Guy Yedwab 12/15/08 Pragmatic Performance A friend of mine was sitting in the office of a professor highly placed in her school's journalism department. She is studying theater, but at the time she wanted to doublemajor in the field of journalism. Much to her dismay, this idea was greeted by scorn and anger by this highly placed professor. “This is exactly what's destroying the field of journalism!” she spouted angrily, “Artists pretending to be journalists!” I am familiar with this sentiment. I myself expressed anger and shock when I saw Anderson Cooper upon the Colbert Report say that he's been doing the same thing for the last fifteen years. Colbert instantly rejoined, “Really? Didn't you host [the reality game show] The Mole for a while? ... That's the same thing as you do now? That's a real insight into what you do now.” The idea that a respected, socially necessary field of work filled with historical giants like Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings could be, in Cooper's mind, the same as hosting the crassest of cheap massproduced entertainment, is precisely why people like that journalism professor resent the theater world. Over the last few decades, it has felt as though a great intellectual dishonesty has pervaded both our politics and our art. Just today, for instance, I have seen the latest dispatches in the growing controversy around the authorization for torture in the United States. In specific, the outstanding Atlantic Monthly journalist Andrew Sullivan notes that in all of the dispatches on the subject, the New York Times (one of the cornerstones of the “fourth estate” that is journalism) has refused to use the
term “torture,” and instead hints obliquely that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” have aroused “some controversy.” It is Andrew Sullivan, not the New York Times, who traces the phrase “enhanced interrogation” back to its origin in the Nazi Regime, when the leaders of the SS were searching for a euphemism for torture that they could present to the International Red Cross as justification for their harsher techniques. At a time when just this week a bipartisan Senate commission said that it is the finding of the Senate that the specific torture techniques employed at Abu Ghirab prison were authorized by the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States, the President continues to assert that he was “shocked” and “dismayed” when he saw the photos of the abuse. The photo of Lyndie England leading a naked detainee on a dogleash was termed “a few bad apples,” when those specific techniques—dog leashes and nudity, amongst many others—were signed off on by the President. It is not so much shocking that the President lies about his criminal action. But what is disheartening and shocking is that the actual, physical proof—memos which have been printed in the press with the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the White House Counsel's signature asserting that those specific techniques would be authorized—is not being treated as true by journalistic bedrocks like the New York Times. More shockingly, in the interest of “fairness,” an oped calling for warcrimes tribunals to investigate the matter was “balanced out” by an oped this weekend which defended the practice of torture, even if it subverted the Geneva Convention, saying that we all know that our government breaks the rules, so why do we bother enforcing them? In this defense of terror, we see the cause of the erosion of truth in politics. President Bush's
high point in office is when, describing how we fail children in our schools, he spoke about the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” As we lower our expectations, our children do worse and worse. And as it relates to the truth, we hold our papers and politicians to a very low standard. Ever since a group of Ronald Reagan's communications branch left office and founded a rightwing news organization—FOX News, now one of the largest in the world—our national dialogue has become less and less occupied with what the truth actually is, but rather who is controlling it. Each party develops a strategy on how to control the truth itself—through repetition and framing of language. George Lakoff argued, in his book Don't Think Of A Purple Elephant, that Democrats' problems winning elections in the late 1990s and early 2000s had nothing to do with politicians, groundgame, or issues; it was a result of them ceding the language battle to Republicans. He argued that Democrats lost the debate over the “Estate tax” by letting Republicans call it a “Death tax,” that they had lost over the War in Iraq when they were accused of being “Cut and runners.” His solution was simple: figure out how to beat the word game. After any political debate, there is now a tradition to head into a loathsome place called “Spin Alley.” There, party operatives supporting the candidates will say whatever it takes to make the debate look like a victory for their side. They frequently lie, misconstrue, and otherwise distort the evening until it looks as though the election is over, and they have won. I remember watching Terry McAuliffe, a former Chair of the National Democratic Party, performing spin when everyone—everyone—knew that it was simply mathematically impossible for Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic Nomination. And indeed, watching McAuliffe fight to win points was watching a descent into madness; the more
