Dear Senator Tillis,
​
The 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King to Senator Strom Thurmond that Elizabeth Warren was censured for reading contains words you need to hear. In that letter, King, a woman of incredible strength and tenacity, explained in clear terms why Jeff Sessions should not be elevated to the Federal District Court of the Southern District of Alabama. The issue, she said, was voter's rights. It was clear to King back then that Jeff Sessions had participated in blocking access to the polls for black people. In other words, Sessions was accused of undermining the democratic process first and foremost. Questions of his racism linger in the accusation, but the primary matter is that of democracy. King comments on both facets of the problem when she writes, "The irony of Mr. Sessions' nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods."

As a Senator in North Carolina, King's words should trouble you for a very specific reason: they are as pertinent today for your own state as they were in 1986 for Alabama. The Federal Court of Appeals very recently struck down North Carolina's Voter ID law saying its provisions deliberately “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision” in an effort to depress black turnout at the polls" (NY Times: http://ow.ly/f7dN308O9ZH). Based in part on those findings, the Electoral Integrity Project pronounced that North Carolina is no longer considered a democracy according to verified statistical analysis (http://ow.ly/n6TY308OatU). It is clear that the fears expressed by King in 1986 are once again palpable, this time because Jeff Sessions is poised to assume an even more powerful position in the US Government. King's accusations, therefore, can and should be summoned during Sessions' nomination proceedings, and, moreover, you as a Senator of this particular state need to take King's words to heart. That is, by supporting Mitch McConnell in censuring King via her contemporary spokeswoman Elizabeth Warren, and by voting to confirm Jeff Sessions, you are perpetuating North Carolina's questionable past and making possible a deeply upsetting future in which a man of questionable integrity drives the US legal system. 

I have written to you quite recently about the confirmation of DeVos for Secretary of Education. You did not listen to my appeal as you cast your vote in favor of her nomination. This time, however, I urge you to listen to my voice and those who share my concerns about Jeff Sessions. If you vote to make him US Attorney General, you are demonstrating to me and to likeminded individuals that you don't value the words of one of our country's most powerful black, female activists, that you don't take seriously the recent condemnation of North Carolina's voter laws, and that you don't care about the legitimate concerns about Sessions's racist behavior. 

If you vote for Jeff Sessions, I will write to you again and request an explanation. In the meantime, if my words aren't enough to at least motivate a long meditation on the problem at hand, then please read King's letter in full. You can find it here: http://ow.ly/LGmR308Odaq. I recommend you read it aloud.

Sincerely, 
Will Daddario, PhD
Asheville, NC 28803

∧ADIEU ∧DIEU ∧P∧, Indeed by WILL DADDARIO on DECEMBER 2ND, 2016
[originally published on theater-historiography.org]

