34

Subversive Art

Author(s): STANLEY DIAMOND

Source: Social Research , WINTER 1982, Vol. 49, No. 4 (WINTER 1982), pp. 854-877

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/40971220

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Subversive Art/ 'BY STANLEY DIAMOND

/ilLL art, worthy of the name, is subversive, subversive of civil society, of civilization. As Vico said, in deconstructing Homer, whom he believed to be the eponymous figure for the mul- titude of archaic Hellenic poets, "He [Homer] is no stupid founder of Greek civility ... he may be quite simply a man of the people." He goes further and demystifies Homer as a legendary individual. Homer is no more and no less than the Greek people themselves singing their own history as it ap- peared to them through their blind, impoverished rhapsodes. The content of Balzac's work, which punctures the mythology of civil society, is revolutionary; his personal ideology is not. Balzac's démystification of bourgeois civil re- lationships is far more important than his presumed adher- ence to monarchism and relative respect for the failing aristo- crat. T. S. Eliot, a political conservative, calls the poet the primitive voice of the community, the echo of the voice of the primitive community, the voice that questions, in its very ar- ticulation, superordinate secular authority and reductive cul- tural exploitation. This has nothing to do with the manifest "politics" of the artist. It is latent in the act of art, in the generically human self-defining necessity to create a symbolic universe that becomes its own reality. Thomas Merton, the American poet, a Catholic convert, understood this very well when he told us that the dictates (and comforts) of the Church overshadowed his identity as a poet. But Merton was lucky - that statement, that voluntary submission to a received au- thority, helped secure the context in which he was then free to write his occasionally remarkable poetry. And he had become, after all, a monk. But Merton's theological reflection on his identity as an artist imparts more than what he intends: vol-

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untarily or not, one creates within certain civil boundaries or one does not create at all.

As the network of civilization has become denser, and states

have become more totalitarian during the past 7,000 years, the act of cultural creation, which is the act of art, has become more dangerous both to the subject and to the structures of domination. Hence, in the most totalitarian societies of the contemporary experience, the artist is exiled, goes under- ground, becomes silent, or in the more relaxed bourgeois milieux, he often mutates into an icon, perhaps a lapdog. The official art in such societies is always dead - a stupid, senti- mental, or brutal realism, a series of shallow signs, the boring translation of a repressive bureaucratic structure. From Mos- cow to New York, examples of official popular culture are redundant through the whole range of the arts. The poet, dramatist, painter, novelist, architect - all those surviving di- vided vocational transformations of the primitive holistic ca- pacities of the human race - cannot live with fascism or penultimate degrees of statism; or rather, their survival im- plies a kind of death. Only the reintegration of labor - as opposed to the pseudopolitical integration of the State - will establish once and for all the integration of art.

There are, of course, a number of ways in which the civili- zational process has been able to appropriate art. Plato under- stood and fostered that appropriation, incorporation, or exile, but it was Rousseau (misunderstood, as usual) who dared to attack the actual destiny of art in civilization. In The First Discourse he tells us that the structure of the arts is corrupt and that the artists are themselves committed to the exercise of

mundane power and the attainment of prestige. He goes further in his Letter to D'Alembert and attacks the theater as the

endless reflection of the life of a decadent society - a de- bilitating repetition of deformed desire - the result being a false catharsis. Rousseau, of course, had a passion for the theater (he never missed Moliere if he could help it); and good actors, he believed, were their own justification. But this was a

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856 SOCIAL RESEARCH

typical Rousseauian paradox; it made his (and our) existence in civil society at least possible, while providing the ground for critique. Still, Rousseau's actor remains the paradigm for the unresolved search for identity, the failure of identity, the absence or diminishment of self in contemporary civilization. Perhaps his meaning can be clarified by understanding the actor's mask (all our modern masks) as the reduction of the person to a role - the reverse of primitive masking in a com- munal ritual - which is the expression of the many aspects of the developed self. The first mask hides an absence; the sec- ond mask reveals presences. But there is another theme implicit in Rousseau's thinking

on this matter, the logical outcome of which I shall return to later - namely, the iconization of the artist. For artists the danger of sanctioning their own appropriation by civil society is ever present. Those who are privileged, hailed as geniuses, and distorted thereby, may escape victimization in the more obviously repressive moments of the political process. They may even be worshiped by the "masses" - as the inheritors of exclusive and mysterious gifts and powers. (Picasso has been so immortalized.) Yet that iconization, perhaps peculiar to modern industrial civilization, is isomorphic with the frag- mentation of labor and is both a symptom and a cause of the artlessness of the great majority of human beings in the modern world. That is, the notion of the artist as a unique genius grows in proportion to the cultural reduction of the vast majority whose lives lack a sustaining aesthetic dimension and whose capacity to build culture has been blocked. Compare this to the situation among the Zulus of southeast Africa, where each person is a poetic improvisor and where the ex- pressed talent of each member of the group serves as the foundation for the somewhat more skilled Imbongi (poet- singers), who are not different in kind. This, of course, relates to the multifunctional, multidimensional social identity of the Zulu person, which must in turn be compared to the spe- cialized existences generic to our industrial civilization.

