9/25: Tragic Bodies and the Birth of Theory

September 18, 2007

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  • 1. Jared Grogan  |  September 19, 2007 at 12:57 pm

    7007 Response #2
    ~Jared Grogan
    I know that the Sophist are often discussed as being some of the “first paid teachers or professors” but I was sort of startled last week to hear Jeff mention that the sophistic era in ancient Greece also coincided with the what is often thought of as the introduction of a monetary system to Athenian society. (I’m not sure how I managed not to know that yet.) All week I’ve been rethinking the idea that Plato and others may have responded to the teaching of virtue for money with a finely tuned elevation and expansion of the soul as the measure of true value, or as something philosophers could at least ‘barter with’ against the Sophists shape-shifting rhetoric about virtue, justice, and truth. Selling lessons in civic virtue for money hardly sounds ignoble today, but this practice, coupled with the popularity of rhetorical skills and the power of some of their political and legal endeavouring, could certainly lead a good philosopher or two to fearfully elevate the soul as a shield against potential corruption on-high, wild-swindles among the masses, and putting more and more virtues and ideals as up for sale.
    Jeff also noted that perhaps the most sophist-like member of current society might be the creative advertiser or advertising executive. As I read Hawhee this week, I couldn’t help thinking about her discussions of metis and kairos in relation to my own experience in advertising. So, I wanted to relate my advertising story to see if had any worthwhile touchstones for our discussion of Hawhee. Although the first thing that may come to mind might be the scrupulous ways advertisers try to nab our attention or persuade us into brand recognition, I’d like to share another way ad-men (I’m not being gender biased… that’s simply an attempt to be accurate about what we called each other at work) may have more subtle sophistic qualities similar to what Hawhee discussed in her book.
    I spent a little less than a month working for Cornhill Publications in London when I lived overseas; but it was enough to learn something about what can go on behind the scenes, and something about the learned “second nature” of some of the best ad-men. Cornhill is “one of the world’s leading publishers” of what are called “business-to-business titles” (or so they proclaim on the Cornhill homepage). These magazines circulate mostly among corporations and smaller businesses in particular fields like architecture/design, television/film, or travel. (Cornhill also has some respectable journals like The New Internationalist in a more reputable fold in the corporation). Two of us, roughly the same age, were hired out of a pool of 75 people interviewed ‘en mass’ in a weeklong process, for which we were all paid. It was an elaborate process. We were asked to answer phone calls made by paid actors who attempted to rattle our resolve. We were told to call the C.E.O. of a particular company and outline our magazines prowess (of course– you can’t get through to anyone without knowing some key tricks of the trade). We were tested on our ability to sell some of the most incredible junk from high street to each other in a competition that lasted all day. When I was hired I was given a small base salary of 400 pounds a week, but any advertising spreads I sold gave me at least a thousand pounds commission– a full page spread gave me eight-thousand pounds, and I was expected to sell at least one of those a month. Your first bonus, in your first year was a paid-lease on a BMW… explaining something about why 75 people were so competitively interviewed.
    So, in what ways does Hawhee’s book evoke this experience? Mainly, it relates through my experience with repetitive physical training. My first week on the job I was working in a massive room with thirty teams of advertising sales executives sitting around “team tables.” Here I learned how to peddle my new magazine (Intelligent Building and Design, a business-to-business magazine that was supposed to share insider secrets about how to profit off the newest mega-developments being built all over the world). I repeated my spiel, listened in to other sales calls, and watched and imitated the experts. I had spent three weeks practicing, listening, repeating, reacting to responses, standing up when talking, sitting down when listening, imitating Simon (my sales leader), and lured on by the thought of all the money I could use to spend on a grand trip around Europe.
    In concept, passing this magazine between companies with each other’s ads on every second page didn’t seem like a very bad thing. However, the truth of the matter was that, even though we worked relentlessly to get this magazine physically onto the desks of C.E.O.’s of companies like Philips and UrbanTech, we sold the majority of our ads to smaller companies who had no chance whatsoever of breaking into the ranks of the mega-corporations who worked on all the projects we promoted. It was an exclusive club. In the first week that I made a sale, I actually told a man in a small town in Iowa that he would have a chance to sell windows from his small business to the companies building a new mall in Dubai. My table got a laugh when he agreed to buy a spread.
    In the third week something else happened that maybe could only be explained as being possible through the kind of responsiveness Hawhee explains as an immanent, mobile, non-rational version of rhetorical kairos. I actually got through to a high ranking official at Philips. I started running through another pre-written spiel that I had in front of me. Not one paragraph in, I noticed that my phone was no longer working. Simon, our team captain, who was monitoring seven of us, had cut me off, and was not only carrying on my spiel, but was also speaking in my voice, in my accent, with natural ease. This was a sale that needed closing, and Simon simply shape-shifted into me to make sure it got done. When I think back on it now, Simon got a real kick out of explaining how he was standing as tall as he could and rubbing his chin while he talked so that he could be as much like me as possible. Simon, a proclaimed “master of the trade,” headed our group dynamic and led us not only with his knowledge of advertising, but with this capacity to immediately respond and transform himself. Working in an agonistic environment, motivated by money, a teacher, a trainer, an imitator, and persuader, perhaps the supremely skilled among ad-men, are the most sophistic among us? Simon was an impressively self-styled figure. Hawhee would certainly appreciate the agonistic training practices, the agon-like atmosphere at work (and I’m sure she would notice the gymnasium that employees had access to!), and she may also see that Simon has qualities of a metis-figure, in that his shape-shifting was marked by immanence, embodiment, movement and imitation,
    I would however, like to hear her explain why Simon imitated Elvis and G.W. Bush everyday at lunch… that was a simply annoying part of his regimen; one that would make Ricki Gervais or Steve Carrell proud.

  • 2. Clay Walker  |  September 26, 2007 at 3:09 am

    “The (Re)Combination of Body & Soul”

    Macy writes in “The Greening of the Self” that the traditional modern Ego-Self is problematic: “The crisis that threatens our planet, whether seen from its military, ecological, or social aspect, derives from a dysfunctional and pathological notion of the self. It derives from a mistake about our place in the order of things. It is a delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its boundaries, that it is so small and so needy that we must endlessly acquire and endlessly consume, and that it is so aloof that as individuals, corporations, nation-states, or species, we can be immune to what we do to other beings” (175); and stemming from a realization of the suffering in the world (which is really an act of compassion) we have begun to open the walls of the ego-self in a transformation toward what she calls the eco-self in which we begin to see the world as our body.

