Thoughts on politics and theater today

Isn't the reason there is so much violence in America partly that our culture is so individualistic, so irrational, and devoid of a strong sense of everyone being part of a "society" that would mean that between any two people encountering each other, some kind of polite and friendly discourse would be the normal way of expressing disagreement, even annoyance or anger, because there would be this sense that they encounter each other within a shared "field" of sorts that is proper equally to both of them?

That this sounds like a privileged school boy's fancy I admit, but I can't help thinking that what distinguishes violent from "civil" social interactions in America, especially between strangers, is only that the former are an extreme vis-à-vis the latter, that those with the latter are more schooled and so more prudent and moderate. Yet, basically, they are the same, figuring the self as proper and the Other as external and a possible threat.

Back in the '80s, when people in the university environment in American that I knew then were influenced by the trend in "French theory" to favor, even insist on, partly due to the strength of feminism and its moral demands, a respect for the "Other" that made his or her radical difference from me, her extreme intransigence to and even incomprehension of my desires, interests, projects, or even beliefs about the public and the political, all of this became the basis of ethics.

But if the Other is radically foreign and nothing is shared, there is no public sphere or space or polis, we live in a republic which is not a "city," as the French sometimes call theirs, referencing the ideal city dreamed of by Plato and Aristotle from the depths of their privilege in a small metropolitan enclave sustained by the exclusion of women's voices (though they were imagined and the effects and stakes involved were considered) and the freedom made possible by a slave empire -- all of which now everyone takes for granted the criticism of, in a generalized cynicism that has at times alternated with the passion of enforcing on the naive and the narcissists with their pride and amour-propre. For alienation and the exilic had triumphed along with the banishment of the social and civil.

As if society were just a multiplicity of persons, in no common space, speaking outside the kind of discussions that would be a discourse, a fabric (the original meaning of "text," that comforting metaphor of the "interesting" for literary intellectuals of my generation). Society does not exist because there is nothing common, and so no community.

We live more in immunity, though the common root of these terms does suggest an alternation or measurable variance along a scale between defended separation at one extreme and a perhaps naively enthusiastic, as in nationalisms and other collective passions, visible in some public protest gatherings though also in riots and pogroms.

Consider: that person over there, whom you might encounter with speech or gestures, whom you might acknowledge as one of us or welcome as at least a subject in the kingdom of the absolute, that person, essentially a stranger no matter how much familiarity is pretended to, is essentially a threat, or a risk and danger of one. Long live the national security or police state! Is that where we are?

The pandemic with its masks and social distance did not make this situation any less possible, though it may have taught many of us that social distance at least physically does not imply or entail hostility to or rejection of the other in her or his innermost being, a soul or true, authentic, self, discernible behind the visible mask covering that other mask that is the other's visible face. What is the difference?

Is not the theater actor the best exemplar of the idea of authenticity, which is not so much to show a non-spectacular self glimpsed in the face behind the pure artificiality and social, governmental imposition of the mask? But the authenticity that is one possibility of the actor (see, on this, Marlon Brando's role and performance in Bertolucci's 1972 film "Last Tango in Paris," which I have discussed elsewhere on this site) is surely only the flip side and inseparable corrollate of performativity with its artificiality, its opposite that is a partnered possibility (and see, in the same film, the performance of Jean-Pierre Léaud, as manic lover of filmed performances as fetished "art" for art's sake, corrollated importantly with shit and its sites, including the anal zone, central as well to the project of the Brando character in the film).

But theater has another possibility, alongside the surface and deep character of the thespian self, and the staging of a spectacle for an audience (a staging that is spatially and temporally integral in live theater and fragmented compositionally in film, as well as turned in film into a pure visual spectacle that is an unchangeable document, with the spectators in the present viewing a performance that is entirely recorded and represented, in an eternal present of the visible that is also the unchanging past of lived experiences and interactions immortalized on the screen). The other possibility of theater is the encounters between persons.

All art problematizes something in the (inevitably social, even if purely abstract) world of lived experience. Art in the modern world is most often the unique refuge of the political because it is the place where we find performed the fact that, as Heidegger said, we are the kinds of beings, living the kinds of lives, in the kinds of world or worlds or showing or making (and/or unmaking and bringing into crisis) of a world, in which the, and our, manner of being in the world is posed as a question for itself and for us, a question and an issue, a problem and more than that its formulation, a problematization.