We learn of a warp in time-space, one that actually occurred here on Earth, from Gertrude Stein who, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932), reflects on the portrait of her painted by Pablo Picasso. It was some time around 1905-1906, Picasso was between periods and thus experimenting with different visions. He had never done a portrait, a fact that might explain why he required ninety sittings from Stein in order to complete it. So much work went into it, so much thought. Upon its unveiling, however, commentators pointed out that the portrait lacked the one element so crucial to the genre. It didn’t look like her. Or, rather, Stein didn’t look like it. Either way, Stein’s representation in oil didn’t represented Stein in the flesh didn’t represent Stein in oil. To this, Picasso famously replied, “She will,” meaning that at some point in the future, Stein would live up to the representation. And sure enough, as time passed, Stein seemingly lived into her artistic representation, growing in appearance more and more like her painting, thereby revealing Picasso’s ability to chart matter’s unfolding through time and space as well as how an art object can act as a foreshock to the future.[1]
As a theatre and performance scholar struggling to make sense of the recent turbulence of the election, I have been asking myself: Is there an analogue in theatre history to this event of painting, one that prefigures our recent election cycle and outcome and acts similarly as a foreshock to the future in which we now dwell? Simon Critchley’s recent post in The Stone about the renewed importance of Existentialist nausea goads my thought, too, though I would like to emphasize here not a philosophical paradigm as such but rather a theatrical-philosophical one.
The foreshock that first comes to mind is The Chairs (1952) by Eugène Ionesco. In this play, now a canonical title belonging to what Martin Esslin named Theatre of the Absurd, we find two characters of greatly advanced age struggling, in essence, to make their lives great again. Dialogue, if we can call it that, drenched in memories, perhaps misremembered recollections, oscillates from semi-sensical to nonsensical and back again, slowly rendering a fuzzy image of the two characters’ present situation. The Old Man, we discover, has something of major import to tell us. He has worked his whole life to express this majorly important insight about the world in which he lives, but he does not have the language to do it. To get the message across, the Old Man has enlisted the help of an Orator who, the Old Man assures us, will convey the full thrust of The Message.
In anticipation and celebration of the Orator’s address, the old couple throws a party. As the play progresses, Ionesco gradually ratchets-up an odd feeling of dis-ease and eventually reveals to the play’s audience that each party guest, while bearing a name and a clear social function, is invisible. One by one, the old couple welcomes these invisible people into their living space. A separate chair marks each guest. It is unclear whether they, the characters, can see these invisible entities or whether they are engaged in some kind of willing suspension of disbelief themselves, a kind of selective dementia. Regardless of the true ontic status of these invisible characters, the frenzy of anticipation grows until the play almost combusts in a conflagration of fragmented speech and hurried movement. The stage, once empty, fills with chairs. The Old Man and Old Woman are moving so quickly that we have either to doubt their age—listed as 95 and 94 in the text—or accept that the vitality of the moment has enthused them.
The Orator finally arrives, and after a suitably grand introduction delivers The Message. But, once again, Ionesco constructs the logic of this moment with his signature strangeness. The Orator speaks in discernable sounds, but not in familiar speech. We learn in the text that he is a “deaf mute,” and thus his message, the oh-so important message hyped throughout the play, is incommunicable and unintelligible. Even when the Orator determines to write The Message on a blackboard, thereby overcoming the problem of the spoken word, the audience, both on and off stage, receives the following: ANGELFOOD […] NNAA NNM NWNWNW V. And so The Message does not land, it cannot land since it seems to have no content. Yet, with renewed vigor, the Orator erases the board and seems to conceive of a remedy: ∧ADIEU ∧DIEU ∧P∧. There’s The Message all worked out. Can’t you see it?
Can we not imagine Trump, Clinton, or Sanders as the contemporary embodiment of the Orator? Enlisted to put into words the message of many disgruntled and uncomfortable citizens of the United States, the message we eventually receive from them is in fact a string of sounds and symbols that have no real import beyond the readymade intelligibility that each sound and symbol may carry for acolytes and those initiated in each politician’s way. As with the Orator’s message, we might ask whether the messages of these politicians lack sense intrinsically or whether some of us lack the reservoir of knowledge to understand the all-important utterance? That Trump won means only that there were more members of the Electoral College who seemed to understand his ∧ADIEU ∧DIEU ∧P∧.
In The Chairs, once the confusion of the message begins to register with the audience—Like, oh, this is it? This is what we’ve been waiting for?—we in the house seats start to re-appraise the character of the Orator. Is he a normal character? Is not something a little bit off about him? Is he indeed a deaf mute (as the text suggests), or is he playing one, perhaps even mocking one? Have we perhaps, because of his title of Orator, overlooked something beneath his appearance? The fact of the matter is that we do not have, nor will we ever receive, answers to these questions. Ionesco, in his stage directions, tells us that the Orator seems displeased with the way his message has landed, but the audio track that slowly rises onstage—“bursts of laughter, murmurs, shh’s, ironical coughs”—suggests that some of the invisible people have understood something. Maybe the Orator’s appearance of displeasure is something else altogether, a kind of body language decipherable only to those who speak his language. After all, before he exits the stage he “bows ceremoniously,” as if he has done what he was summoned to do. When the play ends, a lot has just happened, but what precisely are we to make of any of it?
Back to the present day similarities: The Old Couple foreshadows the electorate. Old and young at the same time, they are equipped with vivid memories but also ample disillusionment, i.e., memories of a past that never existed, able to recognize the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, but simply unable to speak it for themselves. Due to this inability, they require a spokesperson, a surrogate, a representative to drive the message home in precisely the right terms, i.e., terms that make sense to them.
Even the scenography of the piece, which Ionesco draws out in great detail on the first few pages of the script, eerily resembles the floor of a Parliament or legislature: a semi-circular configuration of chairs facing a raised dais with a discernible left side and right side. Are the characters of the play gathered in a political arena that has been evacuated of its use and now functions as a party venue?
While not a completely verisimilar replica of the current political situation, The Chairsnonetheless predicts the confusion, the miscommunication, the enthusiasm paired with despair, and the general out-of-tune-ness of the state in which many now find themselves. A message has been delivered, but can anybody say what precisely that message is. ∧ADIEU ∧DIEU ∧P∧, indeed.
