Transformative Aesthetics 9781138057173, 9781315164991

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Transformative Aesthetics

Aesthetic theory in the West has, until now, been dominated by ideas of effect, autonomy, and reception. Transformative Aesthetics uncovers these theories’ mutual concern with the transformation of those involved. From artists to spectators, readers, listeners, or audiences, the idea of transformation is one familiar to cultures across the globe. Transformation of the individual is only one part of this aesthetic phenomenon, as contemporary artists are increasingly called upon to have a transformative, sustainable impact on society at large. To this end, Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz present a series of fresh perspectives on the discussion of aesthetics, uniting Western theory with that of India, China, Australia, and beyond. Each chapter of Transformative Aesthetics focuses on a different approach to transformation, from the foundations of aesthetics to contemporary theories, breaking new ground to establish a network of thought that spans theatre, performance, art history, cultural studies, and philosophy. Erika Fischer-Lichte is Professor of Theatre Studies at Free University of Berlin. She is past president of the International Federation for Theatre Research, and holds the chair of the Institute for Advanced Studies on “Interweaving Cultures in Performance”. Benjamin Wihstutz is Junior Professor (Assistant Professor) of Theatre Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz.

Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre-Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS

Adapting Translation for the Stage By Geraldine Brodie, Emma Cole Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play By Michael Y. Bennett Acting, Spectating, and the Unconscious A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Unconscious Processes of Identification in the Theatre By Maria Turri Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance Interdisciplinary Perspectives Edited by Matthew Reason, Anja Mølle Lindelof Theatre, Exhibition, and Curation Displayed and Performed By Georgina Guy

Performance and the Politics of Space Theatre and Topology Edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Benjamin Wihstutz Adapting Chekhov The Text and Its Mutations Edited by J. Douglas Clayton, Yana Meerzon Food and Theatre on the World Stage Edited by Dorothy Chansky, Ann Folino White Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance Meetings with Remarkable Women By Virginie Magnat Art, Vision, and Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama Acts of Seeing By Amy Holzapfel

Rewriting Narratives in Egyptian Theatre Translation, Performance, Politics Edited by Sirkku Aaltonen, Areeg Ibrahim

Performance and Phenomenology Traditions and Transformations Edited by Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, Eirini Nedelkopoulou

Mainstream AIDS Theatre, the Media, and Gay Civil Rights Making the Radical Palatable By Jacob Juntunen

Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater Edited by Ronda Arab, Michelle Dowd, Adam Zucker

Global Insights on Theatre Censorship Edited by Catherine O’Leary, Diego Santos Sánchez, Michael Thompson

Transformative Aesthetics

Edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz

First edition published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-05717-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-16499-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Transformative aesthetics—reflections on the metamorphic power of art

vii ix

1

ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE

1

Aristotle’s theory of katharsis in its historical and social contexts

26

EDITH HALL

2

The taste of art and transcendence: Transformation(s) in rasa and bhakti aesthetics

48

GUILLERMO RODRÍGUEZ

3

Metamorphoses of experience in the picture

68

BERNHARD WALDENFELS

4

Somaesthetics and self-cultivation in Chinese art

83

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

5

Schiller’s transformative aesthetics

110

BENJAMIN WIHSTUTZ

6

Clairvoyance and transformation: Wagner’s neuroaesthetics

129

MATTHEW WILSON SMITH

7

The invisible vanguard: Reflections on political movements and contemporary avant-garde formations JAMES HARDING

145

vi

8

Contents

Applied theatre: Theatre for change

173

MATTHIAS WARSTAT

9

Transformative resistance and aesthetics

191

BILL ASHCROFT

10

The art of not relating with one another—notes on some issues and potentials of relational art

208

SANDRA UMATHUM

List of contributors Index

222 226

Figures

2.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5

Alarmel Valli performing Bharata Natyam. Benjamin Franklin’s Table of Virtues. Shen Zhou (1427–1509), Poet on a Mountaintop. Wang Meng (ca 1308–1385), Red Cliffs and Green Valleys. Wu Zhen (1280–1354), Fisherman by a Wooded Bank. Ni Zan (1301–1374), Six Gentlemen. Pan Gongkai, Snow Melting in Lotus (2011). Lin Onus, Twice upon a Time (1992). Henry James Johnstone, Evening Shadows, Backwater of the Murray, South Australia (1880). Lin Onus, Barmah Forest (1994). Lin Onus, And on the Eighth Day (1992). Lin Onus, Road to Redfern (1988).

62 95 97 99 101 103 105 197 198 200 203 204

Acknowledgments

This collection of essays grew out of our research project Aesthetic Experience as Liminal Experience, which was completed in 2014 after twelve years of successful interdisciplinary research, many thoughtprovoking international conferences, and innumerable stimulating discussions on aesthetics at the Freie Universität of Berlin. We would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and all of our colleagues at the Research Center Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits (Sonderforschungsbereich 626), as well as the Institute of Theatre Studies for providing us with the fertile environment that served as the backbone of our project. We would further like to thank the Institute for Advanced Studies on Interweaving Performance Cultures and the Ministry for Education and Science (BMBF) for funding a number of translations commissioned for this book. This volume would not have seen the light of day if not for the generous support of many people to whom we owe our heartfelt gratitude. First of all, we would like to thank Ben Piggott at Routledge and the reviewers for their firm belief in this project. We would also like to express our immense gratitude to all those who assisted in the editing process. We are especially grateful to Saskya Jain and Brandon Woolf, whose editing and writing skills were of particular help. Also, we would like to thank Verena Arndt for her thorough and meticulous work in adapting and standardizing the style of the chapters. We are deeply indebted to our translators Maud Capelle, Jake Fraser, Donald Goodwin, and Christoph Nöthlings for their excellent work. Without them the volume, which brings together some of the leading scholars in aesthetic theory from around the globe, could not have been completed. Last but not least, we would like to thank all the contributors for their outstanding scholarship and unwavering commitment. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz Berlin/Mainz, Spring 2017

Introduction Transformative aesthetics— reflections on the metamorphic power of art Erika Fischer-Lichte For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. … The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power—until they are reflections of his perfection. This compulsion to transform into the perfect is—art.1

In the above quotation, Nietzsche very radically connects art or indeed all aesthetic activity to a liminal state—intoxication—and to processes of transformation triggered and performed by this state. His lines lay bare the inextricable link between aesthetics and transformation, and are therefore ideally suited to set the stage for the arguments put forward in this volume. For this volume introduces a new concept: transformative aesthetics. This concept is meant to serve as a common denominator and reference point for discussing the history and theory of art and aesthetics in Europe and the West in general, as well as in other parts of the world. The editors of this volume proceed from the assumption that it will shed new light on the history of aesthetics, open up fresh perspectives on different notions of it and provide a common ground for relating them to each other. In order to work productively with the concept of transformative aesthetics, it is important to first clarify the two underlying concepts—aesthetics and transformation. My use of the term “aesthetics” does not imply any kind of cultural ideology dealing with questions of beauty, taste and judgement. Rather, I am referring to the sum total of materials, forms, devices and means applied by an artist in bringing forth an artwork/event, and the kind of perception it enables or elicits by affecting the recipients’ senses, emotions, imagination and cognition. The term also refers to theories of art that deal with these very processes (cp. Waldenfels’ contribution). The term “transformation” is closely connected to the notion of aesthetic experience. In my book The Transformative Power of Performance (2008, German 2004), I applied Victor Turner’s concept of liminality from the field of anthropology, specifically ritual studies, to that of art and aesthetics in

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order to delineate more clearly what we mean by aesthetic experience. Having recourse to a number of artistic performances, I defined it as a particular kind of liminal experience. It is liminal insofar as it presupposes a phase of separation in which the participating subjects leave behind their daily contexts, as is also the case with rituals. The participants undergo a liminal phase—another parallel to rituals—in which they are transferred into an extraordinary state that allows for new and potentially disturbing experiences. Turner was already well aware of this similarity between rituals and artistic performances. However, since the third phase of this process differs decisively in rituals and in art, he was not willing to apply the term “liminal” to art but preferred to speak instead of liminoid experiences. During the second phase of a ritual, the participant acquires a new identity or social status that is acclaimed and confirmed by the community/society in the third phase, i.e. that of incorporation. By contrast, the transformation experienced by a spectator in an artistic performance need not endure, let alone be accepted and confirmed by society. Despite this fundamental difference, I prefer to retain the term “liminal”, since it captures the transformative potential of artistic performances much better than “liminoid”. The definition of aesthetic experience as liminal experience encompasses the possibility of undergoing a transformation without determining its nature. This will be highlighted in the further course of my introduction. I was by no means the first to discover the transformative power of art. Not only has it repeatedly been addressed by poets and other artists for centuries, but it has also entered the academic discourse on art. In his seminal study The Power of Images (1989), for instance, David Freedberg wrote about the relationship between the image and its beholder: “We must consider not only beholders’ symptoms and behavior, but also the effectiveness, efficacy, and vitality of images themselves, not only what beholders do, but also what images appear to do”.2 He goes on to assert that the traditional differentiation between images “that elicit particular responses because of imputed ‘religious’ or ‘magical’ power and those that are supposed to have purely ‘aesthetic’ functions” is not “a viable one”.3 Through recourse to a wealth of historical examples, Freedberg demonstrates that this transformative power of images is not restricted to so-called “primitive societies” and their ritualistic contexts because of some “magic” but “that it works in all cultures at all times”.4 That is to say, the beholder of an image may undergo an aesthetic experience as a liminal experience, resulting in a particular, if only temporary transformation.5 If we examine influential theories of and ideas on art and aesthetics in various cultures, we will find that most of them presuppose or indeed call for some kind of a transformation to take place in the recipient—i.e. the spectator, beholder, listener or reader—during the aesthetic process. In the European/Western tradition, the transformative potential of art is addressed within the purview of at least three key paradigms—the aesthetics of impact

Introduction

3

(German: Wirkungsästhetik), the aesthetics of autonomy and reception aesthetics. The history of the aesthetics of impact in Europe begins with Aristotle’s Poetics. In it, he describes the impact of tragedy in performance—as well as in the process of reading—as the excitement of ἔλεος (eleos) and φόβος (phobos), pity and terror, transferring them into an exceptional affective state that is articulated physically and can transform the person concerned. Catharsis, the term he introduced to define the goal of tragedy as the cleansing of these affects, points to many different contexts (cp. Hall’s contribution), among them that of purging in healing rituals. While the excitement of affects transfers the spectator/reader into a liminal state, catharsis brings about the actual transformation. That is to say the experience of catharsis constitutes a liminal and transformative experience.6 Aristotle’s Poetics, and especially his ideas on the excitement of pity and terror as well as on the purging of these affects via the process of catharsis significantly influenced the discussion on aesthetic experience, particularly in performance, at least until the end of the eighteenth century. Opponents and supporters of theatre throughout the ages repeatedly appealed to the transformative potential of art, particularly of performance, which was to be either rejected or encouraged. When the Church Fathers in late antiquity and other opponents of theatre in medieval and early modern times warned against the dangers of theatrical performances, they worried about the spectators’ spiritual health. Conversely, when the imperial physician at the Viennese court recommended a visit to the theatre in 1609, he explained that watching comedies “expands the mind and heart and generally provides well-being”.7 In these cases, the risks or benefits of transformation are implied in the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators. The potential for transformation opens up through the actors’ use of their bodies. In his Dissertatio de actione scenica (1727), Father Franciscus Lang summarized the most important rules developed by Jesuit theatre over the course of the seventeenth century for affecting the spectators: an even stronger affect takes hold in the spectators the stronger, livelier, and more gripping the acting of the person on stage. For the senses are the gates to the soul through which … the appearances of things enter the chamber of affects.8 Father Lang’s basic assumption that perceiving affects in the bodily changes of the actor would arouse corresponding affects in the spectators was widespread well into the eighteenth century. Lord Henry Home Kames wrote in his Elements of Criticism (1762) that “external appearances … open a direct avenue to the heart”.9 As late as 1794, Sulzer claimed in his Allgemeine Theorie der schoenen Kuenste (General Theory of the Fine Arts): “It is certain that no circumstances create livelier impressions and emotions in human beings than a public performance … Nothing in the world is more

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infectious and effective than the emotion sensed in a crowd of people”.10 Perception caused the “infection” by transferring the emotions perceived in the actor’s body to that of the spectator during the performance. Infection here denotes a classical state of liminality, an in-between state, which marks the passage from good health to illness. The idea of emotional infection is evidenced by the transformative power of performances. Rousseau cursed this transformative power, because “[t]he continual emotion which is felt in the theatre, excites us, enervates us, enfeebles us and makes us less able to resist our passion”.11 To Rousseau, this liminal state was the root of all that was wrong with the theatre, because it threatened the male spectator in particular with a loss of self—e.g. by emasculating him. Diderot, Lessing, Lichtenberg, Engel and numerous other theoreticians of the eighteenth century, on the other hand, propagated theatre performances precisely because of their transformative power. In the second half of the eighteenth century, this power was attributed to a new art of acting that celebrated bourgeois ‘naturalness’—a naturalness that could arouse strong emotions in the spectator. We have many accounts of weeping audiences from the second half of the eighteenth century. Karl Wilhelm Ramler, for instance, in a letter to Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (25 July 1755) reports on one performance of Lessing’s Miß Sara Sampson in Frankfurt upon Oder: “Herr Lessing’s tragedy was performed in Frankfurt and the audience sat for three and a half hours, silent as statues, weeping”.12 Bearing in mind that German audiences at the time were rather noisy, coming and going as they pleased, eating, drinking and conversing, this seems to be an extraordinary response. Friedrich Nicolai saw a performance in Berlin in October the following year and gave a detailed account of it in a letter to Lessing: Before I tell you about the performance in more detail, I must let you know that I was extremely affected; up to the beginning of the fifth act, I was often in tears, but by the end of the same act and throughout the whole scene with Sara, I was far too moved to be able to cry any more. This has never happened to me at any other drama and confounds to a certain extent, my own system, which generally resists being moved by tragedy. My feelings and my critical annotations both on your play and the actors were mixed in a wonderful confusion in my head. (3 October 1756)13 Clearly, a transformation took place here within the spectators, a process they seemed unable to control or prevent. They were the addressees of the action on stage, seemingly at the mercy of the actors’ doing. The aesthetics of impact (Wirkungsästhetik) functioned as a means to a particular end. In the case of Lessing’s play and its performances, this end was the moral improvement of the spectators, as Lessing’s reply to Nicolai, in November 1756, suggests. Here he explains:

Introduction

5

The meaning of tragedy is this: it should develop our ability to feel empathy. It should make us so empathetic that the most tragic character of all times and among all people overtakes our emotions. The man of empathy is the most perfect man, among all social virtues, among all kinds of generosity, he is the most outstanding. A person who can make us feel such empathy, therefore, makes us more perfect and more virtuous, and the tragedy which moves us makes us thus—or, it moves us in order to be able to make us thus.14 The spectators’ tears seemed to testify to their empathy and, therefore, to their progressing moral improvement. Their transformation was underway and each such performance would enhance it further. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (first published in 1790) argued against this kind of an aesthetics of impact. In § 5 he declared that only a “disinterested and free pleasure” was legitimate in the encounter with art, that “no interest, neither that of the senses nor that of reason, extorts approval”.15 This is to say that art is autonomous. It is not to be judged by referring to criteria such as the force of affects felt by the spectator16 or the degree of empathy it arouses and the moral improvement deriving from it. But does the demand for a “disinterested and free pleasure” deny art’s transformative potential? In Germany, Goethe’s and Schiller’s classical works are regarded as the epitome of autonomous art. However, a close look at their essays that accompany and explain their work as dramatists, novelists and poets does not allow for such a conclusion (cp. Wihstutz’s contribution). At the turn of the nineteenth century Goethe worked as director of the Weimar theatre with the support of Schiller. Both ultimately regarded their work at the time as a response to the French Revolution and the ensuing terror by elaborating the concept of Bildung, which was defined as the capacity to unfold one’s own potential to the full. As Schiller wrote in the Second Letter of his treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1795): “I hope to convince you … that we must indeed, if we are to solve that political problem in practice, follow the path of aesthetics, since it is through Beauty that we arrive at Freedom”.17 This project thus required a new aesthetics that allowed for a playful encounter with the work of art on stage, “[f]or man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays”.18 The performance must therefore open up the possibility for the spectator to maintain an aesthetic distance, so that the reception process would be able to develop “the whole complex of our sensual and spiritual powers in the greatest possible harmony”.19 Goethe’s new theatre aesthetics, also advocated by Schiller from 1796 onwards, was intended to enable such a development. Both “openly and earnestly declared war on naturalism in art”, as Schiller later wrote in the preface to his tragedy, The Bride of Messina.20 The resulting artistic means

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allowed for a completely new kind of spectatorship. Dramatic characters who spoke in verse and were not “real beings but ideal people and representatives of their species”21 prevented spectators from identifying and empathizing with them. Goethe introduced such a new art of acting that avoided any kind of “naturalness” while stressing the picturesque on the one hand and the symbolic on the other. Schiller recommended reviving an element that was constitutive of ancient Greek theatre but unimaginable on the modern illusionistic stage: the chorus. Stepping “between the passions” of the dramatic characters “with its soothing observation”,22 the chorus creates a certain aesthetic distance between the spectators and the dramatic action on stage: For the spectator’s feelings must retain their freedom even amid the most vehement passion, they must not be victims of impressions, but rather they must come away serene and clear from the agitations sustained. What common judgment finds objectionable in the chorus, namely that it dispels the illusion and shatters the emotional power of the effects is just what serves as its highest recommendation. For it is precisely this blind power of passions that the true artist avoids, it is precisely this illusion that he scorns to arouse.23 In his essay “The Weimar Court Theatre”, written in 1802 as an explanation of the new theatre aesthetics that followed from this, Goethe stated: … the spectator should learn to perceive that not every play is like a coat which must be tailored precisely according to his own current needs, shape and size. We should not think of satisfying our actual spiritual, emotional and sensual needs in the theatre, but we should instead see ourselves as travellers who visit foreign places and lands, to which we travel for the purpose of learning and delight, and where we do not find all those comforts which we are used to at home to satisfy our own individual needs.24 This new aesthetics was meant to help the spectator in attaining Bildung, i.e. in developing the art of self-cultivation. Emotion and reflection were to be balanced so as to unfold their potential to the full while also maintaining their freedom. The new aesthetics did not impose anything on the spectators; they were not at the mercy of what was happening on stage. Rather, it allowed them a “disinterested and free pleasure”, by which they could contribute to their own Bildung. We can therefore conclude that the notion of the autonomy of art did not mean renouncing art’s transformative potential. We may even identify the state of “disinterested and free pleasure” as a liminal state, alienating the recipients from a rational or sensuous approach that dominates in daily life. This liminal state served as a precondition for the transformation into a

Introduction

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“free subject”, a restoration of their ‘wholeness’ that was lost in the process of modernization. Richard Wagner, who in many respects echoes Schiller’s ideas, provides a very different description of the liminal state into which “the artwork of the future” was to transfer the spectator: “that ideal illusion which wraps us as it were in a hazy longing, in a dream of something true that we have never experienced ourselves”.25 This state was regarded as the prerequisite for a transformation the spectators were expected to undergo. They were to transcend their roles as “organically involved witnesses”26 to become “necessary sharers in the creation of the art work”.27 As such—i.e. as “witnesses” and “necessary sharers”—the spectators were meant to represent the “free and lovely public life” that in the sociopolitical reality can only be achieved by way of a revolution. Through their active participation in the Gesamtkunstwerk, the audience, until then a motley assembly of bored, egotistical private persons, would be ‘redeemed’ as a community representative of a public sphere and composed of creative individuals: “Genius no longer will stand isolated, but all will have part in it, the Genius will be an associate one”.28 This also entailed a number of other transformations (cp. Matthew Smith’s contribution). Moreover, by defining the spectator as a “necessary sharer in the creation of the artwork” and in this sense as a co-creator, Wagner sketched a kind of reception aesthetics avant la lettre. For it is via the reception process of the spectators/ listeners that the performance as an art event comes into being. Without their presence and active engagement, it cannot be completed. European aesthetics from Aristotle to Richard Wagner focused on the transformation of the recipients regardless of whether they adhered to an aesthetics of impact or to an aesthetics of autonomy. This is not to say that they ignored the possible transformations the artist might undergo while creating a work of art. This was most notably dealt with in connection with the theatre. In medieval times, the fear was widespread that those playing the part of the devil in mystery plays might thus grant him access to their souls.29 However, playing roles on stage was also seen as potentially contributing to the process of Bildung and self-cultivation of the actor. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister explains his joining a theatre company thus: “To speak it in a word, the cultivation of my individual self, here, as I am, has from my youth upwards been constantly dimly my wish and my purpose”.30 One commonality is striking when we compare European aesthetics from Aristotle to Richard Wagner with traditional Asian aesthetics: they all presuppose and emphasize the transformative potential of art, even if it is located in different conditions and qualities. The Natyasastra, the principal Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts, including music, written between the second centuries BCE and CE by the sage Bharata, elaborates an aesthetic system focusing on the particular aesthetic experience a performance is meant to offer spectators. The question of aesthetic experience is central: rasa is to be aroused by a very particular

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representation of the bhavas, the eight dominant emotions.31 Rasa eschews straightforward translation; in English, it is frequently rendered as “sentiment”, “aesthetic rapture”, “emotional consciousness”, and partly as “flavor” or “taste”. It must be savored like a delicious dish (cp. Rodríguez’ contribution). Rasa describes eight different expressions related to the bhavas, such as the erotic or the heroic rasa, which corresponds to certain modes of being or emotional dispositions, commonly shared by all human beings. Interestingly, the affects referred to by Lang as well as the single emotions Johann Jakob Engel discusses in his Mimik (1785/6/1815) largely correspond to Bharata’s bhavas. Triggered in the actors and spectators through gestures, costumes, music, etc., rasa transforms this disposition into an actual physiological and emotional state.32 It is this transformation that lies at the heart of the Natyasastra. Of a somewhat different quality are the transformations that traditional Chinese aesthetics aim for. A particularly important transformation is the self-cultivation of the artist striving for harmonious self-government (cp. Shusterman’s contribution). One of the key concepts is yun, meaning “harmonious sounds”. In the course of its development it was often used in conjunction with qi (breath) or shen (spirit). Qi yun or shen yun originally referred to the aura, manner or temperament of a person. When these terms were later used to describe paintings, poems and, finally, all kinds of art works, they implied a certain stylistic charm, vividness or vitality. In performances of traditional opera, xiqu, performers can convey such beauty and charm through their voices (sheng yun) and bodies (shen yun) in order to achieve presence (feng yun). This way, they cultivate their own bodies and also afford the spectators great aesthetic pleasure. By commanding the flow of energy within their bodies, they not only energize their dance but also allow the energy to radiate towards the spectators.33 The experience of aesthetic pleasure can be described as a liminal state, whereas the energy emanating from the performer functions as a transformative force. As this very brief survey of European, Indian and Chinese traditional aesthetics suggests, they correspond insofar as they all presuppose that a transformation may occur in the artists/recipients in the process of creating and/or receiving a work of art. However, the envisaged transformation is specific to each case and must be examined within its cultural, historical and social context before further conclusions are drawn. This becomes even more complicated when we look at the development of the arts since the turn of the twentieth century. One such aspect is the more or less open politicization of art. However, even in the cases mentioned above, art did not lack a certain political dimension. Catharsis was, in a way, directed towards the well-being of the polis and its citizens. Schiller himself addresses the political dimension of autonomous art when stating that “it is through Beauty that we arrive at Freedom”. He thereby identifies the free subject as a precondition for the creation of a free state, turning art into a kind of substitute for a revolution. There is also a political dimension

Introduction

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to the fact that in China the possibility of self-cultivation through art, in particular through painting, was available exclusively to the literati. While a political dimension of art is implied in what I have described as traditional European, Indian or Chinese aesthetics, this dimension often gained prominence after the beginning of the twentieth century. Be it the swadeshi movement in India, the May Fourth Movement in China, the European avant-garde movements, or the highly diverse post-World War II political art movements all over the world, particularly in the postcolonial context—in all these cases the envisioned transformations concern not only the artists and/or recipients, but also, and at times primarily, the ruling political and social conditions. The novel aesthetics developed to this end came into being in very different ways: by transposing traditional art forms into new contexts, by appropriating an aesthetics from another culture or by transferring devices and means from non-artistic fields and contexts into art and vice versa, to name just a few models. The first model was realized by the swadeshi movement. It emerged in response to Lord Curzon’s Bengal partition plan of 1905 and testified to the growing sense of India as a nation. The movement aimed to remove British colonial rule or at least to bring about some form of independent governance. To this end, it needed to mobilize the masses rather than just the elite. Performances seemed the most viable means. However, the Dramatic Performance Act of 1876 prohibited all kinds of performances that for whatever reason did not receive the approval of the British government. There was just one exception—religious performances, such as the folk genre jatra that was popular in Bengal and Orissa. It was linked to a deity and performed as a procession featuring singing, acting and dancing. It was closely related to the idea of bhakti (cp. Rodríguez’ contribution), i.e. to the devotion of the goddess, and entailed or unleashed a transformative power that resulted in a particular kind of interconnectedness between all participants.34 After 1905 the swadeshi movement used jatra for their political aims, specifically for their identity politics. These performances were also related to Hindu mythology and particularly to the worship of the goddess Kali— the great Mother of India. The hymns, partly consisting of dialogues with Kali, the embodiment of the nation, were informed by the bhakti tradition that was familiar to large audiences. Jatra aesthetics was thus pressed into the service of political goals. The transformative power of the bhakti movement here resulted in not the religious but the political interconnectedness of all participants, strengthening their sense of belonging to a national community and their will to independence.35 The second model—the appropriation of an aesthetics from another culture—guided the May Fourth Movement in China in 1919. Chinese students and political refugees living in Japan witnessed the foundation of a new theatrical genre, shingeki or spoken drama. It became popular after the

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Japanese premiere of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House produced by Shimamura Ho¯getsu in November 1911. The leading part was played by Matsui Sumako, a young actress who had received her training at a new acting school founded by Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯, where a realistic-psychological acting style was taught. In 1906 Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯ founded the Bungei Kyo¯kai (Literary Society), which staged Hamlet in 1911—not the first Western drama to be performed in Japan, but the first to introduce a realistic-psychological acting style on Japanese stages. Deeply impressed by such activities, Li Xishuang founded the Spring Willow Society in Tokyo in 1906, which aimed to introduce spoken drama to China. In 1914, the Friends of the New Theatre opened in Shanghai the Spring Willow Theatre, which was dedicated to furthering the development of spoken theatre. Members of the May Fourth Movement striving for radical change in society staged Ibsen’s plays and adopted the realisticpsychological acting style. A Doll’s House and Enemy of the People acquired special significance. Hu Shi, who translated A Doll’s House, wrote of Ibsen: Ibsen describes the actual relationships within domestic life, he shocks the audience into acknowledging the dark and rotten foundations of domestic life. He inspires revolution and renewal in those trapped in domesticity. This is Ibsenism.36 Evidently, the new aesthetics of spoken drama huaju and psychological realism in particular were thought to serve social and political goals in the first decades of China’s modernization process. This new aesthetics, so different from that of the traditional xiqu, was intended to unfold its transformative potential with regard to the given social conditions. In the first place, it was not so much aesthetic pleasure that the performances were meant to excite as an engaged reflection on the political and social situation and a will to change them. The appropriation of Western plays has been serving a rather different purpose since the 1980s. Be it Ibsen, Shakespeare, Brecht or even the Greek tragedies, they have all been performed in different genres of xiqu, traditional Chinese opera. This transformation arose partly out of a perceived need to reconcile traditional opera with “modern” times, and partly in order to find a new framework for adapting these Western plays to the traditional aesthetic sensibility of Chinese spectators as compared to the 1920s and 1930s, i.e. after the Cultural Revolution. It was also part of an attempt to ‘sell’ xiqu to Western audiences, for instance at international theatre festivals. The third model—transferring devices and means from non-artistic fields and contexts into art and vice versa—is found in many European avantgarde movements. The development of the arts in the aftermath of the October Revolution in the early years of the Soviet Union provide a particularly fascinating

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example. In general, they were meant to contribute to the realization of building a completely new society. Not only architecture was employed to develop a revolutionary, even utopian aesthetics as exemplified by Vladimir Tatlin’s model for a Monument to the Third Internationale (1920) or the many models for rebuilding cities. The arts, too, were invited to transform themselves in order to transform society. Two trends are noteworthy in this context: a participatory approach on the one hand and a documentary one on the other. In the performing arts the relationship between actors and spectators was key. Vsevolod Meyerhold lamented that up until then “the spectator experiences only passively what happens on stage”.37 To develop a new aesthetics he had recourse to devices from Japanese theatre, e.g. the hanamichi, a kind of catwalk that runs through the auditorium, or to scientific theories such as Taylorism, a system of organizing labor conceived by the American engineer Frederick Taylor and propagated by the Central Institute of Labor in Moscow from 1920 onwards. For his biomechanics, a new style of acting, he also took inspiration from reflexology as developed by the Russian psychologist Bekhterev. This aesthetics aimed to transfer the spectators into a state of permanent activity so as to trigger their own creativity: “For it is through performance that he will define himself as co-actor and creator of new meaning”.38 Platon Kerzhentsev argues along the same lines when demanding that theatre is supposed to uncover and enhance the creativity of each and every spectator: When the spectator of the future goes to the theatre, he will not speak of going to see such and such play, he will express himself differently: “I am going to participate in such and such play”, because he will really be part of the performance, he will not be an observing and applauding spectator but a co-actor actively joining in the performance.39 Both obviously refer to Richard Wagner and so it is no coincidence that among the first titles to be printed in 1918 by Narkompros’ newly established publishing house in Petrograd was Wagner’s pamphlet Art and Revolution, first translated into Russian in 1906. The foreword was written by the Bolshevik and People’s Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky. Like the Communist Manifesto of ‘‘our brilliant teachers” Marx and Engels, this brochure by “the no less brilliant Richard Wagner” was, he explained, a product of the German Revolution of 1848. Its topicality, however, was undiminished, and Lunacharsky recommended it “for the edification of both artists and the victorious workers’ democracy”.40 Particularly, the new genre of mass spectacles was meant to introduce people to the new social order in which all were supposed to be active and creative. They were performed mostly by soldiers—The Red Army Studio— in Petrograd, especially between 1919 and 1920. In these performances self-organizing and self-organized communities were not only represented

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but also brought forth, sometimes in the same act. They were brought forth as self-liberating communities celebrating the act of self-liberation: “There was a radiant joy on all their faces. They frequently halted as the people embraced and kissed one another in jubilation. Everybody said: ‘Here it is at last, triumphant Easter has arrived’”.41 The emphasis here is on the moment of ultimate transformation as a kind of redemption brought about by the revolution, as well as by the revolutionary festivals and its mass spectacles. The aesthetics of the mass spectacles fundamentally redefined the relationship between actors and spectators. The community that came into being during its course allowed for the inclusion of everyone as an active participant. When at one of the last mass spectacles, The Storming of the Winter Palace on 7 November 1920 (25 October according to the old calendar), the spectators were not only cordoned off but also exposed to the gaze of the more privileged spectators seated on raised platforms, this changed the performance in a decisive manner, as Viktor Shklovsky noted: The masses … of people, the demonstration of its power, and the joy of the crowd is a confirmation of these days and an apotheosis. It is legitimate as long as no one watches it from a window, or from a special platform, otherwise it becomes a parade, a ballet in chains or brass band. And that is the reason why it is not a masked ball and not theatre.42 Already in 1920, The Storming of the Winter Palace announced a new era that would develop cultural practices highlighting a supervising authority. It is true that in applying new artistic means, it allowed the spectators to bring forth new meanings. But at the same time, it introduced a supervising authority on several levels. When the Civil War ended, the revolution finally came to an end. The great festival was over. Liminal time was replaced once more by historical time and everyday life.43 While the participatory approach diminished, the trend towards the documentary continued well into the 1930s. Photography and film were used to present models of future Soviet cities as a vehicle for transformation or to demonstrate the rapid growth of Socialist construction in the Soviet Union. This suggested—and by the same token, partly ironically challenged— the idea of permanent transformation and progress on the road to utopia. In all these cases, aesthetic and political dimensions were inextricably linked. Both approaches might allow us to subsume the related aesthetics under the rubric of an aesthetics of reception. Unlike an aesthetics of impact (Wirkungsästhetik), an aesthetics of reception does not proceed from the assumption that the spectator will necessarily be affected by an artwork/ event’s particular aesthetics in a foreseeable and intended way. Rather, the process of reception is performed as an encounter or even as an interaction between the structure/aesthetics of the work/event and its recipient. As Jan Mukarˇovský wrote in his article “Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts”, first published in 1936:

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The real tie in this situation is a variable one, and points to realities known to the viewer. They are not and can in no way be expressed or even indicated in the work itself, because it forms a component of the viewer’s intimate experience.44 What Wagner had in mind when he called the spectator a co-creator of the Gesamtkunstwerk and Meyerhold emphasized when he stated that the spectator defines himself as co-actor and creator of a new meaning, the Prague structuralists such as Jan Mukarˇovský and Felix V. Vodicˇka strove to base on an analysis of the structure of the work. Such an analysis results in the discovery of its indeterminacy that begs for a completion through the recipients, who will have to proceed from their own experiences, knowledge, expectations, emotions, etc., in order to be able to do so. Literary scholars such as Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser continued along those lines when they founded what was called an aesthetics of reception in a series of lectures, articles and books in the 1970s (cp. Jauss 1982 and Iser 1978 and 1980). Iser, in particular, focused on the indeterminacy of the literary work. He argues that aesthetic experience is due to what he labeled a text’s “blanks”, which call on the readers to connect the experience of the text—as that of the other—to their own history of experience. This way, the act of reading ultimately brings forth the text by completing and thus transforming it, and, by the same act, transforming the reader’s own history of experience.45 What literary scholars have explained with regard to the act of reading, art historians such as David Freedberg (1989), Hans Belting (2005), Norman Bryson (1983), Georges Didi-Huberman (1992) have demonstrated in terms of the reception of paintings. Since performances come into being out of the encounter and interaction between actors/performers and spectators, the act of receiving is a creative and transformative act here as well.46 The three models of political aesthetics as developed in the first decades of the twentieth century also apply to various aesthetics that emerged in the 1960s and after, claiming to connect the aesthetic dimension with ethical, social or political ones or even to erase the differences between them. Of course, the models of the last fifty years have been realized in ways that differ greatly from those of the first decades of the twentieth century as well as from each other: most cases, however, highlight the transformative potential and function of the respective aesthetics. Often, the models are also combined so that two or even three of them are involved. This frequently applies to the first and the third ones, i.e. when it is not a traditional art genre that is transposed into a new context but another genre of cultural performance. What, then, do we make of a performance such as The Dead Are Coming (2015) by Philip Ruch and his Centre for Political Beauty? The very name of the collective points to a close interpenetration of the aesthetic and the political. The action consisted of demonstratively unearthing the corpses of refugees who had died on their

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way to Europe, fleeing war and destruction in Syria and buried anonymously in mass graves in Greece and Italy, and having them buried individually according to the Muslim burial ritual. The funerals took place at the Islamic Cemetery in Gatow and at the Twelve Apostles Cemetery, both located in Berlin, in June 2015. The burials were accompanied by an imam who spoke the Prayer for the Dead. At the first burial he later addressed all participants in German, telling them not to see the burial as an “event” but as “a genuine moment of reflection”, the point being to bury a human being with dignity. Moreover, the dead person would act as “a symbol for all who died on their flight”. The imam appealed to “all human beings” to put an end to the dying of refugees.47 At first glance, this was undeniably a ritual—a burial led by an imam who took great care that it was done according to tradition. It was a political demonstration that aimed to direct public attention to the scandal of refugees perishing in large numbers on their flight to Europe and demanded a change in the national policies having a bearing on the situation. It was also, however, meant as an artistic action. It alluded to Sophocles’ Antigone, particularly to Creon’s denial of a burial for Polyneices, and Antigone’s intervention to provide just that. It therefore makes sense to see the burials as the merging of political action, religious ritual and artistic re-enactment, rendering clear demarcation lines between the three impossible. This not only transformed the three genres of cultural performance involved but also impacted public opinion. For it was this merging that was highly controversial and triggered a fierce public discussion. However, what seemed so obvious at first glance turns out on closer examination to be rather doubtful in many respects and raises a number of questions. Was it really a burial? How do we know whether a corpse was, in fact, wrapped up in the cloth? Who can testify to the unearthing of a corpse of an anonymous refugee in Italy? Without a corpse, the event was not a burial but the representation of one. And to further complicate matters: What if the imam was convinced that he was speaking the Prayer for the Dead for a dead Muslim about to be buried? And if he did know that there was no corpse, a rather unlikely situation, he would have been acting out a theatrical scene. This, in turn, raises the question whether he was really an imam or someone else assuming a fictive role. In that case, no aspect of the burial would have been genuine and the entire event merely a theatre performance that, nevertheless, was intended, and functioned, as a political action. In any case, the blurring of the boundaries between the aesthetic, the ritualistic and the political, as well as the constant oscillation between the three, rendered the fate of the ‘invisible’ refugees ‘visible’. This happened every time a perspective was shifted, making one of the three aspects disappear into the other two. The political manifests itself and becomes visible through this emphasis on the aesthetic. Or is it the other way around? Does the focus on the political push the aesthetic into the background, or even make it invisible? This performance, in fact, raises the question of

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visibility and invisibility in cases where the aesthetic and the political merge (cp. also James Harding’s contribution). The second model, the appropriation of aesthetics from other cultures and the concomitant hybridization, is particularly widespread, of course. It gained special importance in the context of postcolonialism. After the independence of their respective countries, many African writers, for instance, turned to Greek tragedies in order to rewrite and adapt them to an African context. During the colonial era, Greek tragedy formed part of the school curricula in Nigeria and other African countries, where it was presented as the epitome of European culture—evidence for its claim to universalism and, as such, one of the tools for asserting the colonizers’ cultural superiority. This process of rewriting and thus decolonizing and appropriating Greek tragedy was accompanied by a lively discussion on the relationship between Greek and African drama. Particularly in Nigeria, the striking kinship between the pantheon of Yoruba and Greek gods, so important to theatre in both cultures, was often noted, even if interpreted differently. In his early essay “The Fourth Stage” (1969) Wole Soyinka contributed to this discussion by highlighting the similarities and fundamental differences between the Greek and Yoruba gods, and especially between Dionysus and Ogun. He describes Ogun as the god of war, revolution, liberation and creativity, as the first actor in the battle fought in “the fourth area of experience, the immeasurable gulf of transition”.48 Soyinka goes on to explain that the state of transition in Yoruba culture is regarded as “the vortex of archetypes and home of the tragic spirit”.49 Accordingly, Yoruba drama comes into existence out of this fourth stage. By necessitating a radically liminal state, Nietzsche’s notion of the tragic developed in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872) resonates in Soyinka’s notion of the same, albeit without being identical. In rewriting Euripides’ The Bacchae (1973), Soyinka merged Greek tragedy with the Yoruba traditional mask drama egungun, and also referred to modern culture by incorporating elements from slapstick, rock concerts, gospel song, night club stunts as well as traditional elements from English culture, such as the Jacobean masks in the dressing scenes or the Maypole dance of the Maenads before Agave’s recognition.50 By representing meaningful liminal situations and states of transition in this way, spectators were able to enter such states—as clearly happened when the tragedy was performed in Jamaica in 197551 and, more than thirty years later, in Lagos in 2008. While the production of 1975 addressed colonialism and its aftermath, the 2008 performance presented it as an African play that criticized “the misuse and peril of power, especially in developing countries”. The same critic goes on to state that from the time of the play’s completion, when “the crass opportunism of the military elites of that era” was obvious, now, “nearly 40 years later, little or nothing has changed. Nigeria, like most African countries, is still in the grip of dictatorship and maladministration, while crime, insecurity, nepotism and looting of the treasury remains a dominant

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feature”.52 Pentheus was no longer equated with the British colonizers but with “the visionless and purposeless political leaders, many of whom occupy the political space not only in Nigeria but also in Africa and many other third world countries”.53 The communal rite that ended the performance could therefore be taken as a celebration of the hope for liberation from dictatorship and a utopian vision of new political communities in Africa.54 Since most of these African plays based on Greek tragedies were written in English, the language of the colonizers, its use was highly contested in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, as an appropriated, hybridized and localized form of English it on the one hand suggested a transformation and, on the other, opened up the possibility of addressing audiences in many parts of the world. The use of English can thus even be regarded as a means for resistance.55 In the visual arts, especially with painting, the situation of course was different. It is not only the appropriation of Western materials and forms, but also of specific kinds of Western aesthetics that can produce “an affective response that draws the viewer into a place from which the political message of metarepresentation can take full effect”, as Bill Ashcroft explains in his contribution to this volume with regard to Australian Aboriginal painting (cp. Ashcroft’s contribution, here p. 199). As concerns the postcolonial situation in general, the second model, i.e. the appropriation and transformation of materials, forms, devices and, broadly speaking, of particular aesthetics, had and still has a transformative potential for the readers, beholders and spectators of such artworks/events, even if it is difficult and often impossible to unambiguously describe and determine the nature of this transformation and its consequences. The third model is quite common today and is often paired with the first and sometimes also the second one. Participatory and documentary tendencies once again dominate. As regards the latter, film and photography often no longer simply document what happened but merge the documentary with the fictional. In feature films, low-tech aesthetics are used to suggest a raw authenticity and directness alongside other means and devices developed for documentary films or live reports. Documentary films, for their part, not only stage a given reality for the camera but—as in the case of Super Size Me (2004), for instance—appear as minutes of the filmmaker’s self-fashioning. Steyerl (2008) has described this documentary approach as a strategy to participate in strong and authentic emotions, a shift from documentary seeing to documentary feeling, from the distancing gaze to an intense live experience.56 This new documentary aesthetics aims to transform the viewer into an emotional, feeling subject and, in this respect, is comparable to the empathy aesthetics of the eighteenth century. Here, the documentary tendencies merge with participatory ones. Yet, it makes sense to differentiate between the two. Participatory approaches can be found in diverse genres of art, such as choric theatre, applied theatre as well as in relational art, to mention just some particularly

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prominent examples. Proceeding from the assumption that representative democracy with its red tape and non-transparent decision-making processes increasingly marginalized citizens, the question arose in Europe in the late 1980s and especially in the 1990s as to how to regain agency, and to transform representative democracy into a participatory one. Various forms of choric theatre featuring chorus groups composed of marginalized communities, such as migrants or the unemployed, but also of regular theatregoers, served as laboratories to find answers to this question. Whether the chorus members spoke of their own situations (e.g. Volker Lösch’s Medea, featuring a chorus of migrants in Stuttgart in 2007 or of the unemployed in his Marat in Hamburg in 2008), or whether the spectators mingled with the actors in an empty space and even joined them in the recital of the chorus songs (as was the case in Claudia Bosse’s/ Theatercombinat’s production of The Persians at Théâtre du Grütli in Geneva in 2006 and in Vienna and Braunschweig in 2008), socially or politically marginalized groups were here granted visibility and a voice. In the case of The Persians, the chorus and the spectators even formed a self-organized collective that did not exert any real pressure on its members but enabled everybody to determine for themselves when to be included or excluded. The process of self-organization largely followed the model of a swarm.57 It could be experienced by all spectators as an aesthetic Vorschein (Ernst Bloch) of a participatory democracy yet to come58 or, to put it in Giorgio Agamben’s words, of “a coming community”.59 A particular case in point is provided by applied theatre. The aesthetics that are developed here mainly serve the purpose of transforming the performers themselves. Spectators are at times present, though the focus lies on the impact the act of performing will have on the performers—be it theatre in education, pedagogy and the school; theatre in prison; drama therapy and psychodrama; or even theatre used to process political crises and violent conflicts. Applied theatre thus does not require or realize just a single aesthetics but a number of different ones, each suited to the specific kind of transformation envisaged. As Warstat points out, the problem with applied theatre is that it often puts itself in the service of the dominating postulates of self-optimization and creativity, and thus aspires to transformations that can be rather questionable (cp. Warstat’s contribution). The same holds true with regard to relational aesthetics, albeit in another regard. If at the centre of interest lies the staging of inter-subjective encounters by way of special installations, as Bourriaud suggests in his book Relational Aesthetics,60 the question arises as to what kind of a transformation can be achieved simply by enabling an encounter between strangers. What kind of a situation is required? And what distinguishes this situation from similar ones in everyday life? What is the role of the particular aesthetics in this installation? Wherein lies its transformative power? While relational aesthetics claims as its political dimension a “surrogate-democratic participation”,61 it might just as well be labeled “a new manifestation of

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spectacle culture, in which participation never plays a central role” (Umathum in her contribution to the volume, p. 216). In such cases we must ask ourselves whether we can really speak of a transformative aesthetics at all. For the experience enabled by such installations ultimately serves the purpose of affirming the status quo, because they lack the necessary transformative potential. Yet, even an encounter under such circumstances may provide a liminal experience resulting in a definite transformation—although whether this will happen and what kind of liminal experience this will be depends on conditions set by the individuals involved. As we have seen so far, we are dealing with a transformative aesthetics in all three cases—the aesthetics of impact, of autonomy and of reception. The different ideas on what kind of transformations would be enabled or intended and through what aesthetic means they are brought about were determined by the various epochs of the European history of ideas that addressed specific problems and had different expectations regarding art and its function in society. However, in terms of relating art to certain kinds of transformations, these divergent concepts concur with each other and also with ideas on art and aesthetics in other parts of the world. I therefore argue that we should relate art and aesthetics as developed in different parts of the world and at different times to each other by referring to the paradigm of a transformative aesthetics. By proceeding from this commonality, it will be much more productive to highlight, discuss and explain the differences between them and to get a much deeper insight into the possibilities opened up by the arts. This seems much more promising to me than the approaches so far favored by comparative aesthetics. The point of departure in this field of research was the question of what happened to philosophical aesthetics as developed in Europe when it was received by non-European, mainly Asian philosophers and art theoreticians.62 How did it work in this new context? Admittedly, the search for a dynamic concept of comparison today is crucial, as is the question of how artists such as John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Toru Takemitsu or Nam June Paik have changed European concepts of art by bringing in Asian ways of perception.63 These are important questions, no doubt. Still, the paradigm of transformative aesthetics has the advantage of being able to focus on highly diverse processes of transformation taking place in the production and reception of an artwork/event and affecting art and its understanding, as well as the individuals involved and even entire segments of society. If we consider the works of the artists named by Elberfeld as well as those of postcolonial artists, the most fascinating aspect is the interweaving of aesthetics developed in different cultures that they carry out in their writing, paintings or performances. For through such processes, different kinds of transformations take place—regarding the art itself, the self-understanding of the artists, the recipients of such artworks/events, and, in the long run, even the cultures concerned. As the examples assembled in this volume also

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show, this interweaving of aesthetics prevalent in different cultures does not result in the homogenization of the artworks/events. Rather, new differences emerge. Since aesthetic processes are closely related to a number of other areas in society—be it politics, the economy, religion, etc.—any new aesthetics emerging out of these processes of interweaving will not only transform the arts but these other spheres as well. Such transformations will also have to be taken into consideration and closely examined.64 Transformative aesthetics thus opens up a wide but still very focused field of research. Of course, this field cannot be comprehensively covered by this one volume, which will serve as a first step towards raising and consolidating awareness of art’s transformative potential as a cross-cultural factor, albeit without essentializing art. However, as this introduction already suggests, the envisaged transformations are diverse and serve very different purposes. This becomes even more evident in the following essays that deal with particular aesthetic theories and/or special case studies. The volume also marks a starting point because it is the first to assemble theories and case studies that all focus on the transformative potential of art; they explore what kind of a transformation the encounter with an artwork/event intended to bring about, or discuss the problems of certain unpredictable transformations. Moreover, it demonstrates that transformative aesthetics is a concept that can be applied to artworks/events in diverse cultures and so begs for further theorizations that understand it as a cross- or even transcultural category. Hopefully, it will be further probed and elaborated as an effective tool to deal not only with art in different cultures, but also with processes of interweaving aesthetics from diverse traditions within specific cultural contexts. The common focus on art’s transformative potential and the transformations that are brought about in the process of producing and/or receiving artworks/events—in the latter case, of participating in them—will allow for much deeper insights into old and new differences as well as new commonalities between them—maybe even as a consequence of a new understanding of art that will by no means be universalist or essentialist. This volume, like Socrates’ questions in Plato’s dialogues, is meant to serve as a midwife to help transformative aesthetics assume clearer contours and establish it as a productive research field in the art disciplines and beyond.

Notes 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, transl. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 82–3. 2 David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in History and Theory of Response (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), xxii. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., xxiii.

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5 Cp. also Hans Belting, “Zur Ikonologie des Blicks”, in Ikonologie des Performativen, ed. Christoph Wulf and Jörg Zirfas (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005), 50–8. 6 See also Elizabeth Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Fortunat Hoessly, Katharsis. Reinigung als Heilverfahren. Studien zum Ritual der archaischen und klassischen Zeit sowie zum Corpus Hippocraticum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2001). 7 Cited in Willi Flemming, Barockdrama, vol. 3, Das Schauspiel der Wanderbühne, 2nd revised edn (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), 14. 8 Franciscus Lang, “Dissertatio de actione scenic”, in Ronald Gene Engle, Franz Lang and the Jesuit Stage, PhD diss., University of Illinois (Ann Arbor: University Microfilm, 1975), 200. 9 Lord Henry Home Kames, Elements of Criticism (Edinburg: Printed for A. Miller, London, and A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1785), 435. 10 Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schoenen Kuenste, vol. 4, 2nd edn. (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1799), 254. 11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Letter to M. d’Alembert”, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 10, Letter to d’Alembert and Writings for the Theatre, transl. A. Bloom, ed. C. E. Butterworth and C. Kelly (Hanover/London: University Press of New England, 2004), 293. 12 Johann W. L. Gleim, Briefwechsel zwischen Gleim und Ramler, vol. 2 1753– 1759, ed. Carl Schüddekopf (Tübingen: Bibliothek des litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart, 1907), 206. 13 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Sämmtliche Schriften, vol. 13, ed. Karl Lachmann (Berlin: Voß, 1840), 29. 14 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, vol. 4, ed. Hubert G. Göpfert (Munich: Hanser, 1973), 163. 15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95. 16 Cp. Lang, “Dissertatio de actione scenic”. 17 Friedrich von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and transl. with an introduction, commentary and glossary of terms by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 26. 18 Ibid., 107 (Fifteenth Letter). 19 Ibid., 143 (Twentieth Letter). 20 Friedrich von Schiller, The Bride of Messina or The Enemy Brothers, A Tragedy with Choruses, transl. Charles E. Passage (New York: F. Ungar Publ. Co., 1962), preface, 6. 21 Ibid., 10. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke, vol. 40 (Weimar Edition, 1802), 83. 25 Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 8 vols, transl. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Ltd., 1892–1899), IV; 284. 26 Ibid., IV, 337. 27 Ibid., IV, 331. 28 Ibid., VIII; 353. 29 Cp. Jody Enders, “The Devil in the Flesh of Theater”, in Transformationen des Religiösen. Performativität und Textualität im geistlichen Spiel, ed. Ingrid Kasten and Erika Fischer-Lichte (Berlin/ New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 127–38. 30 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels, transl. Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman & Hall, 1871), 243.

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31 Cp. Vinay Dharwadker, “Emotion in Motion: The Na¯t.yasha¯stra, Darwin, and Affect Theory”, PMLA, Vol. 130, No. 5 (October 2015): 1381–404. 32 See also Lyne Bansat-Boudon, Poétique du théâtre indien: Lecture du Natyasastra (Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1992); Edwin Gerow, “Rasa as a Category: What Are the Limits of its Application”, in Sanskrit Drama in Performance, ed. Rachel Van M. Baumer and James R. Brandon (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1981), 226–57; Jeffrey Masson and M. V. Pathwardhan, Aesthetic Rapture—The Rasadhyaya of the Natyasastra (Poona: Deccan College, 2001); Erin B. Mee, “Rasa is/as/and Emotional Contagion”, in The Natyasastra and the Body in Performance: Essays on Indian Theory of Dance and Drama, ed. Sreenath Nair (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 157–74. 33 Cp. Yin Quinyan, “Yun in Xiqu Corporeal Movements”, Journal of the National Academy of Chinese Arts, 3 (2009): 103–6. 34 Christian Lee Novetzke, “Bhakti and Its Public”, International Journal of Hindu Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3 (December 2007): 255–72. 35 Cp. Basudeb Chattopadhyay, “Introduction”, in Folk Theatre and the Raj: Selections from Confidential Records (Kolkata: West Bengal State Archives, 2008). 36 Quoted from Bernd Eberstein, Das chinesische Theater im 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1983), 47. 37 Vesvolod E. Meyerhold, Schriften, vol. 1 (Berlin, DDR: Henschel, 1979), 13. 38 Vsevolod E. Meyerhold, Theaterarbeit 1917–1930, ed. Rosemarie Tietze (Munich: Hanser, 1974), 72. 39 Platon M. Kerzhentsev, Das schöpferische Theater (Cologne: Prometh Verlag, 1980), 67. 40 Anatoli Lunacharsky, “Vstuplenie (Foreword)”, in Richard Wagner, Iskusstvo i revolucija (Art and Revolution) (Petrograd: Narkompros, 1918), 3. 41 O. Figes and B. Kolonitski, Interpreting the Russian Revolution of 1917 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1999), 43–4. 42 Viktor B. Shklovsky, “Drama i massovye predstavlenia (Drama and mass performance)”, in Khod konia (The Knight’s Move) (Moscow/Berlin: Gelikon, 1923), 61. 43 See Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), 97–121. 44 Jan Mukarˇovský, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 82. 45 Cp. Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruktur der Texte—Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa, 4th edn (Constance: Universitätsverlag, 1970) and id., The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 46 Cp. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, transl. Saskya Iris Jain (London/New York: Routledge, 2008). 47 Der Tagesspiegel, June 20, 2015, 18. 48 Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1988), 27. 49 Ibid. 50 Cp. Andrea J. Nouryeh, “Soyinka’s Euripides: Postcolonial Resistance or AvantGarde Adaptation?”, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2001): 160–71. 51 Cp. M.M. “Accept Dionysus”, Daily Gleaner, March 26, 1975. 52 Sylvester Asoya, “Bacchae of Euripides, a Satirical Play by Wole Soyinka Comes Alive at the National Theatre”, A Warning Defied, April 8, 2008. 53 McPhilips Nwachuku, “National Troupe Presents Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides as Parable of Power”, Vanguard, March 29, 2008.

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54 See also Biodun Jeyifo, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Ato Quayson, “The Space of Transformation: Theory, Myth and Ritual in the Work of Wole Soyinka”, in Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity, ed. Biodun Jeyifo (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 201–36. 55 See Bill Ashcroft, Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literature (London/New York: Routledge, 2008). 56 Cp. Hito Steyerl, Die Farbe der Wahrheit. Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld (Vienna: Turia und Kant, 2008). 57 Cp. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 58 Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Revivals of Choric Theatre as Utopian Visions”, in Choruses, Ancient and Modern, ed. Joshua Billings, Felix Budelman and Fiona Macintosh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 347–61. 59 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993). 60 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon-Quetigny: Le presses du reel, 2002). 61 Diedrich Diederichsen, “Partizipation und Lebendigkeit”, in id., Eigenblutdoping. Selbstverwertung, Künstlerromantik, Partizipation (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2009), 279. 62 Cp. Kanti C. Pandey, Comparative Aesthetics, 2 vols (Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1950/1956); Harold E. McCarthy, “Aesthetics East and West”, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1953): 47–68; Thomas Munro, Oriental Aesthetics (Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve University, 1965); Eliot Deutsch, Studies in Comparative Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975) and id., “Comparative Aesthetics”, in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 1, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Grazia Marchianò (ed.), East and West in Aesthetics (Pisa/Rome: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1997); Rolf Elberfeld and Günter Wohlfart, Komparative Ästhetik. Künste und ästhetische Erfahrungen zwischen Asien und Europa (Cologne: edition cho¯ra, 2000). 63 Cp. Rolf Elberfeld and Günter Wohlfart, Komparative Ästhetik. Künste und ästhetische Erfahrungen zwischen Asien und Europa (Cologne: edition cho¯ra, 2000), 9–25. 64 Cp. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost and Saskya Iris Jain, The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2014).

Bibliography Ashcroft, Bill. Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literature. London/New York: Routledge, 2008. Asoya, Sylvester. “Bacchae of Euripides, a Satirical Play by Wole Soyinka Comes Alive at the National Theatre”. A Warning Defied, April 8, 2008. Bansat-Boudon, Lynde. Poétique du théâtre indien: Lecture du Natyasastra. Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1992. Belfiore, Elizabeth. Tragic Pleasures. Aristotle on Plot and Emotion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Belting, Hans. “Zur Ikonologie des Blicks”. In Ikonologie des Performativen, edited by Christoph Wulf and Jörg Zirfas, 50–58. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon-Quetigny: Le presses du reel, 2002.

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Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven: York University Press, 1983. Chattopadhyay, Basudeb. “Introduction”. In Folk Theatre and the Raj. Selection from Confidential Records. Kolkata: West Bengal State Archives, 2008. Deutsch, Eliot. Studies in Comparative Aesthetics. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975. Deutsch, Eliot. “Comparative Aesthetics”. In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 1, edited by Michael Kelly. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Dharwadker, Vinay. “Emotion in Motion: The Na¯t.yasha¯stra, Darwin, and Affect Theory”. PMLA, 130, 5 (October 2015): 381–404. Didi-Huberman, George. Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde. Paris: Minuit, 1992. Diederichsen, Diedrich. “Partizipation und Lebendigkeit”. In id., Eigenblutdoping. Selbstverwertung, Künstlerromantik, Partizipation, 256–79. Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2009. Eberstein, Bernd. Das chinesische Theater im 20. Jahrhundert. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1983. Elberfeld, Rolf and Günter Wohlfart, eds. Komparative Ästhetik: Künste und ästhetische Erfahrungen zwischen Asien und Europa. Cologne: edition cho¯ra, 2000. Enders, Jody. “The Devil in the Flesh of Theater”. In Transformationen des Religiösen. Performativität und Textualität im geistlichen Spiel, edited by Ingrid Kasten and Erika Fischer-Lichte, 127–38. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Engel, Johann Jakob. Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action: Adapted to the English Drama. From a Work on the Subject by M. Engel, Member of the Royal Academy of Berlin, edited by Henry Siddons. London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, Paternoster Row, 1785/6/1815. Figes, O. and B. Kolonitsky. Interpreting the Russian Revolution of 1917. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1999. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. London/New York: Routledge, 2008. Originally published in 2004. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Revivals of Choric Theatre as Utopian Visions”. In Choruses, Ancient and Modern, edited by Joshua Billings, Felix Budelman and Fiona Macintosh, 347–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Torsten Jost, and Saskya Iris Jain, eds. The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures. New York: Routledge, 2014. Flemming, Willi. Barockdrama, vol. 3: Das Schauspiel der Wanderbühne. 2nd revised edition. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in History and Theory of Response. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. Gerow, Edwin. “Rasa as a Category: What Are the Limits of Its Application”. In Sanskrit Drama in Performance, edited by Rachel Van M. Baumer and James R. Brandon, 226–57. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1981.

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Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig. Briefwechsel zwischen Gleim und Ramler, vol. 2, 1753–1759, edited by Carl Schüddekopf. Tübingen: Bibliothek des litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart, 1907. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Werke, vol. 40. Weimar Edition, 1802. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels. Translated by Thomas Carlyle. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871. Hoessly, Fortunat. Katharsis. Reinigung als Heilverfahren. Studien zum Ritual der archaischen und klassischen Zeit sowie zum Corpus Hippocraticum. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2001. Iser, Wolfgang. Die Appellstruktur der Texte—Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa. Constance: Universitätsverlag, 1974. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Jauss, Hans Robert. Towards an Aesthetics of Literary Reception. Translated by Timothy Bath. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Jeyifo, Biodun. Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Home, Henry (Lord Kames). Elements of Criticism. Edinburg: Printed for A. Miller, London, and A. Kincaid & J. Bell, Edinburgh, 1762/1785. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgement, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Originally published in 1790. Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. New York: Basic Books 1994. Kerzhentsev, Platon. Das schöpferische Theater. Cologne: Prometh Verlag, 1980. Originally published in 1922. Lang, Franciscus. “Dissertatio de actione scenica”. In Ronald Gene Engle, Franz Lang and the Jesuit Stage. Ann Arbor: University Microfilm, 1968. Originally published in 1727. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Sämmtliche Schriften, vol. 13, edited by Karl Lachmann. Berlin: Voß, 1840. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Werke, vol. 4, edited by Hubert G. Göpfert. Munich: Hanser, 1973. Lunacharsky, Anatoli. “Vstuplenie (Foreword)”. In Richard Wagner, Iskusstvo i revolucija (Art and Revolution). Petrograd: Narkompros, 1918. Marchianò, Grazia ed. East and West in Aesthetics. Pisa/Rome: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1997. Masson, Jeffrey and M. V. Patwardhan. Aesthetic Rapture—The Rasadhyaya of the Natyasastra. Poona: Deccan College, 1970. McCarthy, Harold E. “Aesthetics East and West”. Philosophy East and West, 3, 1 (1953): 47–68. Mee, Erin B. “Rasa is/as/and Emotional Contagion”. In The Natyasastra and the Body in Performance: Essays on Indian Theory of Dance and Drama, edited by Sreenath Nair, 157–74. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc. Publishing, 2015. M. M. “Accept Dionysus”. Daily Gleaner, March 26, 1975.

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Meyerhold, Vsevolod E. Theaterarbeit 1917–1930, edited by Rosemarie Tietze. Munich: Hanser, 1974. Meyerhold, Vsevolod E. Schriften, 2 vols. Berlin (DDR): Henschel, 1979. Mukarˇovský, Jan. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970. Originally published in 1936, Munro, Thomas. Oriental Aesthetics. Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve University, 1965. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols/ The Anti-Christ. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Nouryeh, Andrea J. “Soyinka’s Euripides: Postcolonial Resistance or Avant-Garde Adaptation?” Research in African Literatures, 33, 4 (2001): 160–71. Novetzke, Christian Lee. “Bhakti and Its Public”. International Journal of Hindu Studies, 11, 3 (December 2007): 255–72. Nwachuku, McPhilips. “National Troupe Presents Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides as Parable of Power”. Vanguard, March 29, 2008. Pandey, Kanti Chandra. Comparative Aesthetics, 2 vols. Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1950/1956. Quayson, Ato. “The Space of Transformation: Theory, Myth and Ritual in the Work of Wole Soyinka”. In Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity, edited by Biodun Jeyifo, 201–36. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Letter to M. d’Alembert”. In The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 10. Letter to d’Alembert and Writings for the Theatre, translated by A. Bloom, edited by C. E. Butterworth and C. Kelly, 251–352. Hanover/ London: University Press of New England, 2004. Originally published in 1758. Schiller, Friedrich von. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, edited and translated, with an introduction, commentary and glossary of terms by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Schiller, Friedrich von. The Bride of Messina or The Enemy Brothers. A Tragedy with Choruses, translated by Charles E. Passage. New York: F. Ungar, 1962. Shklovsky, Viktor B. “Drama i massovye predstavlenia (Drama and mass performance)”. In Khod konia (The Knight’s Move), 59–63. Moscow and Berlin: Gelikon, 1923. Soyinka, Wole. Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture. Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1988. Originally published in 1969. Sulzer, Johann Georg. Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, vol. 4, 2nd edn. Leipzig: Weidmann, 1799. Steyerl, Hito. Die Farbe der Wahrheit. Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld. Vienna: Turia und Kant, 2008. Wagner, Richard. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 8 vols. Translated by William Ashton Ellis. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Ltd., 1892–1899. Yin Quinyan. “Yun in Xiqu Corporeal Movements”. Journal of the National Academy of Chinese Arts, 3 (2009): 103–6.

