The Workof Performance Shall Make One Free

The Work of Performance Shall Make One Free

Le Petit Mort like Artaud, sought through the performing of actions, an engagement with a necessary consciousness that must be seen in its perception to be (103, Zarrilli; 86, Blau 1982). This application of consciousness is proposed as a cure for the incessant ‘amnesia of experience’, encapsulated in the psycho-analytical notion of the ‘repressed’ and ‘compulsion to repeat’. Zizek declares ‘us all’ arbitrarily Agamaben’s ‘Homo Sacer’ — “living dead” in exclusion — as we cannot be universalized, due to the trend of Western liberal democracy becoming merely a ‘socially administrative’ matter, in a post-political, late-capitalist, ‘9/11 — war on terrorism’ era, (99,100-149, Zizek 2002). Addressed by Lacan in the figure of ‘Antigone’ in the Ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles’ play — Le Petit Mort posits this is the result of an ideological knowledge of ‘misrecognition’ — like someone-me-you-a father-a god?- a performance-document — that doesn’t know it is actually non-existent — dead, or never existed in the first place, and, yet supports itself, through its compulsive repetitions. The clichés that are propagated particularly through the image — “murdering ... with second-hand reproductions which, filtered through machines, cannot unite with our sensibility … [maintaining] an ineffectual torpor, [where] our faculties appear to be foundering” (84, Artaud 1958) perpetuate the ‘return of the [repressed] same’ problem — the inability to comprehend a ‘truth of radical Otherness within’.

Through the repetition of certain identifications, ‘real life’ is denied in affirmations of ‘virtuality’, worshipping at the altar of ‘mediatised death’ and vicious cycles of loyal and patriotic violence. Opposed to the ‘just talking’ of a psycho-analytical cure, a remedy might be attained by thinking through expressions, gestures, action-s — artistic practices like performance — which “once done, is not to be done” as it does not have “the same value twice” (82, ibid). Improvisation in Le Petit Mort, is analogous to Societas Raffaello Sanzio artistic director Romeo Castelluci’s dislike for rehearsals — because they are “an act of resistance against the original idea” (Castelluci 2006). In this ‘doing’ or performing by “living instruments”, modelled on Artaud’s notions of stirring up “shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way” (12, Artaud 1958 – my emphasis), the ‘absent shadows’ conjured are the “worm of difference” — “the trace-structure” in the “apple of wholeness” where everything is ‘always already’ inhabited by ‘something’ that is ‘always already’, ‘not itself’. These traces desire to question the reconstitution of what seems ‘present’ — such as when experiencing a performance or collective identifications — and by this ‘infiltration’, an aesthetics of absence or the ‘Lacanian Real’ might be evoked through repressed, violent repetitions.

Le Petit Mort sought a self-referential signification, actively engaging a radical recursion, by negotiating a spatial depth, between a sense of object and subject, whose ultimate loss in continuity is necessary. The necessity of acknowledging this — its difference — attempted a hermeneutic, hermaphroditic fusion approaching Artaudian alchemy (48, ibid). As opposed to the post-human-9/11 age of Baudrillard’s simulacra — and Plato — where every day reality is “reduced to a mere inert replica” (ibid), Artaudian transmutation encompasses a “spiritual Double” and dialectical dissolution, between actual materiality and an-other, dangerous, virtual and obscure, artistic reality; that approaches from here, this, the so-called ‘near-side of life’ to there, the ‘far-side of death’. By identifying the artistic practice of performance with death, a subject such as ‘me’-‘myself’-‘I’-‘you’-‘us’-‘we’ might recognize and approach what is feared most, in an attempt to garner knowledge from its research. Le Petit Mort might not be the ‘truth’ but it is a ‘truth’ — ‘mine’ — ‘Craig Darryl Peade’ — an ‘intuitive speculation’ played out as ‘tautological sophistry’, remembering pasts to present [to] the future.

“There is an inducement to say ‘Yes, of course, it must be like that’. A powerful mythology” — Wittgenstein, Conversations on Freud in Adam Phillips’ introduction to The Penguin Freud Reader (vii, Freud 2006).

