skillnaden mellan måleriets svar på uppfinningen av fotografiet och teaterns svar på uppfinningen av filmen.
/…/
En målare som målade i en rent historisk stil, som om fotografiet aldrig hade uppfunnits, skulle idag närmast ses som löjlig.
Det är snarast en underdrift om jag säger att teaterns svar på filmen inte utvcklade riktigt samma kreativitet eller energi. /…/
Mitt spontana svar blev att eftersom den tidiga filmen var svartvit och stum medan teatern innehöll både färg och dialog kanske hotet inte verkade stort i början. Den senare utvecklingen i form av talfilm och senare färgfilm kanske kom så gradvis att det inte blev någon riktig chock. /…/
Måleriet är grodan som släpps ner i kokande vaten. /…/ Teatern är den långsamt uppvärmda grodan. /…/
Jag vill faktiskt gå så långt som att säga att filmen är teaterns nutida form. /…/ Teatern kommer aldrig bli nutida eftersom den redan, för över hundra år sedan, har ersatts av något mer nutida /…/

Att börja se film och TV som den chock för teaterns grundförutsättninar som de faktiskt är /…/
Vid en jämförelse mellan teatern och filmen kan man snabbt konstatera det uppenbara: en stor styrka för teatern är att publiken och skådespelarna /…/ befinner sig i samma rum. /…/
Deleuze säger: ‘Det moderna faktum är att vi inte längre tror på den här världen. /…/ Det är inte vi som gör filmen, det är världen som påminner om en dålig film.’ /…/ Detta är förstås också den nutida teaterns situation. Att den helt enkelt tycks ‘falsk’, känns mindre verklig än det vi är vana att se på bio eller TV. Just denna känsla av ineffektivitet, patos och overklighet delar teatern med våra förmodat verkliga liv. Eller med andra ord: även teatern liknar ofta en ‘dålig film’.
Jag påstås absolut inte att teatern någonsin kommer att kunna läka detta sår. /…/ Det är obehagligt att titta på en teaterföreställning, eftersom det alltid är obehagligt att befinna sig med okända människor i samma rum /…/
en teatersituation är en skräcksituation: /…/ teaterns feghet är bara andra sidan av medvetandet om att ett rum fullt med främlingar stirrar på en /…/
Givetvis kan man, på den konkreta nivån, säga att det bara handlar om rädslan för att inte behaga publiken, eller för att inte bli förstådd /…/ Men på en subtilare nivå menar jag, tvärtemot vad man kan tro, att det också handlar om en skräck för att allför väl bli förstådd, att få en alltför direkt och intim kontakt, en kontakt som man känner är falsk (eller kanske tom). /…/

Ju mer man försöker hantera denna grundläggande relation mellan skådespelare och publik, desto mer inser man i hur hög grad teatersituationen är okontrollerbar. /…/ Även på den mest konventionella teater fungerar det dock så att alltför mycket kontroll förstör just de aspekter som gör teatern annorlunda än filmen, de aspekter som gör att teatern fortfarande kan vara relevant i vår desperat övermedialiserade värld. /…/
Dessa aspekter går i någon mening aldrig att fånga in, att ‘fånga in’ dem skulle nämligen innebära att på något sätt hålla dem kvar eller spela in dem /…/

Det finns förstås en annan, mer affärsmässig, orsak till att måleriets svar på fotografin var så mycket kraftfullare än teaterns på filmen: bildkonstmarknaden ser helt annordlunda ut än teatermarknaden. En målning köps av en troligen rik individ eller av en institution (som ofta leds av en individ). /…/ Teatern måste sälja många biljetter och måste alltså kunna locka till sig många olika individer. /…/
Om teatern vill förbli en konstform måste den ta problemet med sin egen ständigt ökande irrelevans på allvar och söka möjliga vägar bort från detta gungfly. /…/

Ofta är jag inte säker på om det finns några lösningar. Verklig risk är mycket sällsynt i teatern (liksom i livet).

Jacob Wren: “Världen som liknar en dålig film. Några tankar om teater, risk och feghet”
Visslingar & Rop, 22-23/2007
s. 65-73

Något som alldeles lite har satts i fråga, det är om realism – i teatersammanhang vill säga – är ett användbart begrepp. Realism på teatern är ju något helt annat än i filmen eller i en roman. Det är ju redan fullkomligt orealistiskt att människor ställer sig på en scen och gör något, medan andra sitter framför eller utanför. Det är en viktig faktor hos Beckett, kanske själva grunden för hans dramaturgi: det märkliga i det här förhållandet att folk spelar något på en scen för andra som sitter framför den och tittar på.

