How much of life is a battle between logic and not-logic. Whatever is the opposite of logic is what Nietzsche hopes to represent in the Dionysiac: logic’s dialectical antithesis. It is the same not-logic that dominates Freud’s conception of our unconscious. It is what ever is not-logical that compels people to believe in gods. Hegel praised the ascendancy of logic. Marx tended to lament it. How does capitalism (as we understand it) represent logical tendencies taken to extremes? In what way does Marxism or postmodernism, advocate a return to not-logic?
Every (major or minor) social revolution seems to begin in Dionysiac frenzy, a sudden, brief, but extreme restructuring of social and psychological ideas around not-logic, followed by a slow rehabilitation into a state of Apolline logic. This is easiest to see in war (especially simplified in revolutionary civil war, a physical changing of the guard). It is equally true for revolutions in thought. Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, all those theoretical arguments that align themselves with not-logic, whose theoretical implications rock our human understanding to its core, insodoing tend to stir up the Dionysiac embers embedded in each (and all) of us. However, all of these revolutionary ideas also end up incorporated into logical patterns of thought, given logical applications.
As Hegel and Marx seem unable (unwilling?) to do, Benjamin conceives of this cycle not as progress toward some final synthesis, but as an ongoing and continuous process of dialectical potentiality. The dialectic compels us to consider where we stand within this cycle.
But how does our hope that things get better drive us to act, and what is the consequence of a position which denies the concept of progress?
Showing posts with label Hegel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hegel. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Schiller's Dialectic
Schiller's interest in the Artist as a uniter of those things local and contemporary with those things universal and eternal seems intimately related to Hegel's own dialectic. Schiller positions his ideal in the past, with Ancient Greek civilization, but acknowledges that "the intellect was unavoidably compelled by the store of knowledge it already possessed to dissociate itself from feeling and intuition in an attempt to arrive at exact discursive understanding" (488). He traces this split in our psyche to the many fractures which are evident to him in modern society - between "State and Church, laws and customs," and perhaps most importantly between the Individual and Whole (486-7). It would seem then that the dissociation between reason and intellect creates a dialectic which is potentially resolved in the Artist, who can forge anew in the work of Art "the Ideal out of the union of what is possible with what is necessary" (491).
In considering this similarity, what does it suggest that Schiller's first term - Greek art and culture - becomes Hegel's second?
Schiller also seems to remain confident that Art can eventually reconcile the two. Hegel's dialectic suggests that Art reaches its synthesis in its recognition that the two cannot be perfectly reconciled.
In considering this similarity, what does it suggest that Schiller's first term - Greek art and culture - becomes Hegel's second?
Schiller also seems to remain confident that Art can eventually reconcile the two. Hegel's dialectic suggests that Art reaches its synthesis in its recognition that the two cannot be perfectly reconciled.
Hegel's Artistic Progress
In his Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel extends his concept of the dialectic into the realm of art and the Artist. He begins with the questions, "What is art?" and "Where does art come from?" and delineates two flawed conceptions, finally settling on a third.
Initially, he suggests that since a work of art is "a product of human activity," it might be something that can be "known and expounded, and learnt and pursued by others" (Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 547). Hegel has an interest in rejecting this view because it does not take into account what he considers the spiritual nature of the artwork:
Rejecting this view because what is spiritual in art, cannot be taught through formal rules (i.e., "spiritual activity...is bound to work from its own resources and bring before the minds eye a quite other and richer content" (548)), Hegel suggests the opposite scenario. That is, perhaps the work of art is "a work of an entirely specially gifted spirit" which "is supposed to give free play simply and only to its own particular gift" (548). This, too, he finds limited in its applicability:
We can certainly see Hegel's point with a little imagination. Suppose that Michelangelo had had never worked under Giovanni, or that Mozart's father had not been a music teacher. While there is surely something to be said for each of these artist's talent and genius (both far exceeded their teachers in ability), it is hard to imagine either of them getting started without some formal training.
Hegel's use of the word "handicraft" to describe an aspect of high art is telling. He understood, as I and others have suggested, the relationship between the artist and the material world. There is something to Art that is no more than labor, and while he does place importance on inborn (i.e., Natural) talent, he states quite clearly that "Skill in technique is not helped by any inspiration, but only by reflection, industry, and practice" (549).
And so we can see the dialectical synthesis: Art cannot be produced either through gross manipulation of material, nor through pure spiritual abstraction, but must combine elements of both. The manipulation of the object is tempered by the spirit, and likewise the spirit is informed by the artists skillful (i.e., practiced, formal) manipulation of the object.
It must be admitted that Hegel's interest in locating the Spirit in the work of art and Artist is a priori. One might ask him, "how can you tell?" That is, I could likely hire a counterfeit artist to paint an exact replica of Van Gogh's The Starry Night. If the copy is good enough, and I secretly hung it in place of the original, it is unlikely that anyone would suddenly realize the difference: "This painting looks the same but lacks the artist's Spirit!" Indeed, art forgeries are widespread, and forgers find success specifically through the strict implementation of Hegel's first proposition (his thesis, if you will), that art can be created entirely formally. And Kant's aesthetic judgment suggests that this formalism is all that is required for beauty. Certainly we can't perceive the artist's Spirit when we behold in the painting its perposiveness without purpose. However, Hegel's concept of art seems tied specifically to his interest in locating the sources and implications of human self-consciousness, an idea which he ties directly to the Spirit. He suggests as much in his discussion of a third question: "Why is Art Necessary?" The need for art, he says,
Hegel has little interest in Art for the viewer, for the critic (Kantian or otherwise) who would judge a work of art. For him, art is essential to man in its capacity to help him gain self-consciousness.
It almost sounds here, as was implied or guessed at in his Master-Slave Dialectic, that Hegel's artist is, necessarily, in the position of the Slave. He states as much when he discusses the artistic imperative. "[M]an brings himself before himself by practical activity," he says, "since he has the impulse...[to alter] external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics" (550). Compare this to his claim, in Phenomenology of Spirit, that "through work...the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is" (546).
