudkin, Barker and Kane Karoline Gritzner

Aberystwyth University, UK

© Karoline Gritzner 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-71001-0 ISBN 978-1-137-53447-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137534477

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I Yr Athro Ioan Williams

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Contents viii

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

ix

Prologue: ‘After Auschwitz’: Survival of the Aesthetic 1 Adorno and Beckett: from the Crisis of Schein to the Fidelity to Failure 2 Edward Bond and the Aesthetics of Resistance 3 David Rudkin’s Theatre of Myth 4 Howard Barker’s Theatre of Desire 5 Sarah Kane or how to ‘scrape a life out of the ruins’ Epilogue: Adorno, Tragedy and Theatre as Negation

1 24 46 86 105 146 163

Notes

182

Bibliography

190

Index

199

vii

Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to Professor Ioan Williams for introducing me to Adorno’s thoughts all those years ago and for helping me develop my passion for philosophical approaches to theatre. I would like to thank Professor David Ian Rabey for his friendship, generous encouragement, guidance and help in shaping this project. Special thanks are due to Paula Kennedy and Peter Cary at Palgrave Macmillan for their unflagging assistance and advice. Finally, I would like to thank Stephen Ellis for his wonderful encouragement of my work, and for his love and support.

viii

List of Abbreviations AT DoE MM ND

Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory (1970). Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. London: Athlone, 1997. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Trans. John Cumming. London: Verso, 1997. Theodor W. Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951). Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: NLB, 1974. Theodor W. Adorno. Negative Dialectics (1966). Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: The Seabury Press, 1973.

ix

Prologue: ‘After Auschwitz’: Survival of the Aesthetic

More than any other thinker of the twentieth century, the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) was deeply concerned with the scarring effects of the Holocaust on cultural production and experience, language, theory and practice. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno’s collaboration with Max Horkheimer, the question is raised why Enlightenment humanity, ‘instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’ ( DoE xiv). For Adorno, Auschwitz is a metaphor for perennial human suffering and provides the subtext for his sociological and philosophical work; it also fundamentally shaped his thinking about art and culture. The final chapter of his Negative Dialectics (1966), for example, examines the cultural and philosophical effects of the Holocaust on humanity, and the Auschwitz metaphor also underlines his critique of the commodification of art in today’s ‘culture industry’. The concept of Auschwitz and the historical experience of social and humanitarian catastrophes are central to Adorno’s thinking about philosophy and art. Adorno argues that in post-Auschwitz culture ‘actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience’ ( ND 362). The only appropriate response to the epistemological and moral crises of today would be a philosophical and aesthetic practice that is able to face up to its own failure through radical self-critique and negation whilst also, importantly, acknowledging its very roots in a failed culture. Resistance to, and transcendence of, the status quo through theoretical and artistic practice can therefore never be fully realised but remains, nevertheless, the aim. What Adorno proposes is a philosophical and aesthetic discourse that takes seriously the crisis of meaning and representation in art, culture and thought in the context of post-Auschwitz existence. 1

2 Adorno and Modern Theatre

With reference to the public silence about Auschwitz (and other genocides of the twentieth and current centuries), Alan Rosenberg and James R. Watson argue that ‘[g]etting the habits of hell into the syntax of language was accomplished, which is perhaps why today there is little if anything that shocks us’ ( Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwitz 19). There is a danger that the difficulty of articulating catastrophic events, the struggle to make sense of the impossible, might lead to an attitude of moral indifference and thus to a real silencing of the horror. In the spirit of Adorno, Agamben has attempted to elucidate the ‘paradox of testimony’ ( Remnants of Auschwitz 36) – the question of how to pay witness to an impossible event. He confirms the fundamental aporia of Auschwitz, which is that no amount of knowledge will be able to explain it, and that its truth cannot be verified even if its ‘facts [are] so real that, by comparison, nothing is truer’ (ibid. 12). The (ethical) task is not to take the unsayable-ness of Auschwitz as a pretext for silence, for not engaging with the problem and rupture (of historical knowledge, truth, or cultural values) that Auschwitz ultimately represents. The task would be to penetrate, despite recognition of its incomprehensibility, further and deeper into the abyss of the unsayable. For Adorno, this is the primary purpose of avant-garde art and critical theory, both of which would prefer to speak ‘the name of catastrophe’ only ‘in silence’ (‘ Endgame’ 249) in order to resist discursive rationality’s appropriation, commodification and forgetting of humanity’s suffering. The subsequent chapters take Adorno’s critique of the post-Auschwitz culture industry (its positivism and instrumentalism) as a starting point for an analysis of selected examples of modern British drama. Fredric Jameson notes that ‘we will miss the usefulness of Adorno’s diagnosis of positivism for us if we do not recognize that the tendencies he designated under that name have, if anything, intensified since his own death and remain now, in the virtual eclipse of his own philosophy as well as of dialectical thinking generally, virtually hegemonic and unchallenged – which means that they look somewhat different’ ( Late Marxism 89). This refers to Adorno’s critique of the affirmative and functional characteristics of modern society, which are different today only in the sense of being more intensified. In The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), Adorno challenges the meaning-, fact-, and impact-driven discourse of positivism that dominates modern economic, scientific and cultural developments. Specifically, he questions ‘the supposition of a meaning on the sole grounds that there must be one since otherwise one could not live: this supposition of a meaning as a lie’ ( Metaphysics 106). The problematisation of meaning – as a philosophical and ethical

Prologue: ‘After Auschwitz’: Survival of the Aesthetic 3

consequence of the Holocaust – plays a central role in Adorno’s criticism of modern culture and has also shaped the aesthetics of the dramatic work that is under discussion in this present study. For Adorno, Western culture’s relentless commitment to positivism and empiricism has to be called into question in the face of the damaged existing reality. Any forceful assertion of meaning over the meaningless, as is expressed in the cheerful products of the culture industry, is dismissed as ideological and false. Emphatic cases in point are his reflections on the possibility of a survival or continuation of ‘culture’ in post-Auschwitz times. Adorno’s notorious statement that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’ 30) was no doubt a provocative judgement about ‘neutralised and administered’, creative cultural activity in times of ‘absolute reification’ (ibid. 48, 49).1 However, this pessimistic perspective on modern art’s inability to resist the ideology of the culture industry stands side by side with Adorno’s attempts to construct art and the aesthetic experience as a counterpart to social reification and a refuge for damaged subjectivity. As Adorno suggests in Aesthetic Theory , art can provide us with an experience of reconciliation and happiness, which is, however, always deferred because it remains incompatible with existing reality. ‘Because all happiness found in the status quo is an ersatz and false, art must break its promise in order to stay true to it’ ( AT 311). The artwork’s idea or semblance of reconciliation suggests the possibility of a different relation between subject and object; it opens the possibility for non-dominated nature (the object freed from the coercive hold of the subject) to express itself, but the appearance of this expression in the work of art is contradictory, enigmatic, inadequate and unreconciled. Art’s promise of a reconciliation of social contradictions, which reaches beyond the negativity of the social totality, is both affirmed and problematised in Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Whilst the artwork may appear as an autonomous refuge from the callous instrumentalisation of daily life, its (inevitable) objectification as a product of the culture industry denies art such autonomy. However, the mimetic impulse of art yields an aesthetic experience whereby the self assimilates itself to the other. Adorno understands mimesis not as a mere copying or imitation of an external reality. Rather, the mimetic impulse of art produces a non-conceptual affinity with nature, and this affinity with non-identity is akin to a biological, affective impulse – it invites the subject’s exposure to difference. Because ‘[m]imesis ties art to individual human experience, which is the only experience of being-for-itself’ ( AT 30, translation modified KG), Adorno


connects mimesis with art’s capacity for expression and semblance. On the level of expression, the artwork asserts its self-identity and paradoxical non-relationality; it produces the semblance of a being-in-itself and conveys a seductive self-certainty which provisionally releases art from the pressures of external domination. ‘Through expression art closes itself off to being-for-another, which always threatens to engulf it, and becomes eloquent in itself: This is art’s mimetic consummation. Its expression is the antithesis of expressing something’ ( AT 112). Because art is different (apart) from the world, its relation to the world is indirect, oblique and non-identical. The mimetic impulse of art enables the subject to encounter otherness (the non-identical in nature but also the somatic and sensuous ‘other’ of reason) and eventually manifests itself in the artwork’s language of expression. For Adorno, art’s struggle with expression (as evident in the reification of this concept in the modernist movement of expressionism and in anti-expressionist schools such as constructivism) draws attention to art’s responses to historical experience – the experience of human suffering, in particular. Yet, what is at stake in our confrontation with suffering through aesthetic experience seems to be anathema in the discourse of the culture industry. For Adorno, art after Auschwitz must enable self-critique and engage with its own condition of impossibility by ‘turn[ing] against itself, in opposition to its own concept’ ( AT 2). And what is Adorno’s dedicated attention to the question of art, which culminates in his unfinished Aesthetic Theory of 1969, if not the best possible disclaimer of his earlier judgement about poetry after Auschwitz? A more precisely articulated refutation of his challenging statement can be found in Negative Dialectics (1966): ‘Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as has the tortured victim to scream. For this reason it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz it is impossible to write poetry’ ( ND 362). It seems that this need for expression is at once amplified and at the same time impeded by the development of modern society into a totalising apparatus of commerce and consumerism. The Frankfurt School’s critical assessment of the modern administered world (die verwaltete Welt ) has not lost its relevance today. If anything, the positivist and pragmatist bureaucratisation of all spheres of life is intensifying and confirms the view of, as Fredric Jameson has put it, an ‘increasingly closed organization of the world into a seamless web of media technology, multinational corporations, and international bureaucratic control’ (Jameson in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics 208). For Adorno, two central effects of the instrumentalisation of


reason in modern culture are the reduction of difference to sameness (the reinforcement of the identity principle) and the devaluation of individual experience and expression. 2 Yet, his provocative statement that ‘[a]ll post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage’ (ND 367) does not simply suggest that society and culture are damaged in some irrecoverable way and that there is no way of freeing ourselves from the ‘universal guilt context’ ( ND 372) of contemporary existence. Adorno’s project is situated on the fault line between the possibility and impossibility of socio-cultural resistance and transformation. Adorno never tires of returning his reader to the reality of the catastrophic course of the world and the individual’s precarious position in it. Notably, the central theme of his aphoristic study Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951) is the notion of a damaged subjectivity whose expression in the performance of individual existence in late-capitalist society is equally problematic. Yet, especially in his aesthetic writings, he draws attention to the concepts of freedom, happiness, redemption and hope, which he discovers in art’s ability to evoke for us ‘the breaks that belie identity’ ( ND 404). To speak (of) the unspeakable

Adorno dedicates considerable attention to the subject of suffering and death in the section on ‘Meditations of Metaphysics’ in Negative Dialectics. His discourse on death implies a critique of the administered society in which consciousness is reified, objectified and divorced from individual experience. He calls late-capitalist society a web of immanence which human beings are unable to transcend, and in which difference and otherness are reduced to sameness according to the metaphysical principle of identity and the economic principle of exchange. Even though Adorno defines the ego as ‘the self-preserving principle opposed to death’ (ND 370), he also points out that historical processes have led to the dominance of the self over the irrational (nature, myth, magic), which produced a hardened, self-sufficient, spiritualised notion of subjectivity. Contemporary society’s obsession with self-image, health and longevity heightens the spiritualisation of the subject even further and seeks to expel death from consciousness as well as experience. Yet, Adorno draws attention to the death-like qualities of life in modern society: ‘As the subjects live less, death grows more precipitous, more terrifying’ ( ND 370). Our fear of death mirrors our own living death, our reified, predetermined existence in the administered society. In death we face our own image. Adorno’s warning that ‘since


Auschwitz, fearing death means fearing worse than death’ ( ND 371) suggests the weakening of death as a metaphysical, even redemptive idea. The question is now how to talk about this fear, this paradoxical selfconsciousness of death in the face of death. It connects to the question of how to represent that which is beyond the order of appearance; how to approach the unnameable, the unspeakable. The selected dramatic texts by Howard Barker, Edward Bond, David Rudkin, and Sarah Kane address this question in diverse and aesthetically challenging ways. In my view, they are the dramatists of a type of ‘negative’ theatre which is characterised by oblique references to political reality, history, catastrophe and the complexity of affective human relationships. Theirs is a theatre in which the ideas of the unspeakable and the incommensurable challenge the imagination and expose its audience to the crisis or ‘withering of experience’ ( MM 40) as has been theorised in Adorno’s writings on art, culture, philosophy and history. An appropriate philosophical and aesthetic anamnesis of the unspeakable would have to insist on taking catastrophic events such as the Holocaust as a conceptual model for practice; it would have to become conscious of its condition as a philosophy or art in terms of a mode of thinking and doing after Auschwitz. The deferred nature of such practice makes it self-critical, negative, restless and radical in its engagement with the memory of the unnameable and inexpressible. Such a self-reflective ‘thinking against itself’ ( ND 365) would be a dialectical thinking of that which escapes the force of the concept’s own logic of identification. It is a thinking that wrestles with paradox, contradiction and aporia in its embrace of the originary non-conceptual, heterogeneous and somatic moments of expression and thought. As Terry Eagleton has argued, Adorno’s aesthetic theory tries to ‘return thought to the body’ and redeem the ‘proto-materialist aspects’ of cognition from the domination of reason ( Ideology of the Aesthetic 343, 357). In a culture in which the organisation of life is in the grip of the identity principle, Auschwitz continues to be a reminder of the threat of an absolute eradication of alterity. Lyotard has theorised the problem of how to continue linguistic speculative discourse not only ‘after Auschwitz’ but also after Adorno’s critical responses to post-Auschwitz culture ( Differend 86ff). Adorno’s statement that ‘[a]fter Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation’ (ND 367) suggests not only the failure of traditional metaphysics in the face of ‘perennial suffering’ ( ND 362) but also raises


the need for a transformed language with which to express the inexpressible. Lyotard opens the question whether ‘Western thought and life today dispute[s] speculative discourse’ ( Differend 88) and he points out that for Adorno ‘Auschwitz’ is not only a name or a concept but a model which is not used to illustrate or explain a state of affairs. Rather, it is a model that exposes language to its limits, its silence: ‘The “Auschwitz” model would designate an “experience” of language that brings speculative discourse to a halt. The latter can no longer be pursued “after Auschwitz”’ (ibid.). The collapse of enlightenment rationality into barbarism, which ‘Auschwitz’ signifies, puts our capacity for experience into question. George Steiner was also concerned with the loss of experience in modern society and saw the corruption of language in Nazi Germany mirrored in the clichéd, reduced language of the mass media (see Steiner, ‘Retreat’ in Language and Silence 45ff). However, his conservative culture-critical perspective (he rejected post-War abstract expressionism as an aesthetic movement which typifies the decay of language) is diametrically opposed to Adorno’s positive evaluation of the avant-garde. Whilst Steiner critiques modernist abstract art for expressing a ‘sense of a death in language, of the failure of the word in the face of the inhuman’ (‘Silence and the Poet’ in ibid. 71), one of the central tenets of Adorno’s aesthetic theory is the idea that only when it establishes a mimetic relationship to empirical reality’s ‘nexus of guilt’ ( AT 134) can modernist art ‘say what is more than the existing’ ( AT 133). Using the work of Baudelaire, Poe and Beckett as examples, Adorno argues that art’s stance with regards to reification (the ‘principle of death’, AT 133) is paradoxical: ‘it achieves opposition only through identification with that against which it remonstrates’ (ibid.). However, if an artwork attempts to lay a positive claim to this ‘more’ (the promise of reconciliation as suggested by art’s opposition to the actual), it becomes judgement, message, argument and loses its enigmatic character of an ‘address’. As Alexander García Düttmann states: Art is neither the result of a castigation, of a missed opportunity to change the world, nor the symptom of a resignation, of a disenchantment with the world as it is. Both accounts measure it against factuality and conflate an address with a judgement or with its semblance. They reduce the art-work to an attitude, a statement, a message with substitutes for actual engagement. (‘Art’s Address’ in Schafhausen et al., Adorno: The Possibility of the Impossible 88–9)


From crisis to critique

Auschwitz marks a series of crises: the crisis of Western thought (metaphysics and epistemology), representation, meaning, experience, culture and ethics.3 The crisis of philosophy after Auschwitz has been identified and theorised by post-structuralist critics such as Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida, but a critique of the foundations of Western thinking in the light of the catastrophes of the twentieth century was already part of the self-reflective philosophical projects of Levinas, Arendt, Blanchot, Bataille and indeed Adorno.4 Adorno finds the cultural and epistemological crises most pertinently addressed in the avant-garde projects of aesthetic modernism (in Schönberg’s atonal music, Kafka’s novels, and Beckett’s theatre of silence, for example). A recognition of these crises may have caused Adorno’s theoretical project to develop into a critique of German idealism, especially of Hegel’s dialectics, which he criticises for its affirmative emphasis on a conceptual synthesis or sublation ( Aufhebung ) of difference. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) argues that the historical development of autonomous reason is both progressive and regressive. The authors critique the purportedly humanising and liberating power of rationalisation by drawing connections between reason’s domination of external nature and the ensuing effects of repression and alienation on the level of subjectivity. The rationalisation of all aspects of human existence is dependent on a de-mystification of the world: on a rejection of reality’s irrational, mythical, spiritual and heterogeneous elements. In Adorno’s terms, instrumental rationality aims to control and repress the non-identical; that non-conceptual force of alterity which opposes the totalising drives of reason. Much influenced by Freudian theory, Adorno argues that such a repression of the nonidentical manifests itself in the increasing reification of human relations in a context of life which Hubert Zapf has termed the ‘abstract society’ ( Das Drama 15ff). Adorno’s analysis of the totalising and abstracting mechanisms of rationality takes a further cue from his critique of modern theories of identity, especially Hegel’s notion of the absolute and unifying spirit (Geist ). For Adorno, Hegel’s philosophy of identity is reifying because it does not do justice to the particular, the heterogeneous and nonidentical (non-conceptual) moments of thought. This set of arguments prepares the ground for Adorno’s defence of art and the aesthetic experience as an articulation and anamnesis of what remains irreconcilable within the enforced systematisation of conceptual thought. There are


other readings of Hegel, however, which emphasise the concept and movement of negation in his theory of dialectics. Jean-Luc Nancy, for example in Hegel, the Restlessness of the Negative, conceives of Hegelian subjectivity not as a totalising system but as a force of restless movement. The focus for Nancy is on the centrality of the negative in Hegel’s theory of the Absolute and the dialectical movement of identity construction, which led to the definition of modernity as a ‘world of movement, of transformation, of displacement, and of restlessness’ ( Hegel 6). Adorno, too, is appreciative of the emphasis on conceptual movement in Hegel’s philosophy and indeed Hegelian notions of negativity are the starting point for many of his studies, including Minima Moralia. But for Adorno, the Hegelian project tends to sidestep the negative impulse of thought in favour of a reconciliation of conceptual differences and a subjection of the particular to the general principle, a reduction of the individual to the universal. The traces of immanent contradiction in the Hegelian system provide a further reference point for Nancy’s elaborations on the continuing relevance of ‘our history’ (the history of totalitarian ideologies in general and the Holocaust in particular) to the present and the future. In ‘Our History’ he argues that ideology denies thought its moments of self-reflexivity and contradiction, suppressing ‘a knowledge of its own movement’ (Nancy, ‘Our History’ 111). The collapse of humanism, which Auschwitz represents, signifies the liquidation of thought’s knowledge of itself as a process of thinking historicity and finitude. Totalitarian ideology ‘obliterate[s] the untotalisable finitude of meaning, the excess of existence over every Subject’ (ibid.). Adorno’s critique of ideology as identity thinking is based on the same argument, emphasising the violence that is done to the non-identical, the moment of thought that resists totalisation, which he also calls the materialist or somatic element of thought. To argue with Nancy that Auschwitz represents not only a historical event but also an event in the history of philosophy is to broaden and deepen the significance of this event for a critique of our self-understanding as human beings, which must involve a deconstruction of the foundations and guiding principles of Western thought (logos, reason, progress). It may be a call to deliver the ‘excess of finite meaning’ (ibid. 105) inherent in our cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic practices from the lures of ideological subordination and pragmatist control. Auschwitz has ruptured the foundational discourse of Enlightenment humanism within Western thought. In The Spirit of Terrorism Jean Baudrillard speaks of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York as a symbolic event that ‘represents a setback


for globalisation itself’ (3). He goes on to call it ‘the absolute event, the “mother” of all events, the pure event uniting within itself all the events that have never taken place’ (4). The similarities between Baudrillard’s response to terrorism and Adorno’s assessment of Auschwitz as a symbol for the destruction of Enlightenment and humanist values are worth pointing out. Both Baudrillard and Adorno take issue with the growing tendency toward homogenisation in the spheres of economics and culture. Baudrillard’s critique of globalisation is based on the premise that ‘[i]t was the system itself which created the objective conditions for this brutal retaliation’ (ibid. 9). According to this view, the hegemonic system produces immanent forces of destabilisation and creates the conditions for its own destruction. Adorno, too, considers Auschwitz as a symbol for the failure of the Enlightenment and draws attention to the inherently self-destructive nature of all totalised political and social systems. According to Adorno, Fascism’s inability to accept difference (be it racial, sexual, political or aesthetic), its paranoid compulsion to force the stamp of sameness onto every aspect of life, can be considered an extreme and perverse realisation of the Enlightenment impulse to master the world in the name of rational self-preservation and liberation. Adorno sees this triumph of domination at work in the ‘culture industry’5 which manufactures standardised products and promotes an ideology of pseudo-individuality. Influenced by the Marxian critique of capitalist commodity production and Georg Lukács’s theory of reification (whereby commodities – ‘things’ – come to dominate human beings and human relations), Frankfurt School critical theory mounts a significant critique of the homogenisation of cultural practice and the standardisation and curtailing of individual self-determination. Especially for Adorno, the questions of freedom and individual expression in the context of the consumer society were key concerns. The aims of critical theory have found a continuation in the work of poststructuralists such as Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard for whom the encounter with alterity poses important philosophical and moral challenges. When Baudrillard says that ‘terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a system of generalised exchange’ and that ‘all the singularities [. . .] are taking revenge today through this terroristic situational transfer ’ (Baudrillard, Spirit 9), 9), he implies that what terrorism forces upon us is an anamnesis of the other and a remembrance of the past. For Adorno, a reluctance to accept alterity may partly be rooted in the very structure of thinking, in the work of cognition, for conceptual practice implies the subsumption of particular, individual objects or events under general


ideas and categories. This form of identifying thought (Adorno calls it instrumental reason or identity thinking) is unavoidable but needs to be resisted and challenged in order to do justice to the non-identical other. other. Terrorist attacks on representative institutions and nations of ‘global power’ symbolise the revenge of the silenced other(s) – their attack on the system is an attack of the system on itself, an assault on the structures of repression led by repressed, unacknowledged singularities. They also symbolise a reappearance of the past in our present; we are again confronted with ‘our history’ (Nancy) and a consciousness of our ongoing failure to learn lessons from the past. Auschwitz, which symbolises the ultimate rupture of Western Western culture and according to Adorno has paralysed metaphysical thought, insists on being remembered. Its anamnesis responds to the fate of the singular in its relationship to an excess of power, which constantly seeks to repress its non-identical origins. For Adorno, art may offer us particular expressions of non-identity which are, however, always at risk of being integrated into the status quo of the administered empirical world. Even if they take the form of aesthetic objects such as paintings or sculptures, artworks are first and AT 176), a foremost characterised by a powerful ‘processual quality’ ( AT temporality which transforms the meaning of objects in the very process of being experienced. Importantly, Importantly, as a ‘process of becoming’ (ibid.) AT 177). the artwork opposes its reduction to the ‘category of property’ ( AT 177). This enactment of art’s constitutive temporality and ephemerality in the moment of encounter is emphasised in the performing arts, especially in music (to which Adorno was dedicated throughout his life), and in theatre. The time-based and transient character of these art forms can usefully be conceptualised by drawing on the notion of the event. Structuralist discourse proposed proposed the event as a site of the unthinkable, impossible and irrational, one that is opposed to a signifying structure and has no bearing on it. According to Foucault, this was done in an ‘effort to evacuate the event, not only from ethnology but from a whole series of other sciences and in the extreme case from history’ (Foucault, (F oucault, ‘Truth and Power’ 55, 56). Poststructuralist efforts, significantly influenced by Adorno, to revive the significance of the event can largely be considered as an extension of the identification of the event as an ‘impossible’ force, but one that has a distinct impact on the structures in opposition to which it emerges. Derrida, for example, speaks of the event as the rupture or break of a situation and considers structuralism itself as a movement (and event) which ruptured the history of Western philosophy by allowing philosophical thought to reflect on itself as a structure (see Writing and Difference). Lyotard is also concerned with


the destabilising effects of the event on the structure (capitalist totality) itself and he considers it as an excessive energy which is capable of channelling forces. forces. ‘One could call an event the impact, on the system, of floods of energy such that the system does not manage to bind and channel this energy; the event would be the traumatic encounter of energy with the regulating institution’ (‘March 22’ in Political Writings 64). In Badiou’s ontological argument, too, the event ruptures being and has an exceptional status (see Being and Event ). ). It is this conception of the event as a force that impacts on the system, and which the system is struggling to comprehend (to ‘bind’ or ‘channel’), which Adorno seems to address in his dialectical consideration of the possibility (and impossibility) of art in modern culture. The political, ethical and moral questions arising from the event named Auschwitz are precisely how to comprehend that which resists comprehension, how to know that which escapes knowledge, and how to express the inexpressible. Possible answers to this set of questions lie in the open-ended pursuits of negative expression in art and negative dialectics in philosophy, both of which characterise Adorno’s distinctive form of critical theory. Authentic works of art, in Adorno’s view, refuse to be readily subsumed within the systems of exchange, communication, and representation. Every artwork should insist on its radical status as an event, an ambiguous concentration of energy, a force which, precisely because it remains outside the system, poses an immanent challenge to it. 6 Lyotard’s definition of the event as a force that resists the processes of signification within a system is similar to Derrida’s critique of the structuralist project in his article ‘Force and Signification’ (in Writing and Difference). Lyotard’s statement that ‘there is a dimension of force that escapes the logic of the signifier: an excess of energy that symbolic Political Writings 64) echoes Derrida’s exchange can never regulate’ ( Political exploration of the possibility of a loss of centre within the structure, which opens up the destabilising dimension of play and chance (the dance of signifiers, the sliding of the signified, the impossibility to fix meaning). Lyotard transports this poststructuralist notion of the event into the context of his critique of the hegemonic system called capitalism where the disruptive force of the event takes on a political significance. The refusal of the event to bear meaning within the economic/political system constitutes an attack on the system as a totality in which the value and meaning of subjects and objects are dependent on their exchangeability. Similarly, for Adorno the radical artwork has an event-like character, which implies a resistance to the principles of equivalence and exchange that shape modern commodity culture.


However, art’s status remains semi-autonomous and the consciousness of freedom which it expresses remains illusory because ‘as a product of the social labor [sic ] of spirit, art is always implicitly a fait social’ ( AT 225), AT 225), hence also subject to the forces of reification and instrumentalisation. Towards Towards an aesthetics of non-identity

Adorno’s concerns with the possibility of philosophy and art ‘after Auschwitz’ centre on his re-conceptualisation of experience and expression as fundamentally problematic categories in modern philosophical discourse. Adorno argues that the totalitarian tendency towards a systemic homogenisation of difference in modern society exposes individual experience as an idealistic and ideological category of power. An autonomous, unregimented experience of difference is not possible in a system that strives for totality and unity. The more unreconciled and contradictory the system, the more compulsory become the tendencies to prescribe and fashion individual and collective experiences. The experience of damage and suffering, which Adorno considers as prevailing yet ideologically obscured in modern ‘post-Auschwitz’ culture, informs the potential for all forms of liberated expression. Philosophical as well as aesthetic expression are scarred, and it is only through the labour of self-reflexive consciousness and the search for remnants of metaphysical experience in art that such damage and suffering might be given a voice. Adorno’s Adorno’s critique of the reified structures of consciousness which have developed in the spirit of Enlightenment does not seek to eradicate the categories of subjectivity and identity from philosophical or aesthetic discourse. Rather, Rather, his version of Marxist identity critique aims to ensure that the principle of identity itself ‘undergoes a qualitative change’ (ND 149). This change is suggested by the introduction of Adorno’s notion of ‘negative dialectics’ – a form of dialectical thinking that embraces the principal work of contradiction in dialectical thought but which resists the Hegelian compulsion towards conceptual reconciliation and resolution (the sublation of difference in a new and superior category of identity). The implied ethical dimension of Adorno’s negative dialectics revolves around the question of how it is possible to salvage non-identity in its myriad forms and expressions, which would amount to a search for non-coercive relations between people and their relationships to the natural world. This concern with the non-identical is different from a mere surface celebration of difference or anti-expressivity, which are characteristic of certain trends in post-modernity. In his essay ‘Adorno as the Devil’,


for example, Lyotard argues that Adorno’s Marxist social and aesthetic criticism, according to which society is interpreted as a system of ‘alienation’ and art as society’s ‘martyred witness’, fails to comprehend the changed nature of (post)modern capitalism which today is ‘more energetic, more cynical, less tragic’ (Lyotard, ‘Adorno as the Devil’ 128). Lyotard considers the ‘libidinal energy’ that pervades late capitalism to be an ‘affirmative operation’ (ibid. 130) of anti-expressive desire, one which removes the subject from her intentions and according to which ‘everything has value through relation, [. . .] in so far as it is exchangeable’ (ibid. 131). Adorno, on the other hand, criticises the fetishisation of exchange value in commodity culture and notices the objectifying effects of inter-changeability and standardisation on the modern subject – a ‘tragic’ subject who is in need of art as the expression of their own alienated and unreconciled condition. Society understood as a libidinal economy, in Lyotard’s view, renounces the ‘tragedy’ of dialectical thought as an outdated ‘theology’, but I believe this is due to a mistaken understanding of the dialectical nature of Adorno’s theory of expression. Like Lyotard (and Deleuze, for that matter) Adorno rejects the view that expression in art and philosophy is the direct demonstration of an ego’s conscious intentions, yet at the same time he is sceptical of the modern ‘allergy to expression’ which threatens to ‘become the mouthpiece of reified consciousness’ ( AT 117). What Adorno calls the ‘speechless, expressionless expression’ (ibid.) of authentic art performs a contradictory, dialectical movement between expression and non-expression, which simultaneously presents and denounces the disappearance of the self. As Adorno maintains, ‘[i]f the subject is no longer able to speak directly, then at least it should – in accord with a modernism that has not pledged itself to absolute construction – speak through things, through their alienated and mutilated form’ ( AT 118). There are, however, more productive points of contact between Adorno and Lyotard, revolving around both philosophers’ critiques of totalising systems of thought and the philosophical and ethical lessons to be learnt from the Holocaust. Stephen David Ross’s article ‘Lyotard and Disaster: Forgetting the Good’ develops the ethical necessity of remembering the impossible historical event Auschwitz: ‘In bearing witness to any extermination, perhaps we bear witness to others, including the disaster of development’ (Ross, ‘Lyotard and Disaster’ 294). Here, a critique of the Holocaust implies a critique of the European Enlightenment project of mastery and domination. Lyotard advances in an Adornian spirit by establishing connections between cultural/epistemological progress and destruction. Lyotard argues that


remembering the Holocaust means remembering heterogeneity, the ‘infinity of heterogeneous finalities’ (Lyotard quoted in Ross 288). Lyotard’s post-modern critique of totality, which seeks to rescue the heterogeneous, the name of the singular that is threatened to be underminded in the culture industry, wants to be a witness to the unrepresentable which in art is captured as the sublime. Aesthetic experience for Lyotard (as for Adorno) is a liberating process that respects the non-identical which appears in the form of the true event, that which cannot be explained rationally or mastered intellectually. Lyotard and Baudrillard share a profound scepticism about the contemporary world’s development toward uniformity and a globalisation of Western economic, cultural and political values. But already Adorno, in his critical assessment of post-war modern culture in the 1950s and 1960s, registered the growing tendency towards a ‘destruction of non-identity,’ which threatens to develop into a condition of ‘[a]bsolute negativity’ (ND 362), culturally and ethically. Adorno’s pessimistic, almost tragic views on the development of post-Auschwitz culture receive their most emphatic and haunting articulations in the section entitled ‘Mediations on Metaphysics’ in Negative Dialectics and in his Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. In the former text he proposes that the transformation of cognition that Auschwitz has imposed on us can be understood as a materialistic metaphysics which ‘immigrates into micrology’ ( ND 407) where it finds its truth in the ‘bodily sensation’ (ND 365) of our immanent encounter with the other. The persistence of human suffering is thus an indicator of the need for the expression of suffering through artistic activity and aesthetic experience. For Adorno, artworks are expressions of nonidentity when they encourage a ‘lingering with the particular’ ( MM 77) and yield a lived experience [ Erlebnis], such as an experience of incommensurability or ‘the capacity to shudder’ ( AT 331). Adorno’s lifelong theoretical and practical interests in art (he studied piano composition under Alban Berg in Vienna in the mid-1920s) were of great significance to his post-metaphysical project. Terry Eagleton has argued that Adorno’s theory of subjectivity, which understands the self as the product of emancipation as well as of repression, leads him to a conceptual aporia which cannot be resolved by thought alone but points towards the aesthetic (see Ideology of the Aesthetic ). To Adorno, the relations between emancipation and repression, autonomy and subjugation, freedom and violence, which the individual enters into in search for self-definition, are on the one hand of a historical nature. But his insight into the dialectical relationship between reason and myth, the logical and the irrational, opens the debate about the violence that


lies at the heart of subject formation and thinking as such. The search for self-identity depends on the successful overcoming of whatever could pose a threat to personal freedom and autonomy. Because these processes of self-formation are largely of a conceptual nature, Adorno creates a correlation between self and concept. The subjective-conceptual drive tends to undermine the object (nature, materiality, the body as the locus of heterogeneous and non-identical forces). In Freudian terms one would speak of sublimation – but this process of conceptual domination is never complete and fails to satisfy. Consequently, as Eagleton notes, ‘for Adorno, the self is rent by an internal fissure, and the name for the experience of it is suffering’ ( Ideology of the Aesthetic 348). The self suffers as a result of its inability to achieve autonomy and freedom; hence, the notion of subjective freedom bears the traces of the dialectical tension between self-definition and self-denial. The self, according to Adorno but also in post-Freudian theory, is burdened by a consciousness of lack and separation – the link between the ego and his or her material world is severed, and the compulsive repression of natural instincts engenders a longing for a return to a ‘natural’, unspoilt, pure state of existence. Adorno is aware of this conflict at the heart of the development of subjectivity and argues that traditional philosophy does not offer any solutions to this paradox. What is needed is a different kind of theory which enables the critic to think without doing violence to that which remains outside of thought. The Adornian aesthetic project proposes such a way of reflecting on an objective reality with minimal conceptual subjugation of the other. As Eagleton puts it, ‘Adorno’s solution to this riddle is the aesthetic’ ( Ideology of the Aesthetic 348) because in art the non-identical finds expression. The contingent, particular and heterogeneous moments of thought, which in the standardised social totality are forcefully reconciled, manifest themselves aesthetically as forms of contradiction and tension. In Adorno’s meditations on the problem of Auschwitz art plays a central role because it is in art – in its expressive dimension – that social content is formally mediated, transformed and reflected back to the world in a new light. The task of post-Auschwitz art and culture would be to recover a sensibility of subjective freedom from the ruins of a damaged civilisation, without forgetting that a consciousness of freedom ‘after Auschwitz’ must be a consciousness of incommensurability and suffering. This may be achieved, according to Adorno, if attention is paid to the immanent lawfulness of aesthetic material, to the composition of art’s formal elements, rather than a reliance on the notion of subjective intention as a primary factor in the construction of art.


For this reason, Adorno’s aesthetics has been called ‘objective’ – it ‘grant[s] priority to the object’ and is not ‘subject-centred’, i.e. it is not ‘an aesthetics that beg[ins] with subjective experience’ (Graw ‘Adorno is among us’ 16). However, it can be argued that precisely when priority is given to the object, that is, when the aesthetic material is constructed in a manner which ‘conform[s] to the mimetic impulses without planning’ ( AT 44), an alternative concept of subjectivity finds expression. For Adorno, art can be a refuge for a non-coercive relationship between subjectivity and objectivity when the experience of art is understood as a mimetic process that encourages an affinity between the self and its non-identical internal and external other. In his writings about art, especially in Aesthetic Theory , Adorno’s critique of metaphysical identity thinking combines with the idea of aesthetic comportment as a process and experience that gives primacy to the object. The artwork’s mimetic, non-violent assimilation to the other (the non-identical) makes possible an experience of what remains impossible on the level of empirical social and political reality. In other words, for Adorno artworks denote what Lambert Zuidervaart has described as an ‘objectification of transformative hope’ ( Social Philosophy 70) – a promise for a transformed and reconciled existence, which is momentarily captured in the artwork or object, but which remains elusive. ‘Art is the ever broken promise of happiness’ ( AT 136). However, any suggestion that the aesthetic can be a straightforward solution to the problem of reified subjectivity in the development of Western culture is problematic and ideological because, as Adorno was aware, art is of course not immune from the pressures of reification and commodification in today’s culture industry. How can art, the product of social and historical conditions (a fait social) resist and transcend the context of its creation and existence? Adorno proposes aesthetic form as an answer to this crucial question of resistance, because the formal characteristics of a work of art are an expression of art’s inherent autonomy from the social sphere; form is understood as the embodiment of art’s negation of empirical reality. It is this structural and qualitative difference of art from nature and from the social totality, which for Adorno produces a semblance of freedom from the constraints and limitations that are forced upon human activity by late-capitalist society. However, the appearance of freedom is informed by, and takes account of, art’s own locatedness, its specific historical and social condition. Art, in Adorno’s Marxist-materialist view, is a form of immanent critique and determinate negation because it is informed by, and draws from, that which it reacts against. As both social fact (fait social) and autonomous entity, art seeks to transcend ‘the


terms of the empirical world [. . .] though they alone give [it] the chance of transcending’ ( ND 374). The anamnesis of human violence and suffering returns us to the problematic of the body and its plea for expression, as suggested by Adorno’s statement that ‘[p]erennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems’ (ND 362). The dramatists discussed in this study have engaged, in their own distinguishing ways, with the contradictions of history, war, love, personal and collective experience. Read in the context of Adornian thought, their theatrical projects propose and explore an array of responses to the cultural conditions ‘after Auschwitz’. They are theatres of negation in the sense that they reject conventional theatrical forms (such as naturalism and social or domestic realism) and contest the objectives of the culture industry by employing incommensurability and contradiction as structural principles. Most importantly, these projects are political in Adorno’s sense: they enable the dramatic text to appear as an autonomous response to the instrumental and identitarian logic of consumerist society, thereby offering aesthetic theatrical experiences that repudiate the ‘forced reconciliations’ of socially committed art.7 It is worth emphasising again that Adorno’s pessimistic perception of culture in post-Auschwitz society centres on his diagnosis of a latecapitalist spiritual malaise, which he elaborates in his culture-critical writings. Artistic production in a climate of positivist thinking becomes, as Lyotard would later describe it, subject to the rules of a ‘cost-benefit (input/output) ratio’ (‘Svelte Appendix’ in Political Writings 25) that informs economic and cultural life. Works of art become exchangeable objects on a market (named ‘culture’), which also standardises our responses to them. 8 In the context of my discussion of the work of dramatists Edward Bond and Howard Barker, I consider their different ways of responding to the reification of cultural consciousness in late twentieth and early twenty-first century society, bearing in mind their conceptions of theatre’s theatre’s relationship to the unresolved (or unresolvable) conflicts of history. history. Both dramatists have voiced their criticisms of modern culture in various non-fictional texts (Barker in his Arguments for a Theatre; Bond in letters, essays and various introductions to his plays) and their critical assessments of the contradictions of late-capitalist society and culture are also evident in their theatrical work. The different aesthetic treatments of such culture-critical themes become apparent at closer analysis of dramatic texts and with reference to the dramatists’


self-reflective writings on their own practice. It will transpire that Bond’s Bond’s socialist commitment to the essentially humanising effects of art is opposed to Barker’s concept of art as an autonomous sphere which resists the constraints of conventional morality. Bond’s position and practice as a dramatist are shaped by his dialectical-materialist worldview, whereas Barker’s project offers aesthetic speculations on life which do not transmit any overtly political, social or humanitarian messages. Both dramatists, however, continue Adorno’s discourse of the negative imprint of the social in the work of art, and their dramatisations of prep recarious subjectivity in post-catastrophic scenarios offer new perspectives on Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment rationality. The Enlightenment sought to suspend the obscure forces of mythic and uncontrolled instinct by applying the laws of reason to all aspects of human life and experience. However, as Adorno and Horkheimer show in Dialectic of Enlightenment , the development of human reason is interconnected with the will to domination, destruction and violence, as revealed in the subject’s subject’s impassioned subordination of the unknown. The reversal of enlightenment rationality into myth is explained as the effect of subjectivity’s desire for freedom, which puts into place rigid power structures that demand self-sacrifice in the name of selfpreservation (as suggested in the adventures of Odysseus). A development which aimed to be emancipatory and egalitarian has revealed its self-destructive, regressive and ‘barbaric’ essence. Historically, Historically, it continues to manifest itself in the human catastrophes which bring us face to face with the limits of reason, desire and experience. Such ideas and concerns are central to the work of David Rudkin whose drama presents subjective experience as shaped by a dialectic of enlightenment which shows the intertwinement of emancipation and domination, progress and regression, logos and pathos. Characteristically, in Rudkin’s drama the tensions between self-preservation and self-sacrifice are informed by psychoanalytic theories of the divided self (Freud, Lang) and Jungian approaches to the transformative power of psychic life. A continuation of Adorno’s interest in formal experimentation and aesthetic structures which, as Max Paddison has stated, ‘can admit chaos, fragmentation and meaninglessness’ (‘Review Article’ 358), is most radically pursued in the abstract dramatic writings of the late Sarah Kane. In the spirit of Adorno’s Adorno’s definition of avant-garde art as determinate negation, autonomous aesthetic form provides a critical response to (administered) social reality precisely by shutting itself off from reality’s utilitarian concerns whilst also responding mimetically to them. In Kane’s drama, the experimentations with aesthetic abstraction gain a socio-political


import if one interprets them as an ‘allegorical reaction to a world that AT 22). ha[s] become abstract’ ( AT 22). The challenges to aesthetic form, meaning, human experience and expression, which are performed in the theatrical projects under consideration in this study, bear the marks of the one artist whose work Adorno considered to be the most ‘authentic’ and autonomous response to the hegemonic system of late capitalism: Samuel Beckett, to whom the Aesthetic Theory was was to be dedicated. For Adorno, Beckett’s Beckett’s body of work is an example of aesthetic negativity which reveals the antinomy that exists in the relationship between the autonomous artwork and the regressive social totality. Beckett’s work is anti-idealist in its refusal to communicate transparent meaning, yet the idea of redemption is evoked through formal fragmentation and an aesthetics of failure. As Adorno maintains, in Beckett’s Beckett’s drama ‘[c]onsciousness gets ready to look its own end in the eye, as though it wanted to survive it’ Endgame’ 275). (‘ Endgame Adorno’s inaugural lecture at the University of Frankfurt in 1931 was called ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ and it contained many of the central concepts that were to be developed in his later work. It engages with the crisis of idealism and argues that modern philosophy can no longer claim to make sense of the totality of experience and being. The failure of totalising philosophical projects gives way to a notion of philosophy as interpretation and, following Walter Walter Benjamin, as a form of ‘riddle-solving’ (Adorno, ‘Actuality of Philosophy’ 31). As part of the riddle-solving process of philosophical thought the various elements of perception are brought into constantly changing constellations. Adorno states that philosophy ‘must proceed interpretively without ever possessing a sure key to interpretation; nothing more is given to it than fleeting, disappearing traces within the riddle figures of that which exists and their astonishing entwinings’ (ibid.). Reminiscent of the ephemeral images presented in the theatre and the transient moments of appearance and presence that are part of aesthetic experience, interpretive philosophy aims to illuminate the real without fixing it but in order to show its composition as a constellation of material elements. Hence, Adorno’s philosophy understands itself primarily as a ‘thinking of materialism’ (32), as a ‘thinking which aims at relations with the object, and not at validity isolated in itself’ (37). Adorno calls this materialist thinking an ‘exact fantasy’ (37), a form of non-conceptual and non-totalising aesthetic experience which results from the precise configuration (constellation) of material elements. Aesthetic interpretation understood in terms of exact fantasy gives primacy to the object


and proposes a different model of subjectivity: one that is no longer (as in idealism) synonymous with autonomous reason, but a non-identical (internally conflicted and contradictory) subject position which is produced (performed, configured, composed) in the process of aesthetic experience. Adorno’s philosophy of art acknowledges that the idealist ghost of spirit (Geist ) lives on in the art work as appearance (semblance, Schein), and even though Geist ‘is ‘is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, [. . .] it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality’ (‘Actuality of Philosophy’ 38). The aim of Adorno’s interpretative and constellatory philosophical approach to art seems to be a dialectical retrieval of the promise of particularity and non-identity contained within aesthetic expression and experience. Similarly, the aim of this present study is to bring my interpretations of dramatic works into dialogue with Adornian ideas by exploring the particular expressive configurations of language, image, rhythm, form and content. Expression in art, for Adorno, is not understood as a wilful affirmation of the subjective ego or agency; rather, the relation between art and expression is conceived along Hegelian lines as an expression of the human experience of needs and suffering. The primacy of aesthetic experience is connected to our sensing of a ‘primacy of the other’ in our encounter with the work and event of art. This encounter with the non-identical other in and through art points to a suspension of rational concepts and may initiate a process of release from the pressures of self-preservation which modernity perpetuates. However, for Adorno this aesthetic sense of liberation from enlightenment rationality cannot claim to be a simple reconciliation of historical and empirical tensions and it cannot be actualised on the level of art. Whilst any sustainable immediate (unmediated) access to the other remains an impossibility, aesthetic engagement nevertheless contains the possibility of such momentary and fleeting actualisation of immediacy and freedom – a possibility which the artwork, by inviting a philosophical response, upholds precisely by offering a semblance of reconciliation that does not exist in reality. Adorno’s definition of aesthetic experi AT 331) ence or ‘aesthetic comportment’ ( AT 331) carries distinctly expressionist connotations: Ultimately, Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety


of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder’s own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. ( AT 331) The examples of dramatic theatre discussed in this book pursue the expressions of this shudder and may be considered as examples of theatre at the moment of metaphysic’s fall. Metaphysics, here, immigrates into the composition of language, the form of the dramatic text, the theatrical gesture, the movement of the body in space, the sound and silence of speech. The modernist practice of self-reflexivity and the Adornian notion of non-identity (modelled on the Hegelian principle of the negative) have de-centred the subject without calling for its dissolution in modes of self-less subjugation to external power structures. Adorno’s project and the new expressionist drama under discussion in this study operate as critical and aesthetic models of resistance to the social, political and cultural processes of homogeneity and standardisation in globalised capitalism. For Adorno any aesthetic or philosophical gesture towards an escape from the reality of the ‘perennial unfreedom of the whole’ ( AT 1) will need to incorporate a consciousness of destruction and suffering in the very fabric of its claims. The dramatic work of the theatre makers under discussion here suggests complex responses to historical and imaginary reality which do not resort to discursive or representational treatments of thematic materials. They respond to social domination not by expressing messages or making instrumentalising statements, but by foregrounding the transformational energy of complex, irreconcilable human experience on the borderline between language and silence, in extremity. ‘Through expression’, Adorno states, ‘art closes itself off to being-for-another, which always threatens to engulf it, and becomes eloquent in itself: This is art’s mimetic consummation. Its expression is the antithesis of expressing something’ ( AT 112). The problem of expression, which haunts the work presented in this book, reaches its apex in Beckett’s dramatisation of the domination of internal and external nature (the dialectic of enlightenment), which draws near the speechless and the expressionless. ‘Authentic art knows the expression of the expressionless, a kind of weeping without tears’ ( AT 117), Adorno claims. In the post-Beckettian projects of Barker, Bond, Rudkin and Kane expression endures with a passion for the incommensurable and a longing for that which does not yet exist. In these plays the self is not presented as whole or unified; rather, their work invites a philosophical response which, in my case, engages with


poststructuralist theories of subjectivity that have been prefigured in the work of Adorno. The body of works under investigation here engages and extends the theoretical discourse of non-identity in performative, theatrical and dramatic terms. In these works the vanishing of the subject amidst the ruling totality of the administered world is supplemented by a different kind of expressive subjective ‘vanishing’ in the creative process and in aesthetic experience, namely an aesthetic disorientation of the self, which responds to the artwork’s promise of particularity and unrepeatability. Passion, desire, instinct and Adorno’s favourite concept of ‘shudder’ emerge as central ideas in the delineation of the dramatists’ non-representational aesthetics – their characteristic distance from the conventions of naturalism and social realism. Empirical and historical realities are not mimetically represented in socially, morally or politically engaged terms; they are referred to obliquely, challenged with ardent gestures of defiance and transgression, or, as in Beckett’s work, confronted with a frail yet momentous passion for meaninglessness.

