deborah levitt - extreme and difficult sense of spectacular representation -- artaud's ontology of...

8/17/2019 Deborah Levitt - Extreme and Difficult Sense of Spectacular Representation -- Artaud's Ontology of 'Live'

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5/5/2016 Deborah Levitt

http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/4/levitt.html

"THIS EXTREME AND DIFFICULT SENSEOF SPECTACULAR REPRESENTATION"

Antonin Artaud's Ontology of "Live"

Deborah Levitt

prologue

Jacques Derrida, over the course of thirty-one years (between 1965 and 1996), has

written multiple commentaries on the work of Antonin Artaud, on the enigma of Antonin Artaud, which reflect a profound ambivalence. In 1996, in an essaypresented on the occasion of an exhibition of Artaud's drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Derrida names this ambivalence. He names one side of thisambivalence, in fact, "an antipathy." "I am also bound to him [Artaud] by a sort of reasoned detestation, by the resistant but essential antipathy that is aroused in meby the declared content, the body of doctrine of that which might be called thephilosophy, politics or ideology of Artaud." Derrida also describes the source of theantipathy that makes Artaud, for him, "into a sort of privileged enemy, a painful

enemy which," Derrida writes, "I carry and prefer within myself." He resists, he says,whatever in Artaud's work operates "in the name of the proper body or the bodywithout organs" and operates as "a metaphysical rage for reappropriation," for areappropriation, that is, of the proper body and as an exorcism of all that is im-proper. In positioning himself thus in regard to Artaud, Derrida asserts his criticaldifference, and distance, from "almost all those with whom I share a passionateadmiration for Artaud." If Artaud is, for Derrida, not only the object of a passionateadmiration but also a "painful enemy," for me there is only a profound sympathy anda passionate affiliation. It is possible that in my beginning here, with the essential

difference that orients our respective readings of Artaud, a sort of perverse impulseis rearing its head in-between the necessity and chance that orients the starting-poinof an essay for this special issue of Tympanum, "Khoraographies for JacquesDerrida." For it is certainly Derrida's remarkable and insightful commentaries on

Artaud, and particularly his essays of 1965 and 1966, respectively, "La ParoleSoufflée" and "The Theater of Cruelty and The Closure of Representation" that havemoved me to read Artaud and to read him with the highest seriousness, and thathave most profoundly influenced my conception of Artaud's Theater of Cruelty.Beginning thus may also, however, reflect the intervention of a generation of


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http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/4/levitt.html 4

for his theater – which are thus also demands he places on his body – are in theservice of an attempt to manifest this life prior to form.

Derrida, in the first essay, confronts the life of Artaud: "Artaud knew that all speechfallen from the body, offering itself to understanding or reception, offering itself as aspectacle, immediately becomes stolen speech." He calls the theft of speech theoriginal gesture of theft. To condense and schematize Derrida's complex formulation

of this gesture: The problem that Artaud faces, and that tears him apart, that tortureshim unceasingly, is that his speech is never his own. The minute he opens hismouth, or takes up his pen, he inserts himself into a field that has always beendetermined in advance. Language precedes him, and in relation to it his everyutterance and even his every inspiration is already a repetition. This "amounts toacknowledging the autonomy of the signifier as the letter's historicity; before me, thesignifier on its own says more than I believe that I mean to say, and in relation to it,my meaning-to-say is submissive rather than active." Thus speech and writing, for

Artaud, steal from him what is inherently his, his life, his power of inauguration.

The first premise on which Artaud bases his project for the Theater of Cruelty is thatthis theater will no longer be governed by a text. In the history of the West, Artaudasserts, theater is a kind of sub-genre of literature. It has so far been an artstructured by the most slavish forms of representation. The director and the actorsreplicate, or re-present, the text of the play. What is truly theatrical about the theater,that is, its mise en scène, its volumetric extension in space, is subordinated to therepresentation of a text, is subordinated to dialogue. And, Artaud continues, itssubordination to a text also marks its subordination to psychology, to what Artaudcalls "psychological man." Rather than concerning itself with "life," it concerns itself with the life of the individual, with plots that can only reproduce what he considers tobe the petty concerns of modern man. "Given the theater as we see it here, onewould say there is nothing more to life than knowing whether we can make loveskillfully, whether we will go to war or are cowardly enough to make peace, how wecope with our little pangs of conscience, and whether we will become conscious of our "complexes" (in the language of experts) or whether our complexes will do us in."The Theater of Cruelty, on the other hand, will deal with – will be – life itself. AsDerrida points out, life, for Artaud, "as the source of good inspiration, must beunderstood as prior to the life of which the biological sciences speak." Artaud pitsforce against form. The Theater of Cruelty must be a manifestation of an originarylife force, force before it is stolen by the text, by form, by representation."Furthermore, Artaud writes, "when we speak the word "life," it must be understoodthat we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to thatfragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach."

It is Artaud's preoccupation with life, and specifically with a life that is material in allof its manifestations, that impels him to produce his (paradoxically) concretelanguage. Despite Artaud's insistence that life/theater resist the "artistic dallying with


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forms" that has characterized the history of Western art, "life," "force," "matter,""flesh," "existence," "theater" are not mute. They speak. But Artaud does not want touse any language whose meaning has been determined in advance. This kind of language – which is language as such, as a differential system of conventional signs

– is always already dead, can only communicate what has already beencommunicated and is thus doomed to the fate of the repetition of the same – andparticularly loathsome to Artaud, doomed as complicit in the replication or

perpetuation of a dead culture, the culture of psychological man, a culture of pettyplots and concerns, a "social system which is iniquitous and needs to be destroyed."

