By Gordon Wheeler

A version of this article appeared in Australian Gestalt Journal; Vol. 6, No. 1, 2002

The current vogue for Shakespeare and things Shakespearean in the popular media is a curious aspect of the contemporary cultural scene.  Of course we know that the Bard has long (though not always) been the most often-performed dramatist on stage, at least in the English-speaking world.  But live theater — and particularly “highbrow” theater — reaches only a relatively small audience;  big-budget motion pictures and television are a different matter.  When the movie boomlet reaches Titus Andronicus, long and reasonably regarded as the most unstageable of all the Shakespeare canon, clearly we’re in the presence of something different, something that speaks to the current cultural moment in a particular way.   But what is it?  What does Shakespeare reflect in us, and what do we see in Shakespeare, that resonates with our felt concerns and realities in today’s world?

An artist is a voice of the field;  a successful artist, a voice that reaches an ear. This completes an arc of contact, speaker to listener, the crystalization of a vibration in the field that was felt but not yet articulated (what British analyst Christopher Bollas calls the “unthought known”).  This is the meaning of art, and why it speaks to us, at times so powerfully.  Such contact of course changes the field, which is a different “place” because of that new articulation, that new relationship of voice to ear.  The size of the audience is the number of people who are responsive to that particular vibration, which may not speak to the felt concerns of others — or which they may not be ready to hear.  Nothing is more common, after all, than the way artists’ reputations and influence, very much including Shakespeare’s, wax and wane as the felt urgencies of the audience change with the times.  It’s also commonplace to say that “great art” speaks to human concerns that are timeless:  but that too is in the eye of the beholder, and in the particular cultural field and moment (it is above all my concerns, here and now, that are apt to strike me as timeless).  Our individualist age has tended to value Shakespeare (like Freud) for his insistence on interiority, and for the essential loneliness of his characters — the most unredeemed, surely, in all of literature, at least since the Greeks (it was Sir Kenneth Clark who remarked that Shakespeare was the only great artist before the 20th Century whose works are fundamentally atheistic.  There’s a spirit world in Shakespeare, and malificent forces, but no positive spiritual force — and no god).  That is, in our particular cultural time, interiority and loneliness strike us as timeless human concerns, universal characteristics of the human condition.  Still, until recently this appeal seemed to speak only to a very limited elite.  Despite countless attempts, in stage, film, and television productions, to “take Shakespeare to the masses,” the results have been mostly awkward and commercially unviable.  What accounts for a change now?  What is it in Shakespeare’s vision that strikes a popular chord at this particular moment in cultural time;  and then what do we make of that vision, from a Gestalt field perspective?

Shakespeare’s Politics

Whole libraries have been written on the themes and meanings of Shakespeare:  the imagery, the glorious language, the psychology of the characters;1  the role of magic, the spirit world, the Church;  the metaphor of theater itself, the absence of deeply felt religion, the complex gender politics of a theater in which men dressed as women play the parts of women dressed up as men, with much ambiguity resulting — as perhaps befits the author of the most complex and remarkable homoerotic poetry ever written in any language.  It would seem that there can hardly be a topic in the whole fertile, febrile body of his work that hasn’t been analyzed, exploited, and then reconstituted in academic packaging.  And yet relatively overlooked in this Niagara of scholarship is the dominant message of all the works taken as a whole, the single most salient and organizing theme in the entire Shakespearean canon, a particular dynamic pattern that underlies and unites nearly all the plays, either as the central figure of the action, or as the necessary background that sets everything in motion, and without which the story doesn’t make any sense.  This message is Shakespeare’s urgent, ringing, and ever-reiterated endorsement of central government authority, as codified specifically in the then-new political form of the nation state, emerging out of a background of internecine civil strife.  This strife, which destroys all possibility of prosperity and happiness in the land, almost invariably follows from rivalry, upheaval, and betrayal — usually within a ruling house, generally fatal, often pitting brother against brother, and always, always with dire or potentially dire consequences for the local or national body politic as a whole.

In a very real sense, the central problem of Shakespeare is always the problem of governance, in the widest sense of the organization of civil authority, how society is to be ordered, and how the national whole  — a new idea at the time — is to regulate its warring or potentially warring parts.  In other words, the problem is very much a “Gestalt” one, the dynamic relationship in society of parts to whole, and parts to parts.  As we shall see, this is a problem that dominated not just Shakespeare’s plays but his times as well — as it does our own, on a new worldwide level.

A quick glance through the plots shows the overwhelming salience of this basic organizing theme, which has many variations, but hardly a single exception.  Well over thirty of the thirty-seven or so plays hinge directly on rivalry, dissension, and/or rebellion within a social unit, most often a household, generally a ruling house — with around two-thirds of the cases involving possession of a throne.  In eleven cases brother betrays brother — and that’s not even counting dozens of fratricidal subplots (and Lear of course makes twelve, with the genders changed).  Another half dozen or so take off from the rivalry and betrayal of friends, and most of the rest hinge on rebellion against parental authority, and/or rivalry and betrayal, again, between men and women.  In the majority of all these cases, the result is civil war.

