Social Tragedy

The Power of Myth, Ritual, and Emotion in the New Media Ecology

S. Baker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349481507, 9781137386137
• eBook ISBN: 9781137379139
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

A social tragedy is a collective representation of injustice. Baker demonstrates how social tragedies facilitate moral action and discusses a series of contemporary case studies – the death of Princess Diana, Zinédine Zidane's 2006 World Cup scandal, KONY 2012 – to examine their social and political effects.

C H A P T E R 1

INTRODUCTION: PLATO’S CHALLENGE

If the mimetic and dulcet poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her, since we ourselves are very conscious of her spell . . . And we would allow her advocates who are not poets but lovers of poetry to plead her cause in prose without meter, and show that she is not only delightful but beneficial to orderly government and all the life of man. And we shall listen benevolently, for it will be clear gain for us if it can be shown that she bestows not only pleasure but benefit. (Plato, [1935] 2006: 467)

And since learning and admiring are pleasant, all things connected with them must also be pleasant; for instance, a work of representation, such as painting, sculpture, poetry, and all that is well represented, even if the object of representation is not pleasant; for it is not this that causes pleasure or the reverse, but the inference that the representation and the object represented are identical, so the result is that we learn something. (Aristotle, [1926] 2006: 126 [emphasis added])

FOR CENTURIES, TRAGEDY HAS BEEN THE SOURCE OF DEBATE AND speculation. To evaluate tragedy’s effect on the audience is itself predicated upon beliefs regarding the genre’s composition, including by whom, and for what purpose, the tragedy in question is composed. It is a debate regarding the relationship of mimetic art (in this case, poetry in general and tragedy in particular) to knowledge, emotions, and truth—what Socrates described to his interlocutors as an age old “quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Plato, [1935] 2006: 465). Contemporary vocabularies and academic scholarship tend to reduce tragedy to a literary genre. For the Greeks, however, to interrogate the value of tragedy was not merely a question of aesthetic pleasure, but whether such representations could benefit the polis (city-state) and “all the life of man.” To examine the significance of tragedy then is not a topic limited to the realm of literary theory, philosophy, and aesthetics (though these fields are integral to the genre). It is a sociological issue concerning what constitutes a tragedy, how tragedy is constructed, and the consequences of representing tragedy in society.

In the current media age, one is reminded of the salience of interrogating the representation of tragedy in society. Tragedy is an inescapable part of the human condition. Life, as experienced and depicted in the news and popular press, is inundated with tragic stories representing the fall of eminent leaders, athletes, and celebrities, with the journalistic use of tragedy representing events that range from the mundane to the significant. What unites such representations under the rubric of tragedy is reference to an act of unjust suffering; whether injustice takes the form of one wrongly accused, a life cut short, or a collective act of military occupation. In such instances tragedy becomes a moral issue, one which evokes profound feelings of righteous indignation, pity, and fear toward significant others that can result in tangible social consequences. One need only turn to the mainstream media to recognize the capacity for collective representations of tragedy to operate as precursors for claims to truth, justice, and, in some cases, revenge. Here media representations of tragedy are not trivial matters regarding tabloid journalism, but of social import, not least because of the propensity for collective representations of suffering to inform emotion, thought, and action; to manifest into politics, public policy, social movements, and, even, war. But there is also a sense in which despite the profound effects of tragedy, there appears to be something disproportionate and arbitrary about what constitutes social suffering. Why is it, for example, that the untimely death of a celebrity can rupture the social imagination, yet the genocide of thousands of civilians can leave one unperturbed? How do certain episodes of human suffering become recognized as tragic events when similar incidents remain obscured as historical episodes, neglected from public memory, omitted or explicitly denied? These are salient sociological issues regarding the construction and effects of tragedy with which Plato and Aristotle were deeply concerned. And yet despite the legacy of tragedy, and the ubiquity of the genre as a mediated performance, this crucial connection between the poetics of tragedy and media representations of tragedy as models for moral action remains underexplored in academic scholarship.

