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Reality Principles
3

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 Reality Principles
From the Absurd to the Virtual

3
Herbert Blau

The University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor
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Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2011

All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
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2014 2013 2012 2011 4 3 2 1

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

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or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise,
without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blau, Herbert.
Reality principles : from the absurd to the virtual / Herbert
Blau.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-472-07151-7 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-
472-05151-9 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Theater—Philosophy. I. Title.
PN2039.B5775 2010
792'.01—dc22 2010047518

ISBN 978-0-472-02790-3 (e-book)

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To my son Dick
 Contents

Introduction 1
one Relevance: The Shadow of a Magnitude 23
two The Faith-Based Initiative of the Theater of
the Absurd 44
three The Soul-Complex of Strindberg: Suffocation,
Scopophilia, and the Seer 56
four From the Dreamwork of Secession to Orgies
Mysteries Theater 68
five Performing in the Chaosmos: Farts, Follicles,
Mathematics, and Delirium in Deleuze 89
six Seeming, Seeming: The Illusion of Enough 103
seven Who’s There?—Community of the Question 119
eight The Emotional Memory of Directing 133
nine The Commodius Vicus of Beckett: Vicissitudes
of the Arts in the Science of Af›iction 148
ten Among the Deepening Shades: The Beckettian
Moment(um) and the Brechtian Arrest 165
eleven Apnea and True Illusion: Breath(less) in Beckett 182
twelve Art and Crisis: Homeland Security and the
Noble Savage 198
thirteen Ground Zero: The Original Vision
(May 16, 2008) 214
fourteen Blessings to The Pope and the Witch 219
fifteen The Pathos of Dialogue: Unable to Speak a Word 223
sixteen Thinking History, History Thinking 225
seventeen Why “WHAT History?” 236
eighteen The Human Nature of the Bot 243
nineteen Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness 246
twenty Auto Archive 264
Publication History 275
Index 277
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Introduction
3

All of these essays, with one exception, were written just before or
after the millennium, and while they re›ect upon each other, that ear-
lier essay does, not only across the years, but from so long ago that I
might have forgotten what it was about. It would seem to have been an
irrelevance until, working on an autobiography, I happened to read it
again, while remembering the dissident 1960s, spilling into the 70s,
when classrooms were invaded, students were lecturing teachers, and
relevance was a watchword. That my view of it all then, as a rather chas-
tening lesson, is still germane today was con‹rmed by my wife Kath-
leen Woodward, when she was recently asked to contribute to a special
issue of Daedalus, where my essay was published over forty years ago,
after a rather high-powered conference, sponsored by the American
Academy of Arts and Science, “The Future of the Humanities.” That
the future is still in question—and with the economy reeling, the job
market worse than ever—is what Kathy was writing about.1 Much
involved as she is with the digital humanities, a possible source of sal-
vation, about which I know very little, she nevertheless quoted me in
her essay (without saying I was her husband), because “Relevance: The
Shadow of a Magnitude” had apparently left a reproachful shadow on
what, in the academy today, remains misguided, unthought, or know-
ingly hypocritical. And though I had serious misgivings, in those per-
formative days of protest, about my alignment with the students, their
insurrectionary fervor, I felt we had to come to terms not only with
what they were demanding, but what we had been evading, with a
repressed blush, as if the books we were teaching and analyzing—the
sometimes forbidding subtext or darkling indirections, myths of other-
ness, love’s body, their implicit bearing on life, ethically, kinesthetically,
never mind psychedelically—were telling us we were lying, even as the
universities were being corporatized.
What I said at the conference, and what I wrote, apparently had
suf‹cient fervor of its own, which caused James Ackerman—the distin-
guished art historian, in his introduction to the essays—to describe it as
an “apocalyptic message” that had “the most radical implications of any
in the issue.”2 If the message was partially determined by my radical

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work in the theater, which had produced a scathing manifesto a few
years before,3 the more immediate site of provocation was my being at
California Institute of the Arts, where as founding provost I was
responsible for its conception as an implosive scene of learning, a sort
of mixed-media merger of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain. With a
faculty of major artists interacting with students, and the avant-garde as
second nature—‹rst in beautiful downtown Burbank, that right-wing
wasteland, scandalized by it all, then with happenings and installations
all over the landscape of the San Fernando Valley—CalArts became the
exemplary model of the antiacademy. And while there were wild and
whirling dilemmas in its uncensored beginnings, with an escalation of
controversy (up to the Disney-world board) that eventually caused me
to leave, there hasn’t been in my lifetime, except maybe for Black
Mountain, a pedagogical dynamic even remotely like it.
How all of this came about is rehearsed in a miniature autobiogra-
phy, called an “Auto Archive,” which I was asked to write for Theater
Journal, explaining how I came to theater, and why, since I left it, I’m
doing what I’m doing now. If much of that is theoretical, it’s with a
haunted materiality, what I ‹rst tried to de‹ne in Take Up the Bodies: The-
ater at the Vanishing Point—with the ghostings of (dis)appearance, “the
body’s long initiation in the mystery of its vanishings,”4 and the shad-
owy magnitudes there. As for the order of things here, with “Rele-
vance” at the beginning, in an ambience of the Absurd, its manic, non
sequitur theater, the “Auto-Archive” is at the end, as an appendix of
remembrance, in the encroaching world of the virtual, with the “live-
ness” of bots and bytes, and mediatization setting the standard for what
we take to be “real” in performance. Or with the body immaterial, so it
would seem: the appearance of mere appearance, a techno-mimicry of
mimesis. About the nostalgia of virtuality—liveness abolishing pres-
ence in a facsimile of life—there’s a brief re›ection here in “The Human
Nature of the Bot,” which was solicited actually for a debate online.5
The repercussions were such that I was asked to extend the essay for an
updated anthology, Critical Theory and Performance, where I had written
previously on the psychopathology of the actor and, from Brechtian
Alienation to the hegemony of cultural studies, ideological vigilance and
the illusions of demysti‹cation.6 As for the resources of mysti‹cation in
the electronic age, from neural stimuli to info-phantoms of the brain,
the programs proliferate, but despite the “body electric,” the byte
encoding of Whitman’s dream, “the subtext of the virtual is that it really wants
to be real.” Thus, I raised a jaundiced eyebrow over the performative
allure of cyberspace and, without the smell of mortality,7 the empty

reality principles
2
staginess of its digital seeming. The title of the revised essay, “Virtually
Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness,” is a simulated sign-off on the
devolution of it all. Which also suggests Beckett, who in the abbrevia-
tions of being, its synaptic circulation, made a commodius virtue of
“Lessness,” as with the Fizzles and Texts for Nothing, or in his shortest
play, that “faint, brief cry,” the plaintive “vagitus” of Breath.8
As for mortality itself, that dif‹cult birth astride of a grave,9 it’s to
be seen from another perspective, seemingly transcendent, in “The
Faith-Based Initiative of the Theater of the Absurd.” A symptomatic
image there, unconscionable in its excess, out the window and to the
stars, is “the long, long body . . . winding,” in Ionesco’s Amédée or How to Get
Rid of It, ›oating amid the supernal, an ever-ballooning corpse. The
essay was originally commissioned as one of two keynotes for a sympo-
sium at Stanford, a retrospective on the Absurd, from that existential
period when all values were up for grabs, or seemed to have disap-
peared, even in celestial regions, into a black hole, where gravity is so
impacted that nothing, not even light, can escape its relentless pull.
How to think about that, or if value exists at all, might require “com-
plexity theory,” as with the fractals of disordered systems. If that seems,
systemically, cosmically, an overview of absurdist dramaturgy, the invi-
tation came with a cautionary note to me, about how things should be
said, not said, for a not entirely academic, rather hypothetical audience,
the “educated public.” With an apology, then, in advance, and
“chronometrably” in submission, I abided by “the game of the rule,”
taking my cues from Ionesco, with a hyperawareness of words, weari-
some, slippery words, the crimes committed in their name. That didn’t
prevent me, alas, with a disposition to theory and subjunctive habits of
mind, from doing precisely, criminally, what I was warned against, mak-
ing things dif‹cult, in appraising the theatricality that, with every incon-
sequent gesture or conscious incoherence, “inevitably returns to the
tortuous question of whether or not there is meaning in the world, or
whether we were merely born deceived into a reality that is incurable.”
The other keynote was by Martin Esslin, whose book The Theater of
the Absurd (published in 1961), began with an account of that now-leg-
endary performance of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin Prison (1957),
where we weren’t quite sure, as the convicts assembled, the actors ner-
vous, there’d be an educated public, or what kind of education. As for
sophisticated San Francisco, when I ‹rst directed that production at
The Actor’s Workshop, and the now-canonical Beckett just about
unknown, there was not only in the audience, but even in our com-
pany—the knowledgeable ones, of course, really experienced in the-

Introduction
3
ater—much resistance to our doing that gratuitously unintelligible,
pointless nondrama. I’d given various talks at Stanford over the years,
but if it was a pleasure to be there with Martin, by then an old friend, it
was like a pleasure postponed, amusingly ironic, to ‹nd myself this time
on the stage of the Little Theater, where there’d been (in 1949) the ‹rst-
ever production of any play of mine, then several others, written there
at Stanford, to which I came by an almost capricious series of accidents,
with a graduate fellowship in drama, as a temporary diversion from a
career in chemical engineering (about which, again, see the “Auto-
Archive”). It took some time, even while working in theater, before I
really put the periodic table and ›uid mechanics behind, but out of old
re›ex, ideas from the sciences, subatomic or astrophysical, will turn up
in these essays, and another one in a moment on the selvage of the
Absurd—now, but not then, linked to “chaos theory.”
Meanwhile, unfortunately, back to the incurable. It may have been
up in the air, like that corpse in the Milky Way, but mortality came down
to earth, as if through the retrospective. And we even saw it on stage, in
the course of the other keynote, the quivering immanence of it. With no
discernible change in an encyclopedic mind, but his whole body shaking
from an advanced case of Parkinson’s, the sad aftermath of the occa-
sion was the death of Martin Esslin. Thinking of it now, I remember
another symposium (back in 1969), when the two of us were together in
western Canada. At the hotel, Martin and I were having breakfast, when
we heard over a radio that Beckett had won the Nobel Prize. We tried
to call him in Paris, but to avoid reporters and unwanted attention he’d
already gone into hiding, somewhere in Tangiers, and he didn’t show up
in Stockholm to receive the prize. The morning after the talks at Stan-
ford, when Martin was about to return to London, we again had break-
fast together, and were reminiscing about that, when I saw his hands
trembling, and asked about the prognosis. He said it wasn’t good, noth-
ing the doctors could do . . . That, to be sure, was the wrong kind of
nothing, which in Beckett has to be done, as in the waiting for Godot.
More to be said about that, and in the tribulations of Beckett, “the sci-
ence of af›iction,” or with the apnea we shared, its suffocating per-
spective.
There are three pieces on Beckett here, but it was the faith-based
irony of my essay on the Absurd that caused me to return, out of a “ver-
tigo of nothingness,” to when I was studying thermodynamics and
became fascinated with entropy—a measure of the unavailable energy
of the universe, which seemed, as I say at the end of the essay, a datum
of the Absurd, “with its law of increasing disorder and commitment to

reality principles
4
evanescence,” sneaking up in “a dizzying anguish on whatever made it
available.” Along with the dizzying anguish, what made it available, too,
was what I called in the following essay “The Soul-Complex of Strind-
berg,” which like complexity at the edge of chaos, disorderly, but adap-
tive, inclined to something rather than nothing—though we’re never
quite sure what it is, since it came, as in A Dream Play, through an illu-
sory “triplex cosmos,” and with “occulted symbols.” Or worse, what
we’d rather forget, like “an anxiety dream that becomes increasingly
nightmarish,” while the nightmare itself, in its seepage from the uncon-
scious to the unspeakable in the world, brutally implacable, garishly
banal, becomes reality principle. If there is, in the preface to Miss Julie, a
provision of technique which anticipates Brecht, that effect of alien-
ation is only momentary in the mind. Whether naturalism or symbol-
ism, there’s still a double bind: in the penumbra of representation, from
the materialist to the sublime, no escape by illusion from the oppres-
siveness of it all.
For in Strindberg, ultimately, whether in “vulvous grottoes” or
whatever idyllic residues of the biblical garden, the world into which
we’ve fallen is a time-induced pollution of ignominious lessness, mak-
ing it hard to breath. In this suffocating regard, the soul-complex fore-
shadows, with its mordantly longing vision of a world outside this
world, the lingering af›iction in Beckett—that too, incurable, with its
earthbound outbursts of rage, all the more because of nostalgia for
what, “having terminated my humanities,” as Beckett says, but says in
vain, with maybe “a new no to cancel all the others,”10 unnamably never
existed. Not so for the early Strindberg, in›uenced by Swedenborg,
who in his spiritual awakening could visit heaven and hell, to consult
with angels and demons, charged by the Lord with parsing out holy
doctrine. But for the dispirited Strindberg, nothing that ever lived was
holy—no world but this world, no good, no truth, no meaning, there’s
only hell on earth, a Swedenborgian “vastation,” where misery prevails.
Thus with the Student in The Ghost Sonata, well tutored in disenchant-
ment, a far miserable cry from the students we started with here, who in
those cold war days of relevance, presumably telling it like it is, coun-
tered the threat of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) with the
promissory note of a counterculture claiming to change the world.
Strindberg’s unappeasable Student would probably have laughed at
that, with a raging desire to say what he thinks, though if he did, and
people were honest, he’s sure the world would collapse. As I say in the
essay, however (as true now as it was then), “the horror may be that it
wouldn’t”—which is the news that Indra’s Daughter, having descended

Introduction
5
to earth, brings to the Throne above. And then there’s the Captain in
The Dance of Death, who, morti‹ed, impotent—and without the magnil-
oquence of Hamm in Endgame, even if self-de›ating, the saving grace of
his histrionics—can only shake his ‹sts!
In the drama of modern Austria, historical site of one of the essays,
the worlding is still demoralizing, as with the imprisoned Sigismund in
Hofmannsthal’s The Tower, “not sure he is in the world, or [pace Heideg-
ger] where the world is,” with boundaries blurred, too, in a chimeric
subjectivity, between within and without. (To return again to the virtual:
that chimeric subjectivity may be even more so today, with split-screen
attention to a world that is an elsewhere, with Googling, linkage,
WinZip, and instant access to multiple selves, by merely the click of a
mouse.) As for those words, words, words, and the crimes committed
in their name, there’s a logorrheic archive in Peter Handke’s Sprechstücke,
particularly Offending the Audience, and a magisterial indictment in Karl
Kraus’s massive drama, The Last Days of Mankind, which in no uncertain
terms, and a corrosively assured omnipotence, is meant to be the last
Word. “Where are all these corpses from?” asks the bewildered tramp
in Godot,11 who might very well be referring—after two world wars, by
then in their ghostly presence—to the rotting horde of unburied
corpses at the end of Kraus’s play. Though he was not at all Marxist,
what Kraus said with millennial scorn of post-Secessionist Austria
would seem to be the ful‹lment of what Marx once demanded, in an
early letter to the Young Hegelians: “a ruthless criticism of everything exist-
ing.”12 Such a criticism was actually initiated—about the time of that let-
ter, and years before the Young Vienna, who just before the Secession
met in the coffeehouses—in the satires of Johann Nestroy, whose
wordplay buffoonery and redheaded mockery also took on the censors,
that religiously endorsed surveillance, a re‹ned dynastic tradition, cov-
ering up the scandals of imperial power, and its trickle-down
hypocrisies, not only in highbrow Vienna, but at the city limits, among
the theatergoers of an emerging middle class.
Nestroy stuck it to them, his insults making them laugh, but then
was long-neglected, until rediscovered by Kraus, and then again
neglected, not only in the Austrian theater, his plays rarely produced
anywhere, but even by those of us who had studied European drama.
Having read him last I don’t know when, I rediscovered Nestroy
myself, in wondering how to approach the keynote for an international
symposium, here at the University of Washington, “Cultures of Perfor-
mance in Modern Austria.” It wasn’t only Nestroy I had to catch up
with, but Kraus and others, and the Secession too, since I was hardly

reality principles
6
familiar with what had happened under the Hapsburgs, or onstage,
backstage, or the inner circles of waltzing Vienna, when I was asked by
my Germanic colleagues to give that talk. I hesitated to do it, but they
persisted, because of my background in theater and writings on perfor-
mance. Even so, there would be scholars from here and abroad, who
knew modern Austria and its heritage as I didn’t, and all of whom read
and spoke German (indeed, many of the papers were in German, and
when mine was published in a collection from the conference, all quo-
tations I’d made in translation were restored to the original.) Aside from
that delinquency—next to no memory of the language, studied for my
doctorate, but unused then and since—my major immersion in Aus-
trian culture was at a rather remote scholarly haven, when I taught at the
Salzburg Seminar, in the Schloss Leopoldskron, redesigned by Max
Reinhardt as a sumptuous salon for artists, across the lake from the
mountaintop castle where the aged Kokoschka had a workshop for
painters, and might have been teaching then. I follow him here, how-
ever, through his wilder years when, as with the blasphemous erotics of
Murderer, Hope of Women, he shaved his head, bloodied his actors, to
make the theater outrageous, and through a propensity for derange-
ment, became in the café scene of Vienna a spectacle himself. At
Salzburg, much cultural history all around, but my seminar, for the
equivalent of postdocs from all over western Europe, was on American
drama. When I thought it over, however, what made me eminently
quali‹ed, as I said jokingly before the talk, as in accepting the invitation,
was the fact that one of my immigrant grandfathers, an illiterate tailor,
came from somewhere in Austria; hence, the name Blau. Actually, too,
as can be seen in the essay, I had some direct experience at the more
contemporary end of modern Austria, with Viennese Actionism; and in
another context, with one of those af‹liated, the versatile Valie Export
(body art / cinema / video / mixed-media installations), with whom I
had coedited an issue on performance in the journal Discourse.13
Recurrently in these essays, as in a previous collection, The Dubious
Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, the thought of performance is not only
confronting some limiting condition, but as with the Actionists, their
self-abusive performances, extremities at the extreme, often hard to
watch. Or, as with other body artists, such as Stelarc (with ‹shhooks
through his ›esh) and Orlan (with multiple surgeries on her face), even
a photograph might make you wince. This would seem to be, however,
the desirable state of things within the “trajectories and becomings” on the
thousand plateaus of Gilles Deleuze, with its “rhizomatics of theatrical-
ity,” where the repertoire is endless, each of us many others, all roles

Introduction
7
insuf‹cient, in the assayings of nonidentity. In that period of
demysti‹cations, when theory was exposing systems of power, the anti-
identity politics had to do with a pretentious subjectivity or the bogus
individualism imposed upon us by capitalism. As for the anti-Oedipal
dispensation of Deleuzean performance, where the desirable state is
desire, the incessant production of which is assured by lubricious desir-
ing-machines, when I wrote that “the autoerotic [is] on automatic in
runaway machines, given over to pure expenditure in the libidinal econ-
omy,” it still made sense to compare that to Wall Street, which wasn’t
much concerned then “with the prospect of recession, or stag›ation,”
no less a Great Depression. That was, of course, before the enlighten-
ment of the economic collapse.
Whatever the stimulus now, there’s nothing like de‹cit spending in
the super›uity of Deleuze, the incorrigible excess of its plateauing
evanescence. In the early writings with Guattari, that excess was
indebted—the instabilities and ›uctuations, free of all normal causali-
ties—to the utopian anarchy of May ’68. They concede about the dissi-
dence (as I did about relevance) that there were agitations, slogans, idio-
cies, but despite all absurd illusions, there was an opening to the
possible, a visionary phenomenon, throwing off the nightmare of cul-
tural suffocation. And in the dream of a new existence, eventually
betrayed, what appeared was a “spectral cosmos” that “superseded the
world.” Chance was admissible too, but the betrayal, however, was
always in the cards. For there was, at the outset, in the schizoanalysis of
capitalism, a reversing, anomalous logic; even in boundless speculation
the codes of capitalism determined semiotically the vaunted exposures
of critical theory. Or given the law of value, with a marketable equiva-
lence: “›oating theories, . . . ›oating money,” as Jean Baudrillard con-
cluded in an early book on symbolic exchange.14
With a momentum, nevertheless, overriding contradiction,
Deleuze’s spinning circuitry spawned (all verbal, no object), in a profu-
sion of instantaneity or haphazard of signs, as it might on the Internet.
And with the libidinal inexhaustible, pure expenditure continued, nei-
ther mere data, nor pixelated, rather replenished in whatever becomings
by an “energy-source machine,” which in rejecting the Oedipal struc-
ture had nothing to do with the Freudian unconscious, or the inade-
quacy of an Id. The machinic fact of the matter is that with all value
going at once, into and out of all the bodily ori‹ces, despoiling from ass
to mouth the ‹ction of a natural function, the deterritorialized ›ows
became, in a redundancy of irrelevance, the spaced-out apotheosis of
the polymorphous sixties, with its perversity in regression. As

reality principles
8
pre‹gured by infant autism, the yammering, stuttering tantrums, and
with chiliastic dimensions, by the sonorous organless body in the
alchemical theater of Artaud, the “vitalism”15 is examined here, in “Per-
forming in the Chaosmos: Farts, Follicles, Mathematics, and Delirium
in Deleuze.” Which will not be the ‹rst time, and I say this with no bias
against it, we’ll encounter a lot of shit—though in other respects, unex-
cremental, I do take issue with Deleuze.
Given his long hostility to bourgeois theater, overburdened by rep-
resentation, there’s a deep af‹nity with the “operations” of subtraction
in the “minor” stagings of Carmelo Bene, who refused to think of him-
self as a director.16 Insuf‹ciency the heart doth sway, as Shakespeare
says in a sonnet,17 maybe releasing other prospects, but otherwise—and
it may be the inversion of a reductio ad absurdum—Deleuze’s antithe-
atrical prejudice is dispersed through the rigors and excess of excess,
though with insuf‹cient deference to the future of illusion, which
appears to be, as I think it (or is it thinking me? as I’ve also asked about
history) the only future before us, and thus a reality principle. This
rather unnerving thought is more than implicit in the balancing act of
the prejudice, between more theater and less theater, which has varied
through historical periods, but leads to the age-old question, Why theater
at all? With history blurring, however, in a dromoscopic, simulacral,
hyperdigitized world, given over to speed in the furore of information,
theater would seem to be left behind, with the body as an encumbrance,
no less the mortal body performing, arousing thoughts of death and
dying, which can’t be outsourced, except into tragic vision. As to what
death is, as Montaigne once remarked, it is a scene with one character.
An unseeable scene, perhaps. To what extent, we might ask, is it related
to stage fright?—which nobody can avoid, even the best of actors, but
as covered up in performance, or from the body’s speci‹c gravity work-
ing up a sweat, the dark energy of theater, what really activates acting.
Meanwhile, there’s something other than mere liveness in new modes
of genetic and molecular art, which suggest, however (if at all a know-
able truth), that death may be dying, even as antitheater appears to be
obsolete, its inexistence explored, with the perceptual permutations of
that always reversing conundrum—reality of appearance? appearance
of reality?—in “Seeming, Seeming: The Illusion of Enough.”
And when we speak of the future before us, there’s always the cor-
relative question, what constitutes that us? which I’ve asked before in
The Audience, and here with some afterthoughts, in “‘Who’s There?’—
Community of the Question.” The issue is unavoidable in an ontology
of theater, which is more than implicit through this entire book, though

Introduction
9
not very characteristic of performance studies, which tends to be, while
crossing nations and cultures, ethnographical or anthropological, and
when merging with race and gender, ideological too—which, theoreti-
cally, just about everything is, but that predictably so. Wherever the the-
ater comes from, and whether more or less, that essay was crossing bor-
ders for another international symposium, which in its conception was
in›uenced by The Audience. What was in question there, in Zurich,
Switzerland—where the ›oating money usually ›oats (through declared
transparency now) in labyrinthine vaults—is the nature and status of
the spectator in a globalized, migratory, mediatized world. As if resist-
ing dissemination, there had actually been, several years before, a simi-
lar conference in Lisbon, Portugal, once politically isolated, but about
to become, with Expo ’98 scheduled a few weeks after, the cultural cap-
ital of the world. With a festival of performances already around the
city, it seemed an ideal setting for a lively dialogue, between European
Americanists and American scholars, about “Ceremonies and Specta-
cles, and the Staging of Collective Identities.”
What contributed to the festive atmosphere, for those of us giving
keynotes, was our being taken for lunch and dinner to the ‹nest Por-
tuguese restaurants, where there was in the background, unbeknownst
to me, the plaintive irony of a collective identity out of the city’s past,
and probably still in the barrios we weren’t taken to see. I heard it, but
nobody explained it, so far as I recall, but in the slow, lingering sadness
of fado guitars and song, there was an unobtrusive staging of poverty
and dispossession, what in newly prosperous Lisbon was better unre-
membered. As for the worldly scholars at the conference, what seemed
to have been forgotten, in the acceleration of history, is that with the
accumulation of capital into a Society of the Spectacle (what Guy
Debord had called “Separation Perfected” or “an abundance of disposses-
sion”),18 there was reason to be skeptical about the communitarian
theme—which, though I took issue with it, provided the title for The
Dubious Spectacle. To begin with in my talk, I confessed that I might be
there under false pretenses, since after many years of directing, in mul-
tiple kinds of theater, conventional or open spaces, with distance or
intimacy—even actors within the audience or the audience becoming
actors—I’d come to think of the staging of collective identities “as a
rather vain enterprise,” or a leftover platitude from the participatory
mystique. Nor, since the more contentious days of The Actor’s Work-
shop, and The Impossible Theater, could I buy into the tedious notion that
the theater is at its best when it does what the audience wants—as just
last week, praising a production, a critic said in The New York Times.

reality principles
10
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As for “the semblance of a gathered public,” I won’t belabor it

here, nor elaborate as in The Audience, but as I’d written in its ‹rst para-
graph, “Such an audience seems like the merest facsimile of remem-
bered community paying its respects not so much to the still-echoing
signals of a common set of values but to the better forgotten remains of
the most exhausted illusions.”19 And so, too, those attending or watch-
ing being set up for participation, the audience becoming actors, and
not only entertained, but edi‹ed by that. Whatever the identities among
the sizable group in Lisbon, there was some discom‹ture when I said,
“As for the scholarship that takes for granted that theater is the site of
the social, or an af‹rmation of community, that appears to me now—
though I believed it when I was younger—an academic ceremony of
innocence, assuming as a reality what is, perhaps, the theater’s primary
illusion.”20 Those few years later in Zurich, among the others there, it
certainly seemed that the dubiousness was more advanced, as in the
cadenced title of the conference, which was—with globalization speed-
ing up, and the nervous European Union—phrased in three languages:
“Zushchauen / Quel Public? / As You Like It.”
Have it anyway you like it—with everywhere linked to elsewhere in
a computerized cursor(y) life, with Facebook, Twitter, doyouQ, the
scrolling identities there—community is the question, and surely we
know that the early-on autotexted, bitlet generation, growing up at the
keyboard, gaming, with in‹nities of data, hardly goes to the theater.
“Who’s there?” At the two major theaters in this city, the Seattle Reper-
tory and Intiman, if you look around the audience, a large number are
elderly, and the youngest in attendance are usually the baby boomers.
And indeed, what’s up on stage is what that audience wants, invariably
so familiar that, sitting on the aisle, I’m ready to leave after ten minutes,
except that my polite, forbearing wife presses down on my arm, keep-
ing me there until we slip away at intermission. Just last night, at dinner,
an artist friend who works in a gallery literally asked what I was often
asked when I was still doing theater, especially the more inquisitional,
long-rehearsed, encrypted work of the KRAKEN group: “What kind of
audience did you have in mind?” What I said—and he couldn’t believe
it—is what I used to say then (often in stronger language), that I
couldn’t care less about the audience. What I did care about is precisely
what we were doing, on the premise that theater is thought, and whether
verbal or ideographic, at its best when self-con›icted, or this one’s quar-
rel, that one’s pulse, or some last will and testament, stubborn but inde-
cisive, which to believe it would make you bleed. And even then, with
afterthought in the grain of the voice, as if the “geno-text” in Barthes21

Introduction
11

www.Ebook777.com
came from the ori‹ces in Deleuze, there’d be the spittle, sputtering,
stammering, or at some extremity of a scream, shattered words becom-
ing gesture—glottal stops, rasps, plosives, fricatives piercing the
body—and we’d rehearse it all over again.
The method was psychophysical, in a process we called ghosting, but
whatever it is we were after, it was impassioned by the necessity of
understanding that, however inaccessible its meaning might be—or at
some periphery of estrangement, as if the thinking had never started,
and there you are confounded by the ghostly thing itself. So: “Who’s
there?” No wonder that voice on the ramparts has been like a light in
the dark, though it’s the wrong one making the challenge. Of course, as
with everything in Hamlet, you won’t see it if you’re not listening. Then,
that other voice out of the dark: “Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold
yourself.” Who exactly is being addressed? Onstage, sure, but offstage?
They can be in their seats, watching, as in the play within the play,
watching and being watched, but there in the unfolding the audience is
what happens. Or it does and it doesn’t, depending on who’s there. Some
are there for entertainment, but there’s a second meaning of the word,
as when one says, “I’ll entertain that question.” But how to entertain it
when you don’t know what it is, or in the Hamletic vein, nothing either
good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Maybe so, maybe not, like to be or not to be—and is that really the
question? If that exasperates the thinking, what may complicate the
unfolding is some confusion of the senses, those lower bodily senses,
which also inhabit performance: touch, taste, smell, breathing and being
breathed. Thus, if there is a nuance there onstage—more or less dis-
cernible, sometimes unacknowledged—when two actors are kissing or
making love, there are similar effects offstage, not always negligible,
when somebody rustles a program, sneezes, shifts in a seat, whispers,
puts a hand on a knee, or digesting a meal, has bad breath. Those ‹ne
distinctions kept in mind, there was a time, too, as in the novels of
Henry James, when one could say s/he went to hear a play (and with
Shakespeare spoken correctly, as now, indeed, some demand for Beck-
ett). We’ve heard from Hamlet, too, about an interiority, that within
which passeth show, but any way you look at it—the eyes with gazing
fed, deconstruct it as you will—theater is specularity. What’s there, not
there, you really have to see it, in that elision of seeing and knowing,
whatever it is that escapes you, which is what keeps us thinking, and has
caused me to say, too, that theater is theory, or a shadow of it. Or if only
the shadow’s shadow, it’s no mere social construction (the shibboleth
of cultural studies), and something other than virtuality.22

reality principles
12
 Which goes to the heart of directing, or it eventually did for me, as
in the most searching rehearsals, where sometimes manic obsessively,
testing the limits of theater, its capacities, incapacities, and what it was
meant to be, I was already doing theory. And though I came to theater
belatedly, I was still wondering—after many years of directing, achieve-
ment recognized —what I was doing there, and why at recurring critical
moments I also threatened to leave. That questioning was resumed at a
conference on directing in St. Petersburg, Russia, appropriately enough
at the Alexandrinsky, which had once been Meyerhold’s theater. What I
talked about, however, “The Emotional Memory of Directing,” was
cued in by Stanislavski, and my earliest reading of An Actor Prepares. At
the time, if there was any technique among American actors, much of it
was patchwork, but with a character’s actions divided into units and
objectives, and emotion turning inward, psychology was the going
thing. Yet, from private moments to public solitude, with superobjec-
tive de‹ned, and affective memory focused for access to the uncon-
scious, there were indeterminate feelings, and feelings about feelings
(some projected on the director, who has to decipher, de›ect, turn
back, get the actor to use them), and a maybe stressful subtext of “emo-
tions about memory”—of which I’ve been particularly conscious, at an
advanced age, in the writing of an autobiography.
The unconscious, according to Freud, is our oldest mental faculty.
It is also, however imaged, whether as writing or mise-en-scène, the
deepest form of memory, though what seems most deeply remem-
bered, and no illusion of aging, is what you’d rather forget, so painful to
even think it, it’s never suf‹ciently thought, as with the egregious less-
ness of Beckett, where “the brain still . . . still . . . in a way” is still propul-
sively thinking. Indeed, it was a spasm of derangement, from a transient
ischemic attack—brain fever? no painkillers?—that initiated the essay
“Apnea and True Illusion: Breath(less) in Beckett,” his thought, my
thought, con›ating his pain with mine, which in its empathic way, along
with remembered amnesia, blurs into acting method. True, the methods
may radically differ, but in the most powerful acting, whether subjec-
tive, from the unconscious, or before the Brechtian gestus, Meyerhold’s
biomechanics, or masking what it reveals, the “mathematical meticu-
lousness”23 of Artaud’s naked life, there’s some propulsion there, which
like dark matter, unseeable or unseen, turns each thought in its thing-
ness into a condition of possibility—or, as with high energies in particle
physics, an “asymptotic freedom.”
As for Stanislavski’s injunction to make a life in art, it was not very
long after I began to direct that I was trying to literalize that, by bring-

Introduction
13
ing art, so far as I could, into my life in theater. This came about as I
realized, after reading everything, seeing everything, to prepare myself
for directing, that the high energies were elsewhere, and there was more
to be learned about doing theater, and what might be done, from the
other arts, whether visual, sonic, conceptual, or what was on the scene
then, happenings and action events, or performative risks with the
body. Not quite body art, but some approximation of it showed up in
our stagings, as with the cataracts of madness in the storm of King Lear,
and the self-shattering corporeality of its “thought-executing ‹res”;24 or
in the Grand Brothel of The Balcony, from masturbation to necrophilia,
its carnal repertoire of perversion; or ‹nished, nearly ‹nished, the algo-
rithmic steps of Clov’s opening walk in Endgame, the spastic immediacy
of it, visceral, its thingness, which was also an act of mind. As for those
extremities of performance that, at some limit almost illicit, can drive
you out of your mind, there were times in directing when, urging the
actor to let it happen, whatever it is, wherever it goes, latent violence, self-
abuse, or at some perilous edge of the psyche, I seemed possessed
myself. What made it next to immoral is that the actor could really get
hurt, but if it were done as it might be done, in its asymptotic freedom,
almost beyond acting, the performance would be out of sight.
Which doesn’t guarantee that it would happen again, nor that the
emotion that went with it, ephemeral, uncertain, would even be remem-
bered. And meanwhile, too, the question persists as to what constitutes
truth in acting. Stanislavski required it, and believed he knew, but as you
think through the possible forms of theater, across cultural distance,
how do you ascertain it, truth in respect to what? and what kind of act-
ing? where? how? what for?—is it meant to be spontaneous? or as with
Brecht, ideologically constrained? or stylized by inheritance, as in the
Japanese Noh? Despite early resistance—to the plays we did, and how
we did them—experiment made the reputation of our theater in San
Francisco, but whatever the grati‹cations of my work with the actors
there, it wasn’t until the uncertainty principle in the evolution of the
KRAKEN group, its “methodical indeterminacy,” that those elemental
questions about acting were really explored, which taught me a lot more
about what it means to be a director. That was the real substance of
what I talked about in St. Petersburg, while returning to the emotional
memory that, despite the anti-Oedipal, continues to haunt the theater,
“ghosting its greatest drama, the ineliminable riddle, the riddle of self-
doubt.”
There’s all the more reason for doubt when, with the uncertainty of
riddling ambition, artists “try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible

reality principles
14
and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to
another world.”25 This desire to go beyond is not exactly mine, but
from the notorious response by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen
to another extremity of performance, which seemed to come out of
nowhere, with the most formidable, theatrically stunning dimensions,
and for all the traumatized world to see, its mesmerically repeated, tele-
vised images. The phantasmic aureole of smoke and ›ame, the crum-
bling towers, the falling bodies, the horri‹c aesthetic of it—as if, indeed,
a post-postmodern perverse sublime, though many were scandalized
when Stockhausen proclaimed it the greatest work of art that has ever
been. What art could follow after—whether for solace, testament, out-
rage, no less an impossible closure—became a distressing question, as
when Theodor Adorno remarked that there could be no poetry after
Auschwitz. But as if to alleviate 9/11, several faculty from the UW
School of Drama and Dance initiated a yearlong project in honor of
Myra Hess, the British pianist, who during the Nazi bombings of Lon-
don tried to avert a cultural blackout, and overcome wartime stress, by
bringing the foremost concert musicians to perform in the empty
National Gallery. With another vast emptiness, Ground Zero, still
awaiting a memorial, the Myra project, or Myra’s War, was meant to
demonstrate, in a series of performance events, that “in the midst of cri-
sis art remains a vital and buoyant force in our lives.”26 Whether it was
adequate, however, to an era of insidious prospects, on color-coded
alert, with a virtually invisible jihad, and “the foreboding in‹nity of the
undeclared,” were issues I raised in a lecture, which was not the keynote
this time, but the endnote to the project, “Art and Crisis: Homeland
Security and the Noble Savage.”
Given his wealth from Saudi Arabia, and elitist family there, Osama
bin Laden might have been the Noble Savage, that ‹gure de‹ned by
Rousseau as having a mythic purity upheld by natural law, which for the
Wahhabi bin Laden would be the sharia. The reference, however, was
to a journal coedited by Saul Bellow, in which I’d published years before
an essay on the cold war, and its Balance of Terror, called “The Public
Art of Crisis in the Suburbs of Hell.” If hell is other people, as Jean-Paul
Sartre once declared, the suburbs have certainly widened, way beyond
the Paris banlieues, with indescribable legions of others, dispossessed,
futureless, or fanatically fundamentalist, who were then, and no less
now, ready and willing to kill us. And I say that still, for all the explana-
tions about Islam, and cautions about categorizing Muslims, that go
with the proliferating discourse on terrorism (what they’re calling “ter-
rorology”), including reminders that the United States has to be held

Introduction
15
accountable for an exploitative capitalism, and with an eye on oil in the
Middle East, sponsoring Israel in oppressing the Palestinians. As for the
real “Axis of Evil”—according to revelations by counterconspiracy the-
orists—that consists of government of‹cials, FBI agents, and military
tacticians, who by creating war games and disaster drills that were sup-
posed to avoid it, covered up “the fact” that 9/11 was conceived for the
Bush administration, as a pretext for invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq,
with a scenario written by the CIA.
Meanwhile, it’s not exactly to augment homeland security when,
amid debates about health care, jobs, bankruptcy, and failing mortgages,
there’s impatience about getting our troops out of a debacle, with insur-
gents, that has been reminding us of Vietnam. Should there be, how-
ever, with growing animosity in the Muslim world—whether exacer-
bated by our policies, poverty, madrassas and mullahs—another sudden
attack, not at the L.A. airport or Times Square, or toppling the Space
Needle in Seattle, but by a suicide bomber at University Village,
between my house and the campus, followed by another in Tacoma, at
a suburban shopping mall, and still another at a supermarket in Idaho,
and in the serial terror, a magnetic bomb attached to a bus in North
Dakota, we’d be ready for the return of Dick Cheney as national secu-
rity advisor. It was Ronald Reagan that I always considered our most
repellently hypocritical president, and I was certainly no supporter of
the born-again George Bush. But when I suggested in the talk some tol-
erance for decisions that, with a globalized plague of “venomous
hatred,” his suspect administration had to make, I could see that leftist
colleagues in the audience were disgruntled, and at one point in discus-
sion afterward, a woman who apparently knew just about everything I
ever wrote stood up to say that she couldn’t believe, given my radical
views in the theater, that I would ever justify what that crowd of thugs
in the White House was doing.
Whereupon I said what I still believe, that until you’ve had some
experience of power, it’s hard to know how to judge it, and while I
haven’t been president of the United States, I’ve held some fairly
responsible positions—on or over the edge of controversy, not only in
the theater, but academically, as a dean (twice) and a provost—where
you’re often confronted with decisions that, with all the advice you can
get from those presumably best informed, are still a matter of guess-
work. We can certainly see that now, with public advice from his gener-
als, about President Obama’s delay in getting out of Afghanistan, and in
the discrepancy between what he promised during the elections and—
aside from those compromises that antagonize his leftist following—

reality principles
16
his often discretionary hesitancies in of‹ce. Which for the thugs really
there on the right, who question where Barack Hussein was born,
con‹rm that he’s hypocritical.
Hypocrisy, too, has its own ambiguities, and sometimes you’re not
sure you’re doing the right thing when you are standing on principle.
And while I spoke of it earlier as the most extraordinary site of learning
in my lifetime, my experience at CalArts, coming and going, was a les-
son in that regard, testing ambition and possibility, and at the end, the
willingness in principle to leave it all behind, though I might very well
have stayed. When I was ‹rst invited to become provost, with an
opportunity to conceive California Institute of the Arts (what we abbre-
viated ‹rst as CIA), I hesitated, because it was ‹nanced by money from
Walt Disney’s will, and while I grew up with Mickey Mouse, I remem-
bered my father, a plumber, saying Disney was a union-buster in the
1930s, and anti-Semitic too. The family was right-wing, and the board
consisted of those who became Richard Nixon’s, and then Reagan’s,
kitchen cabinet. Watergate came later, of course, but the head of the
board who actually hired me was H. R. Haldeman, who was an execu-
tive then in Hollywood with the J. Walter Thompson advertising
agency. Haldeman and I hit it off, despite total political difference, and
I could level with him, too, about what I thought of Nixon. As for the
controversy that caused me to leave, that might have seemed inevitable,
though it was my choice at the end, because that reactionary board was
reasonable at ‹rst, willing to put up with a lot that offended or confused
them. But because it was hard to believe where the money came from
for this contentious, polemical, leading-edge institution, there were fac-
ulty and students who escalated con›ict, always testing the Disneys—
until their board eventually wanted me to do what I wouldn’t do, ‹re
certain people and alter the governance structure. That, too, was exper-
imental, participatory, leveling out authority, in the mystique of the six-
ties, yet with a disciplinary consciousness among the artists on the fac-
ulty, which was with all the dissidence passed on to the students.
When I left CalArts, nearly forty years ago, I never expected to
return, but a couple of years ago I received a call from Steven Lavine,
current president there, who said they wanted to give me an honorary
degree at graduation. When I was silent for a moment over the phone,
Lavine asked a little nervously if I would accept, and I said I would, if it
was offered “as a form of penance.” If you look at the webpage of
CalArts today, it still uses language from the original prospectus, which
I wrote back then, de‹ning that atmosphere of experiment, always open
to risk. The graduation itself was spectacular, with everybody perform-

Introduction
17
ing, dancing and singing through the awarding of degrees, and an
ensemble of bongo drummers accompanied me to the stage. And I
went up there, arms swaying, shuf›ing to the rhythm. With a laughing
crowd and a Dada backdrop, it was hardly a scene for getting serious,
but what Lavine had asked me to talk about, after receiving my Doctor
of the Arts: Honoris Causa, was “the original vision,” which he has tried
to revive against some resistance. The text of what I said, which is
included here, relates the state of the arts then to what’s happening
now, with re›ections upon what, at Ground Zero, “challenged the
powers, the signi‹cance, and dimensions of the arts.” The other hon-
orary degrees were awarded to the singer/activist Harry Belafonte and
the electronic, mixed with Buddha, composer Terry Riley, both of
whom, with contrasting dimensions, took their own risks.
Another short piece that I’ve included was written for a contro-
versy that I was asked to mediate at the University of Minnesota, having
to do with the playwright Dario Fo, whose proletarian activism received
a Nobel Prize, though he was twice denied visas to enter the United
States, under a law excluding aliens with anarchist, communist, or ter-
rorist inclinations. No doubt whatsoever, the anarchism was there in
the off-the-Vatican-wall zaniness of The Pope and the Witch, really arous-
ing outrage in the Catholic community of Minneapolis–St. Paul,
because of what they considered its abusive ridicule, even hatred, of the
church. What Fo intended to expose, in the pious idiocies of his agit-
prop farce, was the injury done to the impoverished people of Third
World countries because of the Vatican’s teachings on contraception
and abortion, and the strictures enforced by the present pope. When
the production was announced, there were denunciations in the
Catholic press, and the archbishop of Minneapolis petitioned the uni-
versity president to cancel the play. There were also threats by wealthy
Catholics in the city, and on the university board, to withhold money
promised to endowments, or for new buildings on the campus. With
the support of the university administration, on behalf of academic
freedom, the production was going ahead, but Michal Kobialka, chair
of the Theater Department, who knew of my background in contro-
versy, asked if I would come to Minneapolis to address the con›ict
before the ‹rst performance, and then participate in an open forum, at
which there were Catholics and anti-Catholics, and liberal Catholics
who were not for censorship. With the student cast listening, and
apprehensive, there was quite a rabid discussion, by panelists on stage,
by others shouting out from the audience, but the show did go on, with
my “Blessings to The Pope and the Witch”—which came in part from old

reality principles
18
relations with Jesuits at the University of San Francisco, who were faith-
ful admirers of The Actor’s Workshop, despite our rather frequent anti-
clerical plays, which they religiously attended.
If there was a lively dialogue over the play, that really took some
doing, quieting some, letting others speak, shouting down the shouters,
and one wonders still how many change their minds. When the words
are ›owing in public, as in a political debate on television, they’re likely
to be self-serving, specious, even vacuous words, and without going on
at length about the entire repertoire of free-enterprising evasion, I did
refer to the slippery signi‹ers in another short essay, “The Pathos of
Dialogue: Unable to Speak a Word.” A solicited contribution to an
anniversary issue of the Polish journal Dialog, it was not quite what the
editors expected, which was, I gather, some encomium to dramatic the-
ater as a form of verbal exchange. What I wrote was actually published
in translation, and though my grandmother was from Kraków, I don’t
read Polish, so I have no idea to what extent those words were my
words, with the caustic disposition of the essay here. As for being
unable to speak a word, we’ve seen in the academic world, through the
era of political correctness into cultural studies, that there isn’t much to
say—not what you’d think of as dialogue—unless within the spectrum
of race, gender, ethnicity, and regarding facts of the past, properly his-
toricized, which is to say, with some revisionist Marxist view of what
constitutes history. Or as it tends to be registered now, with suspect fac-
ticity, as a matter of social construction.
What of reality then, or reality principle? Or from the absurd to the
virtual, is there nothing but metahistory? Whether what happened hap-
pened, and how we’d know it, that’s a major concern of the last pair of
essays, the ‹rst of which was for a special issue of Theater Survey, “The-
ater History in the New Millennium”; and the second was the introduc-
tion to the conference “Performance and History: WHAT History?”—
which became another special issue, of Modern Language Quarterly. It was
Marshall Brown, editor of MLQ, who persuaded me to put the confer-
ence together, after he’d read the ‹rst essay, “Thinking History, History
Thinking,” and that big red WHAT in the conference poster, italicized,
capitalized, was there as a challenging reminder that there are variant
ideas of history, and that the cultural materialism, and its reductive new
historicism, which had dominated performance studies, was inevitably
being rethought, as if history were doing the thinking. As for an inter-
active discourse on history, there isn’t likely to be much in what passes
for collegiality in academic life, where faculty for the most part don’t
know each other’s writings, and at department meetings, instead of

Introduction
19
engaged ideas, bureaucracy takes over, that spirit of corporatization.
Unlike Beckett, in his Text for Nothing, my humanities are not over,
but with digitalized capitalism diversifying the world, in “a sort of cor-
porate takeover of morphological ›ux,” the question persists “about
the reality of the world, and how in the world we’d know it through the
free trade of appearance,” which would seem to have purged history of
anything teleological, while scattering remembrance with those seeds
upon the ground. Or after the collapsing towers, in the accretions of
dust. If what’s written there is terror, I’ve felt obliged to teach it, as in a
seminar coming up, that is, the almost ceaseless discourse since 9/11,
discourse producing discourse, if not, as some books claim, terror(ism)
itself. Or in mortifying detail, with impartial documentation, we may see
the compounded irony: that Americanization of the world, or its medi-
ated appearance, corresponded with the renewed dream of a caliphate
and, under the Prophet’s banner, an Islamic imperialism, with inevitable
global jihad and apocalypse for the West. If that sounds melodramatic,
or once again about Muslims, politically insensitive, it may also be
what’s otherwise repressed, a more tragic view of history—what Secre-
tary of Defense Gates seemed to suggest, in this morning’s news, when
asked by a soldier in Kirkuk why, and how long, we’ll remain in
Afghanistan. The repercussions of what I wrote in “Thinking History,
History Thinking” are complicated every day, as when shortly after the
Fort Hood massacre, by a crazed Muslim psychiatrist, the decision was
made by the attorney general to prosecute Khalid Shaihk Mohammed,
self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, in a Manhattan federal
courtroom just blocks away from where the World Trade Center was.
And meanwhile the debate continues as to the propriety of that loca-
tion, under civil jurisdiction, or whether it should be in a military court.
While all of this would seem to antiquate the once-in›uential cri-
tique of Orientalism, there are certainly residues of colonialism in vari-
ous aspects of foreign policy, especially in assessing and acting, or
mostly failing to act, on atrocities in the Congo, Darfur, Zimbabwe, or
immeasurably elsewhere in the underdeveloped world. What remains
undeveloped in the academic world is, as I’ve said, our attitudes toward
history, and whether or not what happened can be perceived, no less
authenticated, through the attritions of time—whether in the vanished
immediacy of the living moment or over la longue durée, or extending to
outer space, that realm of dark matter or “stupefyingly empty voids.”
But I’ve now taken considerable time rehearsing the interwoven the-
matics, or possible empty voids, of these various essays, in which,
though I’m not a historian, there is an emergent idea of history. As to

reality principles
20
WHAT history? whether guided by vanities or “supple confusions,”
failing memory or contradictions, it may very well escape me, but—
conscious again, as in theater, of the ghostings of (dis)appearance—I’ll
leave that now to be thought.

notes

Quotations in this introduction, without any superscript, and not annotated here,
are either from what I’ve written in the essays that follow, or if quoted there, with
references in the endnotes.
1. Kathleen Woodward, “The Future of the Humanities—in the Present and
in Public,” Daedalus 138.1 (2009): 110–23.
2. James S. Ackerman, introduction to the issue “The Future of the Humani-
ties,” Daedalus 98.3 (1969): 609.
3. The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1964).
4. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana: University of Illi-
nois Press, 1982) 299.
5. The debate was with Philip Auslander, who some years before had orga-
nized a session on my work at the American Educational Theatre Association con-
vention. In an inscription to his book, Liveness: Performance in Mediated Culture, he
acknowledged me as a “mentor,” but differed with me, nevertheless, as I did with
him, as to what was mediating what.
6. “Ideology, Performance, and the Illusions of Demysti‹cation,” in Critical
Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1992) 430–45.
7. Lear to the blinded Gloucester on the heath, when he tries to kiss the mad
king’s hand: “Let me wipe it ‹rst. It smells of mortality” (King Lear 3.7.132).
8. Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove, 1984) 211.
9. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954) 58: “Astride of
a grave and a dif‹cult birth.”
10. Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing 11, in The Complete Short Prose, 1929–89, ed.
S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1995) 145, 147.
11. Waiting for Godot 41.
12. Karl Marx, “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing,” in The
Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978) 13.
13. Valie Export and Herbert Blau, eds., “Performance Issue(s): Happenings,
Body, Spectacle, Virtual Reality,” special issue of Discourse 14.2 (1992).
14. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Mike Gane (London:
Sage, 1993) 44.
15. “Everything I’ve written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is” (Gilles Deleuze,
“On Philosophy,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin [New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995] 143).
16. Bene’s work has been contrasted with mine, by Mark Fortier, in “Shake-
speare as ‘Minor Theater’: Deleuze and Guattari and the Aims of Adaptation,”
Mosaic 29.1 (1996): 1–18.