Looking back to the precursors of Ionesco’s brand of theatre, I find another intriguing foreshock: Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921). Midway through that play’s action, which itself consists of a rehearsal of a play preparing for its grand opening, the doors in the back of the auditorium open. Through the very same doors through which the audience will have entered comes an ensemble of characters that, so we are told, are searching for their author. At this moment, “real-life” audience and “fictional” stage actors are united in an uncanny experience that hinges on a seemingly impossible reversal of cause and effect: before an author has created them, a cast of characters wanders the earth. Struggling with this twist of temporality, the six characters plead with the actors to put their story into action.
All of this happens within the framework of a play-within-a-play, what Lionel Abel eventually terms metatheatre. The result of this upon the “real” audience watching the play was profound in its day. Audience members shouted in disbelief: Manicomio! (Madhouse!) Incommensurabile! (Incommensurable!).[2] The uncommon event transpiring within the theatre eventually ends tragically, due in part to an inability between the actors and the six characters to determine the precise mode of realism needed to bring the characters to life, in part to the fact that causality has been broken, and in part to the actors’ inability to properly author the ciphers who appeared before them. The characters are indeed ciphers, placeholders with relatively common dimensions—denoted by names such as “Father” and “Daughter”—waiting to be filled out, but the filling out does not transpire properly and thus tragedy befalls the lot of them. Many of the six characters “die” at the end, but the Director of the “real” show is unsure whether it matters. After all, they weren’t real people were they?
In this foreshock, our recent presidential hopefuls corresponded to Pirandello’s characters. We, the electorate, are going about the dramas of our daily lives when there appears a group of characters claiming to need our support in order to bring their visions to fruition. Clinton is the archetypal matriarch, Trump the dominating and witheringly masculine patriarch, Sanders the son (who, in Pirandello’s play hates the family because they have ostracized him). We, the electorate, are told that without us the power of these characters cannot come into being. We are needed to author the promise of each character. Without us, these characters are empty placeholders, Zeroes, but when we do our best to play our parts we find that the joke is on (half of) us. We act through our vote only to discover that the majority of the voting population hasn’t accomplished anything real at all. The votes counted and didn’t count in the end. Were they fictional votes? Does it really matter?
The point I’d like to make here with these strange resonances between absurdist plays and our recent election cycle is this: history is not repeating itself as either tragedy or farce; it is, rather, fulfilling its identity as the theatre of the absurd. Therefore, the present reality is not absurd in its own right, but is instead theatre of the absurd. We are experiencing another stage in the evolution of the Theatre of the World. Maybe this is the most important aspect of Absurdism that scholars like Esslin have overlooked; namely, that, despite its clear relationship to the climate of the times (post-WWII), the theatre of Ionesco and his contemporaries actually conjured a vision of a future, a future that has revealed itself to be the present in which we live. We have, in other words, finally grown into the misery of the world portended by the Absurdists over half-a-century ago.
Faced with this possibility, what we need today is a team of theatre and performance scholars to investigate this current theatre in which we all find ourselves. To do this, the team could break down the theatre into its constituent parts. For example: language. Is it too much of an exaggeration to say that an orangutan testing the depths of a pool blocking its path is more adept with its tool than any of the presidential contenders were with the tool of language?[3] Transcripts from stump speeches prove clearly that not only did language fail to communicate specific messages to the gathered audiences but also that language consistently failed to rise to the level of meaning at all.
Of course, Trump’s are the most amenable to my argument, as this excerpt from a rally in South Carolina on July 21, 2015, proves:
Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, okay, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are […][4]
Where Clinton’s language is concerned, the problem is not outright grammar-less nonsense but, rather, vagueness and empty talk. In her speech for the acceptance of the Democratic Party’s nomination, for example, we heard, “Now we are clear-eyed about what our country is up against. But we are not afraid. We will rise to the challenge, just as we always have.” And then we heard about building a road to citizenship (how?), fixing inequality and social mobility (in what way?), creating better jobs (in what fields?), that climate change is real (…duh?), and other broad-sweeping claims that people in the room with her already believed. What, though, was the main message of her campaign? There wasn’t one. There wasn’t one, and so her speeches could at best aim not to set an agenda but, rather, to accomplish everything that liberals want and to do it all well. This vagueness and lack of message may in fact explain why Clinton polled at 47% for nearly the entirety of her campaign. No message = no change in polls because there’s no new information into which swing voters might tune. (I’d need another 4000 words to discuss the language and logic of polls.)
As was the case in the plays of Ionesco, language did not function in the campaign as a tool to convey meaning but, rather, as a tool to produce not-fully-understood affective responses. With the dog-whistle politics of Trump and the vapid sloganeering of Clinton’s talk, the electorate was left with sound and fury, nothing more. The candidates stripped language down to basic sounds with indeterminate meaning and a hint of recognizable vitriol. In terms of reception, the negatively polarized electorate heard only what it already believed to be true. Like high school fans catching the Fab 4 in concert during the height of Beatlemania, whose screaming drowned out the sound and lyrics of the musicians, the role of the polarized electorate was never to listen to speeches and be convinced of something new. No, the role allowed individuals to cheer and believe that their candidate was saying what they believe he/she has said in the past and what they already fervently believed in before the election cycle even started. Such a breakdown in language’s traditional function as meaning-maker, communication facilitator, or, God forbid, medium of reason, means that we have no hope of applying Aristotle’s tried and true ethos, pathos, logos analytical scheme to the campaign rhetoric. Trump: all pathos (fear), no ethos, no logos. Clinton: all logos (neoliberal), no pathos, no ethos. When we look back on all the transcripts and search for meaning in the words, do we really find anything more “meaningful” than the words uttered by the Old Man and Old Woman in The Chairs?
George Saunders was well aware of this problem when it sprouted a particularly pungent blossom several years ago in the form of Sarah Palin. His essay for the New Yorker, “My Gal” plays with this new de-tooled language. Here are the first two paragraphs in case you missed it:
Explaining how she felt when John McCain offered her the Vice-Presidential spot, my Vice-Presidential candidate, Governor Sarah Palin, said something very profound: “I answered him ‘Yes’ because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink. So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.”