After expound the dialectic of Art on an individual, one might say psychical, level, Hegel puts forward a historical understanding of Art. He proposes that Art has moved through three historical phases. In symbolic art (which is for Hegel represented by the early art of the pantheistic East), the concept of the Idea remains entirely detached from the object, which is only taken, in its more or less natural form, to symbolize the idea. In totemic art, for example, the animal representation is a simple externalizing of the self-conscious Idea onto what amounts to a 'found object.' This results, Hegel claims, from the symbolic artist's inability to shape and determine his own Spiritual Idea, and his realization of the continued incompatibility results in the sublime:
In classical art, on the other hand, the form of the Idea is found in representations of the human body. Hegel considers that this is a step in the right direction, because in representing the external form as that of a human, the Artist has located the external form which most corresponds to the Idea:
Hegel finds classical art deficient in its necessity of finding the Spiritual form in a concrete human form. By doing so, he seems to say, classical art attempts to overcome the gap between the Idea and reality. This is ultimately fruitless, however:
Hegel's Spirit is far to vast to be contained within a particular human form, and by placing the expression of it within a human, classical art limits the spirit to those manifestations of it that are particularly human. The solution to this problem presents itself in Hegel's third (and final) category of art: the romantic. Romantic art becomes possible because man becomes aware of the relationship between his physical form and the world of Spirit. Classical art implies this relationship, but, as Hegel points out:
What started out, in symbolic art, as a mere recognition of the Spirit in the natural world (a recognition which brought about the sublime, which must necessarily be seen as quite fearful and uncomfortable) became an embodiment of the Spirit in human form for classical art. (Classical art, it would seem, grew out out an attempt to do away with the fearfulness of the sublime.) Finally, with the self-conscious recognition of the essential divide between form and Spirit, Romantic art achieves a synthesis. Romantic art is essentially meta-artistic, continually pointing, as it must, to the impossibility of a perfect expression of the Spirit in physical form. Hegel says as much: "romantic art is the self-transcendence of art but within its own sphere and in the form of art itself" (555).
The implication here is that 'art is over.' That art has risen, in Romanticism, to as high a degree of understanding as is possible, as Hegel suggests, may be true, but this truth may simply be a symptom of how he defines art and how he defines Romanticism. Because he defines Romanticism as the self-conscious interaction between man's consciousness and his environment, it might even be said that much of art that was created before the Romantic era is essentially Romantic art. Is not Shakespeare's exploration of the limitations of stage productions in showing reality, as well has his opposite insistence that "all the world" is indeed "a stage," a manifestation of the same meta-artistic tendencies that Hegel requires of his romantic artist? It might be argued further that man's understanding of himself at the time of Hegel's writing seems equally as "classical" to us as his classical artists did to him. It strikes me that what he defines as a completion might simply be another step in humankind's ongoing process of self-actualization and expression.
Initially, he suggests that since a work of art is "a product of human activity," it might be something that can be "known and expounded, and learnt and pursued by others" (Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 547). Hegel has an interest in rejecting this view because it does not take into account what he considers the spiritual nature of the artwork:
...what can be carried out on such directions can only be something formally regular and mechanical. For the mechanical alone is of so external a kind that only a purely empty exercise of will and dexterity is required... (547)
Rejecting this view because what is spiritual in art, cannot be taught through formal rules (i.e., "spiritual activity...is bound to work from its own resources and bring before the minds eye a quite other and richer content" (548)), Hegel suggests the opposite scenario. That is, perhaps the work of art is "a work of an entirely specially gifted spirit" which "is supposed to give free play simply and only to its own particular gift" (548). This, too, he finds limited in its applicability:
...even if the talent and genius of the artist has in it a natural element, yet this element essentially requires development by thought, reflection on the mode of its productivity, and practice and skill in producing. For...the work of art has a purely technical side which extends into handicraft...(548)
We can certainly see Hegel's point with a little imagination. Suppose that Michelangelo had had never worked under Giovanni, or that Mozart's father had not been a music teacher. While there is surely something to be said for each of these artist's talent and genius (both far exceeded their teachers in ability), it is hard to imagine either of them getting started without some formal training.
Hegel's use of the word "handicraft" to describe an aspect of high art is telling. He understood, as I and others have suggested, the relationship between the artist and the material world. There is something to Art that is no more than labor, and while he does place importance on inborn (i.e., Natural) talent, he states quite clearly that "Skill in technique is not helped by any inspiration, but only by reflection, industry, and practice" (549).
And so we can see the dialectical synthesis: Art cannot be produced either through gross manipulation of material, nor through pure spiritual abstraction, but must combine elements of both. The manipulation of the object is tempered by the spirit, and likewise the spirit is informed by the artists skillful (i.e., practiced, formal) manipulation of the object.
It must be admitted that Hegel's interest in locating the Spirit in the work of art and Artist is a priori. One might ask him, "how can you tell?" That is, I could likely hire a counterfeit artist to paint an exact replica of Van Gogh's The Starry Night. If the copy is good enough, and I secretly hung it in place of the original, it is unlikely that anyone would suddenly realize the difference: "This painting looks the same but lacks the artist's Spirit!" Indeed, art forgeries are widespread, and forgers find success specifically through the strict implementation of Hegel's first proposition (his thesis, if you will), that art can be created entirely formally. And Kant's aesthetic judgment suggests that this formalism is all that is required for beauty. Certainly we can't perceive the artist's Spirit when we behold in the painting its perposiveness without purpose. However, Hegel's concept of art seems tied specifically to his interest in locating the sources and implications of human self-consciousness, an idea which he ties directly to the Spirit. He suggests as much in his discussion of a third question: "Why is Art Necessary?" The need for art, he says,
has its origins in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, i.e. that man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is...The universal need for art, that is to say, is man's rational need to life the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self (550-51).