1

Aristotle’s theory of katharsis in its historical and social contexts Edith Hall

Few words have maintained such a hold over both theatrical practice and classical philology as Aristotle’s term katharsis in his Poetics. In this article I explore five aspects of the cultural background to his brief, compressed and elliptical discussion of katharsis as an objective of tragic theatre. I argue that Aristotelian tragic katharsis, although clearly signalling a useful transformation through an aesthetic experience, must remain enigmatic since the noun had many different metaphorical resonances. Yet the abstraction of the language in which Aristotle discussed the effects of tragic theatre on the people who experienced it marks an epochal shift in the ancient understanding of what the production and consumption of tragedy entailed. This intellectual shift coincided with, and partly resulted from, the transformation of the theatre industry in the fourth century BC. In particular, it coincided with the divorce of performances from their original fifthcentury home, in festivals of Dionysus at Athens, to cities all over the Greek-speaking world. Greek horizons had been significantly widened in the early fourth century when theatre was exported to south Italy and Sicily, and expanded much further east in the wake of the conquests achieved by Aristotle’s pupil Alexander the Great. Aristotelian katharsis is the counterpart, in the realm of ideology, to massive changes occurring on the political and cultural levels of the ancient Mediterranean and Black Sea worlds at the very transition between ‘classical’ and ‘Hellenistic’ society. The Greek noun katharsis is related to the basic verb kathairein, which means all the following: cleanse, purify, fumigate, purge, evacuate, wash off, prune (a tree), winnow (grain), clear (land of weeds), and refine (gold). These physical processes can involve the washing or fumigating of cups, statues, or wounds with a cleansing substance such as water or blood or incense; the process may however take several different forms. Pruning a tree meant removing parts of it, but it also meant training the remaining branches of the plant by encouraging them to grow in particular directions. Katharsis could indicate partial evacuation of naturally occurring substances (especially women’s menstrual discharges: Aristotle uses the term with this significance more than fifty times in his biological and zoological treatises). But katharsis could also mean selective elimination of undesirable elements

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within the same basic entity (winnowing chaff from grain; removing weeds to allow desired plants to flourish in a field or flower-bed; refining ore to separate gold from base metal). Moreover, by the time of Aristotle, katharsis had just begun to be able to bear a more metaphorical and non-physical meaning. Plato can speak of men who are ‘refined’ or ‘purified’ by philosophy (Phaedo 114c); Epicurus the philosopher, who was forty years younger than Aristotle, called the intellectual clarification of scientific problems a katharsis. It is important to bear in mind the large range of connotations of the term katharsis in ancient Greek as we approach the text to which any discussion of katharsis in tragedy must return—Aristotle’s Poetics 1449b. Here is the most literal translation of which I am capable: Tragedy, therefore, is an imitation [mime¯sis] of a serious and complete action [praxis] on a large scale, in language sweetened in different ways in different parts of the play—a mimesis of people doing things [dro¯nto¯n, an active plural present-tense participle] rather than through narration, this mimesis achieving through pity and fear the katharsis of emotions of that kind.1 One feature of this sentence forcibly strikes anyone familiar with the ancient Greek language. There is no mention of a dramatic author, an actor, or a spectator. The situation is divorced from any identifiable real-world context (for example, a theatre in a sanctuary of Dionysus). Katharsis is created, in unspecified locales, not by actors or a dramatic author, but by an abstract noun—the nonconcrete, impersonal tragic ‘imitation’ of people doing things. The only humans in this sentence are the people represented in tragic theatre—the dramatis personae or roles. We are offered no information about the nature of the person or people in whom the mimesis achieves “through pity and fear the katharsis of emotions of that kind.” Aristotle seems reluctant to commit to a more specific account of what happens during the process of katharsis, in whom the process takes place, and in what physical and social context. It is not even clear whether he is thinking about a collective process in which many people undergo katharsis together, or an individual process taking place in a single, atomised psyche. A preference for the latter interpretation might derive support from his statement later in the Poetics that the tragic effect does not even need a live theatrical performance to occur (1453b): Fear and pity sometimes result from the spectacle and are sometimes aroused by the actual arrangement of the incidents, which is preferable and the mark of a better poet. The plot should be so constructed that even without seeing the play anyone hearing of the incidents happening thrills with fear and pity as a result of what occurs. So would anyone feel who heard the story of Oedipus.

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Just hearing the Oedipus Tyrannus—or perhaps even just hearing the events in it summarised in the order in which Sophocles arranges them—should, according to Aristotle, be able to arouse pity and fear in the auditor. Since Aristotle had a substantial personal library, and was working at the moment in history when Athenians were beginning to be concerned about the lack of authorised, canonical written versions of the tragedies regarded as meriting a place on the library shelf as well as in the performance repertoire of dramatic ‘classics’,2 we may be expected to include the arousal of pity and fear in the reader, as well. The first ‘context’ of Aristotelian tragic katharsis that needs investigating is the other uses of the term katharsis in the total vast corpus of Aristotle’s writings and in those of other early members of the Peripatetic school of philosophy he founded. He most often uses the term in the context of menstrual discharge. If this is the underlying metaphor, then he sees tragic katharsis as controlled, judicious, and partial expulsion of elements naturally occurring in the human being and not inevitably and inherently harmful; the body itself regulates the beneficial discharge without recourse to an allopathic procedure. On the other hand, in the case of laxatives and emetics, requiring the use of pharmaceuticals to encourage elimination, the beneficial effect of the katharsis is stimulated by allopathic means—by introducing a new substance from outside.3 Another possibility is that the term is to be understood horticulturally. Aristotle’s close friend Theophrastus, the man who succeeded him as head of his school, was a brilliant botanist: he used the term in reference to pruning,4 which meant not only cutting back the growth of a plant but also training new growth in particular directions—a suggestive image for what Aristotle may have envisaged tragic theatre’s educational benefits to be. Yet, unfortunately, there are scarcely any clues in the Poetics as to which of the several processes elsewhere designated by katharsis Aristotle had in mind. The only other instance of the term in the Poetics itself refers to the ritual cleansing of the pollution that Orestes had incurred by killing his own mother (1455b13–15). Aristotle recommends to aspiring playwrights that, when they are working out the episodes of the play, the episodes are to be appropriate, “like the fit of madness in the [case of?] Orestes, which led to his arrest, and the salvation through the katharsis.” It is not clear to which play Aristotle is referring. The definite article could mean the tragedy entitled Orestes, but it could also mean ‘in the case of Orestes’. Both Orestes’ derangement by the Erinyes and discussion of his ritual purification either in Greece (involving the sacrifice of pigs) or Tauris in the Black Sea (with the use of sea-water) are discussed in several works familiar to Aristotle in addition to Euripides’ Orestes, including Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris.5 But the important point from our perspective is that the meaning of katharsis here is specifically ritual purification, which removes a toxic, harmful element corrupting both the human body and mind.6 Orestes himself undergoes a transformation from sickness to health,

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and madness to sanity, by means of a ritual that has both religious and medical dimensions. Orestes is of course a character in the tragedy, rather than an author, actor, or spectator. Aristotle here envisages katharsis as being represented within the storyline rather than as a collective process undergone by all other participants in the theatrical experience as well. But the placement of this use of the term katharsis in the Poetics, just a few chapters later than the famous, more abstract reference we have already cited to katharsis of the emotions as a function of tragic mimesis, may have been significant in the history of interpretations of the katharsis of the emotions. If Aristotle had discussed the ritual katharsis of Orestes’ pollution prior to his discussion of katharsis of the emotions, the reader of the Poetics, with the vivid image of Orestes undergoing religious purification already in mind, might have found it more difficult to avoid envisaging katharsis of the emotions along ritual-medical lines. Aristotle defines tragedy, as we have seen, as “a mimesis of people doing things rather than through narration, this mimesis achieving through pity and fear the katharsis of emotions of that kind.” The agent here is no human participant, but the disembodied phenomenon of tragic mimesis itself, conceived as an abstract entity, an almost personified feminine noun, effecting katharsis of emotions. We can find Greek visual and textual representations of a personified Tragedy, Trago¯idia, usually as a maenad attending Dionysus, dating from several decades earlier than Aristotle’s Poetics.7 But which person or people is his abstraction—tragic mimesis— affecting? None is specified. The only ones even mentioned, or allowed into the mental picture, are the actual characters in the play, such as Orestes. Is Aristotle expecting his reader to imagine everyone involved in the tragic experience to share, somehow, in the emotional journey and transformation undergone by the traumatised character within the drama? Could it be that the audience becomes released in some way from the specific emotions undergone by the ‘doers’—in the case of Orestes’ spectators, to be released from precisely the sort of emotions that made him kill his mother? Thomas Taylor, the great British Platonist and translator, unusually suggested in 1811 that this approach makes the best sense of Aristotelian katharsis, although Taylor used the example of Ajax rather than Orestes: When Aristotle says that tragedy through pity and fear effects a purification from such-like passions, his meaning is that it purifies from those perturbations which happen in the fable, and which for the most part are the cause of the peripeteia, and of the unhappy events in the fable. Thus for instance, Sophocles, through pity and terror excited by the character of Ajax, intends a purification from anger and impiety towards the gods, because through this anger and impiety those misfortunes happened to Ajax; and thus in other circumstances.8

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It may be that we should be reading the two references to katharsis in the Poetics more closely in tandem than has hitherto been customary. The second context in which we need to understand Aristotelian tragic katharsis is in that of his own career and interests. A northern Greek from the town of Stageira, Aristotle was the son of an eminent medical practitioner, Nicomachus, who was hired as court physician by the Macedonian royal family. Professions often ran in families, and Aristotle’s manifest appetite for biology and medicine must have been encouraged by his father. He would have witnessed and perhaps assisted in medical procedures; because he travelled or lived in several different parts of Greece, he would have been able to compare diverse local approaches to healing and therapy. This lends particular interest to the discussion of katharsis in another text by Aristotle, his Politics. Here he speaks of the role of music, as experienced in certain religious rites, in the treatment of emotional people (8.7.1342a4–15): For any emotional excitement that affects some souls strongly also occurs to a lesser or greater degree in everyone—pity, fear, or again religious ecstasy [enthousiasmos]. There are some people who are particularly susceptible to this latter form of excitement and we see them, once they have made use of the most rousing melodies, put back on their feet again as a result of the sacred melodies just as if they had obtained medical treatment and katharsis. People predisposed to feeling pity or fear, or to emotions generally, necessarily undergo the same experience, as do others to the extent that they share in each of these emotions, and for all a certain katharsis and alleviation accompanied by pleasure. This discussion constitutes crucial evidence for the acknowledged power possessed by some special sacred melodies in helping ancient Greeks handle extreme emotions. Moreover, the benefits are available to everyone insofar as nobody can ever be entirely free of emotions. The benefits are compared to those a doctor can offer through medical katharsis; they offer everyone a certain kind of katharsis that alleviates the emotions and gives pleasure. Here Aristotle is certainly talking about emotional katharsis. Emotions pre-exist in people, but they can be stimulated by an external force in a way that makes them susceptible to katharsis. An externally applied ‘treatment’ (music) actually creates a homeopathic response within the listeners, in that the arousal of a strong emotion to which they are predisposed leads to a lessening of the grip which that emotion has on them. Most scholars have found it tempting to see Aristotle’s tragic katharsis in a similar light. If, when he mentioned tragic katharsis in the Poetics, Aristotle had the parallel of the ‘sacred melodies’ in mind, then we need to imagine tragic mimesis as arousing pre-existing strong emotions in its participants, in a homeopathic process, and through the arousal not only pleasing those participants but also making them better able to cope with such emotions when the theatrical

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experience is over. At the risk of drawing anachronistic parallels, Aristotle could be describing an experience comparable to that, familiar today, of watching a film in the category known as ‘weepies’ or ‘tear-jerkers’, involving highly emotive scenes accompanied by a powerful musical score, and permitting oneself to ‘enjoy’ a good cry at the sufferings of the on-screen characters. In Britain, at least, groups of friends, usually women, even organise parties with large boxes of tissues in order to enjoy a ‘weepie’ together, and I can personally attest that the experience can bring about a sense of cleansing and alleviation of psychic pain, accompanied by pleasure.9 Other circumstantial factors make attractive the association of this famous passage in the Politics with tragic katharsis. Several links between theatre and medicine are perceptible in the ancient world.10 There are many medical metaphors in the poetry of Greek tragedy. Sophocles was said to have introduced the cult of the healing hero Asclepius into his own household. Sanctuaries of Asclepius were often built adjacent to theatres, for example at Epidauros, Corinth and Butrint in modern Albania. There is, however, a major problem in accepting unquestioningly the interpretation of tragic katharsis in the Poetics as a process directly parallel to the katharsis by music performed in religious rituals. Aristotle breathes no word of this in the Poetics. There is not a medical word or allusion in sight. Some scholars have therefore preferred to see tragic katharsis as completely metaphorical, as a process of mental enlightenment or elucidation, an intellectual process entailing cognitive work compared with—but actually far removed from— medicines and rituals and emotional frenzy.11 One line of argument points to an interesting passage of Aristotle’s treatise on persuasive speech-making, his Rhetoric, in which he says that people who have already experienced great disasters become invulnerable to fear, since they feel they have already experienced every kind of horror (Rhetoric 2.5.1383a3–5). An important discussion of katharsis by Jonathan Lear, a philosopher much engaged with psychoanalytical theory, argues that this passage in the Rhetoric may hold the clue to what Aristotle really meant by tragic katharsis in the Poetics: perhaps he meant that we can “put ourselves in tragedy imaginatively in a position in which there is nothing further to fear.”12 This process requires a conscious mental move, an imaginative exertion, an intellectual leap, on the part of the spectator. More persuasively, other scholars stress the most important use of the metaphor of katharsis in an intellectual sense that can be identified prior to Aristotle. This occurs in Plato’s dialogue The Sophist (230b-e). Here the Eleatic Stranger who leads the discussion describes what happens during the best (i.e. Socratic) dialectic. By cross-examination, the inconsistencies and contradictions in an interlocutor’s position can cumulatively be pointed out, until he reaches a crisis point and is unable to defend the position further. He becomes angry with himself, but much gentler towards others, and is released from prejudices and harsh ideas:

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The respondent in Socratic dialectic, thrown into a state of confusion, undergoes a katharsis of his false opinions and confidence in his knowledge. The katharsis is good for him and gives pleasure to those who witness it.13 Here the Eleatic Stranger supplies the medical analogy, in referring to katharsis, quite explicitly, which “suggests that Plato is himself transferring the word into the intellectual sphere.”14 There are obvious parallels between this situation and Aristotle’s description of tragic katharsis. But this does not mean that, in Aristotle’s formulation, such a marked estrangement between the somatic and the intellectual has occurred. In Plato the estrangement is marked by the duality—and implicit polarity—imposed by the formal simile. But there is no reason to assume, with, for example, Salkever, that this polarity is replicated in Aristotle.15 A promising recent line of argument has come from neuroscientific approaches to theatre, which allow the physiological understanding of katharsis (implied by the discussion of the curative power of music in Politics) to be combined with the more cerebral understanding of tragic katharsis, with its conscious cognitive component, in the Poetics. There is a kind of imitation that audiences demonstrably undergo when fully engaged by theatre. This may take the form of inferring the intentions of the actor on the stage, ‘intentional attunement’. Recent studies of motor neuron systems have suggested that some neurons in the brain, ‘mirror neurons’, do not make any distinction between an act which the owner of the brain is carrying out and an act which the owner of the brain is witnessing.16 Mirror neurons allow the spectator to intuit that the reason why the character on stage has reached for their weapon is in order to stab someone. This is a physiological and a cognitive process. In other scenes, the spectators’ imitation of the individual impersonated by the actor may be much more direct: spectators often perceptibly respond to the emotions of stage characters by copying some of the symptoms of those emotions—by “tensing muscles, crying, breathing differently, leaning forward, smiling, or turning away… So perhaps the rehearsal of actions and feelings that this generates allows us to respond to our future experiences as if we had experienced them before, even though only a few of our neurons actually have experienced this before.”17 The third context in which Aristotle’s enigmatic statement needs placing is the evidence of earlier Greek acknowledgement of the transformative effect of tragic theatre. On one occasion in the early fifth century, the Athenian audience burst, as a body, into tears because they were so moved

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by what they saw enacted. It was a ‘history play’, now lost, which told the story of the recent defeat of the Anatolian Greek city of Miletus by the Persian Empire. The Athenian navy had participated in this action. Herodotus tells us that “the theatre (theatron) burst into tears” and fined the playwright, Phrynichus, a thousand drachmas “for reminding him of their domestic sufferings, and the forbade anyone to perform the play again” (6.21). The ‘theatre’ which burst into tears, a performance space plus actors and spectators all fused and almost personified as an individual capable of tears, was specifically the Athenian theatre of Dionysus, the place where in the fifth century most tragedies were first performed; experiences such as these will have created collective memories likely to inform audience responses subsequently.18 Everyone who had once wept in the theatre at watching the sufferings of the Athenians and their allies in defeat at Miletus would have had memories of their own trauma to draw upon when watching heroes suffer in other tragedies. Audience reactions to tragedy are also discussed, none too seriously, in Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs: Dionysus speaks of his delight (charis) at some scenes and episodes, but tragedy is also said to have a didactic function and indeed a socio-political one in that it may be able to rescue the citizens from the crisis into which military defeat would throw them (916, 1028, 1030–6, 1419). On a more negative note, respectable women are said to have committed suicide in response to watching the shameful conduct of heroines in Euripides (1050–1), as if a social group (married women) could become so distressed at the fictional representation of their counterparts in tragic theatre that they imitated their most extreme actions. The possibility of individual spectators reacting to tragic performances by considering a connection between their individual situations and those of the suffering heroes on stage is also explored in the fragment of another comedy, the Women at the Dionysia by Timocles: The human is a creature who is born to labour, and his life brings with it many sorrows. Therefore he has contrived ways of relieving his cares, for his mind [nous], forgetting its own burdens, and beguiled [psychago¯ge¯theis] by the misery of another, departs in a state of delight, having been educated as well. Look first at the tragedians, if you like, and see how they benefit everyone. The indigent man, for instance, learns that Telephus lived a more beggarly life than he does, and from then on can bear his poverty more easily. The man who is ill sees Alcmeon raving. If a man has diseased eyes, the sons of Phineus are blind. For a man who has lost his son, Niobe is a comfort. One is lame, and he sees Philoctetes. One elderly man meets with misfortune, but he learns the story of Oeneus. For being reminded that all his calamities, which he thought were greater than any man has borne, have actually happened to other people, he bewails his own trials less.19

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This fascinating text describes a process of transformation occurring in the minds of individual spectators of tragic theatre. The spectator finds ‘relief’ from his cares because his mind, forgetting its own burdens, and beguiled [psychago¯ge¯theis] by the misery of another, departs in a state of delight, having been educated as well. Here ‘beguiled’ is a passive past participle of a verb that can also mean ‘bewitch’, ‘enchant’, ‘persuade’ and ‘lead a soul down to the dead’. The comic speech describes the mental transformation from sorrow and self-pity to joy, edification and increased ability to cope with life’s problems. The metaphor of beguilement is telling, because it implies the mysterious creation of a relationship between the spectator’s self and the experience of the sufferer he sees on stage: I would use the word ‘identification’ to translate it if ‘identification’ had not become so very loaded a term since its adoption into the Freudian psychoanalytical vocabulary. The beguiling encounter with, and personal response to the suffering of the enacted character from ancient mythology are absolutely beneficial and alleviate suffering in spectators. This view was expressed in a comedy performed before the citizens of Athens, rich and poor, well-educated and scarcely literate alike. It may well reflect, albeit in a comic register, the popular view of the benefits and pleasures offered by tragic theatre, which at the time was performed to enormous audiences at huge public festivals. In some ways it adumbrates Aristotelian poetic theory (in envisaging the possibility that the benefits of tragic theatre vary according to the individual, for example). But it is interesting to see how the examples of suffering move from the very specific to the much more universal. The first five types of suffering are caused by poverty, ill-health, eye problems, death of offspring, and disease of the leg. The examples that are given relate specifically to spectators being ‘beguiled’ by stories of characters whose problems, although on a worse scale than their own, are of exactly the same nature. But in the last case, the reference to Oeneus, there is no further specification of the reasons for his suffering. Whose ‘miseries in old age’ could indeed equal those of Oeneus? As a prosperous elderly monarch, he suddenly suffered the anger of a goddess (Artemis), lost all seven of his sons in a war ultimately caused by his own negligence, endured the ‘natural catastrophe’ of the boar which ravaged his kingdom and the suicide of at least one of his daughters, was deposed by his nephews, temporarily reinstated, then ambushed and murdered. This is an all-encompassing group of afflictions, affecting personal and public life, caused by both bad luck and bad management, any one of which any mature adult could face at any time. The implicit point is that the transformative effect of tragic theatre is not confined to those who witness suffering of a nature directly equivalent to their own. Tragedy can benefit anyone suffering from almost any type of problem that humans are likely to face in the course of their adult lives. That is, it has something universal to say to everyone about suffering.

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At approximately the same date as this charming account of the beneficial effects of tragedy was delivered as a speech in Timocles’ comedy, in the quite different environment of the elite philosophical Academy, far from the world of popular theatre, Plato was refining his arguments against the inclusion of theatre in the ideal state. These were recorded in books 2, 3 and 10 of his Republic. In this text, and in some passages of his other dialogues, Plato has Socrates voice a series of objections to the effects of tragic theatre, a category in which he often includes performances of Homeric poetry. All literature and art is fundamentally problematic, so the argument goes, because it is not ‘real’. Since Socrates believes that there is a realm of immaterial ideas that is only imitated in the physical world perceptible to humans, then artistic representations of the perceptible world are indeed especially fallacious, being at not one but two removes from the eternal ideal world. Socrates objects to the way that the arts depict gods behaving immorally, vindictively, and changing their natures during metamorphoses. He complains that the arts encourage a fear of death by painting grim pictures of the Underworld. He thinks that empathising with grief-afflicted people nourishes the very parts of the soul the guardians of the ideal republic need to repress, and encourages the very sorts of ‘unmanly’ and uncontrolled behaviour they need to avoid. The most colourful and compelling Socratic argument against theatre, however, relates to its status as a mimesis performed by people (as distinct, for example, from a mimesis constituted by a painting). In a famous passage in book 3, Socrates considers, in dialogue with Adeimantos, the training of the future guardians who will rule the republic (3.395c-e): But if they imitate [mimo¯ntai] they should from childhood up imitate [mimeisthai] what is appropriate to them—men, that is, who are brave, sober, pious, free and all things of that kind; but things unbecoming the free man they should neither do nor be clever at imitating, nor yet any other shameful thing, lest from the imitation [mimesis] they imbibe the reality. Or have you not observed that imitations, if continued from youth far into life, settle down into habits and nature in the body, the speech, and the thought? “Yes, indeed,” said he. “We will not then allow our charges, whom we expect to prove good men, being men, to imitate [mimeisthai] a woman, young or old, reviling her husband, challenging the gods, boasting about the good fortune she enjoys, or grieving and lamenting when struck by misfortune, or ill or erotically fixated or in childbirth?” “Most certainly not!” “Nor indeed should they imitate female slaves or male slaves doing the sort of things slave do?” “No!”

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The imitation of other people behaving in ways unsuitable to guardians must not be allowed. The reason is that, sooner or later, the imitators internalise the imitated behaviours and their own fundamental natures are transformed. The first specified undesirable behaviours are all designed to remind the reader of famous tragic heroines—Medea, Niobe, and Phaedra, for example; in a notorious tragedy by Euripides, Auge had actually given birth in a temple, her labour screams being heard by the audience ringing out from backstage.20 The other behaviours are explicitly said to include ‘comic’ attacks on other people and are designed to make readers think of comic theatre. Socrates is arguing that if the guardians ‘imitate’ inappropriate behaviours in the way that ‘imitation’ takes place in either tragic or comic theatre, they will start to display those behaviours outside the theatre as well. Yet the language in which Socrates discusses this dangerous process of (theatrical) imitation is ambiguous. It is not at all clear what the guardians are doing. Are they actually to be envisaged as actors, taking the leading parts in tragedies and comedies themselves? This is how the passage is often (mis)translated. But very few individuals in classical Athens ever became actors. Socrates is not saying that the future guardians would be hurt by being trained to act in speaking roles in Greek tragedy, because such an idea had no relation to any reality ever experienced in classical Athens. In fact, he is by no means being so grammatically specific. He means that the future guardians would be damaged by any form of participation in theatrical performances at all. Socrates throughout uses a verb, mimeisthai, which should not be translated as ‘to act the role of’, but ‘to participate in an imitation of’. The guardians are envisaged as participating, in a vague and unspecified way, in a collective theatrical imitation of people doing things inappropriate to the ruling class. This non-specific mode of participation can theoretically include writing the role, making the costumes, performing in the chorus, and spectating as well as performing individual roles. Everyone present in a theatre at a performance is involved together in the collective activity of imitating indicated by the verb mimeisthai. There is a technical, linguistic obstacle that impedes our understanding of the process Socrates and Plato’s readers were envisaging. The fourth context in which we need to think about tragic katharsis is therefore in terms of comparative linguistics. The crucial verb mimeisthai here is a verb in the ancient Greek ‘middle voice’. The Greeks used agential forms of verbs—the active voice (I hit him) and the passive voice (he is hit [by me]). But they also used a third, middle voice which does not exist in most modern languages today, and certainly not in either English or German. The label ‘middle’

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implies an intermediate status between active and passive, but the signification of ‘in-between-ness’ is misleading. It is a result of what Peradotto called “our own unreflective linguistic habits,” which lead us “to think of active and passive voice as the most fundamental pair that exhausts the category of voice” and thence “to impoverished readings.”21 In archaic and classical Greek, ‘doer’ and ‘done to’ sometimes become inadequate categories, drawing a sharp line, legislating a boundary, where none is felt: the name Odysseus, for example, comes from a middle-voice verb and signifies that this hero may cause trouble to others but is also troubled. His presence signifies an enveloping situation of potential trouble for all concerned.22 Historically speaking, in Indo-European, the most ancient binary opposition was probably not between active and passive, but between active and middle. “The active verb was used to present an activity proceeding from a subject outwards; when the event took place within the subject or reflected on the subject, the middle voice was used.”23 The classicist J.-P. Vernant summed up what this meant for classical scholars’ attitudes to early Greek civilization in a famous essay on Benveniste’s Nom d’action et nom d’agent dans les langues indo-européennes. When responding to the active and the middle voices as they are presented in Benveniste’s work, Vernant wrote, We see two cases, one in which the action is ascribed to the agent like an attribute to a subject, and another in which the action envelopes the agent and the agent remains immersed in the action—that is the case of the middle voice. The psychological conclusion that Benveniste doesn’t draw, because he is not a psychologist, is that in thought as expressed in ancient Greek or ancient Indo-European there is no idea of the agent being the source of his action.24 The middle voice of verbs which also have active forms, and the substantial group of verbs which are inherently ‘middle voice’ and have no active forms, can have a wide variety of meanings, but they fall into certain identifiable categories. Just about the only thing they do not signify is an action beginning in an individual agent and which has a direct effect on an object external to that agent, as do active transitive verbs, as in ‘I hit him.’ For example, the middle voice can imply a collective motion: ‘the assembly gathers’. Here the gathering of the collective is “a single action carried out jointly by a group of individuals in which the individuals are completely dependent upon one another if the action is to succeed.”25 Similarly, the middle voice can imply reciprocity between two or more entities: ‘to fight with missiles’; ‘to contend in wit’, ‘to enter a competition’. The Greek verb meaning ‘to participate in a competition,’ ago¯nizesthai, indeed, was the nearest thing the language possessed to our verb to perform, for example at a festival competition in performances of drama, since performance was

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regarded as an activity necessarily involving other participants. Verbs of perceptual experience are also often in the middle voice, such as derkesthai (see) and akroasthai (listen). These middle forms relate “to events in which an animate subject perceives an object through one of the sensory organs. The perceiver is mentally affected by the perception. The subject can, therefore, be considered an experiencer.”26 The process of undergoing a mental or emotional experience is also usually described in the middle voice: I am angry, I am afraid, I am mistaken, I am distressed. It is not a requirement in statements such as these that there is specificity as to the source of the emotion—it may be emanating from the subject of the sentence, or from an outside entity, or there may be a complex reciprocal emotional transaction going on.27 Perhaps it is better to think of a situation, involving more than one individual, which is characterised by anger, or fear, or misconception, or distress: these emotions envelop the whole encounter and there may be little to be gained in distinguishing between what we would call ‘agent’ and ‘patient.’28 Before Aristotle recast tragic mimesis in abstract nouns, it was discussed in middle-voice verbs that implied a situation in which numerous parties were enveloped by the activity of creating an imitation, rather than one in which agents and patients were arbitrarily distinguished. There is also an identifiable category of middle verbs denoting speech-acts involving a subject who is both the agent of the verb and in some way the beneficiary of the speak act it denotes, such as ‘speak in defence’, ‘lament’, “engage in a question-and-answer process.”29 One of the most important verbs here is the middle verb hupokrinomai, which, fascinatingly, gave rise to the basic Greek word for ‘actor’, hupokrite¯s (really meaning ‘interlocutor’). Indeed, the different activities involved in the whole process of making and consuming theatre, collectively and whether as an actor or a spectator— perceiving, acting in a way that is self-beneficial, experiencing mental processes or emotions together, performing or listening to speech-acts—share a profound tendency to be expressed in classical Greek in the middle voice. The idea of ‘theatre in the middle voice’ is perhaps about to find a new champion in the neuroscientific study of performance that we have already mentioned briefly. There are now recognised, as we have seen, certain neurons in the brain that don’t discriminate between an act the owner of the brain is carrying out and an act the owner of the brain is witnessing.30 When Socrates describes tragic mimesis, using the middle-voice verb mimeisthai, he makes no clear distinction between the actor and the spectator participating in the experience—doing and witnessing are parts of the whole process. Whether neuroscientifically or linguistically speaking, observing can actually be the same thing as doing. But there are other shadings to the middle voice that might be helpful in allowing us to understand what Socrates’ verb ‘to imitate’ actually meant in ancient Greek. The one point on which Socrates and Aristotle agree is that the imitation that goes on in tragic theatre has a transformative effect on those who experience it; what these philosophers disagree on is whether the

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effect is harmful or beneficial. The middle voice frequently describes processes in which the subject of the verb undergoes some kind of change. The verb may just be reflexive and the agent may perform a transforming procedure on themselves: ‘to anoint oneself’ or ‘to adorn oneself’ would be in the middle voice. But so would a verb in which the transformation takes place in someone or something other than the agent but still to the benefit of the agent: to heal, to cure, to repair, to mend. In Plato’s terminology in this and other parts of the Republic, the agents involved in the harmful imitation that is experienced in tragic theatre are not (to modern analysts, at least) satisfactorily discriminated. When he says that the future guardians should “not be allowed to imitate” people such as complaining women or cowardly men, he seems to mean something like ‘participate in the collective tragic imitation’ of such inferior people, whether as author, the character within the text, performer or spectator.31 All those involved in this collective process are at risk of experiencing a change for the worse, since they will carry on reproducing the imitated behaviours in their lives outside the theatres. Plato’s theatre is still in the middle voice, the collective ritual performances of tragedy, enacted by the community for the community, at the Athenian festivals of Dionysus. But, for Plato, this middle-voice experience is a negative one for the experiencers. Plato’s Socrates, although admitting that he is reluctant to take such an extreme step, concludes that the only option is to exclude all mimetic poetry, including tragic theatre, from his republic. But he makes the concession of challenging those who disagree with him to formulate a defence (10.607d6–9): We should allow the champions of poetry—men who do not practise the art themselves, but are lovers of it—to offer a prose defence on its behalf, showing that poetry is a source not only of pleasure, but also of benefit to civic communities. Plato is believed to have written the Republic between 380 and 360 bc. From 366 onwards, one of his best students at the Academy in Athens was Aristotle. One way of thinking about Aristotle’s Poetics, probably not written until his residence in Athens between 335 bc and his death in 322, is as a direct response to his teacher’s challenge. For the Poetics is a ‘prose defence’ of poetry, which shows how the pleasure it affords is also of benefit to civic communities. Aristotle’s theory of katharsis—whatever the procedure metaphorically underlying it—is a component, probably an important one, of his defence of tragic theatre. Moreover, in formulating the new defence that tragic mimesis could produce emotional katharsis, Aristotle may cleverly be appropriating ritual and medical ideas that had been given at least embryonic formulation elsewhere in his teacher’s oeuvre. In Plato’s Laws, for example, there is a brief discussion of the curative rites of the women officers in the ecstatic cult of

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the Corybantes, who can calm pre-existing turmoil in the sufferers attending the rites; they do so by applying additional (i.e. homeopathic) turmoil to agitate them further (7.790d–791a). Earlier in the Laws, the Athenian Stranger has already discussed with approval the deliberate production of disorder, through wine-drinking at carefully controlled communal symposia, in souls who are deficient in fire (for example those of the elderly). The goal is to use allopathic wine in order to produce an initial, temporary disorder leading to the recalibration of psychological balance. On just one occasion, therefore, Plato had indeed considered welcoming “anti-rational emotion as a beneficial and necessary element in the human soul.”32 But the four or five decades between Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics had seen a huge transformation in the production and consumption of theatre in the ancient world.33 The fifth and most important context in which we need to locate and read Aristotelian katharsis is in the epochal shifts in politics, society and all dimensions of culture that had occurred in the middle decades of the fifth century BC. A hundred years before Aristotle wrote his Poetics, almost all tragedy was composed and first produced in Athens, in the context of drama competitions held at community festivals of Dionysus, as part of an important act of worship by the Athenian citizen body. By the time Plato wrote his Republic, however, theatres had mushroomed all over the Greek mainland, as well as in Greek colonies in south Italy, Sicily, and even the Black Sea.34 The really profound transformation was to come in 338 BCE, at the battle of Chaeronea, when Philip of Macedon defeated the venerable city-states of Athens and Thebes. The Macedonian Empire had arrived. Two years later Philip ordered the invasion of Asia; in 330, the entire Persian Empire fell to Alexander the Great. Wherever the Macedonians went, deep into Asia, they built new cities with theatres. They needed new plays, as well as the works of the star fourth-century tragedians such as Astydamas, and old favourites of the classical repertoire, written in the fifth century BC by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The world needed a new theory of tragedy to match the new circumstances of tragic performance, and to bridge the ideological gap between the requirements of civic tragedies produced at Dionysiac festivals by the Athenian democracy, and tragedies produced under autocratic new regimes in new Hellenistic theatres.35 Performances now took place on all kinds of occasions besides Dionysiac festivals (at festivals for other gods, for deified monarchs, at funerals, at banquets and in military camp theatricals); they featured star travelling professional actors,36 performing under Macedonian autocracies across the massively and rapidly expanding Greek-speaking world. The man who provided this new theory had, in 343, been appointed Alexander’s personal tutor: Aristotle of Stageira himself. He almost certainly wrote his Poetics after his return to Athens in 335, where he had once studied with Plato. This was just after the Greek world had become Macedonian and at the time when the young Alexander was looking ever further eastward.

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So Aristotle’s defence of tragic mimesis as producing a beneficial transformation through katharsis of emotions, however we are to understand it, was produced at a time when tragedy had divorced itself from the political system of democracy, as well as from the religious context of the civic festival of Dionysus, and had become a mass-market export consumed by audiences in colonies and new civic Macedonian foundations far afield. A corollary of the growth and geopolitical metastasis of the Greek-speaking world, which took its favourite performance media with it everywhere, was the first serious attempt to write all the canonical plays of the major tragedians down in ‘master’ copies and place them in special collections. These were soon to be developed into the massive libraries such as that in Ptolemaic Alexandria that were such a hallmark of the Hellenistic Greek world.37 Tragedy could be read quite as much as performed; it could be studied and edited by scholars alone or in small, learned groups; papyrus copies of the great masterpieces were regarded as some of the finest treasures of ancient book collections. It is in these contexts that we need to understand the lack of emphasis on the performance context of ancient tragedy—whether the festival competitions, or the material aspects of the production such as the nature of the performance space, the costumes, masks, scenery and music. It is in these contexts that we need to understand Aristotle’s avoidance of the political content of Greek tragedy and apparent insistence on ethical rather than religious issues.38 It is in these contexts that we need to understand the conflicting dynamic in his account of the emotional effect of tragedy, which reads as though he is envisaging the newly autonomous entity Trago¯idia effecting her constructive transformation of each individual consumer’s capacity to deal with his inborn emotions by arousing those emotions in a controlled and pleasurable manner. For Aristotle, tragedy had ceased to be a verb in the plural middle voice and had become a singular abstract entity in its own right, which could produce an emotional transformation in another entity in any theatre—or library—in the Greek-speaking world. Fundamentally, it took very real transformations in the real world, and in the relationship between tragic theatre and the real world, to produce Aristotle’s profound but infuriatingly enigmatic theory of the transformative power of tragic theatre. Yet the enigma surrounding precisely what Aristotle meant by the katharsis of emotions produced by tragic mimesis has in hindsight exerted a paradoxically beneficial influence on the subsequent history of theatre. Most importantly, it was Aristotle who championed the capacity of tragic theatre to acknowledge emotions and handle them constructively, even though his theory is marked by such significant gaps. In one sense, the gaps may have been his “greatest contribution, since all subsequent theorizing arose within and in response to them.”39 The rediscovery of his Poetics by western Europeans in the Renaissance brought Aristotle’s ill-defined theory of katharsis to attention. It immediately stimulated great creative minds and

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theatrical experiments. I have argued elsewhere that his avoidance of any detailed discussion of tragic metaphysics, and lack of recommendations to the playwright about how to treat them, have actually helped tragic theatre to spring up and speak to all kinds of religious and philosophical traditions.40 Similarly, Aristotle’s lack of prescriptive detail about how to produce katharsis has surely been an asset rather than a disadvantage. In inventing beneficial tragic katharsis, Aristotle successfully refuted the Socratic argument that tragic imitation was harmful. This idea, however little we may understand it, has been crucial to the history of theatre because it defined a positive effect of tragedy that people have probably always intuitively felt, and also created an aspiration in all subsequent tragedians to make a theatre about suffering that, however the katharsis actually worked, was indeed useful to the community.

Notes 1 ἔστιν οὖν τραγῳδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας καὶ τελείας μέγεθος ἐχούσης, ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ χωρὶς ἑκάστῳ τῶν εἰδῶν ἐν τοῖς μορίοις, δρώντων καὶ οὐ δι᾽ ἀπαγγελίας, δι᾽ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν. 2 On the creation of written ‘master’ copies of the canonical tragedians in late fourth-century Athens, see Edith Hall, The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 2; Edith Hall, “The Pronomos Vase and Tragic Theatre: Demetrios’ Rolls and Dionysus’ Other Woman,” in The Pronomos Vase, ed. Oliver Taplin and Rosie Wyles (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 159–79. 3 See further Velvet Yates, “A Sexual Model of Catharsis,” Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 31 (1998): 35–57. 4 Cf. James Highland, “Transformative Katharsis: The Significance of Theophrastus’s Botanical Works for Interpretations of Dramatic Catharsis,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005): 155–63. 5 Cf. Edith Hall, Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: Euripides’ Black Sea Tragedy (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 4. 6 On pollution (miasma) see the outstanding study by Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 7 Cf. Edith Hall, “Tragedy Personified,” in Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth & Ritual in Greek Art & Literature, ed. Chris Kraus et al. (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 221–56. 8 Thomas Taylor’s “Note on Catharsis” (1811), reproduced in Elder Olson, ed., Aristotle’s “Poetics” and English Literature (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 79. 9 The phenomenon of the pleasure and psychological strength derived from watching ‘tearjerkers’ has been the subject of recent research by academics in the US: see especially Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick et al., “Tragedy Viewers Count Their Blessings: Feeling Low on Fiction Leads to Feeling High on Life,” Communication Research 40 (2013): 747–66. 10 Cf. Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama, History, and the Cult of Asclepius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008).

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11 For one amongst several influential expositors of this interpretation, see Leon Golden, “Catharsis,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 93 (1962): 51–60 and Leon Golden, “Mimesis and Katharsis,” Classical Philology, 64 (1969): 145–53. Other important discussions and interpretations include and are cited in Gerald Frank Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 225–6, n.14; Donald W. Lucas, Aristotle’s Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 272–90; Donald Keesey, “On Some Recent Interpretations of Catharsis,” The Classical World 72 (1978–79): 193–205; Richard Janko, Aristotle on Comedy (Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 139–42; Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) 184–201; Sheila Murnaghan, “Sucking the Juice without Biting the Rind: Aristotle and Tragic Mime¯sis,” New Literary History 26 (1995): 755–73. 12 Jonathan Lear, “Katharsis,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amélie O. Rorty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 335. 13 See the analysis of David Blank, “The Arousal of Emotion in Plato’s Dialogues,” Classical Quarterly 43 (1993): 433–4. 14 Ibid., 434. 15 Cf. Stephen G. Salkever, “Tragedy and the Education of the Demos: Aristotle’s Response to Plato,” in Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, ed. J. Peter Euben (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 274–303. 16 Cf. Amy Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 135. 17 Ibid., 136. 18 See Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 131, quoting J. E. Malpas: “Theatres, like places for worship and spectator sports, hold memories of the past in addition to providing a practical and cognitive framework for performance.” Herodotus’ use of the singular noun ‘the theatre’ here was regarded as a profoundly moving instance of the rhetorical figure of singular-forplural (‘theatre’ for ‘spectators’) by the Greek literary theorist Longinus (On The Sublime 24.1). 19 Fragment 6.5–19 in Poetae Comici Graeci, Vol. VII, ed. R. Kassell & C. Austin (Berlin: de Gruyter 1989). 20 Cf. Hall, The Theatrical Cast of Athens, ch. 3. 21 John Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 132–4. 22 Cf. ibid. 132–4. 23 Leonard R. Palmer, The Greek Language (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980), 292. 24 J.-P. Vernant, cited in Roland Barthes “To Write: Intransitive Verb? – BarthesTodorov Discussion,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Science of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 152. 25 Rutger J. Allan, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek: A Study in Polysemy (Amsterdam: Brill Academic, 2003), 83. 26 Ibid., 95–101. 27 Cf. Eduard Schwyzer, Griechische Grammatik, vol. 2 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1938), 228–9, 232, 236–7. 28 Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice, 134. 29 Rutger J. Allan, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek, 105–12. 30 Cf. Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay, 135. 31 Such distinctions, although important to modern narratological literary theorists, were rarely made so sharply by ancient critics and consumers of literature. For

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34

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37 38 39

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Edith Hall the complex relationship between author and narrator in later ancient Greek writing, and for salutary warnings against making negative judgements of ancient critics for employing concepts and criteria that differ from our own, see Tim Whitmarsh, “An I for an I: Reading Fictional Autobiography,” in id. Beyond the Second Sophistic (Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 63–74. Eleonora Belfiore, “Wine and Catharsis of the Emotions in Plato’s Laws,” Classical Quarterly 36 (1986): 437. The bibliography on the transformations in fourth-century tragic theatre is large and growing. Most important contributions will be found through careful consultation of: Pat Easterling, “The End of an Era? Tragedy in the Fourth Century,” in Tragedy, Comedy, and the Polis, ed. Alan H. Sommerstein et al. (Bari: Levante editori, 1993), 559–69; Oliver Taplin, Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-Painting of the Fourth Century BC (Los Angeles, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007); Eric Csapo et al., Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century BC (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2014). See Kathryn Bosher, ed., Theater outside Athens: Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Edith Hall, “Greek Tragedy 430–380 BCE,” in Debating the Athenian Cultural Revolution, ed. Robin Osborne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 264–87; Hall, Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris, ch. 3; David Braund and Edith Hall, “Theatre in the Fourth-Century Black Sea,” in Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century BC, ed. Eric Csapo et al. (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2014), 371–91, and David Braund and Edith Hall, “Gender, Role and Performer in Athenian Theatre Iconography: A Masked Tragic Chorus with Kalos and Kale Captions from Olbia,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 134 (2014): 1–11. See Page duBois, “Ancient Tragedy and the Metaphor of Katharsis,” Theatre Journal 54 (2002): 19–24, for an articulate statement of the unorthodox argument, informed by Foucault, that Aristotle’s theory of tragedy shifts its focus from the democratic collective to the individual, and exemplifies “a disciplining of the social body” and “a view of theatre and catharsis from the point of view of power, administration, and management of the population. He assumes a gaze from above, looking with an almost panoptic eye at society.” Cf. Edith Hall, “The Singing Actors of Antiquity,” in Greek & Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, ed. Pat Easterling and Edith Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3–38; Edith Hall, “Rhetorical Actors and Other Versatile Hellenistic Vocalists,” in Hellenistic Oratory, ed. Christos Kremmydas and Kathryn Tempest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013b), 109–36. Cf. Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014), ch. 8. Cf. Edith Hall, “Is There a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics?” in Tragedy and the Tragic, ed. Michael Silk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 294–309. Neal Oxenhandler, “The Changing Concept of Literary Emotion: A Selective History,” New Literary History 20 (1988): 107; see also e.g. John Gassner, “Catharsis and the Modern Theater,” in Elder Olson, Aristotle’s “Poetics” and English Literature (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 108–13. Cf. Edith Hall, “Trojan Suffering, Tragic Gods, and Transhistorical Metaphysics,” in Tragedy in Transition, ed. Sarah A. Brown and Catherine Silverstone (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2007), 16–33 and Edith Hall, “Medea als Mysterium im Global Village,” in Medeamorphosen, ed. Nike Bätzner et al. (Berlin: Fink, 2010), 19–33.

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Bibliography Allan, Rutger J. The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek: A Study in Polysemy. Amsterdam: Brill Academic, 2003. Barthes, Roland. “To Write: Intransitive Verb? – Barthes-Todorov Discussion.” In The Languages of Criticism and the Science of Man, edited by Richard Macksey, and Eugenio Donato, 145–56. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970. Belfiore, Eleonora. “Wine and Catharsis of the Emotions in Plato’s Laws.” Classical Quarterly 36 (1986): 421–37. Blank, David. “The Arousal of Emotion in Plato’s Dialogues.” Classical Quarterly 43 (1993): 428–39. Bosher, Kathryn, ed. Theater outside Athens: Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Braund, David, and Edith Hall. “Theatre in the Fourth-Century Black Sea.” In Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century BC, edited by Eric Csapo, J. Richard. Green, Hans Rupprecht Goette and Peter Wilson, 371–91. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2014. Braund, David, and Edith Hall. “Gender, Role and Performer in Athenian Theatre Iconography: A Masked Tragic Chorus with Kalos and Kale Captions from Olbia.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 134 (2014): 1–11. Cook, Amy. Shakespearean Neuroplay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Csapo, Eric, J. Richard Green, Hans Rupprecht Goette, and Peter Wilson, eds. Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century BC. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. duBois, Page. “Ancient Tragedy and the Metaphor of Katharsis.” Theatre Journal 54 (2002): 19–24. Easterling, Pat. “The End of an Era? Tragedy in the Fourth Century.” In Tragedy, Comedy, and the Polis, edited by Alan H. Sommerstein, Stephen Halliwell, Jeffrey Henderson, and Bernhard Zimmermann, 559–69. Bari: Levante editori, 1993. Else, Gerald Frank. Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Gassner, John. “Catharsis and the Modern Theater.” In Aristotle’s “Poetics” and English Literature, edited by Elder Olsen, 108–13. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Golden, Leon. “Catharsis.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 93 (1962): 51–60. Golden, Leon. “Mimesis and Katharsis.” Classical Philology 64 (1969): 145–53. Hall, Edith. “Is There a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics?” In Tragedy and the Tragic, edited by Michael Silk, 294–309. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hall, Edith. “The Singing Actors of Antiquity.” In Greek & Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, edited by Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, 3–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hall, Edith. The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hall, Edith. “Trojan Suffering, Tragic Gods, and Transhistorical Metaphysics.” In Tragedy in Transition, edited by Sarah A. Brown, and Catherine Silverstone, 16–33. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2007. Hall, Edith. “Tragedy Personified.” In Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth & Ritual in Greek Art & Literature, edited by Chris Kraus, Simon Goldhill, Helene

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Foley, and Jas Elsner, 221–56. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hall, Edith. “Greek Tragedy 430–380 BCE.” In Debating the Athenian Cultural Revolution, edited by Robin Osborne, 264–87. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Hall, Edith. “The Pronomos Vase and Tragic Theatre: Demetrios’ Rolls and Dionysus’ Other Woman.” In The Pronomos Vase, edited by Oliver Taplin and Rosie Wyles, 159–79. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Hall, Edith. “Medea als Mysterium im Global Village.” In Medeamorphosen, edited by Nike Bätzner, Matthias Dreyer, and Erika Fischer-Lichte, 19–33. Berlin: Fink, 2010. Hall, Edith. Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: Euripides’ Black Sea Tragedy. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hall, Edith. “Rhetorical Actors and Other Versatile Hellenistic Vocalists.” In Hellenistic Oratory, edited by Christos Kremmydas and Kathryn Tempest, 109–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hall, Edith. Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014. Halliwell, Stephen. Aristotle’s Poetics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. (1984) Highland, James. “Transformative Katharsis: The Significance of Theophrastus’s Botanical Works for Interpretations of Dramatic Catharsis.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005): 155–63. Janko, Richard. Aristotle on Comedy. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Janko, Richard. “Philodemus’ On Poems and Aristotle’s On Poets.” CErc 21 (1991): 5–64. Kassell, Rudolf and Colin Austin (eds). Poetae Comici Graeci, vol. VII. Berlin: de Gruyter 1989. Keesey, Donald. “On Some Recent Interpretations of Catharsis.” The Classical World 72 (1978–79): 193–205. Knobloch-Westerwick, Silvia, Yuan Gong, Holly Hagner, and Laura Kerbeykian. “Tragedy Viewers Count Their Blessings: Feeling Low on Fiction Leads to Feeling High on Life.” Communication Research 40 (2013): 747–66. Lear, Jonathan. “Katharsis.” In Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, edited by Amélie O. Rorty, 315–40. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Lucas, Donald. Aristotle’s Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. McConachie, Bruce. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Mitchell-Boyask, Robin. Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama, History, and the Cult of Asclepius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Murnaghan, Sheila. “Sucking the Juice without Biting the Rind: Aristotle and Tragic Mime¯sis.” New Literary History 26 (1995): 755–73. Olson, Elder, ed. Aristotle’s “Poetics” and English Literature. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Oxenhandler, Neal. “The Changing Concept of Literary Emotion: A Selective History.” New Literary History 20 (1988): 105–21. Palmer, Leonard. The Greek Language. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980.

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Parker, Robert. Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Peradotto, John. Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Reckford, Kenneth. “Catharsis and Dream-Interpretation in Aristophanes’ Wasps.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 107 (1977): 283–312. Salkever, Stephen G. “Tragedy and the Education of the Demos: Aristotle’s Response to Plato.” In Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, edited by J. Peter Euben, 274– 303. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986. Schwyzer, Eduard. Griechische Grammatik. 3 vols. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1938. Taplin, Oliver. Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek VasePainting of the Fourth Century BC. Los Angeles, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007. Taylor, Thomas. “Note on Catharsis.” Orig. 1811, reproduced in Aristotle’s “Poetics” and English Literature, edited by Elder Olsen, 79–81. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Vöhler, Martin, and Bernd Seidensticker, eds. Katharsiskonzeptionen vor Aristoteles. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2007. Whitmarsh, Tim. “An I for an I: Reading Fictional Autobiography.” In id. Beyond the Second Sophistic, 63–74. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013. Yates, Velvet. “A Sexual Model of Catharsis.” Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 31 (1998): 35–57.

2

The taste of art and transcendence Transformation(s) in rasa and bhakti aesthetics Guillermo Rodríguez

India displays a multi-colored tapestry of art forms and aesthetic traditions that have been knit together over the centuries. It could be said that almost any given art form in India today combines pan-Indian, regional and local features in an interactive network of traditions. Within this diverse panorama Indian critics discern at least two principal theoretical conceptions of aesthetics that have been termed “classical”: the hegemonic, pan-Indian Sanskrit tradition of aesthetics with its various treatises and theoreticians, and the Dravidian tradition from the Tamil region in the South which derives from the grammar and poetic treatise Tolkappiyam of the classical Sangam period (third century bce to fourth century ce) and from the works of later Tamil commentators and scholars. Whereas the key classical Sanskrit treatises (just as the Greek) are based on the art of drama, the Tamil model derives from the lyrical art and is intrinsically closer to the poetic mode, as is the case with the Japanese or Chinese tradition. During the medieval period the surge of multiple devotional traditions on the Indian subcontinent added another vibrant layer to Indian aesthetics: bhakti (devotional) aesthetics first evolved in the South out of the classical Tamil poetics of akam (love themes) and puram (public affairs and hero-worship), and converged with the philosophical conceptions and mythologies of the Sanskritic Brahmanical tradition and local folklore. Thus, Indian performing arts—dance and theatre—and their accompanying texts (written and/or oral) are fundamental to an understanding of Indian art and culture, both in the so-called marga or classical model based on the Natya Sastra in Sanskrit, and in the numerous regional, bhakti and folk traditions. Indian aesthetics is, in essence, a “dramatic” criticism of multiple “transformations.”

I. Rasa aesthetics The Sanskrit term rasa as an aesthetic concept is said to have first been propounded by the sage Bharata Muni in the Natya Sastra,1 the principal Sanskrit treatise on drama (performing arts and music) written between the second centuries bce and ce. Bharata delineated in the Natya Sastra the

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fundamental aesthetic system of rasa, which was reinterpreted later by other Indian philosophers, notably Abhinavagupta during the tenth to eleventh centuries ce. Thus, what is called rasa theory today is the classical Sanskrit theory of aesthetic experience based on Bharata’s Natya Sastra and later elaborated as an aesthetic theory between the seventh and eleventh centuries ce. It is to be noted that the concept of rasa remained open to interpretations and further contributions by eminent Indian theoreticians throughout the centuries till today. In the early twentieth century, the notion of rasa was retrieved by prominent writers and scholars who were steeped in both Indian and Western thought, such as Aurobindo Ghose, Rabindranath Tagore and A.K. Coomaraswamy,2 and it has been reinterpreted by modern critics time and again. It can be said that rasa remains the most influential single concept of Indian aesthetics and criticism to this day.3 The classical Sanskrit aesthetic theories that are based on the idea of rasa are essentially rooted in an affective model of art that is receiver-oriented. They provide a comprehensive mapping of the multiple elements involved in the artistic event, i.e. the artist, the work, the perceiver, and the world, and describe the relation of these components to one another. The theory of rasa, as expounded in the Natya Sastra—the foundational work of Indian Sanskrit aesthetics—focuses on the experience of drama, dance and music, yet it has been applied over time to most Indian arts forms, including drama, dance, music, poetry, fiction, painting and even cinema. I shall here first provide a very brief exposition of the early notion of rasa in Sanskrit aesthetics as formulated in the Natya Sastra. I.1. The Natya Sastra: aesthetic experience in drama4 Rasa signifies “that which is being relished,” a “flavour,” “taste,” “juice,” or “essence.” The experience of this flavour is contingent on the right combination of various components. The base component is bhava, which can be defined as sentiments, ordinary emotions or personal psychological states that are commonly experienced. Bharata identifies the eight permanent or dominant psychological states or emotions (sthayi bhava, e.g. sorrow), and further distinguishes between vibhava (the fundamental determinant or cause of the emotion, e.g. the dying hero in a play), anubhava (the consequences or external signs, e.g. tears, sobbing) and vyabhichari bhava or sanchari bhava, the thirty-three transitory or passing states of the mind that are accessories to the primary sthayi bhavas. A sanchari bhava is, for instance, the sensation of despair (visada) at witnessing the death of the hero and which may appear together with the sthayi bhava of sorrow. According to the Natya Sastra, when the rasa essence is experienced in art, these emotions (bhava) are universalized (depersonalized), as the personal psychological mode is transcended in the aesthetic experience. To follow the earlier example, the rasa of karuna or pathos is evoked by the

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sthayi bhava (emotion) of sorrow when it occurs in combination with other elements (vibhava, anubhava and sanchari bhava) in a dance performance or drama. Karuna (pathos) is thus the aesthetic (rasa) mode and is not an ordinary, personal emotion. Bharata identifies in the Natya Sastra eight principal rasas: sringara (erotic), hasya (comic), karuna (pathos), raudra (furious), vira (heroic), bhayanaka (fearsome), bibhatsa (disgusting), and adbhuta (wondrous). For every one of these eight rasas, there is a corresponding permanent psychological state or sentiment (sthayi bhava). Abhinavagupta later added a ninth rasa, shanta (calmness, peace), which is described as the principal rasa that underlies all others. Rasa could hence be defined as the depersonalized, universalized or generalized psychological state of aesthetic delight that may be provoked by a combination of a permanent dominant emotion, fleeting sentiments, and the causes and consequents of the emotion. It is effected by aesthetic distancing from the personal connotations of the emotion and from the object that is the cause of the feeling. Therefore, we could state the following equation in a diagram, providing another example: Personal ordinary experience

Depersonalised aesthetic experience

vibhava + sthayi bhava + anubhava (e.g. a sensual object) (rati, love) (e.g. a smile on the face)

=

RASA

(sringara, erotic love)

+ vyabhachari or sanchari bhavva

Yet the experience of rasa is not a mathematical or automatic formula. For this “spontaneous” aesthetic experience to take place all aesthetic elements need to be in the right combination, and thus the various techniques at hand for the artist to evoke rasa are meticulously explained by Sanskrit aestheticians. According to Bharata, in the aesthetic pleasure of enjoying a piece of dance or music both the artist and the spectator-listener forget the intricate technique that is behind the performance or work of art in the same manner as, when savoring a well-cooked dish, it is no more relevant which ingredients were used and how they were elaborated. Just like a well-cooked dish has its pleasant flavor, it is the correct combination of these constituents that result in rasa. When rasa takes place, we do not differentiate each of the elements that bring it about, just as the guest who is served the tasty dish may not be aware of the various elements that went into the making of it. The components can naturally be separated, structured into elements. Yet, as Rabindranath Tagore put it in his theory of art, “the true principle of art is the principle of unity”; the “food value” of a meal is in its different

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constituents, but “its taste value is in its unity, which cannot be analyzed.”5 Just as in the preparation of a meal we mix natural constituents into a unity, a sensory experience, so rasa is composed by its constituent elements into aesthetic relish. Now where does art (the elements and the unity) come from? It is important to note here that according to the classical Hindu thought system nothing is truly created: neither the dish nor the rasa, i.e. neither the work of art nor the essence and meaning of art. For, in the Hindu worldview, creation is transformation. In the non-dualistic Vedic and Upanisadic philosophical model, and later in the qualified dualism of Samkhya philosophy, the idea of continuity through transformation prevails. Nature (prakrit) is “already made,” yet to be remade into culture (samskrit). And so nothing is truly created nor can it vanish into a vacuum, but it is transformed into something else. Contrary to Christian thought, in the Hindu system the soul, the living self (jiva) is neither created nor destroyed. Another distinctive feature of the rasa theory is the aim of art. Sanskrit aesthetics is not concerned with mimesis and the order and proportion of the aesthetic object, as were the classical Greek theories, but with aesthetic rapture. It explains the techniques that may evoke impersonal psychologicalemotional states (rasa) leading to aesthetic pleasure (rasaanubhava) and transcendental bliss of the soul (atmananda) in the beholder or consumer of a work of art. The primary aim of art is to produce aesthetic delight, yet its ultimate expression lies in the quasi-spiritual sublimation of the art experience and thus in the self-realization of the perceiver as corresponding to the doctrine of brahman (the uncreated, transcendent, all-encompassing principle) and atman (the self, the individual perceiver). Aesthetic experience is therefore not a common worldly experience, but neither is this “taste of transcendence” an otherworldly mystery. It is rather a transient transformation or re-formation of consciousness. Aesthetic rapture is a property inherent in human consciousness. It is there in every one of us and is evoked by ordinary human emotions in a psychological (psychosomatic) process that is akin to analogy, inference, correspondence or reflection. So, where does rasa take place? In the performer or in the spectator? How can an experience in everyday life get transformed into such a heightened state of “perception,” into an expression of inner liberation of the soul (a momentary savoring of transcendence), without becoming a spiritual experience as such? Some light may be shed on these questions if we understand this process as a mirroring of some sort: a mirror—the mirror of art—which reflects and “enlightens” personal emotions as the rasa (aesthetic ecstasy) that is latent in human consciousness, and thus works in the artist and perceiver alike. It was the sage Abhinavagupta who explained aesthetic rapture as a transformation of consciousness and who gave it a metaphysical (philosophical-religious) aura.

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I.2. Abhinavagupta’s contribution to the theory of rasa The famed Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta (tenth to eleventh century ce) in his work Abhinava Bharati devised a complex commentary on Bharati’s Natya Sastra and developed it as an aesthetic theory. As a mystic and spiritual leader of Kashmiri Shaivism, he endowed rasa aesthetics with a metaphysical dimension. He was preoccupied with the nature, production and mode of rasa as aesthetic rapture. Some of the principal concerns and seminal contributions of this most influential Indian aesthetician to the theory of rasa can be summarized as follows: i.

Rasa is produced through resonance, suggestion (dhvani). In his reformulation of the dhvani theory of poetics articulated by Anandavardhana (ninth century ce), Abhinavagupta explains how rasa is evoked: it is suggested, reflected, from the subconscious, innate, latent traces or memories (samskara) in a balanced combination of the various constituents of the aesthetic experience. Rasa is the result that resonates through this combination of elements (described by Bharata) in equipoise of thought and emotion. ii. Shanta (calmness) is the ninth rasa and the most important one, for shanta is the state of calmness to which each rasa returns, where we lose our individuality and embrace the Absolute, the non-emotion. Therefore, shanta rasa, while underlying all other rasas and allowing them to take place, is also a rasa on its own (the aesthetic experience of calmness transformed into rasa). iii. Abhinavagupta states that the aesthetic experience takes place in the receptive spectator of an art form, as he explains rasa primarily in psychological terms. He thus shifts the main focus of the rasa system to the process of aesthetic response, and formulates a receiver-oriented theory of rasa. For him what matters is the subject that perceives and experiences rasa through an identification with the emotions in their pure state, which depersonalizes and universalizes the “reflected” emotion. iv. The aim of rasa is self-forgetfulness. That is, Abhinavagupta implies that there is a transcendental aspect in this transient transformative experience, in that, for a fleeting moment, we experience oneness with the universe, the de-individualized conscience. For shanta is the sea of tranquility out of which all rasas emerge, like ripples that form in the calm ocean. It is the un-reflecting mirror of enlightened consciousness. And so, it is the aesthetic transformation of this calmness that enables and defines all other rasas. v. Rasa (as aesthetic ecstasy) and the mystical experience share similar aims and reach out to transcendence, but they differ in terms of purpose and notion of time. The mystic individual searches for an ultimate union with the Absolute Truth. Like the mystic experience, the aesthetic

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experience is not an ordinary, worldly (laukika) experience. But rasa is arrived at through mundane experience. It is both an experience of this world and of the otherworldly (alaukika). Furthermore, the aim of the mystic is timeless; he/she yearns for permanent dissolution in the Absolute, i.e. liberation (moksha). Rasa is a temporary aesthetic experience leading to a state of bliss (ananda) that may resemble the mystic experience, but for the audience that goes to a performance the intention is aesthetic pleasure (rasanubhava). The taste of rasa is the experience of “Beauty,” the taste of the infinite/immortality, yet one which inevitably needs to be finite/mortal. We need the world in order to feel pleasure: we wish to savor real food, look at nature’s beauty etc. We need to know our self to forget our self and become one with the universe in that instance of aesthetic identification. That is, the experience of rasa requires us to be connected to the mundane, the worldly, the theatre of life, in order to re-connect with transcendence in a moment of ecstasy, whereas the true mystic aims at dissolution in the timeless Absolute and, in that sense, negates life. The classical Sanskrit theory of art is rooted in real life, i.e. drama. In the Indian philosophical tradition, the debate over the differences and commonalities of the aesthetic and the spiritual paths continues to this day, and it is quite common to observe how the roles and aims of the philosopher, artist, and mystic overlap. Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), modern Indian mystic, poet and essayist who reinterpreted the Sanskrit tradition, described “The Significance of Indian Art” thus: Its highest business is to disclose something of the Self, the Infinite, the Divine to the regard of the soul, the Self through its expressions, the Infinite through its living finite symbols, the Divine through his power in life and Nature….6 The conceptualizations of the Absolute that we have discussed so far presuppose that the divine (brahman) is name-less, formless. Indian philosophy, however, distinguishes between the nirguna (formless principle) and saguna (the Absolute with attributes) aspects of brahman, which are complementary approaches to the idea of the divine. The former is given more prominence in certain philosophical schools and religious traditions. The medieval period in South India saw the emergence of a new form of expression. A ground-breaking literary, poetic, and aesthetic practice and theory arose that focused on devotion (bhakti, from the word bhaj, “to partake”) as a path to unity with the Absolute. The concept of bhakti was of course not new. Bhakti was an essential element in the Hindu tradition, and according to the Bhagavat Gita, one of the three spirituals paths to truth— the other two being jnana (knowledge) and karma (action). Yet gradually a new understanding of bhakti as a powerful and greatly influential

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religious practice and aesthetics flourished. It began around the sixth to ninth century CE in the Vaisnava mystic tradition of the alvar community of Tamil poet-saints, and later thrived in the Virasaiva tradition in the Kannada language, spreading over most parts of the Indian subcontinent with the rise of the vernacular languages. Poets, musicians and dancers worshipped their gods (Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna etc.) in their regional (desi) vernacular languages, aware of the Sanskrit pan-Indian (marga) classical tradition, but in modes that had gained local attributes: the bhakta (devotee) followed a personal god with a name and shape that could be worshipped, sung to, loved and yearned for. While bhakti acknowledges and plays with the double understanding of god as person and abstract principle (here and beyond, tangible and intangible, saguna and nirguna), it is the immediacy of god as saguna brahman, as god with personified attributes and forms, that enriches the arts as an expression of this spiritual path. The transformative powers of bhakti as a new aesthetics for the individual artist as well as the community of devotees were especially visible in the literary and performing arts, creating new genres in poetry and music, and contributing immensely to dance and theatre forms with desi (regional) and local ornamentation, flavors and attributes. As mentioned, this shift developed parallel to the evolution and formation of the many vernacular languages on the Indian subcontinent (both Dravidian and Indo-European) and their corresponding literary traditions.