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But before going any further along these lines, it is neces- sary to explore Plato's conception of the artist as subversive (the opposite of the social centrality of art is primitive experi- ence). For Plato's masterwork is the quintessential argument against what we must recover, namely, an authentic popular art, the people's celebration and reconstruction of culture.

The Poet as Trickster

In the state-utopian republic, the dramatists, the makers of tragedy and comedy, the "imitative poets," as Plato calls them, are to be exiled and their works abolished or heavily censored. Socrates says:

When any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our State such as he are not

permitted to exist; the law will not allow them.

Plato has already given us a reason for this in connection with the division of labor: "[in] our State human nature is not twofold or manifold, for one man plays one part only." The "pantomimic gentlemen," Homer or Aeschylus, for example, have no place in the class and occupational structure of the republic, assimilated as it is to the doctrine of essences or ultimate forms. Socrates makes this clear to Adeimantos:

"Human nature appears to have been coined into yet smaller pieces, and to be as incapable of imitating many things well, as of performing well the actions of which the imitations are copies."

But before pursuing Plato's theory of art, which emerges so logically out of the dialogue, let us examine some of the simpler reasons for establishing a "censorship of the writers of fiction" and the implications thereof.

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858 SOCIAL RESEARCH

The poets are perceived as impious and corrupters of youth. They misrepresent the nature of divinity, which is absolutely good, by spinning tales of rage and ribaldry in heaven. If at all possible, children in the ideal state should be told that conflict is unholy and has never existed among the gods or between citizens. The wicked must always be repre- sented as miserable, "because they require to be punished, and are benefited by receiving punishment from God," but God must never, in verse or prose, be considered the author of evil, for such a fiction would be suicidal in "any well-ordered com- monwealth." The poets, such as Euripides, must not be per- mitted to say that suffering is the work of God, or if it is of God, they "must devise some explanation . . . such as we are seeking." The task of the poet, then, is to justify the ways of God to man, to buttress morality in the republic. And the ultimate impiety is to speak, with Homer, of "Zeus who is the dispenser of good and evil to us."

Moreover, the poets are inappropriately emotional. They portray death and the underworld in lurid terms; they lament the fallen warrior and rail against fortune, whereas, in the republic, "the good man . . . will not sorrow for his departed friend [or son, or brother], as though he had suffered any- thing terrible, [since he] is sufficient for himself . . . and there- fore is least in need of other men." What is worse, the poets portray famous men, heroes, even the gods themselves, in undignified postures of grief or frenzy. Nor can Homeric laughter, whether indulged in by men or gods, be tolerated; in men it leads to "violent reaction[s]," and it is a falsification of the nature of God. Hence such verses from the Iliad as "inex-

tinguishable laughter arose among the blessed gods, when they saw Hephaestus bustling about the mansion" must be excised.

Finally, the heresy of the poets is expressed in the concep- tion of God as a magician, "and of a nature to appear insidi- ously now in one shape, and now in another - sometimes him- self changing and passing into many forms, sometimes de-

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ceiving us with the semblance of such 'transformations.' " For "the gods are not magicians who transform themselves, neither do they deceive mankind in any way."

Thus far, then, there are three related reasons for Plato's antagonism to the poets. First, they ascribe a dual nature to the gods - the gods are the authors of good and evil. Second, they portray the gods as extravagantly emotional, sometimes obscenely so, as in the case of Zeus, who, at the sight of Hera, "forgot ... all [his plans] in a moment through his lust." Third, they present the gods in a variety of shapes and decep- tive appearances.

Plato's objections betray a direct antagonism to the transformer, or trickster, image of the gods; that this image is "one of the oldest expressions of mankind" has been conclu- sively shown by Paul Radin. The trickster is an authentically primitive figure, appearing in his sharpest form among primitive peoples - a bestial, human and divine being, know- ing "neither good nor evil, yet . . . responsible for both." Trickster "is at the mercy of his passions and appetites," is devoid of values, "yet through his actions all values come into being." At the same time, all figures associated with Trickster, for example the "various supernatural beings" and man, pos- sess his traits. Thus Plato says the poets must not be permitted to "persuade our youth that the Gods are the authors of evil, and that heroes are no better than men"; for "everybody will begin to excuse his own vice when he is convinced that similar wickednesses are always being perpetrated by 'the kindred of the Gods, the relatives of Zeus.' " He gives as an example "the tale of Theseus, son of Poseidon, or of Peirith- ous, son of Zeus, [who went forth] to perpetrate a horrid rape."

