Stupidity, Idiocy and the Problem of Evil: art after genocide, part III
Deleuze makes a nice distinction between stupidity and idiocy. Stupidity is not thinking. It is the enemy of philosophy; or philosophy its, since philosophy's task is to combat stupidity. Stupidity is not thinking in so far as stupidity doesn't think for itself, so it can appear very wise and think itself happy, while going about avoiding doing so, that it doesn't have to. Until it strikes a problem.
Deleuze is very clear on this point: the problem cannot be such there is a common solution or even that someone else has found a solution. The problem is like suddenly finding one has one appendage too many—it is your own, this is obvious; but, that it is, both entails, like your arm or the extra head of Zaphod Beeblebrox, although it might be hidden or covered, by a hood, and since you can see it in the mirror, that it cannot be ignored and that you're going to have to do something about it, sooner or later. The common wisdom is written down and says, cut it off. The other common wisdom, because in the commons there will always be conflicting opinion, and information, says if one does it's to spite one's face, which face, it assumes, must in all events and at any cost be saved.
Such a problem makes a stupid person a philosopher. You can see how stupidity turns around the star of common morality. Common everything in fact. Common sense. Common knowledge. There will always be a solution on the tip of the common tongue: you are special not in spite of your extra head but because of it! Celebrate difference! What is inside is what's important. And so on, morality shirks its duty, which is why Deleuze and Guattari, that pairing of philosopher and psychoanalyst, prefer ethics. Anyway.
Sooner or later, this is where idiocy comes in. Dostoevsky invents the idiot, says Deleuze. Not always, but for Dostoevsky he, he gets a phonecall. His girlfriend's house is on fire. He runs out onto the street where he sees a dog run over by a car. And he goes to its aid. Only when the dog's OK, or when it's not, conclusively, can he run off. But who's to say how many wounded dogs will present themselves to him on his way to save his girlfriend? Not to speak of kittens, babies, newspaper headlines, calls coming in, well, it could be her! A comment he made on Xwttr is trending. . . a social connection requires immediate response.
It need not be pity that sways the idiot from his primary imperative. Something will and something does. Ishiguro's The Unconsoled comes to mind, Ryder's son has been left at a café eating icecream for days. Sure, he might be comfortable, and the fact he is declares itself to the concert pianist whose concert appearance is deferred for hundreds or so pages, on his return, but he's an idiot and the whole thing has the atmosphere, which Ishiguro confirms, of a dream. The idiot is dreaming.
Because I've recently got into the habit of checking Xwttr in the morning, I do it as if seeking distraction, I know from a recent post that stupidity exists in relation to evil. Imperfectly to recreate the post, which quoted a wellknown author, the evil one who does evil things is preferable to the stupid one who does evil things: the one who is evil can decide to stop.
The inevitable conclusion is left to our imagination that the stupid one cannot. It's stupid to generalise, then it comes with the territory, but isn't it possible to say the same of populations? of masses? I think it's possible to say of voting populations.
Yet there is a sense in which evil concentrates itself, inverse proof of the above, in a singular individual, which permits us to distinguish between stupidity and evil. However, given the inevitable conclusion, this is of little consolation. It is, as Hannah Arendt says, banal.
The stupid and popular leader, endorsed by the democratic vote, cannot decide to stop doing evil things. It doesn't enter his mind that he is not doing right because in his mind he is right, upstanding, his uprightness reflecting the will of the people, and that he has two heads cannot be seen in the mirror of vanity held up by those surrounding him. He cannot decide to do different.
Can he not be she? Can the Right Honourable Christopher Luxon be not the Honourable Member Judith Collins? One is an idiot. One is just stupid. I don't think it difficult to see which one is which.
The same can be said for the one who speaks and the many who speak evil, where the part about art after genocide comes in, the quote from the kind and gentle man Simon Bennett, director, who speaking about the genius and establishment playwright Tom Stoppard, recently deceased, wrote: "He gave us some good shit to sink our teeth into."
He wrote this on Facebook which is like life inasmuch as all those in it or on the platform are in a state of permanent distraction. Otherwise known as idiocy. Idiocy is not the enemy of philosophy but it is art's, which, since it is essentially this demand, demands our attention.
