Pragmatic Aesthetics I: Goal-Based Art

I threatened a while back to start articulating the aesthetic theories that I'm working with, that I spent the last of my college days refining.

The motivating force behind this development was when, in my freshman year, Karen Finley stood in front of all of us and declared that because there was no right or wrong in art, there was no need to study form, and that we were all wasting our time studying art. This was after an enraging performance of The Passion of Terry Schaivo that raised every hackle in my artistic soul.

The Experimental Theater Wing was definitely born out of that post-modernist moment of "What is art?" and constantly asking the question of where we draw the line. I knew that I, personally, had some impressions of what art should and shouldn't be, a critical frame, but I had no way to articulate it that was non-arbitrary.

My first strong sense about this aesthetic realm is that just because the rules are not absolute does not mean that they are arbitrary. The core assumption, so far as I could suss, of a lot of post-modernists is that since truth is relative, we therefore create it in each moment. But I don't believe that the first part leads to the second part necessarily.

So I went in search of some philosophical language that addressed how to talk about something which is relative but not arbitrary, and I fell on William James' Pragmatism like manna in the desert. His prime assumption, which is that "philosophy is rules for action" was a needed bearing. Why do we criticize and theorize? Not simply so that we can diss artists we hate and prop up artists we like. It's so that we can make better art. In other words, aesthetics help us make choices that make our artwork better.

What's better, then? I spent four years in search of what "better" means in the realm of art. This "better" is where the relativity lives.

I thought about it for a while, and I slowly came to the conclusion that there's two separate issues; there's the goal that the artist has in mind for the created work (which is a truly individual and moral choice), and how well the work accomplishes that goal. Based on the goal that the artist wants to fulfill, there are some clear rules for which choices will be more or less effective. They are relative -- relative to the artist's context, relative to the artist's goal -- but they are not arbitrary.

Because of the goal, the efficacy becomes measurable. Any rule stated about a created work should be able to predict success within a certain context; success and its context is defined by the goal.

Now, each created work accomplishes its own individual work. But if it is a work of culture, there is one common function it performs, whether it be an advertisement, a twitter feed, a play, or a blog post. The function of culture is to form a bridge between the creator(s) and the audience member(s) to convey some piece of knowledge or experience. This is how we gain knowledge and experiences without being there firsthand.

Now, what knowledge or experiences will we, the audience, want of the creator? This is where we return to Pragmatism as James put it: we will value the knowledge or experiences that help us live our lives in the way we want to live it. To put another way, we will value the knowledge or experiences that help us make effective choices in our own lives. These are knowledge or experiences that help us make accurate predictions about the world around us, so that our choices will be more effective.

So, to recap:

1. The point of an aesthetic is to provide a means for making effective choices.
2. Each work should have a goal with measurable success conditions.
3. The aesthetic choice within the work is valuable to the degree that it helps achieve the goal.
4. The function of culture is to transmit knowledge or experiences between creator(s) and audience member(s).
5. The knowledge or experiences that the audience will value are those that help make accurate predictions about the world they live in.

Alright, that's the nut basics of pragmatic aesthetics, my attempt to use pragmatic philosophy to create a critical language for the arts. I'm hoping to lengthen my thesis into a book on the subject, which goes into more depth about the principles above and goes into more.

Anyways, the whole point of this was I have some posts I'm going to be working on that are critical responses to other works, and this is the groundwork I'm working in.

On The Meaning Of What We Do

Scott Walters picks up on an important question -- the important question -- posed by Tom Loughlin:

When you stack up the general public’s statistical disinterest in theatre against the general economic condition of the art and the artists themselves, the rational mind has to question why anyone would continue to pursue such a statistically trivial career. Or worse – why anyone would ever educate or train someone to pursue this career. You can choose to take the high road and produce aesthetic arguments supporting such a choice, but only in a first-world country where basic needs are by and large taken care of can this argument actually take place. There are many places in the world where no one is arguing about how many plays or whose plays get produced every year. You own career, stacked up against these statistics, makes for a sober reckoning.