1

Adorno and Beckett: from the Crisis of Schein to the Fidelity to Failure

Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst Das Rettende auch. But where danger is, grows The saving power also. (Friedrich Hölderlin, Patmos, 1802) Adorno’s reservations about existentialist philosophy become apparent in his interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre which radically empties human action and language of positive social value and articulates modern human existence as an ‘outrage’ (Adorno, ‘ Endgame’ 251). He finds an intriguing evocation of post-Auschwitz culture in Beckett’s stage plays, such as Endgame (1957), where pain and suffering are translated into a theatrical aesthetics of tragic-comic failure and inexpressibility. Beckett’s bleak stage worlds are expressive of a damaged subjectivity and an absence of social meaning, which evokes a sense of ‘permanent catastrophe’ (ibid.). The notion of catastrophe is also tangible in the formally more radical Not I (1972) in which a speaker (‘mouth’) recounts her experience of being shocked into speech and life in an obscure and indeterminate environment. However, despite their attempts to ‘live on’ in a catastrophic world, Beckett’s characters are un-tragic in the sense that they do not assume the grand gestures of self-affirmation or zealous resistance to adversity that would be expected in conventional tragic drama; they do not meet death in heroic fashion; they are dying on in a static, grey world. As Eagleton has observed, ‘[d]eath would be far too grand, definitive an occurrence for these eviscerated figures to cope with. Even suicide requires more sense of identity than they are capable of mustering. Beckett’s characters thus 24

Adorno and Beckett 25

have all the unkillability of comic protagonists [. . .]. They are not even up to tragic status, which would at least be some kind of recompense’ (Eagleton, ‘Political Beckett?’ 73). However, Adorno’s view that art is ‘something that has escaped from reality and is nevertheless permeated with it’ (‘Is Art Lighthearted?’ 249) suggests that art – both fait social and pointing beyond its origins in social reality – is an embodiment of tension and contradiction. If, as Adorno suggests, Endgame troubles the Enlightenment belief in an absolute and substantial individuality (the faith in autonomous selfhood and agency) by revealing the individual to be a ‘historical category’ and ‘outcome of the capitalist process of alienation’, it nevertheless (or precisely for this reason) also posits the idea of individual experience as a ‘defiant protest against’ the context of alienation which threatens to jettison the notion of the self (‘ Endgame’ 249). The apparent lack of drama and tragedy in Beckett’s work may be considered a result of this work’s status as catastrophic theatre – a theatre which does not annul the idea of self but embodies (in its form) the catastrophe of modern culture. Adorno’s interpretation of Beckett addresses some of the major aspects of his aesthetic theory, for example the interrelationship between art and society, and the relevance of autonomy, commitment and authenticity for an understanding of the art work’s potential for social criticism. Adorno’s view that Beckett’s work puts meaning on trial raises aesthetic and philosophical questions that remain of interest to British drama, especially in the examples chosen for analysis in this study. Before turning to Adorno’s readings of Beckett, the following section will consider the role of aesthetic form in Adorno’s treatment and conceptualisation of art in general and in his interpretation of Beckett in particular. This is not to suggest that there exists an unequivocal, unproblematic relationship between the concept of art and the concrete moments of its realisation in the forms of each individual artwork. Nevertheless, in his discussions of art Adorno seems to be focussing a great deal on its formal aspects, on technique and material configuration, but he does not generalise the moment of aesthetic construction. He is certainly aware of the attempts of early modernist art to elevate the principle of form to a new ideal which gave rise to the dominance of aesthetic nominalism within modernist aesthetics. The nominalist desire to foreground the particular and individual moments of art, as opposed to its universal principles of organisation and conceptualisation, is generally understood as a reaction to the notion of aesthetic appearance or semblance ( Schein). Accordingly, nominalism is a critique of spirit ( Geist ), understood by Adorno as a


subjective and objective category. His engagement with nominalism is a good example of the ways in which Adorno’s aesthetic theory intersects with his post-metaphysical philosophical project 1 because the point of departure for both critical processes is a revaluation of traditional idealist approaches to subjectivity, human agency and consciousness. Schein in aesthetic idealism

The concept of semblance or aesthetic appearance (Schein) is a central category of traditional aesthetics where it denotes art’s unique ability to create an illusion, an ‘other’ world which stands apart from the perceptible, phenomenal appearance ( Erscheinung ) of empirical reality. In Kant’s aesthetic theory, for example, the subjective judgement of taste which describes an object as beautiful also makes a normative claim for universal validity: ‘when a man puts a thing on a pedestal and calls it beautiful, he demands the same delight from others. He judges not merely for himself, but for all men, and then speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things’ ( Critique of Judgment 52, emphasis my own). Kant proposes an idea of art as subjectively mediated but nevertheless objectively valid, and the objective necessity of subjective judgments of taste becomes thus a question of aesthetic appearance. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason transcendental appearance, as opposed to empirical (perceptible) appearance, is defined as a natural and unavoidable illusion (an ‘objective necessity’) of subjective reason.2 Hence, the objective quality of aesthetic appearance in Kant’s transcendental logic is the product of the a priori categories of ‘pure reason’ (specifically space and time) which surpass the limits of immanent empirical experience. This notion of a transcendental ‘as if’ quality of aesthetic appearance is developed further in Hegel who, rather than taking the subject (reason) as the origin and vanishing-point of aesthetic semblance, replaces it with the ‘objective-historical’ notion of the Idea. Schein in Hegel’s aesthetics is both spiritual and material, but nevertheless transcendental (i.e. reaching beyond the confines of empirical use and immediate subjective experience) as is implied in his definition of art (the beautiful) as the ‘sensuous appearance of the Idea’ (sinnliches Scheinen der Idee) (see Hegel, Introductory Lectures Part I). Hegel’s philosophy of art inaugurates the (German) idealist tradition in aesthetics which emphasises the substance or content of art, thereby shifting the focus away from a previous (Kantian) emphasis on the formal and subjective dimension in art (art as intuition and a matter of judgements of taste). Whilst acknowledging Hegel’s ‘objective’


aesthetics as an important response to both intention- and receptionoriented ‘subjective’ theories of art, Adorno nevertheless criticises the objective idealism initiated by Hegel whose ‘metaphysics of spirit results in a certain reification of spirit in the artwork through the fixation of its idea’ ( AT 91). Hegel’s notion of the ‘objective mediation of all art through spirit’ (ibid.) proposes spirit as an objective substance that sublimates its non-spiritual ‘other’. In short, spirit in Hegel denotes totality and unity, and the artwork is the manifest appearance or Erscheinung of the absolute spirit or Idea. Adorno reacts against the systematising and totalising thrust of Hegel’s aesthetics by arguing that a complete classification of spirit in artworks is hardly possible. ‘In actual fact, history knows no artworks in which there is a pure identity of the spiritual and the nonspiritual. According to its own concept, spirit in artworks is not pure but rather a function of that out of which it arises’ ( AT 89). However, this ‘other’ of spirit, the contingent material ground from which spirit arises, is not easily determined. For Adorno spirit enters a socially and historically determined constellation with its heterogeneous other. It would be misleading to define spirit as an entirely subjective and rational category that works on an objective, natural, form-less material which is consequently transformed into an aesthetic object. Adorno does not consider the work of spirit to be associated with a dominant agent who imposes his or her will onto raw, unstructured natural material. Rather, successful or authentic artworks acknowledge the heterogeneous elements as immanent aspects of their own structure (see AT 89). Hence, spirit in artworks has to be more than a principle of formal construction, but it should not be conceived as something residing beyond the configuration of the artwork’s materiality either. It is in line with Adorno’s materialist philosophy to consider spirit, first of all, as being dependent on the material appearance and formal construction of the artwork, indeed as arising from the particular configuration of material elements within the work. However, Adorno’s working through the legacy of metaphysics becomes equally apparent in his insistence that while ‘the spirit of artworks is bound up with their form, [. . .] spirit is such only insofar as it points beyond that form’ ( AT 89). We notice here a tension between two philosophical traditions which only seemingly contradict each other. The apparent juxtaposition between materialism and idealism in Adorno’s thought is suspended in his conception of the movement of ‘spirit’ in art, specifically in spirit’s relation to the artwork as a self-identical object. ‘The locus of spirit is the configuration of what appears’ ( AT 87) or in other words: spirit is form. More precisely: spirit is the ‘force or the interior of works, the force of their


objectivation’ (ibid.). This is also why, for Adorno, spirit in art has an objective dimension, because it is both the cause for, and the result of, an immanent mediation of all elements in the artwork. It is important to note that for Adorno spirit always implies a process: ‘As tension between the elements of the artwork, and not as an existence sui generis, art’s spirit is a process and thus it is the work itself. To know an artwork means to apprehend this process’ ( AT 88). Adorno’s understanding of spirit as process or becoming is in the first instance a response to German Idealism (which sought to reify spirit as the dominating expression of subjectivity), but it is also a defence of the concept of natural beauty. Adorno seeks to rescue the concept of natural beauty from the discourse of aesthetics which, since Hegel, has concentrated on art beauty as a form of autonomous, subjective expression. The progressive rationalisation and spiritualisation of art since the Enlightenment presented nature as something that ought to be overcome by means of the aesthetic which was posited as an autonomous sphere that exists immanently and for-itself. However, Adorno argues that nature is not the antithesis of art; rather, nature re-appears in art as that which escapes domination by instrumental rationality (the labour of the subjective spirit): ‘natural beauty points to the primacy of the object in subjective experience’ ( AT 71). However, nature does not appear in art immediately and without distortion, as was aimed for in theatrical Naturalism (which proposed drama as a mimetic imitation of reality); rather, nature in art appears indirectly, in refracted and mediated form. Notable for our discussion of the performing arts, Adorno states that natural beauty is evoked in artworks that produce a feeling of fleetingness, ephemerality, suspension and transcendence – these are qualities of natural beauty, for ‘what is beautiful in nature is what appears to be more than what is literally there’ ( AT 70–1). The idea that the appearance of artworks posits ‘more’ than what they show and say is crucial to the Adornian understanding of Schein and his aesthetics of the other. Adorno argues that modernist art’s rejection of aesthetic semblance (Schein) signifies the art historical ‘emancipation from the concept of harmony’ ( AT 100) – a rejection of the illusion of a work’s formal consistency and logical, dynamic narrative development. During the first decades of the twentieth century, aesthetic modernism was characterised by the nominalist tendency to eschew traditional forms and conventional (universal) aesthetic categories in favour of an encounter with sensuous particularity. However, while modernist art can be defined as an attempt to overturn the false idealism and illusory authority of


traditional art – a reaction that leads to formal fragmentation in the visual and literary arts, and to dissonance and atonality in music, for example – for Adorno, art without the dimension of Schein would not be conceivable. He maintains that ‘[t]he difference of artworks from the empirical world, their semblance character [ Scheincharacter ], is constituted out of the empirical world and in opposition to it’ ( AT 103). For him, ‘central to aesthetics therefore is the redemption of semblance’ ( AT 107), an acknowledgement of the potential illusion that the artwork exists in-itself, as a non-exchangeable object, which allows the particular to be rescued from integration into the empirical world (and its logic of instrumental rationality) as a mere ‘thing’ amongst other things. We notice two applications of the notion of aesthetic semblance. On the one hand, the production of Schein is identified with the activity of enlightenment subjectivity (which produces difference from nature); on the other hand, aesthetic semblance is defended as a category that seeks to liberate the non-identical, immediate, sensuous particularity of the artwork from conceptual domination. We have arrived at one of many instances of antinomy and paradox in Adorno’s aesthetic theory, as suggested in the following dense conceptual constellation of semblance, spirit, and domination: Aesthetic semblance seeks to salvage what the active spirit – which produced the artifactual bearers of semblance – eliminated from what it reduced to its material, to what is for-an-other. In the process, however, what is to be salvaged itself becomes something dominated, if not actually produced, by it; redemption through semblance is itself illusory, and the artwork accepts this powerlessness in the form of its own illusoriness. ( AT 107) The mere distance of art from empirical reality – and without this distance or difference, however minimal, there would be no art – gives art a character of semblance. This is why modernist attacks on Schein (as carried out by modernist avant-garde movements such as surrealism, dadaism, and futurism) are nominalist critiques of art as such. As Fredric Jameson has shown, nominalism’s unease with the ‘subsumption of a particular under a general’ (Jameson, Late Marxism 169) in traditional artworks and aesthetic theory continues to be relevant for a Marxist perspective on social and cultural developments in late capitalism. Jameson’s discussion of Adorno’s philosophical dramatisation of the ‘crisis and the agony of aesthetic appearance’ (ibid. 168) draws out the tensions between the nominalist defence of particularity


as well as immediacy and the domination of the commodity form which has become the new ‘universal’ and absolute in modern times – the inescapable and intractable rule of capital. From this perspective, the crisis of Schein as initiated by modernist nominalism does not only signify the disintegration of the aura or conventional meaning of the hermetic work of art, it also draws attention to the inevitable process of reification in the construction of the autonomous artwork. The apparent collapse of aesthetic meaning and semblance in modernism can be considered as initiating a renewed and heightened objectification of aesthetic processes according to which the autonomous artwork adopts a fetish character and thus becomes part of the commodification of culture in late capitalism. In this regard Adorno speaks of the autonomous artwork as an ‘absolute commodity’ (Adorno quoted in Jarvis, Adorno 118) which ‘has utterly thrown off that illusion of being-for-society which commodities otherwise desperately keep alive’ (ibid.). In a way, the autonomous artwork aligns itself with a process that is taking place in the empirical world of the culture industry. By appearing as a being-in-itself, the work mimics the process of reification which not only defines the production and exchange of commodities but increasingly has a bearing on the functioning of interpersonal relationships in consumer society. But it is only through this reification or objectification that works (even events) can be recognised as art at all. Adorno notes that ‘under the compulsion to objectivation, artworks tend toward petrification: It is immanent to the principle of their perfection’ ( AT 297). The aesthetic illusion of ‘perfection’ which the autonomous artwork produces is thus understood as a determinate negation of social processes by means of mimetic assimilation to them. Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics, which he developed in critical response to Hegelian dialectics, refuses to resolve the contradictions and antinomies between the particular elements that make up any conceptual totality. Adorno conceives of the work of art as a totality of appearance or semblance in which expressive (mimetic) and formal (rational) moments co-exist in tension. Their interrelationship within the artwork points to contradictions that are being played out in the world outside the artwork and with which the artwork communicates indirectly. Described as a ‘windowless monad’ ( AT 207), the artwork is a self-contained and self-sufficient semblance, existing primarily for itself. But the more the artwork insists on its autonomy and difference from non-art, the more it adopts the attributes of objectification and becomes a fetish. Yet, it is precisely autonomous art’s fetish character which for Adorno presents a critique of the commodity fetishism that governs the


social, economic and cultural world. In the world of commodification and consumption where all human activity is determined by a means– end logic of exchange and utility (everything must have an unambiguous function, impact, and performative value), the autonomous artwork appears to be radically devoid of commodity exchange values (function, impact, relevance, meaning). Yet art’s resistance to society by means of its immanent, self-sufficient position (and elusive Schein character) is a product of society itself, namely an embodiment of the reification of social and material labour (see AT 228). In other words, the artwork’s appearance as an autonomous object or commodity is itself a fait social, which gives art’s resistance to society an aporetic quality. In order for art to become a determinate negation of society, it has to find ways of resisting the culture industry’s tendencies towards social integration of difference and neutralisation of critique whilst acknowledging (and formally assimilating) its own implication in these social processes. Adorno’s suggestion that neutralisation is ‘the social price of aesthetic autonomy’ ( AT 228) expresses a sense of the difficult position of art vis-à-vis society. Since modernism, a possible answer to this problematic has been sought in the artwork’s self-reflexive interrogation of its own formal constitution and ontological claims. This sense of a crisis of art is alluded to in the opening lines of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory : ‘It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist’ ( AT 1). In this context, Beckett’s work evokes a practice of determinate negation or ‘negative utopia’ (Lüdke, Anmerkungen 106) through its aesthetics of reduction and damage, which lacks self-evident meaning whilst also inviting the idea that, as Adorno put it, ‘the false, once determinately known and precisely expressed, is already the index of the right and the better’ (Adorno, Critical Models 288). Beckett, spirit, form

Adorno argues that the self-reflexive interrogation of artistic form indicates aesthetic modernism’s preoccupation with the disintegration of subjectivity, namely a disavowal of the enlightenment pressure for self-preservation. In Beckett, this signifies the emergence of anti-theatre as a paradigm for what W. Martin Lüdke, following Adorno, calls the ‘logic of disintegration’ (see Lüdke, Anmerkungen ). Beckett’s work is a key example of a negative theatre that embodies the crisis of traditional aesthetic categories such as appearance, form, spirit, content and meaning.


Adorno’s most sustained engagement with Beckett is the essay ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ (1958) which offers an interpretation of the play with reference to Beckett’s aesthetics in its wider philosophical and sociological context. Adorno’s point of departure is the troubled relationship between dramatic form and metaphysical meaning in modernist art. As mentioned earlier, aesthetic nominalism heightens the dissociation between ‘form’ and ‘content’ (or the signifier and the signified; the phenomenon and substance; the particular and the whole) by placing extreme attention to detail – the specific and fleeting moments in art which evoke a sensuous particularity – and by rejecting totalising philosophic interpretations of the work. Followed to its logical conclusion, the nominalist ‘postulate of pure relinquishment to the material’ presents an attack on aesthetic form as a ‘remnant of a spiritual being-in-itself’ ( AT 220), or in other words, it points to art’s Entkunstung or ‘de-aestheticisation’ – a process which Hullot-Kentor describes as the ‘destruction of art’s quality as art’ ( AT 368). For Adorno, this process is firstly part of the historical avant-garde’s attempts to undermine the illusion (semblance) of art’s autonomy, meaning and truth in an effort to produce anti-art, or non-art. Secondly, he considers this attack on semblance to be amplified by the culture industry’s literalist tendency to reduce the (post)modernist artwork to a mere thing amongst other contingent things and thus to further art’s integration in commodity culture and consumer society. The question of art’s residual autonomous status remains open. As Peter Osborne has argued, ‘following Adorno, one can associate the (ever-shifting) non-art element of modernist art with that constitutive moment whereby it secures a critical autonomy by breaking with the illusion of autonomy, which it nonetheless also maintains on a new basis’ (Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All 93). Beckett’s Endgame seems to follow the nominalist and anti-art impulse of modernist art as far as possible and to a point where aesthetic construction borders on the meaningless, the formless and the absurd. However, if considered as a totalising category, the notion of the absurd is likely to forestall possibilities of interpretation. Rather, ‘understanding [ Endgame] can mean only understanding its unintelligibility, concretely reconstructing the meaning of the fact that it has no meaning’ (Adorno, ‘ Endgame’ 243). It poses, as Simon Critchley states, ‘a question of conceptualising and communicating that which resists conceptualisation and refuses communication – a necessary and impossible task’ (Critchley, Very Little 151). The play’s negation of metaphysical meaning, which marks the ‘dying ego’ in a ‘fallen world’ (States, ‘Shape of


Paradox’ 81), is mirrored in a deconstructed, paradoxically arbitrary, ‘formless’ form. The relationship between subjectivity and aesthetic form is extremely transparent in Beckett’s drama in the sense that aesthetic form, conventionally understood as ‘objectified’ spirit or Schein (appearance, illusion), seems to merge with the little that remains of an alienated, dis-placed and reified subjectivity. As a result, dramatic form in Beckett ceases to be the meaningful expression of coherent subjectivity and becomes anti-form instead. A lack of dynamic movement or dramatic conflict in Endgame, a detachment of consciousness from the body, and an explosion of historical time are but a few characteristics of this ‘negative’, ‘non-identical’ dramatic form. Hence, the problem of spirit in art is not resolved in Adorno’s interpretation of Beckett’s work; in fact it is heightened. Beckett’s work is presented as an example of how the antagonistic forces of abstract functionality at work in late-capitalist society continue to be embodied in aesthetic form where they undergo a material transformation (they become ‘unreconciled form’), which in turn allows spirit to linger as an equally unreconciled but necessary concept that promises the impossible: namely, reconciliation and happiness. The concept of spirit plays an essential role in the artwork’s promise of otherness via a concrete and material ‘constellation of the existing’ ( AT 135), which the artwork makes manifest. However, ‘[a]rtworks radically mediated by spirit’ such as Endgame, ‘are compelled to consume themselves’ ( AT 88), which means they negate themselves by exploding the coherence of their own form. And in this sense they also negate their own spirit – that which makes them what they are, namely aesthetic objects which are unrepeatable and different from the existing order of reality. The force of this contradictory movement of spirit within the artwork against its own essence may be called the de-aestheticisation of art, which invites a supremacy of the literal in the artwork (a tendency which, for Adorno, culminates in the happenings of performance art). Yet, even in the late modernist work of Beckett the deconstruction of conventional dramatic form and the attack on art’s semblance character (the renunciation of spirit, the Idea, as a totalising nexus of meaning) allow for a negative expression of spirit to persist. Adorno conceives of modernist art’s rejection of spirit in dialectical terms, namely as the manifestation of a radical spiritualisation. ‘Through the determinate negation of the reality of spirit, [. . .] artworks continue to refer to spirit: They do not feign spirit, rather the force they mobilize against it is spirit’s omnipresence. Spirit today is not imaginable in any other form’ ( AT 88).


Expressing the negative

In its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it. That art enunciates the disaster by identifying with it anticipates its enervation; this, not any photograph of the disaster or false happiness, defines the attitude of authentic contemporary art to a radically darkened objectivity; the sweetness of any other gives itself the lie. ( AT 19) In his essay on Beckett’s Endgame Adorno states that ‘the name of the catastrophe can only be spoken in silence’ (Adorno, ‘ Endgame’ 249). Like his other provocative assertion about the impossibility of culture and art after Auschwitz, this statement touches on the problem of representation after the ‘catastrophe’. Adorno’s philosophy of catastrophe does not offer any consolations, which makes its rootedness in the aesthetic even more paradoxical. In Adorno’s view, aesthetic mediations of reality are to be given priority over direct, political engagements with the real, but at the same time the very practice of art (which for Adorno is mimetic after all) is exposed as an ineffective and contradictory, yet necessary, response to a radically darkened world. For Adorno, a key characteristic of modernist art is its self-reflexive ability to draw attention to its own precarious existence in the historical, social and political context of modern life. In Adorno’s view, it was Beckett who was most radical in exposing art to its limits, its failure and its negative possibility. Cultural activity in the administered, absolutely integrated social world – which is how Adorno describes our late-capitalist consumer society – has become a questionable and paradoxical enterprise. The once progressive and revolutionary politics of the historical avantgarde have lost their critical force and almost seem anachronistic when revived after the historical break of the Holocaust and in the context of the culture industry. Adorno’s statement that after Auschwitz all culture is ‘garbage’ and poetry becomes impossible, much debated and revised by himself,3 has not lost its critical and provocative vigour. One has to consider Adorno’s problematisation of cultural activity and the associated crisis of experience in late capitalism in the context of his critique of the totality of commodification in the culture industry. For Adorno, the culture industry represents a ‘false’ totality of cultural exchange which, as Espen Hammer has summarised, ‘signifies the reign of totalitarian myth – a world of repetition and sameness from which notions


of otherness, heterogeneity, difference, the qualitative, and the new have been expulsed or liquidated’ (Hammer, Adorno and the Political 75). Adorno touches on the aporia of our responses to modern culture by stressing that ‘whoever pleads for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be’ (ND 367). There is, in other words, no way out of this social and moral contradiction, and whatever actions we take, it seems that we will always be guilty of somehow strengthening a false status quo. Beckett’s work evokes this problematic most powerfully. The figures in Waiting for Godot and indeed Endgame seem to inhabit the static worlds of an eternal present; they spend their time performing repetitive actions and engaging in futile conversations, all of no consequence. Yet an Adornian reading would consider these emptied worlds and random sets of behaviour not as transcendental or timeless events but in fact as historical situations and gestures. The ‘historical moment [that] unfolds’ in Endgame is the ‘catastrophic event’ of the ‘complete reification of the world’ (Adorno, ‘ Endgame’ 245) – it is the ultimate catastrophe of the destruction of the self whose ‘endgame’ is as a matter of fact already being rehearsed in contemporary society. Thus, as David Cunningham points out, ‘[t]his meaning, the truth-content of Beckett’s work, would have to be conceived of as an essentially historical meaning’ (Cunningham, ‘Trying (Not) to Understand’ 135). For Adorno, Beckett’s drama stages the dissolution or ‘endgame’ of subjectivity in the context of the dialectic of enlightenment and in the reified sphere of cultural production. Adorno’s views about the post-war cultural condition seem utterly pessimistic. If it is true that culture today is under the spell of reification and its products are no different from the mass-produced and mass-consumed commodities of capitalism, then art must truly have fulfilled Hegel’s prediction and come to an end. If, after the demise of the historical avant-garde, even progressive artistic experiments cannot avoid the danger of succumbing to the integrative, equalising and deadening forces of the neo-liberal market, then aesthetic critique seems equally futile. Successful critique, protest and negation seem impossible today, and yet despite all this, Adorno argues that art must not eschew its critical potential. Despite (or perhaps because of) his disapproving evaluation of modern culture, Adorno creates a substantial space for art in his critical theory. Central to his aesthetic theory is the belief that our negative world demands and deserves a radically negative art, or no art at all. As Tyrus Miller has commented, ‘Adorno took Beckett’s radical


negativity and resistance to any consoling reconciliation with the world as a model of the proper critical stance towards the culture of the postwar’ (Miller, ‘Dismantling Authenticity’ 44). Questions surrounding the paradoxical conditions of art in the culture industry remain a crucial aspect in Adorno’s reading of Beckett. Adorno’s appreciation of aesthetic autonomy and formalism (which he defends in a response to Lukács’ anti-modernist, content-based aesthetic) seems, on the one hand, to reach an aporia if measured against his critique of the culture industry as an apparatus that ‘impresses the same stamp on everything’ ( DoE 120). However, the notion that our cultural life world is becoming an increasingly totalised sphere of administration (and that most of modern art has lost its critical potential) is, in the theory of the dialectic of enlightenment, presented as a symptom of the radicalisation of self-preservation in bourgeois individualism. Adorno contends that the Romantic ideal of an autonomous and transcendental subjectivity is partly responsible for the reifying and fetishising tendencies within modern culture. His revised notion of metaphysics has to be understood in relation to his aesthetic theory and cultural criticism and in effect revolves around his definition of culture as objectified spirit. Hence, the difference between materialism and metaphysics is blurred in Adorno’s critical theory, which reflects the view that in the administered world spirit becomes objectified. ‘The more total the society, the more reified the spirit’ (Adorno, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’ 49). Adorno’s interpretation of modern art (including literary texts) draws not only on the history and contemporary situation of aesthetics but places art in the context of metaphysics. If his Negative Dialectic is dealing with the precarious condition of metaphysics ‘at the time of its fall’ (ND 408), his approach to modernist art takes a similar interest in risk, failure and contradiction. He defends aesthetic forms such as atonal music and the avant-garde theatre of Beckett because they evoke the non-identical other and suggest a capacity to resist effortless consumption. Adorno’s attacks on philosophical ontology (Heidegger), Social Realism (Lukács, Brecht) and engaged art (Brecht, Sartre) elucidate his criticism of what he calls ‘forced reconciliation’ ( erpresste Versöhnung ) – capitalism’s attempts to conceal and falsely resolve the antagonisms, internal conflicts and tensions prevalent in modern society. The spell ( Bann) of capital affects all cultural activity and has produced an inescapable social condition of commodification and reification which philosophical and artistic practices seek to uncover by means of immanent dialectical criticism. Such an approach involves a balancing act between


participation and non-participation in the reified social totality and it reveals, as Espen Hammer’s interpretation of Adorno has suggested, that ‘our response to the world is necessarily open-ended and unsatisfiable’ (Hammer, Adorno and the Political 93). Stephen Booth has argued that the greatness of art (his example is King Lear ) ‘derives from the confrontation it makes with inconclusiveness’ (Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy 16). The modernist artworks which Adorno considers to be authentic and progressive engage with problems pertaining to their own inconclusiveness – they probe the limitations of their own form and refuse to be ‘defined’. If ‘to make a work of art – to give local habitation and nameability to an airy nothing or a portion of physical substance – is to make an identity’ (ibid. 43), it is also a mechanism for the articulation of difference. Art may encourage us to conceive of a different form of life, one that is removed from the prescriptions of the social/empirical reality that we inhabit. But as Adorno maintains, aesthetic difference and non-identity are nevertheless informed by that which the artwork reacts against, namely the ‘constraining spell’ ( AT 5) of identity which the administered world casts on everything. As Adorno notes, ‘[i]nherently every artwork desires identity with itself, an identity that in empirical reality is violently forced on all objects as identity with the subject and thus travestied’ ( AT 4). For this reason the (post)modernist attacks on the apparent ‘identity’ or unity of the artwork has a social import which inheres in art’s performance as a determinate negation of the existing world and in its consequent evocation of a notion of reconciliation that is not imposed from the outside. Crucially for Adorno, ‘form – the social nexus of everything particular – represents the social relation in the artwork’ ( AT 255). If aesthetic form becomes uncertain, precarious and a signifier for ‘indefinition’, as it does for Booth and in the modernist practice of Beckett, then this has an impact on the social and political relevance of art, on the ways in which art communicates with society. For Adorno, art relates to society through non-communication and by becoming socially irrelevant. Importantly, this process of determinate negation is to be understood dialectically: ‘Today the socially critical aspect of artworks has become opposition to empirical reality as such because the latter has become its own self-duplicating ideology, the quintessence of domination’ ( AT 255). These questions, central to Adorno’s aesthetic theory, are also addressed in Beckett’s own theoretical and dramatic writings. Apart from fiction, poetry and dramatic works for the stage and screen, Beckett wrote critical essays and reviews of literature and the visual arts.


His miscellaneous writings, collected in the volume Disjecta (1983), are most interesting because they address wider issues such as aesthetic experience and perception, the connection of form and content, and the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in art. Approached from an Adornian perspective, they reveal the self-reflexive, ‘negative’ nature of Beckett’s aesthetic thought and production. In ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce’ (1929), an early essay (Beckett: Disjecta) on Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’ (later Finnegans Wake), Beckett already expresses his interest in language and artistic form, but also in morality and the meaning of life. Written at the request of Joyce, this exercise in literary criticism is the first formal expression of Beckett’s engagement with the relationship between aesthetic categories and philosophical concepts. Beckett’s theory of art as it is espoused in his critical writings is not straightforward literary criticism, as is suggested by his artistic, idiosyncratic (even performative) style of presentation and his deliberate disregard for the conventions of literary criticism. Beckett rejects the traditional hermeneutical approach to literature, which aims at a systematic, exact analysis of aesthetic categories leading to a comprehensive interpretation of texts, because ‘[l]iterary criticism is not book-keeping’ (Beckett, Disjecta 19). Rather, the concepts of incompleteness, imprecision, and complexity enter his thought very early on and are carried forward into his fictional and dramatic work. 4 Beckett discusses some of the influences of philosophers Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), and the poet Dante on Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’, but a great part of the essay deals with Beckett’s own reflections on aesthetic problems. For example, according to Beckett, Vico’s original and innovative investigation into the origins and functions of poetry, language and myth, as well as his judgement on the circular nature of society are characterised by an ‘impertinent outrage against tradition’ (Beckett, Disjecta 20). This rejection of tradition – a (proto-)nominalist onslaught of the ‘new’ – was partly an extension and partly an ingenious application of previous knowledge (derived, for example, from Herodotus). His attention to Vico’s thought suggests that Beckett too does not embrace the concept of the new unreflectively but is keen to point out the intertextuality of all seemingly original thought. Similarly, Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’ is both original and traditional. Its originality is epitomised by the innovative use of language to create a predominantly sensual impact. Beckett points out Joyce’s parallels with Shakespeare in terms of choice of words, and with Dante in terms of linguistic strategy and innovation. The language of Dante’s Divine


Comedy was probably as artificial, improbable and inadequate to the literary conventions of its time (it was a synthesis of the major Italian dialects) as was Joyce’s imaginative language. What both writers have in common is a sense of resistance to linguistic and literary standards (or absolutes) which they consider outmoded, stale and incapable of adequately expressing the questions of a changed humanity. Joyce’s literary strategy is demonstrative of the modernist desire to break new grounds by rejecting conventional aesthetic concepts (such as wholeness, harmony, linearity) and thereby redefining the essence and function of art. In Beckett’s interpretation, Joyce’s (and by extension modernism’s) recognition of the ‘absolute absence of the Absolute’ (Beckett, Disjecta 33) becomes a problem for aesthetic form. Although Joyce adopts certain of Vico’s subject matters – such as the themes of religion/birth, marriage/ maturity, burial/corruption and providence/generation (ibid. 22) – he is mainly interested in the circularity and particular shape of Vico’s thought.

This inner elemental vitality and corruption of expression imparts a furious restlessness to the form, which is admirably suited to the purgatorial aspect of the work. There is an endless verbal germination, maturation, putrefaction, the cyclic dynamism of the intermediate. This reduction of various expressive media to their primitive economic directness, and the fusion of these primal essences into an assimilated medium for the exteriorization of thought, is pure Vico, and Vico, applied to the problem of style. (Beckett, Disjecta 29) The ‘primitive economic directness’ that Beckett is touching on here refers to the wider preoccupation of a modernist aesthetic with sensuous particularity and immediacy, as opposed to a metaphysical fixation on the transcendental and the universal. When Beckett says that in Joyce ‘there is little or no attempt at subjectivism or abstraction, no attempt at metaphysical generalisation [but] a statement of the particular’ (ibid.), he shows an awareness of the philosophical implications of Joyce’s (and indeed his own) aesthetic project. 5 According to Beckett, Joyce’s world is purgatorial because it renounces the existence of absolutes and presents a humanity freed from transcendental deliverance yet confined to a circular movement between heaven and hell. There is not much difference between heaven and hell, Beckett reminds us, since both share a ‘static lifelessness’ which ironically provides the necessary impulse for the vitality of purgatory (Beckett, Disjecta 33). Beckett’s world, too, is purgatory, a place of suffering rather


than spiritual cleansing; a world emptied of metaphysical meaning. He paints a living hell from which there is no escape for the individual whose ‘claim to autonomy and being has lost its credibility’ (Adorno, ‘ Endgame’ 249). The interrelationship between individuality and the demands of metaphysics take centre stage in Adorno’s aesthetic theory and critique of identity thinking, and they are also present in Beckett’s own work. Beckett’s first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) and his Three Dialogues (1949) are two further examples of the writer’s preoccupation with aesthetic questions. In the excerpts from Dream of Fair to Middling Women, collected in Disjecta, the narrator first reflects on the origins of music in the mythical world of an imaginary Chinese valley before drawing out the parallels and differences between musical and fictional form. The system of music is initially admired for its mathematical clarity and harmony and depicted here as an ideal for novelistic expression: ‘If all our characters were like that [. . .] we could write a little book that would be purely melodic; think how nice that would be, linear, a lovely Pythagorean chain-chant solo of cause and effect, a one-fingered teleophony that would be a pleasure to hear’ (Beckett, Disjecta 43). Similarly, the metaphor of music enters Adorno’s interpretation of Endgame where he suggests that the play’s action is composed ‘on two themes, in musical fashion, as double fugues used to be’ (Adorno, ‘ Endgame’ 269). The first theme – introduced by Hamm – is an expression of the negation of the will to live; the realisation that life does not live anymore because human beings have lost their individuality and substance and have instead ‘become the instruments of their situation, as though they had to play chamber music’ (ibid.). The theme of death and suffering introduced by Hamm, the blind master, is taken up, elaborated and at times contrasted by the second theme carried by Clov, the figure of the slave. The fact that Clov can still see and is physically mobile seems to suggest that he has not yet lost his will to live; that there are still possibilities for him beyond the prison he inhabits. But this state of affairs alludes perhaps to nothing more than humanity’s necessary illusion of agency and free will. Beckett shatters it relentlessly. Clov is forever bound to the ‘negative’ existence of Hamm whose death wish controls Clov like a spell, and in a truly dialectical fashion both creatures dominate and are dominated by each other. ‘Hamm’s will to death is the same as his life principle, whereas Clov’s will to life could well bring about the death of them both’ (ibid. 270). Clov’s capacity to see no longer holds any true significance beyond the pragmatic value of contributing to the physical prolongation of suffering. There


is nothing to see. The world outside (which is but a mimicry of the inner world) is barren, lifeless, grey, yet both characters are bound by its existence, which defines their acts of (non-)being and prolongs their endgames of subjectivity. If incessant waiting for change (and deliverance) is one of the main themes in Waiting for Godot , Endgame makes sure that every last grain of hope dissipates and even waiting becomes a futile activity, because time has stopped: HAMM: [ Pause.] Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended. [ Pause.] ( Endgame 133) In this timeless, a-historical ‘fallen world’ human agency has lost its impulse and purpose a long time ago – the catastrophe has already happened – and the endgame of the ‘dying ego’ seems like an endless rehearsal of the ‘complete dissolution of the act as a statement of will’ (States, ‘Shape of Paradox’ 81, 83). However, even though fictional time seems to have stopped and pushed the characters into the abyss of an inconsequential repetition of the same, theatrical time continues to elapse, structure and therefore give negative meaning to the meaningless. Adorno’s aforementioned comparison of the formal structure of Endgame to music alludes to Beckett’s own interest in the artist’s relation to his material – his efforts ‘to find a form which accommodates the mess’ (Beckett, Disjecta 19). Beckett’s interest in the configuration or ‘shapeliness’ of ideas within the narrative of a play echoes Adorno’s own attention to the constellation of concepts in philosophical systems and the ‘historically changing constellation of elements’ ( AT 2) in artworks, such as rationality, mimesis and expression. The narrator in Dream admires Balzac who, being an ‘absolute master of his material’ (Beckett, Disjecta 47), creates fictional worlds that are under authorial control and where everything has its predetermined place. This ordered and ‘artificially immobilised’ (ibid.) reality is also the wished-for reality of Endgame: CLOV: I love order. It’s my dream. A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust. ( Endgame 120) The irony is of course that this ‘silent and still’ world has become the characters’ dystopian reality and the orderliness of ‘each thing in its


place’ is presented as an ‘image of indifference’ or death (Adorno, ‘ Endgame’ 274). The novelist’s (and musician’s) control of artistic material is translated into a spell of immobility which binds the characters in Endgame together, divorcing them from history and time, and bringing them face to face with the absolute indifference of heaven and hell. For they too are trapped in purgatory and any illusions they might entertain about a reconciled world outside amount to nothing. Conversely, the image of a world where each thing is in its last place also evokes the messianic order which Adorno evokes towards the end of his Minima Moralia: ‘The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption’ ( MM 247). To imagine the world in the ‘messianic light’ of redemption requires thought to emerge ‘entirely from felt contact with its objects’ (ibid.); it requires an encounter with the world’s ‘consummate negativity’ (Beckett’s world) which ‘once squarely faced, delineates the mirrorimage of its opposite’ (ibid.). In other words: the aesthetic encounter with negativity might evoke the possibility of the impossible. Voiced in a context in which harmony is no longer possible, the nostalgia for order and logic in art appears anachronistic at first, but it is in effect a marker of the ‘consummate negativity’ to which art reacts. In Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women, the harmonic ideal initially so passionately espoused by its narrator is substituted by musical dissonance and narrative fragmentation. However, the speaker is fully aware of the impossibility of his desire for harmony; he is firmly placed within the conventions of aesthetic modernism, as becomes clear in later passages of this complex ‘narrative’. The uniform world of absolute music becomes unhinged; it ‘comes to pieces, [t]he notes fly about all over the place, a cyclone of electrons’ (Beckett, Disjecta 45). Form fragments, whole structures collapse, and there is not much that we as observers (and listeners) can do, the narrator admits, perhaps alluding to Adorno’s interpretation of atonal music where the logical, immanent development of the musical material becomes divorced from subjective intention. Perhaps ‘all we can do [. . .] is to deploy a curtain of silence as rapidly as possible’ (ibid.). This is Beckett’s strategy, which he was to employ effectively in his dramatic writing for the stage. The narrator in Dream of Fair to Middling Women introduces Belacqua, the novel’s artistically inclined protagonist whose very own theory of art takes issue with this ‘flight’ of artistic components, the disintegration of form in modern artworks. He realises that ‘the reality of the individual [. . .] is an incoherent reality and must be expressed


incoherently’ (Beckett, Disjecta 48), questioning the very possibility of linear representation in art. He admires Rimbaud and Beethoven for the way they express this incoherent reality ‘in a statement of silences’ (ibid.). ‘The experience of my reader’, Belacqua says, ‘shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement’ (ibid. 49). Similarly, the silences and pauses in Endgame shape our affective understanding of the play, as they express not only the suffering of the characters but also the suffering (caused by the ‘barbarity’ of modern culture, as Adorno would say) of a damaged world. This sense of an overwhelming, objective suffering (indicated by the absence of any believable signs of life) is combined with a sense that one’s individual suffering (one’s own death) is devoid of significance. HAMM: Yes, but how would I know, if you were merely dead in your kitchen? CLOV: Well . . . sooner or later I’d start to stink. HAMM: You stink already. The whole place stinks of corpses. CLOV: The whole universe. ( Endgame 114) As Miller has suggested, ‘tragedy presupposes the distinction of individual suffering, whereas in the death-world, all suffering is impersonal, equivalent – equally meaningless’ (Miller, ‘Dismantling Authenticity’ 53). The distinction between the objective world and subjective experience is more or less cancelled; the darkness of the outside world has entered a dystopian ‘refuge’ in which the characters rehearse their own deaths. For Adorno, Beckett’s aesthetic minimalism is not so much the expression of an existentialist position which, despite its claims about the absurdity of the human condition, continues to celebrate individuality. Beckett’s standpoint is absurdist because it is radically anti-individualist; it shatters the illusion of individual self-determination, revealing the individual ‘to be a historical category, both the outcome of the capitalist process of alienation and a defiant protest against it’ (Adorno, ‘ Endgame’ 249). The notion that the individual who leads no more than a questionable, un-human existence in a regressive world nevertheless is a ‘defiant protest against’ this world deserves attention. Beckett can only be as critical of autonomous subjectivity as the dramatic form allows him to be, for ‘although the prison of individuation is seen to be both prison and illusion – the stage set is the imago of this kind of insight – art cannot break the spell of a detached subjectivity’ (Miller, ‘Dismantling Authenticity’ 53). Art participates in the split between


subjectivity and objectivity and it seems that according to Adorno its only hope for survival is expressed in its resistance to the tendencies towards reconciliation found in the empirical world. Art’s potential to remain critical resides in its ability to resist the positivist assumption of meaningful and rational, discursive communication, whilst at the same time making manifest – on the level of aesthetic form – the contradictions and antagonistic forces which normally tend to be suppressed (or forcefully reconciled) by hegemonic power structures in the administered world. Adorno’s notion of the de-substantialisation of the modernist artwork seems to express an argument that is similar to Belacqua’s. The modern artwork becomes self-reflexive, turns against itself, desires to become non-art, because it has lost the (in any case illusory) ability to ‘posit totality out of itself, whole and self-encompassing’ ( AT 2). The artwork’s critique of its own form is necessarily a critique of tradition, history and, by analogy, of time. Beckett himself takes issue with these complex concepts in Three Dialogues, his criticism of the work by the French painters Tal Coat, Masson, and Brain van Velde. This piece of art criticism, written as a series of dialogues between B. and D., is Beckett’s account of his conversations about modern art with Georges Duthuit. Their debates about the nature and function of artistic perception and expression again reveal in abridged form what Beckett was to demonstrate in his dramatic work. Underlying the main thrust of the dialogues is the notion that as a result of the modernist metaphysical uncertainty, which calls existing aesthetic concepts into question, artistic expression itself has become deeply problematic. Beckett wishes for an art that no longer pretends to offer coherent representations of an incoherent objective reality. Instead, art must release itself from the pressure placed on it by tradition (the past masters); the burden of ‘doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road’ (Beckett, Disjecta 139). Beckett wants art to express that ‘there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (ibid.). This call for a paradoxically negative or failed expression through artistic means of expression is crucial to an understanding of Beckett’s art. The manner in which Beckett’s later drama, for example, ‘mounts a continual assault upon the structures of representation’ (McMullan, Theatre on Trial 5), thereby undermining our attempts to fix the theatrical signifiers and master textual meaning, is echoed in the dialogues’ celebration of the impossibility of expression and the reality


of failure. Once this impossibility is recognised, it seems, art not only frees itself from the need to imitate an external reality (drama rejects the conventions of theatrical realism and naturalist representation) and becomes ‘experimental’; art also discovers the possibility of employing speechlessness and physical as well as temporal subtraction as a means of expressing the impossible. In the work of Edward Bond and Howard Barker the problem and possibility of negative expression in the post-Auschwitz world – this Beckettian ‘fidelity to failure’ (Beckett, Disjecta 145) – is mapped according to a different set of assumptions about the persistence of subjectivity in a darkened world. Both dramatists believe that art (drama and theatre) provides the modern subject with a way of negotiating the ‘context of blinding’ that is modern life. Hence, they seem to reject Beckett’s anti-expressive theatrical constructions of speechlessness in favour of a renewed emphasis on the possibility of the speaking self. But their dramatisations of the subjective struggle to penetrate the instrumental logic of reality propose a semblance of impaired, damaged expression. In doing so, even in these post-Beckettian critical theatrical projects Adorno’s point that only an art which gives up the claim of Schein can produce it, is maintained.

2

Edward Bond and the Aesthetics of Resistance

For more than five decades, Edward Bond (born 1934) has produced dramatic and critical work that is socially committed and, as Peter Billingham has recently argued, characterised by an ‘interrogative, radically self-reflexive, muscular poetic materialism’ (Billingham, Edward Bond 1). Bond is interested in theatre as a medium that has the power to create images of a liberated subjectivity, which on the surface echoes Adorno’s vision of art as a potential placeholder for non-coercive individual expression in the commodified world. However, Bond’s answer to the problem of modern culture is ultimately a radical intensification of enlightenment thought, whereas Adorno remained critical of a universalisation of the logic of reason. The concept of enlightenment is of crucial importance to both Bond and Adorno, and will be examined in what follows. ‘Life does not live’ (Ferdinand Kürnberger) is the epigraph of Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), which traces the dissolution of the subject in the modern sphere of consumption and raises the question of an opposition to the forces of social and cultural production. Adorno criticises the ideological promulgation of concepts of individuality, independence, self-determination and freedom in a society which has a long history of undermining precisely these human qualities. ‘Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer’ ( MM 15). The history of anti-humanistic social tendencies is paradoxically entwined with the Enlightenment tradition of self-liberation and self-determination, and has (according to Adorno) culminated in the genocides of the twentieth century. Progress and regression, development and degeneration, subjectivisation and objectivisation (the solidification of human relationships and the transformation of human beings into quantifiable, 46

Edward Bond and the Aesthetics of Resistance 47

exchangeable objects), are some of the dialectical processes which have shaped the history of humanity. ‘The programme of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy’ ( DoE 3). This disenchantment of the world (the de-mystification of nature) has led to the disenchantment of the individual who is increasingly alienated from nature and her fellow beings. The dissolution of myths (the shedding of light on a pagan collective belief in superstition and magic, for example), which was supposed to spiritually and ethically strengthen humankind, triggered the (moral and indeed ‘physical’) violation or at least disorientation of the subject. In the names of humanisation and emancipation, the power of knowledge over ignorance gained an aggressive momentum and became a ‘method’ for domination. Adorno argues that the rationalistic logic of enlightenment (demythologisation) as a form of conceptual domination (‘domination in the conceptual sphere’) is linked to actual (physical, material) domination – the domination of men over men and men over nature (see DoE 14).1 At the basis of the enlightenment impulses to subjugate, separate and control (which are, as Adorno points out, characteristic of myth as well) lies fear – fear of the other and the unknown, of what lies outside measurable, controllable existence. The radical quality of enlightenment knowledge and practice is reflected in its uncompromising subjugation of man to alienating and dehumanising systems (political, economic and psychological). Rather than successfully dispelling this fear of the other, the enlightenment tradition has contributed to a progressive terrorisation of the relation between humankind and nature (the subject and the object) and of interpersonal relationships as well. The enlightenment desire to know (nature, the other and oneself) expresses a power relationship between the knower and the unknown (the active subject and the passive object which is to be ‘known’). In Minima Moralia Adorno argues that the Enlightenment’s ‘potential of freedom’ (the promise of a liberation from magic and myth, which goes hand in hand with the triumph of scientific progress) is undermined by the fact that its practice in reality is oppression ( MM 146). The Janus face of the Enlightenment – the paradox at the heart of the demythologisation project – can be summed up along these lines: the search for knowledge, light and freedom has plunged humankind into even greater darkness (culminating in Auschwitz, where progress is finally realised as barbarism); the Enlightenment’s project of rationalisation of the life world has given rise to repressive systems of social,


political and economic control; and on the level of subjective knowledge and development, the enlightenment promise of self-liberation and self-determination, rather than strengthening the self, has led to a weakening of the ego in a world which due to the abstract relations of production fails to make sense. This ‘withering of experience’ ( MM 5) in modern society is the ironic result of the enlightened subject’s desperate attempt to discover his self-identity methodically and scrupulously. The search for self and meaning is perverted into an attack on self and a loss of meaning. Self-discovery goes hand in hand with self-destruction. In this theory of the dialectic of enlightenment, resistance is proposed as a positive value and a desirable response to the dehumanising tendencies in society. But, surprisingly, resistance is not sought for in politics or economics – these spheres are ideologically over-determined – resistance and change are ultimately only possible if coming from a sphere that is relatively removed from the debasing laws governing a materialistic, commercialised and, in Adorno’s words, ‘damaged’ society. Adorno’s ultimate focus of attention was therefore given to questions of aesthetics, which he regarded as being able to express the problem of human existence most adequately. The inhumanity of modern society, epitomised by consummate physical and psychological violence, needs to be comprehended in order to be fought (bearing in mind, however, the complicity of every attempt at comprehension, understanding and critical knowledge with existing power structures). Theatre, Bond would argue, presents us with the opportunity to create imaginary places where reality can be mediated and made sense of in a confrontational, even aggressive manner, which brings into sharp focus the aggressions and violence of human behaviour in reality. The work of Bond represents a critical engagement with the forms of estranged modern life in an attempt to comprehend them and learn from them. In this sense Bond is a conscious heir of the Enlightenment project. The desire to know is in his work translated into the aesthetic/ theatrical impulse to analyse human (mostly irrational, precarious and extreme) behaviour on the stage. However, Bond’s desire to show the contradictions of contemporary society by way of a dramatisation of conflict is by necessity a sublimation, a distancing of action from reality. The work cannot claim to be more than the displacement of empirical violence onto the imaginary sphere of a heightened, fictional reality, which perhaps allows an audience to deal with it more effectively or more rationally than in their real lives. The transformative potential afforded by the mediation of reality in the dramatic text and the theatrical performance is of crucial concern for


Bond. This explains his anti-representational aesthetic approach to violence, for example. Because social violence is mediated on the stage, and hence presented in different terms, there is always a possibility for misrepresentation and misrecognition, which becomes part of the aesthetic experience as such. Invariably, art is a medium in and through which human beings create images of themselves – in theatre these images are of a social nature and can be conceived as resulting from social interactions between people or a lack thereof. Various types and functions of mediation are possible, and Adorno rejects the arguments put forward by so-called radical culture critics that mediation is problematic per se because it gives us an ideological, reductive or romanticised, and therefore false, picture of reality (see Jarvis, Adorno 146). Rather, precisely because certain art forms (especially dramatic theatre) have the ability to create imaginative visions of reality and therefore do not always reveal a straightforward relation to the real, art can be valuable and necessary for a culture’s self-understanding and identity. Adorno also rejects the realist, pragmatic and literal approach to art, arguing that ‘the barbaric is the literal’ (Adorno quoted in Jarvis, Adorno 145). Or one could say: the literal is the barbaric, because it does not allow room for an imagination of alternative perspectives, be they excessive or transgressive; it is too limited in scope and its rules (the rules of representational dramatic forms such as naturalist realism) are restraining. However, following Adorno, the literal in art can by definition never be wholly literal because due to its distance from empirical reality, art signifies a sphere of semblance where imaginary differences are given an expressive voice. For Adorno, the distance between an artwork and what it is not (in the theatrical situation symbolised by the divide and distance between the stage and the auditorium) needs to be comprehended in terms of negativity, which implies a symbolic act of violence. He puts it like this: ‘Artworks are a priori negative by the law of their objectivation: They kill what they objectify by tearing it away from the immediacy of its life. Their own life preys on death’ ( AT 133). Objectification means transformation – the laws of the art form (in our case: drama and theatre) alter the material elements taken from social reality and present them in a different light. Even when claims to realistic or documentary verisimilitude are made, art cannot dispense with its ‘semblance character’ which suggests difference, negativity and autonomy. Conversely, art can never be totally autonomous, i.e. unrelated to the world it derives from, but exists in a relationship of tension with its other. 2 For Adorno, this tension is necessary in order for theatre to be able to express a critique of social reality. The definition of art as difference


from, and negation of, empirical reality denotes the ‘opposition of art to civilisatory repression’ ( AT 133), but this opposition can never be complete because art is implicated in the very violence it seeks to contest. As a product of society, it cannot go beyond society; it can, however, through an artwork’s semblance of autonomy and unity (the aesthetic unity which is suggested by its form) propose an alternative reality. In other words, art can make utopian claims. The relationship between theatre, domination and violence in social reality is complex because as art, theatre itself is a form of control and domination but also of redemption – by representing moments of reality on stage, by engaging in the aesthetic process of shaping the real, theatre does violence to the real, the objectively existing, the heterogeneous and contingent. But this aesthetic violence is needed in order to make a statement about real violence. What Adorno calls the ‘echo of social violence’ that can be felt in ‘works of aesthetic unity’ is also an echo of art’s guilt of being able to intervene in reality only by means of presenting an aesthetic image of reality, which effectively means not ‘really’ intervening at all ( AT 134). But at the same time art’s ‘guilt’ about its social ineffectiveness is counterbalanced by the appearance of unity in aesthetic Schein – this appearance of aesthetic unity contains a promise of reconciliation, an aesthetic pledge, which articulates the existence of the non-identical. The aesthetic picture of reality offered by theatre is able to express a promise of possible reconciliation and freedom even more directly and openly because of theatre’s ability to represent interpersonal and social relationships on the stage. In this sense, theatre is the least abstract form of art (in contrast to poetry and music, for example). This does not mean to discredit theatre’s (drama’s) figurative and metaphorical quality which is socially relevant. Indeed, Adorno would argue that it is precisely theatre’s anti-literal elements which, due to their complexity and their ability to problematise meaning, can effectively emphasise theatre’s aesthetic opposition to reality. Bond’s drama engages with collectively suppressed but disturbing issues of socio-political reality, such as violent social behaviour which is recognised as a symptom of modern culture’s regression into irrationality. Many of his plays deal with war: they are either set in war time situations or depict people’s behaviour immediately before or after the devastations caused by war (for example, The War Plays, Human Cannon , Lear ). Even the early Saved (1965), a play that does not contain the explicit signifiers of war, such as soldiers or guns, can be considered as a representation of contemporary society suffering from the failure of the communist revolution (which promised an


end to the class system and in which injustice and inhumanity are perpetuated as ostensibly ‘normal’ values of the unprivileged classes of society). Bond shows a society that is at war with itself – with its morals, ideals and frustrating inadequacies. The strong mimetic quality of this play (the arguably authentic depiction of working-class people, their language and way of life), which at first glance places the dramatic action in a specific and recognisable socio-economic context (the London working class in the 1960s), at the same time points beyond the immediate social problems of the play. This does not mean that the disturbing reality of violence among a particular class is diminished or marginalised, but the problems pertaining to a specific class of society are enlarged – they take on a significance that seems true to contemporary society as a whole. The ‘realist’, immediate, mimetic picture of society that Bond paints in this play is in a way incorrect – untruthful because it only presents half of the truth (the less offensive half, so to speak, namely that violence has become a natural phenomenon ‘only’ to certain members of society). The whole ‘truth’ would be that all of contemporary society is consummated by violence and exists in the shadows of the atrocities of wars waged in the twentieth (and current) century. 3 Bond’s work makes interesting statements about theatre’s social potency and the ways in which theatre, by staging social issues, transforms them and can offer alternatives, promises of a better life. The function of theatre would be to make gestures that on the one hand rupture the authoritarian and hegemonic logic of the market and on the other hand promise to restore unreconciled social antagonisms. His plays have a strong utopian content – even apparently pessimistic plays such as the early Saved , which does not spell out any alternative view of life, offers an idea of a life that is yet to exist, symbolised by the protagonist’s mending of a broken chair. This gesture is humanistic and humanising; occurring at the very end of the play, it throws a hopeful light on the previous disturbing plot of the play. The sufferings of the characters are not mitigated as a result, but the gesture points to a future (outside or beyond the play) which has the potential of being less bleak or despairing than the one presented on stage. Bond’s work is preoccupied with violence, social injustice and the human being’s desire for freedom. But in what sense does Bond offer an aesthetic of humanism? One could argue that it is not just because his plays deal with humanistic issues and throw light on society’s repressive, authoritarian, unjust character. The humanistic themes are shaped, transformed, given dramatic form, in other words: they are


aestheticised. Bond’s concern with the lack of humanism in modern irrational society has remained a constant theme in his political theatre but his aesthetic project has changed over the years. As has been pointed out by Hirst, Mangan and other Bond scholars, his ‘dramatic devices have grown more expressive and dynamic’ (Hirst, Edward Bond 8) since his early work. I would argue that they are nevertheless conceived with the intention of offering an objective (universally or generally true) vision of the world. The way violence is presented in a play like Saved , for example, with its social realist depiction of ordinary but shocking teenage working-class life, is different from the depiction of violence in plays such as Lear or even Coffee. Lear is one of Bond’s most epic and Brechtian plays to date: the social problems it confronts (the repression and violence perpetrated by authoritarian regimes and misguided revolutionaries) are ordered in such a way as to emphasise the meaning and (wider) significance of each action in relation to what is to follow. The play is full of metaphors which give the actions added social significance. For example, Lear’s blinding combines advanced technology (the ‘machine’ with which his eyes are cut out) with myth (the blinding of a wise man who has to suffer for his socially unacceptable, transgressive knowledge recalls the myth of Oedipus – but, conventionally, it is the blind man who sees the truth). Another example is the imagery of caged animals which Lear adopts when reflecting on his own predicament. These images and the rhetorical use of language contribute to a more expressive dramatic style, but the play nevertheless emphasises clarity and rationality as key elements both in terms of form and theme. Lear

