Kushner on Political Agency
The October issue of Preview Massachusetts magazine is out. I just picked up a copy of it today. I have three stories in this month's issue. The theater story is an interview with the playwright Tony Kushner, who is coming to UMass-Amherst on Oct. 9. Instead of giving you the first few paragraphs of the story, as I usually do, I'll give you a section of the original interview transcript.ME: You said in another interview that the question that you have to ask is “Do you want to have agency in your own time.” Could you talk about writing things that are political, controversial or very timely?
KUSHNER: My view is basically that agency is a matter of political activism, rather than writing and artistic production, per se. If you really want to have agency, if you really want to have a direct impact on political and historical fortunes of your time and on the way that the world is shaping or crumbling, that the only way to do that directly is to become politically engaged and politically active. So you organize, raise money, vote, get other people to vote, you know, do direct political work, which I think gives you a chance on having a direct impact on the way things are going to turn out-as direct an effect as any single human being can have, or group of people can have.
I think artistic work is different. I think it’s kind of a mistake for artists to assume that if their work addresses political subjects directly, that translates into direct political efficacy. I don’t think it really does. Works of art are more complicated in that they have a power in the world, but the power is kind of an indirect power. The relationship that you have with your audience is not one in which you are after them to do this or that thing, to think in a certain way. You’re engaged in a much more complicated dialectical and I think ambiguous process where the audience is being asked, basically, to be an audience: to sit in their seat and listen, and afterwards, if they feel inclined, to think. And, of course, they’re going to listen and think only as long as you can hold their attention, and be interesting and challenging to them.
The reason why we go to the theater, and to films, and that we pick up novels about all kinds of subjects, including difficult and very painful subjects, is that we’re safe in our passivity. Nothing is going to be demanded of us, except what we decide to demand of ourselves after we’ve finished our engagement with the work of art. So, it’s kind of a safe way to encounter dangerous things, things that we may want to avoid in our waking life, because they genuinely threaten you or demand your immediate action and be too scary, as a consequence.
I feel I’m a writer who has a proclivity, a penchant, an appetite for political and historical subject matter. This is for all sorts of personal reasons. It’s not because I’m morally superior, or more concerned about the fate of the world than, let’s say, someone who writes only about small moments of thought or behavior between individuals engaged in kind of intimate exchanges. Different writers, different artists view the world through different kinds of lenses. If something that I write ends up having some kind of use for a political group or a political movement, that’s wonderful. But I think that if I write specifically to have that use, I’m going to need to sort of simplify and reduce and probably wind up creating something that’s more of a polemic than I think a play or a screenplay ought to be. That’s a long answer for the question. The ambition to have agency is a laudable ambition, but nobody gets it unless they become directly active as a political agent.
KUSHNER: My view is basically that agency is a matter of political activism, rather than writing and artistic production, per se. If you really want to have agency, if you really want to have a direct impact on political and historical fortunes of your time and on the way that the world is shaping or crumbling, that the only way to do that directly is to become politically engaged and politically active. So you organize, raise money, vote, get other people to vote, you know, do direct political work, which I think gives you a chance on having a direct impact on the way things are going to turn out-as direct an effect as any single human being can have, or group of people can have.
I think artistic work is different. I think it’s kind of a mistake for artists to assume that if their work addresses political subjects directly, that translates into direct political efficacy. I don’t think it really does. Works of art are more complicated in that they have a power in the world, but the power is kind of an indirect power. The relationship that you have with your audience is not one in which you are after them to do this or that thing, to think in a certain way. You’re engaged in a much more complicated dialectical and I think ambiguous process where the audience is being asked, basically, to be an audience: to sit in their seat and listen, and afterwards, if they feel inclined, to think. And, of course, they’re going to listen and think only as long as you can hold their attention, and be interesting and challenging to them.
The reason why we go to the theater, and to films, and that we pick up novels about all kinds of subjects, including difficult and very painful subjects, is that we’re safe in our passivity. Nothing is going to be demanded of us, except what we decide to demand of ourselves after we’ve finished our engagement with the work of art. So, it’s kind of a safe way to encounter dangerous things, things that we may want to avoid in our waking life, because they genuinely threaten you or demand your immediate action and be too scary, as a consequence.
I feel I’m a writer who has a proclivity, a penchant, an appetite for political and historical subject matter. This is for all sorts of personal reasons. It’s not because I’m morally superior, or more concerned about the fate of the world than, let’s say, someone who writes only about small moments of thought or behavior between individuals engaged in kind of intimate exchanges. Different writers, different artists view the world through different kinds of lenses. If something that I write ends up having some kind of use for a political group or a political movement, that’s wonderful. But I think that if I write specifically to have that use, I’m going to need to sort of simplify and reduce and probably wind up creating something that’s more of a polemic than I think a play or a screenplay ought to be. That’s a long answer for the question. The ambition to have agency is a laudable ambition, but nobody gets it unless they become directly active as a political agent.