Nor is this just the case with the history plays, with their constant regicides, infanticides, plots, and rebellions, the seven Roman/Greek dramas, or the quartet of great tragedies (Hamlet, MacBeth, Lear, and Othello), where the flaws and conflicts of the rulers shake nations (or at least, with Othello, a military command).  What is less obvious is that the same thematic dynamic echoes through the rest of the plays as well, as background that organizes the figure of action.  Take the late dream play, The Tempest:  why is Prospero, the Duke of Milan, stranded on an island in the first place? — because he’s been deposed by his brother, with the aid of the King of Naples, whose own brother now plots to murder him.  Why are the two royal cousins Rosalind and Celia (As You Like It) consorting in the Forest of Arden?  — because the father of one of them has deposed the father of the other, the rightful “Duke of France” (and again, the trope is mirrored and multiplied in the subplots).  What sets the rather feeble plot of Much Ado in motion, to sustain the comedy of the lover/rivals Beatrice and Benedict?  — the jealousy of the Duke’s illegitimate brother, who has already rebelled once and been pardoned, and now plots sedition again.   Why does Prince Hal, the off-and-on heir to the throne and the one authentic hero in Shakespeare, lead such a dissolute early life, hanging out with petty criminals and refusing to take up his proper place in court?  Hal gives us the answer himself:  it’s because his father’s throne is illegitimate, usurped from a nephew and his children, who are the rightful heirs.   The civil wars that rage all through the Henry cycle are one result of the old king’s arrogance and overreaching;  war with France will soon be another.  All in all, succession to a throne is the controlling issue of a full two-thirds of all the plays, with the consequences of civil war never farther away than just off-stage (at the end of Hamlet the country is occupied by Fortinbras of Norway, who takes advantage of the divisions in the Danish court to reassert an old grudge.  The ruler who hesitates is lost, and the kingdom with it).

In every case the message of the story is loud and clear, from Caesar to Hamlet, from Romeo and Juliet to Lear to Midsummer Night’s Dream:  the worst of all evils is civil war, which bleeds the realm and destroys the health of the body politic, leaving it prey to enemies and disease from within and without.  Civil war itself is the direct result of instability in the ruling house — almost always the fault of the ruler, who is either immoderate and greedy or else indecisive or too blindly trusting.  Thus it follows that the worst fault in a ruler is unsteadiness — whether too grasping and harsh, too distracted and soft, or just too mercurial.  Hamlet’s “flaw” is neither crippling nor blameworthy in a man (who wouldn’t hesitate to murder an uncle, solely at the bidding of a ghost who may, as Hamlet himself says, be no more than the deceptive conjurings of an evil spirit, or a fevered brain?):  but it is disastrous in a prince.  He should either get on with dispatching his uncle, evil spirit or no, and not look back — or else go back to Wittenburg and stay there.  The fact that he does neither is fatal to him, and to the realm.

Shakespeare’s Field

We don’t have to look far to find the sources of this preoccupation, for Shakespeare and his audience alike.  As the history plays themselves indicate, the story of England over the preceding centuries leading up to Shakespeare’s own is one long bloody saga of warring petty kings and chieftains, shifting feudal alliances and rebellions, and near-constant struggles for succession and power, generally among relatives, often directly fraticidal, and not infrequently parricidal and infanticidal as well.  As a result, while France and Spain gradually unified and gained dominance through the 15th Century, England remained chaotic and weak, constantly prey to civil strife and the threat of foreign invasion.  Then came the 16th Century, Shakespeare’s own, where the history of the royal family reads like — well, like a Shakespeare play.  We know that Elizabeth reigned over an age of prosperity, relative stability, and power;  we forget how precarious that stability was.  It was Elizabeth’s own father, Henry VIII, who (like Claudius) married his brother’s widow, a princess of Spain, — only to divorce her twenty years later for want of a male heir, thus provoking rupture with the Church of Rome, a complete change of state religion, the sacking (and royal appropriation) of all the Church property — and recurrent civil war and crisis along religious lines for most of the next two centuries.  By dint of much marriage (and a good deal of bloodshed), he finally achieved a male heir, with an English mother;  but the boy Edward survived his father by only a few years.  The throne then passed (after the execution of a problematic cousin) to the boy’s older sister Mary, who was half Spanish and all Catholic, which started up the religious wars all over again, only to pass again from childless Mary to her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth — whereupon the newly-reestablished Catholic properties were sacked anew (the “bare ruined choirs” of the Sonnets, Shakespeare’s vivid image for advancing age,2  were actually a common sight in the English countryside of the day).  England, half bled to death, must have looked like easy pickings at this point to foreign powers;  the Spanish Armada was only the culmination of many years of threatened invasion — and only thwarted, finally, by a providential storm, which left some thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of the invading army drowned or else straggling to the Scottish shore (where legendarily they became the ancestors of some of my own forebears, the “black Scots.”)