CULTURAL PESSIMISM: THE “CRISIS OF MODERNITY”

It is surprising that while sociologists concern themselves with pressing issues of war, trauma, and terror, few explore the social significance of tragedy as a genre that cultivates the self and society. In part, this neglect is emblematic of the historical development of sociology with the discipline’s classical founders critiquing what they perceived to be an age of decline and disenchantment spanning early to late modernity, thought to signify the erosion of meaningful sociality. The “crisis of modernity” was attributed to structural processes of industrialization, rationalization, capitalism, and secularization, which classical sociologists corresponded to “a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual,” “anxiety” (Weber, 1905: 60), “egoism,” “anomie” (Durkheim, [1897] 1952), the “blasé attitude” (Simmel, [1903] 1950), and “alienation” (Marx, [1867] 2007), and which more recently has been considered emblematic of a cultural shift in the modern, Western world toward “individualization” (Beck, 1992), “civil indifference” (Giddens, 1990), a “culture of narcissism” (Lasch, 1979), and “the fall of public man” (Sennett, 1977).

The neglect of tragedy from contemporary academic scholarship is also a corollary of developments in literary criticism with scholars endorsing what George Steiner termed “the death of tragedy” (1961) as a genre. Corroborating with theories of disenchantment—the eclipse of the world of magic forces and spirits—the so-called death of tragedy from high art and culture was premised on modernity’s cultural move toward rationalization and scientific progress;¹ the post-Enlightened age of reason considered to be irreconcilable with the genre’s original emphasis on the irrational dimensions of myth, ritual, and moral luck. Although Nietzsche had formerly charged Socratic reason with catalyzing “the birth of tragedy” by rationalizing the symbolic dimensions of myth—that is, those irrational, Dionysian forces that should “still remain hidden” after tragedy’s “revelation” (a charge he also directed toward the fifth-century Attic tragedian, Euripides); it was the Enlightenment’s principles of autonomy, equality, and justice that were held to be the cessation of an already declining genre. By emphasizing the universal right of all humans to mitigate unjust suffering through the social justice system, their capacity to alter conditions of social inequality through technical and civic means (meritocratic institutions, the welfare system, Marxism and Communism, for example), the Enlightenment’s vision of a more rational, secular age was perceived to be the antithesis of tragedy’s fatalistic ideology. Immune to modern values of reason and social justice, it was argued that classical Greek heroes could not be saved by the age of the Enlightenment: “more pliant divorce laws could not alter the fate of Agamemnon; social psychiatry is no answer to Oedipus” (Steiner, 1961: 8).

And yet despite recent suggestions that fifth-century Attic tragedy was itself relatively secularized (Halliwell, 2009: 232–33),² for Steiner, the most striking difference between classical Greek and modern Western sensibilities was the religious doctrines upon which these cultures were cultivated. Here, Steiner argued that the death of tragedy as a cultural phenomenon reflected the Judeo-Christian culture upon which modern Western politics is founded; more specifically, a departure from classical Greek sensibilities. For, whereas Steiner believed the latter to be marked by an unforgiving tragic monotone, Judeo-Christian belief has at its core the notion of hope—one of the seven vital virtues as manifest in the vernacular of faith, resurrection, and redemption—leading Steiner to claim that one cannot have a truly “modern tragedy.”³

While Steiner considered modernity too optimistic to conform to the genre’s fatalistic ideology, this “progressive” move toward enlightened reason in eighteenth-century Europe paradoxically resulted in a profound sense of despair at the supposed decline of meaningful social life. Coinciding with an emotional climate of “cultural pessimism” and disenchantment, the so-called death of tragedy as a literary genre was superseded by the aesthetic of “the tragic” as a mode of existential doubt (Felski, 2008). While the poetics of tragedy, as espoused by Aristotle, refers to the object of tragedy, the philosophy of “the tragic” refers to the idea of tragedy (Szondi, 2002). Resonating with the artistic movement Sturm und Drang (Storm and Drive), its emphasis on emotional expression and understanding, the idea of the tragic was a reaction against the constraints of the Enlightenment (viz, self-restraint), one associated with German Romanticism as articulated by Schiller, Schlegel, Schelling, Hegel, and Goethe. The Romantic impulse toward “the tragic” was an emergent cultural phenomenon that valued introspection, subjectivity, and passion (Armstrong, 2007), embodied by Goethe’s tempestuous, cult hero in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), whose tragedy, his love interest, Lotte, reminds us, may be read more as a story of social alienation—psychologically and socially estranged from his surroundings—than of unrequited love.