    Kristeva takes up the crown on the tooth metaphor for rhythm and language: “On the one hand, then, we have this rhythm; this repetitive sonority; this thrusting tooth pushing upwards before being capped with the crown of language; this struggle between word and force gushing with the pain and relief of a desperate delirium … On the other hand, we have the ’ego’ situated within the space of language, crown, system: no longer rhythm, but sign, word, structure, contract, constraint” (“The Ethics of Linguistics” 211).

    Nietzsche: “The Birth of Tragedy” — Attending to art as the human mediation of the combination of Apollo and Dionysus, Nietzsche writes, “Only insofar as the genius, during the act of artistic procreation, merges fully with that original artist of the world does he know anything of the eternal essence of art; for in this condition he resembles, miraculously, that uncanny image of fairy-tale which can turn its eyes around and look at itself; now he is at one and the same time subject and object, simultaneously poet, actor, and spectator” (33);

    “Homer’s Contest” — “When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something which separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: ‘natural’ qualities and those called truly ‘human’ are inseparably grown together. Man, in his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly nature and embodies its uncanny dual character. Those of his abilities which are terrifying and considered inhuman may even be the fertile soil out of which alone all humanity can grow in impulse, deed, and work.”

    Maffesoli: “The Tragic in Postmodern Societies” — “Confrontation with destiny and cyclical return – these are indeed the essential elements marking the fundamental change now taking place in the notion of social time. Let us recall that this is not an abstractly philosophical problem but rather the basis of a new relationship to others and to the world” (147).

    Is it as Maffesoli seems to suggest, that our sense of alienation, which has come to dominate post-modernist/post-structuralist thought really a problem of the dialectical ego-self?; the Platonic vision seems cold, disconnected, unaffected – the influence of this “despotic logician” is profound, everywhere, to be reckoned with. I have framed this response in the writings of four individuals, two – Joanna Macy, and Julia Kristeva – come from outside this course. Macy makes a persuasive argument about the problem of the ego-self as the cause of earth’s suffering, extending the self into a concerned eco-self that recognizes the relationship of the self with the environment, and begins to see the world as an extension of the body. At its root, her argument is an affective one, based in the recognition of the world’s suffering, vis a vis one’s capacity of compassion, which in turn allows for a cognitive realization of the role and impact of human society and individualism on the environment. Nietzsche also makes the claim for humanity’s inexorable relationship with nature, although he grounds his argument in the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as symbols of image/individuality/transcendency and music/communiality/physical. While Macy argues for an extension of the self into a wider consciousness that takes in the environment, Nietzsche argues for a conflation of subject and object at the service of human culture within the context of the unity of Apollo and Dionysus. Nonetheless, music and nature, Nietzsche argues, ultimately symbolize the same phenomenon, and thus even though he might extend the individual into the communal, there is a clear and ever present relationship (although perhaps not critical awareness) of the natural and environmental. Finally, Maffesoli draws our attention to the notion of time – essential for any combination of the spiritual and physical (consider the essential role time plays in Dionysus’ music versus the always ready poetics of Apollo) – and he argues that the basis for our new relationship with others and the world must begin in a refiguring of our notion of time from the linear to the cyclical. Julia Kristeva articulates the oppositional nature of time or rhythm on one hand, and language or structure on the other. Rather than embrace the dialectical, disembodied, Platonic notion of language, culture, experience as rooted in the understanding and soul, we must look for ways to explain human experience, culture, language, etc., in terms that are both physical and spiritual, embodied and cognitive. What’s at stake is in the most simplest terms, the totality of experience as a human being who thinks and feels.

  • 3. The (Re)Combination of Body & Soul at the harness gall  |  September 26, 2007 at 3:24 am

    [...] “The (Re)Combination of Body & Soul” is cross-posted (minus some notes at the bottom of this posting) at “Bodies of Persuasion” here [...]

  • 4. Jared Grogan  |  September 26, 2007 at 12:23 pm

    Sorry… I guess I added last weeks comment in this week’s post… I should stick to chiseling in stone! Anyway, I’ve evolved, and here is this weeks.
    7007 Response #3
    2007, September 25
    ~Jared Grogan
    Strong pessimism, Cruel optimism…
    I’d like to take this response as an opportunity to briefly measure Nietzsche’s notion of strong pessimism against some aspects of Lauren Berlant’s understanding and development of cruel optimism. Berlant presented most of the ideas I mention here at a reading at Wayne last year, and they are a part of the thinking in the edited collection Compassion that I’ll be presenting in a month or so.
    As the introduction to The Birth of Tragedy suggests, a young Nietzsche may have been taken in by Wagner’s personality, his music, and his philosophy of pessimism. The Schein of pessimism in the original text of the birth of tragedy is something that more straightforwardly contrasts pessimism as “precisely not a symptom of [decline],” compared to the pacifying optimism of Christianity and modern scientific belief in progress. Nietzsche’s later attempt at self-criticism in the preface finds a strangely nuanced version of pessimism that is metaphysical, yet grounded in affirmation or our world of everyday life. This eventual rejection of Wagner and Schopenhaur’s pessimism in favour of a perspective of “strong pessimism” eventually seems like a drawn out sophistic argument, like a rhetorical game between a teacher and student. Our reading of the book itself, influenced by the rest of our readings, offers multiple perspectives and refutations of Nietzsche’s own arguments and shifting positions against Wagner and Schopenhauer’s weakly willed and extremely negative pessimism– ultimately favouring a pessimism of strength that moves beyond a simple pessimism/optimism distinction by simultaneously acknowledging mortality and a need for Dionysian intoxication with the unifying beauty and suffering in each moment. This strong pessimism, which fits into the development of a new tragic culture, is beyond optimism or pessimism about history or the future, and instead grounded in our own life-invigorating illusion/Schein in a way that Maffesoli sort of sums up well in his description of a “multifaceted reinvestment of the present” or “immanentism.”
    Berlant also believes that there is a need for such tragic intensity today, as for most people in the United States, living in the moment has become an “aspirational normativity” attached to a blighted field of possibility. She’s interested in the difficult task of finding productive political agency in a global framework, especially rhetorical inventions of new solidarities. Her latest work studies how people find a “good life in bad jobs” through perverse visions, hopes and fantasies in our current economic paradigm. In other words, she looks at the current Schein of normativity where agency for most in the working classes, is merely like “treading water.” Berlant calls these negative thoughts and emotions that condition and connect people to a normativity Cruel Optimism (something that will be defended despite the intense stresses of much of contemporary everyday life). Much like Nietzsche’s or Maffesoli’s warnings about individuality as an illusion in the face of a mass subjectivity that can bore into the social imaginary, Berlant believes that the magnetism of conventionalities are dramatic more than what we’ve come to understand as tragic.
    Though Berlant and Nietzsche look at this movement towards a more grounded, political, embodied, and vital cultural Schein in quite different ways, together they reveal how cyclically and organically human beings tend to blindly return to fate and myths in ways that bury agency, disembody and dissolve intense everyday meaning, and diffuse the real possibility of sovereignty, solidarity, and perhaps also, long-term cultural survival in a healthy ecosystem.