/…/

När jag skriver en pjäs och börjar tveka om någon scenanvisning, om huruvida den eller den bör stå på huvudet eller gå på händer eller på alla fyra, då vet jag, om det alltså blir en avgörande fråga, att det är något fel på texten. Så länge texten är so mden skall upplever jag sånt som ointressant; det får bli teaterns sak, eller regissörens, att avgöra om vederbörande ska stå på huvudet eller på händerna. Varje gång något sådant blir ett problem för mig är det något jag har misslyckats med att formulera. Det är min grundövertygelse att litteratur är till för att bjuda teatern motstånd. Det är bara när en text är omöjlig att sätta upp så som teatern nu är beskaffad, som den kan bli produktiv eller intressant för teatern.

/…/

För den enskilde rör den [historien] sig långsammare, i Europa, för oss kanske, subjektivt. Men objektivt går den ju allt fortare, och det blir allt mindre möjligt att ingripa och förändra något. Det leder också till att det egentligen inte längre finns tid för en diskursiv dramaturgi med en omständlig presentation av sakförhållanden. Eftersom man alltid när man börjar berätta en historia slungas in i en process som är snabbare än den kan berättas inom historiens ram, blir förhållandet mellan utförandet och det som berättas ofrånkomligen förryckt. Förryckt i positiv betydelse.

/…/

Jag har ett enda behov när jag skriver: att ösa upp så mycket att folk inte vet var de ska börja, och det tror jag också är det enda riktiga. Frågan är hur teatern ska nå dithän. Hur man upphäver det som t.o.m. Brecht uppfattade som en lag: att presentera en sak i sänder. Idag borde man presentera så många angreppspunkter som möjligt på samma gång, så att folk blir tvungna att välja. Det kan hända att man då blir ur stånd att välja, men man måste i alla fall ganska snabbt bestämma sig för var man ska börja. Det duger helt enkelt inte längre att först ge publiken en viss information och sen säga att nu är det emellertid också så här. Den ska bli översvämmad.

/…/

Brecht menade då att episk teater skulle bli möjlig först när det en gång var slut med den perversitet det är att göra lyx till ett yrke – att bygga en hel teaterform på klyftan mellan salong och scen. Först när den klyftan är överbryggad, åtminstone tendentiellt, blir det möjligt att göra teater med ett minimum av dramaturgi, dvs. nästan utan konventionell dramaturgi. Och det är det det gäller nu: att göra teater utan krampmoment. Jag märker själv när jag går på teater att det blir allt tråkigare att sitta och följa ett sammanhngande handlingsförlopp en hel föreställning igenom. Det intresserar mig egentligen inte längre. När det i stället är så att ett skeende dras igång i öppningsscenen, för att i den följande avlösas av ett helt annat och sen av ett tredje och ett fjärde, då känns det genast bättre och blir mer spännande, även om det då inte längre rör sig om en s.k. välgjord pjäs.

[Horst Laube] Just till det tycker jag att en biljardspelsdramaturgi vore mycket användbar: ett biljardklot rullar ut, stöter till ett annat och blir självt liggande efter att ha fortplantat sin rörelse till det. Det mönster som till slut uppstår är då det som skapats av deras rörelser.

/…/

Vad publiken egentligen längtar efter i teaterväg tycker den inte om. Precis som det för teatern själv finns en klar skillnad mellan framgång och verkan. Det tror jag nästan är en lag. Om det uppstår nån sorts kongruens här, då är det ett krissymptom.

“Litteratur är till för att bjuda teatern motstånd”. Ur Samlade misstag. Intervjuer 1975–1993.
Ursprungligen under titeln “Der Dramatiker und die Geschichte seiner Zeit” i Theater heute årsbok 1975.

(from Hans-Thies Lehmann: Postdramatic theatre)

75: “This procedure of a postdramatic isotony, where peaks or climaxes are avoided, lets the stage apear as a tableau. /…/
In Grübers work, /…/ everything takes place in an atmosphere that could be entitled ‘After all discussions’. There is nothing to debate any more. What is executed and spoken here has the character of a necessary, quasi-ceremonially performed, agreed upon rite.
Drama, as an exemplary form of discussion, stakes everything on tempo, dialectic, debate and solution (dénouement). But for a long time now drama has lied. Its spirit, or rather its ghost, has moved from the theatre into the cinema and increasingly into television. There the possibilities of simulating reality are much greater”.