Time is of the essence here. It has been a long time since The Shock of the New, since Robert Hughes glossed art as strategically shocking to gain our attention, since Cabaret in the first in this trilogy of posts, then and not so long since in the second of them Bennett told us Stoppard's plays were shit good enough really to sink our teeth into and Stoppard's attention was drawn away from the matter in hand, Gaza, Jewishness and genocide, to The Crown getting a bad review. It was a corker, he said.
And since Auckland New Zealand's premiere theatre company, ATC informed us of Cabaret's chilling relevance, in order to drum up publicity for its 2026 production, along with the divine decadence character Sally Bowles glosses her Nazi period life with, it has not been so long. Of course, on one side, what bleeds, leads. The dog hit by the car. The girlfriend's house is burning down.
We are, as Neil Postman claimed in 1985, amusing ourselves to death. Or at least distracting ourselves from our own while the spectacle of tens of thousands of others' deaths is foisted upon us, fully suspecting and accepting, by the media. (See what bleeds, leads.) Art has made idiots of us all.
It has if we are not consumed with establishing our survival. Or if we are not distracting ourselves with our own mindfulness, privileged enough to enjoy the art of the lifestyle, not to be paying attention. The crass stupidity is either that or a daily reality of shit and teeth. Then when we think of the grinding stupidity of our current political moment. . .
Neither Stoppard nor Bennett is either, nor can either be accused of being, stupid or evil. I should rather call to lean in and shit-post, particularly on matters so inconsequential as the go-teeth-go-eyes go-all art of theatre, a discursive strategy. To which belongs, not to be gainsaid, the chilling relevance claimed for Cabaret, at the time of a genocide in Gaza.
All the better to sell this art form, the musical! That is, for the sake of theatre, lest in the slumber of its popularity it pass out entirely. With the reality-check, we are back in the uncanny valley of moral ease; but won't it be defined by what sells it to us?
This is the parallel intimated in my first post on art after genocide, we are divinely decadent, darlings, Sally Bowleses, going out to the theatre to see Cabaret. Life is a cabaret, old chum. Until a prick like Clive asks, "Are the Nazis the same as the Jews?"
For the chill of its relevance really to take hold (When were you last harrowed to the marrow, Madam? I hear John Callum's baritone intone as the MC in Music Hall, which revived the songs and styles thereof; some time ago that show had the same reason, to turn a penny by putting bums on seats, as NZ's premiere comedic playwright Roger Hall put it, 1998, in one of his autobiographies; another title occurs to me, All My Lives, Mervyn Thompson, for his one, 1980), hypothetically, what would one have to do with Cabaret? How can we restore it, not in its innocence, because it never was, but in the incandescence at the moment of its loss of innocence? And what would we have to do if we felt any responsibility to the theatre of our time?
Like a boot heel stamping on a human face, Orwell wrote, on the Arab states, the Western empire is represented in the policies of Israel. There is no break of Nazism, simply its continuation. Perhaps a show like Cabaret could remind us, the MC in a Knesset suit, some small resemblance between Joel Gray and Netanyahu, of where we've come from? All these leaders who are in every sense bad actors, who are showmen and in complicity with evil.
And if Nazism is not breaking out but unfolding. The slow betrayal of every human heart. The question the philosopher (Adorno said, Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch) put to us as not one still holds for us its chilling relevance: Isn't it barbarity to write poetry after genocide?
Repräsentationskrise it was called in the part of Germany called West Germany after the war: the crisis of representation consists in a limit inside art, in contravening which, barbarity results. We know Celan to have been personally hurt by Adorno's comment.
Adorno was confusing the ruins of limits with the limits of ruins, they are not the same. There is an incremental cost the poem incurs as it approaches the limits of ruins on one side, the ruins of limits on the other. We might call it the difference between barbarity and barbarism.
It is barbarism to set Cabaret in Gaza; while it's barbarity to call it chillingly relevant without doing so, without any mention of it. The committed artist, dancer or playwright, director or poet, makes a calculation.
He or she uses a scalpel, or a pen like a scalpel, or an embodied movement, which is like using a nailfile on a block of steel. You see, it's quite useless. In fact it looks like idiocy, but that all the weight of barbarism, of history, with the building pressure of stupidity, is on the other side.
