A Personal Inheritance of Artaud’s Failure — To Prove that ‘I’ Exist-ed
I was born in Sydney’s western suburbs at Blacktown Hospital from memory, after my mother’s nine year struggle to conceive again, after an accident, in which she fell down a steep flight of stairs. Upon her arrival at the bottom of three stories of concrete steps, she had miscarried and was diagnosed as having irreparable damage to her reproductive organs. Might an existential anguish and grief be activated as a result of being haunted by a mother’s prior dead foetus?
Was that the dead weight I carried in an infantile form, whilst conducting an improvisational acting exercise, exploring the Jungian, psychoanalytical, archetype of ‘the orphan’, with Ranters Theatre director Adriano Cortese?
Arms outstretched, I cried and then walked…
I was raised in the economically and socially ‘disadvantaged’ area of Mount Druitt —whose closest relation to a mountain is ironically a hill, Rooty Hill — the ‘Las Vegas of the West’. In fact this flat, barren, pastoral land is most (in)famous for its high school which I attended from 1983 to 1989.
In 1996 the entire class failed their Higher School Certificate and the tabloid, now known as the Telegraph Mirror, published their school year photograph on the front page. Realising that their children already had little in the way of prospects, let alone being splattered across a Rupert Murdoch-News Limited paper, in Australia’s biggest city — Sydney — the kids were mobilised, and filed a lawsuit for defamation within the New South Wales Supreme Court — and won. (See ABC’s Radio National website for their 2nd October 2005 story Class Act –No Longer Failures). In the ensuing media exposure, the community, including the surrounding local academic institutions, assisted in soliciting opportunities to aid their escape from this 1970’s ‘social experiment’ gone wrong.
Ridiculously, despite an economics teacher and personal friend Mr Butler’s protestations, I became a god-damned bank employee — in the delusional belief that a passion for economics and art might lead to an in-house graphic designer position — due to the organisation’s scope. Suffice to say I should have believed in the confidence he tried to instil in me and that I was indeed worthy of something more.
After an extended period of working with morons, numbers, dollars and statistics as a ‘personnel officer’ with a penchant for fraud (my ‘performance debut’ as ‘psychologically impaired employee’) and a dalliance in the sheer tedium of accounting — whose ‘Business Psychology’ subject was my only sole interest as a ‘platform’ to espouse ascetic views on family, cigarettes and alcohol — my life became about music and art.
During this transformation I was touched in a co-mingling of ‘true’ love, sex and death.
In 1999 with godspeed’s infinite desire, fear, hope and regret in our hearts, the musical entity known as ‘2 litre DOLBY’ — who I co-founded playing drums — re-located to Melbourne. We speeded towards a future that was “still bleak, uncertain and beautiful”, yet more ‘artistically creative’, and ‘political’. We fled the romantic ideals of haunting, hungry ghosts, broken-hearted lovers and the reconstruction of Sydney for the “best games ever” of Juan Antonio Samaranch’s 2000 Olympics, like the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse in the Christian Holy Bible.
The end result, once again, was inevitably, abject failure and alienation.
As far as music was concerned the heightened state of being, under the gaze of an-other-audience had become my fascination. And, so, the year of 2001 saw me embark on this, an-other, new found journey of ‘performance’.
In May 2001, just before my 29th birthday I undertook my first performance with the assistance of Carla, Matthew, Phillip and his then lover Natalie at Dario’s ‘happening’ called Spart at what was known as the ‘Northcote Bowling Club’ and became acquainted with a certain performer whose name was Gretel.
The performance This Monstrosity Called Life, inspired by the Anna Swir poem Poetry Reading in Czeslaw Milosz’s A Book of Luminous Things was generated from an exercise in foundational practices, facilitated by Kate Kennedy and adapted from ‘The Woolloomooloo Cuddle’ by Remy Charlip.
The live performer wore grey garments on a slightly raised platform.
Inspired by the ‘S:11’ protests commencing on September 11 the year prior — 2000 — at the Crown Casino’s World Economic Forum, a white tablecloth was painted as a crude flag, signifying United States of America’s imperialism and hung beyond the live performer. The pervasive ‘Stars and Stripes’ had become ‘The Union Jack, Southern Cross and Stripes’, precipitating a ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in the perpetual ‘War on Terror’ co-ordinated by the United States. Beside the flag, dressed in black, a guardian stood at attention, with feet apart, a grinning gold face and black gloved hands, clasped firmly behind the back in a tight grip.
Drizzle haunted the musical drone of ‘Godspeed You! Black Emperor’ and their ‘Dead Flag Blues’ began to distort and fall, as a wind affected, sub-sonic-hum in sound. Beyond, above in the night sky, dark clouds lie, illuminated, by the city lights.
As the live performer began, someone within the audience began sniggering. The snigger became a smug laughter. The smug laughter became arrogant and judgemental. From out of the audience came a figure of an imposing, threatening physicality and a maniacal grin. Suited in white, this ‘monolithic, capitalist’ — man-made-likeness-in-the-image-of-‘Lord-God’-from-the Christian-Holy-Bible — entered the space clutching a bag of ‘something’.
Approaching to peer down and survey the live performer, standing face to face, a bleeding heart was presented and crushed repeatedly into the live performer’s skull. Bleeding hearts began to be thrown and pelted in the direction of the live performer as it lay down.
The guardian of the flag, with the grinning gold face, now stood with one arm raised and with hands aflame, set fire to the sacred, symbolic cloth of a collective nationhood. The oppressive material began, begins, burning in flames. And a mother dressed in black, mourning loss, abhorring the sight and taste of once-a-living, now-dead flesh, rushes forth from the recoiling throng, who act as if they are witnesses to such perverse spectacles.
On her knees she begins contemplating these hearts. The tears she cries dissolves into the blood of these still bleeding, crushed hearts, separated from their bodies, they are now, clutched, held, close, evidently close — next to her still beating heart.
The performance has transformed into an apocalyptic hell on earth. And the mother grapples with the stray dogs of all the unwashed idealists, for these still bleeding hearts. The dogs run off and away with the still bleeding hearts in their wet, bloodied jaws, to the appalled mirth of the masterly communal owners.
I am a ship that has become unstuck from its moors.
I am crying, screaming desire, hope, fear ‘n’ regret.
Godspeed you!
Clichés.
Defeat.
Again.
And again.
Again and again.
This is a performance project of abject failure.
Describing this performance to supervisor Dr Barry Laing at our first meeting regarding this project, he told me how “Artaudian” it sounded.
To which I replied “I know, and I didn’t know who the fuck he was!”.
This is a performance project of abject failure.
A tradition of failure that my ‘friend’ and ‘prophet’, of whom I am a maddening ‘disciple’, Artaud, stands accused by Sontag herself in her essay, but yet is redeemed in her preceding discussion and quotation of Jean Cocteau – “the only work which succeeds is that which fails”(xix, Sontag).
Hell, Tim Etchells the director of one of my favourite performance groups ‘Forced Entertainment’ and Matthew Goulish — see above p4 — have dedicated an institute that exists as website to the documentation, study and theorisation of failure —www.institute-of-failure.com.
Fourteen months prior to the performance I was experiencing re-occurring dreams of a world ending, with me, in a shopping complex’s car park, at the base of a building. Trampled and crushed under the weight of the concrete above, that had suddenly collapsed with unimaginable force; I was dead like Freud’s father in my sleeping dreams.
On New Year’s Eve 1999, the year 2000 was not brought in with a bang, but a whimper. No “millennium bug” struck. No apocalypse. No Rapid Eye Movement in the End Of The World As We Know It. As I counted down in the intimate company of musician friends, Leo, Georgina and Genevieve and stood out the front of Newman Street — lying around the corner from Sutherland Street, whose significance in my life was yet to play its fateful card and lies — in the north-west of ‘multi-cultural’ Brunswick.
No drama occurred except for someone — I assume intentionally with good humour — simply turning the streetlights off, and with a pause, turned them back on again. Our hearts were in our mouths, looking, agape with a wonder, awed, wide-eyed in darkness. Then when the light was summoned, with a sigh, we were gone.
Twelve months later, and five months prior to ‘that’ performance — and at this stage I have no idea what I am going to do with myself and the year, but be lost and improvise chances — I am in a car with Phil and Matt on New Year’s Eve at Lake Eildon — a place of significance, that I would return to nearly three years later.
Struck by the lack of water, the terrain had been transformed into Mars on Earth, albeit, with a museum dedicated to all the cans discarded recklessly, that littered the scattered landscape. Performing around a fire, camping under the stars with kangaroo claws, not afraid of our shadows echoing nature — this was a being-becoming–spiritual-sacred.
The sleep of reason.
Monsters.
Frankenstein.
Rosemary’s ‘despicable’ baby.
Sheathed like a butcher stained white, enveloped, in the life-removed-red of blood, flesh and bone realised a shamanic transformation of being- becoming…
Artaud’s To End The Judgement of God.
A witch.
Artaud’s daughters of the heart.
Like some modern day Joan of Arc.
Signalling through the flames … kill …
Hieroglyphic movement-s hypnotised into trance.
Transfixed Artaud with his Balinese Dance-r’s .
Past twelve o’clock.
Everyone’s passed out asleep after exploring, walking, drawing, eating, drinking and ‘tripping-man’ with mushroom tea.
Hippy.
Trying to maintain warmth against the cold, we huddle together, listening to the musical sounds of ‘Godspeed You! Black Emperor’ and their ‘Moya’ from their ‘Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada’ recording a passage, an ominous presence over the dark horizon, and bonnet’s surface, in through the windscreen, across plastic, dusty dashboards and filling aural interiors of ears.
It is the sound of futures waiting to happen.
Alpha.
Omega.
Beginning.
… …
End.
Future is.
…
…all…
All. … ALL …
A favourite piece of graffiti scrawled on a wall in Fitzroy North around the corner from where I live as I write this…
… – or it writes me….past…passed…pass…
Future still, bleak, uncertain and beautiful.
Nine months after this moment in time and four months after the aforementioned performance I am in the studio improvising with Kate Kennedy and some others.
Kate is struck by the quality of the dying afternoon light.
Sunsets with a strange unsettling wind, and clouds look portentous in their appearance and colour.
Black. Red. And grey.
Were they?
Lying in the bed of a trash compactor room, later that night, watching the documentary When We Were Kings about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s classic ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight in Zaire on ABC television, text — now from this moment will be known as ‘tickertape’ irritatingly accompanying what is commonly referred to as ‘the news’ ad nauseum-infinitum — enters the frame across the top of the screen.
A plane.
And.
A building.
One.
Of the World Trade Centre Twin Tower’s in New York City.
Pulse quickening.
The thought.
A once “true” love in that city.
Channel change.
Struck with these images that reel out from the screen into the world full of others.
Hearts beat rapidly in throats.
Open mouths.
Agape.
Wander in and stare at each other.
We are all captured in the screen, with perverse grins in wonder.
And.
Disbelief.
Fascination fascinated.
The pleasure of destruction.
Hollywood’s myths becoming reality.
Is this the end we wanted?
To desire.
Will.
Now, this is shocking and awing.
The images of these poor fucks standing on the observation towers.
Helpless.
Hopeless.
Pondering fate.
Like them.
In praise?
Or blame?
Over and over again.
Wonder.
Like them.
How the fuck is this going to turn out?
Repeat.
Over and over again.
How the fuck can that fire be put out?
Repeat.
Over and over again and again.
What the fuck is going on?
Think.
Repeat repeat.
Repeat.
Thought.
Over and over again and again.
And again.
Cruel.
In ignorance.
And helplessness.
What fire brigade for god and love could possibly extinguish that burning hole eighty stories up in a one hundred story building?
Why the fuck do we need to build skyscrapers for?
My heart sunk when one of these phallic testaments to man began to sink, transforming, disappearing into a mushroom cloud.
New York City of dust.
Traces.
Of memory.
The confusion of those trying to comprehend exactly what was happening was…
Seduced into these destructive images, live, from thousands of kilometre’s away and across the other side of a world.
What was going on?
The Return of the Same.
The Fall.
A modern day fable.
A second coming.
A myth was being constructed before my very eyes.
Live.
On television.
History in the making.
The day the world was changing.
And things would never be the same.
In all lounge rooms.
For free.
Penny’s dropped like that first tower.
America’s empire.
All with it.
Now I felt like I knew what that re-occurring dream was, and that first, original performance.
Is this hell?
I think that is what it was.
When I began to cry.
Terror was truly instilled.
Being.
Condemned.
A repetition.
The same spectacular end.
One, they themselves, like us, had just witnessed.
Only we are safe.
Aren’t we?
A mirror of life’s being becoming death.
Oh the horror.
O!
A reporter.
Humanity.
Herbert Morrison’s plaintive words.
Cried the arrival.
The German zeppelin.
Hindenberg.
Burst into flames.
Over in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
Near.
New York.
Spooked.
Telephone.
Calls.
Mothers.
Watching.
Those images.
Who is going to pay for this transgression?
Us.
Where did it start?
Like this?
Where did this begin?
And the end?
Call.
Name.
Sarah.
A problem.
Later.
Bombing.
Nothing to speak of in the always-already reduced to rubble of Afghanistan.
Words.
There.
She.
Is.
Still.
Breathing.
Air.
Vaporized.
Bodies.
A post-modern 9/11cannibal.
Post-9/11-modern human inhaling metal, glass and debris.
Attached to this function.
The sinthome of Lacanian theory.
A condensed cipher of libidinal attachment.
To the city.
So.
When it disappears.
It will be missed.
Such details.
Bearing witness.
To true love.
The next morning, up all night, not sleeping from watching this same, violent hypnotic, repetition, I tried to glean some kind of knowledge and understanding.
Some form of meaning from the event.
In a trance.
The shocked intimacy of trams.
Was it those people from the Crown Casino at the World Economic Forum S:11 protests last year?
The tension being felt within the presence of those who could be an-other; that is - against US.
The gaze judges.
If you see something report it.
The arrival of a Sri Lankan friend, Ieuan, some months later is palpable.
Was it a Hollywood blockbuster film?
Others don’t know.
Eve-n.
A hell.
A way.
Represent.
Body.
Middle-Eastern Futurists becoming Western technology —-— turning in on itself like a malignant cancer.
Or mobius strip.
The German composer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen considers “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole entire cosmos”.
Is this just like the Matrix?.
A sign post.
But where is the map?
Welcome to the desert of the Real.
I was born in Sydney’s western suburbs at Blacktown Hospital from memory, after my mother’s nine year struggle to conceive again, after an accident, in which she fell down a steep flight of stairs. Upon her arrival at the bottom of three stories of concrete steps, she had miscarried and was diagnosed as having irreparable damage to her reproductive organs. Might an existential anguish and grief be activated as a result of being haunted by a mother’s prior dead foetus?
Was that the dead weight I carried in an infantile form, whilst conducting an improvisational acting exercise, exploring the Jungian, psychoanalytical, archetype of ‘the orphan’, with Ranters Theatre director Adriano Cortese?
Arms outstretched, I cried and then walked…
I was raised in the economically and socially ‘disadvantaged’ area of Mount Druitt —whose closest relation to a mountain is ironically a hill, Rooty Hill — the ‘Las Vegas of the West’. In fact this flat, barren, pastoral land is most (in)famous for its high school which I attended from 1983 to 1989.
In 1996 the entire class failed their Higher School Certificate and the tabloid, now known as the Telegraph Mirror, published their school year photograph on the front page. Realising that their children already had little in the way of prospects, let alone being splattered across a Rupert Murdoch-News Limited paper, in Australia’s biggest city — Sydney — the kids were mobilised, and filed a lawsuit for defamation within the New South Wales Supreme Court — and won. (See ABC’s Radio National website for their 2nd October 2005 story Class Act –No Longer Failures). In the ensuing media exposure, the community, including the surrounding local academic institutions, assisted in soliciting opportunities to aid their escape from this 1970’s ‘social experiment’ gone wrong.
Ridiculously, despite an economics teacher and personal friend Mr Butler’s protestations, I became a god-damned bank employee — in the delusional belief that a passion for economics and art might lead to an in-house graphic designer position — due to the organisation’s scope. Suffice to say I should have believed in the confidence he tried to instil in me and that I was indeed worthy of something more.
After an extended period of working with morons, numbers, dollars and statistics as a ‘personnel officer’ with a penchant for fraud (my ‘performance debut’ as ‘psychologically impaired employee’) and a dalliance in the sheer tedium of accounting — whose ‘Business Psychology’ subject was my only sole interest as a ‘platform’ to espouse ascetic views on family, cigarettes and alcohol — my life became about music and art.
During this transformation I was touched in a co-mingling of ‘true’ love, sex and death.
In 1999 with godspeed’s infinite desire, fear, hope and regret in our hearts, the musical entity known as ‘2 litre DOLBY’ — who I co-founded playing drums — re-located to Melbourne. We speeded towards a future that was “still bleak, uncertain and beautiful”, yet more ‘artistically creative’, and ‘political’. We fled the romantic ideals of haunting, hungry ghosts, broken-hearted lovers and the reconstruction of Sydney for the “best games ever” of Juan Antonio Samaranch’s 2000 Olympics, like the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse in the Christian Holy Bible.
The end result, once again, was inevitably, abject failure and alienation.
As far as music was concerned the heightened state of being, under the gaze of an-other-audience had become my fascination. And, so, the year of 2001 saw me embark on this, an-other, new found journey of ‘performance’.