194n28: [isotony] “From the Freek ‘isotonos’, equally streched, of equal tension or tone. In science used to describe liquids of the same osmotic pressure or concentration of molecules.”

85: “postdramatic theatre is not simply a new kind of text of staging – /…/ it bcomes more presence than representation, more shared than communicated experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse than information.”

101: “in the postdramatic theatre of the real the main point is not the assertion of the real as such (as is the case in the mentioned sensationalist products of the porn industry) but the unsettling that occurs through the indecidability whether one is dealing with reality or fiction. /…/
Theatre is a practice, however, which like no other forces us to realize ‘that there is no firm boundary between the aesthetic and the extra-aesthetic realm’.”

109: “One often feels as though one is witnessing not a scenic representation but a narration of the play presented. Here the theatre is oscillating between extended passages of narration and only interspersed episodes of dialogue”.

112-113: “Scenic essay
/…/ ‘Theoretical’, philosophical or theatre aesthetic texts are dragged out of their familiar abode in the study, university or theatre studies course and presented on stage – by no means without an awareness of the fact that the audience might tend to think that the actors ought to devote themselves to such occupations before the performance. companies and directors use the means of theatre to ‘think aloud’ publicly or to make theoretical prose heard.”

151: “Here one organizational principle can be highlighted that is also peculiar to classical painting: the actors on stage repeatedly behave like spectators watching what other performers are doing.”

90: “Exceeding the norm, just as much as undercutting it, results in what could be described less as a forming than a deforming figuration. Form knows two limits: the wasteland of unseizable extension and labyrinthine chaotic accumulation. Form is situated midway.”

150: “In general it can be said that dramatic theatre has to prefer a ‘medium’ space. Tendentially dangerous to drama are the huge space and the very intimate space. In both cases, the structure of the mirroring is jeopardized.”

171: “This is where the alternative to the electronic image resides: art as a theatrical process that actually preserves the virtual dimension, the dimension of desire and not knowing. Theatre is first of all anthropological, the name for a behaviour (playing, showing oneself, playing roles, gathering, spectating as a virtual or real form of participation), secondly it is a situation, and only then, last of all, is it representation. Media images are – in the first and the last place – nothing but representation. /…/
The body or face in video is enough – for itself and for us. By contrast, an air of (productive) disappointment always surrounds the presence of real bodies. /…/
The electronic image lacks lack, and is consequently leading only to – the next image, in which again nothing ‘disturbs’ or prevents us from enjoying the plenitude of the image.”

173: “Aristotle (and in his wake almost the entire Western theory of the theatre) demands that tragedy has to be a whole with beginning, middle and end. Of course this was a paradoxical concept, since in reality – even in narrated reality – such a ‘beginning’, i.e. something that according to Aristotle has no presuppositions, simply does not exist; and neither does an ‘end’, i.e. something that has no consequences. What Aristotle articulates here, however, in his only seemingly self-evident formula, is nothing but the abstract formula for the law of all representation. The whole with beginning, middle, and end is the frame.”

I am … postponing, for a short time, the exposition of my analysis of anxiety. And yet, that is the crucial analysis that alone can adequately circumscribe the opposition of two political methods; that of fear and the anxious search for a solution … and that of freedom of mind, which issues from the global resources of life, a freedom for which, instantly everything is rich … I insist on the fact that, to freedom of mind, the search for a solution is an exuberance, a superfluity; this gives it an incomparable force. To solve political problems becomes difficult for those who allow anxiety [l'angoisse] alone to pose them. It is necessary for anxiety to pose them. But their solution demands at a certain point the removal of this anxiety.

Werner Hamacher: “Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’
In Andrew E. Benjamin & Peter Osborne (edts): Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience
Routledge, 1994

111: “This more powerful law is the law of historical change and internal structural transformation, dictated by the ambiguity of being both means and end. In connection with this ambiguity, Benjamin speaks of a ‘dialectic’ and its ‘law of oscillation’ (Schwankungsgesetz).”

114: “‘Upon the breaking of this cycle maintained by mythical legal forms’, Benjamin now writes, ‘upon the deposing [Entsetzung] of law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore upon the abolition of state forces, a new historical age is founded’.”

115: “Pure violence does not posit, it ‘deposes’; it is not performative, but afformative.”

116: “Deposing is thus not encompassed by any negation, is not directed toward anything determinate – and therefore is not direted. Deposing could not be the means to an end, yet it would be nothing but means. It would be violence, and pure violence, but therefore entirely non-violent.”