In Lear (1971)4 Bond theatrically negotiates the personal and the social, the subjective and the objective, and he seems to suggest that theatre is able to produce rational consciousness by drawing on imaginative tools.5 Lear is a despot whose past is dark and cruel – his totalitarian paranoia has led him to erect a wall in defence of the enemy; he resorts to dictatorial measures in the name of upholding the law, defending his nation and keeping peace. Much later he will realise that his actions were irrational and brutal, that there is always an alternative to violence, and that people need to liberate themselves from false ideologies and myths. Lear becomes a wise man but he also represents a ‘stage’ on which, in Benjamin’s words, ‘the contradictions of our society are acted out’ (Benjamin, Understanding Brecht 8). Some of the irrational


laws governing society are revealed to the protagonist and the audience; there is a movement towards greater consciousness of what is wrong in the characters’ world (and by extension: in our society). The play seems to be about the production of knowledge which might lead humanity to freedom and peace – and the epic style of the play determines the effectiveness of this cognitive process. Epic Theatre raises questions; it casts doubt upon the conventions of human interaction, social norms and values. Lear’s irrational politics are symbolised by the wall which is supposed to act as a defence against the enemy (the Dukes of North and Cornwall) and to ensure that future generations may live in freedom and peace. But the wall’s hypothetical function of protecting and liberating the people is subverted by Lear’s dictatorial style of labour recruitment (workers are forcefully driven off their land to work on the wall and executed if they fail to perform) and by his dispute with his daughters, which triggers his political downfall and mental confusion. It seems that the wall is to contain and suppress all the horrors and crimes of Lear’s political and personal past: the brutality and injustice of his totalitarian regime and the effects this has had on his daughters who were brought up in a climate of violence, neglect and disappointment, as is subtly revealed later in the play. FONTANELLE: Father, once you found a white horse on a battlefield. You gave it to me and it broke its leg on the ice. They tied it to a tree and shot it. Poor little Fontanelle cried. (33) BODICE: They’re burying soldiers in the churchyard. Father’s brought the coffins on carts. (38) Bond’s explorations of society avoid dealing in any detail with the inner workings of his characters’ minds (for this reason his aesthetic project can be called objective rather than subjective). However, what interests me about Lear (and the later play Coffee) is the psychological subtext of the play, the underlying psychological tensions and emotional experiences which inform political and social actions. Personal, domestic, intimate issues are unconsciously made public, exposed, and enter the public/political realm where they trigger irrational, violent behaviour. Bodice’s and Fontanelle’s marriages to Lear’s archenemies (the Dukes) initially seem to be hopeful acts of political reconciliation, gestures of peace, supported by their insistence that the wall needs to be pulled down. However, once they are married it transpires that their


involvement with the enemy is an act of disobedience against their father whom they officially declare to be mad and a danger to the new political regime. The crisis of Lear begins here; he enters a journey of spiritual and mental darkness as he watches the growing corruption and disintegration of his empire, his people and those he once held dear. Repeatedly, he makes appeals to the importance of ‘understanding’. He dismisses his daughter’s criticism about the way he deals with the workers on the wall and says patronisingly: ‘I have explained and now you must understand!’ (5). But the reasons he gives for his actions are neither rational nor practical; his power as king derives from the ideology of deferred salvation and ongoing tyranny – he is not able to be a king of peace and reconciliation because of the external (and to some extent imagined) threat hanging over his country. According to Lear, his duty is to provide his people with the means of defending themselves (the wall) so that future generations can live in peace and happiness. This ideology of paranoid world domination justifies wars perpetrated in the name of peace and humanity. LEAR: ‘I am not free to be kind or merciful’ (5). ‘When I’m dead my people will live in freedom and peace and remember my name, no – venerate it!’ (7). The dark irony is that his daughters, who rightly condemn Lear’s acts as unreasonable and unjustifiable and who draw attention to his paranoid disposition (all of which they interpret as signs of madness), once in power act no better than Lear has ever done. Their cruelty and viciousness is boundless, devoid of any moral consciousness, and they manage to plunge the country into the darkness of a civil war. The sins of the father are not put right by the new generation but, if anything, made worse. Lear’s appeal to understanding and reason becomes more urgent when he realises the mistakes he made when he was in power, when he becomes fully aware of the implications and effects his crimes have had on his country and especially on his daughters. When he becomes the witness of Fontanelle’s execution and subsequent routine autopsy, reality hits home: he is shocked, nearly speechless at the sight of the body that lies in front of him: cut open, internal organs exposed, blood everywhere. Full of agonising wonder and painful astonishment he feels compelled to articulate what his eyes are seeing: the stomach, the lungs, the womb, the perfection with which the body contains them, the flawlessness of creation. During this almost religious moment of mystery


Lear’s visual (and visceral) encounter with the body triggers a change of consciousness. The sight of the interior of this violated yet perfect female body shocks him into questioning his previously held condemnation of Fontanelle’s moral character. Her flesh and blood do not show her viciousness and hatred; there is no trace of her inhumanity in these ‘bits and pieces’. He is taken aback by the extreme beauty of it all and for the first time since the beginning of the play he recognises and accepts her as his daughter and regrets his past behaviour towards her. He also recognises himself as the creator and destroyer of his daughter – this amounts to a clear, profound awareness of the human costs of tyranny; it is almost a sort of epiphany. Here we have a man who becomes truly self-conscious even though publicly he is still considered mad; a human being who looks at himself, and considers the fragility of existence and the futility of violence. The transformation of Lear’s moral consciousness is articulated in powerful terms: ‘If I had known this beauty and patience and care, how I would have loved her’ (59). Lear’s moving encounter with his daughter’s body (his own flesh and blood), and consequently his awareness of their relationship, is only one of the many dramaturgically effective (and affective) moments of self-recognition in the play. Crucially, these instances of self-understanding and self-questioning are not only concerned with the self but can be considered as recognitions of the character’s position within a wider social framework. In Lear’s case the social structure, which ideally is supposed to support the individual’s needs and enable a peaceful social existence, is experienced as a prison. When Lear is brought to trial (the negative outcome of which is carefully decided upon in advance) Bodice, with the attempt to prove his madness (BODICE: ‘Madmen are frightened of themselves’ 34) makes him look into her mirror. He does not recognise himself: LEAR: ‘No, that’s not the king [. . .]. This is a little cage of bars with an animal in it’ (35). The truth of this Lacanian misrecognition (based on the psychoanalytic theory that identity is a result of imaginary identification with one’s mirror image) lies in the fact that Lear sees an abstraction of himself – the animal in the cage is not only a metaphor for his own condition but a metaphor for all the repressed and suffering people in society as a whole and perhaps even for ‘humane society’ or culture as such: modern culture as a bleeding, dying animal. Lear’s extremely personal and reflective encounter with his own wounded identity implies an awareness of the antagonisms of the wider social context. His mournful yet angry speech about the tormented animal in a glass cage can also be considered a critique of the supposed claims for transparency and accountability of social


institutions. It becomes a death song for a post-Auschwitz culture which has lost its ability to regenerate itself morally and humanely. Through the figure of Lear, Bond ‘appeals to the innocence lost by the righteously corrupt’ (Bond, The Hidden Plot 157). Bond tends to offer solemn perspectives on the failure of justice and the loss of freedom, especially in plays which aim at the production of rational understanding (such as The War Plays, The Bundle, and Human Cannon). But in Lear (and indeed in Coffee) he strikes an interrogative, less overtly humanistic tone. Here, too, there is a tendency towards universalisation, but the generalisations are the subtle effects of the dramatic characters’ troubled, unstable minds, combined with the volatility of their (theatrical) environments. Mental confusion seems to be a prerequisite for comprehending the truth, and personal suffering a reflection of, and judgement on, the ills of society at large. LEAR: Who shut that animal in that cage? Let it out. Have you seen its face behind the bars? There’s a poor animal with blood on its head and tears running down its face. Who did that to it? Is it a bird or a horse? It’s lying in the dust and its wings are broken. Who broke its wings? Who cut off its hands so that it can’t shake the bars? It’s pressing its snout on the glass. Who shut that animal in a glass cage? O god, there’s no pity in this world. You let it lick the blood from its hair in the corner of a cage with nowhere to hide from its tormentors. No shadow, no hole! Let that animal out of its cage! (35) Bond says that he is concerned with creating ‘juster societies’ (Stuart, Edward Bond Letters 4 175). In his view, theatre, by presenting characters who are compelled to speak about their damaged relationships with each other and with the world, can function as a platform for resistance against the pressures put on human beings by the increasingly instrumental and alienating technological and economic structures. Dramatic speech conceived as an articulation of characters’ self-knowledge, which is an expression of their needs and suffering in this world, performs a humanising function because it ‘makes emotions rational’ (ibid.). Bond defends the art form of drama because of its power to reveal a possible link between the imagination and rationality. ‘[Drama] should seek imagination knowing that imagination seeks reason and is the only possible subversion of ideology’ (Bond, The Hidden Plot 185). Drama, for Bond, rationalises emotions first of all by voicing them and not by reducing them to near silence as can be observed in Beckett’s theatre. 6


Bond considers drama as a medium through which social madness can be articulated, transformed and given meaning, and he rejects those models of theatre that do not respond to the human need to understand reality. ‘It is inhumanly irresponsible to say that our existence is meaningless. The Theatre of the Absurd is corrupt’ (Bond, The Hidden Plot 24). Bond’s characters’ articulations of their oppressed conditions in an unjust social totality are an expression of their need to understand what logically cannot be understood: the religion of consumerism, the purpose of war, the corruption of children, the violation of human rights. Yet by being structured in an imaginative dramatic context the irrationality and absurdity of all these examples of contradictory human behaviour are made sense of because drama (imagination) constructs relationships, collects the ‘diffuseness of real life’ (Bond, ‘Notes on PostModernism’ 31), and offers new examples of how human behaviour may be possible in extremely negative situations. Bond’s dismissal of Beckett’s work as a nihilistic cultural example of the ‘incipient barbarism [which] is replacing the Enlightenment’ (Bond, The Hidden Plot xxxi) is a reflection of his vision that art should be socially and morally committed. It also reveals Bond’s fixation on the need for art to illustrate meaning, which might be perceived as a reluctance to engage with the unknown, with what lies beyond rational understanding. This is in sharp contradiction to Adorno’s defence of autonomous art such as Beckett’s which does not attempt to illustrate a problem or create meaning from the theatrical presentation of social content. In Beckett, thematic meaning is determinately negated in the sense that the only kind of meaning to be found is the result of the formal organisation (configuration) of meaninglessness. With reference to Adorno one could say that Bond’s rational theatre, which unites the powers of the imagination and reason to achieve an overall effect of rational understanding, allows ‘reality’s compulsion to identity’ ( AT 4) to enter the artwork. Marxist and Brechtian influences

Bond’s project is Marxist in the sense that he considers human relationships to be socially constructed and objectively determined by the logic of capitalism. And while there are certain differences between Bond’s and Brecht’s theories of theatre, Bond can nevertheless be considered an heir to Brecht, who constructed theatre as a vehicle for the expression of Marxist principles. Central to Marxist theory is a critique of classical (Cartesian) epistemology, i.e. a fundamental reassessment of the relationship between


the thinking subject and his or her objective reality. The basic discrepancy between the rationalist and the empiricist philosophies revolved around the notion that there is a fundamental split between the subject and the object, an essential dissociation between objective reality and our subjective experience and representation of it. The philosophy of modernity, while being centred on the subject–object binary, has developed various strategies of overcoming or at least reducing this gap. Kant, for example, while leaning towards a rationalist/subjectivist theory of knowledge, nevertheless concedes that the objective world cannot be fully known. Hegel’s theory, on the other hand, conflates the subject–object dualism in the idea of the Absolute Idea or spirit, which he takes to be the end-result of a historical development of thought. Marx responds critically to both positions, as well as to traditional materialist theories which attempt to sidestep the subject–object dualism by making empirical sense impression the locus and standard of truth. Marx applies Hegel’s methodological strategy of dialectics to the problem of epistemology and basically considers the relationship between subject and object as dialectical. His theory of knowledge takes the practical relationship between subject and object as a starting point, which means that ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are not entities existing in-themselves but only within a context of praxis. In other words, they are constructed in a framework of human practical relationships; they are the products of human labour. As W. A. Suchting has argued, Marx rejected ‘the idea of pre-constituted epistemological subjects and objects’ (subject and object existing as abstract entities a priori and independently of each other) in favour of a critical theory of knowledge which considers both subject and object as ‘derivative from practical relations’ (Suchting, Marx and Philosophy 15) and hence as historical, temporal and changeable. This anti-metaphysical conception of epistemology is materialist, but not empiricist in the traditional sense because Marx does not dispute the vital contributions of subjectivity (subjective human agency) in the process of knowledge production. Rather, he seems to de-centre the subject by denying it the authenticating primacy that it had in German idealist philosophy and by placing it in a dialectical relationship to its material and objective ‘other’ within the context of capitalist society. His analysis of the economic laws governing modern society – the capitalist mode of commodity production, the theory of use versus exchange value – provides the background for his theory of materialism which, contrary to classical (determinist) materialism, does allow room for the concept of abstraction. In Marxist theory the abstract organisation of


labour in capitalist commodity society removes the immediate relations between the process and the product of labour, thereby diminishing the concrete use value of the product in favour of its abstract exchange value on the market. This has a direct impact on human (social) relations which become object-like (reified, as suggested by Max Weber and Georg Lukács). In materialist philosophy after Marx, such as in the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel who was a friend of Adorno’s, the concept of abstraction is further explored for its role in structuring social relationships. SohnRethel’s notion of ‘real abstraction’ focusses on the primacy of commodity exchange in the production and practice of social relations in reality before they become subject to abstraction at the level of ideology. As he writes in Intellectual and Manual Labour : It is in its capacity of a real event in time and space that the abstraction applies to exchange, it is in its precise meaning a real abstraction and the ‘use’ from which the abstraction is made encompasses the entire range of sense reality. (28) Similarly, Adorno argues that ‘abstraction [. . .] is really the specific form of the exchange process itself, the underlying social fact through which socialisation first comes about’ (Adorno, Introduction to Sociology 31–2). Sohn-Rethel’s and Adorno’s notion of abstraction contributes to the materialist critique (begun by Marx) of idealist abstractions that are devoid of an encounter with practical social relationships. Furthermore, their understanding of abstraction as rooted in spatiotemporal exchange ‘events’ between human beings points towards the importance of subjectivity and knowledge as productive, rather than merely representational, categories. In other words, the concept of real abstraction also reconfigures the relation between theory and practice. In terms of theatre, such concerns are central in the work of Brecht who aimed to address and reconstitute the relationship between theory and praxis, subjectivity and objectivity, history and nature. In Brecht’s work, the production of knowledge is foregrounded and he considers his type of ‘scientific’ Epic Theatre to be a system of representation using experimental (non-naturalistic) aesthetic techniques in order to produce knowledge and truth. Representation is still conceived in the Aristotelian terms of mimesis as a mirror on reality, but rather than being a process of reflection or copying which results in empathy, mimesis in Brecht is a social activity, the effects of which are supposed to be anti-illusory and enlightening. The ulterior purpose of this kind


of mimetic representation is the achievement of self-knowledge and a heightened critical awareness of the functioning of the world surrounding the self, which incidentally is also pursued by Bond. Art is supposed to make us self-conscious by confronting us with (often aesthetically distorted) images of the social and political contexts of our lives. It is therefore crucial that the artist recognises their own interests in the artistic activity and that the audience are made aware of their own investments as well, their preconceptions and expectations when engaging with art. ‘These interests’, Brecht says, ‘which are necessary for the production of knowledge, endow the processes with a specific meaning and exclude a number of positions’ (Brecht, ‘Vorstellungskritik’ 534). When confronted with the theatricalisation of a social process on the Epic Theatre stage, the audience is made aware that the representation is vested with certain interests, that it is not natural, and that their reception of the stage action is similarly biased and informed by their own class interests. The Freudian notion that every representation is necessarily a misrepresentation is of significance in Brechtian theatre theory. The image of theatre as a truthful and objective mirror is negated. Rather, the mirror has the ability to produce – it is inscribed with the power to change reality and transform the objective world by means of representing the given, the referent, with the viewpoint of altering it. Representation on the Brechtian stage admits, makes aware of, and reveals the materiality of the aesthetic processes that are shaping the theatrical experience. The processes of meaning and knowledge production are, it would seem, made transparent. Similar to Marx and Freud, Brecht is not satisfied with traditional, mimetic representations of the world; he wants to look behind the scene, uncover the rules governing obvious social activities, unravel human behaviour, and throw light on contentious social and political issues. Important here is the metaphor of light with its Enlightenment associations: what is needed is clarity, transparency, a lucid mind and eye whose perceptions and reflections are based on reason. Hence, the Brechtian ideology of theatre practice implies (or necessitates) a reeducation of the audience: they are to be made critical participants in the theatrical actions rather than passive or electrified (stupefied) spectators who immerse themselves totally in the illusions offered to them on the bourgeois stage. Brecht’s (and of course Marx’s) critique of bourgeois society for the most part focusses on the alienating, reifying character of modern social relations, i.e. the dehumanising effects of capital on people. Bond takes a similar critical, anti-capitalist stance, but he realises that the ghost or


spectre of capital has become part of our lives and cannot be wished away anymore. What becomes important now is to find a way to live with this ghost, to try to manage it, control it, perhaps even make it work for us. Bond criticises our lack of progress, our backward, conservative notions of art and science, and in doing so his artistic vision continues to be part of the Enlightenment tradition. For Bond, our everyday thinking, morals and beliefs are out of touch with modern scientific and technological developments, hence our feelings of alienation and confusion when confronted with the problems posed to us by postmodern science. Bond’s main argument, it seems, is that we need to understand our reality in order to remain (or indeed become) human. The production and dissemination of knowledge in modern society are key points of interest for Bond. The interplay between imagination and reason, constituting our thought processes and consciousness, is a valuable human activity, which in Bond’s theatre is given an important role in the fight against ignorance and injustice (inhumanity and barbarity). Bond is aware of the fact that the modes of production and systems of representation of modernity (the ‘grand narratives’ of political ideologies, the realist mode of aesthetic representation) have been undermined in postmodern culture. Today we are confronted with the challenges of global capitalism, techno-science, digital and genetic revolution, etc., and fundamentally altered (or distorted) relations between human beings. Drama, in the spirit of Brecht, is recognised as a useful medium in this process of changing our consciousness, and for Bond it has an epistemological value.7 Brecht wanted to create and write for a ‘theatre of the scientific age’ which would incorporate the new technological media (radio, film) and as a result change the function of art in modern society. Bond seems to be driven by a similar concern, but as will be discussed below, he does not wholly endorse the typically Brechtian techniques of epic distancing (alienation), montage and framing. To Bond, the stage presents a platform for the analysis of everyday processes, not merely the representation of such processes themselves. The same is true for Brecht’s construction of epic and didactic theatre as a narration of events which gain significance for the spectator in the course of being dramatically analysed on stage. Brecht was concerned with the impact of the Marxian critique of bourgeois society and ideology on the field of the arts. In The Threepenny Lawsuit (1931/32), for example, he comments on his dispute with the Nero film company over the film adaptation of his Threepenny Opera. Apart from providing detailed information about the court case itself


(Brecht lost his case for authorial rights against the film company) and examples of newspaper reports at the time, the text offers an insightful commentary on the technological as well as ideological production and exchange of art in capitalist society.8 Brecht considers the law suit as a sociological experiment which exposes the still primarily individualistic/ bourgeois attitude of people to art and their unwillingness to come to terms with the demands placed on culture in the age of the new media, film and radio. According to Brecht, film radically questions the notion that the artwork is ‘the unique expression of a specific personality’ (Giles, Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory , 141). Like Benjamin, Brecht would argue that this is due to the complex production process which film has to undergo before it reaches the market (of cultural consumption, which in the case of film is primarily entertainment) and that this has a subversive and politically progressive effect. The production process and the technical nature of the film apparatus lay bare the various elements that make up the final film product (Brecht has shown this in his ‘diagram of the dismantling process’ of film, which shows that film is a de-composed, complex art form). The traditional unity between author and work in a literary text is undermined in film and this fact fundamentally changes the function of art in the context of the modern media and influences the creation as well as reception of art. The technical possibilities of film change the way we perceive and creatively engage with the world surrounding us and it is therefore vital that we take the technological changes seriously. This is also a major point in Bond’s theory of the theatre, which we will discuss in detail below. He deplores our lack of understanding the technology that is increasingly manipulating the way we think and interact in society. Brecht must therefore be considered as one of the first theoreticians, apart from Benjamin, to have recognised the inevitability of the influence of the new media technology on our lives and the vital importance of understanding the implications of these processes on society. Like Benjamin, Brecht is enthusiastic about the anti-individualist, de-mythologising character of filmmaking. Benjamin, in his celebrated essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) attributes the alleged ‘decay of the aura’ (216) of the work of art to the progressive technical elements of photography and film and their rejection of the quasireligious, mythological essence of autonomous bourgeois art. Brecht welcomes the critique of bourgeois ideology through the medium of film and he adopts the revolutionary strategies of the film apparatus to his theory of drama and practice of theatre. While revealing and criticising the primarily economic interests guiding the film


media, he makes the point that in modern times the ‘mechanization of literary production cannot be thrown into reverse’ (Brecht, ‘The Film, the Novel and Epic Theatre’ 47). He denounces the culture-critical argument that art should try to avoid the corrupting influence of the modern technical media and try to remain autonomous and ‘untouchable’ as bourgeois and reactionary. Such an attitude denies modern artists the right to experiment with the new media, which could lead to a desired rejuvenation and transformation of culture. As Benjamin has shown, art in the age of technological reproduction can no longer be perceived as the auratic product of a genius creator whose artistic activity is somehow mysteriously removed from social and political processes. And Brecht argues that due to the reification of human relations in modern society, the experience and reception of art is equally de-mythologised because the audience is made aware of the commodity status of artworks. According to Brecht, traditional aesthetic theory which deplores the commodity character of film and expects ‘real art’ to remain autonomous, i.e. free from the corrupting effects of cultural commodification, misses the point because the commodity form has become a pervasive force in capitalist society which not only transforms economic relations but interpersonal relations too. The laws of commodity exchange demand that all material and immaterial products of economic and cultural production (the products of physical and spiritual labour) enter a tight relationship with each other and only assume significance as part of this web of communication. In his critique of the culture industry Adorno arrives at the same evaluation of contemporary cultural production, but he remains deeply troubled by the all-pervasive commodification of cultural activity and the accompanying ideology of positivism which considers science to be the new intellectual paradigm of the modern age. Adorno, generally a defender of modernist strategies of self-reflexivity and experimentation, remains critical of the tendency towards deindividuation especially if the result of such deconstruction of subjective autonomy tends towards a ‘false reconciliation’ with the political ideology of a collective. For example, Adorno’s criticism of Brecht’s project of didactic plays ( Lehrstücke) is aimed at Brecht’s readiness to subject the individual to the demands of the (Communist) collective, a tendency towards an erasure of the subject which Rainer Friedrich calls ‘totalitarian’ (see Friedrich, ‘Brecht and Postmodernism’). Furthermore, Friedrich argues that the postmodernist appropriation of the early Brecht reveals a similarly totalitarian streak which culminates in the postmodernist, anti-humanist declarations of the ‘death of the subject’. This echoes


Adorno who, in his treatment of the aesthetic as a placeholder for liberation from the reifying effects of rationalisation, defends the idea of autonomous subjective experience, however wounded and damaged it may appear in late modernity. Brecht, on the other hand, welcomes how in film ‘the human being is presented as an object’ (Brecht, ‘The Film, the Novel and Epic Theatre’ 50) because this process fundamentally changes our bourgeois perception and ideological understanding of art. Brecht’s enthusiasm for the transformative, revolutionary potential of the commodification process in modern society may seem naïve today, considering the homogenising, totalising effects of global capitalism and the apparent limitations of collective as well as individual resistance and activism. But Brecht’s positive evaluation of the capitalist labour process has to be understood within the framework of Marxist thought, which considers the economic system of capitalist society only as a transitory, indeed necessary, stage towards a total functional transformation ( Umfunktionierung ) of life. Brecht therefore considers the objectification and reification of the life world as it occurs in capitalist society as the first step towards an eventual overcoming of the commodity structure itself (‘[t]he road leads over capitalism’s dead body’, ibid.). The idea is that somehow, once the commodity system has reached its full potential, some sort of implosion will occur – a subversive self-criticism of capitalist structures and values which will lead to a truly progressive anti-individualist Communist society. Despite the utopian thrust of these arguments, Brecht was right to throw light on the hitherto mystified forces underlying cultural production. He makes us aware that artworks are never totally autonomous or removed from the social context they are produced in and that our appreciation and reception of art is always biased, i.e. we approach art with particular ideological interests in mind, consciously or not. He seeks to lay bare the mechanisms that underlie the production, circulation and reception of art and he focusses our attention on the materiality of these mechanisms, representing them as the result of social activity and praxis, and not merely as the abstract creations of an artistic imagination. He takes the same attitude in the theatre: the process of dramaturgy in the Epic Theatre is also de-mystified, human action is de-naturalised, and the production apparatus is laid bare so that the audience can critically observe the stage action within the context of its material construction. Brechtian theatre can be compared to the film apparatus discussed earlier on – the re-configuration ( Umfunktionierung ) of the forms and materials of theatrical production aims to produce


a desired progressive attitude to social and political reality. Following Marx’s critique of Feuerbach’s abstract materialism (‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’, Theses on Feuerbach (1845) in Bender, Karl Marx 155), Brecht highlights the importance of showing the world not only the way it is, but more importantly, the way it should be. Brecht emphasises that the cultural superstructure should not be considered as the objectified product of an underling economic process but as ‘a self-developing factor [. . .] and most importantly as a process’ itself. ‘The cultural needs of the masses are expressed in their customs and traditions, which, due to economic and political pressure, are in a constant process of development and in our times gain a revolutionary function amongst the class-conscious proletariat’ (Brecht, ‘Theory of Superstructure’ 570–1). It is this belief in the revolutionary significance of culture, the capacity of cultural activity to be able to change the status quo, which seemed to have motivated Brecht’s theory and practice. A major contradiction in Brecht’s (and Marxist dialectical materialist) thought becomes apparent at this point: for surely the cultural activity of the masses needs an element of autonomy from its economic basis in order to be considered as potentially revolutionary. Indeed, the questions of autonomy, revolution and freedom in Marxist aesthetic theory are heavily contested, as Adorno’s critique of Sartre’s and Brecht’s practice of engaged or ‘committed’ art shows. ‘The committed work of art debunks the work that wants nothing but to exist; it considers it a fetish, the idle pastime of those who would be happy to sleep through the deluge that threatens us – an apolitical stance that is in fact highly political’ (Adorno, ‘Commitment’ 76). One could argue, as Adorno seems to do, that Brecht’s translation of his theoretical support for Marxism into theatrical practice remains unsuccessful, and that the aesthetic form the Marxist call for scientific objectivity and clarity takes in his work actually undermines the ideology it is supposed to represent and strengthen. The important elements of formal abstraction and reduction in his work – his anti-psychological treatment of dramatic character in The Threepenny Opera, for example, and his general rejection of theatrical naturalism (the ‘illusion of theatre’) – are meant to reveal that ‘[a]s the law of exchange, [the] essence [of society] is itself abstract’ (Adorno, ‘Commitment’ 82). But because he tried to connect the formalist dimension of his theatre practice with a Socialist agenda, his theoretical and political commitment was in actual fact weakened as a result. ‘His art disdains the quid pro quo in which what presents itself as doctrine is simultaneously exempted, by virtue of its aesthetic form,


from the requirement that what it teaches be cogent’ (ibid.). Adorno points here at an unresolved tension in Brecht’s work between political commitment and aesthetic practice which, however, he nevertheless perceives as a major marker of artistic quality and importance. Bond’s evaluation of the present condition of late-capitalist society can be considered in the light of Benjamin’s and Brecht’s analyses of social, technological and artistic change in modernity. Technological and scientific progress is part of our reality and for Bond it becomes increasingly vital that we learn how to make ‘right’ (humane, effective, progressive) use of the new technology. He criticises the apparently misguided use of technology in the present: rather than controlling the ‘machines’ (Bond’s shorthand for postmodern technology)9 we are controlled by them, our lives are no longer in our hands, we have become the victims of science. Underlying this discourse of alienating technology seems to be a (utopian) desire for the reconstitution of immediate, meaningful, local and communal (rather than global) social relations. Bond’s rational theatre

Bond is concerned with political and aesthetic questions and his dominantly socialist political perspective on modern life in late-capitalist society accords drama an important humanising function. He is concerned with a depiction and analysis of the structures of the moral, political and social totality and their effects on individual members. Especially in his work in the 1970s and 1980s he attempted to provide at least tentative solutions to the problems of the human condition as dramatised on stage. There is a strong pedagogical impulse underpinning his theatrical analyses of modern society, which can be located in a Brechtian-Marxist aesthetic tradition. The trilogy The War Plays (1985) is set in a landscape of destruction and suffering, and traces the actions of the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. It dramatises a negative utopia by offering a tentative suggestion of a possible future after total destruction. As Janelle Reinelt states: The three plays approach the notion of utopia mostly through a negative technique reminiscent of Brecht’s ‘fixing the not/but’. What is wrong, what is missing, what might be otherwise – these aspects press forward as the trilogy unfolds. (Reinelt, ‘Theorizing Utopia’ 228) In Red, Black and Ignorant a scalded and deformed Monster acts out the life that he could have lived had he not burst out of his mother’s womb


when she died in a nuclear attack (‘a huge red ball inflated in the sky’). The minimalist simplicity of the stage design (all that is required are a bench and a few props) and the clarity of dramatic language create a sense of transparency of action and emotion. The strong Brechtian influence on these plays becomes apparent in the frequent moments of characters’ self-reflection and their direct communication with the audience. In Red, Black and Ignorant the Monster adopts the role of a Brechtian narrator who comments on the moral corruption and violence of life in a catastrophic world: ‘MONSTER. Now we will show scenes from the life I did not live / If what happens seems such that human beings would not allow it to happen you have not read the histories of your times’ (5). The individual scenes (thematically titled ‘Learning’, ‘Love’, ‘Eating’, ‘Selling’, ‘Work’, ‘The Army’, ‘No one can willingly give up the name of human’, and ‘Funeral’) illustrate the ‘education’ of the Monster, his adaptation to a world of fear and hate, his experience of social injustice, and his repulsion at his own aggressive, abject behaviour. The dramatic action incorporates the principal mechanisms of capitalist society, such as people’s alienation from the products of their labour (symbolised by the Monster’s wasting of the food the Wife has struggled to pay for). The cultural dominance of the exchange principle in modern capitalist society is presented in exaggerated but effective terms in a scene called ‘Selling’, in which the Monster and his Wife are practically forced by the Buyer to sell their child. This is a post-human, dystopian world in which children are sold and bought like commodities. The Buyer is a representative of the corrupt educational and moral systems of society which offer the child ‘regular health checks and training in discipline’. His euphemistic language (‘Surely you won’t deny him our help and protection?’ 16) is emptied of meaning. The couple have no choice (indeed they themselves have been ‘sold’ in the past) and the Monster’s insistence on negotiating the terms of the transaction functions as a reminder of the now archaic (bourgeois) illusions of subjective freedom and agency. This is a society which exercises total control over its members who are only deemed ‘good citizens’ if they willingly relinquish their individuality. The middle play of the trilogy, The Tin Can People, shows how a community of survivors of the explosions find a new spirit of life in a landscape of total devastation. They have found huge quantities of tinned food and have developed a strong sense of community based on their shared traumatic encounters with death (‘All of us share one common wound’, 56), which they ‘can’t stop speaking’ (58) about. The starting point for the development of a potentially optimistic narrative is


paradoxically provided by the radical negativity of the barren landscape they inhabit, which contains the seeds of possibility and seems like an inverted paradise: ‘There’s no need to work [. . .] we have tins: millions [. . .] there’s no exploitation – and so there are no enemies’ (55–6). Yet their reduced life in this ‘paradise [which] was built in the ruins of hell’ (56) is turned upside down by the arrival of another survivor. At first they welcome the stranger into their community with excitement but soon, after the sudden and unexplainable death of a group member, they accuse the man of carrying a disease, banish him and plot to kill him. Suspicion turns into paranoia and angst when the group member who takes it upon himself to kill the stranger to protect the community suddenly drops dead too. The survivors run mad and in their panic they even start burning the tins – their own future. However, a sense of optimism is re-established at the end of the play when the survivors profess to have learnt from their mistakes and speculate about how future generations will judge their struggles. The sense of optimism is partly subverted in the last play, Great Peace, which dramatises the madness of life during war and shows human strategies of making sense of the world after the catastrophe. The suffering of the Woman in this play is most pronounced. The play begins with the announcement of an impossible order made by an army captain: to prevent the waste of food every soldier must ‘return to his place of domicile and eliminate one child’ (101). The Woman’s son ends up killing his own mother’s baby – a traumatic experience, which the Woman does not come to terms with until the end of the play. After the nuclear explosions she roams the wilderness on her own, clutching and nursing a bundle, which is her imaginary baby. The Woman is physically and emotionally scarred, she looks as grey and withered as the rubble and dust surrounding her. This image of a lone, traumatised figure roaming a vast post-apocalyptic landscape evokes a Beckettian aesthetic, yet the world has not come to an end and there are signs of hope. The bundle, despite being a figment of her imagination or madness, is the most powerful symbol of life in this play. The Woman talks to the bundle-baby to ‘stay sane’ (162) and she defends its existence against the group of soldiers who have deserted after the blast. The soldiers are equally traumatised and getting used to the fact that ‘everyone’s dead’, including themselves, but the Woman cannot accept this defeatist attitude and while acknowledging the physical lifelessness of her surroundings (‘God knows there ain much difference – that went long ago’), she refuses to give up hope (‘But I ’ave t’ live for the kid’s sake / It can’t fend for itself’, 167). However, when given the opportunity of joining a new


community of survivors who are hopeful about their future (‘societies don’t have to destroy themselves / people can learn’, 226), she prefers to continue a solitary existence in the wilderness. What makes her feel human in a landscape of devastation and pain is her sense of choice of how to enter her own death: ‘This may be my last winter – I’ll choose ’ow I live it’ (241). In the final stage image the memory of perennial human suffering combines with a belief in the survival of humanity: ‘The coat has been turned over. In it are the Woman’s bones, not as a skeleton but lying roughly in the human shape. In the stomach: tins, some open and empty’ (243–4). In The Crime of the Twenty-First Century (2001) Bond raises a question which is central to his dramatic project: how to be human in an unjust world? The dramatic landscape of this play again resembles a post-apocalyptic world where characters live in the ruins and rubble of a disaster which has changed the world physically and morally. The characters are speaking bodies who are physically and mentally exhausted but have learnt how to scrape an existence out of the ruins of life. They are literally at the end: aching, mutilated bodies clothed in rags and covered in dust, stone-like in appearance – they are the monuments of a dying civilisation. They do not live but merely, and barely, survive in the face of permanent suffering and absolute negativity. Rather than seeking death, as many characters in Howard Barker’s plays are driven to do, death has settled among Bond’s characters and in rare but significant moments of self-awareness they give voice to their lack of freedom of choice under post-catastrophic conditions. The most tragic character in this play is probably Sweden who in great detail recounts his experience of escaping the prison and ridding himself of the tag that was planted in his chest. The idea of being tagged like a dog by the authorities is dehumanising in itself, and Sweden’s account of his struggle to cut open his chest and take out the ‘little plastic disc be’ind the rib’ (226) objectifies his painful experience into a narrative about the suffering of all survivors, all human beings who are reduced to an animal-like existence in the ruins and rubble. A sense of class division pervades the world of The Crime of the Twenty First Century which carries as an epigram Thatcher’s infamous statement that ‘there is no such thing as society’. It provides an interesting counterpoint to the dramatic action of the play. The characters are part of the play’s underclass – they lead a dehumanised existence – but there is also an upperclass who live in luxury in the suburbs of the ruined cities. Sweden’s anger at the upperclass is expressed in his fire attacks on their cars, terrorist actions for which he was sent to prison. The


dramatic characters have personal histories which intersect with the wider socio-political context that surrounds them and gives shape to their actions. Following the Marxist dictum that consciousness is the performative effect of a person’s activity within a given socio-economic context, the play shows how notions such as personal freedom and choice are being shaped by past events (wars, catastrophes) and by the authoritarian laws of an antagonistic social totality. In History and Class Consciousness Lukács had developed Marx’s notion of alienation (the worker’s alienation from their labour process, products, other workers and finally themselves) into a theory of reification which denotes the objectification (Verdinglichung ) of human relationships in capitalist society. Because the phenomenon of reification ‘necessarily obscures the class character of [society’s] structure’ (Jameson, ‘Reflections’ in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics 212) Lukács maintained that a growth of class-consciousness is dependent on emergent perceptions of society as a totality. Bond’s conception of theatre as a consciousness-raising and in this sense educational social force engages, albeit indirectly, with the Marxist debate about reification and the lack of class awareness in consumer society. A play such as The Crime of the Twenty-First Century addresses the reduction of human beings to the status of exchangeable and disposable objects (a theme which appears in The War Plays in relation to the treatment of children) and it foregrounds the subsequent inability of people to reach or think beyond their reified and ultimately isolated social existence. The characters are nevertheless compelled to search for and reach out to each other because only in these desperate acts of (often failed) communication can the idea of humanness survive. Bond wrote a number of ‘occasional’ pieces on topical subject matters, such as Black Mass (1970) at the request of the Anti-Apartheid movement and Stone (1976) for the Gay Sweatshop theatre company. Whilst these plays are certainly ‘committed’ (in the sense of Sartre’s literature engagé )10 to protests against a flawed social system by providing a platform for marginalised voices, one could argue that Bond’s work in general is committed to the ideal and practice of humanism in a society which today defines itself in increasingly anti- or post-humanist terms. Bond’s critical evaluation of postmodernism sheds interesting light on his views about the social function of art and the role of the ‘responsible’ artist. Comprised of 82 text fragments, Bond’s ‘Notes on Post-Modernism’11 map the historically changing relationship between human beings and ‘the boundary’ – a concept that is only vaguely defined (‘the boundary is unknowable’, ‘Notes on Post-Modernism’ 2). However, it is central to


Bond’s notion of humanness in that it is a symbol of people’s innate capacity to question the world (the boundary) they inhabit – a world which has to be invested with positive meaning in order for humanity to appear. The boundary, while essentially unknowable and a mystery, does become a meaningful reality in and through the various ideological discourses people have ‘invented’ in order to stay alive spiritually and materially. The organising forces between people and the boundary are social institutions and authority – man-made historical constructs. Central to Bond’s theory is the idea that ‘authority does not derive humanness from the human mind. Humanness is socially, culturally created within the mind’s excess capacity’ (ibid.). It is the product of our ability and need to interrogate, to rationally question what is happening around us. Here, Bond touches on the (in his view) important relationship between humanness and rationality: the conception that it is essentially human to be rational, or in other words, it would be irrational (against our nature) not to be human. But what makes us human, in Bond’s terms, is not our ability to apply the logic of reason to our lives but our capacity to respond imaginatively and creatively to the problems of humanity. ‘Non-human animals are concerned with what and when but not with why. Imagination is needed to ask why. Imagination and not reason makes us human’ (Bond, ‘The Reason for Theatre’ in Hidden Plot 113). Elsewhere in the same essay Bond states that imagination and rationality are intertwined (the logic of imagination is rational) and that ‘[i]magination is creative only when it expresses reason and its search for reason’ (ibid. 146). Hence, theatre is constructed as a place where reality can be reinvented and ‘humanness’ recreated through the power of the imagination. As Bond says, ‘I call my theatre “rational” because I think that what seeks reason in us (and is therefore free to fall into unreason – and then to seek reason) is imagination – that imagination is logical in its reaction to deformation from outside’ (Stuart, Edward Bond Letters 5 14). If it is rational to be human, the burning question, which runs through Bond’s work, is therefore: why do humans nevertheless act inhumanely, irresponsibly and irrationally? Why is there so much suffering and injustice in the world? There is of course no clear answer to these perennial questions but Bond gives us an insight into the possible and most probable causes for irrational human behaviour so that we as readers and audiences may gain a deeper understanding of the actions portrayed in his plays. One could of course argue that by directing our attention to the social, political and economic contexts of people’s lives, rather than on any focussed investigation of the individual’s


psychological world, Bond presents human beings as trapped in objective structures which are beyond their control and influence. 12 I would argue that the contrary is true. It is precisely Bond’s socialist analysis of people’s so-called barbaric life world, as found in plays such as Human Cannon, The Bundle, and The War Plays, which ultimately allows for (or even solicits) the re-emergence of free will and constructive, rational human agency, in short a willingness to engage with human society. Human Cannon or how to be human in an inhuman world

Bond’s drama aims to draw attention to the social and economic processes that shape his characters. The material context in which interpersonal action takes place is made transparent so that the audience can learn and understand the significance of the theatrical representation. There is an overall emphasis on the educational and epistemological elements of his plays, which again seems to be the product of Bond’s concern with the recovery of the lost project of humanism in postmodern society. His main criticism of contemporary consumer society is its increasingly irrational, obscure, and absurd functioning – it is a world dominated by the ‘ghost’ of capital which reifies human beings and their products of labour, turning them into exchangeable commodities. As a result, it is a world of wants rather than genuine needs because the economic laws of capitalism work according to the principle of expansion: the global capitalist (material and virtual) market has to invent new products at an increasing speed in order to sustain a high level of economic productivity and consumer spending. In this respect Bond’s analysis of modern society is very much in line with Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture critique as expounded in their Dialectic of Enlightenment . Adorno would argue, however, that the ideology of consumerism has developed sophisticated marketing techniques to masquerade our wants as needs, thereby investing our role as consumers with a sense of agency and necessity. Bond again relates the problem of our ‘society of wants’ to our relation to the ‘boundary’ which in postmodernity is devoid of any humanising quality, that is to say: we have lost our sense of justice; we no longer know how to relate meaningfully and humanely to other people, and we have forgotten to ask the meaning-creating questions of children. ‘Needs (because they invoked Utopia in practical, daily, economic life, and in political and religious dealings, and because they made interrogation ethical) were the means by which we created our humanity’ (Bond, ‘Notes on Post-Modernism’ 27).


Because materially we cannot know anymore what we really ‘need’ (since what we think we need is the product of consumer illusion) we also cannot fully know who we are and what it means to be human. In a society like this, metaphysical categories such as truth, meaning and justice are secondary concerns and no longer a necessity for our material survival. But for Bond the humanist playwright such categories are in need of recovery in order to enable us to ‘increase the humanness of the human mind’ (ibid. 17). Bond seems to argue that it is in our nature to want to live in harmony and peace with others. His work expresses an optimistic (and perhaps utopian) faith in the goodness of human nature and in the possibility of a changed world. Human Cannon (1986) is one example of a Bond play that interrogates the socio-political context of characters in order to show that change is necessary and desirable. The play is set in the Spanish village of Estarobon and deals with a community’s struggle against the Fascist taking of power in the 1930s. The play shows a degree of Brechtian didacticism in that its main characters display a heightened self-consciousness about their (and the community’s) social situation. Nando’s speech, entitled ‘The Argument of the Story’, sets forth a proletarian critique of the capitalist system of ownership (‘when someone else owns the machines you use to earn your living then you are owned’, 38). And his key question (‘How can such a world be at peace?’) is clearly directed to the audience: we are presented with one main aspect of the overall concern of the play right at the beginning and are invited to reflect on the questions the characters themselves are concerned with. In rather unambiguous terms Bond presents an analysis of the human condition in a barbaric, inhuman society: ‘People are angry and cruel not by nature – but because society requires anger and cruelty from its citizens’ (38). This argument in favour of the use of violence is reiterated at significant points throughout the play: as the Fascists move into the village, defeat the people’s militia (Communists) and reinstate the exploitative system of landownership, some of the guerrilla fighters hide in the mountains from where they organise terrorist attacks on the village community. These acts of violence (Agustina’s firing of the cannon, the murder of the couple, the bomb explosion in the church) are not condonable but the context in which they occur makes them seem necessary and, considering the precariousness and danger of the rebels’ situation, even inevitable. The rebels’ fight is carefully explained and contextualised; the audience is never in doubt as to the motives, intentions and causes of their actions, which are presented to the audience in the form of songs, narrative speeches summing up past and predict


future developments, and the main characters’ occasional moments of self-awareness about their social and political situation. The audience is often implicated or addressed in these speeches: ‘We can’t live with ignorance any more. We must fight everyone who stops us trying to understand ourselves. Today we have the power of god and so we must finally become human beings’ (99). In the spirit of Brechtian theatre, the overall epic character of the play implies a strong element of rationalism. Human behaviour, when analysed and presented as occurring in an unambiguous socio-political context, is supposedly rational – because logical and coherent – even if it appears irrational. The play shows how life in a brutalised, inhuman society often provokes irrational actions because there can be no justice in a false world. Bond explains: ‘Reason is not yet always effective, and we are still at a stage when to create a rational society we may sometimes have to use irrational means’ (Bond quoted in Coult, The Plays of Edward Bond 56). But the unjust social and moral order at the same time compels the individual to come to terms with the contradictions of the system by either internalising and thus accepting them or openly rejecting and trying to change them. Whilst the options people have in real life are never as straightforward or easy to conceptualise, the characters in Bond’s plays are often presented with clear, instantly recognisable choices and the audience are encouraged to learn about, understand and to an extent sympathise with the characters’ behaviour. Michael Mangan states that ‘Bond implicitly mistrusts theatre which preaches to an audience’ (Mangan, Edward Bond 40). However, while it is true that he does not explicitly adopt the kind of Brechtian didacticism found in the Lehrstücke, one nevertheless notices an edifying tone which is most of all the result of an attempt to use the stage as a platform for sociopolitical and cultural analysis. As Mangan has pointed out in his study on Bond, there is a strong ‘“two-worlds” dichotomy’ (ibid. 45) at work in Bond’s plays and theory, in which a number of oppositions provide the structural and thematic framework of representation, for example the opposition between technology (‘the machines’) and humanity, and the binary of male and female. Both ‘worlds’ are often engaged in power struggles with their opposite and it is as a result of these dialectical relations that the possibility (and necessity) of a survival of human values is articulated. Bond’s metaphor of the ‘two worlds’ provides the meta-text for Human Cannon – in this case, however, both worlds need to be considered as flawed because in pursuing their political ends they both resort to violent means. The ‘world’ of the rebels is, however, presented as less flawed or less unmoral because their ultimate (if utopian) goal is a total revolution of the human mind, which would be needed in order


to bring about lasting social peace and justice. Although Bond stresses the problematic and contradictory material reality of his characters’ lives, he nevertheless makes the point that we have to learn to fully understand our situation before we can hope to change anything about it. Even if the revolution is not immediately successful (and it certainly is not in the play), there will come a time when the ‘need to be human’ will triumph over the injustice of the world. The ‘truth’ about what is to come rests with Agustina – wife, mother, rebel fighter and heroine who ‘bear[s] [. . .] major moral and political responsibilities’ (Stuart, Edward Bond Letter II 198).13 Her song combines a recognition of the stabilising laws of nature with the power of human agency. The fire will consume itself The tempest will exhaust itself The flood will return to the still deeps of the sea But I will ride the world with my two talking horses Till the generations of the earth are free Later, the notion of necessity and inevitability of change is captured in the image of child birth where the feebleness of the human will is counterbalanced by nature’s progress. For when the human will is weak The laws of change shall still be strong My womb and the earth shall give birth to liberty (Bond, Human Cannon 107–8) The category of rationality seems to be extended here to include the unpredictable and often-called ‘irrational’ laws of nature. While the laws of the social and political world are rational in the sense that they are man-made and can therefore be changed, the laws of the natural world display a rationality that transcends the human free will but nevertheless appear ‘logical’ due to their stabilising and restorative powers. Knowledge, reason, enlightened understanding and empathy are key elements in this process towards an increased critical self-awareness and class-consciousness, as is also illustrated in Bond’s play The Bundle. The Bundle or how to create human consciousness