This was the context of Shakespeare’s writings, and these were the stakes.  By the time Shakespeare was writing for the stage, the situation was growing acute, as an ageing and childless queen grew ever older, ever more phobic about death and averse to any discussion of the succession, and at the same time completely without any surviving close relatives or logical heirs (Elizabeth finally executed her closest surviving relation, her Catholic second cousin Mary Stuart, deposed Queen of Scotland, widowed Queen of France, and long a pretender to the English throne, in 1587).  As the century wore on, the most burning question of the times, who would succeed Elizabeth, must have been the topic of every alehouse debate, and every whispered court conversation.  Above all, would the struggle for succession — or the choice of heir itself — throw the country back once more into the civil and religious chaos of the preceding age?  These were no small questions:  while Shakespeare was writing, France was rocked by the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which tens of thousands of Protestants were slaughtered in Paris, after having been promised safe passage to celebrate the marriage of their hero, Henry of Navarre, into the Catholic ruling house.  The religious question was finally settled in France by the compromise of Henry’s (second) conversion to Catholicism (“Paris is worth a mass”), leaving France unified and menacing across the channel.  Meanwhile, the failure to resolve the same issue would cost Germany over a third of its entire population in the religious wars there over the coming century.

With this context, and again given the urgency and the stakes, it is tempting to see Shakespeare’s most popular play of all, Midsummer Night’s Dream, as a sort of drame-á-clef  for the succession to Elizabeth’s throne.  Royal strife seems to have been ended as the play opens, with the preparations for the marriage of Theseus, King (here Duke) of Athens, to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons — after long warfare between them.  However, all is not yet peaceful, because of parallel strife in the spirit realm, between Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the Fairies.  The issue here is a little orphan boy:  Titania has him, and Oberon wants him — for what exactly is left to our imaginations, but in any case to assert his male prerogative, as Theseus has done over Hippolyta in the secular realm on the field of battle.  The boy is the son of a foreign princess, a devotee of Titania’s, now dead:  thus the Queen’s claim.  It is proper for the Queen to yield to her lord and master, Oberon insists.  Until she does, no peace and plenty can come to the realm, for the spirits rule over the world of nature, just as the mortal king rules over the realm of men.  Without their steady hand, Oberon points out:

                                    …the winds, piping to us in vain

                                    as in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea

                                    contagious fogs…

                                    Floods result, so that

                                     …the green corn

                                    hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard.

                                    …no night is now with hymn or carol blest:

                                    and through this distemperature we see

                                    the seasons alter;  hoary-headed frosts

                                    fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;

                                    …and this same progeny of evils comes

                                    from our debate, from our dissension:

                                    we are their parents and their originals (italics added).

In other words, as above, so below.  Just as royal dissension destroys civil order, so parallel strife on the spirit level upsets the order of nature, with the same disastrous results.  For Shakespeare, these are the inevitable consequences of strife and unsteadiness at the top.  The remedy? — the female principal must yield to the male, so that the natural order is restored.

But female and male, all through Shakespeare, his contemporary writers, and commonly ever since, are analogous to Church and State, respectively.  The Church is personified as a woman;  the principle of state authority is conventionally male, as far back as the Greeks.  Society can have only one master, Shakespeare is telling us (again and again), and that master must be the (male) civil authority, over religion.  The King of England is the head of the Church of England, as proclaimed by Elizabeth’s father Henry, and then carried out paradoxically by the “Virgin Queen” herself (who like Athena, to whom she was often likened by Shakespeare and other poets, has only a father, no mother;  both are desexed, so as to serve as emblems for male-typed power and war).

But then who is an orphan princeling, whose foreign-born royal mother, now dead, was a votary of a foreign, female religion?  Why James VI of Scotland of course, (soon to be James I of England), main candidate for the succession, the boy-king whose mother, Mary Stuart, was such a staunch Catholic, and plotted the restoration of the Roman Church in Britain from the very beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, right down to her own beheading just a few years before the play’s first production.  No question Shakespeare is a Jamesian:  he would celebrate James’s eventual accession with MacBeth, “the Scottish play,” which contains a scene where all the kings of Scotland from MacBeth on parade before us, culminating in James himself, who would reward the legitimizing gesture with royal patronage.  But the condition of Shakespeare’s support, as Dream makes clear, is that the boy-prince must be handed over to Oberon — i.e., the new monarch must swear fealty to the strong, steady (male) central State, over the feminine (and supranational) Church — for the sake of peace in the realm.  James, a devout Protestant as it happens, signs just such a pact with Parliament;  thus all is well, for the moment anyway, with England.

