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 essay presented 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 this ambivalence, 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 me by the declared content, the body of doctrine of that which might be called the philosophy, politics or ideology of Artaud." Derrida also describes the source of the antipathy 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 body without organs" and operates as "a metaphysical rage for reappropriation," for a reappropriation, 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 critical difference, and distance, from "almost all those with whom I share a passionate admiration for Artaud." If Artaud is, for Derrida, not only the object of a passionate admiration but also a "painful enemy," for me there is only a profound sympathy and a 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 impulse is rearing its head in-between the necessity and chance that orients the starting-point of an essay for this special issue of Tympanum, "Khoraographies for Jacques Derrida." For it is certainly Derrida's remarkable and insightful commentaries on Artaud, and particularly his essays of 1965 and 1966, respectively, "La Parole Soufflée" and "The Theater of Cruelty and The Closure of Representation" that have moved me to read Artaud and to read him with the highest seriousness, and that have most profoundly influenced my conception of Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. Beginning thus may also, however, reflect the intervention of a generation of scholarship, between Derrida's first meeting with Artaud and my own, which has made Artaud the object of a critical scrutiny requiring a gesture of distanciation, the insertion of an interval into any proximity with Artaud's works, whether this is in the name of, or against the name of, the proper body or, as Susan Sontag would have it, against "a radicalism that is purely cultural" (rather than political) and thus either "illusory" or conservative in its effects.
What I will examine here, in the form of a series of meditations on Artaud's Theater of Cruelty and on Derrida's readings of Artaud, as well as on a number of related topics (from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy to hieroglyphic characters to Diderot's theory of the tableau), is the conception of spectacle Artaud develops in The Theater and Its Double. Derrida describes Artaud's Theater of Cruelty as conjuring an "extreme and difficult sense of spectacular representation." We need to be attentive to the doubling of sense here in Derrida's short phrase – for this will draw us into the heart of the demands Artaud sets out for himself. Derrida refers us both to the meaning of Artaud's spectacle, or, that is, to the sense we can make of it, and to its sensations, for Artaud's theatrical spectacle speaks, above all, to the senses of its spectators. Artaud, overturning conventional insights into the necessary mediations of language and image, demands a spectacle that will operate corporeally, surgically, on the bodies of its spectators. In "this extreme and difficult sense of spectacular representation," Artaud embeds visibility in a "pure sensibility." Into a Modernist discourse on images which is generally driven by a positivist or psychologistic impulse, by a fetishism of form or one of content, Artaud injects a "mystical" materialism which seeks to draw from the archive of the archaic a tactile spectacle, a language of bodies and things that will re-awaken, or re-animate, a life beneath the shifting surfaces of fact and form. I'd like to make two suggestions here. Despite Artaud's conflicted and tortured physics, or metaphysics, his pragmatics of beholding, which pushes materialism to its expressive limits, provides an essential corrective to a particular tradition, developed in the Enlightenment and active into the present day, of considering pictures as mirror images of a stable and coherent subject. Artaud's conception of spectacle, and its accompanying ontology of "live," impels him to think past a "proper body" and to refer representation beyond a theology of god and one of man, to refer representation, that is, to the "inhuman."
an enigmatic corpus
In and between his two essays on Artaud, "La parole soufflée" and "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation," Derrida establishes Artaud's corpus, both his body and the body of the Theater of Cruelty, as a doubled enigma. He names the first body of the enigma in the final sentence of the 1965 essay, "the enigma of flesh which wanted properly to be called Antonin Artaud." In 1966, he introduces the second body. Derrida writes, "within the space of the unique opening of this distance, the stage of cruelty rears its enigma for us. And it is into this opening that we wish to enter here." At the risk of slipping into an illusory space of contact between clinical and critical discourses, in this case not only necessary but rigorous: these two enigmas are one and the same. The "enigma of flesh" is the same enigma which rears its head in the as-yet-unopened space of the theater of cruelty. The corollary enigmas of theater and flesh, their becoming identical, is precisely the rigor of Artaud's own project, a rigor that he calls also "cruelty," also an "implacable necessity." In "Closure," Derrida asserts that for Artaud, "theatricality must traverse and restore 'existence' and 'flesh' in each of their aspects. Thus whatever can be said of the body can be said of the theater." In fact, as Artaud insists in The Theater and Its Double, whenever he says "theater" he is saying "life," and vice versa. These terms, "life" and "theater," are synonymous and interchangeable.
