TRAGEDY, EXCESS,  DISAFFECTION
J  A  D  E  D
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       

S E C T I O N   I :

A   P O S T M O D E R N   D I O N Y S U S ?

       
       

        "How can you like that sort of thing?"  she asked us, the next morning.  "All these posers with their leather and their body-piercings, all acting so cynical and disaffected and 'modern primitive'.  They act like they're so jaded, like they've seen it all before, and like that gives them the right to not give a fuck about anything.  And they think it's so cool.  It's all such bullshit.  Sex and drugs do not give you the right to be jaded, to pretend that there's nothing left for you to experience.  There's so much more to life than that."
        We had gone the night before to sin-a-matic, a dance club in L.A.  Walking in, we had been engulfed in the driving, orgiastic, Dionysian rhythms of hard techno-industrial dance music.  On a stage above the dance floor two large, ugly drag queens were spanking each other.  Later, the dominatrix show began....
       
       
        This paper is about the ways in which Greek Tragedy pertains to certain modern (or postmodern) cultural phenomena: the ways in which the elements of Greek Tragedy can be deployed to make sense of the (post)modern culture-scape we see all around us. 
        Which is to say that this paper is not about Greek Tragedy at all. 
        Which is to say that this paper is about the only Greek Tragedy that has ever existed. 
        All analyses are, in the final analysis, motivated by some present concern.  I do not mean to ridicule or disparage all attempts at putting past phenomena into historical context, at describing things "as they really were."  This "objective past", and its indifferent pursuit by the would-be scholar, are often useful fictions.  An expository work need not make reference to its own contemporary motivations: it is often a useless distraction to do so.
        This essay, however, makes no attempt at hiding these contemporary motivations, and thus has little occasion to indulge in the fiction of an "objective past", and none whatsoever to indulge in the fiction of "indifferent pursuit".  I am not concerned -- nor, at bottom, is anyone, ever -- with what the Greek texts themselves have to say to me, but rather with how I may use them.  Or, to put the same thing in a slightly more palatable form: the content of the text, "what it has to say to me", is precisely a function of the ways in which it allows itself to be used.
        One more point, before we leave these realms of metacritical abstraction and bring the texts, the objects of this inquiry, up close.  I said above that this essay does not attempt to hide its motivations.  This should not be misconstrued as meaning that this essay makes its motivations explicit.  This is, strictly speaking, impossible: the very concept of "motivation", as I am deploying it, precludes the possibility of a motivation being exhibited self-referentially.  Not only does the presence of the self-referential piece of text -- the part that would supposedly "exhibit" the motivation -- necessarily alter that motivation; but once the concept of "motivation" is deployed self-referentially, one can no longer ignore the problematic question: what motivates the concept of "motivation" itself.  And of course, this problem is insoluble.  Thus the concept of "motivation" can only be applied to something other than itself and its applications.  The motives behind a text are always ulterior.
       
