theater of cruelty: take no prisoners

Dave: Throughout his life he was to plead for special consideration on the grounds that he was suffering and different from other men. He should be allowed to publish and act  not due to any particular merit, but because it was the work of a man psychologically stricken.In later life , having regressed to what Freud called the pregenital stage, Artaud’s horror of sexuality led him to deny that he had been born of woman. ” I was born from a uterus where I had no need to be and which I never needed, for that is no way to be born, copulated and massaged nine months by a membrane that devours without teeth, as the Upanishads say, and I knew that I was born otherwise, of my works and not of a mother,” he wrote to a friend.

It was a position that was characteristic of Artaud in the creation of his proper archetype, a shambling anarchic identity; in his words, “a body without organs”. His illness and the absence of recognizable ego operating “normally” which society at large views as a tragic situation actually provided Artaud to dig into the source of a uniquely truthful voice; suspended somewhere in transition, marooned between the modern and post-modern in which he created a form, barely digestible, as a psychic structure which took the place of conventional content. …

After Antonin Artaud walked out of the surrealist fold, he began devoting himself to his own vision of the theatre. Simply distilled, Artaud believed that the function of the theatre is revolutionary in nature. A play is not geared towards the ends of entertainment, but rather to help remake the world. It is shock theatre. The viewer should not leave the building yawning or pleased but shocked, terrified and deeply disturbed. Something akin to being traumatized by witnessing a public stoning in Iran or the Mai Lai massacre. You must go to the theatre as you would to a surgeon, insisted Artaud- gravely, knowing that you will not leave intact.

The new theatre was a revolt against French psychological drama and boulevard comedy, in which emotions and sitations familiar to the audience provided reassurance and endorsement of the liberal bourgeois culture that Artaud so despised. An authentic play in Artaud’s view , must not contribute to this fairy tale mythology but rather, disrupt it. Traditional theatre was presenting the deja vu, while Artaud was working on the jamais vu. This ripping out of the past was not dissimilar to the Futurists in Italy, but Artaud’s tone and finicky context was art as unsolvable paradox of a fourth dimension, or a primal recessed emotion translated into the gestural without dilution. A kind of abstract expressionism spilling out as Pollock would pour paint. Incoherent with a vague yet frightening interior logic, a “logique delire” or delirious logic. …

“The life and work of on-again, off-again Surrealist Antonin Artaud further exemplifies the importance of the schizophrenic artist to the ethos of modernism at large. Like Khlebnikov, he sought to overcome the arbitrary nature of the sign , expressing a deep interest in mythical thought  as being closer to the essence of things. But what makes Artaud particularly revealing in this sociology of the role of the schizophrenic artist to modernism is his ability to articulate the building blocks of his own philosophy. One scholar borrows a term from Laing, describing Artaud as suffering from an “ontological insecurity” . Laing writes that one experiencing such a condition “may feel more unreal than real […], precariously different from the rest of the world, so that this identity and autonomy are always in question. He may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness […] And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body” . As he felt that what intervened between his mind and a sense of being was language’s reified forms of expression, he sought, as did his modernist peers, to reinvent form with experiments like his Theater of Cruelty. In his case, that meant endeavoring to rediscover more primitive means of expression, when the relationship between language and thought was “immanent” .Read More: http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/18/vitalich18.shtml a

…On another level, his theories were the result of his own estrangement. Through the medium of the theatre he wanted to transport the audience into an understanding of his torment. In February 1925 Antonin Artaud addressed an open letter to the Director of the Comédie Française which began:
Sir,
You have infested the news long enough. Your brothel is too greedy. It is time the representatives of a dead art stopped deafening us. Tragedy does not need a Rolls Royce nor prostitutes jewellery. Enough comings and goings in your state brothel. We look above tragedy, the cornerstone of your poisonous old shed, and your Molière is a twat. But it’s not only a question of tragedy; we deny your alimentary organism the right to perform any play, past future, or present …Read More:http://afronord.tripod.com/thr/intro.html

Artaud operated as both visionary and organizer. He asked famous writers like Gide for support; he wrote puff pieces in Nouvelle revue Francaise for actresses who had promised h

inancial support; he indulged in the compromise and flattery familiar to French literary careerists. With the help of a fashionable hostess he organized a reading of Richard II for wealthy patrons of the arts. Checkbooks at the ready, they heard Artaud explain that he wanted a theatre with uncomfortable seats that would collapse if the spectators fell asleep.