In his never-ending search for himself, Trickster changes shape and experiments with a thousand identities. He has enormous power, is enormously stupid, is "creator and de- stroyer, giver and negator." Trickster is the personification of human ambiguity. He is the archetype of the comic spirit, the

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burlesque of the problem of identity, the ancestor of the clown, the fool of the ages, the incarnation of existential ab- surdity.

This existential absurdity is the converse of what can be termed "political" absurdity. The latter is the result of the effort to train men to respond on command, in terms of signals rather than symbols. So, for example, hazing at a military academy or in any other bureaucracy systematically conditions a recruit not to inquire into the meaning of the absurd act which he is compelled to perform. He obeys with- out question, and it is assumed he will do so in the future when appropriately stimulated. The absurdities which define conventional bureaucratic behavior do not, of course, origi- nate in existential reflection on the absurdity of life - which is a source of creative energy - but in the reduction of men to reflexes in a system, which is the death of the creative instinct. The image of the wooden soldier fits precisely here. Political structures which manipulate persons hardly generate loyalty, skill, or initiative. That first and most basic bureaucracy, the "regular" army, dominated by career officers, predictably fails when confronted with the spontaneity and inventiveness of the guerrilla band, functioning on a higher symbolic level, stimulated by the immediacy of their associations and the consistencies of their goals. Plato was correct in assuming that the guardians would need rigorously trained auxiliaries to "suppress insurrection" in the ideal state; he was wrong in assuming they could succeed.

Inevitably, Trickster must be banished from the republic, wherein identity is a matter of pure, ideal, unambiguous forms and where men are to be totally and strategically so- cialized. The poets who have created or inherited Trickster's image of the world are, it follows, to be silenced. Once again, Plato's opposition to the primitive is clear, if not necessarily conscious.

It would be possible to claim that Plato's negative image of the poets themselves is that of the Trickster, for has he not

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called them "pantomimic gentlemen" and "imitators"? And may we not add that Plato sensed and distrusted the old connection between art and magic? This is a sensible, if su- perficial, interpretation; to deepen it we must explore Plato's theory of art and its implications. Plato regarded the art of the tragic and comic dramatists,

along with that of the painters, as essentially imitative, as dealing with appearances only. The painter, for example, paints a bed, but this image is "thrice removed" from the truth. The ideal form or essence of the bed is created by God; this is the eternal bed which the philosopher kings can intuit, it is the bed in truth and goodness, of one nature, essentially inimitable and complete. At a second remove from the truth is the tangible bed created by the artisan, the particular bed, which is a "semblance of existence," but not existence entire as manifested in God's bed. But the bed of the painter is sheer imitation, being neither useful nor ideal. In no sense can it be considered a creation. Further, all artists, save those who echo the needs of the state by composing "hymns to the Gods and praises of famous men," are deceivers who, in effect, presume to create but cannot. The painter, for example, does not know how to make a bed nor does he know anything of the work of the cobbler or carpenter whom he may represent. Socrates states: "The imitator has no knowledge worth mentioning of what he imitates. Imitation is only a kind of play or sport, and the tragic poets, whether they write in Iambic or Heroic verse, are imitators in the highest degree." Nor can the artist- imitator have any knowledge of good or evil "and may be expected, therefore, to imitate only what appears good to the ignorant multitude." Plato seems to mean here that the intui- tion into pure existence aided by the study of mathematics, a basic subject for the guardians, is also the apprehension of the good, or at least a prerequisite to it. The artist reproduces appearances only, and these vary; pure essence cannot be reproduced, only intuited. Since the artist has no knowledge of the good, he can have no knowledge of evil, nor does he

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862 SOCIAL RESEARCH

possess any understanding of the useful, for he is once re- moved from the particulars that he copies and hence thrice removed from the truth. A perfectly antithetical view of the artist is Goya's statement in the catalogue to Los Caprichos: "Painting, like poetry, selects from the universe the material she can best use for her own ends. She unites and concentrates

in one fantastic figure circumstances and characters which nature has distributed among a number of individuals. Thanks to the wise and ingenious combination, the artist de- serves the name of inventor and ceases to be a mere subordi-

nate copyist." The absolute, reciprocal antagonism of the true artist and

Platonism could not be more pertinently expressed. But this antagonism, it must be said, is not necessarily directed against belief in God or religious passion as such, only against the removal of God from the concretely human, that is, against the turning of God into an abstraction. All religious art of any stature and all religious artists worthy of the name, from Byzantines and Giotto through Michelangelo to Blake and Rouault (confining the example to a fragment of the Western tradition), inscribe their vision in the flesh and see God either as an aspect of man's nature or as a perception to which every man is capable of attaining, usually out of his agony. Hence, God may be apprehended by the artist as objectively real, yet always in the most ordinary, unexpected, various but human guises. The institutionalized and abstract God of the church and the philosophers is never the God of the artist, though called by the same name. The human distance be- tween Plato's God and Blake's is infinite.