        Assuming, for the moment, that Nietzsche's distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollinian is still applicable to today's cultural productions, it would seem that the Dionysian is on the increase.  (Whether this means that the Apollinian is on the decline is another question, one which we shall attempt to address later.)  That most of the clamor over Bacchus's abrupt entrance in the sixties has died down is not so much an indication that the god has left as that he has become comfortably settled in the pantheon of (post)modern culture.  To take an example from just one corner of the current culture-scape: dance clubs and raves -- those Dionysian festivals in the age of mechanical reproduction -- that were usually illegal and underground five years ago have become legitimate, accepted (and often profitable) institutions.
        There are some, of course, who argue that this legality and legitimacy -- of raves as of avant-garde art -- are fatal, that a "legal rave" is an oxymoron, that the Dionysian can only exist as a complete and total transgression.  "wisdom, and particularly Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural abomination;....wisdom is a crime against nature." (Nietzsche p. 69)  "In the heroic effort of the individual to attain universality, in the attempt to transcend the curse of individuation and to become the one world-being, he suffers in his own person the primordial contradiction that is concealed in things, which means that he commits sacrilege and suffers." (Nietzsche p. 71)  In this view, it was essential to the character of the Dionysian that it was heterodox to the Greek culture that it invaded, that the Bacchic rituals were in some way transgressive, that Bacchus was (or was believed to be) an alien.  Perhaps Euripides' Bacchus was so coy about his identity precisely because he was afraid that he might otherwise have been made welcome, and thus lost the source of his power: it was only by being resisted that he could be strong.
        It should be noted in passing that while the Dionysian may valorize transgression, and perhaps invariably does so, not all valorizations of transgression are Dionysian.  This is especially important to keep in mind if one attempts to trace the genealogy of those contemporary cultural phenomena that comprise much of the subject matter of this essay.  While I have space for only the barest outline of such a genealogy here, it will still be obvious that many of the ancestors of this "postmodern Dionysian" are not themselves Dionysian.  For example, much of the contemporary aesthetic can be traced to surrealism, which, though transgressive, was generally un-Dionysian: André Breton's famous edict concerning crowds and revolvers was intended to be a radical affirmation of freedom for the individual, a category with which the Dionysian is not concerned except as something to be transcended or negated.  One might see something more Dionysian in those fringes of surrealism -- such as Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty", or the writings of Georges Bataille -- which are perhaps more closely related to the cultural aesthetic we're discussing here.  But as I have said, this faint indication of the genealogy of popular culture is a gesture towards a project that I do not intend to carry out.  If this abortive gesture has a purpose, it is perhaps only to demonstrate that the Dionysian is often absent where we would most expect him, and present in the most unexpected of places: one of the original theoretical justifications of impressionist painting (to give one random example) was that it was a revolt against the formal principium individuationis of western painting.
       
        The reader may already be skeptical about my applying the term "Dionysian" to something so frivolous and decadent as a rave.  After all, a modern reader cringes, as Nietzsche did later in his career, when reading Nietzsche's naïve assertions that Wagnerian opera was a rebirth of the Dionysian; how much worse it must be to hear this naïve and pretentious pedant (yours truly) seeming to make the same assertion about Lords of Acid.  Indeed, we shall have reason to question that problematic formulation already used, that of the "postmodern Dionysian", but in order to do so productively, we must not dismiss the possibility of such a phenomenon too quickly.
        Consider the following, which was posted to a usenet news group not long ago.  That these "musings" are really rather stupid only makes their similarity to the passages from Nietzsche all the more striking:
       
Xref: news.claremont.edu sci.med:53793 sci.philosophy.meta:6638 alt.rave:9637
Newsgroups: sci.med,sci.philosophy.meta,alt.rave
Path: news.claremont.edu!ucivax!news.service.uci.edu!network.ucsd.edu!pacbell.com!lxfogel
From: lxfogel@srv.PacBell.COM (Lee Fogel)
Subject: 50 yrs +/- a few million
Message-ID: <1993Apr13.210837.2359@PacBell.COM>
Sender: news@PacBell.COM (Pacific Bell Netnews)
Organization: Pacific * Bell
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1993 21:08:37 GMT
Lines: 105 
 
          Some Musings on Raving & the Evolution of Mankind 
 
"It was with them [the Greek festivals of Dionysus] that the destruction of the principium individuationis for the first time becomes an artistic phenomenon." (Nietzsche 40)
"Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man."(Nietzsche 37)
"...this is the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy, that the state and society and, quite generally, the gulfs between man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature." (Nietzsche 59)
"...now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity, caprice, or "impudent convention" have fixed between man and man are broken.  Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him..."(Nietzsche 37)
"...under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the songs of all primitive men and peoples speak,...everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness."(Nietzsche 36)
"In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; [....]  he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams.  He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity."(Nietzsche 37)
"In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the greatest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; something never before experienced struggles for utterance -- the annihilation of the veil of maya, oneness as the soul of the race and of nature itself.  The essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; we need a new world of symbols; and the entire symbolism of the body is called into play, not the mere symbolism of the lips, face, and speech but the whole pantomime of dancing, forcing every member into rhythmic movement.  Then the other symbolic powers suddenly press forward, particularly those of music, in rhythmics, dynamics, and harmony." (Nietzsche 40)
Some ravers feel that they have experienced something special while raving, a kind of positive "vibe" supported by a shared set of ideals that seem  "right" to us.  It is my belief that the activities associated with raving represent a methodology by which many of us, despite having come from very  diverse backgrounds, are able to attain shared states of consciousness that may point to a future direction for the evolution of human existence.  Here is a simplistic outline of some of the ideal concepts I have sensed through raving: 
 