In opposition to a language whose form and system mirror the form and system of the organization of the subject, his constitution as "psychological man," Artaud wantsto make space speak and to constitute a purely material language which will directlyeffect the bodies of the theater's spectators. ("Artaud," Derrida writes, "is as fearful othe articulated body as he is of articulated language, as fearful of the member as of

the word." ) For his Theater of Cruelty, he will reconfigure the space of the theater,abolishing the separation between the stage and the audience and placing thespectator in the middle of the action, "caught as if in a whirlwind of forces." In placeof a theater governed by the text, Artaud wants to create a theater in which mise enscène is paramount. Within the mise en scène, constituting this mise en scène, allpossible means of effecting the spectators, effecting them corporeally, surgically, willbe employed – music, noises, colors, lights, dance, movement, gestures, objects,masks, costumes, breath, poetry. The Theater of Cruelty will not abandon languagealtogether but will employ words for their "incantatory possibilities." Artaud asserts

that this muti-media theatrical language a "concrete language," will "annihilate everyconflict produced by matter and mind, idea and form, concrete and abstract." We cansee, even at first glance, the paradox contained in this formulation: In what sensecould a language that annihilates the conflict between the abstract and the concretebe itself concrete? This paradox demands a careful examination.

In one of his earliest pieces on theater, written on the occasion of the first season of the Theatre Alfred Jarry he founded with Vitrac and Aron in 1926, Artaud writes: "If the theater is not an amusement, if it is an authentic reality, then how are we torestore its rank as reality, how are we to make each spectacle a kind of event? Thisis the problem we must solve." Artaud's concrete language, his speaking space, liesat the heart of his conception of spectacle and provides the details of the manner inwhich, he asserts, spectacle will function in the Theater of Cruelty:

I make it my principle that words do not mean everything and that by their natureand defining character, fixed once and for all, they arrest and paralyze thoughtinstead of permitting it and fostering its development. And by development I meanactual extended concrete qualities, so long as we are in an extended and concreteworld. The language of theater aims then at encompassing and utilizing extension,that is to say space, and by utilizing it, to make it speak: I deal with objects – the


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data of extension – like images, like words, bringing them together and making themrespond to each other according to laws of symbolism and living analogies....

Artaud's revolt against the re-iterations of words which "arrest and paralyze thought,"has, I think been well established. What then becomes, for Artaud, the engine whichwill permit and foster "the development of thought"? First, he clarifies his sense:"...by development I mean actual extended and concrete qualities, so long as we are

in an extended and concrete world." Artaud clearly asserts here that thoughtpossesses extension. It is not immaterial, does not pertain to an "ideal" worldseparated from matter or things or space, but rather itself possesses the qualities weconventionally ascribe to things and bodies. Thought is itself a body. When Artaudsets forth "the problem we must solve" in his manifesto for the Theatre Alfred Jarry ,he poses the question of how to produce a spectacle that would be both event andreality . In the Theater of Cruelty, images and words, like lights and sounds, costumesand gestures, become things and bodies, the "data of extension." Artaud'sconceptions of event and reality reflect his version of a materialism whose pivotalterm is "extension." Artaud is not as centrally concerned with the nature of materialsubstance as he is with its spatial effects. Space, for Artaud, is "full" and full of "shadows." As we have seen, he wants to manifest a life before form, a life beyond,he tells us, the facticity of its surfaces. Space will speak through its "shadows" andits "undersides." Artaud's materialism defies empirical verification. His material"reality" is not consistent with fact. It is absolute and all encompassing. Material, or "mass," is always animate and the engine of its operation, as I will discuss below, isvibration.

As Derrida notes, Artaud seeks to destroy the history of Western metaphysics as a

dualist metaphysics, as the separation of body and spirit. He pushes representationto its limit, attempting to withdraw it from this dualism, by deploying words andimages as things, by letting nothing escape from the purview of extension, of spaceand body. It is in regard to this limit that Derrida suggests – and suggests that Artaudhimself knew – that the Theater of Cruelty would be an impossible theater, that

Artaud could not reclaim what was stolen from him by theft's originary gesture, hispresence to himself before difference, before he heard himself cry out and wasstolen from the proper body from whence his first cry issued. That is, was doubled atthe moment when he cried and heard himself cry, no longer present only as origin

and inaugurator of his own voice.

Here then we encounter Artaud's desire to re-appropriate what Derrida calls his"proper body" – and to re-appropriate the proper body of the theater. Artaud wants toannihilate the conflicts between abstract and concrete and, in fact, wants not only todismantle a dualist metaphysics but also to annihilate all practical or performativedifferences between mind and matter and between representation and presentation.Insofar as this is unimaginable, that is, that any discourse that would claim this for itsobject is already both betraying its object and constituting its own invalidity, Artaud


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fails. But if this is an impossible gesture it is also potentially productive in that it allow Artaud to shift representation's point of reference beyond Man. Artaud's philosophy,a monist materialism and a theory of representation whose elements (words,images, lights, breath, sounds, colors, costumes) would produce "meaning" throughtheir physical effects on their spectators, allows us to penetrate an aspect of bothmatter and spectacle, and material spectacle, which is conventionally disavowed for any number of reasons which may or may not be related in an individual

commentary: because, for Artaud, space speaks without first being place, that is,without first being constituted by the iterability of the trace; because of its invocationof a "mystical" materialism; because of the political connotations, or the conventionalink to fascism, of the conception of immediate, or unmediated, experience. Inaddition to his appeal to the corporeality of both body and spectacle, and toimmediate experience, he also mounts an appeal to what he conceives as thealternative representational practices of various "others," other cultures (the orient ora tribal socius), and other historical moments (the middle ages, the baroque). Artaudstages both turns of this appeal – toward a pure materiality and toward alternative

modes of representation – in order to theorize spectacle, or the image, away from itslink to a proper ontology of the subject. I will suggest that Artaud's body may not be a"proper body" at all, and for two reasons. Firstly, the imbrication of spectacle andspectator in an arena which is, above all, a material and immediate event, preventsthe demarcation of any stable body. (If this sentence possesses a grammaticalinconsistency, it contains the paradox Artaud sets out for us: an arena is an event.Space is inseparable from its actions.) Secondly, as well as calling for a body whichwould present itself as whole, the body Artaud presents is, on its flipside, an atomicbody, one might call it a Lucretian body: its atoms are always-already signifying

elements. Let me begin to unpack this rather dense formulation:

2. In "Closure," Derrida notes the affinities and differences of Nietzsche and Artaud'streatises on the theater. Artaud's appeals to alternative modes of representation arenot inconsistent with the project of Nietzsche's analysis of theatrical representation inThe Birth of Tragedy. If The Birth of Tragedy may help to illuminate Artaud's project, iis because Nietzsche also confronts the matrix of life and representation, andconfronts it as always in transformation. Putting aside his engagement with the