  • 5. eric herhuth  |  September 26, 2007 at 12:33 pm

    To be honest I must be reductive, for Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy as a whole did not move me, but rather only moments in the thinking of the text piqued my interest. So I will begin with the primordial quality of music: “music refers symbolically to the original contradiction and original pain at the heart of the primordial unity, and thus symbolizes a sphere which lies above and beyond all appearance” (36). It seems that this quality of music gives the greatest appeal to all things Dionysiac, and it is in response to the Dionysiac that Apolline images and words become necessary. This dynamic says something about affect.
    As in Aristotle’s Politics, here music is characterized as directly eliciting/evoking/imitating emotions and affects (see Politics 1340a). For Nietzsche then, this quality of music is beyond any capability of Apolline art. The ideal tragedy, from pre-Socratic Greece, utilizes both Dionysiac and Apolline arts, but the chorus, the music, is primary. In addition to providing “solace” (39), there is also a Dionysiac knowledge that is acquired when tragedy is viewed, or perhaps it is better to say experienced as a spectator. The Dionysiac knowledge is opposed to what Nietzsche calls Socratic or Scientific knowledge and seems more akin to the term “wisdom” which occurs regularly later in the essay. Dionysiac knowledge, then, gives the reality outside the Dionysiac state-of-mind a “repulsive” quality and fosters a “will-negating mood” (40). Nietzsche uses Hamlet as an example since this character after having “gazed into the true essence of things” does not act because this truth “outweighs every motive for action” (40). Thus, in a way the tragic art form serves as a remedy for the “terrible or absurd nature of existence.” It seems there is some cathartic quality to this Dionysiac knowledge since it purges an individual of the drive to alter the given conditions of life. Aristotle describes catharsis as purgation of affects (Politics 1342a). My question then is how do Dionysiac knowledge and catharsis compare? What is the relationship between these two concepts? Ultimately, Nietzsche goes on to justify human existence as an aesthetic phenomenon and he praises the poet who sees humans as characters in a living play (43). This follows with the concept of a Will, not a God, that must play an authorial part in this life-as-art. My proposition is that the cathartic Dionysiac knowledge, is a requisite or a necessary preparation for this poet vision that perceives the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.
    For Maffesoli, the tragic life has a somewhat Nietzschean spirit: “Tragedy, on the contrary, accepts destiny and acknowledges existence for what it is: precarious, finite, always submitted to the inexorable law of mortality, the finitude of every thing and every one” (“Everyday Tragedy” 207). And also, “We can say, moreover, that the theatricality of everyday life, the pursuit of the superfluous, even the frivolous, and of course the importance given to carpe diem, not to mention the cult of the body in its diverse forms, are all expressions of such a tragic consciousness” (“Tragic in Postmodern Societies” 135). Maffesoli emphasizes a turn toward affect and the irrational, which may be termed Dionysiac: “That is to say, [humans] are not ruled only by reason, as was the case in modernity, but are equally moved by emotions, feelings, moods, all the nonrational dimensions of what is given in the world” (“Tragic in Postmodern Societies” 139). Also stressed is a certain orgiastic appeal to smaller intimate communities that recall primitive clans in terms of size and familial quality.
    To conclude this compilation of summaries and paraphrases, I will profess that the whole of these readings harkens to the Sophistic tradition. In other words, human beings are characterized as pawns to influence such as Helen in Gorgias’ Encomium. Only this submission is not ignoble but rather a kind of wisdom that enables a person to find contentment in an absurd and tragic world. At the heart of this tragic worldview are those qualities under the Dionysiac category: affects and the nonrational, the body, the orgy, music, etc. The purchase of thinking about persuasion, politics, and philosophy in these terms, terms of affect, is that they give access into the “everyday,” the “here and now,” to use Maffesoli’s words. However, it also seems risky to think in these terms since, as we see with Gorgias’ Helen, the individual, and potentially the collective as well, loses a sense of moral responsibility for her actions.

  • 6. Crystal Starkey  |  September 26, 2007 at 2:24 pm

    Crystal Starkey

    Jared: keep chiseling, man. ;)

    According to Nietzsche, Socrates is a bit too puffy, restrictive and detached. Nietzsche felt Socrates’ scientific Appollonian rationale influenced the modern at the expense of losing the artistic impulses related to the artsy-fartsy Dionysian influence. Though Nietzsche identified three types of culture, (Alexandrian/Socratic; Hellenistic/Artistic; Buddhist/Tragic) he believed only in the artistic and tragic cultures as being real and worthy of pursuit. Nietzsche felt the only way to save the modern world from its own self-destruction is to reawaken the tragedy component we have been taught to bury. For Nietzsche, then, the world can be split into two definitive affects: Dionysian and Appolonian. The Dionysian system operated under Dionysis, the god of wine and music, and thrived on self-forgetting and thus, unity–individuals becoming one with others and nature. The Appolonian perspective operated under Appollo, god of light and reason, and taught restraint, detachment and a strong sense of self. The Socratic philosophy coincided with the Appollonian view, which Nietzsche says is the downfall for our culture. According to Nietzsche the Greeks believed in the Appolonian influence because its simplicity (simple in terms of lack of depth and analysis of emotion) and preoccupation with surface level images and dreams helped them ward of suffering. Here, it seems Nietzsche implies the Appolonian/Socratic tradition encouraged shallow thinking in regards to matters of the heart, tragedy and art and rather only encouraged rational, non-feeling thinking. Thus, Nietzsche argues the Dionysian influence on our shallow, detached, too rational souls would transport us into the apprehension, insecurity and questioning of the very suffering that lies at the heart of all life.
    I question, then, Nietzsche’s position on learning disabled students. The ancient Greeks were notorious for disowning, “tossing out” and disposing of retarded and/or disabled people. Though this attitude is hardly rational, it does follow Socrates’/Appolonian Influence of detachment. Would Nietzsche then argue for the inclusion of disabled people in our society? Would Nietzsche urge us to welcome disabled people in all aspects of the modern world and extend an invitation into the world of academia? When Nietzsche attacks Socrates, he effectually attacks all of Western Philosophy. Rather, he believes in the Dionysian tradition, which bends toward unity and tragedy and results in man experiencing a deeper meaning and connection to life and his experiences. This deeper meaning cannot be achieved through Socratic philosophy but rather through music and tragedy. And, could we venture to say working with and the Inclusion of disabled people? Nietzsche further argues objects and knowledge do not give our existence and the world meaning; he says the only way we can achieve depth and meaning is through artistic experiences. Nietzsche accuses the modern man of being too rationalistic since life only finds meaning through art and worth in tragedy. Thus, for Nietzsche, it is only through tragedy that man is able to explore the depths within him, which lie beneath his rational, detached surface. Nietzsche believed that true knowledge could not be merely processed by the thinking mind because wisdom, for Nietzsche, is only obtained when we forego Socrates’ rational thought and retreat into our deeper selves, where we become inherently connected to art and tragedy.
    Nietzsche further attacks Socrates, who like most philosophers considered the importance of truth and knowledge as an automatic assumption, by questioning where the need for truth and knowledge come from. He continually dismisses the Socratic thought when Nietzsche answers his own question by attributing truth and knowledge as being primarily products of a Socratic world. Nietzsche insists we will never be able to fully grasp, appreciate or partake in the Dionysian world from within a Socratic tradition of rational, restricted reality because the Dionysian tradition stands outside rationality and detachment. Nietzsche furthers this point in his claim that art is not just a human activity but rather the highest expression of human spirit.