"La parole soufflée" and "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation" mark Derrida's engagements with the two sides of the same enigma. In the former, the enigma of flesh is framed by an inquiry into the distance and proximity of a clinical discourse on madness and a critical discourse on the work. Here, Derrida focuses on Artaud's body: or on his psyche, his flesh, and their extension. In the second essay, which is sited in relation to the impossible place that is the Theater of Cruelty, Derrida focuses on the body of the work. But he has set up its paradox in the first essay, for, as he tells us, Artaud wants to create a work that is not a work. Artaud is, Derrida suggests, "In pursuit of a manifestation which would not be an expression but a pure creation of life, which would not fall far from the body then to decline into a sign or a work, an object." "For what his howls promise us, articulating themselves under the headings of existence, life, flesh, theater, cruelty is the meaning of an art prior to madness and the work.... Artaud promises the existence of a speech that is body, of a body that is a theater, of a theater that is a text because it is no longer enslaved to a writing more ancient than itself, an ur-text or an ur-speech."
live spectacle
1. The doubled enigma of theater and body reflect Artaud's preoccupation with life, and with a life "which is prior to the life of which the biological sciences speak." Any invocation of culture, Artaud tells us in the preface to The Theater and Its Double, "Theater and Culture," is an invocation of a kind of death. The theater, Artaud demands, must reanimate a life submerged and petrified by cultural forms and organizations. The "life" of which Artaud speaks is, in some senses, congruent with the "life" conjured by vitalist philosophies and even more so with the "life" the young Nietzsche asserts is active in, or as, the Dionysian festival. All of Artaud's demands for his theater – which are thus also demands he places on his body – are in the service of an attempt to manifest this life prior to form.
Derrida, in the first essay, confronts the life of Artaud: "Artaud knew that all speech fallen from the body, offering itself to understanding or reception, offering itself as a spectacle, immediately becomes stolen speech." He calls the theft of speech the original 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 tortures him unceasingly, is that his speech is never his own. The minute he opens his mouth, or takes up his pen, he inserts himself into a field that has always been determined in advance. Language precedes him, and in relation to it his every utterance and even his every inspiration is already a repetition. This "amounts to acknowledging the autonomy of the signifier as the letter's historicity; before me, the signifier 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 that this theater will no longer be governed by a text. In the history of the West, Artaud asserts, theater is a kind of sub-genre of literature. It has so far been an art structured by the most slavish forms of representation. The director and the actors replicate, 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 the representation of a text, is subordinated to dialogue. And, Artaud continues, its subordination to a text also marks its subordination to psychology, to what Artaud calls "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 to be the petty concerns of modern man. "Given the theater as we see it here, one would say there is nothing more to life than knowing whether we can make love skillfully, whether we will go to war or are cowardly enough to make peace, how we cope 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. As Derrida points out, life, for Artaud, "as the source of good inspiration, must be understood as prior to the life of which the biological sciences speak." Artaud pits force against form. The Theater of Cruelty must be a manifestation of an originary life 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 understood that we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach."
It is Artaud's preoccupation with life, and specifically with a life that is material in all of its manifestations, that impels him to produce his (paradoxically) concrete language. Despite Artaud's insistence that life/theater resist the "artistic dallying with 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 to use 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 been communicated and is thus doomed to the fate of the repetition of the same – and particularly loathsome to Artaud, doomed as complicit in the replication or perpetuation of a dead culture, the culture of psychological man, a culture of petty plots 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 wants to make space speak and to constitute a purely material language which will directly effect the bodies of the theater's spectators. ("Artaud," Derrida writes, "is as fearful of the 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 the spectator in the middle of the action, "caught as if in a whirlwind of forces." In place of a theater governed by the text, Artaud wants to create a theater in which mise en scène is paramount. Within the mise en scène, constituting this mise en scène, all possible means of effecting the spectators, effecting them corporeally, surgically, will be employed – music, noises, colors, lights, dance, movement, gestures, objects, masks, costumes, breath, poetry. The Theater of Cruelty will not abandon language altogether but will employ words for their "incantatory possibilities." Artaud asserts that this muti-media theatrical language a "concrete language," will "annihilate every conflict produced by matter and mind, idea and form, concrete and abstract." We can see, even at first glance, the paradox contained in this formulation: In what sense could a language that annihilates the conflict between the abstract and the concrete be 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 to restore its rank as reality, how are we to make each spectacle a kind of event? This is the problem we must solve." Artaud's concrete language, his speaking space, lies at the heart of his conception of spectacle and provides the details of the manner in which, 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 nature and defining character, fixed once and for all, they arrest and paralyze thought instead of permitting it and fostering its development. And by development I mean actual extended concrete qualities, so long as we are in an extended and concrete world. 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 data of extension – like images, like words, bringing them together and making them respond 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 which will 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 thought possesses extension. It is not immaterial, does not pertain to an "ideal" world separated from matter or things or space, but rather itself possesses the qualities we conventionally ascribe to things and bodies. Thought is itself a body. When Artaud sets 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 and reality. In the Theater of Cruelty, images and words, like lights and sounds, costumes and gestures, become things and bodies, the "data of extension." Artaud's conceptions of event and reality reflect his version of a materialism whose pivotal term is "extension." Artaud is not as centrally concerned with the nature of material substance 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" and its "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, is vibration.
