Not Another Tragedy
Thoughts and prayers may not matter, but words do.
Most of us are likely wearied and worried by the news of yet another school shooting. The usual statements are being made, investigations are happening, and in a few months we’ll have a full report, and take no action. It’s tragic. It’s inevitable.
Only, it’s not.
Tragedy is a form of dramatic action in which the protagonist “grows mentally, emotionally, or morally, by the demand of the action, to the complete exhaustion of his powers, that limit of his possible development.” This is from Susanne K. Langer’s work, Feeling and Form (I don’t want to link to a book selling site, but you can easily Google it). Langer is my philosophical mother and her work led me to my interest neuroscience and evolution as it relates to performance.1 The path the protagonist takes leads inevitably to that limit—usually death. Oepdipus is the OG tragedy. Oedipus doesn’t die at the end, but he IS at the end of his powers. And the journey he took was predicted and unchangeable. We watch him launch full-bore into the action he takes, we know how it is going to end, and we can only witness, with pity and terror, the action unfold inexorably, inevitably, tragically. It is one of two great dramatic forms, the other being comic—which I shall return to in a subsequent post.
What happened in Georgia was horrific, terrible, sad, agoniziing, appalling, disgraceful—all the things. Except one—it was not tragic. In no way or universe was that shooting tragic. In no way or universe was that shooting inevitable. In fact, as we have already seen from early reports, it was completely avoidable. The FBI had interviewed both the shooter and their parent the year before. All this is readily available and I’m sure most of us have been following developments. My point is that the use of the word tragedy to describe this and events like it is not only incorrect, it is dangerous.
Tragedy was famously defined by Aristotle in his Poetics. He uses Oedipus as his model and talks about the purgation (catharsis) of the emotions of pity and fear. The witnessing of the tragic play leaves the audience purged—spent—of powerful emotions. From a political point of view, this suits those in power quite well. The polus is less likely to revolt when emotion energy is spent.2 When the natives are not restless, they tend to obey. This was Brecht’s and Boal’s objection to tragedy and Aristotelean models of drama. In Boal’s reading, catharsis is coercive—it demands that the audience accepts the events as inevitable, unavoidable, and therefore does not permit change. So, when anyone—newscaster, politician, your neighbor—states that school shootings are tragic, what they are really saying is that not only is there nothing to be done, there is nothing that WILL be done. JD Vance made that very clear when he said that such events were “a fact of life.” This echoes Trump’s “we have to get over it.”
But, no. It is NOT a fact of life and we absolutely should not “get over it.” I’ll leave it to others more versed in law and history to take on these egregious statements and the arguments around preventing gun violence. My goal here is to show how theatre, and the arts in general, can be used to create a metaphorical framework that limits or—in the case—shuts down discussion and change. As he says in his 2000 introduction to Theatre of the Oppressed:
The audience mustn’t just liberate its Critical Conscience, but its body too. It needs to invade the stage and transform the images that are shown there.
We are the audience of this political theatre. We must invade it, disrupt it, not accept the narratives uncritically, but to—as Boal says—”trespass” into those spaces where we are not allowed and demand change. To not do so, when it is within our power, would be truly tragic.
I don’t have a single philosophical father—I’m a philosophical bastard.
In my family, we called this “the big feelings pillow”—where we would pour our anger or unhappiness into a soft cushion and expel the pent up feelings. In case you were wondering.