  • 7. M. L. McGinnis  |  September 26, 2007 at 2:54 pm

    Michel Mafessoli is a Cranky Old Fart,
    Or,
    Adventures Beyond the Postmodern

    For all his well-reasoned argument about the postmodern turn to tragedy (and, more broadly, to an un-rational mode of social behavior, one suffused with affect rather than reason), Maffesoli’s reliance on obscure references to “practices of the young” (135), “contemporary attitudes of the young” (137), and “youth practices” (146) seem like the protests of a man who sees revolt on the horizon and doesn’t like it: “These dagnabbit kids and their crazy postmodern tribes!” This is a mere stylistic observation.
    More to the point, however, is Maffesoli’s complication of what postmodernism looks and (more importantly) feels like. While postmodernism continues to be resistant to hard and fast definitions (a fact itself indebted to postmodern epistemic practices), it is easy to rattle off some generally agreed upon tenets of pomo phenomenology: the waning of affect, the rise of omnipresent media saturation, the decline of grand narratives, the aestheticization of experience, and the blurring of discursive distinctions. Maffesoli, however, complicates nearly all of these tenets (here an admittedly contentious term) of pomo theory. I take as my focus two of these as scenes to raise questions.
    The Waning of Affect. As we’ve discussed already, Jameson characterized the postmodern as marking a waning of experiential affect. Maffesoli, however, argues (not wholly persuasively, to my reading) that postmodernism is, instead, marked by a experiential state that “is obliged to take seriously the orgiastic pleasures of taste, smell, hearing, touch, or sexuality” (147). While Jameson argues that postmodern affect is one of periodic intensity, an affect bordering on schizophrenic delight, Maffesoli argues that postmodern subjects can embrace an “ethics of the moment” (146), an ethics that embraces both the heightened moments of sublimity and—as necessary counterpoint—“the grayness of the everyday” (147). But Maffesoli seems ambivalent about the nature of the everyday, noting that is “is shot through by vicissitudes but . . . remains attractive in spite of this or because of it” (146). If the affective pull of the everyday is attractive “in spite of” the periodic illuminating ruptures of which he writes, Maffesoli alludes to an attraction to the banal, to everyday grayness, to muted affect. What is the nature of this appeal? Why, we might ask, would one choose the blanket dullness of an everyday without the promise of intensity? I’m not sure Maffesoli provides an answer; the question remain asked but unresolved. To ask it another way, though: is affect relative? Is the grayness of the everyday tolerable only because of it’s a complementary/counter existence to affective highs? What might an experience be that was all highs or all lows? Would we know the difference?
    The Decline of Grand Narratives. Like other postmodern theorists, Maffesoli argues for the dissolution of large social bodies in favor of “‘neotribes’ that lay siege to specific spaces and harmonize with them” (134). In Maffesoli’s argument, these neotribes will be held together by the “loss of the individual ego in a greater self of natural or social otherness”. In short, by a return to the Nietzschean premise of Dionysiac tragedy—the loss of delimiting representations in the Apollonian mode and a move to the communal experience (in Nietzsche, with the creative Will) of the Dionysiac. In this sense, then, Maffesoli uses Nietzsche to theorize the decline of metanarratives. But as is often the case when critiquing metanarratives, Maffesoli treads dangerously close to substituting one metanarrative—that of rational, scientific, economic “progress”—for another: here, cyclical movement of phenomenological time (“history” being a too problematic word in this case). As Maffesoli writes, “the world and the individual do not progressively become what they ought to be in the light of a predetermined telos, but, rather . . . they arrive at what they are” (143). I have no argument with the basic matter of this claim, but the paradox apparent here—isn’t a reformulation of temporal experience itself a teleological goal?—raises questions about Maffesoli’s project. How can we theorize an ethics of the moment without a teleology? Or, for that matter—as our other readings have suggested—any ethics? What form would a non-telelogical ethics take? Maffesoli attempts to sketch its boundaries, implying that in the intense affect of the tragic experience the loss of individuated subjectivity will be replaced with a new “mass subjectivity” (140) which, in turn, will be the basis for communal (not universal) compassion and pathos. But, as Nietzsche demonstrates, the tragic experience is dependent on the teleologically driven move from the Apollonian spirit into the Dionysiac and back again—and only then establishing what Nietzsche calls “delight in individuals” (Tragedy 102). So the very structure of tragedy that Maffesoli bases his claims on is itself bound to telos. But if the tragic—limited, as a pomo theorist might suggest, by its dependence on telos—is a suspect basis for an ethics, what can we then base an ethical theory on?