Scott's answer:

Our society is built on stories. We communicate our values, our ways of interacting, our aspirations according to the stories we tell each other over generations. The idea that there is value in helping others who are in dire need, for instance, which underlies the Haitian relief effort, is passed on from generation to generation by the stories we tell that reinforce that value. Without that story, or with a more dominant counter-story, such admirable behavior would likely be scarce.

I think I'll take a crack at answering the question, because the question goes back to what my goal was when I began this blog, the philosophy that underlies how I try to approach theater, politics, and everything.

There's a lot of evidence to support the theory is that what drives humanity to create the complexity of our civilization is our ability to communicate. Mankind makes discoveries, and then it shares discoveries with one another, and passes them down. Mankind discovered other ways to encode that communication -- first carved into stone, then written on pages, printed, broadcast, and then finally put into the digital sphere.

You can look at the history of science. A theory begins with a single man making a statement. Someone responds to it. Someone adds on to it. Someone criticizes it. Someone corrects it, someone else rebuts the criticism. The conversation evolves the ideas, and it only evolves as we respond and add on.

That's what culture is. Culture is an aggregation of everyone's attempts to join a cultural, historical conversation about today, tomorrow, and the future. It's a big conversation, much of which is chatter -- Twitter, in a way, is a microcausm of the language. There are conversational threads like the permanent conversations about sex, about governance, about happiness. There are conversations that crop up and rage suddenly in a context and then fade away as people move on (is the Leno-Conan thing going to be important in 2011?).

I'm reading up on mimetics lately to try and support this idea but the idea is this: our society is built on two things: the fitness of our bodies, and the fitness of our ideas. In fact, at this point, we stress the fitness of our ideas more than the fitness of our bodies, because they are far more flexible and pay back to the fitness of our bodies much quicker.

That's what we're doing here in the theater: we're trying to enter this big cultural conversation in the ways we know how. We've got things to say, memes/ideas to spread, things that we hope will add to the survival of the species. We're a tiny shred of society's conversation, or a sliver of its imagination. We're just individual neurons firing inside the great mind of society.

Can we guarantee that our firings are doing something? I don't know. Ask a neurologist which brain cells are "vital" in the working of the brain. We lose some all the time. Often, it's the connections between brain cells which are more important than the neurons themselves -- and that's the conversation.

I forget who it was who first implanted the meme into my head that playwriting is the supreme act of arrogance -- writing as though people care about what you have to say. But the truth is, people are surprisingly interested in what everybody has to say. And we don't have to reach everyone ourselves -- we just have to be 6 degrees away from everybody.

One of the important memes that this conversation includes is, as Scott notes, generosity. That conversation goes so far back in history we can't remember where it begins, but you can see it in the Gospel ("Give to other people, and you will receive. You will be given much. It will be poured into your hands--more than you can hold. You will be given so much that it will spill into your lap. The way you give to other people is the way God will give to you."), and you can see it in the Gospel of Wealth ("In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give those who desire to use the aids by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all.")

As we debate the issues back and forth, in sermons and books and advertise and put on plays, the ideas evolve. They get more specific. When I was young, it seemed like people wanted to help Africa, so they sent food and clothes. Then African economists got together and pointed out that buying food and clothes and sending money was counterproductive in the long term. Nowadays, it seems like we've refined our tools for giving. All of a sudden there's microloans, we're debating whether it's more effective to use pesticides or mosquito nets, we're talking about how closely linked government reform is to international aid. A century ago, we didn't even have a movement that believed that people in other countries might be as worthy of our aid as people in our own.

How often is theater at the center of the debate? Not all that often. But then again, how often is any of the 6 billion people on this planet at the center of the debate? The new rabidly self-aggrandizing type of person typified by the Balloon Boy family or the Salahis is the compulsion of Americans who do not want to be at the edge of the debate, do not just want to be one neuron in a mass of coordinated neurons -- they want to drive the debate. The Salahis, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck; people who aren't content with chiming in with their two cents.