II. Bhakti aesthetics Sanskrit aesthetics in theory and practice has evolved throughout the centuries and numerous philosophers, seminal thinkers, sages and pundits have strived to accommodate their own philosophical thought into the rasabhava classical model of aesthetics. More often than not, theoreticians interpreted the rasa concept in the light of their own thought system in order to suit their theoretical, philosophical or religious agenda. An important contribution to rasa aesthetics emerged from the widespread impact of the bhakti (devotional) tradition, which had significant philosophical, social, religious, literary and aesthetic implications. For Abhinavagupta, influenced by Buddhist thought, bhakti (devotion) was only an accessory to shanta rasa. But the concept of bhakti had gained in prominence in the poetry of South India from as early as the sixth century ce, and later evolved into an aesthetic theory with successive elaborations by philosophers and spiritual masters such as Rupa Goswami (sixteenth century ce). In fact, the bhakti scholars, sects and religious branches recognized that the aesthetics of bhakti cannot be completely disengaged from classical Sanskrit notions of art or from the oral (folk) traditions, as they share a common pool of ideas, myths and images. Bhakti is in this sense a meeting place of several aesthetic traditions. In the bhakti traditions, panIndian ideas and local motifs are “made” into new material by wandering

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poets who sing of the public world and creation, as well as of love and personal mystic experiences, and inspire with their poems peasants, kings and Brahmins. At the same time bhakti in art practice (poetry, music, performing arts) and as an aesthetic theory (which evolved later) also contributed to Sanskrit aesthetics in interesting ways either through contrast—sometimes in opposition to the classical tenets—or through integration, addition and complementation. It can be said that one of the flaws of classical Sanskrit aesthetics was that it did not describe the various types of sringara (love) as they existed in human relations and in literature which dealt with human emotions and relationships. The classical rasa theory focused mainly on male-female interrelation, i.e. erotic love, when describing sringara. In the early sixteenth century ce Rupa Goswami, a follower of the Vaisnava cult, attempted to fill this void and identified five types or levels of bhakti (devotion) that could apply to the worship of Krishna. In his hierarchical model, he placed the emotion of shanta (equipoise, non-emotion) at the base, as the neutral rasa, and moving up in intensity he distinguished between dasya (servitude), sakhya (friendship), vatsalya (parental love), and madhurya—a form of sringara (erotic love) —as the culmination of an intense union with the object of worship (Krishna) leading to infatuation and ultimately to spiritual release. Goswami’s approach and that of other bhakti philosophers and spiritual leaders fore-grounded bhakti as the tenth rasa and even claimed that bhakti was the ultimate rasa, a superior emotional state that explained and illuminated all others. The bhakta, philosopher and practitioner in one, did not attempt to integrate the notion of bhakti into the rasa theory so much as seek to explain rasa theory in terms of bhakti. For the devotee bhakti became the only raison d’être of human emotions (i.e. of all other rasabhavas) and of human wisdom: from the Vedas and Upanisads to Buddhist thought, from classical notions of bhakti to classical Tamil Sangam poetry and to the numerous folk traditions. Bhakti was thus aestheticized and rasa was further spiritualized. The experience of bhakti—bhaktirasa—was considered aesthetically superior: rasa became the servant of bhakti. Because the aesthetic was subordinated to religious belief and practice, personal feeling (bhava) and visible experience (anubhava)—and their transformation—were the ultimate goals. And so to speak of aesthetics in the bhakti tradition is to speak also of religion. In bhakti, the borders between art and life tend to be blurred as the artist, singer, painter, musician or poet is usually a devotee. For in bhakti, the artist, the object and the goal are a composite reality and cannot be held separate as in Sanskrit or classical European aesthetics. Bhakti aesthetics concentrates on the expressive self and on the many ways it can relate to the divine through whatever medium of expression. For the bhakta, art is a path to the divine and a form of communicating a personal spiritual search. The particular art form and the aesthetic experience become a means rather than

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the end. Personal feeling and experience—devotional love, for example— overtakes art and aesthetic experience, which are rendered secondary. The aesthetic serves a spiritual end, which is the only purpose in real life. For both the bhakti poet/devotee and also the theoretician, bhakti in real life is identical to bhakti in poetry or in any other form of performance (dance, drama, storytelling etc.). Art becomes the ritual of worship. Bhakti is therefore the existential bridge between the world (emotions) and transcendence, and moves beyond a traditional secular or religious conception of art. Here the spectator and the performer do not merely taste the flavor (rasa) of transcendence, but become devotees of that ultimate rasa—the bhaktirasa of physical infatuation (madhurya)—as they yearn to turn into the very nectar—the food—that is savored or devoured in a process of ultimate transformation. In some bhakti traditions, the highest expression of art is possession, that is, a complete transformation, a conflation of subject and object, worshipper and worshipped, artist and audience. In the experience of bhaktirasa the artist (performer/the poet), the text, and the receiver are merged. Since the artist is a bhakta, his/her ultimate goal is to unite with the object of devotion (the god) and to embody Vishnu or Shiva. As the aesthetic theory of bhakti is intrinsic to praxis and technique, I shall provide some illuminating examples of this aesthetics as it has come to us through the bhakti poems of the Vaisnava alvar saints in Tamil and the Virasaiva lingayat mystics in Kannada, as translated and interpreted by the eminent poet-scholar A.K. Ramanujan (1929–1993). In his pathbreaking collection of translations of mystic poetry by the Tamil saint Nammalvar (ninth century ce), Ramanujan explains: In bhakti, all the arts become also “techniques of ecstasy,” incitement to possession…. As the poet is entirely given to his god, he believes in a spontaneity that is also possession.… Rasa depends on aesthetic distance. But in the poetics of bhakti, these distinctions are blurred, if not annulled. The Lord (the subject of the poem) becomes the poet.7 The alvars, “the immersed ones” who lived between the sixth and ninth centuries ce, were devotees of Vishnu, the god which represents maya (illusion), preservation and continuity. Vishnu brings forth creation through transformation by incarnating in all things and descending to the world in his multiple avatars. The alvars strived to embody in words the flux of things and the supremacy of Vishnu. In their mystic poetics of process and intimacy the pivot is always the all-pervading, playful god Vishnu in his infinite manifestations. Thus poetry, which plays with words and meanings, is a spontaneous manifestation of lila (god’s play). This Vaisnava theology or cosmological vision of “the one in the many” is reflected in a poetics of connections and continuity through transformation and re-incarnation, which is also why the alvar poets associated poetry with

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possession. The alvar poet was a devotee enchanted by the divine spirit in the process of creation, sometimes in a frenzy of possession. The saint-poet Nammalvar depicts such a “takeover” of the poet by a demon-like genius in the following poem: Poets beware, your life is in danger: the lord of gardens is a thief, a cheat, master of illusions; he came to me a wizard with words, sneaked into my body, my breath, with bystanders looking on but seeing nothing, he consumed me life and limb, and filled me, made me over into himself8 For Nammalvar, the god Vishnu is “a master of illusions” who enters the devotee and speaks through the poet-saint. In the poetry of possession, the poem, the poet, and the object of devotion become interchangeable elements and play out a container-contained relationship: the poem is contained by the poet-speaker who is taken over by the divine genius to consummate the poem, i.e. the possession. God, the world and the devotee stand in a metonymical relation that is typically expressed at the physical plane of partaking. In this process of “mutual cannibalism,”9 as Ramanujan described it, god can be both eater and eaten many times over. In some medieval alvar poems Vishnu is worshipped as an accomplished lover. He teases the devotees who long to merge with him in passionate physical union. The principal tension in the mystic love-poetry of the alvars is the interplay between oneness and separateness, between the allencompassing presence and the mysterious absence of lord Vishnu. The god is not distant, though he seems unavailable at times. He is a lover who needs to be lured, sensed and experienced. And the more intimate the relationship, the nearer the senses are to the experience of physical immediacy (e.g. touch, taste and smell), and the more dramatic the poetry.

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Whereas the alvar poets stressed possession, incarnation, and continuity through transformation, the Virasaiva lingayat saints, worshippers of Shiva from the Kannada-speaking region, firmly believed in their lord’s grace in opposition to the orthodox idea of karma. In both traditions, art (song, poem etc.) can only happen if it is prompted by a spontaneous “experience,” which is understood as a chance moment of rapture. But the artist or poet needs to work towards such a momentary state of divine inspiration through bhakti, i.e. devotion to Lord Shiva. The oral vachana poems of the Virasaiva tradition that originated in the tenth century ce in the Kannada language were sung by the worshipping poets to a particular form of Shiva. The aesthetics of these poet-saints is framed by their personal devotion to this form of the god, which was marked by a distinct name and specific attributes.10 A characteristic belief of the vachanakaras was that, contrary to the prescribed (Vedic and folk) religions, artistic inspiration and true vision are capricious and subject to the grace of god. These poet-saints distinguish between anubhava—“experience”—and anubha¯va, “the Experience,” the unpredictable, spontaneous ecstasy that may arrive in the process of artistic-spiritual practice, i.e. bhakti. On the other hand, in the Virasaiva poetics, the distinction between sthavara (static, i.e. the temple) and jangama (moving, i.e. the body) is essential to fully appreciate the formal and socio-political implications of bhakti aesthetics. The metaphor through which the bhaktas utter their “Experience” is the body. The body is the site for transformation, physical, spiritual, social, political and aesthetic. We could cite here the legendary poet-saint Akkamahadevi who wandered about naked defying both the male world and “unbelievers”: He bartered my heart, looted my flesh, claimed as tribute my pleasure, took over all of me. I’m the woman of love for my lord, white as jasmine.11 Alternatively, we can quote a famous poem by Basavanna, the leader of the medieval lingayat community (worshippers of the linga, the symbol for Shiva) and a contemporary of Akkamahadevi, as another example of art-in-motion: The rich will make temples for Siva. What shall I,

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a poor man, do? My legs are pillars the body the shrine, the head a cupola of gold. Listen, O Lord of the meeting rivers, things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay.12 Another poem by Basavanna illustrates the organic notion of art that breaks the categories of artist, devotee and god, and with it the distinction between artist and art, for the artist is body and instrument alike: Make of my body the beam of a lute of my head the sounding gourd of my nerves the strings of my fingers the plucking rods. Clutch me close and play your thirty-two songs O lord of the meeting rivers!13 To conclude this brief introduction to bhakti aesthetics, which has multiple manifestations and ramifications, we could underline several features that differentiate the bhakti aesthetics described here from the Sanskrit aesthetics of rasa: i.

Since the bhakti poets believed in a poetry of private thoughts, the mother tongue was the essential condition for their aesthetics of spontaneity and natural feelings. Likewise, other bhakti art forms closely related to poetry (dance, music) were enriched by absorbing from their immediate environment the regional/local (desi) flavors, imagery, modes, tunes, rhythms, movements, costumes and other tangible and intangible forms of expression. ii. In bhakti poetry, there is no aesthetic distance. Bhakti breaks down the line that separates the subject of the poem (e.g. the god Vishnu) from the poet, and also dilutes the poet-saint with character and speaker. Rasa aesthetics, on the contrary, distinguishes between “the poet, his subject and his characters, the player and his role in the play, the emotions within poetry and outside poetry, and finally, the players and the audience.”14

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iii. Bhakti aesthetics is a poetics of bhavas (personal emotions) and anubhavas (effects of personal emotions). The alvars, for instance, did not believe in the refined, depersonalized aesthetic emotion that defined rasa. The ultimate purpose of their compositions was to address a living god and a community, and thus their poetry draws on the spontaneous personal feelings of the poet-performer-devotee, “whether aesthetic or not.”15 In several of the features delineated above bhakti aesthetics is closely intertwined with ancient Indian folk/popular practices or what can be called folk aesthetics. Not only does erotic love or sexual union become more than a metaphor of spiritual union when Krishna plays the flute and entrances the gopis (female devotees), for instance, but in many forms of bhakti expression (Saiva as well as Vaisnava) this fusion of spectator/devotee and performer/ devotee with the divine form comes very close to the possession rituals we find in Indian folk traditions. Indian oral traditions, ritual performance and theatre share some of their principal characteristics with bhakti aesthetics. There is, for instance, in folk traditions the same spontaneity, possession rituals and lack of aesthetic distance. The poet/audience, poet/character dichotomies of rasa poetics also do not apply here. In the diverse folk forms the latter categories are constantly crossed, fused and undone, “not unlike the process by which a person is possessed or dispossessed in the course of a possession ritual.”16 Just as in the many bhakti art forms of expression, in oral traditions including folktales, folk theatre and performance the main thrust is on the expression of bhavas (personal emotions) embedded in a narrative structure that suggests the transient and transformative nature of ritual.

III. Rasa and bhakti aesthetics in Indian performing arts today: Some thoughts Rasa as a theoretical system and in a practitioner’s context is a relevant concept in Indian performing arts today. It is very much alive in theatre studies, theory of aesthetics, comparative and applied studies (literature, dance, theatre, music, cinema), as well as in the transmission and teaching of Indian performing art forms and music. It is important to note, however, that in the Indian performing arts scene today the so-called “classical” dance traditions,17 the codified art forms which are said to derive from the Natya Sastra, in fact combine the theoretical framework of rasa aesthetics with desi modes, bhakti and folk elements, as well as some Western (videsi) components. The Western influences (such as ballet-like choreography) were added mainly in the twentieth century when these dance forms were gradually institutionalized and taught at schools rather than in the traditional (guru to disciple) context that was historically linked to temple rituals and bhakti worship. These diverse dance-theatre

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forms that have been given “classical” status in a modern context share a common base but have distinct regional identities and features, and as such have been given different names in the course of their history and in the process of their reconstruction in the twentieth century. The names currently accepted by the Sangeet Natak Akademi for the eight classical dance forms are: Bharata Natyam (a modern coinage for the Tamil temple dance earlier called dasiattam), Odissi, Kuchipudi, Mohiniyattam, Kathakali, Kathak, Manipuri, and Sattriya. Kathakali, the dance-drama of the Southwest coast of India (Kerala) that is at present considered one of the classical dance forms of India, received the early attention of Indian scholars, poets and patrons of the arts, as well as of Western Indologists in the first decades of the twentieth century, and has also fascinated theatre anthropologists since then.18 As an art form it took shape in the seventeenth century CE, yet it is linked to the only surviving form of Sanskrit theatre, Kutiyattam, which is believed to be two millennia old.19 Kathakali originated in the seventeenth century CE from the ritualistic, devotional bhakti forms of dance-theatre called Krishnattam and Ramanattam, while also incorporating elements from the martial art Kalaripayyatu and folk rituals such as Mudiyettu, Thiyyattu, Theyyam and Padayani. Thus, in order to analyze a performance of Kathakali from a theoretical-aesthetic perspective it is essential to have an understanding of the principles of rasa aesthetics, yet the expert connoisseur (rasika) will equally point out that the devotional bhakti features and certain folk ritualistic elements traceable to sacrificial rites and possession rituals are an integral part of the Kathakali eco-system. As in most other performance traditions (both “classical” and “folk”), the context of the performance and the type of audience-spectator determine, qualify or influence the aesthetic experience in a Kathakali performance. Today Kathakali may be presented in its original environment as a ritual performance in a temple festival or in a private house sponsored by a patron of the arts, or in a traditional Kathakali school, but more often than not it is staged in a modern theatre or in a makeshift theatre in an open urban space, or even in a hotel. This context frames and influences the artists’ performance as well as the work’s reception and certainly defines the aesthetic experience, content and purpose of the presentation, which may vary from a mere thirty-minute piece of exotic entertainment to a ritualistic full-night performance. In a tourist show the actor and the art form may be treated as irreverently as the life-size Kathakali cardboard picture that greets the visitor at the airport; but at the same time, even today it is not too uncommon to witness, in a traditional temple performance, an actor being worshipped by the audience as an incarnation of a god, such as Narasimha, the man-lion god that is an avatar of Vishnu. As in many other folk rituals in Kerala, the actor is here transformed into the character Narasimha, and this actor-character is received in awe with flower offerings lest he become truly possessed and kill his fellow actor who plays the enemy demon.

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Figure 2.1 Alarmel Valli performing Bharata Natyam, a classical south Indian dance form. Photographer: Ricardo Otazo, © Casa de la India.

Likewise, the desi, bhakti and folk elements are also the defining features in all the other dance-drama styles of India that are today classified as “classical” and traced to the Natya Sastra. They are revived as modern reconstructions of devotional dance forms associated with temple cults (e.g. Bharata Natyam, Odissi, Kuchipudi, Mohiniattam in South India), storytelling arts, as well as courtly dances in the North. Scholars and practitioners of these diverse dance and theatre traditions that are said to follow the classical Sanskrit texts explain their art form and the aesthetic experience in terms of rasa-bhava and bhakti. Yet depending on the quality of the performer, the audience and. more importantly, the context, the notions of rasa and bhakti may or may not be valid aesthetic references, for they can be so diluted that the presentation becomes a caricature of the traditional form. The excessive influence of Bollywood, film and TV entertainment, the obsession with group choreographies and the visual aspect of the dance (deriving from the Western influence of ballet and later absorption of film choreographies) has changed the mode and context of many Indian dance performances. The traditional repertoire of Bharata Natyam, for instance, was presented as a solo performance, which allowed the artist to gradually exhibit the different rhythmic aspects and expressive as well as narrative skills through the traditional items of the dance in order to build up the aesthetic experience of rasa. Institutions such as Santiniketan, Kalamandalam, and Kalakshetra played a pioneering role in the revival of these Indian

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dances from the 1920s to 1960s and revalorized them. However, in the last decades the institutionalization and patronizing of these arts through festivals (catering to Western audiences), TV programs and school competitions, while in many cases contributing to their popularization, also accelerated the process of de-contextualization. These factors often turned highly refined art forms that traditionally aimed to delight rasikas or serve as bhakti worship in temples and courts, into banal a-la-carte spectacles curtailed by postmodern attention deficits (full-night temple performances are compressed into thirty-minute shows) and dramatic caricature (the more dancers in a group choreography and the faster the tempo, the more appreciation). In the fast-paced globalized India of the twenty-first century most audiences in fact cannot endure the elaborate dramatic nuances of a fulllength solo performance, nor are the majority of the performers any longer psychologically or physically prepared to do so. For instance, exceptional Bharata Natyam dancers who are steeped in the tradition and at the same time know how to effectively incorporate modern elements (use of space, lighting etc.), such as Alarmel Valli or Malavika Sarukkai, are still able to enthrall rasikas and lay audiences alike, but their lineage may soon become extinct. In the future, there may also be “no time” anymore for rasa or bhakti, as transcendence evades the technology-driven spectator who is more preoccupied with capturing movements on a hi-tech device than with reflecting on expression (abhinaya) and abandoning himself to rasa-bhava. The taste of rasa in Indian performing arts is in danger of being reduced to the taste of superficiality. Or we can end this paper on “Art and Transcendence” on a sweeter note, transform the bhava of sorrow caused by looking into the (bleak) future, pull a gentle smile and go by what the charming Alarmel Valli has to say on rasa interpretation: theoreticians and academics may go on and on talking and writing about rasa and aesthetic experience, but they should stop at some point, as rasa cannot be “understood,” it can only be experienced, they should let go and experience that which cannot be described: rasa is to be relished, savored then and now!20 One may go further and state that rasa is (more than ever) a necessary antidote against superficiality and collective technological anesthesia. The capacity of Indian art forms, artists and spectators to evoke and experience rasa is inherent to the rich aesthetic sensibility, depth and spiritual-cultural diversity of its traditions. As long as there are artists who wish to continue to be nurtured by the genuine essence of art—connecting to the universal which has no name, no form, no ego, and no borders—art will continue to communicate and transform.

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Notes 1 For an English edition of the Natya Sastra see Bharata Muni, The Natya Sastra of Bharatamuni: Translated by a Board of Scholars (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1986). 2 One of the influential early twentieth-century works on Indian aesthetics was for instance: Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva: Essays on Indian Art and Culture (New York: Sunwise Turnpress, 1918). On Rabindranath Tagore and Aurobindo Ghose’s interpretation of rasa and Indian art see the next sections in this article. 3 Contemporary interpretations of Sanskrit aesthetics and comparative studies since the 1970s include, for instance: A.K. Ramanujan and Edwin Gerow, “Indian Poetics,” in The Literatures of India: An Introduction, ed. Edward C. Dimock et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 115–43; Hanumantha Rao, Comparative Aesthetics: Eastern and Western (Mysore: D.V.K. Murthy, 1974); Ghoshal Sastri, Elements of Indian Aesthetics (Varanasi: Chaukhambha Orientalia, 1978); V.S. Seturaman, ed., Indian Aesthetics: An Introduction (Madras: Macmillan, 1992); A.R. Biswas, “The Philosophy of Beauty,” in id., Critique of Poetics vol. II (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2005), 425–63. 4 Parts of sections I and II of this essay draw from material that appears in my overview of Indian aesthetic traditions in Guillermo Rodríguez, When Mirrors Are Windows: A View of A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetics (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016). 5 Rabindranath Tagore, “What Is Art?” in Indian Literary Criticism: Theory and Interpretation, ed. G.N. Devy (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2002), 144–145, 152. 6 Aurobindo Ghose, The Significance of Indian Art (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1964), 18. This essay was first published in 1920 in the monthly review Arya and later republished in 1947 with the above title by the Sri Aurobindo Circle in Bombay. 7 A.K. Ramanujan and Nammalvar, Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Vishnu by Nammalvar, trans. A.K. Ramanujan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 116, 161. 8 Nammalvar, “The Takeover,” in Ramanujan and Nammalvar, Hymns for the Drowning, 76. 9 Ramanujan and Nammalvar, Hymns for the Drowning, 150. 10 This feature is particularly evident in the saguna poets, who worship a personal form of god. In Akkamahadevi (also known as Mahadeviyakka) the god is often desired as a lover and is called Cennamalikarjuna, the “Lord White as Jasmine.” To Basavanna, the leader of the lingayat saint community, the god Shiva was the “Lord of the Meeting Rivers.” 11 Akkamahadevi, “Vachana 88,” in Speaking of Siva, ed. and trans. A.K. Ramanujan (New Delhi: Penguin India, 1973), 125. 12 Basavanna, “Vachana 820,” in Speaking of Siva, 19. 13 Basavanna, “Vachana 500,” in Speaking of Siva, 38. 14 Ramanujan and Nammalvar, Hymns for the Drowning, 162. 15 Ibid. 16 A.K. Ramanujan, Folktales from India: A Selection of Oral Tales from Twentytwo Languages (New York: Pantheon, 1991), xxxii. 17 The use of the term “classical” to distinguish certain dance-theatre forms of India was adopted by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the Indian National Academy for Performing Arts. 18 The first institution to promote the study of Kathakali and other performing art forms in Kerala was Kerala Kalamandalam, founded in 1930. See also Alice

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Boner’s early commentaries from 1930–35 on Kathakali in Georgette Boner, Luitgard Soni, and J. Soni, eds., Alice Boner on Kathakali (Varanasi: Alice Boner Foundation, 1996). For detailed studies by later Western theatre anthropologists see Philip Zarilli, The Kathakali Complex (Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1984), and Philip Zarilli, Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play (London/New York: Routledge, 2004). 19 According to Sudha Gopalakrishnan, the present form of Kutiyattam was codified in the tenth century CE. Sudha Gopalakrishnan, Kutiyattam: The Heritage Theatre of India (Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2011). 20 Personal conversation with Alarmel Valli, Valladolid, Spain, January 30, 2014.

Bibliography Akkamahadevi. “Vachana 88.” In Ramanujan, trans., 1973, 125. Basavanna. “Vachana 820.” In Ramanujan, trans., 1973, 19. Basavanna. “Vachana 500.” In Ramanujan, trans., 1973, 38. Biswas, A.R. “The Philosophy of Beauty.” In id., Critique of Poetics vol. II, 425–63. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2005. Bolland, David. A Guide to Kathakali. N. Delhi: Sterling, 1980. Boner, Georgette, Luitgard Soni, and J. Soni, eds. Alice Boner on Kathakali. Varanasi: Alice Boner Foundation, 1996. Chaudhary, Angraj. Comparative Aesthetics East and West. New Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers, 1991. Chaudhury, Pravas Jivan. “Aesthetic Metaphysics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24 (Fall 1965 Summer 1966): 191–96. Chaudhury, Pravas Jivan. “Catharsis in the Light of Indian Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24 (Fall 1965/Summer 1966): 151–63. Coomaraswamy, Ananda. The Mirror of Gesture: Being the Abhinaya Darpana of Nandikesvara (1917). New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1987. Coomaraswamy, Ananda. The Dance of Shiva: On Indian Art and Culture. New York: Sunwise Turnpress, 1918. Rptd New Delhi: Sagar Publishers, 1976, 48–53. Coomaraswamy, Ananda. Introduction to Indian Art. Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1923. Rptd New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1969. Ghose, Aurobindo. The Significance of Indian Art. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1964. Originally published in Aurobindo Ghose, ed. Arya: A Philosophical Review, 1920. Ghose, Aurobindo. Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art. Bombay: Sri Aurobindo Circle, 1949. Rptd in Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971. Ghosh, Manomohan, ed. and trans. The Natya Sastra: A Treatise on Hindu Dramaturgy and Histrionics, ascribed to Bharata-Muni. Vol. I (chapters 1–27). Calcutta: The Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1950. Ghosh, Manomohan, ed. and trans. Abhinayadarpanam by Nandikesvara. Calcutta: Manisha Granhalaya, 1957. Ghosh, Manomohan, ed. and trans. The Natya Sastra: A Treatise on Ancient Indian Dramaturgy and Histrionics, ascribed to Bharata-Muni. Vol. II (chapters 28–36). Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1961. Gopalakrishnan, Sudha. Kutiyattam: The Heritage Theatre of India. New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2011. Gupta, C.B. Indian Theatre. Banaras: Motilal Banarasida, 1954.

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Kale, Pramod. The Theatric Universe: A Study of the Natya Sastra. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1974. Khokar, Mohan. Dancing Bharata Natyam. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1979. Khokar, Mohan. Traditions of Indian Classical Dance. New Delhi: Clarion Books, 1984. Kotari, Sunil, ed. Bharata Natyam: Indian Classical Dance Art. Bombay: Marg Publications, 1979. Kulkarni, V.M., ed. Some Aspects of the Rasa Theory. New Delhi: B.L. Institute of Indology, 1986. Murali, S. The Mantra of Vision: An Overview of Sri Aurobindo’s Aesthetics. New Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corp., 1997. Nair, Appukuttan, and K. Ayyappa Paniker. Kathakali: The Art of the Non-Worldly. Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1993. Nandi, Ashis. Studies in Modern Indian Aesthetics. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1975. Pandev, K.C. “A Bird’s Eye View of Indian Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24 (Fall 1965 Summer 1966): 59–73. Pandit, S. An Approach to Indian Theory of Art and Aesthetics. New Delhi: Sterling, 1977. Pipa, Arshi. “Some Remarks about Western and Eastern Aesthetics.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 8 (1968): 365–72. Rai, R.N. Theory of Drama: A Comparative Study of Aristotle and Bharata. New Delhi: Classical Publishing Co., 1992. Rajendran, C., ed. Living Traditions of Natyasastra. New Delhi: New Bharatiya Book Corporation, 2002. Ramanujan, A.K., ed. and trans. Speaking of Siva. New Delhi: Penguin India, 1973, rptd 1979, 1985, 1994. Ramanujan, A.K., ed. and trans. Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammalvar. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981; New Delhi: Penguin India, 1993, rptd 2005. Ramanujan, A.K. Folktales from India: A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-two Languages. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Ramanujan, A.K., and Edwin Gerow. “Indian Poetics.” In: The Literatures of India: An Introduction, edited by Edward C. Dimock et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974; 115–43. Rao, Hanumantha. Comparative Aesthetics: Eastern and Western. Mysore: D.V.K. Murthy, 1974. Rodríguez, Guillermo. “‘Akkamahadevi, Mística del Sur de la India’ and ‘Vachanas de Akkamahadevi, Allama Prabhu y Basavanna’ (With Translations of Sixteen Vachana Poems into Spanish).” In Mística Medieval Hindú, edited by Swami Satyananda Saraswati, 135–52. Madrid: Trotta, 2003. Rodríguez, Guillermo. When Mirrors Are Windows: A View of A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. Sastri, Ghoshal. Elements of Indian Aesthetics. Varanasi: Chaukhambha Orientalia, 1978. Seturaman, V.S., ed. Indian Aesthetics: An Introduction. Madras: Macmillan, 1992. Shivaprakash, H.S. “Poetics of Kannada Vachanas: Example of Bhakti Poetics.” Indian Literature 194 (Nov.-Dec. 1999): 5–12.

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Shivaprakash, H.S. I Keep Vigil of Rudra: The Vachanas. New Delhi: Penguin, 2010. Subramanyam, Padma. Bharata’s Art: Then and Now. Bombay: Bulabhai Memorial Institute, 1979. Tagore, Rabindranath. “What is Art?” In: Indian Literary Criticism: Theory and Interpretation, edited by G.N. Devy, 137–52. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2002. Originally published in Rabindranath Tagore, Personality: Lectures Delivered in America (London: MacMillan and Co., 1917). Tarlekar, G.H. Studies in the Natya Sastra. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1991. Thampi, G.B. Mohan. “‘Rasa’ as Aesthetic Experience.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24 (Fall 1965 Summer 1966): 75–79. Muni, Bharata. The Natya Sastra of Bharatamuni. New Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1986. Vaidyanathan, Saroja. The Science of Bharata Natyam. New Delhi: Kanishka, 2000. Varadpande, M.L. Traditions of Indian Theatre. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1979. Varadpande, M.L. Krisna Theatre in India. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1982. Varadpande, M.L. Religion and Theatre. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1983. Varadpande, M.L. History of Indian Theatre. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1987. Vatsayan, Kapila. Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts. New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1977. Vatsayan, Kapila. Bharata: The Natyasastra. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996. Venkataraman, Leela. Indian Classical Dance Tradition and Transition. New Delhi: Roli Books, 2002. Zarilli, Phillip. The Kathakali Complex: Actor, Performance and Structure. Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1984. Zarilli, Phillip. Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play. London/New York: Routledge, 2000.

3

Metamorphoses of experience in the picture Bernhard Waldenfels

The meaning of ‘transformation’ depends on what is understood by ‘form’ and ‘formation’ as well as by ‘trans-’, which indicates a passage from one state to another. Accordingly, the outcomes of the transformation process are more or less open. At the uttermost end of the scale we have formalization, which is the basis for mathematical or grammatical conversions and adheres to strict law-like rules. The scale continues with expressive or stylistic forms that undergo historical and cultural change in the course of which the old and the new do not merely succeed each other, but rather penetrate into and alter each other.1 In our phenomenologically oriented approach, the focus is primarily on the sensory and bodily configuration of our experience, which has a primary level of in-formation, on which something is brought into form, and a secondary level of trans-formation and de-formation, on which something is brought into another form. It is in this fundamental sense that I speak of metamorphoses of experience. Terminologically, I lean on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. All of the subtleties of Roman civilization were available to the poet, who resorts to Greek in choosing his title; later, in Pliny, the metamorphoses become ‘transfigurations’, a term more suggestive of the process of shaping and imagining than are ‘transformations’. Not only are the manifestations of the Greek cosmos in the background of this narrative poem, but ancient cosmogonies, theogonies and anthropogonies are revitalized together with their chaotic abysms. The very first lines evoke “forms transformed to new bodies” (in nova mutatas formas corpora). The process of transformation proceeds from a “raw and unordered mass” (rudis indigestaque moles) within which no thing kept its proper form (nulli sua forma manebat) and each thing obstructed the other. The rich tradition of mythical-aesthetic imagination on which Ovid draws generates a kaleidoscope of endless reincarnations. This colourful series of mythological figures and scenes was tamed in philosophy long ago with key concepts such as eidos, morphé and hyle. However, the tension between mythos and logos is a part of the genealogy of Western reason, which was born of wonder. Plato stands out not only as the inventor of dialogical discourses, but at the same time as the inventor of hyperlogical myths; and even Aristotle, who helped an autonomous episteme gain acceptance,

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portrays the philosophos as a kind of philomythos at the beginning of his Metaphysics. Wonder is not limited to the analysis of wondrous things, it is roused. Despite all its methodological discipline, the order of the modern European era retains certain features of this genesis. In the midst of all enlightenment, order increasingly proves to be an order in twilight, that is, an order that can never completely free itself of the shadows of the alien.2 The metamorphoses and transformations to be discussed here are nested in the seams and cracks of orders that are ‘given’, but could also be different. Phenomena, which are the alpha and omega of a phenomenology of experience, prove to be heterophenomena and hyperphenomena, for everything that appears in a certain form is at the same time different from and more than that as which it appears. Each morphé that emerges from a metamorphosis shares the “polymorphic” character of perception and the “polymorphism of being”.3 A logos that provides access to this manifold experience can be understood with Husserl as a “logos of the aesthetic world”,4 that is, as a logos oscillating between asthesis and aesthetics. The following discussion focuses especially on metamorphoses of experience in the picture, but in the background of this pictorial reformation and alteration of experience the interplay of all senses and arts comes into view.5

I. Exemplary pictorial experiences To start, let us look at three literary examples to demonstrate how the picture deploys its pictorial force in various fields of the life-world. These pertain to experiences with the picture in which experience itself takes shape. In his Natural History Pliny the Elder reports of a girl from Corinth “who, being deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, traced the profile of his face, as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp”.6 This story, one of the numerous accounts of the origins of the arts, contains a number of seminal motifs. These include the farewell scene, the distance augmented by longing, and the imminence of death inherent to every departure; no longer seeing touches the hope of seeing again. In addition, there are shadows that are reminiscent of Hades’s realm of shades. Finally, there is the shadow image, the silhouette itself whose outline traces a shape, but also retains traces of a past present; in semiotic terms, the shadow image has at the same time features of an icon and an index. In this frequently interpreted story of the picture, the picture appears as a remote picture, that is, as a picture that not only points towards remote places, but also comes from remote places, as does the stranger’s look. In chapter three of my book Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel,7 I discuss this motif in the form of a triad consisting of mirror, trace and look. Roland Barthes’s essay on photography Camera Lucida deserves mention in this connection; the near-death absence of the person portrayed, in this case especially his own mother, plays a central role.8

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Joseph Roth’s novel Radetzky March, a requiem for old Austria, focuses on Major Trotta.9 He becomes the Emperor’s lifesaver at the Battle of Solferino by spontaneously throwing him to the ground, thus protecting him from an enemy projectile, himself incurring a wound to the shoulder. He thus transmutes to the bogus “hero of Solferino” because his simple act of lifesaving makes its way into schoolbooks among examples of patriotically exalted “deeds of valour”. “Children need examples which they can grasp – something that stamps itself on their minds. Then later, they can learn the real truth”.10 It is well known that there is nothing out of the ordinary about mythologizing war events after the fact. Trotta, the hero of the novel, resists this questionable politics of image by requesting his discharge from the army, which he is granted. In the provincial town in Bohemia in which he spends the rest of his life, without Trotta’s knowledge a painter friend of his son’s paints a portrait of him at an advanced age, and this portrait becomes an object of ongoing surprise for him. “He was getting to know his own face, and sometimes would hold silent conversation with it”.11 Discover in it his premature old age and his loneliness, “they came to him in waves off the painted canvas”.12 This anecdote shows how a primary image emerges behind the conventional depiction. The person depicted does not see himself as he knows himself, but rather becomes acquainted with himself as if he were a stranger to himself – which we all indeed are to a certain extent. In addition, there is a mirror-like self-doubling. Between the seeing person and the person seen there is a gap: the two are one, but not completely. For painting, this means that every self-portrait, as carefully as it may be executed, takes on features of a portrait of another person. In Volume Five of his great novel In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust recounts the death of the author Bergotte, which is overshadowed by an encounter with a sort of commemorative picture.13 The author goes to an exhibition of Vermeer, who at the time had been rediscovered, in order to see his View of Delft again, or more precisely: to see again “the tiny patch of yellow wall”14 (le petit pan de mur jaune) that was, regarded simply for itself, equal to a priceless piece of Chinese art. He fixes his eyes on it “like a child upon a yellow butterfly which it is trying to catch”,15 and in so doing he suffers a stroke. At the brink of delirium, he remarks in retrospect on his life, “That is how I ought to have written.… My last books are too dry”.16 There then follows the amazed question about “those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced them there”.17 This moving passage makes the impression of an inlay with a Jewish coloration; its distinctiveness has been appreciated accordingly by such authors as Adorno and Deleuze. The “patch of yellow wall” appears like a coloured omen from which an anonymous appeal emerges, the call to paint, to speak, to set to music. The linguistic form of the gerundive that calls something to-be-painted or to-be-said contains a request that penetrates into artistic work as an appellative surplus that goes beyond mere artistic craftsmanship and mere appreciation of art.

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So much for our overture. The following deliberations on the development of the picture run through three stages; they proceed from an initial emergence of visibility through the process of generation of visibility to the genealogy of art together with its pre- and post-history, which engenders a school of the senses.

II. Picture as event: Becoming visible in the picture I speak of pictorial events in opposition to the conventional view that takes pictures to be simply given. This assumption would mean that there is something, the picture as a specific pictorial thing – and that there is someone who produces pictures, and others who imagine pictures, that is, the picture maker, the picture viewer, and in addition the picture interpreter in case the sense of a picture is enigmatic. This description is certainly not wrong, it just starts too late, namely with a world in which pictures exist as a matter of course. But the genesis of the picture, the picture in actu that the three literary examples demonstrated to us, points to an initiating event that can be simply characterized as follows: ‘Something becomes visible in the picture’. Becoming visible is not an act that I perform, but rather something that happens to me, a Widerfahrnis in German, a pathos, to use the Greek stem that at the same time designates passive incurring, injurious suffering and the excess of passion. In this process, the picture functions as a medium within which the becoming visible takes place, as a kind of transformer; we see in images before we face images. This can extend to the embodiment of the seeing person by depiction in a portrait. As far as the process of shaping and painting is concerned, it is to be taken as a form of response. Responsivity has to be distinguished from the orientation of intentionality to sense as well as from the rule-directedness of communicativity; in general it means that all of our speech, action and feeling begins elsewhere, namely with our being struck, touched, affected or approached, and that we respond to this, whether we want to or not. The double event of pathos and response has a transformational character inasmuch as the by-what of being touched is transformed into the to-what of responding. This primal transformation cannot be reduced to a pure givenness or to a pure positing. The one extreme makes us pursue a pure presence, the other extreme makes us sink in our own constructions; but in their one-sidedness, both extremes would run counter to the specific work of experience. We devise to a certain extent what we give as a response, but we do not devise that to which we have to respond. The responsive difference emerging between the propositional content of the response and the performative act of responding is the pivot of a creative responsivity, of a responsive creativity. Merleau-Ponty articulates the paradox of a creative expression concisely by referring to Proust’s reading of the “book of unknown signs within me”:18 “To speak or to write is truly to translate an experience which, without the word that it inspires, would not become a text”.19 This originary form of

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translation is the joint between becoming visible and making visible in the picture. At this point let me take a side glance at the process of philosophical thinking. Philosophy begins with wonder, thaumazein. This sentence is in a philosophical dialogue, Plato’s Theaetetus. Is it then a philosophical sentence? Yes and no. If it were a normal proposition like Pythagora’s theorem, it would have to be justifiable and learnable. But wonder is not an act that we deliberately and repeatedly perform. Wonder is, as Plato shows, a pathos, similar to erotic or poetic mania, which in its hyperbolic forms transcends the ethical balance of emotions and the possibilities of a salutary catharsis. There is an excess of the good, an inflaming surplus that in Aristotle only flickers occasionally.20 Wonder means we cross a threshold as we do in the processes of going to sleep and waking up, which are among the persistent metaphors of our bodily being. The unquestioned becomes questionable when such thresholds are crossed.21 This encompasses hesitation, including the hand’s hesitation in painting, strikingly manifested in the stroke of the brush or in slow-motion pictures of the painting process. Similarly to thought, painting does not begin with itself. Here, too, we encounter wonder, which, like all wonder, exhibits ambivalent features. Firstly, other things are astonishing as a disruption of normal procedures and as a deviation from the familiar. However, the astonishing always also signifies a surplus that goes beyond our apprehension and creativity and overstrains our skill. Paul Klee’s motto that the point is to make the invisible visible, that is, the impossible possible, points in the same direction. Taken strictly at its word, this means that the invisible as such is made visible, not merely replaced by something visible. This means that the invisible means something more than something that we do not yet or no longer see, but is not outside of the realm of the visible. MerleauPonty’s great posthumous work The Visible and the Invisible revolves around these questions and owes decisive insights to reflection on painting.22 But we have to go another step further. The pathos that keeps our experience going does not lack aspects of the terrible as we encounter it in the form of Phobos in the Greek tragedy. In our Western tradition, this includes the innumerable depictions of the crucifixion and passion plays as in Oberammergau. A picture such as Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul evokes distressing shock experiences. The viewer indirectly becomes the witness to what happens to someone else in the painting. Something similar holds for the scene of execution by firing squad in Goya’s Third of May 1808. In general, we can speak of a “birth of painting from pathos” related to the “birth of tragedy from the spirit of music”. The one-sided aestheticization of art starts when pathos disappears behind the eidos, the pictorial impulse behind the pictorial form. A telling example is provided by a story told about Prelate Schnütgen, the venerable father of the Schnütgen Museum in Cologne. When a crucifix was held up to him on his deathbed, he murmured something like, “bad seventeenth-century work”. In the case

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of someone from Cologne, however, we can infer that there was some gallows humour involved.

III. Picture production: Making visible in the picture Let us now switch to making visible. Someone who is experienced in seeing is not for that reason a painter, just as someone experienced in hearing is not therefore a musician. Artistic pictures, like all other images, are products, and the making of pictures is an art of a special kind. It is well known that as techne or ars art was originally a single art with various graduations. The division into fine and utility arts is a product of the European modern era; a rapprochement has since taken place on the part of both the arts and technology, not only in the form of video art and electronic music. The production of images is, as already suggested, a responding to specific stimuli and demands of experience. Visual art has to do with a special kind of demand that proceeds from something to be shaped, to be painted or to be drawn. Making visible draws on what is offered by a prior becoming visible. Not the happening (Widerfahrnis) to which the artist is exposed and to which he responds, but rather the way in which the artist responds to it is the result of the inventions of a creative responding. Such inventions are, for example, the panel painting, Breughel’s world landscape, central perspective, pointillist colour effects and etching. Inventions are reflected in manners of painting, which correspond with habitual manners of seeing. The fashion of seeing is just as variable as the fashion of housing and clothing. The realm of artistic formation is neither the what nor the who of experience, but rather the how. What we call style means a manner of representation which despite all the particularity of the individual practice of art always has an aspect of the typical and anonymous. It is only in this sense that it is possible to speak of ‘a Vermeer’ or of a ‘forged Vermeer’. Such manners of painting can be passed on, and they can be learned up to a certain degree of regularity. A specific art world emerges from this, a special, professional world, which, like the realms of law, health, religion or education, constitutes a specific section of the life-world. This includes institutional facilities such as the academy of fine arts, the museum and the gallery. The separation of a specific art world and the establishment of an autonomous artistic profession are, as we know, subject to the vagaries of sociocultural conditions. Gislebertus, the master of Autun, is a border case in the process of individualization. Insistence on artistic autonomy belongs to the modern idea of art. As a consequence of this autonomy, the quality of a pictorial product can only be incidentally subjected to religious, political or scientific criteria. When Joseph Beuys makes a crucifixion collage, it is not a simple act of faith, and when Elsheimer takes account of telescopic images in painting the starry sky, he is not making a contribution to astronomical research. In the case of Galileo’s depictions of the moon, whether genuine or not, the reverse question could be posed as to the extent to which the

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visualization of the object of research makes the visuality itself as visible as we would expect of an artist.

IV. Heterogenesis of art The establishment of the autonomy of art is an act of liberation similar to the invention of modern physics and the development of modern law. Nonetheless, this assessment has clear limits. The genesis of art that was our point of departure undermines the assumption that art is completely selfsufficient and that art revolves solely around itself in terms of the motto l’art pour l’art. If, instead, something else, a heteron, comes into play, it is not because art is fundamentally something other than art, perhaps religion, politics or education with other means. Rather, a heteron comes to bear because art as art is more than just art. If this is the case, it must be reflected in the development of art. In the first place, it has to be recognized that art has a pre-history, that is, that the origin and source of art is not itself artistic, just as Euclidean geometry refers back to pre-geometrical shapes such as the roundness of the wheel, the furrows of the field or the structure of the crystal. Nature is mathematized; but this means that it does not itself consist of numbers and lines. “In nature there are as few colors as lines”, says the painter Goya.23 He thus rightly contests the attempt to transpose the inventions of painting as a whole back into nature. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the natural world as well as the cultural world provide materials from which images are formed, and these materials are not a neutral raw material, but rather a matrix for further shaping. Perception does not only take in, it “already stylizes”,24 as MerleauPonty remarks, continuing aptly: “Pictorial expression assumes and transcends the patterning of the world which begins in perception”.25 Among the visual, rhythmic and physiognomic pre-forms of painting are the changing lights of day and night, reflection on the water surface, the colour palette of the fauna, the play of clouds in the sky, the burning of Troy or Vermeer’s precious yellow patch of masonry. The fact that art has a pre-history means that the source of art is not simply a part of art. Moreover, art fits into a transitional history in the course of which specific works of art are converted as if they were currencies of different countries; however, the singular cannot be converted without residue so that tension between heterogeneous members remains. Thus, the verbal is transformed into the pictorial, and the pictorial into the verbal, as in the case of Pieter Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus in Brussels.26 The Flemish painter transposes the mythical adventure of flying that Ovid versified in Book VIII of the Metamorphoses into the new ambience of a world landscape. Poetic details such as the fisherman going for the catch “with trembling rod”, the shepherd leaning on his crook, the landsman at the plough, and Perdix the “garrulous partridge” all recur in the painting. These peripheral figures become the witnesses of what befell the youth who disregarded his father’s injunction to

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keep “the middle way”, was consumed with “longing for the sky” and soared too high until the sun scorched his wings and he was devoured by “blue water”. The narrative sequence is transformed into a dramatic pictorial moment, the drama of which stands in stark contrast to the epic indifference of the other figures in the painting. It is precisely this contrast in the scene that the English poet Wystan Hugh Auden translates into a contemporary recitative in his 1940 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters”, for example in Breughel’s Icarus: “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster”, not only the people with their everyday business, but also the stately ship that the painter had introduced to the Low Countries scene, “must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky” – but this ship, too, “Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on”.27 This translation between arts from one medium into another would not be possible if the pictorial and the verbal medium were not interlinked chiasmatically so that pictorial aspects find their way into the verbal and verbal aspects enter the picture. This correspondence can be carried over to the musical and the theatrical spheres. It presupposes a bodily experience within which one sphere synaesthetically and synkinetically overlaps the other. The body functions as a “point of conversion” so that its operating resists a mind–body dualism and the isolation of individual sensory spheres just as much as a bodily Narcissism. Detached from bodily bonds, transformations run the risk of falling into the wake of a constructivism removed from experience that imposes its constructs on experience, or of imputing fundamentalist features to the body.28 Finally, art leaves behind a post-history in which it continues to develop. Seeing by means of art’s images has an effect on our normal visual seeing, it makes the senses more acute, makes us sensitive to nuances or brings about special manners of looking. The inhabitants of Amsterdam and Venice were truly able to see their grachten, canals and house fronts anew in Berkheyde’s and Canaletto’s paintings, just as Major Trotta discovered his face anew in the painted portrait. Painting celebrated a late triumph when Warsaw’s prestigious street Krakowskie Przedmes´cie was rebuilt and the Varsovians were able to correct late alterations with reference to Canaletto’s vedute. Land art moves on the borderline between artistic form and artistic effect. It has now penetrated into the industrial zones of the Ruhr valley. When Richard Serra erects his steel Bramme (slab) on the spoil tip of a coalmine in the north of the city of Essen like a post-industrial menhir, he is initiating a regeneration of archaic forms and making a defamiliarizing artistic intervention in the overdeveloped urban-industrial landscape, similar to what is happening in the ongoing redevelopment of the Emscher Canal nearby. Land art is threshold art par excellence, in which nature and art approach each other instead of fleeing from each other. A similar point applies to the acoustic images of cities, which make audible sounds that are often enough heard but more often missed or artificially drowned out. To

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use an expression from Husserl’s Crisis, we could speak of a “backflow” of art into the life-world, comparable to the return of technology to everyday life. Finally, in addition to forwards and back, pre- and post-history, there is a vertical dimension of the super-artistic corresponding to the latent hyperbole of experience.29 Surpluses of the invisible and inaudible that occur in the midst of the visible and audible feed on pathos as an incessant source. Bergotte’s astonished question as to what it is that drives him to his untiring expressive efforts points in the same direction. If these surpluses should run dry, then only normal art would remain, which, like Nietzsche’s normal man (Normalmensch), only walks without getting anywhere and ultimately outlives itself and is denounced by Jean Dubuffet as mere conformist “cultural art”.30 The long series of secessions with which artists repeatedly withdrew from the academization of art belongs to the history of modern art. After the loss of generally binding standards, other dangers have emerged, such as that of a pure design art, which is quickly worn out. Designs are as ambiguous as ornaments, which oscillate between the virtuous play of forms and mere decoration.

V. School of the senses Albert Camus calls to mind the arts of alienation in Husserl’s phenomenology, the phenomenological epoché, which breaches customs and suspends the self-evident, when in the Myth of Sisyphus he writes: “Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive” (réapprendre à voir, à être attentif).31 We would have to add: relearning to hear, to feel, to taste, to move, and so on. Indeed, without a simultaneous training and refinement of the senses, art runs the risk of shrivelling to an aesthetic superstructure or general historical knowledge. The aesthetic needs to rub against aisthesis just as according to Wittgenstein logic is dependent on friction with reality. It follows from this that art already takes effect before it announces itself as art. Correspondingly, a distinction must be made between the artistic as a latent and implicit quality, and art as a special practice of art, similar to how a distinction is made between the political as a public sphere of the collective and of power, and politics in the sense of activities and positions integrated in institutions. The artistic refers back to the pre-history of the arts in the life-world. Colours are “bodily ideas”.32 We encounter them in the play of colours in the plant and animal world just as in the coloration of the surface of the earth and in the colour spectrum of a rainbow. Colours arouse a delight in colour leading to a selection of favourite colours. Colours can just as well horrify and appear as the expression of violence, as in the case of the boy from Bosnia who in red truly ‘sees red’ since he saw with his own eyes his murdered father lying in red pools of blood. The sallow, poisonous yellow that appears in the sky in Tintoretto’s crucifixion painting embodies, as

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Sartre remarks.33 Pictures do not only have an eidos, a form, they are also the expression of a certain pathos. Moreover, there is the symbolism of colours: in the case of traffic lights, this has no more than a sign character, but in the colour language of clothing, politics and religion it takes on the breadth of a culture of colours. Black or white as culturally marked mourning colours take us to the peripheries of the world of colour; they mould the pictorial impression, for example in Anselm Kiefer’s charred paintings. When we switch to music, we enter a specific world of hearing. The field surrounding the art of hearing includes such things as the timbres of the voice or the chirping of birds in the early morning, the course of which can be studied with the help of timings of the dawn chorus. The auditory world also includes the background noises of our cities, which we hear and fail to hear every day. To a certain extent, cities can be singularized by their sound pattern, and are in this respect similar to human faces. Finally, the sense of touch is addressed early in sandbox play, which stimulates the imagination and satisfies archaic desires. Some of this returns in the artistic use of material, for example when Tapiès and Dubuffet apply such thick layers of paint that they bulge out like high-relief, strikingly appealing to the sense of touch. In the practice of art, the transformation and metamorphosis of the sensory occurs repeatedly. Ancient myths on the development of the arts tell of this when the flute is said to emerge from the reed or when in the story of Narcissus and Echo, who live on as a flower and as rock, the artistic formation is prefigured by the visual and auditory fracturing of the sensory; in the reflection and the echo, visibility and audibility are manifest as such before they are explicitly treated in painting and music. Chinese painting brings the ancient patterns of the tortoise shell to bear as “protofigurations”.34 In all of this, a pictorial character of things becomes manifest that is prior to the creation of independent images. It is for precisely this reason that we always encounter artistic creativity as a form of recreating, as a reforming, also as deforming, but never as a creation from nothing and never as a pure reversal of being.35 In this intermediate realm confusing transitional phenomena can occur, for example when the actor whom we just saw on stage suddenly appears in the train station hall; this once happened to me when King Richard in the form of the actor Pekny strode through the crowd as a ghostlike revenant. The world of the theatre approaches the world of dreams, in which disguise and mix-ups are the order of the day. Hence, we should concede to art its surrounding field instead of partitioning the world of art and the world of everyday life off from each other. This encompasses cultural contacts of many kinds that vary from lifeworld to life-world, sometimes from generation to generation. It is part of our Western music culture that in Bach Protestant chorales are heard, in Mozart texts from the Roman Catholic liturgy and in Schönberg’s Moses and Aron stories from Genesis. Elements of Afro-American music penetrate into American music, giving the sound of the voice and the rhythm a

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particular weight. The humus of art does not stem from art itself, as if art stemmed from a primal generation. Finally, let us again look at the example of Proust. I myself have seen, in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, a mother explaining Vermeer’s View of Delft to her adolescent son with Proust’s words, as if Bergotte had risen from the dead in this painting. It need not be Proust, but names like this can, if spoken at the right time, have an alarming effect, they can arouse curiosity. Similarly, politics and violence make themselves heard in paintings such as Goya’s; however, they are always at risk of transformation into mere historical myths. The series of sense transformations and sense alienations brought about by the arts could be continued. At any rate, this all moves on this near side of modules, educational objectives, rankings and other institutional procedures that threaten to suffocate the verve of our schools and universities. To all learning there is a surplus of the unlearnable. Someone who asks beforehand about the utility of art is in the same position as the person seeking something in the fairy tale: he has already forgotten the best point. Arts take indirect effect before educational and vocational goals are defined. Thus, playing music together makes it possible to learn to listen to others in singing and playing. The sensory and playful considerateness eludes explicit commandments and prohibitions, which always presuppose that something is already going on. Drawing, which trains the gaze and the hand, promotes patient carefulness, polishing away some coarseness. Neurology teaches us that the brain operates as a dynamic system within which diverse functions amplify, attenuate and replace each other. Politicians would also benefit if they occasionally sang and played music. With the motif of wonder I return to the beginning of my deliberations. Wonder means that one develops a sense for the alien and surprising. Part of this is a radical alienness in the heart of art. The point of alienness is not erecting educational ramparts that contribute to the transformation of symbolic capital into social capital; rather, it provides art with an internal resistance, it enhances the astonishing and stimulating immanent to it, but also the horrifying. Corresponding to the ethical resistance that according to Levinas proceeds from the other’s face there is an aesthetic resistance flowing from the pathos that can never be appropriated. It can sometimes make itself felt quite unremarkably, for example when in a seemingly idyllic landscape painting by Ruysdael a tree stump appears as a vegetative memento mori. Everywhere we encounter the veneer of the everyday and ordinary; the extraordinary is a rarity that gets worn out. Paul Valéry remarks on this in his reflections on art and aesthetics: “Those who exclusively love the new fail to think about a work’s capacity to be repeated, reheard, rethought, reseen – the value of Re-. […] Maintaining the wonder in familiarity: this is a rare value in works”.36 Maintaining the wonder in familiarity: that means that we do not seek wonder in a special realm beyond the familiar. If we look closely, there is never a lack of cracks through which the extraordinary,

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the non-everyday penetrates, sometimes soundlessly, sometimes stormily – as long as it is not artificially repelled. The school of the senses always also means a school of attentiveness. Translation by Donald Goodwin

Notes 1 Cf. Hartmut Böhme et al. (eds.), Transformation. Ein Konzept zur Erfassung kulturellen Wandels [Transformation: A Concept for Grasping Cultural Change] (Munich: Fink, 2011). 2 Cf. Bernhard Waldenfels, Order in the Twilight, trans. D.J. Parent (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996), and id. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts, trans. A. Kozin and T. Stähler (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011). 3 Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Nothwestern University Press, 1968), 207, 221, 252–3. This author repeatedly refers to related matters in Freud and Lévi-Strauss. 4 Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 292. 5 Cf. my forays into the world of the senses and the arts: Bernhard Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel [Senses and Arts in Interplay] (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010). A first version of the following discussion was published under the title “Verfremdung der Erfahrung in den Künsten” [“Alienation of Experience in the Arts”] in an anthology on art education: Johannes Kirschenmann and Barbara Lutz-Sterzenbach (eds.), Kunst. Schule. Kunst [Art. School. Art] (Munich: kopaed, 2011). For this version, the discussion has been extended and focused on the topic of transformation. 6 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. 35, ch. 43, 151–2. 7 See Note 5. 8 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 9 Joseph Roth, Radetzky March, trans. Geoffrey Dunlop (London: Heinemann, 1934). 10 Ibid., 11. 11 Ibid., 19. 12 Ibid. 20. 13 Marcel Proust, The Captive, in In Search of Lost Time, vol. V, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D.J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 1993), 244–5. 14 Ibid., 245. 15 Ibid., 244. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 246. 18 Marcel Proust, Time Regained in In Search of Lost Time, vol. VII, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D.J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 1993), ch. 3. 19 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Problem of Speech”, in Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 1952–1960, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970) 26. On the paradox of expression in Merleau-Ponty cf. Bernhard Waldenfels, Deutsch-Französische Gedankengänge [German–French Trains of Thought] (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), chap. 7.

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20 On the pathic appreciation of catharsis, cf. my remarks in Grundmotive / Alien (see note 2), 42. 21 Cf. Bernhard Waldenfels, “Fremdheitsschwellen” [“Thresholds of Alienness”], in Liminale Anthropologien. Zwischenzeiten, Zwischenphänomene, Zwischenräume in Literatur und Philosophie [Liminal Anthropologies: Intermediate Times, Intermediate Phenomena, Intermediate Spaces in Literature and Philosophy], ed. J. Achilles, R. Borgards, B. Burrichter (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012). 22 Cf. Antje Kapust and Bernhard Waldenfels (eds.), Kunst. Bild. Wahrnehmung. Blick. Merleau-Ponty zum Hundertsten [Art. Picture. Perception. Gaze: On Merleau-Ponty’s Hundredth] (Munich: Fink, 2010). 23 Quoted from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fischer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 168. 24 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill, ed. Claude Lefort (London: Heinemann, 1974), 59. 25 Ibid., 61. 26 Cf. Ovid, Metamorphosen, trans. M. von Albrecht (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997), 402–7; and on the wealth of pictorial metamorphoses in the painting, the commentary by Beat Wyss, Pieter Bruegel. Landschaft mit Ikarussturz. Ein Vexierbild des humanistischen Pessimismus [Pieter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: An Ambiguous Figure of Humanist Pessimism] (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1990). 27 Wystan Hugh Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 179. 28 Husserl calls the body the “the point of conversion from spiritual causality to natural causality”: Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht/ Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 299 [§62]. This idea can be extended in terms of an intermesh of sense and force, of culture and nature, of own and alien corresponding to a phenomenology of the body. Cf. Bernhard Waldenfels Das leibliche Selbst [The Bodily Self], ed. R. Giuliani (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2000). 29 On the hyperbolic dimension of experience, see Bernhard Waldenfels Hyperphänomene (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012). 30 Jean Dubuffet, “Art Brut in Preference to the Cultural Arts”, in: Art Brut: Madness and Marginalia, ed. Allen S. Weiss, Art & Text (Special Issue), vol. 27 (1988), pp. 30–33. 31 On this wording, which is picked up by Merleau-Ponty, cf. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 30. 32 Cf. Margarete Bruns, Das Rätsel der Farbe [The Enigma of Colour] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997); the author of this book, which is replete with experience, locates the play of colours between material and myth. 33 Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? trans. B. Frechtman, intro. David Caute (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), 3. 34 François Jullien, The Great Image Has No Form: On the Nonobject through Painting, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 108. 35 Following Malraux, Merleau-Ponty speaks, in his theory of art, of a “coherent deformation” (déformation cohérente): Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill, ed. Claude Lefort (London: Heinemann, 1974), 60. When the ‘amorph’ is frequently spoken of in Greek, this must be understood, in analogy to the ‘alogon’, not as total formlessness, but as a withdrawal of form.

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36 Paul Valéry, Cahiers/Notebooks, vol. II, trans. and ed. Brian Stimpson, ed. Brian Stimpson, Paul Gifford, Robert Pickering (Frankfurt/M. et al.: Peter Lang, 2000), 62.

Bibliography Auden, Wystan Hugh. “Musée des Beaux Arts”. In Wystan Hugh Auden: Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. London: Faber & Faber, 1991, 179. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981. Böhme, Hartmut, Lutz Bergemann, Martin Dönike, Albert Schirrmeister, Georg Toepfer, Marco Walter, and Julia Weitbrecht, eds. Transformation: Ein Konzept zur Erfassung kulturellen Wandels [Transformation: A Concept for Grasping Cultural Change]. Munich: Fink, 2011. Bruns, Margarete. Das Rätsel der Farbe [The Enigma of Colour]. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1955. Dubuffet, Jean. “Art Brut in Preference to the Cultural Arts”, in: Art Brut: Madness and Marginalia, ed. Allen S. Weiss, Art & Text (Special Issue), vol. 27 (1988), pp. 30–33. Husserl, Edmund. Formal and Transcendental Logic. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989. Jullien, François. The Great Image Has No Form: On the Nonobject through Painting. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Kapust, Antje and Bernhard Waldenfels, eds. Kunst. Bild. Wahrnehmung. Blick: Merleau-Ponty zum Hundertsten [Art. Picture. Perception. Gaze: On MerleauPonty’s hundredth]. Munich: Fink, 2010. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Structure of Behavior. Translated by Alden L. Fischer. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Ill.: Nothwestern University Press, 1968. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Problem of Speech”. In Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 1952–1960. Translated by John O’Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Prose of the World. Translated by John O’Neill. Edited by Claude Lefort. London: Heinemann, 1974. Ovid. Metamorphosen. Translated by M. von Albrecht. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. 35, ch. 43, 151–2. Proust, Marcel. The Captive in In Search of Lost Time, vol. V. Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Revised by D.J. Enright, Seiten. New York: The Modern Library, 1993. Marcel Proust, Time Regained in In Search of Lost Time, vol. VII, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D.J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 1993), ch. 3, p.?

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Roth, Joseph. Radetzky March. Translated by Geoffrey Dunlop. London: Heinemann, 1934. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What Is Literature? Translated by B. Frechtman. With an introduction by David Caute. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. Valéry, Paul. Cahiers/Notebooks, vol. II. Translated by Brian Stimpson. Edited by Brian Stimpson, Paul Gifford, and Robert Pickering. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2000. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Deutsch-Französische Gedankengänge [German–French Trains of Thought]. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Order in the Twilight. Translated by D.J. Parent. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Das leibliche Selbst [The Bodily Self]. Edited by R. Giuliani. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2000. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel [Senses and Arts in Interplay]. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Translated by A. Kozin and T. Stähler. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Waldenfels, Bernhard. “Verfremdung der Erfahrung in den Künsten” [“Alienation of Experience in the Arts”]. In Kunst. Schule. Kunst. Edited by Johannes Kirschenmann and Barbara Lutz-Sterzenbach. Munich: Kopaed, 2011. Waldenfels, Bernhard. “Fremdheitsschwellen” [“Thresholds of Alienness”]. In Liminale Anthropologien. Zwischenzeiten, Zwischenphänomene, Zwischenräume in Literatur und Philosophie [Liminal Anthropologies: Intermediate Times, Intermediate Phenomena, Intermediate Spaces in Literature and Philosophy]. Edited by J. Achilles, R. Borgards, and B. Burrichter. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Hyperphänomene. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012. Wyss, Beat. Pieter Bruegel. Landschaft mit Ikarussturz. Ein Vexierbild des humanistischen Pessimismus [Pieter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: An Ambiguous Figure of Humanist Pessimism]. Frankfurt/M.: FischerTaschenbuch-Verlag, 1990.

4

Somaesthetics and selfcultivation in Chinese art Richard Shusterman

I The project of somaesthetics—briefly defined as the critical study and meliorative cultivation of the experience and use of one’s body as a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning—emerged from two main philosophical roots. First, it built on pragmatist aesthetics, which highlights the active, sentient body or soma as the necessary energetic ground and skilled medium for our capacities of artistic creation and aesthetic appreciation. Second, somaesthetics drew on the classical idea of philosophy as a meliorative art of living in which the soma again plays a formative role as the medium for all our experience, perception, and action. Hence the quest for self-knowledge and self-improvement should involve somatic self-cultivation.1 Although Western philosophy provided the initial insights for somaesthetics, East-Asian thought and particularly classical Chinese philosophy soon became a continuing inspiration in my somaesthetic research. As traditional East-Asian aesthetics highlights the value of somatic training for perfecting one’s artistry, so Chinese ethical theory insists that critical self-examination is both crucial for moral progress and also intrinsically somatic in character. Confucian Analects 1:4 invokes the idea of examining thrice daily one’s embodied self: san xing wu shen三省吾身, the ancient word for person, self, and body being the same character 身 (shen). Another Confucian classic, The Great Learning (Da Xue), highlights somatic self-cultivation (xiushen 修身, cultivation of one’s embodied person or shen) as the key ethical foundation for harmoniously governing self, family, and society. “Their persons [or bodies, i.e. shen] being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.”2 In different ways, Daoism also emphasizes somatic cultivation or xiushen, which it often interprets in terms of shoushen (守身, protecting the body). Zhuangzi, noting that the ancient sages who “clarified the great Way” made sure to “cultivate their persons” (xiushen), urges us: “Diligently cultivate your [own] person (xiushen)”

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instead of paying attention “to externals.”3 Shoushen and xiushen are combined in the following Zhuangzi injunction: “Carefully guard your body [shoushen], and leave other things to prosper themselves. I guard the one so as to dwell in harmony. Thus have I cultivated my person (xiushen) for one thousand two hundred years and my physical form has still not decayed.”4 The classical Confucian Chinese tradition insists on the body’s crucial role both in art and in the ethical, meliorative art of living pursued through self-knowledge and self-cultivation. It also distinctively combines these themes in an extraordinarily productive way by making the practices of artmaking and art-appreciation an integral part of one’s ethical practices of self-examination and self-refinement. In contrast to Western philosophy’s ethical suspicion of the arts, the Analects of Confucius emphasize the arts of music and poetry (along with ritual) as ethically crucial, while Xunzi builds on these insights to provide detailed arguments for music’s (and ritual’s) capacities for providing personal refinement as well as social attunement and harmony.5 Chinese thought is further distinctive in highlighting painting’s prominence among the arts of ethical self-examination and selfcultivation. My essay explores a genre of painting that is especially central to China’s literati tradition of self-cultivation and that is saliently somaesthetic: the genre of ink-wash painting which the Chinese call shuimo hua 水墨画, a term more literally rendered as ink and water painting. I begin by outlining the important somatic aspects of ink-wash painting and the close link of this genre to the art of calligraphy, through their shared use of brush, ink, and water and through their shared aesthetic views concerning the proper use of such media in making words and images. By means of the same calligraphic connection, I explain how shuimo hua served the Confucian literati tradition as a form of self-cultivation. I then articulate six tensions in calligraphy that can be particularly useful for projects of selfexamination and self-refinement because they help situate the creative, individual self within a wider social and historical setting. Some of these tensions, I argue, are shared by shuimo hua, which so often combines calligraphy with painting. The paper’s next section compares Chinese writing’s use of the brush to Western writing’s use of the stylus or pen, exploring how these differences affect the ways that representational marks on paper can serve the purposes of self-examination and self-cultivation and how such differences in tools of expression can suggest different notions of expressive style. Here, as my Western example for contrast, I discuss Benjamin Franklin’s literary-graphic method of self-analysis and selfimprovement. The paper’s final sections discuss some prominent examples of literati shuimo hua that demonstrate its use for self-expression and selfrefinement. I conclude by examining how the contemporary painter Pan Gongkai exemplifies this historically rich and still vibrant literati tradition, preserving it by creatively renewing it.