Introduction
21
 17. “O, from what pow’r hast thou this pow’rful might / With insuf‹ciency
my heart to sway?” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 150).
18. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. unnamed (Detroit: Black & Red,
1983), part 1, sec. 31, n.p.
19. The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 1.
20. The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000 (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2002) 137.
21. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image-Music-Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 179–89.
22. That it’s possible to think, however, through various meanings of the
word, “across the ‹elds of moral philosophy, optics, physics, and ontology,” of vir-
tual worlds on stage—or in diverse modes of performance, as a movement from
science to spiritualism—one can see in an imaginative critique of the rites and
strategies of representation, in Sue-Ellen Case, Performing Science and the Virtual (New
York: Routledge, 2007). There’s an overview of it all in the introduction and pro-
logue, 1–14. What Case says of the virtual is not the rites we’re concerned with
here, nor is there any assent to what others have aspired to, the abolition of repre-
sentation, which is, however theorized, as with Derrida on Artaud or the desirings
of Deleuze, nevertheless wishful thinking.
23. Antonin Artaud, “On the Balinese Theater,” in The Theater and Its Double,
trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove, 1958) 57.
24. King Lear 3.2.4.
25. “Documentation of Stockhausen’s Comments re: 9/11,” http://www
.osborne-conant.org/documentation_stockhausen.htm (visited September 24,
2010).
26. “Innovative Projects in the Humanities,” Walter Chapin Simpson Center
for the Humanities, University of Washington, newsletter, vol. 6 (November 2003):
6.

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22
 one

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The Shadow of a Magnitude

I got undressed and I looked at myself, and began to cry.

Hush, Luster said. Looking for them ain’t going to do
no good. They’re gone.
—benjy, in The Sound and the Fury

3
In one of the chapels of Peterborough Cathedral, there is a panel that
shows an ass playing a harp. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or
pray. Is it a supreme expression of faith in man, to waft him to heaven
as a dumb beast? Or was that twelfth-century craftsman anticipating
Rabelais, who stripped man to his behind and gave him a comic beating
for his pains? One may feel it both ways: adoration and a secret skepti-
cism below the altar. It was the same in medieval drama. God was the
hero, magniloquent and vast, but most of the energy came from the
Devil. In the iconography of the alchemists there is an image related to
the panel at Peterborough. It shows the Devil as a donkey circled by
dancers, braying a tune out of a horn up his ass. It’s not entirely clear
that the joke is on him. Actually, there’s no point in hedging our bets—
all ambiguities registered, the comedy is obviously leaning the other
way. In virtually the same circle where Death the antic sat, grinning over
his court, irreverence is presiding over life.
It’s the same in Rabelais, in whom there’s the barest syllable’s dif-
ference between the scatology and eschatology. He was a physician and
committed to healing. “Without health,” he said, “life is not life, life is
no longer livable.” In his considered opinion, there was little health in
Paris, which resembled an open drain, a cesspool, a running sore—pol-
lution so rampant there was only one cure. He sent Gargantua to the
top of Notre Dame and had him piss all over the city, drowning thou-
sands. It was an act of moral edi‹cation and civic improvement, medic-
inal, a prodigy of nature. It was also educational, the basis of a recon-
struction of learning in the Abbey of Thélème, a radical institution in
the history of humanism. Instead of the cautionary “Nothing in
excess,” the heuristic “Do What Thou Wouldst” was inscribed over the
portal. There’s a long subterranean torment between that mandate and

23
the nihilist’s “All is permitted,” but when Pantagruel is born he breaks
the cradle to signify there’s no turning back. Or rather, in that revolu-
tion there is a turning back—an audaciously selective attitude about the
past. The Hippocratic oath is leveled against the hypocrites, and the
Delphic “Know thyself”—the other inscription on the ancient portal—
becomes “Physician, heal thyself.” Personal hygiene is public therapy.
The beginning of healing is in exposing the hidden. Is it true or is it not
true that the unexamined life is not worth living? Socrates thought so,
and the scholars at the Abbey of Thélème are told, “Let nothing be
unknown to you.”
If there is anything novel in the gesture of Pantagruel, it is a lust for
totally expanded consciousness and the demand for suffrage at the
instant of birth that we are still trying to redeem. In the calls for Black
Power and Flower Power and Student Power, there is a similar irrever-
ence and a comparable rage, coming out of the feeling that a birthright
has been violated and a signi‹cant part of our human legacy lost. In the
act of salvage, there is an impatience with half-measures. When the stu-
dents, demanding relevance, are charged with being heedless of the
past, the case is being misrepresented. What they are doing is choosing
from the parallel and countervailing traditions in the available lore. The
doctrine of Black Power is not solely a matter of civil rights but of
claims upon the psyche from the vasty deep. There is no politics of joy
that doesn’t somehow respond to those claims. The rest is mere legisla-
tion, curriculum shift, and tedious lying. We needn’t overestimate the
percentage of students agitating to admit the potency of their quest for
power. The quieter criticism of the moderates is affected by it. And only
the grossest moral inattention would be consoled by the careerism and
daily acquiescence of a majority. What’s at stake is hardly a game of
numbers. Seizing on traditions that have been denied has released both
energy and moral fervor, and shaped the logistics of protest as well.
High on the ledge of the library at Columbia was the shadow of Gar-
gantua, and it was the spirit of Pantagruel which advanced at Chicago
the disruptive candidacy of the obscene Pig.
No matter what the media make of it, we get the message. As they
chanted over television, the whole world was watching—and neither
backlash, tear gas, decrepit electoral process, nor the return of Richard
Nixon on a platform of law and order could reverse the inevitable
“return of the repressed.” Both presidential candidates of the major
parties were already undermined by a rhetoric they couldn’t master as
they constantly assured us they were socking it to us and telling it like it
is. What is happening to our institutions is providential and irresistible.

reality principles
24
It is part of a novus ordo saeclorum that is no mere fantasy of the radical left
but the existential recurrence of a venerable dream. Fantasies, like
politicians, ‹nd their time, or make a comeback. In the humanities, it is
already second nature to defend—with the most formidable cerebra-
tion and passion for form—the demands of the instinctual life, subjec-
tivism, love’s body, homo ludens, and the primacy of personal vision,
down to the most perverse mutation of our most singular monsters.
With nearly incredible technique we scanned the uncontrollable mys-
tery on the bestial ›oor. (“Behaviour, what were thou / Till this mad-
man showed thee?”) All through the twentieth century we’ve been
studying the comic morti‹cation or outright retribution of repressed
Energy seeking its Other. There we were gaping with our marvelous
craft, when the rebellions came along to say look how little of such
vision you’re getting into your programs.
Surely our disciplines have only a sad drained remote af‹nity to that
joyous exercise of spirit in pursuit of knowledge that Rabelais pro-
claimed at the Abbey of Thélème. With immaculate methodology we’ve
sucked “the substanti‹c marrow” and ended up, self-deluded masters
of our areas of “responsible knowledge,” gnawing on an old bone.
What the student rebellions turned up was news to the students, but it
was hardly news to us. We all knew the ways in which the humanities
had broken faith. The forms we teach have hit upon a void. If our
teaching has any contemporary substance, we have pronounced our
own judgment. The books we taught are used against us—Plato, Sartre,
Buber, Blake. The demand of the students is not for dilution of knowl-
edge or the abandonment of discipline, but that we be there, present in
our knowledge—and not some bifurcated portion of what we are, but
the whole man whose body is the book, else a great Prince in prison lies.
The great rediscoveries of this period—in civil rights, action projects,
encounter psychology, and the war resistance—have to do with what
Polanyi calls personal knowledge. If criticism has emerged as a surro-
gate for moral philosophy, the drive is to reduce the distance between
philosophy and action.
I remember teaching Kafka’s The Trial on a day when some tractors
appeared on campus to knock down some trees in order to put up some
huts. We were talking about the ambiguities of power. There’s nothing
ambiguous about it, one of my students said. There’s that tractor, here’s
my body, there’s that tree. Too simple? Perhaps. We’ve seen enough of
it, however, to know there’s a moral to be drawn. The moral is authentic-
ity. All the anxieties of humanistic scholars about the idea of relevance
have to do with the failure to face up to this issue. In defense, we accuse

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the students of simplifying or wanting a sense of history; but that charge

is stupefyingly evasive. We answer the call for relevance with proliferat-
ing pseudoknowledge as the monographs stockpile like Overkill, and
we stiffen above the burden of stack-dust like the Duc of Guermantes
above his years in À la recherche, as if perched grotesquely on giant stilts
taller than church spires.
If the students are delinquent about the prose of history, their con-
sciousness of its bloody poetry is impacted beyond tolerance. Where
they stress what happened, they don’t want it to happen again. When
the student protest is countered by saying we’ve seen it before, we are
telling a truth and missing its meaning. The analogies fail under the
duress of history. If similar motives were operating, say, in 1848, the
solution then seemed to be the acquisition of historical consciousness
amid the facts of history that went along with it. Today humanistic
scholars must ask why, pondering civilization and its discontents,
protest among the students takes the form of historical consciousness
that is impatient with the facts or an obsession with the facts that have
simply been left out of history, as with the blacks. I take it that the esca-
lation of protest into anarchy is both inevitable and provisional. There
is something Tolstoyan in the tactics: “Why talk in subtleties,” Tolstoy
wrote when criticized for abandoning the complexity of art for the
bluntness of polemic, “when there are so many ›agrant truths to be
told.” This is not to say the students aren’t contributing their share to
the credibility gap exposed. In the revolutionary process they have
learned to lie, blackmail, and brutalize themselves in the provocation of
the brutality they wanted to remove. No matter that they proved it. The
veil falls, the beast is exposed, and one sees his double. It happens even
to people under thirty. The wrench thrown into the machine to curb an
insane momentum has released a brainless violence no better than
brainless authority. If it’s not yet equivalent to the subtler violence of
our educational system, with its illicit connection to the technostructure
and its distant re›ection in Vietnam, there’s no reward in waiting for an
escalation of inhumanities to make a balance. I can’t pretend to measure
the point of no return, but the students who have been resisting force-
feeding by the system must eventually see there is only so much of a les-
son the university can learn by force. When the university retaliates,
nobody is learning anything. The university’s survival depends on
refusal of the means of violence even to protect itself against outrage.
The students’ cause depends on recognition of the difference between
confrontation politics and a confrontation.
All outrage admitted, what the students have done beyond

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26

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reproach is to make us question the wholeness and accuracy of our
teaching and to measure our precious values not dispassionately against
one another but in real-life situations, urgently, against ourselves. They
are also reminding us of what gets lost in the rationalistic jostling of val-
ues in our most resourceful habits of thought—that the deepest agree-
ments with life are made below the structures by which we are bound.
The true social contract is written in invisible ink. It represents a con-
sensus of the inviolable. I am speaking of what is sovereign in ourselves
that is the basis of any polity, and of which we are forever trying to
understand the terms. The archives are full of preliminary drafts of
which the humanities are the guardian, our Central Intelligence Agency.
When impotency looks imminent, we are theoretically prepared. The
task of the humanities, all ‹ne print read, is to support the resistance
and protect our private property by summoning up the imagination of
power. It would be pitiful if the humanities, foolishly arguing the valid-
ity of relevance, couldn’t hear the message or read the handwriting on
the wall, for it’s all been lifted from some of our sacred texts.
The trouble is, as the graf‹ti said during the May rebellion in Paris,
“Ears have walls.” That wasn’t all the graf‹ti said. For Herbert Marcuse,
what was written on the walls in Paris de‹ned the nature of the insur-
rection. He saw in the graf‹ti a coming together of Karl Marx and
André Breton (there was also the coming together of students and
workers, which General de Gaulle has neatly contained and to which we
have no real parallel in America, the blacks notwithstanding). “Imagina-
tion in power: that is truly revolutionary. It is new and revolutionary to
translate into reality the most advanced ideas and values of the imagina-
tion.” One thinks of Shelley, proclaiming the poet the unacknowledged
legislator of mankind, handing out pamphlets on the street corners of
Dublin. It was a lonely operation in the white radiance of eternity. Over
the millennium settled the factory dust. For both Marx and the surreal-
ists—and now the students—history is the nightmare from which we
are trying to awaken, like Gargantua from “Gothic night.” Since the
atomic dust, history has entered the biological cycle. For students
weaned between fallout and dropout, going into the Underground or
the New Politics, the marriage of the Dialectic and the Unconscious is
a consummation as devoutly to be wished as the marriage of heaven and
hell. The marriage has been expected since that time in the old town of
Zurich when Lenin moved into the house at No. 8 Spiegelgasse directly
across from the Cabaret Voltaire at No. 1, where Dada was issuing its
manifestos. Samuel Beckett, to whom activism is irrelevant and social
solutions insane, nevertheless gave us a description of the oscillating

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ideology that brought the Pig to Chicago and the son of Ubu Roi,
screaming merdre!, onto the barricades at the Sorbonne. “But he had
hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the neces-
sity of those others, on the other (for it is rare that the feeling of absur-
dity is not followed by the feeling of necessity), when he felt the absur-
dity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare
that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity).”
When, to avoid vertigo, the Theater of the Absurd moves out to the
streets, we have one of the dizzier and more demoralizing aspects of the
student rebellions. But the motives can hardly be discounted, and they
are by no means academically disreputable. The students have learned
their lessons intolerably well. The reign of the critical intelligence during
the stasis of the cold war is reaping poetic justice. The logic of an art
form has reached its bitter end. There is a creative disequilibrium in the
polymorphous perversity. We speak of infantile or adolescent behavior,
but that’s partially a response to the unnerving threat of childlike ques-
tions: We hold these truths to be self-evident—why? We hold these
truths to be self-evident—why not? Are the students alienated? No, it’s
not really the students who are alienated, since they are the atomized
re›ectors of profound cultural disorder, performing for us now like the
mechanisms of dream, telling us more perhaps than we want to know.
They inherit our contradictions with our guilt, and they are acting them
out objectively for us to see. It’s as if the young were doing therapy for
us. The psychodrama reveals that we are the alienated, since we are the
ones who insist, with injury to ourselves, on a critical distance between
what we profess and what we do.
The process of revelation is painful, and it has opened up real issues
of matter and methodology in education. Making learning relevant has
little to do with mere topicality or immediacy or politicization or the
updating of accepted knowledge or denial of the past or the abrogation
of discipline; rather our disciplines are being pressed back to ‹rst prin-
ciples and reinvested with a passion for the elemental. Like the gas man
playing the Bishop in Genet’s The Balcony, those of us who teach are
being asked whether we dare go to the limit of our self-conceptions.
Choose a role and there are frightening implications—in text, subtext,
and shadow text too, what is mirrored in the mirror behind the words;
or to put it in the classroom, what remains in the mind’s eye when the
blackboard’s erased.
The issues are explored in the contest of alter egos in Peter Weiss’s
play on Marat and the Marquis de Sade. In the entertainment designed
for the madhouse, in which the madmen play historical parts, the man

reality principles
28
of detachment is poised against the violent revolutionary whom he has
created for the occasion. As he examines his own incapacity for action,
Sade resembles the humanist brought to the highest equivocating pitch
of analytical introspection. The problem of identity is given priority
over the need for action. But self-de‹nition follows a truthless path to a
limitless and metamorphic bottom. All we can do as we descend is try
to dig the criminal out of ourselves. That criminal is the shadow of a
criminal society, in which “What we do is just a shadow of what we
want to do.” The re›ections of Sade, who distrusts revolutionary
extremism, are attacked with scorn by Marat, who has had enough of
the politics of despair:

If I am extreme I am not extreme in the same way as you

Against Nature’s silence I use action
In the vast indifference I invent a meaning
I don’t watch unmoved I intervene
and say that this and this are wrong
and I work to alter and improve them.

At the bottom of their respective obsessions, the activist Marat and the
uncommitted Sade are allies, similarly demonic. Either one might have
said this:

The important thing

is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself
inside out
and see the whole world with fresh eyes.

And as the chorus chants, “We want our rights and we don’t care how
/ We want our revolution NOW,” the decisive voice is that of the for-
mer priest and radical socialist Jacques Roux, straitjacketed by the Es-
tablishment, who says of the con›ict between Marat and Sade to the
audience that is impassively watching: “When will you learn to see /
When will you learn to take sides.” Of course we must remember, in
this whirligig of identities in a no-man’s-land ‹rst explored by Piran-
dello, that Roux is an actor playing a madman playing a defrocked
priest. The cast applauds with catatonic derision at the end of the play,
as the audience backs nervously into the streets. Fortunately, the dis-
tractions of the boulevard are available to relieve the hazards of pulling
oneself up by one’s own hair.
But that’s not entirely true in a university. Our commitment to

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truth confounds us there. Who was it that was dragged screaming into
the twentieth century? It’s not the reform of our institutions that dis-
turbs us so much, it goes deeper than that. As in Genet’s play, we are
being forced back, naked, into that clearing where all values are in jeop-
ardy and we’re no longer sure we have anything to put in their place.
“We discover that we do not know our own role,” as Rilke observed in
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; “we look for a mirror; we want to
remove our makeup and take off what is false and be real. But some-
where a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exag-
geration remains in our eyebrows, we do not notice the corners of our
mouth are bent. And so we walk around a mockery and a mere half: nei-
ther having achieved being nor actors.” Nietzsche anticipated this con-
dition in The Genealogy of Morals and put the question we are forced with
all scholarly scruple to put to ourselves: “We knowers are unknown to
ourselves, and for good reason: how can we ever hope to ‹nd what we
have never looked for? We are perpetually on our way thither, being by
nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind. The only thing
that lies close to the mind is the desire to bring something home to the
hive. As for the rest of life—so-called ‘experience’—who among us is
serious enough for that?” He speaks of seriousness, but his end is light-
heartedness, a “gay science” that “is the reward of a long, courageous,
painstaking, inward seriousness, which to be sure is not within every
man’s compass.” Looking back over the wild and dangerous territory of
his mind, where all value is shattered by the intensity of exposure,
Nietzsche adds, “On the day when we can honestly exclaim, ‘let’s get on
with the comedy!’ . . . we shall have given a new turn to the Dionysian
drama of man’s destiny.”
In the presence of Dionysus we are quick to invoke Apollo. But the
comedy won’t be satis‹ed until the laugh laughing at the laugh de›ates
pretension and drives men and institutions back to their source, to the
“radical innocence” that Yeats sought or the ecstasy of the elemental
that Hart Crane was desperate for in The Bridge when he cried out,
“dance us back the tribal morn!” Lévi-Strauss, whose investigations of
the mind of the savage inform us about the savagery of mind, devel-
oped a vast cerebral system after eating the pullulating sap of the white
kouro worm. We have lain in the soil, T. S. Eliot told us some time ago,
and criticized the worm. When the worm turned, all the old dualisms
were up for grabs. We are expert in the ambiguities. Confronting the
inseparability of reality and illusion, action and passion, identity and
character, sin and sensibility, being and becoming, art and life, we have

reality principles
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warned ourselves about no irritable reaching after fact or reason. Now

all the barriers are down, and the scenarios being acted out by the young
contain imperatives prepared for in our research.
What is it that really disturbs us in the new generation, if it is not a
shift into the abyss as normative, the aim being an extension of sensory
capacity by immersion in the undifferentiated? They are committed to
the art of ›ux. What we once studied in Rimbaud and Mallarmé as a cal-
culated derangement of the senses has become an habitual way of life.
In a strange consortium of powers, technology has come to the aid of
art. They think cinematically, feel spatially, perceive by montage. Synes-
thesia is second nature. They live in a mystique of depth involvement.
At the end of ideology was tribalism, the new communes, participatory
democracy. Teleology is replaced by simultaneity, time is scanned topo-
graphically, narrative structure gives way to cyclical structure, since it’s
always the same story being told without end. “Sucked within the Mael-
strom, man must go round.” Coherence is a continuum of succeeding
vacancies into which rushes at every instant the outside possibility of a
causeless being, revised, travestied, and birthed by recapitulations of a
future hopelessly out of reach.
According to Marx, the revolutions of 1848 were the beginning of
the end of the disguises of history. More than a century later, we still
‹nd ourselves acting out a costume drama. The difference now is that
the students, revising Marx, have accepted the inevitability of the cos-
tumes. Metamorphosis is at the heart of things; behavior is masked.
Revolution is a performance. What distresses us is that they accept in
dead earnest what our greatest literature implies: life is a dream, an
insubstantial pageant. Our affairs are being conducted on the great
wobbling pivot of permanent change. If there is coherence in our pass-
ing, there is no ‹nal proof—only sensation and guesswork. The ego, as
Hesse explores it in Steppenwolf, is a manifold entity whose nature is lost
in the optical illusion of a single undeniable body. Only the ‹ctions are
inexhaustible. The experimentalism of the students in the playing out of
roles is an effort to recover the lost repertoire. L’acte gratuit, the existen-
tial moment, making the scene, the thing itself—they are all trial bal-
loons, improvisations.
It may seem at times like radical nonsense, but who can deny that
they have redeemed in the process old theoretic modes of behavior—
including concrete purpose, commitment, sacri‹ce, martyrdom, and
heroism. Like Yeats, who thought Cuchulain till Cuchulain stood where
he stood, they have converted fantasy into possibilities of action. In

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accepting the fundamental theatricality of being, they have told those of
us protecting our disciplines something about the renewal of discipline.
As Yeats put it, “There is a relation between discipline and the theatri-
cal sense. If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are
and assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon our-
selves. . . . Active virtue as distinguished from a passive acceptance of a
current code is, therefore, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask.”
In the French Revolution, bourgeois businessmen wore the mask of
Romans; in the American Revolution, Boston patriots were disguised as
Indians; and today rebels wear motley borrowed from the rag and
boneshop of the heart.
“We are all under the in›uence of a collective historical uncon-
sciousness,” says one of the student leaders. “We want a communal
world where the imagination runs supreme, and where human institu-
tions respond to human needs.” If there is a mockery of history in the
disguises taken from the anima mundi, there is also the historical courage
to choose not only a second self, but to play out selfhood in its meta-
morphoses. “We are Instant Theater,” proclaims another militant, “we
create our own roles. The humanities are dead in our institutions, alive
in ourselves alone.” If Instant Theater looks through its more sweeping
existentialism like another manifestation of the Instant Culture it is try-
ing to subvert, we are only fooling ourselves when we dismiss too lightly
the substance in the presumption. Bad faith is not only limited to poli-
tics, but ingrained in every aspect of the systems and techniques by
which men live. “Lie, copulate and die,” wrote Céline in Journey to the
End of the Night. The line is a litany in modern literature. “One wasn’t
allowed to do anything else. People lied ‹ercely and beyond belief,
ridiculously, beyond the limits of absurdity. . . . Everything you touched
was faked in some way—the sugar, the aeroplanes, shoe leather, jam,
photographs; everything you read, swallowed, sucked, admired, pro-
claimed, refuted or upheld—it was all an evil myth and masquerade.”
Certainly the condition has been compounded by technology, which
proliferates the resources of mysti‹cation: food substitutes, organ
transplants, new techniques of replication, and, by the year 2000 if the
technocrats are right, gene modi‹cation and programmed dreams.
While energy from the nerves may be used to actuate exoskeleton
power devices, the nervous system may be virtually imitated by minia-
turized electronic components. Every breakthrough in science and
social engineering contributes to the intensity of the masquerade. Every
channel of information contributes to the plethora of pseudoimage and

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illusion, escalating distrust into a sense of conspiracy. The killing of Lee
Harvey Oswald occurred on television like a demented fantasy.
According to the ancient drama, Destiny moves in mysterious
ways. In the vitiated pageantry of things, we add irreality to inscrutabil-
ity. The mysti‹cations to be removed are far beyond the imaginings of
Marx. If we accept the notion that all the world is a stage, we are in dan-
ger of adding theater to theater till nothing but illusion reigns. Here we
are, perhaps, at the self-defeating end of the active virtue of the stu-
dents; or at a conceptual impasse where we can see, from another point
of view, what we have released in their behavior. In the theater’s terms,
too much theater is melodrama. Like farce, melodrama is an agency of
the Absurd. It is also the expression of a persecution complex, with all
the distortions of childhood fantasy and neurotic dream. The power of
melodrama is its instinct for the primitive and the uninhibited. It is an
exposure of the repressed life; it gives us the power to play out what we
didn’t dare. As the bland world of af›uence is rejected, it caters to a
desire for risk and adventure. On the other side, melodrama is also the
realm of the grotesque, the dreadful, and the unassimilable. We have
only come to respect it again since World War II, with its mutilations
and desecrations, the Buchenwald lampshades and radioactively peeling
skin, indiscriminate slaughter on a gigantic scale. As we can see in the
plays of Sartre, melodrama is the realism of atrocity. Just as any horror
is imaginable, so is any sequence of impossibility—as in the novels of
Burroughs, form following function like a razor blade. Perversion,
magni‹cation, barbarity are the conventions of the melodramatist who,
in our own day as in Jacobean drama, may insist he is merely ordering it
as it is.
Yet who can really argue that it is telling the whole story? In our
ardor for the elemental, we have renewed, and necessarily, absurdly, the
truths of childhood, neurosis, and savagery—opposing the apprehen-
sions of myth and magic to the misapprehensions of rationalism. But
the melodramatic point of view, seen from anywhere but inside itself, is
ultimately paranoid. Inside melodrama, reality is villainous and unnego-
tiable, and the only way to transcend it is to make one’s own being the
indisputable center of all integrity. The melodramatic hero is Faust
without Mephistopheles, undeterred will without limit, Gargantua dis-
guised as the hunchback of Notre Dame.
To describe the melodramatic vision is not to dispel it. So with the
behavior of the students, when demands are escalated into the intense
inane. The generation that grew up af›uently with a sense of power-

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lessness is now, quite powerfully, in the center of the stage. Ruthlessly
sure they will overcome, they are still insisting that nobody is listening.
The fact is, certainly since Chicago, everybody is listening—though that
fact alone may not alter social process or the mechanisms set in motion
long before our military-industrial complex. It may even be that we are
dealing with forces that are by now irreversible, and hence really
unnegotiable. Given the forces that none of us understand, the human
mystery, protest can only be posture. It is at this point in the theater that
we return to the tragic vision.
Still, we have lived through a period, the decade after World War II,
when a facile sense of tragedy was a pretext for silence and evasion. In
tragic drama, the emotional life and history of the individual are orga-
nized to earn his fate. It may be similarly so in life, but we don’t always
believe it. It’s good that we don’t believe it. If life is tragic, there’s no
reason to live as if it were tragic—that’s also adding theater to theater.
The result is a fake pathos. The activism of the sixties grew out of impa-
tience with that pathos—a kind of sentimental melodrama. It began by
‹nding power in a negative capability, by a refusal to relinquish the
power it had almost no reason to believe it had. A man, we came to feel
again, is not merely an endurance in time but a judgment upon himself.
The judgment is implicit in the sum of his acts. At the borders of this
judgment, it turned out with increasing frequency that the Law’s coher-
ence was not our coherence. To the degree the Law assumed the role of
Destiny, there was de‹ance of the Law. Whatever the constraints of
Destiny, we came to behave as if we were in control. If that is a grand
illusion, it is perhaps our most precious illusion. This brings us back to
those demands that have clear and present substance.
If the desire for change is sometimes magni‹ed out of all possibil-
ity by the militants, the resistance to change remains a scandal despite all
sympathy by embarrassed humanists. I mean the most liberal not the
unregenerate. Some of us are severely chastened by student dissent, but
we are beguiled by privilege, dissuaded by grants, de›ected by Ful-
brights, trapped by departments, and—even when conscience is next to
overwhelming—returned to sin by scholarly detachment, the academic
version of doing your own thing. So the confrontation takes place, with
the administrators holding the bag and the trustees retaining the power.
Inevitably, the petitions follow after, but that’s only the re›ex of a static
character, returned by habit to a convention. The result is a comedy at
our expense. This is invariably the case when scholars in the humanities
are defending their disciplines as if they were eternal verities, when in
fact a discipline is sustained only by the moving continuity of its disso-

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lutions. Instead of invoking “standards” to preserve what is clearly
going under, we might pay attention to what has been recorded all over
our literature—that standards are discovered precisely in jeopardy, as a
series of abolitions; as William Carlos Williams says in Paterson, “knowl-
edge, undispersed, its own undoing.”
It is astonishing how much uncatalogued precedent still operates in
our procedures, though philosophically we know better. Even what we
take to be research at the frontiers of knowledge is still constrained by
needless usages from the past. We see that in every discipline that insists
on using the word as if there were really de‹ned limits of inquiry rather
than a structure of hypotheses about such limits. In the humanities,
whose province has customarily included manners and morals and the
methodologies of emotion, it may be fair to say that the most genuine
research is being done by experimenters outside the system—by
activists, mystics, ‹eld workers, dope ‹ends, renegade priests, hippies,
occultists, body fetishists, deviants, mutants, and conscientious objec-
tors. All these types have shown that the older uniform society of stable
forms was severely limited in its repertoire of behavior and lifestyle
choices. As we move inward through invisible space or outward to the
galaxies, our values are being challenged by a vaster complex of avail-
able roles. Teachers doing analyses of novels that illustrate the destruc-
tive element or the demonic shedding of multiple personality or jour-
neys to the heart of darkness or the perverse infractions of the Magic
Theater are now facing students some of whom are conscientious prac-
titioners of our most exciting metaphors and formal strategies. Speak of
the Double or the Secret Sharer, and he sits there, coolly, wondering
whether you have the courage to acknowledge him before your eyes.
Between student and teacher the terms of confrontation are differ-
ent today, not only because students are gratuitously protesting, but
because they are assuming some of these disturbing roles; also because
the range of their experience has expanded remarkably in a generation.
Certain old pedagogical leverages are gone. Only a decade ago, when I
had gone abroad for the ‹rst time, I could get a lot of mileage in class by
talking of my world travels, con‹dent that the students had never been
where I’d been. That automatically boosted the authority I already had.
I literally knew more about the world than the student did. That’s no
longer certain, we know, and the whole issue of experience has been
turned upside down. We talk of the great abstractions—Law, Justice,
Freedom—but the kids to whom we once despaired of teaching civics
in high school have not only been down to the courthouse, but have
also been inside the jail. They know political process as we never did.

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Literally, increasingly, they have more experience. Every day now I

encounter students who have seen more of the world than I have seen.
Some of them have hitched across the country in the wake of Ginsberg
and Kerouac, and others have made their way up and down the coasts
of Africa. They have wept beside the Ganges and spent the winter in
Khatmandu. “You don’t know what it’s like in the South,” I used to say,
having done basic training in Georgia. But we are now talking to stu-
dents who have knocked on the doors beside the watermelon patches
where I trained, and who have scraped the Delta to bring blacks to the
polls. Compared to those of us who have garnered our most recent
experience from our bibliographies, they simply know more.
Our only recourse is to claim wisdom through bene‹t of years. But
which of us, as we study our world, can really presume? We have one
sole advantage: all things considered, we are closer to dying, and hence
should have thought more seriously about that. But even about dying
the young are more inquisitive. There was subliminal fallout in their
‹ngerpainting. When they left Dick and Jane, they went to The Myth of
Sisyphus, and some have pondered deeply Camus’s assertion that the
major philosophical question of our time is, why not suicide? They may
have thought about it prematurely, but prematurity seems to be the
conclusive form of consciousness in a world with its ‹nger on the but-
ton. As that modern young woman Antigone says—she who belongs to
Death—“There is no guilt in reverence of the dead.” The most persua-
sive thinkers since Descartes have told them that they die into the
world, and every authentic rite of passage requires a death. The pain of
the future is precisely this requirement of becoming. Their existence is
predicated on a void echoing with all the successions of the vanished. It
is not only fashion, experiment, and the desire for instant mind-expan-
sion that accounts for the interest in drugs, but also the desire to live
sentiently among the successions as if they were simultaneous, not
denying but recovering all time.
We are all familiar with the abyss and theories of continuous
becoming—at least we are conceptually familiar. By such concepts, how-
ever, the young have been touched to the quick. Many to whom we
have transmitted this legacy of the void have discovered there, in the
spectral continuity of absence, the imprints of all previous existence, a
memory bank, as if there alone is the reliable living record that survives
all credibility gaps. Out of attrition comes creation. It is a creation inces-
santly recommitted to the test of nothingness. Making and unmaking.
At the center of the process is the act choosing the act to come. Philos-
ophy is a dramaturgy of perpetually renewing crisis, or stasis. (Wittgen-

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stein: “The best that I could write would never be more than philo-
sophical remarks: my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force
them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.”) If
Authority toppled into the abyss, taking duration with it, a new sort of
endurance was born, radical, surreal, post-Oedipal. As Rimbaud
de‹ned it, “I am my mother and my child / At each point in the eter-
nal.” Pantagruel broke the cradle and now, with the absurd reparation
of a dream, we ‹nd it endlessly rocking.
If we expect to teach the young, we must study their art, like it or
not. Whatever the medium, the stress is ephemerality. The psychedelic
posters are the window shades of junk culture. Death being the mother
of beauty they celebrate the Grateful Dead. Like the hippies’ ›owers,
the posters are meant to wither, though now that they’re mass-pro-
duced, replication makes up for perpetuation. There is eternity in the
duplicating machine, as in the Om made possible by electronic sound.
One can think of this negatively as evidence that the young have no
staying power and their art-forms no durability. But that’s not really the
gist of it: the rhythm is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, to the
last syllable etc. Om. Magnitude is measured by the willingness to throw
away. It takes endurance. There is theory behind it, moreover, and tra-
dition. About the time the Fillmore Auditorium was getting started and
the Berkeley rebellion was breaking out, there was an exhibition of
Jugendstil and expressionism in German posters at the University Art
Gallery. Once again the lesson was learned. The ‹rst psychedelic
designers were in›uenced by this exhibit, and one of them had been a
student of Albers at Yale. Thus, despite the crudity of the photolithog-
raphy, there is real sophistication in the color complementaries that
contribute to the deliberate interchangeability of ‹gure and ground, and
the reversibility of image. True, it’s hard to read, which is precisely the
strategy you might expect from a disenchanted subculture dramatizing
itself a Mystery. The typography is a secret code for the initiates, as in
the engravings of Blake, who also knew about acid—and the corrosion
of value into value.
There are implications for a curriculum in all this, but it’s not a cur-
riculum that needs working out. In fact, the moment these impulses are
absorbed into curricular thinking we have a continuance of the academy
in the old vein. Let’s have a class on it, we say, or a panel discussion; or,
since militancy has no lien on wisdom either, let’s have a Black Studies
program. Teaching the Beatles is not necessarily being relevant. At the
deepest level that’s not what the students are asking for. That’s not what
we were asking for in our preliminary search through the ambiguities

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that sprung loose the power of blackness and the energies of the abyss.
What we’re all asking for is to reduce the distance between our classes
and life, even if it means abandoning our classes. That will require a
more radical reformation of our schools than we can reasonably expect.
But we must speculate beyond reason if only because, like afterimages
in the eye, there comes into the mind what the mind puts off at ‹rst
encounter, that which is so relevant it can only be seen out of phase.
Antigone was relevant when she confronted Creon. That’s still a
confrontation to be argued. In our humanities classes we have been
conscientious about the argument, but we have done very little about
Antigone’s claims. It may be true, given the enigmatic gods, that noth-
ing can be done, but the students won’t concede that—and they will
especially have none of that shift in the balance of power which Dür-
renmatt alluded to when he said that in the modern world Creon’s sec-
retary closes Antigone’s case. Actually, it’s a case that refuses to be
closed. With Creon withdrawn into the obfuscations of power, there are
myriads of secretaries around to worry about the curriculum. Like
Antigone, however, the students remind us that our profoundest
humanistic duty is to the “immortal unrecorded laws” that are “opera-
tive forever, beyond man utterly.” When Antigone commits civil dis-
obedience, she is not presuming beyond herself. What she realizes is
that she is “only mortal” and that with evil all about her, compelled to
act, she can hardly “Think Death less than a friend.”
Which is not to say she is indifferent about dying. She loves life and
abandons it with fear. We know her fate is unalterable, but as we spec-
ulate on its meaning we must come back to this question: is there no
way of altering the system so the next Antigone won’t be put to the test?
Since the mechanisms of the state provide for themselves, how can we
provide for Antigone? To say that only tragedy can provide is somehow
to avoid the case.
We speak of radical alteration of the educational structure, but do we
mean it? How much are we, individually, willing to give up? At the end of
all our research and analysis, are we ready to act on what we ‹nd? How
much are we really willing to experiment? Is our literature forever to
remain in our literature? When, after a formal analysis of The Trial, we
come ‹nally to the parable of the door, what do we make of it? Perceiv-
ing the radiance in the darkness, do we stand baf›ed before the Law,
teased out of action by our gifts of equivocal thought. (“The commenta-
tors note in this connection: ‘The right perception of any matter and a
misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each
other.’”) Or in some re›ex of residual power, do we summon up the

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courage to walk through? I remember entangling my students in the most
appalling paradox of all. Protest as you will, I said, Kafka is unconvinced.
As I read it, you are the power structure. They were enraged, they refused,
they wouldn’t see it that way. Academically speaking, they were wrong.
Chances are, as it seemed with Joseph K., we may be the victims of a
metaphysical hoax and returned, through any door, to the same old struc-
ture. But how do we really know until we dare? K., remember, died like a
dog—“it was as if the shame of it must outlive him.” Whose shame? We
hardly need Marcuse to tell us that this society’s very rationality is irra-
tional and destructive of the free development of human faculties, what-
ever security it has achieved based on war and a garrison state.
All around us now, however, there are people daring to set up pat-
terns of radical change—in community experiences, political involve-
ment, and lifestyle. Who can really contend that what is happening in
our classrooms has more human signi‹cance than all this? The future of
the humanities is, at least temporarily, not in our books or our artifacts
but in these experiments, which are expanding the repertoire of learn-
ing and providing a subtler dialogue between the individual and author-
ity, between person and person. They have brought ideas out of Plato’s
cave into the realm of action and into the body itself—which is the
long-neglected victim of our academic enterprise. Think of all the spir-
itual disciplines we have talked about, all the sacred texts we have stud-
ied, whose proper reading required physical preparation—just as Gar-
gantua had to be prepared physically to be a Renaissance gentleman. We
regale our classrooms with the debilities of spectator sports, but noth-
ing in our conception of the humanities makes development of the
body an organic condition of development of the mind, nor have we
paid much attention to the language of the body as it exists in such dis-
ciplines as mime, dance, yoga, or the art of archery in Zen. And music,
whose true fundamental is blood rhythm, but which was once part of
the medieval curriculum—how is it we have made of it such a special-
ization that most of our Ph.D.’s are not only musically illiterate, but
have no music in their souls? Surely one of the great contributions of
the young is to have brought music back into everyday life, and a kind
of primitive poetry as well.
Like the rock groups, the experiments I am talking about we are all
well aware of. I am speaking of underground worship, with new litur-
gies and modes of communion; of new communities, like Synanon and
Daytop, in which the assumption is that the best therapist is the physi-
cian who has healed himself; of ventures in communal design, and even
architecture, which involve bringing information and thought off the

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page and onto the walls; of intellectual task forces and teach-ins, of
game techniques, encounters, happenings, T-groups, be-ins, freak-outs,
which aim to release lost capacities for play and improvisation; of mul-
timedia scenes like the Fillmore or the Electric Circus; of Operation
Bootstrap and sensitivity training—all of which have possibilities for
learning environments, as do ‹lm, videotape, and the visual and plastic
arts if really approached as alternative languages of inquiry, as well as
alternatives to the term paper. Some of the techniques are already being
absorbed—mostly in schools of education or in psychology courses. All
of them have been described and exploited in the media and their
‹ndings con‹scated and adulterated by Madison Avenue, just as the
posters that once advertised the Haight-Ashbury are now part of the
iconography of the frightened suburbs. Still, none of these develop-
ments are discredited by availability or popularity, nor by books on Edu-
cation and Ecstasy. It may, however, be a measure of what’s wrong with
the humanities that I hesitate to recommend them in a learned journal
as a guide to what needs to be done, for there is some lingering tic about
academic respectability.
Some of what occurs in all this stuff is boring, naive, and downright
silly, but that may be part of its virtue—an immunity to conventional
standards of progress, competence, and achievement. It has professional
limits, to be sure, but it has released a healthy amateurism. Each of these
efforts performs at a more tactile level of awareness than our curricula,
exercising the senses—particularly touch, the most unused of all, partic-
ularly in the relation of one person to another, particularly directed to the
renewal of community. Time enough to declare the limitations and dan-
gers of these processes, the dependence of some of them on pure feel-
ing, the strategic abandonment of the rational, or the emergence of an
isonomy, which is a political condition of no-rule. They are vulnerable to
hysteria and demagoguery, but Aristotle says that was true of so excellent
an art as rhetoric, depending on the intelligence and morality of the user.
None of these things is seen, however, in true perspective if not linked to
the effort to restore to men what is minimally required for manhood, no
less with women making their claims, or crossing genders, if you will—
for the materially disadvantaged, an economic base; for the psychically
mortgaged, a lifeline to the repressed.
It is no accident that all these developments have occurred simulta-
neously with the renewal of political and social passion through the dis-
abilities of the cold war. They are all contributing to the struggle to link
inwardness to otherness. They involve relinquishment of the ego and
intellectual pride to a common humanity, opening channels to the dis-

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possessed. While they may accommodate too easily those who remain
paralyzed and distressed, they also attract those resourceful young
people whose remarkable talents for social engineering have shown up
in the ghettos, in Appalachia, the Peace Corps, and the campaign of Sen-
ator McCarthy as well as in the guerrilla tactics of SDS. There may be an
ululating mindlessness on the dance ›oors of some of our stroboscopic
emporia, but there are also clues to what moves our students, not only
when they’ve blown their minds but when we want to reach their minds,
and to new processes of learning that have been long implied in our crit-
ical theory. The appeals are directly to the aural and visual imagination, in
the grammar of the body, synesthetically, spatially, in a stream of con-
sciousness, as if the critical theory exploded in the drama of the mind
were suddenly released on a stage “autokinatonetically” as Finnegans
Wake, “anastomosically assimilated and preteridenti‹ed paraidiotically,
in fact, the sameold gamebold adomic structure . . . , as highly charged
with electrons as hophazards can effective it.”
If we carry this adomic structure over to education we come, “by a
commodius vicus of recirculation,” back to the organic environmental
learning ideas of Dewey and Rousseau, who have been so long abused
for misrepresented theory. As Lévi-Strauss points out, Rousseau, who
came nearest of all the philosophes to being an anthropologist, never
exalted the Natural Man, nor did he confuse the state of Nature with the
State of Society. What he did was to give us a theoretical model of a
society that, corresponding to nothing that we actually know and prob-
ably nothing that will ever exist, may nevertheless help us disentangle
ourselves from the inertia of a system divided against itself because we
are divided against ourselves, like Godard’s Pierrot, who sees through
his eyes and hears through his ears, and feels no unity. Fractured knowl-
edge is unnatural. What was an expedience in methodology became the
disease of specialization. We have all been victims of categories, linear
sequence, and abstract duration. Certain kinds of investigation require
these habits of mind, and no secondhand McLuhanism will abolish
them. They are human, but at some limit they are violations of our
humanness, and we have suf‹cient evidence that we’ve reached that
limit. The record is in—from saturation bombing to pollution of the
landscape, from political estrangement to psychological disorder, from
public indifference to anonymous killing. Jacques Cousteau recently
warned that the ocean may be contaminated before we can develop the
means to bene‹t from its natural resources. All of this is a re›ection of
demographic imbalance in our own nature. We lack identi‹cation with
the physical universe of a myth-minded age, and we lack identi‹cation

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with the suffering of our own age if we can continue to pillage the earth
that might relieve it. Do we believe the old myths that we teach, or the
new modern versions—from pollution comes the plague?
In the humanities there is no Final Solution, only the possibility of
a change of heart and a return of being to wholeness, or some striving
toward it, through any failure of being. About that, it’s clear beyond
doubt that we have been delinquent. No matter how diligently arrived
at, so much of what we teach feels useless and inept, disengaged, unnat-
ural, imperious, and, yes, irrelevant. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. One
thing is sure: if we publish it in the bulletin, it is not automatically
among the gods. The burden of proof is on us. Only by the intensity of
our convictions can we preserve them, and only by incorporating in our
style of teaching what we’ve discovered at the dissolving margins of our
disciplines. Far more can be done with the whole environment of learn-
ing to incorporate the excluded life that anthropologists, psychologists,
and poets have recovered and, now, the students demand. Far more can
be done to reorganize the masses of information sprawling behind us in
history—indeed, one of the enormities of history. Since The Waste Land
we’ve been shoring up fragments against our ruin, without seeing that
the poem is not only an object to be studied but also, like the collage or
assemblage, a prototype of new con‹gurations of knowledge that can
be encompassed in a lifetime and made useful in a life.
There’s nothing ignominious or anti-intellectual in yielding to the
student or, to negotiate our inadequacies, recognizing him or her as a
peer. W. H. Auden said of Freud in a memorial poem: “All he did was
to remember / Like the old and be honest like children.” The students
we teach, born in the atomic age, are the children of darkness. If they
become obscene, think of what goes on there in the darkling world of
antimatter where foul is fair. Freud, among others, warned that we
would have to deal with them differently:

. . . he would have us remember most of all

To be enthusiastic over the night
Not only for the sense of wonder
It alone has to offer, but also
Because it needs our love: for with sad eyes
Its delectable creatures look up and beg
Us dumbly to ask them to follow;
They are exiles who long for the future.
That lies in our power. They too would rejoice
If allowed to serve enlightenment like him,

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 Even to bear our cry of “Judas,”
As he did and all must bear who serve it.
Our rational voice is dumb; over a grave
The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved,
Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

Look at the students: even the most cataleptic are asking questions,
waiting for us. What do we have to answer?—that our institutions must
be preserved? I’m not saying they shouldn’t be preserved, but why? In
their highest idealism the students have taken a cue from Ivan Karama-
zov, fanatic and cut to the brain with injustice. Our institutions are
worthless, they say, if they contribute, despite all wisdom, to the depri-
vation of powers and to the collective lust to kill. To respond to this
does not mean surrendering what we hold to be good, true, and beauti-
ful; only that no mere argument for the good, true, and beautiful will pre-
vail. They must be convinced at blood level, or they will not be con-
vinced at all. To them, a conviction is a demonstration. If we are
growing tired of the idea of blood consciousness, then we’d better
change our reading lists.
If we really mean what we teach, there’s no repose ahead for the
university. Up to now, the initiative has come from the students, but it
grows increasingly hard for us to insist on the disengagement necessary
for sober thought. That’s disturbing, but it’s not too great a price to pay
for a revival of faith in our best students to whom no particular subject
is, ‹nally, more relevant than any other, though a man in needless pain
or a man dying before his time, unjustly, is more relevant than any sub-
ject. Can we argue with that? I don’t think even Milton would argue
with that, who said as good kill a man as kill a good book, for that was
prefaced by his refusal to praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexer-
cised and unbreathed. The greatest blessing of our educational system is
the refusal of our students to be cloistered, in systems, departments,
requirements, or a ratiocinative meditativeness that can destroy. For the
time being, we have to be where they are, or we are, for the sake of the
future, nowhere at all.

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 two

The Faith-Based Initiative of the

Theater of the Absurd
3
Some prefatory words, or what, in more classical times, might have
been called an apology. In the invitation to this symposium,1 the topic
proposed for me was “The Raging Soul of the Absurd.” I don’t know
whether that came out of some tongue-in-cheek take on my tempera-
ment derived from the rather reticent things I’ve written, but as it turns
out, though I’ve used another title, I will be saying something of the
soul, not exactly raging, in another context.
There was also a warning with the invitation—and I hope to be for-
given for saying so—that the audience here was not likely to “consist of
specialists or academics per se,” but rather a group of that “dying breed,
the ‘educated public,’ which means we need to keep vocabulary rela-
tively jargon free and inclusive.” As it happens, that gave me the idea for
what I have written about, while feeling somewhat like Jack, in Jack or
the Submission, when he’s told he’s “chronometrable”—meaning, per-
haps, it’s time for him to change—after exclaiming, “Oh words, what
crimes are committed in your name!” This leads to his agreeing to
“abide by the circumstances, . . . the game of the rule,” acceding to the
familiar, “Oh well, yes, yes, na, I adore hashed brown potatoes.”2
Which, actually, I try to avoid, though that may not keep me, with
respect for the game of the rule, from making a hash of words, or to use
a word coming up later, an “assemblage.”
Chronometrably, I might even wish that Roberta II—Jack’s ‹ancée
with three noses—were right and all we’d need “to designate things is
one single word: cat,” the word chat, of course, used as a pre‹x, sexier in
French; though “The cat’s got my tongue,” able thus to accommodate
all propositions. Just before the Roberta with three noses—whose real
name, she says, is Liza, with pools in her belly, arms like snakes, soft
thighs, and mouth, naked shoulders, hair trickling down—reveals her
hand with nine ‹ngers, all the more alluring to Jack, she says, with cate-
gorical cattiness: “Cats are called cat, food: cat, insects: cat, chairs: cat,
you: cat, me: cat, the roof: cat, the number one: cat, number two: cat,”
all the numbers and “all the adverbs: cat, all the prepositions: cat. It’s
easier to talk that way” (109). Maybe so, maybe not, but not, I suppose,

44
for hardened criminals for whom the unspeakable crimes persist, from
a sense of unspeakability, germane to the Absurd, as it’s been to critical
theory—with its nefarious vocabulary, which I may have to invoke,
though I shall try in what I’m saying to be nevertheless inclusive.
The focus will be, for the most part, on Ionesco’s early plays, the
ones we did nearly forty-‹ve years ago, at The Actor’s Workshop of San
Francisco. As we moved then, with more than a little controversy, from
Brecht to the Absurd, at that time very strange, we were with some pre-
sumption trying to educate a public, and ourselves, about what turned
out to be a sort of preface to or premonition of what critical theory has
been worrying about, or worrying, for over a generation. As to what I’ll
be saying today, it is not by any means a defense of theory, that’s boring;
so, too, sometimes is the theater of the Absurd—mostly, however,
strategically so.
Returning, then, to my title, its initiating theme . . .