Let's just keep the conversation rolling, so that our ideas can literally evolve and hopefully make us more fit as a society.

Inspiration/Dramaturgy II : Play As A Construct III

Back to 99Seats' comments about playwrights needing to think consciously about their work, and my last post analyzing the ending structure of my play Orchestration (published by IndyMill Publishing), and I wanted to loop those two discussions back to each other.

When I first began the play, my initial image was born out of a Beirut concert (and specifically, the song "Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)"), and it basically involved a manic, spiraling waltz. It was also going to be a play specifically about Lebanese colonial history--that was my first conscious set of decisions about the play, and although they informed the end structure, I wound up making a different set of decisions, more abstract ones; dramaturgical decisions.

By the way, I'm using the term "Dramaturgical" to mean something a little bit broader than just decisions made based off of historical fact. For a while, I didn't really understand the purpose of a dramaturgist--I couldn't see the distinction between him and a director. This conversation is making me understand that the dramaturgical role is to think about the play in the conceptual, the theoretical, and the historical--in other words, in terms of the conscious--when the director is thinking inspirationally, making gut calls, etc. I still think that both functions should actually be the same person, or part of the same team equally, but as a concept I think that's the role of the dramaturgist.

When it came to the ending, though, I had a clear desire to have the play fall apart (in old Greek Tragedy, the character falls apart; it seems to me that the modernist tragedy involves the play itself falling apart). But I didn't know exactly how. I stumbled (inspirationally) on the image of him lashing out at the audience, kicking them out. My intuition was lead along by how people who lose control lash out: first by yelling (which is why I broke the silence of the piece with him yelling), then by cursing, then by violence (I put violence before yelling in the play later, as a decision), and then finally by withdrawal and rejection.

My dad (an executive in the software industry with a background in development) challenged me on this point, for good reason. He felt that the audience would feel rejected and insulted by me, the playwright, and that the play would therefore end on a strong negative feeling for the audience. I wanted that image to stay with them, but I didn't want them to feel assaulted; it was a balance.

This is when I used the Pragmatist model of decisionmaking, and one which I think artists should use when making decisions about their art. It's a strict way of looking at decisions on the stage, and it's based on William James' Pragmatism.

James was discussing whether or not there was a God, and he asked the question this way: Assume that there is a God. How would the world reflect that? Assume that there is no God. How would the world reflect that? The answers to the question are not as important as the question (his version of the answers to those questions is that in the present, everything would look and feel exactly the same, but in the far future it was the difference between a perfect ending and a slow decay into chaos).

I looked at my play and asked, "If I do _____, what effect does that have on the audience? How would ______ support my central ideas?" And then I selected the ending with the desired effects, and the best support of my central ideas.

The ending I selected (having the orchestrator kick out all of the audience, but having the ensemble and, crucially, myself as the writer-director greet them as they exited) answered the questions thus:

1. The ending would first give the audience the sympathy and fear of the collapse of the character, would blur the lines between the internal world of the play and the external--both conceptually, because the play is still going on as they exit, and physically because the characters are outside and they travel out of the theater while still experiencing the play. It would also create a sudden, important separation between the world as the orchestrator has created it and the world as I am running it, because I step in to say "hey guess what? The world isn't as negative as this pathetic wreck would force you to believe."
2. The ending strongly supports the conceptual frame I was operating under, Vaclav Havel's "Power of the Powerless", which states that power only exists as long as the powerful control the truth and the powerless operate under that truth. Once the ensemble rebels against the "Realism" of the orchestrator, the audience is invited out of that realism and into another realism of the real world. Simply by greeting them at the door, I retain the right to completely disassemble his world, without having to directly oppose him in any way. That fits in with the conceptual narrative, and therefore it's the right ending.

Of the thousand of endings I can imagine now, none of them fit the test any better -- although I'd love to hear some better-fit endings! (When I adapted Orchestration for film I had to adjust the ending because in film, it had different impact on the audience).

