11/25/2024 0 Comments Desire and AddictionYou are likely familiar with the expression, “I just need to get out of my own way,” as it pops up, for example, in therapeutic contexts. Clients will say something to the effect of, “I know what I need to do, I just need to do it.” The tacit claim beneath that phrase has at least three parts. 1.) There’s a cognitive part of one’s self that understands, logically, what steps must be taken in order to solve a problem. 2.) An action-oriented part of the self is in some way being prevented from acting. 3.) There is some invisible part of the individual that is blocking meaningful action. Hence: if the obstructive part gets out of the way, then the action part will do what the cognitive part knows needs to be done. None of that is simple or straightforward. What, afterall, is this invisible part that is blocking the action part? What would motivate any part to serve a blocking function? Are we so sure we have or are made up of these “parts,” or is that a helpful metaphor that might lead an individual to an insight needed to overcome fear and produce change in their life? There is no getting out of the way of oneself. The problem is altogether different and more complicated. It is a problem identified and described at length by Jacques Lacan; namely, the “self” is not substantive at all. It is, rather, an “extimate” creation produced from the outside. An individual comes into existence and begins to construct a sense of self through the way the individual seems to be perceived by caretakers and others in their most intimate circles. Not only are individuals constructed from the outside but so too are individuals caught in a lifelong enigma: Am I what others desire me to be? If so, then is my own desire commensurate with the desires of others? If not, then how am I to be desired by others? Whichever angle we choose from which to approach those questions, we have to deal with desire, understood here as a mysterious, attractive (as in, pulling toward) force. It is desire and not “the self” that demystifies many psychological and psycho-somatic problems. Desire is a particularly important facet of addiction. In order to understand how this is the case, however, we have to tarry with desire as Lacan presented it. This is no easy task, but it’s worth the effort because understanding the role of desire in addiction can help therapists cut quickly to the forces that keep addicts locked in subservience to alcohol and other drugs. Lacan poses desire as an equation: Demand - Need = Desire Let’s get oriented in the conceptual landscape where these terms function. Chronologically speaking, regarding the three words of the equation, need comes first. Humans are born and the needs are apparent straight away. We need warmth, touch, food, and safety. But humans are also born into conflict insofar as the world into which we are born is dominated by language (verbal and nonverbal). What language is required to get our needs met? To achieve a need, we must employ language correctly, and, according to Lacan, at the moment a need gets articulated through language (e.g., crying out) it becomes a demand. Pure need is thus relegated to a necessity, but one that must be earned through participation in the symbolic order of discourse. Temporally prior to the need of an individual, language and the Symbolic order exists. Once born and needing, the individual’s need becomes enveloped in the Symbolic order and becomes a demand so that the need may be met by another. Desire comes into focus as the difference between Demand and Need. It is not substantive. Rather, it functions as something like a black hole. When need is removed from demand, a void is created. The gravitational pull of the void leads toward desire. Since desire is not itself a thing, one can never actually attain a desire. If desire was attained it would cease to be desire and become a possession. According to Lacan, our drives propel us toward desire, though we never actually intend to reach the destination. Instead, we circle around desire, careful not to get sucked into the void. That which both motivates the movement toward desire and also keeps us at the event horizon of the void, so to speak, is the stand-in for our desire, that which Lacan calls the objet petit a (where “a” is autre, other). What motivates me to cry? The other. That one over there with the milk. Here we begin to see the problem of focusing on “getting in the way of myself” instead of attending to “desire.” The former speaks of an obstruction whereas the latter speaks of a search and the momentum involved in undertaking the search. If we dedicate time to removing an obstruction, we only delay the search for that thing outside of ourselves that motivates our activity in the world. The former also invites the image of absurd leap out of oneself in order to produce substantive change. Getting out of the way of myself is akin to the turtle shaking off its shell. The latter, instead, renders a movement toward that sates itself with proximity to a suitable object of desire, but, at the same time, also resigns itself to the possibility of a primal lack of fulfillment. That is to say, a focus on desire is also a focus on right and wrong action. Or, if you prefer, action/behavior that produces fulfillment and action/behavior that leaves one wanting. In the world of addiction, there is a temptation to highlight the substance that disables the true intentions and satisfaction of an individual’s authentic self. We ask about one’s “Drug of choice,” for example. But the substance itself is not as interesting as the mechanism that reaches for, say, alcohol. The machinery is that which must be deconstructed, and that is why the phrase “I just need to get out of my own way” is not enough. One is never in one’s own way. Instead, one mistakes substances as, at best, the medium that grants access to desire or, at worst, the very thing one desires. In reality, alcohol and other drugs are most often fuel for a drive that believes itself to be guiding the individual toward desire but is, to the contrary, always off course. Alcohol, in other words, will only lead to alcohol, not to that which one desires. As such, learning what desire is all about is the prerequisite for leaving alcohol by the wayside. Desire, in addition to being equivalent to Demand - Need, is a force that Lacan says we must obey. Because one must obey desire, there is no option of not desiring. The distress caused by alcohol and other drugs comes from the ridiculousness of attempting to betray one’s desire through allegiance to a substance that is masquerading as a desired object (or experience, or person, or feeling). The drive fueled by alcohol will only ensure that desire is never reached. In fact, one cannot reach desire. Instead, desire will absorb you. Problems arise when we interfere in the absorption, which is to say that problems arise the minute we are born (or probably the moment we are conceived). Obstructions abound from Day 1, and the chief obstruction is the medium of language that converts needs to demands. Language and the things of which language speaks will always be incommensurate with each other. Through using language we already find ourselves apart from the thing of which we speak. More importantly, through using language we find ourselves already apart from our needs. (This is why a demand will never fulfill a need once and for all.) And, worse than that, we cannot speak our desire into being. We can only, at best, orient ourselves toward desire with language and then work to let go of the stand-ins that spring up as ventriloquists of desire so as to be absorbed fully by the void. (This is not the space to elaborate, but: the void could well be death.) The same conundrum shows up in Lacan’s famous expression: “Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” Tucked into that pronouncement is a paradigm shift for conceptualizing desire. Recalling that the “self” is really a negative space that comes into view through individuals’ best guesses about what others want them to