Hegel has little interest in Art for the viewer, for the critic (Kantian or otherwise) who would judge a work of art. For him, art is essential to man in its capacity to help him gain self-consciousness.
It almost sounds here, as was implied or guessed at in his Master-Slave Dialectic, that Hegel's artist is, necessarily, in the position of the Slave. He states as much when he discusses the artistic imperative. "[M]an brings himself before himself by practical activity," he says, "since he has the impulse...[to alter] external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics" (550). Compare this to his claim, in Phenomenology of Spirit, that "through work...the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is" (546).
After expound the dialectic of Art on an individual, one might say psychical, level, Hegel puts forward a historical understanding of Art. He proposes that Art has moved through three historical phases. In symbolic art (which is for Hegel represented by the early art of the pantheistic East), the concept of the Idea remains entirely detached from the object, which is only taken, in its more or less natural form, to symbolize the idea. In totemic art, for example, the animal representation is a simple externalizing of the self-conscious Idea onto what amounts to a 'found object.' This results, Hegel claims, from the symbolic artist's inability to shape and determine his own Spiritual Idea, and his realization of the continued incompatibility results in the sublime:
...the Idea, as something inward, is itself unsatisfied by such externality, and...it persists sublime above all this multiplicity of shapes which do not correspond with it (552).
In classical art, on the other hand, the form of the Idea is found in representations of the human body. Hegel considers that this is a step in the right direction, because in representing the external form as that of a human, the Artist has located the external form which most corresponds to the Idea:
...in so far as art's task is to bring the spiritual before our eyes in a sensuous manner, it must get involved in this anthropomorphism, since spirit appears sensuously in a satisfying way only in its body (553).
Hegel finds classical art deficient in its necessity of finding the Spiritual form in a concrete human form. By doing so, he seems to say, classical art attempts to overcome the gap between the Idea and reality. This is ultimately fruitless, however:
...if the correspondence of meaning and shape is to be perfect, the spirutality, which is the content, must be of such a kind that it can express itself completely int he natural human form...Therefore here the spirit is at once determined as particular and human, not as purely absolute and eternal...(553)
Hegel's Spirit is far to vast to be contained within a particular human form, and by placing the expression of it within a human, classical art limits the spirit to those manifestations of it that are particularly human. The solution to this problem presents itself in Hegel's third (and final) category of art: the romantic. Romantic art becomes possible because man becomes aware of the relationship between his physical form and the world of Spirit. Classical art implies this relationship, but, as Hegel points out:
...this elevation of the implicit into self-conscious knowledge introduces a tremendous difference...the unity of divine and human nature, is raised from an immediate to a known unity, the true element for the realization of this content is no longer the sensuous immediate existence of the spiritual in the bodily form of man, but instate the inwardness of self-consciousness (554).
What started out, in symbolic art, as a mere recognition of the Spirit in the natural world (a recognition which brought about the sublime, which must necessarily be seen as quite fearful and uncomfortable) became an embodiment of the Spirit in human form for classical art. (Classical art, it would seem, grew out out an attempt to do away with the fearfulness of the sublime.) Finally, with the self-conscious recognition of the essential divide between form and Spirit, Romantic art achieves a synthesis. Romantic art is essentially meta-artistic, continually pointing, as it must, to the impossibility of a perfect expression of the Spirit in physical form. Hegel says as much: "romantic art is the self-transcendence of art but within its own sphere and in the form of art itself" (555).
The implication here is that 'art is over.' That art has risen, in Romanticism, to as high a degree of understanding as is possible, as Hegel suggests, may be true, but this truth may simply be a symptom of how he defines art and how he defines Romanticism. Because he defines Romanticism as the self-conscious interaction between man's consciousness and his environment, it might even be said that much of art that was created before the Romantic era is essentially Romantic art. Is not Shakespeare's exploration of the limitations of stage productions in showing reality, as well has his opposite insistence that "all the world" is indeed "a stage," a manifestation of the same meta-artistic tendencies that Hegel requires of his romantic artist? It might be argued further that man's understanding of himself at the time of Hegel's writing seems equally as "classical" to us as his classical artists did to him. It strikes me that what he defines as a completion might simply be another step in humankind's ongoing process of self-actualization and expression.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Dialectical Intentionality
It might be productive to pursue a dialectical approach to the impasse we have reached in our discussions of Shakespearean intentionality in performance: a desire to know the author's intentions, an unconscious assumption that we do, exists along with a thriving self-consciousness that we really have no idea of the author's intentions, and the (mysterious?) drive to interpret the plays at any rate.
This is the same impasse which is reached and "overcome" by Hegel, a resolution of the relationship between humans and their environment. In the study of Shakespeare's plays, this deadlock manifests itself in the self-conceptualization of an other both in Shakespeare himself and in the culture he inhabited. (Re)Extending our understanding of Shakespeare into the realm of pure performance serves to highlight this basic antagonism because in performance we reflect our exploration of otherness backward on ourselves. The question of how one goes about recreating a performance of Shakespeare seems to make clear in its implications that anyone interacting with Shakespeare, regardless of the medium, is really doing just that. Thus, the performance suggests a great deal about our own culture -- our immediate, rather than historical, relationship to our environment -- that might otherwise go unnoticed. It is an awakening in a Benjaminian sense, a realization of our own implication in the world.
Shakespeare himself occupied a space in relation to print and performance --both professionally and culturally -- very near the one that any self-respecting director or actor (or critic!) must occupy in his or her attempt to put on a Shakespearean performance. For Shakespeare, it was the proximal nature of text, it's sudden pervasiveness and cultural import that transformed his ideas about performance. He operated for much of his career both as performer, in that the "primary audience" of his plays continued to be a live one, and as author, increasingly aware of the role his works played as literature. In a wider sense, Shakespeare's culture was embroiled in a political and economic transformation which had as its center, it's organizing force, the printed word (Essential McLuhan, 1995, p. 97, 108-109). Shakespeare's plays, more or less consciously, embody this dialectical moment and act as a synthesis for the opposing forces of print and oral traditions.