In recognition of a seemingly inescapable, impossible, mythological subjectivity, Le Petit Mort is a crisis of compulsive, repetitive, masculinity. Caught in an ‘abject madness’, Le Petit Mort seeks a necessarily radicalised, feminine, ‘jouissance’ in the ‘Lacanian Real’ for the ‘subject’-‘me’-‘I’-‘Craig Darryl Peade’ by means of an artistic practice — performance. Performance (specifically, Le Petit Mort); like the scent of 11th September 2001’s vaporized bodies of the victims or the ‘Circus Maximus’ that is now Iraq — is the symptom par excellence, Lacan’s sinthome — a fragmented signifier “permeated with idiotic enjoyment … the meaningless letter that immediately procures ‘jouis-sense’, ‘enjoyment-in-meaning’, ‘enjoy-meant’”. This performance-document, like an olfactory sense emanating from 11th September 2001’s ‘Ground Zero’ or perpetual ‘war on terror’, acts as a “condensed cipher of the subject’s libidinal attachment … when it disappears it will be missed” (145, Zizek 2002) and a “precious gift” transforms into “shit” — the surplus, excess, leftover excrement of the discursive network. In isolating this “heinous”, “repulsive”, “meaningless kernel” of the ‘Lacanian Real’ and its “superego command … “So be it!” a “complete ‘loss of reality’” is eluded to (128-30, Zizek 1991) as ‘I’ in Le Petit Mort becomes ‘God’ or Vishnu — quoted from the Hindu scripture’s Bhagavad-Gita by ‘The Manhattan Project’ nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, at the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb explosion — “Now I am BECOME death, the destroyer of worlds” (91, Goulish). This ‘traversing’ or ‘identification’ with ‘fantasy’ in Le Petit Mort — a ‘fundamentally authentic existential project’ — represents the conclusion of psychoanalytical processes, by recognition of what is ultimately the support of being itself — a “pathological singularity”, an element ‘guaranteeing consistency’, a way to ‘cede or give way — not persist — with desire’, that is, in approaching death or failure through this Honours Research, I really do not want to die or fail. ‘Truth’ is ‘accessed’ by an “interpretative dissolution” (137-8, Zizek 1991) to avoid mortal death or failure in the “final moment” where desire is “purified” by “loss of enjoyment”. The abject madness of these symptoms — the Lacanian ‘sinthome’ is an attempt to “honour a certain debt, to wipe out a certain guilt, to embody a certain reproach to the Other” and attest “innocence to the Other, i.e., to get rid of the unbearable [truth —] burden of guilt” (139, ibid) i.e. FORGIVE ME FOR I HAVE FUCKING SINNED… Performance becomes a subversive element in danger of being prohibited because of its transformative power, rendering it marginalised and subsumed in the cultural conformity of the image. Social self-understandings are enchained elements, specifically articulated within symbolic universes as over-determined meanings of ‘normality’. The symptom — Le Petit Mort or ‘performance’, 11th September 2001 or ‘War on Terror’ in Iraq — appear not as a “hidden truth” of the existing hegemonic, ideological discourse and operational network fields but as a ‘disturbing’, ‘alien’ experience i.e. incomprehensibly devoid of meaning and less. The ‘utter nullity of immediate reality’ and its “stupid, material presence that escapes ‘historical mediation’, retroactively affixes Le Petit Mort and 11th September 2001 as a “fucking wank” or madness, jet aeroplanes as missiles, buildings as targets (129, ibid), speech and language such as “when we talk about war, we are really talking about peace” (Bush 2002) and a ‘perpetual state of emergency or war on terror’ evokes St Paul’s ‘End of Times’ becoming ‘normality’ and George Orwell’s fictional 1984 is reality. Like ‘Communism’ in the ‘Cold War’ era, the ‘madness of terrorism’, ‘Camp X-Ray’ in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, Iraq’s Abu Ghraib and ‘performance’ itself are Lacanian theory’s nodal, quilting or ‘pointe de captione’, that is to say, a measuring stick for situating the meaning of ‘freedom’. So, do you not feel lucky, punk? Don’t you? - So, you do … so … go ahead … and … so … make my day …