117: [Benjamin writes that] “pure means are never those of direct, but always those of mediated, solutions. They therefore never apply directly to the arbitration of interpersonal conflict, but do so only by way of things. the sphere of pure means unfolds in the most material human realm – conflicts relating to goods. For this reason technique [Technik] in the broadest sense of the word is its most proper domain.”

117: “Language in its mediality is pre-positional, preperformative – and, in this sense, afformative. Even before and even during its performative effects, language does not initially lay the foundation for anything outside itself”.

118: “Language is not a medium that can be measured against ‘an objective state of affairs’ – a standard verifiable independently of this medium and already available outside itself. Rather, language is the articulation of a mediacy prior to any distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ and is therefore not subject to that distinction. /…/ Mediacy is the field of afformation. Whoever speaks is afformed and afforms.”

119: “On Benjamin’s account, the technique of language as pure means (and thereby as pure violence), which enables peaceful agreements and ‘mutual understanding’ independently of any legal order, has its contemporary political ‘analogue’ in the strike, specifically in the proletarian general strike. /…/
Benjamin explicitly refers only to George Sorel’s /…/ distinction between the political and the proletarian general strike.”

120: “For whereas the political general strike is only concerne with inverting the relation of domination, and is still based on the preservation and strenghtening of state violence, the proletarian general strike aims at nothing less than the abolition of the state apparatus and the legal order maintained by it. /…/
the proletarian general strike is pure means, not means to an extortion that would affect modifications in the working conditions, in the distribution of power or the power structure and as such would be violent. Rather, it is a non-violent means of annihilation of legal as well as state violence. /…/
This strike, directed toward the annihilation of state violence by way of suspension of all positing violence – in other words, directed toward nothing – can be described as being without intention.”
120-121: “For Benjamin, the strike is the social, economic, and political event in which nothing happens, no work is done, nothing is produced, and nothing is planned or projected.”

125-126: “Unlike historical-transcendental pragmatics, which are oriented toward historical forms of linguistic and social action, Benjamin’s sketch of a politics of pure means is a theory not of positing, producing and presenting, not of forming and transforming action, but a theory of the abstention from action”.

128n12: “the use of afformative event is to contrast with the use of performative act – implying that afformatives are not a subcategory of performatives. Rather, afformative, or pure, violence is a ‘condition’ for any instrumental, performative violence and, at the same time, a condition which suspends its fulfilment in principle. /…/
The afformative is the allipsis which silently accompanies any act and which may silently interrupt any speech act.”

“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

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.

“The dissociation of the world into two sides is a theme which can be seen in many novels of Murakami. In the novel Dance, Dance, Dance, there is another world on the other side of the wall or in the other hotel. In Hard-boiled Wonderland and the end of the World and Kafka on the Shore, two different parallel stories go on; in one chapter one story, in the next chapter the other one. the other world has the clear implication of a mythological world, the world of Gods and of the dead. The connection to and dissociation from the other side is an important theme in Murakami’s novels. /…/
Something essential is lacking and is probably on the other side. Because of the missing essential, this side is not complete; literature, music, and love are not true. And reality, as such, is not complete. /…/ One can think of this as the cultural complex that Murakami is exploring. /…/
So there is a meaningful but sexless relationship on one side and a meaningless sexual relationship on the other side. This dissociation might be reflected in modern Japanese society where teenaged prostitutes and couples in sexless relationships are often reported.
According to Murakami’s novels it is typical for postmodern consciousness in Japan that there is still a sense of lack and longing for what is lost. /…/ The Japanese soul is still between postmodern consciousness and the list mythological world. This dissociation is possible bevause modern consciousness, in the Western sense, has never been established in Japan. /…/ In many ways, Murakami’s novels and the postmodern consciousness of his characters reflext the emergence of a cultural complex in the Japanese collective psyche. /…/
It is probably a misunderstanding to try to overcome the dissociation and find literal union again. As Jung says, we should not try to overcome the dissociation, but to be thaught by it. /…/
If negation and dissociation are dominant, how can people be connected? In this novel, phone calls and letters are important. In other novels or Murakami, the computer plays an important role. It is not the problem of media to be understood. The point is that there is no directness.”

Toshio Kawai: ‘Postmodern consciousness in the novels of Haruki Murakami’. In The. Cultural Complex, eds. T. Singer & S. Kimbles. London: Routledge. Murakami, H. (2000).

