Book Review: Prof. Richard Halpern on the Eclipse of Activeness

By Ryan Campagna

Facing the ghost of his begetter, who beckons him forward, Hamlet famously asks, "Whither wilt thou lead me?" The image of this tragic figure questioning the ambiguous condition of his time to come expresses all the same a greater symbolic and meta-generic business organisation: "whither" the genre of tragedy itself? That is, what has tragedy become and what is to go of it? The anxiety of such a question lurks backside the claims of George Steiner when he notoriously argues that tragedy, proven to exist at odds with the state of modernity, has died. Steiner's ideas volume-end Richard Halpern's newest piece of work, Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy (Chicago, 2017) and ultimately provide quite a colossal and ambitious, yet well-matched, sparring partner for Halpern's own thinking. Halpern diagnoses the problem of tragedy's decline with a very compelling and rigorous explanation, one that couples a grain of optimism with a heap of unease: tragedy has not died, only information technology is in crunch, and this crisis stems not from the modern worldviews of rationalism and secular metaphysics ( à la Steiner), but rather it indicates a much bigger issue within the logic of backer civilisation: the eclipse of action by production.

To see this bigger issue, Halpern invites us to consider tragedy's debilitation in juxtaposition with the emergence of political economy, and he argues that the "crisis of modernistic tragedy is non…primarily a matter of worldview" for "it reflects a quite consequential crunch of action that afflicts modernity and is given its clearest intellectual course in political economy." Specifically, the discourse of political economic system does non directly cause tragedy's decline, but "it gives intellectual form to conditions of capitalist modernity that practise." The weight of such a claim takes shape when considering the arguments of Aristotle, who saw action as both the very essence of tragedy and drama, merely also as that which is nigh directly responsible for human happiness (or unhappiness). If tragedy was predicated upon action, or the imitation of activeness, and tragedy reflected the importance of political activeness to secure human happiness, and then how does tragedy shift when Adam Smith introduces the concept of political economy and argues that it is production and non action that secures human being happiness? Ultimately, Halpern believes that "it is not as if tragic drama can no longer be written or staged under capitalism," but rather "what tends to become hollowed out [by capitalism] is the political reach and seriousness of activity, and therefore of tragedy." Thus, at stake in his argument is non "a question of whether tragedy continues to be, only of how and whether tragedy matters."

In service to such a question, Eclipse of Action tracks the conflict between production and action, also translated as a conflict betwixt making and doing, or, in the most classical sense, poiesis and praxis , as it is staged within tragic drama. To do this, the book examines a range of tragedians as far back as Aeschylus and as recent as Sarah Kane. Chapter one begins with a wonderful extended analysis of Smith'south claim that "a public mourning raises the price of black textile" and considers the anti-tragic sentiments at the heart of his thinking in The Wealth of Nations . Chapter two examines the Oresteia and the "raptor economy" of aboriginal Greece to propose that action in the classical sense emerges from a "matrix of product" and that Aeschylus's trilogy contemplates the line between making and doing to find the appropriate place for tragic theatre in the polis. Halpern then devotes three chapters to early modern tragedy, specifically Marlowe'due south Doctor Faustus , Shakespeare'southward Village , and Milton's Samson Agonistes . In these chapters, Halpern'south overlaying interest resides in the commercialization of theater that takes place during this menstruation and how these tragedies, as commercialized entities, each brainstorm to reverberate the eclipse of production over action in their respective ways. Chapter six departs from a straight reading of explicit tragedies, and observes the novelization of tragedy that takes identify in the 18th and 19th centuries, merely does so via the unexpected route of Hegel and Marx. Chapter vii focuses on the theoretical aggrandizement of action one time it has been eclipsed by production and analyzes Samuel Beckett's reaction against gimmicky political theories that inflate activity's importance. Beckett chooses instead to stage the very impossibility of action in the age of political economy and the contradictory notion that deportment, though they cannot occur, sometimes all the same miraculously do. In the postscript, Halpern closes the volume by concentrating on Sarah Kane'due south Blasted , a tragedy which reflects the dilemmas of post-Fordist action where activity has not only been eclipsed past production but subsumed by it as well.

Ultimately, the narrative of the volume delineates activeness's classical nascence through "an ongoing matrix of product" and the subsequent process of action'southward eclipse over time by production. Seen through a metaphor of gainsay, action may accept won a few early battles, but product won the war. According to Halpern, the eclipse of activity begins with the emergence of modern commercial lodge. Political economy, then, is "the moment when this process begins to become conscious of itself." The conscious devaluation of action by political economic system so prompts a backfire by various political theorists who over-inflate the value of activeness. Tragedy indexes this conflict and becomes "a privileged repository of the hopes invested in action."

Eclipse of Action commendably levies an argument on a wide historical calibration with an intellectual scope that is of interest to a swath of various disciplines. Although information technology casts an ambitiously wide internet, the book even so maintains a strong sense of subtlety and nuance. Halpern'south resistance to the grand provocation of a claim like "tragedy has died," an idea not simply institute in Steiner but echoed past thinkers such as Nietzsche and Hegel, demonstrates a rhetorical restraint that helps to make his argument so unique and abrupt. Halpern indirectly forces usa to recognize that whether tragedy is live or dead is not as interesting as how it got there in the showtime identify. Thus, the brilliance of Halpern's argument lies non in its re-thinking of what became of tragedy every bit much equally it lies in its re-imagining of how tragedy became that way.