Common Knowledge

Morson, Gary Saul

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1187932

In a memorial essay on the philosopher Stephen Toulmin (1922–2009), the author discusses ideas that he and Toulmin drew, over the years, from their reading and coteaching of Tolstoy. He speculates that Toulmin's interest in Tolstoy may have been encouraged by Wittgenstein, Toulmin's teacher and a lover of Tolstoy. All three men understood philosophy as having taken a wrong turn with the rise of rationalism, which occasioned to the idea that social life could be shown to conform to a hard science modeled on Newtonian physics. They saw the dream of a social science as entirely spurious, the superstition of the modern world. They found the idea—held by economists and disciplines inspired by their models—that social processes tend to a predictable optimality absurd, both because the hallmark of real life is imperfection and because (so far as predictability is concerned) time is open to alternatives. Although he did not use the term "casuistry," which Toulmin revived, Tolstoy saw ethics as a matter of case-based reasoning irreducible to a system; and both thinkers regarded the realist novel as the natural home of ethics viewed this way. Anna Karenina also contains an argument about modernization and reform similar to the one that Toulmin advances in Return to Reason . Toulmin took a special, and evidently personal, delight in that novel's portrait of the shortcomings of intellectuals, for whom abstract theory and solidarity with other intellectuals count above all. Such intellectuals, portrayed in the novel and all too common in Toulmin's time, smugly dismiss truly independent thinkers as "reactionary," unenlightened, or unable to rise above the messiness of lived experience to the theoretical world of which intellectuals are the masters. Such thinking, the essay concludes, assures intellectuals' sense of superiority but at the cost of real understanding.

Perl, Jeffrey M.; Gossett, Philip; Levin, Robert; Kallberg, Jeffrey; Jones, Steven E.; Puchner, Martin; Stern, Tiffany; Franko, Mark; Moseley, Roger

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1187941

This essay introduces a Common Knowledge symposium on the relationship between texts (for instance, musical scores or dramatic scripts) and performance in the arts by drawing out its implications for the interpretation of publicly consequential texts (such as constitutions, legal statutes, and canon law). Arguing that judges and clerics could learn much from studying the work of Philip Gossett and other practitioners of textual criticism in the arts, the essay suggests that a wider array of choices exists for legal interpretation than the usual alternative between originalism or literalism, on the one hand, and intuitionism, on the other hand. Contributions to the symposium (titled "Between Text and Performance") emphasize what Roger Moseley calls "improvisatory fluency in historical idioms," and this introduction recommends that jurists develop for the law the kind of "ear" that musicians must have when a score invites or demands improvisation.

Gossett, Philip

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1187950

This article—part of a Common Knowledge symposium titled "Between Text and Performance"—argues that the publication of a new edition of Il barbiere di Siviglia in Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter-Verlag, Kassel) offers an excellent opportunity to reflect upon the written text of an opera and its relationship to the work that performers must do to realize the opera in the theater. Rossini wrote many passages that demand the intervention of performers (performing them "as written" is simply an error), yet this does not mean necessarily that "anything goes." The new edition not only gives Rossini's own variations for the opera, but also (in an appendix prepared by Will Crutchfield) indicates the nature of ornamentation and variations employed by singers before 1850. Many of the variations still heard today in the opera house reflect practices from the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is no moral obligation to avoid such practices, but one wants singers to be fully aware of what they are doing. This essay provides extensive examples of the kind of autograph notation that signals the obligatory intervention of performers and offers many examples from performers who were contemporaries of Rossini as to how they went about their task of representing the composer's work on stage.

Levin, Robert

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1187959

Comparison of surviving texts of eighteenth-century composers, Bach and Mozart in particular, show that considerable latitude was granted to performers for extempore embellishment and cadenzas, not only in arias and concertos but in solo works as well. Amateurs required prepared elaborations, whereas professional performers did not. The aesthetic of improvisation in performance is shot through with risk—an element sadly lacking in the training and the performance of classical music at the present time. This article finds distinct parallels among what it calls the "ghetto language" of 1730s Leipzig, 1780s Vienna, and 1930s New York. Duke Ellington is said to be Bach's and Mozart's true successor.

Kallberg, Jeffrey

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1187968

When we view Chopin's later works in the context of his biography, we find a conjunction of real-life machines (trains, the telegraph), mimetic mechanical music (music boxes), and prolific textual variants. Particularly fascinating are several late pieces that feature canons, a form of strict counterpoint that at once evokes the notion of "machine music"—the leading line seems automatically to generate the following line—and produces relatively few textual variants that concern pitch. Variants in the realm of performing indications, though, occur frequently. Chopin worked hard to ensure fidelity of pitch, but—this article shows—in giving the performer leeway to choose among various modes of performance, he ensured a role for individual expression in musical textures otherwise evocative of notions of science and logic.