that reality was against his candidate, the more he simply rejected reality. This is political theater at its worst. And it is tempting to dream of an era where theater was never part of politics, to put theater back into its theatrical box on the stage. Plato, in his Republic, called art “an imitation of an imitation of the truth” and thus, it was “three removes from truth.” Consequently, he wanted to cast it of the ideal Republic; it had no place there. But what I'd like to argue is that the problem is not politics as “theater” or politics as “drama” or politics as “performance”—all of which have the connotation of disingenuity—it is politics as bad theater (drama/performance). Performance and the performing arts have gotten a bad rap. Somehow, acting has become synonymous in general culture with lying, or pretending. The New York Times review of Tea Leoni in Woody Allen's Hollywood Ending is titled “A Habit Of Lying Taught Her The Truth Of Acting.” Tea Leoni writes off “this grand idea that, 'No, it's the opposite—it's the truth, by God,' blah blah blah.” Instead, she credits her own history has a minor compulsive liar for her craft. And this, to a certain extent, is the public perception of the performer: someone who pretends to be what they're not. Yet over the years, it has become more and more apparent that what the actor does is what a human being does; they play roles and craft their own image. Actors do it more creatively, imaginatively, or specifically, but it is essentially a human task. And unlike Tea Leoni, I do believe in that 'grand' idea that at the core of performance is truth. That, after all, is always the way we judge a performance: did it “ring true.” But over the last 200 years, a shift happened in the world of acting. The actor began to be told that “truth” meant he had to believe everything that was going on onstage. This “psychological realism”
became a method of, in a sense, forced selfdelusion. Whether through sense memory, emotional recall, or imagination, the actor tried to find a sense of a trance that would block out any of the facts that would dissociate him from an imaginary world that he took to be real. Last week, an actor in Australia stabbed himself in the throat with a knife which was supposed to be fake, but turned out to be real. Of course, he didn't stop to notice that the fake knife was real—because in his role in the moment on stage, he was supposed to believe it was real. When this became the dominant mode of theater, theater lost a certain perspective on reality. Now, audiences were going to see something which clearly was staged, but tried to “lose themselves in the world of the play,” and therefore buy into what was being presented to them. This trend continued on televisions—helped by the fact that early television buyers were incredulous at the reality of the images on the screen—and to a certain extent, this led to a desire to be fooled by our art. Bertold Brecht, whose youth was spent in the later years of the Weimar Republic, got a front row view to an even more monstrous subversion of reality than that in our contemporary culture. There, with an unstable democracy, and a generation unfamiliar with the mass media technology, the Nazi Party had discovered that through performance, they could dominate the nation of Germany. To a large extent, the Nazi Party was performance—historians don't credit their rise to power on any legislation they passed, or to some sort of social benefit they caused; simply to the success of their performance, of their propaganda. Brecht, a theatermaker in one of the most vibrant cabaret scenes of the time, formulated a theory of theater which he hoped would counteract this effect. This theater, which he called epic theater, was predicated on a refusal to pretend that it wasn't theater. Rather than aiming for the emotion of the audience, he wanted to stimulate their intellect, and
get their critical thinking skills active. Rather than accepting the images, he wanted them to examine each image, and think. The actors would still be actors, the stage would still be a stage, and the message the playwright was putting into the text would be laid out for all to see, rather than hidden under the floorboards. What is interesting about this method is that it requires the audience to know that the performer's are pretending—that they are, perhaps, lying. But by recognizing that fact that they are pretending, they are getting closer to the truth of the piece. To put this theatrical theory into flesh and blood, the perfect specimen in today's performance world is Stephen Colbert. Each night, he dons the mantle of a rightwing blowhard, who repeatedly asserts the brazenly untrue, so long as it proves his point. But the subtle framing of the show, the knowledge that this is a parody—a mockery—lets us in to the absurdity of his assumptions. It forces the audience to think on a different level; to examine the subtext and the frame. Yet on the other hand, sometimes this conservative blowhard is not wrong—sometimes the absurdity that he's saying aloud is, in fact, closest to the truth. The challenge has become this: how do we define truth that it is not easily manipulatable, and that it doesn't fly in the face of the necessities of reality? What can we expect from our politicians or performers with regards to the truth? This is the question we have to answer. Faith in politics is at an all time low: President Bush's approval rating was recently polled as low as 27%; Congress was polled as low as a staggering 9%. When a politician speaks, our first assumption is that they are at best selfaggrandizing, and at worst lying through the teeth. And because of this, we lose perspective on the real lies.