Despite their affinities with unjust suffering, this shift from tragedy to the tragic results in substantive differences in content and effect. Whereas tragedy represents the protagonist in action as the victim of external circumstances (an unfortunate sequence of events),⁴ the tragic reveals consciousness, representing the protagonist’s unfortunate predicament as emblematic of their inner, psychic condition. The result is a certain aesthetic distance that renders the performance of tragedy more reflective, the narration of the tragic more sentimental (Billings, 2010). With the latter thought to illuminate the perpetual contradictions between the individual and society, the idea of the tragic in philosophy celebrated the moral ambiguity not of the archetypal Greek hero—a “great man” of eminent lineage—but of the human condition.

Discourse on the tragic also entered the domain of psychotherapy with the infantile stage of child sexuality, which Freud termed the “Oedipus Complex,” thought to represent the tragedy of “Everyman.” Although Freud considered the child’s maturation from a psychological state of dependency to adult responsibility to be a universal psychic experience marked by conflict and suffering—a rite of passage that in requiring a symbolic process of death and resurrection embodied the basic motif of the hero’s journey—modern cultures, in particular those marked by heightened levels of regulation, were believed to exacerbate the neuroses and psychoses that characterized the tragic dimensions of everyday social life. For Freud (1930), the essence of tragedy was situated in the psychic conflict between “man’s” innate drives and impulses (id), and those internalized, external forms of authority (super-ego) required to establish and sustain “civilized” society. It was a conflict model indebted to Plato’s allegory of the human soul (psuche)—a charioteer (the rational part of the soul) required to steer two horses: one white (the spirited element of the soul), the other black (the appetitive part of the soul) in order to live harmoniously within the polis’s moral structure (a model that mirrors Plato’s tripartite division of his ideal Republic composed of philosopher kings, auxiliaries, and merchants). In suggesting that individuals inexorably suffer in their attempts to reconcile the perpetual conflict between id, ego, and super-ego, these internal components of the psyche, which Freud considered to be both the source of “civilization and its discontents,” were thought to parallel archetypal Greek tragedies, in which the protagonist suffers as a consequence of their humanity.⁵

The notion of sovereign “man” as a rational actor, yet tragically accursed in their humanity, was not limited to philosophy and psychotherapy but finds expression in the archetypal Promethean paradigm.⁶ In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), for example, the monstrous creature created by Dr Frankenstein illuminates that in the Enlightenment tragic destruction is all too often our own creation. It is telling that Shelley’s Frankenstein (subtitled, The Modern Prometheus) was derived from the classical Greek myth of Prometheus, whose tragic fall echoed a series of contemporary mythologies including that of Sisyphus, Tityos, and Tantalus. Shelley’s text has particular relevance in an age of technological innovation. When read as a precursor to the Frankfurt School’s work on the “dialectic of enlightenment” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947) in “the age of mechanical reproduction” (Benjamin, 1936), it forewarns that the unintended consequence of instrumental rationality, as exemplified by the economic and political organization of advanced capitalist society, is the potential for self-destruction by turning against the “progressive” values of the Enlightenment: reason, freedom, and genuine happiness.