Isn’t that so true? I know that many times, in my life, while living it, someone would come up and, because of I had good readiness, in terms of how I was wired, when they asked that—whatever they asked—I would just not blink, because, knowing that, if I did blink, or even wink, that is weakness, therefore you can’t, you just don’t. You could, but no—you aren’t.
Saunders went wild over the fact that the key of each Palin sentence, that which was supposed to unlock the hermetic meaning in each convoluted expression, was never tendered. And this way of speaking (strategy?) was somewhat brilliant because it compelled listeners to keep listening for the moment when the idea landed. But it never landed.
If we can compare Palin’s wandering talk with Trump’s nonsense, then we can also compare the empty sloganeering of the McCain/Palin ticket with that of the Clinton/Kaine ticket. Saunders also helps us here as he walks through the 2008 Republican banner slogan:
Now, let’s talk about slogans. Ours is: Country First. Think about it. When you think of what should come first, what does? Us ourselves? No. That would be selfish. Our personal families? Selfish. God? God is good, I love Him, but, as our slogan suggests, no, sorry, God, You are not First. No, you don’t, Lord! How about: the common good of all mankind! Is that First? Don’t make me laugh with your weak blinking! No! Mercy is not First and wisdom is not First and love is super but way near the back, and ditto with patience and discernment and compassion and all that happy crap, they are all back behind Country, in the back of my S.U.V. […]
Given his interest/fear in the unmooring of language in 2008, it is no surprise that Saunders turned up again in the eye of the Trump storm, this time not to accost through wit but to understand who exactly these Trump supporters are. He attended Trump rallies, admitting to those he met that he himself was once an avid reader of Ayn Rand and a registered Republican who voted for Reagan. Bonding in this way seemed to give him access to interviews with the Trump supporters gathered there, such as this woman:
I ask her what, in terms of her day-to-day life, she thinks is wrong with America.
“I don’t like people shoving Obamacare down my throat, O.K.?” she says. “And then getting penalized if I don’t have insurance.”
Is she covered through Obamacare?
No. She has insurance through her work, thank God, but “every day my rights are being taken away from me, you know?” she says. “I mean—this is America. In the U.S., we have a lot of freedoms and things like that, but we’re not going to have all that if we have all these people coming in, that are taking our—”
What is on display here if not the same antilogic (illogic? ill-logic?) that subtends the ever-weakening rationality of the masses in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1959)? In that play, Ionesco weaves a discussion between the Logician and the Old Gentleman about syllogisms that functions something like background music to the primary dialogue unfolding between the play’s lead characters:
Logician: [to the Old Gentleman] Here is an example of a syllogism. The cat has four paws. Isidore and Fricot both have four paws. Therefore Isidore and Fricot are cats.
Old Gentleman: [to the Logician] My dog has got four paws.
Logician: [to the Old Gentleman] Then it’s a cat.
[…]
Old Gentleman: [to the Logician, after deep reflection] So then logically speaking, my dog must be a cat?
Logician: [to the Old Gentleman] Logically, yes. But the contrary is also true.
This lesson builds to a more complex example of two cats and the number of their paws. Instigated by the Logician’s question, “If you take six paws from the two cats, how many paws are left to each cat?” the Old Gentleman delivers a wide range of answers before stumbling into the category of the unnatural: one cat with five paws, a cat with one paw, a cat with six paws or with no paws at all—all logically possible. These possibilities lead to further possibilities of some cats with special privileges (those with paws) and some cats without privileges (those with no paws). Here the Logician fuses the path of Logic with that of Justice and declares: “Logic means Justice.” But Ionesco undercuts this statement with the sound of a rhinoceros, thereby suggesting that some bestial thinking undergirds the logician’s seemingly scientific rationality. Saunders seems to have discovered a similar (il)logicality in the thinking of Trump supporters, one that aligns with their (in)justice. Violence lurks beneath this irrational rationality.
So we find ourselves now, after the election, cast within the theatre of the absurd. If language has acquired an Ionesco-like ambivalence and malleability, one of our jobs moving forward must be to understand how this theatrical language works, how it is put to use, and what worlds it is capable of making. But theatre and performance scholars should also rush in to assess other constituent parts of this theater: the embodied knowledge of protesters, for example, and the scenography of violent police shootings, and the mis en scène set by those who claim to be directors of the national interest. In short, what we need now is a dramaturgy of this theatre of the absurd, perhaps one armed with a solid background in Wittgenstein and the notion of language games.
Another foreshock, the last I’ll mention, occurred prior to my writing of this essay. Two days before the election I randomly pulled F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Crack Up” off my bookshelf. In that story, the narrator (who seems to be a surrogate of Fitzgerald himself) tells us that the mark of true intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in one’s head. For example, and to stay in the key of the Absurdists, that I can’t possibly go on andI must go on. The narrator who says this with such certainty, however, also vouchsafes to his reader the fact that he himself is slowly going crazy, slowly cracking up. To practice true intelligence is to risk insanity. The primary opposition in the story, the one that will fuse disjunctively into a profound realization of self and world, comes from the confrontation between the narrator and the narrator’s wife (who resembles Zelda). During a bitter argument, the former explains his belief that his crack is interior to himself and thus he himself bears the responsibility of fixing it (or ignoring it altogether with alcohol), while the latter works from the opposite belief that the crack is outside. “The crack is in the Grand Canyon!” she yells. The story ends abruptly, without resolve, and so leave us with questions. Are we to follow the internal crack-up into our own individual depths, thereby pushing our sanity to the brink no matter how dangerous that may be, or do the cracks of the natural and social words impinge on our sanity to such a degree that our job is to map those forces and explore them like an intrepid scout?
With so many cracks showing now in the aftermath of the election, which path are we to follow? “Of course all life is a process of breaking down,” Fitzgerald tells us, and so we see the cracking of language all around us. But the inevitability of breaking down, either through internal cracks or by external blows, does not preclude an attitude of good humor and sharp wit. Indeed, it is precisely now, with the help of our life dramaturgs, that we may find a new dimension to language altogether, one that frees us from the paradigms of right/left, black/white, 99%/1%, and produces instead a new cosmology.
[1] http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/47.106/
[2] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Six_Characters_in_Search_of_an_Author
[3] Take your pick: http://ow.ly/AoVf3069nZr
[4] http://www.vox.com/2016/8/18/12423688/donald-trump-speech-style-explained-by-linguists