- Physical selfawareness combined with the transcendence of my physical self: dancing & trancing, sleep deprivation. 
 
- Connectivity with my immediate environment and the surrounding universe:  Experiencing the Now and the loss of my self in the timelessness of  neverending rhythms. 
 
- Unity and community, caring and sharing: seeing how we are all capable of experiencing the same feelings; each of us at our center are one and the same. 
 
- Awareness of the neverending journey, change, interactions, of everything  through the evolving cycles and patterns in things and the discovery of new limits to be challenged and explored: changing music, venues, relationships, and use of technology in the house music scene. 
 
The ideals of bringing people together, making them aware of themselves and the world around them is nothing new.  Seeking harmony with the world while challenging the limits that seem to be imposed on us by the world has always been a part of human culture.   
[....] 
LSD, MDMA, trance-inducing music & stimulating visual effects are only the tip of the iceberg; just a hint of what we can do with ourselves.    
[....]  
The next step in human evolution is being characterized by our ability to alter the way we experience reality.   We can now even reprogram the way we  go about reprogramming ourselves.  By directly manipulating our minds,  we are able to directly manipulate our experience of reality.  Each of us will be able to choose to be a god or devil, a pattern of cosmic energy or  a biological animal.  Both or neither.  We will be able to become  any  combination of anything that can be conceived.  We will be able to choose to recognize the independent existence of other beings, or see them as mere  projections of our all-encompassing minds, or not see them at all.  In the future, if we do indeed evolve, the  question each person may have to try  to answer for themselves may simply be: 
 
What do I want Reality to be? 
 
Humans can seek the answer alone, or acknowledge the existence of other  seeking minds with which they can join with in our adventures.  Or we can  simply choose to experience our existence as it is now without attempting  to understand it at all.  Whatever we do the choice will be ours.  
 

Now, where will the dancing be?  Show me
where my feet should go: they'll dance; we'll toss
these old white manes of ours....
I'll dance all day and night and not get tired.

Cadmus, in The Bacchae ll.182-186

 
         
        Of course, most of the Nietzsche passages cited above are precisely those that now seem to us most dated, most naïve, most romantic -- in all the modern pejorative senses of that word -- a defect shared by our usenet raver.  But, as the title of this essay indicates, this optimism seems to me far from typical within the cultural scene that he describes.  As the brief dialogue with which I began this essay hopefully conveys, the usual pose of the postmodern Bacchant resembles Nietzsche's "Dionysian man":  "both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action....Not reflection, no -- true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action..." (Nietzsche 60) 
        Indeed, this is one of the difficulties of Nietzsche's conception of the Dionysian: that it seems to alternate between "the terrible wisdom of Silenus" (45), the "black lake of sadness" (70), "suffering, primal and eternal, the sole ground of the world" (45) on the one hand, and numerous aestheticized, romanticized images of "universal harmony", "reconciliation" (37), and "an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature" (59) on the other.  His later synthesis of these two characterizations of the Dionysian -- for example on page 71: "In the heroic effort of the individual to attain universality, in the attempt to transcend the curse of individuation and to become the one world-being, he suffers in his own person the primordial contradiction that is concealed in things, which means that he commits sacrilege and suffers." -- while interesting, do not seem to exhaust the problem.  One wonders whether this image of "unity" is really properly Dionysian, or whether Nietzsche is projecting a romantic, pantheistic ideal somewhere it doesn't belong.  Yes, the Dionysian intoxication is an ecstasy, an annihilation of the principium individuationis, the individual losing himself.  But must the individual necessarily lose himself to "universality"?  Are "the curse of individuation" and "the one world-being" the only alternatives?  Are there not other forms that ecstasy can take?  Might there not also be an ecstasy of fragmentation
        It is precisely here, it seems to me, that our "postmodern Dionysian", if we still wish to retain that term, must split with Nietzsche's conception of the Dionysian.  Indeed, one wonders if it is not precisely here that the older Nietzsche split with the younger:  though Nietzsche denigrates Buddhism along with Christianity, must he not have eventually noticed the similarity between this Dionysian goal of "attaining universality" and the Buddhist goal of "enlightenment"?  Isn't this conception of the Dionysian precisely that "romanticism" for which the older Nietzsche, in his Attempt at a Self-Criticism, criticized his earlier work?  For this romantic pantheism can only lead to the "will-negating" tendencies of religion: "in sum, as romantics end, as Christians" (26).   
"The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing."
 

-- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
(New York: Macmillan, 1959) 81.

 
 
Whereas Nietzsche's Dionysus tells us "to regard the state of individuation as the origin and primal cause of suffering" (73), the postmodern Dionysus is more ambivalent towards the principium, for the properly tragic despair of his companion Silenus has given way to the gleeful, sadistic irony of a post-Silenic wisdom:  "Did I say that it was best never to have existed?  But the joke is, you never have existed!  And still you suffer."

        The intoxication of the postmodern Dionysian does not resemble enlightenment so much as it resembles schizophrenia.  While it would be a mistake to equate the two, one can see distinct similarities between Nietzsche's conception of the Dionysian and Fredric Jameson's conception of the "schizophrenia" of postmodernism1: the Dionysian involves the breaking down of subjectivity, of the principium individuationis; schizophrenia (to give an extremely simplified account of Jameson's already extremely simplified account of Lacan) involves the breaking down of language, and thus also of subjectivity, of the principium individuationis; for the individuation of subjects is merely one of language's effects.  The schizophrenic, like the ecstatic Dionysian reveler, perceives the world stripped of the Apollinian veil of language.  "...Schopenhauer has depicted for us the tremendous terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumbfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena because the principle of sufficient reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to suffer an exception.  If we add to this terror the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse of the principium individuationis, we steal a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian..." (Nietzsche 36)  But for the postmodern "schizophrenic", while there may be blissful ecstasy, there is no "universal harmony" waiting behind the veil; there are no "innermost depths", no "man", no "nature".  The Dionysian turns "postmodern" precisely when "what might for us [or Nietzsche] seem a desirable experience -- an increase in our perceptions, a libidinal or hallucinogenic intensification of our normally humdrum and familiar surroundings -- is...felt as loss, as 'unreality'." (Jameson 120) 
        The postmodern Dionysian has apparently switched places with the Apollinian: the Dionysian was once the terrible truth -- "suffering, primal and eternal, the sole ground of the world" (Nietzsche 45) -- , was once the reality over which was cast the Apollinian veil of illusion; now the removal of this veil is "felt as loss, as unreality."  One begins to wonder if perhaps it has always been so, if perhaps the "Dionysian" is not the truth beneath the Apollinian veil, but rather is yet another veil cast over the Apollinian.  I referred earlier to Nietzsche's being in some ways "naïve", perhaps this is so also in Schiller's technical sense of "naïve" which Nietzsche associates with the Apollinian artist.  One could read The Birth of Tragedy as the Apollinian's own myth of origins.  While Nietzsche conceives of Tragedy as being "the Apollinian embodiment of Dionysian insights"2, it seems to us now that these "Dionysian insights" are always already so embodied, that the idea of pre-Apollinian experience is purely fictitious, that "the terrible wisdom of Silenus" is not the "substratum" of the Apollinian world of beauty, but one of its products: one that has been projected outside of and prior to the Apollinian world that created it. 
         
