square white world

Joyce Carol Oates:
If Obama wins, very likely there would be an efflorescence of a kind, perhaps most evident in the more public artforms - dance, music, theatre.

Gore Vidal:
Oliver Stone, I gather, is doing father-and-son stories. I’m very fond of Oliver, but you don’t need Freud when you’re dealing with Caligula.

Art is always needed in a country that doesn’t much like it. Performance is all anybody cares about.

Paul Miller:
Usually when you have a rightwing lunatic such as Nixon, or more cynical regimes such as Reagan or Bush I’s administration, there’s a counterpoint. What ended up happening with Bush II is that the counter-culture response became incoherent.

The “culture-entertainment” industry is different now. They realise that the idea of rebellion can be made into an echo-chamber and sold back to you.

Britney Spears giving herself a haircut or the “hyper-realism” of the execution of Saddam Hussein spreading like video wildfire on people’s cellphones. It’s incoherence - montaged and edited a la Oliver Stone.

Elizabeth LeCompte:
The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park are all political works of art. Without the Bush administration I don’t think satire would have been as strong. It revived irony.

Theatre in America is in decline, however. A lot of the people who would have been writing for the theatre 100 years ago are now writing in television. In America, all art is denigrated, basically, with the possible exception of music. Written and spoken arts aren’t taken seriously here, and I don’t think they’ve ever been.

Edward Albee:
We have an administration of criminality, complicity and incompetence but no cultural legacy whatever from those eight years. It doesn’t seem to have produced the kind of rage that I would have expected it to. It shows me that we have a far more passive and ignorant society than I thought we had.

Somebody asked Beckett once why he writes if he’s such a pessimist. He said, “If I were a pessimist I wouldn’t write.”

Alex Gibney:
Unintentionally, the administration provoked a lot of political art that I think was very valuable.

It contributed to an extraordinary flowering of political documentaries - and not necessarily pure anti-Bush ones. The administration provoked a thoughtfulness, both in aesthetic terms and in terms of political thinking, that expressed itself in documentaries in a very exciting way. Iraq in Fragments, for instance, was a beautiful film - not overtly political but political in a deeper sense.

Lionel Shriver:
Hate figures are far more motivating than heroes, and W has graciously provided the collectively leftwing artistic community an embarrassment of riches. In fact, the biggest problem with the Bush era’s artistic legacy is that this widely despised president has tended to inspire polemics and agitprop. Many novels, films, plays, and artworks from the last eight years have been spitting with indignation, painfully obvious in their political intent, sledgehammer subtle in their execution, and clubby - since most of these works are preaching to the converted. Thus W may have bequeathed a whack of subject matter, but whether any of this stuff will be of enduring value is open to question. You have to ask yourself whether the diatribes denouncing Bush in a novel, such as JM Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (a book trying enough when it was published in 2007), will hold the faintest interest after January 2009.

And here’s the really bad news: Obama could be terrible for the arts. Why, when there’s barely an artist in the States who doesn’t support him? Art thrives on resistance.

Trisha Brown:
I was so in love with art-making - but I’m tired of the suppression of arts and I’ve shifted into other disciplines to find vitality and exchange.

Naomi Wolf:
there’s something about the brute force of this administration, and the fetishisation of brute force by this administration, which literally stands in opposition to civilisation and the arts.

I’ve done a lot of work on Germany from the Weimar period to the late 30s. There was a similar hostility then to the cosmopolitan, the urbanite, the avant garde, to any originality in art. Some of the most interesting visual artists we’ve seen in recent times, for example, were working behind the iron curtain, and of course, they had to work allegorically.

Much of the protest work I’ve seen [in America] has been very bad, pedantic, heavy-handed. I’ve seen so many bad monologues about the Iraq war, so many dreadful photo-montages. I think it’s because Americans don’t quite understand repression yet.

Usually writers are at the forefront of denouncing a regime: look at Václav Havel. Here, people have complained a lot, but in terms of organising a vanguard of resistance, of people getting out there and saying this is not the American way … Where is the Arthur Miller of this generation? Who is out front, somewhere visible and tricky and scary?

Daniel Libeskind:
At Ground Zero, we’re not sure if the performing arts centre planned will ever happen. This was a key part of the masterplan, but all that’s mattered in the World of Bush is the workings, and failures, of the market economy. So, Ground Zero could yet end up, unless we get a sympathetic new president, as a purely commercial venture.