[Originally posted at theater-historiography.org]

​Say No to Know Nothingsby WILL DADDARIO on JULY 16TH, 2016
While reading The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears[1] by Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, I found a footnote to the historic Know Nothing party of the mid-nineteenth century ensconced in a passage about the institutional history of U.S. slavery. The name of the party rang a bell in my memory, but I couldn’t come up with any particulars so I looked into it. After a few minutes of online research, I found myself wondering at the repetition of history, especially Marx’s (oft-cited) famous addendum, “…first as tragedy, then as farce.” Is not Donald Trump the new, more farcical version of John Bell who ran for president on the Know Nothing ticket in 1859, or, perhaps more accurately, the new Henry J. Gardner who became Massachusetts’s Know Nothing governor in 1854? What started off as a historical retracing of one trail of tears soon led to the recognition of another equally troubling road.
Several news outlets have posted articles and op-eds about the similarities between Trump, the current GOP, and the Know Nothings of the 1850s (see notes below and links/footnotes along the way). Such similarities include an overt racist-nationalist platform of exclusion, a party membership of mostly working class white men seeking personal economic improvement, and an honest (if not also ironic) embrace of ignorance (“I Know Nothing!”) as the party’s shibboleth. Indeed, the link between Trump and Gardner emerges from research into these similarities, specifically in the fact that, despite the party’s working class base, the eventual Massachusetts governor was a wool merchant who improved upon his already-considerable wealth thanks to his elite family’s connections. Like Trump, Gardner seemed to have had little in common with his constituents’ economic identities and needs.
My own addition to these publications comes in the form of a connection between Trump, the Know Nothings (past and present, official party members and merely like-minded), and that which Michel Foucault dubbed the “Ubus” of power. In the early lectures of the 1974-1975 academic year now published as Abnormal, Foucault links specific historical political leaders with the protagonist in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. What allows this link is Foucault’s observation of “the unavoidability, the inevitability of power, which can function in its full rigor and at the extreme point of its rationality even when in the hands of someone who is effectively discredited” (13). Nero and Hitler, for example, populate what Jana Sawicki calls this “tradition of vile and buffoonish sovereigns.”[2] Hesitant to facilitate any overly simplistic connections between Trump and Hitler, thereby allowing dialogue and debate to dissolve into platitudes, I do support adding Trump to Foucault’s category of Ubu Rulers. We are witnessing not only the farcical (and, therefore, post-tragic) return of the Know Nothings today but also an index of the racist-nationalist conditions that allow such Ubus to take center stage in the U.S. theatre of politics.
Sawicki underscores a similar point in her speculation on the whereabouts of Ubu-power’s many residences: “Perhaps it also resides in a lack of critical reflection on the historical conditions in which such forms of authority arose.” Indeed, when Foucault, in his 1978 essay “What is Enlightenment?” ends by calling for a “critical ontology of ourselves,” which amounts to a historiography of the present, he is asking us all to refuse Ubu government:
The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.[3]
The only chance we have of out-maneuvering the vile buffoonery of the persona known as “Trump” is to create a series of conditions that excoriates pride in ignorance, the likes of which we see not only in the mass of Trumpeteers but also in the belligerent leftist supporters who instigate violence at Trump rallies. As the perspicacious George Saunders has recently outlined in The New Yorker,[4] the true damage of the current political fracas has become visible not as a divisive and sickeningly facile binary opposition between Right and Left ideologies but, rather, as a perpetuation of willful ignorance that keeps the U.S. electorate from participating in meaningful conversations dedicated to the nuanced weave of our country’s political fabric.
To my mind, the disaster that has given rise to the resurgence of Know-Nothing-ness is the evacuation of (yes, I’ll say it and mean it) critical thinking from the halls of Secondary and Higher Education. Given Foucault’s astute reference to Jarry’s theatricality, and my own predilection for performance theory and theatre historiography, I am confident that theatre education (both theory and practice) can thrive as a system capable of performing a critical ontology of ourselves, particularly through its recourse to the study of theatricality in everyday life and the performativity of language. Conversely, however, I am fearful that the ossification of theatre and performance studies in higher education, not to mention the almost complete absence of a fine-arts based critical vocabulary in primary and secondary education, can aid in the momentum of the Know Nothings. Without a self-reflexive and philosophical appraisal of the politics of representation, theatre can easily devolve into thoroughly commodified spectacle, and from there spectacle can be freed up to celebrate the Ubus of the world.
With the highly theatrical and absurd conventions of both the Democratic and Republican parties coming up, I urge us to attend to the conditions that make specific statements possible, to the representational practices that manufacture instrumental visibility, and to the everyday silences that create moral vacuums.
[Other notes]
From Encyclopedia Britannica online
“When Congress assembled on Dec. 3, 1855, 43 representatives were avowed members of the Know-Nothing party.”[5]