Take it on faith. That’s usually said, with more or less comic in›ection,
when faith at some dubious impasse is what we’re least likely to have. If
that doesn’t exactly correspond to the existential condition from which
the theater of the Absurd emerged, it does re›ect on the absurd condi-
tion of American politics that led, through dangling chads in Florida
and a Supreme Court decision with no legal substance at all, to the faith-
based initiative of our born-again president, who recently put a
de‹nitive quietus to any residue of the cold war by looking into the eyes
of his Russian counterpart and, yes, seeing into his soul. That any skep-
ticism in the gaze was allayed by a former agent of the KGB is almost
too wild a conceit, its disarming suspense of the global melodrama
belonging more, perhaps, to a James Bond movie than to the theater of
the Absurd. But here it would seem we have no choice: we either take it
on faith or laugh out loud, laughter redoubling at the thought that it
might be either/or, whereas in the faith-based initiative of the absurdist
theater you can, at minimum, have it both ways. I say at minimum
because, in the drama of Ionesco particularly, you can in a plenitude of
unexpectedness, contradiction, and aleatoric calculation, have it either
and or, or even otherwise, any which way you wish—although that, too,
may be the sort of wishful thinking that sometimes passes as faith, as
when Mrs. Smith remarks of Rumanian yogurt in The Bald Soprano that it
“is excellent for the stomach, the kidneys, the appendicitis, and apothe-
osis” (10). Which may be what Jean-François Lyotard meant by a
“materialist Sublime.”
Lyotard was making the case for transcendence ›attened by a gen-

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45
eration of critical theory which, in the wake of Bertolt Brecht, and revi-
sionist Marx, looked with a jaundiced eye on the “theological space” of
theater with its deployment of illusion to put reality in perspective and,
determining cause and effect in the appearances on stage—whose psy-
chic economy is essentially bourgeois—something like fate or godhead
in the wings. If you’ve been keeping up with theory, from early decon-
struction to the new performativity, you’ll have heard a lot of talk about
invisible power, legislating meaning and regulating desire, though this,
on ‹rst appearance, would hardly seem to apply to the capricious imag-
ination or diabolical virtuosity of the theater of the Absurd. Yet if
there’s no divinity in the dramaturgy shaping our ends, the indetermi-
nacy of the Absurd is not exactly up for grabs, as if in the absence of
faith, roots, origin, authenticity, or any grounding for truth, some utterly
unaccountable but nonetheless scrupling vigilance presides over the
abyss, as over the arbitrariness of the announcement, belabored mani-
cally in The Bald Soprano, of Bobby Watson’s death, which was in the
paper and not in the paper, poor Bobby, a “veritable living corpse . . .
how cheerful he was!” or was it his wife? his uncle? his aunt? son and
daughter? mother? his entire family in fact? all of them commercial trav-
elers, “What a dif‹cult trade!” So much for the moment for the bour-
geois family as reality principle in advancing capitalism, but whether or
not we think of ourselves as fellow travelers, the dialogue through the
sequence, its clamorous orchestration, is more cunningly berserk than
“an association of ideas,” which is how Mr. Smith says he remembered
what he will in a moment confuse again or forget: “Which poor Bobby
do you mean?” (11–13).
Anarchic-seeming as it sounded when the Absurd came on the
scene, it soon became apparent that there’s method in the madness and,
given the protocols of explosive disorder in the tradition of the avant-
garde, the scandal of form as well, in all the mimicry of chaotic absence
laughing up its sleeve, like Mary the maid who con‹des to the audience
that her real name is Sherlock Holmes or the clock striking twenty-nine
times (or striking as much as it likes); or for that matter, in the systemic
wobble at the play’s inconstant heart, the series of baf›ing recognitions
and misidenti‹cations, all of them “true in theory” (23), the gratuitous
mystery to which, obviously, everything leads (though, to be perfectly
truthful, it was a mistake by an actor that Ionesco let stand, giving the
play its title). The critical moment occurs after Mrs. Martin says to the
departing Fire Chief—who has confessed in all subjectivity that his
dream, his ideal, is that of a world in which everything has caught ‹re—
“Thanks to you, we have passed a truly Cartesian quarter of an hour.”

reality principles
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Whereupon, as if reminded to follow through on Descartes’s method of
doubt, with the requisite objectivity, the Fire Chief stops to say, “Speak-
ing of that—the bald soprano?” Which is, as a philosophical question,
the ‹rst and last we’ve heard of her, except—after “General silence and
embarrassment,” the laughter sneaking in—that “She always wears her
hair in the same style” (37). As for the totality of inconsequence in the
momentum of non sequitur, abrogating meaning and value, that hardly
draws a blank, which is to say there may be nothing to get but we get it
nevertheless, like the “Nothing to be done” in Waiting for Godot, the
nothing that comes of nothing, or the anomaly of a nothingness that
not only passes the time but is virtually formulaic.
“How curious it is, how curious it is,” as they chant in The Bald
Soprano, no roots, no origin, no authenticity, no, nothing, only unmean-
ing, and certainly no higher power—though the Emperor turns up
invisibly in The Chairs, as from a “marvelous dream . . . , the celestial
gaze, the noble face, the crown, the radiance of His Majesty,” the Old
Man’s “last recourse” (149–50), as he says, before he entrusts his mes-
sage to the Orator and throws himself out the window, leaving us to dis-
cover that the Orator is deaf and dumb. Thus the delusion of hierarchy
and, spoken or unspoken, the futile vanity or vacuity of speech. But
even more curious, “what a coincidence!” (17) is how this empty datum
of the Absurd became the litany of deconstruction, which hedges its
bets, however, on a devastating nothingness by letting metaphysics in
after presumably rubbing it out, that is, putting it “under erasure” (sous
rature), as Derrida does in his grammatology, conceding what Nietzsche
told us, that God is dead, but using the word anyhow, because we can
hardly think without it, or other transcendental signi‹ers, such as beauty
or eternity—which are, indeed, the words spoken by the Old Man to
the invisible Belle in The Chairs, mourning what they didn’t dare, a lost
love, “Everything . . . lost, lost, lost” (133).
There would appear to be parody here, and one might expect that
Ionesco—in a line of descent from Nietzsche to poststructuralist
thought—would not only disclaim the older metaphysics but laugh as
well at the ridiculousness of any nostalgia for it, as for the originary time
of a radiant beauty endowed with Platonic truth. And indeed the Orator
who shows up dressed as “a typical painter or poet of the nineteenth
century” (154) is, with his histrionic manner and conceited air, surely
not Lamartine, who asks “Eternité, néant, passé, sombre abîme”
(“Eternity, nothingness, past—dark abyss”) to return the sublime rap-
tures they have stolen; nor is he remotely the ‹gure of Keats with his
Grecian urn, teasing us out of thought in equating beauty and truth.

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What we have instead, in Amédée or How to Get Rid of It, is the spellbind-
ing beauty of that which, when they forget to close the lids, emanates
from the eyes, which haven’t aged—“Great green eyes. Shining like
beacons”—of the incurably growing corpse. “We could get along with-
out his kind of beauty,” says Madeleine, the sour and bitter wife, “it
takes up too much space.” But Amédée is fascinated by the trans‹gur-
ing growth of its ineluctable presence, which might have come from the
abyss of what is lost, lost, lost. “He’s growing. It’s quite natural. He’s
branching out.”3 But if there’s anything beautiful here, it seems to
come—if not from the Romantic period or one of the more memorable
futurist images, Boccioni’s The Body Ascending (Amédée’s family name is
Buccinioni)—from another poetic source: “That corpse you planted
last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout?” It’s as if Ionesco
were picking up, literally, T. S. Eliot’s question in The Waste Land: “Will
it bloom this year?”4 If it not only blooms, or balloons, but ›ies away,
taking Amédée with it, the oracle of Keats’s urn—all you know on earth
and all you need to know—seems a far cry from the hilarious mordancy
of this transcendence, or what in The Chairs, even if the Orator had spo-
ken, would have radiated upon posterity, if not from the eyes of a
corpse, from the light of the Old Man’s mind (157).
Yet the truth is that, for Ionesco, the Absurd is predicated on “the
memory of a memory of a memory” of an actual pastoral, beauty and
truth in nature, if not quite yet in art. Or so it appears in “Why Do I
Write? A Summing Up,” where he summons up his childhood at the
Mill of the Chapelle-Anthenaise, a farm in St-Jean-sur-Mayenne, “the
country, the bar, the hearth.”5 Whatever it was there he didn’t under-
stand, like the priest’s questions at his ‹rst confession, it was there, too,
that he was “conscious of being alive. . . . I lived,” he says, “in happi-
ness, joy, knowing somehow that each moment was fullness without
knowing the word fullness. I lived in a kind of dazzlement.” Whatever
then happened to impair this radiant time, the dazzle continues in mem-
ory, as something other than fool’s gold: “the world was beautiful, and
I was conscious of it, everything was fresh and pure. I repeat: it is to ‹nd
this beauty again, intact in the mud”—which, as a site of the Absurd, he
shares with Beckett—“that I write literary works. All my books, all my
plays are a call, the expression of a nostalgia, a search for a treasure
buried in the ocean, lost in the tragedy of history” (6). As for the
estrangement, alienation, and the metaphysical anguish that came with
that history, they may be, given the politics of cultural studies today, and
much theater practice as well, dismissed as disempowering or ideologi-
cally rede‹ned, but when push comes to shove in civilization and its dis-

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contents, they are for Ionesco, though “unbearable, so empty, and use-
less” (15), something like the truth of being—though being (pace Hei-
digger) is ideologically suspect, too, as a sin of “essentialism,” along
with that humanistic entity or mere illusion called “the self.”
“I’ve invited you . . . in order to explain to you,” says the Old Man
in The Chairs, “that the individual”—that avatar of the self spawned by
the Enlightenment—“and the person are one and the same.” That
established, he says a moment later, “I am not myself. I am another. I
am the one in the other” (145). About the self, to be sure, there was a
certain equivocation on the stage of the Absurd, from Beckett’s tramp
insisting that the little messenger from Godot not come tomorrow and
say that he never saw him to the quarrel about the doorbell in The Bald
Soprano. “Experience teaches us,” says Mrs. Smith in a ‹t of anger, “that
even when one hears the doorbell ring it is because there is never any-
one there” (23), as if there were no one to be there, no person or indi-
vidual, nothing resembling a self. Of course, we don’t have to believe
her, no more than we believe Derrida or Deleuze or the new orthodoxy
of dispersed subjectivity, that the self is no more than the liability of
identities elided into language. For in its utter untenability, untenable as
utterance, the self is also liable to be taken on faith. “This morning
when you looked at yourself in the mirror, you didn’t see yourself,” says
Mrs. Martin to Mr. Martin, who is undeterred by that. “That’s because I
wasn’t there yet,” he says (36). How curious it is, how curious it is, we
somehow think we exist.
As for the existence of a “work of art” in our demystifying period,
if art has not been entirely divested of privilege, it has been relegated to
the status of another kind of “discourse,” while (with the canon in jeop-
ardy too) the aesthetic has been turned into an antiaesthetic. One might
think that Ionesco was there in advance with his notion of an antiplay,
taking to its metonymic limit, not this, that, not that, this, words slipping,
sliding, decaying with imprecision, the empty play of the signi‹ers: epi-
grams, puns, platitudes, suppositions, deductions, pleonasms and para-
doxes, doggerel, proverbs, fables, the repertoire of prosody, or in a ver-
tigo of nonsense and nonsensical iterations, an eruption of mere
vocables, plosives, fricatives, a cataclysm of glottals or, in the screaming
choral climax of The Bald Soprano, with a staccato of cockatoos, “cas-
cades of cacas” (40) careening over the stage. Or as the Professor
demands from the Pupil in The Lesson, sounds projected loudly with all
the force of her lungs, like that diva of performance art, Diamanda
Galas, not sparing the vocal cords, but making a virtual weapon of
them. Or the sounds warming in their sensation—“‘Butter›y,’

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‘Eureka,’ ‘Trafalgar,’ ‘Papaya’”—above the surrounding air, “so that
they can ›y without danger of falling on deaf ears, which are,” as in the
insensible resonance of the bourgeois audience (Brecht’s culinary the-
ater), “veritable voids, tombs of sonorities,” to be awakened, if at all, by
an accelerating merger of words, syllables, sentences, in “purely irra-
tional assemblages of sound,” an assault of sound, “denuded of all
sense” (62–63).
Manic obsessive, cruel as he becomes, what the Professor appears to
be de‹ning, through the crescendo of intimidation, is not only the
apotheosis of an antiplay, but a kind of alternative theater or another
form of art. Indeed, he might be describing, “from that dizzying and slip-
pery perspective in which every truth is lost,” what Artaud tries to
reimagine, in relating the Orphic mysteries to the alchemical theater, its
“complete, sonorous, streaming realization,”6 as well as certain experi-
mental events of the sixties, turned on by Artaud’s cruelty, its faith-based
initiative, which came, like the return of the repressed, at the exhilarating
crest of the theater of the Absurd. Thus, in the period of the Living The-
ater and Dionysus in 69, or Orghast at Persepolis, we saw performers (the
word “actor” shunted aside, tainted like “the author” by conventional
drama) pitilessly expelling air from the lungs, or caressingly over the
vocal cords, which, like Artaud’s incantatory murmurs in the air or, in the
Balinese drama, the “›ights of elytra, [the] rustling of branches,”7 or, in
the brutalizing ecstasy of the Professor’s lyric imagining, “like harps or
leaves in the wind, will suddenly shake, agitate, vibrate, vibrate, vibrate or
ovulate, or fricate or jostle against each other, or sibilate, sibilate, placing
everything in movement, the uvula, the tongue, the palate, the teeth,”
and as you might still see it today (back in an acting class) with exercises
in the tradition from Grotowski to Suzuki (tempered by the Linklater
method) the polymorphous perversity of it all: “Finally the words come
out of the nose, the mouth, the pores, drawing along with them all the
organs we have named, torn up by the moth, in a powerful, majestic
›ight, . . . labials, dentals, palatals, and others, some caressing some bit-
ter and violent” (62–64). And some, too, expressing “all the perverse
possibilities of the mind,” as Artaud says of the contagious revelation of
the Plague8—the contagion there, if not the revelation, in Ionesco’s The
Chairs, with “a bad smell from . . . stagnant water” below the window
and, with mosquitos coming in (113), the unrelieved stench of the pathos
of “all that’s gone down the drain” (116).
Whatever’s gone down the drain, including the thirty-nine other
pupils who gave their bodies, “Aaah!” to the sounding out of knife, “my
arms, my breast, my hips . . . knife” (Bald Soprano, 74), the Professor also

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seems to be anticipating certain psychophysical effects of vocal behav-

ior that, by way of punk, funk, and heavy metal, are now commonplace
on MTV, while on the theoretical level he seems to be outdoing Roland
Barthes on “the grain of the voice,” through which, when words really
speak—that materialization of language by way of the body, its ›eshi-
ness or tactility—what you hear is “the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the
mucous membranes, the nose,” whose meaning is a seduction from
which “signi‹ance explodes,” erotically more and other than words,
bringing into performance “not the soul but jouissance.”9 It’s feasible,
too, to see the Professor’s vocal lesson not only through the perverse
possibilities of his mind, but in the terms used by Foucault writing of
Deleuze, his theater of phantasms, which functions at the limits of bod-
ies, but against bodies, too, sticking to them, but sticking it to them as
well, cutting them open and multiplying their surfaces, as a site of meta-
physics for the disillusioning of phantasms; in short, a space of thought
“never hallowed by an idea,” a “theatrum philosophicum” as an “epi-
dermic play of perversity.”10 So far as the metaphysics is vocalized in
the “phantasmaphysics” of sensations at the skin (“Theatrum” 172),
below the eyelids, up the nostrils, or in the dirt below the ‹ngernails,
what it is not, as Barthes writes about the membranous voice, is some
fetishism of breathing, where in the affect(ation) of meditation most
techniques begin, bringing into performance, as from a secretly mystical
center, some deep emotional truth or facsimile of the soul.
Metaphysics, as Artaud suggests (and Deleuze is indebted to him),
may with the sonorous streaming come in through the pores, but only
while escaping, in the vibrations, frications, ovulations, sibilations, the
repressive simulation or “tyranny of meaning” (Barthes 185). As for the
tyranny in The Lesson, true, the libidinous soundings of the linguistic the-
ory there—that “all the words of all the languages . . . are always the
same” (65)—takes a hallucinatory course to the lethal pedagogy of the
knife, which, though the Pupil feels it, voluptuously, in every part of her
body, is something else again than Artaud’s cruelty or Barthes’s con-
ception of voice, whose truth is to be hallucinated (“Grain” 184). Which
is not exactly the state of mind of the Smiths and Martins, in the vocif-
erous fury of The Bald Soprano, their vain pursuit of meaning, where the
concluding lesson is about the runaway signi‹ers, not this that, not that
this, spreading over the stage: “It’s not that way, it’s over here, it’s not
that way, it’s over here, it’s not that way, it’s over here, it’s not that way,
it’s over here!” (42).
But wherever it is or might be, it, the indeterminate referent
through the anarchy of it all, “a work of art,” according to Ionesco—

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unembarrassed by the phrase, which he uses frequently, honori‹cally,
without much slippage—“is not a disordered set of associations. It’s a
structured series of associations around a theme. A work of art is pri-
marily a construction,”11 though it may be pushed to the point of parox-
ysm, “where the source of tragedy lies.”12 The tragic, too, has become
dubious in our time, as politically disempowering, starting with the cri-
tique by Brecht and moving by way of poststructuralism into feminism,
the new historicism, queer theory, and the gendered, racial, and ethnic
politics of cultural studies. In any case, when Ionesco speaks of art as a
construction he doesn’t mean by that what, through Foucault and oth-
ers, we’ve come to think of as “social construction,” as if the work were
composed by an aggregation of discursive circumstances or, in the
anonymous performance of language, as a sort of accretion of history.
The text may be, as Barthes said in “The Death of the Author,” a
multiplex space of diverse writings, none of them original, but rather “a
tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture”
(Image 146); but when Ionesco speaks of his work he leaves no doubt
that he is—as much as William Faulkner with Yoknapatawpha
County—the sole proprietor of the site of multiplicity; and if things
need to be deciphered or disentangled by the audience that’s because
“the mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation” focused, as
Barthes says, in the reader or the audience (148), has been conceived
and perpetrated by the imaginative powers of the artist, who has
through those powers the capacity to construct. This is so even when
the construction resembles, as at the frenzied end of The Bald Soprano or
in the equally frenzied arrangement of chairs—when the Old Woman
says, “I’m not a machine, you know. Who are all these people?” (Chairs
137)—the deterritorialized or nomadic space of A Thousand Plateaus,
conceived by Deleuze and Guattari as an assemblage, an “economy of vio-
lence” in which “speed is added to displacement,”13 in what they call the war
machine. Which might, indeed, be a description of the accelerating
structures of Ionesco’s drama, an exacerbation of assemblage, seem-
ingly irrational and denuded of all sense, as the enmity of the characters
emerges, as if it were genetic, from the banality of its beginnings.
But if the irrationality is there, in the perversity of the Professor and
his harrowing lesson, as in the proliferous invention that, with a teasing
hysteria, seems to generate the plays—like the “spontaneous imagina-
tion” of the surrealist’s creed, to which Ionesco was susceptible—the
economy of violence is not without control, nor is the violence of the
comic in Ionesco that, brought to paroxysm, circles back to the tragic.
Or so it is in conception, whatever it may be in performance. The issue

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is construction, which is not without affects that, in “the active discharge

of emotion, . . . are projectiles just like weapons” (Thousand Plateaus 400),
of which the assemblage, with gaps, detours, always decentered, dis-
persed as it may seem, is the formal cause—so much so in Ionesco that
for all the innovative turbulence the form seems merely the warp of
something quite conventional. “Assemblages are passional,” say
Deleuze and Guattari, “they are compositions of desire. Desire has
nothing to do with a natural and spontaneous determination; there is no
desire but assembling, assembled, desire. The rationality, the ef‹ciency
of an assemblage does not exist without the passions the assemblage
brings into play, without the desires that constitute it as much as it con-
stitutes them” (399).
For Ionesco, it appears, the order of things is “let the torrent rush
in” and then assume “control, grasp, comprehension” (Notes 124), but
what rushes in, as we can see from play to play, would seem to be a
function of the same order of understanding, with a “metaphysical con-
sciousness” that, in a world that is “at once marvelous and atrocious, a
miracle and a hell” (“Why Do I Write” 13), determines social awareness,
as well as his apparent indifference to the political that made him,
through the period of the Absurd, the subject of critique, as, say, Beck-
ett never was—mainly because Ionesco’s indifference to the political
didn’t at all make him indifferent to the critique. The compulsion to
respond—from the initial debates with Kenneth Tynan to those with
leftist critics when Paris was Brechtianized—was documented by Mar-
tin Esslin in his indispensable guidebook to the vicissitudes of the
Absurd as it moved into the theater. I won’t review the movement,
through Ionesco’s self-defense, from the judicious to the polemical to
the didactic, which could have used now and then, in its more philo-
sophical stuf‹ness, a little Brechtian alienation. But when he wonders
through the didacticism why, in every gesture, if not gestus, there is a
potential disaster or catastrophe, a killing instinct we can’t control, he
inevitably returns to the tortuous question of whether or not there is
meaning in the world, or whether we were merely born deceived into a
reality that is incurable.
He insistently asks the question, but that the natural is incurable,
like the growing corpse in Amédée, is something he refuses to accept. If
it’s a law, then he denies it, but what to do is another matter. If he
approaches at times, then avoids, the elegiac estrangement of the Beck-
ettian nothing to be done—whether with Hamm’s old stancher or
Pozzo’s mournful “On!”—he can’t quite buy the solutions of those
who deny on ideological grounds what he virtually takes on faith, that

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“a human fraternity based on the metaphysical condition is more secure
than one grounded in politics. A question without a metaphysical
answer is far more authentic. And in the end [more] useful than all the
false and partial answers given by politics” (“Why Do I Write” 14).
Unable to imagine the in‹nite and condemned to know nothing, what
we can be conscious of is this: “all is tragedy,” universal tragedy, unex-
plainable by original sin. As for politics, particularly revolutionary poli-
tics, that’s a delusion. “We make revolutions to institute justice and
tyranny. We make injustice and tyranny” (“Why Do I Write” 10). What
can be done if at all? Forget ideology, and kill as little as possible. After
World War II, what else can you expect? The simple wisdom is this:
“Ideologies do nothing but prompt us to murder. Let’s demystify” (11).
The irony is, however, as we look back today on the drama of
Ionesco, that it’s the demysti‹ers who might still take issue, like the older
Brechtian critique, with its circuiting back to tragedy, or the insupportable
semblance of it, through the extremities of its comedy. If momentarily
eruptive and disarmingly off the wall, the charge might be that it is debil-
itating in its excess, its elephantiasis of the bizarre merely self-indulgent, a
cover-up of paralysis, no more than a copout, in mockery of the reality
that absurdly overwhelms it, like the interminable corpse of Amédée, “the
long, long body . . . winding out of the room” (63). No matter that in the absur-
dity there is a longing for the supernal, or the memory of a memory of a
memory of something else, as in the “sinister room” with sprouting mush-
rooms, enormous now with “silvery glints” and, as Amédée gazes out the
window, all the acacia trees aglow. “How beautiful the night is!” he says.
“The full-blown moon is ›ooding the Heavens with light. The Milky Way
is like creamy ‹re, honeycombs, countless galaxies, comets’ tails, celestial
ribbons, rivers of molten silver, and brooks, lakes and oceans of palpable
light.” And the correlative of the corpse in the heavens, its long, long
body winding, “space, space, in‹nite space” (59).
As early as Amédée, conscious of the critique that he was jeopardizing
human behavior by invalidating objective judgment, Ionesco brought his
defense, if whimsically, onto the stage, as when the American soldier, who
is helping him with the corpse, asks Amédée if he’s really writing a play.
“Yes,” he says. “A play in which I’m on the side of the living against the
dead.” And as he says again later, when—though he stands for “imma-
nence” and is “against transcendence” (75)—he’s up in the air with the
ballooning corpse: “I’m all for taking sides, Monsieur, I believe in
progress. It’s a problem play attacking nihilism and announcing a new
form of humanism, more enlightened than the old” (69). If for Kenneth
Tynan—just prior to the emergence of the Angry Young Men, and the

reality principles
54
renewed vitality of social realism—progress and humanism were still in,
with the demysti‹ers today they are certainly out, as among the illusions
of the Enlightenment protecting bourgeois capitalism. If, in any event,
there was nothing programmatic to be taken away from the incapacitating
ethos of Ionesco’s drama, with its fractious view of reality as senseless,
purposeless, useless, absurd, there is still in the texts the prospect of per-
formance that is nevertheless enlivening and, if a burlesque of possibility,
ebullient in negation, as if the vertigo of nothingness were itself the source
of energy that reversed, as in chaos theory today, the direction of the
entropic. If entropy was—when I studied thermodynamics, about a
decade before our doing Ionesco’s plays—a measure of the unavailable
energy of the universe, the drama of the Absurd, with its law of increas-
ing disorder and commitment to evanescence, sneaked up in a dizzying
anguish on whatever made it available. That too may be an illusion, which
is not exactly absurd.

notes

1. The symposium was a retrospective, “Fool’s Gold: Ionesco and the The-
ater of the Absurd,” held at Stanford University on July 28, 2001.
2. Eugene Ionesco, Four Plays: The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, Jack or the Submis-
sion, The Chairs, trans. Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove, 1958) 87. References in
the text will be to the titles of the plays.
3. Eugene Ionesco, Amédée, The New Tenant, Victims of Duty, trans. Donald
Watson (New York: Grove, 1958) 15.
4. T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1964) 53.
5. Eugene Ionesco, “Why Do I Write? A Summing Up,” in The Two Faces of
Ionesco, ed. Rosette C. Lamont and Melvin J. Friedman (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1978) 5.
6. Antonin Artaud, “The Alchemical Theater,” in The Theater and Its Double,
trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove, 1958) 52.
7. Artaud, “On the Balinese Theater,” in Theater and Its Double 54.
8. Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague,” in Theater and Its Double 30.
9. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image-Music-Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 183.
10. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-Mem-
ory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Bouchard
and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) 168, 171.
11. Damien Pettigrew, from “Interview with Ionesco,” Paris Magazine,
Autumn 1984, 26, quoted by Ruby Cohn, From Desire to Godot: Pocket Theater of Post-
war Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 93–94.
12. Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes (London: John Calder, 1962) 6.
13. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987) 398, 396.

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55
 three

The Soul-Complex of Strindberg

Suffocation, Scopophilia, and the Seer

3
What I will be saying about A Dream Play is not necessarily as we’ve
seen it here,1 but as I’ve thought about it before, in the mind’s eye, with
some regret that, though I’d long been tempted to stage it, for one rea-
son or other—perhaps the forbidding prospect—I never came to do it.
That it is getting attention now, and not only here, may be telling us
something, but as with its Swedenborgian intimations, triplex cosmos,
occulted symbols, the “round bored holes and a clover leaf in the
door,”2 the visual warp of the mirrored refractions or, with certain
shifts and reversals of vision, recessions of appearance in a sort of cam-
era obscura—the dark picture of a cloud muting the dark picture of a
tower—we may not be sure what it is. Or, maybe, appallingly, only too
sure, so much so that at some psychic level we might wish we didn’t
know, like the Quarantine Master at the Dire Straits who wishes he
could forget (238). And if, for Strindberg, what there was to be known
came in some measure from the vicissitudes of the unconscious, with
the libidinal content transformed into phallic aconites and vulvous grot-
tos, or an organ becoming Fingal’s Cave, there is also the raw self-evi-
dence, the banality, brutality, inequitably unchangeable, implacable state
of things, assailed by his characters with more or less impotency, so that
sometimes the dreaming appears to be by default.
“In the old days,” says the Captain in The Dance of Death, a year
before A Dream Play, “we fought. Now we just shake our ‹sts!” (163).
“Sometimes,” says the Student, six years after A Dream Play, in The Ghost
Sonata, “I get a raging desire to say exactly what I think. But I know that
if people were really frank and honest, the world would collapse” (306).
The horror may be that it wouldn’t, and that’s the news that Indra’s
Daughter, with whatever ascending hope, is bringing to the throne
above, translated “into language / the Immortal One understands”
(Dream Play 259). As Clov says in Beckett’s Endgame, “God be with the
days!”3 But before we count on that, or the faith-based initiative of our
dubiously elected president, let’s back up somewhat in Strindberg, from
“the humiliation and ‹lth” (251) around the mystical dream of redemp-
tion—or, with the Poet as seer, “words luminous, pure and airy enough

56
/ to rise from the [painful] earth” (259)—to the articulation of an aes-
thetic around “the soul-complex”4 of an earlier Darwinism.
The soul is there, but less ethereal, in the naturalistic complex of the
preface to Miss Julie. What we have in the preface—with its particularly
estranged and maybe estranging perspective—is also an assault on the
state of the theater toward the end of the nineteenth century. It will not
be the last time that serious theater has been declared dead or at best a
“Biblia pauperum, a Bible in pictures” for the petty bourgeois, whom it
permits to understand not only complex issues but what Strindberg
calls “the basic questions” (50), in rather simplistic, effortless ways. So
far as our own period is concerned he might be talking not only of
seemingly hip sitcoms passing into commercial theater but even of a
play like Angels in America, which, with whatever virtues it brought to
Broadway, is an updated Tea and Sympathy for the theater parties of the
baby boomers, sustaining their liberal politics with an easy dose of
edi‹cation.
For us, today, the more offensive aspect of Strindberg’s critique is
probably the matter of gender, beginning with his remark that “the the-
ater has always been a public school for the young, the half-educated,
and women, who still possess that primitive capacity for deceiving
themselves or letting themselves be deceived, that is to say, are recep-
tive to the illusion, to the playwright’s power of suggestion” (50). It is,
however, precisely this power of suggestion, more than that, the hyp-
notic effect, which is at the paradoxical center of Strindberg’s vision of
theater. As for what he says of women (beyond his feeling that femi-
nism was an elitist privilege, for women of the upper classes who had
time to read Ibsen, while the lower classes went begging, like the Coal
Heavers on the Riviera in his play) his monomania is such that, with
some remarkably virulent portraits, he almost exceeds critique; or his
misogyny is such that one may say of it what Fredric Jameson said of
Wyndham Lewis: “this particular idée ‹xe is so extreme as to be virtually
beyond sexism.”5 I’m sure some of you may still want to quarrel about
that, to which Strindberg might reply with his words in the preface:
“how can people be objective when their innermost beliefs are
offended” (51). Which doesn’t, for him, validate the beliefs.
Of course, the degree of his own objectivity is radically at stake,
though when you think it over his power would seem to come from a
ferocious empiricism indistinguishable from excess, and not much
diminished, for the skeptics among us, by the Swedenborgian mysticism
or the “wise and gentle Buddha” sitting there in The Ghost Sonata, “wait-
ing for a heaven to rise up out of the Earth” (309). As for his critique of

The Soul-Complex of Strindberg

57
theater, linked to the emotional capacities or incapacities of the bour-
geois audience, it actually resembles that of Nietzsche and, through this
Nietzschean disposition and a lethal edge to the Darwinism, anticipates
Artaud’s theater of Cruelty. “People clamor pretentiously,” Strindberg
writes in the Miss Julie preface, “for ‘the joy of life,’” as if anticipating
here the age of Martha Stewart, “but I ‹nd the joy of life in its cruel and
powerful struggles” (52). What is in jeopardy here, along with the sanity
of Strindberg—his madness perhaps more cunning than Artaud’s, even
strategic, since he “advertised his irrationality; even falsi‹ed evidence to
prove he was mad at times”6—is the condition of drama itself. The
form has been the classical model of distributed subjectivity. With
Strindberg, however, it is dealing with the ego in a state of disposses-
sion, refusing its past and without any future, states of feeling so
intense, inward, solipsistic, that—even then with Miss Julie—it threatens
to undo the form.
This is something beyond the relatively conservative dramaturgy of
the naturalistic tradition, so far as that appears to focus on the docu-
mentable evidence of an external reality, its perceptible facts and unde-
niable circumstances. What we have in the multiplicity, or multiple
motives, of the soul-complex is something like the Freudian notion of
“overdetermination,” yielding not one meaning but too many mean-
ings, and a subjectivity so estranged that it cannot ‹t into the inherited
conception of character. Thus, the idea of a “characterless” character
or, as in A Dream Play, the indeterminacy of any perspective from which
to appraise, as if in the mise-en-scène of the unconscious, what appears
to be happening before it transforms again. Instead of the “ready-
made,” in which “the bourgeois concept of the immobility of the soul
was transferred to the stage,” he insists on the richness of the soul-
complex (53), which—if derived from his view of Darwinian natural-
ism—re›ects “an age of transition more compulsively hysterical” than
the one preceding it, while anticipating the age of postmodernism, with
its deconstructed self, so that when we think of identity as “social con-
struction,” it occurs as if the construction were a sort of bricolage. “My
souls (characters),” Strindberg writes, “are conglomerates of past and
present cultural phases, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of
humanity, pieces torn from ‹ne clothes and become rags, patched
together as is the human soul” (54).
If it seems peculiar to substitute that theological word soul for charac-
ter in the materialist economy of naturalistic drama, there are other
anomalies as Strindberg works out an aesthetic for the atomized soul of

reality principles
58
a hysterical age, shortly before Freud and Breuer began their notorious
studies of hysteria. For instance, there is a passage in the preface where,
observing that people were increasingly interested in “psychological
process,” Strindberg—whose own essays on psychology had been enti-
tled Vivisections—goes on to sound, in the demystifying mode, less like
Sigmund Freud and more like Bertolt Brecht. “Our inquisitive souls,” he
says, “are not satis‹ed just to see something happen; we want to know
how it happened. We want to see the strings, the machinery, examine the
double-bottomed box, feel the seam in the magic ring, look at the cards
to see how they are marked” (57). But a moment after insisting that the-
atricality reveal itself, that the apparatus of production be exposed, and
presumably illusion with it, Strindberg writes about “the technical
aspects of composition,” that he has experimented in Miss Julie “with
eliminating act divisions.” Why? To preserve, like Nietzsche, the future
of illusion. Or, as Strindberg puts it: “The reason is that I believe our
dwindling capacity for accepting illusion is possibly further disturbed by
intermissions during which the spectator has time to re›ect and thereby
escape the suggestive in›uence of the author-hypnotist” (57).
So much for the Brechtian Strindberg, at least for the moment. For
there are other moments, more or less alienating, and so recurrently
painful we might wish for the A-effect, even in the hypnotic structure of
the more symbolist A Dream Play, where the future of illusion comes, as
it did at the end in Freud, with civilization and its discontents—if you
can call it civilization, “this madhouse, this dungeon, this morgue of a
world,” which is how the Student sums it up in The Ghost Sonata (308)
before the invocation of Buddha, the murmuring sound of a harp, the
room ‹lled with white light, and then, after the whimpering of a child,
Böcklin’s painting, The Island of the Dead, appearing in the background,
with soft, calm music, “gently melancholy” (309). There is in A Dream
Play compassion for all this, but what sort of creation can it be, the
Daughter plaintively asks, in which “the spirit craves other garb / than
this of blood and ‹lth,” while doomed, moreover, to “endless repeti-
tions. . . . Doing the same things over and over,” as the Lawyer says—
the compulsions in the repetitiveness by no stretch of obsession what
Judith Butler has been writing about, queering the dispossession, the
exclusion and abjection, the unliveable and the uninhabitable, by the
repetitive and citational practice of subversive bodily acts. Repetition
here—as with the pasting of Kristine, who pastes and pastes, “till
there’s nothing more to paste” (273)—is not “performativity” but a vir-
tual condition of life.

The Soul-Complex of Strindberg

59
The prologue to A Dream Play occurs in a world outside this world, in
which most of the play occurs. This world, represented at ‹rst by a cas-
tle that, phallocratically, “keeps growing up out of the earth,” is also dif-
ferently framed, at least as Strindberg described it: “On the wings,
which remain in place for the entire play, are stylized paintings repre-
senting a mixture of interiors, exteriors, and landscapes” (213). The
world from which Indra’ s Daughter descends is represented too—there
is nothing, after all, outside representation, except the dream of it—in
the constellations that can be seen, Leo, Virgo, Libra, and shining
brightly between them, the planet Jupiter too, above the “banks of
clouds resembling crumbling slate mountains with ruins of castles and
fortresses” (210). The world as we know it, or will come to know, is a
place into which one strays and falls: “a circle of vapors called Earth”
(211), a place in which it is hard to breathe. Wherever we are on earth,
in whatever play, the image of suffocation is ubiquitous in Strindberg.
Yet Indra’s Daughter can also see that the earth is, too, “with green
forests, blue waters, white mountains, and golden ‹elds” (211), as it
might be endowed by Brahma—the natural beauty, however, despoiled,
as it might have been in the biblical garden: “something happened . . . ,
an act of disobedience,” crimes which had to be suppressed (212). Why
suppressed? There is no way of telling, because the fall has been a fall
into language, speech, which is not transparent but has to be deci-
phered. We live, thus, in an ethos of suspicion, with no reliable
hermeneutic and, in the failure of language, the lamentably demeaning
rhetoric of no happiness on earth: we hear from Indra’s Voice, about
those below, that “Complaining / is their mother tongue” (212). If
Indra’s Daughter refuses to believe that, because she hears shouts of
praise and joy, the paternal voice tells her to descend and see, and thus
the drama becomes both an ordeal and trial, a disheartening initiation
into the blight of being human or what will, blighted at birth—pace Hei-
degger—never come to Being.
As the Daughter falls into life as it appears to be on earth, the scenic
image is a fusion of the psychedelic and the fabulous: rising above a for-
est of giant hollyhocks is the gilded roof of the growing castle, crowned
by a ›ower bud, and then, below the foundation walls, piles of straw
that cover manure from the palace stables. If the castle doesn’t stink to
high heaven, it has “been fertilized,” and when the Glazier points out “a
wing [that] has sprouted on the sunny side,” a ›ower high up about to
bloom, the Daughter is ‹rst delighted, then asks: “Tell me, why do
›owers grow out of ‹lth” (213). Whether or not “Love has pitched his
mansion in / the place of excrement”7 still remains to be seen, although

reality principles
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it seems apparent that Yeats’s gendering of Love as male would not be

unappealing to Strindberg, captivated as he was by the inexpressible
beauty of Harriet Bosse—upon whom the Daughter is apparently mod-
eled—and despite the seductive immanence of the mother of illusion,
Maya, a seductive but absent presence in the constellation of symbols.
“And so the world, life and human beings” says the Daughter to the
Poet later in the play, “are only illusion, a phantom, a dream image”
(270), and if the image seems at ‹rst drawn from fable or a fairy tale, it
is soon, with psychosexual resonances in the subliminal text, trans-
muted to an anxiety dream that becomes increasingly nightmarish.
While there is really a conventional act-structure to this movement, it
appears to depart from the dramaturgy of the West into a parabolic or
cyclical quest that is more like the sagas and drama of the East, where
illusion dominates as the supreme order of things. Because the reality of
the world is illusion, the source of which is secret, when the Of‹cer
wants to fetch his bride after seven years of waiting for her at the stage
door, he is told by the Doorkeeper, “No one is allowed on stage!” (219).
There is a certain resonance in the line that exceeds its status in the dra-
matic representation, so far as there is in the representation a remnant
of “the real.” Not only are we not allowed on stage, but “it’s the last per-
formance of the season today” (218). If this reminds us, denied access
at the last, that the theater at ‹rst came with a prohibition, the promise
of symbolism persisting in Strindberg is the end of that vitiating prin-
ciple, representation, trans‹gured through the imaginary in a
puri‹cation of theater, alchemical like Artaud’s, starting with base mat-
ter, the disease of living itself, which at one point in A Dream Play is
referred to as the plague. Out of an “essential separation,” like the sex-
ual division that in the metaphysics of the dream suffuses Strindberg’s
play, comes an “essential drama” that, as Artaud describes it, passes “by
way of all natural resemblances of images and af‹nities” to its “com-
plete, sonorous, streaming naked realization,”8 as if by assuming its
prodigious energy ridding the world of the plague.
Writing of the viceroy of Sardinia who, at the opening of his essay
on “The Theater and the Plague,” “had a particularly af›icting dream,”
Artaud asks: “But is it too late to avert the scourge? Even destroyed,
even annihilated, even pulverized and consumed to his very marrow, he
knows that we do not die in our dreams, that our will operates even in
absurdity, even in the negation of possibility, even in the transmutation
of lies from which truth can be remade” (15). If the viceroy “wakes up”
on this realization, as if between him and plague there was “a palpable
communication” (17)—con‹rming Artaud in “the notion of symbols

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61

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and archetypes which act like silent blows, rests, leaps of the heart, sum-
mons of the lymph, in›ammatory images thrust into our abruptly wak-
ened heads,” naming the powers “we hail as symbols” (27)—the prob-
lem with symbolist drama (as with expressionism later) is that the
thrilling promise of a trans‹gured reality, to which we come through the
dreaming, leaves us with the perpetual irony of something to be desired,
not unlike the phantasm of virtual reality in a cyberspatial world. We
seem to be promised something other, outside, beyond, outdoing to all
appearance the system of representation, but if there’s an alluring ver-
tigo in the hallucinatory moment, it insists somehow on remaining the
same. That in itself may be the substance of the mystery.
Meanwhile, what’s really powerful in Strindberg is the recurring
desire for transcendence that, when push comes to shove in the vale of
repetition, is grasped again by the reality principle, which persists
through A Dream Play like the force of gravity itself. If we do not die in
our dreams—which it appears the Daughter does—sad to say, and
Strindberg knows it, we are not necessarily reborn, for other circum-
stances and history also determine that. Speaking of af‹nities, and not
an accident of history, it has been noticed before that A Dream Play
appeared just about the same time, at the turn of the century, as The
Interpretation of Dreams, but the psychopathology of the drama also seems
to parallel Freud’s Project for a Scienti‹c Psychology, which appeared some
years before, in 1895. Whether or not Strindberg was aware of either,
the af‹nities are there, and the images, while the mechanisms of dis-
placement, substitution, condensation, even secondary revision (the
cover-up for what’s too evident in the dream) would by now seem
familiar enough as they occur in the polymorphous landscape with a
certain perversity: rising castle, towering trees, circumcised candles,
spiky or thorny ›owers and—with the transpositions of male to female,
returning to illusion—cave, grotto, corridor, as well as the alluring
secret through the (maybe anal) cloverleaf hole. As for the cathected
energy of the gestural language, its ideographic fervor and entropic
thrust, there is the autism of the Of‹cer, who strikes the table with his
saber in a ‹gure of masturbation and walks up and down before the
cloverleaf hole 2,555 times: “Is there someone inside? Does anyone live
there?” (220). What he’s looking for he’ll never ‹nd, as the Mother and
Father—in a synoptic (if tamer) version of The Father and The Dance of
Death—will never know why they’ve taunted each other. All they
know is what the Mother says when the Father asks forgiveness: “We
couldn’t do otherwise” (215), which the Daughter as Agnes, wife of the
Lawyer, has to endure later in the play, the anguish of it, far from

reality principles
62
relieved, rather intensi‹ed by their having a child: “And so living
together is a torment” (233).
If there is a fatality in that, there is also the disposition of symbolist
drama to uncover some ultimate secret. Desire is impelled by the
promise of a clue to the mystery, the inevitable revelation behind the
door with the hole. But the nothing that is not there suggests only the
nothing that is, and that the answer is elsewhere, not-seen, other-
worldly—unless it be, as in the hermeneutics of Freud, that wherever
the images lead they disappear at some impasse into the dream’s navel,
and thence through the mycelium (the term is Freud’s, but there are
mushroom growths in Strindberg) with its ‹lamenting nerve ends of
thought. Which is what makes interpretation, deferred and impelled by
multiplicity, as rich, perhaps, as the soul-complex. Before the door is
eventually opened, the Of‹cer wants a locksmith, but instead it is the
Glazier who turns up, for the system with its symbols is also
scopophilic: what is required is not a key but a seer, the irony being that
vision is consummated—as in the restored mystery of Artaud’s alchem-
ical theater—in and through its sonorous substance, the naked stream-
ing realization. What we see and how we see it, with seeing collapsing
upon itself, as in a house of mirrors, is actually the substance of that
other Strindbergian drama, The Ghost Sonata, whose title points to the
ear. In that play it’s as if reality were a matter of whispers ghosted into
appearance.
Do you see? we say, but as in the spectral presence of the audience
(with audition in the word) there is the listening too. “Is it going to be a
musical evening, or what?” Hummel’s servant, Johannson asks (289),
about the ghost supper, which is in its apparitional orchestration left to
our imagining—like the vampire “sucking the marrow out of the
house” or the soup stock ‹lled with water—a pitiful feast for the eyes:
“they nibble on cookies, all at the same time, so that it sounds like rats
nibbling in an attic” (290). Meanwhile, the scenic structure, as in A
Dream Play, draws conceptually on photographic technique: zooming
from exterior to interior, the scenes are at the same time variously mir-
rored, in‹nitely receding and, like the space of relativity, turned back
upon itself. What we have, then, in the impacted expansion of image is
a suffocating enclosure that—with rooms, closets, screens re›ecting
each other, as the characters also do—contracts and expands again like
a Chinese puzzle box, which in the dubious warp of history is, struc-
turally, also a cryptogram.
Which is also re›ected in Hummel’s view of language, when he says
he prefers silence, because you can then “hear thoughts and see into the

The Soul-Complex of Strindberg

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past,” without hiding anything, as you can in words. “The other day,” he
says, “I read that the reason different languages developed was because
primitive tribes tried to keep secrets from each other. And so languages
are codes, and whoever ‹nds the key will understand them all.” Mean-
while, Nature itself has planted “in human beings an instinct for hiding
that which should be hidden,” though as we stumble into truths we’d
rather not see or know, there is also the impulse “to reveal the deepest
of secrets, to tear the mask off the imposter” (298). Thus the Mummy
says of the Colonel that everything in his life is a forgery, including his
family tree. But what she says of him, as of Hummel—he with the “false
name” who also “steals souls” (299)—appears to be the essential reality
of the play: life itself is a forgery that might, and this is a long shot, be
transcended by the Student and Adele, though the fate of the hyacinth
girl is likely to be what we see, a generation later, in T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land.
Problem is, as Ibsen understood in his self-assumed rivalry with
Strindberg, the past is unlikely to die, except in wish ful‹llment. “God,
if only we could die! If only we could die,” says the Mummy. But the
human reality seems to be that “crimes and secrets and guilt bind us
together!” (294). For Strindberg in The Ghost Sonata our lives, like that of
the Colonel’s, are more or less sustained on a promissory note, amor-
tized, the note running its exacting course in an economy of death.
Which, as we’ve come to say in theory, is the place of representation.

But back again to A Dream Play, and the baf›ement at the door: there
must be a way out, or in. How many doors have we seen since, up to and
including The X-Files, its alien ‹gures, occultism, and obsession with
other worlds. “What’s behind it? There must be something!” (222)—
the ground of all allegory with its broken signs. The Law forbids, of
course, the opening of the door, and we have seen that in the mutations
from symbolism to modernism, from Maeterlinck’s The Intruder through
Kafka’s Castle and The Trial. Speaking of trials, and ordeals, the Lawyer
in A Dream Play, witness and interpreter of the Law and record-keeper
of injustice, dreams of nothing but crimes and bears on his face—
“chalk-white, lined, and with purple shadows” (225)—the desperate
inscription of so much pain and suffering, like the Doorkeeper at the
theater, that he thinks of his now as a criminal face.
“Who will pay the ‹nal reckoning? Tell me that,” he asks the
Daughter. How much solace can there be? how much conviction?—she
who plays the role today would, I assume, have to deal with that—when
she says: “He who feeds the birds” (226). Let me be blunt, secular,

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immediate, now: I’m tempted to say that’s for the birds. If there’s a
metaphysic in dreams, as both Freud and Strindberg thought, one can’t
quite count on the spirit, and—for all the orgastic fervor of the ‹re in
the end, uniting the Poet and Daughter—my guess is that Strindberg
knew that too. I said earlier that my not staging the play was, perhaps,
because it was a forbidding prospect, but what may have been most for-
bidding about it—through the castle burning and the ›ower bud burst-
ing into a giant chrysanthemum, the orgastic and spiritual ardor of it—
is, still, my own incapacity for a leap of faith, which may be the datum,
however, of what I might do with the play. The Lawyer says: “But if He
who feeds the birds would come down to the earth He made and see
what wretches human beings are, maybe He would have some compas-
sion” (226–27). Maybe. It’s an old argument, all this, but in the world as
we know it, with its born-again politics in a revival of faith, it would
seem to me that compassion is not enough.
When we look in the play, however, for a less mystical or more sub-
stantial response, what we encounter are the university faculties: Philos-
ophy, Theology, Medicine, and Law. If the Daughter who passes
through the abusive and unsavory rites of being human—vision
dimmed, hearing muf›ed, “bright, airy thoughts trapped in the
labyrinth of fatty coils in [the] brain” (272)—is herself treated with com-
passion, however feeble her responses as an emissary from on high,
Strindberg is merciless about what we would call today, after Foucault,
the disciplinary regimens of institutionalized knowledge.

officer: Is there a funeral in town?

lawyer: No, it’s a commencement exercise.
(227)

There may be a special mordancy today, given the job market, about
having to begin all over when “you already have your doctorate” (242),
although Strindberg’s animus is directed against the epistemological
question, which brings us back to the condition of theater—which is
now not only institutionalized but among the university faculties.
What happened to this world? the Daughter keeps asking, and then
looking into the mirror believes that she sees the world as it really is,
“before it got turned around” (228). There is not only, then, transposi-
tion, metamorphosis, and abstraction of character in A Dream Play, but
because of the turn-around—including the sequence of reversed scenes
and sites—a question of the status of the mimetic in a world of disbe-
lief, or when, whatever the religious revival, belief is nevertheless shaky.