The conclusion of Le Petit Mort is performed within an Artaudian notion of “I will do what I have dreamed or I will do nothing” (117, Artaud 1958). This notion was followed by improvisational explorations with Ranters Theatre director Adriano Cortese, as a questioning of doing “what it is that you want to do”. Each live performance was preceded by THE PHANTOM Ben Cittadini’s inspirational direction of Le Petit Mort as a relation to three elemental things “1 — ACTion!, 2 — ENERGY!!, 3 — FREEDOM!!!”. By these means; Le Petit Mort approaches the “ecstatic limit” of Hinduism and Lacanian theory’s “‘thou art that’”, revealed as “the cipher of mortal destiny” (7, Lacan 1977), beyond a so-called ‘secularization beyond religion’; that perpetually attempts to appropriate an-other’s Otherness, to one’s own ideological self-image. Le Petit Mort attempts the dissolution of the ego-self that alienates each other, and reveal the presence of an illusory barrier i.e. absent, non-existent; that perpetuates the loss and separateness of ‘things’ — us, all —, ‘we’ as people. Le Petit Mort is the embodiment of a hysterical discourse, articulating the fissure of a flawed, fatal ‘consciousness’. The perceived gap between this, these signifiers that represent ‘I’-‘me’-‘Craig Darryl Peade’, is the “symbolic mandate that determines my place in the social network” within Le Petit Mort and justifies or contextualizes not only ‘its’ existence as an ‘Honours Performance Research Project’, but also my very own being. I EXIST. I AM — BECAUSE OF YOU — the audience, there, as necessary participant — constituent of “Why am I what you are saying that I am?” (131, Zizek 1991) — a success-full failure, mad, obscene, misogynist, crude amateur, perverted ‘god’ freak, a genius, a ‘prima-dona wanker’ with his hand ‘on it’, a sado-masochist, a cannibal, a fanatical Artaud wanna-be disciple, a tautological sophist, a Jesus Christ complex personified, a prophet of a future consciousness, a return of the same problem perpetuating the masculine crisis, a nihilist, a confused obfuscation.