Order and Class

But whether or not we accept the terms in which it is couched, Plato's argument has extraordinary power and beauty. The philosopher expressed completely what many

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who have subsequently shared his attitudes have only dimly perceived: the artist is dangerous, as life is dangerous; he sees too much, because that is all he desires to do, and he presumes to create, to erect man into the role of the creator. But his vision is incomplete, he cannot penetrate to the objective order of the universe, the handiwork of God. And to men of Plato's temperament that objective order, the pure anatomy of rea- son, is as essential as breathing. Yet if the artist would accept the eternal order and thus learn humility, if he could convert his art into a public strategy in behalf of an abstract idea of the good, the state would find a place for him. Let the pro- tagonists of Homer and of poetry in general prove their worth, and they will be returned from exile. Moreover, there is a passionate tie between the artist and the "ignorant mul- titude." The artist does not believe in abstract systems; he deals with felt and ordered emotional ideas and believes

that form is attained through the contradictions, the tense unities of everyday experience. Thus the civilized artist him- self may be "unstable," a changeling, and this is a threat to any establishment. Plato is entirely consistent. He was, it seems, a man of a certain type, incapable of tolerating ambiguity, posi- tive in his conviction of an objective, superhuman good. He believed in God with the cool passion of a mathematician, and he believed at least abstractly that the perfectly just city could be established through perfectly rational and perfectly auto- cratic means. He began as a poet, and so he must have under- stood in his own being the old argument between poetry and philosophy to which he occasionally refers. In evicting the dramatist, Plato reveals himself, the nature of the republic, and the functions of art; his motives, of course, are above suspicion.

The poets, then, are to be exiled from the ideal state. There is simply no room for them; they are the first superfluous men. The philosopher kings intuit the universal, ultimate forms, God creates them, and the multitude lives among and constructs their particular manifestations. Hence, the class

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864 SOCIAL RESEARCH

structure of the republic reflects the doctrine of forms or essences. It descends from the superior, from the abstract, created by God and grasped by the guardians, to the inferior, to the particular, grapsed by the craftsmen and ordinary citi- zens, who live in a world of ordinary, useful, sensuous things. Here we encounter Platonism enthroned, a political hierarchy perfectly mated to a conceptual one. The "fleshy" Homer, who also presumes to create, is a threat to this structure and cannot be tolerated.

The class division between the universal and particular, between the institutionalized intellectuals and the economic

men, reflects a condition that develops with ancient civilization as opposed to primitive culture. This is not to say that tem- peramental distinctions do not exist among primitives, for they do, as Radin has brilliantly shown in his analysis of the thinker and man of action. The point is that among primitives such distinctions complement each other, the concrete and the abstract interpenetrate, "thinker" and "man of action" are tied together; sometimes, as Radin points out, they meet in the same individual, and in any case such differences are not politicized. Just as soon as the latter occurs, in early states or as idealized in the Republic, there is both an impoverishment and a denial of the sources of human creativity. Further, in early states in the real world, the differential worth often ascribed to people in the various occupations within the broader classes is a political rationalization, generated from the top down. For not only did accidents of birth and training determine social fate, but the point of view from which evaluations were made was that of the scribes, the priests, the nobility. In the Republic, the ideal world, Plato's division of labor and conceptual ca- pacity is said to be genetically determined. The social accident is nullified, yet the division remains artificial because it isolates the abstract from the concrete, the intellectual from the emo- tional, and considers the craftsman and the farmer useful but inferior beings, not from the perspective of the priest or noble but from that of Plato's philosophy.

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I submit, further, that the Platonic definition of the abstract has become so entrenched in Western thought that the fre- quently encountered attitude toward primitives - that they are incapable of or deficient in this capacity - is a manifestation of it. Conversely, the attempt to prove that primitives are capable of abstracting too often centers on the types of abstraction emerging out of the history of Western culture, which would seem quite irrelevant. While it is true that no primitive group is made up of Platonists in the technical sense of that term (for primitives tend to live, as Radin has put it, "in a blaze of reality") and the various politico-conceptual divisions generic to the state have not yet been established, this does not mean that they do not think abstractly. In the basic sense, every linguistic system is a system of abstractions; each sorting out of experience and conclusion from it is an abstract endeavor; every tool is a symbol of abstract thinking. Indeed, all cultural convention, all custom, is testimony to the generic human capacity for abstracting. But such abstractions are indissolubly wedded to the concrete. They are nourished by the concrete, and they are, I believe, ultimately induced, not deduced. They are not, in short, specifically Platonic abstractions, and they do not have the politicized psychological connotations of the lat- ter.