Theater problematizes social interaction, whatever else its constitutive elements might also permit calling into question. That means that in theater whatever a character says is contingent not only because it is in the artificial space of a work of art, presented to us for a curious contemplation that wants surprise, learning, questioning, enigma. But also because what anyone says is most often said to another. That gives us the hysteria, figuratively and psychologically, of theater and being theatrical.

That is why thuggish bosses sometimes will say, "Stop being theatrical, just answer my question, or just do as I say. Set aside your persona, your mask, your personality. I am the one speaking and making demands here."

In a society or community with a social life that is more than just the idolatry of enacting and acting out a shared ideology or belief that is taken for granted and not questioned, a community as way of being together that requires no naiveté, no presumed conformity, obedience, compliance with the experts and bosses and Unter-bosses who manage us. Nor does it require that a problem is not a problematization for thinking, even thinking together (now there is a fetish for a university brat to enjoy or pretend to live with), but only a conflict, and conflict being only danger, and risk. When I encounter something other than me or other than what I am familiar with, it is something external to me, alien, different, foreign, Other. While what is familiar to my own habits and patterns of thinking and living, of going on in whatever kind of way we all do, this is what is internal to me, and also what I can understand through learning and knowing things, which I then assimilate to my "world."

The internal and external will never meet: that is the false supposition of a world of pure individualism. That means that people never do, or "really" do, as when they do they do not. One encounters the Other in a protected, safe way that is not a real encounter; ideally, one encounters them only as a "vous" and not a "tu," and that authorizes politeness rather than intimacy. But the modern world is one in which boundaries between types of things, of whatever kind, are often called into question somehow. And the inside and outside can and do meet. Part of what it means to inhabit or be a body that has a skin, a surface, that is also sensitive, is that there are possibilities of touch, contact, interaction, and thus, being affected, which is perhaps what it means to be affected, or "touched."

The encounter can be catastrophic. We could wish the sense of catastrophe could always be avoided or held at bay, and the potentially hostile stranger along with it. Catastrophe, which cognitive therapy has taught us to avoid by convincing ourselves through a careful monological dialogue that nothing is catastrophic, one can somehow deal or cope with anything that might possibly happen, so that ultimately one can be courageous and fear nothing, as a soldier ideally would not (or, which is perhaps not the same thing exactly, he would live with his fears and not be disabled by them -- even to the point of living with possible or actual catastrophe, which does happen...). In theater, because it is art, and art takes place by its essential character in a space, a "theater" of sorts (theater was the model of art for Aristotle, in the most influential work of aesthetics in Western history, the Poetics), in which catastrophe is presented as a spectacle for contemplation, observed through sight and sound but not felt through touch and the presence on the stage of one's own body.

The actor himself simulates what actually happens with his body: Oedipus tears his eyes out, the physical pain of this is simulated, represented, and presented as mental anguish, involving affect (the other kind or way of "feeling") and thought or judgement and interpretation. But the actor does not then experience a bloodied eye place, nor does the spectator, who thus is identified, or identifies, with the actor he sees on stage (or screen), making possible catharsis and other theatrical effects, and affects. The very idea of affect, emotion as being affected, that we know is related to this, and we know now that ancient Greek culture has a visual predisposition and prejudice. In theater as paradigm of art, or at least narrative art (including painting that shows persons and reveals something of their character and affect, their way of being in their world), catastrophe becomes a real possibility for living and interpreting or judging and thus understanding our experience, and that means it is real, though real enough to affect us and make us think, without being real in the more material physical sense that would not bring understanding but only destruction. In theater there is a proximity that requires a distance, as there is a propriety of a self-enclosed subject (who can be authentic by being and expressing the truth of his self, or its reality, in its deepest depths and truest truths, obviously an impossible ideal) that is inseparable from the external and potentially emotionally moving character of an encounter. In theatrical expression, people react to those around them in the scene that is placed there before us, mise, as we say, mise-en-scène. The staged scene and audience form one couplet, one character and another, or others, another paired reality, and that is essential to theater. What people say is said partly to affect those around them. Speech is seduction.

But what is an encounter but potential violence if, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, there is no such thing as society? That is the great enigma of American society and culture. It is one of the things we should problematize. Not in the way of the police and the compliant machinery of mental health that goes with their way of thinking and shares it: making a problem is the way of thought, in social and public life it does not have to mean immanent violence. For it could also mean something like a discussion. America, inevitably losing some of its former "greatness," could gain for the first time something we desperately, that even the police will pretend to, and often some eager political intellectuals will call for, but without knowing how to actually facilitate, make possible: a kind of civility. We think of this as a duty that constrains our preferred narcissism, while the latter has also become the name of a pervasive evil, caused by the mysterious evil within, explainable only through the assured science of abnormal psychology, an evil that threatens not only society but all of us individually who might encounter the dangerous other.