This play, too, puts forward a Marxist-humanist worldview, which highlights the contradictions and injustice of a social system and the possibilities for human intervention. The Bundle (1978) presents a world


that is more dynamic and coherently structured. The Bundle, subtitled New Narrow Road to the Deep North, is based on the life story of the seventeenth-century Japanese Buddhist haiku poet Matsuo Basho who fails to save an abandoned infant whom he encounters on his pilgrimage in search for enlightenment. The second source for this play is Bond’s 1968 play Narrow Road to the Deep North in which the abandoned infant survives and grows up to become a tyrant. In The Bundle Bond introduces the theme of the proletarian revolution against a repressive feudal system. The abandoned baby boy (Wang) is taken on by a poor ferryman and his wife. In order to save the lives of his adoptive parents, Wang sells himself to the landowner and becomes Judge Basho’s slave for nine years. Having regained his freedom Wang joins a group of looters and low-life criminals, organises them and returns to the village to mount a proletarian revolution against the landowner and men like Basho who exploit and oppress their people materially and ideologically. The image of the river carries a symbolic significance because it is the starting and end point of Basho’s journey toward enlightenment and it is the place where life begins for Wang but ends for many other abandoned babies. The constant movement of the water indicates the incessant flow of life and regeneration, but the bursting river is also a reminder of nature’s power to cause indiscriminate destruction. The first part of the play suggests that there are two enemies of the people: the landowner on the one hand, who by controlling movement on the river owns the ferryman and his wife; and on the other hand, there is the destructive power of nature in face of which the poor people are helpless (the floods force the inhabitants to seek shelter on the village burial hill). However, in the second part even the apparently natural and inevitable danger posed by the river is exposed as a man-made mechanism of power and control. ‘WANG. We’re poor because there is little to go round. Why? Because the river floods. Why? The mouth is silted. The banks are down. There’s no cut-off channel for the spring water’ (168). The Marxist presentation of the problem of people’s poverty and ideological oppression focuses on the repressive socio-economic structures whose construction by the dominant class is made apparent. And Bond’s humanist Marxist position becomes evident in his attempt to show that a construction of alternative, anti-establishment, proletarian knowledge and understanding is of primary importance in order to change the political, economic and cultural system. Led by Wang, the characters are urged to adopt an active, interrogative attitude to their problems and shake off their lives of ignorant submissiveness, which have been imposed on them by the authorities. In ardent conversations


with his adoptive parents, who have sacrificed their health for his upbringing, he does not display the conventional gestures of filial gratitude and affection but expresses his anger at the virtual insignificance of this one ‘good’ act that saved his life. You picked me up and took me home. A good man! The good ferryman! The saint who lives by the river! Do the birds sing when you come through your door? It’s not easy to do good. You pick up one child. What about the tenth child? Or the hundredth child? You leave them to rot! Drown them with your holy hands. (187) The message that ‘it’s not easy to do good’ in an unjust, morally corrupt world is a running theme in many Bond plays, but in The Bundle clear alternatives to people’s oppression are offered to the characters and the audience. Wang’s call for revolutionary practice takes the form of violent action against the oppressor: he is arming the villages with rifles and has formed a guerrilla group who ‘loot the big houses. Raid convoys. Kidnap. Blackmail. Take hostages’ (185). However, violence is not fetishised but considered as a means to achieving the main goal of the revolutionary operation, which is the creation of understanding and knowledge among the dispossessed – the creation of self-consciousness in the poor, which would bring about changes in the economic and moral organisation of society. Such developments of self-consciousness are articulated in a direct, unambiguous manner: FERRYMAN. Why are our lives wasted? We have minds to see how we suffer. Why don’t we use them to change the world? [. . .] shouldn’t we change our lives so that we don’t suffer? Or at least suffer only in changing them? (204) The ferryman’s growing ability to analyse and reject the ideological foundations of his constrained existence is presented as characteristic of a general movement towards proletarian self-consciousness and empowerment, which in the off-stage world of the play takes the shape of a concerted attack on the rulers of the village. As a result the representatives and collaborators of the ruling establishment – a judge, the head of the army and a businessman – are caught in a defenceless situation and are unable to suppress the revolution. Bond’s work raises the question of the possibility of autonomous individuality in oppressive social contexts. In plays such as The Bundle and The War Plays his analyses of characters’ struggles against the


de-humanising effects of war and ideological and material exploitation provide positive answers to the debilitation of individual self-expression in late-capitalist society. The creation of self-consciousness and emancipatory knowledge14 among the oppressed is considered a viable first step towards social change. The Lukácsian perspective of this argument will be addressed below. First, another short detour to Brecht’s dialectical materialist aesthetics. Brecht’s attack on naturalism’s ‘theatre of illusion’ is informed by his rejection of the bourgeois concept of the subject as an autonomous agent who is able to transform social and empirical reality according to his or her will. The aim of his Epic Theatre is to reveal the contradictions of society and to show how objective, social structures determine and therefore limit the capacity for independent self-expression. But the gesture of showing or revealing social action and conditions is not a gesture of representation or mirroring. By not only showing the action but also the actor in the process of showing, and by making explicit reference to the materiality of the stage and the theatre as shaping factors in the presentation of the action, the illusions of ‘naturalness’ and immediacy are dispelled. Stage events lose the naturalistic air of inevitability and are revealed to be the products of theatrical and social construction. Brechtian dialectical theatre contributes to the dissolution of obsolete (bourgeois) notions of individuality, whilst also affirming an empowered sense of self. As Brecht explained: The simple fact that man can be recognised in a certain way creates a sense of triumph, and the fact, too, that he is not so easily exhaustible, that he holds and conceals so many possibilities within himself (hence his capacity for development), is a pleasurable recognition. That man can be changed by his surroundings and can himself change the surrounding world, i.e. can treat it with consequence, all this produces feelings of pleasure. Not, of course, if man is viewed as something mechanical, something that can be put into a slot, something lacking resistance, as happens today under the weight of certain social conditions. (Brecht quoted in Benjamin, Understanding Brecht 13) Bond’s work seems to create a similar humanising effect, but with the use of different dramatic techniques. Bond substitutes his method of the Theatre Event (TE) for the montage and alienation technique of Brecht’s Epic Theatre. Alienation aims to make conventional social behaviour appear strange (it de-familiarises the known) with the purpose of revealing the ideological construction of meaning ‘so that things appear as


they “really” are’ (Bond, ‘Pearl White: Notes on the TE of the Theatre Text’ in Hidden Plot 40). But for Bond the attempt to alienate a situation (to create distance from it and thereby make it rationally understandable) is less effective because it ‘does not claim to create new meanings in the way TE does’ and it ‘avoids the most important site of drama: the existential need to dramatize the self, the need for imagination to seek reason – alienation only offers these things’ (ibid. 40–1). A production which is structured according to a series of Theatre Events does not only show situations the way they are but makes a demand on the audience by adding a ‘theatrical “use”’ (Stuart, Edward Bond Letters 5 31) to the presentation of situations, i.e. by ‘using’ dramatic situations as sites for the creation (dramatisation) of subjectivity. The emphasis on the concept of rational understanding in Bond’s theory of drama is further articulated in his statement that TEs ‘make clear the cause and consequence of events, collecting the diffuseness of real life into illustration and demonstration’ (Bond, ‘Notes on Post-Modernism’ 31). In his theoretical writings Bond offers his reassessment of the Brechtian legacy in drama, drawing attention away from any unconsidered characterisation of his work as strictly Brechtian (because it is political and humanistic, dealing with social issues such as oppression, injustice, etc.). No straightforward, unreflective identification with Brecht can be made, even though the impulse underlying Bond’s dramatic work may be considered Marxist or socialist, and materialist in a general sense. Bond takes issue with Brecht’s alienation effect and his critique of Aristotelian catharsis. Brecht’s rational theatre rejects the idea of seducing the audience with a theatrical display of emotions; rather, it seeks to educate the critical faculties of the audience who are no longer expected to empathise with stage characters and actions but are encouraged to reflect objectively and rationally on what they see. In Bond, on the other hand, the concept of rational reflection involves emotions and the work of the imagination. As Tony Coult says, the ‘objective’ of Bond’s work is ‘the understanding of a process, but understanding achieved sensuously, viscerally’ (Coult, ‘Notes and Commentary’, At the Inland Sea 65). For Bond, alienation as a concept and technique is not an appropriate dramaturgical tool if the aim is to stimulate the imagination in order to generate ‘creative responses to the crisis’ (ibid. 79). An aesthetics of resistance

Bond’s attempt to rethink the relationship between drama and sociopolitical reality contains aspects of Peter Weiss’ notion of an aesthetics


of resistance. It has been argued that Peter Weiss, after an early period of producing surrealist texts, entered a ‘dialogue with the world spirit’ (Vormweg, Peter Weiss 9)15 with his experiments in documentary theatre and especially with his later novel in three volumes, Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975–81). Bond’s aesthetic project seems to entertain a similar dialogue with objectivity, which aims to counter the isolation and atomisation of the individual in modern capitalist society with theatrical images of resistance against oppression and injustice. In Ästhetik des Widerstands, following the aesthetic model of the Bildungsroman (education or ‘formation’ novel), Weiss traces an individual’s development of a proletarian class identity and artistic voice. We follow the journey of a young worker in 1930s Berlin who is active in the communist resistance milieu, joins the Spanish civil war, supports refugees in Paris, studies the history of art, escapes to Sweden where he works for the Komintern and meets Brecht. The aesthetic and the political are merged throughout – both are considered to be interconnected spheres of activity and consciousness because there ought to be ‘no art which is not based on politics, no political practice which wants to negate art’ (Vogt, ‘Versuch’ 73). Not only is the aesthetic sphere conceived as a medium of resistance, which is also a central tenet of Brecht’s dramatic theory and practice, but resistant political activity as such (political action which is geared towards revolutionary social change) has its own aesthetic. The aesthetic, for Peter Weiss, is a term for the global perception of the complexities of the human world – it is defined as a ‘view of the whole’ (Vormweg, Peter Weiss 120), as an experience and reception of reality’s complexity and potentiality. The aesthetics of resistance is therefore a perception of the world that grounds individual and personal experience in the larger context of history and society in order to achieve a consciousness of unity between individual action and collective (social) identity. Weiss’ emphasis on the necessity of art as a medium through which a sense of class consciousness can be created echoes Lukács’ socialist convictions as developed in his History and Class-Consciousness. Here, Lukács emphasises the importance of realising that social, economic and political reality is a totality in which human relations have become reified. The argument is that only a perception of human activity within a total context of relations will enable individuals to arrive at a consciousness of their positions in society. Art, in Weiss’ programme, should be considered as a means of strengthening the individual’s sense of self-awareness which ideally will result in a class-awareness and prompt effective socio-political action. The conception of art as a medium for ‘global understanding’ and consequentially


political action can also be found in Edward Bond who is equally concerned with how to think and theatrically present the socialist idea of a ‘unity of the human being with humankind’ (ibid. 110). Another factor which unites the aesthetic projects of the later Weiss and Bond is their emphasis on the problem of ‘speechlessness’ of modern existence. Weiss’s perception of a sense of isolation and disconnectedness in modern, late-capitalist society stems partly from his own personal experience of alienation and rootlessness, which he tried to negotiate in his artistic work.16 His changing perception of the role of drama and theatre in the struggle against an engulfing speechlessness is characterised, for example, in his attempt to use the theatre as a stage for the return of the repressed (for example in Marat/Sade) on the one hand, and as a stage for the radical objectification of individual action in his documentary theatre (for example, The Investigation) on the other hand. The Aesthetics of Resistance articulates the artistically fruitful tension between an urge for extreme self-realisation (self-determination which resists social pressures) and a consciousness of the political need to connect one’s alienated inner self with a larger collective unity of human beings. However, the two perspectives and histories of the self (the social and the personal) enter a series of intricate constellations, which has the effect of decentring the individual subject position (the position of the ‘hero’ of the novel) by presenting it from an epic point of view. The experience of reality as contradictory and unjust does not lead into personal neurosis or despair. Rather, despair, anguish and frustration, once identified as providing the basis for a consciousness of resistance, reveal their own distinctive aesthetic qualities. Socialist art is presented as a riposte to the speechlessness of modern experience. Bond is similarly concerned with ways of resisting, through the medium of drama, what to him is the capitalist mythology of meaninglessness and irrationality. Drama, according to Bond, has the unique ability and duty to ‘impose[ ] value on reality, to change reality by giving it meaning’ (Bond, ‘The Seventh of January Sixteen Hundred and Ten’ in Hidden Plot , 184). It may thereby resist today’s ‘[s]ocial madness [which] makes the desire for justice the practice of injustice, the desire for innocence the obsession with corruption, the desire for reason the habits of madness, the desire for love the lust of hate’ (Bond, ‘Notes on Coffee’ in Hidden Plot 166). As can be seen from this statement, Bond’s culture-critical discourse is based on a series of binary oppositions which his dramatic practice seeks to reveal, subvert and redefine. The possibility of art’s power of resistance to repressive tendencies in social reality is of course central to Adorno’s project. There are similarities


and differences between the socialist concept of aesthetic resistance to the experience of social disintegration in advanced capitalist systems (as supported by Lukács, Weiss, Bond and others) and Adorno’s notion of autonomous art’s opposition to ‘reified consciousness, which presupposes and confirms the inevitability and immutableness of what exists’ ( AT 230). The central argument is about the relationship between art and social reality and the readiness or failure of art to positively contribute to a restructuring of social totality. Lukács argues that only realism is able to ‘penetrate the laws governing objective reality and to uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society’ (Lukács, ‘Realism in the Balance’ in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics 38). For him only realist art provides an objective perspective on reality which encourages us to perceive the multifarious manifestations of social, economic and political life as a totality. Bond basically agrees with Lukács even though he does not restrict art’s ability to penetrate reality to exclusively realist forms but shows a great interest in theatrical experimentation. Adorno, too, makes reference to the notion of social totality, which to his mind is marked by the barbaric spell of ‘regressive consciousness’ ( AT 6) as an effect of the overwhelming commodity character of social life. But Adorno emphasises the negative relationship of art to empirical and social reality, which is necessary in order for art to function as a culturecritical medium. Adorno does not support an affirmative aesthetics which articulates social and ideological critique in terms of the discursive and thematic content of an artwork. He develops his notion of a negative aesthetic which considers art’s opposition to empirical reality as primarily located on the level of aesthetic form (which to Adorno is already always sedimented content and therefore ‘social’). Bond’s more recent work, too, shows individuals who struggle to resist the collective ‘madness’ of the world in order to maintain a sense of humanity in increasingly barbaric situations. However, a sense of openness to the unpredictable, which tends to destabilise dramatic form, weakens the categorical emphasis on rationality and understanding which was central to his previous work. Images of Auschwitz

In his critique of the ‘malaise’ of modern consumer society, which instead of satisfying human needs keeps manufacturing ‘wants’ and in which the ‘[i]magination is plundered to provide ingenious novelties for consumption’ (Bond, ‘The Cap’, Plays: 7 xxix), Bond argues that it is


essential for modern culture to develop a consciousness of responsibility for ‘wrong’ action. The question of responsibility is heightened and becomes intractable when the dramatic possibilities for humane action are radically limited, as is the case in plays such as Coffee, At the Inland Sea and Crimes of the Twenty-First Century . What unites these plays is the notion that in catastrophic circumstances ‘rational’ human behaviour can only be maintained through radical, often violent action. The dramatic characters in these plays confront the madness of their surrounding war-torn worlds, and the experience of a total collapse of reason is often combined with a sense of heightened self-awareness. As Bond says, ‘[t]he world I have described is often bleak and tragic, full of needless suffering, a desert of ash and grey winds. We live in a Death Culture and arm death with terrible weapons; and the most terrible of these is ignorance’ (Bond, ‘Notes on Imagination’, Plays: 7 122). The metaphor of Auschwitz is central to these plays and brings into focus Bond’s sustained engagement with the question of how to ensure the continuation of meaningful life in inhuman situations. Bond’s theatre ‘dramatises society’s critical structures’ (ibid. 121) by showing how individuals, through gestures of ‘radical innocence’, struggle to break out of the oppressive totality that contains them. Confrontations with extreme suffering are also reflected in the plays’ structures – their formal instability is expressive of the moral contradictions that the characters have to face and come to terms with. The opening of Coffee (1996), for example, is set in a plain room in a block of flats and introduces Nold (‘an engineer and part-time student’) who is irritated by the presence of a stranger, Gregory, but curiously follows him through a door which leads them both into a nightmarish ‘dark opening in a forest’ (128). They are confronted with two starving women – a frail mother and her mentally disturbed daughter – and while Gregory remains unresponsive to their plight, Nold tries desperately to return home to fetch some food, but he cannot find his way and realises that a war has broken out. The frustrating experience of being a helpless witness to the women’s painful existence turns out to be Nold’s horror and confronts him with existential questions: ‘Tell me why I’m ’ere! Tell me ’oo I am!’ (159). After his short disappearance into a dark hole, Nold emerges as a member of a unit of soldiers, led by a sergeant Gregory, whose duty is to execute civilians. The fourth scene of the play is set at the ‘floor of the big ditch’ – the extermination site, which ‘is covered with the dead and dying’ (188). Nold’s sanity is tested when he disobeys orders to kill the woman and her daughter and instead turns on the sergeant and his fellow soldier. Through the radical actions of Nold Bond tries to show


that the logic of war is ‘madness’ because it is ‘an excess of rationality. The mad [all soldiers in the play with the exception of Nold] are reduced to relying entirely on their reason’ (Bond, ‘Notes on Imagination’ 98) whereas Nold survives the madness of war because he uses his imagination (which according to Bond combines reason and emotion, judgement and value) to find a way out of the apparent hopelessness of the situation. The image of a stage heaped with naked bodies is also striking in At The Inland Sea (1997), which is the story of a teenage boy’s imaginative encounter with the horrors of the Holocaust. While the boy is revising for history exams in his bedroom, he is suddenly joined by a woman who pleads for his help to save herself and her baby from their imminent death in a gas chamber. The only way for the boy to save them is by telling a story. The play emphasises the essential ability of the imagination to structure reality and make sense of the impossible. As Tony Coult says, the play is ‘another act of witness that uses drama to keep the wound of the extermination camps open and its pain unavoidable’ (Coult, ‘Notes and Commentary’, At the Inland Sea 39). But the negativity of the dramatic situation is controlled by its aesthetic appearance – the gas chamber is not physically represented on stage. Bond’s play does ‘speak the name of the catastrophe’ (Adorno) but it nevertheless refrains from offering the audience a visual image of the catastrophe, which would only contribute to reducing its horror to an object for contemplation (and visual as well as moral consumption). However, as is typical for Bond’s work in general, the imaginary stage world created in this play functions as a ‘tool for understanding’ (ibid. 63) – not of the events at Auschwitz as such but of the role of the imagination as a counteractive and hence political force in a given historical context. Bond draws attention to the creative and paradoxically rationalising work of the imagination and he refuses to reduce the imagination to the order of the irrational and the fantastical (other-worldly). For Bond the moral, humane value of the imagination is to be sought in its place of origination – in the human mind which ‘must know the unknown as the context of the known. It makes a topography of nothingness, it is a condition of its sanity’ (Bond, ‘Notes on Imagination’, Plays 7 96). The stories we imagine are ways of constructing or deconstructing realities, modes of shaping the world or destroying it, and it is up to us (our moral responsibility) how we use our imagination. Adorno’s assertion that ‘the name of the catastrophe is to be spoken only in silence’ (Adorno, ‘ Endgame’ 249) needs to be considered in the context of his critique of the possibility of meaningful (i.e. critical,


autonomous) cultural activity in a post-Auschwitz world. It is an expression of his endeavour to do justice to the victims by refusing to objectify their unfathomable experiences. But, to speak in silence is nevertheless to speak. The onus is perhaps on the survivors (modern society) to find ways of speaking which do not violate the incomprehensible. The theatres of Bond and Barker, in their own distinct ways, can be considered as theatrical responses to this problematic – the question of how to speak about the impossible today is the question of how to imagine difference (otherness, the non-identical) in the context of an increasingly bureaucratised, homogenous social world. Bond’s claims for a ‘rational theatre’ (his politicised aesthetics of theatre), even though critical of some of Brecht’s intentions, are nevertheless an argument for the potential of art to carry a message that raises awareness about the state of the world. The ultimate aim of his theatre is the creation of an ethical and political consciousness. However, as Rancière has argued, ‘political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an “awareness” of the state of the world’ (Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics 63). Rather, political art needs to rupture the very categories of socio-politically produced meaning and disturb the ‘meaningful fabric of the sensible’ (ibid.). For art to be political, it should aim to explode the established and totalising order of meaningfulness. For Rancière, the point of political art is to undo conventional modes of perception, to re-distribute the sensible, without however reducing the political potential of art to the transmission of a political message or to an expression of the artist’s commitment. The appearance of the political in art seems to rely on an approach that recognises (without attempting to appropriate and thereby diminish) the art work’s undecidability – its status as a riddle – as will be shown in the subsequent discussion of the work of David Rudkin, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane.

3

David Rudkin’s Theatre of Myth

The work of David Rudkin, who has been characterised as a ‘dramatist of unusual daring and intensity’ (Rabey, David Rudkin 20), represents a dissenting, alternative voice in the context of contemporary British theatre. Ever since the production of his first controversial stage play, Afore Night Come in 1962 by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Rudkin has sought to redefine his art in a series of transgressive, highly individualistic and arguably political texts for the theatre and other media. The following consideration of selected plays for the stage ( Sons of Light , The Triumph of Death, The Saxon Shore, and Red Sun) examines Rudkin’s highly idiosyncratic work in the context of Adorno’s aesthetic theory and culture critique.1 Rudkin’s dramatic project intensifies a discourse of subjectivity, which – considered in the context of Adorno’s critique of enlightenment and with reference to the Freudian split subject – construes the (post-Auschwitz) self in terms of indefinition and negativity. In Rudkin’s work the discontents of the enlightenment logic are performed with unsettling intensity. His theatrical discourse of subjectivity suggests that processes of self-formation are aggressively intertwined with personal as well as cultural practices of self-destruction. In contrast to Bond, Rudkin’s work articulates the inability of rational thought to make sense of reality and subjective experience. Rudkin employs non-naturalistic dramatic techniques in order to draw attention to the limitations and insufficiency of rational discourse or, using Adorno’s critical term, of the dialectic of enlightenment. Many of his plays dramatise reason’s irrational ‘other’, thus providing dramatic expressions of the Freudian theory of the duality of the psychical self. As will be discussed in this chapter, Rudkin not only presents the labour of reason as coercive, violent and self-destructive, he also provides dramatic presentations of the modern subject as a being who is constitutively 86

David Rudkin’s Theatre of Myth 87

non-identical with itself. However, a realisation of the fundamental non-identity of the self is also the origin of a withdrawal from the status quo, and is hence perceived as a political gesture, as well as the articulation of a quest for personal freedom. Importantly, Rudkin’s art draws attention to the theatricality of the processes of subjective de-centering which come to the fore in post-idealist and late-capitalist contexts where, as Adorno has argued, they are perceived as socio-pathological effects of reification and approach the condition of myth. Rudkin’s sympathy with Adornian and Freudian ideas is also reflected in his response to the question ‘what is a work of art for at this point?’ which he was asked in a recent discussion to mark a screening of his film Penda’s Fen in 2014 (first broadcast on BBC1 in 1974). Certainly my wish for it – my intention and purpose for it – is to address itself to, to awaken [. . .] – the unsuspected within the listener, viewer, auditor; to individuate that person. Where I feel betrayed – yes, I will say that – betrayed by much, much of what calls itself cinema and television and art now, is that it somehow addresses me as a member of a homogeneous public, which I don’t think I am. So I think art’s function is to individuate, and, by that same token, inevitably, to subvert. (The Edge is Where the Centre is 54)

The Triumph of Death

One of the key concerns emerging in Rudkin’s work is the problem of the individual’s subjection to, and struggle against, totalitarian ideological structures, oppressive value systems, and the universal triumph of capital which produces a ‘withering of experience’ (Adorno, Minima Moralia 55). The characters’ confrontations with authority make apparent, in dramatic terms, a constitutive antinomy between the individual and society. However, contradictions are not resolved on the level of play (dramatic fiction), but in their ambiguity and open-endedness they may produce a consciousness of difference on the level of theatrical form, i.e. in the spectatorial encounter and the promise of emancipation (or redemption, as Adorno would argue) afforded by aesthetic semblance. In Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), Freud writes: For generations human beings have made extraordinary progress in the sciences and their applications and have secured their


domination over nature in a manner previously unknown. The details of these progresses are generally known and need not be recounted. Humankind is right to be proud of these achievements. But we have noticed that this newly won domination over space and time, this subjugation of natural forces has not contributed to the fulfilment of a perennial desire, namely the increase of the satisfaction of pleasure, and has therefore not made us happier. ( Das Unbehagen in der Kultur 53–4. Translation KG) Here, Freud addresses one of the paradoxical truths about the human condition: humankind’s progressive control over nature (both material and psychological) has resulted in enormous intellectual and practical achievements, but, so it seems, to the detriment of our general (and in Freud’s sense, sexual) happiness. Our technological and scientific feats, impressive as they are, are not only unable to offer complete answers to the questions about human existence; we are also increasingly confronted with the warning signals of the reversal of progress into regression (as Adorno and Horkheimer have also argued in their study of the dialectic of enlightenment), the most threatening today being ecological disasters and the rise of religious fundamentalist groups. Freud’s theory of the human psyche and its domination by the pleasure and the death principles informs his writings about culture, in which he discusses social and cultural developments from a psychoanalytical perspective. His definition of culture as ‘the sum of achievements and facilities which remove our life from the life of animals’, and its function as the ‘protection of the human against Nature and the regulation of relationships between people’ (ibid. 55–6) also echoes the use of ‘culture’ in Rudkin’s play The Triumph of Death (1981). Freud has shown how religious systems are considered as principal cultural achievements and how, as cultural processes, they are engaged in the transformation of human drives and the regulation of social relationships. The play’s dramatic action takes place at significant junctures in the history of Christian supremacy (the Crusades and the Inquisition of the Middle Ages) and interweaves mythic (pagan) rituals, pseudo-enlightened (but in reality: barbaric) cultural practices, and internalised Reformation work ethics, culminating in a late-capitalist (Nietzschean) rhetoric of a transvaluation of values. This involves its characters in complex processes of transformation and doubling within fluid, ambiguous frameworks of space and time. What is established throughout is the Freudian notion that the origins of cultural processes lie in a denial (repression or sublimation) of primal needs (Triebverzicht ).


Freud considers repression to be the major driving force underpinning any cultural action. The effects of the famous ‘return of the repressed’ in dreams, slips of the tongue, art (generally in places where the unconscious speaks) are felt more strongly and violently the more efficiently and absolutely the cultural undermines the natural. The ideology of the cultural can in this discourse also be identified in terms of the artificial, the non-natural, the man-made, but critical attention needs to be paid to the notions of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ as ideological constructs themselves. In the light of Adorno’s theory, no uncomplicated return to nature is possible today because the very concept of a nature that could be ‘returned’ to is fraught with pseudo-romantic notions of purity, origin, unity and harmony.2 The Triumph of Death is an enigmatic play which dramatises the concepts of resistance, compulsion and repression on a number of levels. Its problematisation of conceived ideas about the history of Christianity and Christian morality is extended to (and emerges from) a dissolution of dramatic textual conventions and a challenge of the theatrical experience. Described by Rudkin as ‘an utterly nihilistic, humourless satanic and negative piece of theatre’ (Rabey, David Rudkin 96) the play poses an attack on the Enlightenment ideology of emancipation (from myth and the irrationality of nature) by exposing its aggressive strategies of social, moral and political repression and control. The moments of resistance to a totalitarian politics of de-mystification (or rationalisation of all aspects of life) as expressed by certain characters are brutally undermined. But the violent suppression of the ‘other’, the ‘mythical’, is the result of supposedly rational and morally justified thinking. The enlightened citizens of the new post-barbaric, liberated world order have to resort to taking violent measures in the name of fighting violence (the violence of a not yet controlled inner and outer nature that is threatening humankind). Adorno identifies this paradox, which lies at the heart of the Enlightenment project, as a reflection of cognitive processes of self-formation in which the subject, for the sake of establishing and securing his or her own subjectivity, authenticity and autonomy, is coerced to use violence against the object for the sake of self-realisation. It seems that the self is locked into a circle of violence which logically it cannot escape from because in Adornian terms every cognitive act is already fraught with implications of violence. In The Triumph of Death a forest clan practices a strict proto-Calvinist work ethic but they are still in touch with nature; natural forces determine their lives, and sexual relations are not regulated yet. Yet despite the apparent lack of restrictions on social behaviour, there already


exists a moral consciousness (related to their daily needs and the cycle of nature) and they do believe in God, the Lord, but not yet in the Christ of the cross. Initially, Mother Heniot is the leader of the clan (a matriarchy) and worshipped as a representative of the Lord on earth. However, Heniot repeatedly refuses identification with God and asks her followers, Jehan in particular, to consider nature as such as a manifestation of God’s will, to look for the signs of his love in her natural surroundings rather than glorify only one person as a living God. Heniot’s speech about her origins are revealing because they lead to her dismissal of the Christian fixation on death and suffering. ‘Think no more Mother Heniot were beginning of the world. . . . I come from flesh. . . . I had a mother and a father’ (Rudkin, The Triumph of Death, 16). She emphasises her roots in the flesh, the material world, and rejects the notion that her presence on earth might be interpreted as the manifestation of God’s will, power or even love. ‘Think no more Lord moulded me from clay to gladden Him, alone in His dark earth.’ Freud states in The Ego and the Id (1923): ‘Eros, by bringing about a more and more far-reaching combination of the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicating life and at the same time, of course, at preserving it’ (40). The death drive, on the other hand, simplifies life and therefore kills it; or in other words, by removing life’s complexities, it destroys it. The Triumph of Death dramatises the destructive and aggressive work of the death drive in the socio-historical context of the Crusades of the early Middle Ages and the advent of Humanism which is linked to the cultural development of a protoEnlightenment mentality in the West. The Saracen (a term for an Arab/Muslim, and in the Oxford English Dictionary also for ‘a non-Christian, heathen, or pagan; an unbeliever, infidel; and barbarian’) operated as a symbol of darkness and danger and was used by the Christian authorities in the Middle Ages to justify their religious fanaticism and Crusades against non-Christians in the Arab world. The play does not show the Crusades as such but rather articulates the effects of Christian fanaticism on the people in Christian lands, especially on those who have not yet been successfully converted to the new faith, i.e. the pagans, heathens, practitioners of, and believers in, witchcraft and other superstitions. The role of the papacy in these processes during the Middle Ages is important (the pope played a vital role in turning the ‘holy war’ against non-believers into a political necessity) and alluded to in the play in the figure of Papatrix – a bizarre, uncanny and monstrous figure of spiritual and political authority who introduces us to the dark and savage world of the play. What is


interesting about him is the emphasis on his physicality, both in terms of the mise-en-scène and the characters’ own observations about his bodily functions. Throughout the play numerous references are made to anality, excrements, defecation and abjection. The meaning of the metaphors of light versus dark is reversed in the play. Contrary to expectations, Christianity (as a movement of spiritual enlightenment) is here associated with darkness because in its attempt to expunge the spiritual obscurity inherited from pagan, mythical practice, Christianity insists on the unifying and totalising redeeming figure of Jesus who had to suffer and die for us to live. Death becomes the prerequisite for life; life on earth cannot truly be realised because it must always remind us of the sacrifice of our Lord of love and hence we must reflect our eternal gratitude to Him through our own suffering. This is of course only one reading of Christianity, one which focuses on the context of suffering and death (examples of ‘darkness’) to which believers are bound. Another, more positive, reading would suggest that our failure to recognise and celebrate Christ’s first coming must instil in us the hope for a second coming, which would signal the creation of heaven on earth and bring about our spiritual redemption. According to this version Christians are the people of light and love, and as believers they are themselves the representatives of God on earth. The apparent opposition between myth and enlightenment that is established in the play, with the forest-dwellers as practising representatives of a pagan culture, is not finite or exclusive because at least initially (in part one of the play) both belief systems contain the seeds of their opposite. Adorno reminds us that myth is already a structured narrative, the function of which is to explain (rationalise) and order the unknown. And his critique of modern late-capitalist culture is based on the idea of a reversal of enlightenment into myth, which exposes the ideological inconsistencies of the Enlightenment project. 3 The enlightenment confidence in the absolute power of the critical and rational faculties to explain all aspects of human and natural life and to disperse any residual obscure belief in fantasy, ghosts, or magic, is itself only a ‘belief’, an ideology based on the ‘myth of mythlessness’ (see Coupe, Myth 9ff). This notion of rational civilisation’s ability to transcend the mythic by explaining away its irrationalities and inventing (radical and aggressive) measures of purging the world of the barbaric and pre-rational is a central theme in the play. Papatrix’s initial address to his people (directed at the audience) is a call to arms to defend civilisation from the menacing threat of the Saracen. Papatrix shares with us the image of the Saracen desecrating the holy city of Jerusalem and the tomb of Christ


with his faeces. The theme of anal/excretal activity is introduced by the Pope figure himself who, as he shares his dream of the Saracen with us (‘Oh children dream with me’) is sitting on his throne and literally evacuating faeces from his body. This absurd opening image of a monstrous pope-like figure (‘Face a farded skull of cancerous death’) who is engaged in ‘anal travail’ and surrounded by screaming, suffering human figures who are imprisoned in his throne and crown, casts a shadow of violence, pain and death over the rest of the play. The opening image also undermines Papatrix’s call for a Crusade against the barbaric non-believers – who must be destroyed so that ‘the Purpose’ and ‘that Will Above be given shape on earth’ (The Triumph of Death 1–2) – by exposing the residual attachment of the so-called enlightened and ‘free’ followers of the Lord (the ‘Will Above’) to the natural functions of their bodies (the will from below). Throughout the play, the sovereign characters are engaged in deathly processes of exterminating those who refuse to listen to the Will from above, but it becomes evident through the iconography of the physical stage action that a complete domination of the other is not possible. Following Adorno’s logic of the subject, such external domination would also entail an attack on the other within the self and hence imply self-destruction. The two medieval scholars Peek and Pickavance are ‘men of intellect’ who make sense of Papatrix’s slightly ambiguous speech. They apply logic to Papatrix’s definition of Man as ‘the living pattern of the Will in earth’ (2) and argue that ‘[i]f we are made in God’s Image the Saracen cannot be’ (3), which strengthens their moral supremacy and gives them additional reason to support the extermination of those who refuse to follow the ‘loving God’. The immediate necessity and urgency to implement God’s Will on earth is politicised and functions as a vindication of the endeavour of a particular socio-political group to dominate nature and human life. In part two of the play, when Mother Manus leads the tribunal that is to judge on Jehan’s pagan activities, the context of the play’s action is no longer the Crusades but the Inquisition – another historical manifestation of the cycle of violence and suppression generated by Christian doctrine. Every culture is engaged in myth-making processes which are vital for the collective establishment of a sense of cultural identity and social unity. Myths are the inherited narratives of a culture, and they need to be remembered and/or re-written, re-invented by every new generation. Laurence Coupe has identified a number of different myths (for example myths of fertility, creation, deliverance, the hero myth and the literary myth), which have paradigmatic functions in the creation of cosmic, social, cultural and personal meanings (see Coupe, Myth). With reference to the literary critic Kenneth Burke’s writings on myth, Coupe says


that ‘[b]oth making myths and reading myths imply a drive towards completion’ and that a myth is the result of a ‘pragmatic impulse’ (ibid. 6). Myths create unity, explain the past, and give meaning to human existence. The association of myth with order and the related idea of perfection establishes the connection between myth and aggression. Coupe’s assertion that the mythic ‘drive towards completion and unity can create not only powerfully imaginative stories but also systematic violence’ echoes Rene Girard’s theory of (sacred) violence as the basis (or founding myth) of society (ibid. 8).4 Adorno and Horkheimer, too, talk about the rationalising impulses at work in mythic narratives, particularly the forces of domination and exploitation (see DoE 45). In The Triumph of Death the ‘triumph of death’ denotes the victory of capitalism and its related ideologies of individualism and liberalism. The thematic links between religion and capital, myth and progress in the play are also significant because they identify the components of a discourse of origin, which affects social and cultural organisation. Robert Wilcher has argued that the play dramatises the myth of (natural) origins, or ‘a post-Darwinian version of that myth’ (Wilcher, ‘The Communal Dream of Myth’ 580) which explains the development of self-consciousness, moral awareness and religion as a result of the transition from primate to human being. The transformation from primeval ape-like man who crawls on all four legs (‘A beast of the earth. Eyes to the ground, his mirror the soil,’ The Triumph of Death 50) to Erect Man (homo erectus) is here presented as the precondition for individual consciousness and the ensuing belief in a transcendental agency. ‘Standing erect’ symbolises man’s escape from the physicality of his existence. 5 The distance between the body and the earth anticipates the conflict between man’s intellectual, spiritual aspirations and his material origins which he seeks but ultimately fails to transcend. (Stands. Head raised; nostrils sniffing a new sweet air – all of three feet above his fellow apes’ excretal odours. He looks up. New mirror: the sky. New proud notion of his biped self, reflected there. God. Who else? A Father in Heaven. (50) The basis for this new awareness is shame of one’s bodily excrements and functions. As the figure of Luther explains near the end of the play: Wait. What’s this? Soft, slithering out behind. Ape turns. Looks down. The brown snake steams. Ape wrinkles his nose. Ape is uneasy. New Father in Heaven must not know he’ll die. His Eden’s lost; and ape is Man. (50)


The Sons of Light

Repression, mastery and economic as well as religious exploitation are also central in The Sons of Light (1981), a play which foreshadows many of the dramaturgical and thematic concerns of The Triumph of Death. Set on a volcanic island in the Atlantic, the play opens with the arrival of a new priest and his three sons at a small rural community of devout Christians whose lives are, as is later revealed, ideologically and materially controlled by Sir Wendell Bain, an invisible figure of authority. The islanders’ ritualised and austere way of life in reality lacks truly Christian compassion and love, which is demonstrated in the way the folk treat Manatond’s (a respectable elder’s) mentally and physically disabled child who is rejected and verbally abused by him and ignored or patronised by others. Child Manatond’s mental condition (schizophrenia) can be considered as a psychological manifestation of the effects that moral and spiritual repression has on an individual who is scapegoated for being different, or in Kristeva’s sense ‘abjected’ – expelled from the social order. Yescanab (Stephen) is another abject in the play; his outsider position within the community is confirmed when he is asked by the new pastor to become his ministrant, which also brings to the surface the residual and violent conservatism of the islanders: ‘They hate me, at this Table o’ the Lord. All their hatred of the change, tha visit on mine heid’ (14–15). The Enlightenment ideology is embodied by Father Bengry whose intention is to shake off the islanders’ single-minded belief in a puritanical religious system, according to which God’s Will on earth is manifest in their sacrificial labour on the stony surface of this barren island. Their identity as a God-fearing, law-abiding community is held in place by Sir Wendell Bain’s authority who ‘came to cut a quarry’ (30), as Bengry reminds the islanders. He points out the fact that their dismissive and unquestioning (defeatist) moral code and work ethic are the basis on which Bain’s empire is built. In the second part the reality of the quarry and the landowner’s power becomes manifest as we enter the secret underworld landscape (the Pit) in which dehumanised ‘iron figures’ work like slaves to ‘hew this Palace of His Glorious Majesty from the rock’ (37–8). Controlled by the pre-recorded voice of a Doctor Nebewohl (presumably employed by Sir Bain) the workers are promised a life in God’s paradise as a reward for their daily labour (‘the voice of the day shall come to you. You shall arise, to joy again’ 36). Nebewohl is conscious of the necessity to create a myth of transcendence for the workers in order to ensure their productivity and keep them in line.


The parallels between the soldiers in the pit and the community’s life on the surface of the earth are clear: human beings on both sides base the meaning of their mechanical existence on the hope for redemption in an afterlife. In this respect the characters of Bengry, John and Nebewohl are comparable in their roles as mythmakers and shapers of people’s spiritual hopes and material destinies. Bengry’s expression of his anger at the islanders’ submissive belief in a God of Wrath and Death, rather than in a God of Love, leads to his eviction from the community. His project of enlightening the folk (which in truth entails the creation of another Christian myth) is carried out by his son John who descends into the underground, appears to the iron soldiers as the King of Love and frees them from their drudgery; he brings them into light, i.e. onto the surface of the earth. This self-conscious act of a mythological production of reality is bound to have implications for the lives of the community. Some lives are transformed at the end: Manatond is possessed by the beastlike FogKing, mentally disintegrates, is blinded but able to walk; and dressed in the regalia of a King he staggers away, with the conviction that he must fulfil his ‘duty’. The rest is left to the audience’s imagination, but presumably as King he will want to appear to the people as a saviour and create his own kingdom. His torn robe perhaps contains his fate. When John was freeing the iron soldiers from darkness into paradise he appeared to them as the King of light, life and love, warning them that ‘this other King, of Death, shall also come: pretending love, but angry in his heart, to turn you all to stone’. And they will know this King of darkness ‘[b]y his robe. From neck to hem, his King’s robe shall be torn’ (69). Child Manatond also experiences a transformation of self, or rather for the first time in her life she experiences herself as such. Her schizophrenia has meant that she lacks the sense of a stable identity, which is articulated in her many-voiced speech (‘voices kaleidoscopically splinter, a babel of selves. Ma! Ma! – Da! – Ma! – Sebastian! – Sheela-daughter! – Da! – Son! – Sheela-daughter, Sheela!’ 20). But her condition improves as the play progresses, probably as a result of her emotional and loving relationship with the pastor’s sons. Gradually she becomes aware of herself as an individual; she begins to refer to herself and gains mental stability. But her growing sense of self-awareness in the final act is linked to her ability to hear the voices of the slaves who have been freed and ‘pour upward, out, from the belly of the rock’ (78). It is also connected to her realisation that John has killed the King of Death who has been ruling over them. Her consciousness of the origins of her (and her community’s) false beliefs also leads to the consciousness of her


bodily self (‘What is this I am . . . ? Flesh? Hand? Breast? Eye . . . ?’) and the texture of her material surroundings, the sea. In a state of elated awareness she gives herself over to the elements in the hope of gaining an identity. ‘Deep, make me yours, then I am mine. Bring me from me, then I am. I give you me, and I am given me’ (78). Child Manatond’s schizophrenia is healed but her efforts to deal with her crisis of identity lead her to commit suicide in the sea. Her abject position in society is deeply connected with her strong emotional bonds with nature, which she turns to when she is troubled and to which she gives herself in order to end her life, or rather, to begin it in freedom from the restraints and demands of the social order. The presentation of Sir Wendell’s true project of exploitation and slavery, which takes place in an underworld (the Pit), evokes Plato’s allegory of the cave and his theory of theatrical mimesis. The slaves who work there are controlled by authorities who promise their access to paradise after life if they work hard enough. The cave myth is also an allegory of the islanders’ lives and their relationships to their unseen master and the mission of the pastor. He and his sons are expelled from the community, but this only strengthens their resilience and determination to bring light to those who are ignorant and live in spiritual darkness. The pastor suffers, he loses two of his sons, but his eldest son John, with the help of theatrical means, manages to convince the Iron people of the Pit that they have been manipulated, exploited and deceived all their lives. He puts on the mask of the King and wears his robes, and in a theatrical spectacle of pretence he manipulates the slaves. The notion of arriving at the truth through deception is highlighted and demonstrates a theatricalisation of the truth, which puts doubt on his and his father’s Christian mission on the surface of the island. Even though the play’s narrative is full of mystery and initially unexplained but eventually resolved riddles, the action does not draw to a conciliatory ending. The Saxon Shore

David Rudkin’s work is of interest in a context of Adornian aesthetics because it interrogates the notions of cultural as well as personal/psychological identity in theatrically challenging ways. The action of The Saxon Shore (1986), set on the ‘Saxon shore’ of AD 410, an area of Britain controlled by the Romans, takes place against a backdrop of cultural and political crises, and it engages with the issue of enlightenment control over nature and its resultant regressive effects on individuals. The identity of the Saxon community, politically supported by the Romans


and exposed to the dangers of the native British ethnic groups (the Celts, in the main instance), is revealed to be an illusory category and dependent on a series of repressive manoeuvres. The cultural ‘trouble’ (which Rudkin refers to in his foreword, ‘An Historical Note’) that the play alludes to, provides the locus for self-disintegration but also for a sense of self-renewal amidst a general condition of crisis. Both tendencies and developments are embodied in the character of Athdark, who has a dual life – in the day time he is a God fearing Saxon labourer, and during the night he transforms into a werewolf and unleashes repressed violence and animalistic energy. Both manifestations of his self (his official self and his abject, other identity) are an effect of the teachings of the male God, which are juxtaposed by the Celtic tribe whose prayers are directed to a nature goddess. The play’s concerns with the contradictions between social rule and individual transgression can clearly be framed with reference to Freud’s theory of social repression as developed in Civilisation and its Discontents, or with reference to Foucault’s writings about civilisation as a disciplinary process. However, my interpretive approach will draw on Adorno’s concepts of the dialectic of enlightenment and the operative critical category of the non-identical in order to illuminate the autonomous culture-critical aesthetics of Rudkin’s art. Rudkin articulates the notion of a ‘damaged’ subjectivity through Athdark’s awareness of his dual personality (‘Man outward, wolf inside’, The Saxon Shore 12) and the existential doubt and physical pain that it causes (‘I walked certain in this world, till now [. . .] Oh this wound’, 8). Damage is perceived in Adornian terms as a dialectical process involving the violence with which the self subjects the mythical, enchanted and irrational power of nature and which (as a result of the disenchantment process) turns back on the self. The Saxon community’s regression to wolf-like animal behaviour is an expression of the repression demanded by Christian religion and the political system. The more passionate and total the ideological hold on the community, as is indicated by the Saxon people’s dutiful and pious daytime behaviour, the more brutal and determined are their cannibalistic and abject night time actions. Athdark is the only member of this community who becomes aware of this transformation. For the sake of confirming his identity amidst the growing chaos of social decline and intertribal conflict, his first instinct is to escape into solitude where his belief in God is confirmed (‘God is good. He sent me this stone and wound to show me what I am’ 13). Religious belief is consequently associated with mastery, implying oppression and violence: ‘Well then I’ll master


that. By will. Bury this, it’s past and done. I shall be wolf no more’ (13). The illusion of this desperate confidence in will becomes apparent in the subsequent dramatic action which reveals the fact that repression remains unsuccessful. Athdark’s journey towards a sense of selfhood, which is a typical trope in Rudkin’s work, involves the experience of a collapse of language. Latin, the language of the occupying Roman legions, is the master language, yet Athdark struggles to learn its form and fails to internalise its meaning of superiority. His damaged and critical existence throughout this play is signified by his painful efforts to articulate (‘Ug. Ug. S – si – signa –’ 18) as well as by the physical contortions and injuries that afflict his body during the unconscious nightly raids on innocent civilians. The complex relationship between language and body enters a new dimension when Athdark is discovered by the Celtic priestess Ceiriad (a pertinent version of the Welsh noun cariad , which means love) whose romantic idealism disregards national and linguistic boundaries and focuses on the beauty of the human body (‘Saxon is a word. This looks more like a man’ 21). Functioning as a fairytale princess, she rescues Athdark, heals his wound and naturally falls in love with him, despite or perhaps because of a recognition and appreciation of their many differences (cultural, linguistic and sexual). As the soon-to-be Queen of ‘lost Britain’, she represents Athdark’s ‘other’ side. Having awoken ‘amid tinkling trees’ and being presented with the ‘image of a goddess’ (24), he is immediately taken in by the beauty of her promise of paradise. Their attraction to one another involves them pledging to learn each other’s language (‘I must learn these words of Heaven.’ ‘We must learn Saxonish’ 25) yet this interval of harmony is shortlived and juxtaposed by a scene in which the dominant symbol of the ‘Wall’ (suggesting Roman state practice of division and rule) prevails and reintroduces the binary discourse of imperial power: ‘Rome this side, chaos that. Christ here, darkness beyond’ (26). Athdark’s apparent awakening from his old murderous and unpredictable existence to a new, wondrous self (‘Yet I feel . . . I feel myself to be . . . more living than I was. . .’ 31) produces an idyllic counterpoint to the Roman Saxon community’s growing sense of danger of invasion by the Goths. Yet, the disciplining power of enlightenment thought sits deep and Athdark is still obsessed with the idea of mastery, even in the presence of Godlike harmony and beauty. But the presence of pastoral beauty (the ‘shining city’ of paradise) in Athdark’s confused mind is soon filled by a negative energy. The sweet and foul scent of burning is for Athdark a painful intrusion. He is haunted by the knowledge of the imperfection of man,


which is linked to a bodily presence, the somatic and uncontrollable underside of idealism. ATHDARK. Do not touch me! Oh . . . Athdark, what have I done? I was never dead? I am man still? Flesh, bone . . .? Maimed was I? No stone in my side. That’s somehow gone. But the pain . . . (34) The forceful return to embodied life, which is associated with a sense of awakening and healing (his wound has been healed, yet the pain persists), also means a resurrection of his bestial nature which is first invoked as a consciousness regained in the presence of the Wall: ‘Wall again. Living again. Toil again. Pain again. My lone again’ (34). The havoc and destruction that he encounters upon his return home, especially his mother’s death, trigger the monstrous wolf-existence in him, despite his initial fear of the night and its dark energy. Surrounded by the community, his darker self resurfaces yet again. The collapse of the city of Rome, and by implication the Roman Empire, implies a strengthening of the British Saxon identity and a reinforced suppression of the British Celtic groups. The release of the duty to Rome does not signify a collapse of Saxon culture but, quite the opposite, is translated into an even more aggressive duty to pursue the establishment of a purer kind of Saxon national and cultural identity. Athdark, on the other hand, is still ‘alone’ and rejects the positive and pragmatic post-Roman ideology of reconstruction (‘OLD FARMER: Everywhere it be broke, we shall restore it! Every milecastle shall be raised high again! Every tower – ’ 46). Scarred by the turmoil of the past and frightened by his recognition of unbridgeable differences between the Saxon and the Celtic communities (aggravated by his own participation in brutal raids against the Celts and his murder of the lady Ceiriad), he embraces uncertainty and risk (‘No Ark. The Flood, for me’ 49). In his final speech there is a suggestion that his embrace of insecurity is linked to his rejection of the ‘Good Word’ ethic of the rest of the community who, in their attempt to establish themselves as a nation independent of Roman rule, are bound to resort to tactics of violent oppression of their cultural ‘other’. The sword – the Roman symbol of aggression and imperial rule – is transformed into a spade which suggests the emergence of a different, productive and regenerating ethic. Hoping to awake from his wolfish other existence, ‘he is standing now, the beginnings of a man ’ (49). The split identity which Athdark struggles to come to terms with throughout the play is evoked again at the end (‘Wolf. No. Rest there


on the ground. Dream, that. I must wake now. I must wake. Stand’ 49). But Athdark’s beginnings cannot be divorced from his past, which has taught him that the danger of self-loss which he experienced as ‘wolf’ cannot be sufficiently eradicated by social, i.e. repressed, existence. It is, indeed, social existence which gave rise to the awakening of wolf, the re-emergence of the irrationality of nature. Adorno’s writings on the dialectic of enlightenment have shown that the notion of excess and irrationality (in other words: myth) becomes part of the constructions of subjectivity and identity in opposition to mythic enchantment. Because identity is founded on excess, it does not recognise firm boundaries, even though this stands in contradiction to the principle of identity construction in the first place. Process and possibility emerge as dominating forces in the construction of subjective identity which renounces the claims of authenticity and stability. With reference to Agamben, who refers to Auschwitz as ‘the irrecoverable crisis of authentic temporality’ (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz 128), one could say that Rudkin’s example of new-expressionist drama marks the theatricalisation of the crisis of subjective temporality in a (post)modernist, post-metaphysical context. These dispersals of self on the aesthetic landscapes of modern drama evoke, explicitly or not, images of catastrophe, collapse and damage; in other words, they probe the ‘wound’ which for Adorno characterises late-capitalist culture. Red Sun

David Rudkin’s play Red Sun (2003/4), subtitled ‘A Play for the Space’, presents another theatrical engagement with dialectic of enlightenment and myth. Drawing on the ancient Greek model of the hero myth (encapsulated in the figure of Prometheus), the biblical version of the creation myth (found in the Book of Genesis), and the myth of the Golem of Jewish mysticism, Red Sun articulates the impulses of violence and aggression underlying human acts of creation. An emphasis on the creative as well as destructive powers of human agency is maintained throughout the play, which reduces physical and linguistic action to a level of rawness and immediacy. The play’s desolate landscape is inhabited by the figure of Wana-Apu, ‘a tribal sorcerer or magician-priest’ ( Red Sun 11), who in a fit of rage and filled with a spirit of defiance (‘This is one horror too far our masters do’ 11) turns against his ‘gods’, makes himself leader of his oppressed people and, as a way of proving his heroism and disobedience, breathes the spirit of life into a figure of clay. This ominous beginning of the play presents the


mythical act of creation as resulting from a deeply felt sense of crisis (in this case a conflict between the human and the godlike). According to Laurence Coupe, this dynamic is present in the Babylonian myth of creation (which involves the victory of a warrior god over a monster) and also in the later Old Testament Book of Genesis where ‘Yahweh is doing battle with some force or other, notably the formless “deep”’ (Coupe, Myth 60, 109). This battle with the unknown is likely to be a battle with the gods who have deserted Wana-Apu, who as a result ‘dares’ to take on his own powers of creation. He acts like a god, creates a being out of a mass of clay and names him Adàmu who is supposed to defend the tribe against their oppressor. But Adàmu, unlike his biblical counterpart Adam, is not joined by a female companion who brings evil into the world. Wana-Apu and Adàmu remain in an intense and increasingly violent relationship which spirals out of control. The act of creation, the gesture of giving life (form) to an entity, is an act of differentiation and individuation – it implies a movement away from the formless, heterogeneous pool of nature (‘ He ventures to separate himself from the ground ’) towards an existence of singularity. Nietzsche’s characterisation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian tendencies in Attic Greek tragedy suggests that the Apollonian impulse towards individuation, formation and creation is juxtaposed with the Dionysian principle of rapture, chaos and destruction. Both are the ‘ artistic drives of nature’ (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy 24) in relation to which ‘every artist is an “imitator”, that is, either Apollonian dream-artist or Dionysian artist of intoxication, or finally – as for example in Greek tragedy – simultaneously artist of dream and intoxication’ (ibid. 23–4). Wana-Apu embodies both principles – like the Apollonian dream artist he dares to imagine and shape another being, but his own creation becomes estranged from him and dangerously out of control. From the beginning Wana-Apu is intoxicated by a sense of power and defiance which he directs towards an artistic activity, the result of which – Adàmu – himself becomes intoxicated and overwhelmed by the energy that was breathed into him, and he releases it through his violent behaviour. However, Adàmu is unable to make a distinction between Wana-Apu’s definition of good violence (Adàmu’s murder of the King’s servant) and bad violence (Adàmu’s killing of a child). In Wana-Apu’s role as Prospero-like commander of the spirit world and sculptor of human life from natural elements the Apollonian tendency is emphasised, while in Adàmu – despite his initial willingness to please his master by following his commands – the Dionysian drive seems to take over as the play progresses.