       
1   Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983).

2  While my text reads "the Dionysian embodiment of Dionysian insights" (65), I'm quite certain, given the sense of the rest of the paragraph, that this is a typo.

     
   


     
   

S E C T I O N   I I :

M E T A C R I T I C A L   D I G R E S S I O N S

 
 

Here, my thesis is simple: humans construct their own reality, and they get the materials needed for this construction from the cultural productions that they consume.  Art does not imitate life, life imitates art, and this because life is made out of art.  Life is a bricolage, and we are all bricoleurs  Tragedy, then, is the art from which we scavenge material for constructing our pain.
-- from my own "Random Thoughts" on this
course submitted at the beginning of the semester
 
        In the above passage I was looking at "Tragedy" as a response to real suffering -- suffering conceived as a noumenal, pre-semiotic, non-constructed presence.  "Tragedy" is conceived as the semiotic apparatus with which we "deal" with suffering.  We use Tragedy to construct our pain, make it intelligible, perceivable: Tragedy gives us that set of categories by which noumenal suffering is rendered phenomenal.  "Tragedy" is what gives human suffering meaning, not merely in the existential, philosophical sense ("What's the meaning of life?"), but in the usual, everyday sense of the word ("I didn't know what that word meant."). 
        But once we look beyond the immediate appeal of such a facile explanation of "Tragedy", we see that this account is a displacement, or even a reversal, of what is going on right here, right now.  We are not, right now, using Tragedy as a tool for conceiving some pre-conceptual "suffering", we are using the concept of suffering as a way of theorizing Tragedy.  Tragedy is now the problem, and "human suffering" is the semiotic apparatus with which we "deal" with -- construct, theorize, represent --  Tragedy. 
        "[The lyrist's] own willing, longing, moaning, rejoicing, are to him symbols by which he interprets music." (Nietzsche 55) 
        One could, of course, continue to reverse the positions of "suffering" and "Tragedy" indefinitely: in the next iteration it would again be "suffering" -- though this time the concept of suffering, rather than some pre-conceptual presence -- that would be the "problem", and the concept of some pre-theoretical "Tragedy" that is our way of "dealing" with it; and in the next iteration after that the concept of pre-theoretical "Tragedy" is the "problem", and our concept of "the concept of suffering" is our way of "dealing" with that. 
"Here philosophic thought overgrows art and compels it to cling close to the trunk of dialectic.  The Apollinian tendency has withdrawn into the cocoon of logical schematism..." (Nietzsche 91)
These are mere gestures towards where this project would take us, were we to pursue it:  with each new iteration of this recursive textual algorithm any meaning we may have had becomes increasingly lost in the schien of pure textual abstraction, dissolved in the ecstatic excesses of the meta-.  Signifieds and signification disappear, and with them, significance.  To carry this abstraction higher and yet higher does not lead to theory of greater and greater profundity, but rather to an increasingly homogeneous pile of meaningless drivel.  Our towering abstraction quickly becomes a Tower of Babel. 

 
fig. 1: The Tower of Babel
 
     
 
Meta-meta-meta-
referential
(?)
Language
 
 
Pain as construction of Tragedy constructed as construction of pain Meta-meta-
referential
(signifiers)
Tragedy as construction of pain constructed as construction of Tragedy
 
Pain as construction of Tragedy Meta-referential
(signs)
Tragedy as construction of pain
Tragedy Referential
Pain
 