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 representation to its limit, attempting to withdraw it from this dualism, by deploying words and images as things, by letting nothing escape from the purview of extension, of space and body. It is in regard to this limit that Derrida suggests – and suggests that Artaud himself 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, his presence to himself before difference, before he heard himself cry out and was stolen from the proper body from whence his first cry issued. That is, was doubled at the 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 to annihilate the conflicts between abstract and concrete and, in fact, wants not only to dismantle a dualist metaphysics but also to annihilate all practical or performative differences between mind and matter and between representation and presentation. Insofar as this is unimaginable, that is, that any discourse that would claim this for its object is already both betraying its object and constituting its own invalidity, Artaud 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" through their physical effects on their spectators, allows us to penetrate an aspect of both matter 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 invocation of a "mystical" materialism; because of the political connotations, or the conventional link to fascism, of the conception of immediate, or unmediated, experience. In addition to his appeal to the corporeality of both body and spectacle, and to immediate experience, he also mounts an appeal to what he conceives as the alternative representational practices of various "others," other cultures (the orient or a tribal socius), and other historical moments (the middle ages, the baroque). Artaud stages 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 its link 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 and spectator in an arena which is, above all, a material and immediate event, prevents the demarcation of any stable body. (If this sentence possesses a grammatical inconsistency, 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 which would present itself as whole, the body Artaud presents is, on its flipside, an atomic body, 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's treatises on the theater. Artaud's appeals to alternative modes of representation are not inconsistent with the project of Nietzsche's analysis of theatrical representation in The Birth of Tragedy. If The Birth of Tragedy may help to illuminate Artaud's project, it is because Nietzsche also confronts the matrix of life and representation, and confronts 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 tragedy in Nietzsche's assessment of the theater of antiquity, is born from the productive conflict between a Dionysian force which is life and energy in an unformed state, a force of de-individuation, and the Apollinian dream world of images which individuates and forms, that is the faculty through which "pictures" are made. But as well as describing the characters in this, his most famous scene, Nietzsche describes another scene, that of the death of tragedy. The Dionysian remains as activating force for the drama (and as force itself), but the Apollinian disappears, to be 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. Representation then, or what we might call the faculty of making pictures, shifts. Nietzsche frames the problem thus: "Consciousness," according to Nietzsche, does not make its appearance until Euripides and Socrates take the stage to make these assertions, respectively, "to be beautiful everything must be conscious" and "to be good everything must be conscious." The dream world of Apollo with its dream images disappears to make way for the waking consciousness of Euripides' and Socrates' conceptions of the beautiful and the good. What Nietzsche thus confronts here is the relationship between a life force and different means of representation. The engine of mediation between life and representation changes gears and transforms, in the wake of its own transformation, both aesthetic production and spectatorship. While the medium itself, that is, theater, of course remains the same, the operations of its mediation 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 life arises to take on the philosophy of consciousness emblematized (for Modernity, at least) in Descartes' cogito. "I think, therefore I am." If in the golden age of Greek tragedy, appearance faced, on one side, the undifferentiated life-force of the Dionysian, and on the other, the dream-images of Apollo, at Nietzsche's own historical moment, the image faced at once a re-visioned Dionysian life-force, immersed in a newly scientized physiological (rather than "merely" or resistantly corporeal) 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 to the image, one enters a somewhat different arena. Images, or "the visual," cannot be said to function as a language – at least insofar as they do not participate in a system of signs determined by convention and difference. Artaud wants to change the manner in which representation, and spectacle in particular, interacts with, and produces or transforms, the subjectivity of the theater's spectators. Derrida asserts that Artaud calls for "The end of representation but also original representation. A visible 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 the discourse of the master. Representation, then, as the autopresentation of pure visibility and even pure sensibility."