In his theory of art Adorno identifies two aesthetic moments or drives, an expressive moment which establishes form and unity, and a ‘mimetic impulse’ ( AT 54). Adorno’s expressive–mimetic model of art bears a resemblance to Nietzsche’s Apollo–Dionysus model. Adorno points out that artworks must not be reduced to either of these moments because both of them are constitutive of art. This interplay of aesthetic impulses is evident in Rudkin’s play. Adàmu’s mimetic behaviour involves him entering the natural world that surrounds him: he mimics the noises of the wild animals by trying to become one with them; he feels the beats of the jungle inside himself and immerses himself in the intoxicating dances, songs and rhythms of the native inhabitants. Wana-Apu is careful to control his access to the Dionysian realm by trying to make the most obvious form of intoxication – wine – unavailable to him. Eventually Adàmu does get intoxicated, not by alcohol, but by the act of killing which turns into a powerful idea. A sense of crisis and paradox is felt from the beginning as Wana-Apu’s grand plan is to create a killing-machine to fight the oppressors of his people. Yet Adàmu, who has been invented in order to solve a political crisis, becomes himself an embodiment of crisis and chaos. As the dramatic action progresses, the energy of violence also grows and gets out of control. Wana-Apu is unable to unmake the creature who in the end kills the master and turns on the audience with an expression of defiance: He slowly turns, sees them. Coldly, his eyes take them in, each one. ADÀMU: Poor slaves. I come to save you soon. (65)

Due to his mimetic disposition Adàmu does not successfully differentiate between different kinds of violence; he has no moral concept of murder, and what finally confirms Wana-Apu’s decision to destroy his creation (by breathing the name of death into him)6 is the troubling fact that Adàmu has acquired a taste for killing – he takes pleasure in it. The mimetic principle is extended to the role he is expected to play, namely to be a killer; except he plays it too well, which means he does not play or act at all. There is no difference between killing the enemy (the ‘badmans’) and killing a child of one’s own tribe – Adàmu is intoxicated by the very act of it: he drinks the blood of the child – the ‘wine of child’ – and thus creates a perverse unity of what he was told is the forbidden (drinking wine) and the expected (killing the enemy). Red pours out of his mouth – blood tasting like wine, the fluid of a stolen life intoxicating him; the horror, the rapture, which culminates in his newly found (Apollonian) awareness of power and control. As Nietzsche


said, the power of the Dionysian ‘seeks to annihilate the individual and to redeem him through a mystical feeling of unity’ (Nietzsche, ‘Birth of Tragedy’ 23). Adamu’s mimetic instinct – the desire to establish a unity between himself (a not yet fully self-conscious subject) and the object world, the idea of proximity and closeness – can be regarded as the mythic counterforce to Wana-Apu’s proto-enlightenment drive to create, determine and possess. To create means to define, to delimit, to draw boundaries between the known and the unknown; and as such, creation is a product of the imagination which contains an element of rationality. However, unlike Bond who establishes the concept of the rational imagination as a paradigm for drama and social life, Rudkin engages with the destructive, raw and unsettling energy of reason and consequently blurs the boundaries between irrationality and rationality. Similarly, Adorno maintains that myth already contains the seeds of an enlightenment logic – myth engages with the heterogeneity of formless nature; it imposes order onto chaos by establishing a series of narratives that try to make sense of the unknown and the irrational. Likewise, the ideology of rationality reverts into a form of myth by reducing and objectifying the individual, by forcing the self to a pre-individualistic state. The radical enlightenment idea of demythologisation (the drive to dispel superstitions and throw light onto the darkness of the mind) is revealed as a form of repression of the unknown which – and this is enlightenment’s ‘mythic fear turned radical’ ( DoE 16) – turns on the subject by subjecting him to new forms of domination and exploitation. Wana-Apu, whose creation of Adàmu was an act of enchantment but nevertheless contained the force of enlightenment, is in the end subjugated by his own creation. It is possible to consider the question of responsibility as a central discursive theme of the play, which would, as Michael Billington argues, invite the audience to realise that ‘mankind must take responsibility for its violence and cruelty without hiding behind convenient theistic alibis’ (review of Red Sun). However, I would argue that Rudkin problematises and complicates the theme of responsibility by disconnecting his characters from their social and moral surroundings and by giving the various acts of violence (the very act of creation included) a structural necessity that suspends the binary logic of moral judgement. A sense of crisis pervades the play from the beginning – when WanaApu forcefully breathes life into the figure of clay, the ‘object’ already voices its resistance, which becomes more urgent and unsettling as the dramatic action progresses and finally culminates in the reversal of the power relationship towards the end of the play. The gesture of giving


life to a clay figure itself is presented as an authoritarian, aggressive act: ‘VOICE: Do – not – do – this . . . WANA-APU: I do it. 12’ The outburst of Adàmu’s animalistic rage and insatiability (‘Child wine good! Need more. Bring!’ 46) highlights the failure of the civilisation process – Adàmu remains a creature of nature whose longing for power is not the result of rational considerations (as is largely the case with Wana-Apu) but is arrived at instinctually. The energy of the mimetic in Adàmu, like the Freudian death instinct and Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian, is aimed at a reduction of the differentiation between subjectivity and objectivity and seeks to reincorporate the individual into an inchoate primordial unity. This mimetic force cannot be solely located on the level of the thematic discourse of the play but arises from the characters’ raw, instinctual dramatic language and their forceful presence in a primordial landscape. Rudkin’s dramaturgy is subjective but nevertheless work-immanent, i.e. it receives its impulse from a willingness to follow the logic of the material itself. His readiness to ‘awake only to the formal necessities of the material itself’ (Rudkin, ‘Being an Artaudian Dramatist’) reflects a key element of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, which is both formalist and sociological. The ‘formal necessities’ of the mythical material of Red Sun give shape to a play which destabilises the boundaries between self and nature, control and terror. Communicative and representational references to empirical reality are dispensed with, yet the perceived emphasis on the autonomous quality of art nevertheless (or precisely because of its autonomy from the empirical) points like a monad to the world outside (the political) and the world inside (the personal and sexual). There is a strong modernist quality about Rudkin’s work, which is mainly reflected in the characters’ desire for authentic self-expression, the pursuit of individual experience and self-realisation in an atmosphere of social and moral restrictions. The clash of an individual’s transgressive behaviour with repressive cultural norms is also typical of Howard Barker’s work. Both writers’ projects can be perceived as extensions of the modernist emphasis on representations of subjectivity in conflict with the reified structures of life. However, the modernist impulse towards subjectivisation in new-expressionist drama is not idealist in the sense that it does not aim at new foundational constructions of identity. Rather, this work embraces the irrational and the unknowable as guiding principles for thematic and formal constructions.

4

Howard Barker’s Theatre of Desire

The Enlightenment universalises the rationalistic impulse to impose order onto chaos, shine light in the darkness, and substitute transparency and accountability for secrecy and mystery. Cultural critics and philosophers in the twentieth century (notably Horkheimer and Adorno of the Frankfurt School) have exposed the paradigm of the Enlightenment with its scientific principles of rationality and abstraction as well as the humanist principles of freedom and self-determination, as intrinsically power-driven and authoritarian. In the context of English drama it has been Howard Barker who has voiced similar reservations about the pseudo-humanitarian project of the Enlightenment and its continuing influence on modern society. Howard Barker’s work is characterised by challenging depictions of complex human emotions, and a unique poetic use of dramatic language. The following exploration seeks to discuss some motifs in Barker’s dramatic texts and theory, drawing especially on Adorno’s aesthetic theories of modernism and cultural criticism. Reference will also be made to Beckett, whose concern with literary and dramatic theory has been analysed above. It has been my contention that Beckett’s work – especially his later minimalist drama – provides the pre-condition for the emergence of the work under discussion in this study, due to Beckett’s presentation of an ‘aesthetics of failure’ which problematises the concept of artistic expressivity. His techniques of theatrical reduction and concentration, while initiating a powerful interrogation of mimetic representation, underline the idea that ‘there is nothing to express’. Beckett’s theatrical problematisations of the concept of expression can, however, also be considered as an implicit critique of the instrumentalisation of meaning in society at large. Without addressing social and political problems directly in his art, Beckett nevertheless 105


mounts a powerful aesthetic critique of the status quo. Beckett’s theatre refuses communication; it does not put forward a message which could be separated from the way it is presented and structured in order to be digested or ‘consumed’ by an audience. In fact, it is impossible to separate content from form in Beckett without diminishing the deliberate obscurity and meaninglessness of the drama. What we have to understand is, as Adorno argues, that meaning in Beckett’s work resides precisely in its inner lack of coherent meaning. And that the immanent formal processes, which subvert coherent theatrical meaning, mount a powerful, indirect (‘negative’) social critique. ‘The game with elements of reality, free from all representationality, which takes no position and finds in such freedom its happiness as freedom from prescribed business, unmasks more than would taking a stand with the intention to unmask’ (Adorno, ‘ Endgame’ 248–9, translation altered KG). Adorno concludes that experimental aesthetic form, which pays attention to the immanent lawfulness of its material, contains an artwork’s ‘objective truth’ – its relationship to empirical social reality. Beckett’s problematisation of expression has given important impulses to modern drama by opening new avenues for innovative theatrical experimentation. However, certain modern dramatists have engaged with Beckett’s aesthetic deconstruction of meaning in ways that open up the ‘truth potential’ of artworks (their possible, ambiguous, fleeting ‘truths’, rather than the objective truth-content Adorno sought to decipher). And in the case of Howard Barker, such (post)modern concerns with the decentring of meaning and truth may even lead to a positive re-evaluation of the notion of expression. As David Rabey has noted, in Barker’s ‘theatre of catastrophe’, dramatic characters are engaged in ‘compulsive process[es] of self-discovery’ (Rabey, Howard Barker: Politics and Desire 5). This seems to be a peculiarly logocentric attitude if understood in terms of a search for the (authentic) self. However, a consideration of Barker’s work in relation to Beckett and to Adorno reveals a continuation of the problem of expression in aesthetic and culture-critical terms. Beckettian traces

Beckett’s work has exerted a considerable influence on what has become known as the British new expressionist drama, 1 of which Barker is a main representative. In Barker’s case, the traces of Beckett’s aesthetic legacy are typically obscured but nevertheless present in the composition of theatrical language. To begin with, the stage worlds of a number

Howard Barker’s Theatre of Desire 107

of his plays (The Bite of the Night , Found in the Ground , Rome, for example) are reminiscent of Beckett’s purgatorial, post-apocalyptic wastelands and are essentially places of pain and suffering. But the range of emotions expressed by Barker’s characters and their possibilities for action or non-action are celebrated and painstakingly explored, whereas Beckett’s figures seem to be trapped in the prison of their own consciousness and are often in a process of psychological as well as physical regression. Even though the world surrounding Barker’s characters is also often in a process of degeneration, they do not succumb to displays of emotional paralysis but seem to be forever reluctant to accept the inevitable. Their inner struggle is a form of intense and, given the circumstances, at times suicidal defiance of the way reality presents itself to them. Barker’s characters struggle with the real and are prepared to sacrifice the terms of known, socially acceptable and expected behaviour – they are prepared to step outside the structures imposed on them by the social order for brief but intense moments of experience. To them, the meaning of life (to be alive, to need, to want) equals transgression, and their excessive impulses for self-definition and self-expression are strikingly different to the way dramatic characters and actions are shaped in Beckett’s work. Whilst both dramatists confront their characters with impossible scenarios in exceedingly impossible (and absurd) environments, Beckett’s theatrical strategy is more deterministic and fatalistic than Barker’s. In Beckett’s plays, especially in Endgame, the potentially transformational power of human will is crushed and remains buried under the ruins of a ‘fallen world’. There are no more beginnings and only endings because any hope for change is exposed as nothing more than a private illusion with no significance in the greater scheme of things. Change, however, is a key idea in Barker’s plays and the possibilities and hopes for change are often declared to be synonymous with life itself. As is shown in Bite of the Night change, though necessary, is hardly ever change for the better and moral concepts such as good or bad are subject to debate and redefinition. But Barker holds on to the notion of will as a defining and essential characteristic of human behaviour. Even though his approach might strike us as ‘humanistic’ and in disagreement with the type of postmodern sensibility that celebrates the ‘dissolution’ of the self (Derrida’s deconstruction, for example), Barker’s practice does occupy an intriguing place in contemporary theory. 2 Barker’s drama is in many ways the opposite of Beckett’s. The ‘static lifelessness’ characteristic of Beckett’s figures is denounced in Barker and carried to an extreme of self-expression and vitality, a frenzied state of hyper-activity which often only takes place in the minds of characters and is expressed


in verbal and physical chaos. It is true that the highly charged atmosphere that dominates Barker’s plays is often a powerful and unsettling manifestation of frustration and existential angst – which are part of the range of stifled emotions that fill Beckett’s stage world. But the key to Barker’s method of characterisation (which refuses to ‘psychologise’ or supply clearly definable conscious or unconscious motives for actions) is a heightened, unforgiving sense of expression. Beckett is also very concerned with expression, especially with the problem and impossibility of artistic expression in modern times, as Adorno’s analysis has shown. Adorno considers artworks as manifestations of objective tendencies in society. Therefore, Beckett’s work symbolises for him the progressive liquidation of subjectivity which is the result of a historical process (the dialectic of enlightenment). Adorno’s socio-historical reading of Beckett (and art in general) is strictly opposed to the standard interpretation offered by philosophical existentialism, which Adorno criticises for its procedure of ‘ascribing to the subject substantial and absolute authority as far as interpretations of being ( Sein) or decisions pertaining to existence ( Dasein) are concerned’ (König, Neue Versuche 31, translation KG). This seems to be at odds with Barker’s insistence on the superiority of self-determination over and above social, collective existence. However, I do believe that there are striking similarities between the philosopher of art and the writer of ‘catastrophic’ plays. These concern Adorno’s and Barker’s shared critical interests in questions pertaining to the development of Western civilisation, the contemporary condition of consumerist culture and its relationship to advanced capitalism. Adorno’s views on these matters permeate all his writing on art (especially music) and his late philosophical texts, but are succinctly expressed in the chapter on the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment , as discussed above. Adorno’s analysis of modern society and culture is rather pessimistic. He deplores the commodification of artworks and the futility and impotence of artistic oppositions to the totalisation (the lack of meaningful difference and unique experience) of our life world. Adorno’s crushing critiques of the pseudo-individualistic attempts of certain art forms (he takes jazz as an example) to transcend the materialistic spell of consumerism have become notorious and are often quoted in order to denounce him as a bourgeois cultural conservative. According to Adorno, no revived avant-garde or new revolutionary development in the modern arts could break the spell of commodification and those art forms that proclaim to do so (for example, live art movements in performance with the neo-surrealist and politically motivated agenda


to abolish the boundaries between art and social reality) cannot really achieve their aims but remain trapped in the repressive system. It is a system which, naturally, promotes liberalism and equality, but does not, indeed cannot, provide a platform for the truly different voices without coming into conflict with the laws of its own political and social project, which is democracy. Art is defined in this society as a product which, like every other commodity in the liberal marketplace, is produced for the purpose of effortless, ‘easy’ consumption. As argued by Adorno, culture has been debased to an industrial product, a commodity. But ironically this is consistent with the ‘rational’ spirit of Western civilisation, which has shown its chilling skill and determination to pursue ‘logic’ by organising and carrying out the extermination of human life on a massive industrial scale. Adorno is aware of the stifling rationality of the present cultural climate which is dominated by a consumer ethics of exchange-value and product viability. Given our materialistic outlook on life today, the deliberately irrationalist tendencies of much of modern art can, in line with an Adornian analysis of art, be interpreted as being more than a mere negative reaction or resistance to the status quo. The history of art can be defined in terms of action and reaction – one artistic movement reacting against another; the avant-garde reacting at once against the outmoded and ‘dead’ practice of a previous traditional movement and also to the repressive tendencies in social systems. An Adornian reading would propose that art and society are linked more intricately than that. The notion of the artwork as a windowless monad is introduced as a metaphor for the necessarily indirect relationship between (what Adorno would term authentic or truthful) art and society. As we have discussed, art does not easily mirror social tendencies or react against them by consciously engaging with political questions (such as attempted by socialist realism). The effects created by self-proclaimed social art are in most cases too clear and unambiguous, too direct and straightforward to induce any deeper, unsettling criticism. The type of art that Adorno champions and defends in his writing is the type of ‘high-brow’, intellectual art that goes against the grain of its popular, consumerist counterpart. Adorno’s examples (Schönberg, Kafka, Beckett, for example) used to shock the audience at the time and continue to disturb modern audiences who are used to an unassuming art that celebrates and harmonises reality rather than complicating it. But the irony is that even formerly difficult, uncompromising, challenging art such as twelve-tone music and the Theatre of the Absurd, have been assimilated by the culture industry and continue to be marketed,


promoted and consumed at an enormous speed and with increasing interest. The culture industry is rapidly expanding its repertory and responding to the seemingly diverse tastes of audiences who no longer shy away from truly difficult art because what was once difficult and transgressive is today celebrated for exactly those qualities. It seems that difficult art, which transgresses borders and is challenging, is in vogue today; but (as Adorno would say) because it is popular, it is false. Adorno’s verdict on the possibility of truly transgressive art today is pessimistic because he is sceptical of the strategies with which the culture industry approaches art, namely by putting the stamp of economic viability and social impact on every product. And it seems that no matter how challenging an artwork is, once it enters the claws of the industry, it becomes a victim to the processes of the media machinery. Today we perceive and consume art only as a commodity. The channels by which art reaches us – media, museums, theatres – are all commercially oriented and therefore adhere to the rules of capital. It would therefore be an illusion to believe that art were possible outside the terms created for it by the industry, the commodity system. However, this is not a proclamation of the ‘end of art’. Adorno points to the paradoxical necessity for artistic production (the ‘need for expression’) when he says: ‘Whoever pleads for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be’ ( ND 367). Adorno’s bleak depiction of the contemporary cultural scenario is fuelled by his criticism of the ways in which post-Auschwitz societies refuse to deal with their catastrophic past. The prevalent attitude is to forget what has happened and find some sort of reconciliation with the crimes of the past by using the psychological strategies of repression and denial. According to Adorno even modern art and philosophy fail in view of the false totality of a ‘culture [that] has failed’ ( ND 366) because their mutual strategies of radical deconstruction are guilty of complicity if their sole purpose is to arrive at some ontological explanation of Being (in the terms of Heidegger). According to this analysis, the ontological tendencies in philosophy as well as the existentialist concerns in art are manifestations of a desire to transcend the cultural status quo. Thus, the self-proclaimed post-metaphysical agendas of modern art and philosophy – their rejection of universal categories and their mutual pursuit of the particular and phenomenal – are in danger of turning out to be a new kind of metaphysics if they deny the ‘relation of their allegedly pure categories to the social substance’ (ND 368). Adorno does not propose a


clear new strategy about how to deal with the current situation. In any case, every theory of culture has to be aware of its complicity with what it sets out to criticise, and only an artform or philosophical system that shows this kind of self-reflexivity and awareness of its own limitations or ‘guilt’ can be considered ‘authentic’ in Adornian terms. Adorno’s rejection of philosophical and aesthetic attempts to search for new origins or new beginnings is in many ways also a rejection of the existentialist search for the true self or the Absolute in Being. Barker’s plays assume a position that in many ways represents a mixture of Adornian and ontological viewpoints. He positively relates to Adorno’s analysis of today’s ‘historical state of the spirit’ as representing a ‘universal guilt context’ (ND 372). In dramaturgical terms this is evidenced by Barker’s technique of imprinting the laws of society on the characters’ bodies and their language. But the very fact that his characters refuse to be silenced by the system, however cruel and authoritarian its laws, seems to indicate an openness to the possibility of escaping from the spell of the administered society. Barker has repeatedly commented on the impossibility and illusion of reconciliation between individual and society, but in the light of the above I would contend that the struggles for self-definition and self-recovery that many of his characters engage in point to the work’s suggestion of a possible, if undefined, transcendence of the system. In a lot of cases this potential and always painful ‘escape’ takes the form of self-interrogation and self-criticism. And even if socially and politically nothing really changes in their worlds, at the end of the dramatic narratives the characters are emotionally transformed, often in the sense of being profoundly stirred, by the experiences they have encountered on their individual journeys. These journeys, however, do not come to a clear end; they are not undertaken with any hope for closure, reconciliation or redemption in mind. This may contradict my previous assertion that Barker opens the possibility for an escape of the self from the reifying structures of society. But the apparent contradiction undoes itself if one realises that the ‘escape’ Barker’s characters hope to undertake is in itself both illusory (they ultimately cannot escape society, because there is no way of transcending or overcoming the spell of society) and necessary for their self-understanding. Their hopes for change and transformation, which fuel what I would describe as the characters’ escapist attitudes, are futile; but the very fact that Barker’s characters continue to struggle, desire, question, criticise and doubt, can be interpreted as their individual way of refusing to succumb to the dehumanising principles of a damaged culture. This dialectic relationship between


self and society, individual and nature, ‘I’ and ‘other’ contributes to the overall effects of ambiguity and enigmatic indeterminacy which pervade much of Barker’s work. Barker’s theatre and theory comment (albeit indirectly) on the cultural processes of a materialistic, increasingly reified society, in which human agency and individuality have become subject to the pragmatic socio-economic laws of commodification and the dehumanising practices of postmodern techno-science. But like Beckett and Adorno, he remains sceptical of politically engaged art’s attempts to intervene and ‘change society’ by employing a radical political vocabulary of theatre. In any case, the notion of artistic ‘intervention’ in socio-cultural problems implies taking an action in a situation that does not involve one – for only if the art which one attempts to use in order to criticise society is considered to be removed from society itself, would it be possible to ‘intervene’ in the first place. But the reality is that the modern artist cannot ‘step outside’ the social/cultural/economic context in which s/he works. Art is, as Adorno says, fait social – thoroughly mediated by the society in which it is produced. It would therefore make little sense to expect modern art, including theatre, to bring about radical changes in society. However, this attitude is defeatist and can lead to the assumption that most modern art is only as ‘damaged’ as the society surrounding it and that it therefore is unable to hold our attention. But for all its connections with society, art does not ‘mirror’ society as it is; it is never a coherent representation of the external world but assumes a degree of autonomy and distance. Adorno calls this necessary tension and contradiction between the two moments of art (art as autonomous and art as fait social) the ‘double character of art’. Only by recognising art as being simultaneously autonomous and social, can one avoid the ideological pitfalls of radical formalism (aestheticism) on the one hand, and social realism on the other hand. This theoretical position should not be misinterpreted as a call for ‘moderation’ in art – as if it were possible to clearly differentiate the social from the aesthetic elements (or the ‘mimetic’ from the ‘rational’, to use Adorno’s terminology) and create a harmonious balance between the two. This is neither desirable nor possible because these two dimensions of the artwork are intricately interwoven, as demonstrated by Adorno’s celebration of the potentially radical social commentary of autonomous, hermetic art. Barker, too, seems to defend the autonomy and aura of ‘difficult’ (Adorno would use the word ‘authentic’) art for its social potency, and in his case theatre appears like a refuge from the intellectual numbness spread by consumerist art.


Minima Moralia, Adorno’s critique of the decline of individual experience and expression in the context of automated existence in mass society, is neither systematic in its selection and discussion of examples of ‘damaged social life’ nor does it provide the reader with concrete suggestions for resistance or escape. However, the seemingly unmethodical approach of Adorno’s engagement with the problem of the self in late capitalist (post-Auschwitz) society tries – in terms of form as much as content – to atone for the pressures of systematisation and domination which immobilise the individual spiritually as well as physically. Adorno’s thoughts are typically composed as a series of short essays, aphorisms and text fragments, which indicate that intellectual form can no longer make claims to metaphysical wholeness or absolute truth. The notion of truth, however, is not entirely absent from Adorno’s project; his culture critique is directed at a concept of ‘false truth’ which is manufactured and controlled by the culture industry. The models of individuality and freedom offered by the mass media are not only anachronistic but also deceptive, because the economic model of ‘exchangeability and substitution’ has precisely become the basis according to which personal relations are conducted. Adorno warns us that we live ‘in a phase when the subject is capitulating before the alienated predominance of things’ ( MM 76). The culture industry creates the illusion of autonomy, subjective freedom and choice, but these idealistic claims are in reality negated by the very material conditions on the basis of which modern life is organised (the economic principles of exchange, division of labour and maximum productivity). Adorno’s contributions to the debate about the fate of individuality in the culture industry, which also engaged other members of the Frankfurt School (notably Horkheimer and Marcuse), 3 are informed by his own personal experience and childhood memories of growing up in a pre-war Germany which was already nurturing a fascist mentality. The legacy of the Nazi regime is, indeed, a running theme of Minima Moralia, which draws attention to the continuing and growing (but largely unnoticed) threat to individuality and difference. As a result of social pressures, a stamp of sameness is put on human beings and the mass media propagate pseudo-individuality. Adorno looks for the damage these objective developments exercise on the individual psyche and he goes as far as identifying them as remnants and intensifications of fascist tendencies that the Western world prides itself to have got rid of. What he calls the ‘objective madness’ ( MM 164) of the world is obscured by the illusion of authenticity and independence spread by the ideology of a democratic world. Adorno’s project of critical theory seeks therefore


to disclose the inhumanity and violence underlying the so-called enlightened, progressive, liberated modern world. But in this respect his critique of contemporary society (which he calls barbarous) uses the same cognitive tools as the Enlightenment itself, which was concerned with a disclosure of the darkness and violence at the heart of myth and superstition. Except, Adorno argues that the Enlightenment project of disenchantment and rationalisation was destined to fail because it trapped the autonomously thinking subject in a circle of domination (of nature, the other and the self). Barker’s Arguments for a Theatre (1997) is an interesting combination of dramatic theory, social criticism and personal reflection on his work. It not only sketches the aesthetic qualities, thematic interests and moral consequences of a then ‘new’ British theatre but also delineates the relationships and contradictions of this new theatrical practice with the dominant cultural mode of late-capitalist consumer society. Barker, very much like Adorno before him, defines the contemporary cultural mode as authoritarian and totalitarian in its propagation of false humanistic ideals and its hostility towards individualism. The conventional theatre of today is largely a form of entertainment and its use and function are solely determined by the standards of economic viability. Quite willingly, the mainstream theatre in this ‘age of populism’ (Barker, Arguments 106) submits to the laws of the culture industry; in fact, theatre itself has been turned into an ‘industry’, churning out aesthetic ‘products’ and disseminating them on the cultural market for general and more or less effortless consumption. Needless to say, this kind of anti-capitalist cultural pessimism has been the driving force of many art movements and practices, such as happenings, political and participatory performance art, Boal’s ‘invisible theatre’, etc. These are manifestations of what one could call ‘neo-surrealist’ strategies to eradicate the boundaries between art and life, with the implicit, or in Boal’s case explicit, aims to engender change in society at large. However, for all their anti-capitalist motivations and cultural pessimism, Barker’s theory and practice cannot be ‘applied’ to solve social problems. Quite the contrary is true. His theory of theatre very much upholds the notion of aesthetic and artistic autonomy. Like Adorno, he privileges the hermetic status of art – its relative remoteness and difference from empirical reality – as a possibility for the emergence of a social critique out of the aesthetic sphere. Precisely because it does not accommodate to the tastes of the majority and because it refuses to communicate unambiguous messages, Barker’s theatre can be considered as political and subversive.


This dark, enclosed space, detached from the world, is a laboratory of human possibility. It has religious connotations, but whereas religion affirms disciplines, restrictions, theatre explodes them. (Barker, Arguments 221) As has been shown above, Bond’s dramatic project can be read as an attempt to restructure public morality and recapture our sense of humanity and personal as well as collective freedom. Barker, to the contrary, rejects the need for a theatre that presents the audience with the tools for their collective moral regeneration; he does not embrace theatre as a medium for education or pure entertainment. His theory of theatre could not be further removed from Schiller’s notion of theatre as an institution for the education of public morality. In his critical writing about culture Barker distances himself from the dominant liberal-humanist conception of theatre and art as a celebration of communitarian values. Instead, his is a theatre of uncertainty, ambiguity and radical individuation. Rather than celebrating ideas and practices of collective togetherness and participation, his theatre evokes a sense of individual difference and inwardness, for it is the ‘task of theatre [. . .] to return the individual to himself’ (ibid. 23). This echoes Rancière’s perception that ‘in a theatre, in front of a performance, just as in a museum, school or street, there are only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them’ (Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator 16). Barker’s theatre professes to disturb and contradict, rather than celebrate, affirm or explain; it is difficult and intellectual and resists ‘easy consumption’; it ‘complicates life’ (Barker, Arguments 97), exposes suffering, discovers the beauty of pain and the violence of love. By confronting the spectator with irrational dramatic actions and a complex poetic language, this ‘theatre of catastrophe’ seeks to disrupt an audience’s moral certainty and ideological security. These effects are, however, not consciously sought after; they are the result of a spectator’s individual, personal, almost sacred encounter with the transgressive, instinctual actions of the performer. Barker does not subscribe to the definition of theatre as a place where an audience’s moral values are shared communally. Neither does he believe that the effects of tragedy should be to purge the audience of socially undesirable emotions by instilling pity and fear. The experience of tragedy is essentially individual and particular; it confronts the spectator with ‘the unbearable – literally, what cannot be borne’ (ibid. 144). Because modern culture wants an art that either educates or entertains (and preferably does both), the


most popular art forms (such as the musical) are accessible, celebratory and optimistic. The transformative values of the tragic experience are therefore not recognised, for tragedy means ‘incomprehensible pain’, yet ‘society has an institutional investment in the eradication of pain and the elimination of tragedy from the sphere of art’ (ibid. 146). Barker argues that tragedy can have a subversive effect on performers and spectators. His theory of tragedy is different from Aristotle’s in the sense that Barker does not consider tragedy’s main social function to be the cleansing of a spectator’s negative emotions or dangerous desires. On the contrary: the effects of tragedy on the spectator are not pre-determined. Barker is sceptical of the so-called liberating and revolutionary effects of communal reception and collective experience. For Barker, the only significant and valuable aesthetic experience is that of the individual spectator – it is a private, personal experience, which cannot be evaluated in general terms. Adorno, too, is sceptical of art that accommodates itself to the audience’s preconceptions and expectations. This type of art criticism has often been called elitist, aloof and difficult because it does not put forward any humanistic messages and it is not celebratory. Barker proposes his own version of tragic theatre, namely a ‘theatre of catastrophe’, which rejects the concepts of use-value, communality, enlightenment and clarity. His is a theatre that ‘prefers darkness, if only to separate the audience from itself, and oblige the individual to confront the pain on the stage in isolation’ (Barker, Arguments 57). By turning the stage into a platform where ‘wrong actions are passionately performed in pursuit of self-consciousness’ (ibid.) and where contradictions remain unreconciled, the theatre of catastrophe empowers the individual spectator to make up her own mind and actively engage in an imaginative creation of meaning. At the same time this speculative and obscure theatre instils a sense of moral anxiety in its audience, which might lead to a revaluation and potential reorganisation of the dominant ethical landscape. By confronting the spectator with the irrational and unsettling will of stage characters in an unashamedly direct, expressive and intimate manner, Barker allows the spectator to become a privileged witness of forbidden actions and ‘criminal’ thoughts. He or she may then feel ‘provoked and alerted, and launched unwillingly into considerations of morality’ (ibid. 60). Barker’s work tries to resists the dominant humanist ideology of culture, which denies its audience experiences of the tragic, catastrophic, ugly and painful. And his dramatic theory and practice ultimately (if indirectly) articulate a critique of the reifying and stultifying cultural


strategies at work in postmodern capitalist society. Barker’s ‘antimodern’ project shows similarities with Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the cultural movement and spirit of the enlightenment. As already discussed in an earlier chapter, Adorno and Horkheimer follow the trajectory of reason (rational subjectivity) from its early, necessary function of liberating the self from Medieval irrationality and darkness, to rationality’s regression into a repressive tool for the subjugation of the self. To the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment Auschwitz is both symbol and gruesome reality of the reversal of reason; the atrocities of the twentieth century are the shocking revelations of the so-called ‘enlightened’ spirit of Western culture. Adorno’s philosophy, which according to Jameson ‘prophesies catastrophe and proclaims salvation’ ( Late Marxism 231), is strikingly evocative of Barker’s own theatre of catastrophe. ‘The dreams of reason bring forth monsters’ 4

For Adorno and Horkheimer, the concept of enlightenment is understood as a form of progressive rationality which ‘has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty’ ( DoE 3). However, the scientifically driven demythologisation and disenchantment of the world, which was deemed necessary for the emancipation of humanity from the threats posed by uncontrolled natural forces, resulted in new forms of domination and exploitation. Ultimately, the enlightenment is self-destructive, for it encourages human beings to ‘learn from nature [. . .] how to use it in order to wholly dominate it and other human beings’ ( DoE 4, translation altered KG). The process of enlightenment forms a dialectical relationship between self-definition and domination, control and alienation, freedom and mastery. For Adorno, art is also part of this dialectical process because the construction of the work of art is on the one hand an expression of mastery and control, and on the other hand it allows the self to experience nature as an object of desire freed from domination. The possibility of affective self-abandonment in the work of art signals what Adorno calls the ‘remembrance of nature in the subject’ ( DoE 40). This anamnesis of the ‘other’ was part of Romanticism’s critique of the Enlightenment revolution of light which disregarded the transcendental, spiritual and unconscious dimensions in favour of a profane, scientific and pragmatist rationality. Goya’s place in this debate is not easily determined: was he a supporter of the Enlightenment ideals of reason and progress, or working in the spirit of Romanticism’s return of the repressed?


Goya’s paintings of his late period (the ‘black paintings’, Caprichos, and the Disasters of War series) are fraught with deep and unsettling impressions of cruelty and pain. Yet, considered against the backdrop of the Enlightenment’s ideology and politics (within which Goya was operating), the portrayed acts and effects of war violence can also be read as ironic comments on the actual disaster and darkness that is spread by the instrumentalist ideology of so-called humanist illumination. The artist responds to the incongruous depths of the irrational mind and his art embodies a reality gone astray. Goya, the alleged supporter of Enlightenment ideals, expresses the excesses and ultimate limits of emancipated knowledge, but neither in a moralistic tone nor within the framework of realist representation. The work says: ‘[s]uffering remains foreign to knowledge’ (Adorno, AT 18). A dark, uncompromising imagination – a fascination with the monsters of the unconscious – fires these works. They give shape to a threatening and menacing yet also frustratingly impossible void that is opened up by the reversal of instrumental rationality into forms of irrationality. 5 Barker’s work, too, evokes the dialectic of reason: many of his plays deal with the consequences of extreme forms of rationality. The grotesque masks, wounded facial expressions and mutilated bodies of Goya’s paintings also resurface in some of Barker’s drama, which contains violent, selfseeking, compulsive and tragic characters. In his libretto for the opera Terrible Mouth (1992; music by Nigel Osborne) Barker engages with the figure of Goya and his art in a theatrical form which emphasises the contradictions of human nature. Goya, who is described as ‘a visionary’, becomes an observer of war atrocities which he neither celebrates nor protests against. He is deaf and haunted by an interior voice which is externalised and embodied as a separate character.6 His deafness confines him to a solitary, non-communicative existence which evokes ‘No god who might explain why pain is necessary [. . .] No theory of the higher cause’ (Barker, Terrible Mouth 7). His encounters with the maimed bodies of atrocities reveal and confirm a personal need for transformation through suffering (‘I needed my sickness / and the land it too desired pain’ 6) and a rejection of former identifications as satirist and role model for enlightenment idealism. Above all, he is motivated by the desire for an encounter with the opacity of the human body: ‘The power of the flesh is so exterior! What of her bowel, what of her lung, the red rush of her kidneys! [. . .] Must love the meat, must love the blood!’ (5). The ‘human being under the skin’, which according to Nietzsche ‘is for all lovers a horror and unthinkable, a blasphemy against God and love’ (The Gay Science 122), is the focus of


Goya’s fascination with the transformation of the body in pain: ‘What shape might you become / What shape / Under the hand of hate?’ (Terrible Mouth 12). Goya witnesses the decline of an old world and the rapid emergence of a new, revolutionary political order. Images of atrocities and suffering – represented by a ‘chorus of the maimed’ – unite the old and the new in a temporal and spatial continuum of catastrophe. Goya’s response to the negativity of this darkened world is active and passive, involved but also withdrawn, participating and refusing to do so; in other words: he paints. Above all, it is the response of a solitary figure who thinks and feels too much, one whose response to suffering is suffering. As Adorno notes, ‘[i]n its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it’ ( AT 19). Barker inscribes Goya’s phenomenal reality of war and suffering with poetic language not in order to aesthetically mediate, communicate or make sense of the fraught presence of the extreme body, but in order to ‘retain’ its otherness as a historical trace of suffering within subjectivity. The struggle of the subject in Barker’s drama is advanced to such a degree that living in the ‘face of despair’ (Adorno, MM 247) means neither abnegating the notion of self nor fetishising it as a refuge for the expression of individuality. In Barker’s work, the subject dances on the precarious fault-line between appearance and disappearance. When the extreme body truly appears it overwhelms us because we sense the transcendental moment of its realisation. We try to ‘retain’ the presence of the body through our sensation of it in the hope that our sensation may affirm the appearance of the Other – the evocation of a ‘more’, as Adorno would say, a metaphysical ‘as-if’ without which our relation to the body and the material world would remain on the level of positivist pragmatism and reductive determinism. The Power of the Dog

The contradictions of history are more directly explored in Barker’s The Power of the Dog: Moments in History and Anti-History (1982), which evokes the irreconcilable and complex nature of absolute, totalitarian power. The play is set on the Eastern front of World War Two and, as the subtitle suggests, presents a dramatic discourse on the contradictory progress of history. The makers of history – Stalin and the executors of the communist ideology – come into contact with a fashion model (Ilona) and a photographer (Victor) who travel a war-torn landscape of loss and


suffering. They take photographs of atrocities but do not ideologically align themselves with the doctrines of the Party. Their movements and actions are neither rationally defined, nor do they conform to prescribed socialist objectives. Even in their occupation as photographers they fail (and in doing so: refuse) to demonstrate an aesthetic programme. They are seemingly driven by personal memories (Ilona’s search for the body of her sister triggers memories of their childhood), and motivated by a desire to escape from reality (all Victor really wants to do is sit in a bar in New York). Their confrontation with the comrades intensifies their hazardous way of life but it fails to elicit the expected (politically engaged) responses from them. At their conscious risk they continue to evade the power of history even as they are enlisted to photographically record the enemies of the Party shortly before their execution. Ilona and Victor resist the movement of history, but they do so seemingly, not actively. Their resistance is not motivated by an ideological anti-communist programme; their simple presence as non-conformists signifies their resistance. They are the moments of anti-history, and if one adopts the Hegelian (and Marxist) notion of history as the progression of a consciousness of the Idea (freedom, equality, socialism), Ilona and Victor can be regarded as representing forces of transcendence. However, their desire to go beyond the real is, as mentioned above, devoid of a programme or any clear direction; it does not even display a conscious turning against the historical status quo (that would involve a series of political gestures). Even though logically every transcendence or movement of ‘going beyond’ only becomes recognisable as such when the ground or basis for transcendence is established (i.e. when it is made clear what is being transcended), their personal definitions of that ground of resistance is not articulated either. They are the two aimless dancers at the brink of history and time, but their lack of ideological direction is also the root of their innocence – a quality which is the paradoxical result of their encounter with the dehumanising face of war. Sorge is attracted to Ilona because she is ‘unspoiled by History’ ( The Power of the Dog 53). His sexual desire for her is a desire for the irrational, the Adornian non-identical, the Other which cannot be explained according to the laws of a communist logic. Even Stalin at the end of the play is drawn to her, and she is drawn to him, but this attraction remains unexplained. It is a manifestation of total power’s attraction to that which escapes its absolute control – but this fascination is necessarily short lived: the allure of the Other, the not-yet-subsumed, dies with the forceful reduction of difference to sameness. If interpreted in this way, Stalin and Ilona’s embrace at the end of the play, rather than


symbolising some sort of reconciliation, acquires an air of inevitable destruction – it signals the destruction of totality (the total ‘power of the dog’, the tyranny of history) because once the non-identical element is subsumed by totality it cannot but leave a trace, a destabilising force which is the moment of the future. Ilona falls into Stalin’s arms – history claims its other; ultimate power is asserted without violence, but this gesture also signifies the end of time because the future as defined by the executors of absolute power is timeless and motionless. The communist ideal of absolute freedom is only possible if history is erased because the absolute cannot survive in a context of contradiction and negativity – the absolute commands stillness, lifelessness; in other words, the absolute demands the end of history . The Clown’s words to Stalin – ‘the more resistance you encounter, the more effective yoo are bein’!’ (6) – suggest that total power requires forces of resistance, which it strives to eliminate to ensure itself of its absolute authority. But the absolute power insisted upon by totalitarian leaders can never be fully realised because it has always already become the breeding ground for antagonistic forces within society, which totalitarianism necessarily perceives as a totality. Totality (totalitarianism) and antagonism (resistance, difference) exist in a dialectical relationship, one necessitates the other, and if one loses its insistence on realisation the other will also lose the ability to exert its influence and power. Slavoj Žižek, in his critique of the ‘new liberal-democratic tolerant multiculturalist hegemony’ ( Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 241) has argued that the waning influence of effective antagonistic action in the postmodern era is the consequence of a refusal to conceive of society in terms of identity and totality. Žižek insists that the postmodern celebration of multiplicity and radical heterogeneity in all aspects of life, praxis and theory, however liberating and positive it may seem, needs to be thoroughly examined for its implicit ideological content and the hegemonic strategies of exclusion that it is forced to invent in order to guarantee the viability of ‘this very One, this common field within which multiple identities thrive’ (ibid.). Far from successfully formulating a social discourse that is able to do away with notions of identity and unity, the postmodern pseudo-liberal impulse to tolerate an excess of difference and diversity is contained within the ideological framework of liberal-democratic capitalism’s inability to accept radical criticism in the form of ‘any Leftist radical alternative’ (ibid. 242). In Barker’s play, totalitarianism (represented by the figure of Stalin and his executive force) reveals its obsessive need for control and selfrenewal. However, those who are burdened with the political pressure


to shape history according to the communist ideal are afflicted by paranoia and other signs of emotional instability. Above all, there is the ubiquitous fear of being unable to ‘solve the contradiction’ (49). Stalin, the God of the party whose immortality has long been established, is nevertheless apprehensive about mortality. His melancholia (‘I feel miserable, why?’ [7]) gives way to paranoia (‘Somebody is . . . against me . . .’) and hallucinations of being wiped away by millions of waiters. He is deeply worried about the possibility that his absolute power in the present historical moment might not be a sufficient guarantee for his posthumous honour. His existential question ‘Who will know me when I’m dead?’ (14) initiates the search for a photographer who can capture his truth. Stalin’s obsession with representation is also articulated in his comments about musicology and the role of the artist in the communist state. He is convinced that a certain amount of political pressure is needed in order to ensure the artist’s acceptance of the morals of the social totality, which is allegedly necessary for the production of high quality works of art. Stalin’s metaphor for the interference of the state into the artistic creative process is the activity of tapping a boiled egg: ‘I have yet to meet an artist who did not benefit from being tapped’ (36). His speculation about whether socialism could produce composers in the West (STALIN: Are there any American composers? ZDHANOV: No. STALIN: Do you think socialism would produce some? 37) leads him to question the orthodox Marxist doctrine of the exclusively economic and material origins of superstructure phenomena such as culture and art. He wonders whether there are other factors apart from purely economic ones that determine the difference of musical form in different contexts. He ends his reflections on materialist aesthetics thus: ‘I am sceptical that the introduction of the collective economy to the United States would produce a Shostakovich’ (38). Barker’s fictional Stalin’s insistence on the judgement of the quality of a work of art in terms of political propaganda and social usefulness is in line with what Terry Eagleton (in his essay ‘Towards a Science of the Text’) identifies as the relatively ‘pure’ entry of political ideology into the texts of socialist realism. In the case of Stalinism [. . .] aesthetic categories (‘socialist realism’) bear a peculiarly direct relation to ‘general ideology’, producing modes of aesthetic discourse which seem merely to mime ‘general’ ideological modes. Even with such a work, however, there can be no question of reducing textual to ideological discourse. (Eagleton, Marxist Literary Theory 310–11)


Stalin shows some awareness of the complexity of the relationship between artistic creation and economic circumstances as well as political ideology, despite his previously self-congratulatory talk about the effectiveness of tapping the artist’s head. There are other questions that concern Stalin and seem momentarily more important than the pressing landlord question, for example the problem of the impossibility of objectifying emotional responses to musical structures. Stalin recounts how he was instructed by a particular piece of music to take a political action which turned out to be of historical significance (indeed, like all his actions). He mistrusts the intellectual’s formulation of a theory about the categorisation of possible emotional responses to melodic structures and capriciously announces the solution to the landlord question: ‘Shift them to Transcaucasia’ (38). The swift and unreflective nature of this decision contrasts sharply with its historical significance and the related political and ethical questions it throws up. Stalin is more interested in contemplating the shortcomings of a materialist theory of music than in seriously considering a major political problem. Knowing that he is not obliged to justify his political decision, he can move on to a consideration of the forced movement of the landlords in purely aesthetic terms, which again creates a link to his concern with musical form and structure. His comparison of the ‘movement of peoples’ with an ‘ant-heap kicked into activity’ (39) leads him to imagine himself as the foreman of the building site called history (‘I am the foreman, and Lenin made the plans’). This satirical image of Stalin as the creator of a new Europe is presented as a self-image, motivated by his desire for immortality and impact, and it can therefore be considered a mis-recognition in Lacan’s terms. Stalin’s problem is perhaps desire as such, or the paradox that the fulfilment of his desire for power and control limits not only the possibility for the fulfilment of other desires but creates in him an awareness that the existence of desire as such is threatened by the very mechanisms of authority he put into place. The contradictory nature of his perception of self as the embodiment of absolute power, which is by necessity also the way he is perceived by his people, is perhaps encapsulated in this earlier melancholic statement: ‘I would give up all the authority I possess to meet a beautiful woman on a train . . .’ (10). Stalin is perfectly aware of the impossibility of this wish; not only can it never be fulfilled, the economy of absolute power should have made its very enunciation an impossibility too – but it has not. The absolute cannot appear completely and therefore can never be an absolute as such. Barker dramatises the contradictory nature of the category of the


absolute in the figure of Stalin whose melancholy, paranoia, aesthetic sensibility and complacency as a political leader reveal the nonidentical, and also comically grotesque, moments of power. In other words, absolute power creates its own means of undermining itself; absolute power resists its own full realisation. Stalin’s desire for the unexpected, for risk and possibility presents a moral and political problem because it aims to establish (even if only in the imagination) a reality that is incompatible with the status quo. It is in the nature of absolute control to undermine the accidental, but since ‘accident [. . .] is the essence of experience’ (10) experience as such is also threatening to become an impossibility in the world of the dictator. The shadow of total predictability has entered Stalin’s consciousness and that of his officers, notably Sorge and the artist (poet) Arkov, who are also affected by the pressures of totality. In their own ways they try to negotiate political ideology with their personal impulses. Arkov’s artistic interests bring him into conflict with the party censorship and generate an awareness of the instability of meaning and the relativity of values (‘nothing is absolutely true and nothing is absolutely false – what are you to do with a mind like that?, 30). His later encounter with Gloria leads to self-castration – an outrageous action through which self-harm is constructed as a personal, radical response to political terror. Sorge articulates the party ideology (which has been identified by Arkov as ‘the enemy’) with reference to the enlightenment strategy of man’s mastery over nature’s irrationality and threatening otherness (incomprehensibility). Meaning is imposed on the object world, but as Sorge also recognises, ‘the ordering of man [. . .] can be random too, sometimes’ (30). It is the totalitarian regime’s aim to eliminate all aspects of randomness from political and personal life, but Ilona and Victor represent the enigma of unpredictability in the world of Barker’s play. Their survival amidst fascist and communist oppression puzzles the authorities and it is only a matter of time before their previously neutral presence in history is construed as a negative presence, before they become the drivers of anti-history who challenge the expected hegemonic course of history. Sorge’s attempt to interpret Ilona’s photographs along the aesthetic lines of socialist realism (‘the idea of a neutral art is utterly redundant. Yet these images strive for neutrality. [. . .] they form a background for your face’, 31) is also an attempt to understand her, but both interpretations fail due to Ilona’s refusal to denote unambiguous meaning. The attempt of various official characters to get at the truth of the two dancers in history is counterpointed by filmmaker Matrimova’s endeavour to capture the entire truth of reality


with the new technical possibilities offered by ‘Wholefilm’, her theory of cinema. The aim of Wholefilm is to overcome the false individualism and lack of objectivity in bourgeois film by capturing reality as a dialectical process which juxtaposes thesis (the psychological viewpoint of bourgeois idealism) with antithesis (the socio-historical contextualisation along Marxist lines) and produces synthesis (the creation of an alternative reality which empowers the audience, i.e. makes them active agents in the development of history). But even Matrimova feels the ideological weight of her project to reconstruct reality: ‘How can you get the entire truth? I shall go mad’ (46). The answer is, of course, that you cannot, but to allow this truth (the reality of truth’s incompleteness and instability) to enter consciousness already means to accept the possibility of truth’s failure. Ilona and Victor’s survival skills amidst war and chaos seem to be shaped by their acceptance of possible failure. They do not feel the need to master their objective reality using the violent strategies of instrumentalised rationality; their escape from the horrors of history is largely due to their chameleon-like movements through historical space. Ilona admits that she has been the mistress of many a dictator, but she has never committed herself to anyone. Victor is perhaps less able to psychologically deal with his ‘luck’ – he is horrified by an awareness that there might be no place for them in the future: ‘They are using us. And killing us later’ (46). His premonition of his own death is a recognition that the game of their fluid existence in the face of tragedy might be over, but Ilona shows more resilience. What keeps her alive mentally is perhaps her sense that she is drawn to the absolute; she already moves in the orbit of Stalin’s power and the course of dramatic action pulls her closer and closer to him. If she represents the negative moment of history (the moment of history’s non-identity and non-resolution), if she is the embodiment of all that cannot be covered by the homogenising orbit of history’s rationality, she is also a force that Stalin feels attracted to. In the crucial embrace of Stalin and Ilona at the end of the play history meets its opposite, totality confronts the particular, but what cannot be inferred from this final image is a clear sense of reconciliation. The absolute’s embrace of the Other (the abject of history) can be construed as a subversion of sameness and totality. Let us remind ourselves that Stalin is already affected by change at the beginning of the play. His sense of inadequacy, his awareness that the very principles of his power restrict his freedom (Stalin realises the paradox of absolute power) perhaps foreshadow the seemingly unpredictable meeting with Ilona at the end of the play.


