by Gwee Li Sui
In Singapore, pragmatism is held up as a pillar of governance and a cultural reason for the nation’s widely acknowledged success, achieved, it is commonly argued, through policies whose overriding objective is to ensure continuous economic growth. The right thing to do in order to achieve this continuous economic growth will depend on the context and is, in fact, whatever works best in that context at that point of time. For instance, when the government needed to strengthen its moral authority, it adamantly refused to allow casinos to operate in Singapore. But, when it became clear that a flagging tourism sector needed a boost, the government abandoned its more moralistic language for a hard economic justification for building not one but two casinos in global-city Singapore.3
This cast of mind is by no means confined only to Singapore. Pragmatism is celebrated around the world as a virtue of decision-making. The ability to adapt to changing circumstances, to focus on achieving results, and to compare options using quantifiable cost-benefit analysis is prized over inflexible obedience to totalising dogma and stubborn habits. In public administration, pragmatism opposes the worst forms of bureaucracy. In politics, it is a bulwark against closed-mindedness, extremism, and fundamentalism. It extols a moderate “third way” that deconstructs competing ideologies like liberalism, capitalism and socialism in order to optimally combine their best aspects, discarding the unhelpful, irrelevant, and harmful fragments.4
There is, however, a difficulty with pragmatism and Art and, a fortiori, a difficulty with pragmatism and artists. This is a difficulty that is borne both of Art’s philosophy and its praxis that renders it essentially and constitutionally incapable of being or incorporating the pragmatic. What makes matters worse is that the artist is often the person least capable of solving or resolving this difficulty. This, happily, is as it should be for both Art and for the artist.
The difficulty should remain unsolvable for both Art and artist as a solution may entail the end of the former as we know it. Perhaps even the end of the possibility of Art as we know it. Thankfully, while the unsolvability of the difficulty of pragmatism and Art may be a problem for philosophy, it is most decidedly not a problem for Art.
The artist strives, first and foremost, to capture the world sub specie aeternitatis. In part at least, the work of art is the objectification of the deep human desire to capture the world: all that the world is in a moment and all that it is in all time. At once. The difficulty has to do with the nature of Art. It has to do with what Art must be. It must be at once transcendental and historical, at once necessary and contingent.
At the end of his life, the short story writer Jorge Luis Borges offered these thoughts:
The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfil it, we feel unhappy. A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colours, forms, or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. You are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He’s always working, even when he dreams.5
***
The Egypt-born, American literary theorist and writer Ihab Hassan cites an event, “The Foreigner’s Home”, held at the Louvre in 2007, at which the American poet Toni Morrison used the 1819 painting by Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa to make her point about humanity adrift, displacement, the diaspora, the refugee, and exile.
Hassan asks:
What kind of art can emerge from this wreck, what kind of criticism or aesthetic theory? Morrison’s answer is: look to the individual human body, a choreography of blood and bones. In a sea of distress, she says, “you have the body in motion and you have the obligation of seeing the body as the real and final home.” 6
“You have the obligation of seeing the body as the real and final home.” The obligation of seeing. Remember this obligation. But what precisely is this obligation?
It is the imperative of Art. Richard Rorty, that most subtle of the pragmatist philosophers, holds that we have acquired the habit of seeing various cultures as works of art, that is, of being automatically worthy of appreciation.7 It is, of course, a mistake to see culture in such terms, but Art is different.
Art demands that it only be seen qua Art, “of being automatically worthy of appreciation”.
Wittgenstein has put it memorably:
The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more too. … But only an artist can so represent an individual thing as to make it appear to us like a work of art. … A work of art forces us – as one might say – to see it in the right perspective, but, in the absence of art, the object is just a fragment of nature like any other; we may exalt it through our enthusiasm, but that does not give anyone else the right to confront us with it.8
Art, inherently, necessarily, manifests the imperative to elicit the obligation of us – the viewer, the spectator, the reader, the listener, the receptor – of being seen, viewed, read, or heard in the right perspective. Only the artist may infuse the work with this power; that is precisely what it means to be an artist.
All through recorded time, Art has given voice and line, depth and resonance, and meaning itself to man’s dreams and desires, his fears and foibles. In the midst of the terrors of reality, in the face of our inevitable mortality, Art offers, momentarily, secular succour and just a fleeting glimpse of the subtlety of mind and the nobility of heart that inhere in all of us. That is why, in the fullness of time, Art becomes the signature of civilisations and the conscience of communities.