Pragmatic Theater: Realism and The Play As A Construct I

Unlike many of my classmates, I spent the spring of my freshman year reading the entire book of translated Brecht essays, rather than the ones that were assigned ("The Modern Theater Is The Epic Theater" and "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting"). Now, I know why those two essays are assigned--in terms of the larger history of theater, those are the two that mark the clearest antithesis to Aristotle's Poetics, but in terms of understanding Brecht (and Brecht is a personal hero for me, the man who forms the very core of my artistic sensibility), I think that those essays are poor representatives.

Brecht was a person who loved to contradict himself. He gets the impression of being a radical, especially because the first of the two essays is quite a radical tract. Actually, he turns out to be quite the moderate, pragmatic thinker. He's not interested in things that don't work. That's why when you read Mother Courage and All Her Children, he's not actually driving out all the emotion--he understands that Mother Courage has to be a pathetic character on some level to be compelling. He pushes the form as far as will work (and, admittedly, sometimes too far).

Late in his life, he began outlining a shift in thinking, creating a theory called the Dialectical Theater that would encapsulate both his Epic Theater and the Aristotilian theater he sought to get away from. That dialectical theater is what I really fell in love with, despite the fact that he never got to really articulate it. But I think it was always present in the contradictions within his work.

At any rate, the one thing that gets said most about Brecht is that he's an anti-realist. Brecht himself noticed that, and he wrote one of my favorite essays by him called "The Popular And The Realistic." In it, he puts forward that his theater isn't anti-realistic. Now, he admits freely that it isn't naturalistic, but in terms of realism, he says:

We must not abstract the one and only realism from certain given works, but shall make a lively use of all means, old and new, tried and untried, deriving from art and deriving from other sources, in order to put living reality in the hands of living people in such a way that it can be mastered.

Later on, he says more succinctly:

Our conception of realism needs to be broad and political, free from aesthetic restrictions and independent and convention. Realist means laying bare society's causal network...

He goes on, listing other benchmarks for the term "realist" all of which come from his own socialist interpretation, and which isn't so applicable to day. But you could reword that last sentence to be "Realist means revealing something about the world today."

That's the Pragmatist, moderate Brecht (I have already dubbed my theater aesthetic the Pragmatic Theater, after the pragmatist philosopher William James). What he's saying is that "realism" isn't a certain style of theater (and he's talking about living-room, fly-on-a-wall Ibsen naturalism), it's the accuracy of the play to reality, and in that pursuit we are allowed to use any aesthetic tools necessary.

The reason I use the capital P Pragmatist to describe this Brecht is because this dovetails beautifully into James' model of how we learn knowledge (I've lent someone that book, so I can't quote directly from it, which is tragic). James describes our system of worldview as being the accumulation of rules-of-thumb that we've tested against reality, and we don't change our worldview until something we test it against makes it fail, and then we make the shortest change possible to keep our worldview. That's why when something minor unexpected happens you don't tear your entire worldview down, and you don't often just suddenly change your worldview unprompted.

That's how our audience views our play: they have their worldview, and they test what we put on the stage against it, and if what we're representing matches the world as they understand it, it feels True to them. That's "Realism."

Should we challenge their worldview? Yes. But that doesn't mean negating it (as much of the combatitive, negativistic art of the 1970s and 1980s did), it means finding a way to make their worldview incompatable with itself. If you can make your audience aware of a sudden, deep contradiction, they'll do the questioning of their own worldview. That's what "subversive" really means; it means that the audience follows the logic every step of the way, until they suddenly find that things don't add up. Stephen Colbert does this very well (I could talk for hours about how Colbert is the third big Pragmatist after Brecht and James).

Now, the one thing that Brecht gave to this "realism," and which he is rightfully remembered for, is the idea that acknowledging the play as a construct can be part of realism. We didn't think it was realism, of course, so we put it in its own category, but that doesn't make it untrue. He tried to lay guidelines for how you can incorporate the play into realism, and not have to pretend (which is the true opposite of realism; pretending and lying).

I was going to get to my own view on the Play as a Construct, but I think that's going to be my next post. Too many words makes the baby go blind.