"actual" Greeks, Nietzsche turns to antique tragedy in order to stage an analysis of the relationship between representation and the manner in which it is produced by,and works to form, cultural determinations of subjectivity. High tragedy, good tragedyin Nietzsche's assessment of the theater of antiquity, is born from the productiveconflict between a Dionysian force which is life and energy in an unformed state, aforce of de-individuation, and the Apollinian dream world of images whichindividuates and forms, that is the faculty through which "pictures" are made. But aswell as describing the characters in this, his most famous scene, Nietzschedescribes another scene, that of the death of tragedy. The Dionysian remains as


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activating force for the drama (and as force itself), but the Apollinian disappears, tobe replaced by what Nietzsche calls the "Euripidean" or the "Socratic." If the

Apollinian world is, as Nietzsche suggests, a dream world of images,Euripidean/Socratic images are produced by waking consciousness. Representationthen, or what we might call the faculty of making pictures, shifts. Nietzsche framesthe problem thus: "Consciousness," according to Nietzsche, does not make itsappearance until Euripides and Socrates take the stage to make these assertions,

respectively, "to be beautiful everything must be conscious" and "to be goodeverything must be conscious." The dream world of Apollo with its dream imagesdisappears to make way for the waking consciousness of Euripides' and Socrates'conceptions of the beautiful and the good. What Nietzsche thus confronts here is therelationship between a life force and different means of representation. The engineof mediation between life and representation changes gears and transforms, in thewake of its own transformation, both aesthetic production and spectatorship. Whilethe medium itself, that is, theater, of course remains the same, the operations of itsmediation changes; it produces different kinds of images and it addresses a different

spectator. Whatever relevance this shift may have had for the ancients, the latter formulation speaks to, or of, Nietzsche's own moment, at which a philosophy of lifearises to take on the philosophy of consciousness emblematized (for Modernity, atleast) in Descartes' cogito. "I think, therefore I am." If in the golden age of Greektragedy, appearance faced, on one side, the undifferentiated life-force of theDionysian, and on the other, the dream-images of Apollo, at Nietzsche's ownhistorical moment, the image faced at once a re-visioned Dionysian life-force,immersed in a newly scientized physiological (rather than "merely" or resistantlycorporeal) body and an equally scientized, or rationalized, conception of

consciousness as subjective differentiation.

3. Derrida's discussion of "the fate of representation" is oriented by verbal language,by the problem of re-iteration in a system of conventional signs. When it comes tothe image, one enters a somewhat different arena. Images, or "the visual," cannot besaid to function as a language – at least insofar as they do not participate in asystem of signs determined by convention and difference. Artaud wants to changethe manner in which representation, and spectacle in particular, interacts with, and

produces or transforms, the subjectivity of the theater's spectators. Derrida assertsthat Artaud calls for "The end of representation but also original representation. Avisible representation, certainly, directed against the speech which eludes sight –and Artaud insists on the productive images without which there would be no theater (theomai ) – but whose visibility does not depend on a spectacle mounted by thediscourse of the master. Representation, then, as the autopresentation of purevisibility and even pure sensibility."

That aspect of Artaud's development of his conception of spectacle which thinks it as


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a purely material and immediate event embeds visibility in pure sensibility. "Weintend," Artaud writes, "to base the Theater on spectacle before everything else."While Artaud insists on spectacle and on "the productive images without which therewould be no theater," he attempts to work his theater against that effect of spectaclethat implies a distance between actors and audience, image and observer. Thespectacle – visual or verbal – that marks off a voyeuristic separation betweenspectators and actors is bad spectacle. Artaud demands a spectacle that is "reality,"

and "event." He employs a musical analogy to explain how the spectacle of theTheater of Cruelty will work on the bodies of the "audience." We should keep in mindhere too that this is the gentle, the subtle Artaud, that on the flipside of this corporealmassage is a flaying, incising and torturing of the body.

If music affects snakes, it is not on account of the spiritual notions it offers them, butbecause snakes are long and coil their length upon the earth, because their bodiestouch the earth at almost every point; and because the musical vibrations which arecommunicated to the earth affect them like a very subtle, long massage; and I

propose to treat the spectators like the snakecharmer's subjects and conduct themby means of their organisms to an apprehension of the subtlest notions.

The analogical importance of Artaud's snakes lies in their corporeal contact with theearth, in the form of their bodies which at no point separates them from material andimmediate contact with the world. The reality and event of Artaud's spectacle isdependent on this materiality and this immediacy. In the interpenetration of body andworld imaged by the snakes' "coil[ed] length upon the earth," the distance of hearingthe abstraction of body from sound, cannot interpose itself in the proximity of musica

vibration. The snakecharmer's music effects them, first, immediately and onlyimmediately, through the vibrations that massage the snakes' bodies, through thetactile properties of sound. But the world of encompassing tactility which begins withcorporeal presence and functions according to the engine of vibration, only beginsand does not end here. "By means of their organisms," the snakes/spectators will beconducted, "to an apprehension of the subtlest notions." The body, possessing theconductive properties of live wire, transmits thought and is, materially, equivalent tothought. It is a matter, then, of the metamorphoses of matter. To offer another metaphorical version of Artaud's materialism, one that we will encounter later on, wemight see the electricity of the transmitting conductor as an initial form of the equallymaterial sound it produces.

the doubling of sense

A negotiation between life (or pure bodily sensation) and representation, or meaningas its other. Artaud, and Derrida's reading of Artaud, both grapple with this doubledbody of sense as sensation and sense/meaning. Artaud's theatrical language, his


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spectacle, is, first, "merely" a language of bodies and objects based, mostspecifically and essentially, on the reverberations between them, their vibratorycontacts, the interaction of their tactile frequencies. It is purely material. One mightbe led to conclude, by way of Artaud's materialism and the corporeity of the "data of extension," that significance, or, making sense, do not come into play in Artaud'sspectacle. But this is not at all the case. Artaud wants to produce the Theater of Cruelty as an originary event, eschewing all repetition and representation. But he

also asserts that this theater will be a reflection of "magic and rites," a divine theater which will communicate the true and the inherent "thought" of nature and matter which, for Artaud, constitute what he calls the "archaic," the "sacred," the "divine,"and what he calls a "metaphysics-in-action." "There is a low hum of instinctualmatters in this theater, but they are wrought to that point of transparency,intelligence, and ductility at which they seem to furnish us in physical terms some of spirit's most secret insights."