For the director or critic acting today, this dialectic works in reverse, and Shakespeare's social struggle becomes an artistic one; the struggle with text as a medium takes shape as an object in the playscript itself, and the oral tradition to which Shakespeare and Shakespearean performance hearken back is projected forward in the current performance and impels us to reflect on our own cultural manifestations.
In order to pursue such a theoretical analysis, many other equally valid and important interpretations of Shakespeare's works must be either marginalized or ignored completely. However, examining Shakespeare in this way seems especially useful; Shakespeare's commentary on performance as such, and on textual materials related to performance, may well give new insight into the ways that other approaches (theoretical, thematic, or pragmatic) might best proceed.
Shakespeare himself explores through his plays the experience of waking up to one's position in history. In his mythological themes he reminds his audience of a past that never was, a relationship with an ideal that he places in history, while insisting through his structure and dialogue that his audience place it in their minds. The mythological elements his plays are the most direct and unambiguous references to the recent oral past that can be found in Shakespeare. Additionally, through the metadramatic and metatextual structures that pervade his plays, he continually calls attention to his plays as plays, as cultural artifacts both in their nature as performance, and in their ever-increasing nature as print. By doing so he not only challenges his audience members to recognize the role that performance plays in their own lives and cultural histories; he also outlines the role that performance will play in the burgeoning age of print.
This is the effect achieved by the Chorus in Henry V, as well as by its self-conscious placement at the end of a series of historical plays based on historical books. The Chorus's invocation of the muse in the first line of the play, when paired with the subject matter that the title suggests, serves to begin the play in precisely the ambiguous position between the oral and written traditions that Shakespeare and his audiences were experiencing in the world all around them. And the Chorus of Henry V is pervasive, entering the story line over and over ostensibly in order to "set the scene." The very frequency of these interruptions, however, serves automatically to draw the audience away from the story, away from the illusion, and remind them of their role as interpreters not of reality, not of history per se, but of a creative construct.
Likewise, Henry V seems repeatedly to make direct and indirect reference both to the plays which preceded it. The most obvious reference to 1 and 2 Henry IV is in the structure of the scenes involving Falstaff. Falstaff, of course, does not appear on stage in the play, but to understand his role at all, Shakespeare's reason for even mentioning him, requires a knowledge of his historical existence within the Henriad. This knowledge may well have been cultivated in the audience by the mere existence in performance-past of the preceding plays, but it seems more likely that Shakespeare found he could rely somewhat on the printed dispersal of his plays to fill in the gaps for potential late-comers. (My Oxford Shakespeare gives the date that Henry V was written as Spring 1599, with a first printed edition available by August of the next year. One year to print, even by today's standards, is exceedingly fast.) This is not to say that the actual reading of Shakespeare was necessarily widespread (although it may have been), but only to suggest that quickly printed editions of Shakespeare's plays allowed for a wider familiarity with their characters, stories and themes. An appropriate analogy might be found in the "Last-time-on" segments which begin many television shows, or the Seasonal "recap" episodes of shows like Lost. It's not necessarily important that you know every detail, but that what is important you can glean quickly and so be prepared. Falstaff's death, and Harry's role in Bardolph's execution, not to mention the numerous passing references to Harry's delinquent past, only take on their full meaning if you know what happened in the first three episodes.
The dialogue of the play is also stricken through with references to the previous plays, as well as to their historical source material. In the first scene of the play, while Canterbury expounds Harry's qualifications, he says "list his discourse of war, and you shall hear/A fearful battle rendered you in music" (1.1.44-45), which would seem to be a reminder, right at the outset, that a lot of this story has already been told. And both Canterbury and Fluellen mention history as received by a "chronicle," the former in reference to history yet created (1.2.16), the latter to discuss a history long since past (4.7.92). In both instances the audience is being reminded of the material, the literal Chronicles (according to Wells and Taylor, this includes both those of Hall and Holinshed), with which they are certainly familiar and from which the story of the play is drawn. King Harry himself calls attention to his own position as the character in someone else's creative construct:
That Harry refuses the possibility that it is his death that will be immortalized speaks to his role as a mythological hero. However, by recognizing "history" --that is, written history, in the form of "chronicles" and of plays -- as the immortalizing medium, Shakespeare again calls attention to the increasing importance of print to contemporary society.
A Midsummer Nights Dream seems built entirely around bringing about a conscious understanding in the audience of the interaction between theme and dramatic structure. In its obsession with the idea of Dreams that stretches all the way to the title, it almost demands that an awakening is necessary. He equates dream reality both to dramatic reality, but through some very clever and complicated structural choices, he succeeds in extending the idea of dream-world out into the world itself, in to the world of the audience. His utilization of mythological themes and characters reminds the audience of its oral history, but he implements these characters in such a way that oral (that is to say, episodic) history ends up muddying and being muddied by written (linear, narrative, reason-bound) history. It cannot be coincidence, for example, that Shakespeare locates his dream-world naysayer, his unremitting voice of reason, in the character of Theseus. Theseus, whose own history is entirely mythic, has been tamed by reason and refuses to allow the realm of the myth into his kingdom. Theseus's very decision to marry, to "settle down", the even which frames the entire play, suggests just the sort of transition that Elizabethan culture was experiencing with the growth of print-culture.
Perhaps Shakespeare recognized his cultural and historical position and meant to exploit it. More likely, much of his seeming preoccupation is a result simply of his unconscious position in history. Either way, performance as intention becomes a salient element of any attempt at analysis, and especially analysis with the intention of performance.
