Prehistoric cave art, Chauvet, Ardèche, France. Photo, Inocybe, 2006.
[This is part 4 of 4. To read the other parts of the interview, see the links at the bottom of this page.]
TS: Thus far, we’ve been talking about aspects of what’s going on when we are spectating horrifying transformations in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. The tip off for me that there is something unusual going on here is that, for me, the play is horrifying without being terrifying.
MC: Yes.
TS: I find this initially difficult to pin down, as to why, I mean. Why am I horrified and not terrified? Humorous, yet horrifying.
MC: Absolutely right.
TS: We’re watching people spectating something that exceeds all understanding. It appears that people in the play are “giving in” to some version of what has been called “the political sublime.”
MC: Yes, I think that’s right.
TS: And at least for myself, I feel horrified by their insufficient horror. And there is something very strange about that.
MC: Yes! That’s where the humor of the play comes from, and where the horror comes from.
TS: I’m interested in the apparent toggling that is going on between aesthetic horror, the horror at the horrifying object, and moral horror, which is reflected back upon the horrified subject. We’re horrified, along with the characters in the play, at the sight of other characters transforming into rhinoceroses. But more than that we’re horrified by the quality of their reaction to that, and this seems to give rise to a distinct species of moral horror. So I started reading about moral horror per se, trying to isolate it.
MC: Yes, you said you were reading Jeremy Arnold, State Violence and Moral Horror.
TS: Yes! Not to be confused with the film critic Jeremy Arnold. This Jeremy Arnold is a Singapore-based political theorist.
Arnold refers to moral horror as the result of a fundamental contradiction—a tragic contradiction really as we discussed earlier—so following Lukacs, we should understand it as a tragedy in the realm of the ethical.
MC: Right.
TS: So what is this contradiction all about? It’s the contradiction between what we know and what we do or don’t do, for example. Per Arnold, it’s the precariousness of our humanity that’s at the center of moral horror.
Do you mind if I go on about this a little bit more? He goes to significant lengths to make an argument that I found really interesting, given our topic. He starts talking about the difference between humans and animals, and he runs through what we’ve all heard before—the Greeks on rational animals because of the logos, because of speech and reason. But he says that the specific element that the speaking and reasoning is for, what makes all the difference, is that we have a distinction between justified and unjustifiable violence that you don’t have in the natural world per se.
So it’s the losing of that distinction, or the threat of losing it, that creates a kind of a vivisection of humanity in ourselves which is the basis of moral horror.
MC: I think this is a great way to dig into these issues. I can’t help but think about the recent Jurassic Park movie, Jurassic World with Chris Pratt. There’s a scene where the hero and heroine are looking out over a field of dead dinosaurs that have not been eaten, and they realize that the dinosaur that they have been tracking is killing for sport. And that’s a moment of moral horror from the other side of the equation.
TS: This comes through in Alien also—the sense that the alien is both completely instinctual, that is without any moral imagination, and yet is nonetheless cognizant, in fact really smart.
If the precariousness of our humanity, our capacity for moral freedom is the basis for moral horror, and the act of moral choice is a very inward thing, then presumably its not an easy thing to dramatize.
MC: Well, the moral choice itself may be invisible, but dramatists have been finding a way for thousands of years…
TS: Well I don’t dispute that, but you know, morality plays tend to be pretty didactic, don’t they? Of course, I know these sorts of stinkers aren’t what you have in mind.
There are several good examples from film that come to mind right away–there’s Schindler suddenly apprehending the young girl’s red coat in the otherwise black and white Schindler’s List. There’s Charlie, returning the everlasting gobstopper at the conclusion of Wonka’s test, a test that was conducted, by the way, so that Wonka could be sure of the motive for the action, as sure as possible that Charlie was indeed capable of a good deed in a weary world.
MC: You know, my favorite moment in the Star Wars movies is when Luke is being tortured by the emperor, and Darth Vader comes over, who is certainly a monster, and he looks at his son, who is being ravaged by lightning, and he looks at the emperor who is doing the ravaging, and he looks back and forth, and he looks and he looks and he looks. And the wonderful thing about this is that he’s wearing the same static mask he’s been wearing throughout, but you can nevertheless see this calculation going on, a moral calculus, a choice between good and evil.
TS: This all leads to something I’ve been trying to articulate since I first pointed out that the functioning of the play includes the audiences’ moral horror at the spectating characters’ lack of horror at the transformation of their fellow townspeople. There’s something going on here about the horrible non-appearance of things that ought to be appearing that invokes the experience of the sublime as described by Kant in his Critique of Judgment.
