Reinscribing Obscenity: Thoughts on Trump's World 2

This post will try to put thoughts on the new world together into a coherent framework based on discourses of the moment and some older ideas.

I went to a performance of Electra the other night, and thinking about how that show was done, I think that a productive response to Trump's election can lie in a reinscription of the idea of obscenity.

I'm not advocating censoring much of anything or anybody, but I do want to think about how theater structures visible and obscured actions, and how we can observe it critically and respond to it productively.

The show I saw set Sophocles' play in the South after the Civil War, with all the bloodshed taking place behind the doors of a dilapidated mansion. Though Greek theater often dealt extensively with sex and violence, the most explicit acts customarily took place offstage. I've heard of a lexical connection of the modern English "obscenity" to Greek words meaning "off stage", but OED has a simpler explanation, and the etymology isn't necessary to the idea.

Electra centers around two revenge-killings and dwells on the suffering of all its characters until they are achieved. In that, it's not a tragedy in Shakespeare's sense: not flaws and misperceptions bringing everybody down. The play is set up to an action; it demands resolution, but obscures it at the same time. Aside from the esthetic question of how to convey ancient-world violence to an audience without modern special effects, the convention doesn't want to turn a high-brow religious exercise into something defined by shock or pathos.

The tension here between the demand for violence and an intolerance of confronting it seemed to set so many terms for liberal democratic theater, especially this year. The discourses of justice and retribution that license violence that incidentally falls on so many people who are just in the way, and the reckoning and scope of it is always obscure. This seems so descriptive of a democratic security state defined by the tension of not being able to look at what it insists on: on pervasive suspicion of others, on secret justice, on wars and casualties we don't want to reckon with.

The difference effected by Trump, as in so many other ways, seems only to be dropping the backdrop. Now everyone sees what's really going on. Liberals don't have their niceties about human dignity and human rights to disguise what their designs work out to.

However, this can't be all. Liberals are reacting dramatically to Trump. They are showing real pain and fear, very often to excesses- see "white tears", that break boundaries that can constitute obscenity in a way. Playing the part of the good liberal is an exercise in ally theater, especially if played as a tragedy for oneself. 

Perhaps all this is truly and meaningfully needed for many of us to realize and respond to the violence necessitated in the nice liberal democratic state form and whatever Trump is bringing out. But there are real boundaries to be considered, and for many of us, putting our anger and anxiety at the front of the stage obscures real resolution.

Obscenity, I want to suggest, can be reinscribed to label self-collapsing despair or self-importance on the part of people who have no place burdening others with it. There needs to be a normative sense of an appropriate reaction to Trump on the part of those of us who aren't targeted and who are differently protected by being abled, straight, white, by being inscribed as what the country has always protected.

Real, critical engagement can take different forms with different emotive registers for different people. Furthermore, the esthetic sensibilities of one tradition, or any tradition, aren't enough to tell us what or how to be. 

But responding to boundaries within contexts, and thinking critically about how those contexts are structured can give us some sense of order to work with when we need something to grasp onto.