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The Lawyer con‹rms her sense that the world is a copy, a false copy,
which makes representation itself a double deceit, unless you believe it
may also be a sort of homeopathic magic. The issue is not so much
resolved as intensi‹ed by the juxtaposition of the transformation of
Fingal’s Cave with the manic obsessive pasting of Kristine (229–30).
She is a suffocating preface to the marriage of the Lawyer and the
Daughter, who learns among other things from the disaster of it, that
poverty and ‹lth go together.
The autistic behavior of Kristine may be recalled in another per-
spective at the Dire Straits, with its open-air gymnasium of machines
resembling instruments of torture. Through these scenes—the quaran-
tine beginning, the need to dance before the plague breaks out—we
encounter images of history as nightmare or regression, including the
ovens for cholera that may recall, today, those Holocaustic images we’d
almost rather forget: “How hot does it get in those ovens?” (236).
One may ask: how hot does it get in the play, as the Daughter asks,
with permutations, “Hasn’t anyone thought that there may be a hidden
reason why things are as they are?” (253). If there is—and putting aside
the feeling that it’s more outrageous then—what about a cure? (268). My
own temptation is to burst out like Hamm in Endgame, “Use your head,
can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” (53).
But in A Dream Play, as the Daughter ascends, it’s brought back to the
Poet, “who understands best how to live / Hovering on . . . wings above
the world,” plunging “to earth from time to time, / but just to brush
against it, not be trapped by it!” (273). As if desperate, however, for the
words to guide him, the Poet has snatched a Book of Martyrs from the
‹re, into which it was thrown by the Dean of Theology, who does rage
against “a God who won’t defend His own people.” When he leaves the
stage in disgust, the Poet asks: “Isn’t suffering redemption and death
deliverance?” (273).
I wonder about that Poet, whether he doesn’t need that rage,
whether or not he believes, as with Strindberg himself. In any case, if I
were to stage the play, the rage would certainly be there, pervading the
soul-complex, unappeasable rage, in every shadow of the dream.

notes

1. The occasion for this essay was the conference “Staging Strindberg,” spon-
sored by the Department of Theater and Dance and the Department of Scandina-
vian Studies, at the University of Minnesota, on February 17, 2001. The previous

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night A Dream Play was performed by a (mostly) student cast under the direction of
Aleksandra Wolska.
2. August Strindberg, A Dream Play, in Strindberg: Five Plays, trans. Harry G.
Carison (New York: Penguin/Signet, 1983) 220. All subsequent references to
Strindberg’s plays, from this volume, will be in the text.
3. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958) 44.
4. Strindberg, “Author’s Preface” to Miss Julie, in Five Plays 53; subsequent ref-
erences to the preface will be in the text.
5. Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) 20.
6. Evert Sprinchorn, Strindberg as Dramatist (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1982), 2.
7. William Butler Yeats, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” in The Collected
Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989) 259–60.
8. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards
(New York: Grove Press, 1958) 50, 52.

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67
 four

From the Dreamwork of Secession

to Orgies Mysteries Theater

The Enlightenment will come to a bad end. The brain is

too heavy and the pelvis much too frivolous.
—oskar kokoschka, Sphinx and Strawman

I don’t go to the theater

On principle
it is something quite disgusting
the theater
whenever I am in the theater
I am constantly reminded
how disgusting it is
—thomas bernhard, The Hunting Party

3
I’m not sure whether being a redhead in provincial Austria today
would cause you to be laughed at as you walked along a street, or other-
wise mocked, despised, or even feared, as an agent of the Devil, but so
it was, apparently, when Johann Nestroy wrote The Talisman in 1840.
Prejudice aside, and its wicked incrimination, the play does something
more with his red-haired girl—charged with driving geese from a
hayloft before it burned down, obviously caused by her ›aming top—it
also charges up the drama, a farce with songs, while also baiting the cen-
sors, by whom Nestroy himself was often charged, in both senses, mak-
ing the satire more aggressive, then hardly more restrained, when he
was once not only threatened, but sent to jail for several days. As for the
censorship, it was itself a dynastic tradition, within the religion of state
and law, even as Austria was secularized and modernized, from the
more liberated Secessionists to the Viennese Actionists, among whom
scandal was sacred in the order of things, with animal slaughter, burn-
ings, and ritualized masochisms, pornography, scatology, self-mutila-
tions, public masturbations, vomiting, shitting, eating shit, near-electro-
cutions—all forms, as they conceived it, of talismanic disobedience,
sometimes so funny you could scream. Thus, it should probably be pro-
nounced, with accent on the obsessiveness, talis-manic, or simple manic
without the talis, that Jewish prayer shawl, which intellectuals in Vienna,

68
many of them Jews, couldn’t dream of wearing, even if still willing to be
identi‹ed as Jews, which many of them refused, some converting to
Catholicism, maybe regretting it, maybe not, that equivocal peace with
imperial power. As for others who didn’t deny it, prospering, entrepre-
neurial, well-educated Jews, with Kultur their true religion, they could be
anti-Semitic themselves,1 while old rigidities persisted, with moral stag-
nation and ossi‹ed institutions, in that presumably opening and liberal
world surrounding the Secession.
“To the Age Its Art, to Art Its Freedom.” Despite that famous
motto—inscribed by the architect on the Secession’s modernist tem-
ple—when die Jungen banded together, in 1897, to release the visual and
plastic arts from an imprisoning aesthetic, there was nothing like the
performative insolence of Nestroy when, earlier in the century, he
assaulted the vapidity and hypocrisies of an often confounded audience,
on the edge of shouting him down, yet nervously laughing through it,
then dismissing his arrogant wit, as Nestroy knew they would, since
they knew no better, ready to go on believing what they already
believed. What he believed was sometimes baf›ing, given his wicked
tongue, up for grabs in the spiraling nonsense, or with somersaulting
puns, buried in the buffoonery, but while he seemed to love perform-
ing, there was a time, long before Bernhard, when he found the theater
disgusting, the censor in the wings, and the assembled obtuseness,
which was all the more reason for staying on the attack. I must confess,
having written a book called The Audience, after many years in the the-
ater, much of it controversial, that I’ve often shared those feelings, and
done some attacking myself—as in The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto,
which called for a revolution—though I won’t resume that here.
In the attack mode, Nestroy was quite pro‹cient, and, more or less
manically later, others like Peter Handke, in his play Offending the Audi-
ence, devastatingly, it would appear, calling them every name he could
think of, scum, worms, monstrosities, sclerotics and syphilitics, foul-
mouthed ass-kissers, there, potentially dead, but remarkably unof-
fended, even by the nonstop, incantatory, merciless verbosity, as word
upon word he is soon reversing himself. The play, of course—or what
Handke called a Sprechstücke, a speak-in where you sit in, the actors told
how to listen, the audience taught to be actors, directed from the
stage—is really a discourse on theater, the always impossible theater,
which accounts for the logorrhea, presumably ending representation,
like a Derridean dream, praise be deconstruction! contradicting itself,
playing around with play, structure, sign, and play, a spectacle without
pictures, pure beleaguered play, only a world of words, abolishing

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scopophilia in a linguistic and acoustical space, where if you listen to the
looking you hear it coming back. Handke asserts in a prefatory note that
the Sprechstücke have nothing to do with representation, but then he
admits, with a ready irony, that “they imitate the gestures of all the given
devices natural to the theater”—which is why he claims in disclaiming
that he’s not being revolutionary. The preface ends with the de‹nitive:
“Speak-ins are autonomous prologues to the old plays” (ix).
Which brings us back to Nestroy, whose ironies were still directed
at, and constrained by, a far from autonomous theater, though in Haps-
burg Vienna, with an infection of old plays, even those announced as
new, the spectacles could be extravagant, as well as the acoustical space
for another world of words—upon which, by the deployment of
dialects, jargon, plainspoken speech, funny stuff to make a living, a liv-
ing he deplored, he was with disgusted fervor also making satiric war. It
wasn’t quite the war of words declared at the ‹n de siècle by the much-
feared, formidable, incontestable Karl Kraus, who was actually respon-
sible for reviving Nestroy, as a profoundly needed, deep satirical
thinker, though not perhaps with the Geist, a World-Spirit for Hegel, a
mind-spirit for Kraus, an ethical mastery of the Word, which Kraus
claimed for himself, not only apostolically, but as its virtual incarnation.
Nor, though he’d restored him from oblivion by reading Nestroy’s texts
in public, he absolutely didn’t want to see them in the theater. Opposed
to the aestheticizing of instinct, by the Jung-Wien and Secession, Kraus
also believed that the staging of a text de‹led it, and the purity of lan-
guage as well, thus better to keep it away from the show-off virtuosity,
the self-indulgence of actors. Dramatic art could only be preserved, he
insisted, by keeping it out of performance. It’s hard to say what Nestroy
might have made of all this, if it’s true that he thought more of himself
as an actor than as a playwright. In that regard, whatever the rage of
antitheater he might have shared with Kraus, he was still writing roles
for himself, and while his own virtuosity was running away with the
text—the authority of the author leaving it behind—he had to take the
measure of where they could be performed.
The prestigious theater in Vienna was, of course, the Burgtheater,
and while it was there in peripheral vision, Nestroy’s plays were obvi-
ously not compatible with its edifying repertoire of stentorian drama in
verse, set at some temporal distance, mainly antiquity, for a pseudocul-
tivated highbrow public. As to what could be shown, what not, even
into the next century, with newer stirrings in the drama, certain rules
were imposed with an unbreakable rigor by the deputies of the Haps-
burgs: no mocking of a monarch, or eyebrow raised in critique; so too

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with the ecclesiastical, no elements or sites of ritual allowed to be seen

on stage: no crypts, altars, funerals, and so, if they dreamed of doing
Hamlet, the gravedigger was out; incest, adultery, no question, forbid-
den; nor could a man and woman leave the stage together unless
accompanied by a servant. And no lights down—as Schnitzler signaled,
with asterisks in the text—while sexuality made the round, that illicit
dance of Reigen (better known here as La Ronde). Thus, anything that
was in jeopardy could only show up in the popular theater, or the pup-
pet theater, with its af‹nities to commedia mime. And this, to begin with,
was the milieu for Nestroy, whose tall, thin ‹gure often behaved like a
puppet, even at the curtain call, when he took a bow, and the audience
didn’t quite know whether he was mocking their applause. Yet, while he
had written for the lower classes who, after crying through the tearjerk-
ers, relished raw comedies, with idiomatic smut and a nativist bumbling
slapstick, the audience he was after, when the vitriol soared, were the
self-deceiving types of an emerging middle class, who had sold their
souls for money; in making this judgment, however, Nestroy played no
favorites: common folk would do the same, while the aristocrats he
couldn’t mention were obviously born without. The newly thriving
bourgeois might have sold their souls, too, for admission to the Burgth-
eater, but not yet eligible there, for seating among the elite, they went
instead to the theaters of the Vorstadt, those growing suburbs of fash-
ionable Vienna, but outside the city walls, where the censorship was
spreading too, becoming metropolitan—though already, under a ‹ne-
tuned bureaucracy, the most ef‹cient in all of Europe.
With his antic disposition always under surveillance, there were
notorious repercussions to Nestroy’s more embittered theatricality, the
improvised ridicule and often scurrilous comic assaults, across social
classes, on the fraudulent motives and self-deceits, whose manifest con-
tent was already spawning latencies, volatile in repression, that the clin-
ician Dr. Freud, delighted by the acuity of Nestroy’s clowning, would
later come to address—and so did Arthur Schnitzler, whose own man-
ifest content came with a clinical aptitude acquired from training as a
physician, though he had learned a little, too, as a man about town.
Freud, as the legend goes, thought of Schnitzler as his alter ego, but the
latter, unfortunately, was more deeply pessimistic, unable to reconcile
sociopolitical realities with the erotic behavior—seen, not seen, often
undercover, or with disguised self-loathing—of a hedonist gay Vienna.
Combined with his medical background that made for a desolate wit,
diagnostic, voyeuristic, he examined the interweaving of Eros and
Thanatos in the libidinal economy of the time, or as orchestrated in

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Reigen, the sexual traf‹cking in the social corruption. At a time of neu-
rotic uncertainties, among the artists and intellectuals—mixed mar-
riages, untold affairs, wife swaps, and as with the charismatic Gustav
Klimt (whom Schnitzler confessed he dreamed about) a serpentine per-
sonal life, with fourteen illegitimate children—the sequential curling of
Reigen might seem a sardonic enlargement of the decorative arcs and
eddies in the brushstrokes of Secession. As a subversive diagram, how-
ever, of the trade-off identity politics of Viennese society, where the
erotic might even go begging—though much practiced, much
maligned—it encircles the liability that the libidinous was libelous, and
scandalous up on stage.
And so it certainly was, which kept the play from being produced
anywhere in Austria. When it was eventually done in Berlin, there was
instant outrage and an obscenity trial, and when ‹nally performed in
Vienna, after World War I, the response was even worse, like an
emblematic ground zero for anything really new: demonstrations in the
streets, the theater assailed, stink bombs thrown, prominent ‹gures
implicated, which brought the affair to Parliament; and when the pro-
duction kept going, under police protection, that didn’t protect it from
vili‹cation in the press, as pure vulgarity from a brothel, to satisfy the
indecent tastes of “Asiatic intruders”—no wonder Hitler dismissed it as
nothing but Jewish ‹lth. The virulence was such that Schnitzler forbade
the play to be produced in his lifetime. If that wasn’t the way with
Nestroy, it wasn’t because of scandal or the censor that, after his life-
time, the work went unproduced, then forgotten, until the intervention
of Kraus—who meanwhile, though they agreed about Nestroy, didn’t
exactly like the Jewishness of Freud. As for his own imperious misgiv-
ings about psychoanalysis, Kraus diagnosed it, in a famous remark, as
the disease or mental illness for which it purports to be the cure. There
was plenty to cure in Vienna, including its anti-Semitism, so it may not
have been an apology, but a judgment of Kraus too—who was born a
Jew, but changed his religion—that the therapist Freud actually chose
to live in a building called the House of Atonement, and was the ‹rst to
sign up for it, when others were resisting.
And so the dance continues, with its ironic circlings, on what Freud
called the “royal road” to understanding the operations of the uncon-
scious. Which may have, that royal road, its own circuitous ironies, in
the psyching out of the psyche, dramaturgical and political. Flectere si
nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo—thus the epigraph to The Interpretation of
Dreams, which made its ‹rst appearance in 1899, as if a fated preface to
the century of the modern: “If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will

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move the Infernal Regions.”2 And so they did move, by substitution or

condensation, displacement, always dubious representation, and the
ready-made fantasies of “secondary revision,” which “seem faultlessly
logical and reasonable,” but are something else again, representation
representing, like theater within theater. A sort of “waking thought”
(Freud 528), approximating the Real, that subtly fantasized revision is,
by whatever infernal power, an ingenious cover-up, thwarting interpre-
tation, so that “we ‹nd ourselves helplessly face to face with a mean-
ingless heap of fragmentary material” (529), like the ruins of time spread
out before the receding ‹gure of the Angel, in Walter Benjamin’s “The-
ses on the Philosophy of History,” or to bring it explicitly, materially,
into the theater, like the detritus onstage in Beckett’s abbreviated Breath.
As disordered as all this seems, in its devious wish ful‹llment, the
unconscious remains, according to Freud, our oldest mental faculty,
and down there in the depths, “at bottom, dreams are nothing other
than a particular form of thinking” (545). As for Freud’s own thinking,
The Interpretation of Dreams is by no means merely clinical, the founda-
tional treatise of his new science, but a confessional of his own, his
dreams their dreams, the analyst analyzed, his own buried self, in a
deeply personal counterstatement—and indeed to those higher powers.
Theater is theory, I’ve written, or a shadow of it, and only the shadow
knows. So it might be said of the mise-en-scène of the unconscious,
with all its shadows in the infernal regions there. What it also represents
is the dominance of a reprehensible politics that was, if analyzed, the
projection of psychic forces that not only made a mockery of the Seces-
sion, but Austrian culture as well, through the defeat of the Central
Powers in the Great War, when—returning from theory to theater, with
the shadows still there in the dreamscape—Hugo von Hofmannsthal
‹nished his adaptation of Life Is a Dream, that prophetic drama by
Caldéron.
It was possible to think of Vienna and its avowed culture of
grandeur as itself a city of dreams, with both manifest and latent con-
tent, and the category of Austria suggesting a glorious past. That, in fact,
or fantasy (always hard to distinguish the two), is the legacy which the
King in The Tower—though the world is “topsy-turvy,” threatened by a
“raging ‹re”—is determined to protect, “if need be, with streams of
blood” (Hofmannsthal 275). As for post-Secession Vienna, bringing it
into modernity, with both past and present con›ated, there was an
immanent danger there, reality in hiding, but like the bestial ‹gures in
the Tower, ready to erupt and pounce. Not unaware of the latent feroc-
ity of it all, there is the character of the famous Doctor, who attempts

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with Sigismund what we came to know through psychoanalysis as the
“talking cure.” Behaving like a child, and in a childish voice, Sigismund
nevertheless “forgets nothing” (195); haunted by the past, its bewilder-
ing and bestial, insecticidal images, he’s not sure he is in the world, or
where the world is, with the boundary blurred “between what’s within
and what’s without” (194). Conceding that the famous Doctor is an
astute reader of signs, when Julian, the Governor of the Tower, asks,
“What do you see in my face?” (211)—he is given a full-scale diagnosis
that moves from the personal to the sociopolitical, preceded by that epi-
graph from The Interpretation of Dreams: Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta
movebo!
There’ll be more to say about the circling in the city of dreams, and
while I’m no authority on modern Austria, about re›exes picked up, or
so it seems, on the royal road, even among those who initiated the mod-
ernizing—like some in the Secession who, later, were either evasive,
playing it safe, or turned conservative. Or, like the conservatism of
Kraus, harder to read. What does seem apparent is the anxiety and tur-
moil among those who, conceptually and artistically, were trying to
make a difference, even as they were contending with forms of oppres-
sion and regression that hardly seemed to have changed since before
the time of Nestroy; nor—speaking of atonement, or its absence, from
the Anschluss to Waldheim and the Freedom Party of Haider—through
much of the twentieth century. As for what was really possible in any of
the arts, the cynicism was ubiquitous. The reception of Schnitzler’s
Reigen was, perhaps, the worst-case scenario, but the plays of Nestroy
might well be seen, retrospectively, as ful‹lling what Hermann Bahr
asked for in the ‹rst issue of Ver Sacrum, the organ of the Secession. A
sort of manifesto meant for painters, it applied almost more to the the-
ater, as with the plays of the painter Kokoschka, or later with Bernhard,
or the theatricalized behavior of the painterly Actionists. To create
change where it seemed impossible, Bahr’s prescription was this: “One
must know how to make oneself hated. The Viennese respects only
those people he despises” (qtd. in Selz 149).
However they later went about it, or whatever they targeted,
Nestroy’s satire was a proleptic summary of what others kept com-
plaining about, writing about, or would assault on stage if they could. It
was especially ruthless about the repulsive Gemütlichkeit of an ever-futile,
static, posturing Austria, in love with its wonderful past, though later
described by Friedrich Hebbel as that “little world, in which the big
world holds its rehearsals” (qtd. in Steinberg viii). Whatever happened
on opening night in that other world, there was in Austria, as Nestroy

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saw it, no need to wait for that, because for want of a reality principle,
especially in Vienna, with its factitious grandeur, like dreamwork on dis-
play, there was a more generic investment in the future of illusion, as if
no other future, with rehearsal as performance, and performance a way
of life. And there was a certain pathos in the unavoidable fact that those
who were trying to change it were performing their own illusions. As
T. S. Eliot once remarked, in another context, about this double bind, the
only alternative is to improve the quality of the illusions, which Robert
Musil also suggested in The Man without Qualities—with his view, at cen-
tury’s end, that an accelerating instability was itself reality principle, as if in
a warp of time. This was beyond measure an embarrassment for Vienna,
that enraptured musical city, no way to read the score, whether up or
down or sideways, for what things were moving towards. (With twelve
tones going, Schoenberg might have told them, or Berg, but they had
their troubles too.) It was as if Vienna had entered precipitously into our
age of speed,3 with relativity, sure, across the space of time, but here again
with a kind of Reigen, as if the curvature of Secession, and all its whirling
‹gures, were there in Einsteinian space, in‹nitely extended, but curving
back upon itself. Which, for Vienna, also felt like stasis.
As for Bahr’s invocation, it’s one thing to be dissident in the other
arts, but there’s nothing like being hated when you’re up there on stage.
Apparently shy offstage, but uncrippled by stage fright (which the best
of actors exploit, achieving credibility in the process of covering it up),
what Nestroy dared to expose in his own performances—with gestures,
songs, pauses, monologues, sidelong glances, obscene asides, and a
mastery of taunting dialects—was the posing, the masking, the affecta-
tion, of what was something like simulation, or as we’ve come to say in
theory, the mimicry of mimesis in everyday life, thus doubling up on the
doubleness of reality in the theater, which is only realized, ontologically,
in its (dis)appearance. Ontology, you may recall, recapitulates phy-
logeny, but if you’re wondering why those texts were ignored and
untranslated for more than half a century, it’s as if the phylogenesis
itself were censored in the evolutionary tree of life, that life which is a
dream. Nestroy, they used to say, couldn’t be played without Nestroy—
so much lost without him, no less in another language. Still, there is in
the texts themselves, like a cynical stain on the page, more than a residue
of bitter critique, usually focused in a surrogate ‹gure, quick on insult
and verbal trickery, and disdain for a backward public, in all its squalid
smugness, there to be entertained. So with Titus in The Talisman, a social
pariah, unemployed, also with red hair, whose joking venom is such that
he even despises himself, for the climbing of a social ladder that, in

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repressed rage, he really wants to destroy. It may have been, as he sings,
when he enters the play (with now-translated local color and updated
dialect), that “coffee with schlag has replaced witch’s brew,” but even
when the era of reason began, with science and technology assuring
progress, “Superstition, superstition!” still remained on the scene, with
this taboo or that taboo, and for all the mixed feelings, “What [a] con-
venient condition!” (Nestroy 43).
Indeed, if you reimagine that condition in Nestroy—who played
Titus, disguised in various wigs, another device for mocking the audi-
ence with what they were laughing at—you could see why they said he
was philosophical too, indeed, the only Austrian philosopher then, with
a certain practical wisdom. Simply put: it was stupid to be intelligent, as
it was intelligent to be stupid, or conveniently superstitious, for the lia-
bility of intelligence was coming upon facts and truths, or even the
truthful semblance, as in Ibsen’s theater of realism, astringent, critical,
by which Austria, among the modernizing countries of Europe, was
singularly unaffected. As opposed to the con›icted Hedda Gabler, with
her father’s pistols in a bourgeois parlor, there was, even at the ‹n de
siècle, a self-satis‹ed dispensation of bourgeois well-being in a society
still disposed to the baroque heritage of fantasy, with its cult of beauty,
social grace, sensuous charm, and the blissful abandon of an expedient
gaiety, still whirling through its illusions in the Emperor’s Waltz. If there
was a demystifying piety to Nestroy’s satire, its dialects, rhythms,
G’fallen signals, the catechism was this: what you don’t know won’t hurt
you, and praise the Lord for those illusions, since—in the corrosive
dynamic between the surface seductions of an ornamental culture and
the anguished nothingness of alienated being—that’s what holds the
blemished world together.4 As for the utopian dream of change, by
means of revolution, that was the real delusion of mid-nineteenth-cen-
tury Europe, and after 1848, that multicultural muddle of a nation in the
middle, with its Hungarians, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Ruthenians,
Romanians, Slovaks, Italians, Spaniards, Croats, Serbs, most of whom
had attempted to achieve independence, or dominion over the others,
while the empire persisted with its Germanic inclinations and heroic
pretense, just right for operetta, the subtext of which was decadence
and despair.
For all his satiric prescience, Nestroy never pretended to be a
prophet, though even after the ‹n de siècle, with the Secession settled
in, the jaundiced perspective of The Talisman still applied: “reliance on
science always in season,” yet many things believed “without reason,”
not only with Slavic fatalism or Spanish mysticism or the trickle-down

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folklore of an amorphous polyglottism, but with dissent still muf›ed by

the hegemony of the church, an always adaptable politics, a convenient
conservatism, if not an indifferent or surreptitious hedonism—forget-
ful pleasures metastasizing guilt—along with the recurrent, almost con-
genital, nostalgia for the baroque. In any case, sings Titus in an encore,
with the inarguable refrain, “People must believe in something” (Nestroy
44)—when despite all science and reason, and because of the hovering
censor, they eventually came round to believing they didn’t know what
to believe. And this was so not merely out in the provinces, or the
Vorstadt, but again, among the intellectuals and artists in the Secession,
with its emancipated instincts and quest of interior being, where the
witches were trans‹gured by that incursion of Art Nouveau (or the
German variant Jugendstil), as if eroticizing the waltz into a visual danse
macabre, vertiginous in its stasis, and exotic too.
Raveled, mosaic, primitive, even Asiatic, with weirdly carnal ‹gures,
gold-toned lubricious ›esh, Sphinx-like or watersnake women, clawed,
phallic, abstracted into castration, with a voluptuous motherliness—thus
we see them in Klimt, with ‹shlike eddies, glistening scales, crowned
with laurel, wreathed, tendriled, gowned in mother-of-pearl, and the
silken weavings of a peacock’s tail. Not unaware of the corruption of art
and politics, in a slippery sexuality, he might have borrowed from
Schnitzler’s The Green Cockatoo. But for Klimt, major ‹gure of the Seces-
sion, the search for modernity was Orphic and introverted, in the striv-
ing toward the mysterious, even Dionysian—behind those veils, lustful
desire and torment, with imminent ecstasy. So far as it was performative,
however, as painting would increasingly be, there was nothing like the
sexual extremity of Artaud’s Spurt of Blood or, nurtured by the Plague, the
naked sonorous streaming of his consummate theater of Cruelty. We’d
see something more like that in the expressionist plays of Kokoschka,
and when they were still painters, incited by the gestural drips and pour-
ings of Jackson Pollock, but using their bodies instead of canvas, the
Viennese Actionists: Mühl, Brus, Schwarzkogler, Nitsch, as they moved,
sometimes naked and streaming, their dripping penises painting, from
abstract expressionism toward the atavistic Orgies. Yet, even as Klimt
mutated from the baroque theatrum mundi, with those coiled or admix-
tured bodies in a pregnant but viscous void, to the Byzantine geometry
of more hieratic forms, the eroticism didn’t vanish, nor tinseled, teth-
ered, scabbed with silver, Klimt’s own obsession with pain, or fear of
mental illness, which along with a certain morbidity or mortuary
dream—the notion that death puri‹es—haunted the Secession.
Sumptuous as it could be, with intimations of transcendence, there

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was an invisible bloodstain in the glamorous fabric of Vienna’s ascen-
dency in the art world, its brilliance tarnished not only by that nether-
world of patricides, perversions, betrayals, and the death wish engrailed
in the sexual fantasies, but something more than fantasy, aspiring to
true confession—that process interminable, as Freud himself con-
ceded, with interpretation disappearing into the dream’s navel. Not nec-
essarily what Kraus said of it, but so much for the talking cure. What-
ever was going on in the dramaturgy of the unconscious, it may have
been even more complicated by an actual dire chronicle of empirically
veri‹able, notable suicides. So with the case of Otto Weininger, the pre-
cocious author of Sex and Character—an alternative to Freud, praised by
Strindberg, studied by Wittgenstein, and in its male/female binary,
arguably misogynist, a likely source of Kokoschka’s play Murderer, Hope
of Woman.
Whatever happens in that play, however, or in Sphinx and Straw-
man—with a Sphinx quite other than that in Klimt—there is nothing
causal about it, no logic except that of the most pathogenic instincts or
degenerative disease. In Murderer, the branding of the Woman, the stab-
bing of the Man, would appear to be re›ex and counter-re›ex, but the
Man’s awakening from the lassitude of his imprisonment, to kill the
Woman, and everybody else onstage—nothing prepares an audience
for that. The gratuitousness of it, the spontaneity or ecstasy, is like that
of a nightmare, the dreamwork of atrocity, or the atrocity of dream, as
if at the nadir of the navel there were nothing but madness—which, for
the spasmic brain of Kokoschka, was somehow exhilarating. What
seems palpable about the play, even visceral on the page, is that it
requires a staging—if it’s anywhere in the vicinity of his epileptic
thought—pitched visually at the summit of a scream, not the Ich or
Geist, but a Schrei, with every decibel soaked in blood. As for the acting
of it, it’s not a matter of character, but of elemental urges, simmering,
convulsive, or as if brain damaged, passing through nerves, muscles,
veins painted by Kokoschka on the performer’s bodies when he ‹rst
mounted the play, the young actors left with bruises. The cultural irony
was that he had arranged to do the production, with all its savage inten-
sity, in the charming little theater of the Kundschau pleasure garden,
where Kokoschka expected, wanted, outrage and protest, though he
may have been disappointed—there are contrary views of what hap-
pened—that the furore wasn’t there. Which, for him, with an ethic of
derangement, would have made the theater disgusting—so much so
that, like the futurists, for their performances, he might have incited and
staged the riotings.

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 One might wonder what Weininger would have thought had he
actually seen Murderer, Hope of Woman—with spiritual male/animal
female, but woman immortal, because she gives birth—or about
Kokoschka’s behavior, not in the theater itself, but when, after a devas-
tating affair with the woman he worshipped, Alma Mahler-Werfel, he
went through a psychic crisis to the point of performative madness.
Exhausted by an intense possessiveness, Alma went off with the archi-
tect Walter Gropius, but confusing husbands or lovers, Kokoschka
would show up, with his proto-punk hairdo and bizarre dress, at an
artist café each night, carrying a mannequin of Gustav Mahler, which
he’d seat at a table, then order drinks, and carry on a conversation. Or
he might be seen at the theater, embracing a life-size doll of his loved
one, restored in every feature, the two of them seated together. As for
Weininger himself, despite the in›uential Sex and Character, which was
controversial too, he was not a psychologist, but a philosopher, of
extraordinary promise, who might very well have re›ected on those
oscillations in Viennese thought, particularly among the young,
between scienti‹c reason and a liberating, Nietzschean, even sacerdotal
instinct, the momentum of which was subject to a sti›ing intellect, as if
madness were being reasoned and reason going mad. That Hamletic
impediment may not have been there with Weininger, but in a culture
where the Dionysian was just below the surface, yet even Secession
sti›ed, by the desiccated feeling of an impoverished psyche, what
explains his committing suicide, at the age of twenty-three? And the
additional pathos of it? That would seem in somber perspective, with
the gaiety falling away, a Viennese tradition too, if reclusive and not in
public, still performative, dramatistic, and with a memorable staging—
his having rented a space in the house where Beethoven died. If not
guilt, genius by association, and with a great performer.
With madness in mind, the logic of what follows: “What I would
really like best would be a completely equipped insane asylum.”5 Thus,
another voice of die Jungen, and at the level of royalty too: a young Bavar-
ian princess, wife of Franz Josef, acclaimed for her startling beauty
everywhere in Europe—an insane asylum, that’s what Elizabeth said
when the emperor asked what present she would like for her name day.
This goes back before the Secession, but as we think about cultural per-
formance in modern Austria, onstage, offstage, where performance
might seem, as in Nestroy’s red-haired, disenchanted, bread-and-butter
vision, a discom‹ting way of life, there were also those storied lives with
a compelling theatricality. So with that of Elizabeth, which starts out
like a melodrama, and might have made an opera, but becomes a virtual

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model of more radical kinds of performance. The emperor loved her,
adored her, but for reasons unknown she didn’t or couldn’t reciprocate,
distancing herself from the court, and from Austria too. She would, of
course, have been received royally everywhere, but she preferred,
instead, in Munich or London, as she also did in Vienna, to visit institu-
tions for the insane, while also neglecting poor Rudolf, their only son.
Heir to the throne, but indifferent to that, his loneliness turned into
depression, unrelieved by numerous affairs, and ‹nally to a suicide pact
with one of his lovers: he killed her, then killed himself, at a hunting
lodge in the heart of the Vienna Woods. About ten years later, in
Geneva, escaping Vienna again, Elizabeth too was suddenly dead,
assassinated by an anarchist—which, if not poetic justice, seemed an
appropriate denouement to the meaninglessness of her drama.
What engages me here, however, is not the drama, where she resem-
bles some of the hysterics that Schnitzler wrote about, but a sense that
Elizabeth anticipated, in the undeterred logistics of her imperious
derangement, certain extremities of performance or self-punitive body
art that we saw after the 1960s, with Marina Abramović in Belgrade or
Gina Pane in Paris—and with Valie Export in Vienna, af‹liated with the
Actionists, but at a feminist distance, who also brought an accusatory
pain into what she called “expanded cinema.” Or with herself as
provocative subject, into “touch cinema,” or other body events, where
she solicited what might unnerve you, if you touched, and that crossed
gender lines. The beauteous Elizabeth was apparently provocative in
being inaccessible, maybe untouchable, but there was something painful
there. Whether she was making accusations, hard to say, since she wasn’t
seeing an analyst, probably too early for that, but along with her seeming
narcissism, or to exacerbate the hysteria, she was also anorexic. I say
exacerbate, because there was a conscious regimen to it, with an aesthetic
rigor, as when she’d starve herself for days, with nothing except six
glasses of milk, and the requirement, too, that the exact quantity be made
known. Or then she’d be calling attention to her long walking tours,
often seven to ten hours, at an unusually fast pace, exhausting those in
her entourage who tried to keep up with her; or, having traveled with
enough trunks to ‹ll several railway cars—so she’d always have available
the otherwise unattainable, most stylish clothes—she’d let them languish
or discard them for the dress she wore in her walking, over those
marathon distances, with her body naked beneath, no undergarments
whatever, and to the dismay of her courtly consort, no stockings either,
though she’d sometimes wear as many as three pairs of gloves, to protect
her exquisite hands. If it appears that the mania here was, in its self-abu-

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sive discipline, the insidious inverse of unconscious self-destruction, in

an age enamored with death, it was Elizabeth who thought of herself as
transcending that, as when she said—and it was she who said it—that
“the idea of death puri‹es,” and if reason is going mad, “madness is truer
than life” (qtd. in Bettelheim 10).
Or maybe the psychic equivalent. As for the truth about Austria, or
Austro-Hungary then, if you could get it from a politician, it was a Hun-
garian foreign minister who said, after the collective neurosis had
moved into a new century, with the death drive, too, being de‹ned by
Freud: “We have to kill ourselves before the others do it” (qtd. in Bet-
tleheim 11). He said that in 1912, two years before the war, when it
seemed, indeed, that the ‹xation upon death and self-destruction was
not only psychosexual, but with the personal always political, as if the
empire were committing suicide. When that Great War was over—no
hyphenated Hungary, Austria just itself—the ominous sensation per-
sisted, certainly in the arts, as if that quest to the interior, as for nuclear
‹ssion, had always been moving to an apocalyptic end, which Karl
Kraus was to prophesy, even foreseeing atomic peril, in that caustically
Epic drama, like a memorial in advance, The Last Days of Mankind.
As it happens, that monumental play was ‹nished in 1926, the year
I was born, unfortunately not as a portent of better things to come,
which Kraus couldn’t imagine, given Austria’s past, its unforgivable
present, the debasement of language, along with the ›atulent double-
ness, since the ‹n de siècle, of the liberal intelligentsia, predominantly
Jewish, whose behavior he contemned more than the ineptitude of con-
servative Christians. Having renounced what he was born to, and
con‹rmed in another religion, Kraus went on the attack against any sign
of a “ghetto-mentality,” in manners or behavior, and every ritual rem-
nant of Talmudic belief, no less any shtetl re›ex or intonation, syna-
goguish hat or scarf that might prevent assimilation to the dominant
culture—which, with his satiric omnipotence, he was determined to
reform. As a “timeless world-disturber,” which he said about himself,
according to Benjamin, there was in his “incorruptible, piercing, res-
olute assurance” (Re›ections 253) nothing compassionate or nobly
poetic, which would merely be banal. And as quoted by Benjamin, too,
that world-disturbing assurance was also recognized by Brecht, whose
own Epic drama was indebted to Kraus: “When the age laid hands upon
itself, he was the hands” (253).
Almost eight hundred pages long, with about ‹ve hundred charac-
ters, from Kaiser Wilhelm to the Grumbler, and the whole of Europe
onstage, Kraus’s cyclopean play begins with the voice of a newsboy on

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the Ringstrasse and ends with a pile of unburied, rotting corpses, in a
kind of Walpurgisnacht, with the voice of God or his Unborn Son, beg-
ging for abortion, lest he enter a “shuddering millennium,” where “the
air is noxious-foul,” so much so, that even Death is crying offstage.6
There are lengthy arguments—about the press, imagination, language,
war, religion, sex, psychoanalysis, acting, the telephone, Goethe, mar-
riage, revolution, the sins of the planet, science, cataclysm: almost any-
thing you could think about, with quotations and other borrowings—
between an Optimist and the Grumbler, no doubt representing Kraus,
and there’s no more time here than there’s likely to be in the theater to
review what it’s all about, either the multifarious debates or the plotless
plot, which Kraus himself said were really “intended for a theater on
Mars,” since “theatergoers in this world would not be able to endure it”
(preface, Last Days 3). Or as the Grumbler says, with the drama coming
to an end (in scene 54 of act 5, condensed edition): “I preserve docu-
ments for a time that will no longer comprehend them or will be so far
removed from today that it will say I was a forger. But no, the time to
say that will not come. For such time will not be. I have written a
tragedy, whose perishing hero is mankind, whose tragic con›ict, the
con›ict between the world and nature, has a fatal ending. Alas, because
this drama has no actor other than all mankind, it has no audience!”
(Last Days 195).
As it turned out, Kraus himself was the solution to that, if not the
Final Solution, as in the magnitude of his convictions, he was willing to
take on the burden of being all mankind, becoming that actor in another
kind of performance. I mean those public readings, which by all
accounts were electrifying, mesmerizing, as he dominated from a
lectern, with the visionary fervor of his masterful vocalizations, and
what appeared to be a mimetic genius, so superior, he may have felt, to
other actors, that he even refused eminent directors like Max Reinhardt
and Erwin Piscator, when they requested permission to stage the play.
As the setting has been described, with no surrounding lights, only a
lamp tightly focused over a green-colored table, Kraus would appear
from behind a folding screen, and with seemingly shy, quick steps posi-
tion himself at the table. And then when he started to read, with accel-
erating passion, or painful condemnation, his clenched ‹st might trem-
ble, like the rod of wrath itself, then something melodious, as from a
folk song, before a cyclonic eruption, blows cutting the air7—and as if
he were the one who remembered what Artaud declared actors had for-
gotten, or what Kokoschka really wanted, the Schrei, the scream, insepa-
rable from the Word. As if some madness were really truer than life,

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there he was in those readings, ready to tear himself apart, that shud-
dering millennium over, and no wonder Death is crying.
What we may gather from reports about the excitement of those
readings is that Kraus, at least in his own imagination, had not only
de‹ed the higher powers, but into the capacious polemic of his world-
historical mind had annexed the infernal regions. As for the actual, bod-
ily tearing apart, that had to wait for the Viennese Actionists, who did
so for other reasons, death-defying too, while aware that the staging of
risk, and self-in›icted wounds, has a long history in the arts, and art’s
consciousness of politics, and often, as in Austria, its subservience to
religion. In that reverential context, the Cruci‹xion was certainly the
model for any extremities of performance, especially for Nitsch, a
Catholic, who in one early event, not quite ready for being nailed to the
cross, had himself impaled on a wall in Otto Mühl’s apartment, the act
done in front of a white cloth, with the sacri‹cial ‹gure in a white alb-
like shift, and Mühl pouring blood over him. They were, after all, still
painters, even if objects were projecting from the frame. As for other
risks the Actionists were willing to in›ict upon themselves—razored
›esh, ripping off a ‹ngernail, or wrapped in cloth, like Schwarzkögler,
to the point of suffocation—if the motives were to begin with aesthetic
and political, there was, if not a divinity that shaped their ends, surely
af‹nities with the self-›agellation of saints, or using the whip for initia-
tion, as a symbolic means or, with emblematic scars, the sanction of
puri‹cation, which Nitsch was ready to provide, with ritual slaughter
too, in the Orgies Mysteries Theater.
As he saw it, felt it, the bodily sensation of the carcass wet with
blood was not only a return to the primordial and mythical, but an epis-
temological admission of orgiastic impulses in the repressed nature of
being. As for the sacri‹cial Lamb, if the symbolism was religious, the
terminal points for Nitsch were related, psychoanalytically, to sublima-
tions and suppressions. Overcoming them was, of course, reason for
celebration, and thus the direct experience and sensuosity of sacri‹ce,
the bloodbath of being itself, was orchestrated at the Orgies Mysteries
Theater, with what was known in the sixties, with theater spilling into
the streets, as a “participatory mystique.” But this was Austria, still, and
the mystique came from other sources. With the theater becoming a
festival, tables were set with food and wine, for eating, drinking, con-
versation, while Nitsch split open ‹sh, poured ›uids on objects and
table cloths, eviscerated lambs, performed ritual ablutions, abreac-
tions—in a Gesamtkunstwerk extension of that isolated moment, in 1962,
when he had himself cruci‹ed. The cruci‹xion, too, was reenacted, and

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the spillings of blood, but if all of that came later, at no small cost—at
his castle in Prinzendorf, a short ride from Vienna—it might be said
that the eventual commodi‹cation, in the festivities there, has become
the fate of art, even at its extremities, as if that were the end of mod-
ernism, what it was destined to be.
But in the beginning, the hallowed beginning, and speaking of des-
tiny, as anciently conceived, it’s as if the Actionists had taken over
Plato’s Cave, driven out whoever gazed at the shadow on the wall, or
the shadow’s shadow, then turned and looked directly into the ‹re—
what they named “Direct Art”—to extinguish it by outdoing it, even
burning ›esh, and in that de‹ant regard reauthorizing art, retarded as it
was in Vienna, even Art Informel. Insular as it may seem in retrospect,
as if still in the Cave, Viennese Actionism was actually quite cosmopoli-
tan, well aware of the art world elsewhere, not only performatively, as in
happenings or Fluxus, collapsing the distance between art and life, but
at another level of sophistication, in their own painting and sculpture,
where they were determined not to be outdone by the avant-garde, in
whatever new directions, Arte Povera, Nouveau Realisme, Pop Art,
No-Art, Art Brut, or the activism of Joseph Beuys. I’ve already men-
tioned Jackson Pollock, and his pouring gestures in an Action ‹eld, but
there was the more conceptualist, enigmatic Jasper Johns: his beer can,
for instance—a painted can? or a painting in the form of a can? That,
for the Actionists, with a theoretical disposition, was of epistemological
interest.
As they proceeded, then, to deploy similar enigmas in their own
Direct Art, there was nevertheless an uncomfortable issue—that is, for
the viewer—as to whether that’s feces or mud, or something other of
brown color, that is being eaten. Or is that fresh blood or some thick-
ened liquid, colored red, that is being spilled on the table cloth, when
dinner is being served, and a course coming up, looking succulent, but
maybe tasting like shit? Or that artwork on the body, an apparent inci-
sion there: is it a wound or a painted line? So, too, their desire for an art
destroying art was related to the contradictory practice of Arnulf
Rainer, who in 1953 had described his overpaintings as “painting in
order to abandon painting” (qtd. in Klocker 101). And if they were
going to abandon it, for a sadomasochistic, sacrilegious, performative
praxis brutalizing the artist, the purpose was, once more, to reach that
infernal region, the recesses of the unconscious, in what they came to
think of as an archaeology of the unconscious, or archaeological exis-
tentialism—but as if the existential could only exist in an abyss of pure
sensation.

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 Let us not be mistaken, however: the experiments of the Actionists,
in all their culture shock and uninhibited disposition, were not exempt
from the most venerable of Viennese traditions, which is to say there
was splenetic outrage and protest, and on more than one occasion the
Actionists sent to prison. It was rather astonishing, then, when in 1988,
Franz Vanitzky, chancellor of Austria, attended the opening of “Action
Painting Actionism Vienna, 1960–65,” in Kassel, Germany. That was
quite a turnaround for any government of‹cial, since twenty years ear-
lier, in 1968—the year of dissidence in much of Europe—one of the
Actionists was sentenced for the desecration of state symbols in the
exhibition “Art and Revolution.” What Günter Brus did in a perfor-
mance, after cutting his thigh with a razor blade, was to urinate into a
glass, and then drank from it, and while rubbing excrement onto his
body, he also masturbated—all rather conventional actions for the
Actionists, except that the masturbation was inspired, rhythmically, by
his singing of the Austrian national anthem.
What he succeeded in doing was what Hermann Bahr had urged
upon the Secessionists; he had made himself despised. Calling him-
self—after the uproar and calumny that followed the performance—
the most hated Austrian, he and his family went to live in Berlin. Even
before that, however, as Brus passed from explosive “self-paintings,”
like bomb bursts, to even more radical psychodramatic actions, he was
forced to go underground into a virtual subculture, of which he wrote,
about the high ‹nes and prison sentences: “the Austrian believes that
what is new and unusual must be prohibited. The Austrian isn’t dumb,
but . . . [the] incapacity of most Austrians to have their own or new
thoughts is the consequence of fearing authority, which is probably due
less to Kaiser Franz Josef than to the detrimental in›uence of the Alps.
True is moreover: who in Austria is not criminal is a policeman” (qtd. in
Klocker 100). If it was in Brus’s nature early on to defy the police, he
could also disdain the Junge Generation Gallery, which was equivocat-
ing about his work and wondering, if it were shown, whether it could be
aesthetically justi‹ed. Whereupon Brus conceived The Vienna Walk, in
which completely painted in white, and with a black line down his face
and body, dividing it in half, he walked through the middle of Vienna as
a living picture. As for the various actions of self-mutilation, he
summed up the radicality thus:

I lie in white in a white bedroom.

I lie in white in a white toilet.
I sit white in a white police of‹ce among white policeman. . . .

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I preach in a white church white in white.

I dissever my left hand. Somewhere lies a foot. A suture on my
wristjoint bone. I press a drawing-pin into my spinal cord. I nail
my large toe to my fore‹nger. Pubic, underarm and head hairs lie
on a white plate. I slit open the aorta with a razor blade (Smart). I
slam a wire-tack into my ear. I split my head lengthwise into two
halves. I insert barbed wire into my urethra and by turning it
slightly try to cut the nerve (autosystoscopy). I bite open my pim-
ple and suck on it. I have everything photographed and viewed.
(Qtd. in Klocker 118)

Photographs are ‹ne, and there are those—like some of the

Actionists, or the body artist Stelarc, who suspends himself from
‹shhooks inserted into his ›esh—that you can hardly bear to look at.
Yet there’s always something tempting about sticking your ‹nger into a
wound, and I’d like to examine in detail more of the catatonic parox-
ysms of Brus; or the hermetically shamanistic fastings of Schwarkogler,
or the synesthesia of his alchemical isolations (or the rumor of his com-
mitting suicide in an event, by methodically cutting off his penis); or the
analytical self-extinctions of Mühl; or return again to the festivities at
the Orgies Mysteries Theater, as it con‹scates ceremonies of the
Catholic Church, including the Eucharist, as if for Satanic purposes or a
Black Mass. But as with the compendious drama of Kraus, there’s
hardly time for the harrowing conceptualism and vicissitudes of it, and
I’m running over my time. So let me end with an anecdote, which
returns us also to the issue of commodi‹cation—all the more in a
global economy, what appears to be the fate of art:
Some years ago, when I was giving a series of lectures in Vienna, a
former student of mine, Hubert Klocker—one of the major curators of
Austrian art, and surely the foremost authority on Viennese Action-
ism—wanted me to meet Hermann Nitsch, and drove me out to
Prinzendorf Castle. Nitsch still conducted the festival, but he was also
back to painting, and indeed, later in Munich, I saw an exhibition of his
work, large impressive canvases, at a major museum there—he was
being presented then as Austria’s foremost painter. On the way to the
castle we were passed in an instant, by a speeding black Lamborghini,
no question, a rich man’s car. Hubert’s car wasn’t bad either, and we
made our way to Prinzendorf, where Nitsch greeted us, and before
lunch, which he’d prepared himself, showed us over the grounds, point-
ing out where the various rituals took place, including one that couldn’t.
Nitsch, still a Catholic, intended to marry, in a ceremony he had con-

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ceived, and for which he had built a chapel with an altar—not exactly to
orthodox speci‹cations. When a priest went out to assess that structure
(really a sculpture), the church forbade the marriage, and almost excom-
municated him. After he crossed himself at the altar, and closed the
chapel door, we went back to the castle, and were about to be served
lunch, when there was a knock at the door. Nitsch excused himself, and
said there was an Italian there—sure enough, the man in the black Lam-
borghini, who had lost his way—and somebody had arranged for him
to look at the paintings in Nitsch’s studio, up above. Hubert and I were
reminiscing about the Viennese Actionists, when about twenty minutes
later, Nitsch came down, the Lamborghini speeding away, and he said
that he’d sold a painting, for enough to pay the annual salary of anybody
here in the room. Lunch was served, something roasted. No shit.

notes

1. In the preface to a memoir, Marjorie Perloff writes about her Jewish fam-
ily in Vienna that it “was wholly assimilated,” with many of her relatives “having
been baptized as Catholics or Protestants early in the century.” Anti-Semitism, she
adds, “especially for my mother’s prominent family, the Schüllers, was something
that concerned other people; indeed, they were not free of anti-Semitism themselves”
(xiv).
2. The epigraph is on the title page.
3. See Virilio.
4. On this issue, see Bennett 103.
5. Qtd. by Bettelheim in his essay “Freud’s Vienna” (9), which is focused on
the morbid dynamic of sex and destruction, with reference to Weininger and the
sad unwilling empress, the beauteous Elizabeth.
6. Kraus, Last Days 237. This translation is also a considerably abridged ver-
sion of the play.
7. I am indebted to, and have improvised upon, the description of Frederick
Ungar, in his introduction (Last Days x). When he was twenty years old, Ungar
attended one of Kraus’s readings, and so long as he was in Vienna rarely missed any
others.

works cited

Benjamin, Walter. Re›ections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiograpical Writings. Ed. Peter

Demetz. Trans. Edmond Jephcott. New York: Harvest / Harcourt Brace,
1978.
Bennett, Benjamin. The Theater as Problem: Modern Drama and Its Place in Literature.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Bernhard, Thomas. The Hunting Party. Trans. Gitta Honegger. Performing Arts Journal
13, 5.1 (1980): 101–31.

