| Popis: |
In Nixon in China, composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman recount 1970s America’s historic encounter with Maoist China. In the process, they draw attention to the cognitive function of writing and especially to the different ways in which ideogrammatic and alphabetic writing systems shape experience and thought. While this question was repeatedly raised in North America throughout the twentieth century, its most detailed formulation occurs in the works of Marshall McLuhan; thus, his study of writing as a medium will be invoked in an attempt to highlight the opera’s original contribution to this long-standing debate. Close analysis both confirms that such a parallel is justified up to a point and reveals its limitations. No comparison between Nixon in China and Understanding Media can be complete unless it involves an examination of the new medium invented by Adams and his collaborators, an analysis of its relationship with previously existing media, and a description of the new functions it assigns them. In this regard, Nixon in China mainly innovates by exploring the theatrical potential of the book in ways to which McLuhan’s sketchy grammatology is unable to do justice. This points to a wider problem, as approaches to writing of the kind prefigured in Nixon in China are nowhere to be found in philosophy, not even in the works of Derrida, who wonders whether they could exist, yet immediately answers this question in the negative. The purpose of the present paper is not to invent such a grammatology but, less ambitiously, to formulate a few hypotheses about the shape it may eventually take. |
