Devlin's Love

Autopoiesis and Harold Pinter's Ashes to Ashes

Bibliographic Data

ID5339522
AuthorsGuy Zimmerman (corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume49
Issue1
Pages74-96
Publication date2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSubStance (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/sub.2020.0003
OpenAlexW3016718729
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited19

This paper uses the concept of autopoiesis to describe Harold Pinter's approach to dramatic composition.The playwright strikes a first note and allows the play to emerge from the resonances and feedback patterns of that note.This autopoietical aesthetic, I argue, began with Samuel Beckett and flows forward through an important lineage of postwar drama.Because of its compression and its self-referential qualities, Pinter's Ashes to Ashes shows how Pinter's process relates both to the enactivist model of cognition, and to important strains of poststructuralist thought.In Ashes to Ashes, for example, the playwright deploys the fundamental form-generating characteristics of the theatre space itself in this contest against the totalizing schemata of neoliberalism

Art · Autopoiesis · Epistemology · Literature · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

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