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II Ink-wash painting is done with a brush by applying black ink of varying density of color, which is produced by grinding an ink stick in water, though sometimes additional coloring is added to the black ink forms. The genre thus employs the same materials as traditional Chinese calligraphy and demands the same trained skill in making brush strokes. Traditionally made from bamboo for the stem and with some type of animal hair for the head, brushes can provide diverse pictorial qualities because of their different sizes and types of hair. The different densities of ink and different styles of brush strokes that the artist applies provide further variety. Thus, despite the simplicity of the medium, a skilled artist of the calligraphic or ink-wash brush can produce an extraordinary range of expressive qualities; indeed, even a single brush stroke of black ink can convey a rich variety of color shades and tonalities of expression. Unlike the European tradition of writing, performed with a pen or stylus (from which the West derived its concept of style), traditional Chinese writing used the brush. What the West calls calligraphy—etymologically indicating “pretty writing or drawing,” derived from the Greek words “kalos” (beautiful) and “graphein” (writing or drawing or scratching a mark)—is meant to be distinguished as remote from normal writing. But calligraphy was in fact normal writing for traditional Chinese culture. Such writing is designated by the Chinese term shufa (书法 or in the older script 書法), which literally means writing method or script method.6 But this does not imply that the visual beauty of such writing was not extremely important. Indeed, beauty and expressive quality in the brush strokes of one’s writing were highly prized in the scholarly tradition of China. The fact that literary scholars (if not all highly literate people) were rigorously trained and wellpracticed in using brush and ink increased the prevalence of skills not only for painting but also for the expert appreciation of painterly qualities and meanings. It likewise encouraged scholar artists to combine their brushed literary texts with brushed pictorial expression in a compound artwork of poetry, calligraphy, and painting. In the Confucian tradition of self-examination and self-cultivation through the arts, literary scholars could pursue knowledge, refinement, and harmonization of their persons through these three sister arts of the brush, which by the time of the Yuan Dynasty (1368-1644) were firmly linked and known as “the three perfections” (san jue 三绝). The fundamental unity of calligraphy and painting was widely recognized and frequently asserted through the saying “shu hua tong yuan”: “calligraphy [or more broadly writing] and painting share the same origin.” Indeed, this common origin can be seen in the traditional Chinese characters for these terms shu 書 and hua 畫, whose top radicals—suggesting a hand holding a brush—are identical, and whose bottom radicals are also rather similar in form, with shu’s connoting a writing surface like paper or silk, and hua’s connoting the division of a field.7

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The masterful use of the brush is obviously a bodily act requiring somatic skill. The proper writing of a Chinese character is not simply a matter of producing the right visual appearance; proper form means the proper sequence of brush strokes made in the proper direction. Moreover, the creation of skilled brush strokes involves not only the hand wielding the brush but the soma (or shen) as a whole: one’s vision, proprioceptive and kinesthetic feelings, one’s energy, balance, breathing, and emotions—all influence the quality of the brush stroke. The strongly somatic dimension of brush strokes helps explain why “people with no previous acquaintance with Chinese culture react to calligraphy with immediate, even visceral, excitement.”8 They sense implicitly through their bodies the dynamic expression of the brush strokes despite not being able to read the characters. A Chinese scholar skilled in the art of the brush could read not only the characters he makes but also the state of his own mind merely by looking at the quality of his brush strokes. Similarly, by simply practicing his use of the brush (often by imitating exemplary models), he could increase his refinement. Before exploring the role and powers of ink and brush for self-knowledge and self-cultivation, I should begin by articulating how the somatic dimension of brush use in calligraphy and ink-wash painting finds clear expression in the terminology and imagery through which these arts are described. Indeed, a key principle of such art is that brush strokes provide an external expression and artistic transformation of the creative energy or qi (气) residing in the artist’s body and guiding his use of the brush. First, we should note the bodily analogies of the materials. If ink and water can be likened to bodily fluids like blood and lymph, then the hair of the brush suggests human hair and skin, while the hard bamboo stem can be likened to bone or more generally the skeletal frame. The union of brush and ink thus combines the body’s hard and soft dimensions: its hard skeletal frame together with its liquids and soft skin, hair, and flesh. Second, the brush strokes themselves are described in somatic terms: not only as bones and flesh and blood but also as arteries (mai), sinew (jin), and bone marrow (sui).9 Though the brush hair is soft compared to the bamboo stem, the brush stroke itself is sometimes characterized as bone or sinew so as to contrast it to the ink, which is likened to flesh. Here is a quote to that effect from the Bizhentu 笔阵图 or Battle Array of the Brush by Wei Shuo, a famous woman calligrapher who lived from 272–349. Calligraphy by those good in brush strength has much bone; that by those not good in brush strength has much flesh. Calligraphy that has much bone but slight flesh is called sinew-writing; that with much flesh but slight bone is called ink-pig. Calligraphy with much strength and rich in sinew is of sage-like quality; that with neither strength nor sinew is sick. Every writer proceeds in accordance with the manifestation of their digestion and respiration of energy (xiao xi).10

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Beyond these matters of terminology, the energetic, dynamic somatic dimension of artistic brush work is emphasized in the first two canons of Xie He’s famous fifth-century treatise on the Six Principles of Painting (绘画六 法, Huihua Liufa). The first canon or principle is “qiyun shengdong” (气韵 生动), which can be translated as energy resonating, life-giving movement, but qi also means breath and yun means harmony as well as resonance. The second principle, “gufa yongbi” (骨法用笔) can be rendered quite literally as “the bone method of using the brush,” but it is more elegantly expressed as “skeletal patterning using brush,” where the brush stroke serves as the firm patterning instrument (around which the ink adheres as flesh) to express dynamic energy. The term gu (骨) is anatomically translated as “bone” but means something more and other than this in the dominantly physiologicalfunctional (rather than anatomical) orientation of Chinese medicine. Not only does gu have a general structural role connected with skeletal bones, it also has the function of both storing and transmitting energy. That is why brushwork with superior energy is identified with bone.11 In the somaesthetics of Chinese art, the requisite energy for good brushwork is not confined to the hand that holds the brush and the eyes and arms that guide its movements. Rather the whole body’s energy is involved, so that the brushwork is indeed an expression of the body or person as a whole (recalling that the Chinese word shen身 means both body and person). Moreover, as a famous fable from Zhuangzi clearly suggests, the best painting derives from the energetic yet tranquil power that radiates from a confidently unstressed body. Lord Yuan of Sung wanted to have some pictures painted. The crowd of court clerks all gathered in his presence, received their drawing panels, and took their places in line, licking their brushes, mixing their inks, so many of them that there were more outside the room than inside it. There was one clerk who arrived late, sauntering in without the slightest haste. When he received his drawing panel, he did not look for a place in line, but went straight to his own quarters. The ruler sent someone to see what he was doing, and it was found that he had taken off his robes, stretched out his legs, and was sitting there naked. “Very good,” said the ruler. “This is a true artist!”12 Here the artist’s care for his own body is presented as being even more essential for true artistry than is his care for his essential media of ink and brush and the drawing surfaces of silk and paper. The body, therefore, appears as the primary and essential medium for art as well as for life. Emphasizing the body’s primordial importance by highlighting how the “true artist” strips down to nakedness, Zhuangzi further suggests that the whole body is important for painting by underlining the artist’s leg-stretching rather than mentioning any preparatory exercise of the hand and eyes, whose use is obviously crucial in painting. Besides evoking the idea of a

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relaxed posture, the pose of sitting naked with stretched-out legs suggests a body that can more directly absorb environing energy by being unclothed and having more contact with the ground, while also allowing the energy to circulate more freely by not having one’s limbs bent or flexed. This striking anecdote acquired great prominence in the shuimo hua tradition because it highlighted the genre’s distinctive somatic dimension. Its verbal image of disrobing and stretching oneself out naked jieyi panbo luo (解衣盘礴裸), shortened to jieyi panbo, was transformed into a term frequently used in painting criticism to describe the bodily performative process of painting, including its initial stages before the artist applies his brush to ink and paper. Certain popular painters even attracted crowds who wished to witness the somatic dimension of their painterly performance rather than just imagining it from its traces in the completed painting. For many painters in this genre, a key part of their preparation consisted of deeply absorbing the spirit of the objects to be painted, which sometimes involved somatically identifying with those objects through posture or gesture. For example, when a certain painter “painted bamboo…his own body…was transformed in concert with bamboo.”13 Consider, moreover, this more dramatic example that evokes the nakedness of the Zhuangzi example: When Bao Ding of Xuan Cheng City paints a tiger, he always sprinkles water and sweeps the room, gets rid of any human voice, closes the door and window, and gets light by chopping a hole in the roof. He drinks one bowl of wine, takes off his clothes, puts his hands and feet on the floor, and stalks up and down, looking around, regarding himself as a true tiger. He drinks another bowl of wine, picks up his brush, and wields it. He will go away whenever his yi [idea] has passed, not caring whether the painting is completed.14 Of course, painters were not obliged to practice this extravagant choreography of painting nor present it as public performance; indeed they typically sought to work in solitude so as to avoid the distraction of other eyes. But these tales of dynamic physical movement serve to underline the dynamic movement in the painting itself, the dance of the brush on silk or paper that is an extension of the dancing energy of the painter’s soma.

III Having demonstrated the striking somatic dimension of calligraphy’s and ink-wash painting’s art of the brush, we can now consider how such art was deployed in the key Confucian pursuits of self-knowledge and selfcultivation. We should begin by distinguishing between two groups or traditions of painters. On the one hand, there were the so-called academic painters who were professionals employed by the imperial court or supported by wealthy patrons and by the sale of their paintings. These professional or

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academic artists did not possess the rich classical literary education of Confucian scholars nor did they aspire to the classical Confucian ideal of governmental service. They focused on being skilled professionals in their artistic craft of creating beautiful objects; and as elite artisans, they constituted the dominant tradition in Chinese painting through the Sung dynasty. In contrast, the second tradition of painters, who were known as scholar-gentlemen (shidafu 士大夫) or literati (wenren 文人), comprised a richly learned class of scholars dedicated to Confucian thought and ideals, including the ideal of self-cultivation through humanistic learning and the arts that, in principle (if not always in practice), would prepare them for important governmental service through the scholarship they displayed. In Confucian society, such scholar-gentlemen were regarded as socially superior to the artisan class. Unlike the academic artists who focused on the making of beautiful objects as their profession and source of income, the literati artists painted more as a means of self-expression, self-cultivation, and harmonization, much in the same way that they composed poetry or made music or wrote philosophical texts. It was all part of the Confucian melioristic quest for continuous refinement. This difference of artistic approaches reflects the central distinction Aristotle made between poiesis and praxis, a distinction that greatly influenced the entire Western tradition of art by marginalizing art from the ethics of character and the practice of life. Art, he claims, is a form of making (poiesis) that has its goal and object outside the act or process of making and outside the person who is the maker (its end and value being wholly in the object made). Action (praxis), on the other hand, has its end both in itself (the process or acts of action) and in the agent or actor, who is affected by how he acts, though allegedly not by what he makes.15 The goal of China’s professional painters was to produce external objects, while the essential aim of the literati artists was to use the processes of artistic creation to express and refine their selves. Art and the ethics of self-cultivation were thus essentially linked. This fundamental difference of ideology was also reflected in style. If the academic painters often sought to impress through very large paintings with complex brush strokes often with added color, the literati style was much more modest and simple, specializing in plain ink and based on the brush strokes learned from calligraphy. Rather than seeking to impress, the literati’s goal in painting was the expression of a brush style that conveyed the artist’s inner state and the style or spirit of his character. With the start of the Yuan dynasty, this so-called “amateur” tradition became dominant in Chinese painting and was able “to hold that position for the remainder of the history of Chinese painting, except for a brief resurgence of the Academy tradition in the early Ming Period.”16 We should not forget the sociopolitical conditions that spurred the flourishing of literati art in the Yuan, after the Southern Song dynasty’s final fall to the Mongolian conquest in 1279. The policies of the new, non-Chinese Yuan rulers, resulted in marginalizing the Confucian scholar-class from governmental service and social power,

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thus spurring them to channel their energies and talents more narrowly into artistic pursuits. Having learned and perfected their painterly brushwork through the sister art of calligraphy, the literati often insisted on the fundamental unity of these two arts: not only by repeating the phrase shu hua tong yuan, but also by describing the act of painting in terms of the verb to write, xie (写), and sometimes by even praising good literati painting by calling it writing in contrast to the allegedly inferior academic painting style, which they called “depicting” (miao 描) and which they denigrated as being the style of “a vulgar craftsman.”17 As the calligraphic tradition developed, the styles of some famous great calligraphers were preserved (sometimes even in stone carvings), and these stylistic models served as exemplars for aspiring literati to master. Such mastery involved self-cultivation through the absorption of the valued traditional styles, an absorption process that was distinctively somatic because it involved emulating the making of the brush strokes in their proper sequence of bodily movements (including rhythmic and energetic dimensions of movement) rather than simply reproducing the character’s visual shape or form. But such self-cultivation through emulation of masters also involved self-expression because the complex dynamics of the movement of brush and ink are always mediated by the particular somatic habits and current feelings of the artist. Brush work therefore provided a means for the artist to express and read his own inner character, his current mood or energetic state through its external pictorial manifestation in ink, a representation whose meaning thus went beyond the conceptual meaning of the words or objects painted by the brush. Although such graphological expressions of character, mood, and energy were principally done for the artist’s own self-analysis and improvement, his brushstrokes could also be used by other expert artists and connoisseurs to appraise not only the artist’s skill but also his inherent style or character. Indeed, in the shuimo hua tradition, artistic quality was intimately connected to the painter’s character. As James Cahill explains: “The literati artists believed…that quality in a painting, the kind of painting that would be recognized by the sensitive connoisseur but might escape the ordinary viewer, derived from admirable qualities in the mind who had created it and had little to do with techniques that could be learned. Given this idea that ‘One saw the man in his painting,’” the literati artists sought to improve their personal, humanistic qualities through self-cultivation. Therefore the disciplines they pursued “were not those normally included in ‘studying painting’”; instead “they comprised such matters as sharpening one’s sense of style and becoming familiar with old styles through the study of antique paintings; perfecting one’s brushwork, partly through the practice of the companion art of calligraphy; and refining one’s perceptions and taste through constant, dedicated immersion both in nature and in the literati culture.”18 Since poetry was a very prominent expression of such culture, the literati painters often composed and inscribed poems to accompany their pictures.

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Such poetic expression only reinforced the basic tenet that literati artists regarded their works “as intimate statements of personal feeling” rather than mere pretty objects independent of one’s personality. Literati artists pursued their art as a form of self-expression that was also meant to reveal or communicate their personal thoughts to others. This is clear “not only from theoretical writings but from many appreciatory inscriptions attached to paintings by later writers” and from their own confessions.19 Their expressive self-cultivation through artistic brushwork also clearly involved somaesthetic refinement because one’s body—which Chinese medicine conceived not so much as an organization of physical things but as an organic field of energies—could be aesthetically reshaped through art’s harmonies in the sense that one’s energies were attuned better. Through the practice of art, not only could the good artist become more attractive as an embodied person (radiating the harmonies established through her art), but could allegedly live better and even longer, as some influential theorists also argued. Consider the following remarks by Wang Yu: By learning painting, people can cultivate a gentle disposition, cleanse the vexed temper, break the eccentric mood, release the restless drive, and admit the calm marrow. People in the past said that landscapists had long lives because they were fostered by vapor and cloud and there was nothing but vigor and vitality before their eyes. Since most of the great landscapists from ancient times down to today have enjoyed long lives, this might be true.20 Though these remarks may sound extravagant, it remains a fact that each of the “so-called Four Great Masters of the late Yüan—Huang Gongwang, Wu Chen, Ni Zan, and Wang Meng…produced his finest work in his seventies or eighties,” and that, more generally speaking, good artists, whether in painting or in calligraphy, were thought to improve with age.21 To conclude this section, consider six ways that calligraphic brushwork provides a useful tool for self-examination and self-stylizing cultivation by helping the artist situate the act of expression within wider contexts that are both personal and more broadly cultural. Each of these ways involves navigating between two contrasting aspects of calligraphy. One’s character or mood is expressed by how these different dualities are negotiated in the calligraphic act. First, there is the contrast between the established form and shared meaning of the character (which has a standardized number of strokes of a certain kind in a certain order with a defined conceptual meaning) and, on the other hand, the specific writing style of the artist in using the brush. Second, there is the contrast between the popular or democratic nature of writing characters—all literate people can do it—and the superior, refined skill of expressive brush writing that the expert calligrapher develops through his training. Here the expert calligrapher embodies the ideal of a cultivated gentleman who both shares practices with

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common people but also elevates those practices to a higher level of refinement, thus providing an exemplar for educating and leading the less refined. Third, as the making of conventionally defined characters involving an established procedural order, direction, and number of brush strokes that is learned through a process of repetitive training to improve efficiency in writing, calligraphy relies on the procedural muscle-memory of habit and thus is automatic. But as an artistic expression it involves the artist’s spontaneity and free will; the repetitive habit is a background mechanism or skill on which the artist relies to expresses his spontaneous feelings and stylistic choices. In this way, one can say that shufa has fa or method but is also something other than fa. Fourth, while a calligrapher may have an enduring characteristic personal style or quality that is recognizable from one work to another (and even across the different generic calligraphic styles that he imitates), the writer’s brush strokes also express the varying contexts and changing energies or feelings that animate or inspire his use of the brush. As visible indicators of the mood and energy that produce the brush strokes, calligraphy and ink-wash painting provide the artist a tool of self-knowledge, a measure of his somatic vitality, tranquility and body-mind balance, just as it supplies a tool to cultivate or improve such balance by its channeling and regulating of energy and feeling. A fifth contrast is premeditation versus spontaneity. Although the actual movement of the brush must be smoothly spontaneous rather than hesitating or halting with deliberation, its unforced flow of qi energy must be somewhat pre-structured by a specific artistic intention, meaning, or idea (which need not be a visual mental image) in the artist’s mind. Hence the Chinese saying “yi zai bi xian” (意在笔先), meaning “thought precedes brush.” Wang Xizhi (303–361), who is often described as the sage of calligraphy, thus writes: “Those who are going to do calligraphy usually concentrate and meditate quietly while pretending to grind the ink in order to develop in their minds the sizes, the postures, both horizontal and vertical, and the vibrations of the forms of the characters, and to make their sinew and vein (jin mai 筋脉) linked together. [First, to ensure that] yi precedes the brush, then to write the characters.”22 Zhuangzi’s story of the artist preparing by sitting comfortably undressed on the floor with legs extended could suggest this calmly meditative preparation of realizing his yi before taking up the brush. The sixth pair of calligraphic contrasts is tradition and innovation. The skilled artist deeply respects tradition and first develops his own talent by emulating the tradition’s cherished exemplars, which guide him in the quest for self-cultivation. But as that quest also involves the artist’s own selfknowledge and refining self-stylization, calligraphic art likewise involves some innovative self-expression. Ink-wash painting (intimately linked to calligraphy and often containing calligraphic colophons or poems) displays the same blend of deeply respectful emulation of traditional styles, themes, and exemplars together with creative self-expression. In the same way, its

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use of the brush combines trained habit and spontaneity, enduring personal style and changing contexts of mood, energy, and qualities of ink, brush, and paper.23 The artist Pan Gongkai provides a fine contemporary example of integrating the ink-wash painting tradition with personal stylistic innovation, but we should approach his work by first discussing some important traditional exemplars of this genre and its use for self-examination and selfcultivation. However, before considering those exemplars from the Yuan and Ming dynasty—Wu Zhen, Wang Meng, Ni Zan, and Shen Zhou—it is instructive to contrast the Chinese use of the brush for self-examination with one prominent Western example of using the pen for such projects of self-knowledge and self-improvement.

IV Chinese literary culture can be characterized as a brush culture in contrast to Western culture where writing is traditionally done with the stylus or pen. The brush is soft while the stylus is hard, inscribing marks by carving or penetrating a smooth wax surface. The word “stylus,” from which the Western concept of style derives, is based on the Latin word stilus meaning a pointed stake or hard pointed instrument (often of metal) for writing on wax tablets. The French word for pen, “stylo,” obviously derives from this term, while the English word “pen” is thought to derive either from the Latin “penna” or “pinna” for “feather,” whose hard pointed tip makes the quill pen, or from a still older root of “pinna” that in Proto-IndoEuropean language designates a sharp point. In contrast to the hard, dead stylus, the Chinese word for style, fengge 风格, has its root in the word feng 风 which means wind, suggesting moving spirit and life. The term feng was even used to classify the different types or styles of ancient Chinese odes according to the different regions from which they derived. More generally, feng as wind can be seen as the external expression of the qi (energy or breath) within a person. If the artist’s inner qi creates the work as its external expression, then this expression in turn exhibits that dynamic energy in terms of the work’s feng, its style or atmosphere that conveys moving energy as the wind does. Moreover, we should note that with respect to calligraphy, individual personal writing styles that have proven so influential as to define a more generic style (such as Zhao-ti, Ou-ti, Yuan-ti) are all designated by the word “ti” (體 or in modern simplified form 体), which is a word signifying body and used explicitly to refer to the body’s limbs (as in its four limbs or si ti). This is further evidence of the intimate link of calligraphy to the body, as a style is identified with the work of the artist’s bodily limbs. In any case, the hard, narrow point of the stylus or pen can be contrasted to the softer brush, which instead can spread its ink more broadly, freely, and diversely. This enables not only more varieties of tone, line, and texture but also much more diverse and dynamic expressive qualities that such

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varieties of brushwork can convey. By using the center or tip of the brush, one makes a “round” brush stroke and achieves a thinner or finer line, while by using the edge of the brush, one gets a squarer effect. By holding the brush at middle point (zhong feng) perpendicular to the paper one gets a different effect than when one holds the brush in a slant (pian feng); when one presses the soft brush hard onto the paper one gets a heavier effect than when one touches it only gently on the paper; and the same stroke may start out heavy and end lightly or vice versa, or be heavy in the middle and light at the ends or vice versa. Similarly through the different ways the brush is dipped in ink, the single black ink can admit of different colors or shades that are traditionally described as “thick, thin, dry, and moist.” In short, as Wen Fong argues, “Brush and ink, in their infinite line-and-surface, boneand-flesh, hard-and-soft, and dry-and-wet combinations, can theoretically represent or signal everything in the universe,” including I would add the many shades of meaning and feeling in the artist’s heart and mind.24 One way to appreciate the nuanced subtlety and variety of self-expression in the calligraphic and ink-wash painterly tradition is to compare it to a famous Western example of graphic writing as a tool for self-examination and self-cultivation. It comes from the great American thinker Benjamin Franklin, a late eighteenth-century Enlightenment polymath who achieved great success in the fields of literature, science, and politics. If his integration of humanistic learning and high-ranking government service exemplifies a Confucian ideal, so does his philosophical attitude of moral, melioristic striving. Franklin sought to cultivate his character by a rigorous project of self-examination and self-improvement structured around thirteen virtues, a project he initiated as a young man of twenty and continued to practice throughout his life. His autobiography describes these thirteen virtues as follows: 1. Temperance. Eat not to Dullness. Drink not to Elevation. 2. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling Conversation. 3. Order. Let all your Things have their Places. Let each Part of your Business have its Time. 4. Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve. 5. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing. 6. Industry. Lose no Time. Be always employ’d in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary Actions. 7. Sincerity. Use no hurtful Deceit. Think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly. 8. Justice. Wrong none by doing Injuries or omitting the Benefits that are your Duty. 9. Moderation. Avoid extremes. Forbear resenting Injuries so much as you think they deserve. 10. Cleanliness. Tolerate no Uncleanness in Body, Clothes, or Habitation. 11. Tranquility. Be not disturbed at Trifles, or at Accidents common or unavoidable. 12. Chastity. Rarely use Venery but for Health or Offspring, never to Dullness, Weakness, or the

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Injury of your own or another’s Peace or Reputation. 13. Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.25 To acquire these virtues by establishing them as personal habits of behavior, Franklin set about to monitor his daily actions with respect to them. He did this by “marking every Evening the Faults of the Day” regarding each of these virtues, while paying special attention each week to one particular virtue so that it would have no faults in its column throughout the whole week and thus could be established as a habit. Franklin not only explains the design of this heuristic virtue scorecard but he also graphically depicts it with the following illustration. FORM OF THE PAGES

Temperance Eat not to Dullness Drink not to Elevation S

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Figure 4.1 Benjamin Franklin’s Table of Virtues.

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Visually the diagram is very clear and plain—a clean, regular rectangular grid, whose intersecting straight black lines create blank white squares that provide space for the possible placing of discrete black circles or dots. There are no curving or diagonal lines, no wiggles and no texturing. Moreover, the symbolic functioning of the ink marks here is very simple and abstract. The thickness of the lines, the size of the dots or circles and their color or shade of black, all these carry no significance. The only functioning of the marks is simply being present in their place; abstractly identifying the days of the week, the thirteen abstract virtues, and the existence of the day’s occasions on which a virtue was violated by the person committing a fault. There is no expressive meaning of what that particular virtue feels like or what it feels like to fail in it through faulty behavior. In stark contrast to the complex, subtle, expressive visuality of calligraphy or ink-wash painting, Franklin’s graphic tool of self-study and self-cultivation provides no nuanced sense of the author’s personality, style, sentiments, energy, or current mood. Of course, the very design of the page shows Franklin’s desire for order, clarity, and self-improvement, but there is no personal poetry or subtlety of self-expression. Rather than the human poignancy of expressive art, we get abstract, conceptual bookkeeping by the numbers. Franklin’s method suggests the clear division of morals from art and aesthetics that became more sharply articulated later in the eighteenth century by Immanuel Kant and was later still more fiercely formulated in nineteenth-century notions of art for art’s sake. Such a division is antithetical to the Chinese tradition that made the aesthetic realms of art and ritual the very pillars of Confucian morality.

V Turning back to that Confucian tradition and its calligraphic painterly expression, consider first a famous work that most clearly exemplifies the literati theme of self-examining, self-cultivation through the arts: Poet on a Mountaintop, by Shen Zhou (1427–1509), a very influential poet-painter of the Ming Dynasty who was thoroughly trained in the Confucian classics and deeply respectful of that tradition and its expression in the Yuan shidafu artistic styles. This work includes a short poem along with its ink-wash landscape. The poem, in English translation, reads as follows: White clouds sash-like wrap mountain waists, the rock terrace flies in space distant, a narrow path. Leaning on a bramble staff far and free I gaze, to the warble of valley brook I will reply, with my bamboo flute.

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Figure 4.2 Shen Zhou (1427–1509), Poet on a Mountaintop, © public domain.

The poet is presented as a lone figure on an upwardly inclined mountain summit. The mountaintop is devoid of trees and overlooks a rocky cliff with clouds below and higher mountains in the distance whose peaks emerge from the clouds that seem, like a white sash, to wrap the mountains’ middle. Like the upward tilting terrace “flying” toward the space of distant mountains, the lonely literatus claims to gaze “far and free.” Ostensibly, his gaze is to the remote mountains but when we look at the painting his gaze is focused directly on the calligraphic poem he has inscribed. In other words, the artist’s contemplation of nature is in fact deeply reflective of himself; in looking at the landscape he sees himself through the self-expression of his painted poetry. This means that the contemplation of nature’s beauties, if one’s attention is genuinely profound and heart-felt, will contain some reflection of how those scenes makes one feel. One can find oneself reflected in the mirror of nature because the Way runs through all things, and the artist’s role in depicting nature should essentially include how nature affects his heart and mind, because that too belongs to nature’s powers and beauties. Moreover, we should note that the artist’s reflective contemplation includes a distinctively somatic dimension in that he notes his bodily condition of leaning on his bramble staff. If the position of leaning implies the bodily fatigue of climbing to the mountain peak, then the dark bramble staff (since bramble means blackberry) evokes the tools that artistically support the calligraphic poet-painter by becoming the active extensions of his body— the staff-like brush and black-colored ink of his art. To reinforce still further the core ideal of reflective self-cultivation through artistic

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self-expression, Shen Zhou’s painting suggests that this project goes beyond the arts of the brush. The musical warble of the brook is echoed or reflected in the poet’s playing of the flute, which is stick-shaped and made from bamboo, just like a writing brush, and which seems to hang around the belted waist of the poet’s figure. Again, like the staff and the brush, the flute when handled with skillfully artistry becomes incorporated as a somatic extension of the artist, endowed with the sensitivity and taste of that trained artistic soma. This theme of contemplating nature as a means of artistic self-examination, self-expression, and self-cultivation was already prominent in the renowned Yuan dynasty literati artists. Consider Red Cliffs and Green Valleys by Wang Meng (ca 1308–1385), which portrays the artist calmly seated on a river bank and gazing over the tranquil water, surrounded by a few small objects evocative of the arts and somaesthetic pleasures. The long tubular object on the artist’s left side is probably meant to be a qin—a traditional lute-like musical instrument. That shape could also suggest a rolled-up scroll of poetry or painting; the smaller round objects before him and to his right might be a teacup and teapot (with its stick-like handle) connoting gastronomic pleasures, but they may instead be a censer and a mini charcoal stove, suggesting the beauties of smell. Whatever these objects are, they suggest aesthetic pursuits that involve the skills and pleasures of the body through the use of tools. The qin, like the brush, is a way of extending the body and its aesthetic capacities through a tool that requires a well-trained body whose cultivation involves more than skillful hands and which can create harmonies of beauty to enrich not only the individual but the environing social world. Water is nature’s paradigm mirror, so Wang Meng’s image of river contemplation evokes self-reflection. The theme of self-examination is highlighted in the poem inscribed at the top right of the scroll, because it distinctly raises the existential questions of how the artist got to his present place, where he will go in the future, and if he will reach his goals in the brief time of human life. Far away, among a hundred thousand blue mountains, vermilion cliffs and green valleys, deep and impenetrable. The wind through pine trees brings the sound of a waterfall from the edge of the sky; the scent of flowers emerges from the cave, pervading the clouds. When did the fishing boat bring me here? Where shall I meet the hermits of the Qin? Springtime is brief and flowers fall. Only the river flows, eastward, year after year. The work’s somaesthetic dimension is expressed in the rich aesthetic experience of natural beauty that appeals to the body’s diverse senses: lush colors for vision, fragrant scents that may be so pervasive one can almost

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taste them, the pleasing sounds of a waterfall brought by the wind, a wind which can be heard through the pines but also felt tactilely on one’s skin, just as the qin’s music is felt not only in the ears but in the player’s plucking fingers. Somaesthetic self-examination can also be read into the juxtaposed placement of the standing boy’s small body behind the larger seated painterpoet. On the literal level, the boy seems a mere servant, but metaphorically he could represent the child that the artist once was but who now, having grown to adulthood, sits and examines himself—looking forward to where he will go and what he will become, but also looking backward to who he has been and what he has done. If the poet’s real eyes face forward to what he can still achieve, his mental eyes of contemplation also look back

Figure 4.3 Wang Meng (ca 1308–1385), Red Cliffs and Green Valleys, © public domain.

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on what he has already accomplished by cultivating his talents, as the river of time inexorably passes. The poem’s contemplative vision also expresses a utopian mood, since its mention of the cave’s pervasive scent of flowers, the fishing boat, and the hermits of the Qin unmistakably refer to the fisherman story of the famous Chinese “Peach Blossom” fable (Taohua Yuan 桃花源 記) written by Tao Yuanming in 421. This utopian fable tells of a fisherman who accidentally sailed into a river whose banks were covered with peach petals. The river ended in a cave that led to a magically peaceful village established long ago by people seeking reclusive refuge from the unhappy strife of the Qin dynasty and whose ensuing generations of villagers never wanted to renew their contact with the outside world. The solitary fisherman roaming alone through natural landscapes became a familiar image for contemplative literati painting, along with that of the meditative literatus himself and, in a sense, metaphorically representing him. Consider Fisherman by a Wooded Bank, a small but famous handscroll painting-with-poem by the renowned Yuan master Wu Zhen (1280–1354). As Fong notes, the fisherman’s figure, “briskly done in a few strokes and dots, is a marvel of abbreviation, while the rocks and trees, depicted with the same halting round blunt brushstrokes and clustered ink dots, bristle with energy and liveliness.”26 Above the fisher’s forward-leaning figure, curved in concentrated thought, the artist brushes the following poem in a clear cursive script: Red leaves west of the village reflect evening rays, Yellow reeds on a sandy bank cast early moon shadows. Lightly stirring his oar, Thinking of returning home, He puts aside his fishing pole, and will catch no more. Caught between day and night, sun and moon, his work of fishing and the haven of rest at home, the artist’s cosmic mood of self-examining reflection by a waterside scene is heightened here because reflections come not simply through the water but through the red leaves and yellow reeds, respectively reflecting the setting sun’s rays and the early moon shadows. The situation is one of thoughtful deliberative decision: should he continue his day’s labors or refresh himself by ending them? “Thinking of returning home,” how does he perform this thinking? Not by empty-handed meditation, but by “lightly stirring his oar.” Thinking is done through bodily action, and is proprioceptively felt through the body. This light stirring of the oar, moreover, makes a brilliant metaphor for self-expressive brushwork artistry in painting and poetry that edifies while it entertains. The oar in water is like the brush in ink, skillfully guided by the person’s hands and body but also guiding the person to a new position or new conditions of understanding. Wen Fong rightly claims, “As a symbol of reclusion, the leisurely fisherman was contrasted with the harassed official struggling to cope with the

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Figure 4.4 Wu Zhen (1280–1354), Fisherman by a Wooded Bank, © public domain.

complexities of court life.”27 But I would add that, in this particular work, we can also see the fishing pole (which, like the oar, is a stick that is skillfully moved in water and thus can symbolize the brush) as symbolizing the bonds of official clerical work with the brush that a scholar might confront in government or courtly service and which sharply contrast to the free exercise of his brush in “lightly stirring” aesthetic pursuits of self-cultivation and self-expression. The poem’s idea of returning home could then likewise be read in terms of the classical Chinese idea of self-cultivation as returning to oneself rather than seeking the glory of worldly success. Indeed the poem, in the original Chinese, does not specifically mention the word “home”; its literal meaning is more general, something like an interrogative “now to return perhaps.”28 In the classical paintings we have discussed, human bodies are pictorially represented. But traditional ink-wash painting often conveys somaesthetic themes of self-expression and self-cultivation without painting any human figures but instead symbolically suggesting them: either by highlighting their absence (for example, through empty dwellings, like the pavilion in paintings such as Ni Zan’s Empty Pavilion in a Pine Grove) or instead by depicting surrogate natural objects whose figures are somehow human like. Ni Zan’s well-known work entitled Six Gentleman (1345) provides a fine example of this second strategy. As described in the poem that his teacher (the renowned Huang Gongwang) brushed in at the top right of the painting, the sad clump of six trees, having weathered the autumn flood, remain standing together face to face, isolated on a hill slope. These six figures constitute a poignant symbol of the disenfranchised Confucian scholar-class after the Mongol conquest, especially if we remember the Confucians insistence on the “six arts” as the core of their educational philosophy.

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VI Leaping over more than 700 years, we consider Pan Gongkai as a fine exemplar of contemporary literati ink-wash painting. A paradigm Confucian polymath, Pan has been strikingly successful not only in the visual genres of painting, installation, and architecture, but also in art historical scholarship and theory. By further excelling in the practical fields of art education and academic administration, Pan moreover realizes the Confucian idea of highlevel public service. Uniting Pan’s diverse and extensive activities, I believe, is his advocacy and practice of art as a way of life. Like the traditional literati artists, Pan sees the main goal in art not as the production of fine objects but as the cultivation of the self through study, practice, and creative experimentation. “I make my life itself as a work of art…I do experiments with my own life,” he explains.29 This ancient Chinese idea of integrating the arts to serve the art of living is something I share with Pan, and that I try to revive through a theory of philosophy as an ethical and somaesthetic art of living whose achievement of beauty requires embodied intelligence in feeling, thought, and action, which must be developed through disciplined training.30 I focus here on Pan’s 2011 Venice Biennale installation Snow Melting in Lotus, which reflects his attempt to critically examine himself as a traditionrespecting but forward-looking Chinese artist in today’s challenging international scene that, despite postcolonial globalizing trends, is still dominated by the modern Western concept of art. Although combining image and text, as in the literati tradition, Pan’s installation goes strikingly beyond classical ink-wash painting by introducing new media and new modes of somatic interaction with the work. But such innovation only reinforces the potently pragmatic Confucian idea of preserving tradition by renewing it with freshness and contemporary relevance. Built onto the massive oil tanks that cut through the center of the old warehouse housing the Biennale’s Chinese pavilion, Pan’s work consists of a long corridor framed by a pair of tall, twenty-four-meter long panels of black ink-wash painting representing a drooping lotus, rendered in his distinctive contemporary style. The corridor is artificially chilled and scented with lotus fragrance. Onto the upper part of long panels of painted lotus, Pan projects, in the form of snow, the white letters of the English translation of his text on modern Western art and art theory. These white letters continuously disintegrate and fall like snowflakes onto the painted lotus below. The work’s message is clearly that Western art and art theory are continuously projected onto Chinese aesthetic culture from above, thus bringing new brightness but threatening to bury or obscure China’s own rich artistic tradition. But this message can be read both positively and more negatively. Optimistically, such Western imports melt into the continuously evolving, enduringly beautiful Chinese forms of lotus (a flower symbolizing purity and rebirth), nourishing the flowers of traditional Chinese art with moisture but not burying, destroying, or displacing them. West and East here coexist in active tension and moving beauty, without an isolating

Figure 4.5 Ni Zan (1301–1374), Six Gentlemen, © public domain.

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separation, but also without coercive fusion. More critically and sadly, Pan’s lotus, which he describes as “withered,” suggests that traditional Chinese art is genuinely suffering from the continual piling on of Western influences that chill the native Chinese cultural environments, whose lotuses need warm climates and sunlight to thrive, even if they can emerge from the darkest muddy pond of water. Here the lotus—a signature emblem of Pan Gongkai’s work and thus of himself as an artist who lives his art—is somewhat withered and continuously assailed by the cold snow but is still holding its ground and refusing to fold its petals to hide or be buried. This should remind us of Ni Zan’s poignant pines in Six Gentlemen, struggling but still standing despite being battered by the stormy weather of the autumn flood. Both use natural storms to signify a problematic sociocultural situation caused by foreign pressure. With Pan Gongkai it is not the scourge of invading Mongolian rulers who were too uncivilized to appreciate Chinese culture and its literati, but rather that of Western artworld conquerors who perhaps are no better than the Mongols when it comes to truly appreciating China’s rich artistic traditions. I could say more about the complex cultural politics that defines Pan Gonkai’s sense of self as an artist, theorist, and educator and that sets the challenges that inspire his self-expression and self-cultivation. But I should end this paper by underlining the somaesthetic themes portrayed in this powerful work from the Venice Biennale that was later adapted for other installation spaces. First, consider that in Snow Melting in Lotus Pan Gonkai’s text is not painted with a brush and black ink in Chinese characters but instead projected through electronic means and written in white English letters that have been typed on a computer keyboard. The contrast of colors underlines the contrast of media that implies very different bodily skills and somatic expression. To type on a keyboard we need only to recognize the character we wish to type; we do not need to know how to draw or trace it through the movement of our hand. Although our bodies must be engaged in the act of typing, such engagement is more limited than in brush work. In regarding a computer-generated text we cannot see whether the typing was performed with swift, smooth, and graceful use of one’s hands or instead done with painful slowness by one clumsy finger. Characters composed by typing on a computer keyboard are uniform and do not permit the nuanced expression of the writer’s mood or energy that calligraphy conveys somatically through the different ways the hand wields the brush in terms of thickness, lightness, force, dryness, or density of ink color. Moreover, the pale disintegrating white letters remind us how a computer text can be deleted much more easily than one painted through the more somatically demanding means of brush and ink on silk or paper. This difference in bodily engagement is clearly reflected by the contrast in size between small white letters of type and the very large, energetically brushed lines of the painted lotus, lines whose movement indicates how Pan’s own body must have moved with energetic action to paint those flowing forms.31

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Figure 4.6 Pan Gongkai, Snow Melting in Lotus (2011), courtesy of the artist.

Beyond these points emerging from the Chinese brushwork/English typing contrast, further somaesthetic themes arise prominently in the viewer’s aesthetic experience. That is because the viewer must be more than a simple viewer to properly appreciate this installation piece, which explicitly appeals to more than the eyes. The visitor must walk through the long corridor framed by the two painted panels, thus experiencing the work kinesthetically through her own bodily motion, coordinated with her moving eyes that follow the falling text and flowing lotus forms. Appreciating this work involves appreciating the lovely lotus fragrance that pervades the work’s architectural space, just as it includes appreciating the corridor’s refreshing coolness as a tactile pleasure on the surface of the skin. In a venue like Venice known for the unpleasant heat and stench of its summers, what better way to suggest art’s diverse sensory pleasures than fragrant coolness, while also underlining the somaesthetic theme that art is perceived through the individual’s variety of senses which are essentially transmodal and especially well integrated in aesthetic experience? Dr. Peng Feng, who curated the Chinese Pavilion in Venice and selected Pan’s work along with four others that are rich in nonvisual sensory stimulation and satisfactions, explicitly recognizes somaesthetics as underlying his curatorial project in Venice.32 His Venice show with Pan powerfully asserts the somaesthetic theme that the body’s most crucial yet neglected role in art is not as an object of representation nor as a mere physical tool for producing art objects

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but rather as a sensitive, discriminating subjectivity through whose skilled perception we not only appreciate the beauty and art that we encounter but also learn to fashion new aesthetic visions. As a critical meliorative project of theory and practice directed toward improving body consciousness, somaesthetics aims to make us better equipped to appreciate and to create art’s aesthetic experience. But its ambitions reach well beyond the world of art, by employing aesthetic experience in the broader quest for selfcultivation, self-knowledge, and self-expression. Somaesthetics shares the goal of shuimo hua painters who practice their art as a way of life focused on continuous refinement not merely to edify and entertain themselves but to provide an inspiring model for others.

Notes 1 For an explanation of these roots of somaesthetics, see Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1-14; and introduction to Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1-24. 2 James Legge, trans., Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), 266. 3 I use here the translation by Victor Mair, Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 123, 321. 4 Ibid., 96. 5 Xunzi, “On Self-Cultivation,” in Xunzi, Volume 1, trans. John Knobloch (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988),143-58; Xunzi, “Discourse on Ritual Principles,” in Xunzi, Volume 3, trans. John Knobloch (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 49-73; Xunzi, “Discourse on Music,” in Xunzi, Volume 3, 74-87. 6 The Chinese have another word for “writing” (xie 写), which is more commonly used. 7 For more details on some of these points, see James Cahill, Hills beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yuan Dynasty, 1279-1368 (New York: John Weatherhill, 1976); Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th–14th Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and Jianping Gao, The Expressive Act in Chinese Art: From Calligraphy to Painting (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1996), 82. 8 John Hay, “The Human Body and Calligraphy,” in Theories of the Arts in China, ed. Susan Bush and Christian Murck (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 74. 9 Hay provides a detailed account of this in terms of traditional Chinese medicine in John Hay, “The Human Body and Calligraphy,” 74-102. 10 Quoted in Hay, “The Human Body and Calligraphy,” 85. Compare also the remark of Zhang Huaiguan 张怀瓘 (713-741): “A horse is considered superior when it has much sinew and little flesh, inferior when it has much flesh and little sinew. Calligraphy is also like this” (Hay, 91). Note also the remark of a Yuan dynasty writer, Chen Yiceng, who claims “Characters are born from ink, ink is born from water; water is the blood of characters” (Hay, 96). 11 For a very detailed analysis of these two principles and their relation to Chinese medicine, see John Hay, “Values and History in Chinese Painting, I,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 6 (1983): 72-111, and John Hay, “Values and

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History in Chinese Painting, II,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 7/8 (1984): 102-36. Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tsu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 228. The quote is from the great Song poet-artist-calligrapher Su Shi, cited and translated in Gao, The Expressive Act in Chinese Art, 82. Gao, The Expressive Act in Chinese Art, 83. See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book VI, 1140a1-1140b25, in Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1968), 1025-1027. Cahill, Hills beyond a River, 4. Gao, The Expressive Act in Chinese Art, 56. Cahill, Hills beyond a River, 5-6. Ibid., 17-8. Gao, The Expressive Act in Chinese Art, 168. Fong, Beyond Representation, 432. Wang Xizhi, “Ti Wei Furen ‘Bizhentu’ Hou,” in Fashu Yaolu, ed. Hong Pimo (Shanghai: Shanghai Shuhua Chubanshe, 1986), 7. I use Gao’s translation with a minor grammatical adjustment of its last sentence. See Gao, The Expressive Act in Chinese Art, 152. Ink wash painting also negotiates another tension: the erasure of self through the desire to absorb the spirit of what one is painting and the expression of self in how one’s self appreciates and conveys that spirit. Fong, Beyond Representation, 122-3. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 2008), 126-7. Fong, Beyond Representation, 450. Ibid. The poem reads: 红叶村西夕照余，黄芦滩畔月痕初。轻拨棹，且归欤，挂起渔 竿不钓鱼。(hongye cunxi xizhao yu, huanglu tanban yuehen chu. qing ba zhao, qie gui yu, guaqi yugan bu diaoyu.) Pan Gongkai’s quotation comes from his interview with Wang Ruiyun, published (in Chinese) in Wang Ruiyun (ed.), Great Appearance without Appearing (Beijing: CAFA Arts Museum, 2010), 4. I have had some very instructive discussions with Pan Gongkai about art theory and the idea of philosophy as an art of living. Extracts from one of those discussions are published (in Chinese) in “艺术边界问题对谈” [“Dialog on the Boundary of Art”], Poetry Calligraphy Painting 3 (2011): 162-71. Another of our dialogues “On Philosophy, Art, and Life,” is published (in English and Chinese) in The Journal of Somaesthetics, 1 (2015), 42-85, and is available online at https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/JOS/article/view/1071/941 The projected white letters also move, but their movement is in their disintegration and falling, which contrasts with the expressive motion of the painting’s brush work whose somatic kinetic flow remains firmly visible in the non-disintegrating brushed black forms. See Peng Feng’s dialog with me about the show in Richard Shusterman, “Discussion with Peng Feng,” Art Press 379 (June 2011, Venice Biennale Supplement): 24-5. He is also the one who first introduced the term somaesthetics into contemporary Chinese aesthetics, as the first Chinese translator of my work in this field, translating three books: Pragmatist Aesthetics, Practicing Philosophy, and Performing Live.

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Bibliography Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. In The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1968. Cahill, James. Hills beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yuan Dynasty, 1279– 1368. New York: John Weatherhill, 1976. Fong, Wen C. Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th–14th Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 2008. Gao, Jianping. The Expressive Act in Chinese Art: From Calligraphy to Painting. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1996. Hay, John. “The Human Body and Calligraphy.” In Theories of the Arts in China, edited by Susan Bush and Christian Murck, 74-102. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Hay, John. “Values and History in Chinese Painting, I.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 6 (1983): 72–111. Hay, John. “Values and History in Chinese Painting, II.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 7/8 (1984): 102-36. Legge, James. Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893. Mair, Victor, trans. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994. Shusterman, Richard. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992; 2nd edition, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Shusterman, Richard. Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life. New York: Routledge, 1997. Shusterman, Richard. Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Shusterman, Richard. Body Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Shusterman, Richard. “Discussion with Peng Feng.” Art Press 379 (June 2011, Venice Biennale Supplement): 24–5. Shusterman, Richard with Pan Gongkai, “艺术边界问题对谈” [English: “Dialog on the Boundary of Art,”] Poetry Calligraphy Painting 3 (2011): 162–71. Shusterman, Richard. Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Shusterman, Richard with Pan Gongkai. “On Philosophy, Art, and Life” (in Chinese and English). The Journal of Somaesthetics, 1 (2015): 42–85; online at https:// journals.aau.dk/index.php/JOS/article/view/1071/941. Wang, Ruiyun, ed. Great Appearance without Appearing. Beijing: CAFA Arts Museum, 2010. Watson, Burton. The Complete Works of Chuang Tsu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968. Xizhi. Wang. “Ti Wei Furen ‘Bizhentu’ Hou” (in Chinese). In Fashu Yaolu, edited by Hong Pimo. Shanghai: Shanghai Shuhua Chubanshe, 1986. Xunzi, “On Self-Cultivation.” In Xunzi, Volume 1, translated by John Knoblock, 143-58. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.

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Xunzi. “Discourse on Ritual Principles.” In Xunzi, Volume 3, translated by John Knoblock, 49-73. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Xunzi. “Discourse on Music.” In Xunzi, Volume 3, translated by John Knoblock, 74-87. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

5

Schiller’s transformative aesthetics Benjamin Wihstutz

In spring 1803, two years before his death and ten years after his letters to the Prince of Augustenburg, Friedrich Schiller, in the Prologue to his tragic drama The Bride of Messina, recalls the leitmotifs of aesthetic education: Every one expects from the imaginative arts a certain emancipation from the bounds of reality: we are willing to give a scope to fancy, and recreate ourselves with the possible. … [He will] experience delight from uncommon incidents:—if he be of a serious turn of mind he will acknowledge on the stage that moral government of the world which he fails to discover in real life. But he is, at the same time, perfectly aware that all is an empty show, and that in a true sense he is feeding only on dreams. When he returns from the theatre to the world of realities, he is again compressed within its narrow bounds … for [this world of realities] remains what it was, and in him nothing has been changed. … Art has for its object not merely to afford a transient pleasure, to excite to a momentary dream of liberty; its aim is to make us absolutely free; and this it accomplishes by awakening, exercising, and perfecting in us a power to remove to an objective distance the sensible world … to transform it into the free working of our spirit, and thus acquire a dominion over the material by means of ideas.1 According to Schiller, art—that is, in this case, the theatre—has to fulfill two functions: first, it is to propel its recipients (more precisely, the theatre audience) into an aesthetic condition, a state of freedom, which keeps the sensual world with its constraints and difficulties of everyday life at bay, leaving scope for the imagination and giving autonomy to the mind; second, this state of freedom must not take the ephemeral form of an “empty show.” Rather, it is to arouse, practice, and cultivate, in the recipients, a faculty which extends beyond the individual art experience, outlasts the duration of a performance, and transforms the sensual world into “the free working of our spirit.” As will become clear below, this faculty is no other than the faculty of judgment or, differently put, the education [Bildung] of taste. In Schiller, we are thus dealing with a transformative aesthetics in two senses

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of the word. What matters, on the one hand, is a change of mind and body in the here and now of aesthetic experience and, on the other, a long-term program of aesthetic education, where man attains freedom through the repeated experience of art and by practicing aesthetic judgments. For Schiller, the second of these transformations has a distinctly political dimension. In particular, this becomes clear toward the end of his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, where the author outlines the utopia of an Aesthetic State. In this state, which is less a society capable of practical implementation than “the idealized image of the imagination,”2 man is unfettered by physical and moral constraints; prerogatives or dictatorship are not tolerated here. What is more, in “the Aesthetic State everything— even the tool which serves—is a free citizen, having equal rights with the noblest.”3 It is the utopian realm of play and of the appearance, where all human hopes for freedom and equality—hopes raised in vain by politics and the French Revolution—have been realized. Since there can be no “moral government of the world” in real life, it must be achieved in art—playfully, and in such a way that morals can be dispensed with. In spite of its great fascination, Schiller’s aesthetic theory remains somewhat vague with respect to the transition between the two above transformations, i.e., the transition from an aesthetic condition to an Aesthetic State of lasting freedom and equality. Thus, for instance, it remains unclear what significance the human play-drive would assume if the utopia of an Aesthetic State were achieved, and by what specific means Schiller’s idea of aesthetic education is to be realized. What we do know, however, is that neither politics nor morals but only art—to Schiller’s mind, “the most effective of all the incentives of the human spirit,”4—is capable of contributing to this end. I shall argue in the following that the effectiveness of this incentive in Schiller’s concept of aesthetic education is to be understood against the background of the faculty of judgment. To Schiller, this faculty extends the ephemeral aesthetic condition beyond the present moment and gives it a lasting effect, and it is capable of achieving this because it can (and is to be) cultivated and exercised by the repeated experience of art, by attending theatre events and dealing with things beautiful. Practicing one’s aesthetic judgment not only brings Schiller’s play-drive to the fore—the harmonious connection between the (physical) “material drive” and the (creative) “form impulse”; it also creates a distance from the sensual world. This is because the aesthetic judgment, in contrast to the judgments of the senses and of reason, neither serves a purpose nor is brought to a conclusion: “The agreeable, the good, the perfect, with these man is merely in earnest; but with beauty he plays,”5 writes Schiller in allusion to Kant’s categories of judgment. And yet, as becomes particularly apparent in the case of classical Weimar, the spectator’s aesthetic judgment, especially with regard to theatre, remained a highly sensitive issue well into the nineteenth century. The social dimension of the theatre spectacles and, in particular, the habits of chattering,

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heckling, thumping, and laughing during performances—that is, of either ignoring or noisily commenting on the stage action—which were frequently encountered in the audience of the pit were very much contrary to an aesthetic attitude that demanded contemplation, distance, and silence. My essay is divided into three parts. In a first step, I look at some of Schiller’s aesthetic writings with particular attention to his concept of judgment. What is most important in this first step is to analyze, against the background of the French Revolution and of his reading of Kant, Schiller’s transformation from enthusiast for the theatrical community to the architect of an Aesthetic State. In a second step, I turn to how the idea of aesthetic education was implemented at the Weimar court theatre, where especially Goethe made it his mission as director to create the appropriate conditions for a culture of (practicing) aesthetic judgments. With reference to some lesser known sources, I adumbrate in this context the importance of the discussions on educating the audience to silence and aesthetic distance, which took place at the Weimar court theatre around 1800. In seeking to promote a historically and theoretically differentiated view of Schiller’s transformative aesthetics, I will finally formulate a number of hypotheses on the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and the police in Weimar Classicism.

I. Aesthetic judgment versus judgment of the crowd As early as in Schiller’s famous discourse on “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution,” delivered on June 26, 1784 to the palatine “Deutsche Gesellschaft” in Mannheim, the judgment of the audience plays a significant role in his aesthetics, which at this point does not yet categorically distinguish aesthetic from moral judgments. Contrary to what the title of the speech suggests (it was subsequently added for its publication), the theatre is not merely described as a “moral institution,” but above all as a school of the soul and of the emotions6—a school, to wit, whose lessons are based on the exemplary demonstration of cases and their moral and affective evaluation. Bold criminals, Schiller writes, are summoned by the all-powerful call of poetry to re-enact their shameful lives for the instruction of a horrified posterity. The future of the stage is thus stipulated on the effect its tragic heroes and villains have on the audience: When morality is no longer taught, religion no longer finds adherents, and law no longer avails, we will still shudder at the sight of Medea as she staggers down the palace steps, the murder of her children accomplished. When Lady Macbeth, in a frightful somnambulistic trance, washes her hands and calls upon all the perfumes of Arabia to eradicate the repellent stench of murder, humanity will be seized with a wholesome sense of horror. Just as visual representation has a more powerful effect than the dead letter of narrative, so the stage exercises a more profound and lasting influence than laws or morality.7

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Theatre, according to this concept, is not an autonomous realm of art but an institution closely related to everyday social life, using emotion and catharsis to teach its audience the proper aesthetic and moral sense. Schiller’s claim that “the jurisdiction of the stage begins where that of the law ends”8 makes it clear that, even though different laws may apply in the theatre, the judgments passed on stage must be considered a continuation of those passed outside the theatre. Theatre thus follows a similar purpose as the systems of justice, police, and religion—but it does so by other and better means than these. Here, emotions, which provide the audience with “an infallible key to the most secret passages of the human soul,”9 can be used to practice the faculty of aesthetic and moral judgments. The ending of the speech—whose solemnity was due, no doubt, to its purpose of attracting financial support from the society for the establishment of a national theatre,10 is significantly different from the aesthetic theory Schiller later developed. Far from dealing with aesthetic contemplation and aloofness, it grounds the theatre’s emotional and moral effect on, above anything else, the communal experience of the performance, that is, on the social dimension of theatre: The stage is an institution where pleasure is combined with instruction, relaxation with exertion, entertainment with culture …. The sensitive weakling toughens himself; the unfeeling brute begins for the first time to experience emotion. And then finally—what a triumph for you, oh nature! … when men and women from all walks of life, … united in a single, all-embracing sympathy, become one again, forget themselves and their world, and approach their divine origin. Each enjoys the raptures of all, cast back, intensified, and enlivened, from a hundred faces, and in each breast there is room for only a single emotion—that one is a human being.11 It is difficult to overlook the contrast between these lines and the famous passage in Letter XV from On the Aesthetic Education of Man, where Schiller argues that man is only completely a human being when he plays. In fact, Schiller’s notion of the play-drive has nothing to do with the feeling of a collective trance or an “all-embracing sympathy,”12 but rather with a contemplative experience of freedom and autonomy. This is especially clear when Schiller uses the example of an antique statue to refer the play-drive to the idleness and indifference of the Greek gods. The face of the Juno Ludovisi says nothing, yet the statue alone reflects the disinterestedness and the freedom inherent to the aesthetic disposition. For Jacques Rancière, this example is therefore a paradigm of the classical period and the aesthetic regime, in which works of art are divested of ethical or representative purposes. In fact, the Juno’s facial features are negative: “What the ‘free appearance’ of the Greek statue manifests is the essential characteristic of divinity, its ‘idleness’ or ‘indifferency.’ The specific attribute of divinity is not to want anything ….”13

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Unlike in the discourse on “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution,” what Schiller is interested in now is not a sense of community or any specific purpose of artistic representation, but the aesthetic itself as “freedom in appearance.”14 Putting a point on it, one might say that, within ten years, he juxtaposes the brotherhood of the theatrical community with a statue, whose indifference between grace and dignity is elevated to an aesthetic ideal. In the face of the Juno Ludovisi, the viewer’s gaze is met, as it were, by Kant’s “disinterested pleasure.”15 The aesthetic state is neither a condition of ecstasy nor of collective trance, but, in Schiller’s words, a “middle disposition, in which the psyche is subject neither to physical nor to moral constraint,”16 and thus free. The aesthetic state is conducive to neither morality nor knowledge: “in the aesthetic state, then, man is Nought.”17 The question is, however, how to explain this transition, and the concomitant dilution of art’s moral and communal functions, as well as the shift toward an idealistic and transformative aesthetics. As is well known, Schiller’s reflections on the aesthetic education were triggered by two almost simultaneous events: namely, by the consequences of the French Revolution (which he considered appalling), and by the publication of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. To Schiller’s mind, the beheading of the representatives of the ancien régime on the Place de la Révolution exemplified the coarsening of human nature, and it shattered his dreams of a democratic society of free and independent citizens. On July 13, 1793, half a year after the execution of Louis XVI, Schiller writes to the Prince of Augustenburg: The attempt of the French people to establish its sacred human rights and to obtain through its struggle political freedom has demonstrated only its powerlessness and unworthiness and not only this unhappy people but with it a substantial part of Europe and of the whole century has sunk into barbarism and slavery.18 His horror at the brutality of the mob, whose revolutionary action he had first welcomed, leads Schiller to fundamentally question the Enlightenment’s moral program. No longer does he believe the masses capable of reason: “They were not free men oppressed by the State, as they pretended,” Schiller writes, “but wild beasts.”19 Schiller’s dismay at the unfettered and raging masses is also reflected in his later tragedies. In Mary Stuart (1799), for instance, Queen Elizabeth is told that only Mary Stuart’s head will pacify the “angry mob.” Likewise, in The Maid of Orleans, it is the people that turn against Joan.20 In both cases, the masses are described as a coarsened and angry crowd to be soothed only by the display of violence, and of whom reasonable judgments can hardly be expected, as Goethe notes in one of his proverbs: “The crowd should lay on, / Then it is respectable/ When it judges it is always miserable.”21 In view of his disappointment about the consequences of the French Revolution, it is

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not surprising that the idea of a brotherhood of an audience “from all walks of life”—that is, the communal effect of theatre focused on in “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution”—loses much of its appeal to Schiller over the years. The high esteem for the “all-embracing sympathy” is replaced with the aesthetic experience and contemplation of the individual spectator. The contagious and “soft emotions,” collectively shared by the audience, as well as anything merely pleasurable to the senses, is, following the example of Kant, distinguished from the beautiful and approximated to the “agreeable.”22 In Schiller’s subsequent texts, the cross-class community of the theatre audience is no longer mentioned. What finally triggers Schiller to proceed with his own aesthetic theory is, in particular, his reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. A direct influence of this reading can be found in the categorical distinction between aesthetic and moral judgments, which Schiller, in contrast to “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution,” makes in his essay “On the Sublime.” Other than the moral judgment, which is based on the principles of reason, the imagination as an “aesthetic judge,” according to Schiller, calls for independence and free play, which is why the two mutually exclude each other.23 Thus, one and the same object is capable of causing dislike from a moral standpoint, and pleasure, from the aesthetic point of view. Hence, in poetry, the aesthetic always takes precedence over the moral. “The poet,” Schiller writes, “even when he places before our eyes the most perfect models of morality, has not, and ought not to have, any other end than that of rejoicing our soul by the contemplation of this spectacle.”24 It follows that the aim of art never consists in moral teaching but exclusively in making aesthetic experience possible. The human play-drive is developed through repeated aesthetic experiences so that humans form and cultivate taste and liberate themselves both from the laws of morality and the charms of the senses. In Letter XXVII of the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller writes accordingly: The aesthetic play-drive, therefore, will in its first attempts be scarcely recognizable, since the physical play-drive, with its willful moods and its unruly appetites, constantly gets in the way. Hence we see uncultivated taste first seizing upon what is new and startling—on the colourful, fantastic, and bizarre, the violent and the savage—and shunning nothing so much as tranquil simplicity. … At this stage what man calls beauty is only what excites him, what offers him material—but excites him to a resistance involving autonomous activity, but offers him material for possible shaping. Otherwise it would not be beauty—even for him.25 Aesthetic education is therefore unlikely to succeed if it cannot rely on the practice of aesthetic judgments. It is, in other words, an educational program targeted at the faculty of judgment and governed, at the same time, by the laws of freedom. The model function of the aesthetic state or condition, is

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that it “gives people a taste for freedom by providing them with the opportunity to experience an autonomy which, according to Schiller, only the beautiful is capable of granting.”26 Thus, the freedom Schiller speaks of is above all a freedom of mind; a perceived freedom from the constraints of nature, morality and law, as can be found in autonomous art. For Schiller, by implication, the aesthetic condition is a transformative force, “an aesthetic impulse to form,” leading, via art, to a different, more equitable society of free individuals. It is this explicit, albeit indirect, political function of art as well as the stronger emphasis on sensuality and materiality that sets Schiller apart from Kant’s aesthetics. Apparently, exercising the faculty of aesthetic judgment is only possible on the basis of the sensual, just as exercising the play-drive presupposes the material drive.27 In Kant, by contrast, the faculty of reflective judgment is not directly connected with smell and taste.28 The influence of Kant’s third critique also makes itself felt in the so-called “Kallias Letters.” Implicit reference is here made, in particular, to Kant’s concept of disinterestedness and his idea of aesthetic autonomy.29 With their floral and faunal examples and others from the realms of fashion, gardening, and pottery, however, the Kallias Letters are occasionally more of a textbook on appropriate aesthetic judgments than the fragment of an aesthetic theory. At one point, for instance, Schiller explains that a duck, in spite of its lower weight, is less beautiful than a horse, because the latter easily defies the force of gravity. The beauty of trees, in turn, is related to the nature of their growth. An oak, for instance, is considered beautiful if it bends, whereas a poplar is supposed to grow straight up; “we find the poplar bending in the wind beautiful [only] because its swaying manner reveals its freedom.”30 But also in the art of acting, “matter” needs to be given form by an idea: Unlike the famous actors Schröder or Ekhof, who completely adapted to their roles, keeping their subjectivity out of their representations, the mediocre actress only shows herself.31 If the audience sees nothing but the actor’s body, however, the representation is poor and “in every action the actor (the material) is apparent in all of his disgustingness and amateurishness.”32 In all of these examples, the message conveyed to the reader is one and the same: judgments about what is beautiful are based not on subjective reasons but on the unmistakable principles of nature. In art itself, however, these principles must not show, but are to remain invisible, for it is precisely the impression of their independent and sublime nature that endows things with beauty. In view of Schiller’s political disillusionment with the French Revolution, which is likely to have stirred his wish to distance himself from all those turbulent events and its hot-headed actors, it is hardly surprising that the revolutionary author of The Robbers and erstwhile enthusiast for a brotherhood of man formed in the theatre turns to aesthetic autonomy and disinterestedness. At the same time, the attempt undertaken by Weimar Classicism—most evidently by Goethe—to set up objective and general criteria of beauty and to derive rules of art from these, marks a decisive

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difference to Kant’s aesthetics. If art follows the aesthetic rules of nature and idealizes the latter, then man is capable of being aesthetically educated through art and of cultivating his taste. Aesthetic education offers Schiller the ultimate possibility of satisfying his political and moral claims of his work in spite of the caesura of the French Revolution, namely, by transferring these claims to aesthetic judgments and to the disinterested pleasure that promises a utopian condition of freedom. If freedom is not something that can be achieved by, or granted to, the masses, then it should at least be the prerogative of the “finely attuned soul” in “some few chosen circles” of the bourgeoisie, as Schiller points out toward the end of Letter 27.33 According to this passage, the State of Aesthetic Play and Semblance has been realized in these beautiful souls of the aesthetically educated “as a need.”