Shakespeare and Human Nature

Of course we know that the stability of the realm was only temporary:  religious war (or rather, war in the name of religion) would break out again in the next generation, and then either rage or simmer all through the coming century — the same century that almost exactly covers the life of Thomas Hobbes, that most pessimistic and statist of philosophers — unless you count Shakespeare.  What Shakespeare depicts on stage, Hobbes then formalizes in philosophy (and psychology, at a somewhat more complex level than the Bard’s simplistic vision of good and evil).  Humans are driven to seek power and dominion over others, says Hobbes, not because they are inherently evil so much as because they are inherently weak, and thus always prepotently in a state of fear, vis á vis their compatriots.  Out of fear and the desire for security is born the inevitable drive for dominance.  Thus the “state of nature” for mankind is a murderous free-for-all, famously “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  It follows that peace and prosperity are fragile commodities indeed, to be purchased at essentially any price.  Therefore, just as in Shakespeare, the one essential quality in a leader is stable strength.  The essential, unbreakable social contract is then not between man and man (sic), as in the later, sunnier Locke, but between subject and ruler.  Hobbes’s logic is Shakespeare’s:  a benificent dictatorship is of course to be hoped for, but in the end no tyrant is so despotic as not to be preferable to the alternative, which is endless chaos, endless civil war, endless destruction and grief.

Implicit here of course is the underlying psychoideology of Western individualism.  As in traditional Judeo-Christianity, the largest natural unit of social organization is the single individual (there are of course larger units, but they are imposed, as in the Torah).  At most there may be a bit of family feeling, often honored, as the Bard has it, in the breach (if you’re a Shakespeare character — or a member of the British nobility, circa 1300-1700,– you’d do well to check your back).  But beyond that flickering light, there’s no social or affiliative instinct that you can count on, as an inherent part of our human nature, certainly no world-soul, hardly even any tribal or ethnic identity that isn’t subject to easy traduction.  Even nationalism itself is learned, argued, and finally imposed:  Prince Hal — now King Henry V — is not so much invoking as he is inventing national feeling in his moving speech to the troops at Agincourt (“We few, we happy few…”) — and in the process (onstage, circa 1590), inventing England.

This project — inventing an England, as both the cause and the result of a necessary nationalism — is the whole burden of Shakespeare’s dramas, which can then be seen as thirty-odd arguments on a single theme.  Shakespeare has often been characterized as a reactionary, for his vigorous royalism;  here we rather see that while hardly a democrat, he was something more like a radical, in the feudalistic context of the times.  A radical statist, or nationalist to be sure (and thus a good aspirant bourgeois, if the Stratford man — or a traitor to his ancient feudal class, if the Earl of Oxford).

In feudalism, the Gestalt problem of large-scale social organization is resolved in favor of the autonomous parts (the individual nobles, or their shifting cliques and alliances), over the whole (nominally represented, with more or less real salience at different times, by the generally distant and disempowered Church, a weak bonding agent indeed by the time of Henry VIII and Luther).   Shakespeare would exactly reverse that equation, at least within the confines of a defined national entity:  the national whole would be the only energized Gestalt and the only legitimate figure, with the subsidiary parts resting, ideally, in a pronounced and necessary confluence with the whole (the confluence, most often fixed and thus pathological, that we know as patriotism).  It was for this that Shakespeare was first tolerated, then encouraged, then celebrated by the throne (or, if you incline to the Oxfordians, then he was a court dramatist first and foremost, and only later a popular propagandizer and apologist for the crown under a nom de plume, as Elizabeth and her ministers came to realize what a priceless resource they had right among them, for forging ties of identification among the nascent middle and popular classes who were their natural allies).  Either way, the same socioeconomic forces that fostered those new classes and those anti-feudalist sentiments, also provided the conditions for the emergence of popular public theater — and the Shakespeare canon as we know it was born.

Thus Shakespeare, the poet of interiority (particularly in the Tragedies, even more so in the Sonnets), is above all the apostle of nationalism.  He was born somewhere amid the convulsive beginnings of the Age of the Nation State;  and as much as any one man (or woman), it was he who was responsible for Britain’s taking a place as one of those States — as opposed to being an island colony of France, or a joint suzerainty of France, Spain, and perhaps Scotland, something like Sicily or Cyprus, or Germany and Italy themselves for that matter, right down to the late Nineteenth Century.  Nation Statehood after all is not god-given, for all that we’ve learned (from Shakespeare) to think of Britain at least as part of the divine order of things (“If the British nation and its Empire shall last a thousand years…”3  said Churchill, who knew his Caesar and his Coriolanus and most of all his Henry V by heart, and like Hitler was much given to millennial thinking).  In this Deconstructive age, understanding as we do the sense in which “everything is text,” we can say with new import that Shakespeare is the author of some thirty-odd plays, of other poetry including the intensely erotic autobiographical Sonnet cycle — and of England.