For Plato there is an order in the universe that escapes the human eye. That order is composed of forms or essences which must ultimately be conceptualized; they cannot be per- ceived by the senses. There is a radical split between percep- tions and conceptions in Platonic discourse, a split that has been elaborated endlessly in Western science to the point of morbidity and at the expense of the senses. Reality has become increasingly reified and, at the same time, thrown into ques- tion; the conceived object has been detached not only from the perceiving subject but from itself. When a Platonist looks at an object, the reflection in his eye represents an inferior order of reality; he has no faith in either the perception or the object realized in the world. The object exists only as the shadow of a

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conceptual metareality, as an instance of a class, an analytic construction. The majority of civilized men, it is assumed, see only superficially (they are not "seers"), and they look at the object in a utilitarian, unthinking way. Being incapable of probing more deeply into, analyzing, the nature of their expe- rience, they see but do not see. Therefore, they are compelled by their limited conceptual capacity to follow those who can see.

The expectation of a superior interpretation of what we apprehend is built into the use of our everyday language. That anticipation is an imperative of neither vocabulary nor syntax, but of the cultural arrangement of meaning generic to the civilizational process, as Plato understood so well. Tylor is equally acute, although his evolutionary ethno-

centrism is insupportable:

It may be said in concluding the subject of Images and Names, that the effect of an inability to separate, so clearly as we do the external object from the mere thought or idea of it in the mind, shows itself very fully and clearly in the superstitious beliefs and practices of the untaught man . . . between our clearness of separation of what is in the mind from what is out of it, and the mental confusion of the lowest savages of our own day, there is a vast interval. . . .

Most broadly defined, then, the language of theoretical sci- ence is also the language of political society. The ordinary man, it is imagined, bears witness only to the ordinary object. The priest or scientist - or being more rigorously Platonic, the priest trained as a scientist - conceives a metaphysical or theoretical construct, and that construct constitutes the specifi- cally Platonic definition of the abstract. When we talk about the object in our usual Platonic mode, then, we are talking either metaphysics or theoretical science (not technics); and we are also talking politics, the latter because of the presumed inaccessibility of ultimate reality to the mass of civilized men, except through the conceptual mediation of their perceptions by statesmen, priests, and scientists.

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For the Platonic abstraction is, above all, the basis of the deductive, theoretical proposition which serves as the ground of what we call science. The notion of systematic forms (or, alternatively put, of underlying formal systems governing per- ceived reality, that is, the notion of logically deducible, con- ceptual metarealities) dominates our definition of science, of knowing. In the Platonic view, these conceptions are eternal. They do not enter directly into the perceived world; they are the unmoved scources of all process, dialectic or otherwise; and they have no history. They are the ultimate structures, regularities, laws governing the universe; and they find their analogue in the laws governing the republic.

But there is another way of relating to the object. Looking, for example, can be an intensely perceptual experience. The object may be seen in its absolute singularity through, let us say, the eye of a Vermeer. It erupts as a unique thing in the world, irreducible to an exclusive, a priori class, yet subject to a variety of relationships, a thing which may have been made, used, exchanged and which nonetheless may reveal different aspects according to the quality of light, position among other objects, meaning to those who relate to it. Or it may exist as a thing in nature, its being contained in its existence.

The uniqueness of the object inheres in the immediate, concentrated response of the unaided, humanly experienced eye. The object is connotative. Through the structure of anal- ogy and metaphor that defines discourse among primitive people, it reveals a manifold and spontaneous reality. No decisive denotative statement can be made about the object, no mathematical or metaphysical statement can define it. This heightened perception is, of course, an aspect of the definition of art and commands a focus on the singularity of the object to such a degree that everything seems at once marvelous, strange, familiar, and unexpected. No category can exhaust such an object; it saturates the perceiving subject. That is what William Blake, who despised Plato, meant when he said that he could look at a knothole in a tree until he became terrified.

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868 SOCIAL RESEARCH

This existential perception, which is also that of the artist and the mystic, cannot be trimmed to fit a metaphysical class, and it is the converse of a theoretical construct.

Yet all three ways of looking - the utilitarian, the Platonic, and the poetic - are abstract and relational. What is at stake is the type of abstraction involved. The non-Platonic or "con- crete" abstractions comprise the customary mode of primitive thinking,1 not generically but culturally, and also define the mode of the artist who has been politically alienated from the ordinary man. Yet, despite everything, the artist is more closely aligned with the ordinary man, now differentiated from his primitive estate, than he is with the priest, scientist, or statesman. Like the ordinary man, he ambivalently perceives his dependence on the structures the priest, scientist, and statesman command. Like the ordinary man, he focuses on the object; but for him the object has become an incandescent subject. He is perpetually recovering his primitivism.

Plato's theory of cognition is, therefore, inevitably an aspect of his aesthetics and logically defines his sense of justice or, rather, demonstrates once again how astonishingly integrated, how final, his thinking is. Justice, the aim of the Republic, confined one man to one vocation; that principle of aesthetic and political order is extended to assume single "realities" behind a multitude of "appearances." Indeed, Plato's ontologi- cal ethic inheres precisely in this: for a man to engage in many jobs is to deny his essential nature, for men to concentrate on the uniqueness of things in this world is to deny their essential natures, and for men to presume above their natural stations is to deny the essential nature of the State. Justice in the Republic inheres in the given structure and indivisibility of essences.