Let's look at some examples of statements at odds with reality. President George W. Bush has asserted that he did not authorize torture. But we have paper documents showing that he approved of the use of waterboarding, which has been defined by the Supreme Court and by International Law to be torture (until very recently, when Congress—upon discovering Bush's waterboarding—passed a special act of Congress legalizing it). Another example: President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier with a banner that said, “Mission Accomplished,” and declared that “all major combat operations in Iraq have ceased”two years later, we were forced to surge our troops to the highest level they'd been during the war. A third example: President Bush said that we have clear intelligence on an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. And a last example: President Clinton once said famously, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” The first point is a pure lie. There are facts in the case which were simply ignored. There is a fact, and someone has negated it. But the next three examples are harder to define. Each one, you'll notice, has an interesting caveat: “major combat operations” is not “all combat operations;” President Bush eventually qualified that by saying that the event was supposed to refer to the operations of the aircraft carrier he was aboard. But the disingenuity is clear. The example of the Weapons of Mass Destruction is not an outright lie; what it is is blowing out of proportion certain incidental (and mostly discredited) bits of intelligence to create a case for war. And the last is a statement prevaricated on a certain definition of “sexual relations,” in the same way that redefining “torture” allows Bush to say “We do not torture” without having to whisper “for certain definitions of torture” afterwards. These last three examples are bullshit in a technical sense. Harry Frankfurt's book On Bullshit
defines bullshit as being statements made without regard to truth, rather than statements which directly controvert the truth (a lie, like the first one). He eventually concluded that “bullshit is more dangerous to the truth than lies,” because the pervasiveness of bullshit erodes the possibility of truth. And unfortunately, we can see this toxic effect in our politics—it is assumed that when a politician speaks, his or her words have to have no relationship to truth. In fact, so widespread is this notion, that Harry Frankfurt had to follow up his book with another book entitled On Truth simply to convince people that he was not defending bullshit, and that there was a practical case to be made to defend truth. His argument defending truth from bullshit returned us back into the world of art. Centuries ago, the standard of truth in art was a classical one: conforming to natural law. That is why Aristotle insisted on a unity of time, unlike today's movies or most plays: he wanted a play that accurately portrayed how time progressed. Statues were to be perfect approximations of ideal humans; mathematical proportions like the golden rule, or Vermeer's alleged use of camera obscura to proportion his paintings. Following that movement came, broadly, humanism, and rather than an absolute, natural standard of truth, there came to be a human truth, based on the psychological advances of the 18th and 19th century. And then, in the 20th Century, a new wave of postmodernism was born, and a concept of anything being art, of any expression being a true expression, burst onto the scene—advertisements, chairs, urinals were labeled as art and the whole nature of “art” became hotly discussed. And “art” became discussed because “truth” became discussed. As postmodernism wore on, the initial excitement of breaking the boundaries of conventional art became an art with no boundaries to speak of. In the 1980s, Karen Finley found herself with fellow artists, arguing for her right to get naked
and roll around in honey with government backing; one of her companions argued his need to put a crucifix in a vat of urine. The idea that anything could be art became the defense that anything is art, and it became incredibly corrosive. Any reaction to a work of art became acceptable, so long as the work of art provokes a response. In short, any ability to judge the truth (or anything else) about postmodern work was denied. So the question of what is true in politics and what is true in art is inextricably linked, and it is also devilishly complicated. We must separate out a few categories first. Bullshit, as mentioned before, is a statement which ignores truth. It does not matter whether it is true or not. Often bullshit is innocuous (“No those pants don't make you look fat.”) or simply irritating (“THE BEST DEAL IN THE WORLD!”), but in a political sphere can become highly manipulative (“Mission Accomplished”). Fact is something which can be empirically measured or observed. That the world revolves around the sun is a fact. The existence of six billion people is a fact. From there, we can put facts together to build more facts. Facts are for the most part verifiable, can be experimented, and looked at. Facts cannot be disproved simply because some do not wish to acknowledge that they are facts. There will always be a fight to prove facts, to keep them publicly available, but although sometimes the inability of facts to become socially accepted is frustrating, I believe we actually get better and better about this. Remember how superstitious and confused our ancestors were, on many scores. Sincerity is the degree to which a person believes what he or she is saying. Terry McAuliffe, arguing that Hilary Clinton is going to win long after we all know it's factually impossible (see above),