Foul smells, he promised, would waft through the aisles during the performance, and no accounting of the money spent would be made. Those present, he said, were Philistines and Boeotians whose last chance this was for rehabilitation. He was surprised at the meagreness of the donations and said grandly: “I did the impossible!”.

Artaud was also unique in reflecting his own on mental illness. His experiences with mental illness began in his twenties  and less than twenty years later he would spend years institutionalized . Those sensitive souls who appreciated Artaud’s vision got him out of the institution  and made sure his ideas were heard. Men like Jacques Riviere, who carried on a correspondence with the young writer that so startled him he published it, recognized that Artaud’s unique vision was the “direct result of his malady” . Artaud writes in one such letter, “I suffer from a horrible sickness of the mind. My thought abandons me at every level. From the simple fact of thought to the external fact of its materialization in words. Words, shapes of sentences, internal directions of thought, simple reactions of the mind – I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Thus as soon as I can grasp a form, however imperfect, I pin it down, for fear of losing the whole thought” .Read More: http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/18/vitalich18.shtml

ADDENDUM:

Artaud: All writing is shit says this The Tyrannical Judge of the anxiety punishment side of the writing subject brings out into the open the realization that the complaint against oneself is a reversed hatred for the other which is without doubt a fabrication of the substratum of unsuspected traumas inscribed within us/without memory a fringe of strangeness haunts the writer as victim/the buried accomplice of
regressive data day dreg drift drone-dreams rises and invigorates those frailties….that entertain suicide/ Anality is a bonus with Obsessive persons who list all that must be done in multiple lifetimes of texts and believe that there are those around them that perform this miracle and are published/Its all in the editing says Artaud/One kills the self not the body and to kill the self one needs to be painfully aware of the self as inadequate a weak and vulnerable self unable to save its multiple of selves/The anxiety of being destroyed from within denotes a tendency towards disintegration into SkiTZoid fragmentation/Artauds problem…

was physical not psychological/The depressive mood move mode mutation constitutes itself as a narcissistic inability to see the needs of the Others/ Negative to be sure and often leading on to the suicidal act /the erotization of the suffering of the Other/primarily in passive images in which the other entices the depressive subject to sorrow thru pain is the major sign that gives away the desperate person/Artuad was tortured to death just as Van Gogh was suicided by society/a psychic representation of energy displacements caused by external or internal traumas/producing anxiety of images that are not stable enough to coalesce as verbal or written signs/Literary creation is that adventure
of the body and signs that bears witness to the body without organs and…to the affects of desire and other aleatory moods/What makes a triumph over sadness possible is the ability of the self to identify no longer with the lost Object [the maternal breast] the not Father of the Law the Oedipus Syndrome or Electra Complex but instead the Father as Primal Phallus on the margins of the socias/What escalates this escape from the death of the self?/coded forms of abrasive raw data drawn immediately from the sub conscious moving in a continuous visual loop/Illicit machinic schema of nightmares unbearable to the uninitiated/erratic series of points of departure and standard stoppages/Gendered succession of others redefining feminine self/women as…dominating objects/women as nothing as zero as circle of void complicity with fecundity/circularity/reciprocity/The manic position states: no I haven‘t lost…

…meaning/I evoke/I signify thru the artifice of signs and for myself which up to this point has been parted from me/This phallic or symbolic identification insures the subjects entrance into the Universe of signs and creations/The supporting Father of such symbolic triumph is not the Oedipal father of domination that Lacan speaks adversely of but the phallic Father of the Real /and because there is no absence or loss or lack there is no language in the Real/Language is always about loss or absence/you only need words or images when the object you want/the I or the Self of desire is gone/Or was never there/For the ego can never take the place of the unconscious or control it because the ego or the self is…only an illusion/a product of the unconscious itself/the unconscious after all is…the ground of all being/A difficult death to contemplate each time we take up the pen and hover over the blank sheet// Read More:http://www.scribd.com/doc/35228734/Deep-Tissue-Aug-2010-7

Read More:http://www.impetustoanalysis.com/2010/03/antonin-artaud/