II. Tranquility and distance As becomes clear from reports and reviews of performances as well as numerous treatises on appropriate behavior in the “pit,” published in late eighteenth-century theatre periodicals, the conditions for aesthetic judgments on the part of theatre audiences, in the sense of Kant’s “disinterested pleasure” and Schiller’s aesthetic disposition, were rather poor. Many reviews, comments, and reports mention the audience’s thumping, hissing, or shouting “Da Capo,” “Vivat,” and other heckles; as well as applauding and shuffling their feet.34 Not infrequently, attention focused on the pit rather than the stage, which, from the standpoint of the theatre reformers, made it hard, if not impossible, for spectators to adopt the appropriate aesthetic attitude and mood. For Goethe and Schiller, whose experimenting with verse, masks, and chorus on the Weimar court stage placed new aesthetic demands on actors and audience alike,35 the audience’s lack of quiet and of aesthetic distance was difficult to deal with even where police and disciplinary measures were used. Goethe writes the following in September 1801, in the invitation letter he addressed to subscribers in his capacity as theatre director: A number of unpleasant events that occurred during the last year have prompted the director to make the following announcement: members of this audience are neither by subscription, nor by payment at the entrance, entitled to behave according to their whims. On the contrary, those who enter the theater should not forget that they are being admitted to good society …. The director therefore explicitly refuses to tolerate improper behavior, such as laughing at actors, immoderate applause, thumping as a show of displeasure, hissing during the applause given by others, noisy conversation during the entr’actes, as well as anything which common decency would prohibit in the company of others—whether they be of the same or higher standing.36

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Goethe’s exhortation is evidence of a conflict between different expectations as to the role of theatre—namely, the aesthetic demand for art—on the one hand, and the social space of the performance on the other. Far from giving in to contemplative tranquility and disinterested pleasure, the audience in the pit indulges in an entirely different practice of criticism, namely, in collectively judging actors on the spur of spontaneous emotions and immediate interests. Apparently, for large parts of the audience, thumping, hissing, and applauding were a natural part of their theatre experience. So much so that eighteenth-century theatre could be described as a kind of interactive theatre that increasingly became the arena of a conflict over the correct practice of aesthetic judgments.37 Admonitions to keep order and silence were, however, addressed not merely to the audience but also to actors. As can be seen from the following note from the Weimar theatre statutes of March 1793, actors were to be disciplined and educated already during rehearsals: “Each reading rehearsal must be conducted with utmost silence and accuracy.”38 Elsewhere, it says: Causing loud noises, strife, or dispute in the wings during performances, unseemly behavior, or loud laughter, and thereby offending the audience, as well as disturbing the actors on stage, shall be punished by a fine of 8 Groschen.39 Schiller and Goethe also gave consideration as to how the stage action might contribute to enhance the audience’s silence and attention. It is a concern that is reflected not only in numerous theatre statues but also in the aesthetical writings of Weimar Classicism, such as in the above-quoted Prologue to The Bride of Messina. According to Schiller, the tragic chorus is not a scenic device randomly chosen. Rather, its function is to create the appropriate mood and aesthetic attitude in the theatre, both on stage and in the audience. As the chorus gives life to the language—so also it gives repose to the action; but it is that beautiful and lofty repose which is the characteristic of a true work of art. For the mind of the spectator ought to maintain its freedom through the most impassioned scenes; it should not be the mere prey of impressions, but calmly and severely detach itself from the emotions which it suffers.40 As in the passage quoted at the beginning, Schiller’s description of the aesthetically-attuned mind suggests that the spectator’s faculty of judgment serves to create a distance from the sensual and emotional—a task whose accomplishment depends on the calmness of the scenic action. In his studies on the relationship between theatre and the police, Jan Lazardzig remarks that the preservation of peace and order refers to an early nineteenth-century discourse that goes far beyond the theatre and introduces the concept of

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prevention to public policy.41 “Around 1800,” writes Lazardzig, “the aesthetic regime of the theater is almost identical with the regime of prevention established by the police.”42 The silence or “repose” in the pit is thus directly connected with the state’s ‘inner peace and quiet,’ which is the basis for a close cooperation between theatre reformers and the police. It is a connection that also explains the close cooperation between Goethe and Duke Carl August of Weimar and that is reflected by, amongst other things, the Duke’s involvement in decisions concerning the theatre program.43 Silence in the theatre, apart from its suggestiveness of police and allegiance to the state, implies a resilience to emotions, which are considered detrimental to the aesthetic judgment. In order to keep emotions in check, it was necessary to discover new scenic devices, such as re-introducing the chorus to create an aesthetic distance. The commonplace objection made to the chorus, that it disturbs the illusion, and blunts the edge of the feelings, is what constitutes its highest recommendation; for it is this blind force of the affections which the true artist deprecates—this illusion is what he disdains to excite.44 Schiller’s and Goethe’s works were directed against the bourgeois illusionist theatre and the force of emotions but also explicitly against ‘wrong’ emotions, as becomes clear in Goethe’s famous exclamation, when, during the performance of a tragedy by Schlegel, the spectators were laughing down the actors’ lines: “One must not laugh!”45 Audience reactions such as laughing and applauding, thumping, and hissing did not merely disturb aesthetic contemplation, but also carried the danger of ‘infecting’ the rest of the audience with an inappropriate practice of judgment, which in the eyes of Goethe and Schiller came close to the proverbial “The crowd should lay on.” As to the question of how the faculty of aesthetic judgment might prevail against the apparent superiority of the sensuous and the collective feelings in the theatre, Schiller in his remarks on the pathetic-sublime gives the following answer: “Only in one way, by mastering or, more commonly, by combating affection.”46 The Weimar theatre performances of the 1790s were repeatedly disturbed by students from Jena, who are mentioned in several letters from Goethe to Kirms. In the wake of yet another such performance, Goethe in June 1797 addressed a letter to the marshal’s office, in which he demands that countermeasures be taken by the police: It was with displeasure that I have taken notice of the unruly behaviour of the Jena students in some of the theater spectacles. My advice, given by way of preventing similar inconveniences tomorrow and beyond, is as follows: One, if deemed necessary, two hussars are to be stationed also on the right-hand side, where no guard had been standing heretofore …. In the

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Benjamin Wihstutz event that any-one should start to make a racket, they must be warned and, should they persist, be escorted away, which from now on will be possible on the right-hand side, because there is an exit there. Furthermore, there should be one bench less between the fixed benches and the orchestra, so that the guards, in the event of any occurrence, have space to intervene. The theater is never so crowded as not to leave enough room at the rear end; but everyone throngs together on one spot in the front, and as it is, nobody is capable of either resisting or stirring. The proposed arrangement will be all the more necessary tomorrow as new attempts at coarse behavior are likely to occur. I ask the marshal’s office, which will surely make the pacification of court and audience its concern, to impose the strict adherence to these proposals, whose significant impact I promise.47

What emerges from these lines is the necessary correlation of tranquility and distance. The students’ thronging together in front of the stage not only causes a disturbance but also contradicts the required distance from the action as the prerequisite for an appropriate practice of aesthetic judgments. For the events can be judged from an objective viewpoint only by taking a distance from the action. In his essay “On the Sublime” (1793), Schiller emphasizes this distance to the aesthetic object in terms of the concept of “freedom of mind” as the prerequisite for any aesthetic judgment. “For where we actually find ourselves in danger, where we ourselves are the object of an inimical natural power, aesthetic judgment is finished.”48 It follows that a storm at sea, just as the action of a tragedy, can be perceived as sublime only from a distance. Where, however, the observer is himself part of the event, his faculty of judgment is wiped out. Hannah Arendt, two centuries later, takes this idea of distance as an opportunity to ground her political philosophy on the faculty of aesthetic judgment.49 For Schiller, the appropriate distance is contingent on the middle disposition of the aesthetic condition, where activity and passivity, grace and dignity, inner motion and outer peace are poised. If, on the other hand, neither tranquility nor aesthetic distance can be achieved in the theatre, if hardly any spectator is capable of perceiving the grace and dignity of masque and chorus, then all the ideals of aesthetic education are rendered void. There are only two ways out of this dilemma: either one turns one’s back on the theatre, in favor of an indifferent-looking statue, or one is forced to resort to harsher methods of education.

III. Aesthetics, politics, and the police I have tried to illustrate the factual obstacles and inconsistencies Schiller’s aspirations to an aesthetic education encountered in the theatre practice of classical Weimar. As has become clear, the program of aesthetic education was mainly faced with conflicts that revolved around an appropriate

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understanding of aesthetic judgments in the theatre. The then practice of forming judgments collectively in the pit and expressing them by noisy thumping and applause clashed with the demand for aesthetic distance which, in its turn, largely corresponded with the public policy objective to preserve peace and order. Hence, a program of aesthetic disciplining was required in order to put the ideal of aesthetic freedom into practice, which casts an ambivalent light on Schiller’s aesthetic considered as a whole. On the one hand, as particularly Rancière has shown50, Schiller’s theses on aesthetics have gained in topicality and attractiveness for the contemporary arts—precisely because of their political dimension and their emphasis, far away from the politics of the day, on freedom and equality. From the perspective of cultural history, on the other hand, both the disciplining of the spectators and the negation of the theatre as a social place of gathering are considered the price the public has to pay for a theatre in the aesthetic regime. What is proclaimed by Schiller as the state of aesthetic freedom and a likely occasion for throwing off all chains is perhaps nothing but Marquis de Posa’s “freedom of thought” in Don Carlos.51 In this context, Christoph Menke has remarked that Schiller’s aesthetic education, precisely because it is based on the self-same structure of sovereign power against which it is directed, was bound to remain without political consequences.52 From this perspective, Rancière’s diametrical opposition between a politics of aesthetics and an order of public policy appears no less questionable,53 especially since Schiller’s aesthetic “desire for a state”, according to Joseph Vogl, serves as a regulatory principle as well as “the pseudonym of a political function that is otherwise simply referred to as ‘the police’.”54 The aesthetic regime of art, in which the ethical and representative use of the fine arts is replaced by the promise of liberty and equality, apparently has an ambivalent downside which the disciplining in the theatre brings to light in a particular way. As has been shown, “the police” and aesthetics are, contrary to Rancière’s claim, precisely not diametrically opposed to one another; rather, art itself, like the chorus in Schiller’s Bride of Messina, assumes such tasks as are traditionally associated with the police. When Schiller’s play premiered at the Weimar court theatre in March 1803, however, the chorus was of only limited help in instilling silence and distance in the audience. The audience had remained fairly quiet during the performance; suddenly, toward the end, however, the son of Hofrat Schütz, the publisher of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung in Jena, could no longer suppress the urge to utter his opinion. “Vivat!” he shouted from his place in the gallery, to celebrate Schiller. The director’s reaction was not long in coming. On March 21, 1803 Goethe wrote to the commander of Jena, Major von Hendrich: Your Excellency knows the modest tranquility we enjoy at the Weimar theater; the students from Jena in particular have behaved themselves in

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Benjamin Wihstutz an exemplary manner ever since the auditorium was refurbished, and have refrained from signs of impatience as well as dislike, and even from applauding too loudly. All the more unexpected was the flattering, yet inappropriate gratitude offered to the author after the performance of The Bride of Messina. If we had been able to look at the shouting as but a spontaneous outburst of good will from foreign youth unfamiliar with the local customs, we could turn a blind eye to it. Strikingly, however, the acclamation started off in the gallery, and what is more, several parties have avouched that it was young Mr. Schütz who made himself guilty of this rashness. … Our theater does not admit signs of impatience [sc. on the part of the audience], silence is the only way to express disapproval; applause, the only way to show approval; no actor must be called before the curtain, no singer called upon to perform an aria twice. Anything that might disturb the smooth course of the whole, from the opening of the theater to its closing, has not occurred again and must not take place in the future. I should like to add that the guards, in accordance with a longpracticed custom, are under higher, and now repeated, orders to forcefully counteract any unusual behavior.55

In classical Weimar, the aesthetic education for good taste went hand in hand with disciplinary efforts aimed at the appropriate behavior of the audience. To Schiller’s and Goethe’s minds, an atmosphere of aesthetic tranquility and distance was to reign in the theatre during the entire performance to ensure the aesthetic experience of each individual spectator. What was at stake was nothing less than the transformation of theatre itself, to be carried out in the name of art. For this purpose, they employed, on the one hand, experimental scenic devices, such as the reintroduction of the chorus, tragedy in verse, new styles of acting and the carrying of masks. On the other, the audience was disciplined to repress the social dimension of the theatre as a place of assembly and shared emotions, and to strengthen its aesthetic function of cultivating the spectators’ taste. The transformation of theatre, thus, was not an end in itself but the means of a transformative aesthetics, which, at least from Schiller’s perspective, essentially pursued political ideals. From this viewpoint, it was not through a revolution that human beings would become better persons, but merely by practicing and forming their faculty of aesthetic judgment, “because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.”56 What becomes manifest, however, where the aesthetic theory comes up against the practice of theatre, is that in classical Weimar, the path to aesthetic freedom could only be embarked upon by the use of discipline. Translation by Christoph Nöthlings

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Notes 1 Friedrich Schiller, “On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy,” transl. A. Lodge, quoted from Greek Drama, ed. and with an introduction by Harold Bloom (Broomall: Chelsea House, 2004), 18–9. 2 Peter-André Alt, Friedrich Schiller (München: Beck, 2009), 76. 3 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and Leonard A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 219. 4 Friedrich Schiller, “Letter to Prince Friedrich Christian von Schleswig-HolsteinSonderburg-Augustenburg, February 9, 1793,” in id., Gesamtausgabe, vol. 19, p. 223. English translation quoted from Christian Hamm, “Freedom in Appearance: Notes on Schiller and His Development of Kant’s Aesthetics,” in Kant in Brazil, ed. Frederick Rauscher and Daniel Omar Perez (Rochester: University of Rochester Press/North American Kant Society, 2012), 324. 5 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter XV, 105. 6 See Rainer Ruppert, Labor der Seele und der Emotionen. Funktionen des Theaters im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Sigma, 1995), 87–90. 7 Friedrich Schiller, “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution,” in Sources of Dramatic Theory, vol. 2: Voltaire to Hugo, ed. Michael J. Sidnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 157. 8 Ibid., 157. 9 Ibid.,158. 10 See Rüdiger Safranski, Schiller: oder Die Erfindung des Deutschen Idealismus (München/Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2004), 95; Carl Hegemann, “Moralische Anstalt als Marketing-Strategie: Was es heißt, ein Mensch zu sein,” in Theater proben: Das Körber Studio Junge Regie 3, ed. Kai-Michael Hartig and Ines Gellrich (Hamburg: Edition Körber-Stiftung 2006), p. x-y. 11 Schiller, “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution,” 162. 12 Ibid., 157. 13 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, transl. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 27. 14 See Friedrich Schiller, “Kallias or Concerning Beauty, Letters to Gottfried Körner,” in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. Jay M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/ Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, 2010), 160. 15 Immanuel Kant defines the aesthetic judgment, i.e., the judgment on the beautiful as “pleasure without interest” [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. with intro. and notes J. H. Bernard. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005), paragraph 2, 28], whereas judgments on the agreeable or the good, that is, judgments of the senses or of reason (of which neither, according to Kant, is an aesthetic judgment) are always connected with an interest. In the first case, the interest is in the immediate and individual pleasure of the senses; in the second, in the objective criteria of reason, such as morality, or health. 16 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter XX, 141. 17 Ibid., Letter XXI, 145. 18 Friedrich Schiller, “Letter to the Prince of Augustenburg, July 13, 1793,” quoted from Katerina Deligiorgi, Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York, 2005), 218, n. 9. 19 Ibid., 62. 20 In words similar to the Count of Kent’s lines in Mary Stuart, Fastolffe, the officer of the English army, and Queen Isabeau, Charles’s mother, in The Maid of Orleans report to the English commander Lionel: “The people can no longer be restrained. / With fury they demand the maiden’s death. / In vain your opposition.

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Let her die / And throw her head down from the battlements! / Her blood alone will satisfy the host. / With ladders they begin to scale the walls. / Appease the angry people! Will you wait / Till in blind fury they o’erthrow the tower, / And we beneath its towers are destroyed?” [Friedrich Schiller, The Maid of Orleans, Act V, Scene IX, in Selections from the Dramas of Goethe and Schiller, transl. Anna Swanwick (London: John Murray, 1843), 277]. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Sprichwörtliches,” quoted from James Elstone Dow, A Prussian Liberal: The Life of Eduard von Simson (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981), 193. See Friedrich Schiller, “On the Pathetic (selections),” quoted from Literary Criticism: Pope to Croce, ed. Gay Wilson Allen and Harry Hayden Clark (New York: American Book Company, 1940), 153. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 171. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter XVII, 211. Alt, Friedrich Schiller, 77. The play-drive, according to Schiller, comprises two drives: the material drive and the impulse to form. While the material drive is connected with sensual and living things and, in particular, with all kinds of feelings, sensations and perceptions, the impulse to form is associated with reason and concept, with ideas, laws, and objectivity. In the unification of both, the play drive represents the “living form” as “happy medium.” Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letters XII-XV, in particular Letter XV, 101; 105. Kant denies that smell and taste are capable of aesthetic judgments, arguing that both are guided by interest and have no connection with the imagination as an essential prerequisite for aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic judgments, according to Kant, always take their origin in the imagination: what is being judged is the image produced by the imagination, not the sensual impression itself. Since neither taste nor smell can be imagined or recalled, the gustatory and olfactory senses are incompatible with an aesthetic judgment on the beautiful. As an example, Kant cites the smell of a rose, which is pleasurable but not capable of being judged aesthetically. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 8, 35. In his letter to Körner of February 18, 1793, composed only a few days after his first letter to the Prince of Augustenburg, Schiller writes: “If the judgement of taste is to be absolutely pure, one must completely abstract from it the intrinsic (practical or theoretical) worth of the beautiful object, out of what matter it is formed and what purpose it might serve. May it be what it will!” (“Kallias,” 154). Ibid., Letter to Körner, February 23, 1793, 181. Surely, the fact that Schiller associates mediocre representations with actresses is no coincidence but evidence of the profoundly male discourse on beauty, in which the aesthetic subject is always male, and women are either connected with the merely pleasurable (like female painter Angelika Kauffmann in “On the Sublime”), or objectified as aesthetic objects (see Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter XXV). Schiller, “Kallias,” Letter to Körner, February 23, 1793, 181. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter XXVII, 219. In the theatre almanac for the year 1787 edited by him, Heinrich August Ottokar Reichardt writes: “Attentive listeners and spectators suffer ineffable torment if the noise others produce with mouths, feet, and sticks prevents them from understanding the actors’ words; just as annoying are those who, sitting in the front rows, stand up and walk about, wiggling their heads from side to side to prate with their seat neighbors, thus blocking the view of the stage for those sitting behind; many often go home dissatisfied, having wasted their money.”

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[Heinrich A. O. Reichardt, “Der Lärm in vielen Komödien [On the racket made in many comedies],” in Taschenbuch für die Schaubühne auf das Jahr 1781 (Gotha, 1781), 57]. For the significance of theatre periodicals for the education of the public, see Peter Heßelmann, Gereinigtes Theater? Dramaturgie und Schaubühne im Spiegel deutschsprachiger Theaterperiodika des 18. Jahrhunderts 1750–1800 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002). For the Weimar court theatre as an experimental stage, see Marvin Carlson, Goethe and the Weimar Theatre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), and Erika Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters (Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 1999), 143–55. Einladung zum Abonnement der Generalintendanz (Theater Director’s Invitation for Subscription), September 18, 1801, Generalintendanz des Deutschen Nationaltheaters, Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar, A 10268, Bl. 12. For the behavior of theater audiences in the late eighteenth century, see HansJoachim Jacob, ed., “Das Theater glich einem Irrenhause.” Das Publikum im Theater des 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012). “Theater Gesetze für die Weimarsche Hof-Schauspieler Gesellschaft,” March 7, 1793, Generalintendanz des Deutschen Nationaltheaters 1/1, reprinted in: Jutta Lindner, Ästhetische Erziehung. Goethe und das Weimarer Hoftheater (Bonn 1990), 136–140. Ibid. Friedrich Schiller, “On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy,” 23. Jan Lazardzig, “Ruhe oder Stille? Anmerkungen zu einer Polizey für das Geräusch (1810),” in Agenten der Öffentlichkeit: Theater und Medien im frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Meike Wagner (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014), 104. Ibid., 111. See Birgit Himmelseher, Das Weimarer Hoftheater unter Goethes Leitung: Kunstanspruch und Kulturpolitik im Konflikt (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010), 68. Friedrich Schiller, “On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy,” 23. For the context of this famous anecdote, see Klaus Schwind, “‘Man lache nicht!’: Goethes theatrale Spielverbote. Über die schauspielerischen Unkosten des autonomen Kunstbegriffs,” in Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 21/2 (1996), 66–112. Friedrich Schiller, “On the Pathetic,” 156. Generalintendanz des Deutschen Nationaltheaters 1/2. Friedrich Schiller, “On the Sublime,” quoted from Yuval Noah Harari, The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 306. Arendt particularly thinks of Kant’s distance from the French Revolution, which despite his disapproval of revolutionary action he considers a sublime event in human history. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 54. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2004); idem, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Beth Hinderliter et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 31–50. See Christoph Menke, “Vom Schicksal ästhetischer Erziehung: Rancière, Posa und die Polizei,” in Spieltrieb: Was bringt die Klassik auf die Bühne? Ed. Felix Ensslin (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2006), 66. Ibid. A differentiation needs to be made, however, between Schiller and Goethe in terms of both cultural policy and their respective theater work: Goethe as artistic director having, no doubt, closer relations to the state and the police

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system; Schiller, throughout his life, never assuming a position at a theater or any other official position, such as counseling member of a theater commission [see Peter-André Alt, Schiller. Leben – Werk – Zeit, vol. 2 (München: Beck, 2000), 390]. Goethe’s close involvement with state and cultural politics, by contrast, suggests that what mattered at the Weimar court theatre was never merely an aesthetic education in Schiller’s sense, but always also the education of spectators “as politically mature citizens of a state” [see Birgit Himmelseher, Das Weimarer Hoftheater unter Goethes Leitung: Kunstanspruch und Kulturpolitik im Konflikt (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010), 68]. During rehearsals, Karoline Jagemann reports, Goethe would take a seat in the pit, taking the role of severe judge and moral authority, while Schiller would attentively follow the action on stage, “arms folded and leaning against the scenery.” Quoted from: Annemarie Matzke, Arbeit am Theater: Eine Diskursgeschichte der Probe (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012), 135. Jacques Rancière differentiates between politics and the police as two opposed orders of the sensual. The police, following Foucault’s concept of it, corresponds with the prevailing hegemonic order that governs the visible and the speakable. While the police always aims at obtaining this order, avoiding any kind of unrest, “politics,” in Rancière’s sense, represents an alternative order of equality, which also comprises elements and agents that are excluded, invisible and nonspeakable, and whose relationship with the police is therefore principally characterized by dissent. Politics of the aesthetic, thus understood, stands for the equality of “the aesthetic regime of art,” where, other than in the ethical or representative regimes, anything, regardless of its subject and its meaning, may become art and where all hierarchies of the sensual have been done away with. According to Rancière, aesthetic experience in this sense has an emancipatory potential, inasmuch as it relates to a sensorium beyond the social order, beyond the prevailing orders of the speakable and the visible, facilitating the participation of all. Historically, Schiller’s aesthetic state is the most important reference point for Rancière’s aesthetic-political theory. Joseph Vogl, “Ästhetik und Polizey,” in Ensslin, Spieltrieb, 106. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Letter to the Commander of Jena, dated March 21, 1803,” in Weimar Edition, IV, 4637. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter II, 9.

Bibliography Alt, Peter-André. Schiller: Leben – Werk – Zeit, vol. 2. München: Beck, 2000. Alt, Peter-André. Friedrich Schiller. München: Beck, 2009. Arendt, Hannah. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Carlson, Marvin. Goethe and the Weimar Theatre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. Deligiorgi, Katerina. Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment. Albany: State University of New York, 2005. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters. Tübingen: Francke, 1999. Generalintendanz des Deutschen Nationaltheaters. “Einladung zum Abonnement der Generalintendanz” (“Theater Director’s Invitation for Subscription”), September 18, 1801, Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar (STAW), A 10268, Bl. 12.

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Generalintendanz des Deutschen Nationaltheaters. “Theater-Gesetze für die Weimarsche Hof-Schauspieler Gesellschaft.” March 7, 1793, reprinted in: Jutta Lindner, Ästhetische Erziehung. Goethe und das Weimarer Hoftheater, Bonn: Bouvier, 1990, 136–140. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Sprichwörtliches.” Quoted from James Elstone Dow, A Prussian Liberal: The Life of Eduard von Simson, 193. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Letter to the Commander of Jena, dated March 21, 1803.” In Weimar Edition, IV, 4637. Jacob, Hans-Joachim, ed. “Das Theater glich einem Irrenhause”: Das Publikum im Theater des 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. Hamm, Christian. “Freedom in Appearance: Notes on Schiller and His Development of Kant’s Aesthetics.” In Kant in Brazil. Edited by Frederick Rauscher and Daniel Omar Perez. Rochester: University of Rochester Press/North American Kant Society, 2012: 321–336. Hararai, Yuval Noah. The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Hegemann, Carl. “Moralische Anstalt als Marketing-Strategie: Was es heißt, ein Mensch zu sein.” In Theater proben: Das Körber Studio Junge Regie 3, edited by Kai-Michael Hartig and Ines Gellrich, p. x-y. Hamburg: Edition Körber-Stiftung, 2006. Heßelmann, Peter. Gereinigtes Theater? Dramaturgie und Schaubühne im Spiegel deutschsprachiger Theaterperiodika des 18. Jahrhunderts 1750–1800. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002. Himmelseher, Birgit. Das Weimarer Hoftheater unter Goethes Leitung: Kunstanspruch und Kulturpolitik im Konflikt. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated with introduction and notes by J. H. Bernard. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005. Lazardzig, Jan. “Ruhe oder Stille? Anmerkungen zu einer Polizey für das Geräusch (1810).” In Agenten der Öffentlichkeit: Theater und Medien im frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Edited by Meike Wagner. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014: 97–116. Matzke, Annemarie. Arbeit am Theater: Eine Diskursgeschichte der Probe. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. Menke, Christoph. “Vom Schicksal ästhetischer Erziehung: Rancière, Posa und die Polizei.” In Felix Ensslin, Spieltrieb: Was bringt die Klassik auf die Bühne? Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2006: 58–70. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Rancière, Jacques. “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics.” In Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics. Edited by Beth Hinderliter et al. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009: 31–50. Reichardt, Heinrich August Ottokar. “Der Lärm in vielen Komödien [On the racket made in many comedies].” In Taschenbuch für die Schaubühne auf das Jahr 1781. Gotha, 1781: 57–58.

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Ruppert, Rainer. Labor der Seele und der Emotionen. Funktionen des Theaters im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Sigma, 1995. Safranski, Rüdiger. Schiller: oder Die Erfindung des Deutschen Idealismus. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2004. Schiller, Friedrich. The Maid of Orleans. In Selections from the Dramas of Goethe and Schiller. Translated by Anna Swanwick. London: John Murray, 1843: 159–289. Schiller, Friedrich. “Letter to the Prince of Augustenburg (July 13, 1793).” Quoted from George Peabody Gooch, “Germany and the French Revolution.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, third series, vol. X (1916): 51–76. Schiller, Friedrich. “On the Pathetic (selections).” Quoted from: Literary Criticism: Pope to Croce, edited by Gay Wilson Allen and Harry Hayden Clark. New York: American Book Company, 1940: 150–9. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Edited and translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and Leonard A. Willoughby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Schiller, Friedrich. “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution.” In Sources of Dramatic Theory, vol. 2: Voltaire to Hugo. Edited by Michael J. Sidnell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994: 155–62. Schiller, Friedrich. “On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy.” Translated by A. Lodge. Quoted from Greek Drama. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Broomall: Chelsea House, 2004: 18–9. Schiller, Friedrich. Schiller, “Vom Erhabenen.” In Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5. Edited by Herbert Göpfert and Gerhard Fricke. München: Hanser 1962: 489–513. Schiller, Friedrich. “Kallias or Concerning Beauty, Letters to Gottfried Körner.” In Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. Edited by Jay M. Bernstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, 2010: 145–183. Schwind, Klaus. “‘Man lache nicht!’: Goethes theatrale Spielverbote. Über die schauspielerischen Unkosten des autonomen Kunstbegriffs.” In Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 21/2 (1996): 66–112. Vogl, Joseph. “Ästhetik und Polizey.” In Felix Ensslin, Spieltrieb: Was bringt die Klassik auf die Bühne? Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2006: 101–111.

6

Clairvoyance and transformation Wagner’s neuroaesthetics Matthew Wilson Smith

With its emphasis on calculation over interpretation and sensation over representation, with its attempt to root artistic reception in the body—more precisely, in the nervous system—neuroaesthetics is emerging as our age’s chief mode of transformative aesthetics.1 Aesthetic transformation has become neurological first and foremost; it is not so much that psychology has disappeared as that it has ceased to be separable from the inner electrical drama of the body. It is a remarkable theoretical condition, and one of its forerunners, though largely unacknowledged as such, was Richard Wagner. The key text here is Wagner’s “Beethoven” essay of 1870, a work frequently seen as critical to Wagner’s theoretical development but rarely read in the light of discourses of neurology. The work decisively marks Wagner’s theoretical turn toward Schopenhauer, whose World as Will and Representation had a revelatory effect on him after first reading it in 1854. The trouble is that Wagner’s “Beethoven” essay, like all of Wagner’s prose, is far more often referenced than read. And even when read, it is more often misread than understood. The “Beethoven” essay, and the change in Wagnerian artistic practice that follows it, has been understood by generations of critics and composers (including Felix Weingartner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Arnold Schoenberg) as a turn toward abstract metaphysics and deep psychological states—as a turn, in other words, away from the visible body.2 And Wagner’s essay provides ample support for this reading. After asserting that the drama is subordinate to music (and thereby abandoning his “three sisters” idea of the early Zurich writings), Wagner claims that the wellspring of music is the dark inner world of the psyche.3 In music, gesture is stripped of its corporeality, for music expresses “gesture’s inmost essence in a language so direct that, once we are saturated with the music, our eyesight is positively incapacitated.”4 Music drama, the essay suggests, will be an oddly disembodied affair, a staging of consciousness more than action. All of this Wagner derives and adapts from Schopenhauer. And yet, as we will see, the “Beethoven” essay also represents a sharp turn toward an aesthetics of re-embodiment. How so? And is this a contradiction? To take the second question first: it is no contradiction, though perhaps it

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has something of the flavor of a paradox. For neurology represents for Wagner, as for many of his contemporaries, something like an Aufhebung of body and spirit. The nervous system is on the one hand utterly somatic, and yet on the other hand, particularly before developments in microscopy, largely invisible and even occult in its operations. In the wake of Volta’s popular experiments on the electrical stimulation of frog’s legs, the nervous system could be viewed as at once a material explanation for immaterial things (brain rather than mind) and an immaterial explanation for material things (electricity rather than blood). Wagner’s double-sided understanding of the nervous system hardly marks a break with Schopenhauer—indeed, nowhere is Wagner more Schopenhauerian than in his fascination with the paradox of neurology. A look back at Schopenhauer’s magnum opus will help clarify the point. *

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Schopenhauer struggles throughout The World as Will and Representation with a dissonant cultural condition by attempting to reconcile German idealism with the discoveries of nineteenth-century biology, particularly the biology of mind. Neurological studies play a significant role, and are even more central to the second volume (published in 1844) than to the first (published in 1819).5 Much of the second volume is devoted to harmonizing the neurophysiological discoveries of these figures with the post-Kantian idealism elaborated in the first volume. The neurophysiological picture of the psyche, Schopenhauer concludes, is not only compatible with the idealist; it supports and completes it. One of Schopenhauer’s least appreciated contributions to this scientific discussion is his conception of the mutual participation of external stimuli, sense organs, and the brain in the production of perception. Throughout his oeuvre, Schopenhauer argues that sensory experience is essentially an internal affair of the body. Though sensations may stimulate the nerves from without, our experience of these sensations is entirely internal, and our brains thereby form a kind of mental theatre: our sense of sight, for instance, really “resides within our head, for there is its whole scene of action; much the same as in the theatre we see mountains, forest, and sea, yet everything remains within the house.”6 Schopenhauer took special delight in the apparent irreconcilability of the wide world of perception and the three-pound pudding that produces it. The second volume of World as Will and Representation opens with the shock of this difference. “In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered over with a hard cold crust; on this crust a mouldy film has produced living and knowing beings: this is empirical truth, the real, the world”—Schopenhauer writes lyrically, until abruptly coming to: “all this in the first instance is only phenomenon of the brain.”7 The chapter concludes with a debate between “The Subject” and “Matter,” arguing over which one

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contains the world. The argument reaches a crescendo of sorts in Chapters 22-24, in which Schopenhauer bluntly states that thought is as grossly physical as digestion, that “the intellect, being of a secondary nature, is absolutely dependent on a single organ, the brain, and that it is the function of the brain, just as grasping is the function of the hand; consequently, that it is physical like digestion, not metaphysical like the will.”8 This distinction between the intellect and the will—the former of which is an utterly material manifestation of a neurological process, while the latter is an ultimately unknowable metaphysical drive—allows Schopenhauer to balance, however precariously, neurological naturalism with critical idealism. But he never allows the reader to forget the baffling disparity between the brain’s god-like apprehension and the quintessence of dust that is its circuitry. The shadow of The World as Will and Representation hangs over the entirety of Wagner’s “Beethoven,” but the essay was also inspired by one of Schopenhauer’s lesser works, an essay entitled “On Spirit Seeing and Everything Connected Therewith” (“Versuch über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt”), included in the first volume of Schopenhauer’s collection Parerga and Paralipomena (1851).9 In the essay, Schopenhauer wonders whether such mysterious occurrences as dreams, clairvoyance, somnambulism, mesmerism, and oracular states might be explicable both idealistically and neurologically—that is, as products of the fact that the knowable world is a representation of our consciousness and our brain. While some of these phenomena would now be dismissed by scientists as mere occultism, and were likewise scorned by many at the time, they were by no means universally rejected as fields for scientific investigation. For Schopenhauer, while the reality of such phenomena had been demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt, their cause and nature remained mysterious. Recent developments in neurology, which showed that internal stimuli can produce effects identical to those of external stimuli, provided a possible solution to the mystery. [S]ensory nerves can […] be stimulated to their characteristic sensations from within as well as from without. In the same way, the brain can be influenced by stimuli coming from the interior of the organism to perform its function of intuitively perceiving forms that fill space. For phenomena that have originated in this way will be quite indistinguishable from those that are occasioned by sensations in the sense-organs which were produced by external causes.10 To Schopenhauer, neurology had collapsed any strict separation between internal and external experience since sensations, in both cases, were mediated through the nervous system and could well register to the brain as experientially identical. In the end, all experience is a neurological condition. The most obvious example of the sensory reality of internal states is dreaming, an apparently disembodied experience rooted in the nervous

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system. Dreams arise when “the brain, that sole seat and organ of all representations or mental pictures, is cut off from the external excitation through the senses as well as from the internal through ideas.”11 As a result of this isolation from external impressions, the brain becomes far more attuned to the quiet rumblings of the organism’s inner life—specifically, to the operations of nerves and blood-vessels, which now arise like “the murmuring of the spring which is heard at night but was rendered inaudible by the noises of the day.”12 Perceiving these primordial inner sounds, the brain elaborates upon them “just as it does those that come to it from without, moulding, as it were, a foreign material into forms that are peculiar and habitual to it.”13 The process is essentially neural: “with intuitive perception through the dream-organ, the stimulation starts from the interior of the organism and is transmitted from the plastic nervous system to the brain that is thereby induced to make an intuitive perception which wholly resembles that produced in the ordinary way.”14 Listening to the inner hum of the nerves, the dream-organ inscribes it into its own language of time, space, and causality. Yet more intriguing, if far less common, is the phenomenon of clairvoyant dreaming, such as when dreamers allegedly see “beyond the bedroom” into the real world outside, when sleepwalkers “climb up to the most dangerous precipices on the narrowest path,” when people have oracular dreams, or when people in a state of waking sleep see spirits. Such curiosities, however, lose their “absolute incomprehensibility if we reflect that […] the objective world is a mere phenomenon of the brain”—a conclusion reached, from opposite directions, by Kantian idealism and contemporary neurology, which jointly show that “space, time, and causality” are essentially “brainfunctions.”15 For Schopenhauer, then, the fact that actions should have effects across space (such as a dreamer perceiving things miles away), or across time (such as a dreamer receiving oracular messages), or without apparent causality (such as a magnetizer controlling a somnambulant subject with hand gestures) only reveals the truth of Kant’s insight that things in themselves lie beyond the conditions of our knowledge, as well as the truth of the neurological insight that all representations occur in the brain. By “clairvoyance” (Hellsehn) Schopenhauer means not merely parapsychological phenomena such as seeing-at-a-distance; more metaphysically, he means the fact that the deep dreamer has direct access to the root reality of the world, a reality that eludes the transcendental conditions of consciousness. The dreamer thus sees clearly into the vortex of the Will. Given that Schopenhauer makes the same claim about music—that it is a direct expression of the Will—it is only a simple step to draw the further conclusion that the deep dreamer and the inspired musician are nearly synonymous, and that their common name is clairvoyant. Schopenhauer did not take this step, but Wagner did. *

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This emphatic turn to the unseen inner realm and the privileging of music over drama makes it tempting to read the “Beethoven” essay—and indeed all the work of Wagner’s late period—as a rejection of the material and corporeal in favor of the spiritual and disembodied. But such a reading misses the centrality of the invisible, neural body to the writings of both Schopenhauer and Wagner. In truth, Wagner’s essay, like Schopenhauer’s, is at once inward-looking and embodied, simultaneously concerned with flights of mind and pulsations of nerves. Thus the reader is on one hand treated to a celebration of the limitless powers of musical genius, while on the other being continuously reminded of the centrality of embodiedness to Wagner’s vision. Wagner uses variations of the word “physiology” (Physiologie, physiologisch, etc.) nine times in the essay and references the brain (Gehirn) some 18 times, and such references almost always appear in contexts that recall us—sometimes jarringly—to the corporeal nature of apparently spiritual or even spiritualist phenomena, as when Wagner explains that “our business would lie less with the metaphysical than with the physiologic explanation of so-called ‘second sight’.”16 It should therefore come as little surprise when, midway through the essay, Wagner suddenly turns from a meditation on Beethoven’s defiant and introspective character to remarks on the dimensions of his brain-pan. Though it has been an axiom of physiology that, for high mental gifts, a large brain must be set in a thin and delicate brain-pan—as if to facilitate immediate recognition of things outside us,—yet upon examination of the dead man’s remains some years ago it transpired that, in keeping with an exceptional strength of the whole bony skeleton, the skull was of quite unusual density and thickness. Thus Nature shielded a brain of exceeding tenderness, that it might solely look within, and chronicle the visions of a lofty heart in quiet undisturbed.17 Such physiognomic rationalizations, not atypical of the time, are still worth noting: where (according to Wagner) contemporary cranial theory held that a genius ought to have a thin brain-pan, Beethoven’s thick one serves to prove his genius anyway, since such a skull could only be intended by nature to pillow such a mind. Doublethink aside, Wagner clearly intends such a sharply materialist understanding of artistic creativity, which echoes the association of genius with a “capacious brain” in Wagner’s letter to Liszt of 15 years earlier, to provoke. And so he presses the point, conceding with some relish that he will undoubtedly offend “all Aesthetes” who balk at deriving art “from what appears to them a purely pathologic element.”18 Breaking with such aestheticizing, Wagner points toward a dramaturgy that, for all the essay’s emphasis on “inner drama,” actually advocates less a de-corporealization than a re-corporealization of the stage—along neuroaesthetic lines. The music-drama will draw from, stage, and directly intone the body’s neural inner life.

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A royal road to this inner life—and therefore to music-drama—is the phenomenon of clairvoyance, which Wagner makes a vital property of musical genius and a font of music-drama. Reminding the reader once again that clairvoyance is no airily mystical fantasy but a “physiologic phenomenon,” Wagner recalls that Schopenhauer had connected it to the visions of dreams; expanding on this, Wagner now postulates the existence of a “special organ” in our brain for the purpose of inner musical apprehension, a “cerebral attribute” that would be “analogous to the Dream-organ.”19 Music arises, like dreams, from cerebral processes: “[a]s the world of dreams can only come to vision through a special function of the brain, so Music enters our consciousness through a kindred operation.”20 By turning inward, the brain hears primal tones—the “direct utterance of the Will.”21 In characteristic fashion, Wagner pushes the argument to its extreme, concluding that Beethoven’s late genius must correspond precisely to his increasing deafness, which compelled him to draw directly from the “inner tone-world” of his brain.22 These were not, for Wagner, mere airy speculations but a precise description of the way in which he himself had experienced musical inspiration. In his autobiography, Wagner famously describes the moment when the first notes of Rheingold—the moment of origin of the Moment of Origin—occurred to him. It was a state of somnolent clairvoyance that came after returning from a walk in Spezi (where he had been recovering from dysentery) in 1853. Returning in the afternoon, I stretched myself, dead tired, on a hard couch, awaiting the long-desired hour of sleep. It did not come; but I fell into a kind of somnolent state, in which I suddenly felt as though I were sinking in swiftly flowing water. The rushing sound formed itself in my brain into a musical sound, the chord of E flat major, which continually re-echoed in broken forms; these broken chords seemed to be melodic passages of increasing motion, yet the pure triad of E flat major never changed, but seemed by its continuance to impart infinite significance to the element in which I was sinking. I awoke in sudden terror from my doze, feeling as though the waves were rushing high above my head. I at once recognized that the orchestral overture to the Rheingold, which must have long lain latent within me, though it had been unable to find definite form, had at last been revealed to me. I then quickly realized my own nature; the stream of life was not to flow to me from without, but from within. I decided to return to Zürich immediately, and begin the composition of my great poem.23 (2:603) What Wagner describes here is simply a realization of the theories of the “Beethoven” essay—the world-soul rushing into the brain of the mediumistic artist.

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Though Wagner does not explicitly draw them in his Beethoven essay, there are disturbing analogies between the hypnotic visions of the clairvoyant somnambulist (dem Gesichte der hellsehend gewordenen Somnambule) and the delusional visions of the hysteric. If the musical genius, for Wagner, is linked to the clairvoyant somnambulist, and the clairvoyant somnambulist to the hysteric, then it is a single tenuous element that separates the genius from his feminine other. The possibility of the collapse of these two terms— genius and hysteric—is one of the dangers of Wagner’s neurological aesthetics, a threat made more distinct by the fact that the clairvoyant somnambulist, like the hysteric, was typically gendered feminine.24 The genius, already associated with femininity by his affiliation with somnambulism, was set on a potentially slippery slope toward the hysterical woman—a slope made only more slippery by the fact that Wagner’s postSchopenhauerian conception of genius is already of a creature poised between transcendent sainthood and neurological monstrosity. In his Manuscript Remains (Handschriftlicher Nachlass, 1831), Schopenhauer had already wrestled with this problem, attempting to separate the genius from the clairvoyant by placing them at opposite poles: “The genius and the clairvoyant somnambulist are the two abnormal enhancements of the two opposite centers of the nervous system in their functions. The former is possible only with the male sex, the latter only with the female, and perhaps with boys before the age of puberty.”25 Wagner, who always considered the artist to be an androgynous figure, could not take refuge in such neatly gendered binaries.26 For Wagner, unlike for Schopenhauer, the genius is not antithetical but of a piece with the somnolent clairvoyant, and thus shares an odd kinship with the hysteric. The connection between genius and hysteria is drawn yet tighter by the fact that the audible mark of clairvoyance is that clichéd expression of the hysteric: the anguished cry. Wagner argues that the most intimate link between the inner source of music and its outward expression is the cry of one awakened from a nightmare; it is from this primal scream that all music ultimately derives. From “the most terrifying” dreams “we wake with a scream, the immediate expression of the anguished will.”27 If we take this “[s]cream in all the diminutions of its vehemence, down to the gentler cry of longing,” we find “the root-element of every human message to the ear.”28 Such utterances arise spontaneously from our own anguished will and are understood immediately and unmistakably when voiced by others. “If the scream, the moan, the murmured happiness in our own mouth is the most direct utterance of the will’s emotion, so when brought us by our ear we understand it past denial as utterance of the same emotion; no illusion is possible here, as in the daylight Show, to make us deem the essence of the world outside us not wholly identical with our own.”29 Primordial sounds, rather than primordial gestures, now constitute the original language, and in the hands of the composer these cries echo the ubiquitous cry of the world.

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It is a cry that is meant to pulse through the body of the listener as well. Herein lies the greatest difference between the neuro-aesthetic theories of Schopenhauer and Wagner: for Schopenhauer, all art (including music) demands distanced contemplation rather than ecstatic immersion; it is in this sense that Wagner’s aesthetics in the “Beethoven” essay are transformative in a way that Schopenhauer’s are not. “[T]he affections of the will itself, and hence actual pain and actual pleasure, must not be excited” by music, writes Schopenhauer in World as Will and Representation.30 Only by maintaining emotional distance “does music never cause us actual suffering, but still remains pleasant even in its most painful chords.”31 In real life, on the other hand, “we ourselves are […] the vibrating string that is stretched and plucked,” and so feel the pains of the will far too closely to take pleasure in them.32 Such thoughts are far from Wagner’s “Beethoven” essay, which describes the “prodigious breakingdown of the floodgates of Appearance” that lifts the musician almost to the level of the saint.33 When we listen to a masterpiece, we fall into an “enchanted state” in which we are buffeted by “a pulse, a thrill, a throb of joy, of yearning, fearing, grief and ecstasy, whilst it all appears to take its motion from the depths of our own inner being.”34 Art provides no refuge from (painful, blissful) transformation; as Walter Pater put it two years before Wagner’s “Beethoven” essay, art revivifies us by “getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.”35 Here again, a sharp opposition drawn by Schopenhauer is blurred by Wagner. For the philosopher, direct immersion in the will would be immersion in horror, and the distancing effect of music is critical to its aesthetic effect; music is the stained glass through which we can view the sun. For the composer, on the other hand, music is the art not of distance but of immersion, and what for Schopenhauer would be the road to madness is for Wagner the stuff of ecstasy.36 As with Wagner’s collapse of distinctions between the genius and the somnolent clairvoyant, and thus the peculiar proximity of inspiration to hysteria, so again with the elision of music and the primordial will, and thus the peculiar proximity of artistic enchantment with madness. The Wagnerian genius described in the “Beethoven” essay is an oddly androgynous creature, a sleepwalking medium of dreamy masterpieces. The audience, too, is all swoon—a collective, clairvoyant dreamer, experiencing the brain of the inspired artist. In other prose writings appearing shortly after the “Beethoven” essay, Wagner elaborates on the function of true music-drama (which is to say: the ancient Greek stage and the modern Wagnerian one) for the inculcation of clairvoyance in its audience. The ancient tragedian, Wagner writes in “On Poetry and Composition” (“Über das Dichten und Komponieren,” 1879) “set the Folk itself in his clairvoyant state.”37 The ancient chorus, he writes in “Actors and Singers” (“Über Schauspieler und Sänger,” 1872), “rapt the nation of spectators to a state of clairvoyance in which the hero, now appearing in a mask upon the stage,

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had all the import of a ghostly vision.”38 And in his speech on the occasion of the consecration of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, Wagner claims that “spectral music sounding from the ‘mystic gulf,’ like vapors rising from the holy womb of Gaia beneath the Pythia’s tripod, inspires [the spectator] with that clairvoyance in which the scenic picture melts into the truest effigy of life itself.”39 The most famous innovations of the Festspielhaus—the creation of a deep orchestra pit (“the mystic gulf”) that entirely hid the orchestra from view, the installation of rows of amphitheatre-style seats that allowed all members of the audience an unobstructed view of the stage, and the extinguishing of houselights during performance—were developed by Wagner (together with his designers Gottfried Semper and Carl Brandt) precisely for this purpose. Such technologies would help the audience enter a collective condition of somnolent clairvoyance, such that it could sympathetically vibrate to the brain-state of the musical genius at the moment of inspiration. *

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A certain Schopenhauerian neuroaesthetics inspires not only the theory of Wagner’s music dramas but their casts of characters as well. Has any other writer given voice to so many lucid dreamers? Erda, the earth-goddess of the Ring cycle who eternally sleeps at the font of clairvoyant dreams, arises in Rheingold and again in Siegfried to prophesy the course of future events. In Götterdämmerung, Hagen, in a state between dreaming and waking, with eyes open but still asleep, is visited by his father Alberich. In Tristan and Isolde, the realms of day and night are repeatedly analogized to those of illusory appearance and of inner insight, culminating in Tristan’s clairvoyant vision of Isolde’s approach in Act 3 and Isolde’s concluding Liebestod. As Hans Sachs sings in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, written two years before the “Beethoven” essay: My friend! It is precisely the poet’s task To interpret and record his dreams. Believe me, man’s truest madness Is revealed to him in a dream: All poetic art and versification Is no more than true dream interpretation.40 In the “Romantic operas” of his pre-Schopenhauerian period, clairvoyant states present little challenge to aesthetic integration; that is, gestures, words, and music straightforwardly reflect one another during these passages. Consider, for example, the character of Senta from The Flying Dutchman (1843). As her former lover Erik relates his prophetic dream of the Flying Dutchman coming to steal her away, Senta assumes the position of the mesmerized clairvoyant: she “sits down exhausted in the armchair; at the

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beginning of Erik’s tale she falls to sleep as though magnetized, so that it seems as though she also dreams the dream told by him.”41 The musical accompaniment reflects Senta’s slide into lucid dreaming, shifting tempo from Presto to Sostenuto as the reverie begins, encouraging the audience to share in the couple’s mutual hallucination. The orchestra faithfully mirrors Erik’s words: a tremulo in the strings underscores his mention of the “strange ship” (fremdes Schiff), the Dutchman leitmotif sounds after his description of how “wondrous” (wunderbar) the vision was, and so forth. Turning to another opera from the Romantic period, Lohengrin (1850) features the clairvoyant dreamer Elsa, who envisions the arrival of her magic knight in shining armor. She slips into a somnambulistic “sweet sleep,” an effect so peculiar that the assembled knights respond: “How strange! Does she dream? Is she transported?”42 Her words and gestures are faithfully mirrored by the orchestra, from her first drift into trance (accompanied by a sustained E in the woodwinds, gradually fading away) through her ecstatic vision (accompanied by the Holy Grail leitmotif high in the violins, which tremble thereafter). In such passages, Senta and Elsa are figures not only of the ideal clairvoyant but also of the ideal spectator of Wagnerian opera, sharing in the salvific hallucination of the tragic stage. By the time we arrive at Wagner’s final opera, however, clairvoyance has become a far more problematic affair, constantly in danger of spilling over into hysteria. The central figure here is Parsifal’s wild witch and redeemed sinner, Kundry. Chronically exhausted, magnetized by a powerful will, deeply connected to the “inner tone world,” Kundry exemplifies many of the traits of Wagner’s somnolent clairvoyant. Though cursed and cursing, she sees deeply and speaks prophetically; as Gurnemanz tells Parsifal, “She spoke the truth; for Kundry never lies, and she has seen much.”43 Act 2 opens with the wizard Klingsor rousing her from a “deathly slumber” (Todesschlafe) and as she awakes, she “bursts forth a terrible cry.”44 Recall that, in the cry of the awakened sleeper, Wagner finds a primal form of clairvoyance and “the root-element of every human message to the ear”— the origin both of language and of music. Unsurprisingly, after her waking cry in Act 2, we find that Kundry sings “hoarsely, and in broken sounds as if seeking to regain speech—here primordial sound gropes toward linguistic expression.”45 Tellingly, Kundry’s cries—unlike, say, Senta’s scream upon seeing the Dutchman—exist only in the stage directions: un-scored, they function neither as speech nor as music but as elementary sonic sensations. *

*

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William James published his Principles of Psychology (1890) less than a decade after the premiere of Parsifal. He concludes his chapter on “The Mind-stuff Theory” with a statement of exasperation. The science of the brain, he feels, seems irreconcilable with the mysteries of the soul.

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What shall we do? Many would find relief at this point in celebrating the mystery of the Unknowable and the “awe” which we should feel at having such a principle to take final charge of our perplexities. Others would rejoice that the finite and separatist view of things with which we started had at last developed its contradictions, and was about to lead us dialectically upwards to some ‘higher synthesis’ in which inconsistencies cease from troubling and logic is at rest. It may be a constitutional infirmity, but I can take no comfort in such devices for making a luxury of intellectual defeat. They are but spiritual chloroform. Better live on the ragged edge, better gnaw the file forever!46 In the end, James resolves to leave the mystery uncapitalized (no eternal “Mystery” here) and, for the time being at least, unresolved. “I confess, therefore,” he concludes with something of a sigh, “that to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the line of least logical resistance, so far as we yet have attained.” Wagner shared James’ fascination with the dissonance between neuroscientific and psychological (even parapsychological) accounts of this thing or things we dub brain/mind/psyche/soul, even if Wagner’s Germanic flights of speculation contrast sharply with James’ Anglo-American prudence. Deeply influenced by his idiosyncratic reading of The World as Will and Representation, Wagner heightens the tensions James describes. In place of James’ cautiously understated soul, Wagner’s vision couples a brutally material brain with a clairvoyant psyche: we are such stuff as dreams are made on. This anthropology was inseparable from the project of Wagner’s music dramas, which sought transformation at the neurological level even as they reached toward the ineffable. By transforming stuff we may transform dreams; by transforming dreams we may transform stuff.

Notes 1 The rise of neuroaesthetics in the last quarter century has been inexorable. A starting point may be located in the discovery of mirror neurons around 1990 by scientists at the University of Parma, which suggested ways in which artworks create empathy through neural circuitry. These suggestions have been avidly taken up by scholars of literature, theatre, and art [Marco Iacoboni and Deborah Jenson, “Literary Biomimesis: Mirror Neurons and the Ontological Priority of Representation,” California Italian Studies 2.1 (2011), retrieved December 4, 2014 from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sc3j6dj; Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Vittorio Gallese, “Mirror Neurons, Embodied Simulation, and the Neural Basis of Social Identification,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 19 (2009): 519-36]. Starting around the same time, a series of experiments measured the experience of “chills” while listening to music and linked these feelings to neural centers connected with separation distress and to neural centers connected with reward processing [Herbert Lindenberger, “Arts in the Brain; or, What Might Neuroscience Tell Us?” in Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama

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(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 20-2]. With increasing precision, beauty itself is being mapped with the aid of fMRIs. Hideaki Kawabata and Semir Zeki claim to have found the “neural correlates of beauty” in the orbitofrontal cortex, while Oshin Vartanian and Vinod Goel discover the “neuroanatomical correlates of aesthetic preference for paintings” in three regions of the brain (the bilateral occipital gyri, left cingulate sulcus, and bilateral fusiform gyrus) and a team from the University of Pennsylvania agree that the fusiform gyrus and adjacent areas are central to the processing of beautiful portraits [Hideaki Kawabata and Semir Zeki, “Neural Correlates of Beauty,” Journal of Neurophysiology 91.1 (2004): 1699-705; Vinod Goel and Oshin Vartanian, “Neuroanatomical Correlates of Aesthetic Preference for Paintings,” NeuroReport 15 (2004): 893-7; Anjan Chatterjee et al., “The Neural Response to Facial Attractiveness,” Neuropsychology 12 (2009): 135-43]. A partial listing of relevant scholarly groups founded since the turn of the millennium would include Art and Mind, Artbrain.org, the Association of Neuroesthetics, the International Network for Neuroaesthetics, the Institute of Neuroesthetics, the Italian Society of Neuroesthetics Semi Zeki, and The NeuroArts Lab. The reading is particularly well expressed by Carl Dahlhaus in his stillilluminating 1969 study of Wagner’s use of gesture, which argues that the “Beethoven” essay is the critical turning-point in Wagner’s shift from an “outer drama” of physical gesture to an “inner drama” of mental states [Carl Dahlhaus, Die Bedeutung des Gestischen in Wagners Musikdramen (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1970)]. Mary Ann Smart notes that Carolyn Abbate’s conception of Wagner’s shift from “scenic allegory” to “acoustic allegory” around the period of Tristan and Isolde has much in common with Dahlhaus’ reading, despite the fact that Abbate tends not to draw on Wagner’s prose writings in her understanding of his work [Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-century Opera (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 165]. Richard Wagner, “Beethoven,” in vol. 2 of Prose Works, trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 64, 67. Ibid., 76. Especially in this second volume, composed during a deep immersion in medical writings, Schopenhauer draws heavily on several prominent physiologists of the previous generation. Three Romantic-era physiologists are especially prominent: Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813), who established the journal of psychology in Germany and coined the term “psychiatry” (Psychiatrie) in 1808; Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757-1808), a physiologist and materialist philosopher who argued for connections between psychology and the nervous system, whose work Schopenhauer first encountered in 1824; and Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771-1802), an anatomist who pioneered the use of the microscope to study human biology, whose work Schopenhauer first encountered in 1838. In addition to this earlier generation of scientists, Schopenhauer also drew on four contemporaries: Charles Bell, Marshall Hall, François Magendie, and Johannes Müller. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), 22; “daher liegt das Außer uns, (wohin wir, auf Anlass der Gesichtsempfindungen, Gegenstände versetzen,) selbst innerhalb unsers Kopfes: denn da ist sein ganzer Schauplatz. Ungefähr wie wir im Theater Berge, Wald und Meer sehen, aber doch Alles im Hause bleibt” [Arthur Schopenhauer, Hauptwerke, vol. 2, ed. Paul Deussen (Munich: R. Piper, 19111923), 26]. “Im unendlichen Raum zahllose leuchtende Kugeln, um jede von welchen etwa ein Dutzend kleinerer, beleuchteter sich wälzt, die inwendig heiß, mit erstarrter,

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kalter Rinde überzogen sind, auf der ein Schimmelüberzug lebende und erkennende Wesen erzeugt hat; — dies ist die empirische Wahrheit, das Reale, die Welt. […] Jenes alles zunächst doch nur ein Gehirnphänomen.” Ibid., 287; “dass der Intellekt, als sekundäre Natur, durchgängig abhängt von einem einzelnen Organ, dem Gehirn” [278]. “On Spirit Seeing” was influential not only for Wagner but also for Freud, who mentions the essay three times in The Interpretation of Dreams. Schopenhauer, The World as Will, 236; “wie also alle Sinnesnerven sowohl von innen, als von außen, zu ihren eigenthümlichen Empfindungen erregt werden können; auf gleiche Weise kann auch das Gehirn durch Reize, die aus dem Innern des Organismus kommen , bestimmt werden, seine Funktion der Anschauung raumerfüllender Gestalten zu vollziehn; wo denn die so enstandenen Erscheinungen gar nicht zu unterscheiden seyn werden von den durch Empfindungen in den Sinnesorganen veranlaßten, welche durch äußere Ursachen hervorgerufen wurden.” [263]. Ibid., 261. Ibid., 235; “wie wir bei Nacht die Quelle rieseln hören, die der Lärm des Tages unvernehmbar macht” [262]. Ibid., 248; “das Gehirn, welches nun, seiner Natur getreu, diese inneren Eindrücke eben so wie die ihm von außen kommenden verarbeitet, gleichsam einen fremden Stoff in seine ihm selbst eigenen und gewohnten Formen gießend“”[276]. Ibid., 302; “während hingegen bei der Anschauung durch das Traumorgan die Erregung vom Innern des Organismus ausgeht und vom plastischen Nervensystem, aus sich in das Gehirn fortpflanzt” [335]. Ibid., 240, 241, 263, 263; “dass er über das Schlafgemach hinausreicht; klettern an den gefährlichsten Abgründen hin, auf den schmalsten Stegen ; verlieren wenigstens seine absolute Unbegreiflichkeit, wenn wir wohl erwägen, dass, wie ich so oft gesagt habe, die objektive Welt ein bloßes Gehirnphänomen ist; Raum, Zeit, und Kausalität; Gehirnfunktionen” [268, 269, 293, 293]. Wagner, “Beethoven,” 109; “Es käme hierbei zunächst nicht auf die metaphysische, sondern auf die physiologische Erklärung des sogenannten ‚zweiten Gesichtes‘ an” [Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 9 (Leipzig: C. S. W. Siegel, 1907), 108]. Ibid., 89; “Galt es als physiologisches Axiom für hohe geistige Begabung, dass ein großes Gehirn in dünner, zarter Hirnschale eingeschlossen sein soll, wie zur Erleichterung eines unmittelbaren Erkennens der Dinge außer uns; so sahen wir dagegen bei der vor mehreren Jahren stattgefundenen Besichtigung der Überreste des Toten, in Übereinstimmung mit einer außerordentlichen Stärke des ganzen Knochenbaues, die Hirnschale von ganz ungewöhnlicher Dicke und Festigkeit. So schützte die Natur in ihm ein Hirn von übermäßiger Zartheit, damit es nur nach Innen blicken, und die Weltschau eines großen Herzens in ungestörter Ruhe üben könnte” [69]. Ibid., 71; “Noch allen Ästhetikern hat es anstössig erschienen, aus einem, ihn so dünkenden, rein pathologischen Elemente wirkliche Kunst herleiten zu sollen” [Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 9, 72]. Ibid., 110, 79; “physiologischen Vorgange; eigentliche Organ […] cerebrale Befähigung […] wie dort das Traumorgan” [110, 79]. Ibid., 68; “als jenes Traumorgan des Gehirnes von der Funktion des im Wachen durch äußere Eindrücke angeregten Gehirnes sich unterscheidet”. Ibid., 68; “unmittelbare Äußerung des Willens” . Ibid., 91; “inneren Tonwelt”. Richard Wagner, My Life, vol. 2 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1911), 603; “Am Nachmittage heimkehrend, streckte ich mich todmüde auf ein hartes

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Ruhebett aus, um die langersehnte Stunde des Schlafes zu erwarten. Sie erschien nicht; dafür versank ich in eine Art von somnambulem Zustand, in dem ich plötzlich die Empfindung erhielt, als ob ich in ein stark fließendes Wasser versänke. Das Rauschen desselben stellte sich mir bald im musikalischen Klange des Es-Dur-Akkordes dar, der unaufhaltsam in figurierter Brechung dahin wogte; diese Brechungen zeigten sich als melodische Figurationen von zunehmender Bewegung, nie aber veränderte sich der reine Dreiklang von Es-Dur, der durch seine Andauer dem Elemente, darin ich versank, eine unendliche Bedeutung geben zu wollen schien. Mit der Empfindung, als ob die Wogen jetzt hoch über mir dahinbrausten, erwachte ich in jähem Schreck aus meinem Halbschlaf. Sogleich erkannte ich, daß mir das Orchester-Vorspiel zum ‘Rheingold’ aufgegangen war, wie ich es in mir herumtrug, doch aber nicht genau hatte finden können. Sogleich beschloß ich nach Zürich zurückzukehren und die Komposition meines großen Gedichtes zu beginnen” [Richard Wagner, Mein Leben (Munich: List Verlag, 1976), 511-2]. This gendering of somnambulism, already prevalent in the Romantic period, was further cemented by the immediate and enduring popularity of Vincenzo Bellini and Felice Romani’s opera La somnambula (based on a scenario by Eugène Scribe), which premiered in 1831. Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 56; “Das Genie und die hellsehende Somnambule sind die 2 abnormen Erhöhungen der beiden entgegengesetzten Centra des Nervensystems in ihren Funktionen. Ersteres ist nur beim männlichen, letzteres nur beim weiblichen Geschlecht möglich, allenfalls bei Knaben vor der Pubertät” [Arthur Schopenhauer, Der handschriftliche Nachlass (Frankfurt am Main: W. Kramer, 1966-75), 42]. On Wagner’s aesthetics of androgyny, see Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Wagner Androgyne, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). “aus den beängstigendsten solcher Träume erwachen wir mit einem Schrei, in welchem sich ganz unmittelbar der geänstigte Wille ausdrückt” [Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 9, 69]. Wagner, “Beethoven,” 69; “Wollen wir nun den Schrei, in allen Abschwächungen seiner Heftigkeit bis zur zarteren Klage des Verlangens, uns als das Grundelement jeder menschlichen Kundgebung an das Gehör denken.” Ibid., 71; “Ist der von uns ausgestoßene Schrei-, Klage-, oder Wonnelaut die unmittelbarste Äußerung des Willensaffektes, so verstehen wir den gleichen, durch das Gehör zu uns dringenden Laut auch unwidersprechlich als Äußerung desselben Affektes, und keine Täuschung, wie im Scheine des Lichtes, ist hier möglich, daß das Grundwesen der Welt außer uns mit dem unsrigen nicht völlog identisch ist.” Schopenhauer, The World as Will, 451; “Dafür dürfen die Affektionen des Willens selbst, also wirklicher Schmerz und wickliches Behagen, nicht erregt werden” [525]. Ibid.; “Nur so verursacht die Musik uns nie wirkliches Leiden, sondern bleibt auch in ihren schmerzlichsten Ackorden noch erfreulich” [525]. Ibid., 451; “sondern sind vielmehr jetzt selbst die gespannte, gekniffene und zitternde Saite” [525]. Wagner, “Beethoven,” 72; “ungeheuere Überflutung aller Schranken der Erscheinung.” Ibid., 86-7; “ein bezauberter Zustand […] ein pulsierendes Schwingen, Freuen, Sehnen, Bangen, Klagen und Entzücktsein wahrnehmen, welches alles wiederum nur aus dem tiefsten Grunde unseres eigenen Inneren sich in Bewegung zu setzen scheint.”