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87
Bettelheim, Bruno. Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1990.
Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Blau, Herbert. The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto. New York: Macmillan, 1964.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New
York: Avon, 1965.
Handke, Peter. “Note on Offending the Audience and Self-Accusation.” In Kaspar and
Other Plays. Trans. Michael Roloff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.
ix.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. Selected Plays and Libretti. Ed. Michael Hamburger. New
York: Pantheon, 1963.
Klocker, Hubert, ed. Wiener Aktionisme / Viennese Aktionism, Wien/Vienna 1960–71:
Der zertrümmerte Spiegel / The Shattered Mirror—Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann
Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkögler. Klagenfurt: Ritter Verlag, 1988. This volume
includes essays by Klocker and the Actionists, and was edited in cooperation
with Graphische Sammlung Albertina, in Vienna, and the Museum Ludwig, in
Cologne.
Kokoschka, Oskar. Sphinx and Strawman, a Curiosity. Trans. Victor H. Meisel. In
Henry J. Schvey, Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1982. Appendix C, 141–44.
Kraus, Karl. The Last Days of Mankind: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Trans. Alexander Gode
and Sue Ellen Wright. Ed. Frederick Ungar. New York: Ungar, 1974.
Nestroy, Johann. The Talisman. Trans. and adapt. Max Knight and Joseph Fabry. In
An Anthology of Austrian Drama. Ed. Douglas A. Russell. London: Associated
University Press, 1982.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 2003.
Selz, Peter. German Expressionist Painting. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1957.
Steinberg, Michael P. Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festi-
val. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990; new preface, 2000.
Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New
York: Semiotext(e), 1986.

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 five

Performing in the Chaosmos

Farts, Follicles, Mathematics, and Delirium in Deleuze

3
Let’s begin with the basics: “It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and
fucks.” Sounds like the body, which in a conventional theater may have
no trouble breathing or eating, or in various ways heating up, from the
weight of a period costume, or angrily, passionately, or more or less
imperceptibly, as in a staged embrace. But shitting and fucking, well,
except in way-out kinds of performance, or scandalous body art, they’re
more likely to be represented, and where shitting is concerned, even com-
pared to fucking, it’s going to be in the wings, and even muted there,
that is, the farting and plopping. Back in the theater of ancient Rome,
where unsuspecting actors were actually cruci‹ed, and sexual inter-
course performed without faking it—in festive diversions from the
comedies of Terence—it may have been right out there in the open,
even elimination, the body or its waste. But now, whether we see it,
whether we don’t, what we may think of as a natural “function” is not
that at all, or so we’re told in the Anti-Oedipus, by Deleuze and Guattari:
wherever we do it, whatever it is, even the eating or shitting is every-
where machines, “real ones, not ‹gurative ones” (and nothing like “the
id,” that egregious mistake of Freud), machines driving machines, how-
ever coupled, however connected, or spilling out of the sac, one pro-
ducing a ›ow, menstrual, sperm, urine, that the other interrupts, “an
organ-machine . . . plugged into an energy-source-machine.” There is,
to be sure, an uncertainty principle too, as with the anorexic at the
mother’s breast, whose mouth is wavering between several functions,
not knowing “whether it is an eating-machine, an anal-machine, a talk-
ing-machine, or a breathing-machine.” And if here we’re inclined to
worry, because of “asthma attacks,”1 in Deleuze’s view of performance
that’s not at all undesirable, indeed producing desire, whether wheezing,
rasping, gasping, spitting up, the bronchial autoerotic, in the non-
mimetic ef›uvium of a delirious scene.
There is in the machinic wavering a prankish perversity (once called
“polymorphous”) that emerged in an era of fetishized play. And even
now, about the Anti-Oedipus, Foucault’s prefatory warning serves: “The
book often leads us to believe it is all fun and games, when something

89
else essential is taking place.”2 What’s taking place has to do, as Fou-
cault said, with tracking down fascisms, not only those responsible for
our genocidal history, but the petty ones that, in the paranoia-machine
after 9/11, still constitute the embittering tyranny of everyday life. In a
later book, Deleuze separated his own writing into Essays Critical and
Clinical, but even there, in the space-between, where (we’re told) the god
of theater presides, the vigilant Dionysus, over the “trajectories and becom-
ings,”3 the implications for performance seem what they always were,
the autoerotic on automatic in runaway machines, given over to pure
expenditure in the libidinal economy—which doesn’t seem much con-
cerned, as on Wall Street today, with the prospect of recession, or
stag›ation. Yet, while “continually producing production,”4 these
amniotic desiring-machines, with their pure naked intensities globaliz-
ing delirium, are by no means part of the production apparatus of the
bourgeois theater, about which Deleuze was even more jaundiced than
Brecht—and so, too, about the dramaturgy of the unconscious, its
Freudian mise-en-scène, which Deleuze restaged in his essay “What
Children Say” as a “milieu” of subjectivity, a subversive labyrinth con-
founding the Oedipal structure, with wandering lines, loops, reversals,
and unpredictable “singularities.”
In this milieu, where “it is not a matter of searching for an origin,
but of evaluating displacements,” parents ‹nd themselves positioned “in a
world . . . not derived from them”5—mommy and daddy mere walk-ons
in a dominant children’s theater. With the enlivening performativity of
their hand-›apping forgettings and rockabye repetitions, “nothing is
more instructive than the paths of autistic children,”6 the stammering,
stuttering, tantrums, and babbling echolalia—as if the primal prototype
for the vocal experiments and body language of the clamorous 1960s.
As for the multiplicities, disjunctures, ›ows, inconsequent juxtaposi-
tions, subtractions, and amputations—cannibalizing the body, putting
its organs up for grabs—they still seem fun and games, while acquiring
an ecstatic mission from the messianism of Artaud. It’s as if Artaud’s
Cruelty, with the metastasizing rapture of its miraculated intensities,
totalized in the Plague, were absorbed into the Deleuzian chaosmos as
another universe. If we can put anything of such dimensions into a
philosophical perspective, it was the chaosmos that, according to
Deleuze, superseded the world, by disrupting the preestablished har-
mony (de‹ned by Leibniz) of all existing things, thus emancipating the
virtual into a kind of spectral history, an atemporal miasma of passing
presents and dubious pasts. This in turn produced, in a performative
antiaesthetic, what might be thought as a new music of the spheres, all

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harmony gone, but the replenishing dissonance of unresolved chords.

Or descending from the spheres to A Thousand Plateaus, “a nonpulsed
time for a ›oating music,” in which “forms are replaced by pure
modi‹cations of speed.” That’s how Pierre Boulez described it, but
amid the modi‹cations, “movement and rest, speed and slowness,
›oating affects,”7 the exemplary ‹gure is John Cage, raising the ques-
tion of how you hear them, when and what, as with the notorious per-
formance of 4′33′′ of silence—that suspended music, ›oating, much
admired by Deleuze. We wouldn’t expect, of course, that in the void of
such a performance, or the performative void, nonpulsed, nonplussed,
there’d be any reason for reason, but in the Deleuzian chaosmos you
never rule anything out.
Having started, then, with the basics, let’s space out to the cosmo-
logical: that the universe is rational, or that the idea of rationality is
inherent in the cosmos, was held to be true—as we tend to forget—
before or without monotheism. Pythagoras saw nature as numbers a
century or so before Plato’s transcendent realm of Ideal forms, those
perfected circles and galaxies of which the material world is merely a
›awed re›ection. What’s nevertheless surprising today is to encounter
scientists, whether among subatomic particles or in astrophysics, whose
views of an orderly universe appear to be Platonic, as when they specu-
late, for instance, that mathematics does not describe the universe, but
rather that the universe is, by nature or design, mathematical. This
would have hardly surprised Artaud, whose hallucinatory states or
swarms of images in the brain, its “inexhaustible mental ratiocination,”8
are there—as through the swirling circles and galaxies of the Balinese
theater, its ›ights of elytra, sudden cries, detours in every direction—
with a “mathematical meticulousness,”9 without which there’d be no
pure theater of Ideal forms, yet umbilical, larval, gestures made to last,
“matter as revelation.”10 (As for the faith-based folly of the wrong Ideal, it
should be apparent that, in the “wholly materialized gravity”11 of it all,
“a new and deeper intellectuality,”12 Artaud is not talking of Intelligent
Design.) Thus, as we may gather from Stephen Hawking, in A Brief His-
tory of Time, which can no longer be de‹ned by mere succession, nor
space by coexistence or simultaneity, there’s a mental ratiocination in
equations, restless, heuristic, an inexhaustible desire, which won’t be
satis‹ed without a universe to describe, and with the universe at its ser-
vice—and a tempting metaphysics, “like indrafts of air around these
ideas,”13—mathematics is on ‹re.14 And so it is with “Creation, Becom-
ing, and Chaos, . . . all of a cosmic order,”15 what Artaud insisted was
the forgotten domain of theater, that temporal form in space, given to

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disappearance, but oneirically remembered as timeless and rehearsed
again by Deleuze.
What comes as no surprise, because for him it’s the wrong equa-
tion, is his attitude toward mimesis, an impediment to becoming, which
is “always incomplete,” no mere copy or imitation, in which this resem-
bles that, but a process, rather, of always being formed, “a passage of
Life that traverses both the livable and the lived.” If there were an
“objective” to becoming, as in the Stanislavski Method, the in‹nitive
phrase would be: to free Life from what imprisons it. Or, at another per-
formative level—more abstruse, but with a fastidious grammar—“to
‹nd the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where
one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a mol-
ecule”16—the inde‹nite article’s power “effected only if the term in
becoming is stripped of the formal characteristics that make it say the
(the animal in front of you . . .).”17 More could be said (and I’ve said it)
about what’s inside that parenthesis, as if a proscenium theater, its unre-
generate scopophilia, and what’s in front of you there, visibly invisible,
dying in front of your eyes. As it happens, and for all the incessant
becoming, the spirals, wanderings, reversals, or ambiguous ‹brillations,
keeping life from being imprisoned, Deleuze has faced it, too, whatever
face he put upon it: before his suicide, his own problem in breathing,
and the ominous weaknesses of others, Spinoza’s frailty, Nietzsche’s
migraines, the something in becoming that’s unbearable in being (for
Beckett, the Unnamable), whatever it is “that has put on them the quiet
mark of death”18—the living insignia of theater, seen unseen, its trou-
bling materialization from whatever it is it is not.
Are we trapped, then, by mimesis? or is becoming, really, some rep-
etition of being? In the performativity of Deleuze, as in his prose, repe-
tition acquires the value that the word has in French: répétition, rehearsal,
trying this, trying that, also a form of testing, thus making something
new of repetition itself. Or as Deleuze saw it in Nietzsche, each time
round extracting something other, “the brutal form of the immediate,”
from the Eternal Return. Kierkegaard, too, felt the immediacy of repe-
tition, but as an in‹nite power of consciousness; in Nietzsche’s case, it
becomes a matter of will, which is to be liberated “from anything which
binds it by making repetition the very object of willing.” In that regard,
repetition would appear to be a redemptive double bind: “if we die by
repetition we are also saved and healed by it.”19 For both Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard, repetition is also a double condemnation, of both habit
and memory, but as if condemned, then, to be free becomes the
thought of the future.20 Which doesn’t quite set the stage for the theater

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of existentialism, as we saw it in Sartre and Camus, which is still, in dra-
matic form, a conventional theater of representation. What’s imagined,
rather, as Deleuze derives his theater of repetition from Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard (though the latter’s God is not exactly kin to the former’s
Dionysus) is a “metaphysics in motion, in action,” without any media-
tion, “vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps
which directly touch the mind.”21 And all of this is occurring in an
empty space ‹lled by signs, masks, “through which the actor plays a role
which plays other roles,”22 in a Big Bang of pure forces, the dynamics of
space itself, spirals of color and sound, a language that speaks before
and through words, gestural, spectral, phantasmic, the desiring forces of
repetition with an unexpected power, yet necessarily what it is in the
going beyond itself.
If death has its dominion, which saves and heals, it’s also important
to observe that Deleuze’s notion of becoming as forever incomplete
will have undergone a revision through the “dizzying and slippery per-
spective” of Artaud’s alchemical theater, and its reimagining of “the
Orphic Mysteries which subjugated Plato” and must have evoked, with
its hallucinatory psychology, the density of it, “the passionate and deci-
sive transfusion of matter by mind.”23 Meanwhile, in a shift from the
inde‹nite article to the subatomic becoming, its particle physics, there is
the seemingly oppositional nature of quantum mechanics, according to
which randomness is all, or at least at the heart of (the) matter, those
elementary particles that seem to be everywhere or anywhere, or in a
Deleuzian way nowhere, until some mathematical measurement arrests
promiscuous ›ux or shapes inscrutable waves, con‹rming the “hidden
variable” theory of the later Einstein, distressed by randomness, about
God not playing dice.
It might appear to be chancy still, but with “time out of joint,”
unhinged, constituted only “by a vertigo or oscillation,”24 Deleuzian perfor-
mance still has, in its aleatoric vitalism, not only the clinical, but calcu-
lating moments, as in his equation for “foreign words,” which are to the
tower of Babel as “chains of atoms” to the periodic table.25 If there’s
some guesswork in that equation, so it is, too, with the conundrums of
cosmology, where “law of nature” is either deferential to “truth,” math-
ematically down-to-earth, or for the vertigo up above, a problematic
phrase. I don’t want to get lost in the cosmos, where the whole world is
a stage, or down there in the cellarage, its molecular substructure, but
that, indeed, is how Deleuze conceives it, from the “multiplicity of
nerve ‹bers”26 in all of us performing to the rhizomatics of theatricality
on the thousand plateaus, where each of us is several, or more, with

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nothing like “character” in the becoming of nonidentity, through the
proliferous space of the epistemological in-between. Or rather like
Genet’s Grand Brothel, where life is not only a dream, but with every-
thing betrayed at once, in the becoming of what-it-is-not, an irrever-
ently enacted “nightmare-dream,”27 which requires in its spatial
dynamism “a double theatricality.” With image compounding image in
the profoundest subjectivity, thus destroying the ego, there is nothing
like the extrusion of abstract ideas, which “are not dead things”—cer-
tainly not in Genet’s theater, as Deleuze perceives it—but part of “a
secret cipher marking the unique chance,” and here we’re back to “a
dice throw”: if God is not playing, “a Will that throws the dice.”28
As for the scienti‹c view of the scattering of randomness—or the
compacting of it, by intensi‹ed gravity, into a black hole—we now hear
of a contingency inclination to far-out inquiry, or deep within, that is
neither timeless nor absolutist, and if not a secret cipher, virtually
Deleuzian in its “law without law.” So, too, in string theory, there is the
project of “random dynamics” in which physical laws are “derived” as a
consequence of “a random fundamental ‘world machinery’”29—surely
the mind-bending matrix of any desiring-machine. And I can say this
because of physicists who concede that if, with all the quantum uncer-
tainties, there are laws of nature, they might very well have emerged
from primordial chaos by ‹brils or inchling aeons of cosmological
chance, what—like a Deleuzian follicle, the merest “mite” of an energy
source —they call “it from bit.”30 All of this is further complicated by
the web-spidering of bots in a world of information, where the intrinsic
randomness is such that, on any given day, who knows (God knows?)
what will turn up online: everything possible, incessant novelty and
sameness at once, a fecund universe that in its digitization might be
what Foucault meant when he said, “perhaps one day, this century will
be known as Deleuzian.”31 Which, unfortunately, can also be pro-
foundly boring. But such is Life (his capitalized version of it, revolving
it from bit—It? [Pause.] It all, as Beckett might say) in the vicissitudes of
the cosmos, where string theory, the alleged theory of everything under
the sun, or in the eternal dark, apparently has 10500 solutions. If that’s an
Einsteinian nightmare, it disarranges, rami‹es, aporetically scatters, the
world of performance for Deleuze, where, of course, the law of no law
is a law.
So it is in the theater apotheosized by Deleuze, conceived in “sub-
traction” by Carmelo Bene, who detested “all principles of consistency
or eternity,” no less “textual permanency.”32 Charged with narcissism,
obscenity, blasphemous kitsch, Bene created a theater with no other pur-

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pose than the process of its creation, about which he said: “The specta-
cle begins and ends at the same moment it occurs.”33 For Bene, as for
Deleuze—and the two of them collaborated on a book together—the
birth of a possible theater requires divesting it of any complicity with
power. If that sounds echt Brecht, the “operation” in Bene (he wouldn’t
use the word “technique”) is not to distance by alienation, but “to ampu-
tate the elements of power”34 which, even when represented critically,
enforce the law, so long as theater is dependent upon the apparatus of
representation. Deleuze declares that in Bene’s theater representation is
cut off “at the same time as the actor ceases to be an actor”; the amputa-
tion “gives birth to and multiplies something unexpected, like a prosthe-
sis. . . . It is a theater of surgical precision,”35 which exceeds that of the
A-effect, where the actor calls attention to the fact that s/he is acting. In
using the pronoun slash himself—“S/he is an operator”—Deleuze is
pointing through Bene to a theater surging forward with a political func-
tion in “the strength of a becoming”; instead of magni‹cation, as in tra-
ditional stagings of Shakespeare, “a treatment of minoration,” as in
Bene’s subtraction of Hamlet, or amputation of Romeo that liberates
Mercutio from a textual death into the nondying subject of quite another
play. Yet there’s measure for measure here, since “to minorate” is a term
(Fr., minorer) “employed by mathematicians.”36 So, then, let’s be precise:
if “minority” represents “nothing regionalist, nor anything aristocratic,
aesthetic, or mystical,” it is not, for Deleuze, ideological either, no mere
identity politics, but rather in the presentness of the presenting “a minor-
ity consciousness as a universal-becoming.”37
With his own consciousness of the countercultural aftermath of
May ’68—brought on by the Living (the French said it without Theater,
as if it were Life), when it disrupted the Festival of Avignon, left-wing
to begin with, but becoming touristy—Deleuze concludes his defense
of Bene’s “operation” (he refused to be called a director) by saying, “It
is truly a matter of consciousness-raising, even though it bears no rela-
tion to a psychoanalytic consciousness, nor to a Marxist political con-
sciousness, nor even to a Brechtian one.”38 Nor does Bene have any
patience with the formulas of the avant-garde; thus, the title of
Deleuze’s essay on the “maker,” “controller,” “mechanic,” undeniable
“protagonist,” but not actor or director, of a minoritarian theater: “One
Less Manifesto.” That said, let’s remember what was posited at the
onset of the essay: that in giving birth to the unexpected, with no for-
mula there, just the stammerings and variations, the theater is a “critical
theater,” with the fabrication of lessness (Bene’s, not Beckett’s): less
“character,” less text, no dialogue in performance, but voices superim-

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posed, aphasic, plosive “playback,” and with no drawn-out predictable
plot, for audience expectations, even a populist audience (like Dario
Fo’s), a severe reduction of time. Bene’s plays are very short, but “this
critical theater is constitutive theater. Critique is a constitution.”39 Yet,
swear by it as you will, whatever it is that is constituted by the ground-
lessness of subtraction, the haunting question remains: why theater, if
what you’re after is critique? And despite the disclaimer about the
avant-garde, the Deleuzian paradox of his “One Less Manifesto” is that
as he superimposes his own voice, there and elsewhere, on the stam-
merings, stutterings, lapses, parapraxes, aphasia, in what children say, he
is not subtracting from but adding to the avant-garde legacy, even the
Ubuesque (Bene staged Jarry’s play), and when autistic, there is not only
futurist noise, but—along with Tzara’s manifesto that disavows mani-
festos—some Dada Dada too.
Think of those “nomadic singularities” of the organless body, its
“mad or transitory particles,” or the follicles of strata on the thousand
plateaus, where “God is a lobster” (like Ubu?), “double pincer, double
bind.”40 The double bind is that the pincer seems derived from the
futurist Marinetti’s “‹scofollia,” or “body madness,”41 while the fever-
ish insomnia of his Variety Theater, with nothing impelling perfor-
mance but a logic of sensation, sets out the game plan for Deleuze’s
“phantasmaphysics,” the term created by Foucault for precisely that
logic, its “‹brils and bifurcation,”42 which return us through a “reversed
Platonism,” or converted, subverted, perverted, to an insidious dis-
placement within. In searching out, within the Platonic milieu, ascend-
ing to purest Form, then descending to “its smallest details, . . . as far as
its crop of hair or the dirt under its ‹ngernails—those things that were
never hallowed by an idea,”43 we come upon those again who wouldn’t
know it if they had one, and hallowed by Deleuze for that. There, in that
impromptu nether region, antidoxological, diapered, undiapered, the
milieu of infantility, the reversal occurs at that other ori‹ce, the mouth,
“the canal where the child intones the simulacra, the dismembered
parts, and bodies without organs, the mouth in which depths and sur-
faces are articulated.” And then moving into the nexus between futurist
performance—its Zang-Tumb-Tumb (parole in libertà) or its machinic
“noise”—and the “indescribable vibration”44 of the alchemy of Artaud,
requiring an actor who has not forgotten how to scream: “The mouth
where cries are broken into phonemes, morphemes, semantemes: the
mouth where the profoundity of an oral body separates itself from
incorporeal meaning,”45 as in “the complete, sonorous, streaming
naked realization” of the theater of Cruelty.46

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 Phonemes, semantemes, whatever the realization, this is not quite
the Mouth of Beckett’s Not I, where the ori‹ce, the canal, is a “godfor-
saken hole,” with the “speechless infant” there, “parents unknown . . .
unheard of,”47 and speaking of machines, “the whole machine,” asking
the mouth to stop, “and the whole brain begging,”48 maybe to end
desire, desire not desiring, “the words . . . the brain . . . ›ickering away
like mad . . . quick grab and on,”49 which suggests that even delirium has
its critical variations, as it does even in Brecht. As regards that canal, or
other forsaken hole, Deleuze might have been more responsive to the
early Brecht’s Baal, and the corrosive seriality of its orgiastic hero, who
lives deliriously by nature or choice, and with cruelty too, ›aunts his
nakedness and vice, always ready to “Have some fun or bust! / What
you wish, says Baal, is what you must! / And your shit’s your own, so sit
and have a ball.”50 Here, too, the warped appearance of fun and games,
the elephantiasis of it, with Baal outdoing Ubu, bloated in copulation,
could be misunderstood, as it apparently was when the play was ‹rst
produced. The ‹lthy behavior of Baal, unconscionable, even murder-
ous, had, according to Brecht, its political agenda, his worst re›exes
mirroring what was worse: again an equation of fascism with the
tyranny of everyday life, and what in compliance or self-contempt we
imposed upon ourselves. Or, ready to scream, life as a piece of shit,
holding it all in.
“Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitri‹ed,
sewn-up bodies,” wrote Deleuze with Guattari, having just invoked
Artaud’s declaration of war against organs—“To be done with the judgment
of God,” which will not even let you “experiment in peace.” In their
judgment—like another manifesto, in A Thousand Plateaus—all kinds of
experimentation, “not only radiophonic, but also biological and politi-
cal [incurred] censorship and repression,” whereas “the BwO is also full
of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance.” And so it was in the sixties, that paradisal
era of the “hypochondrial body,” “the schizoid body,” “the drugged body,” “the
masochist body,”51 sodomized too, in the “epidermic play of perversity,”
or the new dispensation of Sade, where “a dead God and sodomy are
the thresholds of a new metaphysical ellipse.”52 The ellipse was a trajec-
tory through the chaosmos, with a celebrative detour through the the-
ater: the Living, the Open, the Ontological-Hysteric, Grotowski’s psy-
chophysics, the enraptured stasis and distensions in the stagings of
Robert Wilson, Dionysus in 69 at the Performance Garage, and with “the
door off its hinges,”53 as if Deleuze had loosened a screw, the audience
dancing out, taking over performance, in a participatory mystique,
drugged out, even fucking, right there on the streets.

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 What followed in the academy, for over a generation, was a dis-
course on the body, the all-knowing body, which brought performance
to theory, but increasingly ideologized, with deference to sex and gen-
der, race, class, ethnicity. Not all of it was in extremis, like the Anti-Oedi-
pus, where the mystique was really contingent upon a derangement of
body and thought, as if the asyntactic delirium, its fractures and dis-
junctures, or schizoid jouissance, were what T. S. Eliot never imagined or
dared when, with the advent of high modernism, he recovered the
metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century, albeit with mixed feel-
ings about its “dissociation of sensibility.” For the emotions they had in
mind, Deleuze and Guattari, there was nothing like an “objective cor-
relative,” the absence of which, for Eliot, made Hamlet an artistic fail-
ure. As for Bene’s Hamlet, its subtraction, his “one less Hamlet,”54 it
might have been a prosthesis, claiming nonrepresentation, but whatever
there was on stage, or amputated there, it was unlikely to be the correl-
ative of the performative body in the imaginary of Deleuze. Or that
banished Oedipal body, not-there in wish ful‹llment. “Is it really so sad
and dangerous,” we were asked in A Thousand Plateaus, “to be fed up
with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with
your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having
an anus and larynx, head and legs?”55 Sadly perhaps, though up for dan-
ger, when this ethos came on the scene, I was suf‹ciently aligned with
Brecht to concur with his Galileo, when he said in defense of reason,
though not unsensory, that he believed in the brain. Which with all the
‹brillations, ventricles, basal ganglia, within the arachnoid mater—the
membrane that covers the cerebral cortex—is hardly disembodied.
So it was in the “ghosting” and “burrowing” of my KRAKEN
group,56 where we were susceptible to, even impassioned, by a synes-
thesia of organs and body parts, like listening with a kneecap, humming
with a thumb, the eyelids avid as taste buds, images there in your gut, or
for that shitty matter, no mere fun and games, lifting the elbow to let
out a fart. “Why not walk on your head,” was the early Deleuzian chal-
lenge, “sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your
belly: the simple thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage,
Anorexia, cutaneous vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation.”57
We were not all that countercultural, but indeed, we did it all: instead of
Yoga, I taught the Tai Chi Ch’uan, and the actors in the group could
perform through contortions or back›ips or, with stammerings, stut-
terings, howls (indeed, I was an “expert witness” at the Howl trial), up
the nose, down the lungs, corporeal incantations, off-the-wall explosive
sounds, with text, without text, but eventually back to words—words

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words words—complexly associational, an always elliptical score, while
standing on their heads, or speaking of “playback,” with ideographic
acrobatics and choral precision too, in a surge of disparate voices, high-
pitched, guttural, logorrheic machines, or machine-gunned utterance, as
fast as words could move, with syllables divided across the length of the
playing space, not randomly, by chance, but in the mathematics of
ghosting, with exactitude.
Words, body, playback, it was certainly autoerotic, but inquisitional
too. And there was method in the madness: at whatever selvage of feel-
ing, in the linguistic abyss or derangement, it was still a matter of
thought—that thinking with the body, which internalizes delirium or
projects hallucination, without indulging fantasy (the vice of psycho-
analysis, according to Deleuze) nor the programmatic (his name for
experimentation which is antipsychiatric). What we were doing might,
in the hysterical passing from one code to another, scramble all the
codes, but the burrowing (Kafkesque) or the ghosting (Hamletic) was a
rigorous way of knowing, a formation of ideas, with shifts of singularity
and multiple affect, but when push came to shove, at the extremity of
performance, where there were actual bodily and psychic risks—the
actor could really get hurt—the commitment was conceptual, we
wanted to understand, whatever the psychophysics, with belief in the
brain.
Thus, as others have written about it, my difference with Deleuze.
But with difference and repetition, it could be a subtle difference. “Give
me a body then,” wrote Deleuze, with his eye on ‹lm, in Cinema 2. “This
is the formula of philosophical reversal. The body is no longer the
obstacle which separates thought from itself, that which it has to over-
come to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into
or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life. Not
that the body thinks, but obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think,
and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life.”58 But
here’s the difference: what forces us to think even more is that it remains
concealed, which thus gives life to (the) theater, which wouldn’t exist if
you could see it; that is, if the absence of transparency weren’t, through
some ontological fault of becoming, in every ‹ber, follicle, nerve end of
being—where the truth of the matter is, “matter as revelation,” we can’t
tell it from bit. And that will be no less true, with all those bytes, in the age
of information.
As for the BwO, that legacy from Artaud—“No mouth. No tongue.
No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No belly. No anus”—it is like Nietzsche’s
Dionysus, essentially imageless, having nothing to do with the body itself,

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99
‘nor what remains of a lost totality.”59 And since it’s not a projection,
resisting being imaged, it can’t it be represented, though somewhere
there’s “a God at work” with the intention of “messing it all up or stran-
gling it by organizing it.”60 Well, let it be blessed by the truer God of
Artaud—but despite the ecstatic vanity of his vision of an antitheater,
its excruciating mystery, with apparitions from beyond, there is no per-
formance without the always vulnerable, material body; or in its
absence, as on an empty stage, the expectation of it, some projection of
the body, as in the detritus of its absent being, mournfully there,
appalling—what Beckett conveys in Breath. If the body without organs
is the body without an image, model of “the death instinct,” as Deleuze
insists, he also insists “that is its name, and death is not without a model.
For desire desires death also, . . . just as it desires life, because the organs
of life are the working machine.”61 Whatever the model may be, it has
been said about death that it can’t be represented, but if you think of it
in the theater it can only be represented. As for the machine, whatever
it may be desiring, it works as theater only with the body there—even in
its absence, you can smell it in the wings, that smell of mortality, which
may come upon us in delirium, as with King Lear on the heath; or sur-
reptitiously, insidiously, as in Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata; or inexhaustibly
in Beckett, giving birth astride of a grave. Double pincer, double bind:
God may be a lobster, but “down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-dig-
ger puts on the forceps,”62 while reminding us that mortality is the
unseeable substance of theater, there, not there, which in the con-
sciousness of its vanishing endows it with Life.

notes

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press,
1977) 1.
2. Michel Foucault, preface to Anti-Oedipus xlv.
3. Gilles Deleuze, “What Children Say,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans.
Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997) 67.
4. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 7.
5. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical 61–62.
6. Ibid. 61.
7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schiz-
ophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)
267.
8. Antonin Artaud, “On the Balinese Theater,” in The Theater and Its Double,

reality principles
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trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958) 63. All references to
Artaud will be from this text, with titles of essays given.
9. Ibid. 57.
10. Ibid. 59.
11. Ibid. 65.
12. Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)” 91.
13. Ibid. 90.
14. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1998).
15. Artaud, “Cruelty (First Manifesto)” 91.
16. Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” in Essays Critical and Clinical 1.
17. Ibid. 2.
18. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 172.
19. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum,
2004) 6.
20. Ibid. 8.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid. 11.
23. Artaud, “The Alchemical Theater” 52.
24. Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian
Philosophy,” in Essays Critical and Clinical 31.
25. Deleuze, “Louis Wolfson; or, The Procedure,” in Essays Critical and Clini-
cal 17.
26. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 8.
27. Deleuze, “The Shame and the Glory: T. E. Lawrence,” in Essays Critical
and Clinical 117.
28. Ibid. 119–20.
29. Dennis Overbye, “Laws of Nature, Source Unknown,” New York Times,
December 18, 2007, Science Times, D4.
30. Ibid.
31. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-Mem-
ory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Bouchard
and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) 165.
32. Gilles Deleuze, “One Less Manifesto,” in Mimesis, Masochism, & Mime: The
Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, ed. Timothy Murray, trans.
Eliane dal Molin and Murray (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997) 240.
33. Quoted by Deleuze, ibid.
34. Ibid. 241.
35. Ibid. 239.
36. Ibid. 243.
37. Ibid. 255–56.
38. Ibid. 256.
39. Ibid. 239.
40. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 40.
41. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Variety Theater,” in Futurist Perfor-
mance, ed. Michael Kirby, trans. Victoria Nes Kirby (New York: PAJ Publications,
1986) 183.
42. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” 166.

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 43. Ibid. 168.
44. Artaud, “Alchemical Theater” 52.
45. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” 179.
46. Artaud, “Alchemical Theater” 52.
47. Samuel Beckett, “Not I,” in Collected Shorter Plays (New York, Grove Press,
1984) 216.
48. Ibid. 220.
49. Ibid. 222.
50. Bertolt Brecht, prologue to Baal, trans. Eric Bentley and Martin Esslin, in
Baal, A Man’s A Man, and The Elephant Calf, ed. Bentley (New York: Grove Press,
1964) 21.
51. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 150.
52. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” 171.
53. Deleuze, “Four Poetic Formulas” 27.
54. Carmelo Bene, quoted by Deleuze, “One Less Manifesto” 239.
55. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 150–51.
56. See chapters 3–5 of my book Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing
Point (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
57. Ibid. 151.
58. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 189.
59. Artaud, quoted by Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 8.
60. Ibid. 9.
61. Ibid. 8.
62. Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954) 58.

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 six

Seeming, Seeming
The Illusion of Enough

What was to be done? or, if nothing could be done, was

there anything further that I could assume in the matter?
—herman melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

3
Wherever it comes from, morality or the aesthetic, the antitheatrical
prejudice is a conceptual vanity, subject to or victimized by theater,
while going through every nerve end to the dubious heart of drama,
which has from whatever beginnings always distrusted the theater. I’m
not merely referring here, with the author living or dead, to a certain
protectionism of the text against the depredations of the stage, a tradi-
tion extending, at times with egregious vigilance, from Ben Jonson to
Samuel Beckett to, recently and unexpectedly, Sam Shepard—once
with-it in the counterculture, and its polymorphous perversions—who
refused to allow a production of True West, if the combative brothers
were misgendered, enacted by women. Propriety aside, and social con-
struction, the liability of the prejudice, whose contingency is theater, is
that it’s constrained ontologically even before it’s thought, for as Hei-
degger said of language, “Language itself is—language and nothing else
besides. Language itself is language.”1 And though it’s been institution-
alized, so it appears with theater, theater itself is, tautological maybe, but
in the immanence of appearance, theater itself is theater, before anything
else, or—in a spectrum of apprehension from Plato to Genet (sainted
by Sartre for sanctifying appearance)—with a duplicitous presence suf-
fusing everything else. That may very well prompt, in the deepest sense,
a desire for antitheater, which may paradoxically, in a strategic, desper-
ate, or imperious theatricality, increase the quotient of theater, while
never resolving the question of whether, in being theatrical as antithe-
ater, it ought to be more or less.
Either way, in a super›uity of it or on a minimalist stage, theatrical-
ity isn’t, in its containment or presumption of theater, even a shadow of
it, only the merest facsimile, and even then we can’t be sure; for if the-
ater is not entropic, a sort of leak in the Real, it seems brought into
being by thought—though maybe the thing itself, disappearing in the

103
perceiving, is precisely the leak in the Real. It seems no accident that the
greatest drama is obsessed with that. As it happens, the most elusively
theatrical ‹gure in the canonical drama would seem, in escaping inter-
pretation, to have re›ected on this, and if we ask the simple question,
what makes theater? the answer might be Hamletic: thinking makes it so.
What’s then to be kept in mind is the theater’s incipience as appearance,
because we have it in mind, from whatever it is it is not (reality? experi-
ence? life?), as it must have been, if it was, before there was any theater,
or precipitous semblance of it, no less anything like the notion that all
the world’s a stage or society of the spectacle or, making a non sequitur
of antitheater, a precession of simulacra. If we’re not quite at the end of
the real—bereft in an imaged world, with its superfetation of signs, no
referentials, no metaphysics, only the vanity of a redundancy without
any substance at all, not even the imaginary substance once thought of
as illusion—the undeniable truth is that we’re not quite sure where we
are. And so far as the theater re›ects that, we’re back through whatever
demysti‹cations to its ineliminable seeming, or in its doubling over of life,
the “Seeming, seeming,” distressingly seminal, as if precisely Measure for
Measure (2.4.151), now you see it now you don’t.
Insidious it may be, or a reprise of illusion, but it’s not to be done
away with by an alienating detachment or preemptive imitation. Nor
will it be carried away or contained by a kind of Brechtian narcissism,
the “ontological-hysteric” or wired-up objecti‹cation, in the theater of
Richard Foreman, who’s still there pulling the strings, but—even before
the dominion of exacerbated digitality—with the video game momen-
tum of somewhat robotic bodies, a little sexier now, but no way “bod-
ies that matter.”2 If the Brechtian paradigm has receded, or is now so
familiar it needs some A-effect itself, it was the theatricalization of the-
ory that—with the materiality of the body linked to the performativity
of gender—appeared to take over the gestus, with a parodic ampli‹-
cation, as in the ‹lms of John Waters and the outrageous drag of
Divine. In deconstructing Austin’s notion of performativity built
around the marriage vow, and imitating an origin that really never was,
the “corporeal style” of queer performativity—truly queer, celebrating
a stigma—derides the notion of a stable or coherent, self-identical
body, with a preemptive strike at specularity in a reversal of the gaze.
Making a virtue of gender trouble, the bodily inscriptions of the perfor-
mative are a nuance away from performance and, in its repetitive acts
(“truly troubling,”3 or so it is claimed, in the hegemony of subversion),
disdainful of theater—bourgeois theater, of course, which has always
distrusted itself.

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 As with modernist art and thought, which in the era of cultural
studies has had a bad rap (masculine dominance, elitism, a depoliticiz-
ing formalism, and the emptying out of history), that apparently com-
modi‹ed theater seems at various levels to have anticipated its critique,
as if the theater itself were proposing something like antitheater. As for
the queer reversed gaze, and its subversive look at the myth of interior-
ity, and the inside/outside binary of what became, in the Method, the
actor’s psychic space, it may be that its seeming seeing is something
other than that. For as queer becomes method, it discovers again—as
they did in painting, since Cézanne pushed his big mountain up to the
picture plane—that there is no surface that doesn’t recede; and if the
activity of perception changes what it sees, it’s in the seeing itself that
interiority persists, as it always has in the theater, subvert it as you will.
And so it may be, with all its sophistication, in a “discursive performa-
tivity” that, in “arguing with the real” (Butler, Bodies 189), confronts an
impasse in the parody turning back upon itself—or, as Shakespeare says
in a sonnet, with a stylish riff on delusion, “Seems seeing, but effectually
is out” (Sonnet 113).
What’s in, what’s out is itself a dismaying problem—beyond specu-
larity, or even the simulacra—in a dromoscopic, techno-scienti‹c, bio-
chemical, geneticist, informational world, with everything seeming to
move, in the wake of the Enlightenment, with the speed of light or, as
Paul Virilio thinks it, with “the light of speed.”4 Channels, screens, PCs,
cell phones, satellite dishes, CDs, webs and weblogs, samplers, Ether-
nets: in the proliferous sensation of the multitudinous moment, the
sheer repetitive promiscuity of the instantly mediated, what happens to
temporality, or for that matter, materiality? Lady Macbeth wanted the
future in the instant, but with so many futures in the in‹nity of instants,
what passeth show would, if it wanted to show, already be far in the
past—though a past is problematic, with the wavelengths and frequen-
cies picking up speed. So it is, if we pick up on the velocity and go with
the implications, that theater/antitheater wouldn’t even be an issue,
though that wouldn’t necessarily relieve Michael Fried, who worried
about the degeneration of art “as it approaches the condition of the-
ater.”5 Defending an art-as-object wholly manifest in the instant, “a
continual and perpetual present” (146) insusceptible to the attritions of
time, Fried insisted on defeating theater, because it is given over to “a
sense of temporality, of time both passing and to come, simultaneously
approaching and receding, as if apprehended in an in‹nite perspective”
(145). What is past, and passing, and to come might have been thus
apprehended, when minimal art, and then conceptual art, ‹rst appeared

Seeming, Seeming
105
on the scene, but if we’re now amidst the megabytes, minimizing the
instant and swifter than any thought, what perspective can be expected
when what’s coming has already passed and the simultaneity, if imagin-
able, is always already surpassed? So with theater/antitheater: the binary
would seem to depend on a here and now, but we’re living acceleratingly,
anaphylactically, in a then and there, with nothing like the memory of a
Bergsonian durée, since, in the immediacy of the remote, light-years
faster than the channel changer, “speed is the old age of the world,”
where if you hadn’t seen it all in an epiphanic ›ash there was hardly
even an instant for now you see it now you don’t.
Is this not something more than fantasy? Or if still not unfantastic,
merely the virtual truth of a prospective virtual world? Maybe yes
maybe no. But if Virilio is (as he would have to be, if what he’s seeing is
so) retrospectively prescient, then with reality “foreclosed,” retracted by
acceleration, “out of time in the strictest sense” (Virilio 16), any
apparency of the real in the form of theater would hardly be worth our
attention, no more than a sheet of newspaper in a Florida hurricane. Or
for that matter, the end of modernism, which like the end of history is
always beginning again—not modernism, remember, but the beginning
of its end.

But slowing down for a moment, taking time (or the restored illusion of
it), in the recidivist way of rehearsal: a brief connection was made
before, between modernism and the bourgeois theater, about which—
as if in a matrix of anachronism and history (with the universe of the
Matrix looming)—I want to say more. So far as that theater is an expres-
sive function of modernism, it was from the beginning a good deal
more con›icted, aphasic, destabilizing than, with the advent of critical
theory, we’ve made it out to be—its gravity such, if thought, that its
accretions of realism, density impacted, as if becoming a black hole,
were an inside out eruption into a more far-reaching amplitude than
those apparently predictable plots and box sets would seem to suggest.
The atmosphere can be oppressive, but with the constraints of space
and time there is, metonymically, a kind of impacted remembrance, too,
opening up as in the unconscious, or as in the modernist visual arts, to
the spatialization of time. If in Cubism, however, all of history appears
to be there, geometrically severed, but (in the wake of Cézanne) up on
the picture plane, and with an autonomy there, that would seem to be
the reverse of what we have in the theater, with its proscenium arch,
teasers and tormentors, surreptitious wings, and legacy of perspective.
Yet I’ve seen productions in open spaces, indoors, outdoors, or sprawl-

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ing all over somewhere, the legacy there regardless, with text, without
text, even through improvisation, old outguessable re›exes, much of it
banal, irredeemably locked in the brain, as if a proscenium there—
though maybe a false proscenium with no perspective at all.
But “Fie upon’t, foh! About my brains,” putting it into the plural, as
Hamlet does, as if with brain damage arrested, the gaze itself is reversed,
as he turns to the “guilty creatures sitting at a play” (2.2.573–75). In a
space created, it would seem, by a high-tech Mousetrap—where the
watchers are watching the watchers watch—we’re talking not only of
graduated perception, but also, in re›ecting that (no less re›ecting upon
it), unaccountable degrees of theater. As for the watchers in the audience,
what brought them there to begin with, or—while digesting dinner, as
in Brecht’s jaundiced view—compels inert attention, tuning in and
screening out? Well, we all know that from the plotline, which has an
ancient history: appearance, disguise, concealment, the lies, deceits, the
overheard, the disclosed, the mortifying confession, guilt again, the
cover-up, and (what else to be expected?) the anxious relief of expo-
sure—that suspect heritage in the bourgeois drama of the phallic Oedi-
pal theater, all of which the new historicism or cultural materialism, or
gendered or racial versions of the going revisionist Marxism, and with it
antitheater, has been determined to expose. And then we go through a
cycle where we want to expose the exposure. As the debates continue in
theory—and now beyond theory, whose future is dubious too—no
doubt about it, there is a cloud of unknowing in our now conventional
theater, as if “the scene upon the stage,” which Freud might have been
describing in Totem and Taboo, “was derived from the historical scene
through a process of systematic distortion—one might even say, as the
product of a re‹ned hypocrisy.”6 Or maybe, after all, not so re‹ned.
Anything can be cheapened by performance, but what’s not there, and
should be, preys upon the brain, all the more as you look with what,
“imagination dead imagine,” Beckett called “the eye of prey.”7 Is it a
case of antitheater when you want to stand up and shout, “Use your
brains!”
We’ve all heard the platitudes (and may even recite them), in
courses of dramatic literature, about not knowing a play until we see it
staged. But much of the time, up there, we don’t see it at all, not to men-
tion the liability—even with a ‹ne performance, and sometimes espe-
cially so, as that gets in the way (transposed now to ‹lm/video, and fre-
quently shown in class)—of not seeing it in multiple ways, incessantly
reimagined or, as by some inquest in the cortex, otherwise rehearsed. It
might be thought of as closeting the drama, or resisting theater, but I’ve

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been telling students for years (even while staging plays, and this impor-
tant to the stagings) that they may engage with a play far more pro-
foundly if they don’t go to a production, and then, grasping my head to
de‹ne it, I’d insist that the brain is the best stage of all, the most expan-
sive, versatile, dynamic, and volatile in containment. Think of it, I’d say,
that englobed space behind the eyeballs (a site of immense “confabula-
tion,” with never a repetition, “unstructured immensities,” and accord-
ing to “neural Darwinism,” with a “value system”)8—now that’s what a
theater should be! inexhaustibly ideational, with a repletion of image, as
if the singular brain were fractured, dialectically plural, of untold and
variable magnitude, and maybe as antitheater, where (with all the neu-
rons working) you can see it again and again, through every (mis)appre-
hension, in some other heuristic form, but not with absent vision. (There is,
as with Charles Lamb and Goethe on Shakespeare, and particularly King
Lear, an antitheatrical precedent for keeping a play in the text and stag-
ing it in the mind, as with Gertrude Stein on reading, but that’s not what
I’m talking about.) Vision may be, as they say, a “transcendental
signi‹er,” but then, so be it: for theater, against theater, it always remains to
be seen, and so it is in reimagining what we think of as bourgeois theater,
which was once, however impaired, also a matter of vision—and with a
materialist disposition, a vision haunted by history, and its visionary
gleam.
Arising from the Enlightenment with a thwarted dialectic, it’s as if
it were inhabited at the outset by some ghosting imminence of Ibsen’s
Ghosts, its remorseless analytic brought to unspeakable terror, with glac-
iers and peaks in the background bathed in the morning light. Where
Peer Gynt once was, the dead may awaken, in a kind of supertheater,
site of the world beyond, but unsayable, Wagnerian, at the limit of wish
ful‹llment upping the ante on theatricality, but as if the subtext of
Osvald’s ‹nal line, “The sun—The sun,”9 were through the syphilitic
blindness a sonorous delirium. How, really, should it be staged, and in
the rush of repressed memory, what kinesthetic evocations? And would
they be enough? For one can imagine that at the very dawn of the
Enlightenment, embodied at dawn in the Festival of Dionysus, the ‹rst
primeval murmurs were heard—the proleptic soundings of a still-
unending cultural hysteria—from those subhuman ‹gures in the caves
below the mountain on which, in the Aeschylean drama, the ‹re-giving
god of forethought, Prometheus, was bound, persisting there in a “mad
harmony”10 with the punishing forces of nature, slashing winds, pitted
clouds, lightning bolts, earthquakes, serving a higher power.
It may be that Shelley released him, or some revisionist production,

reality principles
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but I wouldn’t count on that. What is more likely, however, whatever
we do in the theater, is that at some subliminal level all of it is remem-
bered, all the more if resisted, and if not quite of the same dimensions,
the delirium surely persists. With an ongoing animus against bourgeois
theater, but nothing like Wagner’s resources for hypertrophic theatri-
cality, something like it was aroused again, in the visceral “grain of the
voice,” from way down in the throat, lips, tongue, glottis, teeth, the
mucilaginous membranes, and scabbily out the nose,11 by the
sound/movement exercises of the 1960s, and the participatory mys-
tique of their psychophysical clamor. As with Dionysus in 69, this was one
of the ways in which performance, disavowing the conventional actor,
mere menial of the authorized text, would “escape the tyranny of mean-
ing” (Barthes 185), dismantling bourgeois value and—with bodies that
matter naked, and more or less jouissance—thus transcending its theater,
the mere “sensuous expression of estranged human life.”12 (Which is
actually how Marx described, not irrelevantly, it would seem, the move-
ment of production and consumption.) As for the political apotheosis
of that vociferous period, there was, with bodies spelling out its title and
then naked all over the stage, the Living Theater’s Paradise Now, which
also passed for the temporal instant as a sort of anarchically mesmeric,
unmimetic materialism, with its libidinal economy ›owing out to the
streets.
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx spoke of the
senses as direct theoreticians, each of them formed by the labor of the
entire history of the world (87, 89); but he had in mind another materi-
alism, which had to bring itself ‹rst to consciousness, in a “fully-devel-
oped naturalism [that] equals humanism, and as fully-developed
humanism [that] equals naturalism,” only thence “coming-to-be” (84),
through the long riddling burden of that estranging history, with par-
adise having to wait. And so it had been in the theater, which is in the
play of appearance the form of coming-to-be, as it is—in more than ety-
mology, and not merely with the specular gaze—also the shadow of
theory, suffused with all the senses and with a sensory life. (As I used to
tell my KRAKEN group, taking that as a datum, what we’re doing here
is thinking, though some might think, in a knee jerk, that’s really antithe-
ater.) As for performance itself, the sensuous expression of estranged
life may occur with a certain dispassion, or as in the antitheater of
Brecht, by estranging the estrangement; but so with Ibsen too, in a dra-
maturgy that was radically other, a good long way from the boulevards
and the assembly-line scriptures of Scribe. And if we now think we can
predict Ibsen’s moves, the degrees of estrangement and passion were

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once, as contingencies of the perceptual, what aroused critique in the
drama, while this degree or that degree, like any gesture on stage, or
even an instant of held breath (not to mention Beckett’s play), may at a
particular moment in history determine the force of critique, which sus-
tains itself in estrangement because, so far in history, there is no other
life. As he evolved a utopian vision, Marx was very conscious of that. As
for Ibsen, it adhered like a guilty thought to the most ethereal theatri-
cality of his most symbolic plays, as it did through the grain of the voice
in the organless bodies of Artaud, and—in the consummate delirium of
antitheater—those immemorial incantations, prodigal in the air, also
betrayed by the Real.
So, down to earth again, where the cruelties are suf‹cient. In a
remarkable early letter, meant to de›ect the Young Hegelians from
“dogmatic abstraction,” Marx had called for “a ruthless critique of everything
existing,”13 but in this regard—if they didn’t quite share a politics—it
was Ibsen who virtually outdid him in conducting such a critique, which
is why (historicize! to be sure, but speaking of truly troubling) one of his
plays was attacked as if it were Artaud’s plague, as a running sore, a
wound, an open drain, a cesspool. As for the dramaturgy of his realism,
or the later departures from it, the paradox was that it constituted in
performance, the truth of illusion there, a devastating critique of the-
ater, along with the apparatus of representation we’ve been belaboring
since, where the reality of appearance is confounded by the appearance
of reality—though we’re still not entirely sure which of those phrases
ought to go ‹rst, or (though I can see everything disappearing into the
velocity of the virtual) whether there’s any reality at all without the
duplicity of appearance. About the future of (an) illusion, it was Freud
who acceded to that, after moving, in the antitheater of psychoanalysis,
from the mise-en-scène of the unconscious through Civilization and Its
Discontents, virtually admitting there, with a kind of tragic vision, that
demysti‹cation had failed. Meanwhile, theater persists through antithe-
ater like the generic ghosting in Hamlet through the factitiousness of the
Ghost, or, with Hegel turned on his head, through the ruthless critique
like “phantoms formed in the human brain” (Marx, German Ideology, in
Marx-Engels 154).