be, the notion of “giving” love to another is ridiculous. Not only, according to Lacan, do we have nothing to give; we are also fully constructed around a fantasy of what we presume the other desires. The inequality between what we imagine the other desires and what the other actually desires ensures that whatever love (that which sets desire into motion) we intend to give will not be that which one actually wants. As with Magritte’s paintings, we find ourselves perpetually in a situation where we, for example, go to look at our reflection in the mirror only to find the visage of ourselves, seen from behind, in the act of looking. The “reflection” we seek is desire, the difference we sense is substantively there but we never “see” it. The endeavor of loving and desiring is not futile and doomed to end in frustration. We recall that Magritte is not showing us an actual scene. He has painted a canvas. Our perception turns the image into a frustrating missed encounter with that which we would hope to see in the mirror. The situation is the same with love. If we think a romantic relationship is itself love, we are wrong. Rather, the relationship is the “painting” and our perception is the generator of meaning. We need not perceive a missing reflection (i.e., the absence or presence of love). We can recognize, instead, the relationship as the passageway that permits each partner to sense love and desire beyond the “stand-in” of the person we claim to love. I don’t strive to see a reflection in the Magritte painting. I derive enjoyment from seeing a person in the act of looking where I had anticipated him to perceive his own likeness. Likewise, I don’t “desire” my wife. I derive enjoyment, happiness, titillation, etc., from engaging in the passageway to desire with my wife. This is the problem with alcohol and other drugs. Let’s say we long for meaningful connection with another human being. Such connection, however, is blocked by inhibition. People believe that alcohol functions to dis-inhibit oneself, thereby unlocking the door that typically blocks one from connection. But this is not what happens for the alcoholic. For him, alcohol distorts one’s understanding of the other’s desire. He/She/We fantasize(s) that the other desires us to be dis-inhibited, but by using alcohol to produce disinhibition we merely present the fantasy we have of the other’s desire to the other. If the other accepts what is offered, then they have accepted a fantasy. The inhibited self, which has been discarded as incommensurate with the fantasy of what the other wants, can thus never be chosen. Not only will it never be chosen, which is to say the alcoholic will never be chosen by those he “connects” with by disinhibiting himself with alcohol. The alcoholic will never even be seen at all since alcohol will mask the self attempting to be disinhibited. The alcoholic using alcohol to “connect” will thus merely give something he doesn’t have (i.e., a disinhibited self) to someone who doesn’t want it, where “it” is the absent self that has been discarded through the act of drinking. It’s amusing to zoom in on the way language functions in this formulation. “In-hibit” means “to hold in” or “to keep back.” It is a “negative” phrase insofar as the substance of the inhibited thing is denied and kept from view. The word helps us glimpse the holding back, not the thing being held back. In the scenario about the alcoholic above, alcohol seeks to negate the negation of “in-hibition.” What is produced is a double negative: “dis-inhibition.” At no point has anything positive been produced. There is no connection to be had because the entire operation revolves around negating a negative attribute. Alcohol simulates connection but actually keeps true or meaningful connection at bay. Alcohol does not dis-inhibit. It actually redoubles the inhibition by keeping back the very thing one imagined one was originally unable to produce (i.e., connection). Look at how writing about this also seems to push meaning farther away such that continuing to read brings you no closer to the substance we seek. This is alcohol’s off-track escapade to the alcoholic. For sure, it drives. But where it drives you is nowhere you want to go, or at least nowhere near your destination/desire. … When we encounter Lacan’s ideas, we experience what some people call “counterintuitive” thinking. For example, for Lacan, our desire is not something we actually want to reach. And, psychotics are actually the ones who are not “duped” by discourse and language. With desire, the issue is the “split” that constitutes the subject such that desire is always something we can’t name or understand completely. Fantasies take the place of desire, and desire itself always remains out of reach. Our drives propel us toward the fantasy with no intention of reaching desire, and thus we find ourselves endlessly re-iterating our fantasies in different forms in the hope of achieving something we don’t actually want. In the case of psychotics, they have gained a visceral awareness of the arbitrary nature of “normality.” They cannot accede to the “sense” of what we call “normal psychological functioning,” that to which we need to submit if we want to have any purchase in the day to day reality of “normal” life. Instead, they see and experience endless shifting between signifiers and signifieds, unable to understand how a person could think any such relationship is stable. But “counterintuitive” thinking is often simply a matter of perspective. Consider this demonstration of three-dimensional shapes viewed within various two-dimensional frames. In the video, we are not seeing multiple different shapes. Rather, we are seeing one shape from different perspectives. Lacan asks us to look at Desire, Psychosis, the Subject, the Object, the Other, and many more things from angles typically occluded by dominant discourse. We can play around with this perspectival shift by translating the equation “Demand - Need = Desire” into a diagram, one viewed first from an imagined bird’s-eye, 2-D viewpoint, and then from an on-the-ground, 3-D viewpoint. Beginning with the first diagram, we find need comprehended by demand. In a sense, pure need becomes swallowed by demand, which is to say language, once the subject enters into the symbolic register soon after birth. In the second diagram, we find desire, but we do not find it as a substantive something; rather, we see it as something like a hole, one into which we (think we) want to dive. This whole is equivalent to the difference produced once need is subtracted from demand. The “hole” is both something and not. Consider the example of the baby that cries because it needs something. The mother, accustomed to feeding the baby, offers a breast and begins feeding the baby. The baby’s cry, however, was signifying a need other than hunger (e.g., it signified the need of being held). The baby (Subject) both gets a need met and doesn’t. It receives food, which is a need, but it does not get the primary need (e.g., being held) because it has not gained fluency in the interplay of signifiers and signifieds. We can imagine questions arising for the baby: Is this my need? Do I know my own needs? Is the breast equivalent to being held and I just don’t understand that yet? With these questions, the need has been subtracted, or voided, from demand. Desire results, but the baby doesn’t really know what desire is. If it is anything, it is equal to a lack of comprehension (i.e., not seeing one’s face in the reflection of the mirror). Throughout life, the Subject who was that baby will project fantasies upon that lack in an effort to reach desire. This will never happen, but various drives will ensure that the Subject never gives up the search. Lacan says that the most a Subject can do is “to not give ground to desire,” which means, phrased positively, to allow for desire to attract us while we throw up as few obstacles as possible so as not to impede the attraction. Societal demands, however, or at least symbols one perceives to be demands, will thwart the Subject repeatedly.