“It was demonstrated in an earlier chapter that the vexed question of Japanese modernity turns on the problem of an inadequately defined subject and subjectivity. /…/
In Nejimakidori, Murakami has utilized three versions or aspects of the sublime in order to deal with the complex issue of referentiality in such a way as to not foreclose new ways of thinking about the subject of/in Japanese modernity. These three versions can be described, in broad terms, as the ‘psychoanalytic sublime’, the ‘historical sublime’ and the ‘political sublime’, and it will be demonstrated that the major narrative strands of Nejimakidori variously employ one or more of these. Each of these versions of the sublime indicates and engagement with the problem of ‘presenting the unpresentable’ as a disjunctive modality of the simultaneous affirmation and negation of the subject, whereby the limits of such subjectivity remain uncertain and tentative.
In narrative terms, these aspects of the sublime are integrated through the discursive trope of irony proposed by White, and assume their apotheosis in the figure of Wataya Noboru, where their threat to subjectivity is expressed in terms of an incommensurability in the modalities of presentation of that which cannot be directly presented – ultimately, that is, in the form of what Lyotard has termed the ‘differend’. /…/
we nevertheless cannot ignore the subject of Japanese modernity in terms of a tendency towards a system of pervasive, ongoing ‘fascism’ in the post-was system of political and economic practices and structures, aptly described by Miyoshi and Harootunian under the rubric of the term ‘emperorism’. Nejimakidori is implicitly concerned with all of these issues, and this fact is justification enough to make it a text worthy of serious critical attention. /…/
The aspects of the sublime with which we will be working in these chapters are based primarily on Kant’s discussion of the sublime /…/, as well as on Hayden White’s ‘historical sublime’ and Lyotard’s re-reading of the Kantian sublime and subsequent invocation of a form of ‘political sublime’. /…/

in our discussion of Nejimakidori we are faced with a consideration of whether it is possible (or indeed desirable) to reconcile three seemingly irreconcilable perspectives on the nature of historu:
(i) History is a recuperable, representable reality which can be spoken and written.
(ii) History is simulacral – it arises merely as an effect of speaking and writing, and is not co-extensive with any referent.
(iii) History inheres only in the unutterable aporia of meaning/sense, arrayed between memory, thought, speech and writing.
Clearly, these competing views on the nature of history are related to the question of subjectivity and Japanese modernity, and turn on the possibility of being able to stipulate history-as-subject, or, alternatively, the subject in/of history. The first proposition incorporates what have been broadly described as ‘reconstructionist’ (empiricist) and ‘constructionist’ (’social theory’) forms of history. The second and third propositions are somewhat complementary, and indicatice of what can be described as a ‘post-structuralist- view of history. /…/

“The opening passage of Nejimakidori, with its cacophony of sound-images – boiling water, whistling, ringing telephone, and radio broadcast – sets a remarkably ‘auditory’ mood for the presented world of the novel. It also helps establish the physicality, the marked corporeality of many of the protagonist’s narrated experiences. /…/
In Nejimakidori, there is no doubt that the focus on the auditory sense broadens the range of interpretative possibilities of the work as fictional art. /…/ The central trope of the mysterious, screeching cry of the unseen ‘wind-up’ bird which marks out ‘individual’ and ‘historical’ time and is often heard by characteers in the in-between state of dreaming and waking, consciousness and unconsciousness, is one of the most obvious examples here, but there are various episodes throughout the novel in which specifically auditory hallucinations and images figure. /…/
In terms of the social dimension, Koizumi suggests that in Nejimakidori Murakami is conducting an original and sustained critique of the hegemony of the visual in contemporary Japanese culture. /…/ stridently ‘anti-mass media’, ‘anti-televisual’ – in short, anti-visual /…/
This critique of the visual exposes the myth of Japan as the ‘information society’ (jôhô shakai) which emerged in the eighties, and is clearly connoted in the figure of the thirty-year-old unemployed Boku whose life is effectively in moratorium mode – he neither watches television nor reads newspapers – and is connected to the outside world only through the auditory modality of the telephone.
In stark contrast to this, claims Koizumi, the figure of Wataya Noboru, the consummate political performer and ‘television man’, violates Kanô Kureta [Kreta Kano] through an ‘act of seeing’ – and this is part of a larger, generalized violence of the visual that permeates and controls every corner of contemporary daily Japanese life. /…/
taking as our starting point the basic fact of the sign as being comprised of an audio-image (signifier) and a visual-image (signified), we are left to ponder the implication of how the privileging of the auditory over the visual might prescribe the range of subject positions available to the reader of Nejimakidori. /…/
Freud acknowledge that although in dreams we do ‘make use of auditory images’, in these non-waking states ‘we think predominantly in visual images’. So there is, in terms of the Freudian system, a clear distinction between the visual and audio in relation to the unconscious. /…/
From this it can be surmised that if we could identify a strong opposition between the audio and the visual as dominant narrative tropes or modalities in Nejimakidori, we could extrapolate from the reading of that text an implied threat to the Lacanian symbolic order, which suggests a movement back to the presymbolic stage of the imaginary and the undifferentiated self-perception of the subject, in a way not dissimilar to – and even indicative of – the moment of the subject just prior to abjection. It will be argued later that this is perhaps one of the effects of the privileging of the auditory: to indicate a potential dissolution of the presented Oedipal configuration in Nejimakidori, constructed around the figure of Wataya Noboru.”