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35 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 120. 36 It is surely telling that, sixteen years before “Beethoven” (in December 1854), Wagner had sent Schopenhauer a gift of the libretto of The Ring of the Nibelung with the dedication “out of reverence and gratitude”—in return for which Schopenhauer had scribbled sarcastic notes in the margins and advised Wagner through a mutual acquaintance to quit writing music and stick to poetry. It is easy to read this, the closest the two ever came to a direct exchange, as a tragic misunderstanding, but it more likely reflects Schopenhauer’s insight into the differences between Wagner’s aesthetics of reception and his own. 37 Richard Wagner, Prose Works, vol. 6, trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 141; “indem er das Volk selbst in den Zustand des hellsehenden Dichters versetzte” [Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 10, 145]. 38 Ibid., 196; “rissen das umgebende Volk der Zuschauer bis zu der Begeisterung fort, in welcher der nun in seiner Maske auf der Bühne erscheinende Held mit der Wahrhaftigkeit einer Geistererscheinung auf das hellsichtig gewordene Publikum wirkte” [97]. 39 Ibid., 335; “aus dem ‚mystischen Abgrunde’ geisterhaft enklingende Musik, gleich den, unter dem Sitze der Pythia dem heiligen Urschosse Gaias ensteigenden Dämpfen, ihn in jenen begeisterten Zustand des Hellsehens versetzt, in welchem das erschaute scenische Bild ihm jetzt zum wahrhaftigsten Abbilde des Lebens selbst wird”[338]. 40 “Mein Freund! Das grad‘ ist Dichters Werk, / dass er sein Träumen deut‘ und merk‘. / Glaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster Wahn / wird ihm im Traume aufgetan: / all‘ Dichtkunst und Poeterei / ist nichts als Wahrtraumdeuterei“ [Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 7, 235]. Translation mine. 41 „Senta setzt sich erschöpft in den Lehnstuhl nieder; bei dem Beginn von Eriks Erzählung versinkt sie wie in magnetischen Schlaf, so dass es scheint, als träume sie den von ihm erzählten Traum ebenfalls” [Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 1, 276]. 42 “süssen Schlaf; Wie sonderbar! Träumt sie? Ist sie entrückt?” [Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 2, 70]. 43 “Es sagte wahr. / Denn nie lügt Kundry, doch sah sie viel” [Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 10, 338]. 44 “einen schrecklichen Schrei ausstoßen” [Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 10, 345-6]. 45 “dann bringt sie, rauh und abgebrochen, hervor” [Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 10, 346]. 46 William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Holt, 1890), 178-9.

Bibliography Chatterjee, Anjan, Amy Thomas, Sabrina E. Smith, and Geoffrey K. Aguirre. “The Neural Response to Facial Attractiveness.” In Neuropsychology 12 (2009): 135–43. Dahlhaus, Carl. Die Bedeutung des Gestischen in Wagners Musikdramen. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1970. Ellenberger, Henri F. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1970. Gallese, Vittorio. “Mirror Neurons, Embodied Simulation, and the Neural Basis of Social Identification.” In Psychoanalytic Dialogues 19 (2009): 519–36.

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James, William. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. Jenson, Deborah, and Marco Iacoboni. “Literary Biomimesis: Mirror Neurons and the Ontological Priority of Representation.” In California Italian Studies 2.1 (2011). Retrieved December 4, 2014 from: http://escholarship.org/uc/ item/3sc3j6dj. Kawabata, Hideaki, and Semir Zeki. “Neural Correlates of Beauty.” In Journal of Neurophysiology 91.1 (2004): 1699–705. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Lindenberger, Herbert. “Arts in the Brain; or, What Might Neuroscience Tell Us?” In Toward –35. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Wagner Androgyne. Translated by Stewart Spencer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Hauptwerke. 6 vols. Edited by Paul Deussen. Munich: R. Piper, 1911–1923. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Der handschriftliche Nachlass. Frankfurt am Main: W. Kramer, 1966–75. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Manuscript Remains. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Parerga and Paralipomena. 2 vols. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1966. Smart, Mary Ann. Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-century Opera. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. Vartanian, Oshin, and Vinod Goel. “Neuroanatomical Correlates of Aesthetic Preference for Paintings.” In NeuroReport 15 (2004): 893–7. Wagner, Richard. Prose Works. 8 vols. Translated by W. Ashton Ellis. London: Keagan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1895–96. Wagner, Richard. Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. 10 vols. Leipzig: C. S. W. Siegel, 1907. Wagner, Richard. My Life. 2 vols. Translator unknown. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1911. Wagner, Richard. Mein Leben. Edited by Martin Gregor-Dellin. Munich: List Verlag, 1976.

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The invisible vanguard Reflections on political movements and contemporary avant-garde formations James Harding

I. The missing urinal and its doubles: First reflection on invisibility There is a reasonable chance that any academic essay which begins at a urinal, particularly an inverted one, will address something related to the western avant-gardes’ long-standing fondness for shock and scandal, and while it is impossible to single out any one event as the quintessence of the avant-gardes’ delight in shocking the bourgeois, few narratives in the annals of the avant-gardes can rival the scandalous reverberations generated by Marcel Duchamp’s infamous decision in 1917 to pen the signature of an imaginary artist by the name of “R. Mutt” along the edge of an inverted urinal, which he then anonymously submitted on Mutt’s behalf to be included in an open exhibition arranged by New York’s Society of Independent Artists. As is well known, the Independents initially rejected the piece despite their open call and expressed willingness to exhibit any work by any artist, and scandal ensued when it not only became known that the already famous Duchamp was the artist behind the piece, but when he then also resigned from his position on the board of the Independents in protest over their decision. By almost any measure this was a watershed moment in the history of twentieth-century western art—a moment that, on the one hand, was fueled by a transformative aesthetic that left western definitions of art in a state of flux and that, on the other, placed a urinal, the original version of which ironically was somehow lost or destroyed, as the centerpiece of modernist art. Indeed, in a survey of some 500 art critics back in 2004, Duchamp’s inverted urinal, which he entitled Fountain, was widely acknowledged to be the twentieth century’s most influential art work1—and this despite the fact that no one seems to know the whereabouts of this most influential piece. In short, its influence is spectral: its presence apparently felt amid its all too obvious absence. But I want to suggest that, if one pauses just long enough to take it in, there is a noticeably awkward element of invisibility in the simultaneity of this presence and absence of Duchamp’s infamous urinal that, understandably perhaps, has always been overlooked and that, if given opportunity to expand in scope and context, can tell us much about

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contemporary avant-garde formations. So if I begin with the simultaneity of presence and absence—if I begin, in short, with invisibility, rather than falling back on the standard critical line that the lost urinal doesn’t matter because it was actually the gesture behind the work—the concept or philosophy rather than the object itself—that was important—it is to underscore that invisibility is not a poetic metaphor for gesture but rather is something in its own right, something much more unsettling, something that “gesture” as a critical conceptual paradigm seeks to contain and something that the 17 authorized reproductions of Fountain on display in museums around the world struggle to hide. Invisibility is an awkward vanguard that arrives like an uninvited guest and upsets the show. And taken as a point of departure, the traces of invisibility that haunt the reception of Duchamp’s Fountain are merely guideposts to point us towards more contemporary political contexts where invisibility has taken on a radical life of its own and emerged from the long shadow cast by the notions of vangardism associated with Duchampian aesthetics and the celebrated Duchampian gesture. The point of contrast with this awkward and unsettling power of invisibility could not be clearer. For in emphasizing the gesture, we have literally lost sight of the invisible— of its untapped radical significance and of its transformative power—and opted instead for something much more conservative and safer. The general sense is that if Duchamp’s Fountain endures in the lore of the western avant-gardes and is celebrated as the twentieth century’s most influential work, this is because once submitted to the Society of Independent Artists, the infamous urinal became a catalyst for demanding that the Independents (and artists and critics today as well) carefully examine their unacknowledged assumptions about what does and does not constitute art. Historically significant though this metacritical gesture may have been in its own immediate context, it is worth speculating that Fountain ultimately became so influential because, like a urinal itself, so many people could use it regardless of their partisan stripes. And isn’t this the problem with the conceptual, metacritical turn of art reflecting on itself? That at some level the gesture looks a lot like a rarified form of narcissism, and that one can don the radical chic of the metacritical while never leaving the domain of the safe and secure, or of the conventional and the conservative? It’s not that the urinal proves that anything can be art; it’s that the urinal as art can be just about anything to anyone without significant consequence, and that is the problem. In the annals of the American avant-gardes, there is little that is hipper than Duchamp. But there is also little that has done more than works like Fountain to cultivate the aura of the radical while posing no actual threat. All the hip boys use the urinal. As a case in point, one might consider that in the last—undeniably obscene—U.S. election cycle a popular right-wing American talk show host, conspiracy theorist extraordinaire and recent hipster convert2 by the name of Glenn Beck turned his attention to Duchamp’s

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Fountain and the Dadaist movement from the security of his radio studio and the monotone safety of his conservative talk show. Telling his audience that it is not the urinal but “the philosophy behind the art that is the important part,”3 Beck then gave his audience one of his many idiosyncratic lessons in history. Blaming the Dadaists for a demise in culture and a widespread rise in nihilism, Beck argued that both really began with that infamous urinal and that the supposed nihilistic cultural demise wrought by the Dadaists led in turn “to the Nazis.”4 Amid the bizarre notions of causality and the numerous logical fallacies of this lecture, perhaps the most glaring was that Beck somehow never quite recognized that his characterization of the impact of Duchamp’s urinal specifically and of Dada more generally echoed the Nazis’ own vilification of the avant-garde as degenerate art. His script was, in short, borrowed from the Nazi cultural playbook. The circular irony of Beck’s history lesson is thus that it reasserts a kind of neo-fascist cultural ideology amid what purports to be a critique of that ideology. One might leave matters at that, except that shortly after his strange lecture on the philosophy of Dada, Beck returned once again to the missing pissoir and announced that, speaking as “an art historian,” he was of the opinion that “we are in the beginning of a Dadaist movement. […] and [that] Trump TV can be the urinal of that movement.”5 Laugh as one may, what ultimately emerges from Beck’s backhanded homage to Duchamp in his subsequent swipe at Donald Trump is a clear sense of just how accommodating and innocuous that infamous urinal is, and how with the proper rhetorical plumbing, the urinal can be “politically repurposed”6 for just about anything. Granted, given Beck’s belief that the urinal somehow leads to fascism, associating Trump with Duchamp has its own special appeal. It sullies Trump rhetorically with a philosophy that, according to Beck, sought “to degrade and destroy and make everything disgusting,”7 and following Beck’s line of logic, the implication is thus that, like Dada supposedly had done before him, Trump’s destructive and disgusting politicking is a recipe for a twenty-first-century neo-fascism—as indeed it arguably is. But that recipe has a lot more to do with Trump’s xenophobic populist nationalism and his manipulative cultivation of middle class white resentments—strategies that he and Beck actually share—than it does with an influential urinal that no one seems to be able to locate. But there is a more important issue here. Buried somewhere deep beneath Beck’s circular logic is a subtle reminder that one of the reasons Duchamp is open to comparisons with Trump (and vice versa) in the first place is that both have always been about branding. Like Duchamp before him, Trump’s business model involves signing his name to all sorts of things he did not actually produce. At some serendipitous level, then, Beck’s problematic equation of Trump with Duchamp has an important but unforeseen consequence. It asks us to consider whether Trump’s branding of things with his name—things like steaks, wines, universities, golf courses, casinos, hotels and now the U.S. Presidency—is

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simply a grand commercialized adaptation—indeed, the quintessential example of the influence—of what was always already present anyway in Duchamp’s celebrated appropriation of bicycle wheels, bottle racks, snow shovels, coffee grinders and urinals as “found objects” and hence as works of art. In this respect, perhaps the lesson of history to be derived from the juxtaposition of Duchamp and Trump involves a recognition that the reverberations from the scandal surrounding Fountain have always been a bit overplayed by historians and critics in terms of their scope and significance, or at least skewed in the selective representation of what those implications are. For the challenge that the lost urinal posed to art as such— the question “what is art?”—was of abstract and academic significance rather than of material or practical consequence. “The gesture” may have been intellectually thrilling to a small cultural elite, but it never actually threatened the western cultural economy that produced it. Critics like Leland de la Durantaye have argued that without Duchamp’s urinal, works like Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram (with its random use of a stuffed angora goat and a used tire) or Andy Warhol’s “Oxidation Paintings” (with their use of metallic pigment and urine) are “difficult to conceive of.” Perhaps this is true, but I would suggest that there are more obvious conceptual difficulties that one might consider. Somewhere in that long line leading from the original lost urinal to Duchamp’s 17 commissioned surrogates, for example, it also becomes “difficult to conceive of” meaningful distinctions between the “merchandising and franchising” of Fountain and the emergence of the kind of branding that came of age in the hip marketing milieu of the 1960s, the milieu that not coincidentally also produced Warhol.8 All of those faux Fountains feed the complex dynamic of presence and absence in that milieu. Indeed, as a point of contrast to the inconvenient absence of the 1917 version of Fountain, there has always been something familiar, safe and reassuring in the multiple urinals that now fill the void left by its disappearance. This is in part because absence, like invisibility, is disquieting. It is unsettling because it is difficult to qualify, if only because its very presence is a kind of logical contradiction. The alternative is to combat the null and the void quantitatively. This is the logic of capital. Here things are tangible and clear to the naked eye—and for critics, historians, museum curators, and gallery owners, a wealth of urinals is better than none at all. But it is not that hard to find the invisible amid all those faux Fountains. The urinal photographed by Alfred Steglitz in 1917 is a specter that haunts each and every one, and its invisibility weighs against their fetishized presence and against the extravagant commercial value that is now attached to them as branded cultural commodities. Consider that the last recorded asking price for one of the commissioned reproductions almost a decade ago was $2,500,000.9 That price tag serves as a reminder that since one can’t put a price on a urinal that isn’t there, the presence of those commissioned surrogates plays a very specific material role against the

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all-too-present immateriality of the urinal that Duchamp unsuccessfully submitted to the Independents and that disappeared shortly after Steglitz photographed it. The commissioned replicas multiply the lost urinal’s literal pricelessness by 17 even as its awkward absence somehow nullifies their aesthetic worth and supplants the question “what is art?” with the more practical question “where did it go?” In this respect, the lost urinal’s spectral existence—its invisibility—weighs against the commercial value of the 17 replicas which, rather than defining art’s cutting edge, are complicit instead in a museum sanctioned designation of art as a boundary that separates society into “the haves” and “the have-nots.” Perhaps that same invisibility hovers closest to the signature each urinal carries of “R. Mutt,” that non-existent fictional artist who like the urinal originally submitted to the Independents is nowhere to be found and whose very name is a homophone for the German word Armut, which means poverty. And what is poverty but an acute state of lack, a material void, and a recipe for social invisibility? It is everywhere to be found but so awkward and unsettling that it is ignored and not seen. Armut knows the blind eye, as does R. Mutt. Yet in his absence, “R. Mutt” is still unmistakably present. Moreover, in the wide dissemination of his name across those multiple replica urinals, an invisibility hovers about R. Mutt as Duchamp’s presumable nom de plume—I say presumable because there is reasonable speculation that Duchamp took credit for a purloined pissoir and that R. Mutt was someone else’s fictional moniker, someone absented by appropriation and pushed into invisibility by what in the arts may have been the twentieth century’s most influential act of plagiarism. The art historian Irene Gammel points, for example, to a letter that Duchamp wrote to his sister in April of 1917 where he tells her: “One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; since there was nothing indecent about it, there was no reason to reject it.”10 Based upon this letter and the admission that Duchamp makes in it, Gammel puts together a highly plausible argument that Fountain was actually a piece by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who was picking up random objects from the New York City streets and calling them art long before Duchamp discovered Readymades as a brand he could bank on. The Baroness, on the other hand, died in poverty in an abject Parisian apartment asphyxiated by the invisible gas leaking from the defective heater she hoped would see her through the winter. With its connotations of poverty, the name scrawled along the edge of that infamous missing urinal not only reminds us that, like the gas seeping from the Baroness’ defective heater, poverty and invisibility circulate together in a stranglehold around the lives of the disenfranchised. But in the larger contexts of art history, the name R. Mutt also suggests the need to revisit the particulars of one of the western avant-gardes’ most enduring contradictions—a contradiction first identified by Ortega y Gasset back in 1925. Simply stated, that contradiction results from the fact that the more

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the avant-gardes turn to everyday objects and actions—i.e., the more they turn to the quotidian—for the substance of their art and practice, the more they tend ironically to alienate everyday people in the cultural mainstream. Ortega’s contention was that avant-garde art and acts thus consistently divide “the public into the two classes of those who understand [… them] and those who do not.” He argues that, as a consequence, avant-garde art tends to arouse “indignation […] in the masses” who feel left out and “vaguely humiliated” by an art whose meanings elude them and who thus retaliate by lashing out against the avant-gardes through “indignant selfassertion.”11 Cultural historians would likely cite the scandal provoked by the submission of Fountain to the Independents as a case in point. But it was not the masses who lashed out in that scandal. On the contrary, the rejection of the urinal was and always has been a highbrow affair: a smug titillation with the sordidness of it all that, in retrospect, is a lot easier to celebrate than it is to contemplate, by contrast, the way in which “R. Mutt,” that homophone for poverty, only really found its referent when the first urinal turned up missing. For poverty is about what one doesn’t have, and what one doesn’t have cannot be seen. Not only is poverty a contradictory emptiness—a presence of absence— that while not visible is nonetheless palpable and hence identifiable; it is also an unnecessary political construct that humiliates and thereby subordinates the many to the few by supplanting human dignity with social invisibility. Indeed, the more art veers toward the plane of that invisibility, the more unbearable it becomes not so much for the poor themselves who unfortunately are accustomed to wretchedness but for those who are at pains to keep poverty invisible and hence always already in check, i.e., present but obstructed from view by the veneer of that which purports to be radical but is nothing of the sort. The more art exposes the absence and dearth that is poverty, the more it also exposes humiliation not just to be poverty’s result but also the hidden mechanism of poverty as a tool of political domination. Simply stated, to humiliate is to demoralize, to render impotent and ultimately to subjugate. And the more art exposes humiliation for what it is, the more art also becomes an embarrassment for those who are its otherwise comfortable patrons. Indeed, when art begins to nullify itself as a safe middleclass preoccupation—when, in short, it becomes genuinely transformative as an avant-garde—it will provoke the indignation of the comfortable masses by the void it leaves in its wake, and they will scramble to fill the void. They will fill it seventeen-fold.

II. The construct of a committee and the construct of the avantgarde: Second reflection on invisibility At some level, such scrambling brings us back to the conservative populist Glenn Beck whose tagging of Trump with that infamous urinal, clever though it may have been, was more than anything else a product of a media

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rivalry with Trump as the leader of a cultural rearguard—in other words, the leader of an indignant middle-class white constituency who, fearful of the specter of their own encroaching invisibility, proved to be susceptible to the lure of a reactionary populism. With the inauguration of Trump as the U.S. President, it is clear that Beck lost that rivalry, if only because Beck chose to pursue the rivalry through cultural media rather than through mainstream politics. I only mentioned him here because he has a far better track record of identifying avant-gardes in outbursts of “indignant selfassertion” than in pronouncements made as a would-be “art historian.” I am particularly interested in two of those outbursts and in the way that together they point toward what I want to suggest are the rough contemporary contours of a politically viable conception of avant-gardism—one that necessitates a rethinking of the relation of art to politics. As the title of this chapter indicates I have characterized the dynamic of that relation as something that I want to place beneath the broader construct of what I call “the invisible avant-garde.” Although I don’t discuss the second of the above-mentioned outbursts by Beck until the conclusion of this essay, the first is of immediate interest. It came in the form of a rant back in July of 2009 when Beck devoted a substantial segment of his television show to denouncing a small book entitled The Coming Insurrection, which was written and published in France in 2007 before being translated and published in the U.S. in 2009. To this day it is not clear who the actual authors of The Coming Insurrection are. The same holds true for their more recent 2015 publication, To Our Friends. Authorship of both books is simply attributed to “The Invisible Committee,” and while the calculated conspiratorial undertones of a shadowy group calling themselves The Invisible Committee may have a lot to do with why Beck described The Coming Insurrection as “the most evil book I’ve read in a long, long time,”12 what he never considered is the way this pseudonym positions the book within the context of a contemporary rethinking of the conceptual dynamics of the avant-gardes. While the title looks to the future (as in “the coming insurrection”), attributing authorship to The Invisible Committee positions the book as an immediate critical intervention against a long established vanguard tradition in the arts and in politics. At the most immediate level, that intervention plays out in the quantitatively amplified echo between the collective construct of The Invisible Committee on the one hand and that of the singular “R. Mutt” on the other—an echo generated in the early pages of The Coming Insurrection when the authors state outright that The Invisible Committee is “an imaginary collective” that, rather than being the product of some individual person, functions instead as a vague conduit for the unseen and unheard many. The Invisible Committee is, they admit, a simple literary trope constructed for the purpose of introducing “a little order into the common-places of our time” and for “collecting some of the murmurings around barroom tables and behind

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closed bedroom doors.” In this respect, the book’s collective contributors renounce individual or even collective authorship. They are, so they claim, merely “scribes of the situation.”13 In one sense, then, the anonymous “scribes” of The Coming Insurrection are claiming that the book’s political content is the intellectual equivalent of “found objects” and that The Invisible Committee itself is nothing more than a temporary conduit—a provisional construct—for a rising radical sensibility that is already writ large across society and that, like Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, needs only a touch not to set … but to feel … it in motion. To some extent, this erasure of their own identifiable authorship already positions The Invisible Committee as an avant-garde, following as it does in the artistic tradition, similar to the precedent set by Duchamp, of challenging the notion of the artist or author as producer, or, in this case, challenging even the notion of the political philosopher or intellectual as producer. But whereas Fountain’s scandalous notoriety ultimately resulted not from the fictional construct of R. Mutt itself but from the revelation that Duchamp was actually behind the submission of the urinal to the Independents, the rhetorical, indeed radical, force of The Coming Insurrection results in large part because of the unwillingness of the book’s “scribes” to come forward, identify themselves, and not merely to take credit for the work but to position themselves as intellectual leaders of an emerging political movement. Instead, they remain in a perpetual deference to those to whom they give a voice. In that deference they themselves are fleeting and provisional— authors only of their own erasure. The Invisible Committee thereby issues a subtle reminder that any avant-garde worthy of the name is always provisional. Whether one characterizes it as a provisional construct, an orchestrated mechanism of self-erasure or a fictional persona, The Invisible Committee occupies a position of presence and absence, achieved through the borrowed rhetorical tropes of literary expression. And while the literary underpinnings of that presence and absence invite comparisons across the arts with figures like Duchamp, the more important positioning is an overtly political one that decenters long established notions of vanguardism. In simplest terms, that decentering results from the marked contrast between the construct of The Invisible Committee on the one hand, and the conceptual notions of vanguardism that, on the other, have dominated political discourse since at least as far back as Vladimir Lenin’s now classic 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done? As is well known, Lenin’s pamphlet had its own literary debts, drawing its title and inspiration from Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel by the same name. To some extent, that novel provided Lenin and his contemporaries with an idealized role model in the form of its character “Rakhmetov,” a self-sacrificing intellectual who is devoted to the common people. Indeed, Chernyshesky’s late-nineteenthcentury novel did much to seed the twentieth-century notions of vanguardism embraced by revolutionaries like Lenin because it assigned intellectuals the

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principal role in preparing and ultimately leading the way to revolutionary change, and, as a work of literature, it also implicitly cast its own author and hence artists more generally in a similar role at the revolution’s cutting edge. It thus forged a bond between radical politics and radical art that is now commonplace in general theories of the avant-garde. On the political side of this equation, this same notion of vaguardism is central to Lenin’s subsequent pamphlet and for the role that he maps out in it for the Party and implicitly for himself as its emerging leader. Speaking in that pamphlet on behalf of the international Communist Party leadership, Lenin argues that “it is not enough to call ourselves the ‘vanguard’, the advanced contingent.” The Party, he argues “must act in such a way that all the other contingents recognize and are obliged to admit” that it is the Party itself that is “marching in the vanguard.”14 In this admonition, which unequivocally advocates the privileging of one avant-garde contingent at the expense—and even the repression—of others, Lenin gives voice to the notion of “the vanguard” as a small coterie of revolutionary visionaries who lead by breaking the political path that others then follow, and his admonition lays political claim to the military origins of the term “avant-garde” and the idea of a small band of elite troops engaging in the initial skirmishes that break the enemy’s lines for the army that comes later. And yet Lenin’s admonition is an altogether familiar refrain—even to those of us in the arts who are inclined to look to individual artists to forge new and innovative paths for subsequent artistic practice. For there are clear parallels between this image of Lenin and the image that artists like Duchamp enjoy in the arts. But whether the point of reference is military, political, cultural or artistic, Lenin is borrowing the conceptual image of the avant-garde that we already know and that to this day is recycled in various forms in the discourses of academic and cultural criticism. So in a very literal sense, “The Invisible Committee”—that self admittedly fictional construct—is positioned as a dialectical alternative to the Party-centered notion of vanguardism that Lenin, working in the idealized spirit of Chernyshevsky’ character Rakhmetov, helped to propagate, and much of the significance of The Coming Insurrection—or at least its significance to our understanding of the contemporary avant-gardes—centers on the ways in which both this book and the more recent publication, To Our Friends, use the construct of The Invisible Committee as a purposeful gap, a blank placeholder as it were, for conceptualizing a new political vanguardism that is already in motion but that the books’ contributors struggle to articulate outside of the discursive parameters of the classic image of the leaders of a revolutionary party at the cutting edge of radical change. As part of that struggle, the books’ authors conceptualize the fictive “Invisible Committee” as an empty sign, a construct whose calculated transparency—whose constructed invisibility—clears the conceptual visual field for alternative models of vanguardism that are otherwise obstructed

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and hidden from view and that, for all intents and purposes, are thus invisible. They are present and moving but are overlooked by the conceptual models that frame our current vision of the avant-garde and that, in subtle echoes of Lenin’s arguments in What Is to Be Done?, thus “oblige” us to opt for one form of vanguardism at the expense of others and to be blind not only to the reality of those alternatives but also to the political potential that they embody. Simply put, the constructed invisibility of The Invisible Committee is an antinomy and counter to that blindness, openly positing a literary form of invisibility as an antidote to another form literally hidden in the shadows. As a calculated rhetorical strategy, the construct of The Invisible Committee is thus part of what we might legitimately call a transformative political aesthetic designed to break the prevailing conventional vision of what constitutes a vanguard as such. There are, of course, elements in the book’s strategy of framing political theory within a fictional construct that hark back to Theodor Adorno and to the complex rhetorical dynamics of his book Aesthetic Theory, that magisterial work that skirts the fence between a theory of aesthetics and a theory that achieves its own aesthetic viability, autonomy and force. But unlike the rhetorical tropes of Adorno’s posthumous work, which are implicitly self-reflective, the trope of invisibility in The Coming Insurrection and in To Our Friends is ultimately positioned in deference to praxis and performance, i.e., to that which not only lies beyond the books’ pages but to that which precedes them (hence, the authors’ characterization of themselves as mere “scribes of the situation”). This deference also marks the fundamental break that the two books make with Lenin’s rehearsal of the classic image of vanguardism and of its notion of the intellectual leader forging the path that the idealized yet anonymous and ultimately invisible masses then follow. That break is most emphatic with the moments in which Lenin suggests that the Party can first name itself an avant-garde and then act to be one. Inverting this page-to-stage formula of “word and then deed,” The Invisible Committee seeks the deeds for which an adequate discourse has not yet been articulated and in doing so they remind us that to be avantgarde is to be avant la lettre, and to be avant la lettre is, I would argue, to find oneself in the uncharted and transformative spaces of performance— not in the performative spaces that we already know but in the spaces of performance that remain transparent and invisible because our conceptual lenses look through them without perceiving their significance. Transitioning from the transparent into the translucent and ultimately into a viable opacity—moving the invisible, in short, into visibility—is one of the great challenges of theorizing the avant-garde today. The challenge is not merely of fleshing out a contemporary avant-garde on the visual horizon but of thereby also extending discernable legitimacy and afforded rights where the dark shadows of denial otherwise prevail. Such transitions are no easy task. Even finding a discourse about them is a revolutionary challenge. This is in fact one of The Coming Insurrection’s key assertions. Not only do

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the contributors to The Coming Insurrection argue that political struggles are inseparable from “struggles [to] create the language in which a new order expresses itself”—the kinds of struggles, I would suggest, to which the arts themselves are committed. In 2007, they also specifically lamented that “there is nothing like that today.”15 Seven years later, in 2014, that same lament is echoed in To Our Friends where the contributors argue that “it’s not the weakness of our struggles that explains the disappearance of any revolutionary perspective; it is the absence of any credible revolutionary perspective that explains the weakness of our struggles.”16 The argument here is that every political struggle is always also a struggle against absence and invisibility and a struggle to find a “credible revolutionary perspective” that, in turn, will make the political struggle visible in a way that will facilitate lasting political, social and cultural change. Forging that perspective may well be the signal task faced by the contemporary arts amid the world’s quickly changing political landscape. At the very least, taking up that task is what makes the arts avant-garde today. The looming question that thus emerges from these two books is a very simple one: what conceptual language—what transformative aesthetic—can bring a credible revolutionary perspective into focus and move existing political struggles from the realms of the invisible to the visible? The question here is not about a fictional “Invisible Committee.” It is about the specter of an actual but invisible avant-garde—an avant-garde weakened and obscured by the absence of a credible perspective that could give it political legitimacy and potency. So with regard to that question of forging a credible revolutionary perspective—and of forging a credible theory of contemporary avantgardism—the challenge is to create a viable discourse for the already existing vanguard to express itself beyond the exhausted tropes that have defined the vanguard heretofore. The challenge is to find a discourse that no longer delegitimizes that vanguard even before it has had the opportunity to speak. What we garner from The Invisible Committee is a clear sense that the answer to that challenge cannot come from putting word before deed, script before performance, or theory before praxis. “The Invisible Committee’s” call to arms begins in a dialectical inversion of that hierarchy, and inasmuch as the committee’s own act of self-erasure is an instrumental mechanism of that inversion, I want to suggest that it provides a model for artistic practice and a cue for theorizing the contemporary avant-gardes. The equation here is something akin to the notion of an emergent political avant-garde for which artistic practice helps to forge a viable, empowering and ultimately revolutionary perspective, which then in turn sets the context and conditions for a corresponding theory. The Invisible Committee is certainly not alone in their vision of this inversion, of the conceptual reorientation it requires, or even of its significance for theorizing a contemporary avant-garde. Their focus on the deeds for which an adequate revolutionary discourse has yet to be forged finds a ready parallel in the work of Alain Badiou, the militant political

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philosopher whose devotion to the theatre as a playwright and theorist may have much to do with the affinity that his work enjoys with that of The Invisible Committee, and in particular with their rejection of the notion that an international Communist Party, or anyone else for that matter, can first name themselves an avant-garde and then act to be one. Bruno Bosteels provides some sense of that affinity in the introduction that he wrote to the English translation of Badiou’s book Philosophy for Militants. There Bosteel notes that “Badiou’s entire oeuvre can be said to lead to the conclusion that philosophy cannot, or should not, provide political activists and militants with an answer to the classical question: What is to be done?”17 As is the case with The Invisible Committee, Badiou’s philosophy is thus also a repudiation of the privileged intellectual vanguardism of Lenin and of the hierarchy of word over deed. Bosteels explains that for Badiou, philosophy, rather than “setting the agenda for politics,” is ultimately “conditioned by events that are not of its own making.”18 For the practice of philosophy, at least according to Badiou, is a lot like what The Invisible Committee suggested in the description of themselves as “the scribes of the situation” and so for Badiou the event, echoing much of our earlier discussion of The Coming Insurrection, is something akin to the phenomenological equivalent of a found object: it has its own presence and significance before it becomes the substance of philosophy, a presence and significance that ultimately gives shape to philosophy itself. And indeed, Badiou argues in Philosophy for Militants that philosophy “depends on certain nonphilosophical domains,” which he proposes to “call the conditions of philosophy” and, given those conditions, Badiou argues that “philosophy [thus] always comes in second place; it always arrives après-coup, or in the aftermath, of nonphilosophical innovations.” Stated more poetically, Badiou suggests that “philosophy is the discipline that comes after the day of knowledge, after the day of real-life experiments—when night falls.”19 Like philosophy, theory also belongs to the night, and in the twilight affinity between philosophy and theory, I would suggest that it is possible to find the rough outlines of the theory for a contemporary avant-garde. Keeping with Badiou’s rich metaphor, I would also suggest that perhaps the cover of this metaphorical darkness might adjust our critical vision just enough for the invisible avant-garde to move into the visible horizon.

III. The invisible among us: Third reflection on invisibility How then might the arts bring the invisible avant-garde into visibility and focus? To some extent this is a question about invisibility itself. As Jacques Derrida noted a half a decade before The Invisible Committee’s call for a revolutionary perspective, invisibility refers to an absence of proper perspective rather than to the absence of what, for whatever reason, is actually present but cannot be seen. Although he does not conceptualize his observations in political terms, the human political consequences of

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this unfortunate mismatch of absence and presence are difficult to miss, for Derrida implies that the mismatch results in the creation of a sub-society of specters. “The specter,” according to Derrida, “is someone who watches or concerns me without any possible reciprocity.”20 It is the absence of this possibility of reciprocity that links invisibility with the fundamental political disparities that blight western societies with social injustice. But this too is familiar terrain. In the American context, it is only a matter of time before any political or cultural discussion of invisibility inevitably circles in on the work of the African American writer Ralph Ellison and his 1952 novel Invisible Man. That novel, which won the National Book Award in the year following its publication, is a Bildungsroman of sorts that plots the emerging political sensibility of a young African American man amid his participation in and eventual disillusionment with the organizational politics of the Communist Party in the postwar era. It is a novel rich in metaphor, but perhaps the most famous part of the novel is its “Prologue,” which, written in the narrative voice of the book’s fictional protagonist, opens with the statement “I am an invisible man.” Playing loose with a popular racial slur of the time, the narrator claims to be an unconventional “spook,” a specter—both present and absent—of “flesh and bone” but yet unseen. The protagonist’s invisibility results, he explains, not from some sort of scientific experiment but “simply because people refuse to see” him and because “when they approach [… him] they see only [… his] surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except” him.21 Ellison’s protagonist remains invisible simply because to see him—to acknowledge him with accorded reciprocity—would up-end the racist mindset that runs a political and cultural economy whose very stability is purchased by keeping him in the shadows of the deliberately unseen. Amid all this, what is easy to discern from Ellison’s novel is that this striking protagonist—this fictional construct—is little more than a scaled-back representation. The fictional construct of his own invisibility is an individualized personification of an entire oppressed community, a singular illustration of an actual social invisibility willfully writ large across a complete segment of society. In this respect, any move from the shadows of invisibility into spaces of visibility is literally tantamount to a radical re-visioning of the socio-political order. And the governing assumption of American culture is that it must be policed. Sixty-five years later, we might consider the deep understanding of invisibility in this novel from the mid-point of the twentieth century and take seriously once again its unmistakable yet subtle conception of invisibility as the product of a wanton disregard of one’s neighbors, of their basic dignity and of their human rights. We would not be incorrect to see in it a register that still positions invisibility just outside our doors among the disenfranchised, the dispossessed and the displaced. For they are the invisible among us: the specters denied the possibility of reciprocity and rendered dangerously vulnerable by disregard. It is the invisible among us who cry

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“Black Lives Matter!” only to receive the deaf ear and the blind eye even when the invisible later lie bloodied and dead in the streets from unnecessary, unjustifiable and yet legally sanctioned police bullets. The residents of Ferguson Missouri know this invisibility. It was reflected in the faces of the police and in the officers’ callous indifference to the unarmed and lifeless body of Michael Brown whom they left in lying in the middle of street for some four and a half hours after they gunned him down on August 9, 2014. What was that corpse other than the epitome of invisibility on our city streets: the visible reminder—the inanimate trace—of the 18-year-old young man who at that moment was and was no longer there? Present and absent, Brown’s disregarded body was the visible reminder of the invisibility of all those in the community around him. But so too was his lifeless body a reminder that while invisibility may not be seen, it can be felt, and that sometimes its weight becomes more than one can bear. In such contexts, invisibility emerges forcefully from the shadows and makes itself known— not from the cultivated guidance of a political elite but from the spontaneous, improvisational, and compelling action of the many. It surfaces in the swell of the community filling the streets in protest and among those who thus find themselves simultaneously on the front lines of repression and on the cutting edge of political change. It surfaces in the theatre—not in pieces entitled “What Is to Be Done,” but in pieces like Dennis A. Allen II’s short monologue “How I Feel,” which he wrote for the New Black Fest’s “Hands Up: Six Testaments” theatre project.22 There, after requesting that all members of the audience stand with their hands raised, Allen threw decorum to the wind and resorted to a theatre of expediency. He told the audience: Mike Brown was shot six times and he had NO WEAPON. His brains were blown out in broad daylight. His blood [was] all over the concrete and [he] was left there in the street uncovered for over four fucking hours[.] [T]here is not language strong enough to convey what the fuck I feel about that. Fuck you for not feeling what I feel. Fuck you for shutting down because I’m using “strong” language. I’m not safe, my father’s not safe, my brothers and sisters, my mother is not safe because none of you value our lives. Police don’t. Whites don’t. Blacks don’t. But I will not allow you to take away my rights, my humanity.23 Amid the reverberations of such unsettling yet justifiable anger, aesthetics and theatrical conventions matter little. Nor does it matter whether Michael Brown was a saint or, as became a bizarre matter of concern, whether he did or did not have a juvenile police record (see, for example, the Brown family attorney’s open letter to the St. Louis Post Dispatch24). What matters is that his slain body is clear evidence that he and his friends are homo sacer, that designation of mortal vulnerability that Giorgio Agamben uses to designate those in society who may be killed without the perpetrator being sanctioned: those like Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Grey, Eric

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Garner and Walter Scott and those who are invisible in death as in life because rather than knowing their names we know only that they were like those whose names we can recall. That Agamben’s 1995 study of the concept of the homo sacer takes the concentration camps as its primary example is perhaps understandable. In the western world, those camps are the twentieth century’s most visible blight. They are the material evidence that manufactured social invisibility is a death sentence. Yet it is not difficult to see the broad relevance of the questions that his study raises for the invisible among us today. Writing of “the horrors committed in the camps,” for example, Agamben argues that the question is not “how crimes of such atrocity could be committed against human beings,” but rather how “the juridical procedures and deployments of power” could “so completely” deprive human beings “of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear as a crime.”25 To side with Agamben in this distinction today is to ask this same question time and again with regard to the Michael Browns, the Eric Garners and the Walter Scotts of the Black community. And is this not the underlying question raised by Black Lives Matter? How it is possible that none of these unnecessary deaths “appear as a crime”? At the very least, this is the question that Agamben encourages us to ask regarding the invisible among us. Readers of Agamben know that he points specifically to the undocumented, the stateless and to refugees in this regard. “We should not forget,” he writes, “that the first camps were built in Europe as spaces for controlling refugees, and that the succession of internment camps—concentration camps—extermination camps represents a perfectly real filiation.”26 Underlying that spiraling descent in the 1940s was a sense of panic that is still felt today, a panic about the presence of the invisible in general and a panic in particular about the political economy of the nationstate—that fictional construct sans pareil—whose continued stability depends upon mechanisms of exclusion and invisibility. If there was panic then and now, this is because the refugee is a volatile figure in the structures of the nation-state, volatile enough, according to Agamben, to call into question its “fundamental categories”27—volatile enough that Hannah Arendt, whose essay “We Refugees” looms large over Agamben’s discussion, argued back in 1943 that “refugees represent the vanguard of their people.”28 And what is this vanguard if not that awkward invisibility I referred to earlier that arrives like an uninvited guest and upsets the show—a show whose pivotal trompe l’oeil is to normalize the blind eye: the blind eye with regard to Black and Brown communities, the blind eye with regard to immigrants, the blind eye with regard to refugees and the blind eye with regard to the coming avant-garde. Let us consider those refugees, and provisionally accept their status as a rough approximation of the plight of the comparably disenfranchised and dispossessed—in short, as a rough approximation of the many who are united by their involuntary invisibility—across western societies. To speak

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of the refugee as a vanguard is to recognize that there is nothing short of the transformative in his or her arrival, and the call echoing from Arendt through Agamben to the present moment is to embrace this invisible avantgarde and the radical potential it carries. Building on this very notion of vanguardism, Agamben argues that the refugee is “perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which,” despite its accompanying characteristic of invisibility, “one may see […] the forms and limits of a coming political community.” The reference here is to a community on the move, and “if we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead,” Agamben argues, “we will have to abandon […] the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political […] and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.”29 Of course, that figure, like Ellison’s Invisible Man, is a scaled-back representation: an individualized personification of an entire community condemned to but emerging from the shadows. Here too in Agamben’s reference to a “coming political community,” I would suggest, we finally find the referent for the blank placeholder left by the anonymous authors of The Coming Insurrection— even though it is not what they imagined. In the place of The Invisible Committee we discover something much broader, something akin to what Alain Badiou has called an “enormous nomadic proletariat, […] a virtual advance guard [a virtual vanguard30] of the gigantic mass of people whose existence, in the world today, is not counted.”31 Whether we do or do not count that mass—whether we finally admit that turning the blind eye as if they do not count is a crime—depends upon whether we can look into the invisible and see the future. The stakes in doing so could not be higher. It is not insignificant that for Agamben the specter of the camps frames such arguments, for his question about how, with respect to the camps, it was possible to “so completely” deprive human beings “of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear as a crime” echoes into the future as part of his admonition to recognize the refugee as the cornerstone of a new political philosophy. It would be difficult to find a more concise articulation of that admonition than the one that occurs in the play Illegale Helfer (Illegal Helpers) by the Berlin based Italian playwright Maxi Obexer. A documentary theatre piece that first premiered at the Schauspielhaus Salzburg in 2016 before moving to the Hans Otto Theater in Berlin/ Potsdam, Illegale Helfer offers a series of interwoven dramatic monologues by doctors, judges, social workers and students whose sense of moral purpose drives them to provide assistance to refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants even when such assistance falls outside of the boundaries of the legally permissible. At what is perhaps the most decisive moment in the play for German-speaking audiences—audiences who can still remember the recriminations that the postwar generation directed at their parents in the 1960s for their passive complicity with a fascist state in the 1930s and ’40s—a judge who has taken extra-legal actions on behalf of asylum seekers

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looks to the audience and explains: “In fifty years at the most, the way we’re dealing with asylum seekers today will be considered a crime against humanity. We’re doing it with our eyes wide open […] with pens and clauses, with enforcement officers, and with some despicable tricks, we look away and they [the enforcement officers] know what they need to do.”32 Reflecting on this one moment from Obexer’s play, we might take note of the profound absence of any actual refugees in it and of how the noticeable presence of that absence actually places the invisible within the lens of a radical visibility while avoiding a mere semblance of visibility that ironically would keep invisibility intact. Indeed, the judge’s admonition effectively answers what Badiou has described as “the duty of theatre” today to confront audiences with “excluded and invisible people,”33 while the literal absence of the invisible attends to Benjamin Wihstutz’s concern that the theatrical display of refugees (regardless of whether those on the stage are actors or actual refugees) easily renders them “objects of pity or exoticism,”34 and hence denies them reciprocity and keeps them in realms of the spectral. Above all, with the judge’s admonition we might finally recognize that invisibility is largely a product of a decision “to look away” when one might “have looked to.” It is a product of a cultivated and willful disregard. Here we might also recall Axel Honneth’s famous essay “Invisibility: The Epistemology of Recognition,” which not surprisingly takes Ellison’s novel Invisible Man as its central point of reference. Honneth reminds us that social invisibility is always calculated and that “‘looking through’ someone has a performative aspect because it demands gestures or ways of behaving that make clear that the other is not seen not merely accidentally, but rather intentionally.”35 At the most basic level then, the absence of any possibility of reciprocity—the absence that is at the core of invisibility as a sociopolitical phenomenon—is a seemingly simple matter with profound and far-reaching political consequences. For western intellectuals, at least according to Badiou, “the whole problem lies in […] connecting” with the invisible, with “going to see them, talking to them. No new thinking in politics will be born,” he argues “except through unexpected, improbable alliances, egalitarian trajectories and encounters.”36 But in order to see them, to talk to them, one has to seek out the invisible. One has to replace the blind eye with what in no uncertain terms is a revolutionary perspective. Slavoj Žižek scoffs at this idea, not only characterizing it as “easy to say [yet] difficult to do,” but also suggesting that Badiou subscribes to a “naïve humanist metaphysics” in what he presumes is Badiou’s belief in “some ‘deeper’ human core of global solidarity.”37 But the issue here is perspective, not metaphysics. Nor is the unity among those whom Badiou identifies as an “enormous nomadic proletariat” of their own making. In this respect, Žižek would do well to remember what Theodor Adorno noted in Minima Moralia shortly after the last world war ended: “the most compelling anthropological evidence for the fact that Jews are not a race at all,” Adorno argued, “will in the case of a pogrom hardly change anything […] since the totalitarians

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know very well who they want to kill and who not.”38 The point then and the point now is that invisibility as well as any core unity to be found within it emanates from the blind eye of the privileged beholder and not from those who are thereby erased from the visual plane. The moral and political imperative in such contexts is to replace the blind eye with a revolutionary perspective and a vision capable of countering the crimes that occur when one looks away. For, “it is not the young fascist, banditry, and religion, that create the absence of a politics of emancipation able to construct its own vision and to define its own practices,” Badiou argues. “It is the absence of this politics that creates the possibility of fascism, of banditry, and of religious hallucinations”—hallucinations whose primary manifestation, I would add, is a cultivated selective vision and corresponding invisibility of those who are thereby held in disregard.39 What connects those held in that disregard, what unites the solitary figures of Ellison’s Invisible Man and of Agamben’s refugee, what unifies all those whom Badiou identifies as an internationalized “nomadic proletariat,” is their exclusion from a deeply flawed political equation calculated not by them but by others, an equation in which they not only do not count but do not even register.

IV. The desert mirage and dissolving borders: Fourth reflection on invisibly But what of this internationalized “nomadic proletariat”? Where does one go to meet the invisible? If one is looking for the invisible in the Americas, they are not hard to find. There are Border Angels in the California deserts and mountains just south of San Diego, for example, who attend to those whom others do not see and to those whose traces the Border Angels know all too well. In Christian theology, of course, there are debates about whether angels are visible or invisible beings, but the angels south of San Diego are not the angels of biblical lore. The Border Angels are an activist group, whose volunteers carry jugs of water into the deserts and mountains, leaving them in strategic locations where with a little luck the undocumented can find them as they make the arduous journey from Central and South America to the North, to the U.S. and to the vague promise of a better life—a promise that in the desert often fades into a mirage and thus into something whose fluctuation between presence and absence is a deadly lure. Similar groups provide assistance all along the U.S./ Mexican border because the single largest threat in the desert is the absence of water and the looming possibility of dehydration. Indeed, “humanitarian aid organizations like the Border Angels […] estimate that 10,000 people to date have perished attempting to cross the Mexico-U.S. border (never mind those who’ve died crossing Mexico).”40 Writing for the Tucson Weekly, the journalist Tim Vanderpool says that “the desert is haunted by thousands of unfound dead people”41 who did not complete the journey and who died unseen from dehydration— invisible in death, and in life as well. For we know that they were already

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invisible before they died and would have been trapped within a spectral life had they succeeded in their northern quest. What we also know is that those who do complete the journey remain invisible specters akin to Ellison’s protagonist. Call them what one will: illegal aliens, migrants, immigrants, undocumented workers, border crossers, asylum seekers, refugees. They do not cross the U.S. border—that cutting edge of barbed wire that Gloria Anzaldúa famously called a “1,950 mile-long open wound”42—and remain unscathed. I cite them here because I want to suggest that their haunting invisibility—like that of Ellison’s Invisible Man, Agamben’s refugees, and Badiou’s “nomadic proletariat”—is in fact a source of immense political power that, to echo The Invisible Committee once again, merely awaits a “credible revolutionary perspective” to bring it into visibility, focus and strength. I cite them here because now more than ever—when a newly elected U.S. President won on a bigoted campaign promise to build a wall that will only dig deeper into a festering wound—they are the closest that we have to a political avant-garde, for they are literally traversing the cutting edge. There is no need of a small coterie of revolutionary visionaries to lead the way. The invisibility of this vanguard is offset by their sheer numbers, and they follow their own call rather than that of a self-fashioned leader. I am certainly not the first to see them as such. In the closing sections of her 1991 novel Almanac of the Dead, Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko, for example, presents readers with a prophetic vision articulated through the character of a Mayan woman who can see into the future: “People should go about their daily routines,” this Mayan woman says, “because already the great shift of human populations on the continents was under way, and there was nothing human beings could do to stop it. […] No fences or walls, would stop [… those who were coming]; guns and bombs would not stop them. They had no fear of death; they were comfortable with their ancestors’ spirits. They would come by the millions.”43 Twenty-five years later, this image of mass migration from Silko’s novel is striking first of all for its prescient awareness of the population shifts now unfolding on a global scale—the kinds of shifts that immigration scholars like Fiona Adamson have translated from literary metaphor into hard statistics. In her essay “Crossing Borders: Internationals Migration and national Security,” Adamson notes that the International Organization for Migration “surmises that approximately 4 million people are smuggled across borders every year” and that “in the United States alone, there may be as many as 12 million illegal migrants, with approximately 4,000 illegal border crossings every day.”44 Though the daily numbers of border crossers have decreased since the recession of 2008, Silko’s Almanac of the Dead remains an important point of reference if only because of its recognition of those masses not as a “crisis” but as an inevitable, unacknowledged and unstoppable political force— indeed as a potent and seemingly invisible vanguard that, while not

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conforming to the popular conceptions of elite political vanguardism, is nonetheless in the process of radically transforming the U.S. and European political order. Even Žižek, despite his rather pronounced forebodings about “an influx of a really large number of refugees,”45 is almost instinctively drawn to this same sensibility—albeit not without a rather strange effort at sanitizing it for his broad western audience. In answering the question of “who will be the agent of the restoration of the commons,” and of “humanity itself, threatened by a global capitalism which generates new walls and other forms of apartheid,” Žižek argues for example that “there is only one correct answer to Leftist intellectuals desperately awaiting the arrival of a new revolutionary agent, the old Hopi saying with a wonderful Hegelian dialectical twist from substance to subject: ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’.”46 Wonderful though it may seem that Žižek uses this saying in order to admonish Leftist intellectuals to stop looking to others to be the agents of change that they themselves should be, there is no small irony that in stripping the saying from its Hopi cultural context, Žižek casually disenfranchises—and literally renders invisible once again—the very people to which the saying actually refers. Indeed, it refers to people like the border crossers cited at the end of Silko’s novel. Rather than lending itself to an admonition telling Leftists to take matters into their own hands, the passage tends instead to place those Leftists in the position of being what we might call the “après-coup” to the border crossers’ avant-garde. In this respect, Žižek’s usage arguably betrays the troubling reserve toward immigrants and refugees that can be found throughout his book Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors. Perhaps, that reserve explains Žižek’s hesitancy with regard to border crossers the world over. For they are not merely a nomadic proletariat awaiting a political intellectual leader a la Rakhmetov or Lenin; they are already the embodiment of a radical transformation of vanguardism that is itself transformative. But transformative in what sense? Though they are as yet specters and invisible, the actual border crossers to which Silko implicitly refers enact a political logic that is potent because, like the undocumented laborers themselves, it works behind the scenes. It performs in invisibility, and in doing so it pushes the contradictions of the current socio-economic order into the light of day. Indeed, the “spectral logic” which the border crossers embody through no choice of their own is, according to Derrida, “de facto a deconstructive logic,”47 and so those rendered invisible by the border—those who would circumvent the restrictions it seeks to impose— have a way of exposing the border for what it is and is not behind the well-regulated curtains of its showy public performances of national security. Some sense of that deconstructive logic and its exposure of the contradictions governing the border informs Didier Bigo’s astute critique of border security. Bigo argues that border security measures are less a mechanism for “the management of migrating populations” than they are for the cultivation of extreme and fanatical forms of “patriotism and

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obedience” from within the existing citizenry “towards the government in power.” He argues furthermore that the rhetoric and policies that would associate those on the northern journey with “violence […] terrorism, organized crime, illegal migration, [and even] radical Islam”—rhetoric and policies, we might add, that were key to Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign—accomplish little. They produce invisibility “and succeed only in generating violations of human rights,” thereby—and here the deconstructive turn—“endangering the very practices of democracy they purport to defend.”48 From either side of the fence, the effect of such rhetoric and of the policies it generates is thus to transform the border into something akin to a mirage: that dangerous desert apparition that is and is not there, that seems to be what in fact it is not and that offers what always vanishes from the visual plane when one approaches. It is at this vanishing point that we come full circle on our considerations of invisibility. So it should be no surprise, then, that here we also find ourselves once again in close proximity to Glenn Beck, to questions about experimental art and politics, to questions about the relation of everyday objects to art, and above all to questions about invisibility itself. All of these issues converged in 2010 when Ricardo Dominguez and Brett Stalbalm, founding members of the Electronic Disturbance Theatre, developed an artwork that built upon a psychogeography algorithm called the “Virtual Hiker,”49 which Stalbaum originally designed after having been inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s essay Walking (1862),50 published a year before Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? In that essay, Thoreau praises “the art of Walking” amid reflections on the rich etymological ambiguity of the term “sauntering,” which, as he notes, simultaneously alludes to one who is “going à la sainte terre,” i.e., to the holy land, and to one who is “sans terre,” i.e. “without land or home,” and who, as a consequence, is “equally at home everywhere.”51 Conceptually at least, Thoreau’s notion of the saunterer serves as a viable dialectical antinomy to Agamben’s homo sacer, for the wanderer who journeys to the holy land and is “at home everywhere” is the opposite to the wanderer who has been banned from sacrificial ritual and is everywhere unwelcome. Indeed, inasmuch as the saunterer is “equally at home everywhere,” he or she arguably undermines the very notion of sovereignty upon which the category of the homo sacer depends. Saunterers not only cross borders. At some level, they dissolve them. The question is how one might transition from the position of homo sacer to that of saunterer. Though never articulated in such terms, it was the challenge of finding an answer to this question that was behind Dominguez and Stalbalm’s decision to incorporate Stalbalm’s “Virtual Hiker” algorithm into a new art project. They called the project the “Transborder Immigrant Tool,” and the practical implications of this project were so at odds with the regulatory integrity of the southern U.S. border that, when Glen Beck learned of it, he immediately denounced the TBT on national television and did so in such virulent terms that he

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provoked Congress into investigating whether Dominguez and Stalbalm, who are members of the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, had potentially misappropriated government funds in developing their art project. Dominguez and Stalbalm were exonerated, but found themselves in the midst of a political storm. At the center of controversy was the Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s incorporation of Stalbalm’s algorithm into software designed to highjack the global positioning satellite (GPS) chip in inexpensive cellphones—those ubiquitous everyday objects of technology—which in turn could be distributed to immigrants attempting to cross into the U.S without documentation. The result was an artwork that Dominguez and Stalbalm described as an example of what Christopher Nolan has called “performative technologies.”52 Ostensibly, the modified cell phones gave those who possessed them access to broadcasted poetry. But the TBT also transformed the most basic cellphones “into navigation and survival tools” for the undocumented who traverse the “heavily policed Mexico-US border zone.” As Tyler Morgenstern has noted, the program used information “from NGOs like [the] Border Angels” to point border crossers to “clean water sites and life-saving stations along migration routes” as well as to provide them with “information about where to find safe housing and shelter.”53 Perhaps most important of all, the software accessed “the phone’s GPS features without needing to send out data through the telephony service operator, which [otherwise] could allow the user to be located.”54 So as a practical matter of life and death, the TBT enabled border crossers to move undetected, appropriating their invisibility as a shield for their own protection while pointing them not toward a vanishing mirage but toward containers of water and other supplies that activists like the “Border Angels” leave in the dessert for those attempting to cross it. More recently, Dominguez has argued that one of the main goals of the Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s “aesthetics of disturbance was […] making the invisible visible,”55 and with the TBT, this was achieved by playing one form of invisibility off against another. At the most practical level, the TBT’s clandestine use of a cell phone’s GPS system provided a spectral counterbalance to an otherwise repressive form of social invisibility, which it exposed by refusing in demonstrable ways to acquiesce to the notions of national sovereignty that, in their regulation of the border, are a key source of social invisibility as well as of the rationalized violations of human rights that it facilitates. None of this is particularly difficult to understand, and yet when the controversy came, it was ignited not by a debate about immigration but, ironically enough, by an indignant cry from Glenn Beck on his old Fox New show that the TBT’s “poetry would ‘dissolve’ the nation!” Although Dominguez responded by stating that he too believed that this “is indeed the power of poetry […] and/or the aesthetic [of the project] in general,”56 somehow they both knew that the broadcasted poetry’s actual power was that it provided the pretext and cover for a visionary bit of activism that is

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allied with the inevitable arrival of a massive nomadic proletariat who are already well along the path from homo sacer to saunterer and to the radical political transformation that will accompany that transition. One can talk it up as much as one likes—one can even scream about it on national television—the TBT’s broadcasted poetry was a bit of a ruse—as Dadaist poetry perhaps always is. In this respect, we might wonder why, when he learned of the project, Beck did not assume his self-appointed role as an art historian and call the project part of a new Dadaist movement for which the TBT could serve as a urinal, since among other things its primary mechanism was an everyday object—a simple cell phone—repurposed, in typical Dadaist fashion, to broadcast poetry to the socially invisible, who may or may not be crossing the desert in search of water and a better life. Poetry broadcast into the desert of the real—the only thing that could be more Dada than that would be poetry as window dressing for an invisible insurrection. The TBT facilitated both. Somehow too, all of the controversial media attention the Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s project drew also served its purpose. Members of the theatre suggested that “the attention that the device attracts [in the media and in Congress] serves to deflect attention paid to the border crosser.”57 Whether politically repurposed cell phones are art or even theatre is difficult to say. Perhaps the answer lies in a simple comparison of a prepaid phone and a missing urinal, both of which apparently can be tossed once they have served their purpose. But in a world of invisibility, those discarded burners provide a vision into the future, and I want to suggest in conclusion that they also provide us with a model of an avant-garde, which it behooves us to take seriously. For at this moment in history, I would suggest that the most viable artistic avant-gardes are those that ally themselves and their art with the immigrants and refugees—with the invisible—who are at the political cutting edge and at the borders of our political institutions demanding recognition, reciprocity and something more than invisibility.

Notes 1 “Duchamp’s Urinal Tops Art Survey,” BBC News, December 1, 2004. http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4059997.stm, accessed January 6, 2017. 2 Scott Christian, “Glen Beck Has Gone Full Hipster,” Esquire, November 16, 2016. http://www.esquire.com/style/news/a50753/glenn-beck-has-gone-fullhipster/, accessed January 13, 2017. 3 Glen Beck, “Understanding this Upside Down Urinal Is Critical,” Glen, August 29, 2016. www.glennbeck.com/2016/08/29/understanding-this-upside-downurinal-is-critical/?utm_source=glennbeck&utm_medium=contentcopy_link, accessed January 11, 2017. 4 Ibid. 5 Marisa Guthrie, “Glenn Beck: ‘Trump TV Will Be the Urinal’ of a New ‘Dadaist Movement’,” The Hollywood Reporter, 3 November, 2016. http://www. hollywoodreporter.com/news/trump-tv-can-thrive-2016-election-glenn-beckexplains-how-942849, accessed November 5, 2016.

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6 Kimberly Jannarone, “The Political Fallacy of Vanguard Performance,” Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015, 2. 7 Beck, “Understanding this Upside Down Urinal Is Critical.” 8 Leland De La Durantaye, “Readymade Remade,” Cabinet 27 (2007): np. Online Journal. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/27/durantaye.php, accessed January 15, 2017. 9 No author, “Rogue Urinals: Has the Market Gone Dada?,” The Economist, March 24, 2010. http://www.economist.com/node/15766467, accessed January 18, 2017. 10 Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity—A Cultural Biography. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, 223. 11 José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, 6. 12 Noam Cohen, “A Book Attacking Capitalism Gets Sales Help from a Fox Host,” New York Times, 15 March 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/ business/media/15tract.html, accessed November 8, 2016. 13 The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009, 28. 14 Vladimir Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?” [1902], p. 50. PDF format. https://www. marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/download/what-itd.pdf, accessed November 10, 2016. 15 The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 26. 16 The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015, 95. 17 Bruno Bosteels, “Translator’s Foreword,” in Alain Badiou, Philosophy for Militants. New York: Verso, 2012, viii. 18 Bosteels, “Translator’s Foreword,” xii, xiii. 19 Badiou, Philosophy for Militants, 2, 3. 20 Jacques Derrida, “Spectrographies,” in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002, 121. 21 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1995, 3. 22 “New Black Fest to Present Short Works Responding to Michael Brown Shooting,” New York Times, November 14, 2014. https://artsbeat.blogs. nytimes.com/2014/11/14/new-black-fest-to-present-short-works-responding-tomichael-brown-shooting/, accessed January 29, 2017. 23 Dennis A. Allen, “How I Feel,” The New Black Fest’s Hands Up: 7 Playwrights, 7 Testaments. http://fresnostate.edu/artshum/theatrearts/documents/16-17season-documents/HandsUpScriptAsOfMarch16.pdf, accessed January 28, 2017. 24 Aura Bogado, “Everything You Need to Know About Michael Brown’s Juvie Record,” ColorLines 12 September 2014. https://www.colorlines.com/articles/ everything-you-need-know-about-michael-browns-juvie-record, accessed 29 January, 2017. 25 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 171. 26 Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000. 21. 27 Agamben, Homo Sacer,134. 28 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” Menorah Journal 31.1 (1943): 77. 29 Agamben, Means without End, 16. 30 This is Slavoj Žižek’s alternative translation cited in Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors: Against the Double Blackmail. Melville House: Kindle Edition, Kindle Location 1079.

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31 Alain Badiou, Our Wound Is Not So Recent: Thinking the Paris Killings of 13 November. Wiley: Kindle Edition, Kindle Locations 744–45. 32 Maxi Obexer, Illegal Helpers, 16. (Unpublished manuscript translated by Neil Blackadder from Illegale Helfer. Cologne: Schaefersphilippen Theater und Medien, 2016), used with permission. 33 Alain Badiou, “Theses on Theatre,” Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 74. 34 Benjamin Wihstutz, “Other Space or Space of Others? Reflections on Contemporary Political Theatre,” Performance and the Politics of Space: Theatre and Topology, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz. New York: Routledge, 2013, 191. 35 Axel Honneth, “Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘Recognition’,” The Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 75.1 (2001): 112. 36 Badiou. Our Wound is Not So Recent, Kindle Locations 746–48. 37 Žižek, Refugees, Kindle Location 1079. 38 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. New York: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011, 106. 39 Badiou, Our Wound is Not So Recent, Kindle Locations 730–32. 40 Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab, Sustenance: A Paly for All Trans [ ] Borders. New York: Printed Matter, Inc, 2010, np. 41 Cited in Danielle Maestretti, “Feds Crack Down on Activists along the Border,” UTNE Reader, 10 July 2009. https://www.utne.com/politics/feds-crack-downon-activists-along-the-border, accessed 15 November, 2016. 42 Gloria Anzaldúa Borderlands / la Frontera: The New Mistiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987, 2. 43 Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin, 1991, 735–36. 44 Fiona Adamson, “Crossing Borders: International Migration and National Security,” International Security 31.1 (2006): 176. 45 Žižek, Refugees, Kindle Location 1309. 46 Žižek Refugees, Kindle Locations 1277–79. 47 Derrida, “Spectrographies,” 117. 48 Didier Bigo, “Review of Frontiers of Fear: Immigration and Insecurity in the United States and Europe by Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42.4 (2016): 691. 49 Fernanda Duarte, “Rerouting Borders: Politics of Mobility and the Transborder Immigrant Tool,” Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces, ed. Adriana de Souza and Mimi Sheller. New York: Routledge, 2015, 69. 50 Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, and Brett Stalbaum, “The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity and Hope in PostNAFTA Circuits of Bodies Electr(on)/ic,” Online publication. https://www. uni-siegen.de/locatingmedia/workshops/mobilehci/cardenas_the_transborder_ immigrant_tool.pdf, accessed November 16, 2016. 51 Henry David Thoreau, Walking. New York: Value Classic Reprints, 2016, 5. 52 Cardenas, “The Transborder Immigrant Tool.” 53 Tyler Morgenstern, “Hacking the Border to Pieces: Technology, Poetics, and Protest at the Speed of Dreams,” Art – Threat, 8 October 2012. http://artthreat. net/2012/10/ricardo-dominguez-hacking-border/, accessed November 1, 2016. 54 Duarte, “Rerouting Borders: Politics of Mobility and the Transborder Immigrant Tool”, 70. 55 Ricardo Dominguez, “Fearless Art in the Age of Fear: Electronic Disturbance Theater’s Parrhesian Gestures,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83.1 (2016): 110.

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56 Ricardo Dominguez in Leila Nadir, “Poetry, Immigration and the FBI: The Transborder Immigrant Tool” [Interview with Ricardo Dominguez] Hyperallergic, July 23, 2012. http://hyperallergic.com/54678/poetryimmigration-and-the-fbi-the-transborder-immigrant-tool/, accessed November 16, 2016. 57 Cardenas, “The Transborder Immigrant Tool.”