We don't need to be un-masked. We need to create a sense of society as an imagined community in which the normal presumption is that you can talk to someone as if you and they were part of something shared and common. And as if that, more than the possibility of violence, were what is taken for granted. I don't recommend such thinking to other bookish nice people to use with every stranger who puts their feet on the subway seat, eats, drinks, or sucks their thumb, or worse, without regard to those around them. Maybe it can only be recommended to schoolteachers and their impressionable young pupils. Some problems are more easily diagnosed than cured. I am prudent and avoid talking to strangers.

I also remember what the American university world was like in a time when many idealistic people were busy entertaining ideas of society and politics that may have partly made things worse. Now, the reaction on the right is to oppose all of intellectual life; somehow it is false, or was deluded and wrong.

But to be wrong, in a civil society, is to be not a dangerous threat (as it is for the police, and those who think like them, as we are all encouraged to do -- every daily news report on a violent crime committed somewhere in the place or jurisdiction where you live) but in error within a procedure of getting at truths. Strange, fanciful, or deluded as this may sound: A good American society in the future will resemble a bit more a university seminar, or high school classroom, as sometimes seen in older films, than a bunch of people in a jail cell who have been charged with being disorderly and are attentive mainly to the possibility of being violated by their neighbors or jailer overseers. Maybe there is some other alternative to the classroom discussion on the one hand and the solitary warrior's encounter with presumed enemy combattants on the other. Our recently invented and greatly flourishing media of information and communication provide tools and resources that could be used to create stronger forms of effective civility. Or they could continue to present only weakly any highly desirable potentialities of personal and social life, while being strongly connected to means of making profit and exercising social control through a government of experts and profiteers. I dream of a world where the children and grandchildren of our generations fear less and hope and enjoy more, and this from, among other things, the chance encounters with strangers in public places. That still defines all our ideas of what a city is or can be.

In Los Angeles, an idea of the modern city was created in which people are maximally separated. They live in big boxes surrounded by walls and empty space, and they move around in smaller metal boxes, private cars. In New York people still ride subways and move around with no such protection in open spaces, streets, and air, while it is essentially to be able to breathe, even in public. The life of a city is quite centrally moving around among strangers. One may or may not encounter a stranger without heavy body armor and a mask, which is how the police are sometimes encountered (though I see them mainly not in action, like against a hostile crowd, but standing around, often together, with weapons available but not engaged in the expectation of using them: they are not in combat much of the time, thankfully).

I lived for two years with a graphic artist who drew images of men and women at war, trapped, and responding by reacting, fighting, with determination, for their very lives. Permanent and constant war. Societies, fictioned (imagined and actually created) by the states whose apparatus governs and orders people, demanding their compliance, do go to wars sometimes, in which case it is expected that they do so with enthusiasm, but they do not exist unless peace is what is normal. My graphic artist friend lives in a new feudalism. Is that what the future promises all of us? There are other possibilities worth recognizing and cultivating. The graphic artist was cued by movies made in Los Angeles. But we now know, as my parents could not have, that the city of the future will in fact resemble New York with its streets, subways, and people who get in your face, and not Los Angeles with its highways, cars, and where no one is ever allowed to, unless they are criminals and cops and so violent. He thought he lived in a war. It's true sometimes, but I refuse to. Gnosticism remains a temptation politically, on the left as well as the right, as it thinks that Being, nature, world, society, and the realm of the Now, is in essence evil, or evil is what concerns us, while the good is rare. The opposite view is also a myth, for the truth is most things are more ambiguous. That's good news.

War divides a territory into friend and enemy, self and other, good and evil, the two opposed; the logic of peace is the superior one of ambiguity, the place not of contradiction but enigma, not of aporia but of problematization. One moves from chaos to determination without totalization, as chaos is renewed on the margins of every determinacy. We start not from what is certain but what is uncertain. The tolerance that accompanies liberty recognizes a darkness that is not enemy but friend of what is illuminated and revealed. Our governments today have moved towards a policing that is a permanent war. Neither the social nor natural worlds will long endure it. We still do not know what bodies can do and think in the peaceful conditions of the world to come. With much work of thought and art is my faith in this sustained.