This is the same impasse which is reached and "overcome" by Hegel, a resolution of the relationship between humans and their environment. In the study of Shakespeare's plays, this deadlock manifests itself in the self-conceptualization of an other both in Shakespeare himself and in the culture he inhabited. (Re)Extending our understanding of Shakespeare into the realm of pure performance serves to highlight this basic antagonism because in performance we reflect our exploration of otherness backward on ourselves. The question of how one goes about recreating a performance of Shakespeare seems to make clear in its implications that anyone interacting with Shakespeare, regardless of the medium, is really doing just that. Thus, the performance suggests a great deal about our own culture -- our immediate, rather than historical, relationship to our environment -- that might otherwise go unnoticed. It is an awakening in a Benjaminian sense, a realization of our own implication in the world.
Shakespeare himself occupied a space in relation to print and performance --both professionally and culturally -- very near the one that any self-respecting director or actor (or critic!) must occupy in his or her attempt to put on a Shakespearean performance. For Shakespeare, it was the proximal nature of text, it's sudden pervasiveness and cultural import that transformed his ideas about performance. He operated for much of his career both as performer, in that the "primary audience" of his plays continued to be a live one, and as author, increasingly aware of the role his works played as literature. In a wider sense, Shakespeare's culture was embroiled in a political and economic transformation which had as its center, it's organizing force, the printed word (Essential McLuhan, 1995, p. 97, 108-109). Shakespeare's plays, more or less consciously, embody this dialectical moment and act as a synthesis for the opposing forces of print and oral traditions.
For the director or critic acting today, this dialectic works in reverse, and Shakespeare's social struggle becomes an artistic one; the struggle with text as a medium takes shape as an object in the playscript itself, and the oral tradition to which Shakespeare and Shakespearean performance hearken back is projected forward in the current performance and impels us to reflect on our own cultural manifestations.
In order to pursue such a theoretical analysis, many other equally valid and important interpretations of Shakespeare's works must be either marginalized or ignored completely. However, examining Shakespeare in this way seems especially useful; Shakespeare's commentary on performance as such, and on textual materials related to performance, may well give new insight into the ways that other approaches (theoretical, thematic, or pragmatic) might best proceed.
Shakespeare himself explores through his plays the experience of waking up to one's position in history. In his mythological themes he reminds his audience of a past that never was, a relationship with an ideal that he places in history, while insisting through his structure and dialogue that his audience place it in their minds. The mythological elements his plays are the most direct and unambiguous references to the recent oral past that can be found in Shakespeare. Additionally, through the metadramatic and metatextual structures that pervade his plays, he continually calls attention to his plays as plays, as cultural artifacts both in their nature as performance, and in their ever-increasing nature as print. By doing so he not only challenges his audience members to recognize the role that performance plays in their own lives and cultural histories; he also outlines the role that performance will play in the burgeoning age of print.
This is the effect achieved by the Chorus in Henry V, as well as by its self-conscious placement at the end of a series of historical plays based on historical books. The Chorus's invocation of the muse in the first line of the play, when paired with the subject matter that the title suggests, serves to begin the play in precisely the ambiguous position between the oral and written traditions that Shakespeare and his audiences were experiencing in the world all around them. And the Chorus of Henry V is pervasive, entering the story line over and over ostensibly in order to "set the scene." The very frequency of these interruptions, however, serves automatically to draw the audience away from the story, away from the illusion, and remind them of their role as interpreters not of reality, not of history per se, but of a creative construct.
Likewise, Henry V seems repeatedly to make direct and indirect reference both to the plays which preceded it. The most obvious reference to 1 and 2 Henry IV is in the structure of the scenes involving Falstaff. Falstaff, of course, does not appear on stage in the play, but to understand his role at all, Shakespeare's reason for even mentioning him, requires a knowledge of his historical existence within the Henriad. This knowledge may well have been cultivated in the audience by the mere existence in performance-past of the preceding plays, but it seems more likely that Shakespeare found he could rely somewhat on the printed dispersal of his plays to fill in the gaps for potential late-comers. (My Oxford Shakespeare gives the date that Henry V was written as Spring 1599, with a first printed edition available by August of the next year. One year to print, even by today's standards, is exceedingly fast.) This is not to say that the actual reading of Shakespeare was necessarily widespread (although it may have been), but only to suggest that quickly printed editions of Shakespeare's plays allowed for a wider familiarity with their characters, stories and themes. An appropriate analogy might be found in the "Last-time-on" segments which begin many television shows, or the Seasonal "recap" episodes of shows like Lost. It's not necessarily important that you know every detail, but that what is important you can glean quickly and so be prepared. Falstaff's death, and Harry's role in Bardolph's execution, not to mention the numerous passing references to Harry's delinquent past, only take on their full meaning if you know what happened in the first three episodes.
The dialogue of the play is also stricken through with references to the previous plays, as well as to their historical source material. In the first scene of the play, while Canterbury expounds Harry's qualifications, he says "list his discourse of war, and you shall hear/A fearful battle rendered you in music" (1.1.44-45), which would seem to be a reminder, right at the outset, that a lot of this story has already been told. And both Canterbury and Fluellen mention history as received by a "chronicle," the former in reference to history yet created (1.2.16), the latter to discuss a history long since past (4.7.92). In both instances the audience is being reminded of the material, the literal Chronicles (according to Wells and Taylor, this includes both those of Hall and Holinshed), with which they are certainly familiar and from which the story of the play is drawn. King Harry himself calls attention to his own position as the character in someone else's creative construct:
Either our history shall with full mouth
Speak freely of our acts, or else our grave,
Like Turkish mute, shall have a tongueless mouth,
Not worshipped with a waxen epitaph (1.2.230-33).
That Harry refuses the possibility that it is his death that will be immortalized speaks to his role as a mythological hero. However, by recognizing "history" --that is, written history, in the form of "chronicles" and of plays -- as the immortalizing medium, Shakespeare again calls attention to the increasing importance of print to contemporary society.