It was during the period, approximately, from Freud’s Project for a Sci-
enti‹c Psychology to the inconsolable prospect of unpurgeable discontents
that, in a sort of Möbius warp, theater and antitheater merged in the
vicissitudes of critique: from the early naturalism of Strindberg—whose
preface to Miss Julie has a surprising Brechtian strain—to Pirandello’s

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bewildered characters and Gertrude Stein’s bewildering plays that, with
elisions or traces of character, were really antiplays, where “each one is
that one and that there are a number of them each one being that
one”14—which one is only one (and, until recently, a neglected one at
that) among the avatars of antitheater in the modernist avant-garde.
And there were various ironies there, as in futurism’s assault not only on
the vacuities of boulevard theater, but also on the naturalism equaling
humanism in the fully developed realism. In refusing not only the mere
mimicry, but even the accomplished mimicry that—as theory sees it
today—reproduced what it critiqued, Marinetti and his cohorts actually
went, with all the ferocity of his manifestos, through an exponentially
manic reality theater (with its own Survivor shows) after the manifest
sublimity of a more immediate truth. It’s as if he were anticipating—
though, for all the ferocity, in a tamer version of less dimension—what
Slavoj Z& iz&ek wrote about (with another performative put-on of his glee-
ful dialectic) after 9/11: the fundamentalist terror latent but secreted in
the twentieth century’s “passion for the Real,”15 with martyrdom not
only impassioned, but real, immediate and, guaranteed houris in
heaven, sublime.
There were, to be sure, Boccioni and Carrà paintings, but the the-
atricalized spirit of futurism was not con‹ned to the ›at walls of muse-
ums or stage sets, but went instead (as with Tzara and Dada too), to
where the real action was, in cafés and cabarets, political parlors, sport-
ing events, the of‹ces of hostile newspapers, or out there on the streets,
where in the notorious spectacles, with no playacting, they even beat
people up. And while the surrealists were enamored of dreams and the
unconscious, they also broke out of the frame of painting and plinth-
based art into collage, photomontage, installations, assemblage, noise
and body art, environments, and, with multiple sites in the real world,
not only performance art but the performance of everyday life. (As for
beating people up, the only person I ever heard Beckett talk about with
contempt was André Breton, because if you disagreed with him too
much, he had you beaten up.) All of these, of course, are the going
things today in a performative art world that—as with the blood spat-
terings of Istvan Kantor, or his Machine Sex Action Group, or the cos-
tumes, prosthetics, and role-playing in Matthew Barney’s Viral Infection:
The Body and Its Discontents—couldn’t care less about theater. As for the
traditional avant-garde, and its incursion on everyday life, they may have
deranged it in the process, but what then seemed weird or strange is—
on stage, off stage, even in fashion, or blockbuster shows in muse-
ums—second nature now.

Seeming, Seeming
111
 Or so it is until you think about it, when it may become threatening
again, like the very substance of theater, which, not unlike a viral infec-
tion, keeps itself out of sight. As for the instrumental theatricality of
whatever forms of theater—the entire repertoire of representation, its
originary sources or pretensions to sacred rites—that was later exposed
by exploitation demonically in Genet, who, as if nurtured by infections,
sustains in the theater’s seeming what is indelibly there in life. (If that
seems to be mocking deconstruction, Derrida tried to make the Genetic
best of it in his mirroring Glas. This occurred after he already had to
acknowledge, in an essay on Artaud, that to abolish representation is a
tragic impossibility, that even to think its closure “is to think the tragic:
not as the representation of fate, but as the fate of representation. Its
gratuitous and baseless necessity.”)16 So it is at the end of The Balcony,
when Madame Irma says to the audience, while closing up the brothel,
before extinguishing the last light, “You must go home, where every-
thing—you can be quite sure—will be even falser than here. . . . You
must go home.”17 It may very well be, in our heart of hearts, that we
really don’t want to go home, which is why I’ve often felt that at the
sticking point of the most powerful plays—say, Oedipus or King Lear or
Endgame (among those I’ve directed over the years)—we tend to be
most evasive, as if analysis were closing in, or in the process of absorp-
tion also blanking out, or acknowledging a profundity that really we’d
rather forget—and in order to get on with it, however estranged the life,
that’s just about what we do. So, too, with antitheater, as a scourge of
falsehood and lies; relying as we do on appearances, it would be hard to
live with that. At the extremities of exposure, we may actually incline to
comedy, so we can laugh it off, though the comedy that really gets us is
when we don’t know when to laugh. Is that theater or antitheater, or the
seeming between? If there’s autonomy there, it’s the autonomy of inde-
terminacy, though I won’t say it’s antiaesthetic.
It was Freud who said we must learn to live in doubt, but the
antitheatrical prejudice, for one reason or another, has had its doubts
about that—most of all, perhaps, at the intolerable limits of theater,
where we sense ourselves seeing what we maybe shouldn’t see. Or
through all the seeming, the indiscernible, the insidious, what we really
can’t. Yet what would theater be if it didn’t move toward the unbear-
able, unless we’re prepared to abandon the greatest of all plays, espe-
cially tragedy, already much critiqued, or stage revisionist versions that
arrest, expose, or otherwise set it right? But that, too, is a vanity of
antitheater, for would they really go away—that is, the rage, shame,
remorse, immeasurable pain that, prior to any drama, brought them into

reality principles
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being, insisting they be represented—if we should rewrite or abolish or
parody Lear’s howls or his never never never never nevers, or even, in
some mind-blowing enraptured form of belated epic redemption, sub-
stitute for them Molly Bloom’s yes I said yes I will Yes? In all this we
might remember that it’s not only antitheater or a strategic theatricality
that deters what’s so overpowering in performance that you almost
can’t think about it, but simpler things, like bad acting or directing or—
again light-years from what charges the theater, its grievous mortality
and invisible wounds—lightweight production concepts, antitheater by
default.
Having said that, I may now retract it, or at least qualify the appar-
ent fault. For while I think I know bad acting when I see it, or an over-
charged or slovenly or empty production, the issue that determined my
own rethinking of what I was doing in the theater—after more than
twenty years of doing it, radically changing what I did—is this: what do
we mean by acting? where? why? how? for whom? and to what ideological end?18
Answering any one of those questions may mean that you’re for or
against theater, at least that theater; and indeed, there is a sense in which
the antitheatrical prejudice, or the deployment of theatricality, becomes
an issue of this form of theater against that form of theater. From the
outset, however, I have not been thinking so much of theater forms as
about the troubling question, undispelled by the correlative notion, in
the becoming of theater, that theater is itself, of the materialization of
theater—unless it’s all theater, reality, appearance, whatever—from
whatever it is it is not. Where theater happens in its emergence, as itself
or not, it’s something else again, or at least would appear to be, which—like
the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,”19 or the activated
nothing in the “Nothing to be done”20—baf›es perception itself, and
again demysti‹cation, or the distantiation of that Brechtian A-effect.
This is theater at ground zero, or like the concept of zero itself,
about which it has been said, “If you look at zero you see nothing; but
look through it and you will see the world.”21 And beyond mathematics,
you may see more than that, or rather, see it and not see it, as in Ham-
let’s closet scene, where Gertrude says all that is she sees, which, even if
he’s hallucinating, and nothing there to be seen, is existentially some-
thing more—what he sees, what she doesn’t—than mere coinage of the
brain. And so it is with what’s palpably there that none of us can see,
neither the characters, nor the actors, nor those of us in the audience, in
looking directly at it, or eyes with gazing fed, and no form of antitheater
can do anything about that, though it might break the gaze or intensify
it, cutting to the brain. And that’s no coinage either, or the accursed

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commodi‹cation. Thus, when I’ve written before that the entire insti-
tution of theater, with all its apparatus, is a historical cover-up for the
ontological fact that the one performing there, that one, is dying in front
of your eyes, I was not, as with queer performativity, talking of corpo-
real style, but rather—in the bodies that matter, the matter that makes
the body—the theater’s generic substance, inarguably there but imper-
ceptible, compelling the specularity that it will never satisfy. Yet, if I can
believe what I read in the newspaper, what passeth show may be, and
sooner than we think, another passing phase.

In his apocalyptic imaginings, which he would insist is the virtual truth

(quite literally so), Virilio had already foreseen a superdigitized world
whose high frequencies would invalidate the body as an encumbrance,
requiring, perhaps, the semblance of a biological body with a body art
that mirrors its inexistence (72), with dying then irrelevant. Now we
actually hear from (maybe way-out) geneticists—as from molecular
artists like Joe Davis, who has made art of DNA by inserting coded
messages into bacterial genes—that defeating death may be in the
of‹ng, or that, shy of total victory, a life expectancy of 4,000–5,000
years is now a prospect, and in the sights of the avant-garde. When,
moreover, we hear from Whit‹eld Dif‹e, chief of security of Sun
Microsystems, that “we live, largely speaking, in the last generation of
human beings,” and that there are people alive today who will have
unlimited life spans,22 well, that’s really likely to change our thinking
about theater, as anything but a residual seeming, since the apparatus of
representation on which the institution is predicated, even as antithe-
ater, becomes itself obsolete, as representation itself, reproducing what
otherwise disappears, would itself more or less disappear into the inter-
minable—which was in that other life the fate of psychoanalysis, in the
vanity of interpretation of the dramaturgy of the unconscious.
Meanwhile, as if to augment these prospects there was a production
called The Hanging Man—brought over recently from England to
BAM—in which dying becomes impossible through a series of events
that are eccentrically, obsessively, and decidedly theatrical, no question
of it. The production was developed by The Improbable Theater, which
would seem to be a more sanguine mutation of my own The Impossible
Theater. Subtitled A Manifesto, that book was written with an unyielding
reality principle, that the theater itself is a form of impossibility, though
impossibly so, or despicably, in the American theater, at the time I was
writing the book, after the emergence of the cold war. At one point,
merging a phrase from the cold war with terms from the New Criticism,

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I made this observation: “The ritual balance of power, the maintenance
of ambiguity in perilous tension, has also been one of the major preoc-
cupations of art in the twentieth century.”23 And now in the twenty-‹rst,
what we’re calling an age of terror, it would seem for the time being,
which is the time of theater, that the perilous tension is worse, even more
ambiguous, with innumerable bodies dying, whether they matter or
whether they don’t. Whatever the reasons for it, mea culpa as we wish,
Orientalism, Occidentalism, the paranoia is growing, what with tunneled
networks, stateless, like dreadnaughts spreading dread, with conspiracy
theories and secrecies, homeland security dubious and everything out of
sight. If you really think it over, how does any theater, by whatever the-
atrical means, really match up with that, or the pervasiveness of seeming
that, in the material world, not virtual at all, appears in actuality—now a
perversion of seeming?—to make it nothing but theater.
In this regard, mirrored (paranoia in abeyance), there is a level of
behavior in theater that, like a subatomic particle, a muon or charmed
quark, would—if there were an electronic microscope powerful enough
to bring it into focus—disappear in the energy required for you to see it.
(Which we can only hope won’t happen with the indeterminate jihad, Al
Qaeda, or the suicide bombers.) Materializing as disappearance, theater
escapes us in being theater, though we might think of it then as antithe-
ater, or, corporeal as it is, a correlative of antimatter. Which, among sci-
entists, seems to have its own aesthetic. As for actual theater practice, to
the degree that it persists through the self-re›exive impasse of an ethos
of suspicion, it may acquire a certain energy from what will never be
resolved, which is how to determine though all the seeming whether at
any historical moment there is an insuf‹ciency or overdose of what we
think of as theater. That we can do without it is absurd, since—if we’re
to engage the issues at the level at which Socrates introduced the preju-
dice, and Plato pursued it through Socrates’ voice—we have no choice
in the matter; and we’ve had a form of theater that, in the perverse
excess of its apparent undoings, or nothings to be done, was predicated
on the absurdity, though some of the cruder theatricality, and its repet-
itive acts, appeared to overstate a case that can’t be overstated. Still, if
we think we have it right, there’s nothing more certain in the seeming
than the future of illusion, the insubstantial pageant fading, leaving not
a wrack behind—except the empty space that, for Peter Brook, is
(again) the beginning of theater, if an actor enters the space. My own
view has always been that it needs no more than a look.
More theater, less theater. Actors have always proceeded on that
wobbling pivot, which also de‹nes historical periods, either acting too

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much or acting too little, though who in the world can say—actor?
director? audience?—what is really enough? Every aspect of theater can
be thought of the same way, from scenery, lighting, costumes, sound, to
the timing of a play, its two-hour traf‹c or the aestheticized sopori‹c of
Robert Wilson’s earlier stagings, attenuated, aphasic, repetitive as a raga,
with imperceptible permutations, seen unthinkingly as afterthought.
Or, as the theater expands to operatic dimensions, there may very well
be, even there in its grandeur, too much to be seen, which was actually
an issue in the news the other day—the case of Deborah Voigt,
resounding voice, oversized body—the right weight of a soprano to be
singing Ariadne, no less (auf Naxos) in a cocktail dress. What this sug-
gests, even in the reduced proportions of other forms of theater, is that
aside from too much acting there can also be too much actor, literally
so, psychically so, which we’ve heard in a tradition from Gordon Craig
to Roland Barthes.
When I said a moment ago that the empty theater space only
requires a look, it was not from a desire to create an impersonal art, like
Mallarmé and others since, who, in attempting by diverse means to void
representation, have wanted the actor out of it, in a vanity of poesis
opposed to mimesis. For even when the acting is reduced to the gestural
or the ideographic, even when in fact the actor is not there, but replaced
by a puppet or other nonhuman ‹gure, the mimetic is not extinguished,
representation prevails, and if the human ‹gure seems erased, it is there
as on Freud’s mystic writing pad, if only as a trace. Theater remains to
be seen because it is as remainder, and it wouldn’t be thus at all if it didn’t
smell of mortality, something to be seen feelingly (as the blind Glouces-
ter sees in King Lear) in or out of the theater. As for Barthes’s essay on
the Bunraku, it is also in the tradition of critique that ‹nds nothing more
discreditable in the theater, no mode of theatricality, than that associ-
ated with mimesis and—with a repertoire of hapless gestures and self-
indulgent mannerisms, even when focused in character—the corporeal
presence of the actor. For all his exhortation of the grain of the voice
(sidelined with the musicians in the Bunraku), Barthes prefers on stage
the black-robed anonymous ‹gures manipulating the puppets to the
psychologized human body, which is no more than an execration in its
posturing mindlessness. In the crossing of theory by practice, I must
admit at times, as I’ve watched or worked with certain actors, sharing
this view, though the preference for puppets is sometimes there when
certain authoritarian directors push the actors around.
Where the actors are presumably liberated by sense and emotional
memory, they would be doubly anathema to Barthes, not only because

reality principles
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of their physical presence, and with it the smell of mortality, but maybe
even worse, the inside risk of narcissism. As for the Actors Studio actor,
with a technique disguising mimesis, or any appearance of theater, the
liability in performance is—beyond that in the play—still another illu-
sion, when the refusal of theatricality becomes, as iconically with Mar-
lon Brando, a conspicuous symptom of it. If, meanwhile, there’s a cer-
tain jeopardy in casting, aesthetically or conceptually it may also be
judicious, as a means of augmenting or minimizing theater, and thus,
whether or not by intention, an incursion of antitheater. As for what
happens in a rehearsal, the degrees of appearance there: Do it again! the
director says. What “it,” and how much? “It all. [Pause.] It all,”24 or some
intangibly furtive part of it? which, as in the Beckettian scene, can nearly
drive you up the wall. What wall? Hollow. Like the one Hamm insisted
on going to, before being returned to the center—“Bang in the cen-
ter!”25—in the bottoming out of illusion. And how many times does
one hear in rehearsal, No! that’s not it at all, you’re merely repeating
yourself. Or, you’re merely acting. Which is, one would think, what
you’re supposed to do in the theater.
What I’m essentially saying here—in a period of jaundiced value,
where the familiar is distrusted, as “natural,” taken for granted, and
essence disquali‹ed—is that the theater is essentially, in every nuance, the
site of antitheater, and would hardly exist without it, no more than those
subatomic particles without their antiparticles. But then, at a last psy-
chic extremity of the antitheatrical prejudice, another nuance of seem-
ing, there’s something we tend to forget: another doubleness in the
actor, not that of character, but of wanting to act and not. And I’m not
speaking of the desire, out of technique into performance, for a con-
summate realism, but once again of the Real, the datum of any acting,
ineliminable in the theater, the reality of stage fright. Shakespeare had it
exactly when he spoke (in the best manual of acting I know) of “the
imperfect actor on the stage, / Who with his fear is put besides his part”
(Sonnet 23)—the implication being that there is no other actor. If that
appears to con‹rm again that the theater is inseparable from some
instinct of antitheater, it leaves us with the question out of which—
through whatever imperfection, in the actor, in reality, in theater
itself—the most powerful theater is made: why theater at all?

notes

1. Martin Heidegger, “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert

Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1971) 190.

Seeming, Seeming
117
 2. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993).
3. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1990) 139.
4. Paul Virilio, Ground Zero, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002) 15.
5. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology,
ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968) 141.
6. Quoted by René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1979) 202.
7. “Imagination Dead Imagine,” in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose,
1929–89, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1995) 185.
8. “The Brain? It’s a Jungle in There,” New York Times, March 27, 2004, Arts
& Ideas, national ed., A17, A19.
9. Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, in Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen, trans. Eva Le Gallienne
(New York: Modern Library, 1957) 153.
10. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. David Grene, in Greek Tragedies, vol. 1,
ed. Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)
104.
11. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image-Music-Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977) 183.
12. Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Nor-
ton, 1978) 85.
13. Letter to Arnold Ruge, The Marx-Engels Reader 13.
14. Gertrude Stein, “Plays,” in Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lec-
tures 1909–45, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (London: Penguin, 1967) 75.
15. Slovoj Z&iz&ek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002) 9.
16. Jacques Derrida, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representa-
tion,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978) 250.
17. Jean Genet, The Balcony, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove,
1960) 115.
18. See the chapter “Ghosting” in the book written—in that uncertain period
when I thought it might start again—around the work of my KRAKEN group,
Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1982) 78–144.
19. See Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” in The Palm at the End of the Mind,
ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1972) 54.
20. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954) 7.
21. Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000) 1.
22. New York Times, November 1, 2004, national ed., A15.
23. Herbert Blau, The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (New York: Macmillan,
1964) 21.
24. Samuel Beckett, Footfalls, in Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove, 1984)
240.
25. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958) 27.

reality principles
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 seven

Who’s There?—Community of the Question

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this

strangest of theaters?
—elizabeth bishop, “Questions of Travel”

3
It used to be, in the clamorous sixties, when with all the enchantments
of dissidence we were shattering language, abandoning texts, and going
for broke with the body, or extolling body language, that dance was pre-
ferred to theater, or at least the bourgeois theater, burdened as it was
with words—or the words, words, words that are, in their Hamletic dis-
position, an impediment to action. But if dance and theater were some-
times merged or con›ated, as in the tradition of Martha Graham, we
have now seen a generation of choreographers, like Alain Platel in Bel-
gium or Jérôme Bel in France, who merge them too, but with street arts
or social action, or with a high-tech guerrilla strategy, on rooftops with
satellite disks, as if in some radicalized extension of that other tradition,
from the Judson Memorial Church, with its offbeat antiaesthetic, during
the years of the counterculture. The Judson was not especially political,
and there were trained dancers there, like Yvonne Rainer or Trisha
Brown, but in renouncing virtuosity, mere dance, in favor of “found”
movement or task-directed events, there was another kind of activism,
which might change the site of performance or the spectator’s relation
to it—and sometimes in public spaces, where if there was anything like
a public, they’d have sure been surprised to see it. Thus, if in the church
itself they might have performers upside down on a ceiling or, in autis-
tic slow motion, crawling on a ›oor, they might elsewhere in the city
have them in a spidery web (with rather tenuous ropes) coming down
from the top of a building. In their af‹nities, meanwhile, with new
music, Cage’s silence, Rauschenberg’s collage, and the interplay of per-
formance with all the visual arts, the Judson choreographers initiated
still other ideas: exploring everyday movement, the gestures of eating or
dressing, with barely a humming sound; and in the relation of move-
ment and time, testing the viewer’s endurance, as in a matrix of no-time,
monotonic at long duration, with the boredom as conceptual; or,
breathtaking, breath-catching, the sonic propelling motion, as if danced

119
on the vocal tract. Such ideas were taken up by or inseparable from
alternative modes of theater that, with rock music and blue jeans, soon
came over to Europe—along with the Living’s rabid politics, which dis-
rupted the vacationing public at the Festival of Avignon.
But here there was a difference, with a certain resonance still. While
Judson dance had, inarguably, a major formative impact on companies
abroad, especially in France, there was a minimalist/conceptualist side
to it, about which—whenever a politics surfaced, long after May ’68—
there were unavoidably mixed feelings, and then renunciation, to the
degree it remained abstract. So it was in Great Britain, with Lloyd New-
son’s choreography for the DV8 Physical Theater, which (in its devia-
tions) abjures abstract movement in favor of the narrativizing body,
because of its presumed necessity for the engagement of social issues, as
well as those on the margin ignored by established culture. Meanwhile,
if there’s been a return to narrative, there is still, with degrees of vocal-
ization, the dubious status of words. And taking that on as an issue—as
we’ve seen recently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, by way of the
National Theater in London—there is the choreography of that late-
comer to dance, given to storytelling, the outspoken Matthew Bourne.
Or perhaps I should say bespoken, for his Play without Words—a retelling
of Harold Pinter’s script for Joseph Losey’s movie The Servant—is not
only an East End cockney’s view of oppressive class distinctions, but
impelled by the notion that dance is what the politics of deconstruction
used to say of the theater, with its dramaturgical dialogue or familiar
garrulous plots, that it is elitist and hierarchical, reproducing bourgeois
value and its system of representation.
If that has become something of a litany in theory, the fact is that
theater, certainly in the United States, is of little concern to the young,
the poor, the otherwise dispossessed, that potentially larger audience,
deprived of being a public because, for all the ›ux of words, or the log-
orrhea of capitalism in the Society of the Spectacle, they remain without
a voice. Or if we think of a subculture with an assertive voice, like the
hip-hop or rap of American blacks, also impelled by the body, it’s hard
to assess what it’s really saying today, since what was out is in, and the
question is how to say it—and boo-yaa, Sucka Free, who ya sayn it to.
Brie›y con‹ned to the ghettos, it was quickly on DVDs and—in the
hegemony of speed that is, with digitality, becoming the way of the
world—commodi‹ed on the Internet, while in the musicated ironies of
consumer culture some rappers made it big, like P. Diddy / Sean
Combs, who is not only in the fashion business but, with no experience
as an actor, recently on Broadway, in that African American classic

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(whatever the color line, a long way from rap) Raisin in the Sun. Of course
they loved him, whoever “they” were, those who could afford a ticket,
at nearly $100, which is in that aesthetic economy what still determines
the public. Meanwhile, as with British punk rock or Seattle grunge,
which took over dress and hairstyles in the Shinjuko ward of Tokyo,
and by way of Japanized fashion in Malaysia too, you can see hip-hop
now, its break-dance, and all the risky moves, not only among privileged
white kids in the suburbs of New York, but on an international scale,
from la génération Beur in the banlieues of Paris, with rap in the service of
rage, to the back alleys of Bombay or, with pirated CDs on the streets,
like the fallout of corporatization, the breakout scene of Beijing.
But this is far from the dance world that I started talking about,
with something like the status of our institutional theaters, though those
theaters in America (what we used to call regional theaters, but are now
called resident professional) are still nothing like those, however they
vary from Hamburg to Warsaw to Zurich, in the European theater tra-
dition. Still, the new claim, from DV8 or Matthew Bourne, is also inter-
national, and however paradoxical, it amounts to this: that in theatricaliz-
ing dance, providing it with a narrative—whose liabilities have been
exposed from Barthes’s early semiology through Foucault’s cycles of
power to Deleuze’s thousand plateaus—those who have been margin-
alized could, nevertheless, become an audience, larger than what exists,
thus acquiring power, and thereby becoming a public, to which politics
would have to respond. Praise be to wishful thinking, but having known
a lot of audiences, from many years as a theater director (institutional,
activist, and avant-garde), and having written about them too, and the
public in absentia, I continue to have my doubts.
Putting them in abeyance, it might seem for the fantasied moment
that the DV8 Physical Theater is the generic model or inspiration for
those youthful dissident groups, like Pora in the Ukraine or Zubr in
Belarus, which in the attempt to overthrow tyranny deployed graf‹ti,
improvisation, and the surreptitious tactics of guerrilla theater. With a
subtlety of subversion, somehow diffusing the risk, that’s what the
Zvakwana group appears to be doing in Zimbabwe, in a performative
circulation of the message of “Enough!”—with slivers from bars of
soap or matchboxes with songs of resistance or putdowns of Robert
Mugabe in festive packets of seeds, while emerging from the under-
ground into a public space. There may be, when the tyrant falls, dancing
in the streets, with puppet shows, mime, and such, but here the analogy
falters, and aside from the retrograde question, unseemly because aes-
thetic, of the quality of the dancing, there is (overlooking the looting) an

Who’s There?—Community of the Question

121
unpredictable future in the kinaesthetics of power. And that, with chas-
tening or corrosive or tortuous views of power, is the recurring message
of the major dramas of revolution, from Büchner’s Danton’s Death or
Przbyszewska’s The Danton Case to Genet’s The Screens or Müller’s The
Task to the rather forlorn, post-Brechtian view of it (never mind The
Measures Taken, which even made Brecht uneasy) in Howard Brenton’s
Magni‹cence or Edward Bond’s The Worlds.
Today we hear about Kyrgyzstan and, despite an article in The New
York Times, with the headline, “Democracy Falls on Barren Ground”
(Burkett), here too one hopes for the best. Yet, where democracy is
taken for granted, and a mostly uncensored, self-determining culture, I
still wince at the platitudes of community that, out of the myths of the
ancient world, or the mythicizing of that world, continue to haunt the
theater. And the vanity of it would seem to be compounded in the vir-
tual reality of globalization, or the age of information, in which nothing
is more virtual—if not evangelically virtuous—than the “moral values”
of the public so belabored on American television during our last elec-
tion, and which have since been taken up, along with the “faith-based
initiatives” of George W. Bush, by the communion of “compassionate
conservatism” and the religious Right. Let me say that whatever, in the
paranoid reality after 9/11, moral values may be, on the right or waver-
ing left, they have little to do with the testing of moral perception that
still accrues to the tragic as we have inherited it from the classical drama,
whether from Prometheus there on the rock or from the bleeding eye-
balls of Oedipus, or even, in a seeming epiphany, when he disappears at
Colonus. For it’s the seeming that suffuses the drama, and still does in the
contemporary theater, if the drama is worth our attention. As for the
activity of moral perception, that occurs—in a matrix of contradiction,
cross-purposes, mixed motives, and loose, but variously possible,
mostly unexamined premises—at some limit of indeterminacy where
you’re not quite sure what you’re seeing. Or, as in Pinter’s No Man’s
Land—what seems to be Eliot’s waste land as voyeuristic scene—even
where to look. Or, at the limit of representation, where specularity fails,
and with it subjectivity, and identity, and the long-imperiled self (now
theoretically banished), you’re not even sure who’s looking. And
where’s the audience then? or semblance of a public?
As for the Habermasian notion of a public sphere, where ideas
could be debated in a civil way, that seems to have disappeared into
technocracy, the media, and as Habermas thought himself, into publicity,
with the theater a function of it, and of course the spectator too, though
with a sort of perverse discretion, there and not there. And I’m not even

reality principles
122
talking yet of those who may be appear to be in an audience, but with
their minds elsewhere or simply bored, or asleep, in that culinary state
described by Brecht, in any case not there. Nor has the Alienation-
effect alleviated yet the temptations to be at the movies, or staying at
home with television, or now with all you can download or the hyper-
theatricality, the “liveness” of video games. As for the theater’s com-
plicity with publicity, if that started when—ironically through the
Enlightenment, with the privileged perspective of a proscenium
stage—the audience went into the dark, it can now preserve its
anonymity by ordering seats there, even now in state or national the-
aters, with American Express or a Visa or a Master Charge. But what we
still can’t take on credit is what remains to be seen.
“Who’s there?” As I’ve written before, those opening words of
Hamlet (1.1.1)—the wrong character making the challenge, not the one
on guard, but the one approaching the ramparts—might very well be
addressed to those sitting there in the dark. True, it was afternoon, and
many were not then sitting, but even with light at the Globe, it was a
proleptic question, with manic obsessive permutations through the
entire history of modernism, and not exhausted yet: not only who? but
where? and why? and so long as you’re doing theater, in a proscenium, on
a thrust, even out on the streets, in what space of thought? superstructure?
cellarage? or in the mind’s eye, how are you supposed to see it? and then,
what it? what it?—in the disabled spaces of Beckett, Not I, That Time
(“clearly faintly perceptible” [Ashbery 227]), asked over and over,
enlivened by disability. These are the swarming questions of the play
within the play, and by that I mean the play which, historically, onto-
logically, if the audience is never wrong, as they say in the commercial-
ized theater, disquali‹es it as a public. For when we think of that today,
it is not only a matter of the numbers in attendance, but an attentiveness
to an absence, the much belabored otherness in a theater of specularity.
Even when a director or a method tries to make the theater participa-
tory, the actors circulating amid the spectators or inviting them on
stage, that never quite stops the looking, nor that sense of being watched,
and with it estrangement and distance. And when we think precisely
upon it, even when the spectator is seated close to the stage, eye to eye
with the actor, close enough to touch, that doesn’t reduce the degree to
which division, separation, with a ghosting sense of aloneness—that
impermeable substance of theater, mirrored in the event, demanding we
think precisely—has since become its subject. What’s more, or worse,
but what becomes its deepening substance (and this is certainly so when
the theater, without mere playing around, thinks through the greatest

Who’s There?—Community of the Question

123
drama, as if we were thought by it), is an inversion of the voyeuristic
fear in the most haunted pages of Kafka: a solipsistic anxiety that nobody
may be looking, which may be a profounder source of stage fright, that
paranoid constituent of the performing self, than the fear that every-
body is.
“Is everybody looking at me?” says Pozzo, in Waiting for Godot (20),
the grandiose foolishness of it going to heart of the problem. For when
that play ‹rst came on the scene, so far as the public was concerned it
had nothing to do with theater, the making of a performance from the
“Nothing to be done” (7). But if nothing comes of nothing, it may come
with a Nobel Prize, and then, to be sure, the public that’s never wrong
certainly pays attention, though Beckett continued to say that he was
writing into a void. Speaking of void, or into it, that is not unlike the
mode of consciousness in that opening question of Hamlet, and the
equally challenging response: “Nay, answer me! Stand, and unfold your-
self” (1.1.2). That may be upping the ante on what’s demanded of us all,
onstage, offstage, but in the ceaseless hermeneutic within and beyond
Hamlet, the answer is still unfolding, as at the extremities of subjectivity,
identity politics, and with the vanished self, what we now call “subject
positions”—and so, too, with the public that, if it materializes at all, is a
community of the question, whose unity consists of an essential separation.
And so it has been through the history of drama, which has always
distrusted theater, that site of mere appearance, from the awakening of
the Watchman (that character perfectly named), as if from barbaric
darkness, in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, through the “seeming, seeming” of
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (2.4.150) to the mirror stage of the
brothel in The Balcony of Genet—an apparatus of surveillance that is, as
the Madame says, always being watched. When, at the end of that cun-
ningly derisive play, Madame Irma tells the audience to go home, not to
worry, things will be no different, even more false, than they were in the
Grand Brothel, with its expertise in appearance, all scenarios ending in
death, he was not exactly laying the moral grounds for anything like a
public. And indeed, the idea of the spectator, who is seeing what, was—
as I’ve been saying—also in a dubious state, as it was most explicitly in
Hamlet’s setup or direction of the play within the play, where the
watchers are watching the watchers watch. They are also referred to, as
you may remember, as (potentially) “guilty creatures sitting at a play”
(2.2.588–89), and if in that wider scene, the accusative site of seeing, the
play is to be taken seriously—as it mostly isn’t, nor is the appalling real-
ity of two thousand years of Western drama—I’m trying to imagine a
public emerging from anything like that.

reality principles
124
 On quite another wavelength, but referring to that tradition, the
director Peter Sellars, who has worked extensively in the opera houses
and theaters of Europe, has been imagining a theater, on the Greek
model, which would have “a seat for every citizen,” including those who,
in Athenian democracy, women and foreigners, “couldn’t vote and had
no citizenship.” It was with this in mind that he recently did a production
of Euripides’ Children of Herakles, which attempts to open up discourse to
everybody in the audience, and to bring into the orbit of performance,
wherever it is performed, all those usually excluded. So it was in the city
of Bottrop, in the heart of industrial Germany, where Kurdish refugees
are being resettled, and were brought together with others who normally
don’t go to the theater. In re›ecting on that production, Sellars remarked
about the potential of a democratic public space: “What is public
space?—I think [that] is the biggest question of the 21st century” (37).
Admirable as that work is, and without denying at all whatever
edi‹cation there is in implicating those who’ve never been to the theater,
letting them perform, participate, or question, or even tell their stories, it
would still seem to me that the discrepancy between thinking a public
space and actually achieving it—or how to achieve it, with powerlessness
in the presence of the sources of power, somehow able to change it—
that remains the biggest question of any century.
As for what a public would be if it could be, that is what, with all the
talk of community, persists with a certain poignancy at the selvage of
perception, with subjectivity slipping but empathically there, at some
residual level—which is what, with unexpected poignancy, John Ash-
bery suggests, through all his ironic worldliness, as if in the mirror stage
of his poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”:

. . . a vague
Sense of something that can never be known
Even though it seems likely that each of us
Knows what it is and is capable of
Communicating it to the other.
(198)

Yet if the likelihood is chancy, it may remind us that whatever the

necessities and probabilities of the Aristotelian idea of theater, or the
most rigorous staging of any play, as in the productions of Robert Wil-
son, the fastidious seriality of the most aestheticized detail, the perfor-
mance always de‹es it, because temporally and otherwise, in the very
breathing of the actor, it is always subject to chance. We may try in inge-

Who’s There?—Community of the Question

125
nious ways to cover that up or, by means of improvisation, to double it
up as a virtue. Or to accept it existentially as the condition of any per-
formance. And indeed, according to Alain Badiou in his Handbook of
Inaesthetics, “Theatrical production, or mise en scène, is often a reasoned
trial of chances.” And whatever we think of the public, as Badiou goes
on to say, it is also on trial:

In chance, the public must be counted. The public is part of what

completes the [theater-] idea. Who can ignore the fact that,
depending on which public one is playing to, the theatrical act
does or does not deliver the theater-idea, does or does not com-
plement it? But if the public is part of the chance that is at work in
the theater, it must itself be as prey to chance as possible. We must
protest against any conception of the public that would depict it as
a community, a substance, or a constant set. (74)

When Badiou says, however, that “only a generic public, a chance public,
is worth anything at all” (74), history and social reality are conspiring
against that, as it does against the idea of community, since—as I’ve
written in my book The Audience—“when there is the semblance of a
gathered public, . . . [it] seems like the merest facsimile of remembered
community paying its respects not so much to the still-echoing signals
of a common set of values but to the better-forgotten remains of the
most exhausted illusions” (1).
And we live in a time, it seems, when illusions exhaust themselves
more quickly than ever before. As for the appearance of reality in the
age of simulacra, dominated by the media—where there appears to be
no reality except appearance—it’s hard to think of how in that psychic
environment there is anything approximating a public. But then again
illusion helps, as Freud seemed to understand after Civilization and Its
Discontents, when, as if there were no other future, he felt constrained to
write about the future of (an) illusion. He might very well, in that regard,
have been writing about the theater, and what through its discontents
seems to bring us together. So we may have enclaves of concurrence for
the participatory moment, whether politicized or aestheticized, in
everything from stand-up comedy to the current revival on Broadway
of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (whose audience will largely be theater
parties from Long Island, who can afford the price of a ticket) to Sell-
ars’s more idealistic circuit of dispossession with his questioning adap-
tation of Children of Herakles, the premises of which, actually, also need
to be questioned.

reality principles
126
 For the audience in a postindustrial culture is either a scattering of
incompatible sodalities, if not competing factions, many of them unsta-
ble or a function of the mass, what Jean Baudrillard once called “that
spongy referent” (Silent Majorities 1), which is enveloped, even mesmer-
ized, by the outlying radiance of the apparency of the social: State, His-
tory, Culture, Meaning. In what became over the years an increasingly
jaundiced view of the prospect of community, Baudrillard wrote of the
mass, it is “an opaque nebula” of atomistic individuals, “whose growing
density” will collapse in a “blaze of signi‹ers” into “a black hole which
engulfs the social” (3–4), the end of which he eventually declared.
Before it came to that, however, he said the social is not a concept, but
“a soft, sticky, lumpenanalytical notion” (4), out of which an audience
materializes as a concept, like the concepts of class, power, status, or
social relations with which it is conjoined or on which it re›ects. An
acritical notion itself increasingly like the mass, “without attribute, pred-
icate, quality, reference” (5), the determinacy of the social—like televi-
sion ratings or the viewers at museums, clicked off by an attendant with
a gadget at the entrance—is statistical, radically wanting de‹nition. If
the mass has nothing to do with a real population, the audience is, even
by social class, only amorphously bound, yet predictable too.
Some years ago, on a panel together in Brussels, Baudrillard and I
disagreed openly before a large symposium, and then one-on-one at
breakfast, about his Disneyland view of the United States, in his book
Amerique. But his mordancy notwithstanding, he can’t quite be ignored,
and meanwhile, when I hear the usual banalities about an audience or
the theater as a public form, with more or less hypocritical deference to
the spectator, I have to resist temptations to jaundice in my own view of
it all. Whatever one thinks, and wherever performance occurs—on the
streets, in the ghettos, in factories, prisons, churches, or on Indian
reservations, in whatever peripatetic or participatory modes—theaters
continue to operate, too, with their conventional partition of scenic and
spectatorial space, the (seemingly) public and (darkling) private, onstage
and backstage, the seen and unseen, or (ob)scene, thus to be kept invis-
ible. This is the old or familiar site of specular alienation, preserving at
least a minimal difference between actor and audience, object and
observer, and that difference occurs, sometimes not so minimal, even in
the alternative, unexpected sites of performance. If this form of theater,
however, seems to be gradually yielding, it is not to the Rousseauian
ethos that resurfaced in the participatory mystique of the sixties, but in
something like a sci-‹, hyperreal simulacrum of it, from the
House/Lights video trips of the synthetically voice-layered and multi-

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127
monitored Wooster Group to the imagistic technoscape of Quebec
City’s Ex Machina, which its director, the usually cerebral Robert Lep-
age, brought to Las Vegas in a hydraulic extravaganza, a 200 million dol-
lar collaboration with the airborne acrobatics of the Cirque du Soleil.
Not quite on that exorbitant scale, but not impoverished either, the
videocast enterprise and megabytes of it all have made their way, with
various degrees of synthesized sensation, into the established theaters
and proliferating festivals on the European scene, as with the cross-
mediated, cross-cultural (Franco-Japanese) production of Iris that
Philippe Decouݎ brought to the new Catalan culture palace, the Teatre
Nacional (Marranca 27).
As the mediascape expands into the theatrical scene, it might seem
like a redundancy or rather a queer reversal in the age of informatique,
where much of life, it seems, has already been theatricalized—which is
what was dismaying not only to Baudrillard, as he moved with increas-
ing alarm and asperity from a critique of the political economy of the
sign through the mirror of production and the shadow of the silent
majorities to the precession of simulacra, “whose operation,” he came
to believe, “is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discur-
sive” (Simulations 3); in short, a fact of life. One might not go so far as
Baudrillard—or through the sites of an always theatricalized chrono-
politics with the supersonic speed of Paul Virilio—but surely there is in
our digitized universe, with its cell phones and iPods, and webblogged
screens with chatterbots, a certain substance in the sensation of a cer-
tain absent substance. If, indeed, there’s been a displacement of the real
into a shadow of it, more vaporous than appearance—or the appear-
ance of that reality which is the reality of appearance—that would seem
to make a vanity of the Aristotelian inheritance of a mimetic theater,
with its remedial catharsis in a ‹ction of the public.
Vanity of vanities, and for all the pixelated truth of being, mimesis
still persists, and will probably survive any attempt, theoretical or per-
formative, to make it go away, like the apparently abandoned ‹gure in
the era of Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism, which came
back on canvas in neoexpressionism, like the return of the repressed,
though a somewhat different ‹gure, due to the effect on painting of
body and performance art. Various experiments in modern drama,
from Strindberg to Witkiewicz through the Absurd to Sarah Kane, have
struggled to overcome the idealist notion of the independent subject /
self-identical agent, but, like the ‹gure in painting, it seems to reappear
in every blur of abstraction. So, too, through the entire history of the
avant-garde—and all the strategies of ruptured form, fragmentation,

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dispersion of the subject—it is realism and mimesis that have been the
measure of the manifestation, whatever it is that shows in the seemingly
randomized structures of the discontinuous forms. That is the irony
which is not romantic, attached as it appears to be to the irrepressible
real, mortality itself, that visible invisibility, no more than mere appear-
ance, though—against the grain of going critique—it’s no mere social
construction, while in the recyclings of power, the threat of reproduc-
tion that reproduces itself . . . well, even genetic cloning is being imag-
ined in mimetic terms. As for death, whatever it is, as we’ve come to say
in theory, it can’t be represented, yet can only be represented. This is
something that Beckett, whose shorter plays in particular would appear
to be models of fragmentation in dispersion of the subject, really under-
stood, the haunting tenacity of the mimetic, even when, as in Breath,
there is no performer at all, or in Not I, nothing but a Mouth, and tor-
rentially, unstoppable, those words, words, words—what the non-
mimetic theater, or the illusion of such a conception, has also tried to do
without.
None of this invalidates, however, our sense of a seemingly irre-
versible tendency (and you’ll notice the iteration of seeming in all that I’ve
been saying) toward the end of mimesis by default, or as if in the new
reality on the computer, mimesis is not the default. With the displace-
ment of bodily gesture and desire into electronic commands, and the
miniaturization of an exhaustive memory that is not, like the Freudian
unconscious, a scene of representation, the scene of the world is increas-
ingly dematerialized, and in another kind of culinary theater, divested by
swift bytes of all that used to ‹ll it. This includes the body and the real,
actors and their fantasies. If in that empty space (not quite Peter Brook’s)
there is anything like a spectator, s/he is at the nexus of a system of
nuclear matrices keeping track of an emptied body of meaning in a vast
encoded absence or, in the microsystems of exchange, no more than a
succession of instants, which is a far historical cry from the “chips of
Messianic time,” the redeemable “‘time of the now,’” in Walter Ben-
jamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Illuminations 265).
In our emailing universe of spontaneous communication, with
nothing quite material to constitute a scene, and with all the advantages
of the Internet, our credit cards threatened, and our Social Security
numbers, there is a diminution or con›ation of public and private
spaces, as they were previously understood. In this disembodied con-
text, culture no longer operates through discrete works or, with specta-
torial proximity, the sense of a shared event, but through operational-
ism itself, mass movement or ›ux, Googled or Yahooed, a sort of Pop

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129
Art version of Bergsonian durée. If there were an architectural correla-
tive in the material world—the sort of thing from which Rem Koolhaas
has been rethinking urban spaces—it might be Beaubourg, the Centre
Pompidou in Paris, with jugglers, mimes, acrobats, and sword swallow-
ers on the plaza, and a steady ›ux of exposed but anonymous tourists
ascending in escalators, in a sort of embodied parody of transcendental
signi‹ers. If that’s not so much architecture but a performative space,
it’s one in which, however, the old dream of symbolic exchange, beyond
use value, is not realized, for that implies, as Baudrillard remarked in an
early essay, “a sacri‹cial logic of consumption” (“Ecstasy” 126).
The impersonality of it all, in this spaced-out network, with its nev-
ertheless narcissistic and protean feedback, is not something, obviously,
in which there’s equal participation, since some of us are keeping our
distance, or somehow attempting to, as we proceed with old illusions in
a universe that still seems to be functioning under Newtonian laws. But
at the same time, as even President Bush has envisaged moving forward
in the universe, to new worlds beyond our own, with politicians and
schoolteachers in orbit, quotidian space gradually acquires—with any-
thing from Atari games to computer consoles and the dispensation of
silicon chips—the features of a terrestrial satellite, in which a weightless
body, no longer actor or director or spectator, lives by simulation and
not symbol in a denatured, demetaphorized, metonymic sphere, which
cancels the public sphere and the private as well, for it “is no longer a
scene where the dramatic interiority of the subject, engaged with its
objects as with its image, is played out” (Baudrillard, “Ecstasy” 128).
Even if this were some sci-‹ fantasy of Baudrillard’s own, one feels it is
like many things of that genre, an accelerated anticipation, but not so
long a galactic leap, toward things to come, which certainly will redeter-
mine how we think about the theater, as the dramatic literature—some-
times in apocalyptic ways—has already started to do, as with the plays
of Heiner Müller, especially Hamletmachine, or a neglected late play by
Tennessee Williams, The Red Devil Battery Sign.
All of this causes us, moreover, to re›ect on what were the virtues of
the separated public and private spaces of the old scene of representa-
tion, which has been, since the anti-Oedipal theory of poststructural-
ism, so much under assault, as a deceit, lie, fraud, of the logocentric sys-
tem, with its repressive ideology, purveyor of the mere appearances
emanating from the self-serving seat of invisible or secret power. While
it is this ideological cover-up or obfuscation that has been subjected to
a devastating deconstruction, through the history of the modern theater
as well as critical theory, what was hidden in this scene is the existence

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of that Otherness whose presumable disappearance we may very well
regret. If we distrusted the implications of its originary absence, it was
that which nevertheless gave us, with whatever grievances, “the sym-
bolic bene‹ts of alienation,” in which the Other can fool you, but—and
here I am in accord with Baudrillard—“can fool you for the better or
the worse” (“Ecstasy” 130). And the ‹nal score on that is not yet, if
ever, in.
What we think of as theater—action, spectacle, scene—requires
the minimal separation that is the beginning of alienation, which does
have a tendency to widen its scope, like the rei‹cation of representation
itself. But to the degree that the alienating risk dwindles into the soft-
ware of screen and network rather than mirror and scene, the psycho-
logical dimension having vanished into the microprocess, we are in the
vicinity of obscenity (no-scene) “when all becomes transparence and
immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inex-
orable light of information and communication” (Baudrillard,
“Ecstasy” 130), whose post-jouisssance or ecstasy is obscene. In a kind of
perverse utopianism, at some extremity of deluded desire, it’s the
obscene that does away with the apparatus of representation, every mir-
ror, every image, and presumably every look, and here we are back in
the brothel of Genet, when Roger the revolutionary appears, the rebel-
lion having started, as rebellions tend to do, in a pledge of redeeming
truth, by “despising make-believe” (55), which like it or not in the the-
ater, if not reality principle, is not to be disbelieved.
Who’s there? That, in the indiscernible space between to be and not
to be, is the question—and so long as there’s anyone looking, it’s the
unanswerable question, generic, ontological, whenever theater material-
izes from whatever it is it is not. And for a community of scholars that
would be, I should think—if all the world’s a stage or life is a dream or
an insubstantial pageant fading, what’s not theater?—a still provocative
question.

works cited

Ashbery, John. Selected Poems. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Badiou, Alain. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 2005.
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983.
126–34.