Reality
 
        Having perceived the impending collapse immanent in our original constructions of Tragedy above, the obvious next step is to remove ourselves from this system, to strive for an "objective distance" from which this entire "Tower of Babel" can be perceived and made sense of.  We have taken a first step in that direction already, simply by giving it a name ("Tower of Babel"), and perhaps the narrative above has already produced a neat, stable mental image something like figure 1.  But let us not take this "obvious" next step; let us resist our linguistic compulsion to recuperate contradiction as "synthesis"; let us cross out figure 1.  And let us, instead return to our original object: the jaded, hip, and disaffected -- the postmodern Bacchant -- who continues, despite our best theoretical efforts, to inhabit a world "based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error." (Nietzsche, 23)
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
This is the end of the "polished" section of the text.  I became overly ambitious and set out on a project I wasn't able to complete entirely as planned.  What I have completed here can, I think, stand on its own; however, the ending is rather abrupt.  This seemed to me preferable to the alternative of attempting to give the appearance of an entirely finished work to something that was intended to be much longer, an attempt which would most likely not have succeeded and which would probably have detracted from whatever good qualities the paper has now. 
 
What follows are a chaos of notes and scribblings for where this text might go from here: 
 
 
 
 

S E C T I O N   I I I :
A   P O S T M O D E R N   A P O L L O ?

"Do you really think that all of them are serious, though?" someone else asked rhetorically.  "Sure, some of them are, but a lot of them are like us.  We looked pretty jaded and disaffected last night, all wearing black, sitting in the back, smoking -- and we meant to, that was the fun of it: getting up in costume, striking a pose, pretending that acting jaded and cynical made us cool.  That we don't believe any of it only makes it that much more entertaining..."
 
 
        Having, perhaps arbitrarily, associated (though not equated) Nietzsche's notion of the Dionysian with Jameson's notion of schizophrenia, the obvious next step, the too obvious next step, would be to relate Nietzsche's notion of the Apollinian to Jameson's notion of pastiche.   
         
        ** 
         
        I have said that the pose of the postmodern bacchant was that of the "Dionysian man." One should give full weight to the word pose. It is a rôle. Nietzsche tells us that Hamlet is the archetypal [ww] Dionysian man. The postmodern bacchant is not Hamlet, rather s/he is the actor playing Hamlet. Of all Shakespearean characters, Hamlet is the most sought-after rôle. Paradoxially, the rôle of the Dionysian man, the man whom truth has robbed of all motivation for action, seduces  us to action. By this pantomime of despair, we innoculate ourselves against despair. 
         
        Having, perhaps arbitrarily, associated (though not equated) Nietzsche's notion of the Dionysian with Jameson's notion of schizophrenia, the obvious next step, the too obvious next step, would be to relate Nietzsche's notion of the Apollinian to Jameson's notion of pastiche.   
         
         
        It's very absurdity made it the most profound statement possible. 
         