1 Robert Redfield understood this as follows: The patterns of thinking of a city man where a multitude of unfamiliar experiences are dealt with by relating them to convenient classes are different from those of a remote rural dweller, whose social objects are all unique and known by the individual characters.

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This is not only a reflection of the political imperatives of civilization - it is, at the same time, the basis for a definition of evil (violation of the order) and an affirmation of the meaning of virtue (appreciation of the order). In the Platonic order, we discover the link between political, metaphysical, and scientific classification and, therefore, the significance of the Platonic abstraction, the essence of civilized modalities of thought.

Primitive Ritual Drama

Plato's opposition to the drama and the dramatist is directly associated with the class and ideational structure of the repub- lic. At its root, this is also an opposition to the primitive, not merely with reference to the old tie between artist and magi- cian but, more comprehensively, in connection with the form and meaning of the primitive ritual drama.

In the ritual drama, art and life converge; life itself is seen as a drama, roles are symbolically acted out, dangers con- fronted and overcome, and anxieties faced and resolved. Re- lations among the individual, society, and nature are defined, renewed, and reinterpreted. I am, of course, defining the primitive ritual drama in the broadest possible way, that is, as comprising those ceremonies which cluster around life crises or discontinuities, either of the individual or of the group at large. Generally speaking, the latter are concerned with crises arising from the group's relation to the natural environment, while the former are concerned with personal crises, that is, with the individual's relation to himself and the group. In all ritual dramas, however, despite the relative emphasis on the group or the individual, there is an apparent continuity from the individual's setting in the group to the group's setting in nature. Moreover, the problems of identity and survival are always the dominant themes, and it is for this reason that jve can, I believe, term these primitive ceremonials dramas.

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870 SOCIAL RESEARCH

To clarify, let us consider those ceremonials which devolve upon personal crises, such as death, marriage, puberty or illness. These can be considered "existential" situations; that is, people die, marry, sicken, become sexually mature arid eco- nomically responsible in all societies. In primitive societies, such ordinary human events are made meaningful and valu- able through the medium of the dramatic ceremonies. Here we confront man raising himself above the level of the merely biological, affirming his identity and defining his obligations to himself and to the group. The ritual drama, then, focuses on ordinary human events and makes them extraordinary and, in a sense, sacramental.

At the same time, the ceremonials we are speaking of enable the individual to maintain integrity of self while changing life roles. The person is freed to act in new ways without crippling anxiety or becoming a social automaton. The person dis- charges the new status, but the status does not become the person. This, I believe, is the central psychological meaning of the theme of death and rebirth, of constant psychic renewal, which is encountered so frequently in primitive ceremonials. It is an organic theme; what one is emerges out of what one does. There is no mechanical separation, only an organic tran- sition extending over a considerable time, often crowded with events and never traumatic, but modulated and realistic in its effects.

Hence, the ceremonies of personal crisis are prototypically dramatic in two related ways. They affirm the human struggle for values within a social setting, while confirming individual identity in the face of ordinary "existential" situations such as death or puberty. These ceremonial dramas constitute a shaping and an acting out of the raw materials of life. All primitives have their brilliant moments on this stage, each becomes the focus of attention by the mere fact of his humanity; and in the light of the ordinary-extraordinary events, his kin- ship to others is clarified. Moreover, these ritual dramas, based on the typical crisis situations, seem to represent the

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culmination of all primitive art forms; they are, perhaps, the primary forms of art around which cluster most of the aes- thetic artifacts of primitive society - the masks, poems, songs, myths, above all the dance, that quintessential rhythm of life and culture.

Ritual dramas are not automatic expressions of the folk spirit. They were created, just as were the poems, dances, and songs that heighten their impact, by individuals moving in a certain cultural sequence, formed by that tradition and form- ing it. Whether we call these individuals "poet-thinkers," "medicine men," or "shamans" (terms used by Paul Radin) seems unimportant. Plainly, they were individuals who reacted with unusual sensitivity to the stresses of the life cycle and were faced, in extreme cases, with the alternative of breaking down or creating meaning out of apparent chaos. Let us call them primitive dramatists. The meanings they created, the conflicts they symbolized and sometimes resolved in their own "pantomimic" performances, were felt by the majority of so- called ordinary individuals. There was, of course, magic here too; but, more deeply, there was a perception of human na- ture that tied the group together. The primitive dramatist served as the lightning rod for the commonly experienced anxieties, which, in concert with his peers and buttressed by tradition, the primitive individual was able to resolve. This is not to say that the primitive dramatist simply invented mean- ings promiscuously. It was always done within a given socio- economic and natural setting. But he shaped dramatic forms through which the participants were able to clarify their own conflicts and more readily establish their own identities.