• “The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by the U.S. Congress on May 30, 1854. It allowed people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30´.”[6]

“In 1849 the secret Order of the Star-Spangled Banner formed in New York City, and soon after lodges formed in nearly every other major American city. Members, when asked about their nativist organizations, were supposed to reply that they knew nothing, hence the name. As its membership and importance grew in the 1850s, the group slowly shed its clandestine character and took the official name American Party.”
“the American Party fell apart after 1856. Antislavery Know-Nothings joined the Republican Party, while Southern members flocked to the proslavery banner still held aloft by the Democratic Party. By 1859 the American Party’s strength was largely confined to the border states. In 1860 remnants of the Know-Nothings joined old-line Whigs to form the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell of Tennessee for president.”

• On Bell (from Wikipedia):[7]
  • “Planter,” or plantation owner; “Although a slaveowner, Bell was one of the few southern politicians to oppose the expansion of slavery in the 1850s…”
  • “During his 1860 presidential campaign, he argued that secession was unnecessary since the Constitution protected slavery, an argument which resonated with voters in border states, helping him capture the electoral votes of Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia.”
  • Speaker of the House (1834–1835)
  • “briefly served as Secretary of War during the administration of William Henry Harrison (1841)”

“Two other groups that took the name American Party appeared in the 1870s and ’80s. One of these, organized in California in 1886, proposed a briefly popular platform calling mainly for the exclusion of Chinese and other Asians from industrial employment.”
From Ashefield Historical Society
“Although the Know-Nothing party or the American Party was a national political organization, it was strongest in Massachusetts. This party was based on nativistic beliefs and its members were native born male Protestants who were opposed to immigrants being able to vote or hold political office.”[8]
“One of the most influential party members was Henry J. Gardner who was elected as the Commonwealth’s Governor in 1854. Most of the party’s members were from the working class and wished for many reforms that would affect their lives. Gardner, however, was a wealthy wool merchant and a member of the so-called Boston Brahmins (a small elite group of families who were extremely wealthy and well-educated).”

• Trump parallel??!

From Op-Ed in Baltimore Sun from July 13, 2016
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-know-nothing-20160713-7-story.html
“Eric Heavner taught political science at Towson University for 10 years and now works for a Baltimore real estate developer.”

• …indeed…

“Perhaps Mr. Trump will skip the convention and go it alone. Such a move would appeal to Mr. Trump’s love of sensationalism, and it would it not be unprecedented. Teddy Roosevelt, for example, broke away from the Republican Party to run for president under the Bull Moose Party banner in 1912, and Strom Thurmond bolted from the Democratic Party to run as a Dixiecrat in 1948.”
“Despite the years that separate Mr. Trump and the Know-Nothing Party, they have much in common. […] their message is virtually the same: Immigrants take away jobs from true Americans and threaten the American way of life. There are other similarities. The Know-Nothings’ were anti-Catholic. Mr. Trump is anti-Muslim. The know-Nothings believed only native-born Americans should be allowed to vote and hold public office. Mr. Trump played the native-born American card by questioning President Obama’s birthplace.”
From HuffPo’s “The GOP: The New Know Nothing Part?”
January 18, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-gop-the-new-know-noth_b_9010454
John W. Traphagan, Professor of Religious Studies and Human Dimensions of Organizations, University of Texas, Austin
Conclusion: “When we look at the GOP of 2016, it seems very much as though we are witnessing a new version of the Know Nothings of the 1850s. One can only hope that this time it is equally short-lived.”
ENDNOTES
[1] http://www.penguin.com/book/the-cherokee-nation-and-the-trail-of-tears-by-theda-perdue-and-michael-d-green/9780143113676
[2] http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23977-abnormal-lectures-at-the-college-de-france-1974-1975/
[3] http://philosophy.eserver.org/foucault/what-is-enlightenment.html
[4] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/11/george-saunders-goes-to-trump-rallies
[5] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Know-Nothing-party
[6] http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/kansas.htm
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bell_(Tennessee_politician)
[8] http://www.ashfieldhistorical.org/nothing.htm

