Charles Bernstein's Shadowtime and faithful interpretation

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Christopher Mason, ‘Gay Marriage Galvanizes Canada's Right’, New York Times, 19 Nov. 2006, late ed., sec 1: 3. 2. Stanley Fish, ‘Why We Can't All Just Get Along’, First Things (February 1996), para 14, <http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9602/fish.html>, accessed 26 November 2006. 3. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ed. Timothy McDermott (Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1991), p. 331. 4. Ibid., p. 331. 5. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), p. 160. 6. David Caplan, ‘A Conversation with Charles Bernstein’, The Antioch Review, 62.1 (Winter 2004), p. 141. 7. Even though Vincent Pecora, in Secularization and Cultural Criticism, argues that secular modernity's move toward ‘universally acceptable moral truths’ may ‘provide the only ethical ground we possess within a non-theological (and non-teleological) intellectual framework’, his discussion of a secular, or political faith is particularly relevant to my account of Bernstein's intersection with Aquinas (Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 22, 23). In his study Pecora traces the philosophical attempt within secular modernity (from its early manifestations up through the work of Emile Durkheim), to reconcile reason and faith, effectively filling in the gap between Aquinas and Bernstein. Specifically, Pecora explores the way faith lingers in a secularized form in the work of writers like Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf. As he explains, the process of ‘secularization through which magic or myth is eliminated by reason may never in fact be complete’, a state of affairs that is ‘not simply a function of language or geography but is perhaps something to be acknowledged as the result of an irreducible set of needs in human and group psychology’ (Secularization and Cultural Criticism, p. 22). Pecora goes on to suggest that one ‘might then conclude that the society that produces Enlightenment never fully outgrows its desire for religious sources of coherence, solidarity, and historical purpose, and continually translates, or transposes, them into ever more refined and immanent, but also distorted and distorting, versions of its religious inheritance’ (Secularization and Cultural Criticism, p. 22). Against the historical background Pecora outlines, my argument that faith is a mode central to our learning to negotiate uncertainty appears less a befuddling claim than an alternative, and even affirmative account of faith's persistence in the philosophical development of 20 h- and 21st-century thought. 8. Charles Bernstein, Shadowtime (Los Angeles: Green Interger, 2005), p. 13. Subsequent references will be given in the text with the abreviation SH. 9. Brian Ferneyhough, ‘Words and Music’, The Argonist Online, para. 10, <http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Ferneyhough%20essay.htm>, accessed 15 May 2005. 10. Eric Denut, ‘Charles Bernstein Interview’, The Argonist Online, para. 20, <http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Bernstein%20interview.htm>, accessed 16 November 2006. 11. Denut, ‘Charles Bernstein Interview’, para. 16. 12. The London Coliseum production was released on CD by NMC in 2006, after being recorded in collaboration with BBC Radio 3 and English National Opera. 13. For sound files of these readings go to PennSound: <http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/>. 14. The scope of this essay precludes a detailed discussion of Charles Bernstein's relationship to pragmatism and to contemporary American philosophers like Robert Brandom and John McDowell who write about language; however, we do need to keep them in mind as part of Shadowtime's philosophical heritage and context. Where Brandom and McDowell look back to pragmatism through Richard Rorty and Wilfrid Sellars, Bernstein, as already indicated, looks back to Emerson through Stanley Cavell. While Cavell is hardly a neo-pragmatist, his work still allows Bernstein to occupy a broader American philosophical tradition emerging from the 19th century, of which pragmatism and ordinary language criticism are central elements. Understood in part as a response to European thought (Continental philosophy most recently), this larger American tradition becomes more clear when read through Wittgenstein, for it is Wittgenstein – from our current perspective and despite his nationality – who centres the line of language philosophy running from pragmatism to Stanley Cavell. In this regard, Bernstein's contemporary company is as much with philosophers like Brandom and McDowell as it is with Susan Howe, Ron Silliman or Tom Raworth. 15. See Note 13. 16. See Note 12. 17. See Patrick J. Smith, The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, inc., 1970), pp. 400, 401. 18. Ibid., p 400. 19. Ibid., p. 400. 20. Ibid., p. 401. 21. Ibid., p. 401. 22. For those listeners more familiar with Shadowtime's literary company, Fabrice Fitch, in the CD notes, helpfully places the libretto in its musical context: ‘Ferneyhough's attitude to [opera] is not iconoclastic, let alone disrespectful, but speculative. … In each scene, Bernstein's libretto creatively reinterprets aspects of Benjamin's ideas. In this connection, Ferneyhough cites Mozart's Magic Flute, and also the tradition of the early oratorio. … More explicitly, the adventures of Benjamin's “shade” have distinct echoes of Greek myth, particularly the Orpheus legend. … To be sure, these references reflect Ferneyhough's abiding affection for Italian music of the early Baroque; but they also allow him to speculate on the paths that the genre might have taken during the early stages of its development, when its definition and conventions … were yet to become fixed or standardized. Seen in this broader historical context, Shadowtime begins to make more sense: neither “anti-opera” … nor “anti-anti-opera”, but “ante-opera”‘(Fabrice Fitch, ‘Liner notes’, pp. 7, 8, Brian Ferneyhough, Shadowtime (NMC, 2006), [CD]). Fitch then goes on to discuss Shadowtime's debt to modern scores like Stockhausen's Licht and Berg's Lulu. 23. Charles Bernstein, Content's Dream (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986), p. 181. 24. See Bernstein, Shadowtime, p. 100. In the Note to Scene V Bernstein gives a brief account of Heine's place in the libretto and his relationship to Benjamin. 25. Fitch, ‘Liner notes’, p. 9. 26. Denut, ‘Charles Bernstein Interview’, Para 7. 27. See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1988), pp. 69–82. Equally relevant to our discussion of Charles Bernstein's poetics is the place Benjamin's work holds for those writers influenced by the Frankfurt School who are working on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. For a philosopher like J. M. Bernstein, for example, Benjamin is a crucial touchstone for joining these various discourses so that the ethical, aesthetic, linguistic, and political realms become lenses for thinking about all the others. In this regard, J. M. Bernstein's work – in Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2002), Beyond Representation (1996), and The Fate of Art (1992), among others – provides a useful context for reading Shadowtime as well. 28. Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), p. 179. 29. Ibid., p. 182. 30. Ibid., p. 199. 31. Denut, ‘Charles Bernstein Interview’, para 7. 32. Ibid., para 7. 33. Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, p. 182. 34. For Heine's line see Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), p. 25. 35. See Note 13. 36. See Note 12.