Despite Artaud's radical materialism which constitutes both the body "proper" andthe body of the theater/spectacle, materiality signifies. If man has a kind of "proper"body, than nature, for Artaud, has a proper body too. It is a significant nature,always-already a forest of signs and symbols. If images and words communicatematerially, through incantation, intonation, intensity and vibration, they do not lacksignificance. They obey "laws of symbolism and living analogies" and communicate"the subtlest notions." Despite Artaud's rejection of language, the Theater of Crueltyis not to be improvisatory. This concrete and spectacular language demands asystem of notation more precise, exact, and rigorous than that of spoken or written

language. It is a matter of transforming matter into signs – or vice versa – or of discovering the natural corollaries that exist between them:

" As for ordinary objects, or even the human body, raised to the dignity of signs, it isevident that one can draw one's inspiration from hieroglyphic characters, not only inorder to record these signs in a readable fashion which permits them to bereproduced at will, but in order to compose on the stage precise and immediately readable symbols." [Artaud's italics]

"Everything in this active and poetic mode of envisaging expression on the stageleads us to abandon the modern humanistic and psychological meaning of thetheater, in order to recover the religious and mystic preference of which our theater has completely lost the sense." What is called for here is a full investigation of thetrope of the hieroglyph, which appears on multiple occasions in The Theater and ItsDouble, is invoked by Diderot as the figure for poetic language as such in "Lettre sur les sourds et muets," and is an object of sustained inquiry in both "Closure" and inDerrida's essay on Freud included in the same volume, "Freud and the Scene of Writing." Let it suffice, however, to include a note, an anecdote which may point inthe direction of the hieroglyph's significance for Artaud. Eighteenth century theoriesof language were often presented as genealogies; instead of looking to the functions


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or operations of language to describe its "nature," they appealed to the story of itsorigins (with more or less literalist intentions.) The interest in an original "revealed"language began much earlier, however. Liebniz, for example, searched for aprimitive root-language which he felt could be discovered through research intoetymology, and asserted that this ur-text, whether its signifiers were natural or conventional, would be composed of rational relations worthy of its original author, or

Author, that is, God. He also toyed with the notion that hieroglyphics might be a

philosophical language, a kind of meaningful mathematics, whose revelations wouldbe exact and necessary. The debate over the origins of language – and the status of hieroglyphics – as it played out in the eighteenth-century was linked to a dispute overmetaphor, conceived as a "primitive" mode of expression which preceded and wasless nuanced and precise than the "arbitrary" modern European languages. What isessential here is not the specifics of the debate on the origins of language (althoughthis would certainly add much to the present inquiry) but rather the link that was thusconstituted between hieroglyphics, the primitive ("the savage and the poet speakonly in hieroglyphics") and the idea of an archaic language as an original archive of

meanings which pre-exists Man and his derivative or arbitrary tongues. In the case o Artaud, this archaic and hieroglyphic language would pre-exist both man and god,act like baroque allegory, and conjure a realm of purely animal or machinicsignificance.

tableaux and tableaux vivants

Diderot and Artaud both posit a monist ontology, asserting that mind is not

composed of a unique substance but is rather a special form of matter. Diderot wasalso preoccupied with sensation, and in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets, assertedthe precedence of tactility in all aesthetic apprehension. He came to develop in hiswritings on painting and theater, however, a theory of pictorial representation, and atheory of consciousness as pictorial, whose efficacy is still in force, and which Artaudmust subvert in order to subsume the visual in a pure sensation. Artaud does notrefer to Diderot explicitly but rather indicts 18th-century theater in general for itsdevelopment of the "bourgeois drama." Artaud's critique of psychology is almost adirect response to the epistemological and social ramifications of Diderot's use of the

theatrical tableau: "Psychology, which works relentlessly to reduce the unknown tothe known...is the cause of theater's abasement.... I think both the theater and weourselves have had enough of psychology." For Diderot, the theory of the tableauprovides the means for working through, in the realm of representation, issuesengendered by his conception of a sentient materiality. Despite what might seem tobe at first glance the tableau's connotations of a purely visual regime of representation, what is at issue here is not a conflict between the visual and theverbal, but rather one between thought and materiality. As Geoffrey Bremner notes,although Diderot rejects the Cartesian dualism, he is never able to adequately


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resolve the problem of the nature of mind or spirit in materialist terms, for hecontinuously seeks some particular property which would distinguish the humanorganism both from other forms of animal life and from the dynamism anddeterminism of matter. Diderot uses his conception of the tableau as a defenseagainst the ramifications of his own monist philosophy.

Diderot's monist materialist universe confronts him with two significant problems for

his theory of subjectivity. The first is movement. Matter, according to Diderot, is inconstant flux, and "there is not one molecule exactly like itself even for an instant." If human life is absolutely continuous with the world of matter, and equally prey to itsconstant flux, how is Diderot to account for or provide a stable theory of any humanknowledge? The second problem Diderot must contend with is this continuity itself,this same continuity which situates touch as the universal paradigm for sentience. Ina dialogue with D'Alembert in D'Alembert's Dream, Diderot (in the voice of Doctor Bordeu) asserts that his speculations concerning the acquisition of consciousnesshave led him "to compare the fibers of our organs to vibrating and sensitive strings

that continue to vibrate and produce sound long after they have been plucked. It isthis vibration, this inevitable resonance, as it were, that keeps us constantly aware of[an] object's presence, while the mind occupies itself with deciding what qualities thaobject possesses." This resonance allows for memory as the ability to synthesizeindividual perceptions into consciousness. The vibrations that constitute the form of the material body also constitute the functions of thought. Following Diderot'sexpansion of this analogy D'Alembert interjects, "So, therefore, if this sentient andanimate harpsichord were also endowed with the capacity to feel and reproduceitself, it would be a living creature and would engender, either by itself or with its

female counterpart, young harpsichords, also living and capable of vibration." Dideroreplies: "Undoubtedly."