Without a doubt, part of this power is derived from the ineluctable temporality of Art. From its historicity. For no object of Art is ever alone, no matter how alone the artist may think he or she is, his or her work is always in the company of others. It is in a constant, continuous conversation with all the work that has gone before and all that will come after. This conversation is what we call Tradition. No one has articulated what the relationship of Tradition and Art quite like T. S. Eliot:
Yet, if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.9
Labour. That’s the stuff that infuses a work of art with its power. The artist labours to compact the object with both the “pastness of the past” and its presence. The art object is existential and transcendental, at once.
Eliot’s concerns were, of course, specific to literature, poetry, and poets, indeed to European literature, poetry, and poets. But there is no doubt about the relevance and commensurability of his conclusions to theatre and actor training. My métier, if you please.
***
The world of contemporary theatre is a world of shifting sands and changing shadows; the lay of the land transforms every few years as new ideas, new politics, new politicians, and new visions by new artists attempt to frame and present reality yet again to a new generation of audiences.
Theatre – perhaps more so than other art form – is inextricably connected with the living forms of life; the one feeds off and into the other like the great river systems of the world, channelling mountain waters downwards, traversing the flatness of land, and finally merging with the depths of the sea. There is an ebb and flow that is constant and continuous, as old as the seas. If this connection between life and theatre is severed, if they are put asunder, then both life and theatre will suffer and will eventually wither away, be diminish
ed and reduced until the next inevitable renewal.
Like Eliot’s poet, the contemporary theatre actor must cultivate the “historical sense” of the timeless, of the temporal, and of the timeless and the temporal together in the art of acting, in the presentation of theatre and in the building of performance.
Cultivating this sense requires the development of a particular body-mind complex that enables an imagination grounded in the performative and situated in both the doing and the being. An imagination that is thoroughly and deeply experiential and existential.
What emerges as “technology” for the actor is a radical corporeality, in the Kantian sense, recalling Morrison’s: “the body as the real and final home” that shapes and fixes the actor’s sense of “contemporaneity”: the hic et nunc. The here and the now, as it were, of acting, theatre and performance, and the possibility of Art.
A possibility that resides absolutely in the actor finding a key, a way to unlock and unpack technology so as to plumb, select, and draw on elements – perhaps of gesture, voice, movement, rhythm, breath control, presentational modes, and form – which may be recombined and situated within the specific demands of his or her own society, community, locale, and situation.
What might the key look like, and how might it be used? How might those various and diverse systems of theatre knowledge, the technologies containing the secrets of stage action and representation, of self-awareness and availability, and of owned speech and voice be embodied here and now so that the actor be not too tame, “but let [his or her] own discretion be [his or her] tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that [he or she] o’erstep not the modesty of nature”?10
The key is probably something akin to nous, both a being and a seeing, something of a sensibility, perhaps a capacity, a cast of body-mind, a splinter of spirit, a shard of thinking and feeling. The key is probably a persona, the artistic persona embedded in some specific, definable, recognisable cultural context.
We are many, many things and many things are within us.11
The matter of the artistic persona, however, is more complex than even this implies. For it is not only individuated persona of the artist that is so interpellated. The collective we call “culture” is too.
Allow me to conclude by quoting a contemporary philosopher from Orissa, India, J. N. Mohanty:
A culture is not a self-enclosed world. It is not an identity but a system of differences held together by history. Not being self-complete, it opens out to other possibilities. Then one finds the other within oneself. I do not understand all my motives, choices, and desires. The stranger and the foreigner are right in my neighbourhood. My culture and the other culture are not separated as the known, the familiar and the unknown and the unfamiliar, but rather by degrees of familiarity, foreignness, strangeness. Sometimes, I understand myself only through the other, at other times the reverse happens. The boundaries are shifting.12
No artist can ever know when or how or where his or her artistic journey will end. In the matter of Art and in the making of Art, the beginnings can never know their endings.
Pragmatism is never a possibility for an artist.
1 T. Sasitharan, “Freedom of Expression and Cultural Sensitivity or Fucking the Powerless”, 4th World Summit on Arts and Culture of the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies, Johannesburg, South Africa, 24 September 2009.
2 Charles Sanders Peirce, “How To Make Our Ideas Clear”, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, edited by N. Houser and C. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 132.
3 Kenneth Paul Tan, “Against Uncritical Pragmatism: Education for Doers Who Can Think and Thinkers Who Can Do”, NUS Outstanding Educator Award 2009 Public Lecture, National University of Singapore, 28 April 2009.
4 ibid.
5 Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges Explains the Task of Art”, Open Culture, 22 May 2015
6 Ihab Hassan, “Literary Theory in an Age of Globalisation”, Philosophy and Literature 32 (2008): 2.
7 Richard Rorty, “A Pragmatist View of Rationality and Cultural Difference”, Philosophy East and West 42 (1992): 581-596.
