Art and Politics: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, Theatre (review)

The New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW)’s cancellation of the U.S. premiere of My Name Is Rachel Corrie signaled to many observers the difficulty of sustaining an authentic political theatre. Following the trajectory of neo-Marxist criticism, which holds that art is potentially subversive because it challenges spectators to “examine everything that they don’t want to face about themselves and the world,” Walter Davis demonstrates in Art and Politics the way that political theatre has become vulnerable to the very ideologies it should expose. Hypostatizing theatre as a “primary mode of cognition” that produces a unique kind of knowledge, Davis expands a career-long project fusing psychoanalysis and literary criticism toward a poetics unencumbered by the transcendental guarantees of Western humanism that have dominated critical discourse since Aristotle. As a corrective, Davis proposes a critical methodology grounded in psychoanalytic self-reflexivity that finds its impetus in the tragic—which, having taken aim at every ideological illusion and emotional comfort, represents the “very beginning and heart of political engagement” (135).

In Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience (1994), Davis argued that critical theory functions as an “intellectual defense mechanism that enables us, in mastering the text, to protect and reinforce our ego identity by displacing the motives that control our psyche into a rational hyperspace” (4). By encoding such “ego-preserving” reflexes as projection and denial, critical theory mollifies the traumatic agon of the psyche when confronted with the tragic dimensions of human experience exposed by drama. By emphasizing catharsis of “secondary” emotions (pity and fear), Aristotle simultaneously defined the tragic and contained it, delivering it from the responsibility of unleashing more unsettling “primary” emotions (e.g., anxiety, humiliation, envy, cruelty, melancholia), thus neutralizing its radical potential. Playwrights, says Davis, also struggle with this impulse, with varying degrees of success. Davis exhorts playwrights to follow O’Neill, Beckett, and Albee, who reinvented forms that “constitute,” but do not resolve trauma in order to awaken the repressed conflicts blinding audiences to their historical situation.

In Art and Politics, Davis shifts his attention from philosophical and dramatic texts to the institutions of art. The political significance of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, therefore, is not to be discerned within the play itself, but in the “cultural event that it has become” (27). For Davis, the claims of the NYTW management that the production was postponed because more time was needed to adequately “prepare” audiences for a potential religious controversy is indicative of a wider trend of self-imposed censorship that curtails the power of theatre to effectively serve as the “conscience of the community.” The prospect that this particular work might become exemplary political drama, in spite of its affirmation of an “essentialistic ahistorical humanism,” is troubling to Davis not only because it makes it more difficult for actually bold plays to be produced, but also because it reveals that even progressive theatres have become “so colonized by capitalist imperatives that they can only approve of art that furthers that system” (30). Moreover, the controversy encapsulates the contradictions of leftist political thought, particularly that art is only capable of offering a “simplified take on a political issue to rally its support for a political discourse that has no further need of art,” and that “solidarity trumps all intellectual differences” (57). As with his agenda for literary criticism, Davis proposes that only a rigorous psychoanalytic mode of inquiry grounded in the tragic can reveal the binding forces of repressed psychological and emotional needs underlying both Right and Left politics.

Art and Politics defies easy categorization in that it is equal parts cultural criticism, theatre manifesto, and psychoanalytic self-help guide—though not of the “feel-good-happy-talk” variety that Davis excoriates as the “mental health wing of capitalism” (xii). Following Kafka’s maxim that a book “must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us,” Davis prods the reader to engage in a “drama of self-discovery,” and with...