is either insincere or deluded. Unfortunately, it has been revealed that sincerity and the truth are not always on the same side, as explained by: Truthiness, which Stephen Colbert coined. Truthiness is a statement which feels true, but is, in fact, bullshit (in the technical sense). Truthiness has the force of sincerity, but none of the solidity of fact. Truthiness might actually be true, by the way, but it doesn't particularly care. Wikiality, which Stephen Colbert also coined, is the prevailing conventional wisdom. Wikiality is so named because of Wikipedia, which holds a standard of truth that merely asks that you cite your sources. It doesn't matter if the source you are citing it from made it up, so long as there's a source—so that the reader can ostensibly judge for themselves. It is the best aspects of the “wisdom of crowds” theory mixed with the worst aspects of the “marketplace of ideas,” and politicians and corporations have already taken to altering Wikipedia to their own ends. The postmodern approach to a standard of truth would be, perhaps, this one—that what we agree upon as true is what is true for society. But the postmodern approach still recognizes that those who disagree with the agreedupon truth can, perhaps, form their own truth. Such a postmodernist would be happy to hear that conservatives, who find Wikipedia to be too liberal (hearkening back to Stephen Colbert's famous “Reality has a wellknown liberal bias”), created their own Conservapedia, which defines facts in a more conservative vein. Logic is the set of rules which very smart philosophers and mathematicians created to help us sort through the truth. Unfortunately, logic is not taught in schools. Many logical fallacies are clearly evident in political discourse, and a reintroduction of the language of logic would probably avoid them. In order to weave these concepts together into a form of truth that is applicable both to art and to
politics—also, most likely, to religion, to culture, to love, to psychology, to math, to science, to sex, and to cooking—I turn to the philosophy of William James, who created a school of thought called Pragmatism in his series of lectures of the same name. James was, tellingly, an educator as well as a philosopher, and he also struggled with the idea of how we arrive at truth, on a personal level. James asserts that our worldview is cobbled together through our observations, and our explanations of them. To that end, he applies a simplified version of the scientific method to all sorts of truth. If suchandsuch hypothesis was true, what would that imply about the facts? Do the facts support such a truth? Can we make predictions based on that truth, and see its implications in the real world? The Bush Administration, for instance, was not able to live up to the truths they were asserting. When they said that they were making America “safer,” they were unable to convincingly explain the devastation wreaked on New Orleans. President Clinton's statement “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” may have been factually accurate, if you accept his definition of sexual relations, but whether or not you do, it is clear that the message Clinton was attempting to convey—I was faithful to my wife—was not supported by the facts. There needs to be a new brand of art, a new brand of politics; and this should be united under the umbrella of the term “performance.” That's what we do, in all of these roles. Teachers and employees get “performance reviews,” and we constantly discuss each other's “drama” (and each other's “character”). And there needs to be a new standard of pragmatic performance in the walks of our life. The first step in a pragmatic performance draws upon Brecht. In order for a truthful pragmatic performance, we have to be constantly aware of the roles we fit into, and what that means about our
relationships with each other. I have often been illserved by teachers who try to be students—they try to be informal, to treat the students as equals. But unless they are in a gloriously improbable situation where all of the students treat them as equals, this will go to chaos. The teacher can still keep an informal attitude (after all, it is equally misplaced to assume too much absolute authority), but the relationship of student to teacher is not that of student to student, and will never be. Politicians have a difficult task of being a politician at a time when public faith when the term “politician” sounds like an insult in and of itself. The instinct is to play the “outsider.” This is not always a wrong move, but it displays a terrible lack of selfawareness. If anyone can remember John Kerry's “I'm The Kind Of Guy You'd Like To Have A Drink With” campaign in the South, or witnessed Hilary Clinton taking shots with steelworkers in Pennsylvania, they quickly realize how hollow such bad theatrics are. As for the art world, we need to remember the roles that art plays, and its relationship to its audience. It would be too involved for the purposes of this paper to examine that question—an entire dissertation could be devoted to that—but there is a clear purpose behind the arts, a clear relationship to the community. When Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal on its side and signed it “R. Mutt,” he was not performing this antiart in a vacuum. He was making a specific statement about a specific art show which said it would not refuse any work. He wanted to provoke a conversation about what art is, and why his “Fountain” should be rejected—instead, the art community has skipped the conversation and applauded him merely for the act of questioning the definition of art. Art that rejects its artistic status, that rejects its relationships with the audience, that rejects the history that comes before it, and that