For Diderot, the continuity between matter and mind engenders the problem of howto separate man's sensory responses, his "passions," from the organic world. Natureis a kind of machine whose functions are determined by its mechanism and Diderotwants to free the subject from this mechanism. But how can he theorize man'sconstitution as escaping the determinism of matter if it is continuous with nature? Fohim, as Bremner notes, the danger inherent in this continuity of the passions with theorganic world is that these passions, part and parcel of the causal system thatanimates and controls all matter, may be difficult to control. For the man of greatsensibility, of constitutional sensitivity, "it requires only an affecting phrase to strikehis eye, and suddenly he is filled with a great inner tumult; there is an excitation of allthe fibers in the bundle, he begins to shudder, he is gripped by a sacred horror." Thedeterminism of nature can produce a kind of anarchy in the constitution of man. But,Diderot continues, "the great man, if he has been unfortunate enough to have beenendowed with such a disposition by nature, will strive ceaselessly to weaken it, toovercome it, to make himself master of his emotions, and to preserve the origin of the bundle's [the brain's] position as absolute master." Diderot concludes, "men of


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sensibility and madmen are on the stage; [the wise man] is in the audience.".

In the realm of aesthetics, it is the tableau that provides the means of separatingperception and thought from the provocations of the material world. Diderotinstigates radical changes in the 18th-century theater that have since becomecommonplace. He demands that the audience be moved off the stage and the spaceof the auditorium be definitively separated from that of the stage action. The tableau,

for Diderot, works to reinforce this separation. At a crucial moment in the action, theactors fall silent, and their arrangement on stage, their positions and mostimportantly their gestures, are designed to express the pathos of the scene with aheightened intensity. Diderot defines the theatrical tableau in opposition to the coupde théâtre. The coup de théâtre is characterized by sudden movement, by a changein the situation of the characters. The tableau, on the other hand, is determined by itsstasis, by its fixation of both the scene and the attitudes of its beholders. "Anarrangement of characters on the stage, so natural and so true to life that, faithfullyrendered by a painter, it would please me on canvas, is a tableau." Diderot exhorts

the playwright and the actor: "Whether you are composing or acting, think no more othe spectator than you would if he did not exist at all. Imagine a great wall at theedge of the stage separating you from the orchestra. Act as if the curtain had never risen." In addition to freezing the action, the picture acts as a "fourth wall" separatingthe actors from the audience.

According to Michael Fried, what Diderot calls for "is at one and the same time thecreation of a new sort of object – the fully realized tableau – and the constitution of anew sort of beholder – a new 'subject'." Diderot designs the tableau, as Friedanalyzes in Absorption and Theatricality , not only to separate the action from thespectators but also to prohibit direct address. The playwright and the actor mustwork as if the spectator does not exist. Fried points out that "theatricality," or a work'sdirect appeal to its beholders, is problematic for Diderot. This is because, I wouldargue, the acknowledgement of the spectators presence on the scene of representation produces a continuity between actor and spectator that parallels thecontinuity between mind and matter.

Diderot calls the tableau the "resting place of reason." The movement of speech

mirrors the movement of matter. Reason demands the cessation of this flux. Whenthe rapidity of speech captures man in its flow and does not allow him any time todescend from words to images, he becomes an automaton. But when he begins toapply his imagination and arrives at some sort of sensible representation, then hehas reached, Diderot suggests, that "final stage that is the resting place of reason."The tableau, as an image, provides Diderot's "new subject" with an escape from thisautomatism. While the strings of his various sense organs are being plucked byinternal and external impressions, he must find a way to immure himself from thevicissitudes of these ceaseless vibrations. The tableau, because it freezes motion


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into a temporal and spatial unity, gives perception a kind of hiatus in its action,allowing the beholder to be both passionately affected by the picture, and tosynthesize his perceptions, and passions, into a coherent framework. The tableauthus places the beholder at one remove from the action, instilling in him its particular "lesson," and at the same time reinforcing the coherence of his subjectivity itself.

Diderot constructs what Artaud will call "psychological man" through the idea of consciousness as a picture. Artaud wants to explode this static, pictorial conceptionof consciousness, un-doing Diderot's new subject. If, for Diderot, the tableaufunctions as a kind of protective talisman against the action of matter and itsanarchic provocations of the subject, the Theater of Cruelty is designed to set thismaterial anarchy into poetic action, freeing the subject from the fixations of representational thinking. Artaud's Theater of Cruelty is a tableau vivant : the pictureactually lives.

What is essential about this moment, that which draws Artaud into contact with itsproject, is the way in which materialism comes to take the place of God and at thesame time – and perhaps impelled by the same changing socio-political andphilosophical coordinates – allegory falls into disrepute and the correspondencebetween words and things becomes both exact and scientific and, as Artaud assertsabstract. He writes, "If confusion is a sign of the times, I see at the root of thisconfusion a rupture between words and things, between things and the ideas thatare their representations." Foucault, in The Order of Things, his famous andmassively influential study of the classical age, asserts that what characterized the18th-century was precisely this correspondence between words and things, thebelief in an exact science of representation. "The rupture" that Artaud speaks of thenwould be purely modern – late or proto "post-modern," that is, late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century – in its origin and its effects. But, as Artaud would have it,and if we are permitted to extend his various and dispersed commentaries on therelative characteristics and values of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and theEnlightenment (which he associates with the birth of "psychological theater" and"bourgeois drama") the rupture has occurred due to the great error in judgementand, we might say, in method, of 18th-century thinkers like Diderot. The aspects of Diderot's project with which Artaud was sympathetic and that he, in fact, adopted ashis own, its materialism and its emphasis on a gestural or tactile aesthetics, weremarred by Diderot's re-interjection of a theological machinery into representation,replacing god with Man.

allegorical illuminations/the atomic body

1. The face is always prepared for its transubstantiation into mask:


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"The ten thousand and one expressions of the face caught in the form of masks canbe labeled and catalogued, so they may eventually participate directly and symbolically in this concrete language of the stage, independently of their particular

psychological use. Moreover, these symbolical gestures, masks, and attitudes...will be multiplied by reflections, as it were, of the gestures and attitudes consisting of themass of all the impulsive gestures, all the abortive attitudes, all the lapses of mind and tongue, by which are revealed what might be called the impotences of speech,

and in which is a prodigious wealth of expressions..." [Artaud's italics]