In May 2001, just before my 29th birthday I undertook my first performance with the assistance of Carla, Matthew, Phillip and his then lover Natalie at Dario’s ‘happening’ called Spart at what was known as the ‘Northcote Bowling Club’ and became acquainted with a certain performer whose name was Gretel.
The performance This Monstrosity Called Life, inspired by the Anna Swir poem Poetry Reading in Czeslaw Milosz’s A Book of Luminous Things was generated from an exercise in foundational practices, facilitated by Kate Kennedy and adapted from ‘The Woolloomooloo Cuddle’ by Remy Charlip.
The live performer wore grey garments on a slightly raised platform.
Inspired by the ‘S:11’ protests commencing on September 11 the year prior — 2000 — at the Crown Casino’s World Economic Forum, a white tablecloth was painted as a crude flag, signifying United States of America’s imperialism and hung beyond the live performer. The pervasive ‘Stars and Stripes’ had become ‘The Union Jack, Southern Cross and Stripes’, precipitating a ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in the perpetual ‘War on Terror’ co-ordinated by the United States. Beside the flag, dressed in black, a guardian stood at attention, with feet apart, a grinning gold face and black gloved hands, clasped firmly behind the back in a tight grip.
Drizzle haunted the musical drone of ‘Godspeed You! Black Emperor’ and their ‘Dead Flag Blues’ began to distort and fall, as a wind affected, sub-sonic-hum in sound. Beyond, above in the night sky, dark clouds lie, illuminated, by the city lights.
As the live performer began, someone within the audience began sniggering. The snigger became a smug laughter. The smug laughter became arrogant and judgemental. From out of the audience came a figure of an imposing, threatening physicality and a maniacal grin. Suited in white, this ‘monolithic, capitalist’ — man-made-likeness-in-the-image-of-‘Lord-God’-from-the Christian-Holy-Bible — entered the space clutching a bag of ‘something’.
Approaching to peer down and survey the live performer, standing face to face, a bleeding heart was presented and crushed repeatedly into the live performer’s skull. Bleeding hearts began to be thrown and pelted in the direction of the live performer as it lay down.
The guardian of the flag, with the grinning gold face, now stood with one arm raised and with hands aflame, set fire to the sacred, symbolic cloth of a collective nationhood. The oppressive material began, begins, burning in flames. And a mother dressed in black, mourning loss, abhorring the sight and taste of once-a-living, now-dead flesh, rushes forth from the recoiling throng, who act as if they are witnesses to such perverse spectacles.
On her knees she begins contemplating these hearts. The tears she cries dissolves into the blood of these still bleeding, crushed hearts, separated from their bodies, they are now, clutched, held, close, evidently close — next to her still beating heart.
The performance has transformed into an apocalyptic hell on earth. And the mother grapples with the stray dogs of all the unwashed idealists, for these still bleeding hearts. The dogs run off and away with the still bleeding hearts in their wet, bloodied jaws, to the appalled mirth of the masterly communal owners.
I am a ship that has become unstuck from its moors.
I am crying, screaming desire, hope, fear ‘n’ regret.
Godspeed you!
Clichés.
Defeat.
Again.
And again.
Again and again.
This is a performance project of abject failure.
Describing this performance to supervisor Dr Barry Laing at our first meeting regarding this project, he told me how “Artaudian” it sounded.
To which I replied “I know, and I didn’t know who the fuck he was!”.
This is a performance project of abject failure.
A tradition of failure that my ‘friend’ and ‘prophet’, of whom I am a maddening ‘disciple’, Artaud, stands accused by Sontag herself in her essay, but yet is redeemed in her preceding discussion and quotation of Jean Cocteau – “the only work which succeeds is that which fails”(xix, Sontag).
Hell, Tim Etchells the director of one of my favourite performance groups ‘Forced Entertainment’ and Matthew Goulish — see above p4 — have dedicated an institute that exists as website to the documentation, study and theorisation of failure —www.institute-of-failure.com.
Fourteen months prior to the performance I was experiencing re-occurring dreams of a world ending, with me, in a shopping complex’s car park, at the base of a building. Trampled and crushed under the weight of the concrete above, that had suddenly collapsed with unimaginable force; I was dead like Freud’s father in my sleeping dreams.
On New Year’s Eve 1999, the year 2000 was not brought in with a bang, but a whimper. No “millennium bug” struck. No apocalypse. No Rapid Eye Movement in the End Of The World As We Know It. As I counted down in the intimate company of musician friends, Leo, Georgina and Genevieve and stood out the front of Newman Street — lying around the corner from Sutherland Street, whose significance in my life was yet to play its fateful card and lies — in the north-west of ‘multi-cultural’ Brunswick.
No drama occurred except for someone — I assume intentionally with good humour — simply turning the streetlights off, and with a pause, turned them back on again. Our hearts were in our mouths, looking, agape with a wonder, awed, wide-eyed in darkness. Then when the light was summoned, with a sigh, we were gone.
Twelve months later, and five months prior to ‘that’ performance — and at this stage I have no idea what I am going to do with myself and the year, but be lost and improvise chances — I am in a car with Phil and Matt on New Year’s Eve at Lake Eildon — a place of significance, that I would return to nearly three years later.
Struck by the lack of water, the terrain had been transformed into Mars on Earth, albeit, with a museum dedicated to all the cans discarded recklessly, that littered the scattered landscape. Performing around a fire, camping under the stars with kangaroo claws, not afraid of our shadows echoing nature — this was a being-becoming–spiritual-sacred.
The sleep of reason.
Monsters.
Frankenstein.
Rosemary’s ‘despicable’ baby.
Sheathed like a butcher stained white, enveloped, in the life-removed-red of blood, flesh and bone realised a shamanic transformation of being- becoming…
Artaud’s To End The Judgement of God.
A witch.
Artaud’s daughters of the heart.
Like some modern day Joan of Arc.
Signalling through the flames … kill …
Hieroglyphic movement-s hypnotised into trance.
Transfixed Artaud with his Balinese Dance-r’s .
Past twelve o’clock.
Everyone’s passed out asleep after exploring, walking, drawing, eating, drinking and ‘tripping-man’ with mushroom tea.
Hippy.
Trying to maintain warmth against the cold, we huddle together, listening to the musical sounds of ‘Godspeed You! Black Emperor’ and their ‘Moya’ from their ‘Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada’ recording a passage, an ominous presence over the dark horizon, and bonnet’s surface, in through the windscreen, across plastic, dusty dashboards and filling aural interiors of ears.
It is the sound of futures waiting to happen.
Alpha.
Omega.
Beginning.
… …
End.
Future is.
…
…all…
All. … ALL …
A favourite piece of graffiti scrawled on a wall in Fitzroy North around the corner from where I live as I write this…
… – or it writes me….past…passed…pass…
Future still, bleak, uncertain and beautiful.
Nine months after this moment in time and four months after the aforementioned performance I am in the studio improvising with Kate Kennedy and some others.
Kate is struck by the quality of the dying afternoon light.
Sunsets with a strange unsettling wind, and clouds look portentous in their appearance and colour.
Black. Red. And grey.
Were they?
Lying in the bed of a trash compactor room, later that night, watching the documentary When We Were Kings about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s classic ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight in Zaire on ABC television, text — now from this moment will be known as ‘tickertape’ irritatingly accompanying what is commonly referred to as ‘the news’ ad nauseum-infinitum — enters the frame across the top of the screen.
A plane.
And.
A building.
One.
Of the World Trade Centre Twin Tower’s in New York City.
Pulse quickening.
The thought.
A once “true” love in that city.
Channel change.
Struck with these images that reel out from the screen into the world full of others.
Hearts beat rapidly in throats.
Open mouths.
Agape.
Wander in and stare at each other.
We are all captured in the screen, with perverse grins in wonder.
And.
Disbelief.
Fascination fascinated.
The pleasure of destruction.
Hollywood’s myths becoming reality.
Is this the end we wanted?
To desire.
Will.
Now, this is shocking and awing.
The images of these poor fucks standing on the observation towers.
Helpless.
Hopeless.
Pondering fate.
Like them.
In praise?
Or blame?
Over and over again.
Wonder.
Like them.
How the fuck is this going to turn out?
Repeat.
Over and over again.
How the fuck can that fire be put out?
Repeat.
Over and over again and again.
What the fuck is going on?
Think.
Repeat repeat.
Repeat.
Thought.
Over and over again and again.
And again.
Cruel.
In ignorance.
And helplessness.
What fire brigade for god and love could possibly extinguish that burning hole eighty stories up in a one hundred story building?
Why the fuck do we need to build skyscrapers for?
My heart sunk when one of these phallic testaments to man began to sink, transforming, disappearing into a mushroom cloud.
New York City of dust.
Traces.
Of memory.
The confusion of those trying to comprehend exactly what was happening was…
Seduced into these destructive images, live, from thousands of kilometre’s away and across the other side of a world.
What was going on?
The Return of the Same.
The Fall.
A modern day fable.
A second coming.
A myth was being constructed before my very eyes.
Live.
On television.
History in the making.
The day the world was changing.
And things would never be the same.
In all lounge rooms.
For free.
Penny’s dropped like that first tower.
America’s empire.
All with it.
Now I felt like I knew what that re-occurring dream was, and that first, original performance.
Is this hell?
I think that is what it was.
When I began to cry.
Terror was truly instilled.
Being.
Condemned.
A repetition.
The same spectacular end.
One, they themselves, like us, had just witnessed.
Only we are safe.
Aren’t we?
A mirror of life’s being becoming death.
Oh the horror.
O!
A reporter.
Humanity.
Herbert Morrison’s plaintive words.
Cried the arrival.
The German zeppelin.
Hindenberg.
Burst into flames.
Over in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
Near.
New York.
Spooked.
Telephone.
Calls.
Mothers.
Watching.
Those images.
Who is going to pay for this transgression?
Us.
Where did it start?
Like this?
Where did this begin?
And the end?
Call.
Name.
Sarah.
A problem.
Later.
Bombing.
Nothing to speak of in the always-already reduced to rubble of Afghanistan.
Words.
There.
She.
Is.
Still.
Breathing.
Air.
Vaporized.
Bodies.
A post-modern 9/11cannibal.
Post-9/11-modern human inhaling metal, glass and debris.
Attached to this function.
The sinthome of Lacanian theory.
A condensed cipher of libidinal attachment.
To the city.
So.
When it disappears.
It will be missed.
Such details.
Bearing witness.
To true love.
The next morning, up all night, not sleeping from watching this same, violent hypnotic, repetition, I tried to glean some kind of knowledge and understanding.
Some form of meaning from the event.
In a trance.
The shocked intimacy of trams.
Was it those people from the Crown Casino at the World Economic Forum S:11 protests last year?
The tension being felt within the presence of those who could be an-other; that is - against US.
The gaze judges.
If you see something report it.
The arrival of a Sri Lankan friend, Ieuan, some months later is palpable.
Was it a Hollywood blockbuster film?
Others don’t know.
Eve-n.
A hell.
A way.
Represent.
Body.
Middle-Eastern Futurists becoming Western technology —-— turning in on itself like a malignant cancer.
Or mobius strip.
The German composer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen considers “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole entire cosmos”.
Is this just like the Matrix?.
A sign post.
But where is the map?
Welcome to the desert of the Real.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Begging — Love — to Differ — as an Artistic Terrorist
Begging — Love — to Differ — as an Artistic Terrorist
The commonality of Le Petit Mort and 11th September 2001 is that they represent the idiom of two sides of the same coin — between their respective antagonisms relative to each other — or the Lacanian topology of the mobius strip. Lacan’s ‘point de captione’ or ‘quilting point’ refers to the nodal point of convergence. In Le Petit Mort this ‘spatializing device’ is literally that of the live performer which situates retroactively and prospectively the signifiers. By this “quilting” or “stitching” in the particular signifying chain, a sense of experience and recognition situates and structures meaning for the subject — as audience-participant. However, the composition of framing the audience in-the-round allows for a sensation of perception like ‘watching a performance of a person watching a performance’ or a ‘seeing-self-seeing’. This circumambiency emphasises the complex layering that occurs in the work, whilst situating the audience as points themselves pertaining to meaning-making. These series of encounters might demonstrate by their pure contingency, the process symbolization depends, defined by a ‘vicious circle of differentiality’ and whose elemental identity is over-determined in their articulation. Between these points, the still ‘free-floating’ mass of meanings ‘circulating’, represents the Lacanian logic of “not-all” — what is not signified in the performance — and begs the question ‘when something is happening, what isn’t happening? — when something is happening?’
The audience is presented with an alternative in either deciding to fortify their alienating ‘invisible’ sphere, or risk stepping out of their isolating comfort zone, toward approaching an-other — the live performer. Within a fucking serious play between excess and a lack of power, Le Petit Mort aspires towards a commitment to a being-in-the-world-for-others-itself in the performance and an acknowledgment of learning to accept a sense of vulnerability.
Not merely an ‘exhilarating confrontation’ imposed on behalf of the live performer akin to a form of audience torture, Le Petit Mort intended to fulfil a ‘sad duty’, evoked by artistic director Tim Etchells from performance group ‘Forced Entertainment’ . Notions of — “it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it” — might then become a ‘shared responsibility’ as contextualised within the performance. In the presentation of Le Petit Mort, both positions might be adopted, simultaneously, by resorting to a dialectical totality — analogous to the mobius strip. Le Petit Mort attempts to make explicit the falsity of each side of the performance divide as being only one sided — i.e. the pretence of the audience being at the ‘controlling’ live performer’s mercy — like little lamb’s to the slaughter. The field of desire in Le Petit Mort suggests otherwise, the two are not opposed in an excess of (un)freedom, that is, the unity of one self and an-other as live performer and audience-participant. Together, we are compromised in a guilty notion that is comprised of the Frankensteinian monster created in the live performance. The audience become complicit by what Zizek refers to as “Hegel’s well-known dictum that Evil resides (also) in the innocent gaze itself which perceives Evil all around” (56, Zizek 2002). The notion of universal “evil eye” manifests itself in Hegel because Evil is a part of God’s creation, evoking Artaud’s Gnostic tendencies. This ‘evil eye’ and its endowment of a fundamental power to separate is the essence of the alienating gaze (114, Zizek 1991).
Without a driving force of difference, there would be no humanity, and as the world is produced by ‘God’, so the divine idea always forms the foundation of what the world as a whole is. ‘God’ creates the world and humanity within it, not of free choice, but because he has to as an Act which is a leap of faith. ‘God’ needs this creation for without it, ‘God’ is not ‘God’, and without our consciousness, ‘God’ is not self-consciousness and therefore doesn’t even fucking exist. The truth of ‘God’ is revealed himself through a mysticism in our belief-s or as per the German Dominican monk Meister Johann Eckhardt’s “Divine knowledge is the negation of negation”.
Hegel quotes from a passage passed on by the German mystic philosopher Franz Xavier von Baader which turns out to be a Hadith saying much loved by the Sufi’s:-
The eye with which God sees me is
The eye with which I see Him,
My eye and His eye are the same…
If He did not exist, nor would I;
If I did not exist, nor would He (218, Hegel 1942).
This is the relation at work within the framework of the performance Le Petit Mort and following the mystic Lutheran shoemaker Jakob Boheme in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy:-
“Nothing can be revealed to itself without opposition. For if there is nothing that opposes it, then it always goes out of itself and never returns to itself again. If it does not return into itself, as into that form which it originated, then it knows nothing of its origin”. (203, Hegel 1955)
In reference to 11th September 2001, the “predominant point of view is that of an innocent gaze confronting unspeakable Evil which struck from the Outside” (56, Zizek 2002) might be applied to the live performer in Le Petit Mort, in its provocation of a passive audience to become active.
Marcelle Marini’s book Jacques Lacan testifies to Lacan’s rejection of the ideal “primum vivere – first, to live” and declaration of the medical precept “primum non nocere – first, no harm” as inane, for the —
“cautiousness of the ‘not to act’ would prevent him from ‘finding, in the very dead end of the situation, the intense strength of the [redeeming] intervention … [A]ny act entails unavoidable risks, for the other and for oneself, all the more so when what is at stake is an operation of truth … access to the desire for (unconscious) knowledge. ‘All knowledge is instituted in a horror that cannot be overcome and concerns the place that hides the secret of sex’, a secret linked to death”. (84-5, Marini 1992).
For one must “pay with his person”, that is “To love thy neighbour as yourself” in Lacanian terms is to recognize in him, as in oneself, the Thing in all its horror — flesh i.e. mortality. We are all subject to being the ‘objet a’ — the cause of the others desire — or in an expression interpreted through a long theological tradition from the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger — a “being-for-death” — separating one from “‘the herd’. The initiated in turn initiates.” (84-5, Marini 1992).
The aim of the masochist is not to generate jouissance in the other but anxiety. The live performer in Le Petit Mort, whilst serving the other by being “tortured” by the “evil” eye of their gaze, defines the rules of servitude and discloses one’s own desire to the other. The object of the anxiety is then, the (over) proximity of the other’s desire and, it is this disclosure which is found to be repulsive (21-2, Zizek 2002).
In Le Petit Mort, the ambiguous relation of its content might be read as a desire to be ‘god’, or “in love”, or have a ‘sexual relation’ — “He wants to fuck himself as his own creation! — or worse still … — me!!! — an audience- participant”. Such is this the extent, that the subject — the live performer — might be identified as a ‘misogynist’, ‘rapist’, or wishes in fact, not to be alive, but dead, or actually believe in these propositions. A certain excess discloses the relevance of live performance in situ, and pity becomes repulsion.