Bibliography “Duchamp’s Urinal Tops Art Survey.” BBC News, December 1, 2004. http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4059997.stm “New Black Fest to Present Short Works Responding to Michael Brown Shooting.” In New York Times, November 14, 2014. https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes. com/2014/11/14/new-black-fest-to-present-short-works-responding-to-michaelbrown-shooting/ “Rogue Urinals: Has the Market Gone Dada?” In The Economist, March 24, 2010. http://www.economist.com/node/15766467 Adamson, Fiona. “Crossing Borders: International Migration and National Security.” In International Security 31.1 (2006): 165–99. Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. New York: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000. Allen, Dennis A. “How I Feel.” The New Black Fest’s Hands Up: 7 Playwrights, 7 Testaments. http://fresnostate.edu/artshum/theatrearts/documents/16-17-seasondocuments/HandsUpScriptAsOfMarch16.pdf Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / la Frontera: The New Mistiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Arendt, Hannah. “We Refugees.” Menorah Journal 31.1 (1943): 69–77. Alain Badiou, Alain. “Theses on Theatre.” In id. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Badiou, Alain. Our Wound Is Not So Recent: Thinking the Paris Killings of 13 November. Trans. Robin Mackay. London: Polity, 2016. Badiou, Alain. Philosophy for Militants. Trans. Bruno Bosteels. New York: Verso, 2012. Beck, Glen. “Understanding This Upside Down Urinal Is Critical,” Glen, August 29, 2016. www.glennbeck.com/2016/08/29/understanding-this-upside-down-urinalis-critical/?utm_source=glennbeck&utm_medium=contentcopy_link. Bigo, Didier. “Review of Frontiers of Fear: Immigration and Insecurity in the United States and Europe by Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42.4 (2016): 689–93. Bogado, Aura. “Everything You Need to Know about Michael Brown’s Juvie Record.” In ColorLines, September 12, 2014. https://www.colorlines.com/ articles/everything-you-need-know-about-michael-browns-juvie-record. Bosteels, Bruno. “Translator’s Foreword,” in Alain Badiou, Philosophy for Militants. New York: Verso, 2012, vii-xxiv.

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Cardenas, Micha, and Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, and Brett Stalbaum. “The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity and Hope in PostNAFTA Circuits of Bodies Electr(on)/ic,” Online publication. https://www. uni-siegen.de/locatingmedia/workshops/mobilehci/cardenas_the_transborder_ immigrant_tool.pdf Christian, Scott. “Glen Beck Has Gone Full Hipster.” In Esquire, November 16, 2016. http://www.esquire.com/style/news/a50753/ glenn-beck-has-gone-full-hipster/ Cohen, Noam. “A Book Attacking Capitalism Gets Sales Help from a Fox Host.” In New York Times, March 15, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/ business/media/15tract.html. De La Durantaye, Leland. “Readymade Remade.” Cabinet 27 (2007): np. http:// www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/27/durantaye.php. Derrida, Jacques. “Spectrographies.” In Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002, 113–34. Duarte, Fernanda. “Rerouting Borders: Politics of Mobility and the Transborder Immigrant Tool.” Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces. Edited by Adriana de Souza and Mimi Sheller. New York: Routledge, 2015, 65–81. Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab. Sustenance: A Paly for All Trans [ ] Borders. New York: Printed Matter, Inc, 2010: n.p. Dominguez, Ricardo. “Fearless Art in the Age of Fear: Electronic Disturbance Theater’s Parrhesian Gestures.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83.1 (2016): 107–13. Dominguez, Ricardo. “Poetry, Immigration and the FBI: The Transborder Immigrant Tool.” Interview by Leila Nadir. In Hyperallergic July 23, 2012. http:// hyperallergic.com/54678/poetry-immigration-and-the-fbi-the-transborderimmigrant-tool/ Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity—A Cultural Biography. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Guthrie, Marisa. “Glenn Beck: ‘Trump TV Will Be the Urinal’ of a New ‘Dadaist Movement’.” In The Hollywood Reporter, November 3, 2016. http://www. hollywoodreporter.com/news/trump-tv-can-thrive-2016-election-glenn-beckexplains-how-942849. Honneth, Axel. “Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘Recognition’.” In The Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 75, no.1 (2001): 111–26. The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009. The Invisible Committee. To Our Friends. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015. Jannarone, Kimberly. “The Political Fallacy of Vanguard Performance.” In Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right. Edited by Kimberly Jannarone. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015, 1–15. Lenin, Vladimir. “What is to Be Done?” [1902]. https://www.marxists.org/archive/ lenin/works/download/what-itd.pdf Maestretti, Danielle. “Feds Crack Down on Activists along the Border.” In UTNE Reader, July 10, 2009. https://www.utne.com/politics/feds-crack-down-onactivists-along-the-border

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Morgenstern, Tyler. “Hacking the Border to Pieces: Technology, Poetics, and Protest at the Speed of Dreams.” In Art—Threat, October 8, 2012. http://artthreat. net/2012/10/ricardo-dominguez-hacking-border/. Obexer, Maxi. Illegal Helpers. Translated by Neil Blackadder, unpublished manuscript, 2016. Obexer, Maxi. Illegale Helfer. Cologne: Schaefersphilippen Theater und Medien, 2016. Ortega y Gasset, José. The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin, 1991. Thoreau, Henry David, Walking. New York: Value Classic Reprints, 2016. Wihstutz, Benjamin. “Other Space or Space of Others? Reflections on Contemporary Political Theatre.” In Performance and the Politics of Space: Theatre and Topology. Edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz. New York: Routledge, 2013, 182–97. Žižek, Slavoj. Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors: Against the Double Blackmail. London: Melville House Publishing, 2016.

8

Applied theatre Theatre for change Matthias Warstat

The concept of a “social turn” has been used to capture the renewed interest in the humanities for questions of the societal and the political dimensions of the arts. Two recent publications from Shannon Jackson and Claire Bishop are poignant representatives of this trend. First, they manage to effortlessly bridge visual art, photography, performance art and theatre, meaning that the political is no longer divided according to artistic genres. Second, both authors contend that political effects emerge precisely from the fact that artworks and performances prompt reflection on their own material preconditions. Jackson and Bishop afford preferential treatment to works that thematise their own infrastructures, production conditions and forms of financial support. Finally, one gets from both books the impression that it is more the societal component of the arts than the political that is up for debate. The magic word in Bishop’s argument is, above all, “participation”— and this in the sense that social groups which are otherwise not visible in the public sphere are to be afforded a stage, an exhibition space, or some other sort of visible forum. It’s important in the context of this kind of socially engaged art to look at a type of theatre usually situated outside of the art world; one which in Germany—in contrast to the USA and Great Britain—has in large part developed with little attention from the field of Theatre Studies. In English, the concept of applied theatre is used as a sort of catch-all for theatre projects with explicit political, pedagogical or therapeutic intentions.1 It covers projects targeted towards very precise audiences: town or village communities, residents of particular neighbourhoods, patients, clients, prisoners, members of specific social milieus, corporate workforces—in any case, groups which, in distinction to a more or less ‘randomly’ composed, paying audience, share definite social characteristics. Since this form of highly functionally-determined theatre exists in various forms—from documentary pieces to improv theatre to psychodrama--it’s difficult to elaborate the particulars of such projects through a single example. Similar difficulties are encountered by attempts to translate the English term into German. If one were to do so literally, applied theatre would have to be translated as ‘angewandtes Theater,’ but this term immediately suggests two

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false associations: first, ‘Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft’ [Applied Theatre Studies] already exists as a term; it stands for a course of study that is theoretical and academic, while also artistically and practically oriented, developed at the Universität Gießen. Its central concern is certainly not applied theatre in the English sense. Second, ‘angewandtes Theater’ sounds like ‘angewandte Kunst’ [applied art], but this association too is misleading. For applied theatre is not about commercially or even industrially-produced products, nor about design in the broadest sense of the term. Applied theatre is not a term for products, but rather for projects and processes. In what follows, applied theatre will be introduced as a form of theatre gaining in international significance. It will also be investigated with respect to its aesthetic potential. My claim is that in a certain sense, the processes at work in this theatre can be understood with the aid of the terms and conceptual structures of a transformative aesthetics. However, if these concepts are to explain applied theatre, they will have to be referred more to the actions and experiences of actors than to the perceptions and lived experiences of spectators. This will be explained in greater depth in the second part of this essay. The task of the first part will be to give a more general sketch of the phenomenon that is applied theatre. In so doing, I want to take as my point of departure a typology that lays out the whole spectrum of applied theatre. The most significant subgroups are: • • • • • • •

Theatre used in social and social-therapeutic work Theatre in education, pedagogy and the school Projects dealing with theatre pedagogy, and youth theatre clubs Drama therapy, psychodrama, and theatrical therapy forms Prison theatre Corporate theatre Theatre used to process political crises and violent conflicts

Admittedly, this provisional typology seems somewhat unsystematic, as it relies upon a mixture of functional and institutional criteria. However, a more satisfying solution is hindered by the fact that neither type of criterion alone is capable of sorting the entire field. A strictly institutional typology (theatre in the school, the clinic, the prison, the office, etc.) couldn’t include the large number of projects which take place beyond traditional institutional boundaries, those that occur in their own structures, specially developed for them. A strictly functional typology, on the other hand, would face the problem that many of the implied functions of applied theatre (cultural education, conflict resolution, social integration) can also be fulfilled by traditional stagings in municipal and state theatres. Despite or because of its murky contours, this phenomenon needs to be examined more closely. Internationally, theatre forms that pursue social, pedagogical or therapeutic agendas under the umbrella of terms like social theatre, community theatre, or indeed applied theatre are on the rise. The

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sheer number of projects under these headings transforms the global theatre landscape: where previously commercial theatre systems had dominated, these projects produce a significant non-profit sector. Where on the other hand—as in Germany—an arts-oriented theatre prevails, these new forms of theatre present a challenge to the traditional ideal of aesthetic autonomy, because they take as their point of departure clearly defined goals. Participants are to be afforded experiences that contribute in direct, immediate fashion to a change in their situation. In light of these far-reaching promises for practical effects, which suggest possibilities for numerous kinds of transformations, it seems appropriate to analyse applied theatre with the categories of a transformative aesthetics. A number of actors and actresses, at least, do not hesitate to describe applied theatre in a kind of vitalistic spirit as theatre which can fundamentally change your life.2

I. What is applied theatre? Applied theatre is not any individual form of theatre, for entirely distinct forms of theatre—from psychodrama to role-play to stand-up comedy—can be done as applied theatre. Instead, applied theatre refers to specific contexts for the use (or application) of theatre. Applied theatre is, in essence, a contextual concept. It answers questions regarding the framework in which theatre is performed and the aim with which it is undertaken. The institution which we are accustomed to calling ‘theatre’ is, in general, not the framework in which applied theatre is carried out—although to a certain extent municipal and state theatres also do applied theatre projects. It’s more commonly embedded, however, in other societal institutions—schools, clinics or prisons—or is supported by non-governmental organisations with social, pedagogical, political or therapeutic agendas. The aim of such projects is not primarily an artistic-aesthetic one. Instead, the focus is on social, pedagogical, political or therapeutic goals—although these can certainly be connected with aesthetic ambitions. One characteristic of applied theatre lies in the fact that its aims can be formulated in advance. Only a few artistically-oriented performance groups and directors are willing to declare in the run-up to a production what sorts of effects the performance is supposed to have on individual target groups. Not so for the organisers of an applied theatre project: for them it is a matter of course that one commits oneself in advance to concrete effects, particularly in the applications for funding that must be submitted in advance. In practice, organisers of applied theatre serve two masters: they connect aesthetic tasks with therapeutic, pedagogical or political ones. Now, one might object that traditional directors have always occupied such a double role: many contemporary directors continue to understand their position along the lines of the Early Modern theatre director, who had to take care of all the needs of ‘his’ or ‘her’ troupe. If, however, emphasis is placed here on the double role of the organiser in applied theatre, this is not just with

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respect to his or her self-understanding. Those who wish to organise an applied theatre project often require doubled qualifications—it’s expected that they possess not only artistic training, as an actor or director, but also that they can demonstrate pedagogical or therapeutic credentials.3 This means that the study of applied theatre must consider the ways in which organisers come to terms with this double role, and also how the specific combination of capabilities and demands affects a group’s work. As a collaborator in an applied theatre group, one has to reckon with the possibility that not only will one be judged according to one’s accomplishments as an actor, but also that one’s social behaviour and psychic states will become objects of discussion. Additional discursive confusion arises from the fact that the actual functions of applied theatre often don’t accord with the programmatic statements of its organisers. A typical move in their argumentation is a retreat to (strictly) artistic intentions. In public statements by theatre pedagogues and drama therapists, one often finds—all previousdeclared and clearly defined goals to the contrary—statements like: “I’m not trying to do anything other than theatre” or “I’m only interested in the artistic process. If that succeeds, all the other effects take care of themselves” or “Nothing worse than the didacticization of theatre!” One should not necessarily take these sorts of statements at their word— their rhetorical goal, at least, is transparent: first, they relieve the speaker of the necessity of revealing the pedagogical, therapeutic, or political techniques behind their own work. Second, they suggest a kind of reverence for the traditional ideal of aesthetic autonomy. The claim that one wants to do theatre and nothing but theatre makes use of well-known idealistic tropes in the discourse surrounding art. In particular circles—amongst others in circles of theatre aficionados—this sort of gesture can lend added weight to one’s own work. For it is precisely from this perspective that applied theatre is charged with a desire to engage in pedagogy and not art. As such, it’s understandable that actors and agents in applied theatre place such emphasis on their artistic demands when they make statements about their own work. This only becomes problematic when it causes the actual preconditions of their work to become obscure or unreflected. Applied theatre is more a theatre for its collaborators than its spectators. The promised effects of applied theatre are directed primarily towards the agents involved in it, and only secondarily—if at all—towards an audience. This shift in focus relative to other forms of theatre has a number of consequences. When they rave about the opportunities afforded by their type of theatre, most organisers of applied theatre do not have in mind the experience of performing in the strictest sense. Instead, they’re thinking of longer-term learning processes that the collaborators go through. One example would be disadvantaged children or youths who take part in a theatre project and in so doing learn a few things: speaking techniques, improvisation, mimetic facilities, and much more. It doesn’t seem a priori flawed to assume that the skills acquired by performers in, for example, rehearsals will be useful to them in other aspects of their

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lives. 4 Applied theatre has a unique approach to performances. As a spectator of such performances, it’s customary that one doesn’t pay admission—or if one does, it’s a very small sum. When, for example, a drama therapy group performs in front of friends, relatives and acquaintances of the participants, these spectators are invited as guests: they are not a paying audience. The funding structures for applied theatre guarantee for the most part independence from admission fees; what’s more, the performers in a drama therapy group are not professional actors who have to earn a living from their work. The decision not to charge admission contributes to the development of a particular kind of theatrical public space, although it’s not the sole decisive factor. More important are the specific ways in which it is received and judged: those who watch an applied theatre performance, e.g. one put on by a prison theatre group, are prepared to overlook technical weaknesses. There will be no booing from the audience when an actor forgets lines or when a chorus passage is not spoken with perfect synchronisation. This does not mean that an applied theatre audience cannot be critical of a production, merely that the criteria for evaluation are different. Performances can be judged, for example, according to whether they seem to be the result of group processes that benefit the performers. A frequent subject of discussion is whether the actors seem to be carrying out someone else’s agenda by remote control, or whether they were able to shape the work themselves. One aspect that is beyond question is that applied theatre should not have a self-promotional or publicising effect. One of the unwritten laws of prison theatre is that the participating inmates do not discuss their own crimes, although certainly biographical themes from their lives are indirectly raised—through corresponding dramatic material—in such a way that the audience gains some insight into the life-worlds of the inmates. The object of corporate theatre can consist in revealing communicational problems and other ‘deficits’ of individual departments in such a way that this knowledge is more readily digestible for those involved. The work in pedagogical theatre at municipal and state theatres in Germany has for a number of years benefited from a program called “Heimspiel,”5 launched by the Federal Culture Foundation. This program supports theatre activities “that engage with the urban and social realities of the city and are intended to draw a new audience to the (municipal) theatre.”6 Through this program, a number of projects arose which revealed the social problems of individual neighbourhoods on the stage of their local theatre. These examples make clear the ways in which applied theatre can help publicise—albeit in limited form—experiences, problems and social injustices. In comparison to other theatre publics, that of applied theatre is generally more selective, sometimes hand-picked. It’s rare that the audience can truly be characterised as ‘external.’7 What’s sought after is an audience that rewards the collaborators for their work with recognition and appreciation. Applied theatre is not a theatre that reflects on itself to a particularly high degree as theatre. The self-reflexive components so important to avant-garde theatre (and for later

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performance types as well, such as performance art and installations) appear only sparingly in applied theatre. There is an affirmational relationship to theatre as praxis; the participants take for granted that acting is a good, creative thing, from which one can learn a great deal and increase one’s capacities for self-expression. As a result, what’s striking about applied theatre is rarely the form—it’s the content. What appears on stage are conflicts, emotions and experiences that are not only of biographical relevance for the participants, but which are also immediately recognisable by the audience as significant. At the same time, humour plays a significant role in applied theatre. There’s a lot of laughter, as well as a belief that there should be a lot of laughter: many organisers believe that laughter has a liberating power. It’s in precisely those locations—corporations or clinics—where people do not voluntarily decide to become participants that organisers rely on funny moments as a way of easing access to theatre for the target group—a way of ‘lowering the threshold’ for participation. For distant observers, this constellation has something of the grotesque about it: one sees adults laughing and grinning in an environment characterised by stress, competition, repression and whole host of anxieties. One wonders why applied theatre organisers, who have for the most part undergone theatrical training and are thus capable of understanding the effects of a theatrical constellation, are willing to accept such revealing, even compromising effects. Presumably the frequent recourse to satirical revue, improv theatre and comedy forms results from the organisers’ desire to find forms that will be familiar to their collaborators from their own experiences. People are less reluctant to engage in practices they already know, and whose demands and outward appearance they can better assess. They want to act in genres which they enjoy watching themselves. This could be the reason that so many applied theatre offerings imitate popular television formats. The possible effects of applied theatre range across a broad spectrum, from cathartic to distantiating. Applied theatre can stimulate strong emotional responses and take it upon itself to provide participants with affective release. Just as often, however, it aims for distantiating effects: the collaborators are meant to be able to view their own problems through the distance of theatre, in order to be able to then draw conclusions—resembling in a way the model of the epic. Both dimensions of affective response raise difficult questions. Catharsis is a promise to produce certain effects, which at least in older theatre-theoretical discourses—beginning with Aristotle—are directed towards the spectators of an event, and not the actors themselves. Catharsis refers to the emotional experience of a spectator who achieves a kind of affective release through observing the fate of a dramatic figure. 8 In applied theatre, by contrast, it is not the spectator but rather the actors who are the focus. They are the ones meant to benefit from the performance. Whether actors themselves are capable of experiencing something like catharsis in performing a character appears doubtful when one considers the high degree of self-control that

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appearing on stage requires of untrained actors. Similarly, one should take care not to overvalue the specific form of self-distantiation achievable in theatre. To be sure, one can observe one’s own conflicts in a distantiated manner by observing dramatic personae. But couldn’t verbalising and discussing the same conflicts offer similar distantiating effects, and with substantially less time and effort than through a scenic representation? To determine the political position of applied theatre, two aspects have to be taken into consideration. First, the core of the vast majority of applied theatre projects comprises programs for creative self-optimisation. The characteristic effects promised by applied theatre apply to the acting subject as creative individual. He or she is offered the opportunity to increase his or her capacities for self-expression, to develop a better sense of his or her body, increased capacities for empathy, the ability to experience new things, and much more.9 With such promises, applied theatre aligns itself with neoliberal societal programs, whose aim is to improve social conditions through an increase in individual capacities and better behavioural control. Second, however, applied theatre is also a collective praxis. Most applied theatre projects are intended to be a kind of group work. It’s precisely in contrast to other forms of artistic therapy, such as art therapy or music therapy, that applied theatre contains a politicisable element of collective cultural tradition. In any case, theatrical processes lead to various kinds of cooperation, and in cooperation political energies can arise. The juxtaposition of an individualising logic of self-optimisation and collective cultural praxis makes it difficult to clearly situate applied theatre in the political spectrum. That said, one must note that, at least in Germany, there are very few applied theatre projects that really aim for criticism of the existing system and radical societal change. Much more common are projects that try to come to some sort of accord with the institutions of the existing social order; their goal is system-immanent change, and in their own self-understanding, they are more socio-therapeutically than politically oriented.10

II. Relationships to reception aesthetics On September 1, 2009, bankruptcy proceedings began for the Quelle corporation, one of the largest employers in the cities of Nuremberg and Fürth. By November 1 of the same year, nearly 4,000 of the firm’s workers were unemployed. Many of them had worked their entire lives for Quelle, a mail-order firm run by Gustav and Grete Schickedanz. With its kitchen appliances, washing machines, vacuums and affordable clothing, Quelle had been a symbol of the economic growth of the old Federal Republic. Although previous years had seen the closure of a number of major businesses in the region—including historic firms Grundig and AEG—it was only after the bankruptcy of Quelle that it became clear that the traditional life plan of the West German Economic Miracle, a secure position as an employee in a carefully-managed family-owned business, was no longer tenable.

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Located a few kilometres as the crow flies from the now empty primary warehouse of Quelle is Fürth’s small municipal theatre.11 As the smaller, working-class version of Nuremberg, Fürth was both economically and culturally more closely connected with Quelle than its larger neighbour. As a result, Fürth’s theatre pedagogue Johannes Beissel decided towards the end of 2009 to stage a performance with the recently laid-off employees of Quelle. As an experienced director of workshops and youth projects, he wanted to produce a show not just for, but also with those affected by Quelle’s bankruptcy. Through posters and advertisements, he invited Quelle’s dispersing personnel to send in photos, texts and other personal contributions as material to develop a performance. Ten former employees answered and were invited to present their texts within the framework of a program composed of a series of individual numbers. On Monday, February 1, 2010, the 730-person municipal theatre was at full capacity for the premiere of The People of Primondo and Quelle. In narratives, poems, musical pieces, songs, choral presentations and short sketches, the former employees shared their feelings during the difficult final days of Quelle and the weeks following their dismissal. Filled with microphones, shipping boxes and piles of Quelle catalogues that could be used as stools, the stage offered a versatile framework for the various numbers. Many scenes simply consisted of the ex-employees reading the texts they had written into the microphone. A video screen in the background played a prominent role, showing intertitles, slides and video clips. These often strove for comic effect, as when a black and white photo of the Quelle heiress Madeleine Schickedanz was combined with the caption (a quote from her), “I have to shop at budget stores.” The evening had, in many respects, the air of a belated settling of scores with the management; another element was criticism of the retraining measures of the employment agency. “All I learned from you was how to lick envelopes!” cried Sibylle Mantau, who had been employed in brand communication at Quelle. Beissel left no doubt in interviews with the press that the primary intention of the evening was a kind of mourning work: the project was supposed to help the laid-off employees process their experiences. The evening’s final message, the theatre pedagogue said, was supposed to be “that there is a future.”12 It was in accordance with this therapeutic gesture that at the end of the evening, the mayor of Fürth, Thomas Jung, stepped on stage to tell the actors and the audience: “We have witnessed an incredible evening of theatre. It was moving and very well done”. Former PR agent Manfred Gawlas found what he had seen “equal parts dignified and impressive”: the performers had “laid themselves bare.”13 Beissel, the theatre pedagogue— who confessed that he had not rejected a single one of the submitted texts—similarly focused his public statements on the dignity that had been given back to the performers by the theatre. As he told the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel, “it’s never too late to give back to a human being some of his

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or her dignity.” Monika Goetch’s report in the Tagesspiegel contains notes from the rehearsal process that suggest intensive emotional events: Amongst the authors is Josef Bößl, 57 years old, a trained accountant and industry salesman, employee of Quelle for 31 years. He sent his piece several times—by email and by post—to make sure that it really arrived. Bößl sits in the rehearsal room in a grey turtleneck sweater. Everything is black—the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the table where the manuscript lies. Bößl has decided not to read his piece himself, so Nuremberger actor Hannes Seebauer is also there at the rehearsal, a quiet, white-haired man with a paternal voice. It’s completely silent in the rehearsal room; Bößl’s sits, his hands folded together. He listens to his own words, apparently floating on Seebauer’s voice. And you can see how much all of this hurts him. Silence. Then the choral piece “A clare benedicition.” May Seebauer tell the audience that this piece was a comfort for Bößl? “In your letters you spoke of comfort,” Beissel says. But Bößl wants to avoid the word comfort. “Say: it helped me to look at the world more optimistically.” Beissel nods. He would have liked to have left “comfort.” “But it’s your evening. It’s for you. You can decide what you share with the audience and what you don’t.” After a moment, he adds “The listener will notice anyway that it’s about comfort.”14 The evening had little in the way of formal coherence, not least because professional actors were performing alongside unpractised amateurs. As a result, woodenly read texts were juxtaposed with professionally-studied songs and dance interludes. On the one hand, the artistic direction borrowed from the advanced documentary techniques of the group Rimini Protokoll, who had created in 2004 a well-received piece called Sabenation. Go Home & Follow the News with seven laid-off employees of the failed Belgian airline Sabena. On the other hand, the evening in Fürth was also permeated with truly unshaped, at most gently revised contributions from the participants. Beissel emphasised forms vaguely linked to traditions of worker’s theatre: speaking choruses, agit-prop presentations, collective reports. At the same time, his staging revealed a knowledge of how proletarian subject matter can be popularised today (one thinks of films like Peter Cattaneo’s 1997 The Full Monty): with melodramatic emphases, with musical elements and a dosing of showmanship. From a political perspective, the staging suffered from the futility of the situation. For in February 2010, there was nothing that could be done for the Quelle personnel. The firm was broke, the jobs were gone, and the social support hurriedly cobbled together by both state and region would have existed regardless of the intervention of Fürth’s theatre. The piece’s title reflects the dominant political uncertainty: The People of Primondo and Quelle—a vague reference to the human component of the disaster, but no indication of a future-oriented plan or a political attitude. Nonetheless—it

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immediately sounds cynical—the spectators were witnesses to a miraculous transformation: the Quelle veterans, who had until then been portrayed in the media exclusively as victims, transformed into entertainers, capable of presenting on stage their own story from their own point of view—and in a form they chose. In this, there did seem to be a narrative that pointed into the future: people who could stand in metonymically for the entire discarded workforce displayed in a highly visible public location their own—admittedly varied—thespian talents. The audience enjoyed what was from a number of perspectives a heroic story. For here, not only had superfluous workers become astonishing public actors; in addition, Fordist assembly-line workers had been transformed into creatively engaged post-Fordian subjects, who ironically appeared ideally suited to the demands of the contemporary creative economy. Through this example, we can try to think through the extent to which applied theatre can be discussed in the context of a transformative aesthetics. The key terms of transformative aesthetics refer to experiences that transcend the everyday, break out of the accustomed limits of perception and place their subjects in unique, liminal situations. Such experiences are, as a rule, ascribed to the observer of an artwork or a performance. A transformative aesthetics refers to effects meant to be provoked in an audience or the observers of an aesthetic object. In the Quelle example, however, it’s the actors, the performers, the amateurs who undergo a radical, exceptional experience and who are in a certain sense ‘transformed.’ In this, we see again one of the unique qualities of applied theatre: its promises of wide-reaching effects are directed at actors and not at spectators. Spectators are more or less irrelevant to the type of transformation aimed at by applied theatre projects; at most, they’re needed to bear witness to the actors and authenticate them. How can this be reconciled with prevailing discourses of a transformative aesthetics? First, it has to be said that it’s anything but self-explanatory to consider applied theatre from an aesthetic perspective. There are a number of interesting things about projects like the one described above: one can study the way such a theatre is embedded in a social context, one can analyse the group dynamics amongst the performers, one can consider the political implications of the project, critically scrutinise the actions of the organisers and pedagogues, and much more. Applied theatre frequently becomes the object of sociological, pedagogical or social-pedagogical studies, which are interested in just these dimensions of the project. Indeed, when asked about possibilities for academic accompaniment of their projects, even the organisers and actors themselves turn first to social-scientific, evaluative perspectives. They want to know from an academic perspective how successful their projects are, how they can further improve their techniques and what the medium- and long-term effects of their projects might be. Clearly, it’s just these questions that aesthetic reflection is not capable of answering. Transformative aesthetics is a higher-level concept for theories of reception from different historical epochs. Within this rather broad

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spectrum, applied theatre corresponds better with some theories than with others. In order to situate the phenomenon more precisely in the discursive universe of the aesthetic, what follows will show links to four different reception-oriented aesthetic traditions. These are: the Classical conception of catharsis and its modern reformulations (1); the program for aesthetic education through theatre that emerged in the eighteenth century; the call to abolish the border between art and life from the twentieth-century avantgarde (3); the still-fledgling model of an aesthetics of liminality (4). 1

2

What’s generally understood as a cathartic experience is a strong affective response, produced in a spectator by a fictional plot—in particular through empathy for the characters. Central to the concept of catharsis is the idea that this affect has strong effects on the emotional constitution of the spectator. As such, classical theories of catharsis proceed from the assumption that emotional blockades in aesthetic experience can be dissolved or discharged through strong affects. Some types of applied theatre work with catharsis effects of this nature, although with a particular reinterpretation. One example is psychodrama: the inventor of this form, Jacob Levy Moreno (18891974), writes of “action catharsis,” indicating that in contrast to Aristotle’s primarily spectator-oriented conception, applied theatre’s characteristic twist on the concept—as discussed above—is directed above all at the actors themselves. Every human action has “to some degree its own catharsis.” What produces a cathartic effect is in essence the experience of “creative activity” made available to the actors.15 Spontaneity and creativity are in point of fact elementary values of the entire applied theatre scene. As such, the catharsis motif stands in direct connection to the system of values that applied theatre shares with a neocapitalistically organised work-world. This coincidence of values once again raises the question of where the societal relationship of applied theatre is actually to be located on the spectrum between conformity to the prevailing system and subversion. The problems of an achievement-oriented creative society have been widely discussed in recent years, although explicit consequences for applied theatre have yet to be drawn from these discussions. Theatre pedagogy, school theatre and theatre in education are an important branch of applied theatre. Practitioners working in this field frequently argue based on the ideals of aesthetic education, developed in the eighteenth century in the context of German idealism.16 One important point of orientation is Schiller’s educational ideal, which recognises in the play drive the chance to harmonise the opposing demands of sensory experience and ethical life. The educational program of Weimar Classicism is directed towards all participants in cultural life; and this includes those actors upon whom Goethe, in his role as theatre director, forced completely new rules. The topoi of classical-humanistic

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Matthias Warstat educational discourses are present not just in Germany, but also internationally whenever one speaks of the positive effects of theatre on participating actors. Through theatre, people are meant to develop their sensory and creative facilities; this is just as much the promise of the youth clubs of German municipal and state theatres as of the Freedom Theatre of Jenin or of projects for juvenile inmates in Latin-American prisons. However familiar this argument may be to those who engage with theatre-pedagogical discourses, it is nonetheless worthwhile to consider two more recent debates about aesthetic education to applied theatre. On the one hand, recent attempts to build on the work of Jacques Rancière have considered whether aesthetic experiences in the classical sense could not also be described as egalitarian experiences.17 From this, a great deal of political potential could be drawn. On the other hand, recent research has underscored the authoritarian, disciplinarian tendencies in Weimar Classicism’s pedagogical ideal.18 These indications too are of significance for critical reflection on applied theatre. For example, the remarkably far-reaching authority of group directors—in the tradition of charismatic leadership personalities like Augusto Boal or Jacob Moren—and its effects on group structures and the scope of permissible actions have until now rarely been problematised. Practitioners of applied theatre like to invoke the names of pioneers of the European avant-garde in their programmatic statements and selfportrayals (amongst others: Stanislawski, Evreinov, Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski, Barba, and time and again Boal19). Each time this occurs, its justification should be carefully scrutinised. In general, there is a tendency to take on the technical models and methods of the avantgarde (particularly acting techniques), but to ignore the revolutionary and anarchic forces of these movements.20 One strong point of convergence between the avant-garde and applied theatre is in their unhesitating readiness to instrumentalise artistic processes and experiences for societal goals. Apparent on both sides is a strategic, goal-oriented relationship to one’s own artistic praxis, always aware of power relationships. Between the 1870s and the 1930s, the concept of the avant-garde stood not only for visionary attempts to break down the barriers between art and life, but also—particularly in Russia and Germany—for artistic projects that strove unrepentantly for political power and societal upheaval. If one understands under ‘avant-garde’ a revolutionary cultural movement, then many applied theatre projects seem too harmless, too affirmative to really belong to this tradition. This argument becomes even stronger when one considers that, upon closer inspection, the representational forms of applied theatre often seem quite traditional. For example, they often rely upon bourgeois dramatic theatre models which have their proper place in the two centuries preceding the emergence of the avant-garde.

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The concept of liminality under consideration here was imported into aesthetic discourses from the ritual theory of Viktor Turner and Arnold van Gennep. It stands for phases in which structures are dissolved and individuals are released from established rules and social bonds. In her book The Transformative Power of Performance, which offers an adaptation of the concept of liminality for Theatre Studies, Erika Fischer-Lichte preserves significant elements of contingency, emergence and risk. She describes aesthetic experiences in the theatre as moments of a profound confusion, in which those present can no longer rely upon their acquired cultural knowledge. The result of this disorientation is that they are subject to strong sensory impressions and intellectual complications.21 Although Fischer-Lichte emphasises that these theatrical experiences are not permanent, and thus allow their subjects to return to daily life after the performance concludes, one should nonetheless not underestimate the lasting psychic effects of even temporary affective and cognitive intensities. The infamous ‘choc’ that so many avant-garde artists hoped to produce with their works belongs to this spectrum of effects. It must however be noted that these riskier strains of aesthetic experience are explicitly not desired in many forms of applied theatre. This holds particularly for theatre in clinical and other restrictive institutional contexts (schools, prisons). There, practitioners are obligated to exclude a priori practices whose risks for participants or institutions can be difficult to calculate in advance.

III. Summary: On the transformation of the self through theatre Despite its more social-therapeutic impetus, greater historical distance will allow applied theatre to ultimately be understood as part of the history of political theatre—and this precisely because applied theatre is a praxis which demonstrates links to the four reception-aesthetic discourses listed above. In discussions about applied theatre, a number of discourses coincide: those of catharsis, education, the avant-garde and liminality. This mixture of discourses can also be found in other realms of political theatre. The collective character of applied theatre projects, equally capable of producing powerful group dynamics or significant peer pressure, also speaks for its place in the tradition of twentieth-century models of political theatre. Thus, I want to sum up with a few more observations on the political implications of applied theatre. One result of deploying applied theatre is that it leads to the theatricalisation of life in the domain where it is used. Thus, corporate theatre is one component in a process that could be described as the theatricalisation of corporate culture. Similarly, when theatrical performances are used as part of campaigns to prevent the spread of HIV—as is common in many countries—one can speak of a theatricalisation of AIDS awareness. And when drama therapy exercises are used in conflict-management seminars

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this leads equally to the theatricalisation of political conflicts. In order to adequately assess such applied theatre projects, one needs a fundamental stance on theatricalisation processes in society. Without being able to go into this discussion in greater depth here, I do want to recall that Theatre Studies—in the tradition of Guy Debord and Walter Benjamin—has with good reason been quite sceptical about the theatricalisation of life-worlds in general and political life in particular. Hans-Thies Lehmann, for example, has called in his influential texts on the political in theatre for a radical “interruption” of the media-orchestrated discourses shaping political life.22 In his account, (artistic) theatre can do society a great political service above all when it succeeds in putting its own theatricality in question. In this way, it enables a kind of self-reflexivity on the theatrical in political discourse. Theatricality, as we knew even before Debord’s Society of The Spectacle, is not the same as participation or democracy. 23 With respect to actors, one has to consider which structures of subjectivity applied theatre benefits and which it opposes. The decidedly subject-oriented narrative guaranteeing the effectiveness of applied theatre is not one of risk, danger, or transgression. In the end, it corresponds more to the dream already prevalent amongst the eighteenth-century sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, i.e. to stand on stage and be celebrated— both for one’s own mimetic talents and for the representation of a more or less plausible subject. The story goes like this: through the gaze of another, a broken, weakened subject lodged in crisis becomes a strong actor, master of particular performance techniques and capable of representing a coherent (stage-) subject. Without dismissing such a dispositif—which has a long tradition in school theatre, for example—out of hand, one must nonetheless point out that it appears tailor-made for narcissistic and histrionic forms of subjectivity frequently problematised in contemporary psychology. There’s a lot which seems to speak in favour of labelling applied theatre an elementary, perhaps even central theatrical dispositif of the neoliberal creative society. Applied theatre puts itself in the service of postulates of self-optimisation and creativity, supporting a form of subjectivity which is not only prepared to engage in experimental mimetic self-transformation, but also immediately wants to present this process to the gaze of an observer or the judgment of an audience. For the subject, theatricalisation processes are always linked to an increase in advances towards the ‘big Other,’ and are as a rule guided by the hope of achieving recognition and stability through this Other. Whether applied theatre is actually capable of satisfying these desires for stability is another question—one which has already become the subject of self-critical reflections from a number of practitioners.24 Describing a theatre dispositif necessarily requires generalisations and omissions. Amongst those who practice applied theatre, there are doubtless many who seek in it a theatre for change, in the tradition of leftist political theatre and emancipatory protest cultures. That this praxis has long since

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been drawn into a neocapitalist culture of staging appears as an irony of theatre history, one for which an appropriate response does not yet exist. Translation by Jake Fraser

Notes 1 See for example the way the term is used in the overview chapter of Christopher Balme, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2008), 179-94. Also well-known: James Thompson, Applied Theatre: Bewilderment and Beyond (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003); Philip Taylor, Applied Theatre: Creating Transformative Encounters in the Community (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); Helen Nicholson, Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 2 In this sense see for example Phil Jones, Drama as Therapy: Theatre as Living (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); see in particular his programmatic introductory statements, pp. 1-6. 3 The extent of such double roles is apparent when one reads through the short biographies of the various authors of the handbook Theater Therapie, all of whom are experienced practitioners. Doris Müller-Weith, Lilli Neumann, and Bettina Stoltenhoff-Erdmann, eds., Theater Therapie. Ein Handbuch (Paderborn: Junfermann, 2002), 337-40. 4 This hope is fundamental for programmatic and theoretical discourses on theatre in the school. See for example Eckart Liebau, Leopold Klepacki, and Jörg Zirfas, Theatrale Bildung. Theaterpädagogische Grundlagen und kulturpädagogische Perspektiven für die Schule (Weinheim and München: Juventa, 2009). Similar tendencies can be seen in Leopold Klepacki and Jörg Zirfas, Theatrale Didaktik. Ein pädagogischer Grundriss des schulischen Theaterunterrichts (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Juventa, 2013), particularly 166-80. 5 German for home play, also used in the sense of ‘home’ game, as opposed to an ‘away’ game. 6 According to the presentation of the project’s goals in „Heimspiel. Der Fonds zur Förderung von Kulturprojekten im Überblick,“ Kulturstiftung des Bundes, http://www.kulturstiftung-des-bundes.de/cms/de/programme/kunst_der_ vermittlung/archiv/heimspiel_1056_91.html, accessed July 31, 2016, 7 In many cases, one can speak of a peer-group audience. In corporate theatre, for example, teams of employees act in front of other employee teams from the same firm; in clinics, drama therapy groups chose fellow patients as their audience; students act for other students, etc. 8 This reading is dominant in modern and contemporary accounts of catharsis. See for example the prominent psychological adaptation in Thomas J. Scheff, Explosion der Gefühle. Über die kulturelle und therapeutische Bedeutung kathartischen Erlebens (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1983). 9 The political implications of the current creativity dispositif are the object of critical reflections in a number of disciplines. See for example Ulrich Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007); Christoph Menke and Juliane Rebentisch, eds., Kreation und Depression. Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus (Berlin: Kadmos, 2010); Andreas Reckwitz, Die Erfindung der Kreativität. Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2012). 10 I’m referring in this assessment to an understanding of politics that, following theorists like Agamben, Badiou, Nancy or Žižek, distinguishes between the administrative (as the logic of a constantly optimising administration of the

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current situation) and the political (as the radical questioning of the current situation). The theatre proudly proclaims itself the “smallest German municipal theatre”; under theatre manager Werner Müller, it has—apparently for reasons of subsidy law—exactly one permanent actor. Quoted in Monika Goetsch, „Quelle – Bühne der Abschiede,“ Der Tagesspiegel, February 1, 2010. Statements from Jung and Gawlas cited following, „Niedergang von Quelle. Beeindruckendes Stück im Fürther Stadttheater,“ Main-Post (Würzburg), February 4, 2010, accessed July 31, 2016, http://www.mainpost.de/ueberregional/ kulturwelt/kultur/Niedergang-von-Quelle;art3809,5456198. Quoted in: Goetsch, „Quelle – Bühne der Abschiede.“ Jacob Levy Moreno, „Gruppenpsychotherapie und Psychodrama,“ in Texte zur Theorie des Theaters, ed. Klaus Lazarowicz and Christopher Balme (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 658. See for example the 2004 “Tutzing Theses on School Theatre,” adopted at a conference of the Evangelical Academy of Tutzing, published in: Spielpause, Sonderheft 2, 2006, 88-9. On aesthetic experience as an ‘egalitarian’ experience, see particularly Jacques Rancière, “L’esthétique comme politique,” in id., Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 31-64. See also Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (New York: Continuum, 2004). For a critical respones, see Christoph Menke, “Vom Schicksal ästhetischer Erziehung. Rancière, Posa und die Polizei,“ in Spieltrieb. Was bringt die Klassik auf die Bühne?, ed. Felix Ensslin (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2006), 58-69. See also Benjamin Wihstutz’s chapter in this book. Augusto Boal is by far the most important and most frequently cited theorist of the international applied theatre scene. The question of why his methods for a “Theatre of the Oppressed” have been able to carry across cultural borders world-wide would be worthy of a comparative study. His influence clearly extends beyond the International Theatre of the Oppressed Organisation (ITO, see www.theatreoftheoppressed.org [last accessed 29.8.2014]), for his techniques are also used in numerous forms of development theatre, theatre in education, prison theatre, corporate theatre, etc. A contemporary, praxis-informed reflection on these techniques can be found in German Boal-specialist and translator Henry Thorau’s Unsichtbares Theater (Berlin: Alexander, 2013). Phil Jones’s textbook for theatre therapy (1996, see note 3) is a striking example of this. Jones quotes and summarises nearly all of the avant-garde theorists named above, in order to arrive at a thoroughly pragmatic approach that ends in concrete exercises for practitioners of clinical drama therapy. Jones is far from putting into question repressive structures of the clinic. See in particular Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. by Saskya Jain, New York: Routledge, 2008, 161-180. See for example Hans-Thies Lehmann, „Wie politisch ist postdramatisches Theater?“ in id., Das Politische Schreiben (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002), 11-21. Cf. Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). For one self-critical position from the perspective of praxis, see: James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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Bibliography Balme, Christopher. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Bröckling, Ulrich. Das unternehmerische Selbst: Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. Debord, Guy. La Société du Spectacle. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. New York 2008. Goetsch, Monika. “Quelle – Bühne der Abschiede.” Der Tagesspiegel, February 1, 2010. International Theatre of the Oppressed Organisation. Accessed August 29, 2014. www.theatreoftheoppressed.org. Jones, Phil. Drama as Therapy: Theatre as Living. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Klepacki, Leopold, and Jörg Zirfas. Theatrale Didaktik: Ein pädagogischer Grundriss des schulischen Theaterunterrichts. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Juventa, 2013. Kulturstiftung des Bundes. “Heimspiel. Der Fonds zur Förderung von Kulturprojekten im Überblick.” Accessed July 31, 2016, http://www.kulturstiftung-des-bundes. de/cms/de/programme/kunst_der_vermittlung/archiv/heimspiel_1056_91.html. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. “Wie politisch ist postdramatisches Theater?” In id., Das Politische Schreiben. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002: 11-21. Liebau, Eckart, Leopold Klepacki, and Jörg Zirfas. Theatrale Bildung: Theaterpädagogische Grundlagen und kulturpädagogische Perspektiven für die Schule. Weinheim and München: Juventa, 2009. Menke, Christoph. “Vom Schicksal ästhetischer Erziehung. Rancière, Posa und die Polizei.” In Spieltrieb: Was bringt die Klassik auf die Bühne? Edited by Felix Ensslin, 58-69. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2006. Menke, Christoph, and Juliane Rebentisch, eds. Kreation und Depression: Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus. Berlin: Kadmos, 2010. Moreno, Jacob Levy. “Gruppenpsychotherapie und Psychodrama” (1959). In Texte zur Theorie des Theaters. Edited by Klaus Lazarowicz, and Christopher Balme, 653-9. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000. Müller-Weith, Doris, Lilli Neumann, and Bettina Stoltenhoff-Erdmann, eds. Theater Therapie: Ein Handbuch. Paderborn: Junfermann, 2002. Nicholson, Helen. Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. NOS. “Niedergang von Quelle. Beeindruckendes Stück im Fürther Stadttheater.” Main-Post (Würzburg) February 4, 2010. http://www.mainpost.de/ueberregional/ kulturwelt/kultur/Niedergang-von-Quelle;art3809,5456198. Accessed July 31, 2016. NOS. “Tutzing Theses on School Theatre.” In Spielpause, Sonderheft 2, 2006. Rancière, Jacques. “L’esthétique comme politique.” In id., Malaise dans l’esthétique. 31-64. Paris: Galilée, 2004. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. New York: Continuum, 2004. Reckwitz, Andreas. Die Erfindung der Kreativität: Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2012.

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Scheff, Thomas J. Explosion der Gefühle: Über die kulturelle und therapeutische Bedeutung kathartischen Erlebens. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1983. Taylor, Philip. Applied Theatre: Creating Transformative Encounters in the Community. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. Thompson, James. Applied Theatre: Bewilderment and Beyond. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003. Thompson, James. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Thorau, Henry. Unsichtbares Theater. Berlin: Alexander, 2013.

9

Transformative resistance and aesthetics Bill Ashcroft

There is a continuing debate in postcolonial studies concerning the appropriation of the technologies and cultural discourses of the colonizers. While this applies to various aspects of imperial culture it has focused most keenly on the question of language. While British colonial education systems privileged the teaching of English and in many cases punished pupils for using vernacular language at school,1 something occurred amongst speakers and writers of English in British colonies which imperial administrations, and the institution of English literature itself, could not have foreseen. Postcolonial writers took hold of the language with a vengeance, and in so doing took hold of the means of their self-representation. Appropriating the language, producing a variously hybridized English, and transforming the official genres of English literature, they produced a located form of English and interpolated networks of production and distribution to speak to a world audience.2 This remains a model for most cultural engagements between the colonized and colonizers. European colonial occupation gave rise to various forms of violent resistance, including wars of rebellion, which proved a great drain on imperial resources. But the most fascinating feature of postcolonial societies is a ‘resistance’ that manifests itself as a refusal to be absorbed, a resistance which engages that which is resisted in a different way, taking the array of influences exerted by the dominating power, and altering them into tools for expressing a deeply held sense of identity and cultural being. This has been the most widespread, most influential, and most quotidian form of ‘resistance’ in postcolonial societies. In some respects, as in the debate over the use of colonial languages, it has also been the most contentious. Consequently, this engagement with colonial discourse has rarely been regarded as ‘resistance,’ because it is often devoid of the rhetoric of resistance. While the soldiers and politicians have gained most attention, it is the ordinary people—and the artists and writers, through whom a transformative vision of the world has been conceived—who have often done most to ‘resist’ the cultural pressures upon them. In most cases this has not been an heroic enterprise, but a pragmatic and mundane array of living strategies to which imperial culture has no answer. In fact, violent resistance has been the exception. As Marshall

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Sahlins argues, colonial encounters were “guided by the cultural logic of the local people concerned,” that is, there was a critical local authorship, a cultural autonomy preserved from the interlopers, that framed colonial encounters, ensuring that in the end local peoples remained the authors of their own history, reinventing, and sometimes subverting the products of colonial domination through frameworks of the indigenous culture.3 There is perhaps no more striking demonstration of the power of colonized people to transform the discourses designed to oppress them than the culture which developed in the Caribbean. African slaves were unable to transport their culture or their languages with them to the plantations in any coherent way. Members of the same language group were placed with strangers on plantations either through the exigencies of the system or to prevent conspiracy. The resulting heterogeneity limited what could be shared culturally. Yet Afro-modernity took on a form generated from this heterogeneity, a dynamism adapted to the physical and social conditions with which they had to deal. In this process, both the various slave and nonslave populations absorbed aspects of the various African heritages. What developed was a culture of such creative adaptation that its transformative capacities were able to resist absorption into the dominant culture. In this respect ‘transformation’ is contrary to what we normally think of as ‘resistance’ because the latter has been locked into the party political imagery of opposition, a discourse of ‘prevention.’ But postcolonial transformation has been the most powerful and active form of resistance in colonized societies because it has been so relentless, so everyday and, above all, so integral a part of the imaginations of these societies. The way in which political oppression works is to lock the oppressed into a myth of binary opposition. But this is precisely where music, art and literature demonstrate their power: the aesthetic takes us beyond resistance into the realm of possibility: indeed, aesthetic works dare to imagine the impossible. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of this transformative resistance was the aesthetic dimension of the political struggle. Aesthetics had been an essential component of the discourse of exclusion by which postcolonial writing was kept out of the orbit of the ‘beautiful and good’ characterizing canonical English literature. Mathew Arnold’s dictum that “culture [is] the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know… the best which has been thought and said in the world”4 did not, despite his protestations of universalism, include colonized cultures, those marginalized by race or class. The consequence of this has been a deep suspicion, shared by many postcolonial and Marxist critics, that the ‘aesthetic’ is merely a function of ideology. The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch was deeply interested in the link between the aesthetic function and utopia but declared that aesthetics “should not be confused with contemplation or considered disinterested. Often, certainly, the true, the good, or the beautiful, or rather what is proclaimed as such, has nothing to do with daily life and so serves the purpose of deception, as an opiate of the people.”5

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Perhaps the most influential work has been Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), which proposes aesthetics as a fundamental instrument for installing the bourgeois subject as universal human. For Eagleton, the very term ‘aesthetic’ is a bourgeois and elitist concept in the most literal historical sense, hatched and nurtured on the rationalist Enlightenment.6 The vision of the aesthetic/moral project, according to him, is to create a universal order of free, equal, autonomous human subjects, obeying no laws but those they give to themselves. This bourgeois public sphere breaks decisively with the privilege and particularism of the ancien régime, installing the middle class in image, if not in reality, as a universal subject […] What is at stake here is nothing less than the production of an entirely new human subject—one which, like the work of art itself, discovers the law in the depths of its own free identity.7 What Eagleton sees as the bourgeois middle class subject we might also see as Western or European. This universal human subject is the spectre that has haunted the reception of colonial creative production for at least a century and a half. The combination of knowledge, judgment and taste, contemporaneous with the rise of capitalism, provides a hegemonic order to which all consent. Just as some people’s thinking, and not others,’ is regarded as philosophy, so only some writing is considered ‘literature’: the aesthetic judgment of the dominant class is regarded as a standard of ‘taste.’ In the production of the idea of human being, the classed, racial and colonized subject positions are gathered into a single type. The universal human values, the principles of aesthetic judgment, which at the same time established the canon as “the best that has been thought and said,” pushed postcolonial writing to the periphery—beyond the universal, beyond the canon and indeed beyond anything that could be called ‘good literature.’ The response of that literature was to produce a writing that aspired to culture as a way of life rather than as Art (Raymond Williams). This led directly to the worldliness of postcolonial writing, its affiliation with a social and cultural context rather than its filiation with the lineage of English literature. However, the aesthetic remains in postcolonial cultural production because the affective engagement with the materiality of the text has profound consequences in cross-cultural communication. Therefore, when Marxist critic Tony Bennett says, in a provocative article entitled “Really Useless ‘Knowledge,’” that “nothing whatsoever of any practical political consequence hinges on the establishment of an aesthetic by whatever means, biological, social or historical,”8 he is not aware of the transformative ways in which postcolonial cultural producers have engaged questions of aesthetics. This familiar dismissal of aesthetics depends on what you regard as a political consequence; on how you want to define the operation of the

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aesthetic, whether you regard it as a stimulus or an ideology. It depends on the function of the materiality of the work. Aesthetic judgment can be a political strategy, a function of colonization, but does it have any role at all in cross-cultural engagements? This was the basis of a debate amongst anthropologists at a Manchester conference in 19949 on the motion that Aesthetics is a Cross-cultural Category. The audience on that occasion was overwhelmingly persuaded that aesthetics is not a cross-cultural category, indeed, is not a useful anthropological tool at all. But the arguments centred on two diametrically opposed definitions of aesthetics: On the one hand the opponents advanced the idea of the aesthetic as a cultural ideology heavily involved in issues of taste and judgment; on the other, aesthetic qualities were seen to be a function of sensory stimulus, according certain kinds of values without opting for judgment based on the myth of intrinsic universal value. The question of judgment remains a pressing one in the practical aesthetic exchange. We make judgments all the time concerning the values stimulated by the effect of the aesthetic object on our senses: judgments arising from the emotions they arouse, or judgments surrounding the selection of the objects for their function and purpose (in a university course for instance). The important difference, however, concerns this issue of value. An engagement with the aesthetic object elicits a perception of values rather than intrinsic ‘Value’—these are ‘values for’ rather than an ideologically determined ‘inherent value.’ Indeed, Wittgenstein, responding to Moore’s assertion that “[e]thics is the general enquiry into what is good,” claimed that this aligned ethics with aesthetics because the term good, like value, or beauty, was amenable to several different uses.10 Aesthetic values, like forms of good, are explicable and their perception legitimate, but they vary according to the nature and context of the aesthetic engagement. These values may be regarded as the qualitative effect of the stimuli on the senses and are completely separate from the values of a dominant class or culture. Dividing the definitions of aesthetics between ideology and stimulus clarifies the relevance of aesthetics to postcolonial production by dispensing with certain preconceptions—such as the idea of individual genius— obviously deeply bound to a European cultural sensibility. Paintings such as the acrylics of Warlpiri Aboriginal painters, for instance, “do not emphasize original creative individuals or assign them responsibility as authors. Instead of an ideology of creative authority, there is an ideology or reproduction…”11 Aspects of a particular Dreaming are ‘owned’ by certain people who have the right to reproduce them in art. The reproduction may indeed enter the realm of Western aesthetics, and this is where the dynamic of transformation takes place. For postcolonial cultural production aesthetics is politics because affect is a key element in the communication of difference. But the transformative nature of the postcolonial aesthetic lies in the capacity of the colonized to occupy, disrupt and transform the realm of the dominant aesthetic. The

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aesthetic can be transformative in both form and function. Its cross-cultural nature is not a fixed property but a function of the agency of the cultural producer. This becomes particularly evident in the production of visual representations. Like writers using the colonial language, indigenous artists are poised in a hybrid space between, on the one hand, an appropriation of Western materials and forms that enable them to interpolate global markets, and on the other the hunger of global markets for exotic artworks. The role of Aboriginal art in Aboriginal culture exists at a level of the sacred and the communal that precludes almost all the principles of aesthetics developed in Romantic philosophy. But the key feature of such art has been its capacity to interpolate the aesthetic registers of the global art market in a way that kept hidden the sacred knowledge involved in the paintings. This is equivalent to the “metonymic gap” in postcolonial language transformation, where English is used to communicate to a world audience, but is transformed by the requirements of the source language in a way that creates distance, a cultural gap.12 By using raw linen and thinned acrylics rather than canvas boards and school poster paints, by choosing colours that observed the requirements of a harmonious palette, indigenous artists interpolated the aesthetic landscape of Western art. For instance, a well known painter such as Rover Thomas can produce a water-hole Dreaming that both represents and hides sacred knowledge while appropriating the requirements of the dominant aesthetic. Ironically, the ‘authentic’ traditional Aboriginal artwork is already hybridized, already aesthetically transformative. The style that is universally recognized as Aboriginal—dot painting—was almost never painted onto surfaces, but painted onto the chest, breasts, arms and thighs by one particular Northern Territory group. Even as body decoration it was by no means a universal style. In 1971 a white school teacher north of Alice Springs, Geoffrey Bardon, encouraged Aboriginal children to use acrylics to paint a mural using the traditional body and sand painting techniques of their culture. The fusion style that the children created quickly spread amongst Aborigines in the region and became the recognized form, even though what had been background now came to dominate the paintings. Therefore, the basic reality of culture—that it is never static but continually mobile and transformative—is demonstrated by the spread of Aboriginal dot painting. In short, Aboriginal painting is already hybridized and transformative. But this appropriation of contemporary materials reflects a familiar argument in postcolonial cultural production about the efficacy of using colonizing language and technologies, and in this case appropriating features of a dominant aesthetic.13 Is this an incorporation of Aboriginal practice into the requirements of the market, or an interpolation of a dominant system of circulation? Are Aboriginal painters being used by the market, or are they simply using the available technology? Are they passively acceding to the desires of their audience or taking the opportunity to widen the aesthetic

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range of their communal stories? The same questions could be asked of Aboriginal writing, and Kim Scott has made it very clear in his latest novel That Deadman Dance that appropriation and adaptability are fundamental skills of the Nyoongar people.14 As with all postcolonial literatures, this process of transformation and hybridization is a continual tension between agency and control. In the case of Aboriginal art in general there is great tension, for instance, between the communal responsibility for art and the market’s need for paintings signed by individual artists. But the outcome is a resounding demonstration of Aboriginal artistic agency however much the requirements of art marketing abound in its consumption. The point is that no matter how much Aboriginal painters appropriate modern tools and techniques, however transcultural their aesthetic practice, the work is no less ‘authentically’ Aboriginal. According to Michaels, “Traditionalism and authenticity are completely false judgments to assign to Aboriginal painting practices. Warlpiri painting, even if it accepts the designation ‘traditional’ as a marketing strategy, in fact arises out of conditions of historical struggle and expresses the contradictions of its production.”15 While Aboriginal art produced with contemporary materials has led to a powerful and widespread awareness of Aboriginal culture, the consequence has been that dot painting has become the accepted form of Aboriginal art. “Aboriginal art” is considered to be traditional dot painting and the work of contemporary Aboriginal artists excluded from “Aboriginal art” by neglect or outright rejection.16 However, the work of contemporary artists such as Richard Campbell or Lin Onus shows how the artist can produce a transformational aesthetic that carries the political message of contemporary Aboriginal resistance but do it in a way that engages the affective response of the viewer. Richard Campbell’s paintings use the characteristic dot style but in a clearly representational way to convey a political message. His painting Change of Lifestyle is an ironic comment on the alienating effect of modernization on Aboriginal people. The painting is divided horizontally between two pictures of community: a linear row of suburban houses in one and a circle of traditional ‘gunyahs’ in the other. Here the dotting style hides no spiritual secret but is used as an indigenous form to reappraise the political effect of modern life. Death in Custody, which depicts a prisoner hanging in a cell, refers to a notorious spate of suicides of young Aboriginal men jailed for minor offenses that would result in a fine for a white person. The painting addresses what became a national scandal. Roped Off at the Pictures is a searing comment on the segregation of rural cinemas. Campbell’s use of the dotting style to produce starkly political representational paintings situates itself at the intersection of white and Aboriginal society to reveal that the interstitial space itself is one of violence and disruption. By using the dotting style the critique of the dominant society becomes a critique of the commodification of Aboriginal art and thus the suppression of Aboriginal culture.

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However, the work of Lin Onus is the most powerful example of a transformational aesthetic because he produces attractive paintings that reveal a much more subtle and even global political strategy. His work addresses several prominent issues, including the dominance of colonial representation, the importance of place and the significance of Aboriginal history. One of the most important strategies of postcolonial transformation is the control of selfrepresentation. The issue of representation is absolutely central to Onus’ work and he conducts this strategy in the space of a hybridized aesthetic. But in entering this hybrid space Onus bridges two concepts of cultural production. For Aboriginal people, “singing, dancing, writing, or other forms of performance, are not communicative items created for distribution. They are more like ecological events, existing more spatially than temporally; they have their roots in sacred country.”17 While his paintings convey this sacred sense of place they are produced as “communicative events” within a dominant aesthetic in order to command the field of representation. This is the positive and transformative function of hybridization. The issue of representation is therefore absolutely central to Onus’s work. A prime example of this can be found in the painting Twice upon a Time (1992):

Figure 9.1 Lin Onus, Twice upon a Time (1992), 182 × 182 cm. © Lin Onus Estate/ Licensed by Viscopy, 2013.

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The key feature of the painter’s particular form of transformative resistance is a “meta-representational” strategy. His representations, and particularly his representations of place, are about the process of representation itself. His “seeing” of place is always an investigation of seeing, or at least a disruption of our seeing to uncover that ideology to which it is giving form. This is precisely what makes his hybridity transformative: it is multidimensional, operating as a constant field of interrogation. In order to take control of representation he reveals the extent to which the conventions of seeing have been naturalized. A prime example of this can be found in the painting Twice upon a Time (1992) which actually mimics a painting by H.J. Johnstone called Evening Shadows, Backwater of the Murray South Australia (1880). Twice upon a Time “writes back” to Johnstone in mimicry so tranquil that it seems to lack the “menace” Bhabha considered central to colonial mimicry, reproducing too lovingly the conventions of colonial representation. But the meta-representational aspect of the painting provides the “menace” of disruption and subversiveness. It is a critique of colonial inscription and the policies of removal and injustice that accompanied the dominance of representation. The painting is a palimpsest in which the visual reproduction is laid over another representation of the surface of geometrically carved trees. The painting represents the contest between the power of Western ocularcentrism and the inscription of Aboriginal art upon the surface of the text of place,

Figure 9.2 Henry James Johnstone, Evening Shadows, Backwater of the Murray, South Australia (1880) © public domain.