The "mass of all impulsive gestures," undergoes a transubstantiation – the puremateriality of this mass is multiplied into signs and symbols, into a " prodigious wealthof expressions" which can be codified and catalogued (but not repeated). Theexpressions of the face are reified in a numerical specificity (ten thousand and one)and reified, if you'll allow a certain redundancy here, as masks: expressions becomethings. The transubstantiation of expression into thing and vice versa (and Artaudspeaks elsewhere of "the decanting and transfusing of matter" and of "thetransfusion of matter by mind" ) is the structural and operational matrix of Artaud'sconcrete language. Expressions, gestures, the atomized body-in-pieces, are always-already significant, and signify "independently of their particular psychological use."

Artaud writes, "an image, an allegory, a figure that masks what it would reveal havemore significance for the spirit than the lucidities of speech and its analytics." Whatlinks this concrete language to, at least, the connotative reverberations of a Baroquemode of allegory, is the link between the mask or emblem and spiritual revelation.

And a spiritual revelation which not only produces the thing as the source of illumination but which has itself given to the thing or emblem its spiritual significance

The emblematic language is a gift – from God in the case of Baroque allegory, andfrom the significant nature of the divine in the case of the Theater of Cruelty. But inorder not to be led astray, it is essential to emphasize that it is not to this Baroquemoment that Artaud needs to return in order to constitute, or to re-constitute, arelation between sensation and representation – oriented through a tactile image –that will provide the basis of the Theater of Cruelty, but rather to the moment whenthe sensory science of representation was constituted as the science of Man (andnot of God).

2. Artaud's references to an innate spirituality of matter threaten to flip hismaterialism into its other, an idealism that asserts the spirituality of matter. But if wewant to maintain, in any integral sense, the materiality of psyche and of thought, thismateriality must provide an explanation of what has conventionally been determinedas "immaterial." Despite Artaud's inflamed and insane rhetoric (if we want to invokethe clinical discourse here) and the seeming untenability of Artaud's "science," ametaphysics of physics or physics of metaphysics which he calls metaphysics-in-action, the manner in which he lays out the coordinates of a body and a spectacle


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which would maintain the insights of materialism reminds us of the inherent dualismof commentaries that might call themselves iconographies or even iconologies. Andreminds us that materiality itself – if we do not take for granted (as "materialistcriticism" so often does) its "scientificity," ascribing to it a pre-ordained definition of material substance which can provide an uncontested backdrop for literary and/or aesthetic criticism – always leaves a "remainder," a set of unresolved and perhapsunresolvable questions for whose answers we can not appeal to common sense.

Despite the possible limitations of Artaud's meta/physics, the proper body he offers isnot the proper body of man, but rather a body which he must retrieve by doublingback behind the Enlightenment conception of Man, even if this means conjuring asignificant body and asserting that there are properties inherent to a nature thatprecedes both the concepts of god and man.

metaphysical anatomy: animal machines

1. Artaud engages in a metaphysical anatomy. But the anatomical images he thusconstructs do not present the elements of an image of Man but rather a set of "pointsof localization" at which the spectacle, a "machine which breathes," may take hold ofits spectators, effecting them materially and immediately.

In order to reforge the chain, the chain of a rhythm in which the spectator used tosee his own reality in the spectacle, the spectator must be allowed to identify himself with the spectacle, breath by breath and beat by beat.

It is not sufficient for this spectator to be enchained by the magic of the play; it will

not enchain him if we do not know where to take hold of him. There is enoughchance magic, enough poetry which has no science to back it up.

In the theater, poetry and science must henceforth be identical.

Every emotion has its organic bases. It is by cultivating his emotion in his body thatthe actor recharges his voltage.To know in advance what points of the body to touch is the key to throwing thespectator into magical trances. And it is this invaluable kind of science that poetry inthe theater has been without for a long time.

To know the points of localization in the body is thus to reforge the magical chain.

Artaud wants to produce, between spectator and spectacle, an identification that, if this can be said, reaches beyond itself to form a link between spectator and image,annihilating the distance between them and making of them one entity, one living,breathing body connected through the rhythms of breath and heartbeat. To theextent that, as I have suggested, Artaud needs to return to an Enlightenment projectin order to develop a new and concrete theatrical language – and we mustremember that for Artaud, theater is synonymous with life – it is in order to re-


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constitute a correspondence between physical and metaphysical anatomies. Toconstitute the double body of sense as, even if this is paradoxical, a single body. If

Artaud's Lucretian body and his allegorical nature seem more "archaic" thanDiderot's mirroring tableaux vivants, it is because he searches for tropes and figureswhich image the disruption of the science of Man and its vision of a pictorialconsciousness, and subvert the pictorial bias of empiricism (whose effects Artaudalways contests, under the rubric of what he calls the "surrealist empiricism of

images") to re-elaborate the elusive matrix that connects, and disconnects, "life" and"representation." He returns to the hypothetical moment of the "night before thebook," "the eve of the birth of languages," to a moment before the separation of bodyand soul which is invoked by Diderot's conceptions of tactility and resolved by histableaux . It seems relevant to note here the coalescence of empiricism in a theory of images, contemporary with Diderot's. David Hume, for example, claims thatverisimilitude, and reality itself, is constituted through the image and particularlythrough what he calls the lively or enlivened image. It is, for Hume, the degree of "liveliness" of an image (as a perception) which provides experience with the basis

for distinguishing whether that perception is indicative of presence (the object isgiven to consciousness contemporaneously with its appearance as perception) or memory (the object has been retrieved from the past as a memory-image.) If, in thissense, Hume lets "life" in through the back door of a philosophical system thatpretends to eschew ontological concerns, Artaud wants to recover the real-life of theimage through its corporeal and tactile encompassing of the spectator, through thespectator's entrance into the architecture of the image, and vice versa. In Artaud'sconcrete theatrical language, the tactile image is not used to mediate betweensensation and significance but rather to produce them as identical – even if the spirit

matter of Artaud's "productive images" undergoes various metamorphoses.