    Post script:
    I have just as many new questions and comments as those I detail above, so I’ll try to keep this brief. After hearing my peers’ work, one thing I kept coming back to was the question of tragedy as a particular affective experience. Maffesoli uses its model–derived from Nietzsche, if in a “demystified”, de-Romanticized form–to suggest a moment of affective intensity–it is these periodic ruptures that let us see the dull greyness of the everyday. In a sense, then, Maffesoli seems to be spinning his wheels: although he couches this as a characteristic of pomo experience, it in many ways recalls the affinity for “shock effects” of many Marxist modernists (W. Benjamin comes to mind, as do Adorno & Horkheimer). The difference, Maffesoli might contend, is that modernists situate shock as a response to exploitive labor practices–as the first step toward a particular kind of materialist consciousness that then becomes the class-consciousness necessary to overthrow the capitalist regime. But I wonder whether Maffesoli’s model is not that different. That is to ask, to what degree has Maffesoli substituted tragic experience for modernist shock tactics, both toward the goal of a reformed consciousness?

    There are differences, sure. The Marxist modernist shock is aimed at the particular telos of the proletarian dictatorship, while the pomo tragic, as described by Maffesoli, remains cyclical in nature: we are constantly reminded of the banality of existence because we are constantly thrown into the realm of the tragic. (See above for some of my problems with Maffesoli’s cyclical model.) Maffesoli’s solution seems to be really an accomodation: let’s change our consciousness to be affectively charged by the banal. I am not convinced that the Marxist telos is the ideal one, but Maffesoli’s accomodation of the banal (although reasonable within its own terms) is a bitter pill to swallow.

  • 8. Kim Lacey  |  September 26, 2007 at 4:24 pm

    Trudging through this week’s texts, I kept thinking that the real ‘birth of tragedy’ was how much time I spent reading and rereading, simply wanting to understand Nietzsche. As I repeatedly attempted to contextualize the reading by trying to understand it through something else, it finally dawned on me that the notion of ‘understanding through’ was exactly the point. Nietzsche employs the Apollonian, “an ethic of moderation and self-control,” and Dionysian, “the dissolution of boundaries, the destruction of individuality, and excess,” as both opposing and supportive forces while calling upon the Greek tragic chorus (and here I hesitate to use the following phrase) to articulate the pairing (Birth xi). The chorus is reflected in the Maffesoli readings, as it exemplifies the notion of “a collective mind, mass subjectivity” through which we experience tragedy (“Return” 140).
    Similar to Hawhee’s insistence that the body and the mind were trained in unison, Nietzsche notes of the Apollonian and the Dionysian that, “these two very different drives exist side by side, mostly in open conflict, stimulating and provoking one another to give birth to ever-new, more vigorous offspring in whom they perpetuate the conflict inherent in the opposition between them” (Birth 14). While it appears that these two, separate pairings function almost identically, here is where the Apollonian and Dionysian differ from the mind and body dualism.
    As he discusses an Apolline Greek, Nietzsche expresses that, “his entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a hidden ground of suffering and knowledge which was exposed to his gaze once more by the Dionysiac” (Birth 27). As we read last week, training either the body or the mind simply increases the ability of the other, although training only one side does not necessitate the training of the other. Conversely, in the above passage, the Apolline Greek only becomes aware of his Apollonian features through the recognition of the Dionysian. Further, in contrast to the likely simultaneity of the mind and the body, neither the Apollonian nor the Dionysian are concurrently present, so that “wherever the Dionysiac broke through, the Apolline was suspended and annulled” (Birth 27). Even though we foster both sides within us (and here I am thinking of the sandcastle example), we are only capable of drawing upon one at a time.
    According to Nietzsche, however, he insists that tragedy, as an immediate construction of the present, is represented in Greek drama, a form eventually born-again in Wagnerian operas. Maffesoli, too, temporally distinguishes drama as a perpetual possibility, from tragedy, as “a series of actualizations: passions, thoughts and creations that exhaust themselves in action” (“Everyday” 202). Because we live with an understanding of fatality and replacement, Maffesoli reflects Nietzsche by claiming that this is our “tragic consciousness” (“The Tragic” 135). From this, it appears that the idea of tragedy is not the notion that we are mortal, but rather that some live ignoring this fact. In “Homer’s Contest,” Nietzsche questions, “What is a life of struggle and victory for?” (3). The Greek chorus responds to this self-questioning, speaking “in this regard of an organic solidarity that causes everyone, willing or not, to be essentially part of a whole that at the same time makes each person what he or she is,” functioning not as a work of art, but as representations of real, living beings (“Return” 140, Birth 37).

  • 9. Katrina Newsom  |  September 26, 2007 at 7:50 pm

    My first response to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy was a long sigh of apprehension and confusion, but once my thoughts retreated from the repetition of the musical line that went something like “huh oh what is he talking about de dah de dah”, I began to try and organize his position. So if I understand the book correctly, Nietzsche is describing two forms of art in relation to the two deities Apollo and Dionysos. I gather from the reading that essentially, Apollo is the god of appearance, and with his form of art, which is sculpture, the experience that the spectator has is superficial. In other words the experience of this art is through the act of seeing or looking. Here, I will infer that this form of art and its philosophical position’s superficiality is the result of the spectator’s inability to experience the art itself. It expresses a frozen moment in time in the form told by the artist of the work or to quote Nietzsche, “eternity of appearance” (80). The spectator is never able to go beyond its plaster to reach some sort of understanding beyond the three-dimensional. On the other hand, Dionysos is the god of music, and with this form of art the spectator becomes a participator. The Dionysiac form of art creates community and is ability to create appearance as well. Nietzsche asserts that “This close relation that music has to the true nature of all things can also explain the fact that, when music suitable to any scene, action, event, or environment is played, it seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning, and appears to be the most accurate and distinct commentary on it” (78). I understand this line to mean, that the permeable nature of music expresses the heart of things. So to put this in layman’s terms to understand tragedy, the Apolline approach will inevitably dismiss the tragic moment as something that can either be understand within given frames of context or of time, while the Dionysiac approach will understand the affect of tragedy, that reaches beyond the frame of time and philosophical understanding. The spectator’s experience of tragedy is one that is (well because I am at a lack of words, let me borrow some from Michel Maffesoli in “The Return of the Tragic in Postmodern Societies”) “moved by emotions, feeling, moods, all the nonrational dimensions of what is given in the world” (139). This would probably be a good time to mention Nietzsche’s concept that deals with optimism and pessimism in relation to philosophy and theology and the Apolline and Dionysos, but for the purpose of this response I will not venture any further into that discourse. So I return to the plaster figure of the Apolline art in relation to African/African American studies, which I believe deals greatly with Nietzsche’s attempt to explore Greek religion and art. When I say black bodies, I am speaking specifically to the black body that is representational of black philosophies, theologies, histories and experiences. The black body is viewed as the portal to understanding the black conscious. I know that what I am saying my have its problems, but the pathos that are exhibited in black literature and study often are link to that of a representational figure “which have been dipped in the ether of art” (62). Let’s face it not only have the faces of say such figures as Frederick Douglas or Martin Luther King serve as the arête that all African descendant should become, but their images are used as a mechanism that contest the African American move from nostalgia for the past that is directly connected to the hope in the future. In fact, the future is thought little of if at all without the connection to the past and to just except things in the now or the present, as expressed by Maffesoli is virtually impossible. And yet, there is a Dionysiac present in the African/ African American cultural experience. Many studies have been done on the role of music and tragedy in the African/African American culture. I am not referring to the African Diaspora’s ability to create music, etc, etc. I referring to the Nietzschean quote that was mentioned early in which music is the most accurate and distinct commentary on events, scenes, etc. This form of music has given a voice and understanding to the tragedies of the African Diaspora that logic and reason could not. So, now I am struggling to understand this dichotomy of the Apolline (black representational figure of plaster) that is the past dipped in logic and reason as it is used to explain the Dionysiac African/African American experience. This is something that – if I am not too far off the mark – I would like to explore further.