There was an organic tie, then, between the primitive dramatist and the people at large, the tie of creation and response, which is in itself a type of creation. The difference was that the dramatist lived under relatively continuous stress, most people only periodically so. Thus the dramatist was in constant danger of breakdown, of ceasing to function or of functioning fantastically in ways that were too private to elicit

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872 SOCIAL RESEARCH

a popular response. In this prototypical primitive situation we can, I think, sense the connection that binds the psychotic to the shaman whom we have called a dramatist and the

dramatist to the people at large. The distinctions are a matter of degree. The very presence of the shaman-dramatist is a continuous reminder that life often balances on the knife edge between chaos and meaning and that meaning is created or apprehended by man coming, as it were, naked into the world.

The Inevitability of Greek Drama

The Greek drama is the direct heir of the primitive ritual drama, as Cornford, Murray, and Harrison have helped es- tablish. Indeed, it retains various technical ritual elements: the chorus, the conscience of the play, was a vestige of group participation. The plays of Sophocles were watched with an air of "ritual expectancy," Aristophanes was performed at the Dionysiac festivals, and the themes of Greek drama had the style of ritual. Thus we can begin to apprehend why Plato found it neces-

sary to exile the dramatist, as the very prototype of the artist, from the republic. The dramatist is tied to the "ignorant multitude," he presumes to create meanings and reveal con- flicts, he senses in his own being the ambiguity of man, and he is concerned with the ordinary-extraordinary things, with values as a problem and the common human struggle for personal identity. Such men are dangerous precisely because they view life as problematical in the best of states; they clarify what others feel. Hence, they must either be confined to composing "hymns to the Gods and praises of famous men" or exiled.

We must remember that in the Republic the problem of identity is presumably solved in terms of a political interpreta- tion of higher and lower human natures. Such an in- stitutionalized human identity is entirely contrary to the

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dramatist's perceptions; it is equally foreign to the mind of primitive man. The dramatist, as a dramatist, cannot believe in such stark and ultimate separations between men or within the individual man. When Shakespeare writes his tragedies of kings, he plays out their conflicts against a specific socioeco- nomic background, but in the end he tells all of us about our civilized identities, and the "multitude" in the pit responds. And was not Shakespeare, in a sense, all the characters he constructed, what Plato would call a gross "imitator"? Nor can the dramatist deny the sensuous, earthy things,

since his plots are based on the "existential" situations: mar- riage, death, the coming to maturity, sickness of mind and body, the recurring issues in the inner relations among men, the very themes that served as the occasions for the primitive drama of personal crisis. Let me put it as plainly as I can. In the end, the dramatist must either become an antagonist to Plato's perfectionist God or he must cease being a dramatist. Within his own lights, the philosopher was right. If the dramatist is a tragedian, then he is grimly concerned

with the problem of identity, self-definition, integrity; for tragedy is no more that the dissolution of personal identity and social value through behavior to which the hero is com- pelled and of which he is, sooner or later, aware. And by that awareness, he transcends himself in one final blinding move- ment, as did Oedipus at Colonus. The civilized tragic drama is, then, a free elaboration on the theme of identity, celebrated in the primitive ritual and there transcended. If the dramatist is a comedian, then he burlesques the

problem of identity, he laughs it out of court, he stands aside and lets men make fools of themselves; men, he tells us, with Aristophanes, are everything but what they presume to be. The civilized comic drama, then, is based on the trickster's primitive image of the world, on identity, as it were, turned inside out. It is a celebration of the failure of identity, but there is no human command of that failure as among primi- tives, only a senseless interruption.

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874 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Among primitives, the most serious rituals (those ancestral to the modern tragedy) and the ancient comic spirit of the trickster are often mingled. In Wintun, Pueblo, and Kond ceremonials, for example, "in nearly every instance it is the very thing which is regarded with greatest reverence or re- spect which is ridiculed," as Steward states. The Dionysiac tradition of the satyr (or trickster) play following the tragic trilogy echoes this primitive usage but does not duplicate it. It should be clear, then, that on every major count Plato's

exile of comedy and tragedy was inevitable; for the dramatist, in his elemental - or, better, primitive - nature, would have worked havoc with the structure of the ideal state and its

ideology of identities. But if one exiles or diminishes the artist, then who helps

discover and dramatize the people to themselves? And if the people are considered incapable of attaining to real under- standing, a view obviously not held here but essential to the Republic, then how are value and meaning to be transmitted to them? Plato answers this question, although he does not ask it. The royal or noble lie, the manufactured or applied myth filtering down from above, that is, official propaganda, is to provide the popular raison d'etre of the republic. The youth are to be told, in morality tales, that they live in the best of all possible worlds. This is in addition to the fictions which justify the class structure. These lies, these political myths as opposed to primitive myths, are the means for fixing personal and social identity for the majority of people in the ideal state in the absence of the artist, both as a specialized figure and as an inherent aspect of the personality of every man.