MC: Yes. Ok. Yes. The absence of a thing—which is a thing, and which is being dramatized–perhaps a form of surrogation as we discussed previously.
TS: You have all these people who are failing, in myriad ways, failing to exhibit a proper moral response—would people stop turning into rhinos if they were reacting differently? I don’t know. But I think that the real significance of the play is found in the way we the audience become agitated by the nonappearance of any sign of something invisible that ought to be there but apparently is not.
In preparing for this interview, I somewhere read a quote from Adorno on the Kantian sublime that was paraphrased by someone as “an art that shudders to the point of self-cancellation in its attempt to present the unpresentable.”
MC: Yeah, absolutely.
TS: So my (undoubtedly overly fabulous) contention here is that Rhinoceros is quite literally a morality play—not in the allegorical sense one would expect, but rather by trying to make visible something invisible, and by creating a specific kind of response that comes about through the failure of that thing to be represented.
My further contention is that this very closely describes the experience of the sublime in Kant. The specific kind of response—the sublime part, if you will–is recognition of the existence of higher purposes within ourselves; what Kant calls the ideas of reason—moral freedom, the immortality of the soul, and/or God in 18th century parlance.
MC: Yes. That’s great. I love that. That’s awesome.
If nothing else, it’s pretty clear that horror and the sublime are very closely related. Losing a feeling for one’s place in the universe and feelings of awe at things that outstrip our imagination’s ability to represent are psychologically quite similar. Reacting to your central point, which is the expression of an absence. I think you’re right that Ionesco does this really well. The people in Rhinoceros are all self-obsessed. Their inability to rise above their immediate self-interestedness is what Ionesco wants us to think is the cause of their inability to react appropriately.
We’ve been thinking about the rhinoceroses as the monstrous representation of the fascists—
TS: Yeah, I see the rhinos as people who are “giving in” to an aestheticized politics, and so are having an experience of the political sublime, and the spectators and we in the audience are horrified at their doing that, and they are mostly insufficiently horrified, and then they are becoming rhinos. I realize we haven’t discussed what is meant by an aestheticized politics, a la Walter Benjamin. The usual answers given refer to all the spectacle of the 3rd Reich designed to excite people, Leni Riefenstahl and whatnot. But the example I like to give is the Trump voter who, when asked why they voted for him, say “I just wanted to shake things up.”
MC: Right, left the chips fall where they may.
TS: There’s an experience of the dynamical sublime when people get enthusiastic about certain kinds of large-scale political transformations. This is what is happening with these rhino people. They’re making political decisions based on aesthetic criteria. But they’re us—there isn’t something fundamentally different about them.
MC: Exactly. These are not the master race. They’re just ordinary French villagers.
TS: If I’m even close to right about how the play is structured and how its supposed to work, then this still leaves the question of whether it does really work or not. What is it exactly that these people are supposed to be doing that they are not doing? And how do you feel coming out of the theater if you can’t answer that?
After almost two years now of thinking about this in relation to our present circumstances, I think the answer has something to do with recognizing that the genie can’t be put back in the bottle, and that addressing really fundamental underlying conditions that have led us to this state of affairs, where it appears that there is nothing to be done, is what is needed. We can’t continue to think that these people should continue to be who they are, but somehow have done something. So maybe the take away is that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and it’s not Hamlet.
MC: Perhaps, but maybe it’s still the case that Marcellus should actually be saying, “there’s something rotten in Denmark, and it’s me.” The problem with this, though, is that its very hard to make art that motivates people in this way. People are resistant to it. Nobody wants to be told what to do, especially in America.
TS: Which ever way you come down on this—the answer obviously includes both determinism and spontaneity—it still seems to be the case that the resources needed to address what is happening within the play are not found within the play.
MC: Right. That’s correct.
TS: And in some sense, they aren’t within art, either.
MC: Yeah, they’re not. So Roach says, when writing about surrogation, that most pieces of culture are affirmative about the culture they represent. Very few are deeply critical. Because until people are in absolute danger, they won’t listen to it.
TS: A minute ago we were talking about Shakespeare, and Hamlet in particular. It occurs to me that this is significant in that what is so notable about Shakespeare is that the characters are so self-aware within the plays, and people respond with wow, this play is shockingly modern, even now. But the characters in Rhinoceros are distinctive by their total lack of self-awareness, and you have to sit there as a self-aware modern person and watch that.
MC: Yes, hopefully, when you leave the theater, then, you go out in the world and you are attuned to noticing this lack of attunement—you can notice it in yourself, and you can notice it in others.
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