That aspect of Artaud's development of his conception of spectacle which thinks it as a purely material and immediate event embeds visibility in pure sensibility. "We intend," Artaud writes, "to base the Theater on spectacle before everything else." While Artaud insists on spectacle and on "the productive images without which there would be no theater," he attempts to work his theater against that effect of spectacle that implies a distance between actors and audience, image and observer. The spectacle – visual or verbal – that marks off a voyeuristic separation between spectators 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 the Theater of Cruelty will work on the bodies of the "audience." We should keep in mind here too that this is the gentle, the subtle Artaud, that on the flipside of this corporeal massage 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, but because snakes are long and coil their length upon the earth, because their bodies touch the earth at almost every point; and because the musical vibrations which are communicated 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 them by means of their organisms to an apprehension of the subtlest notions.
The analogical importance of Artaud's snakes lies in their corporeal contact with the earth, in the form of their bodies which at no point separates them from material and immediate contact with the world. The reality and event of Artaud's spectacle is dependent on this materiality and this immediacy. In the interpenetration of body and world imaged by the snakes' "coil[ed] length upon the earth," the distance of hearing, the abstraction of body from sound, cannot interpose itself in the proximity of musical vibration. The snakecharmer's music effects them, first, immediately and only immediately, through the vibrations that massage the snakes' bodies, through the tactile properties of sound. But the world of encompassing tactility which begins with corporeal presence and functions according to the engine of vibration, only begins and does not end here. "By means of their organisms," the snakes/spectators will be conducted, "to an apprehension of the subtlest notions." The body, possessing the conductive properties of live wire, transmits thought and is, materially, equivalent to thought. 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, we might see the electricity of the transmitting conductor as an initial form of the equally material sound it produces.
the doubling of sense
A negotiation between life (or pure bodily sensation) and representation, or meaning, as its other. Artaud, and Derrida's reading of Artaud, both grapple with this doubled body of sense as sensation and sense/meaning. Artaud's theatrical language, his spectacle, is, first, "merely" a language of bodies and objects based, most specifically and essentially, on the reverberations between them, their vibratory contacts, the interaction of their tactile frequencies. It is purely material. One might be 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's spectacle. 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 instinctual matters 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" and the 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 communicate materially, through incantation, intonation, intensity and vibration, they do not lack significance. They obey "laws of symbolism and living analogies" and communicate "the subtlest notions." Despite Artaud's rejection of language, the Theater of Cruelty is not to be improvisatory. This concrete and spectacular language demands a system 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 is evident that one can draw one's inspiration from hieroglyphic characters, not only in order to record these signs in a readable fashion which permits them to be reproduced 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 stage leads us to abandon the modern humanistic and psychological meaning of the theater, 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 the trope of the hieroglyph, which appears on multiple occasions in The Theater and Its Double, 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 in Derrida'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 in the direction of the hieroglyph's significance for Artaud. Eighteenth century theories of language were often presented as genealogies; instead of looking to the functions or operations of language to describe its "nature," they appealed to the story of its origins (with more or less literalist intentions.) The interest in an original "revealed" language began much earlier, however. Liebniz, for example, searched for a primitive root-language which he felt could be discovered through research into etymology, 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 would be 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 over metaphor, conceived as a "primitive" mode of expression which preceded and was less nuanced and precise than the "arbitrary" modern European languages. What is essential here is not the specifics of the debate on the origins of language (although this would certainly add much to the present inquiry) but rather the link that was thus constituted between hieroglyphics, the primitive ("the savage and the poet speak only 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 of 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 machinic significance.