Who’s There?—Community of the Question

131
Baudrillard, Jean. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . . . or The End of the Social, and
Other Essays. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and John Johnston. New York:
Semiotext(e), 1983.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman.
New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Beckett, Samuel. Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove, 1984.
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1954.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New
York: Schocken, 1968.
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems 1927–1979. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1999.
Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Burkett, Elinor. “Democracy Falls on Barren Ground.” New York Times, March 29,
2005, A21.
Genet, Jean. The Balcony. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove, 1960.
Marranca, Bonnie. “Barcelona Contemporary.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
79, 27.1 (2005): 22–31.
Sellars, Peter. “Performance and Ethics: Questions for the 21st Century.” Inter-
view by Bonnie Marranca. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 79, 27.1 (2005):
36–54.
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works. 2nd ed. Boston:
Houghton Mif›in, 1997.
Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New
York: Semiotext(e), 1986.

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 eight

The Emotional Memory of Directing

3

Let me begin with something like a confession, brought on through a

late visa by delayed awareness of where I am, not merely in St. Peters-
burg, but at a conference of the International Federation of Theater
Research. I’m pleased to be here, of course, but I trust that those who
invited me to give this keynote were also aware that I’ve never been a
theater scholar, and that whatever research I did before a turn to theory
was done in the theater, where I worked for nearly forty years, always
questioning, in some respect, what I was doing there and why I did it,
and at certain critical moments why it shouldn’t be otherwise. And so,
too, questioning the nature of theater, about which—after a generation
of new historicism, cultural materialism and, with essentialism undone
and the aesthetic demysti‹ed, everything social construction—I ‹nd
myself unregenerate, by no means indifferent to history, but still think-
ing ontologically, having asked such tenuous questions as what is it now,
as it occurs, as it is, before the eye? even here, what is it, then, in the mind’s
eye? in the confusions of eye, ear and the other senses? in the synesthe-
sia of its perceiving and the being perceived, and though we overlook it,
in the embodied theater, as here, now, breathing and being breathed? Or:
to what does a performance refer except to itself, and what is the onto-
logical status of that other thing, if what is there, whatever it is that escapes
you, now you see it now you don’t, is not the thing itself?
Those were questions I began to think about in the theater, which
is why I’ve been given to say, even while working in it, that theater is
theory, or a shadow of it. And while I’ll not be pursuing such questions
here, one or another may be implied in passing, as I re›ect upon direct-
ing in a more or less personal way, as the title is meant to suggest—and
so, too, the following three epigraphs, as they’re absorbed into what
I’ve been thinking, as if thought before, as a virtual habit of mind, which
may be (habitually) a little circuitous as it proceeds:
When thought has become each thing in the way in which
a man who actually knows is said to do so . . . , its
condition of possibility is still one of potentiality . . . and
thought is then able to think itself.
—aristotle, On the Soul

133
 Only if I am not always already and solely enacted, but
rather delivered to a possibility and a power, only if living
and intending and apprehending themselves are at stake
each time in what I live and intend and apprehend—only
if, in other words, there is thought—only then can a form
of life become, in its own factness and thingness, form-of-
life, in which it is never possible to isolate something
like naked life.
—georgio agamben, Means without End

But, ah, thought kills me that I am not thought.

—shakespeare, Sonnet 44

If my title speaks of emotion and the epigraphs then of thought, it’s by

no means a lapse of memory, about which I’ve been thinking much these
days, having started an autobiography, full of emotional memory—and
emotions about memory too—including my ‹rst encounter with
Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares. I was not at all preparing to be an actor
when I ‹rst read that book, but rather desperately catching up with what
might help me to be a director, since I’d come to the theater belatedly, by
way of a series of accidents that, since I’ve written about them elsewhere,
I won’t rehearse here. But since we’re here, I might say that, whatever my
own naïveté at the time, or insecurities, without a de‹ning voice, the
voices I really heard—with a conceptual disposition that I didn’t know I
had, and an experimental inclination that would sooner than later
emerge—were, if not classical, mostly Russian. With the Russians—not
only Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, but ‹rst of all, Dostoyevsky,
who didn’t write for the theater, but seemed to me, with his feverish
metaphysics, the greatest dramatist of the nineteenth century; then Tol-
stoy, who, in presuming to master history, eventually abhorred the the-
ater; and in the theater itself, the suggestiveness of Chekhov, the way-
ward hints or non sequiturs, even the mysterious cord that, according to
old Ferapont, stretches under all of Moscow, or in the sound of a
snapped string mournfully dying away—there was a certain magnitude
of mind, and with everything beginning at the level of soul, a reform of
being, ethics, purpose, no small-mindedness. And what I remember
from Stanislavski as much as anything else, as if, morally, a condition of
technique, was this injunction: Don’t come into the theater with mud on your
feet! You want to be a director, learn to make a life in art—though like
Meyerhold, comes the Revolution, you may also lose it for art.
I haven’t quite lost it, but when in the ‹rst book I wrote, The Impos-
sible Theater: A Manifesto, I called for a revolution, saying in the opening

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paragraph that when I looked at the state of the American theater, and
the despicable behavior of the people in it, I felt like the lunatic Lear on
the heath, wanting to kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, there were those out
there only too ready to kill me. Forgive this replaying of history (and it
is history), but that was more than a dozen years after I started working
in the theater, and at the time, as we went into the 1960s, other things
may have been stirring, but there still wasn’t much talk about art. And if
I was outraged then about that, it was almost more because, in its uncer-
tain beginnings, at the turn of the 1950s, that was also true of my own
theater, The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco, which developed
eventually as I wished, or in the vicinity of it, by sheer stubborn will—
depending on where and when, a prime requisite for the director—past
all resistance. And I don’t want to minimize that, coming mostly from
people whose greatest impediment was that they had, unfortunately, a
good deal more experience in theater than I could claim at the time. In
this regard, my innocence, or ignorance, may have been a saving grace.
And I don’t want to minimize either—though I was reading everything
about theater, one play after another, volumes of theater history, and
everything else in the arts that might conceivably bear upon it—what it
is I didn’t know, and particularly about acting. And it’s acting that still
seems to me, whatever there is on stage, or off stage, there above the
teasers or concealed behind the tormentors, out there in the wings, and
even with a provocatively self-conscious, conceptually empty stage,
whether Peter Brook’s or Beckett’s—nothing there but a breath, or a
faint brief cry, “an instant of recorded vagitus”1—it’s acting that
remains the sine qua non of theater.
And I was all the more convinced of that as I began to realize,
through those early years, that even as the actor acquires (in that
voyeuristic perversion without which there’d be no theater) the look of
being looked at, stage fright is something like an existential condition.
Those mandates of Stanislavski for the process of building a charac-
ter—concentration, focus, circle of attention, units and objectives, pub-
lic solitude—are also, in becoming something like second nature, ways
of dealing with stage fright, while much of what we do in directing is an
equivocal cover-up, because the credibility of performance draws upon
that fright, hiding it and exploiting it, all the more as we approach the
limits of performance. Speaking of limits, however, it’s not so much the
theater but rather performance and body art that have really explored
this issue, and I could examine it in excruciating detail in the now-leg-
endary aesthetic and ritual perils of the Viennese Action group; or Chris
Burden, being cruci‹ed on the back of Volkswagen or crawling on bro-

The Emotional Memory of Directing

135
ken glass; or the cosmetic surgeries of Orlan (actually theorized in the
process, by texts she reads aloud), or, Abramović and Ulay, breathing
and being breathed, to the point of asphyxiation; or, though you’d cer-
tainly wince if you were there (or even looking at the pictures), the
exquisite suspensions of Stelarc—over the water in Japan or over a
street in New York—by large ‹shhooks he’d insert, with a studied
impeccability, through his own ›esh. But lest we think this is merely raw
extremity or some gratuitous public display of indulgent self-abuse, we
should recognize that there were models and incitations in the classical
avant-garde, as well as a reciprocal linkage between the performative
body (not yet “queer”) and conceptual art, where thought has, indeed,
become each thing as a condition of possibility, whether through the
mythic incisions of Orlan’s facial text, itself a map of myth, or Stelarc’s
theorization of “the obsolete body.”2
What I might say here, however, is that as I began to direct, I soon
became aware—through a period of happenings and Action Events,
and before the insurgence of the body in theater and in theory—that
there was more to be learned about what might be done in the theater
from the other arts (the visual, the sonic, the plastic, multimedia now
and multiple installations) than from the theater itself, or mostly what’s
happening there, which with few exceptions is usually far behind—and
if exceptions, usually because they’re aware of what’s happening in the
other arts. As for what happens in the theater (and here referring in
passing to a few plays I’ve done), do we not want some bodily affect, the
wound, the cut, the tear, if not exactly literal, something more than
emblematic, at the sticking point of Oedipus, that blinded and blinding
vision, as if it were thought in the ›esh? Or, in another plaintive dimen-
sion, the grotesquely blinded Gloucester, after Cornwall does it (and
how exactly does he do it? spurs, knife, sword? or just ‹ngers? wrist up
the channel—which is how, it appeared, we did it), again the sensation
of it, seeing it feelingly, as if an act of mind, its factness, its thingness, on
the edge of naked life. And then that other extremity, as if it were pure
thought, yet somehow felt in the ›esh, there on the cliff at Dover, seen
in the vast beyond, the impalpable magnitudes of it, from “yond tall
anchoring bark, / Diminished to her cock; her cock a buoy / Almost
too small for sight,” to the indiscernible currents, down there, dizzily, in
the depths below—brain turning on the waters with “de‹cient sight”—
where “the murmuring surge,” like all of history in the gathered tides,
“on the unnumb’red idle pebble chafes” (King Lear 4.6.18–22). I’ve
often said to actors that we want that surge, and the cha‹ng of history
too, in the most inconspicuous action performed upon the stage.

reality principles
136
 But then there are times when, it seems, the surge is being moni-
tored, at another psychophysical level, for its libidinal ›ow. So it is when
the house is being watched in the fantasy scenes of Genet’s brothel,
where all the scenarios end in death. What do we do when we realize
that each of the scenarios has its own perversion, like a rite of history—
masturbation, sadism, buggery, and with the Envoy there and the Exe-
cutioner dead—necrophilia too? And how is all that to be acted? Act
more, act less? If sometimes less is more, sometimes it’s nothing at all;
or, while we’ve learned from Beckett that nothing can be done, there’s
also a sense of not doing it when all you’re doing is merely acting. As
through the years I upped the ante on what I was asking of the actor,
I’ve found myself at some extremity—way out there where you’re not
really sure you should go, or way in there where it’s almost illicit to be—
being next to immoral, and not only being aware of it, the actual jeop-
ardy there, but knowing if we can do it the doing would be superb. Not
only is the actor severely threatened, but wanting it, not wanting it,
induced to take risks that, psychically, physically, could very well be
injurious, but as if homeopathic too, overcoming stage fright by being
frightened all the more. And now and again in directing that seemed to
apply to myself.
“Every morning since rehearsals started I wake anxious.” That
expression of anxiety, however, is not quite mine. I’m not doing theater
anymore, but adventitiously, as I was writing this talk, it came from a
distance as a sort of directorial challenge, with the kind of emotional
turmoil that may be, at the same time, an impediment to performance
and the impelling substance of it. It came in an over›owing email from
a former student of mine, not in acting, but rather a course, as I recall,
in the cultural politics of modern drama. She’s a beautiful young
woman, with glowing eyes and passion, and I’m told she was one of the
most impressive actors in the School of Drama. I can’t con‹rm that,
because I never saw her on stage, but what I can say is that—with a des-
perate desire to know, and to know more, whatever there was to
know—she was perhaps the most acutely intelligent student in my class.
And she has been writing me constantly since she asked for some advice
and then went off to New York, where she was almost immediately
noticed, and is now in one of the resident professional theaters doing
the major role for which, as she describes it, she seems ideal. I hope she
won’t mind my quoting some fragments of what, if in a play, would
seem a long compulsive monologue—the scene familiar, a conven-
tional form of theater, bringing us back into the orbit of Stanislavski.
The character moves, she writes, “from being the beautiful girl, the

The Emotional Memory of Directing

137
loved by all, . . . to this ravaged shell of a woman. It is . . .” She breaks
off, and then her normally self-re›ective, lyrically ›uent prose, now
repetitive, urgent, regressive, aphasic, seems to be in character:

I’m scared. I feel scared. I feel like it’s this enormous play and . . .
I feel like a little girl . . . I worry about what everyone . . . do they
think I’m up to it? (which I know is so much about me being like
Oh my God I hope I can do this!). . . . And then, and then there
are times when I feel like, God, my choices . . . all my characters
seem . . . riddled with self-doubt because I am riddled with self-
doubt . . . and then just feel like a big fucking sham . . . and the
people around me seem so Fearless and I feel like, well god, that’s
what an actor is supposed to be! Fearless! . . . And I don’t feel that
way right now. I feel pent up and terri‹ed. And always it’s this
fear, deep down, that I’m just no good. And that somebody’s
gonna pull back the curtain and ‹gure it out. Is it just . . . how do
you control the doubt? . . . Maybe there aren’t answers to these
questions. . . . I’m just so rabidly hard on myself. . . . I don’t want
to do that and I don’t know how to not.

Here’s the murmuring surge that—sometimes even with the maturest

of actors (read Laurence Olivier’s autobiography, if you want to check
on that)—may very well be the subtext of the subtext in any given
rehearsal. If you’ve directed for any time, you’ve certainly had to deal
with some version of it, and since there are never reliable answers, often
guessing what’s best to do, or doing nothing at all, or, as I wrote her, “so
be it, riddled with doubt, bring the character into the orbit of the riddle,
and thence into the ravaged shell of a woman. You should be hard on
yourself, that’s what it appears to be about.”
This was no more, of course, than a variation on affective memory.
I was telling her not only to remember it, but to use it then and there,
making a virtue of it—as if, indeed, as I thought myself, we must learn
to live in doubt. If that was in some respect, too, derived from
Stanislavski (maybe by way of Freud), when I ‹rst read An Actor Prepares
there seemed more certitude there. As for the Stanislavski method, it
was during those years being taken over by the Actors Studio, which
capitalized the Method and also commodi‹ed it, with such iconic
‹gures as Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe, and even more up-to-
date, Puff Daddy or P. Diddy, in a quick recent tutorial for the Broad-
way revival of A Raisin in the Sun. This is not to discount the seriousness
that the Studio brought to acting, nor could I avoid the Method as I
made my way into the theater.

reality principles
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 Actually, my ‹rst wife, Beatrice Manley—already an actor of
resourceful grace and power, who had been on Broadway before I ever
saw a play—had studied with Michael Chekhov and, instead of joining
the Studio, preferred to work with a group guided, before he went to
Hollywood, by Sidney Lumet. But even so, the emphasis was upon an
internalizing technique. Bea and I worked together for over twenty
years, and as she taught me much about acting I directed her in perfor-
mances ranging from Alma in Summer and Smoke and Madame Ranevsky
in The Cherry Orchard to Mother Courage and Madame Irma in the
brothel of The Balcony. But even after the experience of various destabi-
lizing styles and, as we went on, the quite radical eccentricities of a
strategically conscious, avant-garde, often antitheatrical theater, she
wrote in one of the two books on acting she published before she died:
“Acting is convincing when the emotions are so deep inside the body
that they seem to be essential and personal to that particular performer;
when it is as though there were no outside world. This is subjective, vis-
ceral, inner, private acting.”3
If there was for her a long circuitous subtext to that visceral inner
life, that was not necessarily so for the actors on the scene when I ‹rst
started directing, though if they had any technique at all, it was some ver-
sion or other of the Method, the psychological acting still the currency
of the American stage. While I did my best to engage it, psyching the
actors out, as they were turning in, through the rites of interiority—and
becoming adept myself at creating the conditions for that—I was soon,
in an inchoate way, con›icted about it too, though I knew nothing what-
ever then about Brechtian alienation, no less anything as instrumentally
hieroglyphic as Meyerhold’s biomechanics. Actually, I did learn about
the Verfremdungseffekt when, in 1957, I directed the ‹rst production of
Mother Courage in the United States. And while I’d have no compunc-
tions now about performing Brecht against the authority of the text, I
was very scrupulous then, not only about that, but also the various con-
trols on emotion (like “he said,” “she said”) in the Brechtian method. I
attempted to do it like a model student of the model book, if that had
been available. If that wasn’t quite true later on—as in a subsequent pro-
duction of Galileo—that was because Brechtian theory and example pro-
vided the ideational grounds for turning against the authority of the text,
as he did himself with Galileo after the bomb fell on Hiroshima. If, as he
said in the recorded discussion of Coriolanus, we’re entitled to amend
Shakespeare where Shakespeare needs amending, I would assume the
same is also true of Brecht, as I later did about Beckett.
What should be apparent is that Beckett’s texts, more than any,

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have really given us theoretical grounds for revisionist staging, despite
his own unbecoming vigilance, the unquestioning devotion of Billy
Whitelaw, the dutifulness of certain directors, from Alan Schneider to
Walter Asmus, and continued surveillance now by his heirs and rever-
ent scholars, with a deep emotional commitment to something like
Beckettian method. If I were to start directing again, however, as I once
told Beckett—who always wondered why I stopped, and each time I
saw him urged me to start again—I could never do one of his plays,
especially when he was alive, because I couldn’t promise at all that I’d
do it as he prescribed, or as if the text were gospel. And I say that, too,
believing that I’d get at some truth in the plays that a more obedient
director would miss, and—presumptuous as it may seem—maybe
Beckett himself. If there is any psychoanalytical basis to that—and
Beckett was once in analysis—the directors I most admire tend to think
like that, out of another sense of duty, and maybe, aesthetically, another
kind of commitment, with its own emotional truth.
Actually, it should be said of Stanislavski that he seems to have done
that with Chekhov, who apparently dismissed the method’s public soli-
tude as a pretext for excess, the maudlin self-indulgence or arti‹cial
pathos that, in the actor, is the nether side of narcissism. We know that
he expected The Cherry Orchard to be funnier, and if he’d had his way with
Andrei in the fourth act of The Three Sisters, where the pain was bad
enough without the actor focused inward, commiserating with himself,
he’d have had him instead aiming his denunciations of the tedious com-
placency of provincial life right at the spectators in Moscow, letting them
know what they really knew, that their own lives were no less boring,
miserable, empty, sopori‹c, and without imagination, next to dead. I
don’t know that Stanislavski was nearby when Chekhov said it, but out-
doing anything we’ve heard from Brecht, he apparently told the actor
playing the role, “He must be just about ready to threaten the audience
with his ‹sts.”4 If that resembles Franz Wedekind who, when he acted in
his own plays, would break up a scene and leap to the edge of the stage,
gesticulating wildly, exhorting the audience to wake up and understand,
it would certainly disrupt any “culinary theater,” in its own excessive
seizure of the Alienation-effect. There have been times when I’ve
wanted to leap on stage and do something like that myself, but as for
Stanislavski’s suppression of the comedy in Chekhov’s plays, when we
see nowadays certain productions that, deferring to the author, are farci-
cally overdoing it, we might very well prefer the forgoing of a few laughs
in the interests of the empathic, and instead of trivializing the drama, a
naturalistic method that gives it credibility.

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Whatever the method, however, or stylization in performance,

there seems no way of avoiding what Stanislavski required, some grounds
for emotional truth, which—as I began to perceive through the years—
may come through cultural distance or difference or any form of dis-
tantiation: not only the Brechtian gestus, but a Chinese mask, a shadow
puppet, or a Kathakali headdress, or down the hashigakara in the Japa-
nese Noh drama, as one of the National Treasures, or honori‹c per-
formers, takes what seems an eternity to make his way to the stage—but
then, mesmerically, stunningly, in a swirl of voluminous robes, as if he
brought the space with him, projecting an inner life. Or for that matter,
in the early work of Robert Wilson, from Deafman’s Glance to Einstein on
the Beach, the seemingly imperturbable absence/presence of an equal
amount of time, with not a word spoken, the actor then without train-
ing, and unequipped to speak it, no less develop a character out of a
causal narrative—not so much an actor then, with a psychological life,
but an aural or visual instance, or a passing ‹guration, maybe sinking
into the stage or, weightlessly, emblematically, disappearing from it.
There may be in such performance unexpected incursions of feeling, or
in its dispersive vision the Su‹ whirling semblance of it, but where it
comes from, or why? what for? we’d ‹nd that hard to say, as if the ground
of emotion there—in the temporal archeology of the spatial attenua-
tions—were, in Foucauldian terms, from another episteme.
But then, the same might be said, indeed, of my earliest readings of
Stanislavski, which took place actually more than half a century ago.
What particularly struck me then, in the notorious chapter on “Emo-
tion Memory,” was (as I remember) the stress on emotional truth, with
some indeterminacy remaining to this day on how, in directing, you
really determine that, that is, what constitutes truth? truth in what
regard? and if not ideologically, on what conceptual grounds? Such
questions occurred to me soon beyond the issue of acting, about every
aspect of theater, from the most imperceptible breath through every
cadenced sensation, in light, sound, fabrics, objects, space, to the per-
formative bodies in the tactile rhythm of thought. That rhythm will
surely be altered somehow, in the age of information, by electronic and
digital extensions into cyberspace, which in theory, at least, has raised
the issue of “liveness,” and if I were directing now that would be some-
thing to think about. What impressed me then, however—given what’s
still the unregenerate mortality of the form, with all its human failings,
and a complex emotional life—was the reminder to the young actors,
by Stanislavski’s surrogate, the all-knowing director Tortsov, that while
there may be now and then “spontaneous eruptions” of feeling, the

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truth of emotion cannot depend on that. To be sure, spontaneity in act-
ing is still a desideratum, but if I were to say let’s stop and think about it
a little, what forms it might take, there’d be some who’d say, that’s the
trouble, too much thinking.
Yet if, in the American theater today, it’s still a pretty standard view
that a liability for the actor is thinking too much, the premium placed on
spontaneity may have—especially for the actor who hardly thinks at all,
in the sort of theater with not much to think about—the dubious virtue
of sustaining certain illusions, to which a director, at least, would have
to give some thought. So it is when, presumably, the instinctual life
takes over during the course of improvisation, and—with the libidinal
body coded, an agglomerate of familiar re›exes—we ‹nd ourselves
dealing with a plethora of banalities, which if not perceived, challenged,
rehearsed away, merely serve as veri‹cation of what Freud tipped us off
about, that the instincts, if spontaneous, are essentially conservative.
And quite frankly, those instincts are likely to be no different, despite all
claims of subversion, dispersion, multiplicity, in the multiplex of the-
aters de‹ning themselves by difference, whether gendered, racial, eth-
nic, queer, or in a body without organs on one of the anti-Oedipal sites
of the Deleuzeian thousand plateaus.
As for access to the unconscious—however you think of it, as a lin-
guistic, metaphorical, or dramaturgical structure—difference isn’t priv-
ileged; so the question is how to get there. Tortsov was actually address-
ing that when he said of technique that the “cardinal principle” is this:
“through conscious means we reach the unconscious,” and these con-
scious means seem to require the deployment “of repeated feelings drawn
from emotion memory. . . .” When one of the young actors, Grisha, sur-
prised at the notion of repetition, asks whether “in every kind of role,
from Hamlet to Sugar in The Blue Bird, we have to use our own, same,
old feelings?” Tortsov replies: “What else can you do? . . . Do you
expect an actor to invent all sorts of new sensations, or even a new soul,
for every part he plays? . . . You can borrow clothing, a watch, things of
all sorts but you cannot take feelings away from another person. My
feelings are inalienably mine.”5 No quarrel with that whatever, putting
aside the question of soul. But when it’s asked on the ramparts in Ham-
let, “What, has this thing appeared again to-night?” (1.1.21), it’s quite
another thing, with its vast ghostly repository of feeling, as Coleridge
understood, and conceivably Tortsov too, but because of the very elu-
siveness of the thing, there are still feelings and feelings, and in the
actual making of theater feelings in estranged, unsettling, doubtful,
delirious, maybe even deranged, or even if pedestrian, always particular

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contexts, and sometimes an actor’s sense, equally inalienable, of not
feeling right at all, or not doing this or that because s/he doesn’t feel it,
though s/he may not feel it if s/he doesn’t do it, or even know what it
is, as it materializes somehow from whatever it is it is not or, at the quick
of thought, its factness, its thingness, might conceivably be.
And so it was in my KRAKEN group (and this an emotional mem-
ory) when during the course of a long inquiry (I don’t say rehearsal,
since we were still seeking, in the heuristic methodology of that group,
what there would be to rehearse), one of the actors stopped and said—
as Method actors frequently do, and that was not our method—
“Damn! I don’t feel this, I’m not feeling it at all.” Whereupon I burst
forth in no uncertain terms, “I couldn’t care less what you feel, or don’t,
feelings are cheap! I only care what you think! What we’re doing here is
thinking, trying to understand.” Which by no means made me insensi-
tive to what the actors felt, for as there are feelings and feelings, there is
thinking and thinking, and other forms of spontaneity in their fastidious
interaction. And I think over the years we worked together they surely
understood that, as they did when I said that what we were attempting
to do, with all the resources at our disposal—bodies, minds, psyche,
senses, every form of intelligence, neurally analytical, and intuitive
too—whatever we were working on, with text, without text (when the
text evolved, maybe elliptical, associative, dense as it could be), was to
bring it into thought. And since the means were psychophysical—the
actors so adept with their bodies, breath blood nerves brains, that they
could literally perform standing on their heads—I called it “blooded
thought.”
And that pertains to emotions, too, about which we have to think,
because we know very little about them. As it happens, too, while I was
writing this, a friend of mine, the poet C. K. Williams, came to Seattle to
give the Theodore Roethke Memorial Reading, and I was asked to
introduce him. In working up what to say, it occurred to me that he had
actually written about the uncertain and troubling way in which we
think about emotions. So I looked again, not only at the poems, but at
his essays on Poetry and Consciousness, in which he admits to having “been
puzzled for a long time by what exactly an emotion is.” Thinking about
that, he wrote:

Presumably . . . we might say that at least I myself know my emo-

tion. But do I? If I were to describe the feeling itself to myself, what
do I say? Much the same sort of thing. I am depressed about . . .
death, say, separation, isolation. But these, again, are conditions of the

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143
 emotion, frames, even causes; the emotion itself will often remain
vague, uncertain, and transitory. Often it seems that by the time we
are into the investigation of an emotion, that emotion has been
frustratingly replaced by the one attached to the investigation.6

Of which, in the work with KRAKEN, I tried to make the central issue,
with the investigation itself as the potentiality or prospect of an alterna-
tive form of theater. This made the task of directing, too, something
else again than what I had been doing, even with the experimental ten-
dencies of radically conceived productions, with scenic ideas coming,
say, not only from theater designers but a wide range of visual artists,
and with electronic music and sound that, to this day, would be consid-
ered way out, hard to take, and—as they used to say, too, about our pro-
ductions of now-canonical dramatists when they were hardly known—
self-indulgently avant-garde. What may have been even more troubling
in what I came to do was the movement of thought through a self-
re›exively conscious process of indeterminate feeling, or through a
methodical indeterminacy, the layering of performance in such a way that it’s
impossible to say, for all its obsessive precision, what exactly is being
enacted, or how much acted, with what degree of representation or, in the
semblance of naked life, its seeming actuality, where seeming is seminal,
or in the reality of its vanishings, at the selvage of perception, the immi-
nence of meaning or some precipitous truth.
I have no illusions, by the way, that what I’m saying about directing
is likely to be possible in every kind of theater, since what led me to
think this way, after those many years of staging an extraordinary range
of plays (nothing in the country like it), was a desire, for various reasons,
to start all over again, as if from ground zero. That required, as you’ll
see, asking certain questions, which I wrote about in Take Up the Bodies:
Theater at the Vanishing Point, most speci‹cally at the beginning of a chap-
ter called “Origin of the Species.” That, too, starts with an epigraph, and
then a reference to the Nordic kraken, which we capitalized and Amer-
icanized in the name KRAKEN. Though Tennyson wrote a poem
about it, what I remembered, rather, was a letter from Melville to
Hawthorne, who had asked, after the publication of Moby-Dick, what
Melville might be doing next. He said he was after bigger ‹sh, the
kraken, which lives in its immensity many fathoms deep, but never rises
to the surface, where, if it does, it dies.
That directing, too, has its affective memories I have been suggest-
ing through this talk, and though I vaguely alluded to it a moment ago, I
should say that if there’s an informing emotion to the epigraph, that came

reality principles
144
from our failure at Lincoln Center, which I had written about in the pre-
vious chapter, no excuses, and the concluding question, taken from Dan-
ton’s Death, with which I had opened the Beaumont Theater there: “What
is it in me that denies me?” And the feeling afterward that, if the denial
was inarguable, with a sort of emptying out, there were still resources to
be drawn upon. But, about that, the epigraph poses a question:

“Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from
whence then hast thou that living water?” (John 4:11):
(. . . in the kraken’s wake:) What we want to show is not only the struc-
ture we have come to but the conceiving process in the structure, what led to it
and what leads back to its sources, in the world, in us, in the friction between
us, the work, each other, the rage, the work, each playing upon the other, reced-
ing, the world, our gravity; a memory trace in a spoor of association, the
thinking through. There is always the haunted and critical moment when
what we’re after is almost not-there, the moment of Appropriation, the step-
ping back: Act? how? why? where? what for? for whom? and to
what End? Why am I doing this in the ‹rst place? and can we? and since
there is always the likelihood that nobody is listening or, if listening, cares what
it means, what difference does it make? It may be that we are all listening to
different voices, this candle, that ›ame; not for love or money the same light.7

Out of this view of things, at that restively self-questioning, transi-

tional period of my life, came another method, taking up those ques-
tions, while intensifying the question, for me, of what it means to be a
director—or how one can be a director without being asked for the
answers, because the actors are the answers as the substance of the
work. I mean the living and intending and apprehending, an inalienable
function of it, what is done and how it’s done, its conditions of possi-
bility passing into thought, until through the very facticity of thinking, it
becomes the thing itself. As for the friction between us, that’s almost
inevitable among those who work together long hours daily, with a
revealing intimacy or intolerable silence, over a considerable period of
time. Whatever the loyalty, love, and affections, there were—and if in
any way de›ected, de›ected into the work—anxieties, distrust, antago-
nism, resentment, and even in the most responsive accord, the rage, the
work, the work itself raging, different voices and different value, with
both the license and the stricture of competing instincts, the metonymi-
cal impetus—and the work was highly verbal, sometimes in the process
logorrheically so, suffusive, complex, cerebral—of an always aberrant
desire. And not, once fashionable, the post-Lacanian kind, desire desir-

The Emotional Memory of Directing

145
ing desire, but as in metaphysical poetry, thou blind man’s mark, thou
fool’s self-chosen snare. Or as it was in Crooked Eclipses, the title of a
work we did, derived from Shakespeare’s sonnets:

Look what thy memory cannot contain,

Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt ‹nd
Those children nursed, delivered from thy brain,
To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.
(Sonnet 77)

As for the entire repertoire of confused and troubling emotions

that, as they arise, nobody quite understands, they indeed became
frames or even causes, subjects of critique. As the investigation contin-
ued, it sometimes seemed, indeed, as if we were hallucinating, or in the
shape of dream, as in the stagings of the unconscious, which is not only
the deepest form of memory, but where we do our deepest thinking, in
a superfetation of image, at the ‹lamenting nerve ends of thought, “A
quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart” (Sonnet 46). Nor was any-
thing censored in the process, even the tendencies of the actors to crit-
icize each other, or me for that matter, all of it caught up in the inquiry
and, however sublimated, displaced, projected, suffusing what was
done in performance, and so, too, what haunts the theater, ghosting its
greatest drama, the ineliminable riddle, the riddle of self-doubt. I wish I
had time to explore it, as it informed the work we did, as frame, as
cause, as motive, the curious thing being that one can feel enlivened by
that. About one thing, however, I have no doubt: though there was a
kind of brain fever to it all, at the most haunted and critical moments,
the thing not-there, whatever it is that escaped us, is also what kept us
thinking, what we would never have thought without it, and that more
than anything, in its factness, its thingness, as an emotional memory is,
to this day, an inspiriting form-of-life.

notes

1. Samuel Beckett, Breath, in Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove, 1984)
209.
2. Obsolete Body / Suspensions / Stelarc, ed. James D. Paffrath, with Stelarc
(Davis, CA: JP Publications, 1984).
3. Beatrice Manley, My Breath in Art: Acting from Within (New York: Applause,
1998) 16.

reality principles
146
 4. Quoted in Timothy J. Wiles, The Theater Event: Modern Theories of Performance
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 49.
5. Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hap-
good (New York: Theater Arts, 1936) 165–66.
6. C. K. Williams, Poetry and Consciousness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1998) 1–2.
7. Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1982), 77–78.

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147
 nine

The Commodius Vicus of Beckett

Vicissitudes of the Arts in the Science of Af›iction

To think perhaps it won’t all have been for nothing!

—hamm, in Endgame

3
When the theater becomes conscious of itself as theater, it is not so
much studying itself as an object but realizing that theatricality, if too
elusive for objecti‹cation, materializes in thought, like representation
for the human sciences, as a condition of possibility, which as always
remains to be seen. Once that is realized, there is no alternative but for
the theater to become more and more self-conscious, even beyond
Brecht, re›exively critical, with the dispelling of illusion, however, as
another order of illusion in which there will inevitably be a succession
of demysti‹cations and unveilings, but as if the teasers and tormentors
that frame the stage (even in a thrust, or presumably open stage) were
revealing nothing so much as the future of illusion. This might be
thought of, too, in its materialization, and especially in Beckett, as the
nothing that comes of nothing or, in despite of nothing—as he says of
sounds, in “Variations on a ‘Still’ Point”—“mostly not for nothing
never quite for nothing,”1 the inexhaustible stirrings still, at “the very
heart of which no limit of any kind was to be discovered but always in
some quarter or another some end in sight such as a fence or some
manner of bourne from which to return” (“Stirrings Still” 263). Even if
the return were guaranteed by the “preordained cyclicism” that Beckett
perceived in Vico,2 this could, of course, “all eyes”—in the more
scopophilic Beckett—proceed “from bad to worse till in the end he
ceased if not to see to look (about him or more closely) and set out to
take thought,” where what goes up must come down, transcendentally
de›ated, “So on unknowing and no end in sight” (“Stirrings Still” 263).
It is to this no-end that Beckett points when at the quasi beginning
of Endgame—in the gray light, there at the outset, the depleted limit of
the scopic ‹eld—the room is exposed, the forms are differentiated, and
in a series of unveilings, with the parents in the ashbins, still stirring, the
memory of the Oedipal pattern is played out. It’s as if consciousness
itself is referred back to its real conditions: its contents litter the scene,

148
both as dissociated objects and fragments of desire and longing, the old
words, the old questions, the return of the Same as an old compulsion,
with something taking its course that, whatever’s happening now, may
or may not have happened before, and in any case we wouldn’t know it
as it somehow passes us by, as it does in the prose of “The Calmative,”
sometimes with “shrill laughter” or “cries of joy toward the comic
vast,” the something that has to happen, “to my body as in myth and
metamorphosis, the old body to which nothing ever happened, or so lit-
tle, which never met with anything, loved anything, wished for any-
thing, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter, the
plane, the curved, the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the
havoc of images” (63). As we try, amid the havoc, to put the untellable
story together, it becomes quite possible that the myriad of indetermi-
nacies in the virtually nonconscious, receding with every stirring into
the problematic of the unconscious, becomes thus coextensive with the
drama, all that the drama is left to be.
It is with this in mind that I must confess to feeling about the
notion of “after Beckett” as I’ve always felt when I hear talk—for all
that’s warranted in critique—of “after Freud,” as if there were a sequel,
not only to civilization and its discontents, but to the existential datum
of the reality principle itself, what I come back to invariably through
ground zero in Beckett: “Use your head, can’t you, use your head,
you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” If there’s no cure for it, alas,
we still have to use our heads—“he having been dreamt away [letting]
himself be dreamt away” (“Still Point” 267)—as in the “talking cure”of
Freud, which he tells us is interminable, or in the mise-en-scène of the
unconscious, our oldest mental faculty, active in sleep, deeply there,
“But deep in what sleep, deep in what sleep already?” (Endgame 53), as
Hamm asks insidiously, in his scornful rehearsal of undying desire
around the un‹nishable story of the dubious child. As for the future of
illusion, it would seem, for all the demysti‹cations still going on in the-
ory, to be through the stirrings the only foreseeable future, unless in
“the poisonous ingenuity of Time,”3 which the young Beckett dis-
cerned in Proust, as in the toneless “‹xed gaze” of Clov’s grievous wish
ful‹llment, “it’s ‹nished, nearly ‹nished” (1). If grain upon grain, it’s
nevertheless not quite, whatever it is—“It all. (Pause.) It all.”4—taking
its measure is another matter, since if there’s any reality there, it “can
only be apprehended as a retrospective hypothesis,” which is what
Beckett says of the Proustian subject in the depredations of Time, its
“constant process of decantation” (Proust 4), with the hypothetical ret-
rospection like the interpretation of a dream.

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149
 Thus, what I think of as Beckettian is that which, whatever there
was before, in the “commodius vicus of recirculation”5 of the some-
thing taking its course, imperceptibly is, as at the “dream’s navel”
(Freud’s term), unnamably there, where in a collapse of temporality it
passes out of sight—it? no? nothing?—the deciphering of the dream,
which Beckett might insist was not a dream at all, but in the disremem-
bered remnants of what was or may be, the materiality of an absence
forever becoming itself. So, before we come to after, let me turn to
before, “Another trait its repetitiousness. Repeatedly with only minor
variants the same bygone. As if,” as Beckett wrote in Company, “willingly
by this dint to make it his.”6 Which is perhaps to think of after—though
there will be other variants—as a habit of apprehension, mainly a state
of mind, “Saying,” as in “Faux Départs,” “Now where is he, no,” even
with nothing there, “Now he is here” (272).
To be sure, there was considerable talk about nothing before Beck-
ett came on the scene, with his nothing to be done, which became the
anomalous grounds of a political activism that—around our ‹rst
attempt to do it, there in San Francisco nearly half a century ago—I’ve
written about before: the apparently purposeless waiting that, before
the Days of Rage, became the model of passive resistance. “Because I
do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not
hope to turn”7—here the voice, as you may know, is neither mine nor
Beckett’s, but T. S. Eliot’s, not quite at the still point, but just before he
entered the church, declaring himself a classicist in literature and a roy-
alist in politics. If the variants of the repetitiveness in their equivocating
momentum are not exactly a form of activism, what we tend to forget is
that Eliot had been much admired by those on the political left, even
the radicals of The New Masses, when he gave us a devastating critique of
modernity, as in The Waste Land, which they read as bourgeois reality. If
he was, even then, seeking the peace that passeth understanding, “Shan-
tih shantih shantih” (67), a transcendental form of nothingness, he
came to that by way of the nothing that with hysteria in the bygone
keeps repeating itself:

Nothing again nothing.

“Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
“Nothing?”

The autistic intensity of that obsessional nothing, its self-punishing iter-

ation, would seem to be the exacerbated condition of what Beckett later

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called, in his essay on Proust, “the science of af›iction” (Proust 4), about
which you could also say—whether “in rats’ alley / Where the dead
men lost their bones” (Eliot 55) or in the “thousand small delibera-
tions” protracting “the pro‹t of their chilled delirium” (Eliot 33)—that
nothing came of nothing in the nothing to be done.
As for the ef‹cacy of art in that delirium, as in the non sequiturs of
the tramps in Godot, the thousand small deliberations in the vicissitudes
of waiting, where “Thinking is not the worst” or even “to have thought,”
if you could somehow remember, having forgotten the very beginning,
“The very beginning of WHAT?,”8 what you were saying when,
Wittgenstein remarked—with reservations about the causal when the
problem is conceptual—“In art it is hard to say anything as good as: say-
ing nothing.”9 But if that raises the question of whether saying is
doing—as in the “Closed place” of Beckett’s “Fizzle 5,” where “There
is nothing but what is said. Beyond what is said there is nothing,” while,
with its alienated millions,“What goes on in the arena is not said”10—it
was W. H. Auden who might have been speaking for Beckett when he
said, backing away from the arena, or the early politics in his poetics,
that art changes nothing, but it at least changes that.
He might have added, however, that, in the changing of nothing
there might also be changes in art, as there certainly were after the incur-
sion of Beckett, not only upon the theater, as in Peter Brook’s King Lear
or, about the same time, my own—but on other modes of performance
and performance sites, as well as the emergence of hybrids in the visual
arts and music, and now in digitality, where the absences and the noth-
ingness may be of another order. So it is with That Brainwave Chick, Paras
Kaul, sitting in a chair, like Hamm, something dripping in her head, not
from the veins, or arteries, but from digital-system electrodes for neural
audio imaging of what’s not there when it is, that is, another virtual
world. Or there’s the cyborgian dystopia of Remote Host, a recent com-
puter animation by Katya Davar, with its giddy balloon over a Beckett-
ian landscape which, impeccably rendered by the intuitive graphic inter-
face that inspired Microsoft’s Windows, needs only Didi and Gogo to
attend to the whisper, the rustle, the voices all speaking at once, in the
bleakly alluring nowhere with its woefully lea›ess tree.
As for the emergence of conceptual art, back in the 1960s, that too
was of another order, where everything seemed to be absent, no ‹gures,
no tree, no nothing, except the deliberations, what it is to have thought,
about what it is to be art, which turned out to be not object or image but
context, as if thinking made it so. If art only exists conceptually, it was
given de‹nition by Joseph Kosuth’s Art as Idea as Idea, which, in white

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www.Ebook777.com
print on a black ‹eld, consists of the dictionary de‹nitions of “Idea,”
beginning with the Greek “idein . . . , to see” and ending with “the Phil n
ideatum, a thing that, in fact, answers to the idea of it, whence ‘to ideate’,
to form in, or as an, idea,” and during the course of ideation through
permutations in other languages: ideal, idealism, idée ‹xe. Or as if the ‹xe
were seeking a site, as with another “work” by Kosuth, Matter in General,
it turns up with block-lettered words on a billboard (in a gamut of
abstraction from RESINS to UNIVERSE) out in an open ‹eld, trans-
lating from the conceptual or placing it, thus, as site-speci‹c art.11 In the
closed places or arenas of such art—“Place consisting [maybe] of an
arena and a ditch,” as Beckett says in the ‹fth Fizzle, with an ominous
impassivity: “No interest. Not for imagining,” the millions there, “six
times smaller than life” (236)—it’s as if the idea doesn’t materialize until
it determines where it is, putting in abeyance for the moment the dimen-
sions of the site, which might be considerably larger than the mound of
Happy Days in which Winnie is up to her diddies; or even than the
›attened cylinder of “The Lost Ones,” if not its “omnipresence as
though every separate square centimeter were agleam of the some
twelve million of total surface” (207). Which is what—that prospect of
“agleam”—keeps the auratic alive, as if from the lower depths, in the
age of deconstruction. “For in the cylinder alone are certitudes to be
found and without nothing but mystery” (216). As for deconstruction,
it might also be remembered that it also came after Beckett, but as if he
had predicated the Derridean writing before the letter that, somehow
avant la lettre, would surely reverse itself, while the critique of represen-
tation with its scourge of the scopophilic—and thus what we think of as
theater—would not deter the “unceasing eyes” (212) or “questing eyes”
(220) that “without nothing but mystery” approached in the bed of the
cylinder “clear-cut mental or imaginary frontiers invisible to the eye of
›esh” (216).
Whatever those ubiquitous eyes, all eyes, ‹nd there, in the dire vast
of the cylinder, the charting of location here, entangled as there with
language, is a matter of reading signs, which is to say—as if repeating
another bygone, the structuralism of Saussure—situating the signi‹er
within the semiotic system. Manifold, tautological, interminable, it is a
system of multiple discourses, from the political to the aesthetic, all
informing “what ‘it’ can be said to be,”12 as one critic wrote about what,
like the zones of the cylinder, “if this notion is maintained” (223), is pre-
sumably site-speci‹c. Say what you will about it, in Beckett that “it,”
caught up as it is in discourse, seems not merely conceptual but also
ontological, and for the metonymic moment can almost drive you out

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of your mind: not that, this, not this, that, or in block letters call it IT,
WHAT it? (damn all pronouns!) before it disappears, like—though it
seems on another scale entirely, far beyond the scope of a ‹zzle—
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, with its commodious Viconian shape, a
major site (or is it arena?), which in the Great Salt Lake of Utah is under-
water now. And for those who have been there, having seen the pho-
tographs, looking for it, it’s as if space itself extended through the long
solemnity of time, “All sides endlessness earth sky as one no sound no
stir.” If the vanishing occurred, shockingly, before Smithson had antic-
ipated, there was also—as he thought in archaeological rather than his-
torical time—the expectation of attrition over aeons, as if Beckett had
written the scenario at the very beginning of “Lessness”: “Ruins true
refuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind” (197).
It’s no accident, then, that in the “ultramundane margins” around
the “four blocks of print” in the visual layout of Smithson’s essay,
“Quasi-In‹nities and the Waning of Space,” he quotes the passage from
Beckett’s essay on Proust about the constant process of decantation,
after speaking of “actuality” as a sort of Beckettian pause when, as a void
between events, nothing is happening. “In art,” he says in one of the
blocks, “action is always becoming inertia, but this inertia has no
ground to settle on except the mind, which is as empty as actual time.”13
There is a quotation from Cage’s Silence on one side and images of de
Kooning and Pollock paintings on the other, but in what Smithson says
of action becoming inertia in its movement through empty time, it’s as
if he were describing (with one omission I will come to) the dramaturgy
of Beckett, which, whatever the drama was left to be, seemed inclined
to make it less, and at its most reductive nothing more than (a) Breath.
Again, this is far from the magnitudes associated with Smithson,
who eventually thought of the monumental and, even through the
ineluctability of entropic waste, was always imagining more. He started
smaller, of course, but elsewhere he refers to his early Cryosphere, in
which mirrors were built into a hexagonal lattice containing ice crystals,
magnifying, minifying, moving through multiplication in an “ambigu-
ous ›ux,” like a version of Endgame I saw the inmates rehearsing at
Tegel Prison in Berlin, with seven Hamms and seven Clovs re›ected
through re›ections around a wading pool. The Cryosphere was a sort of
prototype of the expanded site or “self-canceling” system that Smith-
son calls “a surd area,” which, though it seems to fold tautologically back
upon itself, is nevertheless, he says, “beyond tautology . . . not really
beyond, there’s no beyond,” and with logic suspended too, the surd
defeats “any idea of any kind of system”14—the idea for which, how-

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153
ever, we later learn in a footnote, was mainly derived from The Unnam-
able.
Putting aside playwrights, from Pinter and Mamet to Sarah Kane or
the Egyptian Taw‹k al-Hakim, whose Fate of a Cockroach is a dialogue of
inconsequence with metaphysical intimations, about the struggle of a
cockroach to get out of a bathtub, to Chinese Nobel Prize winner Gao
Xingjian, whose plays bring to the politics of exile, through a version of
lessness, the scruple of Zen, Smithson was hardly the only artist to have
speci‹cally picked up on Beckett. This was apparent in my own experi-
ence with artists in San Francisco, who almost never went to the the-
ater, or pretty much disdained it as a form that was retarded, all the
more because of the drama, which even if subject to the Brechtian A-
effect, was still predictably mimetic and not suf‹ciently surd, never
mind absurd, “quaquaquaqua,” where “for reasons unknown no matter
what matter the facts are there and considering what is more much
more grave,” there seems no system to cancel, and if also no beyond,
the matter still “un‹nished,” as at the end of Lucky’s speech (Godot 29).
We were already doing work that was considered avant-garde, but it
wasn’t really until Waiting for Godot and Endgame that an array of visual
artists became engaged with other productions, quite explicitly then
because they began to design for our theater. As for myself, paradoxi-
cally, it was during this period that I was thinking of leaving the theater,
because—through inclinations partially nurtured by directing Beckett,
and images, objects, aspects of the work: the silences, pauses, the metic-
ulous mathematics of an antiaesthetic, the timings down to the second
or “(Smooth grey rectangle 0.70m. × 2m.),” and then, as if painted by Brice
Marden or in›ected by Robert Ryman, “No shadow. Colour: none. All
grey. Shades of grey”; in short, “Forgive my stating the obvious” (Ghost
Trio 248), with correlatives in the other arts—I was far more interested
in what was happening there, and in alternative modes of performance.
If what was emerging in the art world, particularly visual culture,
but in the newer music too—from the “noise” in Cage’s silence to the
longing in Feldman’s durations to the sustained repetitiveness of Terry
Riley’s middle C, its preordained cyclicism—corresponded in strategies
to what we see on stage in Beckett, it included the “energy-drain” in the
action of inertia, which caused Smithson to write elsewhere of “the ›at
surface, the banal, the empty, the cool, blank after blank,” in short, the
blank planes of an art “going nowhere,”15 and which, in its “lugubrious
complexity,” is enlivened by “a new consciousness of the vapid and the
dull” (13). These were qualities, of course, invoked by those who were
puzzled or even outraged by the earliest productions of Beckett. What

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may have been missing, however, in the conceptual substance of the
artists referred to by Smithson in “Entropy and the New Monuments”
(Flavin, Judd, Lichtenstein, LeWitt, Morris, Thek) was, along with the
poignancy of an unpurgeable nostalgia, the residual metaphysics in the
diminuendo of being, the mourning in the entropic, so endemic to
Beckett, or what even in the dominion of nothing always inclined
toward lessness—“Blank planes touch close sheer white all gone from
mind” (“Lessness” 197)—but was somehow quite enough, whatever it
may have been. And so it is, even silence: “Too much silence is too
much. Or it’s my voice too weak at times. The one that comes out of
me. So much for the art and craft” (“Enough” 186).
But what we have in the art and craft, suffused as it is with nostal-
gia—“More and more. All was,” as at the end of “Enough” (192)—is
what might be considered, through the facet-planes of the impasse that,
oxymoronically, makes Beckett postmodern, the last of the modernists,
for whom what can never be anymore, maybe, when remembered,
really couldn’t have been. In the visual arts, modernism was in the
1950s—when at The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco we turned to
Beckett’s plays—still the historical and critical matrix of the major
forms of art, as with the abstract expressionists, whose erasure of the
‹gure, or nonobjectivity, took place in “an arena,” as Harold Rosenberg
called it, where “action painting,” was in its performativity “not a pic-
ture but an event,”16 yet still an assertion of valued identity rather than
a testament to nothing. Things were moving in that direction, however,
when the painters and sculptors sponsored by Clement Greenberg, and
later by Michael Fried—whose “Art and Objecthood” was an obdurate
resistance to the theatricality taking over painting and sculpture17—
were challenged by artists as diverse as Jasper Johns, Richard Hamilton,
and Joseph Beuys, as well as the Pop Art that, in restoring the ‹gure,
enlivened emptiness, or brought the notion of nothing, as in exchange
value, into the image of commodi‹cation. If there was a certain equivo-
cation in such art about being commodi‹ed itself, the equivocation dis-
appeared into the phenomenon of Andy Warhol, who seemed to be
painting next to nothing when he did his Campbell Soups, as if willingly
by this dint the repetitiveness was no longer a bygone, but the mar-
ketable immediacy of the evacuated thing itself.
Meanwhile, the sophistication of advertising is such today that it
can even deploy with ambiguity a sort of Beckettian nostalgia, as design-
ers manage to bring, through fantasized images of duration and loss, a
sense of dispossession to fashion models on the runway, while endow-
ing certain objects with a patina of cryptic time, even now in the tearing

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155
of jeans, making a sales pitch out of the memory of what never really
was, or was it? in a maybe guarded recall of the dubiously recoverable,
the loss of which is a question better not to ask. (Especially at those
prices.) Or there may be with a certain jaundice, confessing that “all is
false,” as if drawing on Texts for Nothing, a sense of “no way out,” and in
a reality that’s factitious with plaintiveness aside, letting ourselves “be
dupes,” as Beckett wrote of the nothing to understand, except no more
denial, “dupes of every tone and tense, until it’s done, all past and done,
and the voices cease,” super‹cial or profound, “it’s only voices, only
lies” (Texts 3:109). As for the market or the shopping mall, if they hardly
exist in Beckett—unless in the “tattered syntaxes of Jolly and Draeger
Praeger Draeger” of “All Strange Away” (169)—when we encounter
objects, their melancholy might be ascribed to their never being so
desirable as to achieve, shabby or makeshift as they are, the ignominy of
commodi‹cation.
This was not a problem, however, to artists who, in 1986, were part
of an exhibition on reference and simulation in painting and sculpture,
the title of which was “Endgame,” the reference there, no question, pre-
cisely to Beckett. For Peter Halley, Sherrie Levine, and Philip Taaffe,
the commodi‹ed world is not only the context but the ceaselessly
reproductive source of their art, abstraction itself or simulation a thriv-
ing commodity, which is the absence of longing, even as they iconicize
emptiness, for anything like an existential void. As can also be seen in
the installations of Haim Steinbach and Jeff Koons—his vacuum clean-
ers, for instance, encased in plexiglass boxes—emptiness can be glam-
orized and even the void sold.18
It wasn’t so much the void, but the recursiveness of the language
and the extremes of human behavior that excited the video artist Bruce
Nauman in the work of Beckett. What attracted him ‹rst of all, like oth-
ers to this day, were the clownish types or gestures, from the Chap-
linesque of the tramps to Buster Keaton in Film, along with the inca-
pacity in the ashcans or the urns or up to its neck in the sand. Thus, in
Clown Torture (1987), there’s a ‹gure stressed out on one leg, and then—
as if with the carafe and cubes in Act without Words—forced to balance
two ‹sh bowls and a bucket of water, while shouting “No, no, no” and
“I’m sorry” to the nobody listening there. Even before that, in Slow
Angle Walk (1968), which was subtitled Beckett Walk, Nauman himself
performed a series of impaired or spastic Clov-like movements, includ-
ing a stiff leg up in the air, with his body swivelling around to get the leg
back on the ›oor. Nauman has also done environmental videos in
which the spectator is made wary of what’s not (yet) there or otherwise

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demoralized by a babble of disjunct words, as in the Deep Sleep of John
Jesurun (1985), where a sea of associations (“deep in what sleep
already?”) going on incessantly suggests the elliptical stream of words
from Beckett’s disembodied Mouth.