rejects the very craft of art purely as an act of rejection is not pragmatic. The second step flows out of the first step. For a politician in specific, much of their effectiveness and role today is to understand the current cultural narrative, and how it fits into a historical narrative. One of the reasons politics has become so disjointed from the truth is an emphasis on the present moment—a feeling that the past and the future don't matter. Longterm thinking is discouraged, and there seems to be little retribution for ignoring anything in the past (beyond the current media cycle). If in 2003 and 2004 John McCain told the President that he stood behind his war policy, and in 2008 said he was “always been a critic of President Bush's war policy,” there was little to no outcry. Vaclav Havel noted that in a totalitarian regime, the regime controls society through two major ways: controlling time, and controlling truth. In our superpresent society, it takes a specific effort to keep Aristotle's unity of time in a meaningful sense. The third step in a pragmatic performance is to examine the foundations of your own beliefs. This is always a very difficult thing to do, but it is necessary. Neil Postman once made a speech in which he outlined “Postman's Third Rule”: "At any given time, the chief source of bullshit with which you have to contend is yourself." Part of the reason for this, as William James observes, is that our worldview tends to only come into question when it is confronted by a large crisis, and in a crisis, we make the smallest adjustment to our worldview possible. To return to the allimportant torture issue, it is interesting to note several prominent conservative writers who, when the Abu Ghirab scandal broke, vowed that it was necessary to try whomever was. But in the wake of this week's report confirming that the man responsible was no less than the President of the United States, these voices are discussing the necessity of torture and the vagaries of the international law on the subject. It is easier for them to
question international law (of which they've always been skeptical) than to question the man they voted for twice. When you're wrapped up in your own opinion, it is difficult to remember where you got it from—your sincerity may be founded on wikiality, rather than on fact. It is not simply difficult to question your own assumptions because of force of habit, or lack of selfawareness. Professor Harry Frankfurt lays out the difficulties in his work, The Reasons of Love. If you attempt to remove all of your own personal biases and beliefs before examining your own views, you'll be left without any internal yardstick to judge them by. To a certain extent, we have some opinions and views that stem deep into us. But if we cannot match them to the external world, the world of fact and effect, then they prove themselves to be useless. Politicians lose their way when they stop asking themselves why they do what they do, when they stop applying logic to facts to arrive at opinions. With little time to do research and a reliance on the media narrative, it is easier for them to assert their opinions first and hope that they'll be vindicated by fact. Taking the time to stop and listen, to weigh evidence and examine your own logic, is a tough promise to make to yourself. The last step toward a pragmatic performance is to remain in conversation. Ironically, the single most important skill toward speaking is listening, whether it's in politics or art or personal life. In the theater world, this is one of the biggest downfalls of the 20th Century realism school of acting—in creating a delusional 'world of the play' for the actor to inhabit and inhabit alone, the audience was shut out behind the “fourth wall.” This created more “realism” but less truthfulness (which Brecht describes in his essay on realism, arguing that realistic theater is not realism), because the audience was shut out
of responding. Theater's declining role in society is partly due to this—and note that whatever people may think of theater, improv and comedy continues to thrive in the mainstream. The most promising training of this skill I have seen is through Sanford Meisner's actor's training program. Although tailored for the actor, the aim of the program is to create an actor who listens and responds naturally. (Meisner, coincidentally, has an excellent definition for acting “responding truthfully in imagined circumstances”). It is impossible for an actor to succeed without an awareness of his scene partner and their relationship. In politics, it takes a superhuman effort to break through and return to being in communication with the outside world—any man who travels in a limo amongst six black limos with a security detail can hardly be expected to walk into a coffee shop and say hello to the baristas—but the internet is returning that interaction back to public life. The ability to listen—not to demonstrate listening, but to actually listen and response in real time—is the single biggest virtue in politics, and it must be guarded. These steps are not a format of measuring truth, but they are a method of staying in conversation with the truth—with reality. Once you've opened yourself up to reality (through selfawareness of role, understanding context, examining your beliefs, and staying in conversation), you are ready to apply the aforementioned test of truth: is this something that describes the world around me accurately? Is this something I can make reliable predictions with? Does this fit in logically with the facts as I know them? Jon Stewart described his support for Barack Obama by saying that previously, he had been used to politicians walking through the rain and saying it's sunny. In the end, that's the true test that voters apply to their politicians. Are they describing the world I live in? Ronald Reagan was called “The Great Communicator” not just because he was a good actor and knew how to deliver a speech; he saw where
people were coming from, and he knew how to talk about his own ideas in a way that resonated with the world they live in. The skill—accurately describing the world, making the world easier to understand, is at the heart of all of our pursuits, whether it's a religious search to better know the face of God or a romantic search to truly understand and connect on a deep level with another human being. If you write the book, or film the movie, or make the speech that truly resonates with the world people are living in—without ignoring the facts—then you have found the key to success.