Gertrude Stein as a precursor to postdramatic theatre

“Gertrude Stein was (and still is) considered to be ‘unplayable’ – which is true if her texts are measure by the expectations of dramatic theatre. Asking how ’successful’ her texts were on stage, one would have to attest her unequivocal failure as a theatre author. Yet in the forms of her texts, too, a dynamic force declares itself, which eventually dissolves the tradition of dramatic theatre. /…/
Stein’s texts were hardly produced and became more effective as a productive provocation /…/ When Gertrude Stein speaks of her idea of the Landscape play’, it appears as a reaction to her basic experience that theatre always made her terribly ‘nervous’ because it referred to a different time (future or past) and demanded a constant effort on the side of the viewer contemplating it. Instead of following it with ‘nervous’ – we may as well translate this as ‘dramatic’ – tension, one ought to contemplate what was happening on stage as one would otherwise contemplate a park or a landscape. Thornton Wilder remarked: ‘A myth is not a story read from left to right, from beginning to end, but a thing held full in-view the whole time. Perhaps this is what Gertrude Stein meant by saying that the play henceforth is a landscape. /…/
Gertrude Stein simply transferred the artistic logic of her texts to theatre: the principle of a ‘continuous present’, of syntactic and verbal concatenations that mark time seemingly statically (similar to the later ‘minimal music’) but in reality continuously create new accents in subtle variations and loops. /…/
Just as in her texts the representation of reality recedes in favour of the play of words, in a ‘Stein theatre’ there will be no drama, not even a story; it will not be possible to differentiate protagonists and even roles and identifiable characters will be missing. For postdramatic theatre Stein’s aesthetics is of great importance, although more subconsciously so outside America.”

Hans-Thies Lehmann: Postdramatic Theatre

Aristotle: Poetics

2. Poetry as a species of imitation
Epic poetry and tragedy, comedy also and dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one another in three aspects – the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.

2.1 Medium
/…/
the imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or ‘harmony’, either singly or combined. /…/ In dancing, rhythm alone is used without ‘harmony’; for even dancing imitates character, emotion, and action, by rhythmical movement.
/…/

2.2 Object
Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type /…/, it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting. /…/
Such diversities may be found even in dancing, flute-playing, and lyre-playing. So again in language, whether prose or verse unaccompanied by music.
/…/

3. The anthropology and history of poetry

3.1 Origins
Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures /…/
Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. /…/
Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, metres being manifestly sections of rhythm.

/…/

4. Tragedy: Definition and analysis
/…/
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.
By ‘language embellished’, I mean language into which rhythm, ‘harmony’ and song enter. By ‘the several kinds in separate parts’, I mean, that some parts are rendered through the medium of verse alone, others again with the aid of song.

/…/

For tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.

/…/

4.4 The ranking completed
The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colours, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.

/…/

5. Plot: Basic concepts
/…/
5.1 Completeness
Now, according to our definition tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude; for there may be a whole that is wanting in magnitude. A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which somwthing naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally folloes some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. /…/

5.2 Magnitude
Again, a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order. Hence a very small animal organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused, the object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment of time. Nor, again, can one of vast size be eautiful; for as the eye cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is lost for the spectator; as for instance if there were one a thousand miles long. As, therefore, in the case of animate bodies and organisms a certain magnitude is necessary, and a magnitude which may be easily embraced in one view; so in the plot, a certain length is necessary, and a length which can be easily embraced by the memory.

/…/

5.3 Unity
Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action.

/…/

5.4 Determinate structure
As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole.

5.5. Universality
/…/ The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. /…/ The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen.
Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. /…/

It clearly follows that the poet or ‘maker’ should be the maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates are actions. /…/

5.6 Defective plots
Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot ‘episodic’ in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence. /…/

6.1 Astonishment
But again, tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect.

/…/

6.3 Reversal
Reversal is a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity. /…/

6.4 Recognition
Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune. The best form of recogition is coincident with a reversal, as in the Oedipus. /../

6.5 Suffering
Two parts, then, of the plot – reversal and recognition – turn upon surprises. A third part is the scene of suffering. The scene of suffering is a destructive or painful action, such as the death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds, and the like. /…/

7. The best kinds of tragic plot
/…/
There remains, then, the character between these two extremes – that of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. /…/
The change of fortune should not be from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad. It should come about as the result not of vice, but of some great error or frailty.

/…/

8.2 Kinds of recognition
What recognition is has been already explained. We will now enumerate its kinds.
(i) First, the least artistic form, which, from the poverty of wit, is the most commonly employed – recognition by signs. /…/
(ii) Next come the recognitions invented at will by the poet, and on that account wanting in art. /…/
(iii) The third kind depends on memory when the sight of some object awakens a feeling /…/
(iv) The fourth kind is by process of reasoning. /…/
(v) Again, there is a composite kind of recognition involving false interference on the part of one of the characters /…/
(vi) But, of all recognitions, the best is that which arises from the incidents themselves, where the startling discovery is made by natural means.

/…/

8.5 Kinds of tragedy
There are four kinds of tragedy: the complex, depending entirely on reversal and recognition; the pathetic (where the motive is passion) /…/; the ethical (where the motives are ethical) /…/. The fourth kind is the simple.

/…/

8.7 Tragedy and epic
Again, the poet should remember what has been often said, and not make an epic structure into a tragdy – by an epic structure I mean one with a multiplicity of plots – as if, for instance, you were to make a tragedy out of the entire story of the Iliad.

/…/

10.3 Differences between tragedy and epic
/…/
In tragedy we cannot imitate several lines of action carried on at one and the same time; /…/ But in epic poetry, owing to the narrative form, many events simultaneously transacted can be presented;

/…/

The poet should speak as little as possible in his own person, for it is not this that makes him an imitator.

/…/

11. Problems and solutions
/…/
(i) The poet being an imitator, like a painter or any other artst, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be.

/…/

12. Comparative evaluation of epic and tragedy
The question may be raised whether the epic or tragic mode of imitation is the higher.

12.1 The case against tragedy
If the more refined art is the higher, and the more refined in every case is that which appeals to the better sort of audience, the art which imitates anything and everything is manifestly the most unrefined. /…/
Bad flute-players twist and twirl, if they have to represent ‘the quoit-throw’, or hustle the coryphaeus when they perform the Scylla. /…/
Tragic art, then, as a whole, stands to epic in the same direction as the younger to the elder actors. So we are told that epic poetry is addressed to a cultivated audience, who do not need gesture; tragedy, to an inferior public. Being then unrefined, it is evidently the lower of the two.

12.2 Reply
Now, in the first place, this censure attaches not to the poetic but to the histrionic art; for gesticulation may be equally overdone in epic recitation /…/

Once more, the epic imitation has less unity; as is shown by this, that any epic poem will furnish subjects for several tragedies. Thus if the story adopted by the poet has a strict unity, it must either be consisely told and appear truncated; or, if it conforms to the epic canon of length, it must seem weak and watery.

Georges Bataille: Method of meditation

The servile intelligence serves folly, but folly is sovereign: I can change nothing without it.

/…/

The idea of silence (the inaccessible) is disarming!
I am unable to speak of an absence of meaning without giving it a meaning it doesn’t have. /…/
In the end, being is offered to us as impossible!

/../

Every problem is in a certain sense a problem of the use of time.

/…/

Scientific work is more than servile, crippled. The needs to which it responds are foreign to knowledge. They are:
1. The curiosity of those who do crossword puzzles /…/
2. The needs of the collector (to accumulate and organize curiosities);
3. Love of work, intense output;
4. The taste for a rigorous honesty;
5. The worries of an academic (career, honour, money).
At its origin, often enough, a desire for sovereign knowledge, to go as far as one can go, a desire so quickly born, nullifies itself, by accepting subordinate tasks. /…/ Science is practiced by men in whom the desire to know is dead.

/…/

One must choose: one is unable to subordinate oneself to some ulterior result and “to be sovereignly” at the same time. (Because “to be sovereignly” means “not being able to wait”.)

/…/

If I lead being to the extreme limit of reflection, to its misunderstanding of itself, like the infinite, starry expanse of the night, I FALL ASLEEP.