A Midsummer Nights Dream seems built entirely around bringing about a conscious understanding in the audience of the interaction between theme and dramatic structure. In its obsession with the idea of Dreams that stretches all the way to the title, it almost demands that an awakening is necessary. He equates dream reality both to dramatic reality, but through some very clever and complicated structural choices, he succeeds in extending the idea of dream-world out into the world itself, in to the world of the audience. His utilization of mythological themes and characters reminds the audience of its oral history, but he implements these characters in such a way that oral (that is to say, episodic) history ends up muddying and being muddied by written (linear, narrative, reason-bound) history. It cannot be coincidence, for example, that Shakespeare locates his dream-world naysayer, his unremitting voice of reason, in the character of Theseus. Theseus, whose own history is entirely mythic, has been tamed by reason and refuses to allow the realm of the myth into his kingdom. Theseus's very decision to marry, to "settle down", the even which frames the entire play, suggests just the sort of transition that Elizabethan culture was experiencing with the growth of print-culture.
Perhaps Shakespeare recognized his cultural and historical position and meant to exploit it. More likely, much of his seeming preoccupation is a result simply of his unconscious position in history. Either way, performance as intention becomes a salient element of any attempt at analysis, and especially analysis with the intention of performance.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Hegelian Dialectic: The Master and the Slave
Hegel's interest in the dialectic lies in his attempt to codify the process by which human's come to self-consciousness, to an understanding of themselves. Thus, he begins his Master-Slave Dialectic with the assertion that "Self-consciousness exists...only in being acknowledged," and the twisting path which leads us all to a recognition of this fact is what comprises the rest of the passage (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 541). My chief goal in this post is to attempt an untangling of the relationship that Hegel describes.
He presents us with a self-consciousness. Hegel's self-consciousness is a negatively defined entity. That is, self-consciousness is "simple being-for self, self-equal through the exclusion from itself of everything else. For it, its essence and absolute object is 'I'...it is an individual. (542). Hegelian self-consciousness defines itself by excluding everything 'other' than itself. This self must be very Kantian in nature, taking no interest in the material world, and existing in a state of pure reason. It is an appeal to the pure "Spirit" of the being. (Because Hegel thus puts it, and because it might help understanding the interaction that must take place, I will henceforth place myself, my 'I' in this role)
Suddenly, I am faced by an other (presumably another human being like me), and because the other is obviously another self-consciousness, I am faced with a host of difficulties. It seems like some of these difficulties arise because, as the editors of the excerpt suggest, "selves do not take their fundamental dependence on others kindly" (538). I am disposed to think of myself as an independent identity, existing eternally, but the confrontation of another self, and the realization through that experience that this other self must feel the same way that I do about its independence and identity, I feel that my independence, and thus my identity (my self-consciousness, at least so far as I have developed it up to this point) is threatened. Hegel suggests that my first reaction, when faced with this threat, is to supersede the other:
However, by attempting to supersede the other, which I recognize as independent - a veritable mirror of my own self-consciousness - I realize that I myself have also been superseded, both in my attempt to position myself above the other, and in understanding that the other is invariably doing to me just what I have done to him. Hegel addresses the double nature of this interaction, which makes it essentially different than the interaction I might have with other objects:
This back and forth between denial-of-other and denial-of-self goes on until I am faced with a realization: if I am to preserve my self as independent and eternal, I must destroy this other.
(I must say, though I think I sorta' get this, it doesn't come out much clearer from my pen then it did from Hegel's. Ever thus...)
Hegel's "life-and-death struggle" heightens the interplay between the two self-consciousnesses to the highest degree. What began as mere "supersession" becomes destruction. However, the paradoxes inherent in the first situation have not diminished. By seeking the death of the other, I necessarily put my own life on the line, and by recognizing the opportunity to kill the other, I necessarily recognize my own inherent killability. Hegel says, rather cryptically, that "it is only through staking one's life that freedom is won" (543). It is in this moment of staking my life that I realize "that there is nothing present in [me] which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment" (543). Essentially, it seems that by staking my own life on my perceived self-consciousness, I necessarily recognize that my idea of an eternal self independent of external factors is a flawed conception. I begin to realize that my only consciousness is one "entangled in a variety of relationships" (543).
If the battle ends in death, by the same paradox that Hegel has been following, it ends in the death (quite literally) of the other self-consciousness, and the death also (though implicit) of my own. However, Hegel suggests that this battle might end otherwise: in a relationship he considers as Master (Herr, which Norton translates as "lord") and Slave (Knecht, translated here as "bondsman").
A note: I have been using myself as the subject of this interaction, supposing as the 'other' another human being like me, and until the moment that he introduces Lord and Bondsman, it seems as though Hegel, too, considers this an interaction between two separate human beings. However, this does not necessarily hold true hereafter. Look at the way Hegel leads up to the idea:
Suddenly it seems as though Hegel has moved inside the mind of one of his individuals, in order to discover a split which has occurred within the self-consciousness (within me), rather than between it and another. It's as if the dialectal struggle between self and other (which culminated in a life-or-death struggle) is synthesized in an understanding of self as self and other. Suddenly, the 'I' that at first comprised my entire self-consciousness - built as it was on my understanding of being-for-self, now comprises a single dialectical aspect of my self-consciousness; the other aspect is understood as being-for-another.
So the Master-Slave dialectic, which for Hegel is the ultimate struggle, is perhaps one that takes place within my own mind. I preserve my sense of self-consciousness as being-for-self (that Kantian Ideal of mind free from all interest in the world, negatively defined as only that which is not external to me) by supplicating the second self-consciousness (the being-for-another) to the role of Slave. The former takes the role of Master, and mediates its interaction with the world of things through the latter.