         
        (attempt at a self-criticism) 
        In comments on a previous paper (in which I discussed the significance of Hegel's excessively abstract prose) I was told that I was "reacting to the appearance of abstraction, not to what's being said".  My most succinct response to this objection is "So?"  Or, to be less glib: my point was precisely the significance of this appearance. "What's being said", to the extent that it is separable from this appearance, was irrelevant to my purpose.  A more cogent objection to my critique of Hegel would be its utter hypocrisy:  " 'Every lower irrational individuality'?  I know, it's comforting to call them that. [....]  But they're called worms, Georg, WORMS; and you can't reason them away.  There's really no escape."  As if my petty rhetoric was any less of an aestheticization than Hegel's; as if my own narcissistic fascination with language could actually bring us any closer to truth.   
"final analysis": One of the uses of "truth" is as a teleology of analysis: analysis "approaches" truth, and the "theoretical" limit of this approach -- the asymptote of analysis, so to speak -- the fictional final analysis in an infinite procession of analyses -- is the truth.
        But, to raise a question hinted at earlier: is appearance separable from "what's being said"?  To what extent can one separate tenor from vehicle, form from content?  Aren't these distinctions, at bottom, wholly artificial?  {* put digression box here: dichotomies as productive technology: replicating text through the forced fission. For indeed, though I question these dichotomies, I continue to use them.  Else, what would I have to say?  Without categories, all would be silence.*}  And what motivates this need to dichotomize if not the desire to fix (in the sense that an animal is "fixed"? i.e. castrate?) the text:  all "appearances" are stripped away leaving only a single, fixed meaning, what's being said.  But do we strip appearances away because they are appearances, or do we call them appearances because we wish to strip them away?  "Behind this mode of thought and valuation, which must be hostile to art if it is at all genuine, I never failed to sense a hostility to life -- a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error." (Nietzsche, 23)  Do we, perhaps, deploy our dichotomies precisely in order to immobilize the text?  Perhaps we have no choice, if we wish to analyze a text: the subject must be restrained prior to vivisection. 
        And I do wish to analyze the text -- so far, I have not done so, having been preoccupied with these vague metacritical concerns -- so let us deploy our dichotomies:  the subject is restrained; Hegel is pithed on the dissecting table[, next to the chance juxtaposition of an umbrella and a sowing machine]; let us proceed. 
        ...I was told that I was "reacting to the appearance of abstraction, not to what's being said".  True enough, though my point was precisely the significance of this appearance. "What's being said"... 
        {Hegel's abstraction symptomatic of/mirrors what he's doing: romanticizing, aestheticizing, beautifying, "dressing up" (as Pentheus was "dressed up" by Dionysus?) -- this is what (some? all?) theory is.  The romantic poet lying in his garret, dying of the cough.  "It's so cool!  Sid Viscious killed his girlfriend and she's dead!"  What, also, the jaded, disaffected aesthetic/lifestyle is -- what Hegel does with words, the modern primitive does with tattoos, piercings, etc.  BODY AS THEORY. } 
        {Greek theatre: masks, personae.  Was Greek Tragedy really so "close" as I implied earlier, or did the masks' distancing make up for the closeness of the character?  By modern standards, a Greek production would be almost bauhaus: the abstraction of the human form! } 
         
        (DON'T BELIEVE A WORD OF IT.  THE AUTHOR DOESN'T:  WHY SHOULD YOU?) 
         
         
        "A man stands at a crossroads."  A man stands on the edge of a precipice.  He is gripped by the fear that he will fall, that some force outside of himself will compel him to hurl into the abyss.  Finally, the terror grows so unbearable that he hurls himself into the abyss, claiming his own fate, and thus becoming, as Schelling would tell us, a "tragic hero". 
        [aside box:]  Essentialism is reductive: to "get at" essence is (essentially !?) to reduce to essence, i.e. to reduce, to make less.  A thing is(!) more than its essence. 
         
        Holy Communion: a manifestation of the Dionysian within Christianity, or its repression?  (Homeopathic remedy, inoculation against?)  Or is communion a symptom -- i.e. an incomplete repression?  Or could communion be, along the lines suggested by my previous paper, an abstraction of the Dionysian, a distancing re-presentation of the Dionysian itself?  We can see that even within the Christian tradition a further distancing has taken place:  in earlier theologies of the blessed sacrament, it was believed that the bread and wine really do, in some spiritual sense, become Christ's body and Christ's blood.  The sparagmos and homophagy are not merely represented but literally reenacted every time communion is taken.  In more modern theologies, Presbyterian and Methodist for example, this is no longer the case: the bread is just bread, the "wine" is just grape juice.  (Presbyterians and Methodists do not allow alcohol in their ceremonies, thus eliminating any possibility of a Dionysian intoxication.) Christ is spiritually present in the ceremony merely as a benevolent host inviting the faithful to eat, not his body, or anybody's body, but just the simple food of bread and grape juice. 
        [aside box:]  Pain and Kantian Metaphysics. 
 AUTHOR       Scarry, Elaine.
 TITLE        The body in pain : the making and unmaking of the world / Elaine
                Scarry.
 IMPRINT      New York : Oxford University Press, 1985.
 DESCRIPT     vii, 385 p. ; 25 cm.
 NOTE         Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBN/ISSN    0195036018 :
 SUBJECT      Pain.
              War.
              Torture.



'äääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääää"
û    LOCATION             CALL NO.                       STATUS               û
û1 > HON                  BJ1409 S35 1985                DUE 12-10-93         û
'äääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääää"  
        I said earlier that the usual pose of the postmodern Bacchant resembles Nietzsche's "Dionysian man":  "both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action....Not reflection, no -- true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action..." (Nietzsche 60)  Thus Silenic wisdom can serve as a justification for  
         
        Once, transgression justified suffering.  Oedipus committed patricide and incest,  and thereby brought suffering onto himself.  Adam ate of the forbidden fruit, thereby bringing misery into the world.  Tragedy was a way of justifying the world to ourselves.  It does seem that this sort of tragedy is dead.  Perhaps we have utterly given up even pretending that the world is fair, or perhaps two millennia of Christianity have convinced us that whatever happens, we deserve it; but whatever the reason, we no longer attempt to justify the world to ourselves in this way. 
        Instead, we attempt to justify ourselves to the world.  Now, suffering justifies transgression.  Consider the song "Gimme the Car", by the Violent Femmes, which expresses a very typical modern attitude towards moral transgression and suffering.  The song opens with the singer trying to convince his dad to give him the car: 
        
come on dad, gimme the car tonight
i got this girl i wanna...
[...]
i'll tell you what, i'll tell you what i'm gonna do
i'm gonna pick her up, i'm gonna get her drunk
i'm gonna make her cry, i'm gonna get her high
[....]
and then I'm gonna touch her
all over her body...
  
        In other words, the singer is intent on date-raping someone, certainly a morally transgressive act, a sin.  But then the singer goes on: 
       
what's wrong?  what's right?
i don't care when i hate my life
what's wrong?  what's right?
y'know people don't care, when they hate their lives
but how can i explain personal pain
how can i explain personal pain
how can i explain
my voice is in vain
how can i explain
the deep down driving... driving... driving...
 
        {One is tempted to say that it was (and perhaps still is) society that justified individual suffering through the concept of transgression (not always the transgression of the individual: the "sins of the fathers" will do just as well, it seems), and that it is the individual that justifies his (and her?  or only his?) own transgression through the concept of suffering.  Does this make the new disaffection merely another tiresome manifestation of bourgeois individualism?  Or is there some way in which this justification of transgression transcends the increasingly outmoded "modernist" ideology within which it was originally construed?} 
       
come on dad, gimme the car tonight
come on dad, gimme the car tonight
i got this girl i wanna...

come on dad, gimme the car
come on dad, gimme the car tonight
i'll tell you what, i'll tell you what i'm gonna do
i'm gonna pick her up, i'm gonna get her drunk
i'm gonna make her cry, i'm gonna get her high
i'm gonna make her laugh, i'm gonna make her sh...

woman, woman, woman
see i know she's it cuz i'm gonna
touch her all over her body, gonna touch her
all over her body, gonna
touch her, all over her body, gonna touch her
all over her body, AND SHE CAN TOUCH ME 
all over my body
she can touch me all over my body
she can touch me
all over my body she can
touch me all over my body

time goes by i can feel myself growing old
burning inside's makin this boy turn out cold

what's wrong?  what's right?
i don't care when i hate my life
what's wrong?  what's right?
y'know people don't care, when they hate their lives
but how can i explain personal pain
how can i explain personal pain
how can i explain
my voice is in vain
how can i explain
the deep down driving... driving... driving...
we're driving... we're driving... we're driving... we're...

hey dad, speaking of driving... come on dad, gimme the car tonight
 
so much he don't understand
just might never make it to a man

come on dad, gimme the car
come on dad i ain't no runt
come on girl gimme your...

cuz i ain't had much to live for
i ain't had much to live for you know 
i ain't had much to live for
you know i ain't had much to live for


                                                -Violent Femmes
                                                 "Gimme The Car"
 
         
        life is the displaced phantom image of existence; life is the shiny happy face of a non-returnable coke bottle grinning cheerfully in the desert, five-hundred miles from the chemical warfare, the melting skin; life is art, the phantom displaced image of anti-art; life murders existence with metonymy; it is against the law to exist; existence is logocide; existence does not exist.