  • 10. Andrea J. Vought  |  September 27, 2007 at 3:02 am

    It is no small wonder that Friedrich Nietzsche held the ideas of the Sophists in such high esteem; his premise of the ancient Greek notion of tragedy are built upon the foundations of sophistic theory. Michel Maffesoli, too, implicitly structures his argument in “Everyday Tragedy and Creation” and “The Return of the Tragic in Postmodern Societies” around the basic premises of sophistic theory, thus ultimately proving sophistic theory’s true adaptability through time.
    One of the basic tenets of sophistic theory, the fallacy of transcendent truth, is a key element to both Nietzsche’s and Maffesoli’s arguments. In his discussion of theoretical man’s reliance on logic and scientific thinking, Nietzsche illustrates the indeterminacy of language and logic’s inability to arrive at truth, “… it is an arrogant delusion to believe that we can penetrate the innermost essence of things by following the chain of causality” (Birth 87). He thus dismantles the very premise of metaphysics, which he parallels with the dramatic. In short, Nietzsche argues that causality is a human construct, flawed, unreliable. Yet it is important to qualify Nietzsche’s claims; he does not merely advocate skeptical viewing of the metaphysical dominance of Western thought. Rather, his blending of the Apolline (which one might parallel with several more familiar concepts: modern, logical, structured) with the Dionysian (mythic, hedonistic, tragic) is reminiscent of the Sophists’ precarious state between mythos and logos, a tightrope they walked thanks in part to their own middle ground: nomos. But let me first try to bring Maffesoli into the discussion as well.
    Maffesoli echoes this idea in a slightly different fashion. He also does not completely discount rational, metaphysical learning; however, he does show the necessity for a shift in focus from the metaphysical to the natural: “Transcendent power, whether religious or political, may be exercised, but it is no more than an illusion that is not to be trusted, or as a force that can be tempered by the much more precious demands of the everyday, of concrete existence expressing itself in the infinity of rites and customs—exacting, minutious, constraining—that make up a culture” (“Everyday”). This passage is especially evocative of the Sophists’ use of nomos, or customs and laws, when speaking to an audience.
    What is especially interesting is Maffesoli’s acknowledgement that while transcendent knowledge and power is indeed an illusion, it is nonetheless embedded in culture. Like Gorgias, who attests to the dangerous power of language to drug and manipulate listeners when abused, Maffesoli similarly contends that these sorts of power may still be practiced, but it essential that people be aware of these infelicities and not turn a blind eye to the intoxicating and convenient draw of transcendentalism.
    But I have digressed. To return to the point I’d prefer to elaborate, Maffesoli alludes to the Greek concept of nomoi, or laws and customs, which the Sophists commonly used to bind together the Greek states as a pan-Hellenic whole, much as he advocates the appreciation of the banalities of everyday life as a way to create a hegemonic, postmodern culture that is concerned with “entirety” and the “primacy of the tribal,” as opposed to the narcissism of the individual. These customs, nomoi, are themselves myth and language combined, a hybrid of Nietzsche’s Apolline and Dionysian, contemporary yet still rooted in mythic culture . The Sophists alluded to these myths in order to bind their own culture together with the culture of their ancestors and to make sense of contemporary issues. Gorgias does just this in his Encomium of Helen by using Helen of Troy as a backdrop for his argument situated in his own culture. Maffesoli alludes to this, too, in his discussion of the cyclical nature of time, and, ultimately, of mythical images, like Michael Jackson as the eternal boy or Madonna as the repentant fallen woman. While the visceral presentation of these ideas is bound to change across cultures and eras, the underlying significance remains the same.
    According to Susan Jarratt, nomos also holds close ties with hexis, or habit, and the sophistic notion that habitual action can create meaning and, crucially, knowledge. This idea, too, is evident in the previous passage from Maffesoli and his larger argument for the importance of the everyday and the banalities that tend to get overlooked. I am running short of room, but suffice that to say that Maffesoli also seems to say that the repetition of the every day is what makes our reality. A true neo-Sophist indeed.

  • 11. Jack McIntyre  |  September 27, 2007 at 5:50 pm

    Very briefly, the Lacanian Oedipal complex is the fantasy of self-completion through the mother. At some point the child recognizes that this is impossible because s/he lacks the phallus which the mother desires, and will envy the father as the possessor of the phallus. However, father is not responsible; the essence of the Oedipal complex is the impossibility of self-completion through the mother or any substitute entity, any other.

    The myth of the fall of mankind in the Garden of Eden has been referred to as the “great divorce”, the separation between God and man. This separation is brought about by man’s newfound knowledge of good and evil. In this sense the goal of all Abrahamic religions is the reunification with God, in Lacanian terms, self-completion through another; God fills the mother role in Lacan’s formula.