[full text available here]

Where is there a similar attempt to question, articulate or even consider Helen Clark’s legacy? Whether political, polemical or cultural?

You are welcome to a submit comment to this post … by way of protest, restitution or recapitulation: What is Helen Clark’s cultural legacy?

- Arthur Boyd, Figure supporting back legs and Interior with black rabbit, 1973-4

the image is from Arthur Boyd’s ‘caged painter’ series, commenced in 1971 upon his return to Australia after over a decade in England. The year he left Caetano Veloso was recording his own record of exile, ‘A Little More Blue.’

Norman Manea repeats the mantra he learnt from Franz Kafka: in the confrontation between oneself and the world, take the side of the world.

Jorge Luis Borges is a poet of the pathos of time. He writes of Citizen Kane that it links the Koheleth to the memory of another nihilist, Franz Kafka. [Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weingberger, Viking, New York, 1999, p. 259]

Emptiness, emptiness, says Koheleth, emptiness, all is empty.
…
So I came to hate life, since everything that was done here under the sun was a trouble to me; for all is emptiness and chasing the wind.
…
I considered all the acts of oppression here under the sun; I saw the tears of the oppressed, and I saw that there was no one to comfort them.
…
Woe betide the land when a slave has become its king, and its princes feast in the morning.
…
Whatever has already existed has been given a name, its nature is known, a man cannot contend with what is stronger than he. The more words one uses the greater is the emptiness of it all; and where is the advantage to a man?

and the Koheleth, said to be a sage whose sayings were recorded in the second century BC and collected in Ecclesiastes, also wrote the song which goes … a time to be born and a time to die, and so on.

There is an empty thing found on earth: when the just man gets what is due to the unjust, and the unjust what is due to the just. I maintain that this too is emptiness. So I commend enjoyment, since there is nothing good for a man to do here under the sun but to eat and drink and enjoy himself; this is all that will remain with him to reward his toil throughout the span of life.

… and I bethought myself of all the fury and hatred I had to bring against the world and its illusions and because the door opened a crack I heard the engine pounding, its hammers beating. I wondered if this was the engine, the war-machine with which I was to assail the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze; albeit that its hammers were butterfly wings shamanically grafted onto it and that its beating was only theatrical: the apocalypse is achieved with a backlit gauze on a proscenium arch stage. It is sheer melodrama.

Nothing is more terrifying writes Borges than a labyrinth without a centre.

And if for every step the thread was cut?

A final note: a modernist poetics has haunted these thoughts on “Digital Maoism” and limited its responsibility to complete clarity. Plaguology is of the same coinage as the poetics of a “terrible beauty.” The latter need not only describe the beauty of terror. It is indeed in excess. It might also figure the displacement of beauty onto terror and prefigure the way in which capital may in turn displace or may already have displaced onto terror in the circulation of fear: the overturn of capitalism into worldwide terrorism and the concomitant culture and currency of fear. These remain questions of aesthetics. As Michel Foucault enjoins, know how what is made was made so that it can be unmade.

- my corpocracy and plaguology]

… the history of depths begins with what is most terrifying: it begins with the theatre of terror whose unforgettable picture Melanie Klein painted. In it, the nursing infant is, beginning with his or her first year, stage, actor, and drama, at once. Orality, mouth, and breast are initially bottomless depths. Not only are the breast and the entire body of the mother split apart into a good and a bad object, but they are aggressively emptied, slashed to pieces, broken into crumbs and alimentary morsels. The introjection of these partial objects into the body of the infant is accompanied by a projection of aggressiveness onto these external objects, and by a re-projection of these objects into the maternal body. … We call this world of introjected and projected, alimentary and excremental partial internal objects the world of simulacra. Melanie Klein describes it as the paranoid-schizoid position of the child. It is succeeded by a depressive position which characterises a dual progress, since the child strives to reconstitute a complete good object and to identify himself with this object.

- Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 215

We will justify the clinical term with an outward-looking - yes, RJF looked inward - and critical engagement with the disease. The disease is terror and terror as the current rule of the spectacle, of representation. …

This would beat the Invisible Theatre we have now. Tom said, Stage an invisible play. Thing is the play’s in progress. And we are invisible. To become visible we need the sell. To sell we need the spectacle. To represent or reprazent we need terror. So a terror-cell to sell theatre. We will come out and with us out the truth, the error of representation, the deathwish in it, the disease. In it of it … in the middle of it! We have to represent as the violence in the middle of the representation. A theatre of morsels. A feedback from the guts of the audience to the matrix of the spectacular terror inside representation. The cathode-ray nipple as Franti had it in the good old days of Hiphoprisy is attached to a breast to which belongs the urethral and anal sadism of Klein’s maternal, matricial theatre, the matrix itself.

- my T-CELL: a terrorist performancell

Olkowski provides a possible way of thinking theatre with Deleuze: the ‘theatre of terror.’ She explicitly connects Melanie Klein’s ‘theatre of terror,’ in Deleuze’s reading of it, and Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty.’ [Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Dorothea Olkowski, Uni. of California Press, London, 1999, pp. 182-189]

- my T-Cell: draft project proposal

Rending the maternal body into fragments, the suckling infant consumes and introjects these morsels, investing them with an infantile but, for that, nonetheless sadistic rage. The pieces of the mother’s body become poisonous little breasts.

The infant squirts mother back at mother in a urinous flood: the child liquefies its mother, first directing the flow against the breast. In this interchange of flows, the suckling’s feedback contravenes the energetic law which constrains output never to exceed input. Mother and child concur in a feedback loop which is also a credit bubble. …

Olkowski desublimates representation, showing representation to be homologous with this [Aristotelian] view of substance: insofar that substance is presumed to be the guarantor, to ground and govern the continuity of the “sensible intuition,” of phenomena, organising, distributing, categorising. This work of stratifying and freezing in the privileged state of being, stating, or representing, is undertaken with the insistence of the same, the same substance, which, in what is smaller, partitioned and further partitioned, the being of substance equivocates. …

As Aristotelian substance is just like representation, according to Olkowski, so Platonic Ideas impose representative standards upon the pure form of time and ‘death.’ The latter is understood to crack the subject open to the form of time, which is pure flow: on one side of the crack, the ‘I’ who acts; on the other, the ‘me’ who is acted upon, asujetti, subject-ed. …

Olkowski brings in Deleuze’s take on Klein’s ‘theatre of terror’ to witness the ruin of theatre. She introduces Artaud to witness the ruin of theatre as a form of representation. Her use of Artaud differs radically from Deleuze’s recontextualization, since for the latter, Artaud is the epitome of a schizophrenic writer, not a ‘man of the theatre [or of cruelty]‘ at all. We would not sacrifice a single page of Artaud for Lewis Carroll’s entire literary output, says Deleuze.

Olkowski’s observations following these remarks about Artaudian theatre suggest little experience of contemporary theatre practice, which is as traditionally a ‘theatre of cruelty’ as one of ‘poverty’ or Aeschylus’s or Shakespeare’s: the whole tradition is transformed in Artaud’s theatre (in the past that’s never been present), but it is decisively there - where, as I’ve indicated, Olkowski situates it. …

… representation is already … complicated and resonates in series with the spectacle and, therefore, with terror: a complication with capital, a capital C. …

My affinity … for Olkowski’s work has to do with her problems of which, in The Ruin of Representation, and why I picked up the book in the first place, representation is clearly one. She is attracted to Deleuze, as I am, for the reason that in his philosophy there might be a before/between/meanwhile to representation that is at the same time able to be conceived and brought to consciousness, that language need not be the only theatre of operations for philosophy.

Her problem, again where I concur, is that of affirmation: how make it without making it stand in a relation of opposition, to critique, to the negative; how affirm representation or not disavow it, when the problem of representation, like death, consists in its indifference. Anne Carson, I believe, poses to this dilemma the question of the double negative, as does Slavoj Zizek, by imposition, in his thematization of negative disavowal: it’s not not to judge/critique/oppose/negate or judge/affirm but to suspend such judgement in time.

- my notes on Dorothea Olkowski’s Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, the section entitled, “The Theatre of Terror”

The aesthetics of consumerism are not foisted upon us; they emerge out of a rich and imaginative collaboration between the forces of capitalism and our own fears and desires. If there is kitsch in our daily lives, it is because there is kitsch in our minds.

- Daniel Harris quoted in Jonathan Kalb, Play by Play: Theatre Essays & Reviews, 1993-2002, Limelight Editions, New York, 2003, p. 113 (full quote here)