Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual PDF
Preview Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual
Reality Principles 3 Reality Principles From the Absurd to the Virtual 3 Herbert Blau The Universityof Michigan Press Ann Arbor Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2011 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2014 2013 2012 2011 4 3 2 1 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blau, Herbert. Reality principles : from the absurd to the virtual / Herbert Blau. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-472-07151-7 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0- 472-05151-9 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Theater—Philosophy. I. Title. PN2039.B5775 2010 792'.01—dc22 2010047518 ISBN 978-0-472-02790-3 (e-book) To my son Dick Contents Introduction 1 one Relevance: The Shadow of a Magnitude 23 two The Faith-Based Initiative of the Theater of the Absurd 44 three The Soul-Complex of Strindberg: Suffocation, Scopophilia, and the Seer 56 four From the Dreamwork of Secession to Orgies Mysteries Theater 68 five Performing in the Chaosmos: Farts, Follicles, Mathematics, and Delirium in Deleuze 89 six Seeming, Seeming: The Illusion of Enough 103 seven Who’s There?—Community of the Question 119 eight The Emotional Memory of Directing 133 nine The Commodius Vicus of Beckett: Vicissitudes of the Arts in the Science of Af›iction 148 ten Among the Deepening Shades: The Beckettian Moment(um) and the Brechtian Arrest 165 eleven Apnea and True Illusion: Breath(less) in Beckett 182 twelve Art and Crisis: Homeland Security and the Noble Savage 198 thirteen Ground Zero: The Original Vision (May 16, 2008) 214 fourteen Blessings to The Pope and the Witch 219 fifteen The Pathos of Dialogue: Unable to Speak a Word 223 sixteen Thinking History, History Thinking 225 seventeen Why “WHATHistory?” 236 eighteen The Human Nature of the Bot 243 nineteen Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness 246 twenty Auto Archive 264 Publication History 275 Index 277 Introduction 3 All of these essays, with one exception, were written just before or after the millennium, and while they re›ect upon each other, that ear- lier essay does, not only across the years, but from so long ago that I might have forgotten what it was about. It would seem to have been an irrelevance until, working on an autobiography, I happened to read it again, while remembering the dissident 1960s, spilling into the 70s, when classrooms were invaded, students were lecturing teachers, and relevance was a watchword. That my view of it all then, as a rather chas- tening lesson, is still germane today was con‹rmed by my wife Kath- leen Woodward, when she was recently asked to contribute to a special issue of Daedalus, where my essay was published over forty years ago, after a rather high-powered conference, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Science, “The Future of the Humanities.” That the future is still in question—and with the economy reeling, the job market worse than ever—is what Kathy was writing about.1 Much involved as she is with the digital humanities, a possible source of sal- vation, about which I know very little, she nevertheless quoted me in her essay (without saying I was her husband), because “Relevance: The Shadow of a Magnitude” had apparently left a reproachful shadow on what, in the academy today, remains misguided, unthought, or know- ingly hypocritical. And though I had serious misgivings, in those per- formative days of protest, about my alignment with the students, their insurrectionary fervor, I felt we had to come to terms not only with what they were demanding, but what we had been evading, with a repressed blush, as if the books we were teaching and analyzing—the sometimes forbidding subtext or darkling indirections, myths of other- ness, love’s body, their implicit bearing on life, ethically, kinesthetically, never mind psychedelically—were telling us we were lying, even as the universities were being corporatized. What I said at the conference, and what I wrote, apparently had suf‹cient fervor of its own, which caused James Ackerman—the distin- guished art historian, in his introduction to the essays—to describe it as an “apocalyptic message” that had “the most radical implications of any in the issue.”2 If the message was partially determined by my radical
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