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 was also preoccupied with sensation, and in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets, asserted the precedence of tactility in all aesthetic apprehension. He came to develop in his writings on painting and theater, however, a theory of pictorial representation, and a theory of consciousness as pictorial, whose efficacy is still in force, and which Artaud must subvert in order to subsume the visual in a pure sensation. Artaud does not refer to Diderot explicitly but rather indicts 18th-century theater in general for its development of the "bourgeois drama." Artaud's critique of psychology is almost a direct response to the epistemological and social ramifications of Diderot's use of the theatrical tableau: "Psychology, which works relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the known...is the cause of theater's abasement.... I think both the theater and we ourselves have had enough of psychology." For Diderot, the theory of the tableau provides the means for working through, in the realm of representation, issues engendered by his conception of a sentient materiality. Despite what might seem to be 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 the verbal, but rather one between thought and materiality. As Geoffrey Bremner notes, although Diderot rejects the Cartesian dualism, he is never able to adequately resolve the problem of the nature of mind or spirit in materialist terms, for he continuously seeks some particular property which would distinguish the human organism both from other forms of animal life and from the dynamism and determinism of matter. Diderot uses his conception of the tableau as a defense against 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 in constant 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 its constant flux, how is Diderot to account for or provide a stable theory of any human knowledge? The second problem Diderot must contend with is this continuity itself, this same continuity which situates touch as the universal paradigm for sentience. In a dialogue with D'Alembert in D'Alembert's Dream, Diderot (in the voice of Doctor Bordeu) asserts that his speculations concerning the acquisition of consciousness have 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 is this 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 that object possesses." This resonance allows for memory as the ability to synthesize individual perceptions into consciousness. The vibrations that constitute the form of the material body also constitute the functions of thought. Following Diderot's expansion of this analogy D'Alembert interjects, "So, therefore, if this sentient and animate harpsichord were also endowed with the capacity to feel and reproduce itself, 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." Diderot replies: "Undoubtedly."
For Diderot, the continuity between matter and mind engenders the problem of how to separate man's sensory responses, his "passions," from the organic world. Nature is a kind of machine whose functions are determined by its mechanism and Diderot wants to free the subject from this mechanism. But how can he theorize man's constitution as escaping the determinism of matter if it is continuous with nature? For him, as Bremner notes, the danger inherent in this continuity of the passions with the organic world is that these passions, part and parcel of the causal system that animates and controls all matter, may be difficult to control. For the man of great sensibility, of constitutional sensitivity, "it requires only an affecting phrase to strike his eye, and suddenly he is filled with a great inner tumult; there is an excitation of all the fibers in the bundle, he begins to shudder, he is gripped by a sacred horror." The determinism 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 been endowed with such a disposition by nature, will strive ceaselessly to weaken it, to overcome 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 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 separating perception and thought from the provocations of the material world. Diderot instigates radical changes in the 18th-century theater that have since become commonplace. He demands that the audience be moved off the stage and the space of 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, the actors fall silent, and their arrangement on stage, their positions and most importantly their gestures, are designed to express the pathos of the scene with a heightened intensity. Diderot defines the theatrical tableau in opposition to the coup de théâtre. The coup de théâtre is characterized by sudden movement, by a change in the situation of the characters. The tableau, on the other hand, is determined by its stasis, by its fixation of both the scene and the attitudes of its beholders. "An arrangement of characters on the stage, so natural and so true to life that, faithfully rendered 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 of the spectator than you would if he did not exist at all. Imagine a great wall at the edge 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" separating the actors from the audience.
According to Michael Fried, what Diderot calls for "is at one and the same time the creation of a new sort of object – the fully realized tableau – and the constitution of a new sort of beholder – a new 'subject'." Diderot designs the tableau, as Fried analyzes in Absorption and Theatricality, not only to separate the action from the spectators but also to prohibit direct address. The playwright and the actor must work as if the spectator does not exist. Fried points out that "theatricality," or a work's direct appeal to its beholders, is problematic for Diderot. This is because, I would argue, the acknowledgement of the spectators presence on the scene of representation produces a continuity between actor and spectator that parallels the continuity 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. When the rapidity of speech captures man in its flow and does not allow him any time to descend from words to images, he becomes an automaton. But when he begins to apply his imagination and arrives at some sort of sensible representation, then he has 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 this automatism. While the strings of his various sense organs are being plucked by internal and external impressions, he must find a way to immure himself from the vicissitudes of these ceaseless vibrations. The tableau, because it freezes motion 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 to synthesize his perceptions, and passions, into a coherent framework. The tableau thus 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 conception of consciousness, un-doing Diderot's new subject. If, for Diderot, the tableau functions as a kind of protective talisman against the action of matter and its anarchic provocations of the subject, the Theater of Cruelty is designed to set this material anarchy into poetic action, freeing the subject from the fixations of representational thinking. Artaud's Theater of Cruelty is a tableau vivant: the picture actually lives.