/…/

Often enough, sufficient leisure is left for me to order my thought, in obedience to the rules. But today I express this movement: “Sleep invades me…”: It is more difficult! In other words, I arrive at the sovereign operation, wherein thought accepts no subordinate object and losing itself in a sovereign object, annihilates the demand for thought within itself.

/…/

When I am laughing or having an orgasm, the impossible is before me. I am happy but every thing is impossible.

The simple truth:
Servile activity is possible (on the condition of remaining enslaved, subordinate – to other men, to principles, or even to the necessity of production – human existence has a possibility in front of itself).

But sovereign existence is in no way, for even an instant, separated from the impossible; I will live sovereignly only at the heights of the impossible and what does this book mean if not:

LEAVE THE POSSIBLE TO THOSE WHO LOVE IT.

/…/

Part II
Decisive Position

Principles
1. If I wish it, to laugh is to think, but this is a sovereign moment.

/…/

Not only does the sovereign operation not subordinate itself to anything, it is indifferent to the effects that might result;

/…/

knowledge relating objects to the sovereign moment in the end risks being confounded with this moment itself.
This knowledge that one could call free (but that I prefer to call neutral) is the use of a function detached (free) from the servitude that is its principle: the function related the unknown to the known (to the solid), whereas dating it from the moment when it detaches itself, it relates the known to the unknown.

13. What I’ve just said seems to oppose itself to the fact that without a sketch, at least, of neutral knowledge, a sovereign operation could not be represented. /…/
The sovereign operation engages these developments: they are the residue of a trace left in the memory and of the subsistence of these functions, but, insofar as it takes place, it is indifferent to and mocks this residue.

/…/

16. In order to describe it better, I would like to situate it in an ensemble of apparently sovereign behaviors. Other than ecstacy, these are:
* intoxication;
* erotic effusion;
* laughter;
* sacrificial effusion;
* poetic effusion.

/…/

18. The behaviors I have just listed are effusive in that they demand muscular movements of little importance and consume energy without any other effect than a kind of interior illumination /…/

19. Previously, I designated the sovereign operation under the names of inner experience or the extreme of the possible. And now I designate it under the name meditation. Changing words signifies the boredom of using whatever word it should be (sovereign operation is, of all the names, the most fastidious: comic operation, in a sense, would be less misleading). I like meditation better despite its pioous appearence.

20. In laughter, sacrifice, or poetry, even partly in eroticism, effusion is obtained through a modification, willing or not, in the order of objects: poetry makes use of changes on the level of images; sacrifice, in general, destroys beings; laughter results from diverse changes.
In drunkenness, on the contrary, and willingly, the subject himself is modified: it is the same in meditation.

/…/

22. In meditation, the overwrought subject looks for himself.
He refuses himself the right to remain enclosed in the sphere of activity.
Still, he refuses exterior means: toxins, erotic partners, or alterations in objects (comic, sacrificial, poetic).

/…/

35. I am writing in order to nullify a game of subordinate operations (it is, when all is said and done, superflous).

36. The sovereign operation, whose authority results only from itself – expiates this authority at the same time. If it atoned for it, it would have some point of application, it would look for an empire, for duration. But authenticity refuses this: it is only powerlessness, absence of duration, hateful (or gay) destruction of itself, dissatisfaction.

/…/

In the end everyting puts me at risk, I remain suspended, stripped, in a definitive solitude: before the impenetrable simplicity of what is; and the depths of the world opened, what I see and what I know no longer has any meaning, any limits, and I will stop myself only after having advanced the furthest that I can.

/…/

But the smallest activity or the least project puts an end to the game – and I am, lacking play, brought back into the prison of useful objects, loaded with meaning.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. this is still, the instant .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . . . . . . this, presently, neither my absence nor me, neither death nor light – and my absence and me, death and light – a light laugh rises in me like the sea, fills the absence immensely. All that is – IS TOO MUCH.

Tragedins födelse ur musikens anda

Friedrich Nietzsche: Tragedins födelse ur musikens anda (1872)
Ur Samlade skrifter, band 1 (2000)

80: “I motsats till alla dem som bemödar sig om att härleda konstarterna ur en enda princip, en enda livgivande källa, nödvändig för varje konstverk, fäster jag blicken vid grekernas båda konstnärliga gudomar, Apollon och Dionysos, och finner i dem levande och åskådliga representanter för två konstvärldar, olika till sina djupaste naturer och sina högsta syften. Apollon är för mig en förklarande genius för principium inividuationis, som ensam kan ge en verklig frigörelse i skenet: medan Dionysos mystiska jubelrop spränger individuationens fängelse; varefter vägen ligger öppen till varats mödrar och tingens innersta kärna. Denna oerhörda motsättning öppnar sig som en klyfta mellan skulpturen såsom den apolliniska konstarten och musiken såsom den dionysiska”.

22: “det existerar en enorm motsättning i den grekiska världen, till ursprung och syften, mellan den avbildande konsten, den apolliniska, och den icke avbildande konstarten musik, Dionysos konstart /…/
drömmens och rusets skilda konstvärldar”

106-107: “Den populära och alldeles felaktiga motsättningen mellan själ och kropp förklarar förvisso ingenting av det komplicerade förhållandet mellan musik och drama, bara förvirrar det”.

23: “Drömvärldens vackra sken, i vars bilder varje människa är helt och fullt konstnär, är förutsättningen för all bildkonst, ja också, som vi skall se, för en viktig hälft av poesin.”

81: “vilken estetisk effekt uppstår då de två i sig åtskilda konstnärliga krafterna, den apolliniska och den dionysiska, blir aktiva bredvid varandra? Eller i korthet: hur förhåller sig musiken till bild och begrepp?”

87: “Genom den nyare dityramben gjordes musiken på ett hädiskt sätt till ett imiterande porträtt av företeelsen, t.ex. en drabbning, en storm på havet, och därmed totalt berövad sin mytskapande kraft. /…/ Tonmåleriet är således på alla sätt motsatsen till den sanna musikens mytskapande kraft” /…/
På ett annat område ser vi verkan av denna odionysiska mytfientliga kraft, när vi riktar blicken mot Sofokles tragedi med dess alltmer framträdande karaktärsskildring och psykologiska raffinemang. Karaktären går inte längre att vidga till en evig typ, utan skall tvärtom verka på ett individuellt sätt genom konstfärdiga smådrag och schatteringar, genom finaste tydlighet i alla linjer, så att åskådaren över huvud inte längre uppfattar någon myt, utan i stället konstnärens stora naturtrogenhet och imitationsförmåga.”
88: “Det som nu finns kvar av musiken är antingen upphetsnings- eller erinringsmusik, alltså antingen ett stimulansmedel för trubbiga och förbrukade nerver eller tonmåleri.”

39: “Ja, det borde vara historiskt påvisbart att varje period som var produktiv i fråga om folkvisor, samtidigt kraftigt rördes av dionysiska strömningar, vilka vi alltid måste betrakta som bas och förutsättning för folkvisan.”
40: “I folkvisediktningen ser vi alltså hur språket spänns till det yttersta för att härma musiken /…/ Därmed har vi beskrivit det enda möjliga förhållandet mellan poesi och musik, ord och ton: ordet, bilden, begreppet söker ett med musiken analogt uttryck och utsätts nu för musikens makt.”
41: “Hela denna diskussion håller fast vid att lyriken är beroende av musikens anda, lika väl som musiken själv på grund av sin oinskränkthet inte behöver bilden och begreppet, men däremot tillåter dem bredvid sig själv.”
41-42: “Musikens världssymbolik kan därför aldrig på något vis skildras uttömmande med språkets hjälp, eftersom den symboliskt berör urmotsättningen och ursmärtan i det ur-enas kärna, och alltså symboliserar en sfär som finns ovan alla framträdanden och före alla framträdanden.”

105: “Så lösgörs vi från det dionysiskt generella genom det apolliniska och vi entusiasmeras för individerna; det är dessa som fängslar våra känslor av medlidande och som tillfredsställer vårt sinne för skönhet i stora och sublima former; det visar oss bilder av livet och lockar oss att förstå med tanken den livskärna som finns i dem.”