Shakespeare, Gestalt and Politics

Today we live in the twilight — equally convulsive — of that same Age of Nationalism of which Shakespeare stood at the dawn.  Even as great parts of the world struggle to deal with the level of social and technological organization and complexity that made nation states seem salient, the rest of the world (and parts of those other parts) tries fitfully and reactively to integrate a sociopolitical gestalt at some wider, deeper level.  In this period of chaotic disequilibrium we have on the one hand the new field-organizing dynamics of the EEC, the WTO, the World Bank, and of course the World Wide Web — even as we have on the other hand the growth of separatism, the violent renewal of long dormant nationalist and sub-nationalist schisms, and the renascence of so-called religious fanaticism, all at the same time.  Nor do we any longer believe in the modernist myth of linear progress.  Things could go any one or more of a number of ways at this point:  the possibility of a new Dark Age, triggered by environmental degradation, the forced mutation of pathogens, biochemical warfare, or even nuclear accident or attack, is very real.

In this context the new popular vogue for Shakespeare seems somewhat less heartening and innocent — something more like, perhaps, the anodyne soothings of American television, circa 1950’s and 60’s, or maybe the wild popularity of Dumas novels in France in the Nineteenth Century, fanning the embers of Nation and Gloire down through the long enforced national weakness of the post-Napoleonic age.  Never fear, the subtext murmurs to us reassuringly, under the disturbing clang and chaos of the action onstage — as long as a strong national leader is here. In the background of any Shakespeare play — if not in the foreground, as the contentious stakes of the action — is always the State, seemingly god-given if ever-menaced.  Those who threaten that divine order — Claudius, Iago, Goneril and Regan, Lady MacBeth et ux., or any of the literally dozens of scheming, traitorous brothers who infest the Shakespearean scenery — are outside the pale of society, by definition.  They “threaten the legitimacy” of things as they are (and here we can see the Machiavellian wisdom of Bush and Company, who understood well that if they could only achieve office nominally, no matter how, then the other side would automatically become paralytically stigmatized, as the destabilizing enemy of the people).

This is not to say that Shakespeare was wrong, about civil war (to paraphrase the pacifist American poet William Stafford, there are many things worse than war, civil or otherwise — “and war brings all of them.”)  In the context of the times, he may not have been wrong about the nation state either, as the largest relevant unit of world political organization — or even, as Hegel would say, the vehicle of Spirit.  It is at least arguable that in that day, at that given (European) level of social and technological complexity, the nation state at least at times provided the fertile ground and space for the expansion of human potential and freedom, and for the evolutionary articulation of greater levels of complexity of consciousness and experience.

On the other hand, there is the stark fact that the whole logic and raison d’être of the nation-state is war.  As with the monadic Western individualistic self (crystallized by Leibniz and then caricatured, unintentionally, by Nietzsche, Freud, Perls, and many others), the field-organizing principle in both cases is an ideally rigid polarization of consistency/confluence within the posited boundary, and aggressive self-assertion and dominance without.  So well have these forms fulfilled their function over the past four centuries or so of their ascendency that individualistic capitalism (and its attendant abuses) now reigns untrammeled over almost all the globe, while the total casualties of war in that same period probably equal the whole population of the world, of several hundred millions or so, around the beginning of that time.

Plainly we can’t go on like this.  In an interlocking world where global welfare is unitary and detailed plans for nuclear and biochemical weapons are available on the web, the organization of the world into an ever-proliferating number of presumedly autonomous state-monads has to represent a throwback to an inadequately simplistic, dysfunctional and dangerous political order, one which stands for less, not more human growth and freedom.  On the one hand, the idea of the nation state, unrestrained in theory, is a festering-ground for aggressive social reactions, now armed at a technological level which threatens the whole world.  Everybody wants his/her own state (for what is again unclear, but generally the manifest issue is something about Identity, or Self-assertion, with the barest obligatory gesture toward improved welfare for a disadvantaged group).  On the other hand, the nominal independence of states functions as a fig leaf to cover the real and shameful exportation and sequestration of toxic waste and toxic social policies such as child servitude, exploitative pay scales, and dangerous working conditions, from the privileged nations in the direction of the less fortunate.  Meanwhile the real power of international business goes unchecked, for want of any regulatory power at the supranational level of the companies themselves.