The kinship of Le Petit Mort to 11th September 2001 and such tragedies is that they might be considered the result of an “obscure god who demands human sacrifices” (140, ibid). The live performer plays both ‘God’ and a ‘subject to be sacrificed’, yet also desires an investment of an-other-audience-participant as body and ‘guilty’ flesh, through ‘witnessing as self-sacrifice’. In contemplating Le Petit Mort, one might attribute to this ‘Other’ of the live performer, a naïve, fixed belief as a subject that is “supposed to believe” like a terrorist on a suicide mission, whose reward is so many virgins in the after-life once dead. Zizek beseeches that such transpositions might be in ignorance, for by killing oneself, the subject posits the possibility of the act as a means of verifiable proof, in actu, of resolving the deadlock of doubt (72, ibid). In enacting Le Petit Mort, analogous to following this argument, the live performance ascertains whether :-
1. I am an idea of my being — mortal condition — ontology — (non)existence
2. am I really a ‘god' or is he dead (or am I just a ‘fuck up’ trapped in the past) Or
3. a vague notion of spirituality resides within.
The positing of an audience confirms for the live performer — and therefore a so-called ‘God’ — that both indeed, actually exist, and are not dead. On the contrary ‘we’ are very much alive — albeit in a perverted guise — whilst alluding to ‘God’ and ‘I’-‘me’-‘Craig Darryl Peade’ as live performer is as if being one and the same thing. Unless, however, like Freud’s father — “He who did not know that he was dead” — neither of ‘us’ know that ‘we’ are actually dead!!! Lacan refers to Freud’s ‘dead father’ figure as a ghost returning, surviving “only by virtue of the fact that one does not tell him the truth of which he is unaware” and then proffers “what, then, is to be said of the I, on which this survival depends?” For Lacan, the father’s knowledge of his death posits ‘I’ as dead, by a discourse in which it is “death that sustains existence” (300, Lacan). Le Petit Mort renders its ontology as a ‘problematic history’ and is ‘anchored’ to an inherent doubt of mutual existence between the ‘I’ of ‘me-Craig-Darryl Peade’ and an-Other, particularly those explicitly absent from attending the live performance. This might then constitute “love” in performance, by the ‘will-ingness to be-ing together’ of Le Petit Mort, whose physical presence enacted an ontological affirmation, juxtaposed with absent others who did not attend. This begs the question — “if ‘an-other’ such as ‘you’ were not in attendance, who is it that might not exist? Is it ‘I’-‘me’-‘Craig Darryl Peade’? ‘You’? Or is it both of ‘us’?” For Lacan, this is how “I get there, there where it was: who knew, then, that I was dead?” and proposes that “[W]e cannot ask this question of the subject as ‘I’” because one would lack “everything needed to know the answer”, since it would not be known that one — the subject — were dead and therefore not know that an Other was alive (300, ibid).
Zizek refers to the “infinite task of translation, a constant reworking of one’s own particular position” (66, Zizek 2002), in that relations to an-other(s) consist of one having to relate to oneself and our complicity in perception, first and foremost. Le Petit Mort is paradoxically explicit here, in its attempts to be ambiguous of “who is speaking, and to whom?” — is that ‘Him’, ‘God’, ‘Craig Darryl Peade’, ‘a deluded madman’, ‘his lover — imagined or not’ and “is he really talking to me or addressing some unapprehended ‘other’ of himself or absent-persons — fictional or otherwise — through my presence here, now rendered absent in the performance?”
For Zizek, the appearance of a “violent experience” in the Lacanian Act is when distance between borders (ethical and political) collapse — which was literally the case 11th September 2001. An unbearable tension emanates from the presence of an invisible-absent barrier between live performer and audience in Le Petit Mort, demarcating the “actual universality” of our existence as being that “we share the same antagonism” (66, ibid – my emphasis).The ‘menacing proximity’ in Le Petit Mort is enacted by interventions into the spheres of physical intimacy that might render these ‘invisible barriers’ as ‘present’ and the live performer as ‘superhuman’, by such ‘absences of prohibition’ that seemingly permit ‘anything and everything’. Objective distance is seized by this ‘little piece of the Lacanian ‘Real’ in Le Petit Mort and an-other as audience-participant is attempted to be drawn into this breach by the live performer.
The inherent tension of the internal struggle in Le Petit Mort and its own excess undermines the reliance of a subject’s — namely the audience-participant — un-readiness or inability to confront desire’s consequences by way of satisfaction in the pleasure principle. The insistence to go beyond the reality principle and participate in the performance with an ‘Act’ per se, confers that precisely in moments of such apparent clarity of choice, mystification is total when it comes to the inter-relations ‘between things’. An emerging discourse that questions the dominant relations is induced by such actions, suspending assumed ‘knowledge’ and only acquires import retroactively through the negotiation. In Le Petit Mort, the notion of the live performer as being solely active — ‘in control’ of a ‘passive’ audience is what is at stake. Ultimately, this is the ‘monstrosity of the Act’ in Le Petit Mort and what makes it so ‘catastrophically traumatic’ or ‘Other’, and defined within the limitations of the site-specific-photographic studio — absolutely claustrophobic. The symbolic context conditioning recognition is suspended, disturbed and transformed in each of the subject’s existent relations and alters their relative terms. Notions of what is permissible might become troubling in unpredictable ways and induces a symptomatic anxiety — explicitly demonstrated in subjects averse to the live performance space — physical or otherwise — and fear of Le Petit Mort i.e. terror.
Citing Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Zizek refers to the fanatic who “wrecks the world for love of the other” (84, Zizek 2002), that is, those who act as terrorists, do their will, not out of hatred, but what Zizek cites as Novalis’ “perspicuous observation that what an evil man hates is not the good — he hates evil excessively (the world which he considers evil), and therefore tries to hurt and destroy it as much as possible” (142, ibid). Le Petit Mort is situated in this ‘terrorist’ model, in that it destroys the ‘reality of the world’ and the excessive evil it detests for “love of the other”, by means of an Aristotlean poetics that re-creates the world not necessarily as it is, but as is it ‘ought to be’. Le Petit Mort posits that the contemporary era’s pathology ‘clings to the image’. This scopophilia asserts ‘seeing-vision’ as an ‘alienated knowledge’ inherited from ‘The Fall’, and summed up in the sophistry of Bishop George Berkeley’s famous principle — “esse est percipi” — ‘to be is to be perceived’. Live performance in its necessary proximity to ‘an-other-audience-participant’, yields ‘something beyond’ pure optics by a constitutive force of proprioception. The anonymity of a gaze that objectifies an-other initiates a subject as simultaneously ‘Master-Slave’ in the voyeuristic act. Le Petit Mort plays out the fucking seriously, playful, threat and fears of an-other — not necessarily physically present, but absent — representing this dialectic relation. As opposed to the knowledge that a passive image has no real ability to affect a judgment upon the ‘taboo’ of looking, the subjects of Le Petit Mort — whether live performer or not — become aware that they are being judged, as they themselves judge. As opposed to the relative anonymity of conventional frameworks of collective seeing, — that is, in darkness, — the conspicuous space of the site-specific photographic studio implies a responsibility by the ‘looking act’. This constitutes both the ‘frisson and love’ of Le Petit Mort in the complicity of the work, positing all in attendance as omnipotent, all-seeing ‘God’.
Zizek warns that in ‘approaching limits’, one must be aware of the need to respect the “Other’s radical Otherness” as not simply a being, reduced to the “bearer” of a projected “false knowledge” (67, ibid). For Zizek, the application of “Christ’s famous words about how he has come to bring the sword and division, not unity and peace: out of our very love for humanity” (68, ibid – emphasis in original) is the “line of reasoning”, as there is “the Absolute impenetrable abyss” at the heart of the “Other’s radical Otherness” (67-68, ibid). In Le Petit Mort, an-other is not the same but each similar in their difference, as might be demonstrated by subjective experiences akin to chaotic physics in quantum mechanics’ theory, where no single interpretive perception exists (45-7, Zizek 1991) . This ‘many minds interpretation’, of ‘many parallel worlds’, accords performance with an experimental, ‘scientific consciousness’ and, ultimately, aligns both as spiritual practice of faith in choice — i.e. free(dom-)will.
The commonality of Le Petit Mort and 11th September 2001 is that they represent the idiom of two sides of the same coin — between their respective antagonisms relative to each other — or the Lacanian topology of the mobius strip. Lacan’s ‘point de captione’ or ‘quilting point’ refers to the nodal point of convergence. In Le Petit Mort this ‘spatializing device’ is literally that of the live performer which situates retroactively and prospectively the signifiers. By this “quilting” or “stitching” in the particular signifying chain, a sense of experience and recognition situates and structures meaning for the subject — as audience-participant. However, the composition of framing the audience in-the-round allows for a sensation of perception like ‘watching a performance of a person watching a performance’ or a ‘seeing-self-seeing’. This circumambiency emphasises the complex layering that occurs in the work, whilst situating the audience as points themselves pertaining to meaning-making. These series of encounters might demonstrate by their pure contingency, the process symbolization depends, defined by a ‘vicious circle of differentiality’ and whose elemental identity is over-determined in their articulation. Between these points, the still ‘free-floating’ mass of meanings ‘circulating’, represents the Lacanian logic of “not-all” — what is not signified in the performance — and begs the question ‘when something is happening, what isn’t happening? — when something is happening?’
The audience is presented with an alternative in either deciding to fortify their alienating ‘invisible’ sphere, or risk stepping out of their isolating comfort zone, toward approaching an-other — the live performer. Within a fucking serious play between excess and a lack of power, Le Petit Mort aspires towards a commitment to a being-in-the-world-for-others-itself in the performance and an acknowledgment of learning to accept a sense of vulnerability.
Not merely an ‘exhilarating confrontation’ imposed on behalf of the live performer akin to a form of audience torture, Le Petit Mort intended to fulfil a ‘sad duty’, evoked by artistic director Tim Etchells from performance group ‘Forced Entertainment’ . Notions of — “it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it” — might then become a ‘shared responsibility’ as contextualised within the performance. In the presentation of Le Petit Mort, both positions might be adopted, simultaneously, by resorting to a dialectical totality — analogous to the mobius strip. Le Petit Mort attempts to make explicit the falsity of each side of the performance divide as being only one sided — i.e. the pretence of the audience being at the ‘controlling’ live performer’s mercy — like little lamb’s to the slaughter. The field of desire in Le Petit Mort suggests otherwise, the two are not opposed in an excess of (un)freedom, that is, the unity of one self and an-other as live performer and audience-participant. Together, we are compromised in a guilty notion that is comprised of the Frankensteinian monster created in the live performance. The audience become complicit by what Zizek refers to as “Hegel’s well-known dictum that Evil resides (also) in the innocent gaze itself which perceives Evil all around” (56, Zizek 2002). The notion of universal “evil eye” manifests itself in Hegel because Evil is a part of God’s creation, evoking Artaud’s Gnostic tendencies. This ‘evil eye’ and its endowment of a fundamental power to separate is the essence of the alienating gaze (114, Zizek 1991).
Without a driving force of difference, there would be no humanity, and as the world is produced by ‘God’, so the divine idea always forms the foundation of what the world as a whole is. ‘God’ creates the world and humanity within it, not of free choice, but because he has to as an Act which is a leap of faith. ‘God’ needs this creation for without it, ‘God’ is not ‘God’, and without our consciousness, ‘God’ is not self-consciousness and therefore doesn’t even fucking exist. The truth of ‘God’ is revealed himself through a mysticism in our belief-s or as per the German Dominican monk Meister Johann Eckhardt’s “Divine knowledge is the negation of negation”.
Hegel quotes from a passage passed on by the German mystic philosopher Franz Xavier von Baader which turns out to be a Hadith saying much loved by the Sufi’s:-
The eye with which God sees me is
The eye with which I see Him,
My eye and His eye are the same…
If He did not exist, nor would I;
If I did not exist, nor would He (218, Hegel 1942).
This is the relation at work within the framework of the performance Le Petit Mort and following the mystic Lutheran shoemaker Jakob Boheme in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy:-
“Nothing can be revealed to itself without opposition. For if there is nothing that opposes it, then it always goes out of itself and never returns to itself again. If it does not return into itself, as into that form which it originated, then it knows nothing of its origin”. (203, Hegel 1955)
In reference to 11th September 2001, the “predominant point of view is that of an innocent gaze confronting unspeakable Evil which struck from the Outside” (56, Zizek 2002) might be applied to the live performer in Le Petit Mort, in its provocation of a passive audience to become active.
Marcelle Marini’s book Jacques Lacan testifies to Lacan’s rejection of the ideal “primum vivere – first, to live” and declaration of the medical precept “primum non nocere – first, no harm” as inane, for the —
“cautiousness of the ‘not to act’ would prevent him from ‘finding, in the very dead end of the situation, the intense strength of the [redeeming] intervention … [A]ny act entails unavoidable risks, for the other and for oneself, all the more so when what is at stake is an operation of truth … access to the desire for (unconscious) knowledge. ‘All knowledge is instituted in a horror that cannot be overcome and concerns the place that hides the secret of sex’, a secret linked to death”. (84-5, Marini 1992).
For one must “pay with his person”, that is “To love thy neighbour as yourself” in Lacanian terms is to recognize in him, as in oneself, the Thing in all its horror — flesh i.e. mortality. We are all subject to being the ‘objet a’ — the cause of the others desire — or in an expression interpreted through a long theological tradition from the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger — a “being-for-death” — separating one from “‘the herd’. The initiated in turn initiates.” (84-5, Marini 1992).
The aim of the masochist is not to generate jouissance in the other but anxiety. The live performer in Le Petit Mort, whilst serving the other by being “tortured” by the “evil” eye of their gaze, defines the rules of servitude and discloses one’s own desire to the other. The object of the anxiety is then, the (over) proximity of the other’s desire and, it is this disclosure which is found to be repulsive (21-2, Zizek 2002).
In Le Petit Mort, the ambiguous relation of its content might be read as a desire to be ‘god’, or “in love”, or have a ‘sexual relation’ — “He wants to fuck himself as his own creation! — or worse still … — me!!! — an audience- participant”. Such is this the extent, that the subject — the live performer — might be identified as a ‘misogynist’, ‘rapist’, or wishes in fact, not to be alive, but dead, or actually believe in these propositions. A certain excess discloses the relevance of live performance in situ, and pity becomes repulsion.
The kinship of Le Petit Mort to 11th September 2001 and such tragedies is that they might be considered the result of an “obscure god who demands human sacrifices” (140, ibid). The live performer plays both ‘God’ and a ‘subject to be sacrificed’, yet also desires an investment of an-other-audience-participant as body and ‘guilty’ flesh, through ‘witnessing as self-sacrifice’. In contemplating Le Petit Mort, one might attribute to this ‘Other’ of the live performer, a naïve, fixed belief as a subject that is “supposed to believe” like a terrorist on a suicide mission, whose reward is so many virgins in the after-life once dead. Zizek beseeches that such transpositions might be in ignorance, for by killing oneself, the subject posits the possibility of the act as a means of verifiable proof, in actu, of resolving the deadlock of doubt (72, ibid). In enacting Le Petit Mort, analogous to following this argument, the live performance ascertains whether :-
1. I am an idea of my being — mortal condition — ontology — (non)existence
2. am I really a ‘god' or is he dead (or am I just a ‘fuck up’ trapped in the past) Or
3. a vague notion of spirituality resides within.
The positing of an audience confirms for the live performer — and therefore a so-called ‘God’ — that both indeed, actually exist, and are not dead. On the contrary ‘we’ are very much alive — albeit in a perverted guise — whilst alluding to ‘God’ and ‘I’-‘me’-‘Craig Darryl Peade’ as live performer is as if being one and the same thing. Unless, however, like Freud’s father — “He who did not know that he was dead” — neither of ‘us’ know that ‘we’ are actually dead!!! Lacan refers to Freud’s ‘dead father’ figure as a ghost returning, surviving “only by virtue of the fact that one does not tell him the truth of which he is unaware” and then proffers “what, then, is to be said of the I, on which this survival depends?” For Lacan, the father’s knowledge of his death posits ‘I’ as dead, by a discourse in which it is “death that sustains existence” (300, Lacan). Le Petit Mort renders its ontology as a ‘problematic history’ and is ‘anchored’ to an inherent doubt of mutual existence between the ‘I’ of ‘me-Craig-Darryl Peade’ and an-Other, particularly those explicitly absent from attending the live performance. This might then constitute “love” in performance, by the ‘will-ingness to be-ing together’ of Le Petit Mort, whose physical presence enacted an ontological affirmation, juxtaposed with absent others who did not attend. This begs the question — “if ‘an-other’ such as ‘you’ were not in attendance, who is it that might not exist? Is it ‘I’-‘me’-‘Craig Darryl Peade’? ‘You’? Or is it both of ‘us’?” For Lacan, this is how “I get there, there where it was: who knew, then, that I was dead?” and proposes that “[W]e cannot ask this question of the subject as ‘I’” because one would lack “everything needed to know the answer”, since it would not be known that one — the subject — were dead and therefore not know that an Other was alive (300, ibid).
Zizek refers to the “infinite task of translation, a constant reworking of one’s own particular position” (66, Zizek 2002), in that relations to an-other(s) consist of one having to relate to oneself and our complicity in perception, first and foremost. Le Petit Mort is paradoxically explicit here, in its attempts to be ambiguous of “who is speaking, and to whom?” — is that ‘Him’, ‘God’, ‘Craig Darryl Peade’, ‘a deluded madman’, ‘his lover — imagined or not’ and “is he really talking to me or addressing some unapprehended ‘other’ of himself or absent-persons — fictional or otherwise — through my presence here, now rendered absent in the performance?”