Of course the Master finds his role to be empty, for the reason that he is now necessarily determining his own self-consciousness in relation to a self-consciousness in the Slave that, while he may have dominion over it [the Slave], loses its being-for-self precisely because he has dominion over it: It is now a thing, a being-for-another, and because the Master can only measure himself in relation to the Slave, he finds himself to be lacking as well. Hegel says, "What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He [the Master] is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself" (545). (It strikes me that while the Master sees his complete dissociation from the world of things as an ultimate goal, this dissociation necessarily sends him wheeling into disconnectedness. Either he has nothing to measure his self-consciousness by but itself [which induces a circularity], or he must measure it by something self-consciously inferior).
The Slave, on the other hand, has a golden opportunity. Remember that it, too, faced its death and so understands itself as a vanishing moment:
Hegel seems to suggest that through their dialectical relationship the Master is naturally diminished and the Slave is naturally empowered. How this comes to a dialectical synthesis, however, in which the opposition itself is superseded, is not clear. (Perhaps because it hasn't?)
Taken this way (as a manifestation of inner conflict), the Master-Slave Dialectic presents us with a self at odds with itself, a consciousness at once dominant and submissive. The delineation of the Slave suggests that our interactions with objects, with the external environment, is at once somehow barbaric and redemptive. It also paints a picture of our higher faculty (what I might characterize as our sense of reason) as both domineering and distant.
There is also the possibility of taking the Master-Slave Dialectic as an external conflict, between two individuals (or even two groups of individuals). It seems, in this case, that the Master's crisis, his recognition of the Slave, and thus himself, as something less than being-for-self, might result in the sort of moral imperative that has ended slavery in the past. There comes a point when the Master "stops fooling himself" and recognizes in the Slave another independent self-consciousness. I'm not sure, however, what necessitates this shift, except to point to historical examples as proof that it happens. It seems like it might be just as easy for the Master, who has reduced the Slave to just another object, might achieve the same level of self-consciousness through his manipulation of the Slave as the Slave receives through his manipulation of other objects.
As Nausheen Eusuf pointed out in our class discussion, one might take the Slave's interaction with the world as analogous to that of the Artist, realizing his self-consciousness in the work he does on the material world:
Nausheen positions the Artist Slave in relationship to the Master that is the weight of artistic tradition, but I wonder if the Master couldn't equally well be positioned within a Kantian critical art community. That is, perhaps the Master which the Artist Slave works under is the Ideal of artistic aesthetic, certainly bound to a great degree by ideas of beauty that have been handed down, but ultimately determined by a critical 'disinterest' in Kant's sense.
It is telling that this Masterly critical viewpoint is rather empty. Kant's aesthetic judgment needs necessarily hold no interest in the object, and the effects of this, as I have explored them previously, seem to align with the ultimate self-conscious dissatisfaction that the Master experiences by distancing himself from the world of objects.
One of the beauties of Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic is its ambiguity. Finally, I don't feel like I've fully come to grips with Hegel's concept of self-consciousness, nor with the implications that his Master-Slave dialect suggests, and I don't (wholly) blame Hegel's confusing and difficult language. In a certain sense it feels deliberately left unfinished. What, after all, is the use of a theory that answers all the questions?
He presents us with a self-consciousness. Hegel's self-consciousness is a negatively defined entity. That is, self-consciousness is "simple being-for self, self-equal through the exclusion from itself of everything else. For it, its essence and absolute object is 'I'...it is an individual. (542). Hegelian self-consciousness defines itself by excluding everything 'other' than itself. This self must be very Kantian in nature, taking no interest in the material world, and existing in a state of pure reason. It is an appeal to the pure "Spirit" of the being. (Because Hegel thus puts it, and because it might help understanding the interaction that must take place, I will henceforth place myself, my 'I' in this role)
Suddenly, I am faced by an other (presumably another human being like me), and because the other is obviously another self-consciousness, I am faced with a host of difficulties. It seems like some of these difficulties arise because, as the editors of the excerpt suggest, "selves do not take their fundamental dependence on others kindly" (538). I am disposed to think of myself as an independent identity, existing eternally, but the confrontation of another self, and the realization through that experience that this other self must feel the same way that I do about its independence and identity, I feel that my independence, and thus my identity (my self-consciousness, at least so far as I have developed it up to this point) is threatened. Hegel suggests that my first reaction, when faced with this threat, is to supersede the other:
[I] must supersede this...other independent being in order thereby to become certain of [myself] as the essential being. (541)
However, by attempting to supersede the other, which I recognize as independent - a veritable mirror of my own self-consciousness - I realize that I myself have also been superseded, both in my attempt to position myself above the other, and in understanding that the other is invariably doing to me just what I have done to him. Hegel addresses the double nature of this interaction, which makes it essentially different than the interaction I might have with other objects:
[I do] not have the object before [me] merely as it exists primarily for desire [as perhaps other objects in the world might exist], but as something that has an independent existence of its own, which, therefore, [I] cannot utilize for [my] own purposes, if that object [the other self-consciousness] does not of its own accord do what the first does to [me] (542).
This back and forth between denial-of-other and denial-of-self goes on until I am faced with a realization: if I am to preserve my self as independent and eternal, I must destroy this other.
(I must say, though I think I sorta' get this, it doesn't come out much clearer from my pen then it did from Hegel's. Ever thus...)
Hegel's "life-and-death struggle" heightens the interplay between the two self-consciousnesses to the highest degree. What began as mere "supersession" becomes destruction. However, the paradoxes inherent in the first situation have not diminished. By seeking the death of the other, I necessarily put my own life on the line, and by recognizing the opportunity to kill the other, I necessarily recognize my own inherent killability. Hegel says, rather cryptically, that "it is only through staking one's life that freedom is won" (543). It is in this moment of staking my life that I realize "that there is nothing present in [me] which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment" (543). Essentially, it seems that by staking my own life on my perceived self-consciousness, I necessarily recognize that my idea of an eternal self independent of external factors is a flawed conception. I begin to realize that my only consciousness is one "entangled in a variety of relationships" (543).