Jones, Steven E.

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1187977

This article continues from where the author's 2008 book The Meaning of Video Games concluded and concerns what he learned from playing the simulation game Spore by Sims -creator Will Wright, especially the extent to which a social-network model had become during the development process the infrastructural backbone of the game. Spore 's approach to the problem of building an asynchronous content-creation and content-sharing system aligned the video game with the most important trends in text-based digital humanities scholarship today. Thus this article compares video games and digital texts, not in terms of their supposedly shared narrative content (not in terms of their content at all) but, rather, formally—in terms of how they model complex systems, how both video games and digital-text environments work by creating networked environments for the production, reproduction, transmission, and reception (indeed for the continual reediting) of their respective content-objects. Both texts and video games are systems, with their own special affordances and constraints, that provide both "spores" and "spurs," seeds and provocations, prompts for new performances of meaning.

Puchner, Martin

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1187986

In theater studies, the dramatic text tends to be treated as a remnant of an older and even old-fashioned type of theater that has now been replaced by a "post-dramatic" theater, answering only to the logic of performance. Against that view, the article argues for the continuing importance of the dramatic text across different types of theater, including those termed post-dramatic. For what has changed in the case of theater groups such as the Wooster Group that are associated with post-dramatic theater is not that they discard the dramatic text, but rather that they envision a different relation to it. In order to capture the different functions of text in theater, the essay proposes three models and touches on their historical manifestations. The first assumes that the dramatic text dictates theatrical performance; the second, that the dramatic text needs to be supplemented by theatrical performance; and the third, that the text needs to undergo a process of adaptation. This third model is then applied to two case studies, the production by the Wooster Group of Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and the production by Big Dance Theater of Mac Wellman's Antigone.

Stern, Tiffany

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1187995

Songs in early modern playbooks—printed books of the plays of Shakespeare and other authors—differ from the surrounding dialogue in a number of ways. They are often in italic though the dialogue tends to be in roman lettering; and they are frequently topped with the heading "Song," self-evident information that is a statement rather than a stage direction. On other occasions, songs are missing from the text altogether, leaving a stranded heading, "Song," though no words are supplied at all. This article asks why it is that songs have a different story from their surrounding dialogue. In so doing, it considers how playwrights conveyed their songs to composers and composers conveyed their songs to player-singers. Moments of textual oddity in printed and manuscript plays, it is argued (with numerous examples), are revelatory about performance even when the songs themselves are absent from the text.

Franko, Mark

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1188004

This article explores the history of dance notation from the Renaissance to postmodern dance. It examines the tension between text and oral tradition in Western dance practices, as well as the issue of how to reconcile our views of choreography as both scriptural and visual. It has been difficult, if not impossible, to think of notation in relation to composition; notation has become almost solely associated with reconstruction as a phenomenon of historical interest. But, at the same time, the sense of the score—and hence some notion of notation—seems to remain within the body and the mind of the dancer as a danced possibility. That is to say, some form of cognitive mapping takes the place of the idea of notation and takes root in the dancer's mind and body (if not on paper). Literal notation is not just secondary but tertiary with respect to this sense of scoring, which appears to preexist notation in the mind and the body, making of dance a form that places particular demands on the performer.

Moseley, Roger

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1188013

This article details the motives, processes, and historical context behind an improvised performance of a commedia dell'arte -style pantomime originally devised by Mozart and his friends during the Viennese Carnival season of 1783. The performers' efforts to reconstruct and interpret the fragmentary musical and literary materials that survive are framed by a consideration of the marginal position that musical improvisation occupies in the history of eighteenth-century music, and alternative historiographical and ethnographical methods are explored for the insights they can offer into praxes of extemporized music making. Improvisatory traditions in the realms of jazz and the commedia dell'arte offer models for reconceiving Mozart's music as a dialogical and collaborative medium; they also suggest ways in which present-day performers can gain historical, phenomenological, and hermeneutical insights into eighteenth-century texts and performances by engaging with them as improvisers.

Klug, Nate

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1188022

EDITORIAL NOTE: On Margaret Atwood's Payback

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1188031

Moreton, Bethany

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1188040

This essay review of Margaret Atwood's Payback centers on the observation that the book does not dwell on the unnatural face of interest and finance. In this era of financialization, debt has been thoroughly uncoupled from the concept of payback. The least valuable debt is the one that is promptly repaid. It is this aspect of debt—the interest, not the principal—that has attracted the richest tradition of social condemnation. As stable forms of production and exchange were replaced by international arbitrage, the link between debt and sorcery became evident to observers around the world. More profoundly, Atwood's widely shared commonsense impression that consumer debt is a measure of self-indulgence does not hold up empirically. It turns out that our unprecedented levels of household indebtedness were overwhelmingly a function of nondiscretionary spending. Even as Americans owed one hundred percent of GDP in individual debt in 2008, the real Faustian bargain was not a "enjoy now, pay later" scheme for "glitzy, short-term junk." The truth is much scarier, and points toward a different set of cultural and theological references than the ones Atwood investigates. The dividing line between solvency and insolvency, it turns out, is not consumption but reproduction: the most certain route to financial disaster is having a child.