Addiction, again, offers multiple glimpses of this process in action. Consider again the alcoholic. In particular, a Subject who, when intoxicated, tends to “black out.” (Keep in mind the blacked out hole in the diagram of desire.) The next day, he is told that he was enraged, that he broke furniture, that he yelled at the dog about something having to do with God and promises. What’s more, this is his pattern. He frequently enters this blacked-out state. But both the Subject and his loved ones who tell him about his behaviors have difficulty understanding where this all comes from. When sober, the Subject is a friendly, if meek, individual who seldom asserts his wants and needs. I frequently hear, “It’s like he’s a completely different person.” From the Subject I hear, “I don’t know who that person is, but he isn’t me.” Of course, it is one and the same Subject. The two personas are indicative of the imbalance of positive and negative forces that shape the Subject. 1 + 1 = 3. Performance of Self in Everyday Life + Hulked-Out Rager = Symbolic-Subject + Real-Subject + Desire. In scenarios such as these, desire shows itself through the form, not the content, of the Subject’s language while blacked-out. This form is first of all marked by an internal difference, that difference between the affective force of the rage and the Subject’s meek presentation when “sober.” What appears first to the family, and then to the Subject himself when he hears of his drunkenness? Precisely the way in which it is NOT like him, the Uncanny Self. A non-thing has appeared, and that tips us off that desire is close. Second, the form is marked by what I think of as firehose speech. Opposed to the laminar flow of speech within the transactions of everyday life, this speech explodes with such force that it would appear to be an attempt at extinguishing a raging fire. And there is something like a fire present at all times in one’s life, the fire of desire. For this Subject, however, he only lets himself interact with it directly when intoxicated and, in a sense, turned off. Alcohol enables rebellion against the dominant discourse of the Symbolic Order (what Lacan calls the Name of the Father, which is a “quilting point” that produces what Deleuze refers to as the “sense” of discourse). When acceding to the Symbolic Order, the Subject is Symbolic-Subject. The drive to no longer participate in that discourse—to become Real-Subject—is in fact a motive force propelling alcohol abuse. The alcohol itself, however, is a fantasy, one that the Subject “knows,” unconsciously, can move him closer to Desire. The fantasy is in part authentic. Alcohol can move him closer, but, at the same time, the fantasy stands in for Desire and actually bars the Subject from Desire. When conscious and sober, the Subject does not permit himself to rebel against the Symbolic Order, likely because he believes the Other desires him to be submissive. (This is the whole problem with being-in-language and entranced by the Discourse of the Other.) But the attraction of Desire will not relent and so the Subject cedes to the part or version of himself that will speak the Truth and thus obtain, he thinks, what he desires. Alcohol (as fantasy) is the medium required to accomplish the secession. But desire will not be reached, and the coup of self, if we can call it that, will fail, precisely because the form and content of the speech and its object of desire does not “make sense” to anyone, not even to the Subject or the dog. This is how we know alcohol is or provides only a fantasy. Alcohol seems to offer access to what the Subject desires, but it only perpetuates a misunderstanding that further frustrates the Subject and moves him away from desire. The drive propelling the return to the fantasy is only capable of this trajectory: propel toward desire, miss it, and return. Then, repeat. What does the Subject desire? What is being sought while blacked out? The answer to that question is variable and unique to each Subject. The only way the Subject can get closer to knowing what that desire is will be to translate the form and content of the blacked-out speech into the speech of the Symbolic-Subject in daily life. This is another way of saying that the client needs to enact the coup of self without the fantasy of alcohol. The problem that clinicians and the Subject himself will no doubt encounter is that the Subject doesn’t actually want to know what that desire is. (Recall the mantra “I don’t want to know” that Lacan puts in place of the Aristotelian “I want to know” that founds the classical Subject.) As such, at least initially, therapy will resemble the Magritte painting: the Subject will go to therapy to look himself in the mirror only to find himself looking at himself looking toward a mirror. But slowly over time, if the Subject speaks freely (a la parrhesia), the desiring Subject will produce stones that the clinician and Subject can cobble together to form a path away from the painting and toward desire, one that no longer requires alcohol.