56: “Apollon vill bringa lugn och ro till individerna just genom att dra gränslinjer mellan dem och genom att ständigt påminna om dem såsom heliga lagar för världen med kraven på självkännedom och måttfullhet. Men för att inte denna apolliniska tendens skulle frysa formen till egyptisk stelhet och kyla, för att inte havets rörelse skulle avstanna genom ansträngningen att föreskriva varje våg dess bana och revir, förstörde då och då den höga dionysiska flodvågen dessa små cirklar vilka den ensidigt apolliniska ‘viljan’ ville tvinga hellenerna in i.”

24: “man kunde till och med karakterisera Apollon som en härlig gudabild av principium individuationis /…/
när denna principium individuationis bryts, så får vi en inblick i det dionysiskas väsen, som vi bäst kan närma oss genom analogin med ruset. Dessa dionysiska impulser, varvid det subjektiva stegras till fullständig glömska av det egna jaget, vaknar antingen genom bruket av narkotiska drycker, varom alla primitiva människor och folk talar i sina hymner, eller genom vårens mäktiga ankomst, som lustfyllt genomtränger hela naturen.”
25: “Nu är slaven en fri man, nu brister alla stela, fientliga begränsningar som nöd, godtycke eller ‘fräcka moden’ uppställt mellan människorna. /…/ Sjungande och dansande visar sig människan som medlem av en högre gemenskap: hon har glömt hur man går och talar och är nära att dansande sväva i luften.”

84: “först genom musikens anda förstår vi glädjen i individens utplåning. /…/ ‘Vi tror på det eviga livet’ ropar tragedin; medan musiken är den oförmedlade idén om detta liv. Skulpturkonsten har ett helt annat syfte: här övervinner Apollon individens lidande genom ett lysande förhärligande av det eviga i företeelsen, här segrar skönheten över livets inneboende lidande, smärtan så att säga ljugs bort ur naturens drag. /…/
Även den dionysiska konsten vill övertyga oss om den eviga lusten att existera: men vi skall inte söka denna lust i företeelserna, utan bakom dem.”

58: “tragedins mysterielära: den grundläggande insikten om allt existerandes enhet, synen på individuationen som det ondas djupaste orsak, konsten som den glada förhoppningen att individuationens förbannelse går att bryta, såsom aningen om en återställd enhet.”

84-85: “Under korta ögonblick är vi verkligen urväsendet självt och känner dess obändiga existensbehov och existenslust; nu förefaller striden, kvalen, utplånandet av företeelserna såsom nödvändig, genom övermåttet på otaliga existensformer, som trängtar och pockar på att leva, tack vare världsviljans översvallande fruktbarhet; vi genomborras av dessa kvals rasande gadd i samma ögonblick som vi så att säga blivit ett med den omätliga lusten att existera och då vi i dionysisk hänryckning anar det oförstörbara och eviga i denna lust. Trots fruktan och medlidande är vi de lyckligt levande, inte som individer, utan som det levande enda, med vars lust att alstra vi smultit samman.”

45-46: “Förtrollningen i det dionysiska tillståndet, med dess utplånande av tillvarons vanliga skrankor och gränser, innehåller nämligen medan det varar ett letargiskt element, vari alla tidigare personliga upplevelser sjunker ner. Genom denna klyfta av glömska skiljs den alldagliga världen från den dionysiska verkligheten. Men så snart denna alldagliga verklighet åter blir medveten, är det med en känsla av äckel; en asketisk, viljenegerande stämning är en frukt av det nämnda tillståndet. I denna mening har den dionysiska människan en likhet med Hamlet: båda har en gång fått en sann inblick i tingens väsen, de har förstått, och de äcklas av att handla; ty deras handling kan ingenting ändra i tingens väsen, de upplever det som skrattretande eller förnedrande att de förmodas återupprätta världen, som lossnat i fogarna. Förståelsen dödar handlandet, för att handla måste man vara insvept i en illusion – det är Hamlets lära, och inte den lättköpta klokskapen hos Hans Drömmaren, som reflekterar för mycket och aldrig kommer fram till handlandet på grund av ett överflöd på möjligheter; inte reflexionen, nej! – den sanna kunskapen, inblicken i den hemska sanningen väger tyngre än varje motiv till handling, hos Hamlet lika väl som hos den dionysiska människan. Nu hjälper ingen tröst längre, längtan sträcker sig över världen efter döden, över själva gudarna, och tillvaron, inklusive dess glittrande återspegling i gudavärlden eller i ett odödligt hinsides, förnekas. Medveten om den en gång skådade sanningen ser människan överallt bara det hemska eller absurda i tillvaron, nu förstår hon symboliken i Ofelias öde, nu uppfattar hon skogsguden Silenos visdom: hon äcklas.”

102: “Man kan nämligen alltid, vid varje betydande spridning av dionysiska impulser, iaktta hur det dionysiska lösgörandet från individens bojor först och främst märks genom en ända till likgiltighet, ja, fientlighet stegrad bortträngning av de politiska instinkterna, liksom å andra sidan den statsbildande Apollon också är genius för principium individuationis, och stat och hembygdskänsla kan inte leva utan ett bejakande av den individuella personligheten. Från orgiasmen leder bara en väg för ett folk, vägen till den indiska buddismen, /…/ Med samma nödvändighet råkar ett folk, som utgår från de politiska drifternas obetingade betydelse, in i en bana av ytterligt förvärldsligande, vars mest storartade, men också mest förskräckande uttryck är romarnas imperium.”

46: “Här, när viljan är som mest hotad, närmar sig konsten som en räddande, läkekunnig förtrollerska; endast hon förmår böja dessa äckeltankar om tillvarons hemskhet och absurditet till föreställningar som går att leva med: dessa är de sublima, såsom ett konstnärligt bemästrande av det hemska, och de komiska, såsom en konstnärlig urladdning från absurditetens äckel.”

85: “Scenernas utformning och de åskådliga bilderna uppenbara en djupare visdom än vad diktaren själv formulerar i ord och begrepp: samma sak kan också observeras hos Shakespeare, vars Hamlet exempelvis på liknande sätt talar ytligare än han handlar, så att förut nämnda insikter om Hamlet inte kan hämtas ur orden, utan ur ett fördjupat beskådande och överskådande av helheten.”

102-103: “Placerade mellan Indien och Rom och tvingade till ett förföriskt val, lyckades grekerna att i klassisk renhet uppfinna ytterligare en tredje form, visserligen inte för långvarigt eget bruk, men just därför odödlig. /…/ tragedin, som rörde, renade och frigjorde ett helt folks liv; /…/ som den styrande medlaren mellan de starkaste och i sig ödesdigra egenskaperna hos folket.
Tragedin absorberar musikens högsta orgiasm, så att den rentav bringar musiken till fulländning.”

49: “Vi kan nu, med denna kunskap, förstå den grekiska tragedin som en dionysisk kör som ständigt på nytt frigör en apollinisk bildvärld.”

65: “Tragedins verkan berodde aldrig på den episka spänningen, på den lockande ovissheten om vad som skall hända nu och sedan: däremot på de stora retorisk-lyriska scener då huvudpersonens passion och dialektik sväller till en bred och mäktig flod. Allt förberedde för patos, inte för handling: och det som inte förberedde för patos, ansågs vara förkastligt.”

95: “Operan har framfötts av den teoretiska människan, den kritiske lekmannen, inte av konstnären: ett av de egendomligaste förhållandena i konstarternas historia. Det var de i grunden omusikaliska åhörarnas krav att man måste förstå orden /…/ Ty orden vore mycket ädlare än det beledsagande harmonisystemet, lika mycket som själen är ädlare än kroppen. /…/ Eftersom hon inte anar något om musikens dionysiska djup, /…/ tvingar hon maskinister och dekorationsmålare i sin tjänst; eftersom hon inte kan förstå konstnärens sanna natur frammanar hon den ‘konstnärliga urmänniskan’ enligt sin smak, dvs. en människa som sjunger och talar i verser när hon är passionerad. /…/ Operan förutsätter en falsk uppfattning om den konstnärliga processen, nämligen den idylliska uppfattningen att egentligen varje kännande människa är konstnär. Med en sådan uppfattning blir operan ett uttryck för lekmannaskap inom konsten, vilket dikterar sina lagar med den teoretiska människans glada optimism.”

62: “Nu är emellertid ‘publik’ bara ett ord och absolut ingen likformig och bestående storhet. Varför skulle konstnären känna sig förpliktad att anpassa sig till en kraft, vars styrka bara ligger i antalet?”