What is essential about this moment, that which draws Artaud into contact with its project, is the way in which materialism comes to take the place of God and at the same time – and perhaps impelled by the same changing socio-political and philosophical coordinates – allegory falls into disrepute and the correspondence between words and things becomes both exact and scientific and, as Artaud asserts, abstract. He writes, "If confusion is a sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between words and things, between things and the ideas that are their representations." Foucault, in The Order of Things, his famous and massively influential study of the classical age, asserts that what characterized the 18th-century was precisely this correspondence between words and things, the belief in an exact science of representation. "The rupture" that Artaud speaks of then would 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 the relative characteristics and values of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment (which he associates with the birth of "psychological theater" and "bourgeois drama") the rupture has occurred due to the great error in judgement and, 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 as his own, its materialism and its emphasis on a gestural or tactile aesthetics, were marred 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:
"The ten thousand and one expressions of the face caught in the form of masks can be 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 the mass 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 pure materiality of this mass is multiplied into signs and symbols, into a "prodigious wealth of expressions" which can be codified and catalogued (but not repeated). The expressions 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 become things. The transubstantiation of expression into thing and vice versa (and Artaud speaks elsewhere of "the decanting and transfusing of matter" and of "the transfusion of matter by mind" ) is the structural and operational matrix of Artaud's concrete 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 have more significance for the spirit than the lucidities of speech and its analytics." What links this concrete language to, at least, the connotative reverberations of a Baroque mode 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, and from the significant nature of the divine in the case of the Theater of Cruelty. But in order not to be led astray, it is essential to emphasize that it is not to this Baroque moment that Artaud needs to return in order to constitute, or to re-constitute, a relation between sensation and representation – oriented through a tactile image – that will provide the basis of the Theater of Cruelty, but rather to the moment when the sensory science of representation was constituted as the science of Man (and not of God).
2. Artaud's references to an innate spirituality of matter threaten to flip his materialism into its other, an idealism that asserts the spirituality of matter. But if we want to maintain, in any integral sense, the materiality of psyche and of thought, this materiality must provide an explanation of what has conventionally been determined as "immaterial." Despite Artaud's inflamed and insane rhetoric (if we want to invoke the clinical discourse here) and the seeming untenability of Artaud's "science," a metaphysics 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 which would maintain the insights of materialism reminds us of the inherent dualism of commentaries that might call themselves iconographies or even iconologies. And reminds us that materiality itself – if we do not take for granted (as "materialist criticism" 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 perhaps unresolvable 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 is not the proper body of man, but rather a body which he must retrieve by doubling back behind the Enlightenment conception of Man, even if this means conjuring a significant body and asserting that there are properties inherent to a nature that precedes both the concepts of god and man.
metaphysical anatomy: animal machines
1. Artaud engages in a metaphysical anatomy. But the anatomical images he thus constructs do not present the elements of an image of Man but rather a set of "points of localization" at which the spectacle, a "machine which breathes," may take hold of its spectators, effecting them materially and immediately.
In order to reforge the chain, the chain of a rhythm in which the spectator used to see 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 enough chance 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 that the actor recharges his voltage.
To know in advance what points of the body to touch is the key to throwing the spectator into magical trances. And it is this invaluable kind of science that poetry in the 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 the extent that, as I have suggested, Artaud needs to return to an Enlightenment project in order to develop a new and concrete theatrical language – and we must remember that for Artaud, theater is synonymous with life – it is in order to re-constitute a correspondence between physical and metaphysical anatomies. To constitute 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" than Diderot's mirroring tableaux vivants, it is because he searches for tropes and figures which image the disruption of the science of Man and its vision of a pictorial consciousness, and subvert the pictorial bias of empiricism (whose effects Artaud always 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 the book," "the eve of the birth of languages," to a moment before the separation of body and soul which is invoked by Diderot's conceptions of tactility and resolved by his tableaux. It seems relevant to note here the coalescence of empiricism in a theory of images, contemporary with Diderot's. David Hume, for example, claims that verisimilitude, and reality itself, is constituted through the image and particularly through 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 is given to consciousness contemporaneously with its appearance as perception) or memory (the object has been retrieved from the past as a memory-image.) If, in this sense, Hume lets "life" in through the back door of a philosophical system that pretends to eschew ontological concerns, Artaud wants to recover the real-life of the image through its corporeal and tactile encompassing of the spectator, through the spectator's entrance into the architecture of the image, and vice versa. In Artaud's concrete theatrical language, the tactile image is not used to mediate between sensation 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 itself available to (at least) two different, and even oppositional, interpretations. Artaud employs here a highly conventional vocabulary. He speaks of the spectator, the actor, the play, identification, reality, the organic, and science. One might be tempted to conclude, and this conclusion would not be without its justifications, that Artaud appeals 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, as Derrida might, that Artaud's reference to the organic is in the service of a desire to re-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 certain important affinities, Artaud is "not the son of Nietzsche," is writ large here.
