¨...the world is hungry and not concerned with culture, and that the attempt to orient toward culture thoughts turned only toward hunger is a purely artificial expedient.
¨What is more important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger.¨
This comes from ¨The Theatre And Its Double¨, by Antonin Artaud. The words have stuck in the craw for a long time.
later in the same piece, he writes:
¨We must insist upon the idea of culture-in-action, of culture growing within us like a new organ, a sort of second breath: and on civilization as an applied culture controlling even our subtlest actions, a presence of mind; the distinction between culture and civilization is an artificial one, providing two words to signify an identical function.¨
Änd a little later:
¨A civilized man judges and is judged according to his behavior, but even the term "civilized" leads to confusion: a cultivated "civilized" man is regarded as a person instructed in systems, a person who thinks in forms, signs, representations – a monster whose faculty of deriving thoughts from acts, instead of identifying acts with thoughts, is developed to an absurdity.¨
It is shocking how steadfast he was in acting under the belief, or at least the desire to change the world with art. Especially given his proposals for doing away with written language, which came from his erroneous view that thinking is independent of language.
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