73-74: “vem kan ta miste på det optimistiska elementet i dialektikens väsen, där varje slutledning firas med jubel och som bara kan andas i kylig klarhet och sinnesnärvari: när en gång det optimistiska elementet trängt in i tragedin överlagrar det efter hand de dionysiska regionerna och driver dem till självförstörelse – ända till dödssprånget in i det borgerliga dramat.”
74: “Den optimistiska dialektiken driver med sina syllogismers gisselslag musiken ur tragedin: den förstör alltså tragedins väsen, som bara kan tolkas som en manifestation och bildsättning av dionysiska tillstånd, som synlig symbolisering av musiken, som det dionysiska rusets drömvärld.”

79: “Emellertid rusar vetenskapen, sporrad av sin starka illusion, oupphörligt mot sina gränser där dess optimism, förborgad i logikens väsen, havererar. Ty vetenskapens omkrets har en periferi med oändligt många punkter, och det går inte att förstå hur hela omkretsen någonsin skall kunna beskrivas, men varje ädel och begåvad människa möter, innan hon nått mitten av sin bana, oundvikligen sådana gränspunkter på periferin, där hon stirrar in i det oförklarliga. När hon här till sin förskräckelse ser hur logiken vid dessa gränser kröker sig och till slut biter sig i svensan – då bryter den nya kunskapsformen fram, den tragiska kunskapen, som behöver konsten som skydd och botemedel redan för att uthärdas.”

86: “en evig strid mellan den teoretiska och den tragiska världssynen; och först sedan vetenskapens anda drivits till sin gräns, och des anspråk på universell giltighet utplånats genom påvisandet av dessa gränser, kan man hoppas på en återfödelse av tragedin”.

89: “Somliga fängslas av den sokratiska kunskapslusten och illusionen att därigenom kunna läka tillvarons eviga sår, andra bedåras av konstens förföriska skönhetsslöja som vajar framför ögonen, åter andra av den metafysiska trösten att det eviga livet oförstörbart flyter vidare bakom företeelsernas virvel: för att inte tala om de enklare och nästan ännu starkare illusioner som viljan ständigt håller i beredskap. /…/ Av sådana lockmedel består allt vad vi kallar kultur: allt efter blandningens proportioner har vi en företrädesvis sokratisk eller konstnärlig eller tragisk kultur; eller om man tillåter en historisk exemplifiering: det finns antingen en alexandrinsk eller en hellensk eller en indisk (bramansk) kultur.
Hela vår moderna värld är fångad i den alexandrinska kulturens nät och har som ideal den teoretiska människan“.
90: “Alla våra medel för uppfostran har ursprungligen detta ideal för ögonen: varje annan existens måste mödosamt kämpa sig fram såsom en tillåten men inte avsedd existens. /…/ För en äkta grek måste Faust ha förefallit obegriplig. /…/
Man bör observera: den alexandrinska kulturen behöver en klass av slavar för att i längden kunna existera: men den förnekar, i sin optimistiska syn på tillvaron, nödvändigheten av en sådan klass och går därför efter hand mot en grym utplåning, när effekten av dess vackra förförande och lugnande ord om ‘människans värdighet’ och ‘arbetets värdighet’ förbrukats.”

88: “Allra tydligast visar sig den nya odionysiska andan i de nyare dramernas slut. /…/ Nu, när musikens genius flytt från tragedin, är strängt taget tragedin död: ty var skulle man nu kunna hämta den metafysiska trösten? Man sökte därför en jordisk lösning på den tragiska dissonansen; hjälten, sedan han plågats tillräckligt av ödet, skördade en välförtjänt lön genom ett ståtligt bröllop eller gudomliga ärebetygelser. /…/ Jag vill inte påstå att den tragiska världssynen förstördes överallt och helt och hållet genom den framträngande odionysiska andan: vi vet bara att den måste fly från konsten till underjorden, till urartning, till hemlig kult.”

101-102: “Tragedin finns mitt i detta överflöd av liv, lidande och lust, i upphöjd hänförelse, lyssnande till en fjärran svårmodig sång – som berättar om varats mödrar, vilkas namn lyder: villfarelse, vilja, smärta. – Ja, mina vänner, tro med mig på det dionysiska livet och på tragedins återfödelse. Den sokratiska människans tid är förbi: bekransa er med murgröna, ta tyrsosstaven i handen och förundras inte om tiger och panter smeksamt lägger sig vid edra knän. Våga nu bara att vara tragiska människor: ty ni skall befrias.”

Philip Auslander on “rock ideology” and authenticity

Auslander, Philip (1999): Liveness. Performance in a mediatized culture
Routledge, London/New York

70: “The concept of rock authenticity is linked with the romantic bent of rock culture, in which rock music is imagined to be truly expressive of the artists’ souls and psyches, and as necessarily politically and culturally oppositional. /…/
the fact that the criteria for rock authenticity are imaginary has never prevented them from functioning in a very real way for rock fans.”

95: “As I have argued, rock authenticity resides in a dialectical relationship between recording and live performance.”
83: “rock ideology, itself a product of the age of mechanical reproduction, is a form of contemporary perception that allows its adherents to experience mass-produced objects as auratic through the process of authentication.”
76-77: “Live performance contributes to the process of authentication in two crucial ways. First, to be considered an authentic rocker, a musician must have a history as a live performer, as someone who has paid those dues and whose current visibility is the result of earlier popularity with a local following. Pursuing rock’s traditional career path, musicians must first establish themselves and find an audience through live performance; musicians are chosen to record by industry scouts on the basis of live performances.”
82: “Listeners steeped in rock ideology are tolerant of studio manipulation only to the extent that they know or believe that the resulting sound can be reproduced on stage by the same performers.”

71: “rock ideology is conservative: authenticity is often located in current music’s relationship to an earlier, ‘purer’ moment in a mythic history of the music.”
67-68: “The name most frequently used for rock’s Other is ‘pop’.”

84-85: “In the case of rock ideology, the aura must be seen as existing between the recording and the live performance. The aura is located in a dialectical relation between two cultural objects – the recording and the live performance – rather than perceived as a property inherent in a single object, and it is from this relation of mutuality that both objects derive their authenticity.”

72: “Synthesizers, once seen not as musical instruments but as machines that had no place in rock, have come to be seen as just another form of keyboard instrument. The computer keyboard has yet to be assimilated in quite the same way, though that process has begun.”

Hamlet, han hajade…

“Förtrollningen i det dionysiska tillståndet, med dess utplånande av tillvarons vanliga skrankor och gränser, innehåller nämligen medan det varar ett letargiskt element, vari alla tidigare personliga upplevelser sjunker ner. Genom denna klyfta av glömska skiljs den alldagliga världen från den dionysiska verkligheten. Men så snart denna alldagliga verklighet åter blir medveten, är det med en känsla av äckel; en asketisk, viljenegerande stämning är en frukt av det nämnda tillståndet. I denna mening har den dionysiska människan en likhet med Hamlet: båda har en gång fått en sann inblick i tingens väsen, de har förstått, och de äcklas av att handla; ty deras handling kan ingenting ändra i tingens väsen, de upplever det som skrattretande eller förnedrande att de förmodas återupprätta världen, som lossnat i fogarna. Förståelsen dödar handlandet, för att handla måste man vara insvept i en illusion – det är Hamlets lära, och inte den lättköpta klokskapen hos Hans Drömmaren, som reflekterar för mycket och aldrig kommer fram till handlandet på grund av ett överflöd på möjligheter; inte reflexionen, nej! – den sanna kunskapen, inblicken i den hemska sanningen väger tyngre än varje motiv till handling, hos Hamlet lika väl som hos den dionysiska människan. Nu hjälper ingen tröst längre, längtan sträcker sig över världen efter döden, över själva gudarna, och tillvaron, inklusive dess glittrande återspegling i gudavärlden eller i ett odödligt hinsides, förnekas. Medveten om den en gång skådade sanningen ser människan överallt bara det hemska eller absurda i tillvaron, nu förstår hon symboliken i Ofelias öde, nu uppfattar hon skogsguden Silenos visdom: hon äcklas.