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including the inscription on the body. A single strand of barbed wire drawn across the painting signifies the further inscription of colonial occupation, the bounding and fencing of place as property. The fence, being barbed wire, carries the connotation of more than enclosure. It is also a signifier of imprisonment. Unlike Johnstone’s painting, Twice upon a Time is uninhabited, dismantling the apparently bucolic appearance of the image with a suggestion of a sinister history. The palimpsest of the painting inscribes not only a spatial history, but also a gradation of modes of representation, modes of seeing and being in place. The meta-representational function of Onus’s art is demonstrated in a different palimpsest in Jimmy’s Billabong (1988). Over the picturesque visual representation of Jimmy’s Billabong is the striped covering of rarrk cross-hatching, designs that signify clan affiliation. As Neale suggests, the “rarrk overlay can be interpreted as a process of indigenizing the Other, of claiming custodianship of the land, and of subverting the primacy of Western systems of representation.”18 As with the former painting, Twice upon a Time, the meta-representational contest is between the visual, ocularcentric history of Western representation and the embodied construction of Aboriginal place. This is a section of the painting showing the rarrk overlay, which signifies the cultural palimpsest of seeing. The process of responding to, writing back to H.J. Johnston in Twice upon a Time duplicates the aesthetic strategy of Onus’s work. The paintings establish themselves clearly in terms of a Western aesthetic, producing an affective response that draws the viewer into a place from which the political message of meta-representation can take full effect. This is particularly evident in the painting Barmah Forest. From 1986 until his death in 1996, Onus made sixteen “spiritual pilgrimages” to Arnhem Land. These journeys enabled him to fill his in-between space, the space of the contemporary Aboriginal painter, with a diverse array of techniques and a diverse array of points of view that underlie his genius for dismantling the processes of seeing. Introduced to his own ancestral site at the Barmah Forest, Onus engages the place with the full force of his transformative and meta-representational vision. The painting is a strikingly simple subversion of the landscape techniques on which the painting itself capitalizes. By including the ingenious device of a couple of displaced jigsaw pieces, the painting suggests that what is seen is a cultural construction. Significantly the pieces themselves do not fit, suggesting that the jigsaw of visual representation is a tenuous and provisional one that overlays other forms of seeing. But the striking thing about this very large painting is the ease with which it employs a Western aesthetic while at the same moment undercutting the ocularcentrism of Western representation. The jigsaw motif is continued in the painting Arafura Swamp (1990). In this painting we come closest to a statement about a hybrid aesthetic. The realist Western landscape style is punctuated with cutouts through which

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Figure 9.3 Lin Onus, Barmah Forest (1994), 182 × 244 cm. © Lin Onus Estate/ Licensed by Viscopy, 2013.

one can view a traditional bark painting below. The painting represents the reinscription and interpenetration of Aboriginal and Western forms of representation. For Margot Neale, “The two systems of representing the land each overlaid the other. Archeologically speaking, the older is below the newer, giving primacy to its more ancient origin.”19 The bricolage technique gives a new dimension to the concept of the hybrid, for the painting is not simply a pattern of different forms but a dialectic of different ways of seeing. Ultimately, the overlay is something more than bricolage: it is in itself a different way of seeing place—a “third space”—collage, certainly, yet more than the sum of its parts. It is important to see that this bricolage operates in a very different way from Aboriginal dot painting, which offers images of Dreaming stories that present themselves as authentic Aboriginal culture. The philosophy and practice of colonial enclosure and its capacity to simultaneously enclose an experience of the land is revealed in Fences, Fences, Fences (1985), a view of landscape restricted by a cyclone wire fence painted across the whole. There is a deep ambivalence here, as if the fence prevents the viewer from truly experiencing “what is there” when “what is there” is represented in the conventions of landscape painting. But the painting describes in simple visual form the imaginative and social effects of the principle of enclosure, so fundamental to Western views of place. The

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painting provides a very simple but effective interrogation of the cultural bases of Western habitation. What Onus’s painting engages here is a deepseated Western concept of property, such as seen in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common … [For God] gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational (and Labour was to be his Title to it).20 The physical enclosure of property lies at the heart of colonial invasion and has its correlative in the visual enclosure of colonial representation. This is why the meta-representational dimension of Onus’s painting has such a profound resonance. Connected to enclosure and representation is the function of colonial inscription through mapping and naming, and this process of inscription is satirized in Balanda Rock Art (1989). While apparently a playful variation on the contest between visual representation and rarrk inscription in so many of the paintings, it carries a rather grim message. Here the Aboriginal process of painting on the land, of inscribing the surface text of place, is reversed. The painting depicts rocks in a bush setting on which have been painted various forms of graffiti. The inscription is the graffiti of those for whom the bush as a place of belonging is virtually meaningless. Embedded in the dark humour of this unsubtle message is the idea of Aboriginal place as a tabula rasa defaced by white occupation or, perhaps more critically, defaced by modernity itself. Onus has many other ways of Aboriginalizing the indigenous fauna of Australia with different effect. In Bunpa near Malwan (1992) the lyricism of place is celebrated by the landscape occupied by butterflies with Aboriginal markings—cut out from CDs. The butterflies wear the Aboriginal team colours of black, red and yellow. But the engagement with a dominant discourse is seen in their capacity to inhabit not so much the landscape, but its representation. This is the kind of painting that might be accused of being “kitsch” because it is perhaps too realistically pretty for art purists. But this only intensifies the political strategy of entering the dominant aesthetic to question its forms of representation. The Aboriginal markings on the butterflies offer just enough ambivalence to disrupt any simple reception of the painting. There is a category of paintings that extends this Aboriginalizing of the indigenous fauna in terms of displacement. In Fishes (1991) the fish are literally “out of water” and travelling across the land in search of waterholes. While the narrative of the painting is a message of displacement, the experience of viewing these paintings is one that is confronted by the transgression of “natural” or conventional conditions of realist representation. The combination of displacement and transgression means

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that this painting, as well as a similar one called Hovering till the Rains Come (1995), operate in a striking meta-representational way, because they stimulate a doubleness of vision in which the medium in which fishes and rays are swimming/flying is ambivalent. Dispensing with conventional panoramic views, Onus is here attempting the technique of his mentor Jack Wunuwan, a way of seeing “beneath the surface.” The ambivalence of this “seeing” is converted into a compelling picture of aspiration in Stingrays Also Dream of Flying (1995), in which the stingray hovers in the sky, displaced from its natural environment but launched into the visionary realm of possibility. When we move from space to time, from place to history, we find a much more overtly political discourse emerging. Why this is so could provide some insight into Aboriginal subjectivity in general. The place is still there to be contested while history is not, at least not obviously so. As Ashish Nandy puts it, “Historical consciousness now owns the globe… Though millions of people continue to stay outside history, millions have, since the days of Marx, dutifully migrated to the empire of history to become its loyal subjects.”21 When colonial societies are historicized they are brought into history, brought into the discourse of modernity as a function of imperial control—mapped, named, organized, legislated, inscribed. But at the same time they are kept at history’s margins. The consequence of this is the implantation of both loss and desire. Being inscribed into history is to be made modern because history and European modernity go hand in hand. As Dipesh Chakrabarty says, So long as one operates within the discourse of ‘history’ at the institutional site of the university it is not possible simply to walk out of the deep collusion between ‘history’ and the modernizing narratives of citizenship, bourgeois public and private, and the nation-state.22 But rather than “walk out of” the deep collusion between history and the nation-state, postcolonial interventions in art and literature write another history, and they do this by transforming the aesthetic tools at hand. While history then becomes a focus of struggle, the area of visual representation is one that provides a great hope of change because it lends itself more easily to the strategies of postcolonial revision. Place is interpenetrated by history, as the Mabo and Wyk cases demonstrate. The master discourse of Western history is a bit more intransigent and has been critiqued by historians such as Henry Reynolds in The Other Side of the Frontier, but in former colonies, at least those of the British Empire, the re-writing of history has usually been launched in literary writing. In painting, the engagement with history outside of its embedding in place is perhaps more difficult. When colonial societies are historicized they are brought into history; brought into the discourse of modernity by means of the narrative of history, but kept at its margins.

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Figure 9.4 Lin Onus, And on the Eighth Day (1992), 182 × 145 cm. © Lin Onus Estate/Licensed by Viscopy, 2013.

The myth of beginnings is a point at which the contestation of history starts for Onus and he engages it with a characteristic mixture of humour and rage. In And on the Eighth Day (1992) we find two winged Valkyries flying Botticelli-like into what is obviously an Australian landscape, carrying the toxic effects of colonization: whose cloven hoofs tore up the land; barbed wire, used to fence pastoral properties and keep trespassers out; the gun, used to decimate Aboriginal populations; the Bible symbolizing cultural colonization; and in a typically humorous note a toilet cleanser, the ‘toilet duck’ which becomes a sacred object held aloft by the angels winging across the painting. The picture of these winged female Valkyries on the eighth day of creation is an extremely anti-imperialist painting prompted by Onus’s reaction to the Republican debate and the sight of bumper stickers saying “Keep our flag forever.” It is the flag of neither Aboriginal people nor most Australians, a point that emphasizes the complexity of postcolonial discourse in a settler colony. The painting is a luminous parody of invasion. The future Time and place continue to be fused in Onus’s painting. Within the overarching discourse of colonial representation he depicts a search for Aboriginal place that has been obscured by the operations of colonial

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inscription. The concept of Aboriginal people finding out where they have come from and where they are going is a recurring motif in Onus’s work in paintings such as Where to Now? (1986). The painting Mum, When Do We Get There? (1989), conflates time and place in a way that asks the broader question of the future for Aboriginal culture. The painting depicts a road snaking around like the rainbow serpent, lined with question marks, on which is shown a red truck that immediately raises the question “Where are we going?” At the bottom of the painting a hand holding a map represents the authorized form of mapping, which is the one that remains inimical to the Aboriginal discovery of place. The symbol of colonial inscription and organization of space stands as the constant reminder of the enclosure of colonial discourse. On the other hand the painting prescribes a form of mapping that, by conflating time and space, humorously indicates the way in which Aboriginal place is consciously and culturally embedded in time. But layered on this is the reality of Aboriginal engagements with modernity and a suggestion of the ways in which a traditional conception of Aboriginal place may be located in the modern world. The interpenetration of place and history becomes a feature of Onus’s Road to Redfern (1988). This painting captures a similarly utopian vision that may be seen prominently in all postcolonial literature, one that can be called “remembering the future.” Redfern is a Sydney suburb in which there exists a very politically active Aboriginal community. Redfern Park was the location of Prime Minister Paul Keating’s historic acceptance of white responsibility for Aboriginal dispossession, an acceptance that was denied by the subsequent conservative government of John Howard. In the rear-view mirror of the truck on the way to Redfern is the image of the rainbow serpent, demonstrating the ways in which the past infuses the present to produce a hopeful future. The Road to Redfern demonstrates

Figure 9.5 Lin Onus, Road to Redfern (1988), 60 × 120 cm. © Lin Onus Estate/ Licensed by Viscopy, 2013.

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what Edouard Glissant calls a “prophetic vision of the past”: “The past,” he says, “to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is, however, obsessively present.”23 This concurs with the difficult and much discussed concept of the dialectical image in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.24 It is the function of the dialectical image to know time in the way Glissant suggests, by situating it. The Road to Redfern is a dialectical image, perhaps in a more obvious way than the ‘flash’ to which Benjamin refers, because it captures the unity of past and future in a mobile present. The past is apprehended in terms of the future and vice versa. It offers an image that is both a vision of the past and a utopian assurance of the future of Aboriginal identity. Why I bring this comparison to light is not so much to use Benjamin to explicate the function of place/time in Aboriginal literature, as to show that Benjamin’s positing of a dialectical relationship between the past and the present that lies within the image, is already a feature of indigenous knowledge. The painting is crucially framed by the title: the road to Redfern is the road towards a Sydney suburb that has been the centre of urban Aboriginal resistance, a modern urban sacred site. The rainbow serpent in the rear-view mirror is the sustaining metaphor for the continuation of the past in the present. The fact that the head of the serpent is a truck is a cunning metaphor for the persistence of Aboriginal identity in modernity and the importance of mobility and transformation. The image is dialectical because it resists closure. Onus captures here the key feature of any hopeful vision of the future. The valuing of the mythic past in the Aboriginal imagination is not only an attempt to disrupt the dominance of history, but also an attempt to re-conceive a place in the present, a place transformed by the infusion of this past. This is an infusion that lies at the core of the “bricolage” of Onus’s painting. The present is the crucial site of the continual motion by which the new comes into being. In such transformative conceptions of utopian hope the “not-yet” is always a possibility emerging from the past. For those societies contesting the dominance of colonial discourse, the radically new is always embedded in and transformed by the past. This is why the connection between the rainbow serpent in the rear-view mirror and the future of Aboriginal sovereignty symbolized by Redfern are so significant. For Onus the road to the future is powered by hope. Lin Onus offers an aesthetic that is transformative in both form and function, embodying the conflicting and overlapping discourses of tradition

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and modernity within which contemporary Aboriginal resistance takes place. In this porous transcultural and deeply ambivalent space, Onus reveals the power that lies in that very ambivalence—its “two powered,” ambi-valent potential. In his playful disruption of painting conventions he demonstrates the effectiveness with which Aboriginal artists may appropriate contemporary forms in order to interpolate dominant cultural discourses in the production of an alternative modernity.

Notes 1 Cf. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Curry, 1981), 11. 2 Cf. Bill Ashcroft, Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2008). 3 Cf. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993), 3. 4 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 6. 5 Cf. Michael Landmann, “Talking with Ernst Bloch: Korcula, 1968,” Telos 25 (Fall 1975): 184. 6 Cf. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 4. 7 Ibid., 19. 8 Tony Bennett, “Really Useless ‘Knowledge’: A Political Critique of Aesthetics,” Thesis Eleven 12.1 (May 1985): 33. 9 Cf. Peter Lamarque, “Paleolithic Cave Painting: A Test Case for Transcultural Aesthetics,” in Aesthetics and Rock Art, eds. Thomas Heyd and John Clegg (London: Ashgate, 2005), 23. 10 Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” The Philosophical Review 74.1 (Jan. 1965): 4. 11 Eric Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media and Technological Horizons (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 144–5. 12 Cf. Ashcroft, Caliban’s Voice, 174–5. 13 Cf. Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind. 14 Cf. Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance (Sydney: Picador, 2010), 398. 15 Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art, 146. 16 Cf. Bernhard Lüthi, “Translating Cultures: Lin Onus, a Man of Many Ways,” in Urban Dingo: The Art and Life of Lin Onus 1948–1996, ed. Margot Neale (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2000), 53. 17 Stephen Muecke, “Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement,” Cultural Studies Review 18.1 (March 2012): 43. 18 Neale, “Urban Dingo,” In Urban Dingo, 16. 19 Ibid., 16. 20 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, introd. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 333. 21 Ashish Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” History and Theory 4.2 (May 1995): 46. 22 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Post-Coloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for the ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 19. 23 Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. with introd. by J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 64.

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24 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Rolf Tiedermann (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3. (“Awakening,” Arcades, 462; N2a, 3)

Bibliography Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Edited by J. Dover Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993. Ashcroft, Bill. Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 2008. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Rolf Tiedermann. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Bennet, Tony. “Really Useless ‘Knowledge’: A Political Critique of Aesthetics.” Thesis Eleven 12. 1 (May 1985): 28–52. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Post-Coloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for the ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 1–26. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated and with introduction by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Lamarque, Peter. “Paleolithic Cave Painting: A Test Case for Transcultural Aesthetics.” In Aesthetics and Rock Art, edited by Thomas Heyd and John Clegg, 21–35. London: Ashgate, 2005. Landmann, Michael. “Talking with Ernst Bloch: Korcula, 1968.” Telos 25 (Fall 1975): 165–85. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Introduction by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. Lüthi, Bernhard. “Translating Cultures: Lin Onus, a Man of Many Ways.” In Urban Dingo: The Art and Life of Lin Onus 1948–1996, edited by Margot Neale, 49–54. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2000. Michaels, Eric. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media and Technological Horizons. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Muecke, Stephen. “Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement.” Cultural Studies Review 18.1 (March 2012): 40–58. Nandy, Ashish. “History’s Forgotten Doubles.” History and Theory 4.2 (May 1995): 44–66. Neale, Margot. Yiribana: An Introduction to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collection. Exhibition catalogue. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1994. Neale, Margot. “Urban Dingo.” In Urban Dingo: The Art and Life of Lin Onus 1948–1996, edited by Margot Neale, 11–23. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2000. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Curry, 1981. Scott, Kim. That Deadman Dance. Sydney: Picador, 2010. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “A Lecture on Ethics.” The Philosophical Review 74.1 (1965): 3–12.

10 The art of not relating with one another Notes on some issues and potentials of relational art1 Sandra Umathum I “The 45th edition of Art Basel displays a trend toward participatory art,”2 notes the subheadline of a June 2015 review of the eminent modern and contemporary art fair published in the Basler Zeitung. Its author Alexander Sury goes on to present some artists who conceive of their audience as active contributors to their works: Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose Do We Dream Under the Same Sky (2015) invites visitors to stay in an “open bamboo shelter” on Basel’s Messeplatz, where they can take part in a “public debate and ad hoc discussions in the convivial atmosphere of shared food”3; David Shrigley, whose Life Model (2012) stages a drawing class by arranging chairs and easels in a circle around a roughly three-metre high naked male figure (described by Sury as a cross between Michelangelo and the cover boy of satirical magazine Mad), encouraging visitors to try their hand at life drawing; or the Brazilian art collective Opavivará!, whose octagonal installation Formosa Decelerator (2014) invites visitors to while away the time in one of 16 hammocks and create their own tea blend choosing from a variety of tea leaves on the table that forms the centre of the wooden structure. However, the trend toward participatory art diagnosed by Sury is anything but recent. Works that frame exhibition visitors as active participants in artistically motivated situations and encounters with other people have belonged to the established repertoire of contemporary art for several years. The following pages are devoted to this artistic practice, which since its emergence in the 1990s has been covering a much-discussed field, particularly with a view to the question of art’s transformative potential. Of course, the phenomenon of artists attempting to activate intersubjective interactions is restricted neither to the context of the visual arts nor to the 1990s. Theatre, dance, happenings, actionism, and wide swathes of performance art are and have been exploring in this practice of encouraging and facilitating a form of attendance that goes beyond the mere position of onlooker, thereby also shaping or framing the way in which people may engage with one another. The novelty thus does not lie in the fact that

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onlookers are turned into agents and enabled to affect the course of events. It lies rather in the fact of this aesthetic practice accessing the sphere of institutionalised visual arts, i.e. museums and galleries, which have traditionally given dominance to relations between subjects and objects rather than between people. The works under consideration take this convention as their starting point and make use of a neglected or untapped potential by placing exhibition visitors in various relations with people recruited amongst either museum staffers, specially hired actors, or fellow exhibition visitors. Against this background, it becomes difficult to fully and adequately apprehend such works by merely referring to their overstepping of traditional boundaries between subject and object. For although they extend an invitation to interact with an object or to spend time in an installation, they are at the same time conceptually aimed at a form of togetherness that is as constitutive of the artistic designs as it is of the resulting experiences. Endeavouring to initiate encounters between people yields transformations at several levels: at the level of the institutional context, which witnesses a refiguration of the traditional relation between subject and object; at the level of the artwork that, having gone from a product displaying a set form to an emphasis on the unfinished and the processual in the 1960s, is now undergoing a new turn toward intersubjective situations; and at the level of experience, insofar as the exhibition visitor is now being asked to exert influence on an artistically initiated event.

II In the context of institutionalised visual arts, minimal artists were the first whose objects shifted the relationalities between a work and its beholder as well as between a work and its environment to the effect that the experience of objects and of situations began to interlock in a peculiar way. With the minimalist object, which attempts to elude all representational and narrative levels, the situation of an experience or the experience of a situation came into focus, as did the beholder whose attention the specific constitution of the minimalist object directs to her own being in the room, her own perception, or the relationalities she establishes between individual elements: between herself and her position-sensitive perspectives onto the object, between the object and its architectural environment, between object and light, light and architecture etc. Looking at the pronouncements of minimal artists, it appears that, while the establishment of those varied relationalities is broached explicitly, no mention is made of the potential relation of exhibition visitors to fellow visitors, to their presence in or their movements across the room. The notion of interpersonal interaction evidently did not yet play a significant role for minimal artists. Their works first and foremost aimed to shift the subjectobject relation—reconsidering the beholder by means of reconsidering the

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object. In other words, what they sought was a shift in paradigm: a revaluation of the beholder and of the aesthetic experience of the object.4 Although relations amongst exhibition visitors remain undiscussed, at least in its practitioners’ writings, it was nevertheless minimal art that, by opening its objects toward the circumstances of their experience, established within the institutionalised visual arts a greater awareness of the behaviours and actions of other visitors or of the encounters of other visitors with an object. Viewed in this light, minimal art thus ensured the transformation of an object’s surroundings into a setting in which one (also) experiences oneself as an observer of agents or as an agent in front of observers, making us aware of the fact that being an agent involves not only an active dimension (actions directed at an object or a person) but also a passive one (being perceived in these actions by others). The major difference between minimal artists and contemporary artists who encourage the emergence of intersubjective relations is that the latter already include the production of such intersubjective relations at a conceptual level, recognising them as a constitutive and productive parameter of their works.

III Over the last years, this new approach to artistic practice has inspired first attempts at theoretical grounding. The most prominent and influential contribution remains that of curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, who in his book Relational Aesthetics posits that “[a]fter the era of relations between Humankind and deity, and then between Humankind and the object, artistic practice is now focused upon the sphere of inter-human relations.”5 Since its publication in 1998 and especially since its translation into English in 2002, Bourriaud’s book has garnered much attention and much criticism from both art practitioners and art theoreticians. In the following, I would like to sketch some of Bourriaud’s core theses and interweave them with the debates they triggered. With his reflections, Bourriaud not only contributed to a lively debate as to the political efficacy art should or can achieve today, he also addressed the issue of its current transformative potential. With relationality, Bourriaud introduces a concept that makes it possible to establish a common denominator between such heterogeneous works as Rirkrit Tiravanija’s food and housing installations, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Candy Spills, or Vanessa Beecroft’s vivid performances involving varioussized groups of uniformly dressed men and women. Like many other works of the past two decades (including the three works mentioned at the beginning of this essay), they do not fit comfortably within established categories. Most of them are located in between the modes of installation, performance, sculpture, and image; they are often several things at once and

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not clearly identifiable as one thing or another. Having determined the inadequacy of describing these works simply with reference to their hybrid structures, Bourriaud introduces the concept of relationality to underline what binds them despite their disparities, namely the relationalities they encourage between individuals. Strictly speaking, every type of art is relational insofar as it always negotiates relations between form and content, signifier and signified, art and non-art, work and beholder, or work and context. However, by reserving the notion of relationality for relations initiated by an artwork between people, Bourriaud turns it into the linchpin of a theory in which intersubjectivity is “the quintessence of artistic practice”6. For Bourriaud, the sweeping amount of work on intersubjective situations undertaken since the 1990s does not simply denote one art historical turn amongst many others or the mere exploration of a hitherto untapped potential of the visual arts. Rather, he identifies as one of its concerns the desire to transform art institutions traditionally beholden to representation into sites where, shielded from the uniformity of everyday behavioural patterns, “alternative forms of sociability”7 may be tried out, giving rise to a “community effect”8 that is nowadays difficult to find: The present-day social context restricts the possibilities of inter-human relations all the more … The general mechanisation of social functions gradually reduces the relational space. Just a few years ago, the telephone wake-up call service employed human beings, but now we are woken up by a synthesised voice… The automatic cash machine has become the transit model for the most elementary of social functions, and professional behaviour patterns are modelled on the efficiency of the machines replacing them, these machines carrying out tasks which once represented so many opportunities for exchanges, pleasure and squabbling.9 Based on this diagnosis and on the observation that artists produce situations that may be experienced together for a certain period of time, in Bourriaud’s perspective museums and galleries do not merely turn into spaces in which art—or more precisely relational art—attempts to react to modern urban life’s and a technified and globalised world’s tendency to increasingly alienate and distance people from one another. Insofar as relational art contributes to making the world at least temporarily habitable in a different, somehow better way, for Bourriaud museums and galleries are furthermore transformed into spaces in which the aesthetic and the political come together in a specific way. The function of relational art is political in that it endeavours to fill “cracks in the social bond”10 and to encourage “an interhuman commerce … that differs from the ‘communication-zones’ that are imposed on us.”11

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Bourriaud thus brings relational art into play as the answer to now deficient communication structures and to the virulence of increasingly indirect or virtual encounters. He even goes one step further by associating these temporary, makeshift solutions with the notion of utopia, albeit not in the sense of large-scale, socially transformative designs and ideas such as put forward by various avant-gardes but rather in the sense of feasible “life possibilities.”12 “Micro-utopias” or “neighborhood utopias”13 are other terms used by Bourriaud for these artistically instituted communities, which take leave of battling on behalf of forward-looking utopias in favour of shaping intersubjective relations in the here and now, “within the existing real.”14, 15

IV Bourriaud is clearly highly confident (or ambitious) as regards the potential of relational art—bearing in mind that museums are not adequately equipped to assemble visitors around one work at the same time. Unlike the theatre, the museum is a site of dispersal, whose flexible visiting hours and architecture produce unpredictable comings and goings and in which the many objects on display, vying for visitors’ attention, impose constant movement. These circumstances make it much more difficult to generate community effects in a museum or a gallery than in a theatre. Yet aside from this fundamental difficulty to create anything deserving the name of community on the basis of such randomly occurring encounters, Bourriaud fails to address another aspect. As Juliane Rebentisch rightly notes regarding his positive assessment of social connectedness, ultimately there is nothing “less political than a call for community devoid of any enquiry into this community’s specific quality.”16 Interestingly, the issue of a community’s specific quality is one Bourriaud does not touch upon. His remarks seldom go beyond the assertion that people in museums and galleries are transposed into communal situations by means of art. This assertion is problematic not only because readers of his book are told nothing of the individual and possibly divergent concerns of the artists he mentions. As a generalisation it is also problematic because it occurs at the cost of a more precise focus on specific works and the different encounters they give rise to. Bourriaud does not provide evidence for the processes these works actually set in motion. And yet, people who gather in exhibitions with other people to act as instructed by artists do not automatically give rise to a community—at least not so long as one sides, for example, with Roberto Esposito in viewing the formation of a community as predicated upon the willingness to pay a munus to the communitas, a gift in the sense of a pledge, a service, an office, which necessarily involves a dispossession of one’s own subjectivity.17 Since Bourriaud abstains from providing evidence for his theses by analysing concrete situations and remains vague as regards his concept of

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community, critics have found it easy to attack his notion of relational aesthetics and along with it, at times even foremost, the artworks that fall under this heading. “[T]oday simply getting together sometimes seems enough,” is one of the often raised objections, here in Hal Foster’s words. “[W]e might not be too far from an artworld version of ‘flash mobs’ … of ‘people meeting people’ … as an end in itself. … [T]his tends to drop contradiction out of dialogue, and conflict out of democracy ….”18

V. Bourriaud’s neglect of a democratic understanding of politics has notoriously also been targeted by Claire Bishop. In her article Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, she argues against such solemn embracing of interpersonal togetherness that appears to leave no room for conflict or dissent.19 In this context, she also criticises the lack of consideration given to concrete situations: The quality of the relationships in ‘relational aesthetics’ are never examined or called into question. … [A]ll relations that permit ‘dialogue’ are automatically assumed to be democratic and therefore good. … If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what type of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?20 Bishop’s criticism hence does not merely target the note of “happy together” implicit in Bourriaud’s book, but takes more precise aim at the notion of such togetherness having anything to do with democracy. Bishop’s concern is thus twofold: to the extent that she attempts to defend an understanding of politics beholden to dissent rather than consensus, conciliation, and the absence of conflict, she also endeavours to demonstrate that the relations discussed by Bourriaud are not “intrinsically democratic” inasmuch as they “rest too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole and of community as immanent togetherness.”21 The central concept used by Bishop to challenge Bourriaud and the artists under his patronage is that of antagonism. Leaning on Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s notion of antagonism, which posits conflictual relations as a basic requirement of democratic communities,22 she opposes both Bourriaud’s understanding of politics in particular and, at a more general level, the view of art being political when it sets itself the task of generating consensual and reconciled communities. In her attempt to defend an understanding of politics beholden to dissent, Bishop does not limit her criticism to Bourriaud’s theses. Indeed, she focuses first and foremost on two of the artists he champions, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick, declaring them to be representatives of a type of art that is not aimed at and not capable of producing tensions, differences, and conflicts.

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However, just like Bourriaud, Bishop dispenses with an analysis of concrete situations. In order to substantiate her criticism of Gillick’s and Tiravanija’s works and launch Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra as key exponents of an art that facilitates dissent, she seeks and finds her arguments not in the situations themselves but in catalogue essays, in the words of curators and critics, or in those of the artists themselves.23

VI A further objection was raised by Jacques Rancière, sparked by the function Bourriaud ascribes to relational artworks, namely to patch cracks in the social fabric. Leaning on the paradox formulated by Theodor W. Adorno and then widely defended by aesthetic theory, according to which art’s social function consists in it not having any function, Rancière champions the view that “an artwork’s emancipatory potential … [lies] entirely in its idleness, i.e. in its distance from any social ‘work’ and any involvement in activist projects aimed at improving the world or in the quest to embellish the sphere of the market and alienated forms of life.”24 In other words, art should beware of relinquishing its self-sufficiency and should steer clear of the logic of usefulness. On the contrary, it should define a reality separate from non-art, which Rancière identifies as the only locus where it will be able to assert and deploy its political potential. In his view, art taking on a social or communal calling marks not the beginning but rather the end of a politics of art. This viewpoint derives from Rancière’s conviction that art is political first and foremost when it reshapes experiences by partitioning a specific space and a specific time, thereby “building new relationships between reality and appearance, the visible and its meaning, the individual and the collective.”25 In this context, conflict also represents a fundamental aspect of Rancière’s understanding of politics, insofar as he identifies politics with the conflict over how to dismantle and repartition these spaces and times. Accordingly, the politics of art begins to operate precisely when it reorganises the existing partitioning of the sensible, and precisely by deciding which objects occupy this space (and which do not) as well as which subjects partake in it (and which do not). Rancière acknowledges that relational art, by constructing intersubjective relationalities, facilitates a shift in perception and a change in status from onlooker to agent.26 Yet he still questions the potency that Bourriaud ascribes to these shifts. Where Juliane Rebentisch criticises Bourriaud for attributing too much “emancipatory power”27 to the fleeting experiences of such social situations, Rancière’s unease goes even further. In his view, the politics of art relies essentially on revoking the link between cause and effect.28 Art, if it is to be political in Rancière’s sense, must not want anything. It must recognise the uncontrollability of its effectiveness and shield itself from functional and harnessable effects. In order to be political, it must

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hence reject the very constitution of the world and be an art of indifference between activity and passivity, between knowledge and lack thereof—which for Rancière amounts to indifference in the twofold movement “that on the one hand drives art to its own abolishment and on the other hand confines the politics of art to its isolation.”29 Art must occur between these poles, for as soon as it enters the service of or begins to champion a political cause, leading appearance to dissolve into reality and putting an end to any possible reconfiguration between reality and appearance, art and with it the idea of its politics disappear.

VII The levelling of art and non-art constitutes Rancière’s most vehement objection to Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics and—since he equally dispenses with looking closely at concrete situations—relational artworks. Drawing on Juliane Rebentisch’s considerations, we may expand this thought to encompass the institutional context of these works. The fact that Bourriaud describes museums and galleries as spaces in which art invents models for social relations and facilitates the transformation of loose gatherings of people into communal encounters prompts Rancière to speak of a breaking down of boundaries between art and non-art. Rebentisch views the issue from yet another angle. In her view, what takes place is not merely a levelling of art and non-art. She holds the very opposite view when she writes that at the very moment a social experiment is meant to become “exemplary for the rest of society,” and consequently for the world beyond art institutions, “the old difference between art and life, which relational aesthetics believed to have overcome,”30 is reestablished. For Rebentisch, however, this old difference no longer lies in the distinction between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic but rather—taking the guise of a social difference—between those who frequent art institutions and those who do not. Partaking in (supposedly) successful social relations hence becomes a privilege that sets the art-viewing public apart from those who remain excluded and relegated to the deficient communication structures and “disintegrated circumstances on the outside.”31 This issue ensuing from Bourriaud’s theses is also seized upon by Tom Holert. Not only does he raise the understandable question as to why, of all people, artworld protagonists such as curators and artists should be the ones able to effect a transformation of social form. He rightly further points to the fact that some of the strategies cited by Bourriaud to create social relations appear to negate “social, political, and economic inequalities in a pseudo-critical non-stop party of the like-minded.”32 However, the issue with many relational artworks goes further than their oft-criticised pseudo-criticism and the blind spots they thereby reveal. It begins with the invitation to participate itself, which more often than not presents itself in the guise of a generous gift or even a gesture of release from

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the position of onlooker, without reflecting on the implications of such a proposition.

VIII It goes without saying that an artist whose work invites the audience to take part is never simply proffering a generous gift. In fact, he is concurrently demanding something in return, namely the willingness of exhibition visitors to assist in the realisation of his artistic concept and the completion of his work. Participants are thus not simply given the opportunity to turn from onlookers into agents. If they agree to it, they become collaborators, albeit of the unpaid kind, for the tacit and often unquestioned deal struck by the two parties implies that the volunteer workers must content themselves with the symbolic values created with their help. In his critical appraisal of such deals, Kai van Eikels noted that it would only be fair from an ethical standpoint “to pay people whose participation contributes to the creation of an artwork,” increasing especially its “recognition capital,” which “predominantly benefits the initiating artists” who then proceed to “leave behind the people who have partaken in one of their works and move on ….”33 One could naturally object that an unequal distribution of profits is to a certain extent always already at play when artists rely on the participation of exhibition visitors (or audience members in the context of theatre performances), scheduling them in as assistants in their artistic practice. Yet we are currently facing social and socio-economic conditions that seem to make the critical consideration of such unequal distribution of profits more urgent than ever. In the 1960s and 1970s, interest in participatory artworks often possessed a political dimension that can be described by the impetus to release exhibition visitors from a position in which they were unable to play a part in shaping events. Especially in the context of left-wing cultural and social criticism, participation therefore constituted a swipe at the passivity-inducing and isolating effects of the society of the spectacle.34 Today, when, as Diedrich Diederichsen puts it, we are expected to be “constantly actively involved” and are “subjected to the permanent terror of surrogate-democratic participation in our leisure time as well as in the work spheres of services and culture,”35 artistic invitations to take on an active role forfeit their effectiveness as weapons against existing conditions when they unthinkingly fall in with the laws and principles guiding what is simply a new manifestation of spectacle culture, in which participation now plays a central role. Now that participatory artworks have been making history for more than five decades, growing scepticism in the face of the spectacle-like excesses spawned and encouraged by the ubiquity of such formats has been expressed beyond the ranks of theoreticians. In their works, some artists also convey their belief that participation does not possess value in and of itself, and

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directly address the notion and its issues. A work such as Felix GonzalesTorres’ Candy Spills (1990–93)36 operates by not confining itself to simply suggesting certain tasks or activities. Instead, the Candy Spills establish spaces of possibility in which, in addition to doing things, refraining from doing them is as important as the questions of how, why, and for what purpose we do or refrain from doing those things. Perhaps we refrain from taking a piece of candy because we know that these installations are sweet (at times mournful) declarations of love, some of them abstract substitutes for someone the artist loved, their weight in candy equivalent to that person’s body mass. Accordingly, whatever we do, or do not do, reveals the manner in which the Candy Spills appear to us. Moreover, our manner of doing or not doing is observable; our choices and reactions are on display to other visitors and may in turn influence their decision as to whether or not to take one of the sweets. The synchronous occurrences around the installations enable forms of intersubjectivity in which we are challenged to acknowledge the other as someone who prompts us to reflect upon our own attitudes, actions, and decisions. These artworks do not allow us to not participate because participation becomes effective in a different sense: it pertains to the way we configure and organise relations among ourselves, the installation, and other visitors, and the way we generate situations of aesthetic experience through our own behaviour and our own processes of observation. Refusing the invitation to take a sweet thus in no way endangers the functioning of the work; the Candy Spills assert their autonomy precisely through the fact that they cannot be reduced to and are not reliant on any directly practical notion of participation.

IX A fundamental issue of the debate surrounding Bourriaud is the frequent lack of any clear separation between his arguments and the artists and works he draws on to substantiate these arguments. As a result, artworks that foster relationalities between people are often assessed less in terms of their constitutive elements or the situations they trigger than in reference to Bourriaud’s assertions. If one wishes to adequately approach these works, it is therefore imperative to replace such projections—be they positive or negative—with a long overdue attention to events and details on site. Considering for example Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Candy Spills, prominently discussed by Bourriaud, it becomes obvious they have little to do with generating a community or social value added of any sort.37 Siding with Rancière against Bourriaud, one may argue that what makes art political is not its adoption of a compensatory or surrogate responsibility to engineer social change. Yet many relational artworks do not display any such concern. They are interesting for a wholly different reason, namely that they invite activities that stimulate an involvement with one’s own actions or with the ways we exert influence on events and other visitors. Felix

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Gonzalez-Torres’ Candy Spills are only one of many examples that enable such a confrontation with one’s own self by means of others. By designing situations that set in motion processes of empowerment and disempowerment, of determining and being determined, of consonance and dissonance, of affirmation and negation, these works make it possible to see and experience one’s own disposition and the necessity to take a stand. Felix Gonzalez-Torres is one among several artists who do not stage these intersubjective relationalities by focussing on the issue of belonging or not belonging to concrete communities, which is precisely why they manage to address aspects of intersubjectivity in a manner different not only from Bourriaud but also from Bishop. While Bishop identifies as an essential quality of Thomas Hirschhorn’s and Santiago Sierra’s works the fact that they make visible and foster confrontation with socially marginal groups, Gonzalez-Torres brings the other to the fore in a very different way. He ensures the emergence of situations in which it may come to light that the other who forces me to question myself and adopt a self-reflexive mode may be someone who belongs to the same cultural sphere, the same gender, or the same discursive system, who speaks the same language, is the same age, or has come to the exhibition driven by the same interests as I. In other words, the Candy Spills ensure that I recognise any other by virtue of what he or she triggers within me and what he or she prompts me to do: questioning my actions, my behaviours, or my decision to participate, evoking specific emotions and thoughts, the willingness or the refusal to be determined by him or her. By staging intersubjective encounters, the more interesting among relational artworks have transformed museums and galleries into settings in which participants’ various interests, attitudes, sensitivities, or dispositions may meet and be given consideration. A fundamental turn is thereby operated in the history of institutionalised art with respect to exhibition visitors, insofar as they are now conceived of as entities that may become productive not only as regards their own experiences. By contributing to shaping events, altering their course, and thus also affecting the experiences of others, exhibition visitors are now themselves staged as engineers of experience. Translation by Maud Capelle

Notes 1

2

This essay expands on previous considerations, to be found in particular in the final chapter of Sandra Umathum, Kunst als Aufführungserfahrung. Zum Diskurs intersubjektiver Situationen in der zeitgenössischen Ausstellungskunst. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Erwin Wurm, Tino Sehgal (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011). Alexander Sury, “Ich bin auch ein Kunstwerk,” Basler Zeitung, June 17, 2015, accessed July 18, 2015, http://bazonline.ch/kultur/art-basel/Ich-bin-auch-einKunstwerk/story/14332452 [trans. Maud Capelle].

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

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See project description: “Do We Dream Under the Same Sky,” e-flux Homepage, accessed July 18, 2015, http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/do-we-dreamunder-the-same-sky/. It is notoriously precisely this shift in paradigm that triggered Michael Fried’s criticism of minimal art. See Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), 116–47. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: les presses du réel, 2002), 28. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 16–7. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 45. “Avant-gardes were about utopias. How is it possible to transform the world from scratch and rebuild a society which would be totally different? I think that is totally impossible and what artists are trying to do now is to create microutopias, neighborhood utopias, like talking to your neighbor, just what’s happening when you shake hands with somebody. This is all super political when you think about it. That’s micro-politics.” “Nicolas Bourriaud and Karen Moss. Part I,” Stretcher Homepage, October 18, 2002, accessed July 18, 2015, http://www.stretcher.org/features/nicolas_bourriaud_and_karen_moss/. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: les presses du réel, 2002), 13. For a critical assessment of Bourriaud’s notion of utopia see Juliane Rebentisch, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2013), 65–7. Ibid., 65 [trans. Maud Capelle]. See Roberto Esposito, Communitas. The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 1–19. Hal Foster, “Arty Party,” London Review of Books 25 no. 23 (2003): 22. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Spring 2004): 51–79. Ibid., 65 [emphasis in original]. Ibid., 67. Bishop refers in particular to the notion of antagonism developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London/New York: Verso, 1985). See Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Spring 2004): 66–7. See in more detail: Umathum, Kunst als Aufführungserfahrung (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011), 166–74. Jacques Rancière, “Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien,” in Jacques Rancière. Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen. Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien, ed. Maria Muhle (Berlin: b_books, 2006), 85–6 [trans. Maud Capelle]. Ibid., 89 [trans. Maud Capelle]. See Jacques Rancière, “Politics of Aesthetics,” in id., Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 24. Juliane Rebentisch, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2013), 65 [trans. Maud Capelle]. Jacques Rancière, “Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien,” in Jacques Rancière. Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen. Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien, ed. Maria Muhle (Berlin: b_books, 2006), 87. Ibid., 89 [trans. Maud Capelle]. Juliane Rebentisch, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2013), 62 [trans. Maud Capelle].

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31 Ibid. [trans. Maud Capelle]. 32 Tom Holert, “Formsache. Netzwerke, Subjektivität, Autonomie,” in Kreation und Depression. Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus, ed. Christoph Menke and Juliane Rebentisch (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2010), 140 [trans. Maud Capelle]. 33 Kai van Eikels, “Kunst partizipiert. Fünf theoretische Anmerkungen für die Praxis,” https://kunstdeskollektiven.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/kunst-partizipiertfunf-theoretische-anregungen-fur-die-praxis/ [trans. Maud Capelle], accessed Feb 19, 2017. 34 See also Rebentisch, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2013), 63–4. 35 Diedrich Diederichsen, “Partizipation und Lebendigkeit,” in id., Eigenblutdoping. Selbstverwertung, Künstlerromantik, Partizipation (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009), 279 [trans. Maud Capelle]. 36 See Sandra Umathum, “Given the Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Case: The Art of Placing a Different Idea of Participation at our Disposal,” Performance Research, 16:3 (“On Participation and Synchronization,” ed. Bettina Brandl-Risi and Kai van Eikels) (2011): 94–8. 37 On the analysis of such situations, see Umathum, Kunst als Aufführungserfahrung (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011).

Bibliography Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October no. 110 (Spring 2004): 51–79. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: les presses du réel, 2002. Diederichsen, Diedrich. “Partizipation und Lebendigkeit.” In id. Eigenblutdoping. Selbstverwertung, Künstlerromantik, Partizipation (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2013). Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009: 256–79. “Do We Dream Under the Same Sky,” e-flux Homepage, http://www.e-flux.com/ announcements/do-we-dream-under-the-same-sky/. Accessed July 18, 2015. Eikels, Kai van. “Kunst partizipiert. Fünf theoretische Anmerkungen für die Praxis.” https://kunstdeskollektiven.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/kunst-partizipiert-funftheoretische-anregungen-fur-die-praxis/. Accessed February 19, 2017. Esposito, Roberto. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Foster, Hal. “Arty Party.” London Review of Books 25, no. 23 (2003): 21–2. Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” In Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Edited by Gregory Battcock. New York: Dutton, 1968: 116–47. Holert, Tom. “Formsache. Netzwerke, Subjektivität, Autonomie.” In Kreation und Depression: Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus. Edited by Christoph Menke and Juliane Rebentisch, Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2010: 129–48. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London/ New York: Verso, 1985. “Nicolas Bourriaud and Karen Moss. Part I.” Stretcher Homepage, October 18, 2002. http://www.stretcher.org/features/nicolas_bourriaud_and_karen_moss/. Accessed July 18, 2015. Rancière, Jacques. “Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien.” In Jacques Rancière. Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen. Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien. Edited by Maria Muhle. Berlin: b_books, 2006: 75–99.

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Rancière, Jacques. “Politics of Aesthetics.” In id. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009: 19–44. Rebentisch, Juliane. Theorien der Gegenwartskunst. Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2013. Sury, Alexander. “Ich bin auch ein Kunstwerk.” Basler Zeitung, June 17, 2015. http://bazonline.ch/kultur/art-basel/Ich-bin-auch-ein-Kunstwerk/story/14332452. Accessed February 19, 2017. Umathum, Sandra. Kunst als Aufführungserfahrung: Zum Diskurs intersubjektiver Situationen in der zeitgenössischen Ausstellungskunst. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Erwin Wurm, Tino Sehgal. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011. Umathum, Sandra. “Given the Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Case: The Art of Placing a Different Idea of Participation at our Disposal.” Performance Research 16, no. 36 (2011): 94–8.

List of contributors

Bill Ashcroft is Professor in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. A founding exponent of post-colonial theory, he is author and co-author of sixteen books, variously translated into five languages, including The Empire Writes Back (Routledge 1989), Post-Colonial Transformation (Routledge 2001), Post-Colonial Futures (Continuum 2001), Caliban’s Voice (Routledge 2008) and Intimate Horizons (ATF 2009). His latest publications are: Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts (3rd edition), Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal (2012), Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the TwentyFirst Century (Rodopi 2012), Patrick White Centenary (Cambridge 2014), and Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (Routledge 2016). Erika Fischer-Lichte is Professor of Theatre Studies and the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies on “Interweaving Performance Cultures” at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has held guest professorships in the USA, Russia, India, Japan, China, and Norway, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Copenhagen in 2006. Fischer-Lichte has published widely in the fields of aesthetics, history and theory of theatre, in particular on semiotics and performativity, contemporary theatre, and interweaving performance cultures. Her publications include The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (Routledge 2008), Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (Routledge 2005), and History of European Drama and Theatre (Routledge 2002). Edith Hall is Professor at the Classics Department and Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London. She is the Co-Founder and Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama at Oxford and Chairman of the Gilbert Murray Trust. From 2006 until 2011 she held a Research Chair at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her books include Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford Univ. Press 1989), an edition of Aeschylus’ Persians (Liverpool Univ. Press 1996), Greek and Roman Actors (Cambridge Univ. Press 2002, co-edited with Pat

List of contributors

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Easterling), Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914 (Oxford Univ. Press 2005, co-authored with Fiona Macintosh), and Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind (Norton 2014). James Harding is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on the history of experimental theatre, on post 9/11 theatre and performance, on the intersection of surveillance and performance, and on performance studies more generally. He is the author of the monographs Performance, Transparency and the Cultures of Surveillance (Univ. of Michigan Press 2017), The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theatre and Performance (Univ. of Michigan Press 2013), and Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists and the American AvantGarde (Univ. of Michigan Press 2010). He has co-edited five anthologies, the most recent of which is entitled The Sixties, Center Stage: Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade (Univ. of Michigan Press 2017). Guillermo Rodríguez has since its creation in 2003 been the Director of Casa de la India in Valladolid, Spain. He has PhDs from the University of Valladolid (philology) and the University of Kerala. He held the post of Indian Studies Coordinator at the Centre for Asian Studies, University of Valladolid, from 2000 to 2003. Rodríguez is a multi-disciplinary scholar, writer, translator, cultural activist, and producer, and publishes on contemporary Indian poetry, medieval bhakti literature, Indian aesthetics and performing arts, and literary criticism. He is the author of When Mirrors Are Windows: A View of A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetics (Oxford Univ. Press 2016). Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture at Florida Atlantic University. His major authored books include Thinking through the Body; Body Consciousness; Surface and Depth; Performing Live; Practicing Philosophy; and Pragmatist Aesthetics (Cambridge Univ. Press, now published in fifteen languages). Shusterman received his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford and has held academic appointments in France, Germany, Denmark, Israel, China, and Japan. His most recent book is The Adventures of the Man in Gold (Hermann 2016), a philosophical tale based on his work in performance art. The French government honored him as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. Matthew Wilson Smith is Associate Professor in the departments of German Studies and Theatre and Performance Studies at Stanford University. His publications include The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge 2007), Georg Büchner: The Major Works (Norton 2012),

224

List of contributors

Modernism and Opera, and The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (Oxford Univ. Press 2017). His articles on theatre, opera, film, and digital performance have appeared widely. Sandra Umathum is Professor of Performance Studies and Dramaturgy at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts. She holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on the relations between theatre and the visual arts since the 1950s, theory and praxis of contemporary theatre and performance art, and new forms of dramaturgy. She is the author of Kunst als Aufführungserfahrung (Transcript 2011), a book on intersubjective experiences in the visual arts, and co-editor of Disabled Theater (diaphanes/Univ. of Chicago Press 2015), and Postdramaturgien (Neofelis 2018). Bernhard Waldenfels is Professor for Philosophy at the Ruhr-Universität, where he became emeritus in 1999. He is the co-founder German Society for Phenomenological Research and the German translator of the late Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He works on a responsive, corporally based phenomenology in the tradition of Husserl and Schütz as well as the newer French philosophy (particulary Derrida, Foucault, Levinas and MerleauPonty). Recent publications: Ortsverschiebungen, Zeitverschiebungen: Modi leibhaftiger Erfahrung (2009), Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel: Modi ästhetischer Erfahrung (2010), Hyperphänomene: Modi hyperbolischer Erfahrung (2012) (all with Suhrkamp). In English: Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts (Northwestern Univ. Press 2011), The Question of the Other (State Univ. Press of New York 2007). Matthias Warstat is Professor of Theatre Studies and the Director of the Institute of Theatre Studies the Freie Universität Berlin. Warstat is spokesperson of the ERC-project “The Aesthetics of Applied Theatre” and co-director of the Institute for Advanced Studies of Interweaving Performance Cultures as well as member of the Research Center Affective Societies. His main research fields are contemporary theatre and society, applied theatre and the theatricality of politics, and the historiography of modern European theatre. Warstat is the co-author of Theaterhistoriografie. Eine Einführung (Francke 2012); and author of the monographs Krise und Heilung. Wirkungsästhetiken des Theaters (Wilhelm Fink 2011), and Theatrale Gemeinschaften, Zur Festkultur der Arbeiterbewegung 1918-1933 (Francke 2005). Benjamin Wihstutz is Junior Professor (Assistant Professor) of Theatre Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany. He holds a PhD from The Freie Universität Berlin. His research fields are politics and aesthetics of contemporary theatre and performance, German theatre around 1800, and performance and disability. He is the author of Theater der Einbildung (Theater der Zeit 2007) and Der andere Raum:

List of contributors

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Politiken sozialer Grenzverhandlung im Gegenwartstheater (diaphanes 2012), and co-editor of Performance and the Politics of Space: Theatre and Topology (Routledge 2013) and Disabled Theater (diaphanes/Univ. of Chicago Press 2015).

Index

References to figures are in italics; references to notes are indicated by n. Abhinavagupta 49, 52–4 Aboriginal art 16, 194, 195–206 actors 6, 7; applied theatre 177, 178–9, 182, 186; bodily changes 3–4; classical 36; discipline 118; Japan 10 Adamson, Fiona 163 Adorno, Theodor 154, 161–2, 214 Aeschylus 28, 40 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno) 154 aesthetic regime 113, 119, 121 aesthetics: applied theatre 182–5; appropriation 15–16; autonomous 5–7; colonialism 192–6; culture 18–19; definition 1, 2–3; politicization 8–15; Schiller 110–11, 113–14, 115–17, 120–1; see also Asian aesthetics; bhakti aesthetics; neuroaesthetics; rasa aesthetics; reception aesthetics; relational aesthetics; somaesthetics aesthetics of impact 2, 3–5 Africa 15–16, 192 Agamben, Giorgio 158–9, 160, 162 Akkamahadevi 58 Alexander the Great 26, 40 Allen, Dennis A., II 158 Almanac of the Dead (Silko) 163–4 alvar saints 56–7 Analects (Confucius) 83, 84 And on the Eighth Day (Onus) 203 antagonism 213 Antigone (Sophocles) 14 applause 117, 121, 122

applied theatre 173–9, 180–7 Arafura Swamp (Onus) 199–200 Arcades Project (Benjamin) 205 architecture 11 Arendt, Hannah 120, 159, 160 Aristophanes 33 Aristotle 3, 7, 38–9; art 89; katharsis 26–31, 32, 41–2; Metaphysics 68–9; tragedy 40–1 art: alienness 78; autonomy 73–4; Duchamp 145–50; history 74–6; minimal 209–10; participatory 208, 215–17; politics 151, 152–3; rasa aesthetics 51; transformative power 2–3; see also Aboriginal art Art Basel 208 artistic performance 1–2; ancient Greece 37–8; applied 17; China 8; India 49–50, 54, 60–3; see also actors; theatre Asian aesthetics 7–8, 18; see also China; India Astydamas 40 asylum seekers 160–1 Auden, Wystan Hugh 75 audience 3–6, 7; applied theatre 177, 182; attention 117–22, 124n34; avant-garde 11–12; clairvoyance 136–7; collective 17; imitation 32, 38–9; Schiller 112–13, 115; tragedy 33–5 autonomy 3, 5–7, 73–4 avant-garde 9, 10–12; applied theatre 184; contradictions 149–50;

Index Duchamp 145–6; invisibility 151–2, 153–4, 155, 156–7 Bacchae, The (Euripides) 15 Badiou, Alain 155–6, 160, 161, 162 Balanda Rock Art (Onus) 201 Bardon, Geoffrey 195 Barmah Forest (Onus) 199 Basavanna 58–9 beauty 8, 124n31 Beck, Glenn 146–7, 150–1, 165–6, 167 Beecroft, Vanessa 210 “Beethoven” essay (Wagner) 129–30, 131, 133–6 Beissel, Johannes 180–1 Benjamin, Walter 205 Bennett, Tony 193 Benveniste, Émile 37 bhakti (devotion) aesthetics 9, 48, 53–63 Bharata Muni 7, 8, 48–9, 50 bhava emotions 8, 49–50 Bigo, Didier 164–5 Bildung (self-cultivation) 5–6, 7 Bishop, Claire 173, 213–14, 218 Bloch, Ernst 192 Boal, Augusto 184, 188n19 body, the 86–8; art 195 books 13 Border Angels 162, 166 borders 162–5, 166 bourgeoisie 4, 186, 193 Bourriaud, Nicolas 210, 211–13, 215, 217, 218 brain, the 130–2, 133–4, 138–9 branding 147–8 Bride of Messina, The (Schiller) 5, 110, 121–2 British Empire 9 Brown, Michael 158 Brueghel, Pieter 74 brush work 86–8, 89, 90–4 Bunpa near Malwan (Onus) 201 calligraphy 84, 85–7, 90–2, 93–4 Campbell, Richard 196 Candy Spills (Gonzalez-Torres) 210, 217–18

227

Caribbean 192 Carl August, Duke of Weimar 119 catharsis 3, 26–32, 39, 41–2; applied theatre 178–9, 183 Change of Lifestyle (Campbell) 196 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai 152–3 children 35, 70, 176, 195 China 8; May Fourth Movement 9–10; painting 83–93, 102, 103, 104–6; poetry 96–101; writing 93–4 chorus 6, 17, 118, 119 Church Fathers 3 clairvoyance 132, 134–5, 136–8, 139 classical society 26, 40 collective 36–9, 115, 119, 151–2, 179; Aristotle 27, 29; clairvoyance 136, 137; trance 113, 114 colonialism 9, 15–16, 191–2, 193–6; Aborigine 196–206 colours 76–7 comedy 3, 34; applied theatre 178 Coming Insurrection, The (anon) 151–2, 153–5 communism 153, 156, 157 communities 17, 211–13 concentration camps 159, 160 Confucius 83, 84, 88–9 Conversion of St. Paul (Caravaggio) 72 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 114 culture 2–3, 18–19; appropriation 15–16; colonialism 191–2, 193–6 Czechoslovakia 13 Dadaism 147 dance 60–3 Daoism 83–4 Dead Are Coming, The (Ruch) 13–14 Death in Custody (Campbell) 196 Derrida, Jacques 156–7 desert 162–3 disinterest 5, 6, 113–14, 116–17, 192 Dissertatio de actione scenica (Lang) 3 distance 5, 6, 56, 59, 60 Do We Dream Under the Same Sky (Tiravanija) 208 documentary 12, 16 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen) 10

228

Index

Dominguez, Ricardo 165–7 Don Carlos (Schiller) 121 drama see theatre Dramatic Performance Act (1876) 9 dreaming 131–2, 134, 135–6, 194 Duchamp, Marcel 145–50, 152 Eagleton, Terry 193 education 17, 28, 73, 74, 78, 89, 101, 102, 110, 115, 120, 174, 183–4, 185, 191; aesthetic education 110–12, 114–15, 117, 120–2 Eikels, Kai van 216 Electronic Disturbance Theatre 165, 166, 167 Ellison, Ralph 157, 161, 162 emotion 4–5, 6; Aristotle 30–1; bhakti 55; bhavas 8, 49–50; documentary 16 empathy 5 Enemy of the People (Ibsen) 10 Epicurus 27 eroticism 55 Euripides 33, 40 everyday life 51, 76, 77, 78–9, 113 Evening Shadows, Backwater of the Murray South Australia (Johnstone) 198 exhibitions 209–10, 212, 216 experience 50, 209; pictorial 69–79 expression 8 Fall of Icarus (Brueghel) 74–5 fascism 147 Fences, Fences, Fences (Onus) 200–1 film 12, 16, 31 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 185 Fisherman by a Wooded Bank (Wu Zhen) 100–1 Fishes (Onus) 201–2 Flying Dutchman, The (Wagner) 137–8 formation 68, 77; see also transformation Formosa Decelerator (Opavivará!) 208 Fountain (Duchamp) 145–50, 152 Franklin, Benjamin 84, 94–6 Freedberg, David 2

freedom 6, 8, 110–11, 113–14, 115–17, 121 French Revolution 5, 125n49; Schiller 111, 112, 114–15, 116 Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa von 149 Frogs (Aristophanes) 33 galleries see museums Gammel, Irene 149 Gawlas, Manfred 180 genius 7, 57, 133–4, 135, 136 Gennep, Arnold van 185 Ghose, Aurobindo 49, 53 Gillick, Liam 213–14 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 5–6, 7, 112, 116, 183; audience 117–18, 119–20, 121–2 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix 210, 217–18 Goswami, Rupa 54, 55 Götterdämmerung (Wagner) 137 Goya, Francisco 72, 74, 78 Greece 26–8; language 36–8 Greek chorus 6 Greek tragedy 15–16, 32–6 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 10 hearing 77 “Heimspiel” program 177 Herodotus 33 heterogenesis 74 Hinduism 9, 51, 53–4, 56–60 Hirschhorn, Thomas 214, 218 Hōgetsu, Shimamura 10 Holert, Tom 215 Honneth, Axel 161 Hovering till the Rains Come (Onus) 202 Hu Shi 10 hyperbole of experience 76 hysteria 135, 136 Ibsen, Henrik 10 Ideology of the Aesthetic, The (Eagleton) 193 Illegale Helfer (Obexer) 160–1 illusion 6–7, 56–7, 119 imagination 68, 110, 111, 124n28 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 70–1

Index India: aesthetics 7–8; bhakti aesthetics 54–63; rasa aesthetics 48–54; swadeshi movement 9 ink-wash painting 84, 85, 86–93, 96–8, 100–1; Pan Gongkai 102, 104–6 installations 17–18 intersubjectivity 208–9, 210, 211–12, 214, 217–18 invisibility 146, 148–9, 150, 151–2, 153–5, 156–62; migration 162–5, 166–7 “Invisibility: The Epistemology of Recognition” (Honneth) 161 Invisible Committee, The 151–2, 153–4, 155–6 Invisible Man (Ellison) 157, 161, 162 irony 147, 164 Iser, Wolfgang 13 Italy 26, 40 Jackson, Shannon 173 James, William 138–9 Japan 9–10 jatra 9 Jauss, Hans Robert 13 Jimmy’s Billabong (Onus) 199 Johnstone, H.J. 198 judgment 112–13, 194 Jung, Thomas 180 “Kallias Letters” (Schiller) 116 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 3 Kant, Immanuel 5, 96; French Revolution 125n49; judgment 123n15, 124n28; Schiller 112, 114, 116 Kathakali 61 katharsis see catharsis Klee, Paul 72 Lang, Father Franciscus 3 language 36–8, 191, 195 Laws (Plato) 39–40 Lazardzig, Jan 118–19 Lear, Jonathan 31 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 186 Lenin, Vladimir 152–3, 154, 156

229

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 4–5 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller) 111, 113, 115 Li Xishuang 10 Life Model (Shrigley) 208 liminal/liminality 1–4, 6–8, 12, 15, 18, 182–3, 185 literati 9, 84, 89–92 logos 68, 69 Lohengrin (Wagner) 138 love 55 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 11 Macedonian Empire 40–1 Maid of Orleans, The (Schiller) 114 Manuscript Remains (Schopenhauer) 135 marginalized groups 17 Marxism 192 Mary Stuart (Schiller) 114 masses 9, 114, 117, 150 May Fourth Movement 9–10 medicine 30, 31 Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Die (Wagner) 137 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 68, 74 metamorphosis 68–9 metaphor 26–7, 28, 34, 72, 156, 157; Aboriginal art 99, 100; medical 31 Metaphysics (Aristotle) 69 metarepresentation 16 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 11, 13 middle voice 36–9 migration 162–7; see also refugees mimesis 38–9, 41 minimal art 209–10 mirror neurons 32 morality 4–5, 114–16 Moreno, Jacob Levy 183 Mouffe, Chantal 213, n219 Mukařovský, Jan 13 Mum, When Do We Get There? (Onus) 204 “Musée des Beaux Arts” (Auden) 75 museums 149, 209, 211–12, 215 music 30, 31, 77–8; Wagner 129–30, 133–8 myth 68–9, 77

230

Index

Nammalvar 56, 57 Natural History (Pliny the Elder) 69 nature 74, 97–100, 104, 116 Natyasastra 7–8, 48–51, 52 Nazis 147 nervous system 130, 131–2 neuroaesthetics 129–30, 133, 136, 137, 139 neurology 78, 129–30, 131, 132 neuroscience 32, 38, 138–9 Ni Zan 101, 104 Nicolai, Friedrich 4–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 15 Nigeria 15–16 Obexer, Maxi 160–1 “On Spirit Seeing and Everything Connected Therewith” (Schopenhauer) 131 “On the Sublime” (Schiller) 120 Onus, Lin 196, 197–206 Opavivará! 208 opera (xiqu) 8, 10 order 69 Orestes 28–9 Ovid 68, 74 painting 8–9, 13, 16, 72–3; Chinese 84, 85, 86–93, 96–8, 100–1; see also pictorial experience Pan Gongkai 84, 93, 102, 104–6 Parsifal (Wagner) 138 participation 208–9, 215–17 pathos 49–50, 71, 72, 77 performing arts see artistic performance Persian Empire 40 Persians, The (Bosse) 17 Philip of Macedon 40 philosophy 27, 28, 68–9, 72; Chinese 83–4; Indian 53 Philosophy for Militants (Badiou) 156 photography 12, 16 Phrynichus 33 physiology 133, 140n5 pictorial experience 69–79 pit 112, 117, 118, 119, 121 pity 3

Plato 27, 35, 39–40; myths 68; The Sophist 31–2; Theaetetus 72 play-drive 111, 113, 115, 116, 124n27 pleasure 8, 10, 113, 115, 117–18, 136; Aristotle 30, 32, 39; China 98, 105; India 50, 51, 53; Kant 5, 6 Pliny the Elder 69 Poet on a Mountaintop (Shen Zhou) 96–8 Poetics (Aristotle) 3, 26, 27–9, 31, 39, 40; katharsis 41–2 poetry 54–5, 56–60; Chinese 90–1, 96–101 police 118–20, 121, 126n53 politics 8–15, 17; applied theatre 179, 181–2, 185–6; art 78, 151, 152–3, 214–15; dissent 213–14; invisibility 155–8, 160–2, 163–4; Schiller 111 Politics (Aristotle) 30–1 postcolonialism see colonialism poverty 149, 150 primordial scream 135–6, 138 Principles of Psychology (James) 138–9 prison theatre 174, 177 Proust, Marcel 70–1, 78 psychodrama 183 Quelle corporation 179–82 racism 157–9, 196 Radetzky March (Roth) 70 Ramanujan, A.K. 56 Rancière, Jacques 113, 121, 126n53, 184, 214–15 rasa aesthetics 7–8, 48–54, 55, 60–3 Rauschenberg, Robert 148 reading 13 Rebentisch, Juliane 215 reception aesthetics 3, 7, 12, 13 Red Cliffs and Green Valleys (Wang Meng) 98–100 re-enactment 14, 112 refugees 13–14, 159–61, 162 rehearsal 32, 118, 176–7, 181 relational aesthetics 17–18, 209–18 religion 9, 14; Hinduism 51, 53–4, 55–60; music 30, 31 Republic (Plato) 35, 39

Index resistance 191–2, 206 responsivity 71–2 revolution 7, 8–9, 10–12, 152–3, 154–5, 157; see also French Revolution Rheingold (Wagner) 134, 137 Rhetoric (Aristotle) 31 rituals 1–2, 3, 14; Corybantes cult 39–40; purification 28–9 Road to Redfern (Onus) 204–5 Roped Off at the Pictures (Campbell) 196 Roth, Joseph 70 Ruch, Philip 13–14 Sarukkai, Malavika 63 Schiller, Friedrich 5–6, 110–11; education 183; judgment 112–17, 120–1, 122; politics 8 Schnütgen, Prelate 72–3 scholar-gentlemen 89–92 school of the senses 71, 76–9 school of the soul 112 Schopenhauer, Arthur 129, 130–2, 133, 135, 136, 143n36 Scott, Kim 196 self-cultivation 8, 9, 83–4, 88–93, 97–9, 101; Franklin 94–6; Pan Gongkai 104, 106; see also Bildung self-examination 83–4, 85, 91, 93, 94, 98 Shen Zhou 96–8 Shōyō, Tsubouchi 10 Shrigley, David 208 Siegfried (Wagner) 137 Sierra, Santiago 214, 218 silence 112, 118, 119, 121 Silko, Leslie Marmon 163, 164 Six Gentlemen (Ni Zan) 101, 103, 104 slavery 192 Snow Melting in Lotus (Pan Gongkai) 102, 104–6 social turn 173 Society of Independent Artists 145, 146, 149 Socrates 35–6, 38–9 somaesthetics 83–8, 86, 97–9, 101; Pan Gongkai 105–6; self-cultivation 88–90

231

somnambulism 135, 142n24 Sophist, The (Plato) 31–2 Sophocles 31, 40 soul 35, 40, 51, 112, 117, 138–9 Soviet Union 10–12 Soyinka, Wole 15 spectators see audience staging 174, 181, 187, 218 Stalbalm, Brett 165–6 Steglitz, Alfred 148, 149 Stingrays Also Dream of Flying (Onus) 202 Storming of the Winter Palace, The 12 stylus 93 suffering 33, 34 Sumako, Matsui 10 swadeshi movement 9 Tagore, Rabindranath 49, 50–1 Taylor, Thomas 29 TBT 165–7 terror 3 That Deadman Dance (Scott) 196 theatre 3–5; applied 17, 173–9, 180–7; audience 117–22; China 10; choric 16–17; India 61–2; politics 158, 160–1; Schiller 110–12, 112–17; Socrates 35–6; Soviet Union 11–12; see also comedy; opera; tragedy; Weimar theatre Theatre of Dionysus 26, 27, 29, 33, 40 Theophrastus 28 therapy 17, 173, 174–6, 177, 179, 185; Aristotle 30; Quelle corporation 180 Third of May 1808 (Goya) 72 Thomas, Rover 195 Thoreau, Henry David 165 Tiravanija, Rirkrit 208, 210, 213–14 To Our Friends (anon) 151, 153, 154, 155 touch 77 tragedy 3, 4–5; Aristotle 26, 27–9, 31; changes 40–2; Greek 15–16, 32–6; imitation 38–9; Schiller 118 transformation: applied theatre 182–3, 185–6; colonialism 192; definition 1–2; Schiller 110–11; theatre 3–4; see also catharsis

232

Index

Tristan and Isolde (Wagner) 137 Trump, Donald 147–8, 150–1, 165 Turner, Victor 1–2, 185 Twice upon a Time (Onus) 197–9 urinal 145–50, 152 U.S./Mexico border 162–3, 166 utopia 11, 12, 192, 212, 219n13; Aboriginal art 204, 205; Africa 16; China 100; Schiller 111, 117 Valli, Alarmel 62, 63 value 194 Vermeer, Johannes 72, 73, 78 Vernant, J.-P. 37 Virasaiva saints 58–9 “Virtual Hiker” (Dominguez/Stalbalm) 165–7 visibility 73–4; see also invisibility Vodička, Felix V. 13 Wagner, Richard 7, 11, 13; “Beethoven” essay 129–30, 131, 133–6; clairvoyance 136–8, 139

Walking (Thoreau) 165 Wang Meng 98–100 Wang Xizhi 92 Warhol, Andy 148 Weimar theatre 5–6, 111–12, 116–18, 119–22, 183 What Is to Be Done? (Lenin) 152–3, 154 Where to Now? (Onus) 204 women 33 Women at the Dionysia (Timocles) 33–4 wonder 72, 78–9 World as Will and Representation, The (Schopenhauer) 129, 130–1, 136, 139 Wu Zhen 100–1 Yoruba 15 Zhuangzi 83–4, 87, 88, 92 Žižek, Slavoj 161, 164