For Zizek, the appearance of a “violent experience” in the Lacanian Act is when distance between borders (ethical and political) collapse — which was literally the case 11th September 2001. An unbearable tension emanates from the presence of an invisible-absent barrier between live performer and audience in Le Petit Mort, demarcating the “actual universality” of our existence as being that “we share the same antagonism” (66, ibid – my emphasis).The ‘menacing proximity’ in Le Petit Mort is enacted by interventions into the spheres of physical intimacy that might render these ‘invisible barriers’ as ‘present’ and the live performer as ‘superhuman’, by such ‘absences of prohibition’ that seemingly permit ‘anything and everything’. Objective distance is seized by this ‘little piece of the Lacanian ‘Real’ in Le Petit Mort and an-other as audience-participant is attempted to be drawn into this breach by the live performer.
The inherent tension of the internal struggle in Le Petit Mort and its own excess undermines the reliance of a subject’s — namely the audience-participant — un-readiness or inability to confront desire’s consequences by way of satisfaction in the pleasure principle. The insistence to go beyond the reality principle and participate in the performance with an ‘Act’ per se, confers that precisely in moments of such apparent clarity of choice, mystification is total when it comes to the inter-relations ‘between things’. An emerging discourse that questions the dominant relations is induced by such actions, suspending assumed ‘knowledge’ and only acquires import retroactively through the negotiation. In Le Petit Mort, the notion of the live performer as being solely active — ‘in control’ of a ‘passive’ audience is what is at stake. Ultimately, this is the ‘monstrosity of the Act’ in Le Petit Mort and what makes it so ‘catastrophically traumatic’ or ‘Other’, and defined within the limitations of the site-specific-photographic studio — absolutely claustrophobic. The symbolic context conditioning recognition is suspended, disturbed and transformed in each of the subject’s existent relations and alters their relative terms. Notions of what is permissible might become troubling in unpredictable ways and induces a symptomatic anxiety — explicitly demonstrated in subjects averse to the live performance space — physical or otherwise — and fear of Le Petit Mort i.e. terror.
Citing Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Zizek refers to the fanatic who “wrecks the world for love of the other” (84, Zizek 2002), that is, those who act as terrorists, do their will, not out of hatred, but what Zizek cites as Novalis’ “perspicuous observation that what an evil man hates is not the good — he hates evil excessively (the world which he considers evil), and therefore tries to hurt and destroy it as much as possible” (142, ibid). Le Petit Mort is situated in this ‘terrorist’ model, in that it destroys the ‘reality of the world’ and the excessive evil it detests for “love of the other”, by means of an Aristotlean poetics that re-creates the world not necessarily as it is, but as is it ‘ought to be’. Le Petit Mort posits that the contemporary era’s pathology ‘clings to the image’. This scopophilia asserts ‘seeing-vision’ as an ‘alienated knowledge’ inherited from ‘The Fall’, and summed up in the sophistry of Bishop George Berkeley’s famous principle — “esse est percipi” — ‘to be is to be perceived’. Live performance in its necessary proximity to ‘an-other-audience-participant’, yields ‘something beyond’ pure optics by a constitutive force of proprioception. The anonymity of a gaze that objectifies an-other initiates a subject as simultaneously ‘Master-Slave’ in the voyeuristic act. Le Petit Mort plays out the fucking seriously, playful, threat and fears of an-other — not necessarily physically present, but absent — representing this dialectic relation. As opposed to the knowledge that a passive image has no real ability to affect a judgment upon the ‘taboo’ of looking, the subjects of Le Petit Mort — whether live performer or not — become aware that they are being judged, as they themselves judge. As opposed to the relative anonymity of conventional frameworks of collective seeing, — that is, in darkness, — the conspicuous space of the site-specific photographic studio implies a responsibility by the ‘looking act’. This constitutes both the ‘frisson and love’ of Le Petit Mort in the complicity of the work, positing all in attendance as omnipotent, all-seeing ‘God’.
Zizek warns that in ‘approaching limits’, one must be aware of the need to respect the “Other’s radical Otherness” as not simply a being, reduced to the “bearer” of a projected “false knowledge” (67, ibid). For Zizek, the application of “Christ’s famous words about how he has come to bring the sword and division, not unity and peace: out of our very love for humanity” (68, ibid – emphasis in original) is the “line of reasoning”, as there is “the Absolute impenetrable abyss” at the heart of the “Other’s radical Otherness” (67-68, ibid). In Le Petit Mort, an-other is not the same but each similar in their difference, as might be demonstrated by subjective experiences akin to chaotic physics in quantum mechanics’ theory, where no single interpretive perception exists (45-7, Zizek 1991) . This ‘many minds interpretation’, of ‘many parallel worlds’, accords performance with an experimental, ‘scientific consciousness’ and, ultimately, aligns both as spiritual practice of faith in choice — i.e. free(dom-)will.
Begging — Love — to Differ — as an Artistic Terrorist
Begging — Love — to Differ — as an Artistic Terrorist
The commonality of Le Petit Mort and 11th September 2001 is that they represent the idiom of two sides of the same coin — between their respective antagonisms relative to each other — or the Lacanian topology of the mobius strip. Lacan’s ‘point de captione’ or ‘quilting point’ refers to the nodal point of convergence. In Le Petit Mort this ‘spatializing device’ is literally that of the live performer which situates retroactively and prospectively the signifiers. By this “quilting” or “stitching” in the particular signifying chain, a sense of experience and recognition situates and structures meaning for the subject — as audience-participant. However, the composition of framing the audience in-the-round allows for a sensation of perception like ‘watching a performance of a person watching a performance’ or a ‘seeing-self-seeing’. This circumambiency emphasises the complex layering that occurs in the work, whilst situating the audience as points themselves pertaining to meaning-making. These series of encounters might demonstrate by their pure contingency, the process symbolization depends, defined by a ‘vicious circle of differentiality’ and whose elemental identity is over-determined in their articulation. Between these points, the still ‘free-floating’ mass of meanings ‘circulating’, represents the Lacanian logic of “not-all” — what is not signified in the performance — and begs the question ‘when something is happening, what isn’t happening? — when something is happening?’
The audience is presented with an alternative in either deciding to fortify their alienating ‘invisible’ sphere, or risk stepping out of their isolating comfort zone, toward approaching an-other — the live performer. Within a fucking serious play between excess and a lack of power, Le Petit Mort aspires towards a commitment to a being-in-the-world-for-others-itself in the performance and an acknowledgment of learning to accept a sense of vulnerability.
Not merely an ‘exhilarating confrontation’ imposed on behalf of the live performer akin to a form of audience torture, Le Petit Mort intended to fulfil a ‘sad duty’, evoked by artistic director Tim Etchells from performance group ‘Forced Entertainment’ . Notions of — “it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it” — might then become a ‘shared responsibility’ as contextualised within the performance. In the presentation of Le Petit Mort, both positions might be adopted, simultaneously, by resorting to a dialectical totality — analogous to the mobius strip. Le Petit Mort attempts to make explicit the falsity of each side of the performance divide as being only one sided — i.e. the pretence of the audience being at the ‘controlling’ live performer’s mercy — like little lamb’s to the slaughter. The field of desire in Le Petit Mort suggests otherwise, the two are not opposed in an excess of (un)freedom, that is, the unity of one self and an-other as live performer and audience-participant. Together, we are compromised in a guilty notion that is comprised of the Frankensteinian monster created in the live performance. The audience become complicit by what Zizek refers to as “Hegel’s well-known dictum that Evil resides (also) in the innocent gaze itself which perceives Evil all around” (56, Zizek 2002). The notion of universal “evil eye” manifests itself in Hegel because Evil is a part of God’s creation, evoking Artaud’s Gnostic tendencies. This ‘evil eye’ and its endowment of a fundamental power to separate is the essence of the alienating gaze (114, Zizek 1991).
Without a driving force of difference, there would be no humanity, and as the world is produced by ‘God’, so the divine idea always forms the foundation of what the world as a whole is. ‘God’ creates the world and humanity within it, not of free choice, but because he has to as an Act which is a leap of faith. ‘God’ needs this creation for without it, ‘God’ is not ‘God’, and without our consciousness, ‘God’ is not self-consciousness and therefore doesn’t even fucking exist. The truth of ‘God’ is revealed himself through a mysticism in our belief-s or as per the German Dominican monk Meister Johann Eckhardt’s “Divine knowledge is the negation of negation”.
Hegel quotes from a passage passed on by the German mystic philosopher Franz Xavier von Baader which turns out to be a Hadith saying much loved by the Sufi’s:-
The eye with which God sees me is
The eye with which I see Him,
My eye and His eye are the same…
If He did not exist, nor would I;
If I did not exist, nor would He (218, Hegel 1942).
This is the relation at work within the framework of the performance Le Petit Mort and following the mystic Lutheran shoemaker Jakob Boheme in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy:-
“Nothing can be revealed to itself without opposition. For if there is nothing that opposes it, then it always goes out of itself and never returns to itself again. If it does not return into itself, as into that form which it originated, then it knows nothing of its origin”. (203, Hegel 1955)
In reference to 11th September 2001, the “predominant point of view is that of an innocent gaze confronting unspeakable Evil which struck from the Outside” (56, Zizek 2002) might be applied to the live performer in Le Petit Mort, in its provocation of a passive audience to become active.
Marcelle Marini’s book Jacques Lacan testifies to Lacan’s rejection of the ideal “primum vivere – first, to live” and declaration of the medical precept “primum non nocere – first, no harm” as inane, for the —
“cautiousness of the ‘not to act’ would prevent him from ‘finding, in the very dead end of the situation, the intense strength of the [redeeming] intervention … [A]ny act entails unavoidable risks, for the other and for oneself, all the more so when what is at stake is an operation of truth … access to the desire for (unconscious) knowledge. ‘All knowledge is instituted in a horror that cannot be overcome and concerns the place that hides the secret of sex’, a secret linked to death”. (84-5, Marini 1992).
For one must “pay with his person”, that is “To love thy neighbour as yourself” in Lacanian terms is to recognize in him, as in oneself, the Thing in all its horror — flesh i.e. mortality. We are all subject to being the ‘objet a’ — the cause of the others desire — or in an expression interpreted through a long theological tradition from the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger — a “being-for-death” — separating one from “‘the herd’. The initiated in turn initiates.” (84-5, Marini 1992).
The aim of the masochist is not to generate jouissance in the other but anxiety. The live performer in Le Petit Mort, whilst serving the other by being “tortured” by the “evil” eye of their gaze, defines the rules of servitude and discloses one’s own desire to the other. The object of the anxiety is then, the (over) proximity of the other’s desire and, it is this disclosure which is found to be repulsive (21-2, Zizek 2002).
In Le Petit Mort, the ambiguous relation of its content might be read as a desire to be ‘god’, or “in love”, or have a ‘sexual relation’ — “He wants to fuck himself as his own creation! — or worse still … — me!!! — an audience- participant”. Such is this the extent, that the subject — the live performer — might be identified as a ‘misogynist’, ‘rapist’, or wishes in fact, not to be alive, but dead, or actually believe in these propositions. A certain excess discloses the relevance of live performance in situ, and pity becomes repulsion.
The kinship of Le Petit Mort to 11th September 2001 and such tragedies is that they might be considered the result of an “obscure god who demands human sacrifices” (140, ibid). The live performer plays both ‘God’ and a ‘subject to be sacrificed’, yet also desires an investment of an-other-audience-participant as body and ‘guilty’ flesh, through ‘witnessing as self-sacrifice’. In contemplating Le Petit Mort, one might attribute to this ‘Other’ of the live performer, a naïve, fixed belief as a subject that is “supposed to believe” like a terrorist on a suicide mission, whose reward is so many virgins in the after-life once dead. Zizek beseeches that such transpositions might be in ignorance, for by killing oneself, the subject posits the possibility of the act as a means of verifiable proof, in actu, of resolving the deadlock of doubt (72, ibid). In enacting Le Petit Mort, analogous to following this argument, the live performance ascertains whether :-
1. I am an idea of my being — mortal condition — ontology — (non)existence
2. am I really a ‘god' or is he dead (or am I just a ‘fuck up’ trapped in the past) Or
3. a vague notion of spirituality resides within.
The positing of an audience confirms for the live performer — and therefore a so-called ‘God’ — that both indeed, actually exist, and are not dead. On the contrary ‘we’ are very much alive — albeit in a perverted guise — whilst alluding to ‘God’ and ‘I’-‘me’-‘Craig Darryl Peade’ as live performer is as if being one and the same thing. Unless, however, like Freud’s father — “He who did not know that he was dead” — neither of ‘us’ know that ‘we’ are actually dead!!! Lacan refers to Freud’s ‘dead father’ figure as a ghost returning, surviving “only by virtue of the fact that one does not tell him the truth of which he is unaware” and then proffers “what, then, is to be said of the I, on which this survival depends?” For Lacan, the father’s knowledge of his death posits ‘I’ as dead, by a discourse in which it is “death that sustains existence” (300, Lacan). Le Petit Mort renders its ontology as a ‘problematic history’ and is ‘anchored’ to an inherent doubt of mutual existence between the ‘I’ of ‘me-Craig-Darryl Peade’ and an-Other, particularly those explicitly absent from attending the live performance. This might then constitute “love” in performance, by the ‘will-ingness to be-ing together’ of Le Petit Mort, whose physical presence enacted an ontological affirmation, juxtaposed with absent others who did not attend. This begs the question — “if ‘an-other’ such as ‘you’ were not in attendance, who is it that might not exist? Is it ‘I’-‘me’-‘Craig Darryl Peade’? ‘You’? Or is it both of ‘us’?” For Lacan, this is how “I get there, there where it was: who knew, then, that I was dead?” and proposes that “[W]e cannot ask this question of the subject as ‘I’” because one would lack “everything needed to know the answer”, since it would not be known that one — the subject — were dead and therefore not know that an Other was alive (300, ibid).
Zizek refers to the “infinite task of translation, a constant reworking of one’s own particular position” (66, Zizek 2002), in that relations to an-other(s) consist of one having to relate to oneself and our complicity in perception, first and foremost. Le Petit Mort is paradoxically explicit here, in its attempts to be ambiguous of “who is speaking, and to whom?” — is that ‘Him’, ‘God’, ‘Craig Darryl Peade’, ‘a deluded madman’, ‘his lover — imagined or not’ and “is he really talking to me or addressing some unapprehended ‘other’ of himself or absent-persons — fictional or otherwise — through my presence here, now rendered absent in the performance?”
For Zizek, the appearance of a “violent experience” in the Lacanian Act is when distance between borders (ethical and political) collapse — which was literally the case 11th September 2001. An unbearable tension emanates from the presence of an invisible-absent barrier between live performer and audience in Le Petit Mort, demarcating the “actual universality” of our existence as being that “we share the same antagonism” (66, ibid – my emphasis).The ‘menacing proximity’ in Le Petit Mort is enacted by interventions into the spheres of physical intimacy that might render these ‘invisible barriers’ as ‘present’ and the live performer as ‘superhuman’, by such ‘absences of prohibition’ that seemingly permit ‘anything and everything’. Objective distance is seized by this ‘little piece of the Lacanian ‘Real’ in Le Petit Mort and an-other as audience-participant is attempted to be drawn into this breach by the live performer.
The inherent tension of the internal struggle in Le Petit Mort and its own excess undermines the reliance of a subject’s — namely the audience-participant — un-readiness or inability to confront desire’s consequences by way of satisfaction in the pleasure principle. The insistence to go beyond the reality principle and participate in the performance with an ‘Act’ per se, confers that precisely in moments of such apparent clarity of choice, mystification is total when it comes to the inter-relations ‘between things’. An emerging discourse that questions the dominant relations is induced by such actions, suspending assumed ‘knowledge’ and only acquires import retroactively through the negotiation. In Le Petit Mort, the notion of the live performer as being solely active — ‘in control’ of a ‘passive’ audience is what is at stake. Ultimately, this is the ‘monstrosity of the Act’ in Le Petit Mort and what makes it so ‘catastrophically traumatic’ or ‘Other’, and defined within the limitations of the site-specific-photographic studio — absolutely claustrophobic. The symbolic context conditioning recognition is suspended, disturbed and transformed in each of the subject’s existent relations and alters their relative terms. Notions of what is permissible might become troubling in unpredictable ways and induces a symptomatic anxiety — explicitly demonstrated in subjects averse to the live performance space — physical or otherwise — and fear of Le Petit Mort i.e. terror.