8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, translated by Peter Winch, edited by G. H. Von Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1e.
9 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 43.
10 William Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.2.17-20.
11 Sasitharan, “Freedom of Expression and Cultural Sensitivity”.
12 Jitendra Nath Mohanty, The Self and Its Other: Philosophical Essays (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 19.
A Litany of Broken Prayer and Promise
BY NATALIE HENNEDIGE
1
Once I met a woman who told me, it always comes back.
You imagine, one day it’ll go away.
One day it will go away forever and ever.
One day you will be happy and whole.
Believe it.
Have faith and believe.
Cast down your eyes and believe.
I believe a curse looms over me.
I believe I was born under an ominous star.
I believe I was made incomplete.
My mother
My father
My sisters
My brothers
I pray to you
Help me
2
WIFE: He was married. I never thought I could ever be involved with a married man. Adultery – ha-ha-ha – adultery. I’m not young. I’m not beautiful. I was so ugly. My ugliest when I met him.
HUSBAND: Why were you ugly?
WIFE: I was making an offering at the temple. It was your favourite food. Duck. The priest said not to bathe or wash my hair. My hair was so oily. My skin was so green. My eyes were so red. My lips were so dry. My teeth were turning black. I didn’t look human. I was so ugly. I took the duck. I placed it at the altar. Then I knelt down and prayed.
HUSBAND: Were you praying for me? In the afterlife in heaven that I would be happy were you praying that my soul would be free that I would be waiting for you to be united with me? Were you praying for me? In the afterlife in hell tortured tormented where you praying for my relief release offering atonement for my sins?
WIFE: No. I wasn’t praying for you.
HUSBAND: Oh?
WIFE: I was praying for me.
HUSBAND: Oh.
WIFE: He was praying next to me. I turned to look at him. His eyes were closed. His hands were clasped. His mouth was moving very quickly. I kept looking at his mouth. Whispering words. Muttering words. Endless words. So quickly. So quickly. I kept looking at him. I just kept looking at him.
HUSBAND: What did he look like?
WIFE: A man.
HUSBAND: Yes. But what did he look like?
WIFE: It’s not important
HUSBAND: It’s interesting. I’m interested.
WIFE: I said it’s not important.
HUSBAND: Are you going to tell me?
WIFE: No.
HUSBAND: Are you going to tell me?
WIFE: He was short.
HUSBAND: And?
WIFE: Bald.
HUSBAND: And?
WIFE: Blind in one eye.
HUSBAND: And?
WIFE: He had a wooden leg
HUSBAND: And?
WIFE: His teeth jut out.
HUSBAND: He was short and bald and blind in one eye with a wooden leg and jutting teeth. [Chuckling.] Marvellous.
WIFE: We went for lunch together.
HUSBAND [abrupt]: In public? [Dark.] Marvellous.
WIFE: Then we went to the zoo.
HUSBAND: Did you look at the animals or did the animals look at you? Ha-ha-ha-ha!
WIFE: Then we went to the beach.
HUSBAND: This
is very interesting.
WIFE: The moon was full, and a light breeze was blowing.
HUSBAND: And?
WIFE: We walked to the water’s edge. I touched the water with my feet. It was warm. I told him I wanted to go in. We took off our clothes and went in.
3
Once I met a man without fingers.
He was a large man.
Not fat.
More like a boxer.
Stout.
I remember sitting across from him and looking into his eyes.
They were the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen.
Blue.
As he spoke, I found myself being drawn increasingly to him.
I imagined him at home.
I imagined cooking him a meal.
I imagined talking to him about the children.
I loved him so much.
Then the bus stopped
And he got off.
I continued my journey back home.
To my husband and children.
4
There are seven doors. A WOMAN comes through the middle one.
WOMAN: Seven days ago, there was nothing but one Body of Land – eyes, ears, mouth, heart, lungs, stomach, feet, in perfect harmony. Body lay there. Strong. Hard. One day, Waters came. Soft. Wet. She came from nowhere and caressed him. Body responded to Waters. She caressed him for an eternity and then suddenly turned cold and flowed silently away. Without her, Body was in turmoil. My temple my temple my sweetness my flower my temple my temple my sanctuary my shelter my temple my temple my quiet my touch my temple my temple my sanity my air
A trumpet call. Six doors open simultaneously. SIX PEOPLE come through. They stand, breathing heavily.
Singing:
Without you
Eyes shut
Ears stop
Mouth cries
Heart dies
Lungs choke
Feet slide