Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 10 Number 3, December 2009
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The Theatre and Civilisation
By
Introduction - Determining and understanding the relatively recent origins of Civilisation became a major concern of Sociologists and Archaeologists together, in the 20th-century.1 The aim of this essay is to communicate a distinctive new approach to understanding how the conscious development of Architecture created Theatrical Environments that are effective as "Universal" conditioners and programmable directors of such social developments.
This is a brief summary of 50 years of my researches and the assembled recent discoveries of many others, as acknowledge experts in their various specialist fields of inquiry. The extension of this approach in future books and web-based studies and investigations will, it is hoped, clarify many issues so raised.
The essence of “Civilisation” is recognised in a “Universal” form of confined, environmentally conditioned and geometrically regulated human construction. Archaeologists can trace the still visible origins of Civilisations in the earliest remains of those rectilinear building and landscaping activities of our prehistoric forebears; likewise, when knowledgeable men of modern science thought they saw “canals” on Mars, they envisioned an advanced and Civilised intelligent activity already taken place there, until the “canals” proved to be just an illusion.
Civilisations develop as complex abstract ideas are materialised; idealised states of mind are conveyed in a symbolic or iconic Architecture. Then a tensioned differentiation progressively grows between a civil flat-planar urbanism along with organised agriculture as a disciplined and fixed way of life, in contrast with a hilly and untamed “pagan”2 ruralism. With concepts of townscapes as entities separated from landscapes, Civilisation’s spatially and temporally dispersed origins, continuity and contemporary development is ever within this psychically formalised setting – in activities played-out as the dynamics of the “Social Theatre”.
Civilised Humanity exists through its mechanical control of Nature, yet this is juxtaposed against (and coexistent with) the self-same Humanity controlled by the complex exigencies of Nature’s own programme. Material conflicts and inner psychological tensions (both individual and collective) are induced; these are potentially destabilising of any contrived order. This inevitable dilemma is resolved “Theatrically” in social, religious or political rituals, organised to dynamically maintain a Normative social condition, where all the co-dependent players are placed in symbolic or real relationships of cooperative harmony.3
This “Theatrical Formalism” is, in setting, scripting and cast, a paradigm for and microcosm of the extended macrocosm, that is the Civilised State itself. Now the Urbanised organisers, material manufactures, distributors and consumers, must psychically direct and physically dominate the activities of those Rural food producers and primary material suppliers, who, only when reliable as cooperative allies, subjects or slaves, are the supportive component of the ever advancing Urbanisation of the globally Civilised social system.
Every Civilisation is self-consciously designated as a finite entity by its centralised and self-regulatory ritual systems, directing it on a specific course to achieve and maintain a collective objective. With an applied spatial logic, a metaphysical ambition to sustain (or practical decision to curtail) a potentially infinite expansion is formalised in a set of visual and verbal statements, with territorial boundaries and enforced laws as basic operating principles. These State Regulations are applied in the varieties of associated Theatrical Environment as specific building types and designs, along with constructed urban and rural locations and communication networks. These buildings and landscapes are geometrically modulated, in Architecture and Planning, to spatially and temporally condition, connect and coordinate the various localised rituals and formal activities of that Civilised society.
Humanity embarked on this formally restrictive material and social development - the Anthropocene Age of Civilisation - over a unique and relatively short geological time period, the post-glacial Holocene era. This newly benign geo-climate configured and coordinated a revolutionary social and material developmental sequence all around the world, beginning just 10,000 years ago.
That, still extending, Transformational Age came with the invention and co-development of Agriculture and Architecture. The regulated ordering of a secure and expanding food supply was thus assured, along with the secure and regulated ordering of complex new mental conceptions and social structures in an exponentially expanding population. Now, that ever expansive Civilising era is closing. In our finite global containment, catastrophic material, environmental, technological and social interactions presage the beginning of a new Earth Era.
Our ancestors were long-evolved as intelligent and astute hunter-gathers, successfully embedded in the temporal diversity and mobility of Nature; so the numerous and world-wide diffused locations of this radical transition from primal living conditions [Neolithic Revolution] were in an already contrived “Ritual Theatre” setting. Then, in appropriately supportive landscapes for settlement location, new rituals were centred around sacred primordial Hearths, performed in clan-gatherings on ancient tribal Dancing Grounds. Such proto-locations remain till now the sacred settings for an archaic social cohesion, in temporally localised ‘femininely’ integrating camp-fire rituals, of those few remaining hunter-gatherer or nomadic societies.
This localised regulatory activity was then forcefully redirected towards a male-dominant spatial-order, with commands issuing from the newly envisioned Architectural enclosure and formal Theatrical backdrop of the sacrosanct “Men’s House”.4 This radical invention – a formal structure with a newfound rectilinear formation and symbolic symmetry - was erected on the “Cosmic Axis”, ever at the centre of that tribal “Dancing Ground”.5
Whilst the women alone must ritually construct the archaic family-band’s ever rounded, energy efficient shelters6, when the sacred “Men’s House” was first set out, it was ostentatiously square-built by men, to be firmly located on the quartered cosmos, axially directing a new way of life. As the embodiment of the Female Principle7 and storehouse of the “Goods of the Gods”8 this then radical new structure, in its enduring presence (ref. the U.S. Presidential “White House”), still empowers those in charge of our technologically advanced society, but now environmentally and organisationally challenged situation.
