Special Section:
Howard Barker
Death, The One, and The Art of Theatre
(excerpt)
by Howard Barker
Introduction
Some Notes towards Autonomy in Howard Barker’s Art of Theatre
by Karoline Gritzner
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010. Copyright © 2010 Howard Barker, Karoline Gritzner, and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
In his philosophical commentary on Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia, entitled So Ist Es, Alexander García Düttmann defines the aphorism as an aesthetic gesture which says: ‘that’s it’ (‘so ist es’). According to Düttmann, the successful aphorism does not need to be explained or elaborated. Like a work of art, it addresses the reader with an immediacy and urgency that resists translation into discursive language. Like a work of art, the aphorism is a poetic and philosophical expression: in perfect form it ‘reveals the unsayable in the sayable’ (Düttmann, 41). Much the same can be said of Howard Barker’s Death, The One and The Art of Theatre, which explores the mysteries of tragedy, eroticism and death in an aphoristic form that expresses a profoundly philosophical sensibility. In the words of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy, writing in aphorisms expresses a ‘fragmentary demand’ that calls into question the relation between the part and the whole, the finite and the infinite.(1) This discontinuous and anti-systematic mode of writing denotes a refusal to subsume the singular thought and particular expression under an overarching totality of meaning. In Barker’s work this fragmentary demand is staged as an expression of subjective autonomy. Barker’s own preferred term for his poetics of profound emotional experience is the ‘Theatre of Catastrophe,’ a tragic theatre that rejects the utilitarian values of the modern world (such as transparency, clarity, usefulness) and pursues uncompromising explorations of human pain, anxiety, instinct and transgression. Barker defends theatre, especially tragedy, as an autonomous, independent space which authenticates modes of being on their own terms. In the extra-ordinary space of tragic theatre, bodies and language, movement and expression become exceptional—suspended from the instrumentality of the outside world.
Autonomy is commonly understood as an Enlightenment concept and as instrumental in forging the myth of modernity’s morally objective, self-controlled, rational human being—in effect a self without a body or desire. In the spirit of Romanticism, Barker’s poetic imagination denounces the ideology of reason in favour of exaggeration and irrationality. Here the principle of autonomy is not a denial of the sensuous or ‘merely’ private dimension of emotional experience. On the contrary, Barker translates the demand for freedom into a performance of self-definition that takes the form of connecting more deeply with the dark and obscure force field of emotional and bodily desire. It seems that only by reaching deeper and further into catastrophe can the individual experience his or her freedom to be. Thus, the self in the Theatre of Catastrophe answers the call of the infinite by embodying and thereby rising above social, moral, and political crisis. In the process, self-authorship borders on self-obliteration, and servitude, coercion, and pain can become manifestations of love and passion. Therefore, Barker’s poetics is also an ethics: it does not seek to reconcile differences or smooth out contradictions; it admits them and in doing so ‘serves to allow the infinite relation of Self to Other’ (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 53). Above all, the autonomous claim of tragic theatre, this peculiar ‘art of playing with division’ (Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 360), rests on an affirmation of incomprehensibility as a primary existential value.
In Barker’s drama, to defend a position and ideal of autonomy (however precarious and self-destructive) means to admit chaos, exaggeration, and solitude, all in defence of an unknown life lived at a remove from what is already known and agreed upon. Dancer in Hated Nightfall is a good example of a transgressive dramatic character who exposes himself to an existence at the limit, defying the laws of history and politics in favour of a condition of uncertainty and contradiction.
DANCER: […] The gratification, the celebration, the reputation the everything heroic and magnanimous, who could refuse? (Pause)
Only me. (Pause)
This dancing around the abyss in the Theatre of Catastrophe effects a suspension of objective truth and meaning while also suggesting a playful irresolution of conflict and interminable transvaluation of values. Sexual desire and death are the primary dramatic forces of this form of tragedy. Barker’s art of theatre is drawn to the mystery of eros and death because they offer ‘limit-experiences,’ experiences of extremity where life borders on the impossible. When death becomes an ‘object of desire’ (Barker, 75), the One, as is the case in many Barker plays, we enter an unknowable and unfathomable relation with it. “The limit-experience is the response that man encounters when he has decided to put himself radically in question. This decision involving all being expresses the impossibility of ever stopping, whether it be at some consolation or some truth, at the interests or the results of an action, or with the certitudes of knowledge and belief” (Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 203-204). Perhaps Barker’s art of theatre is a ‘theatre without limits’ (Barker, 36), an autonomous space, precisely because it recognises and affirms the value of the boundary, of experience in extremis, for only ‘the fence’ can give rise to transcending thoughts and actions.
Barker’s poetic drama expresses, in Nietzschean fashion, a compulsive longing for ‘unknowing,’ uncertainty, and difference. Irresolution and contradiction are the hallmarks of this theatre of becoming. Barker’s philosophy of theatre is disruptively theatrical because rather than constituting a dialectical search for truth, it oscillates between a multitude of appearances, gestures, and ‘truths’ that are discovered and experienced in moments of ecstasis. Theatre approaches philosophical thinking when it appears as an ‘event,’ following Alain Badiou: “This event—when it really is theatre, the art of the theatre—is an event of thought. This means that the assemblage of components directly produces ideas” (Badiou, 72). Barker’s staging of desire, which may or may not be a ‘gift of death’ (Derrida)—we cannot know!—does not emerge from any foundational discourse of identity or gender politics.
Even the One does not fulfil the function of a synthesising origin or stable reference point, however cunningly she stages herself in the theatre of our imagination. Barker’s conception of the One should not be confused with a metaphysical, transcendental notion of essential unity and sameness. Rather, the appearance of the One (as lover, object of desire) in surprising manifestations, shapes, and movements—in short, his/her ‘theatricality’—is what renders the One impossible. The One is ‘the One’ because he has a disturbing, dislocating effect upon me; he pushes me onto a shifting ground, causing disorientation and interruption. In Barker, the One elicits a (dialogic) fragmentation of the self rather than reducing plurality or offering at-one-ment. The One agitates my becoming in space and time, in which he is also not immune to change and influence. He launches an affect and thus declares himself unnameable and unknowable—to me.
When exploring the philosophical connotations of Barker’s theatre and the poetic force of his theory, the spectre of Nietzsche is never far away. Nietzsche’s attempt to free art and thought from the burdens of morality and exclusive truths is expressed in his view that “existence and the world appear justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon” (Nietzsche, 128). Barker refines this vision by foregrounding the distinctively theatrical nature of human existence in the context of tragic experience, which allows for the contradictions and dissonance of human nature (the pain, pleasure, and beauty of life lived ‘beyond good and evil’) to emerge affectively. The theatre of tragedy invites a (potentially exhilarating) ‘self-detachment from the weight of the factual’ (Adorno, 126) and initiates an open-ended search for the infinite, for Death and the One. In doing this, Barker’s art of theatre offers the promise and challenge of profound disturbance rather than deliverance.
‘May words cease to be […] means of salvation.
Let us count, rather, on disarray.’ (Blanchot)
Notes
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