There are then several insights to be obtained from tracing the historical and cultural development of tragedy. First, although the death of tragedy has been repeatedly announced, there remains an elemental concern with understanding how individuals negotiate unjust suffering; one that challenges the tendency to ascribe the “death of tragedy” to modernity or to conflate the genre with fatal resignation. In these mythologies, it is precisely tragedy that gives rise to agency and creation; a primordial story of reincarnation that finds expression in the Abrahamic religions, as well as Plato’s discussion of the myth of Androgyne, where “Original sin” signifies a process of self-constitution from a condition of wholeness into separate gendered selves. This standard cultural motif of “the fall” as facilitating a process of growth and transformation is not, as Steiner suggests, particular to Judeo-Christian theology. Even Freud, renowned for his criticism of religion, regarded the recognition of the ego as separate from the “world outside” to be a process of self-awareness created by “the frequent, multifarious and unavoidable feelings of pain” (2002: 5–6). It would be limited, therefore, to reduce tragedy to nihilism or to suggest that modernity signifies the “death” of the genre. Indeed, these mythologies reveal that it is only by eating the forbidden fruit that “man” becomes an autonomous agent, making the “fall” both destructive and creative, tragic and enabling. It was a metaphor familiar to the Greek imagination with Dionysus, the God of the theater, resembling the Hindu God, Siva—a signifier not only of destruction, but of transformation and liberation (as the Theatre of Dionysus, Eleuthereus [meaning liberator], indicates). This is not to suggest that such cultures avidly sought tragedy from social life. The point is rather that tragedy signals a liminal process of transition for the individual and society, which cannot be reduced to a sense of fatalism, despair, or resignation.

THE MEDIATION OF TRAGEDY AS DISTANT SUFFERING

A historical comparative approach to tragedy also contextualizes critical attitudes toward the mediation of suffering in relation to the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass society. As critics of mass culture and communication, the Frankfurt School conveyed the central role of the media as culture industries in modernity. State capitalism, they argued, engendered new forms of administration, bureaucracy, and domination that undermined individual freedom and democracy. The media played a crucial role in reproducing such ideologies, reducing spectators to passive, docile consumers of popular culture. The result, they believed, was a mass society marked by homogeneity and conformity that eroded the possibility for critical thought. These critiques built on extant feelings of distrust toward technology, particularly regarding the Holocaust where such mediums were used “to justify political falsehood, massive distortions of history, and the bestialities of the totalitarian state” (Steiner, 1961: 315). But for critical theorists, the media’s role in reproducing mass culture was not limited to the fascist regimes of Nazi Germany, the instruments of mass culture and communication (e.g., magazines, film, television, radio) played a similar role inculcating capitalism and democracy in the popular imagination of twentieth-century America. In the twentieth century, the visual arts were regarded as the privileged site of social change with culture and society, aesthetics and politics, bound by the modernist belief that art could provide a symbolic transformation of social content in aesthetic form (Delanty, 2000: 134). But with culture itself a process of mediation, produced and legitimated by state and commercial interests, the problem with this utopian ideal was that art was susceptible to the very culture industries it tried to subvert. It was the failure of critical theory to engender a radically democratic society that resulted in cultural pessimism about the social consequences of media technologies.

The Frankfurt School’s disillusionment about the homogenizing and commercial effects of media industries on popular consciousness formed part of a broader trend of cultural pessimism regarding the effects of media representation on society. This legacy finds expression in Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967), a critical view of media and consumer society as organized around, and reproduced by, the mediation of spectacle in its various forms: commodities, staged events, and, principally, image. Echoing Marxist themes of alienation and domination, Debord’s society of the spectacle is one in which “everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation” (1967: 24), a society where reality can no longer be grasped given that representation is reduced to image. For Debord, the incessan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.  Introduction: Plato’s Challenge
• 2.  What Is a Social Tragedy?
• 3.  Performing Social Tragedy: Exploring the “New British Spirit” a Decade beyond the Death of Princess Diana
• 4.  Recalling Social Tragedy: Staging Zinédine Zidane’s Transgression on France’s Postcolonial Arena
• 5.  Mediating Social Tragedy: The 2011 English Riots and the Emergence of the “Mediated Crowd”
• 6.  Mediation as Moral Education: KONY 2012—Can Social Tragedies Teach?
• 7.  Conclusion: Social Tragedy’s Democratic Vision
• Notes
• References
• Index