The newly revealed dynamics of Nature in space-time Relativity Theory, show extreme space-expansive and time-conditioning ways are not sustainable as an exclusive pattern of existence. Now, as we rapidly exhaust Earth’s finite supply of consumables and drastically deplete or eliminate its life-supporting resources, we must find a way of life that better accommodates all the needs of this Earth-bound condition.
Iconic Settings in geometrically formalised Architectures and Urbanisms are the material vehicles of political and religious authority in the regulated development of psychic, social, economic and cultural continuity - or revolutionary transformations. A male-initiated social framework with its concomitant sacred locations remains an effective “Theatrical Formulation”. Ceremonies, in designated environments for rituals and activities, direct us towards collective spatial extension, in a Civilised material advancement. But now the Electronic Era has “instantly” Universalised the Theatre and Individualised the Audience/Players.
New Projected Architectures and Insubstantial Virtual Environments [Infinite Space Logic] condition our individual and collective psyches’ in our local Finite Time Logic. We are directed towards new forms of social construction, via Cinema/Video and Computer Communication.
The House Constructed as a Psychic Theatre
In the primordial world of the mobile clans of hunter/gatherers, the egalitarian extended family group travelled together with minimal possessions and lived on the ground in the women’s realm around the open fire, taking shelter behind it for the night in the women’s ritually formed temporary construction..
Then, from its enforced origins in the early Neolithic era, the male-dominant nuclear family unit was to become the fixed building block of Civilisation. Now each family would live full-time within its separate, private and permanent enclosure of the “House-as-Home”.9
In a stratified society, structured “theatrical personas” as Fathers, Mothers and a gendered hierarchy of legitimate descendents, Sons & Daughters, slaves were mechanical possessions and women were domestically confined; all still gathered around the “feminine” family hearth, now enclosed as an Altar; (where the Japanese more recently developed the “masculine” Tokonoma alcove). Thus we see clearly in the ancient Greek House how structured those much more ancient social relationships became, along with a rigid female confinement and seclusion. Yet “Hestia’s Hearth” was still in the prime location – the feminine fire-altar was central in the entrance courtyard of the House. Outside, in the Urban arena, Hestia’s Eternal Flame was Public Altar in the Prytaneion, the governmental building for the Men’s free-realm-ordering of the Iconic City State.
With the 20th-century Electronic Revolution, radio at first strengthened this core home-relationship of Nuclear Family to State, as the cinema concurrently extended it to a spatially and temporally homogeneous national or international community. Now the general demise of the Hearth as the open fire, the advent of mechanised individual and mass mobility and portable microelectronics (in phone, radio, TV and computer communications) has made for a temporal and spatial structural dislocation in the nuclear family unit, but globalised the community.
Regular and personalised access to Spatial Infinity has been achieved via electronics, after 10,000 years of a collectively regulated Civilised endeavour. Now, in a new Cosmic Theatre of seemingly boundless dimensions, a new sense of Anomie becomes evident in our lack of care for the immediately supportive environment. Along with Global Warming, dislocations in the distribution of wealth are a product of the organisation of our socio-economic systems that generate and regulate it; so it is with the development of new Theatrical Rituals and environmental formalisms that we may find ways to re-normalise our collectively interdependent existence with Nature.
References:
1 Man, Settlement and Urbanism. Edited by Peter J. Ucko, Ruth Tringham and G.W.Dimbleby. Proceedings of a meeting of the Research Seminar in Archaeology and Related Subjects held at the Institute of Archaeology London University. Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd – 1972 and, The Evolution of Social Systems. Edited by J.Friedman and M.J.Richards. . Proceedings of a meeting of the Research Seminar in Archaeology and Related Subjects held at the Institute of Archaeology London University. Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd – 1977.
2. “Paganism” - Wikipedia: Related to the Latin term “paganus” cognate to Greek for a
wild, rocky and hilly place.
3. Durkheim’s concept of Anomie: An unhealthy dislocation of co-dependant elements,
destabilising a healthy or Normative condition. http://durkheim.itgo.com/anomie.html
4. “Co-evolution of Ritual and Society”. Marcus and Flannery. 2004. PNAS.
5. Bororo Tribe – Brazil: Men’s House placed at the centre of the encircling village,
related to cosmological consideration; subject of Levi-Strauss’ Structuralism Studies.
6. Nama Mat-House – Transportable Shelter constructed by the women of nomad herders.
http://www.iziko.org.za/sam/exhibitions/deserts_2006/deserthome.html
7. The Ceremonial Men’s House, Tamaran.
http://mv.vatican.va/3_EN/pages/x-Schede/METs/METs_Sala02_02_01_018.html
8. Ise Shrine – Japan: Granary Style Sacred Storehouse of the Goods of the Sun Goddess
Amaterasu, in the Shinto Belief System.
9. Çatal Hüyük & Asikli Hüyük - Anatolia.: Initiating Urbanism without agriculture?
Bibliography:
Barnard, Alan. 1992. Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa. Cambridge University
Press
Cauvin, Jacques. 2000. The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture.
Translated by Trevor Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marcus, Joyce, and Kent Flannery. 2004. The Co-evolution of Ritual and Society.
PNAS. Vol. 101, No. 52. http://www.pnas.org/content/101/52/18257/T1.expansion
Mellaart, James. 1979. Early Urban Communities in the Near East, c. 9000 – 3400 BC
The Origins of Civilization. Wolfson College Lectures. 1978. Edited by P.R.S.
Moorley. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Wright, James. 1995. The Spatial Configuration of Belief. Placing the Gods:
Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece. Edited by Susan E. Alcock and
Robin Osborne. Oxford: Clarendon Paperbacks