Citing Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Zizek refers to the fanatic who “wrecks the world for love of the other” (84, Zizek 2002), that is, those who act as terrorists, do their will, not out of hatred, but what Zizek cites as Novalis’ “perspicuous observation that what an evil man hates is not the good — he hates evil excessively (the world which he considers evil), and therefore tries to hurt and destroy it as much as possible” (142, ibid). Le Petit Mort is situated in this ‘terrorist’ model, in that it destroys the ‘reality of the world’ and the excessive evil it detests for “love of the other”, by means of an Aristotlean poetics that re-creates the world not necessarily as it is, but as is it ‘ought to be’. Le Petit Mort posits that the contemporary era’s pathology ‘clings to the image’. This scopophilia asserts ‘seeing-vision’ as an ‘alienated knowledge’ inherited from ‘The Fall’, and summed up in the sophistry of Bishop George Berkeley’s famous principle — “esse est percipi” — ‘to be is to be perceived’. Live performance in its necessary proximity to ‘an-other-audience-participant’, yields ‘something beyond’ pure optics by a constitutive force of proprioception. The anonymity of a gaze that objectifies an-other initiates a subject as simultaneously ‘Master-Slave’ in the voyeuristic act. Le Petit Mort plays out the fucking seriously, playful, threat and fears of an-other — not necessarily physically present, but absent — representing this dialectic relation. As opposed to the knowledge that a passive image has no real ability to affect a judgment upon the ‘taboo’ of looking, the subjects of Le Petit Mort — whether live performer or not — become aware that they are being judged, as they themselves judge. As opposed to the relative anonymity of conventional frameworks of collective seeing, — that is, in darkness, — the conspicuous space of the site-specific photographic studio implies a responsibility by the ‘looking act’. This constitutes both the ‘frisson and love’ of Le Petit Mort in the complicity of the work, positing all in attendance as omnipotent, all-seeing ‘God’.
Zizek warns that in ‘approaching limits’, one must be aware of the need to respect the “Other’s radical Otherness” as not simply a being, reduced to the “bearer” of a projected “false knowledge” (67, ibid). For Zizek, the application of “Christ’s famous words about how he has come to bring the sword and division, not unity and peace: out of our very love for humanity” (68, ibid – emphasis in original) is the “line of reasoning”, as there is “the Absolute impenetrable abyss” at the heart of the “Other’s radical Otherness” (67-68, ibid). In Le Petit Mort, an-other is not the same but each similar in their difference, as might be demonstrated by subjective experiences akin to chaotic physics in quantum mechanics’ theory, where no single interpretive perception exists (45-7, Zizek 1991) . This ‘many minds interpretation’, of ‘many parallel worlds’, accords performance with an experimental, ‘scientific consciousness’ and, ultimately, aligns both as spiritual practice of faith in choice — i.e. free(dom-)will.
The commonality of Le Petit Mort and 11th September 2001 is that they represent the idiom of two sides of the same coin — between their respective antagonisms relative to each other — or the Lacanian topology of the mobius strip. Lacan’s ‘point de captione’ or ‘quilting point’ refers to the nodal point of convergence. In Le Petit Mort this ‘spatializing device’ is literally that of the live performer which situates retroactively and prospectively the signifiers. By this “quilting” or “stitching” in the particular signifying chain, a sense of experience and recognition situates and structures meaning for the subject — as audience-participant. However, the composition of framing the audience in-the-round allows for a sensation of perception like ‘watching a performance of a person watching a performance’ or a ‘seeing-self-seeing’. This circumambiency emphasises the complex layering that occurs in the work, whilst situating the audience as points themselves pertaining to meaning-making. These series of encounters might demonstrate by their pure contingency, the process symbolization depends, defined by a ‘vicious circle of differentiality’ and whose elemental identity is over-determined in their articulation. Between these points, the still ‘free-floating’ mass of meanings ‘circulating’, represents the Lacanian logic of “not-all” — what is not signified in the performance — and begs the question ‘when something is happening, what isn’t happening? — when something is happening?’
The audience is presented with an alternative in either deciding to fortify their alienating ‘invisible’ sphere, or risk stepping out of their isolating comfort zone, toward approaching an-other — the live performer. Within a fucking serious play between excess and a lack of power, Le Petit Mort aspires towards a commitment to a being-in-the-world-for-others-itself in the performance and an acknowledgment of learning to accept a sense of vulnerability.
Not merely an ‘exhilarating confrontation’ imposed on behalf of the live performer akin to a form of audience torture, Le Petit Mort intended to fulfil a ‘sad duty’, evoked by artistic director Tim Etchells from performance group ‘Forced Entertainment’ . Notions of — “it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it” — might then become a ‘shared responsibility’ as contextualised within the performance. In the presentation of Le Petit Mort, both positions might be adopted, simultaneously, by resorting to a dialectical totality — analogous to the mobius strip. Le Petit Mort attempts to make explicit the falsity of each side of the performance divide as being only one sided — i.e. the pretence of the audience being at the ‘controlling’ live performer’s mercy — like little lamb’s to the slaughter. The field of desire in Le Petit Mort suggests otherwise, the two are not opposed in an excess of (un)freedom, that is, the unity of one self and an-other as live performer and audience-participant. Together, we are compromised in a guilty notion that is comprised of the Frankensteinian monster created in the live performance. The audience become complicit by what Zizek refers to as “Hegel’s well-known dictum that Evil resides (also) in the innocent gaze itself which perceives Evil all around” (56, Zizek 2002). The notion of universal “evil eye” manifests itself in Hegel because Evil is a part of God’s creation, evoking Artaud’s Gnostic tendencies. This ‘evil eye’ and its endowment of a fundamental power to separate is the essence of the alienating gaze (114, Zizek 1991).
Without a driving force of difference, there would be no humanity, and as the world is produced by ‘God’, so the divine idea always forms the foundation of what the world as a whole is. ‘God’ creates the world and humanity within it, not of free choice, but because he has to as an Act which is a leap of faith. ‘God’ needs this creation for without it, ‘God’ is not ‘God’, and without our consciousness, ‘God’ is not self-consciousness and therefore doesn’t even fucking exist. The truth of ‘God’ is revealed himself through a mysticism in our belief-s or as per the German Dominican monk Meister Johann Eckhardt’s “Divine knowledge is the negation of negation”.
Hegel quotes from a passage passed on by the German mystic philosopher Franz Xavier von Baader which turns out to be a Hadith saying much loved by the Sufi’s:-
The eye with which God sees me is
The eye with which I see Him,
My eye and His eye are the same…
If He did not exist, nor would I;
If I did not exist, nor would He (218, Hegel 1942).
This is the relation at work within the framework of the performance Le Petit Mort and following the mystic Lutheran shoemaker Jakob Boheme in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy:-
“Nothing can be revealed to itself without opposition. For if there is nothing that opposes it, then it always goes out of itself and never returns to itself again. If it does not return into itself, as into that form which it originated, then it knows nothing of its origin”. (203, Hegel 1955)
In reference to 11th September 2001, the “predominant point of view is that of an innocent gaze confronting unspeakable Evil which struck from the Outside” (56, Zizek 2002) might be applied to the live performer in Le Petit Mort, in its provocation of a passive audience to become active.
Marcelle Marini’s book Jacques Lacan testifies to Lacan’s rejection of the ideal “primum vivere – first, to live” and declaration of the medical precept “primum non nocere – first, no harm” as inane, for the —
“cautiousness of the ‘not to act’ would prevent him from ‘finding, in the very dead end of the situation, the intense strength of the [redeeming] intervention … [A]ny act entails unavoidable risks, for the other and for oneself, all the more so when what is at stake is an operation of truth … access to the desire for (unconscious) knowledge. ‘All knowledge is instituted in a horror that cannot be overcome and concerns the place that hides the secret of sex’, a secret linked to death”. (84-5, Marini 1992).
For one must “pay with his person”, that is “To love thy neighbour as yourself” in Lacanian terms is to recognize in him, as in oneself, the Thing in all its horror — flesh i.e. mortality. We are all subject to being the ‘objet a’ — the cause of the others desire — or in an expression interpreted through a long theological tradition from the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger — a “being-for-death” — separating one from “‘the herd’. The initiated in turn initiates.” (84-5, Marini 1992).
The aim of the masochist is not to generate jouissance in the other but anxiety. The live performer in Le Petit Mort, whilst serving the other by being “tortured” by the “evil” eye of their gaze, defines the rules of servitude and discloses one’s own desire to the other. The object of the anxiety is then, the (over) proximity of the other’s desire and, it is this disclosure which is found to be repulsive (21-2, Zizek 2002).
In Le Petit Mort, the ambiguous relation of its content might be read as a desire to be ‘god’, or “in love”, or have a ‘sexual relation’ — “He wants to fuck himself as his own creation! — or worse still … — me!!! — an audience- participant”. Such is this the extent, that the subject — the live performer — might be identified as a ‘misogynist’, ‘rapist’, or wishes in fact, not to be alive, but dead, or actually believe in these propositions. A certain excess discloses the relevance of live performance in situ, and pity becomes repulsion.
The kinship of Le Petit Mort to 11th September 2001 and such tragedies is that they might be considered the result of an “obscure god who demands human sacrifices” (140, ibid). The live performer plays both ‘God’ and a ‘subject to be sacrificed’, yet also desires an investment of an-other-audience-participant as body and ‘guilty’ flesh, through ‘witnessing as self-sacrifice’. In contemplating Le Petit Mort, one might attribute to this ‘Other’ of the live performer, a naïve, fixed belief as a subject that is “supposed to believe” like a terrorist on a suicide mission, whose reward is so many virgins in the after-life once dead. Zizek beseeches that such transpositions might be in ignorance, for by killing oneself, the subject posits the possibility of the act as a means of verifiable proof, in actu, of resolving the deadlock of doubt (72, ibid). In enacting Le Petit Mort, analogous to following this argument, the live performance ascertains whether :-
1. I am an idea of my being — mortal condition — ontology — (non)existence
2. am I really a ‘god' or is he dead (or am I just a ‘fuck up’ trapped in the past) Or
3. a vague notion of spirituality resides within.
The positing of an audience confirms for the live performer — and therefore a so-called ‘God’ — that both indeed, actually exist, and are not dead. On the contrary ‘we’ are very much alive — albeit in a perverted guise — whilst alluding to ‘God’ and ‘I’-‘me’-‘Craig Darryl Peade’ as live performer is as if being one and the same thing. Unless, however, like Freud’s father — “He who did not know that he was dead” — neither of ‘us’ know that ‘we’ are actually dead!!! Lacan refers to Freud’s ‘dead father’ figure as a ghost returning, surviving “only by virtue of the fact that one does not tell him the truth of which he is unaware” and then proffers “what, then, is to be said of the I, on which this survival depends?” For Lacan, the father’s knowledge of his death posits ‘I’ as dead, by a discourse in which it is “death that sustains existence” (300, Lacan). Le Petit Mort renders its ontology as a ‘problematic history’ and is ‘anchored’ to an inherent doubt of mutual existence between the ‘I’ of ‘me-Craig-Darryl Peade’ and an-Other, particularly those explicitly absent from attending the live performance. This might then constitute “love” in performance, by the ‘will-ingness to be-ing together’ of Le Petit Mort, whose physical presence enacted an ontological affirmation, juxtaposed with absent others who did not attend. This begs the question — “if ‘an-other’ such as ‘you’ were not in attendance, who is it that might not exist? Is it ‘I’-‘me’-‘Craig Darryl Peade’? ‘You’? Or is it both of ‘us’?” For Lacan, this is how “I get there, there where it was: who knew, then, that I was dead?” and proposes that “[W]e cannot ask this question of the subject as ‘I’” because one would lack “everything needed to know the answer”, since it would not be known that one — the subject — were dead and therefore not know that an Other was alive (300, ibid).
Zizek refers to the “infinite task of translation, a constant reworking of one’s own particular position” (66, Zizek 2002), in that relations to an-other(s) consist of one having to relate to oneself and our complicity in perception, first and foremost. Le Petit Mort is paradoxically explicit here, in its attempts to be ambiguous of “who is speaking, and to whom?” — is that ‘Him’, ‘God’, ‘Craig Darryl Peade’, ‘a deluded madman’, ‘his lover — imagined or not’ and “is he really talking to me or addressing some unapprehended ‘other’ of himself or absent-persons — fictional or otherwise — through my presence here, now rendered absent in the performance?”
For Zizek, the appearance of a “violent experience” in the Lacanian Act is when distance between borders (ethical and political) collapse — which was literally the case 11th September 2001. An unbearable tension emanates from the presence of an invisible-absent barrier between live performer and audience in Le Petit Mort, demarcating the “actual universality” of our existence as being that “we share the same antagonism” (66, ibid – my emphasis).The ‘menacing proximity’ in Le Petit Mort is enacted by interventions into the spheres of physical intimacy that might render these ‘invisible barriers’ as ‘present’ and the live performer as ‘superhuman’, by such ‘absences of prohibition’ that seemingly permit ‘anything and everything’. Objective distance is seized by this ‘little piece of the Lacanian ‘Real’ in Le Petit Mort and an-other as audience-participant is attempted to be drawn into this breach by the live performer.
The inherent tension of the internal struggle in Le Petit Mort and its own excess undermines the reliance of a subject’s — namely the audience-participant — un-readiness or inability to confront desire’s consequences by way of satisfaction in the pleasure principle. The insistence to go beyond the reality principle and participate in the performance with an ‘Act’ per se, confers that precisely in moments of such apparent clarity of choice, mystification is total when it comes to the inter-relations ‘between things’. An emerging discourse that questions the dominant relations is induced by such actions, suspending assumed ‘knowledge’ and only acquires import retroactively through the negotiation. In Le Petit Mort, the notion of the live performer as being solely active — ‘in control’ of a ‘passive’ audience is what is at stake. Ultimately, this is the ‘monstrosity of the Act’ in Le Petit Mort and what makes it so ‘catastrophically traumatic’ or ‘Other’, and defined within the limitations of the site-specific-photographic studio — absolutely claustrophobic. The symbolic context conditioning recognition is suspended, disturbed and transformed in each of the subject’s existent relations and alters their relative terms. Notions of what is permissible might become troubling in unpredictable ways and induces a symptomatic anxiety — explicitly demonstrated in subjects averse to the live performance space — physical or otherwise — and fear of Le Petit Mort i.e. terror.
Citing Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Zizek refers to the fanatic who “wrecks the world for love of the other” (84, Zizek 2002), that is, those who act as terrorists, do their will, not out of hatred, but what Zizek cites as Novalis’ “perspicuous observation that what an evil man hates is not the good — he hates evil excessively (the world which he considers evil), and therefore tries to hurt and destroy it as much as possible” (142, ibid). Le Petit Mort is situated in this ‘terrorist’ model, in that it destroys the ‘reality of the world’ and the excessive evil it detests for “love of the other”, by means of an Aristotlean poetics that re-creates the world not necessarily as it is, but as is it ‘ought to be’. Le Petit Mort posits that the contemporary era’s pathology ‘clings to the image’. This scopophilia asserts ‘seeing-vision’ as an ‘alienated knowledge’ inherited from ‘The Fall’, and summed up in the sophistry of Bishop George Berkeley’s famous principle — “esse est percipi” — ‘to be is to be perceived’. Live performance in its necessary proximity to ‘an-other-audience-participant’, yields ‘something beyond’ pure optics by a constitutive force of proprioception. The anonymity of a gaze that objectifies an-other initiates a subject as simultaneously ‘Master-Slave’ in the voyeuristic act. Le Petit Mort plays out the fucking seriously, playful, threat and fears of an-other — not necessarily physically present, but absent — representing this dialectic relation. As opposed to the knowledge that a passive image has no real ability to affect a judgment upon the ‘taboo’ of looking, the subjects of Le Petit Mort — whether live performer or not — become aware that they are being judged, as they themselves judge. As opposed to the relative anonymity of conventional frameworks of collective seeing, — that is, in darkness, — the conspicuous space of the site-specific photographic studio implies a responsibility by the ‘looking act’. This constitutes both the ‘frisson and love’ of Le Petit Mort in the complicity of the work, positing all in attendance as omnipotent, all-seeing ‘God’.
Zizek warns that in ‘approaching limits’, one must be aware of the need to respect the “Other’s radical Otherness” as not simply a being, reduced to the “bearer” of a projected “false knowledge” (67, ibid). For Zizek, the application of “Christ’s famous words about how he has come to bring the sword and division, not unity and peace: out of our very love for humanity” (68, ibid – emphasis in original) is the “line of reasoning”, as there is “the Absolute impenetrable abyss” at the heart of the “Other’s radical Otherness” (67-68, ibid). In Le Petit Mort, an-other is not the same but each similar in their difference, as might be demonstrated by subjective experiences akin to chaotic physics in quantum mechanics’ theory, where no single interpretive perception exists (45-7, Zizek 1991) . This ‘many minds interpretation’, of ‘many parallel worlds’, accords performance with an experimental, ‘scientific consciousness’ and, ultimately, aligns both as spiritual practice of faith in choice — i.e. free(dom-)will.
The Act of Faith in Trusting Madness as Freedom — or Am I the Madman Searching under a Strong Light?
The Act of Faith in Trusting Madness as Freedom — or Am I the Madman Searching under a Strong Light?
Examining “the great American tradition of Westerns, admired by Alain Badiou as the great genre of ethical courage” (73, Zizek 2002 - emphasis in the original), Zizek refers to the structure of displaced decisions and when a “key Act is performed not by the central character who appears to be the focus of the ethical ordeal, but by a secondary character” (74, ibid). Le Petit Mort educes this quality of a ‘secondary character’ by soliciting the audience to have the courage to question their position within the performance and constitute an idea of the Hegelian divine gift — the ‘Beautiful Soul’ that is tempted to participate in a spirit of freedom or madness.
The key Act ‘doubles’ when a space is placed for it to be performed not by the ‘designated’ live performer, but the audience’s engagement .This is the ‘work of the work’ in Le Petit Mort substantiated in:- refusals to subject oneself to the performance environment; a kiss from someone’s lips; a caressing brush of the hair, off the forehead, by the fingers of audience members hands; the audience’s mimicry of the live performer’s movement in the head, tongue, hands, fingers or sounds and words; and even in sheer physical exertion — a sprinting run around the park block! — these are just some of the audience behaviour encountered prior to, during or following the live performance; attesting to effectuations and liminal qualities of time in Le Petit Mort.
