Artaud and the Plague: A Posthumanist Theatre?

Artaud’s theatrical vision differs markedly from the representationalism and anthropocentrism of the “dramatic” theatrical tradition. Given the close relationality between theory and practice in Artaud’s work, this chapter puts his theatrical practice in conversation with his ground-breaking theoretical statements in The Theatre and its Double (1938), generally considered “the bible of modern theatre”. Sensory perception and affect are central to Artaud’s theatre. As the host of immunological tropes in his theoretical work shows, in Artaud’s theatre affect reaches the intensity of an epidemic. Instead of trying to fend off the anxiety that pervades modernity with dramatic representations, Artaud aims to physically and affectively immerse his audience in the sensory materiality and perpetual movement of the performance, co-producing spectators that experience themselves as physically and ontologically vulnerable. With Artaud’s notion of theatre as plague, the theatre as a performance of the spectators’ bourgeois politeness comes to an end. The immunitarian border shielding the spectators from contagion and violence or cruelty collapses. It is in his view of life as a universal force and in the use of heterogeneous theatrical tools that Artaud arguably becomes posthumanist.

Death and Community, or Metaphors and Materiality

On the trajectory towards ever-increasing abstraction, modernity perceives any libidinal implication in the sensory as dangerous. In Strindberg’s naturalistic plays, the feminized libidinal other threatens human (male) autonomy with fusion. In the “anthropocentric” theatrical tradition that includes Strindberg’s naturalist work, the lethal threat posed by communitas is more often expressed in metaphors of nonhuman otherness than through nonhuman characters themselves. Strindberg questions the status of his female protagonists as not fully human through their association with the nonhuman (parasites, blood, animals, etc.), while simultaneously enlivening this materiality, which can no longer be reduced to passive matter only. The post-metaphysical coming-to-terms with the autonomy of objects is, however, at the heart of Strindberg’s work. With Strindberg, the enactment of (human and more-than-human) difference starts to move in ontological status from a metaphor, i.e. a representationalist mode safely in the human author’s hands, to (in Artaud, for instance) an agentive element of the performance.

Flies vs. the Fetishisation of Consciousness

The conceptualization of human consciousness in Sartre’s early work continues the anthropocentric subjectivism of the Cartesian tradition. In Sartre, in order to become truly human, the human must break from his origin in the natural-material world. The fetishization of consciousness in Sartre’s existentialism is an attempt at redemption, an attempt in other words to imagine the human as the master of his metaphysical destiny and of the material conditions and agents that surround, drive and form him. Sartre’s dualistic world view blocks the impersonal, more-than-human energy that traverses the human self, the “contagion” brought on, for instance, by the title characters of Sartre’s most famous play, The Flies. This phobic blockage --- together with a restrictive definition or biopolitical caesura of what or who qualifies as truly human – is reminiscent of fascism, pointing to the dialectical implication of even antifascist critiques in fascist psychic structures.

Introduction: Anxious Flesh

Laying the intellectual groundwork for the book, this chapter gives an in-depth introduction to new materialist philosophy and its relationship to other 20th and 21st century theoretical movements and discussions, as well as to key concepts used in the study: affect, old and new materialism, dramatic and postdramatic theatre, biopolitics, sovereignty and economics, fascist immunitarianism, and others. This Introduction also announces the book’s focus on modern theatre: The plays explored map the universality of the “flesh” in (politically democratic, post-Darwinian) modernity, an ontological anxiety located at the threshold between materiality and human sovereignty, in other words the danger -- or, depending on the writer, the promise -- posed in post-transcendental modernity by the inability of keeping human subjectivity separate from nonhuman vitality. Rather than considering them in isolation, the book explores the entanglement of human culture with diverse forms of agentive materiality – economic, embodied, and inorganic.

Bare Life, or Becoming-Animal

Arguably moving beyond the anthropocentric “dramatic” tradition in both form and content, Brecht’s early theatrical work explores the setting beyond its function as décor. Instead, as Brecht writes, the “environment acquires the quality of a process”, becoming an integrated, constantly changing mesh of agentive biological and more-than-biological bodies. Brecht’s first full-length play, Baal, enacts the human title character’s transgressive unity with this environment. The dynamic formal structure of the play intra-acts with the play’s enactment of a live natural ecology or bare life from which the title character comes and to which he returns. In contrast to Brecht’s later, more didactically oriented work, the play’s structure is a non-linear productive assemblage rather than a receptacle of “content.” Providing an alternative to the trajectory towards twentieth century immunitarian fascism, Brecht’s early theatrical work puts in play the ontological status of the human, in a paradigmatic shift beyond the mere representation of the characters’ ontological anxiety in Strindberg, and in a theatrical vision pre-figuring absurd theatre and contemporary eco-drama.

Where Does the Body End? Artaud’s Materialsymbolic Theatre

This chapter offers a descriptive reading of Artaud’s most famous play, The Cenci (1935), that respects the materiality and temporality of Artaud’s text, while also including a discussion of the play’s sparse production history. Breaking down immunitarian walls between self and other, Artaud’s theatre of cruelty provides a performative assemblage of human and nonhuman actors or actants, (human) spectators, non-verbal theatrical tools, and forces and energies that transverses the binary distinction between materiality and mind, aesthetic perception and meaning. Together with Brechtian theatre and the theatre of the absurd, Artaud’s use of space and the mythical and ritual dimension of his theatrical vision constitute the end of “fourth-wall realism,” prefiguring the postdramatic, “dialogue-less” theatre of the 1960s to 90s. Inspiring Deleuze’s view of art, Artaud’s theatre brings us to the limits of what our embodied selves can endure and to the limits of representation, opening the horizon of death. In this sense, as the experience of limits, theatre is again what theatre scholar Una Chaudhuri calls “boundary work”.

Posthumanism and Gender, or the Fall Back into Nature

Engaging with the scientific theories and popular concerns of the late nineteenth century, Strindberg’s naturalist plays enact the anxiety related to the renegotiation of the status of the human following the publication of Darwin’s work. The loss of human exceptionalism in the natural sciences intersects with the socio-political crisis of symbolic male authority in democratic modernity. An emerging posthumanism and the crisis of gender, i.e. ontological and socio-political questions, converge. Strindberg’s work problematizes the modern biopolitical, immunitarian lines of separation in terms of sexual difference, along a threatened binary gender distribution. While Strindberg’s work is part of the naturalist “dramatic” theatrical tradition -- a representationalist tradition centrally based on human dialogue and therefore generally considered “anthropocentric,” this chapter argues that Strindberg’s naturalist work, thematically if not yet formally, marks the intra-action of gender with a beginning posthumanism.

Conclusion

Inspired by the work of Niels Bohr, the quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad refers to apparatuses as “device[s] for making and remaking boundaries”. Although theatrical performances are not necessarily the same as the performative enactments Barad describes, theatre as an apparatus is in a prime position for such boundary work. This book has specifically followed how the modern stage has generated and challenged the immunitary, biopolitical boundaries of nineteenth and twentieth century European society. Given that Bruno Latour as well has advised us to think of objects not in terms of substances but rather as performances, theatre is in a more than advantageous position to benefit from the insights of the recent material turn in philosophy and culture– and the material turn from theatre.