This delirious, diachronic document approaches an interpretation of the practice inherent in Le Petit Mort and the ‘nondialecticizable’ dimension of writing about performance, where the doing is — or might be — easier than the articulation of ‘it’. The universe of anxiety provoked in the difficult task of translating the experience of Le Petit Mort within an organized logic and discursive language, might rather than relate the so-called ‘impossibility’ of representing the live performance, but actually signify its proximity as an ‘inexhaustible’ performative effect. Like the scientific domain’s increasing recognition that “in order to explain anything, you have to explain everything” of physics’ chaotic quantum mechanical theory, Le Petit Mort is akin to the topological mobius strip subjectivity — prior to the Lacanian theoretical mirror — that began this ‘ordeal’ (244, Reanney 1992). This structure like an ‘illusory transitivity’ — the familial resemblance of a series decreasingly similar, not unlike Deleuzean ‘repetition with difference’ — (purported by the likes of performance theorists Bert O.States in the article ‘Performance as Metaphor’; citing Umberto Eco’s use of Wittgenstein language games theory in the prophetic article ‘Ur-Fascism’) — renders problematic, the totalitarian tendencies of the ‘universally globalised post-9/11 era’. Strategically, Zizek posits an “inter-subjective supplement to the famous Lacanian maxim ‘do not cede your desire’: avoid as much as possible any violation of the fantasy space of the other i.e., respect … the other’s ‘particular absolute’” (156, Zizek 1991), that is, the absolutely particular way one organizes a ‘universe of meaning’, structuring its ‘impossible’ relation to the traumatic ‘Thing’ — ‘objet petit a’-object-cause of desire — the ‘Real’ and ultimately, the real-ity of life – [our] death. Le Petit Mort is one such “‘pathological kernel” of a ‘strictly essential’ and at times impenetrable, private, dreamt world that ‘I’, as ‘Craig Darryl Peade’ have existed in reality or otherwise. Like all artistic practices, Le Petit Mort is a ‘freedom of self-creation’ in a dialogical interplay, between the liminal paradigms of belief- knowledge, theory-practice, and me as live performer and you as audience-participant. The traversing of private into public realms and vice versa, asserts a subjective differentiation, by an inverted protection, from ‘intrusions’ of intimate space. The intimacy of Le Petit Mort parallels the ‘universal reality’ of ‘globalised’, virtual images that 11th September 2001 is the representation of par excellence. The modus operandi of Le Petit Mort and performance exacts a reciprocating, ‘cutting wound’ onto the violently abstracted Cartesian ‘cogito ergo sum’ (that haunts Western metaphysics like Artaud), in order to break the deadlock of radical doubt that confers through the image — “I think, therefore we are all the same freedom loving peoples everywhere”, into, “I think, therefore, I am in doubt that we are all the same freedom loving peoples everywhere, and in fact, I know I am similar, but, irreducibly different”. The ceaseless, inventive, nominations of external enemies — beginning with Usama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Abu Masab al Zarqawi and even Australia’s own David Hicks — accounts for the current era’s failure and burgeoning totalitarianism. A proximity of presence within prescribed borders by these ‘absent Others’, is rendered present by their ‘spectral images’, that become as though ‘harbingers of death’ or ‘memento mori’. Such images never cease in their attempts to restore these ‘lost subjects-becoming-objects’, as opposed to the finitude of ‘that has been’— i.e. past. By transgressing its own ordained taboos as a ‘death cult’, a national mythology of heroic patriotism amasses a collective, pathological ‘jouissance-enjoyment’, against these ‘Other’ figures that apparently desire one’s dissolution. Through the institution of these images of ‘Other’ — such as those of ‘Camp X-Ray’ in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib — mediatised notions of freedom are distributed that reflect the implementation of Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ in reality, and an ‘initiation’ into the ‘cultural’ values that ‘sustains’ the ‘New World Order’. Dissemination of these mediatised images removes the viewer, at a determined distance, from a common complicity. By inscribing a notion of Western, liberal, democratic ‘privileges of luxurious freedom’ — as a relation to ‘envious terrorist Others’ and their clandestine operations that are ‘determined’ to destroy such ‘attributes as those of our way of life’ — the hegemonic status quo asserts itself as a utopia worth defending. However, this ‘cult of death’ affirms the ‘sacredness of all life’ by a so-called ‘secularised religiosity’, demanding sacrifice by ‘just’ warfare, in exchange for an immortal ‘after-life’ — lest we forget. The impatience to die and relieve suffering is sublimated through an ‘Armageddon complex’, that desires an ‘End of Times’ for the world and its existence, whilst the elderly and terminally ill are subjected to the anonymous death of aged and palliative care.

In contradistinction, Le Petit Mort attempts to foreground a cultural process of pretension, repetition and transformation that posits performance as a ritual of dying and (re)birth by implication. With the indissoluble linking of death and time, Le Petit Mort attempts to invert the Latin phrase of tempus fugit — time flies — into a ‘fleeing of time’ in a performance, imagined as an idealistic, naive four dimensional ‘Nietzschean dance of becoming consciousness-ess’; — you, being, becoming, alive — with me, us, all, we, together. Cultural aesthetics of violence and repetition are compulsively perpetuated by a virtual immortality, in favour of conformity. As such, in order to liberate consciousness beyond ‘ego-self’ against such practices, artistic performance cannot be guaranteed as constituting ‘no harm’. A Nietzschean ‘active forgetfulness’, implemented through the ‘remembering’ of performance, resists such simulacra that refuses to forget so-called ‘days changing worlds’ like 11th September 2001. In absence now, as a memory strives to psychically live on (im)mortally, and in remembering ‘I’ exists — (or is that insists, to be or not to be, a question or ‘presence of something’, that necessarily wills transformation?) — referring to Blau’s citation of poet W.H Auden; Le Petit Mort might change nothing, but it at least changes that (19, Blau 2003); — nothing, that is. ALL...