Rituals of Resistance

And so we return to Rousseau's notion of the popular festi- val and its sensuous, sensibly disciplined celebration of culture, its recovery of the dance as the fountain of art, and its

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transmission of a common language which, in recapitulating the primitive, replaces the theater as segregated, vicarious, socially stratified event. In T. S. Eliot's words: "Poetry is not the assertion that something is true, it is the creation of a sensuous embodiment." This return of drama to the people explodes the civilized boundaries of art and deconstructs the actor. Tragedy and comedy return to their sources in every- day life - but they can now be sustained; they lose their mor- bidity as the strengths and talents of the subordinated human community are released. We discover that art is everywhere; we no longer need a word for it, the reification dissolves - -just as the Hopi have no specific term for "religion" within their sacred universe, just as the Yir-Yiront do not distinguish be- tween work and play. For the denotation of art or religion, or work or play, signifies their isolation from each other - and from everyday life in the centers of modern civilization; it signifies their formal institutionalization, their imprisonment. What then is left of everyday life but the desymbolized strug- gle for power, pleasure, money - a nightmare of anxiety circling around an empty death? This had been Plato's fear - hence the theological structure of the Republic and the repres- sive nature of the Laws. His distrust of "ordinary" people is his distrust of art; in the final analysis it is humanity itself that is censored - and subjected to the predestination of the state. But underneath all this, the omnipresence of art is evident

in monologues, dialogues, the texture of ordinary individual speech, the good rearing of children, all efforts to shape the mere biochemistry of life into patterns of meaning. The terri- ble dramas "enacted" by political and social prisoners strug- gling to maintain a measure of human self-definition become a single metaphor for all people struggling for identity as all civilized illusions dissolve, and the theater, as we have known it in the modern world, along with them. That is to say, the theater is not presently a medium for this transformative awakening to our realities and, therefore, can lead only to a false catharsis, a praxis manqué. Only a profound social

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transformation will render art obsolete and crystallize these tendencies into salient patterns of culture. Twentieth-century art has anticipated this imperative in movement after movement - from surrealism, which brackets all the arts, to the theater of the absurd, the factory "theater," street "the- ater," the political "theater," in the theater which is no longer the theater but the social arena for the rituals of resistance.

These rituals of resistance cannot wait upon the transformation of our society (and I now refer specifically to American society); they contribute to that transformation by simultaneously expressing and creating the consciousness of people who can no longer survive their social and political frustrations. These rituals of resistance are flourishing everywhere - and they are, perforce, political. One finds them in the bitter (and hopeful) poems and songs of the new, if still half-submerged popular consciousness, in the satirical car- toons that try to balance the pious editorials of the con- ventional newspapers, in the street art that adorns the walls of slum dwellings, in graffiti. But there is a vast reservoir of dissatisfaction in American culture that remains to be tapped and focused. Its symptoms are clear - drugs, alcoholism, famil- ial disintegration, the daily humiliation of the powerless having to suffer their arbitrarily imposed deprivation, their underdeveloped capacities, the loneliness and boredom to which we are all susceptible. The public spectacles, the accep- tance of vicarious experiences channeled into our lives by the media, the substitution of fantasy for creativity, and the myriad forms of addiction that mark everyday life in our society - all these inverted rituals of resistance are the poten- tial sources of an immeasurable aesthetic and socially transformative energy.

Whatever else schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug addiction may be, they are the unconscious symptoms of a thwarted politics, art in suspension, the miserable miracles to which the French poet Henri Michaux refers. One has only to give close attention to schizophrenic languages or to the fantasies of a

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drug addict in search of a connection in order to understand them as rituals of resistance on the verge of creative formula- tions. The positive of these negatives will, hopefully, be a people's art - its giant magnifying glass concentrating the rays of our discontent, an art en route to the emancipation of self and society. In the interim, the political context of art on the path to deconstruction will be salient and specific because we are not yet done with politics. Hopefully, we will act against class and status oppression, bureaucratic callousness, legal hypocricy, and, at the contemporary cutting edge of all these issues, nuclear proliferation. This is, of course, the manifest definition of art as subversive, art drawing its content from below, the opposite of art censored from above.

"Postmodernism" then will be a return to the voice of a

newly developing community, to the integrated arts of the crisis rite that reunites man, woman, nature, and society and resolves its ambivalence while defending and defining the liberty and potential of the person. It will be unself -centered as the peasant who shapes his terraces into a natural painting of local color and necessary design. Or postmodernism will be reduced to an empty gesture, a matter of form.

If we are to reconstruct our civilization and emancipate ourselves, we will have to recreate an unofficial art, an art freed of class determination, without patrons, an art that can face and transform death because it has become synonymous with the whole of culture in the performances of everyday life. A subversive art, beyond Plato's imagination.

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