Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual

301 Pages·2011·1.06 MB·English

by  Herbert Blau

Reality Principles
3

Reality Principles
From the Absurd to the Virtual
3
Herbert Blau
The Universityof Michigan Press
Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2011
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
c Printed on acid-free paper
2014 2013 2012 2011 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise,
without the written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blau, Herbert.
Reality principles : from the absurd to the virtual / Herbert
Blau.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-472-07151-7 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-
472-05151-9 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Theater—Philosophy. I. Title.
PN2039.B5775 2010
792'.01—dc22 2010047518
ISBN 978-0-472-02790-3 (e-book)
To my son Dick

Contents
Introduction 1
one Relevance: The Shadow of a Magnitude 23
two The Faith-Based Initiative of the Theater of
the Absurd 44
three The Soul-Complex of Strindberg: Suffocation,
Scopophilia, and the Seer 56
four From the Dreamwork of Secession to Orgies
Mysteries Theater 68
five Performing in the Chaosmos: Farts, Follicles,
Mathematics, and Delirium in Deleuze 89
six Seeming, Seeming: The Illusion of Enough 103
seven Who’s There?—Community of the Question 119
eight The Emotional Memory of Directing 133
nine The Commodius Vicus of Beckett: Vicissitudes
of the Arts in the Science of Af›iction 148
ten Among the Deepening Shades: The Beckettian
Moment(um) and the Brechtian Arrest 165
eleven Apnea and True Illusion: Breath(less) in Beckett 182
twelve Art and Crisis: Homeland Security and the
Noble Savage 198
thirteen Ground Zero: The Original Vision
(May 16, 2008) 214
fourteen Blessings to The Pope and the Witch 219
fifteen The Pathos of Dialogue: Unable to Speak a Word 223
sixteen Thinking History, History Thinking 225
seventeen Why “WHATHistory?” 236
eighteen The Human Nature of the Bot 243
nineteen Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness 246
twenty Auto Archive 264
Publication History 275
Index 277

Introduction
3
All of these essays, with one exception, were written just before or
after the millennium, and while they re›ect upon each other, that ear-
lier essay does, not only across the years, but from so long ago that I
might have forgotten what it was about. It would seem to have been an
irrelevance until, working on an autobiography, I happened to read it
again, while remembering the dissident 1960s, spilling into the 70s,
when classrooms were invaded, students were lecturing teachers, and
relevance was a watchword. That my view of it all then, as a rather chas-
tening lesson, is still germane today was con‹rmed by my wife Kath-
leen Woodward, when she was recently asked to contribute to a special
issue of Daedalus, where my essay was published over forty years ago,
after a rather high-powered conference, sponsored by the American
Academy of Arts and Science, “The Future of the Humanities.” That
the future is still in question—and with the economy reeling, the job
market worse than ever—is what Kathy was writing about.1 Much
involved as she is with the digital humanities, a possible source of sal-
vation, about which I know very little, she nevertheless quoted me in
her essay (without saying I was her husband), because “Relevance: The
Shadow of a Magnitude” had apparently left a reproachful shadow on
what, in the academy today, remains misguided, unthought, or know-
ingly hypocritical. And though I had serious misgivings, in those per-
formative days of protest, about my alignment with the students, their
insurrectionary fervor, I felt we had to come to terms not only with
what they were demanding, but what we had been evading, with a
repressed blush, as if the books we were teaching and analyzing—the
sometimes forbidding subtext or darkling indirections, myths of other-
ness, love’s body, their implicit bearing on life, ethically, kinesthetically,
never mind psychedelically—were telling us we were lying, even as the
universities were being corporatized.
What I said at the conference, and what I wrote, apparently had
suf‹cient fervor of its own, which caused James Ackerman—the distin-
guished art historian, in his introduction to the essays—to describe it as
an “apocalyptic message” that had “the most radical implications of any
in the issue.”2 If the message was partially determined by my radical