“An act always involves a radical risk, what Derrida, following Kierkegaard, called the madness of a decision: it is to step into the open with no guarantee about the final outcome … an Act retroactively changes the very co-ordinates it intervenes” (152, ibid)
Like the superficial example of choosing to look into a ‘Lacanian’ theoretical mirror and responding “FUCKING HELL!-HOLY SHIT!!! FUCKSHITFUCK — I DIDN’T KNOW I LOOKED LIKE THAT … that I WAS looking like that …” — the live performance of Le Petit Mort approaches what might be — the (im)possible of someone’s act.
Following Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” in the book Fear and Trembling, Abraham in the Christian Holy Bible serves up his and Sarah’s only son Isaac for sacrifice, to prove a faith in God which is akin to the Russian word ‘Pravda’ — a “self relating truth” (81, ibid).This notion becomes evident in Le Petit Mort, as there is no guarantee that this — its ‘Truth’ — will succeed in asserting itself at the level of factual transference between the live performer and audience (81, ibid) nor these words here now to you as ‘dear reader’. The Act of trust in an intuitive philosophy that ‘spoke’ or insisted — begot from the Japanese dance form — Butoh, Artaud and French theorist Roland Barthes notions in the essay ‘Death to the Author’ i.e. beyond ‘I’-me-myself-Craig Darryl Peade — influenced the aesthetics of Le Petit Mort as a work that will ‘make itself’ with the audience-participant, as opposed to me just simply ‘making the work’.
Le Petit Mort tempts a “gesture of radical and violent simplification” from the an-other-audience-participant, not unlike the fundamental cut of the “proverbial Gordian knot” (101, ibid) Zizek refers. Evoking the Marquis de Sade’s ‘Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man’ — positing understanding as simplification — Le Petit Mort conspires for an-other-audience-participant to act within the complex event and verify together our corporeal existence beyond a ‘deadly’ gaze. Paraphrasing the French Revolution leader — subsequently implicated in the ‘Reign of Terror’ — Maximilien Robespierre, Zizek declares that “those who oppose the Act as such … want an Act without the Act” (153, ibid). Transposed onto live performance, this Act becomes akin to its live-ness that must be ‘tempered by invisible barriers’ or negated by the ‘novel’ mediatisations permeating contemporary artistic practices. Attitudes embracing image-technology for its own sake, exposes live performance to congealed audiences, whose experience is informed by slavishly worshipping at the ‘altar’ of ubiquitous, virtual images. Worse still, wooden performances set in concrete, owing to these ‘state of the art’ distractions, act as a crutch for performers who are metaphorically — and might as well be as good as — dead from a lack of vitality, that is, life.
Le Petit Mort is a metaphorically, suicidal “ecstatic transgression” — to evoke Zizek’s citing of Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (98, ibid) — in a situation which is ‘always already too complex’ — we don’t really know who the fuck each — any of us — really are – let alone the closest to us – the ‘self’.
Within the enclosure of the performance’s framing devices, the limits of in-and ex-clusion might be renegotiated by a knowledge-becoming-aware of our being — “we are instruments of the Other’s jouissance”. Relations might then be rearticulated by reconsidering the specific, structural conditions that are contingent and configured within fields (96, ibid) specific to Le Petit Mort. Together, the authenticity of the ‘self’ is ‘freed’ and contextualised by the constitutive acts apparent to, or within performance. The necessity of a decision — that is, an intervention ‘not of one’s own making’ — in representation and practice is ‘without an intention’ proper, and as a consequence one becomes ‘not oneself’ — evoking Richard Schechner’s ‘double negative’ of “not me … not not me”’ theory following from psycho-analyst Donald Winnicott (112, Schechner) — or ‘more-self’ in Goulish’s appropriation of the Wooster Group’s terms (See below page 77). Provocation becomes confused with confrontation, when an audience-participant seemingly has no choice but to act, as one draws a line — even if a ‘passivity’, by refusal to participate — and take full responsibility. Performing is enacting an active attitude of risk, combining voluntarism with a fundamental fatalism in that one acts, hopes and trusts things will be ‘OKay’, ‘all right’, or ‘safe’ for the live performer of Le Petit Mort and audience-participant alike i.e. have faith in belief
“There is a risk involved, but in the present circumstances … believe it is a risk worth running” (83, Artaud 1958).
The hidden complexities of the two poles that support and reproduce each other within Le Petit Mort and 11th September 2001 have a close connection between Hegel’s opposition of Enlightenment and Faith in Phenomenology of the Spirit. This might be perceived as the repression and exclusion common to the same symptomatic anxiety — whose antagonistic and traumatic feature resides within the always already alienated subject. Ultimately, there is nothing beneath these so-called deceptive appearances other than a lack of inner form and identity — Lyotard’s “bad form” of being — a formlessness, that is an ‘always already’, empty power and its occupancy has to be accepted within the so-called ‘logic of castration’ i.e. trepidation, fear and anxiety or terror. To acquire meaning from existence, an-other is required to be present. The confronting, radical contingency of the Lacanian Act and Le Petit Mort is “the ultimate abyss of freewill, the imponderable fact of ‘I did it because I did it!’ which resits … explanation” (137, ibid) — from German philosopher F.W.J von Schelling; alludes to a concept of the Hegelian Gnostic God previously referred above. Despite being critically derived in opposition to a pan-logical idealism, the Hegelian universal, logical, system is rendered impotent. Without the supplementary, ‘irrational’ act of pure Will in order to actualize itself — positing Hercalitus’ notion of “in differing, it agrees with itself” (198, Wilson), Lacanian theory’s mobius strip as topological subjectivity; or extimite; and the ‘coin idiom’— Le Petit Mort ceases to exist, if it were not for an-other-audience-participant-you, that is, ultimately, essential, to its enactment.
Examining “the great American tradition of Westerns, admired by Alain Badiou as the great genre of ethical courage” (73, Zizek 2002 - emphasis in the original), Zizek refers to the structure of displaced decisions and when a “key Act is performed not by the central character who appears to be the focus of the ethical ordeal, but by a secondary character” (74, ibid). Le Petit Mort educes this quality of a ‘secondary character’ by soliciting the audience to have the courage to question their position within the performance and constitute an idea of the Hegelian divine gift — the ‘Beautiful Soul’ that is tempted to participate in a spirit of freedom or madness.
The key Act ‘doubles’ when a space is placed for it to be performed not by the ‘designated’ live performer, but the audience’s engagement .This is the ‘work of the work’ in Le Petit Mort substantiated in:- refusals to subject oneself to the performance environment; a kiss from someone’s lips; a caressing brush of the hair, off the forehead, by the fingers of audience members hands; the audience’s mimicry of the live performer’s movement in the head, tongue, hands, fingers or sounds and words; and even in sheer physical exertion — a sprinting run around the park block! — these are just some of the audience behaviour encountered prior to, during or following the live performance; attesting to effectuations and liminal qualities of time in Le Petit Mort.
“An act always involves a radical risk, what Derrida, following Kierkegaard, called the madness of a decision: it is to step into the open with no guarantee about the final outcome … an Act retroactively changes the very co-ordinates it intervenes” (152, ibid)
Like the superficial example of choosing to look into a ‘Lacanian’ theoretical mirror and responding “FUCKING HELL!-HOLY SHIT!!! FUCKSHITFUCK — I DIDN’T KNOW I LOOKED LIKE THAT … that I WAS looking like that …” — the live performance of Le Petit Mort approaches what might be — the (im)possible of someone’s act.
Following Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” in the book Fear and Trembling, Abraham in the Christian Holy Bible serves up his and Sarah’s only son Isaac for sacrifice, to prove a faith in God which is akin to the Russian word ‘Pravda’ — a “self relating truth” (81, ibid).This notion becomes evident in Le Petit Mort, as there is no guarantee that this — its ‘Truth’ — will succeed in asserting itself at the level of factual transference between the live performer and audience (81, ibid) nor these words here now to you as ‘dear reader’. The Act of trust in an intuitive philosophy that ‘spoke’ or insisted — begot from the Japanese dance form — Butoh, Artaud and French theorist Roland Barthes notions in the essay ‘Death to the Author’ i.e. beyond ‘I’-me-myself-Craig Darryl Peade — influenced the aesthetics of Le Petit Mort as a work that will ‘make itself’ with the audience-participant, as opposed to me just simply ‘making the work’.
Le Petit Mort tempts a “gesture of radical and violent simplification” from the an-other-audience-participant, not unlike the fundamental cut of the “proverbial Gordian knot” (101, ibid) Zizek refers. Evoking the Marquis de Sade’s ‘Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man’ — positing understanding as simplification — Le Petit Mort conspires for an-other-audience-participant to act within the complex event and verify together our corporeal existence beyond a ‘deadly’ gaze. Paraphrasing the French Revolution leader — subsequently implicated in the ‘Reign of Terror’ — Maximilien Robespierre, Zizek declares that “those who oppose the Act as such … want an Act without the Act” (153, ibid). Transposed onto live performance, this Act becomes akin to its live-ness that must be ‘tempered by invisible barriers’ or negated by the ‘novel’ mediatisations permeating contemporary artistic practices. Attitudes embracing image-technology for its own sake, exposes live performance to congealed audiences, whose experience is informed by slavishly worshipping at the ‘altar’ of ubiquitous, virtual images. Worse still, wooden performances set in concrete, owing to these ‘state of the art’ distractions, act as a crutch for performers who are metaphorically — and might as well be as good as — dead from a lack of vitality, that is, life.
Le Petit Mort is a metaphorically, suicidal “ecstatic transgression” — to evoke Zizek’s citing of Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (98, ibid) — in a situation which is ‘always already too complex’ — we don’t really know who the fuck each — any of us — really are – let alone the closest to us – the ‘self’.
Within the enclosure of the performance’s framing devices, the limits of in-and ex-clusion might be renegotiated by a knowledge-becoming-aware of our being — “we are instruments of the Other’s jouissance”. Relations might then be rearticulated by reconsidering the specific, structural conditions that are contingent and configured within fields (96, ibid) specific to Le Petit Mort. Together, the authenticity of the ‘self’ is ‘freed’ and contextualised by the constitutive acts apparent to, or within performance. The necessity of a decision — that is, an intervention ‘not of one’s own making’ — in representation and practice is ‘without an intention’ proper, and as a consequence one becomes ‘not oneself’ — evoking Richard Schechner’s ‘double negative’ of “not me … not not me”’ theory following from psycho-analyst Donald Winnicott (112, Schechner) — or ‘more-self’ in Goulish’s appropriation of the Wooster Group’s terms (See below page 77). Provocation becomes confused with confrontation, when an audience-participant seemingly has no choice but to act, as one draws a line — even if a ‘passivity’, by refusal to participate — and take full responsibility. Performing is enacting an active attitude of risk, combining voluntarism with a fundamental fatalism in that one acts, hopes and trusts things will be ‘OKay’, ‘all right’, or ‘safe’ for the live performer of Le Petit Mort and audience-participant alike i.e. have faith in belief
“There is a risk involved, but in the present circumstances … believe it is a risk worth running” (83, Artaud 1958).
The hidden complexities of the two poles that support and reproduce each other within Le Petit Mort and 11th September 2001 have a close connection between Hegel’s opposition of Enlightenment and Faith in Phenomenology of the Spirit. This might be perceived as the repression and exclusion common to the same symptomatic anxiety — whose antagonistic and traumatic feature resides within the always already alienated subject. Ultimately, there is nothing beneath these so-called deceptive appearances other than a lack of inner form and identity — Lyotard’s “bad form” of being — a formlessness, that is an ‘always already’, empty power and its occupancy has to be accepted within the so-called ‘logic of castration’ i.e. trepidation, fear and anxiety or terror. To acquire meaning from existence, an-other is required to be present. The confronting, radical contingency of the Lacanian Act and Le Petit Mort is “the ultimate abyss of freewill, the imponderable fact of ‘I did it because I did it!’ which resits … explanation” (137, ibid) — from German philosopher F.W.J von Schelling; alludes to a concept of the Hegelian Gnostic God previously referred above. Despite being critically derived in opposition to a pan-logical idealism, the Hegelian universal, logical, system is rendered impotent. Without the supplementary, ‘irrational’ act of pure Will in order to actualize itself — positing Hercalitus’ notion of “in differing, it agrees with itself” (198, Wilson), Lacanian theory’s mobius strip as topological subjectivity; or extimite; and the ‘coin idiom’— Le Petit Mort ceases to exist, if it were not for an-other-audience-participant-you, that is, ultimately, essential, to its enactment.
An Ontology of Artistic Freedom and Relevance
An Ontology of Artistic Freedom and Relevance
Herbert Blau’s article ‘Art and Crisis – Homeland Security and the Noble Savage’ refers to the response of artists, who in the wake of 11th September 2001 thought of the “diminished relevance” of art as being an ‘inconsequential anticlimax’. Blau cites architect Daniel Liebskind’s Jewish Museum and its testimony to the figure of the ‘Muselmann’ — representing the “the short circuit between the noumenal [Thing] and the phenomenal … the living dead, the desubjectivized subject … the witness of what one cannot bear witness” (139, Zizek 2002) — and the Holocaust as one of those artists who “think it unconscionable to abandon their art, since there’s nothing else with the power to materialize an adequate response” (16, Blau 2003). In the process of this research, the question “Why the necessity of art — performance?” returned to haunt the project repeatedly again and again. This question posited, might be crudely equated with supervisor Dr Barry Laing’s consideration “what makes a work something more than just a fucking wank?”. Writing here now is the time to return to Matthew Goulish and a micro-lecture on ‘Beauty’ as a riposte of sorts.
Avant-garde musician John Cage is quoted in reference to the music of Morton Feldman as the “highest responsibility of the artist is to hide beauty”. For Goulish, the statement implies that in order for beauty to be hidden, it must be present and that the “attitude” of the artist toward beauty might be then something like “I know it’s here somewhere” (82, Goulish 2000). For me, the answer to the question of “why the necessity of art — performance?” is very simply “because I exist” — to feel-being-alive. By way of director Elizabeth Le Compte’s commentary on the Wooster Group performance Brace Up!; Goulish refers to the “transformation of actors from self to more-self” by the process of “gathering, altering and recombining texts”. Goulish posits that this layering of texts on the surface of performers might be “what Gilles Deleuze meant when he spoke of … in contrast to [psycho-analyst Carl Jung’s] … ‘collective unconscious’, the ‘constructed unconscious’ and its imminence to creativity” (83, ibid). Following this — the phenomenon of an artistic play in disguising beauty — inverts Nietzsche’s ‘profoundly tragic Greek culture’ whose ‘superficial, serene and simple beauty’ was founded on an understanding that the ‘truth of existence’ is ‘violently meaningless’. Le Petit Mort is ambitiously constituted in the ‘liminality between things’. This Kiekergaardian synthesis of me-you, truth-falsity, freedom-necessity, sacred-profane, life-death, temporal-eternal, the finite and the infinite and the notion of a ‘constructed unconscious’ that renders what Goulish (following from Zen Buddhism) considers as “not mine” of “me-Self” but “BECOMING”, from a “first principle” and “basic constituent of the universe” — the body as “small self” — to “larger self of everything else” — LeCompte’s “more self” (78-9 ibid - emphasis in original). By these processes the ‘I’ becomes the ‘body through which the dream flows’ and once again evokes, Picasso’s response to being interrogated by a German in 1937 about the “GUERNICA” painting “That’s your doing, not mine!” (34, Virilio 2000 – emphasis in original) as well as ‘Butoh-esque-Artaudian’ notions of a will’s force impelled from without — a conduit, channelling forces beyond the self or a certain je ne sais qua.
Le Petit Mort; (again following Artaud and post-World War II Japanese dance philosophy, – butoh; and 11th September 2001) — as a constructed, collective unconscious, manifested in reality; are examples of an ‘aesthetic’ that (re)presents a monstrosity of form upon beauty and the ‘Dionysian absurdity of existence’. The in-authenticity of Western culture, Wilson posits, is inherited from Socratic optimism, whose dialectic negation renders existence as “knowable and rational” (184-190, Wilson 2005). Instead of the “genuine culture” of the Greek “tragic age”, the aesthetic phenomenon par excellence for the 20th and 21st Centuries might be of a Dionysian veil over Apollonian nature rather than the application of an Apollonian veil upon Dionysian nature (190, ibid). From Freud’s “repeat compulsion”, traumatic events in artistic performance might be remembered, re-collected and “turned over” at the mind’s end, where following Blau, thought demanding ever more thought escapes and presents a demand for an-other to contemplate and act, causing the pursuit and enlivenment of thought (13, Blau 2003).
Herbert Blau’s article ‘Art and Crisis – Homeland Security and the Noble Savage’ refers to the response of artists, who in the wake of 11th September 2001 thought of the “diminished relevance” of art as being an ‘inconsequential anticlimax’. Blau cites architect Daniel Liebskind’s Jewish Museum and its testimony to the figure of the ‘Muselmann’ — representing the “the short circuit between the noumenal [Thing] and the phenomenal … the living dead, the desubjectivized subject … the witness of what one cannot bear witness” (139, Zizek 2002) — and the Holocaust as one of those artists who “think it unconscionable to abandon their art, since there’s nothing else with the power to materialize an adequate response” (16, Blau 2003). In the process of this research, the question “Why the necessity of art — performance?” returned to haunt the project repeatedly again and again. This question posited, might be crudely equated with supervisor Dr Barry Laing’s consideration “what makes a work something more than just a fucking wank?”. Writing here now is the time to return to Matthew Goulish and a micro-lecture on ‘Beauty’ as a riposte of sorts.