Briggs, Chris

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1188049

What happens when a debtor does not pay back what he or she owes? As Margaret Atwood's chapter on "The Shadow Side" shows, the unpaid debt—in the broadest sense—is a recurring theme of history and literature. This review essay looks at the fourteenth-century village, a world which, perhaps contrary to expectations, turns out to have been characterized by a large number of outstanding interpersonal debts of money and goods. We know about these debts because the creditors were obliged to use local courts in order to recover them. Remarks are offered on the circumstances that led to so many individuals being sued for debt, in particular English villages in this period. Discussion then focuses on the extent to which the proliferation of unpaid debts between villagers led to tensions or a breakdown in trust within rural society. The essay concludes with comments on the character and functions of institutions and rules that have developed in this and other societies to deal with the "won't pay" tendencies of human beings.

Chace, William M.

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1188058

Some writers are drawn, almost as if hexed, to pronounce on matters of state, politics, and, occasionally, economic policy. Margaret Atwood is one such writer. Her book Payback suffers from its aspiration to create an idealistic and implausible world to take the place of the one we have. This imaginary world would adopt all currently attractive ecological and friendly principles. In positing such a utopia, Atwood puts aside the admirable acuity she has when investigating the real world of literature and veers away into the world of politics, economics, and social life, where she reveals herself a romantic. In so doing, she takes her place, a modest one, in the ranks of twentieth-century writers (Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Brecht) who also ventured into the construction of unworkable social visions that would supplant what they saw around them. Her adventure, while less ambitious, is no less naive than theirs.

Goodchild, Philip

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1188067

This essay review of Margaret Atwood's Payback shows how the book's accomplishment is to provide a Jungian analysis of the "shadow" of wealth: the primitive meanings attached to debt deriving from ancient cultural configurations of a proper balance in the order of things. Debt is conceived in terms of social obligations, of guilt and sin, of revenge, and as a plot that structures the narrative of human life. Instead of simply looking to the archaic meanings of debt for its shadow side, this review attempts to take stock of what the recent credit crisis can teach us about the place of debt in our lives. It is a question of seeking out shadows that belong specifically to our global financial system, rather than belonging to ways of accounting order, honor, and revenge from a repressed past. If financial institutions, governments, businesses, and individuals were all exposed to high levels of debt, to whom was all this wealth owed? How does the shadow of debt affect economic behavior? Since debt forms the basis of further lending, debt increases through a multiplier effect without corresponding assets, which leads to an unstable system of virtuous or vicious cycles, and debt takes over some of the social, practical, and theoretical functions formerly held by God.

Glickfeld, Carole L.

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1188076

Tung, Charles M.

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1188085

For much of the twentieth century, the discipline of literary studies has grappled with the question of how its generally sotto voce activity responds to a history that calls loudly for action. This essay treats the question of literature's quietism in relation to the problem of literature's modernity and temporality. The turn away from the noise of the world at the beginning of the century has been criticized as the motivation for and the effect of modernism's obsession with time. But the modernist "time cult" did not simply withdraw into the space of the internal and eternal. By examining T. S. Eliot's complaint against time in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and engaging theoretical critiques of the desire to be modern, this essay argues that modernism explored alternatives to the static, quieted present, and that contemporary American time-travel narratives continue this exploration. Rather than see postmodernism as the inheritor of modernism's silent and disengaged moments, the essay concludes that both seek to examine the disquieting multiplicity of times and the denser, more complicated versions of the present that they engender.

Richmond, Colin

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-1188094

The author here extends a dialogue with Jeffrey M. Perl, published in the Spring 2010 issue of Common Knowledge , under the title "`Decorate the Dungeon.'" That dialogue concerns whether Thomas More could have avoided martyrdom though he acted with heroic quietism during the Henrician Reformation. Dubious of this premise during the previous exchange, the author here examines the lives of three northern English quietists of More's time—Christopher Urswick (c. 1448–1552), Cuthbert Tunstall (1474–1559), and John Redman (1499–1551)—who never quite risked martyrdom but never abandoned their own principles either. This essay concludes that Tunstall was the most heroic of the three. As a bishop (for well over thirty years), he could have burned heretics in the 1530s and 1550s but he sent no one to death—a record perhaps better than that of Thomas More, who saw sedition in some of those brought before him as heretics when he was chancellor. A record so free of violent commitment as Tunstall's was extraordinary in his time, as in ours, and this article gives it due recognition.

Notes on Contributors

2011 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-17-2-423