Stalin’s embrace of Ilona is an embrace of the unknown; he welcomes uncertainty into his predictable, ‘total’ life. Logically there is no room for the unplanned in his political existence, but perhaps the gesture of the embrace points to a possibility that previously would not have been imaginable. Barker’s theatre of catastrophe elicits unexpected responses from its characters; their sense of living in a state of crisis heightens their sensibilities. One of those illogical actions is their embrace of uncertainty in a world that is already uncertain or that is in the process of revolutionary change, as in the play Rome where the demise of an old value system signals a loss of personal freedom and the imposition of uniformity. The moral question to be confronted is how it is possible to do justice to the heterogeneous, the non-identical, the ‘differend’ (Lyotard) in the face of a systematisation of capitalist values. Adorno identifies modern society as a system which he refers to as a Bann, a spell of sameness that freezes and subjugates whatever is radically different. The enlightenment aim to deliver humankind from ignorance by the gift of knowledge which enables us to master nature backlashes when humanity realises that it is trapped in a cycle of suppression and control. The process of knowledge production takes on a life of its own, spins out of control and reverts back onto the individual; it subjects the individual to the instrumentalising force of rationality. Barker is not against the pursuit of knowledge, indeed his characters often desperately articulate their need to know and to experience, but they are not automatically led by the logos. Rather, their speech reveals the unstable grounds upon which knowledge and understanding are produced, and often they reveal the void in which individuals struggle against the norms of the social. Desire in Barker’s work produces a different kind of knowledge, an indeterminate, somatic form of knowing. Desire triggers movements of thought that are instinctive and subversive, and which involve the characters in processes of moral renegotiation and reconstructions of reality. Knowledge and desire

Savage, the main character of The Bite of the Night (1998) , is in search of absolute knowledge, signified by his journey into the past (he visits Troy – the origin of Western civilisation) and into the deepest and darkest recesses of his mind. As suggested by his name and revealed in his murderous actions, he represents the savagery of enlightenment reason against the irrationality of myth and the threatening ‘ignorance’ of nature. But his savage acts against other characters (his son, his father,


Helen) are also cruel attacks on himself, because the sense of relief or liberation he might expect as a result of his deeds never materialises but plunges him deeper and deeper into a crisis of consciousness. Throughout the play we witness the creation of authoritarian political systems (Troys), each one of which is a reaction to an older system that is dismissed for being irrational and unjust. The irony is of course that every new Troy repeats the same mistakes – albeit in different guises – of the very first, Old Troy. The brutality of Old Troy is replaced by the radical individualism of Paper Troy (‘In Paper Troy the only crimes are crimes against the self’ [33]), which is supplanted by the Communist Laughing Troy, which is challenged by the anti-rational, pre-linguistic Mum’s Troy, which in turn is forcefully transformed into Fragrant Troy, where ‘desire is soaped out of existence’ (92). Not to mention the conveniently ‘forgotten’ Troys, such as Mechanical Troy and Dancing Troy. Each new social system redefines truth and reality by forcefully introducing new laws that claim to be less brutal and more refined, more ‘humane’. However, they end up being more irrational and inhuman than the laws of previous systems. As Gay says in defence of Mum’s Troy: ‘Innocence is not without authority! Nor does purity go unarmed! The meaningless violence of Old Troys is replaced by the liberating force of pre-articulacy’ (67). It seems that in order to justify its ‘progressive’ laws, every new society is forced to redefine the terms in which reality is experienced and language is used. A new political and social discourse needs to be created and a new repertory of authoritarian strategies (new codes of violence and oppression) invented. The political programme of each new Troy is defined by a rejection of the cruelty and barbarity of its predecessor, but in dialectical fashion every new Troy turns out to be an even more advanced manifestation of savagery. This is a theatrical manifestation of the dialectic of enlightenment: the drive for progress and the ‘common good’, ideals of harmony, education and improvement are revealed as illusions and caught in a process of reversal. Last Troy will therefore be total destruction, the logic of rationality carried to its extreme: irrationalism and barbarism. The catastrophe that will be caused by Last Troy will resemble the archaic inhumanity of Old Troy. The figure of Helen plays a crucial but controversial role in The Bite of the Night . She is at once the cause of savagery and destruction (the theft of Helen caused the siege of Troy) but at the same time she assumes the iconic status of a martyr – she become the negative point of reference for all Troys; she becomes an object of hate and the violence she literally embodies is institutionalised and provides the foundation upon which each new Troy is built. Even those Troys that see no place for Helen in


their system (‘SHADE: . . . No place for her in Laughing Troy? Her ego and her filthy legs? Her mouth and acts of endless privacy? She is all I and this is the age of we’, 46) define their new order in relation to what they outlaw. Helen’s mutilated, maimed body is the symbol of accumulated aggression and irrationality; it is ‘a monument to pain’ (93) which is perversely improved upon and polished to near perfection by each new society. Helen’s beauty, which according to the teachings of Doctor Savage caused the beginning of the end of civilisation, remains the moving force behind a people’s desire for perfection, despite the progressive distortion of her physical appearance. Savage orchestrates the violence that is inflicted on her by others. But despite her physical decay and apparent loss of beauty Helen remains eternally beautiful because she is the Idea – she is the Absolute that every new society of Trojans learns to hate in order for their social system to work efficiently. She is the necessary unifying idea of a people and embodies a society’s rejection of the past. ‘ The more they injure me the more they hate, can you explain that? You’re educated’ (71) she asks Savage. But it was in fact knowledge that caused this injury and hate and it can only be knowledge that has the power to put a halt to it. Helen embodies all the contradictions that human reason creates for itself, and every irrational assault on her body is in fact another expression of the mind’s desperate and self-destructive search for absolute knowledge. HELEN: No knowledge? Look at me. Sliced. Minimal. Reduced. Hacked. Slashed. Incapable. How dare you say no knowledge. I am it. (92) Knowledge and desire not only move along parallel lines but also enable each other. Desire is not possible without a moment of consciousness that articulates and directs it, gives it an intention. Similarly, knowledge derives its necessary impulse and energy from desire, the imagination and the unconscious. The shattering and transformative power of knowledge in the play is linked to a self-consciousness of extreme desire. Both levels of existence overlap and boundaries are blurred, which is visualised on Helen’s mutilated body: she loses her arms and legs; she ‘shrinks’ and becomes incapable of clearly defining her edges, the points on her body that connect to what is outside her physical self. The maimed body can be read as a powerful metaphor for regress (physical, emotional and intellectual). The more they injure me the more they hate. The more they attack and abuse her figure, the more they strengthen her identity – what they call ‘essential Helen’ (64). Because


she is no longer defined in the conventional, limiting terms of physical beauty, she assumes the more powerful existence of an idea (an absolute, an ontological signifier), which is nevertheless dialectically related to the physical. This exemplifies Barker’s dramatic interest in the possibility of an essential existence amidst conditions of seeming impossibility. Yet every search for identity is fraught with contradictions and threatened by inevitable destruction. The truth that ‘essential Helen’ represents remains an indispensable factor of a people’s desperate and frustrating search for cultural identity. Helen brings out hate and violence in her people and yet her imaginary presence, despite being challenged by every new system, is vital to the maintenance of law and order. But her socially integrative function is undermined by her violated physical condition, which symbolises a transgression of the symbolic order. This dynamic may be explained with reference to post-Freudian theories of subjectivity and its relation to language. For example, Kristeva’s theory of subjectivity is based on the notion that the realm of the symbolic (the law of language, or phenotext ) contains the semiotic ( genotext – the realm of desire and drives, that which remains outside language), which has the potential power to transgress the symbolic. In poetic language this so-called ‘semiotic disposition’ is especially strong. Kristeva’s model problematises the repressive totality of the Lacanian symbolic order (dominated by the law of the phallus) – the final stage in the formation of subjectivity7 – by exposing the heterogeneous and transfiguring moments prevalent in this very order. She proposes a theory of the ‘speaking subject’, which considers the production of meaning as an activity (a signifying process or practice, rather than a static system) and takes into account the potentially unsettling (and painful) effects such a process may have on the speaking subject. The speaking subject typically lacks a sense of wholeness; it possesses (and is possessed by) a ‘fragmented body’ that shows ‘the shift, the split in logical unity brought about by language which separates out [. . .] the symbolic order from the workings of the libido (this last revealing itself by the semiotic disposition)’ (Kristeva, ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’ 78, 79). In a similar vein, Helen’s physical fragmentation – carried out as a way of purging the sins of past generations – can also be considered as a subversion of every new symbolic order. When she is found guilty of violating the laws of Mum’s Troy (‘You have failed to be a mother, and therefore should not look like one . . .’ 69) her ostensibly ‘anti-social’ behaviour is sustained by a challenging personal conviction (‘I never let a child come in the way of love’ 68). But the manner in which the


private and the political interlink at this and many other critical points in the play, can also be elucidated following Kristeva’s analysis of the speaking subject. By refusing to conform to the moral expectations of those who are in power she expresses her ‘capacity for renewing the order in which [s]he is inescapably caught up; and that capacity is, for the subject , the capacity for enjoyment’ (Kristeva, ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’ 79). Helen, the embodiment of archaic pain and perennial suffering, never stops desiring, even when the pursuit of desire becomes a physical impossibility. Her desire transcends limits, even those imposed by her disintegrating body, and can be a threat to the ideology of any political system because it creates the need for new orders and opens new possibilities. The speaking subject explodes the system by shaking its very moral foundations. This strategy of transgression is also a strategy of remembering the self (a form of self-definition) because transgression and definition go hand in hand. Booth’s notion of tragedy as a dialectical process of indefinition and definition points in the same direction: the experience of tragedy is an experience of loss, transgression and confusion on the one hand; but this is nevertheless achieved against a backdrop of prior definition – a symbolic order that finds its logic reshuffled and renegotiated as a result of the signifying, subversive logic of tragedy (see Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy ). The notion of ‘re-membering’ implies the opposite concept of ‘dismembering’, taking apart. Helen’s slashed body signifies the attempts of every new civilisation (every new Troy) to forget its past and the value system that was part of it. ‘But what hope clings to [. . .] is the transfigured body’ (ND 400). What hope is there for Helen or for the future generations if they are all consumed with hate and pain? The play does not offer any consolation and there is no reconciliation of conflict. But Adorno would argue that art does not need to articulate this hope in the form of a message because the gesture of difference and transformation is already present in the very materiality of the artwork. The absence of conceptual clarity and meaning in art does justice to the experience of modernity as a problematic and contradictory social condition. Such a negative art is capable of expressing the antinomies of modern society; and by giving voice to the inexpressible and the incomprehensible (the sublime), art unconsciously articulates a ‘different life’. Barker’s characters often find themselves in extreme situations in which the possibilities for choice and morally ‘correct’ behaviour are radically diminished. Savage’s typical reaction to the dilemma posed by knowledge – the unsettling realisation that reason is no shield against


barbarism – is to dive deeper into the darkness of his soul, to employ more violence and inflict more pain on others. Savage’s actions are expressions of his quest for self-liberation (killing as a way of asserting one’s freedom), but they are also profoundly socially subversive because they profess a new set of values ‘beyond good and evil’. His main driving force is perhaps a Nietzschean will to power, which inevitably comes into conflict with the system’s conventional definitions of truth and reality as pertaining to the standards set by the ‘general good’. Savage’s (and other Barker characters’) will to power is motivated by a ruthless logic of knowledge (‘Because I was an intellectual I chose to follow thought, thought to the finish, that is the duty of one, isn’t it?’ 64). One might assume that in the first instance such extreme performances of the will initiate radical transformations of individual consciousness and its relationship to external reality. This would probably be the case in a realist social context. However, the anti-realist parameters of Savage’s fictional stage world engender an almost nightmarish atmosphere in which extreme individualistic actions are neither indirectly supported nor explicitly criticised by the social order surrounding them. While it can be argued (and indirectly I might have done so above) that the characters – by means of their radical actions (Savage) or unsettling presence (Helen) – are able to step outside the system, it must also be emphasised that such an interpretation is only possible if based on an unambiguous notion of stable subjectivity. A straightforward division between self and society can only be made if the ego is understood to be a whole, unified entity which exists ‘cut off from its body, its unconscious and also its history’ (Easthope and McGowan, A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader 78).8 The Bite of the Night can offer a powerful critique of transcendental subjectivity because of the ways subject positions are constructed and renegotiated throughout the play. It is true that some of the characters are motivated purely by their search for identity and self-affirmation, hoping to arrive at a point where their own essential being may be revealed; but this remains an illusion. The characters remain split and alienated from themselves, and yet it might be the unacknowledged awareness of their loss that strengthens their will to ‘find themselves’, which in Savage’s case is the will or compulsion to follow reason’s contradictory logic to its end. Found in the Ground

Adorno supports his theory of the reversal of reason into a condition of a-rationality or myth, culminating in the catastrophe of Auschwitz,


by drawing on examples from modern art (especially Beckett’s work and atonal music). The ‘endgame’ of rationality is uniquely addressed in Barker’s formally more complex dramatic work such as Found in the Ground (2001) which carries an Adornian epigraph: ‘In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner.’ Found in the Ground expresses a sense of degeneration and menacing negativity which borders on the surreal. The dramatic action lacks formal coherency or logical progression, yet there is a powerful sense of urgency, a drive forward into the unknown, mainly generated by a compelling poetic language and stage imagery which lack unambiguous meaning or purpose. We encounter transgressive characters such as Burgteata whose actions signify unrestrained sexual desire. A headless woman perambulates the stage, perhaps an image of perennial suffering. A librarian burns books. A former judge of Nazi crimes is presented with his unresolved past in the form of heaps of mud on a tray, symbolising deceased war criminals. The play seems to evoke the problem of how to come to terms with the catastrophes of the past (holocaust, genocide). The work of memory, as exemplified by the actions of judge Toonelhuis, turns collective violence and suffering into a private affair, making any ‘official’ versions of the past susceptible to distortion. Did he fail to settle the wrongs of his society because he was unable to punish all the perpetrators of violence and terror? Is this why they are revisiting him in his old age? The stage, reminiscent of an industrial wasteland or one of Beckett’s post-apocalyptic landscapes, is peopled by the perpetrators and victims of political crimes as well as characters who pursue their individual passions. Again, the personal and the political, the subjective and the objective, interconnect and cannot be clearly separated. The characters inhabit a nightmarish dream world, but it appears that the dream, which is on constant replay, is the real catastrophe of Western civilisation. There is no escape from the ‘eternal recurrence’ of the violence that humanity inflicts on itself. To opt for a personal, silent death seems to be the only way out, but death is neither desired nor desirable. Life, even when it seems unacceptably cruel and meaningless, pushes forward without sympathy, without regret. But within this amorphous situation people are struggling to understand, to come to terms with their past, to rescue fragments of a self that officially has been exterminated a long time ago. It seems as if hope, if to be found anywhere at all, resides in this theatrical representation of cruelty and waste. By means of the very presentation of the ‘negative’ on stage, the possibility of another life is addressed, and this may be the last refuge for


an ailing humanity – it could be the place from which humankind can rebuild itself. The metaphorical and physical ‘ground’ of Found in the Ground soaks up life, blood, urine, and functions like a magnet (the figure called Denmark is unable to stand upright, he keeps falling to the ground). The deceased Nazi war criminals are now heaps of earth and dust, the condition that all human life is ultimately reduced to. Everything loses its shape; even mankind’s humanistic knowledge and ideas, once available in book form, are being turned into ashes. In a painting entitled The Dog by Goya, a dog is submerged in what looks like a sand dune. He is about to disappear, his head pointing to the sky – a deep, dark void that fills most of the space in the picture. In Barker’s play, too, one gets a sense that the ground (earth, mud) is about to submerge all life and the menacing void surrounding the characters is filled with the ‘repetitive sound of an industrial process’. This is the monotonous noise of capitalist production, the sound of our materialistic life world, the true music of our age. The ‘sound of industry ’ is occasionally accompanied by the roar of barking dogs, or broken by long cries of despair that travel the landscape; by sounds of infinite distance and silence, and of course by the movements of the characters. The space they inhabit is both real, actual, located in the present time, yet at the same time it seems unreal, fictional, belonging to their individually and collectively imagined past. The same can be said for the audience’s relationship to the stage world and its spectacles, which are not purely fictional but the disturbing reminders of our history. The characters struggle to comprehend their passions, desires and crimes and are engaged in paradoxically selfdestructive journeys of self-recovery; they are also allegorical in the sense that their excesses and frustrations symbolise the bankruptcy of Western civilisation at large. Toonelhuis ‘dines’ on the Nazi perpetrators – presented to him as heaps of earth on trays – whom he sentenced to death when he was a judge at Nürnberg in 1948. He revisits the horrid deaths of those he executed and is haunted by the spectral appearance of ‘a pissing girl’ whom he observed while taking a break from his duty (‘I’d sentenced five to execution/I needed air ’ 300). Having passed judgement on the atrocities of war criminals for most of his life, he has lost faith in Christ and humanity, and with the excessive rationality of a mass murderer (‘be methodical by all means / But bring to method energy’ 312) he burns his library. The uncanny order and precision with which the canon of Western humanism is destroyed (‘Have you burned Erasmus yet?’ 313) recall the irrational logic of the ‘final solution’ (the extermination of the Jews). The heap of burning books is perhaps the most disturbing


metaphor for the dialectic of enlightenment, symbolising the reversal of the ideals of humanity, education and social progress into irrationality and barbarity. The victims of rationality’s regress into darkness are represented by Macedonia, the naked and headless woman who remains on stage throughout the play as if to forever remind us of our dark past (and present). She perambulates, marches, stops, urinates on the ground and at crucial moments carries portrait photographs of the dead on her shoulders. She is the representation of all victims, past and present. I am all the Ann Franks (Pause) All the Ann Franks me (Pause) The ditches full of (Pause) The pits of (Pause) Composers Violinists Physicists (Pause) ... (310) The headless woman perambulates – Macedonia walks about on stage without going in any particular direction. In Minima Moralia, Adorno refers to walking as the ‘bourgeois manner of moving: physical demythologisation’ and contrasts it to people’s modern habit of ‘running on the street, [which] expresses horror’ ( MM 303). In the modern context of technological speed and military marches the apparent untruth reflected in the selfishly private, aloof and leisured walk of the aristocracy (‘UND: I am a fragment of a dying class’, Und 211) is revealed as a truth which we no longer have: ‘Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, on a rhythm which is not wrested away from the body by order or terror’ ( MM 304). The terror inflicted on the victims of war – symbolised by Macedonia’s and Helen’s dismembered bodies – assumes a chilling air of normality and certainty. Macedonia’s measured gait is perhaps both an expression of ‘archaic violence’ (ibid.) or perennial suffering, and a way of remembering a time when the individual was still able to put a claim on her being. The cultural degeneration of modern, post-Auschwitz society that the play alludes to is also embodied by Burgteata, Toonelhuis’ daughter who prostitutes herself out of a deeply felt desire (‘I so need / I so / I so need . . .’ 287). Her name contains a reference to high culture,9 which is ironic, given her precarious and dangerous liaisons with the senile, the sick, the dying. Burgteata (‘culture’) has passed on a disease to Denmark and must therefore be ‘sick’ herself, and her sentimental willingness to


prostitute herself (she calls it a vocation) can be read as another allusion to the moral bankruptcy of modern culture. The meaninglessness of the present situation is painfully experienced by the librarian Denmark, who has been made responsible for the strategic burning of the books and who, like Hamlet, is wrought with feelings of anger and disgust and unable to act meaningfully. His identity is defined by an unbound sexual desire for Burgteata, which he is unable to satisfy (‘I want too much / That’s obvious / But what is far from obvious is this / I’m drenched / Whether this excessive wanting is a flaw in my own character or . . .’ 302). When he realises that ‘ she has communicated some disease / To me’ (309) – a sexually transmitted disease which impairs his ability to stand upright (‘I’m angled to the ground’ 310) and triggers his madness – he begins to view things from a bigger, almost cosmic perspective. And like Hamlet, in his madness he starts to reflect on the meaning of our actions and utters some uncomfortable truths: ‘Absolute meaninglessness / Let us be clear / Far from being a disaster is precisely the condition to which the vast majority aspire’ (334). His struggle to come to terms with the catastrophe of humanity is expressed in his desire to be ‘alive’ but he is unable to do anything about it. Because he claims to be the ‘defender of the books’ (and consequently the defender of humanism?) he heroically attempts to kill Toonelhuis. But what initially appears to be attempted in some kind of courageous spirit of twisted philanthropy (a crime for the greater good) is revealed to be motivated by the ‘logic’ of the Nazi mass killings: ‘The books should not be burned / Vastly better / If burning must take place / Humans burn’ (327). However, Denmark is not able to push the logic of destruction beyond the realm of the private; his actions fail precisely because murder to him is still a ‘personal ambition’ (307) and perhaps the most negative expression of his desire. But he shamefully realises that his yearning to know himself cannot be fulfilled in this way: ‘Alive where is it / Not in murder obviously / Because / At the very moment I stood as it were / On the threshold of satisfaction / The will faltered / Desire drained away’ (328). He lacks the war criminal Knox’s perseverance to universalise ‘the ecstasy of murder’ (317) and make it the ‘material substance of an intellectual dispute with God’ (326). Madness and an extreme self-will drive Denmark to suicide (‘ Excessive in one’s individuality / One ends up dead (Pause) / One ends up a suicide’, 309); but having survived his own death (he throws himself into the bonfire at the end of act one and re-emerges as Burgteata’s dying husband, ‘swathed in bandages’ in act two), he is confronted with the ‘feverish imagination’ (359) of an unsuccessful artist: Hitler.


HITLER: Critical moments in the history of a culture frequently require swift and violent actions the elimination of old values the fall of monasteries the tidal rush of some purifying river naturally this wounds us in some obscure place some spiritual cul-de-sac but all the same this gnawing pain should not be interpreted as a reason for inaction . . . (360–1) Denmark counterpoints this extreme strategy for cultural ‘renewal’ with his own politics of desire and excessive individuality: ‘ From me will come new dispensations / [. . .] Yes / Me / Why not me / And your womb’ (362). This expression of unmitigated desire is articulated in a theatrical context of cultural degeneration and catastrophe. Barker’s theatre expresses contradictory emotions, such as pleasure and pain, desire and violence. The contradictions between emotions are not resolved; they are not even presented in a traditionally Brechtian dialectical manner. It is often impossible for characters to embark on a plane of secure and rational distance from which they can reflect and safely engage with extreme passions. Denmark is certainly incapable of doing so, despite being an ‘intellectual’. And a sense of the impossibility and futility of rational interpretation of events and states of mind is extended to the spectator. The language of many Barker plays is highly poetic and often strangely lucid and bizarrely articulate, even when the characters find themselves in extreme emotional and psychological disarray. Indeed, it seems that the language used in such extreme situations (when characters face imminent torture or death, or engage in sexual passions) shows an even higher degree of self-consciousness and artificiality (‘I so need / I so / I so need / So / So / So’ 123). The effect of this is initially distancing and alienating, but once one accepts these peculiarly cerebral but also rhythmic terms of dramatic discourse, one realises that dramatic language/speech is in effect employed here as a most compelling medium for self-discovery (and self-critique). The urgency and bizarre necessity with which actions are undertaken, events unfold and crises thicken, are astounding effects of Barker’s compelling mastery of poetic dramatic language. ‘A space must be maintained or desire ends’

The theme of the Holocaust also provides the subtext for Barker’s play Und (2001) in which the female protagonist Und performs a monologue in a self-conscious, neurotic voice which addresses an ‘other’.


This speaking subject has no stable, fixed notion of herself; she keeps asking the questions of the hysteric: Who am I? But the other does not respond. The hysterical subject is dependent on the other, and this is also a reflection of the structure of language as such: language differentiates; the self is posited and positioned as the one who speaks (the enunciator) and the one who is spoken to or about (the enunciated). In language subjectivity is in tension between identity and alterity. But what is highlighted and problematised in the discourse of the hysteric is the fact that speech does not originate from a self-contained, stable, authentic subject position. Rather, ‘all speech proceeds from the place of the Other’ (Wajcman, ‘The Hysteric’s Discourse’ 11). The hysteric’s questions is posed to the other but it is also (and mainly) a form of self-questioning, an expression of doubt. Slavoj Žižek reformulates the question of the hysterical subject as ‘What am I for the Other? What does the Other want from me?’ (The Ticklish Subject 248).10 This is Und’s question: she is a woman waiting for a man, and her act of waiting is an address, a question posed but not answered – the answer is deferred but already inscribed in Und’s consciousness of the inevitability of future developments. The man she is waiting for kills Jews and the text suggests that she is his mistress and a Jew herself. There are echoes of the Holocaust theme: ‘Horrid smell / Fumes’, ‘He gathers Jews [. . .] the Jews exhaust him probably [. . .] he demonstrates an extraordinary capacity for violence and [. . .] tenderness’ (211–22). Her crisis (‘I’m under siege’) is the crisis of wanting and needing to know, and the fear of knowing the answer already. The Other expresses what he wants from her (through her speech we detect the intentions of the man who remains invisible throughout), and in doing this he attempts to answer her question and solve her riddle. But the solution to the riddle of her existence (her ‘final solution’) means death. The position of the hysteric is impossible yet the intractability of her situation is articulated intensely and persistently. Und insists on her right to speak – in fact it is primarily her self-consciousness as a speaking subject that keeps her alive for the duration of the play. Following Adorno, Giorgio Agamben argues that ‘subjectivity and consciousness, in which our culture believed itself to have found its firmest foundation, rests on what is most precarious and fragile in the world: the event of speech’ (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz 122). For Und the ‘event of speech’ takes on an existential and political dimension due to its power to dispel the idea of a stable subjectivity. She does not know where she speaks from; she does not occupy a stable place or position from which she could speak, and neither does her body. The system of the symbolic order is


politicised here: her Jewish origin is negated by the symbolic (political) order and as a result does not offer her a possibility for positive identification. Barker’s self-consciously oblique theatre of catastrophe refers to the problem of Auschwitz in indirect and abstract terms. He rejects the liberal-humanist theatre’s celebration of clarity and rationality, which are key elements of Bond’s project, and produces work that intends to ‘complicate[ ] life’ and ‘insists on the exposure of pain that is not soluble’ (Barker, Arguments 97). Human suffering and death are therefore not presented as the products of irrational societies and they are not explainable through analyses of the objective conditions in which they occur. Rather, in Barker’s ‘promiscuous theatre’ pain and death are constructed as personal experiences which ‘affirm[ ] the individual’s right to chaos, extremity and self-description’ (ibid. 123). Und’s fraught experience of singularity is tied to her anticipation of death, a death which seems inevitable and inescapable because it is part of an irrational, totalitarian ideology of race. Und nevertheless struggles to maintain control over her situation precisely by fictionalising her condition, by trying to enter the unknown (death) on her own (albeit increasingly diminishing) terms. The primary site in which her struggle to respond to death is being performed is the site of language, her own language, her singular voice. Her precarious and offensive existence within a repressive totality is prolonged solely by means of her determination to remain a ‘speaking subject’ for as long as possible – for the duration of the (her) performance. By confronting her singularity in the presence of death, Und fulfils her ‘first and last responsibility, [her] first and last desire’ (Derrida, The Gift of Death 44) – the responsibility of giving herself death. For as Derrida writes, ‘ death can neither be taken nor given’, ‘[o]ne has to give it to oneself by taking it upon oneself , for it can only be mine alone, irreplaceably’ (ibid. 45). 11 In Gertrude: The Cry and Knowledge and a Girl (2002), Barker offers increasingly erotic dramatisations of the concepts of knowledge, education and desire. The types of knowledge that are generated in these plays are motivated by sexual desire, which involves the seekers of knowledge (the characters, the audience?) in incessant explorations of their own and others’ depths. In Barker’s theatre, knowledge is a form of transgressive desire – linked to a consciousness of lack, incompletion and possibility. In Gertrude: The Cry , Barker’s version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet , the incessant and unpredictable movements of desire are crucial to the development of dramatic action. Desire, in this play, becomes a mode of knowing – not cerebral and rational, but somatic, instinctive, illogical. The dramatic characters’ experience of knowledge


appears to affect them in the form of a wound and they remain forever unreconciled with the things they want to know about. Barker constructs knowledge as a process of incomplete and unsuccessful longing and becoming, thus articulating the destabilising force of the nonidentical at the heart of instrumental rationality. The signifier of the non-identical in this play is the elusive ‘cry’, which belongs and yet does not belong to Gertrude. The cry comes from her but it is also more than the woman. Claudius, more than any of the other men in the play, desires not only to hear it but he wants to own, possess and control it. But the cry embodies transgression: transgression of language (it is a verbal discharge, an explosion of language without discursive meaning), transgression of space (it cannot be located anywhere specific within or outside her body), and of meaning (it is a floating signifier). In this version of Hamlet , sexuality (which is already a central theme in Shakespeare’s original) and eroticism are constructed as the channels for shameless acts of self-definition. Gertrude and Claudius are aware of the illegality of their sexual relationship and they shamelessly perform it to excess, thereby offending the morally restricted (Hamlet). The sense of risk involved in their relationship (which is founded on a series of betrayals) provides them with the energy that fuels their passion. Similarly, Barker’s idiosyncratic reworking of the Grimm fairy tale Snow White in Knowledge and a Girl reinvents the character of the wicked stepmother as a promiscuous and dangerously desirable Queen and Snow White as a naïve girl whose stubborn yet unsuccessful insistence on imitating the Queen’s sexual transgressions drive her into a self-imposed exile. As so typical for many Barker characters, the Queen from the very beginning shows a heightened awareness of her use of language: her naked body in the forest (the initial image) is clothed with words. QUEEN: Infantile he calls me Is that not a lovely word? He thinks the word humiliates me but I like the Word I wear the word I walk in it You say it You say infantile (97) Her physical exposure is juxtaposed by the pleasure she derives from her command of the symbolic, which also reflects the difference of


status between her and the servant with whom she has just had a sexual encounter. Like Gertrude, the Queen is sexually promiscuous and despite her apparent sterility she is the object of desire (‘knowledge’) for the men in the play. KING: I never know with you QUEEN: How good that is How good you never know with me (104) The desire for knowledge that Barker’s characters express so passionately and persistently is balanced by an awareness of the impossibility to ever arrive at, or rest in, ‘knowledge’. Knowledge is aspired to and falsely imagined as a place that can be entered into, as is articulated in Claudius’ longing to penetrate Gertrude (her body, her solitude) in order to know her cry. But the cry refuses to be identified, it remains an indeterminate force; and in a similar manner any understanding of the cry cannot be determined but must remain incomplete and contradictory. Likewise, the pursuits of knowledge and education in Knowledge and a Girl are characterised in terms of possession on the one hand (Snow White believes mere imitation and repetition to be key principles for her education in sexual love), and presented as an interminable, unyielding force on the other hand. Barker’s concept of knowledge as it is presented in these plays is paradoxical as it is established as an identifying, discriminating practice but also as a promiscuous force which seduces the characters to know more and never to rest or take solace in the little that they know. The desire to be ‘educated’, to gain knowledge, is precisely this: a desire, a passion, which liberates the concept of education from its commonplace relation to rationality. As Anne Carson has stated, ‘[e]ros’ mode of takeover is an education: it can teach you the real nature of what is inside you. Once you glimpse that, you can begin to become it’ (Carson, Eros the Bittersweet 153) – except that in Barker’s dramatic worlds the characters’ ‘real natures’ often remain an enigma to the audience and even to themselves. Knowledge in Barker only has the appearance of possession and control. In other words, the potential of knowledge as a form of, in Adorno’s terms, instrumental rationality is seemingly acknowledged but persistently challenged. Snow White’s attempts to copy her stepmother’s sexuality are bound to fail yet her persistence in doing so drives her into a confrontation with fear (‘I’m frightened I am not desirable’) and into exile. The movements of knowledge and desire open up


distances between characters (‘A space must be maintained or desire ends’, Carson, ibid. 26) and the duality of the known and the unknown translates into a consciousness of the intractable yet absorbing strangeness of the other. Adorno writes that [o]nly by the recognition of distance in our neighbour is strangeness alleviated: accepted into consciousness. The presumption of undiminished nearness present from the first, however, the flat denial of strangeness, does the other supreme wrong, virtually negates him as a particular human being and therefore the humanity in him, ‘counts him in’, incorporates him in the inventory of property. ( MM 182) There are moments of the sublime in the work of Howard Barker, if one agrees with a definition of the sublime (drawing on the work of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant) as an idea of power which presents an incomprehensible, terrifying yet attractive source of pleasure. Moments of intense pain, terror and struggle are often referred to as beautiful by Barker’s characters. Erotic encounters promise an ecstasy which, far from relieving the characters of their angst or granting them pleasure in any ordinary sense of the word, often deepens their tragic sensibilities and moves them closer to the orbit of death. In Gertrude: The Cry , Cascan says of Gertrude: ‘Her life is such a seeking and so beautiful is her pain’ (64), and the Queen in Knowledge and a Girl, who is literally being made to suffer for her beauty (she is forced to wear hot iron shoes), considers death to be her destiny: ‘Death yes / Death I ran towards / Death in every cupboard / Death on every stair’ (129). Those moments of the sublime may be called irrational because the extreme emotional responses they elicit cannot be understood in any ordinary sense, yet the characters nevertheless create their own individual discourses about these moments. The disturbing effects of the catastrophic and the ecstatic are experienced not only physically but also linguistically – fragmentations of the body as well as of language are characteristic of sublime experiences (for example, Helen’s dismembering of her body, or Katrin’s hysterical flood of incoherent speech in The Europeans). On the question of the characters’ experiences of pain as beautiful another cross-reference to Burke might be useful. According to Burke, author of the 1757 treatise Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, terror is the main physiological effect of the sublime, which puts the human being in a state of tension and excitement. The subject in a state of terror becomes aware of his or her closeness to death, but it is the sublime’s evocation of death which also becomes


a source of pleasure. Burke describes the ‘delight’ that one feels in the presence of the sublime as rapturous and violent and it is this strong sensuous affect which evokes the realm of the erotic. Barker’s aesthetic offers a complex interrelationship between eros and death by suggesting that eros as such (the sexual force elicited and yearned for by dramatic characters in their passionate encounters) can be deathly. Adorno’s anti-existentialist position does not consider existence under the current circumstances as a positive value (like Sartre), but as an ‘outrage’ (Adorno, ‘ Endgame’ 251). As argued above, he finds an apt treatment and presentation of the damaged world in Beckett’s work where pain and suffering are translated into a theatrical aesthetics of failure and meaninglessness, which nevertheless suggests a recuperation of non-identity and alterity. The effects of a dissolution of the self and its associated suspension of meaning are also, and perhaps more strikingly, articulated in Barker’s theatre of catastrophe. In his collection of essays and aphorisms, Death, The One and The Art of Theatre, Barker speaks of an ‘ecstasy of vanishing meaning’ as one of the key effects produced in his plays. The vanishing of meaning in the context of drama implies the possibility (but also the risk) of failure and uncertainty, which are transformed into aesthetic categories in both Beckett and Barker. In Blanchot’s terms, literature in general (and poetry and poetic drama in particular) is a mode of risking language, or as Adorno maintains: modernist art is self-consciously engaged with the endgames of art’s possibility as art – it takes seriously its own possibility of failure. In Barker’s theatre the modernist consciousness of failure is played out on the level of interpersonal exchange and gains a dramatic energy and dynamic that needs to be distinguished from the more or less static playing space of Endgame which presents the world as ‘nearly finished’. The imagined effects of war and catastrophe in much of Barker’s work open the possibilities for characters (and audiences) to engage in processes of resistance through encounters with contradictory subject positions. An example is Barker’s play I Saw Myself (written in 2007) in which the widowed female protagonist Sleev and her servants are in the process of weaving a gigantic tapestry which is to represent a political record of the country’s heroic past juxtaposed with Sleev’s personal, sexually transgressive history. The surrealistic image of a naked man inside a mirrored wardrobe; Sleev’s recurring speculations about Adam and Eve’s relationship before and after their expulsion from paradise; the women’s painstaking labour of weaving ‘the truth’, which gradually damages their eyesight; the imminent catastrophe of an approaching


war; – the structural combination of these evocative gestures and ideas give theatrical emphasis to the overall themes of (subjective) reflection and (artistic) representation in a context of personal and objective crisis. The looming catastrophic collapse of the characters’ physical world (the kind of closure that is threatened by war) is throughout the play foreshadowed and resisted by Sleev’s intra- and inter-personal conflicts (her own ‘war’). She finds an imaginative extension of her subjective world in and through the reflections provided by the mirror and her sexual partners. The reflexive gaze of the self in the mirror and the ‘other’ provides a kind of reflective opening by means of which the circumstances of the present are heroically challenged, without however offering a sense of moral resolution. In an essay on Bizet’s opera Carmen Adorno notes: ‘For in the aesthetic refraction of passion subjectivity becomes conscious of itself as nature, and abandons the illusion that it is autonomous mind [ Geist ]’ (‘Fantasia sopra Carmen’ 63). The subject who desires (in many ways the archetypal tragic figure) ‘sees herself’ in those moments of rupture and unknowing which recall the force of uncontrollable nature SLEEV: With desire came the mirror but the mirror only served to deepen the anxiety desire inevitably creates ( She looks at herself ). ( I Saw Myself 14) In other words, the aesthetic presentation and appearance of subjectivity as divided, fractured and in the process of self-conscious dissolution suggests a different way of understanding and thinking. Self-becoming (or self-recognition) in the process of self-dissolution (a Romantic idea which, incidentally, also shaped Hölderlin’s theory and practice) does not abandon thought to non-conceptual effusion, nor does it deliver speech to silence. Barker’s theatre of catastrophe is a very powerful example of the relentless continuity or ordeal of philosophy in the face of unexplainable, because uncontainable, human emotions. But, importantly, thought’s wrestling with the boundless is translated into the actuality of dramatic stage action and therefore becomes immanent. ‘The ordeal’, as Nancy states in his discussion of the self in Hegel’s philosophy, ‘is that of immanence’ (Nancy, Hegel 55). In Barker’s work passion and the ‘de-civilising experience’ and ‘series of permissions to transgress’ (Barker, Arguments 110) which it invites, becomes a theatrical core principle that abnegates the achievements and morality of the transparent, humanist world of reason. The argument shared by both Adorno and Barker is that individual experience


in late capitalist culture has become dangerously diminished – this constitutes tragic experience today. Barker proposes that an encounter with tragedy reveals that ‘the world is inadequate’ ( Death, the One and the Art of Theatre 33) and ‘wanting’ (ibid. 40), ‘negative’ in Adornian language. But the pain and anxiety (a ‘condition of tragedy’) thus experienced, simultaneously create a longing in the individual for the unknown, a desire which, as it were, rescues the authenticity of the self from its repressive and fateful entanglement in the ‘irrationality of the system’ ( MM 23). If Barker’s theatre can be termed ‘irrational’ and thus an antagonism to the ‘rational’ liberal-humanist society, as Charles Lamb (in The Theatre of Howard Barker ) has suggested, its irrationality has to be understood dialectically, i.e. as an aesthetic refraction of the irrationality of reality, similar to the ways in which the darkness of Beckett’s plays is constructed as a mimesis of the darkness of the post-Auschwitz world. Barker’s definition of tragedy, his ‘art of theatre’, combines art’s propensity for transcendence (its drawing near the non-existent, its fascination with the other) with a simultaneous discovery or instinctual and intuitive knowledge that the world is meaningless. His work is therefore a contemporary example of Adorno’s call for a changed, postmetaphysical form of art which does not make affirmative claims on the construction of positive meaning through art (by suggesting the possibility of reconciliation or redemption), nor does it reject the possibility of the impossible. The dramatic character’s ‘fascination with death’ (Barker, Death, the One 71) presents in Adornian terms a challenge to the imagination by juxtaposing the wrong world with an ‘as if’ scenario of possibilities. By challenging the coercive intelligibility of the world with the enigmatic ‘incomprehensibility’ of the artwork, Barker’s art of theatre – without passing judgement – exposes the spectator to pain, failure and forbidden desires. His theatre of catastrophe thus constitutes an ‘address’ which returns the individual spectator to him or herself (see Düttmann, ‘Art’s Address’ 85–91). Furthermore, theatre’s seductive performance of the ‘ecstasy of vanishing meaning’ (Barker, Death, the One 14) suggests that the mythic quality (or spell) of the social totality (this ‘context of blinding’ which forces singularity into sameness) can (if only momentarily) be both simultaneously heightened and suspended in our confrontation with the abyss of the self. As suggested above, Barker’s work engages with the contradictions of Western culture and history and puts forward aesthetic ideas which echo those of Adorno. Both projects of cultural criticism (the one theatrical and poetic; the other philosophical and critical) place the fate of the individual and the fraught possibility of expression at centre


stage – in their own ways they seek to make visible the psychological, social and material scars and wounds of the modern self. The starting point for both is a form of cultural critique, which resists the stifling positivity and instrumental rationality of the empirical, commodified world. In Barker’s drama the physical and spiritual concreteness and fixity of the given world as it is known and recognised by the audience is not mimetically represented. Barker creates anti-worlds and anti-realities that stand in a negative relationship with the empirical reality occupied by an audience. The ‘merely existing’ is juxtaposed with the possibility of the different, the new, the not-yet-realised. The instinctively and passionately pursued ‘different’ worlds remain negative in the sense that their logic cannot be comprehended according to the laws of exchange or any philosophy of the already known. The incessantly desired flights from reality and normativity spurs the characters on to discover the other within themselves but also in their seductive relations with the object(s) of their desire. 12 The theatrical possibilities of desire and the search for self-determination and self-expression are also explored, and taken to an extreme, in the drama of Sarah Kane.

5

Sarah Kane or how to ‘scrape a life out of the ruins’1

In his important study of modern drama, Peter Szondi investigates the relationship between socio-historical reality and modern drama by focussing on various manifestations of drama’s form–content dialectic. Drawing on the work of the early Lukács, Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study and Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music , Szondi argues that the forms of modern drama (its ‘technical contradictions’) are indicative of sociohistorical conditions (Theory of the Modern Drama 5). In other words, Szondi turns aesthetic formal principles into socio-historical categories by adhering largely to what Jochen Schulte-Sasse calls a ‘mimetic concept of art’ (‘Foreword’, Theory of the Modern Drama xiv) – a conception of art as a reflection of objective reality. But by subscribing to a concept of mimesis Szondi nevertheless opposed normative theories of aesthetic realism such as developed by the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács for example. Lukács’s socialist-materialist aesthetic theory applies a prior set of interpretive criteria pertaining to the ‘laws governing objective reality’ to the meaning of a text, and for him only realist, mimetic art is able to adequately represent the ‘objective essence of reality’ (Lukács in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics 38, 40). But this method of judging an artwork’s meaning in relation to empirical reality from the outside – from the perspective of an already formed interpretation of social-historical conditions – is renounced by Szondi who, like Adorno, derives an artwork’s socio-historical meaning from immanent form analysis. ‘The contradictions between dramatic form and the problems of contemporary life should not be set down in abstracto. Instead, they should be examined as technical contradictions, as “difficulties,” internal to the concrete work itself’ (Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama 5). Szondi perceives a crisis of modern drama, which began with the rise of modernism in the arts during the second half of the nineteenth 146

Sarah Kane or how to ‘scrape a life out of the ruins’ 147

century. He develops the notion of a formal rupture in the development of drama, which has its origins in what he calls the ‘absolute Drama’ – the drama of the Renaissance and neoclassical period (the drama of modernity, so to speak) which on the whole adheres to the unities of time and place and in which dramatic action develops out of interpersonal relationships. In absolute Drama, for example the dramatic theatre of Racine, it is the ‘absolute dominance of dialogue – that is, of interpersonal communication’ (ibid. 8) which provides insight into characters’ motivations and drives the dramatic action forward in a linear sequence. The so-called crisis of modern (or rather modernist) drama in Szondi’s view comes about with the introduction of epic elements and an increase of drama’s self-consciousness of the world outside its structural frame. Adorno already argued that self-consciousness and self-reflexivity are the main characteristics of modernist art: ‘Art must turn against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself right into its innermost fibre’ ( AT 2). In Strindberg’s expressionism, for example, the presentation of action from a purely subjective perspective ( I -dramaturgy) calls the objectivity of empirical reality into question and suspends the unities of time and place, leading to a more loosely organised, fluid dramatic structure (as can be found in To Damascus and A Dream Play ). However, Strindberg’s expressionist dramatisation of the theme of self-consciousness articulates his characters’ awareness of their estrangement not only from the world that surrounds them but also from their inner selves. Szondi here refers to the ‘paradox of subjectivity itself: self-alienation in reflections, the reification of the self through self-contemplation, the sudden transformation of energized subjectivity into the objective. [. . .] Thus, the isolated individual, fleeing from the world into himself, is confronted once again by someone unknown’ (Szondi, Theory 27). This consciousness and experience of the external world and one’s own inner psyche as ‘other’ and ultimately unfathomable is characteristic of early twentieth-century aesthetic expressionism, but traces of this sentiment can also be found in contemporary British drama. I have already drawn attention to the importance of alterity and difference in Barker’s drama. David Rudkin’s work, too, articulates the (Adornian) dialectic between subjectivity and reification in complex dramatic terms. And in the later work of Sarah Kane, what Szondi calls the ‘paradox of subjectivity’ undergoes even more rigorous theatrical transformations. Before a consideration of her work, however, I want to draw attention to Adorno’s thoughts on the avant-garde movements of the 1960s, which he characterised as showing a tendency toward aesthetic


impurity (Verfransung ) – a structural convergence of artistic genres. In Kane’s work, such a Verfransung of genre is evident in the increasing poetisation of her later, arguably postdramatic theatre. Crossing aesthetic boundaries: the not-knowing of new art

As has been previously noted, Adorno considers art to be at once separated from and connected with empirical reality. What he terms the Doppelcharakter (double character) of art refers to every artwork’s existence as an autonomous aesthetic entity which nevertheless arises from, and communicates with, what is external to its form, i.e. with the social and empirical reality that appears as the artwork’s ‘sedimented content’ ( AT 5). Without imitating external reality, however, autonomous art nevertheless absorbs and makes manifest the ‘unresolved antagonisms of reality’ as ‘immanent problems of [aesthetic] form’ ( AT 6). This is achieved through a combination of mimesis – art’s assimilation to what is other than itself – and rationalisation (the imposition of aesthetic form on nature).2 These complementary forces at work in art – the incorporation of the mimetic by the rational element and the potential destabilisation of the rational by the mimetic element – make it possible for art to denote and criticise the social dynamic of domination which constitutes the subject’s relation to nature. Art’s social critique thus becomes possible without the need to imitate objective reality by representing (on the level of content) thematic material which corresponds to the social/empirical. Adorno argues that art’s critical and political dimension – its social significance – is the result of its formal opposition and resistance to empirical reality, which makes possible a negation of the ‘constraining spell’ ( AT 5) of the world. In his essay ‘Art and the Arts’, Adorno comments on the strategies of certain artistic phenomena of the 1950s and 1960s avant-garde (such as happenings, musique concrète, and polyphonic visual art) to question again, in the spirit of the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century, the relationship between art and society (empirical reality). These new aesthetic genres are characterised by elements of impurity and ‘promiscuity’ – ‘The artistic genres appear to revel in a kind of promiscuity that violates some of the taboos of civilization’ (‘Art and the Arts’ 371). Adorno calls this process aesthetic Verfransung – a deconstruction or erosion of the boundaries between different artistic genres, leading to a cross-fertilisation of the arts. For example, music takes on characteristics of the visual arts (Stockhausen’s piano scores, like


paintings, do not insist on being read in any particular, linear order) and musical structures enter the visual arts (as for example in the visual art of John Cage, but already noticeable in Paul Klee’s paintings which influenced post-war abstract art).3 What is interesting about this tendency toward a loosening of genre boundaries is that it confirms and supports Adorno’s characterisation of modern(ist) art as a self-reflexive practice that pushes against preconceived artistic conventions in the spirit of the avant-garde. The key question that the avant-garde raises for an audience is: ‘Is this still art?’ Adorno understands but also questions the development towards an increasing spiritualisation of art (predicted by Hegel, but manifest in modernist art since symbolism) which also shows its traces in the Verfransungs-tendencies of the avantgarde in the 1950s and 60s where spirit denotes art’s ability to resist and transgress the terms of the real. On the surface, the Verfransung of modern art suggests a negation of aesthetic meaning and an attack on the semblance character of art due to the art work’s integration of heterogeneous elements. Adorno says that ‘[t]he erosion of the arts is almost always accompanied by the attempt by works of art to reach out toward an extra-aesthetic reality’ (‘Art and the Arts’ 385) which can be observed in happenings, for example. Having renounced attempts to reflect or imitate reality, artworks and art events participate in the empirical world by becoming ‘virtually a thing among things, a something we know not what’ (ibid.). Ultimately, aesthetic Verfransung is subject to contradiction: art’s object-hood ( Dinghaftigkeit ) cannot wholly be affirmed, nor can art be emphatically emptied of meaning and semblance if the concept of art is to survive. The Hegelian prognosis of the end of art, which Verfransung on the surface seems to stand for, is confirmed and undermined at the same time due to art’s ongoing relationship to human suffering (Hegel’s definition of art as a consciousness of needs). The negation of aesthetic meaning in modern art is, for Adorno, an attack on the purported meaningfulness of reality and humanity. However, [t]he consistent negation of aesthetic meaning would be possible only if art were to be abolished. The latest significant works of art are the nightmare of such an abolition, even though by their very existence they resist their own destruction; it is as if the end of art threatens the end of mankind, a mankind whose sufferings cry out for art, for an art that does not smooth and mitigate. Art presents humanity with the dream of its doom so that humanity may awaken, remain in control of itself, and survive. (Adorno, ‘Art and the Arts’ 385)


Art’s as well as humankind’s continued existence is dependent on the notion (and realisation) of freedom, and for Adorno aesthetic freedom is primarily evident in the artwork’s formal autonomy – its difference from the empirical reality. This difference is embodied through the work’s formal unity and its parameters of construction (the constellation of material elements) which of course, as has been mentioned in previous chapters, exist in a dynamic tension to its mimetic moments (those elements that are heterogeneous and antithetic to the artwork, signifying its otherness). Aesthetic autonomy (freedom) becomes a question of materiality, and as Eichel has suggested, Adorno tends to consider the Verfransungs-tendencies as ‘a new autonomous principle of construction’ (Eichel, Vom Ermatten der Avantgarde 158). The principle of montage plays a significant role in this tendency of modern art to erode genre boundaries. Considered as part of the developments within the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century, montage is conceived in Adorno’s theory as a force (and artistic principle) that disrupts aesthetic unity and semblance. Furthermore, the montage technique of integrating literal fragments from empirical reality (as in cubism and later in musique concrete, for example), signifies what Adorno calls ‘the inner-aesthetic capitulation to what stands heterogeneously opposed to it’ ( AT 155). However, Verfransung in neo-avant-garde art is also an emancipation of form and therefore socially significant. As Adorno suggests: ‘The liberation of form, which genuinely new art desires, holds enciphered within it above all the liberation of society, for form – the social nexus of everything particular – represents the social relation in the artwork; this is why liberated form is anathema to the status quo’ ( AT 255). We are presented with two perspectives which are upheld simultaneously in Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Whilst it is possible to read the developments of the avant-garde in the early and mid-twentieth century as art’s attempts to liberate form (and in doing so to negate the prescriptions of empirical reality), it is also possible to interpret art’s radical attack on its own autonomy and independent use value, as well as its assimilation of (and to) the heterogeneous, as signs of de-aestheticisation ( Entkunstung ) or a movement towards the ‘end of art’. Approached critically, the aesthetic phenomenon of Verfransung can be interpreted as an indication that modern art too has succumbed to the socio-economic logic of reification and exchange. The postdramatic

