La freccia e il cerchio
anno 3, numero 3, 2012
pp. 25-29
Bianca Maria d’Ippolito, Marino Niola
In the circle of appearances
I. Rite’s After-Effects
NIOLA
I intend to begin this conversation with a question mark. Are we to accept that the post-modern age, our age, should be defined as the time of broken rites and empty rituals, or should we rather challenge and rethink such a definition? I believe that it is necessary to reconsider the category of rite altogether, also because we risk falling into an ambiguous and useless state of nostalgia, if we restrict ourselves to mourning its decline. Besides, anthropology has already started this rethinking process long ago – I am referring in particular to the British school of social anthropology, which first unhooked the notion of rite from the religious/sacred field, aiming instead to consider the role that rite plays as a collective emphasiser and peculiar principle of order within social relationships. This principle can also turn into its opposite, into the amount of intrinsic disorder which constitutes such relationships.
D’IPPOLITO
I want to start from its origins. Rite is connected, at least within the European tradition, to one of the highest moments of spiritual development, that is to say, to tragedy. Greek tragedy is connected to rite insofar as it was born, as Aristotle has told us, out of ancient processions. Little by little, the function played by the chorus gains meaning, on behalf of the polis, and a protagonist is detected. At first the protagonist plays no clear role, but his function becomes important once the deuteragonist enters the scene and the confrontation starts to take place. Mario Untersteiner connects the origin of this contrast with the double birth of the Greek community: on the one hand the Hellenes, coming from the north, and on the other, Mediterranean populations, more tied to the notions of return, land, and cyclicity. Tragedy is a rite, the main rite.
NIOLA
Fine, we can also trace our conversation back to tragedy. Then I wonder, following your thread, whether there are still remains of this ancient chorus within the western landscape, in contemporary urban settings. I wonder if there is a sort of ever going echo, a soundtrack which is at times aching and critical, a background which exists regardless of ourselves, but includes and transforms us, whether we are aware of it or otherwise. I believe that something similar does exist and is indeed to be traced back to the tragic chorus, but it bears the opposite sign. Nowadays, the soundtrack of a city – not only those megalopoleis that radicalise urban shape – is a magmatic kaleidoscope of sounds, noises, voices, within which it is almost impossible to detect the unity of the polis, on which tragedy is based. In this case, unity does not exist, because the city is by default a heteroclitic, hybrid place where one can hardly find a common point from which to understand differences. Such differences, instead, express themselves through this seemingly confused chorus, that juxtaposes without choosing, and represents the soul of the contemporary metropolis.
D’IPPOLITO
Let me go back to the tragedy. And to dialectics, which comes from there. It is within dialectics that confusion and hybridism can find a positive form of ‘overcoming.’ In this sense, Nietzsche’s reading of tragedy is still valid: a development made possible by two contrasting elements which persists, as long as it keeps them. As I was saying, at first there were the chorus and the protagonist, then the latter dealing with the deuteragonist. Here a new spark started, generating a real dialogue between contrasting positions, a tangle of evergoing contrasts never to be solved: this is the birth of dialectics.
NIOLA
The theatre as rite, as a parameter of ideas and behaviours, within and beyond the stage. In this sense, I am reminded of eras when theatre had really represented a fundamental and catalysing language. In Elizabethan England, for example, kingship and decline are put on stage. Lear represents the medieval order that falls into a crisis, the order founded on ranks. And the drama between Lear and his daughters is exactly that such ranks do not work, they break, produce different expectations and take up different forms. Lear still behaves à la façon of a saga king: in the scene of the castle of Flint he even wants to show control over the elements, just like an old sacred king, in a moment when England already faces the “bankruptcy of sovereignty”, a formula that Shakespeare puts in the mouth of another sovereign, Richard II. Theatre is the actual witness of this great, irreversible crisis.
D’IPPOLITO
Theatre, ancient and modern, transmits us a lesson, simultaneously bitter and vital: the unavoidability of competition (of conflict), which changes its skin, nature, object and interlocutors in different epochs. In modern times such a competition does not occur so much between the protagonist and his opponents, but rather between the protagonist and himself. The individual interiorises the contrast, gets wounded and consumed, so the struggle becomes even more heated and secret. Genuine dialectics, in contemporary times, concerns the external and the internal; it is radical, ulcerating dialectics, and, I believe, it is reflected like a mirror in rituality: the public rite has somehow become an intimate one.
NIOLA
I am not sure about this and it is difficult to draw univocal conclusions. I ponder over one fact: contemporary anthropology – the one that has been predominant in the last twenty five years after the decline of structuralism, which represents the final example of ‘strong thought’, the final generalising theory – is characterised by a preponderance of deconstructive trends. I often associate this fashion with that of minimalism in literature. We witness a fragmentation of big social bonds and grand narratives, as Lyotard said. All becomes dust through a process of umbilical microanalyses within anthropology, and micro-narrations in the case of literature.
D’IPPOLITO
The tie between the individual and the city/the social has ceased to be. There is a highly spread indentation, which is then interiorised. The individual in his substantiality, in his unified spiritual conception, no longer exists.
NIOLA
Exactly. It is unity that goes to pieces, many small pieces.
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