2. The long passage quoted above provides us an opportunity to interrogate Artaud's"extreme and difficult sense of spectacular representation" for it seems to make itselfavailable to (at least) two different, and even oppositional, interpretations. Artaudemploys here a highly conventional vocabulary. He speaks of the spectator, theactor, the play, identification, reality, the organic, and science. One might be temptedto conclude, and this conclusion would not be without its justifications, that Artaudappeals to science, and particularly to a biological science, to determine a "reality"

which his spectacle would thus represent, or present. Or lead one to conclude, asDerrida might, that Artaud's reference to the organic is in the service of a desire tore-appropriate a proper body of man which exists necessarily, and exists as prior to,his biological organization and his discursive constitution. Artaud's rejection of discourse and of metaphor, which leads Derrida to conclude that despite certainimportant affinities, Artaud is "not the son of Nietzsche," is writ large here.

Another perspective is, however, available to us (and the compossibility – or


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compositure – of these alternative readings may be precisely what engendersDerrida's intense and intensely ambivalent relation to Artaud). This alternativeinterpretation is dependent on what we want to make of Artaud's appeal to "science""In the theater," he writes, "poetry and science must henceforth be identical." Thisquestion, that is, what to make of Artaud's science, his metaphysics of physics andphysics of metaphysics, has oriented (if from below its surface) my interrogation of

Artaud's spectacle. The direction my argument takes hinges on whether science, as

Artaud frames it here, precedes and dictates his poetry or whether, on the contrary, iis Artaud's poetry which dictates, or produces, his science. In his groundbreakingstudy, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric , Daniel Tiffany explores theproductive exchanges between lyric poetry and scientific materialism. He argues thatthe tropes and figures that have constituted scientific materialism, which haveproduced it by making available the possibility of imaging the historically invisiblerealm of material substance (beginning with the atom in the philosophy of antiquity)have been drawn from lyric poetry, from a "lyric substance." One needs to pose asimilar question in reference to the corpus of Artaud: Is it Artaud's poetics, and

particularly his spectacular poetics, that constitute what he refers to as "the organic"and "science"? An affirmative answer is justified with reference to numerous aspectsof Artaud's formulations of body and spectacle. Artaud, who casts his net wide – intoallegory and significant nature and into "the repressed debates on the science of thesoul" which were played out in "the [medieval] dramas staged on the parvis" – in fact

produces his proper body as and through the substance of his spectacle.

What the ramifications of this might be for materialism as such I cannot explore here.

But the passage above, in particular, illuminates the manner in which Artaud'sspectacle constitutes his organic and corporeal science. Artaud attempts to produce,in his Theater of Cruelty, a new matrix of life and representation: to "reforge themagical chain" so the spectator may see "his own reality in the spectacle. Hisspectacular tactics, as we have seen, are diverse; he invokes allegorical emblems,hieroglyphic characters, vibration, electricity, massage, machines, and snakes. Healso invokes synesthesia, sensory derangements which violate the barriersseparating the five senses – and the media that speak to them – in order toconstitute the spectator as a "pure sensibility." The spectator "sees his own reality in

the spectacle" through "the chain of a rhythm." Vision operates not only by way of the eyes but also through audition; its pulses draw the body into an "identification," orather, an identity : spectator and spectacle are a single corpus, or apparatus,operating "breath by breath and beat by beat." In order to "take hold of" the spectatoone must know the special "points of localization in the body" whose stimulation willproduce "magical trances." But Artaud's notion of the "organic" is complex, and thebody, or this collection of points, is described as an apparatus of electrical circuits:"Every emotion has its organic bases. It is by cultivating his emotion in his body thatthe actor recharges his voltage." The image, Artaud says elsewhere, is "a machine


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that breathes." One does not want to read Artaud's machinic images too literally. Artaud, equally, imagines an audience of snakes. We can see, however, how Artaud's tropes and figures, and the various engines with which he animates thetheater, push the individual body and the spectacular body past a proper body of man, referring representation beyond the human.

NOTES

1 Derrida. "Artaud the Moma: Interjections of Appeal." English text of lecture, trans. PeggyKamuf, p. 7.2 Ibid..3 Ibid., pp. 7-8.4 Ibid., p. 7.5 Jacques Derrida. "La parole soufflée" and "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of

Representation" in Writing and Difference, trans. and intro. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).6 Susan Sontag. Introduction to Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1988), p. xli.7 "Parole," p. 195.8 Ibid., p. 232.9 "Closure," p. 232.10 "Parole," p. 175.11 "Ibid., pp. 174-75.12 "Parole," p. 175.13 Ibid., p. 178.

14 "Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène," in The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary CarolineRichards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 41. All future citations of Artaud are drawn fromthis work, except where otherwise noted.15 "Parole," p. 179.16 "Preface: The Theater and Culture," p. 13.17 "Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène," p. 41.18 "Parole," p. 186.19 "The Alchemical Theater," p. 52.20 "The Alfred Jarry Theater," in Selected Writings, p. 155.21 "Letters on Language," pp. 110-11.22 Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner , trans. Walter Kauffman(New York: Random House, 1967),23 "This is the new opposition: the Dionysian and the Socratic – and Greek tragedy waswrecked on this." Tragedy , Section 12, p. 82.24 "Like Plato, Euripedes undertook to show the world the reverse of the 'unintelligent' poet; hisaesthetic principle that 'to be beautiful everything must be conscious' is, as I have said, theparallel to the Socratic, "to be good everything must be conscious." Ibid., p. 86.25 "Closure," p. 238.26 "The Theater of Cruelty (Second Manifesto)," p. 124.27 "No More Masterpieces," p. 81.28 "On the Balinese Theater," pp. 60-61.