0 Comments
6/18/2021 1 Comment Can We Talk About Grief?
My conversation on grief with Priya Jay for Fevered Sleep's "Can We Talk About Grief" series is available to watch on YouTube. Please listen if you are seeking a heartfelt dive into the multidimensional landscape of grief and healing.
9/14/2020 1 Comment Eulogy for Mary OverliePostmodern art practice has lost one of its most ardent proponents. Mary Overlie is dead at the age of 74.
It is fitting that a picture of her life and work will slowly come into focus through multiple viewpoints, as colleagues, students, and friends reveal glimpses of her giant contribution to contemporary performing arts. I offer my perspective here as a former student of Mary, her friend for 20 years, and an ongoing practitioner of the six viewpoints. The precise meaning of “viewpoints practitioner” is what I want to address in this short eulogy. Despite the global reach of the viewpoints, I suggest it is not a phrase that many people understand in the same way that Mary understood it. The primary reason for the confusion is twofold. On the one hand, there is the issue of Anne Bogart’s cooptation of the work. On the other hand, there is the anarchic horizontality of Mary’s teaching, which, while rigorous, caring, thorough, and artful, always resisted systematization and the rigid boundaries of rational coherence. To practice the viewpoints, for Mary, had less to do with composing works for theatre or dance and more to do with living life as art. Mary’s six viewpoints could be used to create showable experimental theatre and postmodern dance pieces, but this was merely one of its uses. More broadly, the six viewpoints was a breathing theoretical organism, a certain kind of performance philosophy that was equally available to welders, bridge painters, landscape architects, and casual pedestrians as it was to BFA and MFA artists. Bogart’s popularization of Mary’s work and Mary’s own presence as a teacher within one of the United States’s most innovative theatre conservatory programs may have given the viewpoints a semblance of knowability. But I don’t think anyone apart from Mary actually knew what it was and is. Our work, I believe, is to live into Mary’s teaching of the viewpoints so as to internalize the by-now all-too-familiar, yet deceptively deep, phrase “the performance of everyday life.” If we do that, then I think we become viewpoints practitioners. Nowhere was the living aspect of Mary’s viewpoints more palpable to me than in the late stages of her dying. Even after a grand mal seizure stunned her speech capacity, a panoply of medications coursed through her veins, a fatigued immune system had grown dim from a prolonged entanglement with cancer, and the contours of her own finitude began to show their seams, Mary’s herculean strength permitted her to speak on the phone with the same liquid perspicacity that I had always known. A couple weeks before her exit, I participated in a kind of duet with her that was not unlike an exercise in the Shape viewpoint. She presented various shapes in the form of thoughts and recollections to which I responded with my own shapes. She pondered, “Why am I still alive?” I asked, “Does it sound like Ornette Coleman?” She recalled of the jazz virtuoso, “He understood shape.” “The shape of jazz to come.” “Creativity.” “In pain?” “No pain.” “What would Barry Lopez say about it?” “The Arctic and Montana.” We went on like this for a while, touching on motherhood, the inside of time, dizziness, silence, crying, and other such textures. It was a completely normal conversation with Mary. But this time I was struck by her commitment to her own teaching. This was the viewpoints of dying. There she was, “standing in space,” aware of the fact that everything is moving, attuned to the Cunningham-like expression of the Cage-ian silence that buttresses all the buzzing, sensing the decay of her dura mater at a cellular level, calmly discoursing with a friend on creativity and the shape of things as the end of her life settled into view. The structures of Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story were at play here in the grain of her voice and the correspondence between thoughts. I thought to myself: you don’t teach this. You learn this by going where you have to go. The viewpoints are a system for artfully going where we have to go, which is to say, going through life and through the door called death. Mary’s students will all have memories of times when the full molecular complexity of the universe became sensible during her classes. Two of my own memories stand out to me now. The first recalls a spontaneous trip to the Museum of Metropolitan Art. The class had decided to compose a viewpoints improvisation on the steps to the museum. We wanted to alert visitors and passers-by to the particular temporal dimension of entering a museum. It came to pass that all of us lined up on the stairs leading up to the front door, each person behind the other, creating something like a huge gnomon. The light from the sun cast our shadows onto the steps as we slowly, nearly imperceptibly, moved out of the line formation. That was it. The class felt straight away that something important had happened, though we couldn’t put it into words. We all sat down and fell into thought. More than a handful of pedestrians came up to ask us what that was. Were we artists? What were we making? Our only answer was, “a kind of time.” The other outing was also unplanned. It arose from an exercise on space. We wondered about the geometry of conversational distance and were curious to discover if such a thing was quantifiable, meaning could we, in fact, measure them all and then do something with the data? We departed the second-floor classroom of 721 Broadway, grabbed some hard hats, reflective vests, and measuring tapes from a tech storeroom in the building, and went outside. We stopped at every couple or group engaged in conversation between Tisch and Washington Square Park. We measured the distance between people. When we got to the fountain in the park, we climbed inside it and noticed that construction workers from a nearby building were waving at us from a distance of a couple hundred yards away. Somebody asked out loud, “Is this a conversation?” And then somebody else: “What counts as a conversation?” That question blew our minds and we realized that our measuring equipment was not calibrated to the task. We returned to the classroom and made dances built around the