Avant-garde musician John Cage is quoted in reference to the music of Morton Feldman as the “highest responsibility of the artist is to hide beauty”. For Goulish, the statement implies that in order for beauty to be hidden, it must be present and that the “attitude” of the artist toward beauty might be then something like “I know it’s here somewhere” (82, Goulish 2000). For me, the answer to the question of “why the necessity of art — performance?” is very simply “because I exist” — to feel-being-alive. By way of director Elizabeth Le Compte’s commentary on the Wooster Group performance Brace Up!; Goulish refers to the “transformation of actors from self to more-self” by the process of “gathering, altering and recombining texts”. Goulish posits that this layering of texts on the surface of performers might be “what Gilles Deleuze meant when he spoke of … in contrast to [psycho-analyst Carl Jung’s] … ‘collective unconscious’, the ‘constructed unconscious’ and its imminence to creativity” (83, ibid). Following this — the phenomenon of an artistic play in disguising beauty — inverts Nietzsche’s ‘profoundly tragic Greek culture’ whose ‘superficial, serene and simple beauty’ was founded on an understanding that the ‘truth of existence’ is ‘violently meaningless’. Le Petit Mort is ambitiously constituted in the ‘liminality between things’. This Kiekergaardian synthesis of me-you, truth-falsity, freedom-necessity, sacred-profane, life-death, temporal-eternal, the finite and the infinite and the notion of a ‘constructed unconscious’ that renders what Goulish (following from Zen Buddhism) considers as “not mine” of “me-Self” but “BECOMING”, from a “first principle” and “basic constituent of the universe” — the body as “small self” — to “larger self of everything else” — LeCompte’s “more self” (78-9 ibid - emphasis in original). By these processes the ‘I’ becomes the ‘body through which the dream flows’ and once again evokes, Picasso’s response to being interrogated by a German in 1937 about the “GUERNICA” painting “That’s your doing, not mine!” (34, Virilio 2000 – emphasis in original) as well as ‘Butoh-esque-Artaudian’ notions of a will’s force impelled from without — a conduit, channelling forces beyond the self or a certain je ne sais qua.
Le Petit Mort; (again following Artaud and post-World War II Japanese dance philosophy, – butoh; and 11th September 2001) — as a constructed, collective unconscious, manifested in reality; are examples of an ‘aesthetic’ that (re)presents a monstrosity of form upon beauty and the ‘Dionysian absurdity of existence’. The in-authenticity of Western culture, Wilson posits, is inherited from Socratic optimism, whose dialectic negation renders existence as “knowable and rational” (184-190, Wilson 2005). Instead of the “genuine culture” of the Greek “tragic age”, the aesthetic phenomenon par excellence for the 20th and 21st Centuries might be of a Dionysian veil over Apollonian nature rather than the application of an Apollonian veil upon Dionysian nature (190, ibid). From Freud’s “repeat compulsion”, traumatic events in artistic performance might be remembered, re-collected and “turned over” at the mind’s end, where following Blau, thought demanding ever more thought escapes and presents a demand for an-other to contemplate and act, causing the pursuit and enlivenment of thought (13, Blau 2003).
The Art of Avowal — Memorium Mori — It is All Coming Back to Artaud
The Art of Avowal — Memorium Mori — It is All Coming Back to Artaud
Blau asserts that in the “activity of perception”, a “moral rigor” and “self-critical severity” are necessary in times of social purblindness. This sense of purpose lies at the heart of Artaud’s proposition for a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ that is “difficult and cruel for myself first of all” (79, Artaud 1958). Circumscribing a sociological pandect, within the context of 11th September 2001, and performance apropos Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’; Le Petit Mort is a viscerous response in the ‘tradition’ of art in “times of crisis” and perceives an “acute moral and spiritual bankruptcy”. The culture of fear and trivial distractions –— artistic or otherwise — blighting the current ‘war on terror’ era is autogenous of death’s denial. Consciousness is condemned to psychoanalytical repetitions, until the taciturn subject of mortality is addressed onerously. Artistic practices are the ideal medium par excellence in providing this voice — literally in performance — and Artaud’s ‘Will ... without conflict” (51, ibid). An ontological, corporeal thought might reconcile existence with ‘memento mori’ by means of performance and having a distinct disregard for proper Latin ‘ars moriendi’ — the art of dying — becomes ‘ars vita longa’ — the art of living forever.
Like Herbert Blau and Forced Entertainment’s artistic director Tim Etchells; Helen Cixous in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing approaches a “certain truth”, however unsayable, indefined or unbearable with the inclination for avowal —the “Real need” (41-2, Cixous 1993). Unexpected perceptual insights may be garnered by the revelations of an artistic audaciousness, consisting in “saying the worst”, where it is not the religious but the human content, venturing “there where we don’t have the strength or means to venture, to the edge of our abyss: and then describe it” (41, ibid). By confessing to the presence of “crime”, and the “repulsion that is always at work within us”, a strategy “[T]hrough death, towards the recognition of love” — not unlike Artaud’s cruelty — presents for Cixous a “difficult joy”. The knowledge that “the approach to anything is done gradually and painfully — and includes as well as passing through the opposite of what is being approached” (42, ibid) evokes Lacanian theory in the ‘extimite’ of subjectivity, where in “differing it agrees with itself” — we become each ‘thing’ — I am you am I are you are I me and you and I and you and me and I and you. Le Petit Mort is a ‘dubious confession’ to crimes never committed, but somehow one assumes responsibility, guilt, shame and carries burdens of blame for acts like murder, misogyny and the ‘masculine crisis’, rape — by seduction, colonialism and Western imperialism, negating ‘God’, suiciding, vilifying minorities like the Jews in World War II, incest and paedophilia, 11th September 2001 and being a failure in love and life.
Le Petit Mort contrived to be a dramatic tragic-comedy, a romantic story of loss, grief and unrequited love. In its woeful fucking lamentations, brevity of autoeroticism; guilt and shame and guilt — one more time, for ‘good measure’ — with blame; are played out by a psychotic, schizoid and jealous ‘god’, whose painful explorations might bring ‘wisdom from suffering’. Like most ambitious, artistic endeavour, it is a pathetic gesture, incommensurate with the events and complex emotions it actually sought to represent — the ‘unrepresentable-ness’ of this, the ‘Thing’ called ‘loss’, the ‘Real’ in the death of love-life and its ‘impossibility’; whether consisting in the experience of the date 11th September 2001 or not otherwise.
The beauty of ‘successful’ artistic exploits might be determined in the ability to transcend ‘the moment’, by creating something ‘timeless’, that is, ‘out of time’. Le Petit Mort desired this by not being explicit in situating its content — by ‘giving space to time’ and the chance to ‘measure’ its quality of ‘something beyond’, ‘emptiness’, ‘fullness’, ‘nervousness’, ‘humour’, ‘absurdity’, ‘pathos’, ‘bathos’ or utter ‘incomprehensibility’ that approaches a ‘nameless-ness’. The logic of Le Petit Mort was intuitively determined by an entanglement of failure and jouissance, that ultimately serves nothing but something between what Blau describes as a “proleptic uselessness” and Peggy Phelan’s “psychic need to rehearse for loss and especially death” (3, Phelan 1993; 20, Auslander).
Elizabeth Grosz refers to the “inherent violence” of binarization demonstrated in French philosopher’s Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Western metaphysical ‘logocentricism’; and it is this polarizing structure whose repetitions create the conditions for contemporary aesthetics. Lacan’s positing of a topological subjectivity — (as a mobius strip, prior to being captured in the mirror-image and its subsequent ‘mis-recognised knowledge’) — is reality apprehended par excellence, where seemingly at one point, two sides are distinguished, yet when traversed, are experienced as a singular side — the Lacanian extimite. The subject as a binary structure, is supported by the compulsive return of a repressed fantasy, as a relation, to an object of desire that ‘never was’ existing in the ‘first place’ — a mere memory; in doubt?
Aligned with such (mis?)conceptions, Antonin Artaud proposed that an idea of culture — ideally artistic — distinct from life should be abolished by theatre-as-plague — in a crisis “resolved by death or cure” — “an extreme purification”, revealing the repressed shadow, doubling reality. Artaud posits that the first true aim and purpose of artistic creation is the pedagogical instruction that all “great Myths” and “all true freedom is dark” because “We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads.” (79, Artaud 1958). “Infallibly” identified with this freedom, is the recounting of an “essential separation” that is not the fault of artistic creation, but “of life”, veiled by traces of psycho-analytical desire marking its disappearance — a vanishing point into void. For Artaud, the explicit, physical, materiality of the body and its acts within a performance space might be capable of attaining a pious, ritual purity — a sacred spirituality. The conception of Artaud’s theatre would produce “instantaneously” an act in order to “free us, in a Myth in which we have sacrificed our individuality, like Personages out of the Past, with power rediscovered in the Past”, where “pleasure” is found, increasing life value by “profound transformations”, derived by “the spirit” of the times and assuming “another form of civilization” (116-7, ibid).
Following what might be described as a ‘terrorist aesthetic’, Artaud acknowledges the appearance of “Good that is always upon the outer face, but the face within is evil … which will eventually be reduced, but at the supreme instant when everything that was form will be on the point of returning to chaos.” 11th September 2001 becomes the Artaudian aesthetic we deserve when compared to the anti-thesis of the original “superior” idea; — “capable of attaining awareness and a possession of certain dominant forces … notions that control all others … energies which ultimately create order and increase the value of life”. Due to the inability to “restore all the arts to a central attitude and necessity”, Artaud suggests that “we might as well abandon ourselves now, without protest, and recognize that we are no longer good for anything but disorder, famine, blood, war and epidemics”, and to cease “painting, babbling, writing or doing whatever it is we do.” (80, ibid) — And why not? For to continue would be, nay, is, sheer nihilism, when faced with the continuing prospects of nought but wealth for 20% of the worlds population; poverty, misery and exploitation for the rest of capitalism’s ‘trickle-down effect’ recipients with an ironically — (or is that moronically?) — apt global, ecological disaster for all of us!!! Unless “WE” ACT. The spectrum of being within, has Artaud considering evil as “permanent law and what is good is an effort and already one more cruelty added to the other”. However, “cruelty” for Artaud must be “taken in a broad sense” that signifies ‘pure, philosophical consciousness’. It is “Everything that acts”, an “appetite for life”, a “cosmic rigor” and implacable submission to necessity, intention and decision, irreversibility, lucidity, kinds of rigid control — “in the Gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the darkness … good is desired, it is the consequence of an act … the hidden god creates, he obeys the cruel necessity of creation which has been imposed on himself by himself, and he cannot not create, hence not admit into the centre of the self-willed whirlwind a kernel of evil ever more condensed, and ever more consumed ... the sense of continuous creation, a wholly magical action, obeys this necessity. A play in which there would not be this will, this blind appetite for life capable of overriding everything, visible in each gesture and each act and in the transcendent aspect of the story, would be a useless and unfulfilled play” (102-3, ibid). The idea of life for Artaud is an “irrational impulsion, a kind of initial perversity” and suggests Zizek and the notional Lacanian Act, as well as the Kiekergaardian ‘madness’ incorporated in a “leap of faith”. This approach toward ‘pure thought’, “beyond” Occidental realms of psychological individuality and meta-physics, evokes the Victoria University — Footscray Park’s Division of Performance’s “thinking through performance” and Blau’s final essay ‘Limits of Performance: The Insane Root’, in The Dubious Spectacle, where one is doing performance, methodologically, “in order to think” — (318, Blau 2002 - my emphasis).
Grosz cites a certain “imaginary anatomy” as an “individual and collective fantasy” of the body’s “forms” and “actions”. The “refusal” to accept loss, in what is known as the ‘phantom limb phenomenon’, asserts Lacan’s claims that this explains “peculiar, non-organic connections”; in that what is removed “continues to induce sensations” there, where it was once occupied (41, Grosz). Absence is “psychically invested” as “present”, in a libidinally invested “memorial”, or “nostalgic tribute strongly cathected” to undermine “perceptual awareness” of such loss, not unlike the Freud’s “compulsion to repeat” . Grosz then suggests that this can be a “kind of mourning for a pre-Oedipal — i.e. pre-castrated — body and a corporeal connection to the mother that women in patriarchy are required to abandon” (40, ibid). The imaginary identification with what is and is not self, is a mapping of the ego through this subject’s identification and internalization of the totalized image of the self. This “body phantom” forms the basis of an imaginary Gestalt, that derives a stability or lack from these self-representations (42, ibid). ‘We’ become identified in a relation to ‘an-Other thing’ — a parent, lover, nation or religious god. The “phantoms” of Le Petit Mort are the absences of what cannot be explicitly present — that which is ‘lost’ — such as a ‘God’, a ‘Garden of Eden’ (that might be imagined as a public bar) , serpents and other shape-shifting identities, lovers — past or otherwise, memories, projected traumatic scenes of suffering, a war, fallen bodies falling, terrorist attacks, the detonation of bombs — atomic or otherwise, concentration camp victims, terminally-ill cancer patients, crucifixions, other bodies in pain, a subjects circumcision, a feminine sexuality, a mother giving birth, an explicit sex scene, an apple, a tree, a book, a word, a world, a sky, a sun or star, a cosmological universe or a blank screen with white noise.
Like Blau’s reference to architect Damien Leibskind’s Jewish Museum and its “no exit acuity of the unnerving space” that testifies to the Muselmann of the Holocaust in World War II (16, Blau 2003); the site-specificity of the photographic studio in Le Petit Mort represented the Lacanian ‘concentrational anxiety’ that constitutes the utilitarian form of the social bond — a “freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison” (6, Lacan 1977) and conceived in psycho-analysis as the authoritative, super-ego, incorporated into the subject — subjected to allegiances such as ‘father’, ‘nationhood’ or ‘god’.
Significantly, following Artaud — “the desire characteristic of Eros … feeds upon contingencies” [such as] “death … resurrection … transfiguration”, [for] “nowhere in a circular and closed world is there room for true death, since ascension is a rending” [and] “closed space is fed with lives … tramples down the others, consuming them in a massacre” — this consciousness is rendered as giving the “exercise of every act of life its blood-red colour, its cruel nuance, since it is understood that life is always someone else’s death”(103, Artaud 1958). Ultimately, Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ project and Le Petit Mort are an ‘impossible’ act of gift-giving love, whose reciprocal sacrifice between the audience-participants and live performer — what Blau refers to as the “stink of mortality”, lying at the “edge of the breath” — is experienced in the proximity of being together and makes ‘failure’ palpable (83-86, Blau 1982).
Le Petit Mort plays with these notions of ‘cruelty’ and the question and knowledge of Artaud’s “hieroglyph of the breath”, as being primary to performance, as conceived in ‘An Affective Emotional Athleticism’ and ‘Theatre of the Seraphim’. Principally these consist of innumerable combinations of the cabalistic ternaries:-
ANDROGYNOUS MALE FEMALE
BALANCED EXPANSIVE ATTRACTIVE
NEUTER POSITIVE NEGATIVE
— Here, “all life issues” and acts as the place where “magic respiration is reproduced at will” (112, Artaud 1958). For Artaud, the performer is “an athlete of the heart” whose “emotional musculature corresponds to certain physical localizations” and becomes a “Double, like the Ka of the Egyptian mummies ... a perpetual spectre” evoking Freud’s ‘uncanny’. The organic sexuality of the breath, in this spectral double, has a “long memory” of the heart that “endures”, “thinks” and “holds sway” (133-6, ibid).
It is in “the belly that silence must begin” and the breath “descends and creates its void”, extending space as per Merleau-Ponty’s spatially ‘buccal notion’ of body experience (122, Merleau-Ponty 1964). Le Petit Mort experimented in its developmental phases, by explorations of this space-void within the body, through extended voice inspired by Roy Hart-Alfred Wolsohn. From Artaud’s ‘Theatre of the Seraphim’, a scream of “anguish armed for war”, demanding justice like a “terrible subterranean cry” of the “feminine” was sought. Informing the live performance was a strategic “revolt”, like the “groan of an abyss that is opened: the wounded earth”; [in] ‘the dream where one must fall’, [that makes the] “energetic will prevail” by a “disappearance of force” and the “SENSES WILL BELIEVE THEY ARE PRESENT”. By ‘calling forth’ a “hole of silence”; the scream cried, attempts to ‘awaken’ a “double” and “sacred”, ‘lost secret’ — “magic in living” — existence — and ‘passes’ into a “single chest” from the performing body, reforging the ‘chain of Time’ in order to be “locked away”. ‘Entranced’ upon entering the “chest of the spectator”, an ‘identification’ is then sought in the “reality” of the “spectacle” (272-5, Artaud 1976). The ‘infantilism’ of this scream, (that echoes Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s iconic 1883 painting The Scream), produces a condition beyond language, abandoning audibility, in accord with silence. As per Paul Valery in 1938, what is more an immediate duration of time collapsing, and therefore, mortal life passing and death approaching than silence? (69, Virilio 2004). In a play between its representation, layers of real time rendered fictional — a ‘historical world’s end’ — and the ‘life’ of Le Petit Mort pursues this silence by simply concluding; ‘being there’ — quotidian, with an-other-s-audience. The ultimate reality of actual matter in Le Petit Mort, seeks to possess a spirit that permeates its ‘presence’ as ‘phantom’, with a ‘feminine dynamic’ — the Artaudian ‘Great mystery’ governing life and guarding the dead from birth to burial;-— beyond the spheres relating to a metaphorical and cultural ‘God’s death’. The live performer’s desired ‘communicable purity’ of ‘presence’ is sought and to be found in the ‘risk and wreckage’ of its own ‘blank perfection’ and ‘happening’. Alienated beyond the rhetorical powers of artistic contrivances obsessed with ‘technique’, Roy Faudree from the Wooster Group’s notion of the live performer — referred to by Forced Entertainment’s artistic director, Tim Etchells — is conveyed in the “Look, I am in front of you. You can look at me from the top of my head to the tips of my feet” attitude Le Petit Mort seeks to evoke through its ‘decaying away’. Alive, together, we share the similar experience of breath, in a seemingly endlessness of eye contact and inquiry between each other (216, Etchells), hopefully, during Le Petit Mort. Here in this — a live performer’s — becoming-mythical-being; expectations, resistances and defensive limits of meaning might be discarded, perpetually now, without closure, approaching towards an intimate neutrality, beyond fatal and clichéd ‘master-slave dialectics’ that are seemingly devoid of life — in a necessary, flawed, failure and labour of love.