What is the answer, to these dire world-organizational problems?  On the one hand we have the nation-state model, in which only the centralized whole counts, while the parts subside into deenergized confluence (punctuated by occasional outbursts of Basque-like resistance, generally without lasting impact).  Most often this model, if applied at a global level, is held up before us as the dread specter of World Government and Global Uniformity (while the real confluent tide of consumerism and conformism actually flows right on, under the invisible hand of The Market — for which read aggressive exploitation by Western megabusiness).  That is, in this vision the dominant model of the nation-state itself is simply transferred, in imagination, to the level of the whole world — which would then presumably lose the energized creative potential of real multi-cultural, multi-national differences (as is in fact currently happening, without benefit of organized world authority).  Ironically then, this is increasingly the world we actually live in, without our taking intentional responsibility for this state of affairs, its direction, or its consequences.

On the other hand we have the model of monadic feudalism, anathema to Shakespeare (though curiously romanticized by Marx, who saw nation states as the worst of temporary, necessary evils) — only now applied likewise on a world scale, so that each of the 200 or so members of the General Assembly is like a big or little feudal vassalage, separate but of course vastly unequal, and most of them subject to further subdivision at any time by warring sub-parts seeking their own tribal recognition.  This is of course the espoused organization of the world we actually live in — though in reality the field is organized under a Great Powers model (or rather, at the moment, one Great Power and a number of secondary powers, then followed by all the rest) — with the supposed inviolability of nation-states by other nation-states more honored, again, in the breach. In this model the parts have all the energy (or at least some of the parts), while the whole, like the United Nations, is powerless except as an agent of some shifting coalition of the more powerful of the individual state-monads.  In other words, the feudalism Shakespeare so rightly saw as destructive to the community, now acts on the level of the world community, with much the same effects.

Manifestly, what is needed urgently is a new organizational form, a new gestalt beyond the simplicities of either of these two traditional reductionistic poles.  That new form, if we could find it, would be characterized by an energized, competent, and powerful whole (or central authority), comprising and comprised of parts which were themselves energized, vibrant, and creative, free to self-realize within the community of the whole, without vitiating or dominating that community.  The relationships among the parts would then not be ones of unrelated oppositionalism, like those of individuals to other individuals in society (or nature) to Hobbes, nor those of feudal satraps among each other in Shakespeare, or of nation-states today.  Nor would the part-whole relationships be ones of submissive confluence, like the individual (or feudal lord) to the crown in Shakespeare/Hobbes.  Rather, these relationships would be dynamics of figure-ground, where each figure in turn (part to part, part to whole, whole to part) nourishes and is nourished by the relevant ground, informed and challenged by the demands of belongingness and supported to realize its own evolution of spirit.

In other words, the new field organization we need is not just reformist, and for that matter not just revolutionary (though it is both these things and more).  Rather, it is evolutionary — the creative elaboration of a new level of complexity, beyond what has existed before, out of and yet beyond the organizational patterns of the political world up to this time, at least at the world level.  Beyond the thesis of the (presumed) internal order of the State, as well as the antithesis of the destructive chaos of States, in the creative potential of the field must lie a new synthesis, a new morphogenesis which, when found and articulated, then feeds back and crystalizes the field as a whole.  Like all evolutionary change, this new organization will be both continuous and discontinuous with the past.  Continuous, in that the form we seek already exists somewhere in our world, at least in parts and pieces;  and discontinuous, in that its use now, which is local or background, must be lifted up as figure so as to crystalize the political organization of the whole field.

Where do we find such models, or if not whole models, then elements which, when configured in a new dynamic way, can gain the necessary purchase and influence?  For organizations where the part and the whole are lived in dynamic, mutually nourishing figure-ground relationship, each containing and supporting and energizing the other, we may naturally look to quite small, face-to-face relationships and communities such as marriage, family, and joint intentional enterprizes, run by consensus and often organized around identification with some strong common figure of value (in my own life, beyond family the small collaborative firm GestaltPress comes to mind, along with certain study groups, project teams, and friendship networks).  At the opposite end of the spectrum we may take some heart from a social form as large as the EEC, where we seem to find some of the tensions of nationalism (Scottish/English, for instance — and perhaps eventually British-Irish, Spanish-Basque, even Serb-Bosnian or -Albanian and others) attenuated by lowering the salience of the national boundary (and the requisite sub-national confluence) in favor of joint participation in the whole, with a resulting increase of space and support for local distinctiveness.  (The late King Hussein of Jordan championed just such a model for a pan-Palestinean federation, which would consist of three nominal states, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine, integrated economically into a common market and eventually a common currency.  Alas, this dream seems for now to have died with him).  Where else can we look, for relevant experiments and forms?