question, “What’s [the space of] a conversation?” These two memories reveal the subtle and deceptive depth of Mary’s work. Both classes were part of “advanced” viewpoints training, which meant that everyone in the class had dedicated the requisite 40+ hours to exploring each of the six viewpoints and were comfortable creating improvisations with those materials. Yet here we were engaged in rudimentary explorations of Time and Space. What appears so clearly to me now is that there is no such thing as advanced viewpoints because the irreducible complexity of the universe is present in the very first viewpoints class you ever take from Mary or from one of her students. Mary folded her life’s realizations into her work such that any encounter with the primary materials of the viewpoints launched the student-practitioner into the quantum realm of reality. Though we can now say that Mary is biologically dead, we can also say that she experienced many social deaths before her body stopped her working. She died every time people spoke of the viewpoints as Anne Bogart’s contribution to the world of theatre. She died every time people asked, “Mary Who?” She certainly died every time students engaged in the viewpoints without a willingness to confront the quantum realm of reality that attracted Mary’s attention since she was a young girl growing up in Montana. I think the only way she lived so long, despite the near persistent tolling of these social deaths, was that she crafted a pedagogical method that opened students’ eyes to the true depth of viewpoints work, thereby establishing a method for parrying the world’s slings and arrows. Her teaching was so precise that she helped students familiar with Bogart’s training to see the differences between the two sets of viewpoints straight away. Her teaching was so cunning that she was able not to answer the question “Mary Who?” but, rather, to accumulate greater mystery and awe, two of the key ingredients in pedagogical charisma. Her teaching was so smart that she could guide students effortlessly from walking around the room to probing the temporalities of their inner lifesystems in one snap of the fingers. Her teaching kept her alive, and I think her teaching is what we all must strive to understand as we continue on. That is to say, there is more to the six viewpoints than any of us think we know, and we would be doing the art world a favor by pursuing that “something more.” There are two aspects of this pursuit of which I am sure Mary would want us all to be aware. The first is intellectual, perhaps even philosophical. Shortly before she died, Mary told me that she hopes she can be reincarnated as a masterful, technically proficient dancer who never thinks with her/his/their head but only through the body. I said, “well, perhaps, but thank goodness that’s not how you came back this time around.” Within the practical work of the six viewpoints is a largely unexplored intellectual world that, if mapped, could change the way we teach the arts in primary, secondary, and higher education, not to mention the way we integrate the arts into other (seemingly) non-artistic fields. This intellectual component is underexplored, but certainly not a secret, as the first sentence of Moisés Kaufman’s jacket blurb to Standing in Space makes clear: “Mary Overlie is one of the greatest thinkers of the American Theatre.” A dancer? Yes. An institute builder who helped launch the Experimental Theatre Wing at ETW, co-founded Movement Research, the Danspace at St. Mark’s Church, and other international organizations? Definitely. But Mary was also a thinker, a theorist, and an intellectual, and that side of her work is something we must endeavor to understand in much greater detail. The second way in which I hope we pursue Mary’s legacy is through group experimentation. While words and language in the shapes of books and articles on her ideas are much needed, there is a bodily knowledge and movement-based thinking without which the viewpoints makes no sense at all. All students of the work understand what this means, but I wonder if we overlook the significance of experimenting with this kind of knowledge. To experiment in this sense means to engage in the work without a clear idea of what may come out of it. We ought to do this collectively, in classes, in-person, through Zoom, and in whatever way “collectivity” is possible. This is especially important to do now at a time when the meaning of “to gather” is changing greatly and when the instrumental use of education to obtain practical ends seems to predominate in all types of schooling. The viewpoints could become a method for teaching and learning generally and for showcasing the ways in which movement is itself a form of thought, one as deserving of attention as the critical capacity of individual “genius.” The timing of Mary’s biological death is, in other words, something for us to ponder. Occurring in such close proximity to the deaths of Kristin Linklater and Sally Banes, Mary’s death is a reminder that important work is frequently obscured by the shadows of “the great ones,” those who, for whatever series of reasons, have achieved legibility within the complex field of cultural production. Let us work harder to shine light on the work being done in those shadows. Next, given the tide change in education that is taking place now in the midst of the pandemic, we ought to consider seriously what place we are willing to make for the type of non-traditional pedagogy that Mary has created. How can experimentation continue to thrive in the arts education of the future? And, finally, what uncharted territories still remain within the phrase “the performance of everyday life?” Despite having had its heyday in the academe, this phrase continues to remind us that art and living are constantly entangled, which is also to say that art and dying are likewise entwined. Mary’s death can urge us to keep the borders of academic disciplines not only open to each other but also to the horizons of life and death in order to ensure that the work we do in the classroom speaks directly to the lives we lead on the streets. Finally, I’d like to relate one of Mary’s thoughts that she shared with me in her last weeks. During the last months or her life, despite her medical condition, Mary undertook a multi-week teaching tour through Europe and then a residency in Shanghai. During those trips, she earnestly discussed creating a bricks-and-mortar school for the study