Michael Seats: “Murakami Haruki: The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture”

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.

I. (Fundamental proposition). It is a question of opposing not good to evil but the “moral summit”, which is different from the good, to the “decline”, which has nothing to do with evil and whose necessity determines, on the contrary, the modalities of the good.
The summit responds to excess, to the exuberance of forces. It takes tragic intensity to its limit. It relates to measureless expenditures of energy, to the violation of the integrity of beings. It is therefore closer to evil than to good.
Decline – responding to moments of exhaustion, of fatigue – grants all value to concerns for preserving and enriching the being. Rules of morality result from decline.

/…/

‘communication cannot take place from one full and intact being to another: communication wants being twith their being at stake, places at the limit of death, of nothingness; the moral summit is a moment of risk taking, of the suspension of being beyond itself, at the limit of nothingness.

II. In “communication”, in love, desire has nothingness as its object. It is like this with any “sacrifice”.

/…/

IV. Humans only “communicate” – live – outside of themselves and since they must “communicate”, they must want this evil, this deseceation which, putting the being within themselves at risk, renders them penetrable to one another . . . Thus: all “communication” partakes of suicide and crime . . . In this light, evil appears as a life source!

/…/

Communication, essentialy, wanting being to be overstepped: essentially, what is rejected in evil is concern for the future. /…/

In common judgment, the essence of a moral act is being servile to some utility, to return to the good of some being a movement in which the being aspires to surpass being. In this way, morality is no more than a negation or morality.

If i suppress consideration of the future, I am unable to resist temptation . . . To tell the truth, this state of happy openness is not humanly imaginable. Human nature as such cannot reject its concern for the future /…/

As long as we are animated by a youthful effervescence, we consent to dangerous squandering. But when these forces begin to fail us, . . . when we begin to decline, we become preoccupied . . . with accumulation . . . with enriching ourselves for difficulties yet to come. We act. And action, effort can only have an aquisition of forces as its goal.

/…/

X. We must go further. To formulate such criticism is already to decline. The act of “speaking” of a morality of the summit itself arises from a morality of decline.

/…/

XI. Like Kafka’s Castle, in the end, the summit is nothing but the inaccessible. It slips away from us, at least insofar as we don’t stop being human, speaking. Besides, we cannot oppose the summit to the decline like evil to good. The summit is not “what one must reach”, decline not “what one must abolish”. Just as the summit is, in the end, nothing but the inaccessible, decline is from the very beginning inevitable.
(”The summit is, in essence, the place at the limit where life is impossible.”)

XII. Through history the reasons that a human being might have for going to the summit (the good for the nation, justice, salvation, etc.) have developed. “But the difficulty is to go to the summit without a reason, without a pretext.”
“. . . Every gamle, every ascent, every sacrifice being, like sensual excess, a loss of strength, an expenditure, we must justify our expenditures every time with a promise of gain, be it illusory or not.” Even though a revolutionary action would establish the classless society – beyond which a historical action could no longer arise – it seems that, humanly speaking, the amount of energy produced is always greater than the amount necessary for its production. Hence this perpetual overfull seething og energy – which continually leads us to the summit – constituting the malefic share.

/…/

XIV. (Conclusion). Within hostile and silent nature, what becomes of human autonomy? “Maybe the desire to know has only one meaning: to serve as motive for the desire to question. No doubt knowledge is necessary for the autonomy of that action – by which it transformed the world – procures for humanity. But beyond the conditions of doing, knowledge finally appears as a decoy, when faced with the interrogation that commands it. When this interrogation fails, we laugh. The raptures of exstasy and the fires of Eros are so many questions – without responses – to which we submit nature and our nature. /…/ It is by leaving the interrogation open as an inner wound that I maintain chance, a possible access toward the summit . . .”