My own hunch is that we must look now to that part of our present socioeconomic/political world that is generally the most energized and figural on a global level, and already dealing with the realities of transnationalism, searching for those higher order of levels of complexity that are required by organization at a global level.   This is of course the world of business, particularly international corporatations (though all businesses are really international now, even when they’re not aware of it).    Here the crucial Gestalt issues of dynamic, creative relationship of parts to parts and parts to whole are matters of constant, active experiment, both aware/intentional and ad hoc/reactive.  The problems of flow and use of information across great distances and multiple levels of decision-making (so that choices are often made at levels far from the feedback source);  the empowerment of constituent parts to support both creativity and that essential feedback flow (democracy after all is the application of this essential information theory idea on a political level);  the role and relationships of face-to-face or identity communities within a larger whole;  the issues of boundaries and belonging, inclusion and extrusion;  “response-ability,” the capacity to adapt and apply multi-level goals and planning, together with enormously complex information, to local situations and demands;  even the intertwined dynamics of motivation and meaning-making — all these and more are the issues and challenges of international business and multi-national governance alike.  The new forms of creative adjustment elaborated in the world-lab of corporations, under the acute evolutionary selection pressure of the Market, already offer a rich repertoire of structures and processes, successful and unsuccessful, for political and social experiment.

At the same time, until we have global governance structures at the same transnational levels of scope and power as the corporations themselves (many of which have long since outstripped most nation-states, and which in the aggregate probably outweigh even the largest states, acting alone), there will be no empowered voice to speak for (and enforce) those issues that are ecological, in the largest sense of having to do with our relationship to the whole.  These issues include problems like the use of resources, the processing of wastes, the regulation of population, the distribution of goods, the control of disease, and war and peace themselves — as well as the provision of those minimum standards of rights and claims for the disempowered which are so crucial to the health of the whole field (a point which becomes clear in a Gestalt field analysis, but remains completely obscured in our familiar individualistic paradigm, where such challenges are seen as extrinsic or even opposed to “self-interest,”and thus dependent on “moral suasion” for their energy).

This in turn means the evolution of new field-organizing forms, along the lines discussed above.  Clearly some such structures are already evolving, especially in the world of international trade.  To oppose their emergence and empowerment, as some groups on the left now advocate doing with the WTO, for example, is probably just to acquiesce in the unrestrained onward march of things-as-they-are, Western international business rolling unchecked over the globe.  The more productive position, to my mind, is to organize to influence the policies of the WTO itself, which alone on the current world scene has the power to influence or control the behavior of both corporations and governments.  National governments alone simply can’t do it, because of the corporations’ capacity to “freeze out” one or more states, in favor of others too weak, corrupt, or desperate to oppose corporate policies that are short-sighted, irresponsible, and wrong.  In this view, the fight then shifts toward using the WTO (and GATT, NAFTA, the World Court, the EEC, and so on) as the vehicle of those policies of social, cultural, and economic justice which are always so essential to the health and survival of the whole, and always so threatened and marginal in a capitalist/ individualist world.  Certainly we are right to fear a world in which international business reigns supreme over every other power center, mowing down both local cultural distinctiveness and translocal achievements in universal human rights alike.  But just as surely it is hopeless to oppose this trend with means and on levels that were developed for local battles, and are sadly, ridiculously out of scale with the scope of the current problems.  Thus among the new tools and forms we seek are new forms of civic protest and political action themselves (and here of course the internet comes to mind, as a ready vehicle for organizing, for example, consumer boycotts and citizen education/alerts at a transnational level).

Conclusion

The key word in all this is of course “transnational” — which is also the key place where Shakespeare’s vision fails us.  Shakespeare dreamed a world in which dissident and contrasting elements of the social body would submerge themselves wholly to the central authority of the State — just as the members of the physical body, in his favorite political metaphor, submit and harmonize with the direction of the body as a whole.  Like the physical body, so goes the analogy, the body politic can have only one head (a metaphor often taken up in gender politics as an argument for male dominance, in the family and in society).   It is important to remember that this world, this embodied England, did not exist at the time that Elizabeth and her loyalists were working to will it into reality.  But Shakespeare dreamed a modern nation-state, and to a degree unimaginable to the Elizabethan court, that dream, that England, became first a reality and then for a time the dominant organizing force, politically and economically, over much of the globe.  In a sense that force still operates, today more than ever, through the military/economic agency and the social institutions of the Western Atlantic colonies promoted by Elizabethan expansionism, and through the language Shakespeare shaped and wielded, paintbrush and scalpel, with a glorious flourish and thrust no one has surpassed, before or since.

Of course, that vision didn’t become reality just because Shakespeare dreamed it.  The artist, again, is a particular voice of the field, and to chronicle all the field conditions enabling the emergence of a coherent national state on the island of Britain, and then the preeminence of that state for a time in the Age of Nation States, would be to analyze the whole history of the world, over the past half millennium.  Still, to enable is not to determine.  Periods of chaotic disequilibrium, those transitions from one relatively “steady state” to some new equilibrium, are notoriously sensitive to the influence of germ crystals, those organizational templates or vortices known in chaos theory as “strange attractors.”  Vision and the articulation of vision always function as powerful organizers of the dynamic field;  in times of disequilibrium they may become vastly more influential (the sudden, improbable emergence of Christianity as the organizing force of the late Roman Empire is another clear case in point).  To say that Shakespeare didn’t “cause” England — much less the modern state, European-style — is still not to say that England, or Britain, or the Age of States that was to follow would have had the same form or the same subsequent course, without him.