Installation number two of an old dream journal I found:

No date (2005?)
Hospital.
3 patients had a strange disease that required a purple mixture/compound to be spread on their backs.
It could only be spread with the tongue.
It felt like community service felt.
The compound was bright purple.
I was also preparing to go to St. Joseph's college in Europe somewhere.
Hospital patient was a girl my age.
After the treatment, we placed her evenly upon the body of another patient.

No date (2005?)
A group of people find themselves together for an unknown reason — felt like Clue! — they figure out that something is not right with Time. I was the ringleader.

No date (2005?)
In a grassy courtyard. Spring day. Talking about post-doctoral work with unidentified woman. Very sunny. I could feel the weather, and I was talking about it, too.

No date (2006?)
I had a real-time conversation with my mother about money. Very intense. No fun. Then, completely unrelated, I dreamt of a group of late-20s people who lived by the sea in bland apartments. They all knew each other and it was very much like a movie or a t.v. drama.

No date (2006?)
3 dismembered heads in a cooler. Large apt. The heads came from a grizzly accident. Military-like principal. James McMenamin is V.P. Christian, Val, Blythe.

No date (2006?)
Story about the battle for the compass of time. 2 primitive societies  and 2 animal societies wage war. The evil guys won. Flash forward: The evil has become mythologized within a city. Magic factions will fight once more for freedom.

Packing and preparing to move, I found an old dream journal. Here are its contents (installment 1):

July 12, 1995
Something about a girl who I met in a hotel. Sat on my bed and I distinctly remember being in my room and then going to my door and opening to see snow falling. I thought it was odd because it was July. Phone rang, it was my mom telling me to go to sleep.

July 25, 1995
I dreamt that I was at school and in PPD [gym]. There was a huge gladiator competition. I won by hurting everyone to a point where they couldn't compete anymore.

July 27, 1995
Anthony and I battled the forces of evil. Little girl possessed by devil needed to be destroyed.

January 2, 2005
Sci-Fi Dream.
I was a warrior, almost like Jedi.
There were two opposing factions.
I trained
I spied
evil troops took over territory

January 4, 2005
Movie script
the dream was the movie itself
3 characters, Latino
2 adolescent boys and 1 girl
German family
Latinos are indentured servants.
Main image: pool of water, from left
bodies flow on, water gets suctioned out the right side,
bodies flush through the right side,
Also felt like theatre

No date [2005?]
Derrida teaching a class
sort of communicates telepathically
Deanna Martin was in class
sat around conference table
nobody really understood anything
no lights on in classroom
but lots of light through windows
Homework assignment I forgot to do

No date [2005?]
Went to China
met Linq in a hybrid train station/airport
Two stories were merged together.
One was Linq, a friend, and myself hanging out catching up,
the other was like a high school dance

No date [2005?]
horse raising
it was time for the races
needed to get a 
large photograph printed 
so I went to a Kinkos-like place. The sales
people were rude idiots
and kept me from leaving by asking stupider and stupider questions
Left eventually to meet up with Christian
and his mom. We were going for Margaritas 
Somehow my bedroom was located... [ink ran out]

No date [2005?]
Some kind of explosion
in a big city forces people onto underground
trains. The trains contain several hundred
evacuees. While underground a disease
rips through world's pop
leaving nobody alive

No date [2005?]
I meet Linq. He is very tired.
His fingers have grown thin.
He has a walkman/recording device
that he wears strapped to his arm;
this makes him happy. We arrive in 
a city that is all deception
People are [undecipherable word] medicine
to sleep.
Unclear what we were doing there.

No date [2005?]
A woman, slightly deranged in that 
Glass Menagerie kind of way
was the mother of two crab
children that out of embarrassment
and concern for them she hid on a beach.
They were crabs,
but big. I was terrified of them and ran away.
There was an office setting.
​I think it's anxiety about teaching.

(Scroll down to Part I, or click here to download all my posts on Jay Wright)

Whereas the last post focused on Wright’s overcoming of the dissociative spatial paradigms found in Modernist poetry—a paradigm that bifurcates the performance experience and/or encounter into performers, on the one hand, and observers, on the other hand—this post will deal with the synesthetic events scattered throughout Wright’s poetry. These events require a spatial reading since the unification of different sensing apparatuses amounts to a synthesis of an individual’s being in the (poem) world. Wright, for example, allocates sound to color and sight to skin in order, I would argue, to help us all learn to read what he calls the “coherent grammar” of our surroundings. 
 