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29 "The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)," p. 94.30 "Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène," p. 46.31 Denis Diderot. "Lettre sur les sourds et muets," in Oeuvres completes, Tome IV (Paris,Hermann, 1978), pp. 129-231. In neither this section, nor in the one following, in which I discussDiderot in some detail, am I able to give attention to the subtleties of his thinking. Diderotcomes into play there only where his theories of the visual are essentially different from

Artaud's.32 I am indebted to the following two articles for their analyses of historical interpretations of

hieroglyphs: William Keach, "Poetry, after 1740," and "Primitivism," Maximillian E. Novak (esp.pp. 464-69) in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 4: The Eighteenth Century ,ed. H.B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,1997.)33 Somewhat surprisingly, Artaud links the bourgeois drama with Racine, despite the fact thatDiderot is known for having named and developed the genre. "The misdeeds of thepsychological theater descended from Racine have unaccustomed us to that immediate andviolent action which the theater should possess." "The Theater and Cruelty," p. 84.34 For these observations I am indebted to Geoffrey Bremner's argument in Order and ChanceThe Pattern of Diderot's Thought (Cambridge, London and New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1983).

35 Denis Diderot. "D'Alembert's Dream," in Diderot's Selected Writings, intro. Lester G.Crocker, trans. Derek Coltman (New York and London: The Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 19536 As Martin Jay suggests in Downcast Eyes, "however ocularcentric the Enlightenment ingeneral may have been, at least one philosophe, [Diderot], ... expressed doubts about itsprivileging of sight." And as he also notes, Diderot theorized all the senses, sight included,through the common paradigm of touch. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press,1994), pp. 101-2. All matter, Diderot asserts, is sentient, and it is the structure of matter whichconstitutes this sentience as either passive, as in, for example, the marble of a statue, or activeas is human flesh. What he calls the "bundle of threads" which constitutes the human organism

is "transformed, by nutrition and its own conformation alone, into organs with particular sensefunctions." Touch, he asserts, is the "primary property" of sentient matter, "but that pure andsimple sentience, that sense of touch, is diversified by the various organs that are produced byeach of the fibers." Taste, smell, hearing and sight are thus all species of the tactile. Theformation of a bundle of fibers into an eye, Diderot writes, "gives rise to a...kind of touch, whichwe call color." "D'Alembert's Dream," p. 201. Diderot's privileging of the pictorial in his theory of the tableau is his defense against the ramifications of the relationship he posits between tactilityand sentient matter.37 "D'Alembert's Dream," p. 186.38 Ibid., p. 188.39 Ibid., pp. 208-9.

40 "Le geste," Diderot writes, "doit s'écrire souvent à la place du discours." Denis Diderot. "Dela poésie dramatique," in Oeuvres esthétiques (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1994), p. 269.41 Quoted from Michael Fried. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Ageof Diderot (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 95.42 "Soit donc que vous composiez, soit que vous jouiez, ne pensez non plus au spectateur ques'il n'existait pas. Imaginez, sur le bord du théâtre, un grand mur qui vous sépare du parterre;

jouez comme si la toile ne se levait pas." "Poésie," p. 231.43 Fried, p. 104.44 The thrust of Fried's argument here is somewhat different from, although not antithetical to,my own. He argues that, for Diderot, theatricalization produces "estrangement and dislocation"


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while the de-theatricalization of the "object-beholder relationship" produces "absorption,sympathy, self-transcendence." Ibid.45 L'imagination est la faculté de se rappeler des images.... Lorsque la rapidité de laconversation entraîne celui-ci, et ne lui laisse pas le temps de descendre des mots aux images,que fait-il autre chose, si ce n'est de se rappeler des sons et de les produire combinés dans uncertain ordre? O combien l'homme qui pense le plus est encore automate! Mais quel est le moment où il cesse d'exercer sa mémoire, et où il commence a appliquer sonimagination? C'est celui où, de questions en questions, vous le forcez d'imaginer; c'est-à-dire

de passer de sons abstraits et généraux à des sons moins abstrait et moins généraux, jusqu'àce qu'il soit arrivé à quelqe représentation sensible, le dernier terme et le repos de raison?

Alors, que devient-il? Peintre ou poete. "Poésie," p. 218.46 Diderot prescribes moral subject matter for his tableaux . He insists, for example, that thetableau of an old blind couple, still seeking each others hands, and caressing one another evenin their feebleness, will hold more interest for spectators than all possible pictures of vice, of parricide, of seduction, of deceit. While his conception of the relationship between art andmorality is more complicated in his descriptive analyses than this example shows, hisprescriptions for how the tableau should instill moral virtue into their spectators often take thisform. "L'honnête, l'honnête. Il nous touche d'une manière plus intime et plus douce que ce qui excite notre mépris et nos ris." "Poésie," p. 195.

47 Artaud's critique of psychology is almost a direct response to the epistemological and socialramifications of Diderot's use of the theatrical tableau: "Psychology, which works relentlessly toreduce the unknown to the known...is the cause of theater's abasement.... I think both thetheater and we ourselves have had enough of psychology." "No More Masterpieces," p. 77.48 "Preface: The Theater and Culture," p. 7.49 Ibid., pp. 94-9550 "The Alchemical Theater," p. 52.51 "Oriental and Occidental Theater," p. 71.52 Artaud. "But what I am drawing/. is a machine that has breath." "Ten Years Since LanguageLeft." Quoted by Derrida in "Moma," p. 30.

53 "An Affective Athleticism," p. 140.54 Cf. Derrida's discussion of "the eve of the origin of languages, as, among other things, thesite of a "dialogue between theology and humanism whose inextinguishable recurrence hasnever not been maintained by the Metaphysics of Western Theater." "Closure," p. 240.55 This conception of the relative "vivacity of ideas" appears throughout Hume's work. For aparticularly straightforward account of its effects, cf. David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature.The Philosophical Works, ed. Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose (Darmstadt,Germany: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1964), Sect. VII, pp. 544-49. Cf. also, for a discussion of Hume's "vivacity of ideas": Wayne Waxman. Hume's theory of consciousness (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1994).56 "Parole," p. 185.

57 Daniel Tiffany. Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 2000).58 That is, in the drama of the resurrection played, each Easter, on the church-porch.59 In this sense, one needs to resist Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's appropriation of

Artaud's Body Without Organs for their theory of "abstract machines" and "desiring machines."Cf. esp. "Chapter One: Desiring Machines" in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) and "November 28, 1947: How Do YouMake Yourself a Body Without Organs" in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophreniatrans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

deborah levitt - extreme and difficult sense of spectacular representation -- artaud's ontology of...

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