Här, när viljan är som mest hotad, närmar sig konsten som en räddande, läkekunnig förtrollerska; endast hon förmår böja dessa äckeltankar om tillvarons hemskhet och absurditet till föreställningar som går att leva med: dessa är de sublima, såsom ett konstnärligt bemästrande av det hemska, och de komiska, såsom en konstnärlig urladdning från absurditetens äckel.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1872): ur Tragedins födelse ur musikens anda, kap. 7

Nietzsche om “inspiration”

155.
Tro på inspiration. – Konstnärer har ett intresse av att man tror på deras plötsliga ingivelser, den så kallade inspirationen; som om idén till ett konst- eller diktverk, grundtanken i en filosofi slagit ner som en nådablixt från himlen. I verkligheten producerar en god konstnärs eller tänkares fantasi oavbrutet: bra, medelmåttigt eller dåligt, men hans urskillningsförmåga, högeligen skärpt och utövad, vrakar, väljer, kombinerar; så som man nu ser av Beethovens anteckningsböcker att han fogat samman sina härligaste melodier av ståstumpar och på sätt och vis gallrat fram dem ur många olika ansatser. Den som sovrar mindre strängt och litar på sitt efterbildande minne kan väl under vissa omständigheter bli en stor improvisatör; men konstnärlig improvisation står lågt i förhållande till en med allvar och möda framsiktad konstnärlig tanke. Alla stora konstnärer har varit stora arbetare, outtröttliga inte bara i fråga om att hitta på utan också när det gällt att stryka, sovra, omgestalta, ordna.

156.
Inspirationen än en gång. – När produktionsförmågan någon tid dämts upp och hindrats i sitt utflöde av någon hämning, utgjuter den sig till slut så plötsligt som bevittnade man här en ingivelse utan föregående arbete, alltså ett mirakel. Det är den bekanta illusion som alla konstnärer som sagt är lite för intresserade av att vidmakthålla. Kapitalet har bara just ackumulerats, det har inte plötsligt fallit ner från himlen. För övrigt finns även på andra områden exempel på sådan skenbar improvisation, exempelvis på godhetens, dygdens eller lastens områden.

Ur Mänskligt, alltförmänskligt, första boken.

Anna-Lena Carlsson about Nietzsche and creativity

Anna-Lena Carlsson: “…Is it hunger or superabundance that has become creative?” Nietzsche on creativity in art & life
(Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in aesthetics,
presented at Uppsala University, 2005)

246: “If we were to talk about Nietzsche’s aesthetics, it is aesthetics from the perspective of the creator. /…/
According to Nietzsche, human beings are fundamentally artistic, down to the level of the creation of language and the truths. He thereby uses the terms ‘art’ and ‘artistic’ both in a narrow and in a broader sense.”

71: “In ‘On Truth and Lying’, Nietzsche speaks of a broader sense of the artistic. He argues that human beings are artistically creative ['künstlerisch schaffend'] and regards an impulse to image-making as being fundamental to language and our existence in the world.”
73: “Nietzsche writes of a ‘mysterious x and indicates how we act as if we have access to the thing-in-itself when we designate objects. /…/ The thing-in-itself is incomprenhensible to human beings, according to Nietzsche. He has turned away from his early artistic metaphysics and he no longer argues in favour of a possibility of gaining access to the sphere of things-in-themselves.”
76: “To sustain a certain society, existence is ordered into a forgetfulness of our fundamental artistic creativity. /…/ this creativity is forgotten – and thereby denied – according to Nietzsche /…/ Nietzsche thereby expresses an order of rank among human creations in the essay; everything is not equally valued as artistically creative.”

83-84n55: “He continues [in Human, all too human] ‘for he who does not have two thirds of his day to himself is a slave, let him be what he may otherwise: statesman, businessman, official, scholar’. This is a defence of a certain kind of idleness [Müssiggehen] /…/ that means being true to oneself in a more profound way, not just in a simple suspension from external demands. /…/ Nietzsche’s notion of a ‘higher culture’ is related to ‘true leisure’. This is seen, for instance, when he writes that a higher culture can only come into existence where there are two different castes in society: The cast compelled to work and the cast that works if it wants to work. /…/ The notion of work and leisure is moreover related to the capacity of suffering and being sensible. /…/ Nietzsche writes: ‘In a better ordering of society the heavy work and exigencies of life will be apportioned to him who suffers least as a consequence of them, that is to say to the most insensible, and thus step by step up to him who is most sensitive to the most highly sublimated species of suffering and who therefore suffers even when life is alleviated to the greatest degree possible.’”

86: “To ‘create a comfortable life for as many as possible’ is then to be regarded as life-negating, because it does not affirm existence in its whole.”

85: “Morality is a means to preserve society; it wards off a destruction. To be moral is to act according to custom. /…/ We only suffer from new chains, Nietzsche writes, /…/ the fettered spirit does not take its position on grounds of reasons, but out of habit.”

87: “The fettered spirits and their culture are nevertheless triumphant, according to Nietzsche, and they hold out four things to be right: 1) that which possesses duration; 2) things that are not inconvenient; 3) everything that brings them advantage; 4) and all things for which they have made a sacrifice.”

105: “It is important to note that there is no fundamental distinction between the master and the slave of morality. Although Nietzsche writes of these two types as being two different historical types of existence; their powers are not opposites but are considered as being a difference in degree. Both want to increase their power, but the slave is hindered in his activity by a stronger force, and turns his attempt at increasing in power elsewhere.”

98: “The advocates of old values or those who destroy old values without creating new values belong to forms of lives that ought to be overcome.”
118-119: “To affirm life as the will to power is to affirm one’s own increase in strength. It is self-mastery, a creation of one’s own rules, one’s own path and existence in the world. /…/
A strong will excludes, selects and orders a multitude of forces into rank. /…/ It is in association with the will to power and life-affirmation that we must also consider the question of the eternal recurrence ['die ewige Wiederkehr'].”
121: “I interpret the eternal recurrence as Nietzsche’s attempt to express the pathos od a future type of existence; to express the pathos of the being that has overcome contemporary man and nihilism – the pathos of the overman.”

109: “When Nietzsche writes favourably about morals, he focuses on the individual and associates morals with an affirmation of life as hierarchical. There is an order of rank, he writes, between moralities and between human beings.”
246: “To affirm life is to affirm existence as creative, but also as destructive and hierarchical. /…/ In his early writings, this is described in metaphysical terms whereas in his later writings it is described in physiological terms.”
117: “If existence is affirmed as destructive and creative, one also affirms that equality is not the fundamental principle of society. /…/ Life itself is ‘essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppresion, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, explosion’. The order of the world and life is hierarchical, because life (as the will to power) is hierarchical.”
192: “Nietzsche asks: ‘Is living not valuating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different?’ To want to live according to nature is to be an actor and self-deceiver.”

124: “Nietzsche writes of an active and a passive nihilism: ‘Nihilism. It is ambiguous: A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and ecession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.”
125: “Vattimo underlines this difference between passive and active nihilism, where passive nihilism becomes a reactive response in its refusal to accept chaos and annihilation, while active nihilism remains open and affirmative concerning new values. Affirmation, however, is not a creation of active nihilism. Vattime writes:
‘/…/ this [reactive] nihilism has always taken an affirmative appearance since its very purpose is to conceal tha nothingness which lies at the base of all that which is believed to be true, to have value and to subsist as an objective structure.’”
125-126: “Nietzsche writes in a note from Nachlass dated 1887 that it is an exhausted nihilism which no longer fights – the most famous form is Buddhism.”

189: “Nietzsche writes that the overestimation of consciousness is absurd /…/ One can neither capture the qualities of great art by transforming the will to a form of consciousness, nor set out from consciousness and get a grip on the art. Consciousness and language are always related to a Yes-saying or No-saying to existence. /…/ Aesthetic judgements are then to be considered as a mode of existence. When a life-affirming event is given significance, the judgement made is not separated from the ‘judge’ /…/ There is nothing outside the self justifying this Yes-saying. The ’strong’ will affirms itself.”
190: “If a life-affirming utterance about art has an effect, it is not brought about by arguments or rules. It rather imposes itself on the other, if the other affirms life. /…/
To follow one’s own path is not to be confused with a desire to have one’s own path. A striving for originality has nothing to do with this privileged uniqueness. /…/ Magistrates in matters of a life-negating taste also utter their ‘Great art!, ‘Art!’ and ‘Non-art!’, but alienate themselves from their judgements. These ‘judges’ do not walk on their own paths, but rely on something external (arguments, rules, authority, desire for power et cetera) in forming their judgements. /…/ According to Nietzsche, great works of art have more in common with other life-affirming creations (in a broader sense), than with life-negating art, such as the creation of oneself.”