If the battle ends in death, by the same paradox that Hegel has been following, it ends in the death (quite literally) of the other self-consciousness, and the death also (though implicit) of my own. However, Hegel suggests that this battle might end otherwise: in a relationship he considers as Master (Herr, which Norton translates as "lord") and Slave (Knecht, translated here as "bondsman").
A note: I have been using myself as the subject of this interaction, supposing as the 'other' another human being like me, and until the moment that he introduces Lord and Bondsman, it seems as though Hegel, too, considers this an interaction between two separate human beings. However, this does not necessarily hold true hereafter. Look at the way Hegel leads up to the idea:
In the immediate self-consciousness the simple 'I' is the absolute object which, however, for us or in itself is absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment lasting independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience [of the life-and-death struggle?]; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself but for another, i.e. is a merely immediate consciousness, or consciousness in the form of thinghood. Both moments are essential. Since to begin with they are unequal and opposed, and their reflection into a unity has not yet been achieved, they exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord [Herr], the other is bondsman [Knecht] (544).
Suddenly it seems as though Hegel has moved inside the mind of one of his individuals, in order to discover a split which has occurred within the self-consciousness (within me), rather than between it and another. It's as if the dialectal struggle between self and other (which culminated in a life-or-death struggle) is synthesized in an understanding of self as self and other. Suddenly, the 'I' that at first comprised my entire self-consciousness - built as it was on my understanding of being-for-self, now comprises a single dialectical aspect of my self-consciousness; the other aspect is understood as being-for-another.
So the Master-Slave dialectic, which for Hegel is the ultimate struggle, is perhaps one that takes place within my own mind. I preserve my sense of self-consciousness as being-for-self (that Kantian Ideal of mind free from all interest in the world, negatively defined as only that which is not external to me) by supplicating the second self-consciousness (the being-for-another) to the role of Slave. The former takes the role of Master, and mediates its interaction with the world of things through the latter.
Of course the Master finds his role to be empty, for the reason that he is now necessarily determining his own self-consciousness in relation to a self-consciousness in the Slave that, while he may have dominion over it [the Slave], loses its being-for-self precisely because he has dominion over it: It is now a thing, a being-for-another, and because the Master can only measure himself in relation to the Slave, he finds himself to be lacking as well. Hegel says, "What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He [the Master] is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself" (545). (It strikes me that while the Master sees his complete dissociation from the world of things as an ultimate goal, this dissociation necessarily sends him wheeling into disconnectedness. Either he has nothing to measure his self-consciousness by but itself [which induces a circularity], or he must measure it by something self-consciously inferior).
The Slave, on the other hand, has a golden opportunity. Remember that it, too, faced its death and so understands itself as a vanishing moment:
In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness (546).The Slave is not conscious of this capacity within itself, but, Hegel maintains, can become conscious of it through the work the Slave does on things:
...work forms and shapes the thing...the formative activity is at the same time individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness which now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence (546).So through the act of creating, of working on the natural world, the Slave becomes conscious of himself as other than the natural world (i.e., he can set himself up once again as a negatively-defined self-consciousness). In what he makes, he sees the permanence that is then reflected back onto himself. Does that make sense? (I'm afraid not.)
Hegel seems to suggest that through their dialectical relationship the Master is naturally diminished and the Slave is naturally empowered. How this comes to a dialectical synthesis, however, in which the opposition itself is superseded, is not clear. (Perhaps because it hasn't?)
Taken this way (as a manifestation of inner conflict), the Master-Slave Dialectic presents us with a self at odds with itself, a consciousness at once dominant and submissive. The delineation of the Slave suggests that our interactions with objects, with the external environment, is at once somehow barbaric and redemptive. It also paints a picture of our higher faculty (what I might characterize as our sense of reason) as both domineering and distant.
There is also the possibility of taking the Master-Slave Dialectic as an external conflict, between two individuals (or even two groups of individuals). It seems, in this case, that the Master's crisis, his recognition of the Slave, and thus himself, as something less than being-for-self, might result in the sort of moral imperative that has ended slavery in the past. There comes a point when the Master "stops fooling himself" and recognizes in the Slave another independent self-consciousness. I'm not sure, however, what necessitates this shift, except to point to historical examples as proof that it happens. It seems like it might be just as easy for the Master, who has reduced the Slave to just another object, might achieve the same level of self-consciousness through his manipulation of the Slave as the Slave receives through his manipulation of other objects.
As Nausheen Eusuf pointed out in our class discussion, one might take the Slave's interaction with the world as analogous to that of the Artist, realizing his self-consciousness in the work he does on the material world:
The bondsman labors to fashion the world of objects and imprint upon it the mark of his own subjectivity, through which he gradually gains self-definition and authority. SImilarly, the young writer labors to fashion language into shapes that are uniquely his, and as he finds language bending to his will, he gains confidence through the permanence of his art. (Eusuf, Nausheen. From lecture notes entitled "Hegel, Consciousness, Creativity." 3 Sept. 2010)
Nausheen positions the Artist Slave in relationship to the Master that is the weight of artistic tradition, but I wonder if the Master couldn't equally well be positioned within a Kantian critical art community. That is, perhaps the Master which the Artist Slave works under is the Ideal of artistic aesthetic, certainly bound to a great degree by ideas of beauty that have been handed down, but ultimately determined by a critical 'disinterest' in Kant's sense.
It is telling that this Masterly critical viewpoint is rather empty. Kant's aesthetic judgment needs necessarily hold no interest in the object, and the effects of this, as I have explored them previously, seem to align with the ultimate self-conscious dissatisfaction that the Master experiences by distancing himself from the world of objects.
One of the beauties of Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic is its ambiguity. Finally, I don't feel like I've fully come to grips with Hegel's concept of self-consciousness, nor with the implications that his Master-Slave dialect suggests, and I don't (wholly) blame Hegel's confusing and difficult language. In a certain sense it feels deliberately left unfinished. What, after all, is the use of a theory that answers all the questions?
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