Another perspective is, however, available to us (and the compossibility – or compositure – of these alternative readings may be precisely what engenders Derrida's intense and intensely ambivalent relation to Artaud). This alternative interpretation 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." This question, that is, what to make of Artaud's science, his metaphysics of physics and physics 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, it is Artaud's poetry which dictates, or produces, his science. In his groundbreaking study, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric, Daniel Tiffany explores the productive exchanges between lyric poetry and scientific materialism. He argues that the tropes and figures that have constituted scientific materialism, which have produced it by making available the possibility of imaging the historically invisible realm 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 a similar 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 aspects of Artaud's formulations of body and spectacle. Artaud, who casts his net wide – into allegory and significant nature and into "the repressed debates on the science of the soul" 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's spectacle constitutes his organic and corporeal science. Artaud attempts to produce, in his Theater of Cruelty, a new matrix of life and representation: to "reforge the magical chain" so the spectator may see "his own reality in the spectacle. His spectacular tactics, as we have seen, are diverse; he invokes allegorical emblems, hieroglyphic characters, vibration, electricity, massage, machines, and snakes. He also invokes synesthesia, sensory derangements which violate the barriers separating the five senses – and the media that speak to them – in order to constitute 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," or rather, 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 spectator one must know the special "points of localization in the body" whose stimulation will produce "magical trances." But Artaud's notion of the "organic" is complex, and the body, 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 that the actor recharges his voltage." The image, Artaud says elsewhere, is "a machine 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 the theater, push the individual body and the spectacular body past a proper body of man, referring representation beyond the human.
1 Derrida. "Artaud the Moma: Interjections of Appeal." English text of lecture, trans. Peggy Kamuf, 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 Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 41. All future citations of Artaud are drawn from this 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 was wrecked on this." Tragedy, Section 12, p. 82.
24 "Like Plato, Euripedes undertook to show the world the reverse of the 'unintelligent' poet; his aesthetic principle that 'to be beautiful everything must be conscious' is, as I have said, the parallel 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.
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 discuss Diderot in some detail, am I able to give attention to the subtleties of his thinking. Diderot comes 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 that Diderot is known for having named and developed the genre. "The misdeeds of the psychological theater descended from Racine have unaccustomed us to that immediate and violent 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 Chance: The Pattern of Diderot's Thought (Cambridge, London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 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. 195.
36 As Martin Jay suggests in Downcast Eyes, "however ocularcentric the Enlightenment in general may have been, at least one philosophe, [Diderot], ... expressed doubts about its privileging 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 Twentieth Century 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 which constitutes this sentience as either passive, as in, for example, the marble of a statue, or active, as 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 sense functions." Touch, he asserts, is the "primary property" of sentient matter, "but that pure and simple sentience, that sense of touch, is diversified by the various organs that are produced by each of the fibers." Taste, smell, hearing and sight are thus all species of the tactile. The formation of a bundle of fibers into an eye, Diderot writes, "gives rise to a...kind of touch, which we 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 tactility and 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. "De la poésie dramatique," in Oeuvres esthétiques (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1994), p. 269.
41 Quoted from Michael Fried. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of 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 que s'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" 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 la conversation 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 un certain 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 son imagination? 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'à ce 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 the tableau of an old blind couple, still seeking each others hands, and caressing one another even in 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 and morality is more complicated in his descriptive analyses than this example shows, his prescriptions for how the tableau should instill moral virtue into their spectators often take this form. "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 social ramifications of Diderot's use of the theatrical tableau: "Psychology, which works relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the known...is the cause of theater's abasement.... I think both the theater and we ourselves have had enough of psychology." "No More Masterpieces," p. 77.
48 "Preface: The Theater and Culture," p. 7.
49 Ibid., pp. 94-95
50 "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 Language Left." 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, the site of a "dialogue between theology and humanism whose inextinguishable recurrence has never 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 a particularly 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 You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs" in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).