In contemporary theatre, the (neo-)avant-garde Verfransung of the arts manifests itself as a tendency towards a deconstruction of dramatic


forms and a cross-fertilisation of media. In his theory of the postdramatic, Hans-Thies Lehmann takes Szondi’s concept of Drama as a point of departure and makes reference to Adorno’s aesthetics of Verfransung when he calls postdramatic theatre a ‘meeting place of the arts’ (Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater 44). Lehmann argues that contemporary theatrical forms (such as Robert Wilson’s theatre of images, the experiments in Tanztheater, or Peter Handke’s non-dramatic drama) signify a radical departure from the classical (Szondian) definition of Drama as an absolute form which ‘can be conscious of nothing outside itself’ (Szondi, Theory 8) and in which the development of action ‘depends on the possibility of dialogue’ (Giles, ‘Szondi’s Theory of Modern Drama’ 273). Lehmann argues that the postdramatic forms of theatre take important impulses from the Brechtian concept of epic theatre as far as the subversion of the primacy of dramatic dialogue and the intensification of theatrical gestures are concerned. Szondi had also registered a significant ‘shift towards the epic’ ( Theory 35) as constitutive for the crisis of modern drama. 4 But postdramatic theatre does not stop at a subversion of dramatic illusion or fragmentation of dramatic action. Importantly, the postdramatic aesthetic rejects the categories of illusion, action, character and plot, as well as the Brechtian emphasis on theatre’s potential to express an alternative to dominant ideology. By virtue of its refusal to articulate and legitimate the ideological metanarratives of modernity, postdramatic theatre can be interpreted as a distinguishing cultural form of postmodernity. As an example of a postdramatic theatre text Lehmann cites Peter Handke’s play Über die Dörfer. Dramatisches Gedicht ( About the Villages. A Dramatic Poem) (1981) – a lyrical theatre text in which dramatic action is no longer associated with tension or plot development. In fact, the notion of ‘action’, which is central to the classical understanding of drama, is suspended in favour of an emphasis on the lyrical, musical quality of the language and the physicalisation of ideas in the rhythmic movements and gestures of the speakers. In short, the play’s self-reflexive poetic form emphasises the ‘aesthetic qualities of theatre as theatre’ (Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater 51) and at the same time extends the possibilities of text-based theatre. In Kane’s work the rejection of the representational (mimetic) function of theatre takes the form of suspending the referential relationships of the theatrical elements (text, action, gesture) to what may be perceived as a recognisable, extra-aesthetic, reality. This rupture of representation and referentiality is primarily the result of the abstract presentation of character and their ambiguous positioning in non-specific locations in her later work. Here one notices a cross-genre movement from drama to poetry;


or, put differently, an inclusion of the poetic into the dramatic which accelerates the dissolution of the dramatic form (thus pointing towards the postdramatic) and challenges the primacy of mimetic approaches to the dramatic arts. This dynamic provokes questions such as: ‘is this still theatre?’ and ‘where is the dramatic subject?’ Characteristic of Kane’s drama is a primacy of aesthetic form over content, message or story, which, paradoxically, also determines the political dimension and import of her work. Lehmann, too, argues for a primacy of form in his discussion of postdramatic theatre and its relation to the political. ‘The political can appear only indirectly in the theatre, at an oblique angle, modo obliquo’ (quoted in Jürs-Munby et al., Postdramatic Theatre and the Political 31). The postdramatic rejects drama’s claim to offer a representation of experiences, actions or empirical conditions in the theatre, and draws attention to the ‘real’ as a destabilising force that ruptures the dramatic frame of representation. However, such a rejection of drama as a representational mode which creates a fictional cosmos that is synthesising and totalising assumes an easy binary relationship between the real (the truth) and the fictional (the illusory) which Adorno’s aesthetic theory seeks to complicate. What unites the dramatists under consideration in this study is the stringency and originality of their theatrical imaginations, which are postdramatic in the sense that they do not aim for reconciliation of conflict and difference, or affirm direct, referential links between the stage and the outside world; and which in aesthetic terms moves beyond realist representation (rejection of realist aesthetics) but not beyond representation as such. It is still drama which affirms the potentially transgressive and transformative effects of the theatrical text understood as a mode of semblance or indeed representation. The crisis of semblance, as inaugurated by modernism, is hence also a crisis of representation and was articulated first as a challenge to the conventions of naturalism and realism in art (art’s production of an illusion of the real). Adorno, however, demonstrates that the categories of illusion, semblance and appearance remain constitutive features of the artwork, even though they need to be met with self-conscious critique. Sarah Kane’s theatre is a prime example of an art ‘that does not smooth and mitigate’ personal or social contradictions (Adorno, ‘Art and the Arts’ 385) and in which ‘[t]he negation of synthesis becomes a principle of form’ ( AT 155). Kane resists the synthesis of body and mind, or reason and consciousness, even though her work is still imbued by a utopian wish for such synthesis, by a wish (which she shares with Edward Bond) that ‘humanity may awaken, remain in control of itself,


and survive’ (Adorno, ‘Art and the Arts’ 385). This negative utopian desire finds painfully emotional expressions in her theatrical language of violence and love. In the 1990s, British theatre saw a revival of distinctive theatrical voices who engaged with social and cultural phenomena in highly imaginative and formally experimental ways. Alex Sierz coined the genre definition ‘in-yer-face theatre’ to include dramatists who deliberately sought to challenge audience expectations. Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill are the main representatives of this genre and their work has been acclaimed for its direct, uncompromising and anti-romantic depictions of the possibilities and impossibilities of inter-personal relationships in violent social contexts. In Kane’s later work we witness the aesthetic dissolution of the subject, a movement which Adorno characterised as ‘the urge to lose oneself in identification with the “other”’ ( DoE 184, translation modified KG). Sarah Kane has been celebrated as the leading playwright of the 1990s and many critics agree that her brief theatrical career, cut radically short by her suicide in 1999, has given expression to a new aesthetic sensibility in British theatre.5 Her plays can be read as idiosyncratically aesthetic responses to the social climate of the late twentieth century. This is especially true of Blasted , in which Ian – a middle-aged journalist with links to the secret service – physically and mentally abuses his ex-girlfriend Cate – a young girl, prone to epileptic fits – in a posh hotel room in Leeds. The entrance of a soldier and the explosion of a mortar bomb radically transform the stage setting into a war-torn space in which the unthinkable yet real crimes of war unfold. The soldier rapes Ian, gauges his eyes out and kills himself. Cate returns with a baby who dies; Ian eats the baby, then climbs under the floor boards with his head sticking out and finally dies, only to wake up into the same situation. Any attempt to give a narrative account of the play’s action does not do justice to Kane’s effective use of striking visual images which have a deeper, non-linguistic resonance. The soldier’s rape of Ian echoes Ian’s rape of Cate in the first half of the play and presents one of the points of connection between domestic violence (in peace time) and the violence inflicted on victims of war. Another powerful visual element is the series of movements and actions (self-strangling, shitting, laughing hysterically, having a nightmare, etc.) that Ian undertakes shortly before his death and which are intercepted by darkness and light. These visual images and soundscapes (of summer, autumn, and winter rain) intensify the oppressive atmosphere of prolonged suffering and endless despair, which engulfs the characters. However, as has been pointed out


by Kane herself, the play is less pessimistic and less morally ambiguous than her later work. Bond was moved by the ‘humanity of Blasted ’ (Bond quoted in Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me 25) and his appreciation placed a lot of emphasis on the ability of the play to alter our attitudes to the world around us. His contention that ‘ Blasted changed reality because it changed the means we have of understanding ourselves’ (ibid. 190) echoes his conviction that theatre should be a rational (or rationalising) activity that connects the audience with the deepest levels of their humanity. This is a model of theatre as an apparatus of understanding and articulating social problems with a view of enabling us to confront the ills of society and the irrationality of human conduct. It is characteristic of Bond’s humanistic and rationalising aesthetic project to interpret Kane’s work in terms of its wider political (in the sense of moral and consciousness-raising) potential. Her (and his own) work’s confrontation with the ‘ultimate in human experience’ (ibid. 190), which connects both writers with Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, is in Bond’s mind an adequate and necessary response of modern drama to the catastrophes of the twentieth century. In comparison, Barker’s work can also be said to confront the ‘ultimate’ and the implacable, articulated by his characters’ relentless needs for self-expression and self-definition often against the prescribed standards of normality and historical truthfulness. But Barker’s engagement with the ‘ultimate’ does not amount to a call for a rational theatre, nor can the effects of theatre’s risk taking and exposure to the unknown and catastrophic be summarised as a contribution to ‘our humanness’ in Bond’s terms. Barker’s radically individualistic theatre resists interpretative approaches which concentrate on the function of work and what it may contribute to the general discourse of liberal humanism, not least because any definition of humanness will necessarily be based on notions of the collective, on what is communally shareable (see Arguments for a Theatre). It seems that Bond’s appreciation of Kane as a humanist playwright is more appropriate when discussing her early work ( Blasted , Phaedra’s Love and Cleansed ) in which the dramatisation of characters’ relationships to the external world, however problematic and devoid of any psychological realism, nevertheless articulates a sense of moral conflict, or a judgement on the moral ills of society, with which the audience can connect on some level. Kane’s later work ( Crave and 4.48 Psychosis) is characterised by the thematic flights of the self from the world, which is reflected in the plays’ experimental dramatic forms. As Dan Rebellato


has noted, Kane’s ‘writing is sparse and poetic’ (‘Sarah Kane’ 280). More than her previous work, these plays transcend any clearly identifiable social or political realities and for this reason they can be described as abstract, internally directed, or ‘closing in on themselves’ (Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me 156). Aesthetically, Beckett is one of the major influences6 on Kane: Ian and Cate’s existence of mutual dependency in an extreme situation at the end of Blasted echoes Hamm and Clov’s relationship in Endgame. The development of her dramatic writing from Blasted to 4.48 Psychosis is characterised by an increasingly poetic (musical) and minimalist use of language and further fragmentations of dramatic form. In terms of her choice of subject matter she also displays a Beckettian sensibility: the fragmented personal narratives (or confessions) in Crave largely express the speakers’ existential fears of isolation, loss of love and spiritual disillusionment. Crave (1998)7 consists of four characters (A, B, C and M) who express individual emotions ranging from feelings of physical pain to despair, fear of rejection, romantic love, sexual desire, etc. Beckett’s Play is structured similarly, yet the mise-en-scène is more striking: three characters, submerged up to their necks in urns, are prompted by light to tell their personal versions of a narrative that connects them all. In Crave the connections between the speakers is less clear, though there are indications that A (male) and C (female) have been in an unbalanced, possibly abusive relationship. A seems to be obsessed with C, she wants him to leave but he keeps following her, he is overpowered by romantic feelings for her (which he articulates in a torrent of uncontrollable, love-sick language: ‘[. . .] and whimper when I’m next to you and whimper when I’m not and dribble on your breast and smother you in the night and get cold when you take the blanket and hot when you don’t’, 169). The intensity of his feelings is counterpointed by the moral ambiguity of meaning and C’s inability to respond to his exaggerated gestures. She keeps saying ‘I feel nothing, nothing. I feel nothing’ and that she wants ‘to die’. There is a strong suggestion that C is suffering from an unresolved past experience, which is highlighted by her response to A’s account of an incident of child abuse: ‘ C And she has been hurtling away from that moment ever since.’ A’s earlier statement ‘I’m a paedophile’ implies him in this incident and throws a disturbing shadow on their relationship, which is complicated and contradicted by his confession of unconditional love for her, as I mentioned above. C is harking back to a moment in the past which has defined her and which she is desperate to resolve and overcome. There are references to a (her) mother, which suggest that the collapse of her psychic reality


(‘I’m having a breakdown because I’m going to die’ 172; ‘I’m evil, I’m damaged, and no one can save me’ 173) may be linked to C’s inability to come to terms with the absence of her mother. When she says that ‘No one died but I lost my mother’ (155) and repeatedly ‘You’re dead to me’ (168), this may refer to her absent mother or indeed the speaker M (M for mother) who in the play is involved with B (she wants his child but no romantic relationship). As this attempt at drawing out a few narrative strands has shown, it is impossible to arrive at unambiguous, final meanings when interpreting this play. There are some recurring motifs; for example, A’s verbal gestures of love for C, her rejection of him, C’s desperate effort to remember (‘I am here to remember. I need to . . . remember’ 171), B’s self-destructive energy and longing for M. What on some level unites all characters is an awareness of their suffering and a desire to end their existence. ‘To be free of memory’ and ‘free of desire’ (198) means to choose death, because life is not possible without memory or desire. Adorno’s theory of the subject proposes that the construction of subjective identity is an effect of processes of external and internal domination, as has been discussed above in the context of his theory of the dialectic of enlightenment. He emphasises the historical radicalisation of the subject’s desire for freedom (its reversal into violence) and considers art as a determinate negation of the real and as a placeholder of non-identity and the possibility of the impossible (the search for an intention-less relation between subject and object). The dialectic of presence (appearance) and absence (disappearance), meaning and loss of meaning, in the construction of subjectivity is further explored in post-Freudian psychoanalytical approaches, for example in the work of Jacques Lacan. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan illustrates the operation of alienation in the constitution of the subject. He opposes the field of the subject to the field of the Other – the realm of language ‘in which is situated the chain of the signifier that governs whatever may be made present of the subject’ ( Seminar, Book XI 203).8 The signifier exercises control over the subject, meaning that ‘it functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a signifier, to petrify the subject in the same movement in which it calls the subject to function, to speak, as subject’ (ibid.). 9 This (forceful) process of subject constitution is accompanied by a ‘movement of disappearance’, a ‘fading of the subject’ (ibid. 208). The subject is conceived of entering a dialectic of presence and absence in the structural field or discourse of the Other (which is the unconscious), and it is within this field or chain of signifiers that the subject at once gains


and loses meaning. Lacan speaks of this original division of the subject in terms of alienation and ‘a matter of life and death’ because paradoxically the subject as signifier is at the same time ‘cause of his [the subject’s] disappearance’ (ibid. 218). If read through a Lacanian lens, Crave’s characters’ final decisions to choose death (over a life of desire and hence suffering) is an effect of their consciousness as disappearing subjects, as subjects of lack, or subjects who lack. Realising that in life their freedom to be a (fulfilled, authentic) subject is an illusion which they cannot maintain because ‘when your sense of centre shifts [. . .] the balance has gone’ (Crave 192–3), they welcome the ‘bright white light’ (200) of death and demonstrate that ‘in the conditions in which someone says to you, freedom or death!, the only proof of freedom that you can have in the conditions laid out before you is precisely to choose death, for there, you show that you have freedom of choice’ (Lacan, Seminar, Book XI 213). The feelings of loss, pain and desire which the characters experience are the products of their relationship with the Other (be it lover, mother, abuser or ‘vastly overrated’ (189) external reality in general), which is experienced as a (self-)division that has become unbearable to them. In Crave, the characters’ problematic relationships with external reality are given an ironic, meta-dramatic expression when A asserts ‘[a]nd don’t forget that poetry is language for its own sake’ (199). This raises the question of the play’s relationship to the outside world, the context of its generation, and the positioning of the reader/spectator in a social framework. Kane draws attention to the artificiality and aesthetic quality of her piece, which is not to say that any conceivable connections with ‘the world outside’ are for this reason abandoned or considered irrelevant. Rather, in the spirit of Adorno, it is maybe more interesting and challenging to look for the social signifiers, the traces of society and history in the play in precisely its appearance as an autonomous piece of work which draws attention to its status as art. A continues: ‘Don’t forget when different words are sanctioned, other attitudes required [sic ]. Don’t forget decorum. Don’t forget decorum’ (199) as if to establish a similarity between theatrical form and the degree of artificiality and construction that plays a part in the development of subjectivity (understood as an effect of language). The social traces in this play are the traces of the workings of the unconscious, the symptoms and pathologies that the characters have developed in their struggles to understand their psychic realities and, by extension, their world. Their agreement that the external world is ‘overrated’ throws them back onto themselves and turns all their verbalisations of desire and discontent


into spectral moments of heightened self-awareness which at the same time are the moments when the subject witnesses her own disappearance and alienation. This thematic is repeated in Kane’s last play 4.48 Psychosis which has been referred to as her suicide note. Formally, this play presents a further development of dramatic structure and composition towards greater abstraction and a musical quality which was already noticeable in the repetitions and variations of motifs in Crave. 4.48 Psychosis as a whole can be regarded as a variation on, and intensification of, the experiences of Crave’s character C. The unresolved issues of C’s memory (her absent mother, her possible abuse as a child) and crucially the indications of her mental breakdown are articulated in 4.48 Psychosis in more powerful, lyrical and explicit ways. In terms of structure and its implications for performance, the play presents an added challenge due to the fact that it does not contain any specified characters – the play for this reason resembles a dramatic poem rather than a play, even though there are moments of dialogue. However, the dialogue as much as everything else in the play can be envisaged as taking place in the consciousness (or indeed the unconscious mind) of the speaker. In both Crave and 4.48 Psychosis the problem of the self becomes a problem of objective and poetic/theatrical representation. The characters’ sense of isolation, mental disintegration and inability to conduct their lives according to the acceptable rules of social conduct in Crave are intensified in the discourse of the psychotic in 4.48 Psychosis. Here, the speaker struggles to hold the fragments of his/her disintegrating mind together, but moments of utter despair, loss and anxiety are juxtaposed with instants of clarity and self-awareness: At 4.48 when sanity visits for one hour and twelve minutes I am in my right mind (229) The play can be read as a preparation for the speaker’s impending suicide, and it is filled with feelings of self-accusation and guilt (‘I am guilty, I am being punished’ 206), repulsion of her physicality (‘I am fat [. . .] My hips are too big / I dislike my genitals’ 207), and spiritual visions of sacrifice (‘Gird yourselves: / for ye shall be broken in pieces / it shall come to pass’ 228). There are also insights into the love–hate relationship with her therapist, which convey the patient’s experiences of frustration and disillusionment when confronted with the reality of


deception that is part of the transference (the analyst–analysand relationship): ‘I trusted you, I loved you, and it’s not losing you that hurts me, but your bare-faced fucking falsehoods that masquerade as medical notes’ (209–10). An oppressive and consuming feeling of alienation possesses the psychotic patient who experiences her body as separated from her mind (‘Body and soul can never be married’ 212) and frustratingly disconnected from her environment. The psychotic self enters a void where she does not live anymore; her declaration ‘I have been dead for a long time’ (214) echoes B’s and C’s ‘I feel nothing, nothing. I feel nothing’ and invokes the sense that her suicide will not come as a surprise; that her acceptance of the ‘white light’ (which again signifies the presence of death) is the only logical alternative. What we witness in the psychotic’s discourse is a dramatisation of aphanisis, the ‘fading of the subject’ (Lacan, Book XI 208) that Lacan speaks about when referring to the subject’s relationship to the signifier. 10 The ‘fading’ of the speaker in this play is characterised by her problematic relationship not only to other people and the external world, but also to language. Lacan’s assertion that ‘the psychotic is inhabited, possessed by language’ ( The Psychoses 250) finds expression in the fragmentary dramatic form of the play, with its repetitions of phrases, ellipses and silences, verbal explosions and ruptures. In this context Lacan’s description of the structure of the psychotic’s monological discourse as ’music for several voices’ (ibid.) also applies to the play’s polyphonic structure and rhythm. Of course, the fraught relationship with language is an expression of a broken relationship with the world, since (according to Lacanian psychoanalysis) it is through the structure of language that the subject connects with the outside world. The speaker’s consciousness of her dysfunctional relationship with language (and the world) is expressed in moments where her language becomes automatic, in passages where the mechanical ‘rhythm of madness’ ( 4.48 Psychosis 227) takes control: flash flicker slash burn wring press dab slash flash flicker punch burn float flicker dab flicker punch flicker flash burn dab press wring press punch flicker float burn flash flicker burn (231) Juxtaposed to this we hear a voice of apparent objectivity: ‘it will never pass’, ‘Nothing’s forever’, ‘the morning brings defeat’ (231), followed


by: ‘I know myself. / I see myself’ (233). These juxtapositions of different registers are the formal counterparts to the contradictory emotions that consume the speaker. Overwhelming feelings of love and longing for ‘a woman who was never born’ (218) give way to the painful realisation (or imagination) that ‘there’s no meaning to life in the light of my loss’ and ‘nothing can fill this void in my heart’ (219). Her love of ‘the absent’ (219) is the love of the Other (in the sense of ‘I love you, my Other’) but in order for this love to become a reality it must also be precisely what it is not in her story, namely the love of the Other, the Other’s love (for me). The speaker’s discourse of (absent) love is the prelude to the dramatisation of her disappearance from the world; it is the opening of a space in which her ‘breakdown’ (219) – the flight of the self – takes the shape of a flight into form, which gives rise to the experience of formlessness that characterises her Being. The question ‘How can I return to form / now my formal thought has gone?’ (213) expresses the fundamental division that the subject experiences in view of the pressures exercised on her by the external discourse of normativity and reality, which she is incapable of speaking or writing (‘I write for the dead / the unborn’ 213). This is because speaking (meaningfully, rationally, sanely) requires a standpoint from which one speaks, a sense of location and an ability to judge oneself in relation to what one speaks about. This consciousness of connection and relation (of being connected to the world, to others, etc.) is lacking in the speaker, which results in her experience of herself as a floating, dislocated signifier, a formal element in a structure of signification in which ‘[e]very act is a symbol / the weight of which crushes me’ (226). She not only suffers from a perceived over-signification of her surrounding environment, but from the riddle of her psychic reality, which throws her onto ‘a twisted path to expression’ (213). Expression, whether as articulation, verbalisation or gesture, becomes a physical manifestation, a structure devoid of content. And the point at which form becomes an abstraction, a pure form, is also the point at which the subject approaches death. The dialectic between the signifier and the signified in the chain of signification (language), translated into the dialectic of presence and absence in the psyche, finds its aesthetic articulation in the paradoxical formlessness of a text in which: A glut of exclamation marks spells impending nervous breakdown Just a word on a page and there is the drama (213)


4.48 Psychosis is perhaps the play that most thoroughly and radically pushes the boundaries of theatre to create an effect of Verfransung . It can be characterised as a dramatic poem rather than a play and most clearly displays the influence of Beckett in terms of formal experimentation and ambiguity of content. In this example of postdramatic theatre there are no longer any character definitions at all, which means that in production a choice has to be made as to the number of speakers on stage and the division of the text. It is possible to conceive of the play as only consisting of one speaker/voice/body whose mental disarray gives expression to a myriad of verbal images, fragmented lines of thought, and perplexing descriptions of a surrounding reality which no longer possesses any clear definitions or markers of empirical objectivity. Kane’s work on the whole lacks clearly identifiable political content, and even if her early work (especially Blasted ) can be considered as an expression of her political conscience, it would be misleading to focus one’s interpretation of her work exclusively on a search for political signifiers on the level of content alone. Even Blasted , which of all her plays is most influenced by contemporary events and conditions (the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s; the increase of violence in modern society), points to political and humanitarian catastrophes by means of a disintegration of aesthetic form – the play’s references to empirical reality (to ‘real’ events occurring outside of its aesthetic structure) are most unsettling when the unpredictability and relentless violence of war enter dramatic form and explode it: ‘I think that what happens in war is that suddenly, violently, without any warning whatsoever, people’s lives are completely ripped to pieces. So I literally just picked a moment in the play, I thought I’ll plant a bomb and blow the whole fucking thing up’ (Kane quoted in Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me 41). Kane’s plays are not ‘issue plays’ that contain identifiable (and readily consumable) social messages. Rather, it would be more effective and in agreement with her project of formalist theatrical experimentation to focus attention on her treatment of dramatic form which, according to Adorno’s definition of art as a windowless monad, does provide a critical statement on the (administered) world outside and maybe even an indication of a different order of things. As Adorno maintains: ‘By their very existence artworks postulate the existence of what does not exist and thereby come into conflict with the latter’s actual nonexistence’ ( AT 59). Thus the socio-political significance of the tendency towards aesthetic abstraction in Kane’s later work can be explained with reference to Adorno’s notion that abstract art is an ‘allegorical reaction to a world that ha[s] become abstract’ ( AT 22). Kane’s later work is no longer


dominated by the logic of theatrical representation (mimesis conventionally understood), but takes on characteristics of Lyotard’s concept of an ‘energetic theatre’. ‘Energetic’ aesthetic form embraces a ‘libidinal economy’ of energies and intensities, which transfigures linguistic structures, decentres subjectivities and ‘produce[s] events that are effectively discontinuous’ (Lyotard, ‘The Tooth, The Palm’ 109). To conclude, Kane’s project embodies a Beckettian challenge to dramatic meaning yet nevertheless works in the tradition of expressionist theatre which physicalises the emergence of subjective desire as a critical urge (irrational, compulsive, self-destructive) that blasts the forms of linguistic and physical movement in time and space. The self continues to be in search for means of expression, and indeed it insists on its damaged forms of articulation. But this articulation becomes increasingly abstract in Kane’s later work, suggesting (as Adorno maintained), that ‘after the catastrophe of meaning, appearance becomes abstract’ ( AT 22). In Kane’s theatre, subjectivity appears as a riddle, a wound, and gives rise to a distorted form which invites contradictory emotional responses (from performers and spectators). What Kane dramatises so effectively in her experimental approach to theatrical form is the extent to which late-capitalist reification has effectively produced a failed subject. Placed in the context of Adornian negative dialectical thought, the operations of deconstruction apparent in Kane’s ‘theatre of extremes’ (Saunders) may suggest that ‘[t]he image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite’ ( MM 95). In other words, by aestheticising the failure of the subject, Kane’s work puts the subject back into the theatrical (representational) frame and preserves subjectivity as a vestigial but necessary category.

Epilogue: Adorno, Tragedy and Theatre as Negation

For only what does not fit into this world is true . ( AT 59) Towards the end of his book Participation: Consciousness of Semblance, Alexander García Düttmann addresses the connection between the aesthetic semblance of beauty and the immediacy of the corporeal. Following Adorno, the semblance ( Schein) or spirit of art is here characterised as a ‘more’ which aligns art with the concept of natural beauty. Düttmann shows how nature, like art, has the ability to say more than it is, and this more, or semblance, is an expression of the somatic and corporeal. ‘Der Schein ist das, was in der Kunst vom Körper bleibt’ – ‘Semblance is what remains of the body in art’ (Düttmann, Participation 181; translation KG) but this remainder of the body as (and in the form of) aesthetic semblance is foremost, and paradoxically, a negative expression of the non-existent and the inexpressible rather than an affirmative utopian claim to that which does not (yet) exist. If art has the power to rescue the body as semblance, thus releasing physicality from its contingent or literal fate as mere empirical matter, this process is nevertheless only to be conceived as a tension between art’s suggestion of a ‘more’ (an ‘as if’) and the contingency of artistic material. Thus, aesthetic semblance understood as a recollection of immanent corporeality (the body) becomes a marker for non-semblance, without which the work of art would ‘lose itself to the delusion of fantasy’ ( Participation 182). In other words, aesthetic semblance, the very expression of art, points to the inexpressible by way of the body which contains a promise of immediacy. For Adorno and Düttmann, ‘central to aesthetics therefore is the redemption of semblance’ ( AT 107). Art’s essential quality of semblance is particularly foregrounded 163


in the dramatic form of tragedy where thought and body are pushed to the limit. Conventional understandings of the concept of tragedy imply a fatalistic worldview and suggest a narrative of heroic opposition in the face of destruction and suffering. At first glance it seems that tragedy is an untimely notion in our so-called postmodern world in which social life can be analysed as a parodic play of signifiers, heterogeneous, rapidly shifting subject positions and a breakdown of legitimising meta-narratives of power. To hold on to the notion of tragedy in postmodernity seems to amount to a dangerously old-fashioned, perhaps even reactionary, position due to its interpretation of human nature as finite rather than endlessly changeable. Marxist social analysis as developed by Critical Theory, however, defines contemporary society and culture not as a field of unlimited possibilities but as a totalised context of commodification with negative implications for individual experience. As the work of Adorno demonstrates, life in late-capitalist culture has transformed into a nexus of exchange and reification, which problematises the notion of individual freedom and thus makes a renewal of the discourse on tragedy relevant and necessary. The dramatic works of Bond, Rudkin, Barker and Kane, in their continuation of Adorno’s critique of the ‘damaged self’, may be described as forms of tragedy. Adorno argued that the culture industry transforms audiences into consumers and regulates their responses to cultural products. Due to his Marxist leanings, Adorno might be thought to have no critical interest in tragedy, a mode that seems to belong to an archaically precapitalist worldview with associations of mythic determinism and fatalist assessments of identity. Sceptical attitudes to the concept of tragedy can be noted in critics such as George Steiner who argued that the tragic consciousness was incompatible with modernity and went into decline in Romanticism (see Steiner, Death of Tragedy and ‘“Tragedy,” Reconsidered’). Tragedy as a concept and aesthetic form was also problematic for Marxist thinkers such as Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht who believed that the concept stands in sharp contradiction to the idea of socio-historical change. However, by maintaining that the spirit of late capitalism has generated an administered, over-bureaucratised society in which a dehumanising ‘withering of experience’ can be noticed at all levels of life, Adorno’s thinking prepares for the recovery of tragedy as a mode that may possibly allow us to think against and beyond the reified structures of society. In his assessment of modern culture, Adorno uses the term catastrophe not only to designate Auschwitz as a moral catastrophe which has imposed a new ‘categorical imperative’

Epilogue: Adorno, Tragedy and Theatre as Negation 165

upon humankind: ‘to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen’ (ND 365). He also refers to the ‘ideologically lurking’ ‘destruction of non-identity’ (ND 362) in contemporary society as a sign of ‘permanent catastrophe’ (ND 320). The theatrical aesthetics of Samuel Beckett and Howard Barker in particular provide artistic examples of a reworking of the tragic dramatic form in the modern context of catastrophe. Theories of the tragic

The notion of tragedy has preoccupied philosophers and artists throughout the ages and it has given rise to many different definitions and associations. In his Poetics Aristotle defines the basic structure of Greek tragic drama as containing a cause-and-effect plot development involving the fateful fall of a hero, with moments of reversal of fortune and recognition, leading to catastrophe, a scene of suffering and a resolution. With regard to the particular effects of the tragic spectacle on an audience, Aristotle talks of an arousal and purging of pity and fear (catharsis). Aristotle’s poetics has influenced subsequent theories of tragedy from the Renaissance to the modern day, and reflections on tragedy have assumed an important presence in philosophical thought. As Peter Szondi suggests, since the late eighteenth century there has been a philosophy of the tragic which more or less coincided with the rise and subsequent critical responses to idealism in German philosophy (see Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic ). Philosophers such as Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have turned to art – music and the visual arts, but also tragedy – in their attempts to articulate philosophically (and in many cases reconcile) the contradictory nature of the mind and its relationship to objective reality. In other words, the subject–object antinomy has preoccupied thinkers since Kant. Because tragedy raises conflict and contradiction as core principles of viewing the world, it has been suggested that the achievements of German idealism manifest a ‘tragic turning within philosophy’ (Sparks and de Beistegui, Philosophy and Tragedy 7). The work of Adorno is very much part of this tradition, and in what follows it will be argued that the concept of the tragic plays a significant role in his aesthetic theory, cultural criticism and negative dialectics. Adorno did not develop a theory of tragedy as such, and it is therefore not surprising that his work is not discussed extensively in many of the recently published books on tragedy (such as Blackwell’s Companion to Tragedy edited by Rebecca Bushnell or The Cambridge Introduction to


Tragedy edited by Jennifer Wallace). 1 Indeed, in his Aesthetic Theory he argues that the dramatic genre of tragedy, like comedy, has become a redundant category in modern aesthetic theory. However, it will be argued that the treatment of an idea of tragedy, a tragic world-view so to speak, can indeed be extrapolated from Adorno’s writings. A first and important attempt in this direction has been made by Samir Gandesha who emphasises that Adorno’s critique of identity thinking – the dominating principle of subjective reason – takes the form of a negative dialectic in which the somatic, material moments of cognition are foregrounded. Adorno seeks to rescue or bring back into consciousness that which normally lies outside the ‘circle of identification’ (Adorno quoted in Gandesha, ‘The Theatre of the “Other”’ 259) created by instrumental rationality. By opening the possibility of a thinking beyond the domain of autonomous subjectivity, Adorno criticises rationality’s way of a ‘thinking that tolerates nothing outside it’ ( ND 172). Gandesha argues that in Adorno’s philosophy such a dialectical recovery of the ‘other’ implies a ‘recovery of tragedy’ because it emphasises ‘the primacy of the body and its suffering’ (‘The Theatre of the “Other”’ 244) which tragedy powerfully draws attention to. There is a philosophical history of understanding tragedy as a dialectical category. For Schelling, tragedy poses the fundamental question of subjective freedom; the assertion of free will against the pressures from objective necessity. The conflict between the individual human being and their object world leads to destruction, which at the same time symbolises the self’s assertion of freedom, their negative victory over the other despite self-annihilation. Death contains the paradoxical possibility of autonomy and self-definition. Other German idealists, such as Hölderlin and most importantly Hegel, also articulate the tragic in the dramatic terms of contradiction (the antagonism between subject and object, nature and art, God and man) whilst foregrounding dialectical relationships. For Hegel, the tragic manifests itself in the absolute claims of two different ethical systems (as he points out in his discussion of Sophocles’ Antigone2). Bradley, too, in his essay on Hegel’s theory of tragedy argues that ‘in all tragedy there is some sort of collision of conflict’ and that it is basically a ‘story of suffering’ (quoted in Paolucci, Hegel on Tragedy 368). Adorno and Horkheimer associate this story of so-called human progress (suffering) with the development of enlightenment modernity, and Benjamin, as will be further discussed below, describes history as an accumulation of catastrophes. According to Adorno, life in late-capitalist culture, in which administrative reification has reached unsurpassed


levels, imprisons the individual in regulative structures of uniformity (of ‘ever-changing sameness’, MM 238) which are designed to obscure and conceal contradictions and conflict on the level of culture, even though political and social conflict is proliferating everywhere. The profit-making, standardised art products of the mass culture are therefore a false mimesis of the social reality which gives rise to them. 3 An awareness of tragedy draws attention, on the one hand, to the fate of particularity in late-capitalist society (the erasure of differences between particular objects and individuals under reified formulas and schemata). On the other hand, the concept of tragedy may also permit us to make hidden social contradictions and antagonisms reappear. Such a resistant perspective as offered by tragedy may enable us to (re-)assert the individual’s rights against oppression, injustice and moral prescriptions in a world which, as Adorno warns us, exercises the ‘radical replaceability of the individual’ ( MM 232) and pronounces the ‘decay of experience’ (ibid. 235). In tragic drama, the particular gestures of the individual subject become ethical claims in a universe of contradiction and injustice. If any power can be ascribed to the notion of tragedy, it is similar to the force of the Hegelian ‘spirit’, namely the power of ‘looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it’ (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 19). Such a way of wrestling with the negative is suggested in tragedy’s encounter with death – this absolute other which eludes rationalisation. By confronting the other, the subject confronts herself. Hegel’s theory of tragedy, which he discusses in most detail in his lectures on aesthetics, remains of importance to modern approaches to tragedy, including Adorno’s, because it draws attention away from the Aristotelian emphasis on the effects of tragedy towards a consideration of the structure and historical significance of tragedy. Influenced by his theory of dialectics, Hegel’s concept of tragedy is characterised as a movement of progress of contradiction and negativity towards the ultimate condition of rational resolution in an absolute (see Roche in Bushnell, Companion to Tragedy ). Adorno’s own philosophy of negative dialectics emphasises the moments of contradiction and negativity that structure Hegel’s interpretation of the development of history. History, to Hegel, is the unfolding of events that stand in contradictory, negative relations with each other; but his overall emphasis on ethics as a recognition of the ‘untenability of one-sided positions’ (Roche in Bushnell, Companion to Tragedy 57) and the supremacy of rationality produces an insistence on resolution and harmony, a viewpoint which is rejected by subsequent approaches to tragedy, including Adorno’s.


Adorno’s assessment of the tragic development of individual subjectivity in the context of enlightenment is also, perhaps more evidently, informed by Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy. Nietzsche’s definition of tragedy as a combination of Dionysian and Apollonian aesthetic principles impresses a duality on the form and experience of art which seems relevant to Adorno’s definition of the art in terms of a dialectic relationship between mimetic-expressive and constructive-formal elements ( AT 44). The Dionysian spirit of formlessness, intoxication, irrationality and dissolution of individuality can be located in Adorno’s understanding of mimesis as a ‘nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other’ ( AT 54) – a kind of intuitive, non-violent identification with the other. And the category of construction in Adorno’s definition of art carries traces of the Apollonian form-giving, structural and rational principle which Nietzsche identified as the principium individuationis (the Schopenhauerian principle of individuation). Nietzsche’s general criticism of the over-rationalisation of the modern world and the need for the re-emergence of a tragic vision which could contribute to a cultural renewal also seems relevant for Adorno, to some extent. Both criticise the enlightenment prioritisation of rationality in Western civilisation, which has progressively alienated the individual from an immediate, sense-oriented engagement with what in reality remains inaccessible (i.e. intellectually ungraspable) and therefore a challenge. Tragedy would be able to produce a self-awareness of the limitations and deficiencies of subjective reason and also confront us with the traumatically unrepresentable, namely with suffering, death and what Lacan and Žižek define as the Real. Nietzsche predicted the coming of a ‘tragic age’ in the future, in which mankind would be reborn and transfigured.4 But whereas he defines tragedy as ‘the supreme art in the affirmation of life’ (Nietzsche quoted in Bushnell, Companion to Tragedy 82), Adorno argues that the cultural conditions determined by late-capitalist society make it imperative, yet also difficult and increasingly impossible, for art to resist the influence of the culture industry. For Adorno, the authentic aesthetic gesture is strictly associated with the category of negation. Nietzsche emphasises tragic pleasure as the pleasure to be found in pain which is aesthetically transformed in tragedy, and he compares the tragic effect to the effect of musical dissonance, the primary locus of the Dionysian power of art. ‘The Dionysian, with its original joy perceived even in pain, is the shared maternal womb of music and of tragic myth’ (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy 128). Nietzsche extends the notion of dissonance to his (Romantic) definition of the human form (ibid. 130)


as essentially divided, torn and transfigured (made meaningful and beautiful) through the Apollonian art of appearance. To Nietzsche, the Dionysian dissonance produced by the effect of tragedy possesses a kind of pre-historic power which ruptures the Apollonian. Adorno, too, perceives dissonance as a rupturing force, but only in the context of the historical development of art: dissonance is the product of a modernist dynamic of the new, expressing an ambiguity of meaning and contradiction of emotions. Dissonant music, for example, rejects the false harmony of traditional (pre-modernist) art and by breaking through the illusion of its own appearance (thus initiating a self-reflexive critique of its own condition and possibility of existence) it articulates a claim to truth ( Anspruch auf Wahrheit ). ‘Dissonance is the truth about harmony’ ( AT 110) because it attempts to disrupt not only the aesthetic conventions of harmony but also the very idea of a homogeneous social totality, a construct which in Adorno’s view produces the forced reconciliation of social antagonisms and inequalities. What is needed as a counterpoint and critique of this ideologically distorted reality, in which culture is constructed as a façade that conceals the ‘accumulated, speechless pain’ ( AT 40), is an art that wears the colour black. The relation of authentic (‘true’) artworks to reality is twofold: on the one hand their task is to become equal to the ‘darkness’ of the world (through the mimetic process); on the other hand they must point beyond this state of affairs, ‘for only what does not fit into this world is true’ ( AT 59). Tragedy in an age of catastrophe

According to George Steiner’s death-of-tragedy theory the metaphysical concept of tragedy is an unhelpful category when it comes to understanding the development of modernity. He argues that the decline of tragic drama in European theatre since the late seventeenth century has been connected with the regression of ‘certain essential elements of social and imaginative life [. . .] from western consciousness’ (Steiner, The Death of Tragedy 113–14). He lists the following as reasons: changes in the economic and intellectual constitution of audiences (the rise of middle-class, philistine audiences); the predominant role of drama as mere entertainment in the Romantic period; the emergence of the new ‘historical man’ who encounters the theatrical play with a mind distracted, nervous and unresponsive; and the rise of the novel, as well as the general lack of an audience for tragic drama. But, for Steiner, the struggle and failure of Romantic writers to re-establish and renew the form of drama (especially the ‘ideal of high tragedy’, ibid. 124) suggests


that the concept of tragedy was incompatible with Romanticism. ‘The romantic vision of life is non-tragic’ (ibid. 128) because it is based on an optimistic and energising belief in revolutionary progress and the liberation of mankind from the (imaginative and real) oppression of classicism, as well as a rejection of the concepts of fate and damnation. In drawing attention to the incongruity of the spirit of tragedy in the Romantic period, Steiner, perhaps inadvertently, articulates the force and radicality of the effects of the tragic, thus making it an attractive concept for a response to the systemic nature of late capitalism. Tragedy, so Steiner, shocks us with the ‘inexplicable and destructive forces that lie “outside” yet very close’ (ibid. 128) and shows us that ‘there is in the very fact of human existence a provocation or paradox’ (ibid.). Here, Steiner’s viewpoint is similar to the materialist position of Žižek or Adorno. Tragedy has the power to express the enigmatic and incommensurable substance of human existence – it brings us closer to the abyss of the mind and, using one of Adorno’s favourite concepts, therein lies tragedy’s aesthetic ‘truth-value’: by expressing the many manifestations of subjective suffering, it establishes a critique of objective reality. In tragedy, suffering constitutes the expressive reality of the individual and even when it is experienced as a necessity or ecstasy, compromise or remorse do not compensate for pain and anxiety. Tragedy brings about a suspension of the rational principle and there lies its paradoxical power to negate, whilst revealing, the instrumental rationalisation of the world. One could argue, with Steiner, that the Romantic worldview, predicated on the possibility of social progress and the redemption of evil, belongs largely to our own, modern and so-called emancipatory outlook. Yet the evasion of tragedy in the cultural products of modern society (represented by the safe, formulaic products of the culture industry) demonstrates our collective failure to engage with the catastrophes of the present and the past. Insofar as Steiner represents a liberal-humanist progressive view of the enlightenment which makes tragedy seem impossible today, this is in fundamental conflict with those who see modern life from the perspective of accumulated (historical) disasters. Perhaps it is one of the ironies of the objective reality of catastrophe that it prepares the conditions for a violent encounter with the Real – a development which deserves the name of the tragic. The Romantic, liberalist belief in the goodness of humankind and the possibility of progress and social justice have been shattered repeatedly since their idealistic enthronement as revolutionary principles during the eighteenth century. The twentieth century, by contrast, can only


be described as a history of failed revolutions and catastrophes, and not much has changed in the new millennium. Tragedy’s perceived renunciation of social revolution and the tragic form’s arguably aestheticist ends are perhaps some of the reasons why it has not been a favourite concept for Marxists. Lukács in his later work, for example, was suspicious of tragedy’s expression of a bourgeois sensibility that enthrones the principles of autonomous subjectivity and aestheticism. Brecht, to be precise, did not so much disagree with the form of tragedy as with the conventional ways in which the audience relates (namely passively) to tragic subject matter in the theatre. Tragedy is rejected in Epic Theatre as reactionary because it creates docile viewing patterns which support the status quo instead of promoting social, cultural and political change or revolution. As Ronald Gray states, Brecht associated tragedy with a kind of ‘fatalistic acquiescence [that] was typical of the whole theatre which he needed to combat’ (Gray, ‘Brecht and Tragedy’ 242). Furthermore, Brecht attempted to draw attention away from the contradictions and suffering of the individual self onto a dramatisation of social context and historical development. ‘As in all his dealings with tragedy, concern for the whole suppresses his concern for the individual’ (ibid. 248). For Adorno, on the other hand, a concern for the individual is paramount in his philosophy and aesthetic theory. 5 However, to argue for a recovery of the tragic in our times does not necessarily involve an anti-revolutionary acceptance of the status quo. As Raymond Williams has shown in Modern Tragedy (1966), tragedy might well prove a useful concept for Marxism, and more recently Eagleton has argued along similar lines (see Eagleton, Sweet Violence). Eagleton tries to reclaim tragedy for the left (‘the left should not airily ditch the notion as antiquated and elitist’, ibid. 22) by arguing that the concept of the tragic makes us aware of our finitude, constraints and frailty, and that today such awareness carries political and ethical significance for attempts to challenge and transform the system. By trying to release the concept of tragedy from its associations with immutability and defeatism, which provide the subtext in Steiner’s humanist treatment of tragedy as a metaphysical category, Williams creates a link between tragedy and the historical development of society. Williams’ treatment of tragedy becomes relevant for a Marxist interpretation because he forges associations between tragedy and social crisis, the main appearance of which is suffering. Furthermore, he argues that the conventional Marxist polarisation of tragedy and revolution needs to be reviewed because revolution itself is precisely the manifestation (the ‘crisis’) of a larger social disorder. Revolution according to Marx


is a ‘total redemption of humanity’ (Marx quoted in Williams, Modern Tragedy 75), which for Williams is ‘born in pity and terror’ and therefore ‘inescapably tragic’ (ibid. 77). As Eagleton points out, ‘[t]he tragic contradiction is clear: the practice of revolution may itself give the lie to the very humanity in whose name it is conducted’ ( Sweet Violence 59). But to argue that there exists a tragic connection between liberation and terror, which becomes manifest in the revolutionary struggle against alienation, does not have to amount to a fatalist acceptance of inhumanity. It can lead to a consideration of revolution as a necessary and ongoing development and struggle. The ‘tragic action’ that carries the name ‘revolution’ forces upon us a consciousness of suffering, which ‘is again revolution’ (Williams, Modern Tragedy 83). One can see from this discussion how the notion of ‘tragic action’ has been transposed from its origin in a context of dramatic theatre to the wider context of culture, and it is in this latter sense of the tragic as pertaining to a cultural crisis that an Adornian understanding of tragedy is rooted. Adorno, however, prefers to refer to cultural crisis in terms of ‘catastrophe’. The sociologist Georg Simmel, whose cultural criticism had a significant influence on the Frankfurt School’s neo-Marxist critique of mass society, already spoke of a ‘tragedy of culture’ with reference to the individual’s increasing experience of alienation. This is the actual tragedy of culture. Because the tragic undoing – as opposed to a sad or externally imposed one – can be said to consist of the following: that the devastating powers directed against an individual originate within the deepest layers of the individual himself; that his destruction articulates an inherent destiny, pertaining to the logical and structural development of the individual’s affirmative self-realisation. (Simmel, ‘Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur’, Philosophische Kultur 263. Translation KG) The development of subjectivity is perceived as fateful and its reification as inevitable, leading to an ‘emptiness of the innermost private life’ (ibid. 263). Adorno’s position with regards to the tragic development of enlightenment – its eventual denial of the principle of freedom and its reversal into barbarism – is centred on the notion that human suffering in modernity is connected to the effects of instrumental rationalisation (means–end rationality) which has become an absolute principle in latecapitalist society. The subjective impulse toward freedom from mythic relationships of coercion results in the self’s confinement in the prison


of its own mind on the one hand, and in its objective reification in the ‘world of things’ on the other hand. Following Nancy, one could argue that modern theatre comes ‘after tragedy’ because it ‘has no recourse, nor have we, to a higher (or more profound) truth, to which the “tragic” itself would open onto as to a possibility, in spite of everything, of making sense, even if it means making sense of the relinquishing of sense’ (Nancy, ‘After Tragedy’ 284). Yet, even for Nancy the concept of tragedy persists in postmodern times, because ‘tragedy itself, already comes after’ (ibid.). It comes after the catastrophe, after sacrifice, after the death of God and the crisis of subjectivity. The concept of tragedy implies a structure of feeling, which Steiner calls alienation or estrangement from life (the human experience of loss and of being a stranger to others and to oneself). But tragedy is also a structure of thought, a constructed conceptual system of relations between singularities; a structure of thought that plays out its own logic of separation and negation (the tragic hero separates herself from the world; she negates existence and puts meaning on trial). The alienation of the central character is experienced as a profoundly individualising process, a singularity that cannot adequately be thought. Tragedy thinks this eventuality of the singular, it thinks it to excess; and in thinking (tragically), thought reaches beyond the limits of its own conceptual structure. In classic as well as tragic theatre, thought undoes itself in its violent encounter with immanence which, as Adorno proposed, is the non-identical kernel of the concept. That the connection between tragedy and subjectivity is fundamental in Adorno’s theory can be deduced from the fact that he considers both categories to be not only in crisis but increasingly obsolete in the administered culture of today. ‘Tragedy evaporates because the claims of the subjectivity that was to have been tragic are so obviously inconsequential’ (Adorno, ‘Is Art Lighthearted?’ 252). Hence, the possibility for an experience of the tragic in art would be connected to the possibility of subjective experience in life. That both are wanting in the culture industry is in itself a tragedy, but as Adorno’s lifelong preoccupation with modernist art conveys, there is the belief that the notion of autonomous subjectivity (an individuality liberated from the damaged world) can somehow be recuperated in the aesthetic experience. By engaging with the problematic category of the self – its structure, development and evident reification in late modernity – Adorno’s thought also prepares for a recovery of the concept of the tragic, albeit as a reconfigured, changed category.


