Word: meaninglessness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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These audio-visual flurries are imposed on the play and blow up any chance of dramatic development within scenes. They fragment the play and make it painfully obvious that the dialogue is also fragmented--little blips of exposition that are never again used, meaningless historical name-dropping. And the actual Lincoln speeches and quotes from Scripture that come from the loudspeakers when the play has one of its seizures make Kirstein's rhetoric look sick...
...most persuasive theory is advanced by Sociologist Erving Goffman, who worked for a year in Las Vegas as a dealer. He describes gambling as a "meaning machine that grinds out random decisions very rapidly. Betting on the outcome transfers mere random decisions into fateful ones. This provides an essentially meaningless but exciting situation that allows people to read into the action whatever fantasies they want, to groove, to go crazy in an intensely personal way." In other words, gambling becomes life itself, made into whatever one wants...
...inner and outer self-determination, and a mixture of nationalism and communism, "containment" becomes a pretty empty phrase. Yet those of us that get into sounding off in public about what is our policy don't have any other phrase to use. I think it's a pretty meaningless term...
...seek power, but "once I take on the job, I must do it properly." He is not without some compassion; he even offers to gloss over Antigone's first violation of his edict if she will agree not to repeat it. To him the burial of Polyneices is "meaningless," the people he governs are "featherheaded rabble," and "this whole business is nothing but politics." Carnovsky is marvelously forceful in describing his job ("Kings, my girl, have other things to do than to surrender themselves to their private feelings."), and in his extended Homeric simile about the ship of state, culminating...
...geometrical face paintings of the Caduveo Indians, Lévi-Strauss recognized not meaningless makeup, but a subtle statement of man's place in the world: "The face paintings confer upon the individual his dignity as a human being: they help him to cross the frontier from nature to culture, and from the 'mindless' animal to the civilized man." He decided that, "without any play on words," both the Caduveo and the Bororo "could be called in their different ways 'learned societies...