When thinking about what to call the gesture of invitation tucked within the synesthetic realm of Wright’s poetry, an invitation that provides an opportunity to read the entire world all at once and, ultimately, to know what love is, I return time and again to the magic circle. Let’s briefly visit the world of Christopher Marlowe and Dr. Faustus where he famously writes:
 
Within this circle is Jehovah’s name
Forward and backward anagrammatized,
Th’abbreviated names of holy saints,
Figures of every adjunct to the heavens,
And characters of signs and evening stars,
By which the spirits are enforced to rise.
Then fear not, Faustus, be resolute
And try the utmost magic can perform. (1.3.8-15)
 
Offering a user-friendly history of the magic circle, Jon Kaneko-James reminds us that the magic circle served two purposes. First, it protected the magician from whatever he or she conjured. The space within the circle offered sanctuary from the demons without. Second, the circle produced a field of energy and functioned as a conductive space, “the magical words and symbols filter[ed] specific kinds of mystical power into the circle to be used by the magician.” In fact, the second attribute of the magic circle leads us to question whether or not the inner space within the circles’ arcs are indeed safe or whether, instead, the energy conducted to the magician from the signs and symbols inscribed around the circle actually empowered the magician to stop whatever force attempted to assail him/her.
 
Without attempting to resolve that dispute here, I would suggest that both are true. The space of the inner circle is an ancient form of critical distance, something that allows the magician to be, simultaneously, near and far to the action transpiring in the scene. At the same time, the space within the circle, buttressed and enhanced by magical symbols gathered around it, transmits powers to the magician. Transposing this formula to Wright and his poetry, I propose that we think of his poetic equations—as he calls them in Music’s Mask and Measure—as the symbols that form the magic circle around Wright and produce the powerful critical distance necessary for conjuring into being a reading of the world’s coherent grammar, a reading that leads to a necessary naming.
 
Look at this excerpt from Equation 2 (which I’ve reproduced here in such a way as to mimic the page layout of the book itself):
 
The red roof tiles                                        The oriole has established
slip into the morning fog.                           an evasive coherence,
There is a red silence                                     infinite, exact,
               all around us.                                with its place, there where
It will take years to learn                             the day seems set to honor
this coherent grammar.                                the bird's expressive deceit

In the stanza on the left, Wright’s equation rewires the sensorium of things surrounding us such that the redness of the present but muted visual tile-field enacts an audible silence, not dissimilar (in my mind) to the sound of the Summer Sun at its zenith. From within the circle of his poetry, Wright enters into the rewired scene and, perhaps because it is foreign and new, declares that it will take years to learn the coherent grammar of what surrounds him. His poetry, in other words, doesn’t reveal everything at all once. His poetry, instead, offers a glimpse and a bodily sense of all that hides behind daily appearances. This “coherent grammar” amounts to the order of the world presented by and present within each individual thing. I find it interesting that an etymological definition of grammar traces the word back to the late 14th-century: “‘Latin grammar, rules of Latin,’ from Old French gramaire ‘grammar; learning,’ especially Latin and philology, also ‘(magic) incantation, spells, mumbo-jumbo.’” It will take years to learn these rules, to attune ourselves to the incantations of things that sound like mumbo-jumbo upon first encounter but soon, once appraised with care, speak clearly of hidden (occult) truths.
 
While it will take Wright years to attune himself to this grammar—not to mention you, me, humans generally—it takes no time for the oriole who, being of this grammar, speaks it fluently. The “oriole has established an evasive coherence.” Either its being-in-the-world requires evasiveness, or its apparent evasiveness actually masks the coherence of the grammar. I’m not sure which it is – maybe both. But I do know that the oriole’s participation in the world’s grammar comes not only from its song, which, note, Wright doesn’t mention here, but also from its correspondence with world’s colors, sounds, and other senses. Wright conjures the bird “there where the day seems set to honor the bird’s expressive deceit,” which to me means there, in front of the setting sun, whose evening coloration mimics the oriole’s orange, that is, the bird’s expressive outwardness that, despite its seeming ostentation, serves to camouflage it and keep it safe. Oriole, setting sun, red roof tiles :: (silent) song bird, thronging light and distant heat, red silence all around us. The continuum of color, sound, and silence, indeed the continuum of music’s mask and measure, indexes Wright’s brief foray into the world normally hidden by inattentive business.
 
He lingers on another bird—to be precise, the Carolina wren—before revealing the aim of this conjuration, this poetical work:
 
Love is ancient
evidence, an instrument
constrained, jealous of its
utility,
in awe of its own death;
every name embraces it.
 
The purpose behind Wright’s poetry is the desire to conjure love. Love: perhaps another way of saying “this coherent grammar.” Every name embraces it, he says. Is poetry not the daring attempt to name that which either cannot be named or that which wishes to remain unnamable? Each name bracketed, deduced, possibly discerned from within life’s belligerent symphony brings love closer to the caller, the poet. The purpose of all this magic is to call love close, and the space produced by the poem is that which provides the means for embracing love. The word-equations summon; the space of the magic circle conducts the orchestra into the embrace.