242: “Nietzsche thinks of life-negation as a beautification of life and the world that makes the life-negating type of lives bearable and attractive. This beautification keeps humans within bounds. The construction of an ego, the ‘I’ of thinking, is also taken as an example of a life-prohibiting image.”

211: “Both the ego and the self are creations, but the willing of the self is an affirmation of the whole of our physiological existence. The body, Nietzsche writes, possesses a greater reason than the ‘I’.”
205: “The truth gained through the ‘I’, excluding other forms of reason is only one part of the body. Behind the ‘I’ there is a ’self’ [das Selbst]. As we have also seen, there is a gap between the ‘I’ and the self. According to Nietzsche, we find that human beings should affirm a self, not their thinking. To affirm one’s self, is to affirm one’s own will: ‘Will a self‘, Nietzsche stresses”
206: “When Nietzsche speaks of an affirmation of the self, rather than the affirmation of the ‘I’, our physiological body is consequently also emphasised. The body, he writes, is a greater reason than the reason of the ‘I’. /…/
Zarathustra values that which human beings produce in an affirmation of their whole existence, not that which humans produce only with their thinking.
To emphasise being as becoming, the affirmation of one’s self is a state that threatens binary oppositions, such as that between a real and an apparent world. Along with the abolition of the subject, the real world is also abolished.”
207: “To create one’s own self is to become wiser than artists, Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, because artists stop where art ends while ‘we want to be the poets of our life’. /…/ In this state of being, the need for traditional works of art passes away. If one has enough tragedy and comedy in one’s own company, one keeps away from the theatre.”
208: “Nietzsche’s emphasis on the perspective of creation and organisation also emphasise the possibility of works of art without an artist. /…/ about art as organisation /…/ A work of art without an artist represents a change in Nietzsche’s attitude from the metaphysical artist of the world, in The Birth if Tragedy, to the world as organisation and as a work of art giving birth to itself”

194: “Artistic creativity is crucial for both the life-negating and life-affirming type of existence. /…/ To stress human existence in the world as fundamentally creative, as Nietzsche does, is to stress the repudiations of all values, nihilism.”

176: “one of the beliefs protexting the life-negating artist and his art is that the artist has access to a ‘true truth’, a ‘real reality’ which is expressed in art. This is one of the consequences of elevating the artist as genious. In a life-negating culture, one believes that the work of art is able to convey such truths.”
177-178: “There is, however, also a positive aspect to art in Nietzsche’s time. Firstly, Nietzsche seems to mean that this art is better than no art at all. In Human, all too Human he says that we do not have leisure enough for art. /…/
‘Let us be grateful to it that is has consented to live as it does rather than flee away; but let us also admit to ourselves that an age which shall one day bring back true festivals of joy and freedom will have no use for our art.’
/…/ Art can restore these faded ideas and make different ages and old spirits return. Old emotions are, for a moment, aroused. This is a useful function of art, Nietzsche argues /…/ Without his knowledge, the artist’s task becomes that of making mankind ‘childlike’ and this is regarded both as a glory and a limitation.”

196: “The beautiful does not exist. /…/ That which is regarded as beautiful in a community, depends on what type of existence is triumphant in the world.”

2: “Some commentators associate current aestheticization processes with Nietzsche’s broadened sense of art and the artistic.”
3: “I soon came to believe, however, that the processes of aestheticisation spoken of today originated in an aesthetic paradigm that Nietzsche opposes. This is a paradigm that has come to associate aesthetics with the perspective of the receiver of art, while Nietzsche emphasizes the perspective of the creator.”

191: “In the aestheticism of Wilde, life itself becomes a work of art.
Nietzsche indeed also links art and life, although he does not link life to an already established notion of art. Instead, he criticises the aesthetic paradigm and emphasises artistic creativity in and outside the realm of art. This artistry is far from being disinterested and its prime concern is not beauty. Our aesthetics up to now, he writes, has been an aesthetics of the receivers of art; ‘the receivers of art have formulated their experience of “what is beautiful?” In all philosophy hitherto the artist is lacking.’ The last sentence is important: the artist is lacking in all philosophy so far.”
210: “Nietzsche’s suggestion of humans’ self-creation and the future overman has little to do with the aesthetic paradigm taken to its extreme in aestheticism, of the disinterestedness and beautification of life according to Oscar Wilde.”

243: “I believe that the processes of aestheticization spoken of today have their roots in an aesthetic paradigm that Nietzsche opposes. This is a paradigm that has come to associate aesthetics with sensory perception and the receiver of art (in a broader sense), while Nietzsche emphasises the perspective of the creator.”

4n: “Hegel writes that aesthetics ["Ästhetik"] designates the science of the senses [des Sinnes], of perception [des Empfindens]“

5: “My thesis is that there is a two-fold type of art and the artistic in Nietzsche’s writing. Nietzsche emphasises the perspective of production and asks: Has hunger or superabundance ["der Überfluss"] become creative? That is: Has life-affirmation or life-negation become creative?”
241: “Life-affirming art is made out of the artist’s own abundance; it is the result of an overflowing into a new creation. This art does not originate from the conscious intentions of the artist or from conformity to pre-established standards. /…/ The beholder of this art is physiologically stimulated; he is strengthened in his life.”

180: “Great art should be what we give away in an overflow, not something that is created and received because of a need for relief, security, and beauty. A conscious desire to create art is not favoured by Nietzsche, because the existence of great art does not have its origin in this desire. In Human, all too Human he writes: ‘I intend never again to read an author of whom it is apparent that he wanted to produce a book: but only those whose thoughts unintentionally became a book.’ /…/
Nietzsche says that creativity consists in the artists’ (or thinkers’) highly sharpened and practised power of judgement which rejects, selects and joins together.”
181: “The artist has practised and sharpened his power of judgement into a sharpness of the senses and a feeling of enhanced power when he chooses, discards, and creates new constellations. His art does not represent anything, it adds to the world of phenomena. In this creation he too, by necessity, destroys established images. /…/ Concerning art, Nietzsche emphasises the creative, organising process. This approach is in itself a critique of the existing aesthetic paradigm, of the emphasis on the receiver of art.”
185: “Great art in Nietzsche’s thinking, as we have seen, cannot serve as a standard for someone else to follow. What we can learn from the artist, he writes in The Gay Science, is their kind of creativity.”

11: “The concept ‘artist’ is sometimes used as a word of abuse, regarding someone who negates life. Sometimes it is the highest praise of someone who lives in life-affirmation. Another concept Nietzsche uses in a two-fold sense is ‘philosopher’.”
185-186: “Nietzsche argues [in HH]: ‘One man wants to enjoy his own nature by means of art, another wants with its aid to get above from his nature for a time. In accordance with both needs there exists a two-fold species of art and artist.’”
186: “there are two kinds of sufferers, those who suffer from an abundance of life and those who suffer from an impoverishment of life. The former kind wants Dionysian art, the latter seeks redemption from themselves through art. Life-denying art appeals to life-denying lives and liffe-affirming art corresponds to life-affirming beings. /…/
Art is created out of a surplus of life and it is only experienced by another ‘Yes-sayer’ to existence.”
35: “Life-affirmation is now regarded as an immanent justification of existence, in no need of any kind of external justification. Life-negation depends on something external for its justification of existence – such as God.”

187: “The superabundance of creativity is involved in both the perception and creation of an object. There are certain beings incapable of producing and responding to great art. /…/
judgements have nothing to do with understanding /…/
What happens when a life-denying existence is confronted with life-affirming art? Nietzsche answers that they ‘would interpret their own value feelings into it’.
In the correspondence between art and life, Nietzsche opposes the strict division between the artist, the beholder of art, and the work of art.”
188: “The physiological correspondence between the artist, the work, and the beholder of art levels out a hierarchy among them, which can be regarded as a critique of the cult of the geniusm of the autonomy of the work of art, and of the disinterested contemplative beholder of art. /…/ The beholder is therefore /…/ active in the participation of both the creative process and the work of art.”