    Both of these myths relate to Nietzsche’s Dionysian destruction of the principium individuationis that was at the heart of Greek tragedy: “… the doctrine of mysteries taught by tragedy: the fundamental recognition that everything which exists is a unity; the view that individuation is the primal source of all evil; and art is the joyous hope that the spell of individuation can be broken, a premonition of unity restored” (p 52-53). However, Nietzsche adds the Apollonian as a critical element which serves to justify individuation, though this is a deception, as he repeatedly emphasizes; it is a “magnificent illusion which would spread a veil of beauty over its own nature. This is the true artistic aim of Apollo, in whose name we gather together all of those countless illusions which, at every moment, make existence at all worth living” (p 115). Yet the Apollonian implies individuation, which is the source of conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysian; Apollo both creates and resolves this tension. It is not entirely clear, then, why the Apollonian cannot be dispensed with entirely, in favor of eternal, unadulterated Dionysian bliss. Nietzsche’s hints at explanations here and there; he repeatedly writes about the “Will”, though it is never clearly defined, and he claims that “[Apolline illusion] is of the kind so frequently employed by nature to achieve its aims” (p 25). Will and nature, in this context, seem to be singularities; they constitute the point beyond which human inquiry cannot penetrate, yet they clearly act as organizing entities. This is as good a definition of God as any. Forgive my impertinence in saying that within Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy, the Apollonian cannot be dispensed with entirely because God says so.

    According to Nietzsche when Socrates jettisons the Dionysian in favor of reason and knowledge, he sends mankind on a degenerate detour away from the essential wisdom of mankind; his false ideal is that if enough knowledge can be gathered man can achieve perfect understanding. For Nietzsche, there are mysteries reason cannot penetrate, which undermines Socrates, and as science progresses the world will be forced to acknowledge the inadequacy of reason. He does not acknowledge that Socrates is not purely rational; rather, he is deeply mystical. Even if one sets this aside, the glorification of science is actually the glorification of universality, and universality is unity, in the sense that it establishes a set point from which all things derive. A “theory of everything” would seek to find what is common to everything; a complete theory of humanity would reveal what is common to all people, emphasizing unity and de-individualization. In this sense Socrates is not so far from Nietzsche’s Dionysian impulse.

    Attempting to bring this essay full circle, Lacan’s Oedipal drive towards self-completion through another, the Abrahamic desire to reunite with God, Nietzsche’s Dionysian desire to shatter the principium individuationis, and Socrates’ rationalism are all based on the same fundamental human desire. This certainly does not mean they are all the same; they obviously differ on any number of critical details. However, as The Birth of Tragedy is at heart about the desire to destroy of the individual in favor of blissful unity, it is worth noting the unity of Nietzsche’s theory and several other prominent worldviews, including that of Socrates which he so harshly criticizes. And there is another point common to all of these myths: each of them has an unanswered “why?” at its foundation; why is mankind so enthralled by the idea of unity that it pervades his myths and worldviews to the extent that is does, inevitably manifesting itself in some form or another?

  • 12. Jennifer Niester  |  September 27, 2007 at 7:28 pm

    Fatality vs. Natality

    In Birth of a Tragedy, Nietzsche describes an art form which helps individuals tolerate the suffering that accompanies life, the Greek Tragedy. The spectators watch as the hero goes through numerous trials that lead to death, which releases the hero from the agonies of being an individual and leads him to warm embrace of Primal Unity. The theme that life is characterized by suffering seems to repeat the idea that it is better to die soon and even better to not have been born, which is extremely pessimistic and leads to a fatalistic point of view. This view is the opposite of what Hannah Arendt discusses in The Human Condition, which is natality. She writes, “The lifespan of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new…an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin” (246).

    These two takes on the role of death fit in well with our ongoing class discussion of the relationship between mortality and ethics. Maffesoli describes the effects that a return to the tragic is having on our current society of youth. While there is a celebration of life’s moments, there is no consideration given to ramifications or future legacies, as death is what each day is moving towards not the constant renewal of life. Based on his description a tragic consciousness is driving us further into being ruled by consumption and away from being the true humans Arendt defines, who set about change through action and speech.

    What has happened that has created this apolitical life of apathy that revolves around every day life instead of the big picture? If we are to specifically look at today’s American youth, they are a generation that has experienced the trauma of 9-11 and has come of age under the various shades of terror alerts. But what makes today’s youth different than the youth who grew out of the Vietnam era, who also seemed to pursue an intensity of experiences? Is it the way individuals come together and use their collective energy? Maffesoli writes, “[T]he initiative no longer belongs to the isolated individual or a collectivity formed on the basis of a social contract; rather it is conjoined, shared between the world and humanity, between things and the words that are spoken about them. . . .” (139). The things Maffesoli cites as creating a bond between the youth are not radically different than what came in previous generations: film, music, clothes, etc. However, there is a heightened level of expendability to “things,” making them objects to be consumed and bringing an intensification of necessity, if I am understanding that term correctly. They are a generation “who want everything and want it now, even if this ‘everything’ does not amount to much, even if it is—whether religious, cultural, technical, or economic—quickly rendered obsolete” (135).

    I wonder what does the return of tragedy have to do with an increase in consumption. Is it that we need to purchase items to ease our suffering? Or is it that pleasure seems like something in limited supply, so you need to stock up today? Or is the fact that because we feel like life is out of our control that it is okay to run up credit card debt and live about our means? The correlation Maffesoli seems to be making is that we are not guided by reason, as we were in Socratic times, but by emotion, moods, and the nonrational. There are examples of our nonrational tastes appearing on most television stations. According to most reality television, and apparently the Tao of Steve, we are ruled by the pursuit of love. Yet, according to Maffesoli, the youth sound so uncaring, unable to feel the emotions that would lead them to take political action; they are stoic to much of the world’s problems. The fact that we cannot care about the things that seem beyond our control, such as the War in Iraq and atrocities like Darfur, correlates to Arendt’s argument that we leave disaster consequences if we engage in the freedom of non-acting. It seems that while the tragedy is suppose to evoke some sort of unity, there is no consideration to the condition of plurality that Arendt discusses in her book.

    I wonder what changes the unity the spectators felt at the Greek Tragedies invoked in their lives. Arendt speaks of the collectiveness felt in groups of laborers who became unaware of themselves as individuals, which she relates to the joy felt eating and drinking with company, a communion of sameness. Sharing labor eased the hardship. It doesn’t seem that different of a concept than the way that acknowledging a shared suffering in life helped spectators of the tragedies cope with life. The question remains does this unity do anything other than make it easier to deal with the struggles of life and labor? Arendt writes, “This unitedness of many into one is basically apolitical; it is the very opposite of togetherness prevailing in political or commercial communities” (214). Based on these ideas, I would have to say that rebirth of tragedy is indeed tragic.