Adorno rejects idealist definitions of tragedy but that does not mean that he is insensitive to the possibilities of post-metaphysical experience opened by the tragic. Metaphysics, like tragedy, needs to undergo a process of redefinition in order for it to speak to the present situation (late-capitalist reality) – both categories need to be disengaged from associations of affirmation and positivity; they have a changed status in the world ‘post Auschwitz’. The intrinsically affirmative character of traditional metaphysics, which Adorno identifies in Aristotle, Plato and to some extent in the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, assumes the categorical existence of positive meaning and value in life. In addition, the metaphysics of idealist philosophy (especially Hegel’s) presumes the possibility of transcendence toward a higher principle (see Adorno, Metaphysics). Equally, one of the conventional perceptions about tragedy (again, in Hegel) is that the tragic hero is determined to face and challenge the negativity of the world; that his suffering has some kind of purpose and thereby creates meaning in a meaningless world; and that personal suffering is sublimated and redeemed in the context of the absolute. Adorno counters this with the following remark: ‘The tragic is decaying because it raises a claim to the positive meaning of negativity, the meaning that philosophy called positive negation. This claim cannot be made good’ (‘Is Art Lighthearted?’ 253). For Adorno, in the face of Auschwitz and its victims neither metaphysics nor tragedy in their traditional, idealist senses are acceptable – they become a ‘mockery’ and ‘downright immoral’ (Adorno, Metaphysics 104). For a culture that is erected in the aftermath of catastrophe to gain credibility and value, it needs to face up to its own damaged condition. When speaking of a tragic quality of Adorno’s sensibility, one needs to draw attention to the influence of Benjamin who challenged the idea of a ‘progress’ of modernity, focussing instead on its blind spots and contradictions. In his discussion of Paul Klee’s painting ‘Angelus Novus’ Benjamin states that history is ‘one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’ ( Illuminations 247), suggesting that enlightenment modernity is in a process of decline. As Richard Wolin has argued, the present (late-capitalist modernity) for Benjamin is in a ‘perpetual state of emergency’ (Walter Benjamin xxiii). But there is another sense of catastrophe operating in Benjamin’s thinking, one deriving from his considerations of the aesthetic. Benjamin ascribes a redemptive quality to catastrophe and sees this operating in the aesthetics of rupture in surrealist art, where the catastrophic shock-moments produced by the technique of montage disrupt the flow of linear time and narrative development, generating redemptive moments of


‘now-time’. Catastrophe can therefore be understood in two interrelated senses: as a condition of modernity, in which case it functions as an internal critique of modernity’s progress; and as a disruptive event which causes momentary suspensions of the linear logic of time and power. Adorno adopts both senses of catastrophe in his theory, arguing that modern culture and society are catastrophic in a terminal sense, resulting from the reversal of enlightenment and the legacy of Auschwitz; and the notion of catastrophe also enters his definition of modernist art where it is aligned with the aesthetic categories of shock and the new. ‘Scars of damage and disruption are the modern’s seal of authenticity; by their means, art desperately negates the closed confines of the ever-same; explosion is one of its invariants’ – it is the ‘catastrophic instant that destroys temporal continuity’ ( AT 23). In addition to catastrophe’s status as a condition of cultural crisis and aesthetic rupture, there is a sense that catastrophe for Adorno signifies the erasure of the individual, which can be understood with reference to tragedy. His assertions that in late-capitalist society ‘the individual is wholly devalued’ and that social progress has created a new kind of barbarism in which ‘the individual disappears before the apparatus’ ( DoE xiv) evoke the tropes of the tragic: the idea of a ‘reversal’ [ peripeteia] of development and the ‘fall of man’. The gods and fate are determining forces in ancient Greek mythology, and even though Aristotle’s theory of tragedy relates the demise or fall of the hero to some error of individual character – their ‘tragic flaw’ (hamartia) – the notion of inevitability or destiny remains crucial. Hegel, too, speaks of the fall of the hero who ‘suffers from her greatness’ (Roche in Bushnell, Companion to Tragedy 55) and commits actions that lead to catastrophe. Nietzsche would call the ‘fall’ or disintegration of the individual intoxicating and ecstatic, arguing that the irrational force of the Dionysian shatters the foundations of selfhood, thus producing ‘an overpowering feeling of unity which leads back to the heart of nature’ (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy 45). Adorno’s interpretation of the problematic, self-destructive legacy of enlightenment suggests that there is an inevitable logic at work in the so-called progress of reason, one that does not lead to freedom and autonomy of the self but to the creation of administered, reified social structures which drown the individual. Adorno thus suggests that the contradictions of modern culture are fateful in the sense that they reflect an inescapable dynamic, which Adorno and Horkheimer relate back to the principle of domination according to which the subject and society are structured. The totalising tendency of the rationality principle, according to which nothing is beyond thought, has given rise to a closed,


bureaucratically organised social system (a ‘context of blinding’, a ‘culture industry’) in which individuality has become an illusion and life is dominated by the mythic principles of immanence and a repetition of the same. Therefore, the ‘fallen nature of man cannot be separated from social progress’ ( DoE xiv). To call life in late capitalism tragic would, in Adorno’s view, already be too hopeful, because the context of catastrophe in which humanity, having survived its own death, continues to exist, is so dominated by the principle of integration that the individual’s impulse for resistance is abolished. For Adorno, ‘[t]he liquidation of tragedy confirms the abolition of the individual’ ( DoE 154). Yet the ‘tragic’ perspective of Adorno’s critical theory suggests that a recovery of the notion of autonomous individuality (one that is divorced from its former associations with bourgeois morality and idealist identity thinking) is needed and connected to a sense of the tragic. Such a recovery of self becomes a political and moral necessity in a social context of reification and standardisation in which it seems ‘part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces’ ( MM 63). For Adorno, the catastrophe of modernity is symbolised by Auschwitz, which denotes not only a real, humanitarian crime, but also the collapse of metaphysical thinking and the disintegration (reversion into barbarity) of enlightenment rationality. Adorno criticises the myth of capitalist culture: its ideological hold on our imaginations, its prescriptions and regulations, its global appeal and imposition. Totalising reason has encouraged the subject to control and thereby damage nature, and it has ended up damaging the subject itself. This ‘damage’ is referred to as reification and alienation. Enlightenment causes reflection (of the self back to itself in the mirror of objectified nature), but this reflection is stultifying because the knowledge that it produces is not authentic knowledge of the other, but an anthropomorphic view of the world as a projection of subjective power and control. Adorno and Horkheimer make reference to Homer’s epic Odysseus as an illustration of the dialectic of self-preservation and self-destruction underlying the Western development of bourgeois civilisation. The epic adventures of Odysseus signify the hero’s domination of nature and anticipate the rational subject’s ordering of the object world, at the same time they demand self-sacrifices in order to resist the ‘irresistible promise of pleasure [which] threaten[s] the patriarchal order’ ( DoE 33). The temptations that the hero encounters on his journey (the seductive song of the Sirens; the bewitching goddess Circe) are emblems of the fear of death in the face of which the subject confirms his own identity. ‘The strain of holding the I together adheres to the I in all stages;


and the temptation to lose it has always been there with the blind determination to maintain it’ ( DoE 33). This emphasis on the creation of self-knowledge and its dialectical relationship to self-destruction is perhaps more poignantly addressed in the Greek tragic myth of Oedipus to which the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment also refer. Oedipus receives an affirmation of the subjective principle from the Sphinx, whose riddle he solves with the answer ‘It is man!’. However, the tragic succession of dramatic events which eventually fulfil the prophecy of the oracle (that Oedipus is destined to kill his own father and marry his mother) reveals the fateful consequences of the totalitarian principles of enlightenment. The hero in search for knowledge is eventually blinded by his own insights. The enlightenment primacy of the subject thus leads to an aggressive idealism or an equally reductive positivism: ‘either the dull repetition of subjectivity in the form of the answer “It is man” or its progressive vanishing in the passive reflection of reified empirical data’ (Gandesha, ‘Enlightenment as Tragedy’ 117). A possible critique of this reduction of the experience of subjective freedom in idealism and positivism (both of which, according to Adorno, constitute the discourse of modernity) is represented by the expressive dimension of art. Art must be an anamnesis of the suppressed, the non-identical, another word for which is ‘suffering’. In order for art to be ‘authentic’, i.e. neither a fanciful flight from reality nor ‘falsely reconciled by a trumped-up realism’ ( AT 260), suffering must enter the form of art and constitute its principal expression. The fact that Adorno did not write extensively about the genre category of tragedy as such is to be derived from his understanding of the fundamentally uncertain character of art since modernism, which Adorno understands as a ‘crisis and overcoming of metaphysical meaning’ (Eichel, Vom Vermatten der Avantgarde 53) and which entailed a loosening of genre distinctions, or what he called the Verfransung (fraying) of art. This includes the dissolution of a clear distinction between tragedy and comedy as theatrical genres. They can no longer be maintained as separate categories: ‘Advanced art writes the comedy of the tragic: Here the sublime and play converge’ ( AT 198). Adorno associates the experience of the tragic with the sublime (das Erhabene) because both appear to suggest the ‘grandeur of human beings who are spiritual and dominate nature’ ( AT 198). However, Adorno’s theory of the enlightenment dialectic leads to a problematisation of both concepts, for what becomes apparent in the experience of the sublime is the ‘selfconsciousness of human being’s naturalness’ ( Naturhaftigkeit ) (ibid.). Art, and sublime tragic art in particular, makes necessary an anamnesis


of the non-identical, the moments of (objective) otherness which refuse to be appropriated by the subjective spirit – it calls for a return of nature which would provide the ‘counterimage of mere existence’ ( AT 197). Art can claim a truth-content only if it carries unresolved contradictions, and therein lies its ability to oppose the culture industry’s ideology of art as entertainment or ‘mass deception’ which masks the negativity of modern culture. Tragedy would seem to come closest to such an appeal for a negative artform and view of life, but only if it is imagined as a changed concept – namely released from its idealist associations with resolution of conflict in the Hegelian ‘absolute idea of ethical life [Sittlichkeit ]’ (Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic 15), as well as released from an undialectical Nietzschean understanding of tragedy as the expression of an irrational force or will that blindly affirms life in the face of negativity. If for Nietzsche the development of culture has given rise to two ‘types’ of human beings: ‘the strong who affirm life in spite of suffering and the weak who seek to flee suffering and thus negate life’ (Douglas Smith in Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy xxviii),6 for Adorno affirmation becomes a problematic (and politically regressive) category. Any authentic response to the negativity of life would have to be constructed as a form of anamnesis of suffering devoid of affirmative gestures. ‘But because for art, utopia – the yet-to-exist – is draped in black, it remains in all its mediations recollection; recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it; it is the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history’ ( AT 135). Art’s relationship to the ‘permanent’ catastrophe of history and culture is central to an understanding of its status as negation, which constitutes its utopian character, its ‘promise’ of otherness and transcendence from the empirical ‘nexus of guilt’ ( AT 134) from which it necessarily emerges. However, in a post-metaphysical (post-Auschwitz) context of life art must nevertheless be critical of this desire to transcend the real, because no positive or affirmative suggestion of the non-existent (an imagined ‘other’ utopian world) can be proposed without facing the danger of regressing into a false reconciliation of the contradictory constitution of reality. The ‘possibility’ of difference and non-identity that art nevertheless expresses, however, is ‘promised by its impossibility’ ( AT 136). Endgames and theatres of catastrophe

The aesthetic form of tragedy answers to another principal concern of Adorno’s, namely the recovery of the possibility of metaphysical


experience in post-Auschwitz culture. Notwithstanding Adorno’s critique of the status of Western metaphysics (Plato and Aristotle) as a philosophy of origins and presence, he was never in favour of totally eliminating the metaphysical impulse for transformation and transcendence as this would only amount to positivism’s affirmation of the existence of mere facts without history or consequences. That dramatic tragedy offers us metaphysical experience was already recognised by Georg Lukács in his early essay ‘The Metaphysics of Tragedy’ (1910) where he states: Real life is always unreal, always impossible, in the midst of empirical life. Suddenly there is a gleam, a lightning that illumines the banal paths of empirical life: something disturbing and seductive, dangerous and surprising; the accident, the great moment, the miracle; an enrichment and a confusion. It cannot last, no one would be able to bear it, no one could live at such heights – at the height of their own life and their own ultimate possibilities. One has to fall back into numbness. One has to deny life in order to live. ( Soul and Form 153) This echoes Adorno’s views about the happiness that is promised, yet broken, by the artwork. For the early Lukács the ‘metaphysical root of tragedy’ is precisely this promise or longing for selfhood and for the transformation of one’s existence (ibid. 162). Adorno’s famous aphorism ‘[t]here is no right life in the false one’ ( MM 18, translation KG) is also echoed in Lukács’s acknowledgement of the negativity of tragedy – namely, that the promise of tragedy (the fulfilment of desire) is inevitably and necessarily broken because ‘every longing fulfilled is a longing destroyed’ (Soul and Form 162). The ‘false life’ of the existing world, by contrast, does not nurture longing and desire but manufactures and manipulates needs according to the economic demands of the culture industry. The instant gratification of desire that is promised by the products of capitalist society is withheld on the stage of dramatic tragedy; or, as Adorno puts it: ‘For the sake of happiness, happiness is renounced. It is thus that desire survives in art’ ( AT 13). And that which survives in art, negatively, is the refuge for metaphysics at the moment of its disintegration. For Adorno the emphasis on the body and on suffering provides the foremost possibility of metaphysics because as unrepresentable categories of experience they respond to the power of the imagination and the mystery of the other. Tragedy may lift us out of the ‘closed context of immanence’ (ND 403) and thereby recover a fragment of metaphysical experience, however not one that formally realises harmonious


reconciliation but rather one that fails to do so, and by failing keeps the promise of redemption and reconciliation. The dramatic form of tragedy, primarily due to the theatrical, emphatic, heightened and exaggerated form of address (speech) performs a negative, resistant form of thought which offers us a distinctively immanent and contingent perspective on what thinking is or can be. In his discussion of parataxis in the presentation of Hölderlin’s poetry Adorno draws attention to the effect of spacing as a result of the constellatory lyric technique. The poet disregards syntax, punctuation and the logical ordering of thoughts and thus creates a ground or plane of poetic immanence (to borrow and amend Deleuze’s key concept) on which thought emerges as thought in direct contact with the object or ‘thing’. Similarly, in his interpretation of Hegel, Nancy states that ‘[t] hought is penetration into the thing, a breaking or sinking into the thing’ (Nancy, Hegel, 19). This penetration of the thing by thought does not, however, invite thought to stop or relinquish itself. On the contrary, contact with materiality and the concrete makes thought ‘restless’, self-reflexive and thus able to actualise itself as thought made manifest . The problem of manifestation, or to use the related concepts of appearance and semblance, in aesthetic terms has been a concern for philosophers of art since Kant. German idealism’s contribution to the discourse around aesthetic appearance rests on the primary notion that the semblance character of the work of art is its ability to reach beyond the limitations of art’s material object-ness to suggest the possibility of an ontological difference that is captured by the notion of a ‘more’, as Adorno has pointed out (see AT ). Adorno’s treatment of semblance is deeply informed by his reception of the idealist discourse of art and philosophy which established a connection between aesthetic appearance and spirit (Geist ). In the Hegelian tradition the spirit of art is the semblance of something immaterial (of an Idea, the Absolute), but it is unable to exist independently from the sensuous, material elements of the artwork, as I have discussed above in the context of thought’s relation to the thing. However, the artwork’s Schein cannot be identical with the material itself and it cannot be reduced to it, because such an identification would extinguish the difference or otherness of the artwork compared to other objects of empirical reality. Art as semblance is defined by this crucial element of difference from the real or, to use Adorno’s language, by its negativity from that which ‘merely exists’. In Aesthetic Theory he writes: ‘Artistic spirit raises itself above what merely exists’ (48). This might sound like the opposite of Hegel’s view (via Nancy)


that thought must penetrate into the thing (that which exists) in order to realise itself as (restless) thought. However, both statements are in dialectical relation: by sinking into the materiality of being, thought (spirit) – in order to be perceived as such – also, at the same time, raises itself above that into which it is sinking. The process of ‘sinking into’ the material becomes manifest in thought’s ability to reach beyond the known and contingent towards a possibility and futurity that is not yet defined or circumscribed. The ‘reaching beyond’, which is triggered by a ‘sinking into’, may do justice to the infinite singularity of that which is given to us in the (theatrically) distinctive experience of presence. Tragic drama, by bringing us ‘before the abyss of the self’ ( MM 63) through the power of the imagination, might be able to lift us out of the web of ‘ever-changing sameness’ (ibid. 238). In Adorno’s work of negative dialectics this can only be achieved if thinking draws attention to its own blind spots, to those elements of thought which lie beyond the circle of identification, to that which is not subject. Adorno calls for a recognition of the non-identical, a recovery of the ‘“dignity of the physicality” of embodied subjects’ (Gandesha, ‘The Theatre of the “Other”’ 259). If this remains unrealistic under current cultural and political circumstances or at best a utopian wish, the impossibility of such a critical gesture must itself undergo a transformation in the aesthetic and seek expression as a negative possibility. In tragedy, suffering, anxiety and agony but also ecstasy, are constructed as core principles in the ongoing and necessary struggle between (objective) determination and (subjective) freedom. Tragedy shows us that the appearance of suffering expresses defiance and that the expression of pain and ecstasy can be a challenge to order. The deterministic logic of the capitalist world, in itself a ‘tragic’ historical development of human civilisation, provokes gestures of resistance which are dependent on the recovery of a tragic worldview. The notion of tragedy in Adorno survives only as a concept aligned with the (moral and aesthetic) demands emerging in our ‘catastrophist’ culture. Hence, Adorno’s thought insists that the question of freedom has to be re-imagined as a primary demand in our context of withering experience and unlived life. Perhaps theatre, and tragic drama in particular, can embrace such a challenge by ‘strictly maintain[ing] a distance from mere existence’ ( MM 111).

Notes Prologue: ‘After Auschwitz’: Survival of the Aesthetic 1. In 1959 the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger called Adorno’s statement ‘one of the harshest judgments that can be made about our times: after Auschwitz it is impossible to write poetry’, and urges that ‘if we want to continue to live, this sentence must be repudiated’. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Die Steine der Freiheit’ in Petra Kiedaisch (ed.). Lyrik nach Auschwitz? Adorno und die Dichter (73). 2. Herbert Marcuse, too, criticised the tendency toward uniformity and repression of individuality in modern technological society in his seminal 1964 study One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced industrial Society . 3. For philosophers such as Hannah Arendt the culmination of totalitarian power as executed in the camps led not only to the degradation and extermination of people, it also opened profound and important questions about our understanding of humanity and ethics (see: Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism). The question of an ethical response to Auschwitz also preoccupies Giorgio Agamben who argues that an ethical attempt to bear witness (testimony) to Auschwitz must inevitably confront the impossibility of speaking without, however, condemning Auschwitz to the ‘forever incomprehensible’ ( Remnants of Auschwitz 11). 4. See Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg’s Postmodernism and the Holocaust . However, Adorno’s response to the Holocaust is not discussed in this volume. His most notable reflections on Auschwitz can be found in Negative Dialectics (‘Meditations on Metaphysics’), Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems (1965), and in the collection Can one Live after Auschwitz? 5. See the chapter in Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment where the authors discuss the schematic nature of advertisement and film production, and the construction of audiences as consumers and customers. 6. Lyotard also argues that the event has the power to alter the dominant forms and movements of desire, which in the economic system of capitalist society are shaped according to the needs of the totality (the need to produce and exchange). The event elicits a crisis of desire because it mutates ‘the relation between what is desired and what is given, between potential energy and the social machinery’ (Lyotard, ‘March 22’ in Political Writings 65). 7. Adorno develops the notion of a ‘forced’ or ‘extorted reconciliation’ between art and objective reality in an essay on the work of Georg Lukács, where he criticises Lukács’s socialist realism as undialectical and ‘stubborn vulgar materialism’ (Adorno, ‘Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’ Realism in Our Time’. Notes to Literature Vol. 1). 182

Notes 183 8. Adorno argued that the culture industry manufactured standardised (reified) responses to music, which he called modes of ‘regressive listening’. See Adorno, ‘Über den Fetischcharacter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens’. Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt .

1 Adorno and Beckett: from the Crisis of Schein to the Fidelity to Failure 1. Hartmut Scheible points out that despite his aesthetic and philosophical nominalism Adorno nevertheless emphasises the importance of authentic art to negate the false empirical reality. Scheible argues that Adorno’s theory of art as an immanent transcendence of reality is an example of his ‘idealism without ideal’. See Hartmut Scheible, ‘Geschichte im Stillstand. Zur Ästhetischen Theorie Theodor W. Adornos’, Heinz Ludwig Arnold (ed.). Text+Kritik, Zeitschrift für Literatur, T. W. Adorno (104ff). 2. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), 379. Kant calls the illusion offered by the categories of reason ‘transcendental’ (transzendentaler Schein). 3. See Adorno, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’ (1951), 30: ‘[N]ach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch’ (To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric). Adorno, ‘Die Kunst und die Künste’ (‘Art and the Arts’) in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft 1, Gesammelte Schriften, 10.1 (452): ‘Während die Situation Kunst nicht mehr zulässt – darauf zielte der Satz über die Unmöglichkeit von Gedichten nach Auschwitz – bedarf sie doch ihrer’ (While the situation does not tolerate art – this was meant by the statement about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz – it nevertheless calls for art). 4. Beckett’s ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce’ and other criticism and reviews contain the seeds of an aesthetic imagination that would flourish in his novels and find their most accomplished expression in his drama. This essay’s significance to Beckett’s ensuing creative progress could be compared to the importance of Adorno’s programmatic essay ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ for his later development. One gets the impression that both men’s philosophical and aesthetic projects are contained in miniature in their earliest critical writings. 5. Whilst the inclusion of the aesthetic concerns of both writers in a wider (and by implication general, universal) context may perhaps in itself seem problematic, their shared concern for the particular in art has parallels in Adorno’s interest in the dialectic between the particular and the universal in modernist artworks and his defence of the somatic or material moments of thought.

2 Edward Bond and the Aesthetics of Resistance 1. Even though Horkheimer and Adorno do refer to the historical movement of eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, more often they consider enlightenment as a trans-historical phenomenon, or impulse, which is connected to processes of self-preservation and the differentiation between the human and the natural world.

184 Notes 2. Adorno notices a development of de-aestheticisation in modern art (‘Entkunstung der Kunst’), which began with modernist avant-garde art’s attack on its status as art and the desire to dissolve the boundaries between art and life (the desire to narrow art’s distance from its viewer). 3. David L. Hirst acknowledges Bond’s presentation of a ‘savage picture of abuse and irrationality’ ( Edward Bond 124), which is true for most of his work, but in Saved no clear answers to the dramatised social problems are articulated. This is perhaps because the ‘picture of abuse and irrationality’ as presented in this play is contained within a specific social group and location, as pointed out above. The realism of the play resists the kind of excessive violence that becomes apparent in Bond’s later (both thematically and stylistically more complex) work. 4. Page references to quotes from Bond’s plays are provided in brackets in the main text. 5. Bond articulates the importance of the imagination in his notes to At The Inland Sea where he develops the idea that art (especially drama) is able to interrogate the irrationality of the world by stimulating our imagination and creativity. According to Bond, only when ‘we are made human by our imagination’ ( At The Inland Sea 78) will we be able to respond to the problems of the world rationally and constructively. 6. Bond rejects Beckett’s theatre and the absurdist aesthetic as forms of cultural nihilism which glorify and fetishise the idea of ‘nothingness’ (see Bond , ‘The Cap’. Plays: 7 ). 7. It seems that Bond is driven by a need to justify the existence of theatre in modern society and to emphasise its ‘use-value’ (Marx) in the age of postmodernity. Barker seems to argue differently: in a society where everything is designated a use-value and a function, the theatre should express no utilitarian aspirations, no meaning, no sense of responsibility. The function of theatre today should be to have no function (or, to put it with Adorno, a ‘negative function’). 8. For a detailed study of The Threepenny Lawsuit with reference to Brecht’s social and media theory see Steve Giles, Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory: Marxism, Modernity and the Threepenny Lawsuit . An extract of Brecht’s account of his lawsuit is also published in John Willett’s translation of Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (47–51). 9. See Bond, ‘Notes on Post-Modernism’ in Plays: 5. 10. See Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? 11. Originally published with the plays Jackets and In the Company of Men in Two Post-Modern Plays. Also published in Plays: 5. 12. Bond’s play Coffee (1995), however, does show an interest in the complex psychological landscape of his characters. Outer and inner worlds are intertwined; dream realities and interpersonal power relations impinge on the objective reality of war, famine and genocide. 13. The same can be said about Hecuba in The Woman (1978), Bond’s ‘sceptical demythologisation of the Trojan War’ (David Ian Rabey, English Drama Since 1940 83). The play contains a sharp criticism of blind faith in myth and religion (religion is here turned into a political tool) and shows a world that is changeable if human beings develop the strength and will to question the ideological structures of their existence.

Notes 185 14. Emancipatory knowledge is here understood as the aim of Marx’s praxisoriented theory. It means the understanding of one’s individual needs as well as the needs of the collective, with a view to changing the material conditions of life in an antagonistic society. 15. Weiss’ experiments with the documentary theatre form in the 1960s and the centrality of historical as well as political questions in his materialist aesthetic practice are discussed in Robert Cohen, ‘The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Literature: Peter Weiss’ The Investigation and its Critics’ in History & Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past . 16. Born near Berlin in 1916 as the son of a Hungarian Jewish textile worker and a Swiss actress, Weiss emigrated with his family to England in 1935, then to Prague in 1936. In 1938, after the German invasion of the Sudetenland, his parents fled to Sweden while he moved to Switzerland. In 1939 he moved to Sweden and lived in Stockholm until his death in 1982.

3 David Rudkin’s Theatre of Myth 1. David Rudkin has also produced original work for radio, film and television, which will not be analysed in detail here, but is considered in David Ian Rabey’s study David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience (1997). 2. Eagleton argues similarly in his discussion of Adorno’s call for a ‘return to the body’ (or the somatic moment) in thought, which finds its most distinctive expression in Adorno’s aesthetic project. As Eagleton remarks, Adorno is aware of the ‘dangerous illusion’ of positing ‘the body and its pleasures as an unquestionably affirmative category’, but he also recognises the pressing need to affirm the somatic, material, non-identical element of cognition, a project which can best be achieved by the aesthetic. See Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic 344. It seems that Adorno’s work is generally characterised by such a double-consciousness of the limitations and necessity (urgency) of atoning for what is being silenced, not only in history and contemporary culture but also in and through the very processes of cognition. 3. The aim of the de-mythologisation project was to rid people of irrational fear (of the unknown, darkness) and to make them see the light – a metaphor for reason and freedom. 4. In Violence and the Sacred René Girard argues that the basis of human society lies in the collective sacrifice of a victim (a scapegoat), which establishes a community identity. This act of sacrifice is re-enacted again and again in society’s myths and rituals and thus gains a sacred quality. Girard identifies persecution (scapegoating) and violence as playing essential roles in the social practices of the world’s civilisations. 5. Freud has reflected on the implications of man’s erect posture, our turning away from the earth, our sense of smell and our sexual behaviour. Due to man’s erect posture the sense of smell diminishes and no longer plays a central role in the arousing of sexual desire, which is now determined by visual signs (e.g. facial expression, the visibility of genitalia) and achieves a potential continuity which becomes regulated in the institution of the family. Freud puts it succinctly: ‘[a]t the beginning of the ill-fated cultural processes is the erection of the human being’, Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur , 64–5 (my translation).

186 Notes 6. When Wana-Apu decides to unmake the creature by breathing the name of death into him, it transpires that the name of death is composed of the same letters (but in different order) as the name of birth, which establishes the idea that the moment of one’s birth already contains the writing of one’s death.

4 Howard Barker’s Theatre of Desire 1. See David Ian Rabey, English Drama Since 1940. 2. There are, for example, points of connection between Barker’s ‘theatre of catastrophe’ and Lyotard’s aesthetic of the sublime. Lyotard’s suggestion that postmodern art presents the ‘unpresentable’ – the sublime sentiment, which is located ‘in an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain’ (‘Answering the Question’ 131) – resonates strongly in Barker’s theatre. See Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’. 3. See Horkeimer and Adorno’s culture industry essay in Dialectic of Enlightenment , and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. 4. This is the title of Francisco de Goya’s ‘Capricho’ no. 43. In this etching one sees the artist (perhaps Goya himself) resting on a table, asleep, while monstrous dark birds hover around him. 5. W. Martin Lüdke comments on Adorno’s critique of the means–end logic of instrumental reason thus: ‘Eventually authoritarian thought ( Herrschaftsdenken) also subjugates the thinking of domination (das Denken der Herrschaft ); the reason of instrumentalisation instrumentalises reason so that in the end [. . .] the type of reason necessary for the development of self-preservation turns on itself and forces self-preservation into the logic of instrumental rationality.’ Anmerkungen zu einer ‘Logik des Zerfalls’: Adorno Beckett 87. Translation KG. 6. In the 1992 production at the Almeida Theatre the character of ‘Goya’s voice’ was performed by an opera singer, and Goya by the actor Ian McDiarmid. 7. According to Lacan’s theory of the formation of subjectivity, the self, upon entering language, is subjected to the laws of the symbolic order, a process that is necessary for the creation of subjective identity. See Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan (eds), A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader , 68. 8. Such a transcendental concept of subjectivity has been rejected by Freudian and post-Freudian theories, which basically consider the self to be a divided subject who is decentred by language and whose identity is a construct affected by historical and social forces. 9. The ‘Burgtheater’ in Vienna is Austria’s National Theatre – generally considered to be a place of ‘high culture’. 10. By addressing the question of the hysteric Žižek reflects on the opposition between perversion and hysteria in contemporary society, lamenting the loss of hysteria in the postmodern economy of the ‘polymorphously perverse subject [who] follow[s] the superego injunction to enjoy’ (The Ticklish Subject 248) The subject of late capitalism is ‘perverse’ – s/he is engaged in processes of shaping and reshaping identities, playing with roles, immersing oneself into the other, transgressing the borders between self and other, subverting

Notes 187 distance and difference. Žižek argues that the virtual realities of cyberspace provide the perverse subject with opportunities for games with identity. The hysterical position, on the other hand, is one of extreme and painful tension; it is the tension and contradiction experienced by a subject who is troubled by his/her position in the symbolic order, which is an order determined by a dynamic of power and control. The hysterical self (the speaking subject) is engaged in a dialogue with the system, and this dialogue is frustrating because the subject cannot accept the place ascribed to her by the system. The subject – even though she asks for an answer – is never content with the answer and cannot be content with it because the answer to the question of the hysteric (who am I? You are what I say you are!) is a reifying answer. The answer turns the self into an object and thus threatens to erase her. This is the dilemma of the hysteric. The hysterical (unlike the perverse) subject does not ‘follow the superego injunction to enjoy’, she does not play the game of the culture industry and refuses to laugh. Barker rejects the notion of theatre as entertainment. His theatre of tragedy or catastrophe refuses to find consolation in ‘society’s obsession with comfort/the political obsession with the elimination of pain/ the popular pursuit of pleasure’ ( Arguments for a Theatre 128). 11. This paradoxical sense of choosing death or inviting death on oneself in situations of impending catastrophe is typical for many Barker characters. Dancer in Hated Nightfall suffers the contradictions of history with a heroic sense of self-sacrifice driven by an excess of imagination. When he is finally ready to receive the gift of death he is afraid that ‘death even . . . will be poorer than my imagination predicted’ (Barker, Hated Nightfall 47). 12. Seduction has been identified as a key force in Barker’s work. Characters’ language and movements gain a seductive and transgressive quality, but crucially they are concerned with maintaining the distance between themselves and their love object, which is necessary for the continuation of the flow of desire – the life-giving energy which catapults many of them into death. (See Lamb, Howard Barker’s Theatre of Seduction.)

5 Sarah Kane or how to ‘scrape a life out of the ruins’ 1. Sarah Kane quoted in Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today 106. 2. Adorno’s concept of mimesis does already imply an element of rationality because it is through mimetic behaviour that the individual dissociates herself from the danger of the mythic world. Mimetic behaviour thus entails the naming, structuring and controlling of alien nature. It is a way of grasping the unknown by assimilating it and thus making it less terrifying and dangerous. 3. For a comprehensive discussion of Adorno’s analysis of artistic developments in the 1950s and 1960s and a consideration of what is referred to as Adorno’s ‘perspectives on an interdisciplinary aesthetic’ see Christine Eichel, Vom Ermatten der Avantgarde zur Vernetzung der Künste. Perspektiven einer interdiszi plinären Ästhetik im Spätwerk Theodor W. Adornos. 4. Examples of epic elements, for example, are the representational, demonstrative function of plot in Hauptmann’s social drama, or the introduction of the

188 Notes authorial I and epic narrator who intensify the spectator’s sense of distance from dramatic action and draw attention to the world beyond the spectacle. 5. Aleks Sierz defines this sensibility and new way of dramatic writing as ‘inyer-face theatre’ and many other critics, among them established writers such as Pinter and Bond, have recognised Kane’s talent and praised her work as ground-breaking and radical. The critical consensus seems to be that the media outrage surrounding her first play ( Blasted ) was utterly unjustified, hysterical and an expression of the fundamental conservatism and materialist/utilitarian ideology underpinning contemporary cultural discourse. 6. Kane’s classical sensibility is evidenced by the Shakespearean resonances in Blasted and more directly her rewriting of Seneca’s Phaedra myth in Phaedra’s Love. There are biblical references in Cleansed and Crave, and an influence of T. S. Eliot’s poem Waste Land on 4.48 Psychosis can be noted. 7. Crave is published in Sarah Kane: Complete Plays. Hereafter page references to Kane’s plays are provided in brackets in the main text. 8. Lacan’s theory of subjectivity is based on the notion that the unconscious is structured like a language; hence the subject is defined as ‘the effect of the signifier’ (Lacan, Seminar, Book XI 207). 9. At this stage it is interesting to note the economy of violence which is played out in the construction of the subject. Adorno’s theory of the subject as implicated in processes of domination (of the other and the self) also thinks of subject construction in terms of violence, as has been discussed above in the context of his theory of the dialectic of enlightenment. 10. In Écrits (1966) Lacan maintains that the condition of subject formation (the subject’s appearance as an object) is a ‘moment of a “fading” or eclipse of the subject that is closely bound up with the Spaltung or splitting that it suffers from its subordination to the signifier’ (347).

Epilogue: Adorno, Tragedy and Theatre as Negation 1. Adorno is mentioned in these studies mainly with reference to his theory of the enlightenment and, in the case of Wallace, as an original interpreter of Beckett. 2. Antigone was for Hegel the most perfect aesthetic embodiment of tragic conflict, due to the fact that the heroine is torn between her duty to her family and to the law of the State. Hegel refers to it in order to support his view that tragedy consists of the clash or collision of two substantial, and equally justified, positions or ‘goods’. See: Paolucci, Hegel on Tragedy 368. 3. Adorno notes that all art in modern consumer society is subject to the pressures of commodification and reification; in other words, there is no art today that can fully exist outside the culture industry. He does, however, focus on art forms which have the capacity to resist these tendencies (Beckett’s work is a primary example). For fuller discussion of Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry see Deborah Cook, The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture. 4. ‘The tragic myth, in so far as it belongs to art at all, also participates fully in art’s metaphysical intention to transfigure’ (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy 127).

Notes 189 5. That tragedy has the power to awaken the individual has also been suggested by Jean-Marie Domenach in Le Retour du Tragique (1967). Inspired by existentialist thought, he contrasts the individual in ‘les temps nouveaux’ with the ‘homme tragique’ who ‘is a separate being who refuses the world’ (‘est un être séparé, qui refuse le monde’ 285), (translation KG). Domenach’s critique of modern bureaucratised culture shares much of Adorno’s sensibility. 6. According to Nietzsche, the rationalism of modern life is designed in support of ‘the weak’ and is therefore ‘decadent’. See: The Birth of Tragedy (1872).

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Index absurd, 32, 92, 107 absurdist, 43, n184 theatre of the absurd, 57, 109 administered world, 4, 5, 23, 36, 7, 44, 161 Adorno, Theodor W. ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, 20, 21, n183 ‘Art and the Arts’, 148, 149, 152, 153, n183 ‘Commitment’, 65 Dialectic of Enlightenment Enligh tenment (with (with Max Horkheimer), 1, 8, 19, 36, 47, 72, 93, 103, 108, 117, 153, 175, 176–77, n182, n186 ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, 3, 36, n183 Minima Moralia: Reflections from f rom Damaged Life, Life, 5, 6, 9, 15, 42, 46, 47, 48, 87, 113, 119, 134, 141, 144, 162, 167, 176, 179, 181 Negative Dialectics, Dialectics, 1, 4, 5, 6, 13, 15, 18, 35, 36, 110, 111, 130, 165, 166, 179, n182 ‘Trying to Understand Endgame Understand Endgame’,’, 2, 20, 24, 25, 32, 34, 35, 40, 42, 43, 84, 106, 142 aesthetic aesthetic appearance, 25, 26, 29, 84, 180 aesthetic comportment, 17, 21 aesthetic experience, 3, 4, 8, 15, 20, 21, 23, 38, 49, 116, 173 aesthetic form, 17, 19, 20, 25, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 44, 65, 82, 106, 146, 148, 152, 161, 162, 164, 178 aesthetic process, 30, 50, 60 aesthetics of resistance, 46, 79, 80, 81 Entkunstung ], de-aestheticisation [ Entkunstung ], 32, 33, 150, n184 affect, 142

Agamben, Giorgio, 2, 100, 137, n182 alienation, 8, 14, 25, 43, 61, 67, 70, 78, 79, 81, 117, 147, 156–9, 172–3, 176 alterity, 6, 8, 10, 137, 142, 147 antagonism, 36, 51, 5, 121, 144, 148, 166, 167, 169 aporia, 2, 6, 15, 35, 36 apparatus, 4, 36, 62, 64, 154, 175 appearance aesthetic appearance, 25, 26, 29, 84, 180 sensuous appearance, 26 see also illusion also illusion see also semblance also semblance archaic, 67, 127, 130, 134, 164 Arendt, Hannah, 8, n182 Aristotle, 116, 165, 174, 175, 179 aura, 30, 62, 63, 112 Auschwitz, 1–23, 34, 47, 82–4, 100, 117, 131, 138, 164, 165, 174–6, n182, n183 post-Auschwitz, 1–3, 5–6, 13, 15–16, 18, 24, 45, 56, 85, 86, 110, 113, 134, 144, 178, 179 authentic, 20, 37, 51, 100, 104, 106, 111, 137, 157, 168, 176, 178 authentic art, 12, 14, 22, 27, 34, 109, 112, 169, 177, n183 autonomy, 3, 15, 16, 17, 25, 30, 31, 32, 36, 40, 49, 50, 63, 65, 89, 104, 112, 113, 114, 150, 166, 175 autonomous art, 20, 30, 31, 57, 82, 148 avant-garde, 2, 7, 8, 19, 29, 36, 108, 109, 147, 148, 149, 150, n184 historical avant-garde, 32, 35, 148, 150 Baudrillard, Jean, 9–10, 15 barbarism, 1, 7, 35, 47, 57, 110, 127, 131, 172, 175

199

200 Index Barker, Howard Arguments for a Theatre, Theatre, 18, 114, 115, 116, 138, 143, 154, n187 Bite of the Night , 107, 127, 131, Death, The One and the Art A rt of Theatre, Theatre, 142, 144 The Europeans, Europeans, 141 Found in the Ground , 107, 131–3 Gertrude: The Cry , 138–41 Hated Nightfall, Nightfall, n187 I Saw Myself , 142–3 Knowledge and a Girl, Girl, 138, 139–41 The Power of the Dog , 119–26 Rome, Rome, 107 Terrible Mouth, Mouth, 118–9 theatre of catastrophe, 106, 115–17, 126, 138, 142, 143, 144, n186 beauty, 26, 28, 55, 98, 115, 128, 129, 141, 163 natural beauty, 28, 163 Beckett, Samuel Disjecta, Disjecta, 38–45 Dream of Fair to t o Middling Women Women,, 40–2 Endgame, Endgame, 24, 25, 32–5, 40–3, 107, 142, 155 Not I , 24 Three Dialogues, Dialogues, 40, 44 Waiting for Godot , 35, 41 Being, concept of, 110, 111, 160, being-in-itself, 4, 30, 32 Benjamin, Walter, 20, 52, 62, 63, 66, 78, 146, 166, 174 Blanchot, Maurice, 8, 142 body, 6, 16, 18, 22, 33, 54–5, 64, 92, 93, 98, 118–19, 120, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 137, 139, 140, 141, 152, 159, 161, 163–4, 166, 179, n185 embodiment, 17, 25, 31, 102, 123, 125, 130, n188 Bond, Edward At The Inland Sea, Sea, 79, 83, 84, n184 Black Mass, Mass, 70 The Bundle, Bundle, 56, 72, 75–7 Coffee, Coffee, 52, 53, 56, 81, 83, n184 Human Cannon, Cannon, 50, 56, 72–5 Lear , 50, 52–6

‘Notes on Post-Modernism’, 57, 70, 72, 79, n184 rational theatre, 57, 66, 85, 154 Saved , 50, 51, 52, n184 Stone, Stone, 70 Theatre Event (TE), 78, 79 The War Plays, Plays, 50, 56, 66, 70, 72, 77 The Woman, Woman, n184 Booth, Stephen, 37, 130 Brecht, Bertolt, 36, 57, 59–60, 61–5, 78, 79, 80, 164, 171, n184 Epic Theatre, 53, 59, 60, 63, 64, 78, 151, 171 Burke, Edmund, 141–2 capitalism, 12, 14, 22, 35, 36, 57, 61, 64, 72, 93, 108, 121, late capitalism, 14, 20, 29, 30, 34, 164, 170, 176, n186 Carson, Anne, 140–1 catastrophe, 2, 6, 24, 25, 34, 35, 41, 68, 84, 100, 117, 119, 127, 131, 132, 135, 136, 142, 162, 164, 165, 169, 170, 172–6, 178, n187 see also Auschwitz also Auschwitz theatre of catastrophe, 106, 115–17, 126, 138, 142, 143, 144, n186 character commodity character, 63, 82 double character of art, 112, 148 dramatic character, 56, 65, 70, 83, 106, 107, 138, 142 enigmatic character, 7 semblance character, 29, 33, 49, 149, 180 comedy, comic, 25, 124, 166, 177 commitment, 3, 19, 25, 65, 66, 85 committed art, 18, 65 commodity, 10, 30, 31, 58, 59, 63, 64, 109, 110 commodity character, 63, 82 commodity culture, 12, 14, 32, 59 commodity form, 30, 63 commodification, 1–2, 17, 30–1, 34, 36, 63, 64, 108, 112, 164, n188 communication, 12, 32, 44, 63, 67, 70, 106, 147 non-communication, 37 comportment, aesthetic, 17, 21

Index 201 configuration, 20, 21, 25, 27, 41, 57, 64 constellation, 20, 27, 29, 33, 41, 81, 150 construction, 9, 14, 16, 25, 27, 30, 32, 61, 64, 76, 78, 100, 117, 144, 150, 156, 157, 168, n188 consumerist, 18, 108, 109, 112 consumer society, 10, 30, 31, 34, 70, 72, 82, 114, n188 content truth content, 35, 106, 178 sedimented content, 82, 148 see also form–content also form–content dialectic contradiction, 6, 9, 13, 16, 18, 25, 35, 36, 57, 65, 111, 112, 121, 122, 149, 165, 166, 167, 169, 172, n187 corporeality, corporeality, 163 1 63 see also materiality also materiality crisis crisis of art, 31 crisis of drama, 146–7, 151 crisis of meaning, 1 Schein (semblance), 24, crisis of Schein (semblance), 30, 152 critique, immanent, 17 culture culture industry, 1–4, 10, 15, 17, 18, 30–2, 34, 36, 63, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 164, 168, 170, 173, 176, 178, 179, n182, n183, n186, n187, n188 post-Auschwitz culture, 1, 2, 5, 6, 13, 15, 24, 56, 179 damage damaged subjectivity, 3, 5, 24, 97, 164 damaged world, 43, 142, 173 Entkunstung ], de-aestheticisation [ Entkunstung ], see aesthetic Deleuze, Gilles, 14, 180 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 10, 11, 12, 107, 138 dialectics negative dialectics, 12, 13, 30, 162, 165, 166, 167, 181 dialectical thinking, thinking, 2, 6, 13, 14, 162

see also Adorno, also Adorno, Dialectic Dialectic of Enlightenment see also Adorno also Adorno , Negative Dialectics disintegration, 30, 31, 42, 54, 82, 97, 158, 161, 175, 176, 179 logic of disintegration, 31 dissonance, 29, 42, 168, 169 drama (dramatic) dramatic character, 56, 65, 70, 83, 106, 107, 138, 142 dramatic form, 32, 33, 43, 49, 51, 82, 146, 152, 154, 155, 159, 161, 164, 165, 180 dramatic text, 6, 18, 22, 48, 89, 105 see also postdramatic also postdramatic Eagleton, Terry, 6, 15, 16, 24, 25, 122, 171, 172, n185 ego, the, 5, 16, 21, 32, 41, 48, 90, 131 emancipation, 15, 19, 28, 47, 87, 89, 117, 150 empiricism, 3 empirical reality, 7, 17, 26, 29, 37, 49, 50, 78, 82, 104, 114, 145, 146–8, 150, 161, 180, n183 enigma (enigmatic), 3, 89, 112, 124, 140, 144, 170 Rätselcharacter ], enigmatic character [ Rä ], 7 see also riddle also riddle enlightenment enlightenment rationality, 7, 19, 21, 46, 98, 103, 117, 118, 126, 176 see also Adorno, also Adorno, Dialectic Dialectic of Enlightenment ephemerality (ephemeral), 11, 20, 28 see also transient also transient epistemology, 8, 57, 58 eros, erotic, 90, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142 essence, 19, 33, 39, 62, 65, 124, 146 ethics, 8, 88, 109, 167, n182 see also morality also morality event, (philosophy), 11–12, 15, 35, 161, 162, n182 absolute event, 10 event of Auschwitz, 2, 9, 12, 14 catastrophic event, 2, 6, 35 dramatic event, 177

202 Index existence human existence, 8, 24, 43, 48, 88, 93, 170 individual existence, 5 mere existence, 178, 181 experience historical experience, 1, 4 individual experience, 5, 13, 25, 104, 113, 143, 164 subjective experience, 17, 19, 26, 28, 43, 58, 64, 86, 173 expression aesthetic expression, 13, 21, 147 anti-expressive, 14, 45 expressionism, 4, 7, 147 expressive-mimetic, 102, 168 individual expression, 10, 28, 46 new expressionist drama, 22, 100, 104, 106 fantasy, 91, 163 exact fantasy, 20 fascism, fascist, 10, 113, 124 fetish, 14, 30, 36, 65, 77, 119, n184 fetish character, 30 film apparatus, 62, 64 form aesthetic form, 17, 19, 20, 25, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 44, 65, 82, 106, 146, 148, 152, 161, 162, 164, 178 artistic form, 31, 38 formalism, 36, 112 formlessness, 32, 33, 101, 103, 160, 168 form–content dialectic, 146 Foucault, Michel, 8, 11, 97 Frankfurt School, 1, 10, 105, 113 freedom subjective freedom, 16, 67, 70, 87, 113, 126, 166, 177, 181 unfreedom (lack of freedom), 22, 69 Freud, Sigmund, 19, 60, 87, 88, 89, 90, n185 gaze, 143 genre, 148–9, 150, 151, 153, 166, 177 gesture aesthetic gesture, 168 theatrical gesture, 22, 151

Goya, Francisco de, 117–19, 133, n186 guilt, 5, 7, 50, 111, 158 guilt context (nexus of guilt), 5, 7, 111, 178 Hammer, Espen, 34–5, 37 Handke, Peter, 151 happenings, 33, 114, 148, 149 happiness, 3, 5, 33, 34, 54, 88, 106 promise of happiness, 17, 179 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 8–9, 13, 21, 22, 26–8, 30, 35, 58, 120, 143, 149, 165, 166–7, 174, 175, 178, 180, n188 Heidegger, Martin, 36, 110, 174 history anti-history, 119, 120 historical experience, 1, 4 ‘our history’ (Nancy), 9, 11 Hitler, Adolf, 135–6 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 24, 143, 166, 180 Holocaust, 1, 3, 6, 9, 14–15, 34, 66, 84, 132, 136, 137, n182, n185 hope, 5, 17, 41, 44, 68, 75, 91, 95, 96, 107, 111, 119, 130, 132 Horkheimer, Max, 1, 8, 19, 72, 88, 93, 105, 113, 117, 166, 175, 176, n182, n183 humanism, 9, 51, 52, 70, 72, 90, 132, 133, 135 liberal humanism, 154 Hullot-Kentor, Robert, 32 idealism, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 98, 99, 118, 125, 177, n183 German idealism, 8, 28, 165, 174, 180 identity identity thinking, 9, 11, 17, 40, 166, 176 non-identity, 3, 11, 13, 15, 21, 22, 23, 37, 87, 125, 142, 156, 165, 178 self-identity, 4, 16, 48 social identity, 80 ideology Enlightenment ideology, 89, 94 Ideology of the Aesthetic (Eagleton), 6, 15, 16, n185 political ideology, 63, 122, 123, 124

Index 203 illusion, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 40, 42, 43, 60, 65, 67, 73, 78, 98, 107, 110, 111, 113, 127, 131, 143, 151, 152, 155, 157, 158, 169, 176, n183, n185 see also appearance see also semblance imitation, 3, 28, 140 see also mimesis image self-image, 5, 123 stage image, 69, 132 visual image, 84, 153 imagination, 6, 49, 56, 57, 61, 64, 68, 71, 79, 83, 84, 95, 103, 118, 124, 128, 135, 144, 152, 160, 176, 179, 181, n183, n184, n187 immanence, 5, 143, 173, 176, 179, 180 immanent critique, 17 immanent form, 106, 146 immaterial, 63, 180 impossibility, 4, 5, 12, 21, 34, 42, 44, 45, 108, 111, 123, 124, 129, 130, 136, 140, 178, 181, 182, n183 impossibility of poetry, n183 see also possibility indeterminacy, 112 instrumentalisation, 3, 4, 13, 105, n186 instrumentalised rationality, 125 irrationality, 50, 57, 81, 89, 100, 103, 117, 118, 124, 126, 128, 134, 144, 154, 168, n184 Jameson, Fredric, 2, 4, 29, 70, 117 Joyce, James, 38–9, n183 Kafka, Franz, 8, 109 Kane, Sarah Blasted , 153, 154, 155, 161, n188 Cleansed , 154, n188 Crave, 154–5, 157–8, n188 4.48 Psychosis, 154, 155, 158–9, 161, n188 Kant, Immanuel, 26, 58, 141, 165, 180, n183 Kierkegaard, Søren, 165

knowledge knowledge and desire, 126, 128, 140 knowledge production, 58, 59, 60, 126 self-knowledge, 48, 56, 60, 177 theory of knowledge, 58 transgressive knowledge, 52 Kristeva, Julia, 94, 129, 130 Lacan, Jacques, 55, 123, 129, 156–7, 159, 168, n186, n188 language dramatic language, 67, 104, 105, 136 poetic language, 115, 119, 129, 132 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 151–2 liberalism, 93, 109 Lukács, Georg, 10, 36, 59, 70, 78, 80, 82, 146, 164, 171, 179, n182 Lyotard, Jean-François, 6–7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 18, 126, 162, n182, n186 magic, 5, 47, 91, 100 Marcuse, Herbert, 113, n182, n186 Marx, Karl, 58–9, 60, 65, 172, n184 Marxist theory, 57, 58, 64 mastery, 14, 94, 97, 98, 117, 124, 136 materialism, 20, 27, 36, 46, 58, 65, n182 materialist aesthetics, 78, 122, 146, n185 materialist philosophy, 27, 59 materiality, 16, 27, 60, 64, 78, 130, 150, 180, 181 meaning aesthetic meaning, 30, 149 crisis of meaning, 1 meaningless, 3, 19, 23, 32, 41, 43, 57, 81, 106, 127, 132, 135, 142, 144, 174 metaphysical meaning, 32, 40, 177 memory, 6, 69, 132, 156, 158 remembrance (anamnesis), 6, 8, 10, 11, 18, 117, 177, 178 messianic light/order, 42

204 Index metaphysics, 5, 6, 8, 15, 22, 27, 36, 40, 110, 174, 179, n182 post-metaphysical, 15, 26, 100, 110, 174, 178 see also philosophy micrology, 15 mimesis, 3, 4, 41, 59, 96, 144, 146, 148, 162, 167, 168, n187 see also imitation mimetic mimetic behaviour, 102, n187 mimetic element, 148 mimetic impulse, 3, 4, 17, 102 see also mimesis modernism, 8, 14, 28, 30, 31, 42, 105, 146, 152, 177 modernity, 9, 21, 58, 61, 64, 66, 130, 147, 151, 164, 166, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177 monad, 30, 104, 109, 161 morality, 19, 38, 89, 115, 116, 143, 176 see also ethics more, concept of, 7, 28, 119, 163, 180 music, 8, 11, 29, 36, 40, 41, 42, 50, 108, 109, 116, 108, 122, 123, 132, 133, 146, 148, 149, 151, 155, 158, 159, 165, 168, 169, n183 myth, 5, 15, 19, 34, 38, 47, 52, 86, 87, 89, 91–4, 96, 100, 101, 103, 114, 126, 131, 168, 176, 177, nn184, n185, n188 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 9, 11, 143, 173, 180 nature, dominated, 3, 92, 177 Nazism, 7, 113, 132, 133, 135 see also Hitler, Adolf negation, determinate, 17, 19, 30, 31, 33, 37, 156 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 88, 101, 102, 103, 104, 118, 131, 165, 168–9, 175, 178, n188, n189 nominalism, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, n183 nominalist critique, 29 non-conceptual, 3, 6, 8, 20, 143 non-identity see identity object primacy of the object, 17, 28 subject–object binary, 58, 165

objectification, 3, 17, 30, 49, 64, 70, 81 Odysseus, 19, 176 Other, the, 119, 120, 125, 137, 156, 157, 160, 166, 181 participation, 37, 115 non-participation, 37 particular, the, 8, 9, 15, 25, 29, 32, 39, 110, 125, n183 particularity, 21, 23, 28, 29, 32, 39, 167 performance, 5, 48, 108, 115, 131, 138, 144, 158 performance art, 33, 37, 114 performative, 23, 31, 38, 70 phenomenon, 32, 51, 70, 150, n183 philosophy idealist philosophy, 58, 174 materialist philosophy, 27, 59 philosophy and art, 1, 13 see also Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ see also metaphysics Plato, 96, 174, 179 playwright, 73, 153, 154 poetry (after Auschwitz), 3, 4, 34, n182, n183 poetic drama (use of language), 105, 115, 119, 129, 132, 136, 142, 144, 151, 152, 155, 158 popular, 109, 110, 116, n187 possibility possibility of the impossible, 7, 42, 144, 156 see also impossibility postdramatic, 150–2 postdramatic theatre, 148, 151–2, 161 postmodernism, 63, 70, n182, n186 postmodernity, 72, 151, 164, n184 practice artistic practice, 1 conceptual practice, 10 praxis, 58, 59, 64, 121 presence (appearance), 156 process, aesthetic, 30, 50, 60 promise of happiness, 17, 179 see also happiness psychoanalysis, 156, 159

Index 205 Rabey, David Ian, 86, 89, 106, n184, n185, n186 Rancière, Jacques, 85, 115 rationality enlightenment rationality, 7, 19, 21, 176 irrationality, 50, 57, 81, 89, 100, 103, 117, 118, 124, 126, 128, 134, 144, 154, 168, n184 realism anti-realist, 131 realist, 49, 51, 61, 82, 118, 131, 146, 152 social realism, 32, 36, 112 socialist realism, 109, 122, 124, n182 reality empirical reality, 7, 17, 26, 29, 37, 49, 50, 78, 82, 104, 114, 145, 146–8, 150, 161, 180, n183 social reality, 19, 25, 49, 50, 81, 82, 106, 109, 167 reason autonomous reason, 8, 21 instrumental reason, 11, n186 subjective reason, 26, 166, 168 totalising reason, 176 Rebellato, Dan, 154 reconciliation false reconciliation, 63, 178 forced reconciliation, 18, 36, 169 redemption, 5, 20, 29, 42, 50, 87, 91, 95, 111, 144, 163, 170, 172, 180 reification, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 13, 17, 18, 27, 30, 31, 35, 36, 63, 64, 70, 87, 147, 147, 150, 162, 164, 166, 172, 173, 176, n188 representation, mimetic, 60, 105 resistance,1, 5, 12, 17, 22, 24, 31, 36, 39, 44, 113, 120 aesthetics of resistance, 46–85 see also Weiss, Peter riddle, 16, 20, 85, 96, 137, 137, 160, 162, 177 see also enigma Rudkin, David Afore Night Come, 86 Penda’s Fen, 87 Red Sun, 86, 100, 103, 104

The Saxon Shore, 86, 96–9 Sons of Light , 86, 94–6 The Triumph of Death, 86, 87–93 sacrifice, 19, 77, 91, 107, 158, 173, 176, n185, n187 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 36, 65, 70, 142, 174, n184 Saunders, Graham, 154, 155, 161, 162 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 165, 166 Schönberg, Arnold, 8, 109 self damaged self, 164 self-destruction, 48, 92, 176, 177 self-formation, 16, 86, 89, 129, n186, n188 selfhood, 25, 98, 160, 175, 179 self-realisation, 81, 89, 104, 172 see also subject semblance [Schein] semblance character, 29, 33, 49, 149, 180 crisis of semblance, 152 non-semblance, 163 see also aesthetic appearance see also illusion sensation, 15, 119 Shakespeare, William, 38, 138, 139, 154, n188 shock, 2, 24, 52, 54, 55, 109, 117, 170, 174, 175 shudder, 15, 21, 22, 23 see also affect Sierz, Alex, 153, n187, n188 Simmel, Georg, 172 singularity, 10, 101, 138, 144, 173, 181 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 59 somatic, 4, 6, 9, 99, 126, 138, 163, 163, 166, n183, n185 spectator, 60, 61, 87, 115, 116, 136, 144, 157, 162, n188 spirit [Geist ], 8, 21, 25, 143, 180 absolute spirit, 27 spirit of capitalism, 164 spiritualisation, 5, 28, 33, 149 style, 38, 39, 52, 53

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