In respect for this silence, in the experience of breath, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Proposition #7’ from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus shall be invoked and what remains is left within Artaud itself :-
“When I live I do not feel myself live. But when I act, it is then that I feel myself exist … doing something … [T]he events of the dream, directed by my deep inner consciousness, teach[ing] me the meaning of the events of the waking state in which a naked fatality directs me … [B]ut the theatre is like one waking state in which it is I who direct the fatality ... [m]y own personal fate … an idea … sacred … ”(275-6, Artaud 1976).
Blau asserts that in the “activity of perception”, a “moral rigor” and “self-critical severity” are necessary in times of social purblindness. This sense of purpose lies at the heart of Artaud’s proposition for a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ that is “difficult and cruel for myself first of all” (79, Artaud 1958). Circumscribing a sociological pandect, within the context of 11th September 2001, and performance apropos Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’; Le Petit Mort is a viscerous response in the ‘tradition’ of art in “times of crisis” and perceives an “acute moral and spiritual bankruptcy”. The culture of fear and trivial distractions –— artistic or otherwise — blighting the current ‘war on terror’ era is autogenous of death’s denial. Consciousness is condemned to psychoanalytical repetitions, until the taciturn subject of mortality is addressed onerously. Artistic practices are the ideal medium par excellence in providing this voice — literally in performance — and Artaud’s ‘Will ... without conflict” (51, ibid). An ontological, corporeal thought might reconcile existence with ‘memento mori’ by means of performance and having a distinct disregard for proper Latin ‘ars moriendi’ — the art of dying — becomes ‘ars vita longa’ — the art of living forever.
Like Herbert Blau and Forced Entertainment’s artistic director Tim Etchells; Helen Cixous in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing approaches a “certain truth”, however unsayable, indefined or unbearable with the inclination for avowal —the “Real need” (41-2, Cixous 1993). Unexpected perceptual insights may be garnered by the revelations of an artistic audaciousness, consisting in “saying the worst”, where it is not the religious but the human content, venturing “there where we don’t have the strength or means to venture, to the edge of our abyss: and then describe it” (41, ibid). By confessing to the presence of “crime”, and the “repulsion that is always at work within us”, a strategy “[T]hrough death, towards the recognition of love” — not unlike Artaud’s cruelty — presents for Cixous a “difficult joy”. The knowledge that “the approach to anything is done gradually and painfully — and includes as well as passing through the opposite of what is being approached” (42, ibid) evokes Lacanian theory in the ‘extimite’ of subjectivity, where in “differing it agrees with itself” — we become each ‘thing’ — I am you am I are you are I me and you and I and you and me and I and you. Le Petit Mort is a ‘dubious confession’ to crimes never committed, but somehow one assumes responsibility, guilt, shame and carries burdens of blame for acts like murder, misogyny and the ‘masculine crisis’, rape — by seduction, colonialism and Western imperialism, negating ‘God’, suiciding, vilifying minorities like the Jews in World War II, incest and paedophilia, 11th September 2001 and being a failure in love and life.
Le Petit Mort contrived to be a dramatic tragic-comedy, a romantic story of loss, grief and unrequited love. In its woeful fucking lamentations, brevity of autoeroticism; guilt and shame and guilt — one more time, for ‘good measure’ — with blame; are played out by a psychotic, schizoid and jealous ‘god’, whose painful explorations might bring ‘wisdom from suffering’. Like most ambitious, artistic endeavour, it is a pathetic gesture, incommensurate with the events and complex emotions it actually sought to represent — the ‘unrepresentable-ness’ of this, the ‘Thing’ called ‘loss’, the ‘Real’ in the death of love-life and its ‘impossibility’; whether consisting in the experience of the date 11th September 2001 or not otherwise.
The beauty of ‘successful’ artistic exploits might be determined in the ability to transcend ‘the moment’, by creating something ‘timeless’, that is, ‘out of time’. Le Petit Mort desired this by not being explicit in situating its content — by ‘giving space to time’ and the chance to ‘measure’ its quality of ‘something beyond’, ‘emptiness’, ‘fullness’, ‘nervousness’, ‘humour’, ‘absurdity’, ‘pathos’, ‘bathos’ or utter ‘incomprehensibility’ that approaches a ‘nameless-ness’. The logic of Le Petit Mort was intuitively determined by an entanglement of failure and jouissance, that ultimately serves nothing but something between what Blau describes as a “proleptic uselessness” and Peggy Phelan’s “psychic need to rehearse for loss and especially death” (3, Phelan 1993; 20, Auslander).
Elizabeth Grosz refers to the “inherent violence” of binarization demonstrated in French philosopher’s Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Western metaphysical ‘logocentricism’; and it is this polarizing structure whose repetitions create the conditions for contemporary aesthetics. Lacan’s positing of a topological subjectivity — (as a mobius strip, prior to being captured in the mirror-image and its subsequent ‘mis-recognised knowledge’) — is reality apprehended par excellence, where seemingly at one point, two sides are distinguished, yet when traversed, are experienced as a singular side — the Lacanian extimite. The subject as a binary structure, is supported by the compulsive return of a repressed fantasy, as a relation, to an object of desire that ‘never was’ existing in the ‘first place’ — a mere memory; in doubt?
Aligned with such (mis?)conceptions, Antonin Artaud proposed that an idea of culture — ideally artistic — distinct from life should be abolished by theatre-as-plague — in a crisis “resolved by death or cure” — “an extreme purification”, revealing the repressed shadow, doubling reality. Artaud posits that the first true aim and purpose of artistic creation is the pedagogical instruction that all “great Myths” and “all true freedom is dark” because “We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads.” (79, Artaud 1958). “Infallibly” identified with this freedom, is the recounting of an “essential separation” that is not the fault of artistic creation, but “of life”, veiled by traces of psycho-analytical desire marking its disappearance — a vanishing point into void. For Artaud, the explicit, physical, materiality of the body and its acts within a performance space might be capable of attaining a pious, ritual purity — a sacred spirituality. The conception of Artaud’s theatre would produce “instantaneously” an act in order to “free us, in a Myth in which we have sacrificed our individuality, like Personages out of the Past, with power rediscovered in the Past”, where “pleasure” is found, increasing life value by “profound transformations”, derived by “the spirit” of the times and assuming “another form of civilization” (116-7, ibid).
Following what might be described as a ‘terrorist aesthetic’, Artaud acknowledges the appearance of “Good that is always upon the outer face, but the face within is evil … which will eventually be reduced, but at the supreme instant when everything that was form will be on the point of returning to chaos.” 11th September 2001 becomes the Artaudian aesthetic we deserve when compared to the anti-thesis of the original “superior” idea; — “capable of attaining awareness and a possession of certain dominant forces … notions that control all others … energies which ultimately create order and increase the value of life”. Due to the inability to “restore all the arts to a central attitude and necessity”, Artaud suggests that “we might as well abandon ourselves now, without protest, and recognize that we are no longer good for anything but disorder, famine, blood, war and epidemics”, and to cease “painting, babbling, writing or doing whatever it is we do.” (80, ibid) — And why not? For to continue would be, nay, is, sheer nihilism, when faced with the continuing prospects of nought but wealth for 20% of the worlds population; poverty, misery and exploitation for the rest of capitalism’s ‘trickle-down effect’ recipients with an ironically — (or is that moronically?) — apt global, ecological disaster for all of us!!! Unless “WE” ACT. The spectrum of being within, has Artaud considering evil as “permanent law and what is good is an effort and already one more cruelty added to the other”. However, “cruelty” for Artaud must be “taken in a broad sense” that signifies ‘pure, philosophical consciousness’. It is “Everything that acts”, an “appetite for life”, a “cosmic rigor” and implacable submission to necessity, intention and decision, irreversibility, lucidity, kinds of rigid control — “in the Gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the darkness … good is desired, it is the consequence of an act … the hidden god creates, he obeys the cruel necessity of creation which has been imposed on himself by himself, and he cannot not create, hence not admit into the centre of the self-willed whirlwind a kernel of evil ever more condensed, and ever more consumed ... the sense of continuous creation, a wholly magical action, obeys this necessity. A play in which there would not be this will, this blind appetite for life capable of overriding everything, visible in each gesture and each act and in the transcendent aspect of the story, would be a useless and unfulfilled play” (102-3, ibid). The idea of life for Artaud is an “irrational impulsion, a kind of initial perversity” and suggests Zizek and the notional Lacanian Act, as well as the Kiekergaardian ‘madness’ incorporated in a “leap of faith”. This approach toward ‘pure thought’, “beyond” Occidental realms of psychological individuality and meta-physics, evokes the Victoria University — Footscray Park’s Division of Performance’s “thinking through performance” and Blau’s final essay ‘Limits of Performance: The Insane Root’, in The Dubious Spectacle, where one is doing performance, methodologically, “in order to think” — (318, Blau 2002 - my emphasis).
Grosz cites a certain “imaginary anatomy” as an “individual and collective fantasy” of the body’s “forms” and “actions”. The “refusal” to accept loss, in what is known as the ‘phantom limb phenomenon’, asserts Lacan’s claims that this explains “peculiar, non-organic connections”; in that what is removed “continues to induce sensations” there, where it was once occupied (41, Grosz). Absence is “psychically invested” as “present”, in a libidinally invested “memorial”, or “nostalgic tribute strongly cathected” to undermine “perceptual awareness” of such loss, not unlike the Freud’s “compulsion to repeat” . Grosz then suggests that this can be a “kind of mourning for a pre-Oedipal — i.e. pre-castrated — body and a corporeal connection to the mother that women in patriarchy are required to abandon” (40, ibid). The imaginary identification with what is and is not self, is a mapping of the ego through this subject’s identification and internalization of the totalized image of the self. This “body phantom” forms the basis of an imaginary Gestalt, that derives a stability or lack from these self-representations (42, ibid). ‘We’ become identified in a relation to ‘an-Other thing’ — a parent, lover, nation or religious god. The “phantoms” of Le Petit Mort are the absences of what cannot be explicitly present — that which is ‘lost’ — such as a ‘God’, a ‘Garden of Eden’ (that might be imagined as a public bar) , serpents and other shape-shifting identities, lovers — past or otherwise, memories, projected traumatic scenes of suffering, a war, fallen bodies falling, terrorist attacks, the detonation of bombs — atomic or otherwise, concentration camp victims, terminally-ill cancer patients, crucifixions, other bodies in pain, a subjects circumcision, a feminine sexuality, a mother giving birth, an explicit sex scene, an apple, a tree, a book, a word, a world, a sky, a sun or star, a cosmological universe or a blank screen with white noise.
Like Blau’s reference to architect Damien Leibskind’s Jewish Museum and its “no exit acuity of the unnerving space” that testifies to the Muselmann of the Holocaust in World War II (16, Blau 2003); the site-specificity of the photographic studio in Le Petit Mort represented the Lacanian ‘concentrational anxiety’ that constitutes the utilitarian form of the social bond — a “freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison” (6, Lacan 1977) and conceived in psycho-analysis as the authoritative, super-ego, incorporated into the subject — subjected to allegiances such as ‘father’, ‘nationhood’ or ‘god’.
Significantly, following Artaud — “the desire characteristic of Eros … feeds upon contingencies” [such as] “death … resurrection … transfiguration”, [for] “nowhere in a circular and closed world is there room for true death, since ascension is a rending” [and] “closed space is fed with lives … tramples down the others, consuming them in a massacre” — this consciousness is rendered as giving the “exercise of every act of life its blood-red colour, its cruel nuance, since it is understood that life is always someone else’s death”(103, Artaud 1958). Ultimately, Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ project and Le Petit Mort are an ‘impossible’ act of gift-giving love, whose reciprocal sacrifice between the audience-participants and live performer — what Blau refers to as the “stink of mortality”, lying at the “edge of the breath” — is experienced in the proximity of being together and makes ‘failure’ palpable (83-86, Blau 1982).
Le Petit Mort plays with these notions of ‘cruelty’ and the question and knowledge of Artaud’s “hieroglyph of the breath”, as being primary to performance, as conceived in ‘An Affective Emotional Athleticism’ and ‘Theatre of the Seraphim’. Principally these consist of innumerable combinations of the cabalistic ternaries:-
ANDROGYNOUS MALE FEMALE
BALANCED EXPANSIVE ATTRACTIVE
NEUTER POSITIVE NEGATIVE
— Here, “all life issues” and acts as the place where “magic respiration is reproduced at will” (112, Artaud 1958). For Artaud, the performer is “an athlete of the heart” whose “emotional musculature corresponds to certain physical localizations” and becomes a “Double, like the Ka of the Egyptian mummies ... a perpetual spectre” evoking Freud’s ‘uncanny’. The organic sexuality of the breath, in this spectral double, has a “long memory” of the heart that “endures”, “thinks” and “holds sway” (133-6, ibid).
It is in “the belly that silence must begin” and the breath “descends and creates its void”, extending space as per Merleau-Ponty’s spatially ‘buccal notion’ of body experience (122, Merleau-Ponty 1964). Le Petit Mort experimented in its developmental phases, by explorations of this space-void within the body, through extended voice inspired by Roy Hart-Alfred Wolsohn. From Artaud’s ‘Theatre of the Seraphim’, a scream of “anguish armed for war”, demanding justice like a “terrible subterranean cry” of the “feminine” was sought. Informing the live performance was a strategic “revolt”, like the “groan of an abyss that is opened: the wounded earth”; [in] ‘the dream where one must fall’, [that makes the] “energetic will prevail” by a “disappearance of force” and the “SENSES WILL BELIEVE THEY ARE PRESENT”. By ‘calling forth’ a “hole of silence”; the scream cried, attempts to ‘awaken’ a “double” and “sacred”, ‘lost secret’ — “magic in living” — existence — and ‘passes’ into a “single chest” from the performing body, reforging the ‘chain of Time’ in order to be “locked away”. ‘Entranced’ upon entering the “chest of the spectator”, an ‘identification’ is then sought in the “reality” of the “spectacle” (272-5, Artaud 1976). The ‘infantilism’ of this scream, (that echoes Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s iconic 1883 painting The Scream), produces a condition beyond language, abandoning audibility, in accord with silence. As per Paul Valery in 1938, what is more an immediate duration of time collapsing, and therefore, mortal life passing and death approaching than silence? (69, Virilio 2004). In a play between its representation, layers of real time rendered fictional — a ‘historical world’s end’ — and the ‘life’ of Le Petit Mort pursues this silence by simply concluding; ‘being there’ — quotidian, with an-other-s-audience. The ultimate reality of actual matter in Le Petit Mort, seeks to possess a spirit that permeates its ‘presence’ as ‘phantom’, with a ‘feminine dynamic’ — the Artaudian ‘Great mystery’ governing life and guarding the dead from birth to burial;-— beyond the spheres relating to a metaphorical and cultural ‘God’s death’. The live performer’s desired ‘communicable purity’ of ‘presence’ is sought and to be found in the ‘risk and wreckage’ of its own ‘blank perfection’ and ‘happening’. Alienated beyond the rhetorical powers of artistic contrivances obsessed with ‘technique’, Roy Faudree from the Wooster Group’s notion of the live performer — referred to by Forced Entertainment’s artistic director, Tim Etchells — is conveyed in the “Look, I am in front of you. You can look at me from the top of my head to the tips of my feet” attitude Le Petit Mort seeks to evoke through its ‘decaying away’. Alive, together, we share the similar experience of breath, in a seemingly endlessness of eye contact and inquiry between each other (216, Etchells), hopefully, during Le Petit Mort. Here in this — a live performer’s — becoming-mythical-being; expectations, resistances and defensive limits of meaning might be discarded, perpetually now, without closure, approaching towards an intimate neutrality, beyond fatal and clichéd ‘master-slave dialectics’ that are seemingly devoid of life — in a necessary, flawed, failure and labour of love.
In respect for this silence, in the experience of breath, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Proposition #7’ from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus shall be invoked and what remains is left within Artaud itself :-
“When I live I do not feel myself live. But when I act, it is then that I feel myself exist … doing something … [T]he events of the dream, directed by my deep inner consciousness, teach[ing] me the meaning of the events of the waking state in which a naked fatality directs me … [B]ut the theatre is like one waking state in which it is I who direct the fatality ... [m]y own personal fate … an idea … sacred … ”(275-6, Artaud 1976).
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