224: “When [Wolfgang] Welsch writes that Nietzsche’s views on the aesthetic constitution of reality have become commonplace /…/ – he does not recognise the difference between a life-affirming and a life-negating structuring of reality. “
234: “Both Wolfgang Welsch and Richard Shusterman acknowledge an all-embracing notion of creativity, as did Nietzsche. Both of them refer to Nietzsche’s writings in their attempt to broaden the field of the aesthetic, but in contrast to Nietzsche they do not distinguish between a life-affirming and a life-negating type of artistic creativity. This is evident, for example, when Shusterman regards Oscar Wilde’s ‘life itself is an art’ as a ‘Nietzschean maxim’. /…/ Welsch and Shusterman do not acknowledge Nietzsche’s affirmation of an order of rank. Instead, they hold that this coexisting plurality of aesthetic phenomena is democratic.”
238: “An acknowledgement of the hierarchical character of life as the will to power, however, eliminates an interpretation of Nietzsche as a philosopher who affirms plurality without any order of rank.”

199: “Nietzsche asks: How does the subjective become an aesthetic phenomenon? He finds the answer in a certain ‘musical mood‘ which is prior to the actual act of creation. The ’subjective’ poet, as a Dionysian artist, first has to become united with the ‘primordial unity’, he then has to produce its image as music. /…/
Nietzsche writes that subject and object, as well as doer and deed, are constructions. This is expressed, for example, in a note from Nachlass dated 1888: ‘Subject, object, a doer added to the doing, the doing separated from that which it does: let us not forget that this is mere semiotics and nothing real.’”

40: “the Apollonian, this is characterised as an acknowledgment of human beings as artistically creative in their production of ‘beatutiful illusions’ /…/ a plastic energy forming a harmonious whole.”
41: “The Apollonian also forms individuality. /…/ Apollo is the image of principium individuationis“
43: “The Olympian world is produced through the Apollonian tendency, which made it possible for human beings to live with the terror and horror they knew from existence.”
45: “Apollonian culture indeed affirms life as artistically creative in its affirmation of illusions, but it attempts to exclude pain and contradictions within existence, inasmuch as pain and contradictions are hostile to individuality.”

46: “In the Dionysian emption, ‘everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness [Selbstvergessenheit]‘ This ’self-forgetfullness’ is to be understood in relation to the Apollonian ‘know thyself’.”
47: “Although Dionysian music touches the essence of things, it is significant to note that Nietzsche does not consider music as the will in itself. /…/ Music precedes other formations and creations – such as words and concepts – because it is more closely related to the universal ‘primal unity’ ['das Ur-Eine'].”

189: “a kind of music which has forgotten the world and speaks to itself, of itself, while disregarding the hearers’ and listeners’ effects and failures. He regards it as ‘innocent, as opposed to ‘guilty’ music in need of justification and explanation. Nietzsche generally dislikes verbal explanations of great art.”

62: “There is a difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche regarding their respective views on what constitutes the veil of illusion. Nietzsche makes a distinction between the artistic Apollonian and the inartistic theoretical, or Socratic, world of illusion. Nietzsche uses the word ‘artistic’ as an indication of something highly values and ‘inartistic’ as a sign of something of low value. The inartistic veil of illusion is indeed artistically produced, as we shall see later, although it denies itself as such a creation.”

49: “We may now say that the Dionysian brings a fuller view of existence into Apollonian culture and art. The Dionysian affirms the whole of existence. I regard this as an artistic life-affirming alternative in The Birth of Tragedy, in the sense that the Apollonian-formed Dionysian state affirms the whole of existence.
One might also say that the Apollonian relieves existence of the suffering associated with the Dionysian.”

53: “We have three types of culture: a dominant theoretical culture, an artistic one and a tragic culture. Although Nietzsche seems to distinguish between an Apollonian artistic culture and a Dionysian tragic one here, we must keep in mind that the Dionysian tragic culture must always be Apollonian formed and hence artistic as well as tragic.”

Complementarity and performance

Simon Jones, 2003: The Courage of Complementarity
(On the phase-transitional problems of the paradigm shift in performance studies provoked by Practice-as-research.)

performance itself re-minds us in the academy that objects, even those of study, do not really exist, what we call things being relatively slower events than what we call events, hence empiric reality is an illusion

…

an event in the world is that which is or is subsequently recognized as phrased. From the outside or before the event, performance is in this commonsense way recognized as separate from other known events in the world. However, during performance, that which most affects us about performance is precisely that which we do not recognize and cannot phrase, that which can only be felt uncannily.

…

After the performance, when we have returned to the everyday world of events, we can write it up as event by phrasing it. This incorporates the experience into discourse and allows that which was felt uncannily to be addressed indirectly. In effect, we write cannily about the uncanny. We come to know performance by way of not knowing. What remains un-phraseable of the performance is essentially a non-event and continues to work uncannily and can only be known by what it is not and only approached as if one were approaching a miracle.

…

As the product of the processes of research is both objectified and fetishized, so the academic performs or disappears. However, in effect, the practitioner-as-researcher has both to perform AND disappear. They have nothing to show for their work the morning after the performance. This disappearance of the research output, its co-called ephemerality, so beautifully described in the writings of Peggy Phelan, is compensated for by a perceived need to be constantly active, constantly performing. As memories are short, the practitioner-as-researcher must constantly perform their own disappearance within the academy.

…

Our greatest challenge is to find ways, and I stress here the plural, /…/ of housing the mix of performative and textual practices alongside each other.

…

We could think of the epistemological difficulties /…/ as analogous to those encountered by physicists in their own attempts to measure the world of quantum mechanics using the experimental machinery developed to demonstrate Classical or Newtonian mechanics. The apora between these realities – the everyday and the quantum – challenged the belief that systems could be finally known through measurement.

…

So, whilst many academics find it acceptable to incorporate certain notions from quantum mechanics, such as the proposition that no observer can stand outside of the event they are observing, that they who only sit and watch affect what’s happening on stage; it is interesting to follow the implications of complementarity a little further. The wave-particle experiment demonstrated that light behaves either as a wave or as a particle depending on the kind of recording device the scientist chooses to use.
…
according to the theories, light cannot behave as both a particle and a wave; the two realities, according to physicists who know, are mutually exclusive. Hence the phrasing of complementarity, that potentially light is both particle and wave, until the scientist, through his choice of measuring device, that is, a particular technology that couples a particular theory with a particular know-how, chooses which reality to materialize.

…

“At the quantum level, the most general physical properties of any system must be expressed in terms of complementary pairs of variables [e.g. momentum & position; energy & time; continuity and discontinuity], each of which can be better defined only at the expense of a corresponding loss in the degree of definition of the other.”
[David BOHM, Quantum Theory, Prentice Hall, London, 1960, p.160]

Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Constituents of a Theory of the Media (1970)

Originally printed in the New Left Review, no. 64, 1970, pp. 13-36.

Potentialities of communication media
“For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participiation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves. Such a use of them would bring the communications media, which up to now have not deserved the name, into their own. In its present form, equipment like television or film does not server communication but prevents it. It allows no reciprocal action between transmitter and receiver /…/
This state of affairs, however, cannot be justified technically. On the contrary. Electronic techniques recognize no contradiction in principle between transmitter and receiver. Every transistor radio is, by the matters of its construction, at the same time a potential transmitter; it can interact with other receivers by circuit reversal. The development from a mere distribution medium to a communications medium is technically not a problem. It is consciously prevented for understandable political reasons. The technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers.”

“The radio wars of the 1950s demonstrated that in the realm of communications, national sovereignty is condemned to wither away. The further development of satellites will deal it the coup the grâce. Quarantine regulations for information, such as were promulgated by Fascism and Stalinism, are only possible today at the cost of deliberate industrial regression.
Example. The Soviet bueraucracy, that is to sat the most widespread and complicated bueraucracy in the world, has to deny itself almost entirely an elementary piece of organizational equipment, the duplicating machine, because this instrument potentially makes everyone a printer. /…/ It is clear that Soviet society has to pay an immense price for the suppression of its own productive resources – clumsy procedures, misinformations, faux frais.”