of the viewpoints, understood in all the senses (and more) that I’ve touched on here. Fascinatingly, her plan was to name this school something like, The Institute of Horizontality, a move that would have marked a profound letting go of the name “viewpoints” in order to grapple more directly with the nonhierarchical mode of living and thinking that Mary prized so much. I see in this act of letting go a model for how to continually deepen one’s engagement with art and also a challenge for all of us committed to the viewpoints. Each time we practice this work, which is to say, with each breath we take, we can sense the greater whole in which we all participate. To work through Mary’s viewpoints is to increase our aptitude of this participation. In this sense, it is possible to see death as more than the finite terminus of life’s long arc and, thus, to continue our work with Mary even if she is no longer here on this Earth to guide us. An edited version of this eulogy appears in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 43.3 (Sept. 2020): 50–54. WILL DADDARIO is the author of Baroque, Venice, Theatre, Philosophy (Palgrave 2017), and co-editor of two anthologies: Adorno and Performance (with Karoline Gritzner, 2014) and Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics (with Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, 2013). He is co-editor of the Performance Philosophy Book Series and co-editor of the journal Performance Philosophy (performancephlosophy.org/journal). He currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina where he engages in grief work and continuing education services for local and international communities. 4/28/2020 1 Comment With grief, acceptance (ἡσυχία)A couple years ago, I wrote a follow-up to my essay on grief that meditated on the perplexing subject of “acceptance.” During a multi-day silent retreat in the mountains of Boone, North Carolina, I had an eye-opening realization about “acceptance,” which, up to that point, had appeared to me like a cruel and unrealizable fantasm, a point on a horizon I would always be able to see (through a perpetual squint) but never reach. The realization brought me closer to acceptance by, surprisingly, revealing the extent to which it was already upon me. In other words, I had at the retreat a leap in place facilitated by many hours of silent meditation and reflection. Recently, I decided to go back to this essay on acceptance and get it ready for publication. As a warm up for myself, I revisited the term “acceptance” in Ancient Greek to see what it could teach me. What follows is the lesson. Part 1: An Act of Translation The “acceptance” I’m grappling with is more than the simple reception of some idea or thing or state of mind. The “acceptance” in front of my eyes is the mythical at-peace-ness that is, ostensibly, the aim of the grieving process. To accept one’s grief is to be ok with it all, to understand one’s losses not as lacks or pure absences but, rather, as additions to the manifold self. The roadblocks to this realization are many, not least of which is the anger and sadness that produces wave after wave in the wake of loved ones’ deaths. More than that, the roadblocks are all somehow supposed to be metabolized by this mythical acceptance in an almost-magical transubstantiation of hardship into insight. Is there a word for this, a word that names something real and tangible? It turns out that this kind of “acceptance” does not have a direct equivalent in Ancient Greek. The verb λαμβάνω, meaning to take hold of or seize, for example, is too literal. Even its connotation of “understanding” is not quite right because of its mostly cognitive meaning, as in “I understand what Plato means when he says _____.” The most poetic word is λῆψις. Spoken or written in this way, to accept is to take one’s medicine. Acceptance is the cure for what ails us. The word also has a musical connotation: it is the setting of the key. In what register am I being asked to sing? Can I reach this pitch without straining, or do I need to train my voice? What kind of vocal regimen will allow me to reach the extraordinarily high pitch of Acceptance without hurting my voice over time? How can I sustain the pitch of Acceptance? Each of these questions opens into an ongoing musical practice that has as its end not an aesthetic beauty but a sustained cosmological consonance. Finally, this word also connotes the choice of poetic matter. In the context of my thoughts here, I might ask, what is the best way to tell the story of Acceptance? What story will adequately portray the humongous magnanimity of Acceptance’s act of giving? There is one more word that approaches the wide semantic range of “acceptance” I am exploring: δεχεσθαι or δέχομαι. Dio Chrysostom, in his 30th Discourse, relays the dying words of Charidemus, which shows why the word appeals to me: What has happened to me has happened in accordance with God’s will; and we should not consider anything that he brings to pass as harsh, nor bear it with repining: so wise men advise us, and Homer not least when he says that the gifts of the gods to man should not be spurned by man—rightly calling the acts of the gods ‘gifts,’ as being all good and done for a good purpose. As for me, this is my feeling, and I accept the decree of fate calmly, saying this, not at any ordinary time, but when that fate itself is present, and I see my end so near at hand. (Τὰ μὲν καθ᾿ ἡμᾶς οὕτω γέγονεν ὡς ἔδοξε τῷ θεῷ, χρὴ δὲ μηδὲν τῶν ὑπ᾿ ἐκείνου γιγνομένων χαλεπὸν ἡγεῖσθαι μηδὲ δυσχερῶς φέρειν, ὡς παραινοῦσιν ἄλλοι τε σοφοὶ καὶ οὐχ ἥκιστα Ὅμηρος, λέγων μηδαμῇ ἀπόβλητα εἶναι ἀνθρώποις τὰ θεῶν δῶρα, καλῶς ὀνομάζων δῶρα τὰ ἔργα τῶν θεῶν, ὡς ἅπαντα ἀγαθὰ ὄντα καὶ ἐπ᾿ ἀγαθῷ 9γιγνόμενα. ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν οὕτω φρονῶ καὶ δέχομαι πρᾴως τὴν πεπρωμένην, οὐκ ἐν ἑτέρῳ καιρῷ ταῦτα λέγων, ἀλλὰ παρούσης τε αὐτῆς καὶ τὴν τελευτὴν ὁρῶν οὕτως ἐγγύθεν.) This particular kind of acceptance is, first, a mode of mental reception, but it is, moreover, a full “taking upon oneself” of one’s own fate. The “gift” of the gods is the perfect primer for the acceptance yoked to grief because it is a gift you cannot, are simply unable to, refuse. Even if you don’t want it, the gift only exists as something already given, and no mental or physical acrobatics can make it ungiven. In fact, we humans accept this gift in the same gesture as it is given, or else we suffer through a tragic farce of attempting to shake off something already part of ourselves. This is especially the case with our own death, which is given unto us as soon as we are conceived. Ultimately, however, even δέχομαι stops short of the acceptance I seek. I decided instead to follow a path marked in the dictionary by the word “acquiesce.” My act of translation senses harmony in the “quiet” of this verb. But “acquiesce,” with its French sensibility of “to yield or agree to; to be at rest,” leads back ultimately to Latin and, therefore, doesn’t have a Greek cognate. As such, the path forces me to leap toward something less common, a word near to “accept” but more capacious and mysterious. Part 2: To be at peace My act of translation leads me, eventually, to the enigmatic word ἡσυχία. The word’s mysterious quality comes from the shadow cast upon it by Christianity. That is, looking back from the present toward the classical emergence of this word requires us to pass through its employment in Biblical verse, and specifically its usage in Orthodox Eastern Christianity where it refers to an inner quiet that leads to a oneness with God. Thinking historiographically, it seems likely that Christians first encountered ἡσυχία through pluralistic scholars like the Hellenstic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. In Philo’s On Flight and Finding, for example, we see the following: To these inquiries the other gives the only right answer, “God will see for Himself” [...] For it is by His taking thought for them that the mind apprehends, and sight sees, and every sense perceives. As for the words [i.e., idiomatic expression] “A ram is found held fast,” this is reason keeping quiet and in suspense. For the best offering is quietness and suspense of judgement, in matters that absolutely lack proofs. The only word we may say is this, “God will see.” (ταῦτα πυνθανομένῳ δεόντως ἀποκρίνεται· “ὁ θεὸς ὄψεται ἑαυτῷ”· θεοῦ γὰρ ἔργον ἴδιον τὸ τρίτον. ἐπιφροσύνῃ γὰρ αὐτοῦ ὁ μὲν νοῦς καταλαμβάνει, ἡ δ᾿ ὅρασις ὁρᾷ καὶ πᾶσα αἴσθησις αἰσθάνεται.“κριὸς δ᾿ εὑρίσκεται κατεχόμενος,” τουτέστι λόγος ἡσυχάζων καὶ ἐπέχων. ἄριστον γὰρ ἱερεῖον ἡσυχία καὶ ἐποχὴ περὶ ὧν πάντως οὔκ εἰσι πίστεις. ῥητὸν γὰρ μόνον τοῦτο “ὁ θεὸς ὄψεται [...]”) If we seek to understand how so many Ancient Greek philosophical ideas wound up in early Christian thinking, we could investigate points of contact between figures like Philo and, say, Paul the Apostle. The historiographical challenge requires seeing through Philo back into spaces where ἡσυχία acted in its Ancient Greek clothing, so to speak. To do that, we have to keep digging into texts by the likes of Plato and Pindar whose thinking predates the Christian episteme. For example, in Book IX of Plato's Republic we find Socrates asking questions about pain and pleasure. He wonders whether, for people in pain, the relief (ἡσυχία) of pain is more desirable than the feeling of wellness. In usual fashion, Socrates’ interlocutor is quick to agree with the great philosopher when he says, “And you notice, I think, when people get into many other similar situations in which, when they’re in pain, they praise not the feeling of joy but not being in pain and the relief from that sort of thing as the most pleasant sensation.” “Yes, this is perhaps what then becomes pleasant and desirable: the relief.” For my inquiry, this notion of relief is central to acceptance since, after all, the accepting of one’s grief ought to bring not the erasure of the conditions that brought the pain to be but relief of that pain’s sting. “Relief” is absent from the translations of acceptance I mentioned above. Another resonant morsel sings out through Pindar who, in his 8th Pythian Ode, reminds us that the noun ἡσυχία is derived from Ἡσυχία (same pronunciation), the daughter of Dike, goddess of Justice. Her name is synonymous with Peace, specifically peace within the polis (city). Justice presides over the political practice and philosophy of a place and Peace presides over the place itself as a kind of adjunct to Justice. When Justice is present, so too will be Peace. My train of thought leads from acceptance to ἡσυχία and moves through a series of stations. First, acceptance is most certainly a state of mind, a kind of mental reception that allows one to understand the events that have befallen them. But this cognitive understanding is only the first blush of acceptance. (Think, for instance, of times when you say that you know something to be true but you don’t yet feel it. Here, the mind grasps some truth but the body has not yet fully metabolized it.) Mental acceptance must be accompanied with a full-bodied acceptance of the gift of one’s fate. It seems to be the case, however, at least in my experience, that acceptance of this gift is a perpetually repeating action. Each moment asks of acceptance insofar as each moment of life is a gift given. The consequence of this is something like an acceptance seizure that shudders through the body and can only be calmed by a kind of inner peace. Attainment of this peace begins with an inner quieting (acquiescence), and the quiet allows the self to sense the great expanse of the self (something usually muted or occluded by the ego and/or traumatic memories). Here we reach the stations of Pindar and Plato since inner quiet is truly a relief and Peace, and this Peace is offspring of Justice insofar as the sense of self that results from ἡσυχία is tantamount to finding balance. Here we find another way of thinking about the “stage” of acceptance. The so-called stages of grief are not thresholds through which we pass but are, rather, environments in which we fully immerse ourselves. The environment of acceptance is everywhere a space of peace and calm. Plato’s Timaeus contains a discussion of the “inner fire” going away when sleep befalls us. A quiet ensues within the mind and body right before deep sleep. Thus, in the moment of falling asleep we sense the environment of Peace that marks the domain of acceptance. In his “Twentieth Discourse: Retirement,” Dio Chysostom speaks of the silence and quiet needed by the sick to fully recover from illness, and this peaceful environment is also the space of acceptance where those who ail become receptive to their state. All of this is to say, the acceptance yoked to grief is an environment, but—and here’s the mind-blowing thing—we’re always already in this environment. Delusion and temporary blindness distract us from the fact that we are always already dwelling within this Peace. If we seek acceptance, then we already walk in the wrong direction since no seeking is required. To seek is to assume not to dwell. No seeking. Only being. A being-with oneself and one’s grief. This revelation stops any attempt at moving through grief’s stages and convinces us to fall quiet. This blog entry is a portion of a multi-part sequence of posts dedicated to the Ancient Greek language. You can read the rest by following these links:
4/20/2020 0 Comments What of No?In anticipation of the 2021 Performance Philosophy conference, I've been thinking about "problems" in the sense that Deleuze discussed them. I particularly like Bourassa's parsing of the term in the book Deleuze and American Literature:
"Problems, far more than solutions, open our eyes. It is said that every solution is worthy of its problems and that every problem gets the answer that it merits. So we can talk about good and bad problems, problems that are more or less worthy. And this is truly the challenge of thinking. Not to get the 'correct' answers, but to formulate the worthy problems, problems that carry their answers with them in the clarity and rightness of their form. [...] The difference between a bad problem and a good one is that the bad problem demands a solution that will quickly be recognized and validated. When we read the essay that portentously comes to the same conclusion as the last dozen essays of its kind, we are in the presence of a worn-out problems. A good problem is one that changes our vision, makes new things visible, breaks up the previous divisions, and installs new ones (which may themselves be replaced). The good problem is often the articulation of a mystery that has not been voiced, and in the setting out of the mystery, much comes to us, not as answers, but as singular points of the question we have posed" (2009, 195; this appears in the conclusion where the problem being put forth is that of the Nonhuman)." In this sense, a Performance Philosophy problem would be one of the mysteries that have evolved within the seams of the organization since its emergence in 2013. I'm interested in the problem of "No," and I'd like to explore it along the following lines:
4/11/2020 0 Comments Notes on acceptance (ἡσυχία)The Ancient Greek word for the type of acceptance I've been thinking about is most closely related to "acquiescence." [I'll have to explain why I think that word is best.] But that word is from Latin, not Greek, so I started looking at the Greek words for "quiet" and "to become quiet."
I find: ἡσυχία, rest of quiet personified; to be at peace or rest In the Loeb Classics, it shows up in a number of places, but most interestingly in Pindar's 8th Pythian Ode where it is offered as a proper name: Ἡσυχία. The translator flags it for footnoting: "Hesychia, peace within the polis, is the daughter of Justice."
“And you notice, I think, when people get into many other similar situations in which, when they’re in pain, they praise not the feeling of joy but not being in pain and the relief from that sort of thing as the most pleasant sensation.” “Yes, this is perhaps what then becomes pleasant and desirable: the relief,” he said. Robert A. Bauslaugh links the term to "neutrality," as in political inaction due to policy. Other sources:
(Full version coming soon)
Nurse:
Nursing:
Attending:
Secondary sources Yannicopoulos, A. V. (1985). The pedagogue in antiquity. British Journal of Educational Studies, 33(2), 173–179. doi:10.1080/00071005.1985.9973708
Christian Laes, “Pedagogues in Greek Inscriptions in Hellenistic and Roman Antiquity,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 171 (2009): 113-122.
I have a frictious relationship with repetition. On the one hand, I don’t believe that anything ever repeats, not really, at least not in the strict sense of a “repetition of the same.” For example: I I I I I I I I. This is not the repetition of the same I. Each I is different. Each occupies a distinct space and has resulted from a distinct pressing of my computer’s keyboard. In casual conversation, one could easily suggest that I have repeated I. But when I really think about it, I don’t see a single I repeated. I see I and I and I and I, always new.
On the other hand, my body seems to feel the return of habitual action, specifically habitual actions that trouble me. The air seems to thicken each morning at 7am when my three-year-old bolts out of bed to start a new day. My body drags itself to an upright position so as to follow and hesitates because of a deep uneasiness about doing this again, of trying to get energy again, of repeating the struggle of parenting. I could possibly describe this as a “continuation” of parenting, instead of a “repetition,” except that there is something very Groundhog’s Day about it. Same with the non-linear path of potty training: poop, again! In this scenario, it doesn’t feel like new poop. It feels like I’m re-living the totality of the “training” process. At the other end of the continuum, where this repetition feels most invasive, I encounter trauma, which is the epitome of this bodily sensation of repetition: I, in the present moment, feel again a series of affronting and unwanted bodily reactions that I have experienced before. This is related to the idea of nomos that I wrote about last time, the habit of experience that instantiates itself through (ostensibly) repeated action. I have a frictious relationship with repetition. Does it exist as a natural phenomenon of life, or am I the one who fabricates it? To answer this question, I have, for years, explored the topic of repetition in theatre and performance studies. Each time one performs (any habitual activity) or each time an actor steps onstage to enact a part in a pre-designed performance, what precisely is happening? Do we repeat our actions, or is each time a totally new experience? The most intriguing treatment of these questions, however, appears not in theatre and performance scholarship but in philosophy and psychoanalysis. Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and Jacques Lacan’s re-workings of Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on repeated (neurotic and desirous) behavior are texts I return to, repeatedly (?). >>READ MORE<< 1/14/2020 1 Comment To repeat (yet again)Notes for forthcoming entry on repetition:
Repeat and Repetition
|
AuthorWill Daddario is a historiographer, philosopher, and teacher. He currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina. Archives
June 2021
Categories |