This then in turn points up the essential nature and potential political role of our wide joint project and voice as Gestaltists, offering a different vision of field organization and the dynamic relationship of part-to-whole and part-to-part in our shared world.  Our Western culture, after all, is deeply steeped in the mostly unexamined, paradigmatic notion that the parts of the world (individuals, states) are god- or nature-given, irredeemably, irreducibly separate from each other in their nature — and thus inherently opposed in their “self-interest.”  To mitigate this, the culture offers the Hobbesian, Lockeian, or Freudian idea of a social (or psychic) contract, whereby each separate individual (or state, or id drive) gives up some of its presumedly inherent autonomy — as little as it can get away with, of course — in exchange for some degree of social insurance.  If you won’t kill me, I won’t kill you (unless I think I can get away with it). Beyond that strategic minimum, the modernist vision, from Shakespeare to Freud (and, in all fairness, Perls), offers precious little to build on, when we turn to the urgent post-modern concerns of taking care of the world-whole.  I may be a “better person” for my concern for, say, the peasants of Chiapas or the workers of Bangladesh (though as Nietzsche pointed out, in a purely individualist world this moral judgment is arbitrary);  but nothing in the modernist project, again from Shakespeare to Freud/Perls, suggests that I am personally constricted, that my self-realization is actually less, because of those distant constrictions of the field.4   The transformative idea that I might gain positively (as opposed to stand to lose less) from the enhancement of the whole social field — even that I may not be able to thrive and grow fully at all, as long as that field is so impoverished (even that I may have only the palest notion and experience of what thriving and growth are, under the current given conditions) — just doesn’t enter into the argument.

Today we find the Bard once again at the forefront of broad popular culture, after some centuries of relative exile in more rarefied social strata.  Once again we find masses of people laying down good money to hear those glorious, witty lines, to see those tyrants and traitors and lovers strut and fret their hour upon the stage — willingly, as the popular audience did four hundred years ago, for entertainment value and not because it would be “good for them.”  And part of that entertainment, the emotional subtext then as now, is the reassurance of the vision they find there, of the peace and security of a strong, wise leader at the head of a firm, well-defended nation, harmonious within, bellicose without.  Whatever the merits of that vision half a millennium ago, it is dangerously, tragically misguided today.  In his eloquence, the great poet of dreams would lead us into, not out of the dark chaos he so often evoked, and looked to the nation-state to dispel.

Where is the new vision, the new creative form that can respond to the darkness that yawns over our world today, crystalizing a new world order somewhere in the creative tension between stasis and chaos?  It is here that we need to take heart together, renewing the energy of the Gestalt vision, with its promise of a radically different way of imagining the dynamics of the whole field.  Radical visions are by their nature marginal — and yet both evolutionary theory and chaos theory alike tell us that times of extreme disorder and stress are also times when the whole may suddenly reorganize around one of these marginal figures, in a new order which then spreads through the entire relevant field.

But neither chaos nor evolution is unidirectional:  that new order may be at a higher level of complexity, offering new freedom and new creative potential — or it may be at a lower level, a simplification downward at the sacrifice of the growth and capacities previously attained.  As Gestaltists in these anti-humanist times, it has to be our charge to keep our own model and vision, which promise greater complexity and a richer freedom, lively, figural, and energized, maximally available for influence in the wider field.

And where is the poet whose vision carries and then realizes that dream?  Probably her or his birth still awaits the moment of emergence of a new world language, like Shakespeare at the birthing moment of English.  Meantime, the work and the dream of a better world, organized along the radically different principle of the growth of the human spirit in the widest sense, is up to us ordinary mortals.  Are we up to the challenge?  “Woe to the land that has no heroes,” says another poet/playwright of the past century, obsessed like Shakespeare with much the same themes of politics and the social fabric;   — only to correct himself immediately:  “No — woe to the land that needs them” (Bertolt Brecht, Kaukasische Kreidekreis, author’s translation).

______________________________

Note — For stimulation and the development of ideas and perspectives underlying this article, I am very much indebted to members of the Field Theory Circle:  Vincent Beja, Ty Francis, Ruella Frank, Judith Hemming, Lynne Jacobs, Jim Kepner, Tali bar-Levine, Phil Lichtenberg, Mark Nicholson, Leanne O’Shea, Arch Roberts, Paul Shane, Deb Ullman, Nancy Lunney Wheeler, and especially Malcolm Parlett.