A coda on the politics of the aesthetic

Having discussed the potential of the method used by the performance to gain a better understanding of another culture, I want to finally look at the politics of the docu-drama genre. While the success of changing an audience’s attitudes largely depends on how effectively the feeling of amazement is aroused, the audience’s background knowledge is also of key importance. It remains to be discussed whether the director gave any indication about the reason why he put this particular piece on stage.

Summarizing my arguments, which are built around the problem of authenticity by having experts perform in the theatre, I partly agree with the critic of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung when she indicated that the aesthetic value of Radio Muezzin was negligible. However, while it may be true that the unmediated experience of lived life as authentic reality cannot simply turn into theatre or be transferred into the realm of the aesthetic without being distorted, it is also true that the notion of performativity may increase the authenticity of lived life.

The aestheticization of life has had a truly transformative impact on society as a whole. The influence of the Bollywood film industry on Indian life serves as an example here: people’s expectations of marriage and the wedding ritual–some would say theatre–are visibly changing due to the influence of that imagined world portrayed in Bollywood films.

Herein may lie the hidden power of the performative: reality becomes authentic by being performed. This contains the political dimension of theatricality, viewed through Austin’s lens: reality becomes authentic not in spite of performance, but because of it.2 Radio Muezzin‘s political dimension alludes to the Bollywood example mentioned above. As Kaegi repeatedly indicated, the motivation for his play was the intention of the Egyptian government to centralize the call of the muezzin in order to end the cacophony of competing and discordant voices in Cairo’s neighborhoods. At one point during the performance, the electrician-muezzin referred to the centralization by voicing a plea for retaining the multiple, individual calls. However, in the same sentence he also said that he would not oppose the government’s decision.

Kaegi’s example is appropriate if his point is to illustrate a ritual shift by referring to the disappearance of multivocality. However, what does this achieve? Our reflexive judgment about multivocality in the Orient would have to be applied to our own practices: yet, no comparison is drawn to, let us say, the tolling of church bells. If all he intended was to show the aesthetics of multivocality, why choose an Oriental (i.e. foreign) example?

The impact of multivocality or, to put it in de Certeau’s terms, of everyday life (maybe most appropriate to many of Rimini Protokoll’s agenda pieces), may easily be lost in the performance, not becoming the centre of aesthetic intervention at all. But what impact will wrenching this issue from its place of origin to our stage have? Probably none–the muezzins were obviously taking care not to offend anyone back home, to where they wished to return. An interesting–if unintended–political commentary did emerge for me during the play: at one point, the weight-lifting muezzin, appointed a government representative along with thirty odd others, showed slides of him winning trophies for Koran singing in different countries ranging from Libya to Indonesia. The naive selection of photos, which the muezzin proudly presented, showed a number of heads of state who are well known for their totalitarian cultural and religious politics or their questionable legislations on state support for the construction of mosques, etc. What about Kaegi’s wish to show a different image of Islam? Here we have a religion whose ritual practices unite its followers on a global scale, in spite of and beyond all cultural peculiarities? As Qantara‘s London critic reveals, the Cairo audience did not applaud the performance (Kaegi does not mention this): maybe they remained stony-faced as they understood this implication about the terror or blasphemy only too well (a sacred ritual on stage!). Be that as it may, what good does it do to bring this issue to us? Does it give us a more balanced view of Islamic societies (whatever that generalized term may mean)? Does globalizing such a question invite us to write letters to the Egyptian government to protest about their treatment of the muezzin by Egyptian state decrees? That would certainly kill any chance for the muezzins to re-integrate into their home societies. Out intervention should certainly occur at another place, in our home environment.

When we turn the gaze back on ourselves: perhaps we ought to reexamine our responses to encyclicals or our legislation of Sunday as a sacred day of rest, for that matter. This would follow the spirit of Malinowski’s ethnographic approach of seeing another society through the eyes of the natives and subsequently seeing our own societies with new eyes. If the play wanted to go beyond dazzling the audience and demonstrating the power of vocal performances by exoticizing, or even orientalizing it, it should have included pointers for where to direct our gazes. Ranging from Gregorian chants to the notion that a composer like Bach used to pray before putting a note down, music has always been closely linked to religious sentiment in our own cultural traditions as well. Yet, we only casually remember this fact when we romantically think of musical performances as transporting us to a realm that transcends daily life. It is of course true that our sensibilities and our knowledge about our own heritage have become so fragmented that even these performances would be and are applauded tout court when put on stage (though not during a church service, we may add), not much different from exoticizing spectacles; this is the feature of self-exotization which has become part and parcel of that spectacularization of which Debord speaks in the quote given at the outset of this critical essay.

Alternatively, the performance might have questioned the notion of the power and place of prayer in our own society: we do not perform this ritual on the street, but we might locate it in our daily lives, where it becomes a very private interlocution between ourselves and God. As the Austrian film-maker Seidl’s documentary, Jesus, you know, shows, this practice is also prevalent among Catholics. This might come as a surprise to some, since Mary Douglas, for example, like many adherents of Anglicanism during the Renaissance, held that the Catholic Church was one great theatrical play in their public splendour of rituals and thus lacked actual religious rigour (“Christ is not an actor” was the slogan in England when Anglicanism established itself against “popery” during the reign of Henry VIII). Those filmed performances indeed have the power to move, as each individual presents us with the problems of daily life which we can all relate to, be it the education of children, wayward husbands, or financial and health problems. We realize that these prayers are also confessions of individuals and their private thoughts in the form of voicing the monologues we often have with ourselves and the thoughts that we don’t dare to utter in front of interlocutors. Interestingly, Seidl’s film opens with a sermon by a bishop of the church blessing the documentary enterprise as a pious piece of the power of God in the world.

While Seidl’s film and the performance of Radio Muezzin have much in common in terms of preying on our voyeuristic desires to see how others cope with the problems of life, the spectacle of the “Oriental” other fell flat in comparison. In the worst case, it catered too closely to a form of self-authentication as an exercise in nostalgia for a lost culture. The context of an Islamic society trying to come to grips with the changes of a globalized world and its effects on the lives of individuals, or the nexus between history, society, and individual was completely eclipsed, while the issue of centralizing the ritual voice could have but did not give rise to an aesthetic intervention about censorship at the crossroads between modern state and religious tradition. This would have taken an Egyptian production of Murder in the Cathedral. How close to the bone such issues of centralization and censorship are becomes clear in one of the world-renowned film-maker Chahine’s films, in which he critically reflects on the figure of the eminent philosopher and Jewish-Arab sage Averroes (Ibn Rushd). Despite cushioning his critique of the connection between religion and state in the historical context of the 14th century, Chahine’s film was banned in Egypt. Radio Muezzin aspires to address a key question for the cultural conditions of the other, in this case Egyptian muslimic practices, but it does not come to terms with it. The muezzin were good as professionals, even engaging, in presenting their voices, but contrary to the hype of Rimini Protokoll, it was not their daily lives we were having the privilege to participate in, while at the same time that hype of the staging directors was putting forward the dissimulation as the “authentic” but not even succeeding to aesthetically or critically engage with that notion. There was then much spectacle, but not much enlightenment.

2. I reached this conclusion with my colleague Burkhard Schnepel within the framework of Erika Fischer-Lichte’s program, “Theatre as Cultural Model”. [↩]