Against unionist interpretations of media
“There is the danger of underestimating growing conflicts in the media field, of neutralizing them, of interpreting them merely in terms of trade unionism or liberalism, on the lines of traditional labor struggles or as the clash of special interests /…/ An appreciation of this kind does not go far enough and remains bogged down in tactical arguments.”

Contradiction
“the contradiction between the present constitution of the media and their revolutionary potential /…/ leads, subjectively, to a split between a puritanical view of political action and the area of private ‘leisure’; objectively, it leads to a split between politically active groups and subcultural groups.”

Manipulation?
“The New Left of the 1960s has reduced the development of the media to a single concept – that of manipulation. /…/ it now threatens to degenerate into a mere slogan which conceals more than it is able to illuminate /…/
The liberal superstition that in political and social questions there is such a thing as pure, unmanipulated truth seems to enjoy remarkable currency among the socialist Left. It is the unspoken basic premise of the manipulation thesis. /…/
The electronic media do away with cleanliness; they are by their nature ‘dirty’. That is part of their productive power. In terms of structure, they are antisecterian – a further reason why the Left /…/ has little idea what to do with them. The desire for a cleanly defined ‘line’ and for the suppression of ‘deviations’ is anachronistic and now serves only one’s own need for security. /…/
It often seems as if it were precisely because of their progressive potential that the media are felt to be an immense threatening power, because for the first time they present a basic challenge to bourgeois culture”

“At the very beginning of the student revolt, during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the computer was a favorite target for aggression.”

“Manipulation – ethymologically, ‘handling’ – means technical treatment of a given material with a particular goal in mind. /…/
Thus every use of the media presupposes manipulation. /…/ There is no such thing as unmanipulated writing, filming or broadcasting. /…/ A revolutionary plan should not require the manipulators to disappear; on the contrary, it must make everyone a manipulator.”

“An all-too-widely disseminated thesis maintains that present-day capitalism lives by the exploitation of unreal needs. /…/ A socialist movement ought not to denounce these needs, but take then seriously, investigate them, and make them politically productive. /…/
These desires are not – or are not primarily – internalized rules of the game as played by the capitalist system. They have physiological roots and can no longer be suppressed. Consumption as spectacle is – in parody form – the anticipation of a utopian situation. /…/
‘Open spaces’ and ‘free time’ are concepts which corral and neutralize the urgent wishes of the masses.”

“Intellectual property”, producers and consumers
“The new media are oriented toward action, not contemplation; /…/ Their attitude to time is completely opposed to that of bourgeois culture, which aspires to possession, that is, to extension in time, best of all, to eternity. The media produce no objects that can be hoarded and auctioned. They do away completely with ‘intellectual property’ /…/
It is wrong to regard media equipment as mere means of consumption. It is always, in principle, also means of production /…/
The contradiction between producers and consumers is not inherent in the electronic media; on the contrary, it has to be artificially reinforced by economic and administrative measures. /…/
– the prevailing laws for control of the air are anachronistic. They recall the time when the operation of a printing pres was depentent on an imperial license.”

“It has long been clear from apparatus like miniature and 8 mm movie cameras, as well as the tape recorder, which are in actual fact already in the hands of the masses, that the individual, so long as he remains isolated, can become with their help at best an amateur but not a producer. Even so potent a means of production as the shortwave transmitter has been tamed in this way and reduced to a harmless and inconsequential hobby in the hands of scattered radio hams. /…/
Any socialist strategy for the media must, on the contrary, strive to end the isolation of the individual participants from the social learning and production process. /…/ Anyone who expects to be emancipated by technological hardware, or by a system of hardware however structured, is the victim of an obscure belief in progress.”

Georg Lukács as example of a reactionary position
“‘Anything that culture produces’ can, according to Lukács, ‘have real value only if it is in itself valuable, if the creation of each individual product is from the standpoint of its maker and a single, finite proces. It must, however, be a proces conditioned by the human potentialities and capabilities of the creator. The most typical example of such a process is the work of art, where the entire genesis of the work is exklusively the result of the artist’s labor /…/ In highly developed mechanical industry, on the other hand, any connection between the product and the creator is abolished. The human being serves the machine, he adapts to it.’ /…/
These nostalgic backward glances at the landscape of the last century, these reactionary ideals, are already the forerunners of socialist realism, which mercilessy galvanized and then buried those very ‘cultural values’ which Lukács rode out to rescue.”

On the N.Y. avantgarde and McLuhan
“From the Cabaret Voltaire to Andy Warhol’s Factory, /…/ the apolitical have made much more radical progress in dealing with the media than any grouping of the Left. /…/ Today this apolitical avant-garde has found its ventriloquist and prophet in Marshall McLuhan, an author who admittedly lacks any analytical categories for the understanding of social processes, but whose confused books serve as a quarry of undigested observations for the media industry. /…/
This charlatan’s most famous saying – ‘the medium is the message’ – perhaps deserves more attention. In spite of its provocative idiocy, it betrays more than its author knows. /…/
The complementary mistake consists in the widespread illusion that media are neutral instruments by which any ‘messages’ one pleases can be transmitted without regard for their structure or for the structure of the medium. In the East European countries the television newsreaders read fifteen-minute long conference communiqués and Central Committee resolutions which are not even suitable for printing in a newspaper, clearly under the delusion that they might fascinate a public of millions.
The sentence, ‘the medium is the message’, transmits yet another mesage, however, and a much more important one. It tells us that the bourgeoisie does indeed have all possible means at its disposal to communicate something to is, but that it has nothing more to say. /…/ It wants the media as such and to no purpose.
This wish has been shared for decades and given symbolical expression by an artistic avant-garde whose program logically admits only the alternative of negative signals and amorphous noise. Example: the already outdated ‘literature of silence’, Warhol’s films in which every thing can happen at once or nothing at all, and John Cage’s forty-five-minute-long Lecture on Nothing (1959).”

Writing and talking
“Written literature has, historically speaking, played a dominant role for only a few centuries. /…/ Now it is being succeeded by the age of the electronic media, which tend once more to make people speak. /…/
The formalization of written language permits and encourages the repression of opposition. In speech, unresolved contradictions betray themselves by pauses, hesitations, slips of the tongue, repetitions, anacoluthons, quite apart from phrasing, mimicry, gesticulation, pace, and volume. The aesthetic of written literature scorns such involuntary factors as ‘misdirections’. It demands, explicitly or implicitly, the smoothing out of contradictions, rationalization, regularization of the spoken form irrespective of content. /…/
Structurally, the printed book is a medium that operates as a monologue, isolating producer and reader. /…/
None of the characteristics that distinguish written and printed literature apply to the electronic media. Microphone and camera abolish the class character of the mode of production (not of the production itself). /…/
As at present constituted, radio, film, and television are burdened to excess with authoritarian characteristics, the characteristics of the monologue, which they have inherited from older methods of production – and that is no accident. These outworn elements in today’s media aesthetics are demanded by the social relations. They do not follow from the structure of the media. On the contrary, they go against it, for the structure demands interaction.”

Original and reproduction, document and fiction
“In the productions of the consciousness industry, the difference between the ‘genuine’ original and the reproduction disappears /…/ Strictly speaking, it has shrunk to its legal dimensions. A document is something the ‘forging’ – that is, the reproduction – of which is punishable by imprisonment. This definition naturally has no theoretical meaning. The reason is that a reproduction, to the extent that its technical quality is good enough, cannot be distinguished in any way from the original, irrespective of whether it is a painting, a passport, or a blank note. The legal concept of the documentary record is only pragmatically useful, it serves only to protext economic interests.
The productions of the electronic media, by their nature, evade such distinctions as those between documentary and feature films. They are in every case explicitely determined by the given situation. The producer can never pretend, like the traditional novelist, ‘to stand above things’. He is therefore partisan from the start. This fact finds formal expression in his techniques. Cutting, editing, dubbing – these are techniques for conscious manipulation without which the use of the new media is inconceivable. /…/ The material, whether ‘documentary’ or ‘fiction’, is in each case only a prototype, a half-finished article, and the more closely one examines its origins, the more blurred the difference becomes. (Develop more precisely. The reality in which a camera turns up is always faked, e.g. the moon landing.)”