  • 13. Michael Cipielewski  |  September 27, 2007 at 7:44 pm

    Michel Maffesoli’s concept of kairos seems to be at ends with Debra Hawhee’s conception. Kairos for Hawhee represents the same principle, the “window of time” where the best or worst possible action can take place, but Maffesoli’s rendering of kairos is complicated by Fortune and Fate. Where Hawhee sees kairos as the rational extension of metis, Maffesoli acknowledges metis, but also acknowledges that “all human effort is precarious, even more so when it is moved by passion and affect.” His rendering shows a return of predestination, where the human collective, in a manner “bumbles” through a set of predetermined encounters, using our “heads and hearts” as guides – more than just our individual cunning, but a collective cunning of many individuals, many tribes, even fortune and fate exhibit metis, and at times seem at odds. Maffesoli later describes passion and affect in thoroughly Socratian manner; that is, what was once transcendental knowledge is now transcendental knowledge of the passionate tragic. That is, inherent knowledge that can be awakened in the individual, for Maffesoli, is inclusive of tragedy; it is “the [awakening] of a desire for an intensely lived fate.”
    Maffesoli takes Nietzsche’s conception of the tragic in a modern context. Nietzsche sees the image-maker, the Apolline artist, as being a simulator (at best) of the Dionysiac, and so by extension of the tragic. Tragedy is the Dionysiac; Maffesoli conjectures that tragedy is the affect, the passion, fortune, fate, and the whole lot.
    What is most striking is the return of Deus Ex Machina in Maffesoli. Where Nietzsche sees Deus Ex Machina taking the place of metaphysical solace (84), Maffesoli sees a connection between the two. For Maffesoli, it seems irrelevant whether or not Deus Ex Machina is the construct of a God per se, but rather external forces, forces he warns “we master [.] less than they rule us. We must, for better or worse, deal with them.” It is Maffesoli’s conflictual harmony, along with Nietzsche’s amor fati, that exhibit the tension between destiny / Deus Ex Machina and the individual character.
    Surplus being is then the “intensity and exultation of the tragic condition” (Maffesoli 142), though not necessarily inclusive of solace. Maffesoli describes Surplus being as serenity, and only in the context of globality. Our friend, the “collective consciousness” returns, and now is serenity of plenitude, where the surplus of the self is not a single instance, but one of many, a surplus of the collective, the immanent transcendence in a feeling of belonging.
    Immanence is the present – the irrational, uncontrollable present. The present becomes transcendent in the tending to the self, and thusly the self tends to others in the experience of “nowness”. Though cyclical habitus our daily lives are connected.
    Allow me a metaphor which (to the limits of my ability) exhibits the myriad of collective daily experience: Socks.
    Even socks exhibit the grand scope (or even a grand problem) of “I” and “We”. The presence / absence of socks, color, shape, (matched) pairs, material, logo, social context…and relation to others forms of raiment shows a collective “experience” of socks. My socks are my experience, your experience, and so on, eternally and cyclically. Socks are a personal/cultural/collective experience in Maffesolian mundane tragedy.
    So what happens when we look at other forms of raiment? speech? hair color? dialectics? culture clash? What about predisposition and its transformation (or lack there of) when the feedback of amor fati, the self-other-self-other-self-other-self occurs?

    A possible answer and order:
    tragedy: intensity: serenity: solace

  • 14. jule wallis  |  October 8, 2007 at 2:16 pm

    Jule Wallis – Response 3
    Nietzsche believes that the fundamental human condition/Will is one comprised of horror, pain, and illusion: “the primal unity, its pain and its contradiction.” Our life, our individuality, is not only the source of evil, but an illusion which becomes apparent when facing death/life. Death/life reminds us of the absurdity of existence. Yet, man can also experience pleasure through forgetfulness, drunkenness, and sexual release. Through the figure of Dionysos, one becomes reconnected with the will/truth while being simultaneously separated from the will/truth by “an illusion spread over things.” Thus, a tragic life is both painful and pleasurable. Yet, how does this duality exists? If the primal affect of the world is purely pain, how can the Dionysian, which mimics the world, be both painful and pleasurable?
    From a moral perspective, the notion of primordial suffering grounds the Nietzschean idea that human existence is essentially doomed to the “horrors” so intensely felt by the archaic Greeks, or the nausea that strikes the Dionysian man once he has acquired an “insight into the horrible truth” and “now sees everywhere only the horror or the absurdity of existence.” However, Nietzsche also speaks of the “joyous hope that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored oneness.” Dionysus, then, is defined by Nietzsche as an “intoxicated reality” which tries to redeem the individual “by a mystic feeling of oneness.” This occurs, Nietzsche asserts, through the redemptive nature of art. He also asserts the possibility of pleasure overcoming pain (“an excess of pleasure”). In addition, Nietzsche compares Dionysian pleasure as an event which is an instantaneous process, a “continual spasm.”
    From the onset, the Birth is ripe with sexual undertones thus Apollo and Dionysus “coupled with each other and through this coupling ultimately generated … Attic tragedy.” A later passage explicitly points the sexual undertones of Nietzsche’s vision of the will: “Yes to life beyond all death and change: true life as the overall continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality” Thus, The Birth of Tragedy describes Appollian/Dionsyian coupling as a squandering of energy which transgresses the rational, productivity-based structure of the everyday world whereby the will constantly regenerates itself, its pleasure coming from the gratuitous excess of squandered forces (the “overflow of primordial delight” mentioned above).
    I couldn’t help notice the connection between Apollonian and Dionysian pain and pleasure and the pain and pleasure that occurs during funerals. Death forces us to face our own immortality, our own inconsequence in the world. We come to understand, as did the Greeks, that life is filled with pain and contradiction. If the funeral happens to have an open casket, we are forced to peer into the abyss; required to come face-to-face with “the horrible truth” and the “absurdity of existence.” Yet, death, and specifically the funeral process, affords us a form of Dionysian pleasure. We shudder at the abyss looming before us, knowing full well that we must one day face that abyss ourselves, naked and alone. On the other hand, we rejoice that we are not the tragic figure lying in the casket, we are still alive. Often this “appearance/illusion,” which is happening upon the stage of our lives, is coupled with the Dionysian excessive pleasure of forgetfulness, drunkenness, and sexuality, what Nietzsche coins as a “continual spasm.” And so, it is not strange to find people reveling in Dionysian pleasure after a funeral- getting drunk, forgetting their own precarious humanity, and even engaging in intercourse (an orgiastic experience which allows one to attain genuine self-dissolution and oneness). Thus, post-funeral Dionysian actions allow one to recognize that the fate of the man/woman lying in the grave is also our fate, and this realization forces us to return to our original state of being. One, may ask, though, about the fate of the plump old aunt sitting alone on the couch? We can only hope she enjoys her whiskey and has a battery operated Dionysian tool of pleasure waiting for her at home.

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