But to go back to when happenings and installation art were ‹rst mak-
ing the scene, in the work of Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, and Claes Old-
enburg: their in›uence was such, eventually, that there seemed to be a
virtual moratorium on painting. Or you might see the virtual equivalent
of the picture in Beckett’s Endgame that—though looked at bitterly, sar-
donically, by Clov, without letting us see it—is otherwise turned to the
wall, as it might very well be in the send-up gallery of Ben Vauthier or
the rubbish-strewn cellar of Terry Fox, which might have been swept
up by Beuys and, in an impeccably minimalist glass-enclosed case,
which might have been done by Koons, exhibited with the broom. This
was the period when Yoko Ono did her Painting to Be Stepped On (which,
with loose fabric on the surface, is actually an assemblage) and Robert
Rauschenberg exhibited, in Trophy III (for Jean Tingueley) a see-through
picture frame in which the picture was replaced by a miniature piece of
bedspring, a swag of knotted cloth, and up one side of the chipped and
abraded frame, with small objects protruding in, a thin ladder that if
larger might have been used in the cylinder by the lost ones struggling
to climb—the art object rather elegant, like some stagings of Beckett, in
its impoverishment. Nor was Beckett alone in denying us a look at what,
perhaps, was not really there to see, though if it was, its visual status was
like that of the mechanically drawn lines of Piero Manzoni, rolled up in
a tube, stored, and for those all eyes, unavailable to be seen.
At the same time, in Italy, there was the arte povera of Jannis Kounel-
lis, Mario Merz, and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Their constructions from
any material whatever (animal, vegetable, mineral) conveyed, like
Gogo’s boots, the pathetic tree, the three-legged toy dog in Endgame,
Krapp’s spool or banana, a tailor’s scissors out of the ›ies or the littered
stage of Breath, the dull and vapid absurdity of a reality that—whether
dissolving in ‹ve seconds, two seconds, two seconds, ‹ve seconds, or in
. . . but the clouds . . . was replenished or augmented by “something else,
more . . . rewarding, such as . . . such as . . . cube roots, for example”—
seemed increasingly, nonetheless, to amount to nothing, “that MINE,”
undermined, yet issuing forth again (261), a view that sustained itself
even as prices went up on this impoverished art, as Beckett’s stock rose
into canonization with his Nobel Prize.
If there are artists, like Steinbach and Koons, who’ve created a

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quite consciously super‹cial aesthetic of commodity culture, there are
those like Christian Boltanski who have with layers of impacted history
aestheticized waste and impoverishment, even as Beckett has done with
decrepitude, but with affects exceeding any aesthetic, or perhaps com-
pounded by it. In Reserve (1989), Boltanski littered half a ton of ragged
and smelly clothes on a gallery ›oor. The mute shamble of a presence
created by the cheap material, showing signs of long use, was due to its
having been worn by now-anonymous poor children. What was con-
veyed by the massive heap—this, too, an “impossible heap” (Endgame
1), the muteness only disturbed when gallery viewers shuf›ed
through—was a certain eeriness, a deadliness, like that of a mass grave,
which, through the evasive (now commonplace) laughter, might be in
the wings of Godot. Or never mind the wings, but as if it were reeking
somehow from their own smelly clothes, Didi and Gogo sense it, right
there on the stage—“Where are all these corpses from?”—or maybe
out in the audience, the maw of absence there: “A charnel-house! A
charnel-house!” At which you don’t have to look, but “You can’t help
looking” (Godot 41).
If there is voyeurism in Boltanski, compulsively solicited, as with
the tearings at caecal walls, the slow killings in the skull, “the fornica-
tions with corpses” (“Calmative” 61), all eyed in Beckett’s prose, it is
with the remembrance of what at some unseeable limit makes those
questing eyes go still, as after a rare erection in the cylinder, “the spec-
tacle . . . remembered of frenzies prolonged in pain,” which, when
“desisting and deathly still,” verges on the obscene. Whereupon,
“Stranger still at such times, [the eyes] ‹x their stare on the void or on
some old abomination as for instance other eyes and then the looks
exchanged by those fain to look away” (220). As for the logorrheic
rehearsal of the egregious comedy of the plays—like the scene where, if
the tree is up for a hanging, the tramp might get an erection—the void
is there still to be stared at, and the abomination, prolonged as it was in
pain, the unspeakably obscene. So it is when, sitting there in the dark,
staring at the stage, no looks exchanged in the audience, there is the
whisper, the murmur, the rustle, and those voices all speaking at once.
Meanwhile, if you didn’t look away, there was surely an af‹nity
between the ›ea-market compositions of certain artists, or wasteland
installations, and the bleak, forlorn, or found-object landscapes of
Beckett: aside from the boots and radishes, or Lucky’s empty bag, the
mound, the mouth, the urns, the nine-step passage of Footfalls, the stan-
dard lamp with its skull-sized globe, zero out the window or behind the
hollow wall, or “facing other windows,” the old rocker, mother rocker,

reality principles
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“other only windows” (Rockaby 277, 280) looking out on an empty quad.
“Area: square. Length of side: 6 paces”—that might have been the
space in which Marina Abramović and her former partner Ulay, when
they were still together, paced (a duo instead of four), “On the basis of
one pace per second and allowing for time lost at angles and centre
approximately 25 minutes,” at ‹rst crossing paths “without rupture of
rhythm, [but] if rupture accepted” (Beckett asks in stage directions:
“how best exploit?”), they’d exploit by increasing the pace, two bodies
repeatedly passing (but without the gowns and cowls, naked as not in
Quad), gradually touching each other, then colliding at high speed, per-
haps at quad’s E, “supposed a danger zone,” and then they’d pace, col-
lide, pace, collide—no instruments necessary, “All possible percussion
combinations given,” until they “complete their courses” (Quad 291–
93), as they did in utter exhaustion, in 1976 at the Venice Biennale,
“Time 58 minutes.”19 In their work, as in Beckett, duration was also an
issue, and when Abramović and Ulay stared at each across a table for 16
hours—with “Thoughts, no, not thoughts. Profounds of mind” or in
that commodius vicus, as desideratum, “mindlessness”—not only the
table (“say 8′ × 4′”) might have been borrowed, but the profounds too,
from Ohio Impromptu (285, 288).
Yet these performance events, transmuted as they were into rituals
of high risk, were also meant to give access to otherwise forbidden con-
sciousness or, without self-jeopardy, consciousness unattainable. But
for Abramović particularly, there is also in the danger zone, as if she
were listening to Hamm when he insisted we use our heads, a residuum
of the reality principle: thus, on this earth, there might be a sense of the
sacred, but without transformative powers. With a despair almost
beyond Beckett’s, who didn’t bother much with the sacred, except at
the furious thought of it, with the most disdainful humor, Abramović
said mournfully, “It is too late, the destruction is already such that the
world can no longer be ‘cured’. . . . Its destruction will continue,
inevitably. I only want to prepare people for the fact that we are all on a
dying planet and that we will all be destroyed. I see a chance or a possi-
bility of at least dying in union with the earth, at last grasping reality one
single time.”20 Grasping the possibility if not the reality, there was, in
her Relation Works with Ulay, an impetus toward the dissolution of
boundaries, psychic and sexual, with such intensity as to exhaust or
exceed the body, its capacity to withstand the ceaselessness of a singu-
larity entailed by two, as in the seeming binary of the tramps in Waiting
for Godot, one of whom would seem to exist only in the pulse of the
other, the waiting itself an endurance. Thus, in Breathing In / Breathing

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Out (1977) Abramović and Ulay relinquished autonomy, as they’d done
of course before, but this time by sharing a single breath. Nostrils
blocked, they pressed mouths together and synchronized their breath-
ing, she inhaling air exhaled by him, he breathing the air exhaled by her.
With ever-increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide, they breathed
to the point of asphyxiation. Time: 19 minutes.
If there is in its sadomasochism an intimate theater of Cruelty, the
same might be said of Beckett’s. For all the compassion there, or, in the
inconsolably deep structure of ungrounded dispossession, the pain of
unnoticeability—like the tramp with the Boy, or the ‹gure in the urn:
“Am I as much as . . . being seen?” (Play 157)—there is with fastidious
understatement, or aphasic compulsion, a Nietzschean side of Beckett,
drawn like Artaud to cruelty, and the discom‹ting pleasures of pain.
Sometimes the unnoticeability can give that pleasure too, as in the
unpublicized disappearances performed by Jochem Gerz and—having
announced he would disappear, which he proceeded to do with no one
seeing—Chris Burden, whose body art was otherwise known, like Gina
Pane, Stuart Brisley, or Rudolf Schwarzkogler, for self-in›icted cruel-
ties, sometimes excruciating. As Nietzsche remarked, in The Genealogy of
Morals, “pleasure in cruelty is not really extinct today; only, given our
greater delicacy, that pleasure has had to undergo a certain sublimation
and subtlization, to be translated into imaginative and psychological
terms in order to pass muster before even the tenderest hypocritical
conscience.”21
If the sublimation, translated, is nowhere more imaginative than in
the plays and prose of Beckett, with subtleties unforeseen, in
Schwarzkogler’s case the subtlization was, in the extremity of its cruelty,
next to suicidal—which turned out to be a preface to what he actually
did, after the long rumor that he’d done it before, actually in perfor-
mance, by methodically slicing his penis. Here the implacability is what,
about certain mutilations, we may also remember in Beckett, both in
physical images and as damage to the psyche, in the crisis of identity
going back to Molloy.22
“And to tell the truth,” says the Molloy who speaks at the end of
the novel, “I not only knew who I was, but I had a sharper and clearer
sense of my identity than ever before, in spite of its deep lesions and the
wounds with which it was covered. And from this point of view I was
less fortunate than my other acquaintances. I am sorry if this last phrase
is not so happy as it might be. It deserved, who knows, to be without
ambiguity” (233). As it turns out, though they were not acquaintances of
Beckett, there were certain artists in the period following on what we

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call the sixties (which was mostly the 1970s) who were only too ready to
do without the ambiguity. In that regard, with not even wounded van-
ity, they appropriated or canceled the iconic ‹gures of high modernism
by outright replication, thus undoing, presumably, the claims of the
modern to posing serious ontological and epistemological questions. In
this, they were taking a bypath from the practice of Beckett, where self-
re›exivity and a relentless self-canceling was a way out, by going com-
pulsively in, of the mortifying trap of identity—no less complicity with
hierarchy, power, and the ideology of essence. In the act of replication,
as in the painting of Peter Halley, who negated the factitious content of
geometric abstraction, there was something like a secular conversion, a
purgation of the modernist sin of a valorized self-indulgence, the vain-
glory of an identity celebrated in art, as the prerogative of genius: a Pol-
lock, a Rothko, a Reinhardt, and—particularly unnerving, if haunting to
Halley—the auratic zip in a Barnett Newman.
If formalists could argue that abstraction and nonobjectivity, the
absence of narrative image, focused in the visual arts what is intrinsic,
the sort of replicated abstraction practiced by Halley turned the mod-
ernist argument on its head: “art survives now,” wrote Thomas Crow in
1986, “by virtue of being weak,”23 a conviction linked in its way to the dis-
missal of authorial presence by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. It
is that art which was featured in the exhibition “Endgame,” though
Beckett’s weakness and the manic obsession of its re›exivity, is some-
thing else again, and again, and again, aphasically so, restoring essence
despite him, no mistaking identity, even when he says, especially when
he says, as he did in “First Love,” “it is painful to be no longer oneself,
even more painful if possible than when one is” (31). No doubt, the
weakness is weakened even more by “the saturated, unending long-
ing”24 that Morton Feldman admired and, with the vanity of remem-
brance, like the failing memory of a self, tried to bring to his music. As
he remarked in a book of his own, “we do not hear what we hear . . . ,
only what we remember,”25 the question being—as Clark Lunberry, a
student of mine wrote, in a just-completed dissertation—“how we
might hear that, as if, once-removed, the remembered sounds,
decayed,” as in The Unnamable, “might somehow be made to return (in
some ghostly manner) to sound, perhaps inaudibly, in their own
resounding absence.”26 Which is what Feldman tried to achieve in his
String Quartet II, through what seemed in performance the bodily
fatigue of the musicians, as if it were, indeed, the orchestration of the
unending, or as Beckett said of “the way out” in Texts for Nothing 9, “isn’t
it like a duo, or a trio, yes,” not quite a quartet, true, but what variety,

The Commodius Vicus of Beckett

161
what monotony, “what vicissitudes within what changelessness” (137).
And given the nature of the vicissitudes, while there are plenty of ana-
logues to Beckett, and imitators too, as well as revisionist productions
that—unbecomingly to his modesty, he also tried to stop—who can
mistake a Beckett, even when deconstructed.
There is much more one could say about art after Beckett, its gen-
res and speciation, or that which is more or less explicitly in its image.
But about the unmistakable endurance of that which, in the before or
after, remains inarguably his, one may say, as the narrator does of him-
self in the early story “Assumption” (published in 1929), that for all of
Beckett’s recurrent talk of dying—not even a slow death, but no sooner
one is born, the (actual) death of the author, that “timeless parenthesis,”
there is in everything he wrote “the unreasonable tenacity with which he
shrank from dissolution” (6). And if we were (as is customary in cultural
studies today) to historicize this predilection, it might be said that what
Beckett pushes to its extreme—or with the body, no body, to its
extremities, “of so exquisite a quality as to exclude all thought of suc-
cour,” as in the story “The End” (97)—is not exactly the end, but the
beginning of the end which is our history, which is another way of
de‹ning modernism, among its vicissitudes being recurring announce-
ments of its death.
Thus, the primary emotion of the modern, even when making it
new and always subject to change, is mourning, which would seem to
have reached its nadir or apotheosis in the lamentations of Beckett,
though one hears much about it now in theory, as one does still in the
arts, if mixed with degrees of indifference, or even exultation, about
modern being the name for what’s not possible anymore. When appro-
priation art appeared on the scene, as in the “Endgame” exhibition,
there were those, like Yves Alain-Bois, who took to task the “manic
mourning,” or “pathological mourning,” of such art, reminding us in a
Freudian way that mourning has to be worked through; and so the end,
endlessly so, without, however, elaborate mechanisms of defense, so
that—in what seems like a paradox of endlessness—there would be a
‹nal “settling [of] our historical task: the dif‹cult task of mourning”
(“Endgame” catalogue 47). Dif‹cult, no doubt, even absurd or
appalling, but the notion of a nonpathological mourning might be
incomprehensible to Beckett, who was for a time in psychoanalysis, but
as if, in his obsessional case, to alleviate the working through. No
sooner does he say, as in “Faux Départs,” “Never ask another ques-
tion,” then imagination dead imagines “a place, then someone in it, that
again,” and the talking cure seems to consist of his “talking to himself

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the last person” (272). As for mourning as pathology, if he couldn’t
quite absorb that, “never see, never ‹nd, no end, no matter” (273),
that’s because it’s not only a matter of modernity but closer to the
human condition, so long as one is suf‹ciently moved by the immitiga-
ble impasse of the human itself, which can neither be painted, sculp-
tured, installed, caught on a videodisc, nor, in or out of the theater—no
less with “performativity,” the going thing in theory, the solace of “bod-
ies that matter” (it used to be “bodies without organs”)—somehow per-
formed away. “No future in this. Alas, yes.”27 Which, if the annulment
of every no, leaves us with nothing yet.

notes

1. Samuel Beckett, “Appendix I: Variations on a ‘Still’ Point,” in The Complete

Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1995) 267; unless oth-
erwise speci‹ed, all references in the text to Beckett’s prose will be from this vol-
ume.
2. Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous
Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1883) 21.
3. Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove, n.d.) 4.
4. Samuel Beckett, Footfalls, in Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove, 1984)
240; all references to Beckett’s shorter plays are from this volume.
5. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1955) 3.
6. Samuel Beckett, Company, in Nohow On: Three Novels (New York: Grove,
1992) 10.
7. T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday, in Selected Poems (New York: Harvest/HAJ, 1964)
83; all references to Eliot are to this volume.
8. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954) 41–42.
9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1980) 3.
10. “Fizzle 5,” in Complete Short Prose 236.
11. These examples of Joseph Kosuth’s conceptualism are in Ursula Meyer,
Conceptual Art (New York: Dutton, 1972) 153–54.
12. Nick Kaye, Site-Speci‹c Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (London:
Routledge, 2000) 1.
13. Robert Smithson, “Quasi-In‹nities and the Waning of Space,” in The Col-
lected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 35.
14. “Four Conversations between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson”
(1969–70), in Smithson, The Collected Writings 198–99.
15. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments” (1966), in The Col-
lected Writings 11.
16. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in Tradition of the
New (New York: Horizon, 1959) 25.
17. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology,
comp. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968) 116–47.

The Commodius Vicus of Beckett

163
 18. See David Joselit, “Modern Leisure,” in Endgame: Reference and Simulation in
Recent Painting and Sculpture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986) 71–89. The exhibition
was at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
19. Paul Schimmel, “Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object,” in
Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–79 (London: Thames and Hud-
son, 1998) 101.
20. Marina Abramović, quoted by Linda Weintraub, Art on the Edge and Over:
Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society 1970s–1990s, with essays by Arthur
Danto and Thomas McEvilley (Litch‹eld, CT: Art Insights, 1996) 64.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans.
Francis Golf‹ng (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1956) 200.
22. Samuel Beckett, Molloy: A Novel, trans. Patrick Bowles, in collaboration
with Beckett (New York: Grove, 1955) 233.
23. Thomas Crow, “The Return of Hank Herron,” in Endgame: Reference and
Simulation 16; italics mine.
24. Morton Feldman, quoted by Everett C. Frost, “The Note Man and the
Word Man,” in Samuel Beckett and Music, ed. Mary Bryden (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1998) 51.
25. Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton
Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000) 209.
26. Clark Lunberry, “Situating Silence, Articulating Absence: Sites of Time
and the Object (Lessons) of Art,” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee,
2002, chap. 4, n.p.
27. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, in Nohow On 91.

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 ten

Among the Deepening Shades

The Beckettian Moment(um) and the Brechtian Arrest

3
It may not be, as Nietzsche said in The Birth of Tragedy, that illusion as
the “re›ection of eternal contradiction, begetter of all things,” will lead
to “a radiant vision of pure delight, a rapt seeing through wide-open
eyes.”1 But if, as Freud thought, illusion has a future, with civilization
and its discontents, it must surely include certain illusions about illusion
and the means by which it is produced—what Brecht called the “appa-
ratus,” through which society absorbs “whatever it needs to reproduce
itself,” and which imposes its “views as it were incognito.”2 If one may
speak not only of the illusion of reality but the reality of illusion, what
shadows Brecht’s critique is the question that prompted Nietzsche and
has always haunted the theater—synoptically there in Beckett’s Breath,
or in the “Mere eye. No mind” of the “[Repeat play]” of Play3—as to
whether the illusion produced is a doubled over redundancy, now you
see it now you don’t, mere eye insuf‹cient, whether dazzled or baf›ed,
distracted by the gaze, in a world made out of illusion.
The canonical drama dwells on that, and despite the deconstruction
that was—after the Berliner Ensemble came to Paris in 1954, shortly
after the appearance of Waiting for Godot—a partial outgrowth of
Brechtian alienation, there is a residue in our thought of the resonance
of illusion: all the world’s a stage, life is a dream, the insubstantial
pageant fading . . . into the “precession of simulacra,” as Jean Bau-
drillard would say, when he announced the end of the real,4 or into the
Society of the Spectacle, which, as Guy Debord had said in the wake of
the sixties, “is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes
an image.”5 Nor is that any the less illusory for being thought of as com-
modi‹cation in a factitious economy of invisible power. In a notorious
passage of his Short Organum Brecht wrote scathingly of the capitulation
to such power in tragic drama: to the gods who, beyond criticism, pun-
ished Oedipus, and of “Shakespeare’s great solitary ‹gures bearing on
their breast the star of their fate,” life becoming obscene as they col-
lapse, “those dreamlike ‹gures up on the stage,” while the representa-
tion of their fate remains, through the “irresistible force of their futile
and deadly outbursts” (BT 189), also beyond criticism. Despite the force

165
of Brecht’s remarks, irresistibly absorbed into an almost relentless cri-
tique of tragedy in poststructuralism, feminism, the new historicism,
those dreamlike ‹gures persist in thought, sometimes so vividly if dis-
tressingly that what we took to be illusion seems more like reality prin-
ciple, with demysti‹cation itself drawn into its service.
So it was with Derrida, at the end of an essay in which he virtually
identi‹ed with the ideas of Artaud, whose theater of cruelty, as the
beginning of the essay insisted, “is not a representation. It is life itself, in
the extent to which life is unrepresentable.”6 Whatever life may be or, if
all the world is not a stage, however theater emerges from whatever it is
it is not—reality? what’s left of the real? what is presumably not theater—
Derrida had to concede that “to think the closure of representation is to
think the tragic: not as the representation of fate, but as the fate of rep-
resentation. Its gratuitous and baseless necessity” (250). As for thinking
the tragic in Beckett, or its leftover symptoms there, his solitary ‹gures
may not be great, in their futile and deadly outbursts, whether Pozzo,
Hamm, or the Mouth, or without any ‹gures at all the “recorded vagi-
tus” of Breath, the two identical cries (211), but he would certainly
understand the gratuitousness and the baselessness, with the declension
of necessity into “Something is taking its course,”7 instead of a star on
the breast, inside the breast “a big sore” (Endgame 32), or something
dripping in the head—“A heart, a heart in my head” (18)—or, even
more alarmingly, a vagrant ›ea in the crotch.
If such, with painful laughter, is the Beckettian fate of representa-
tion, let us go back for a moment to commodi‹cation: while the mar-
kets are described by distinguished economists as being in an essentially
unstable state of “dynamic disequilibrium,” controlled if at all by an
“invisible hand,” the spectacle is still being rehearsed in critical theory,
along with the apparatus of representation, as an “economy of death,”
as if, Hamletically, it were ghosting itself. Preempting the ghost was, of
course, the initiating prospect of Brechtian method, by strategic repeti-
tion or quotation re‹guring representation, breaking down the appara-
tus by turning it against itself, thus producing a dynamic disequilibrium
for subversive purposes, supplanting the invisible hand with a signify-
ing body or an acutely visible sign, the gestus, or what Frederic Jameson
calls “a properly Brechtian materialism.”8 In a curious turn of his own,
Jameson sees the source of that materialism now in the Taoism of the
Chinese Brecht, and he seems to be invoking another kind of ghostli-
ness when he says of the secular and skeptical, disruptively cynical
Brecht that a “hermeneutics of suspicion” is suspended “for the meta-
physics that have become impossible” (12)—by which Jameson means,

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in his own disappointment with the future of an illusion, the meta-
physics in the teleology of Marxist utopianism. It is, to be sure, the
metaphysics that have become impossible which, with a dynamic of
attrition in the disequilibrium, accounts for the repetitiveness in Beck-
ett, like a pulse of dispossession or momentum of deferral that, in the
permutations of absence, seems not at all strategic, or if so, vain, ill seen
ill said, which is itself a kind of ghosting, of what, not sure: “No longer
anywhere to be seen. Nor by the eye of ›esh nor by the other. Then as
suddenly there again. Long after. So on”9—approaching in the warped
teleology of its compulsive vanity, aphasic, unutterable, nohow on, the
asymptotic mirage of whatever it is, or was, “that time you went back
that last time to look,”10 even if it wasn’t, “no better than shades, no
worse if it wasn’t” (That Time 231), the impossible thing itself.
As to what you went back to look for, Brecht would agree with his
friend Walter Benjamin that “nothing that has ever happened should be
regarded as lost for history,” but Benjamin would seem to encompass
Beckett as well as Brecht when he says, in his “Theses on the Philoso-
phy of History,” that “the past can be seized only as an image which
›ashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen
again.” This is not a matter of recognizing, as in an older misguided his-
toricism, “the way it really was,” but rather of taking hold of “a memory
as it ›ashes up at a moment of danger.”11 But the danger for Beckett is
that whatever ›ashes up is in “no time gone in no time,” which recurs
again and again in That Time (235), “from the ‹rst and last that time
curled up worm in slime when they lugged you out and wiped you off”
(230), without anything like the “temporal index by which,” as Ben-
jamin says in the “Theses,” the past “is referred to redemption” (256).
As for history, if it is not there in the “old style,” as Winnie might say of
the Portrait Gallery, “when was that,” in That Time, “there before your
eyes when they opened a vast oil black with age and dirt someone
famous in his time,” or “there in whatever thoughts you might be hav-
ing whatever scenes perhaps way back in childhood or the womb worst
of all or that old Chinaman long before Christ born with long white
hair,” then it is “just one of those things you kept making up to keep the
void out just another of those old tales to keep the void from pouring in
on top of you the shroud” (That Time 229–30). It may be that the tales,
the old tales, belong to “the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in histori-
cism’s bordello,” as Benjamin says (“Theses” 264), but the relay of
voices in That Time, “without solution of continuity” (227), the void
pouring in, the shroud, would seem to do what he wants, and what
Jameson quoting Benjamin attributes to Brecht, that is, “to blast open

Among the Deepening Shades

167
the continuum of history” (264). As it turns out, in a peculiar twist upon
the void, nobody does that better than the shrouded Hamm—making
metaphysics impossible too—when the shroud is taken off: “But what
in God’s name do you imagine? That the earth will awake in spring?
That the rivers and seas will run with ‹sh again? That there’s manna in
heaven still for imbeciles like you?” (Endgame 53).
We are endowed, Benjamin says, with “a weak Messianic power,” in
a “secret agreement” with the past (“Theses” 256), through which we
come to the present “as the ‘time of the now’ . . . shot through with
chips of Messianic time” (265). If there is the dying fall in Beckett that
suffuses the time of the now, the vehemence, when it erupts, seems
something more than weak, as when Hamm assures Clov, “with prophetic
relish,” that he will one day go blind too: “In‹nite emptiness will be all
around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t ‹ll it, and
there you’ll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe”
(Endgame 36), which may lack the luster of a Messianic chip but has its
history too. And if memory ›ashes up, it is out of the bottomless pit of
an incapacity to forget, if not history, the illusory promise of myth, and
so it is in the gray chamber when Clov stares at the wall. “The wall!”
rages Hamm, as if he had con›ated the Book of Daniel with the Pla-
tonic Cave, the archetypal site of illusion: “And what do you see on your
wall? Mene, mene? Naked bodies.” Clov: “I see my light dying” (12).
But speaking of danger and redemption in the light of that dying
light, as if the secret agreement were being made, and made again, by
those dreamlike ‹gures on stage with what, recurrently, is a ghost of the
past: “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” What was asked on
the ramparts of Hamlet (1.1.21)—and what I’ve written about before,
the illusive substance of theater, which does not exist if it does not
appear—became in the hollow of Endgame, “This . . . this . . . thing” (45),
while the nothing that came of nothing in pursuit of the thing itself
became the Beckettian premise: “Nothing to be done.”12 As for this
too, too solid ›esh—for all the talk of the body as discourse, words,
words, words, the words ›ying up, the body remaining below, naked
body, libidinal body, all the bodies that matter or, with its repetitive acts,
the body of “performativity”13—if it resolves into a dew, adieu, adieu, it
is born astride of a grave, the light gleaming an instant, then gone, with
maybe a forlorn sense, as always in Beckett, that it might have been
once or never—even when parodied, all the more poignant for that—a
visionary gleam: “Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look!
The sails of the herring ›eet! All that loveliness!” (Endgame 44). Or so it
was in Yeats, recalled in . . . but the clouds . . . , “when the horizon fades

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. . . or a bird’s sleepy cry . . . among the deepening shades.” Even in the
measured countdown, there on the video screen—“5 seconds. Dissolve to
M. 5 seconds. Fade out on M. Dark. 5 seconds” (SP 262)—we are still the
stuff of dreams, rounded to a sleep, though if dreams are wish
ful‹llment they may not feel as we wish, no more than the begged
appearance, “a begging of the mind, to her, to appear, to me,” by the
voice in the “little sanctum” of the ‹gure with “robe and skull,” and the
sleep may be dubious too, begging there in vain, “deep down into the
dead of night,” alienated in being, whether awake or asleep, and—even
with “break of day, to issue forth again” (260–61), voiding the little
sanctum—can we be sure of that?
Meanwhile, the question of vision persists through the eternal con-
tradiction that, even with eyes wide open in the dispensation of the
gaze, is more like a failure of the begetting in some perversion of sight.
Thus it is with the woman in Rockaby, “famished eyes / like hers / to see
/ be seen” (SP 279), among the “successive fades” that have replaced
the deepening shades—“Jet sequins to glitter when rocking” and pale
wood “polished to gleam” (273)—saying to herself when being rocked,
or in that othered, recorded voice, “time she stopped / time she stopped”
(277) till “the day came / in the end came” (278) and “dead one night /
in the rocker” and the rocker “rocking away” (280)—like O rocks in
Film, cringing “away from perceivedness” (SP 168) but not immune to
the gaze—“fuck life / stop her eyes / rock her off / rock her off,” but
even through the ending echo “coming to rest of rock” (Rockaby 282),
something is stirring still, what, or what where, not sure, since it seems
to escape perceivedness—and in all the texts for nothing, by whatever
number or name, it may only be an illusion but there appears no end to
that.
Nor to the various ways we think about it. If illusion commingles
with faith and, to all appearances, may be thought of as fantasy too, it
may also be, as in Brecht’s Galileo, with history taking its time, “con-
sciousness impatient for truth,” as Althusser said in an essay on the Pic-
colo Teatro and Brecht. Or it may be “the image of a consciousness of
a self living the totality of its world in the transparency of its own
myths.”14 As a function or necessity of the political, illusion may be
social construction or what, without knowing it, in the ether of ideol-
ogy, we have somehow come to believe. And while it is this, of course,
that would seem most germane to Brecht—whose “principal aim,” as
stated by Althusser, “is to produce a critique of the spontaneous ideol-
ogy in which men live” (144)—it is not quite where we will see certain
af‹nities with Beckett. That is more likely to occur with various degrees

Among the Deepening Shades

169
of subjectivity in the act of perception itself, despite the dramaturgical
gap between a critical arrest in the service of Verfremdung and somatic
immersion in the “science of af›iction,” where—as Beckett said in his
essay on Proust, a proleptic de‹nition of what infected his own
thought—“the poisonous ingenuity of Time” subjects the individual to
a “constant process of decantation,” which leaves it “innocuous, amor-
phous, without character.”15
Yet, while Brecht moved from the deobjecti‹ed characters of his
early plays to those in a more gestic solid state, we have to deal in his
work, as we do more egregiously in Beckett, with the perceptual status
or analytics of the performative body, from Galy Gay as a human ‹ght-
ing machine to Dumb Kattrin’s blinded eye, eye of ›esh, eye of prey, to
the predatory presence of the Inquisitor, alone, silent, stately, incising
an empty stage, bringing to Galileo the liabilities of perceivedness, as
with the swiveling light on the bodiless heads in the funeral urns of Play.
There are characters in Brecht who, like Anna Fierling, never miss
a trick but fail to see, though we are likely to ‹nd little in Brecht that, like
Beckett’s body parts or absent bodies, severely abstracting or dis‹gur-
ing space, not only direct but demoralize, even stigmatize perception, in
the stigma directing it even more: Winnie, up to her diddies in the
mound; a back, a bare foot, an arm, or even the “trace of a face”;16 or,
with “head bowed, grey hair,” the dreamer of Nacht und Träume and,
with the dreamt self, dreamt hands, palm upward, joined, gentle, those
dreamt commiserable hands, not like those in Catastrophe, with “‹brous
degeneration” (298), crippled to begin with and, speaking of a Brechtian
gestus, made to look like claws. If that suggests, affect aside, or because
of it, that there’s a chastening semiology in Beckett, it is not quite, even
in Catastrophe (dedicated to the imprisoned Havel), like Brecht’s point-
ing toward the action not-done through the action that is, deciphering
and exposing social cause. Yet it is possible to see in Catastrophe—its
exposure of the production apparatus, the director’s tyranny and the
assistant’s servility, what is pernicious and vitiating in the constructed
mise-en-scène—a more virulent critique of the theater itself than
almost anything staged in Brecht.
Meanwhile, if there is the “agony of perceivedness” (Film 165) there
is the wanting to be seen, or in the inquisitional light of Play something
equivocal about that: “Am I as much as . . . being seen?” With a slight-
est shift of accent (being seen, being seen) the issue of recognition passes
into the notion that, however unnerving it may be, “mere eye,” just the
gaze, to be looked at—“Just looking. At my face. On and off” (157)—
there is no being at all, nothing like identity, without being seen. Which

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is what Didi conveys when he advances on the Boy from Godot and
says, “(With sudden violence.) You’re sure you saw me, you won’t come
and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!” (59). Here, through the
stasis of the waiting, dispossession, desperate, is speaking for itself, as P
in Catastrophe does at the end, however minimally, when he raises his
head and confronts the audience with more than a trace of a face.
Which is something else again than the willing anonymity of the agita-
tors in Brecht’s The Measures Taken, who “must not be seen,” blotting
out their faces on behalf of the oppressed workers of Mukden, “To win
the victory / But conceal the victor.”17 This is the problematic context
in which the Young Comrade, who puts “his feelings above his under-
standing” (87) and, taking the revolution upon himself, tears off his
mask, revealing his “naked face, human, open, guileless” (102), before
capitulating to the will of the Party, accepting the measures to be taken,
extreme as they are, letting himself be shot and thrown into the lime pit.
The play has been attacked as an anticipatory defense of Stalin’s
purge trials and, despite the animus of Brecht’s critique, defended as
tragic drama, and its dialectic is such that, were it to be rethought today
in rehearsal, as the Lehrstücke were in theory meant to be, we might the-
orize alternatives to the Young Comrade’s chilling sacri‹ce. This is, of
course, an extremity to which Brecht himself was never quite submit-
ted, in his more agile and cryptic dissidence in East Berlin, nor in his
cautious debates with Lukács about the proprieties of socialist realism.
Yet he considered the play absolutely central to what he was attempting
in the theater, and it remains a temporal index of a question persisting
through his work, as to how much subjectivity not only the revolution
can allow, but also the Epic theater, as it sublimated, say, the unap-
peasable appetites and narcissism of Baal, the utterly carnal version of
the Canaanite fertility god, seen in cosmic scale in the opening Grand
Chorale, as if he were the eroticized avatar of illusion itself. Grown in
“his mother’s womb so white”—and so primal, ecstatic, synesthetic, he
seemed like the sky itself, “Naked, young and hugely marvelous”—Baal
comes into being as something more than a subject, or less, with the
voracious innocence and assurance of the modernist criminal/saint:
“Baal will drag his whole sky down below,”18 as if, incestuously, the
Great Mother imaged there, he would seduce the universe itself.
When he does seduce a young woman, who drowns herself in
shame, he sings a song—with another sort of detachment, not yet of the
A-effect—about her slow descent: “The opal sky shone most
magni‹cent,” but as the song continues we get the nether side of Baal,
who could be embraced by beauty itself, all that loveliness! and, as if

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171

www.Ebook777.com
longing for desecration, never leave it at that. As she ›oats downstream
like Ophelia, there are no trans‹guring garlands, no willows askant the
brook, only “wrack and seaweed” clinging, with creatures and other
growths, to the forlorn body that rots—as Baal’s does eventually too—
and he seems to relish that: “I see the world in a gentle light; it’s the
good Lord’s excrement” (CP 1:46). If that, for Yeats, is where love has
pitched his mansion, it is also not far from Beckett, nor is Gougou far
from Gogo, but with “a cold in the lungs,” in the scene at the abysmal
bar, the mordancy takes over in a tone resembling Hamm’s. “A slight
in›ammation. Nothing serious.” And when Baal says of the past that it
seems a strange word, Gougou ignores the notion of any secret agree-
ment, of which, according to Benjamin, the historical materialist is
aware. “Best of all is nothingness. . . . Yes, that’s paradise. No more
unful‹lled desires. All gone. You get over all your habits. Even the
habits of desire.” And when the beggar woman Maja—with a child in a
crate, about as promising as the boy out the window in Endgame—asks,
“And what happens at the end?” Gougou says, grinning, “Nothing.
Nothing at all. The end never comes. Nothing lasts forever.” It is here,
momentarily, that Baal seems to take a position like that of the later
Brecht, or a parody of him, as he rises in drunken indignation, or a
mockery of it: “The worms are swelling. Crawling decomposition. The
worms are glorifying themselves. . . . Bag-of-Worms, that’s your name,”
he says to Gougou (43–44).
As it happens, “crawling decomposition”—like the disjunct narra-
tive of the man crawling on his belly in Endgame, and not only him, but
“the place was crawling with them!” (68)—would seem to be a fair
description of the momentum of Beckett’s aesthetic, though the crawl-
ing accelerates from the muck in the waiting or the mud of How It Is to
the “lifelong mess” of That Time (230), with its curled up worm in slime,
or the vertiginous “out” of Not I, not merely decomposition, “but the
brain—. . . what?” (217) and the body with it, never mind desire, “whole
body like gone . . . just the mouth . . . lips . . . cheeks . . . jaws . . . never—
. . . what? . . . tongue?” (SP 220), torn between screaming and silence,
“crawl back in,” and then through all the buzzing, “godforsaken hole
. . . no love . . . spared that” (222), until the wished-for end, “God is love
. . . tender mercies,” bag of worms aside, “back in the ‹eld . . . April
morning . . . face in the grass . . . nothing but the larks . . . pick it up”
(222–23). If the larks are not exactly, though “God is love,” singing
hymns at heaven’s gate, the entreaty to pick it up may suggest the ‹nal
scene of The Good Person of Szechwan when Shui Ta / Shen Te, who has
been washed in gutter water and also known the muck, entreats the

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Enlightened Ones to stay, though the gods—having had enough of
how it is, which is how it is going to be—›y homeward to their own
nothingness, leaving the tender mercies to the audience, to whom the
epilogue is addressed: “That you yourselves should ponder till you ‹nd
/ The ways and means and measures tending / To help good people to
a happy ending” (CP 6:104). Which—lips, cheeks, jaw . . . never—. . .
what?—sounds like tongue in cheek.
It would certainly make Gougou laugh, or Garga of In the Jungle of
Cities, who says, “We thought the planet would change course on our
account. But what happened? Three times it rained, and one night the
wind blew.”19 As for Baal, who is at the end the stinking image of crawl-
ing decomposition, Brecht apparently did not entirely realize that
almost everything about him, when the play was ‹rst done, would be
seen as politically incorrect. But some years later, reviewing his early
work, he took note of the criticism: “Baal is a play which could present
all kinds of dif‹culties to those who have not learned to think dialecti-
cally. No doubt they will see it as a glori‹cation of unrelieved egotism
and nothing more.”20 If the dialectic seems a little devious, given the
antisocial nature of Baal, he remains through Brecht’s reassessment a
virtual prototype of the lifestyle social protest, not unideological but at
the extremity of it all, that we encountered in the sixties, when the
apparently apolitical waiting for Godot could be taken as a model of
passive resistance—as it was in San Francisco when I ‹rst directed the
play, in 1957, the same year I staged the ‹rst American production of
Brecht’s Mother Courage. As I have pointed out before, it was Waiting for
Godot that turned out to be, against the grain of the political Left, or—
to use Benjamin’s phrase from the “Theses”—“brush[ing] history
against the grain” (259), the most in›uential play, politically, of that
period,21 taken up then by the Left, which was ready to dismiss it as
avant-garde indulgence. We did not do Baal, but we should have,
because—despite its apparent misogyny—it opened up ideas of sexual-
ity that, as Sue-Ellen Case pointed out in the eighties,22 we are still com-
ing to terms with now. If the Young Comrade is his dialectical opposite,
Baal remains a model of a polymorphous perverse spirit taking the plea-
sure principle to the threshold of exhaustion, where reality kicks in like
the woodcutters going out, suggesting as they go a little Verfremdung:
“Try to look at things more objectively. Tell yourself that a rat is dying.
See? Just don’t make a fuss. You have no teeth left.” And then, as one
man leans down to spit in Baal’s face, another gives an additional piece
of advice: “Try to schedule your stinking tomorrow” (CP 1:55–56).
Yet, if Baal is omnivorous about his living he is about dying as well.

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And if the anarchic nature of his corporeally indulgent body had to be
curbed to the ideological policy of the later plays, it is not entirely
extruded, for as even one of the woodcutters had to concede: “He
drank like a sponge, but there’s something about that pale lump of fat
that makes a man think” (56). Which is about as good as you’re going to
get in de‹ning the materiality of the A-effect, its arresting substance
(which is what Joseph Beuys understood when he picked up the fat and
used it, conceptually, in his estranging installations). One may ask:
where does Baal, however surreptitiously, make his appearance in this
or that play, as with the priapic ‹gure in the garden in Galileo’s meeting
with the Little Monk, and when does he disappear, as Azdak does
(rather like Falstaff in Henry IV, Part II) when a more rational order
needs stabilizing toward the end of The Caucasian Chalk Circle? To the
degree that his science is self-indulgence, an appetite, insatiable, Galileo
is eventually excoriated. It is as if Baal represents, too, at another level
the murky intuitive process that, as Brecht says in his essay on Chinese
acting, commenting on Stanislavski, “takes place in the subconscious.”
This may be where it should be in what we call Method acting, but the
subconscious, Brecht adds, “is not at all responsive to guidance; it has
as it were a bad memory” (BT 94).
In a sense, then, Brecht struggled throughout his career with tech-
niques for managing or disposing of Baal, though killing him off was
itself a dangerous project: “Sometimes Baal plays dead. The vultures
swoop. / Baal, without a word, will dine on vulture soup” (CP 1:4). If
there is nothing so cunningly lethal in Beckett, his plays and short prose,
as if with a failure of memory, appear to be taking place at some level of
the psyche below the subconscious, though we may have to remember
that the forgetting as it turns up in the unconscious is, as Freud
remarked, the deepest form of memory. As for Brecht in the period of
Baal, and In the Jungle of Cities, it may be the wrong word, but a sort of
faith accompanied his cynicism, or to use President George W. Bush’s
phrase, a “faith-based initiative,” as when Shlink urges Garga not to quit
because, speaking of things below, “the forests have been cut down, the
vultures are glutted, and the golden answer will be buried deep in the
ground” (Jungle 160). But then he may be speaking, too, in the Chicago
setting of that play, of environmental depredations, corporate pro‹ts,
and like President Bush today, reserves of oil in the ground.
In what would seem another de‹nition of the Brechtian gestus, “a
con‹guration pregnant with tensions” (or what Roland Barthes, writing
of Brecht, calls “the pregnant moment”), Benjamin remarks that
“thinking involves not only the ›ow of thoughts, but their arrest as

reality principles
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well,” giving the “con‹guration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a
monad” (“Theses” 264–65). That ‹gure is, however, in the allure of its
crystallization, better suited, perhaps, to the Imagism of H. D. and Ezra
Pound or, epiphanically, certain ideographic moments in the poems of
T. S. Eliot. But if, as Eliot once said, as a virtual preface to the writing
of Beckett (who was not at all indifferent to Eliot), words slip, slide,
decay with imprecision, will not hold still, the monad is always threat-
ened, which Brecht (whose early work, we forget, emerged into mod-
ernism with Eliot’s) certainly understood. The trouble with thinking,
always—to cite that dreamlike ‹gure again, who is if anything pregnant
with tensions—is that there is nothing either good or bad but thinking
makes it so. If, then, the complex pedagogy of The Measures Taken, its
painful dialectic or unbearable lesson, is characterized by the oxymoron
of an ambiguous didacticism, the apparent nihilism of Baal, its sheer
perversity, is eventually relinquished in the desire for a supportable ped-
agogy, which is not so much what Brecht wants us to think but rather
the method by which he causes us to think.
Speaking of a certain calculated unreality, like a dead man singing,
in the manifestation of a gestus, Brecht remarks in a footnote what we
have come to expect, that this does not preclude an element of instruc-
tion, though the irrationality or even seeming lack of seriousness con-
tributes to the gestic content that registers and de‹nes the theatrical
moment as meaning, though with the metaphysics at bay the meaning
may be provisional. In Beckett, of course, with a seeming lack of seri-
ousness the impossible and the provisional are maneuvered into a
laugh: “We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?” But before
Hamm says “(Vehemently.) To think perhaps it won’t all have been for
nothing!” he pauses to wonder, “Imagine if a rational being came back
to earth, wouldn’t he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed
us long enough” (Endgame 32–33). And whatever he says to mock it, if
you did not get ideas, a myriad of ideas—as in the circuitous, self-can-
celing, tortuous thinking of thought that Beckett calls the pensum—you
must be out of your head. And the ideas, moreover, if you observed
them long enough, that is, as they occur in performance, whatever the
nothing done, arise from a certain ordering of perception that corre-
sponds to an issue further de‹ned by Brecht, still resisting illusion in the
apparatus of representation. Yet, though he might put it another way, it
is as if he agreed with Eliot’s remark that, confronted as we are by the
indeterminacies of the modern and a culture of disbelief, what we need
to do is improve the quality of our illusions. Among which is the possi-
bility entertained by Beckett, despite and by means of the derision of

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Clov, that we do “Mean something! You and I, mean something!” (33).
As for the theater, what makes it mean something is, if by nothing more
than intelligence (which was at a premium in the American theater
when they ‹rst came on the scene), shared by Beckett and Brecht.
If in the culinary theater, as Brecht describes it in the Short Organum,
the eyes wide open may signify a trance, as with the sleepers of the
house who stare but do not see, the eye which observes long enough,
“which looks for the gest in everything is the moral sense.”23 Yet, if what
Brecht is seeking is a moral tableau, as Diderot might have de‹ned it
(what Barthes later admired), it is not without an element of subjectiv-
ity, as when, suspended in the gaze, Galileo studies the moons of Jupiter
or when, with voracious appetite and inarguable passion, he says he
believes in the brain. If Beckett had any affectation it was the habit of
denying its importance, but he also had quite a brain, and considerable
erudition. Yet if in the elemental substance of his obsessive subjectiv-
ity—the subject seeking its subject in the regressive desperation of a
never-ending quest—there is the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the
laugh at anything like a moral sense, he is by no means without that
either. And while there would seem to be a world of difference, though
the actions in each instance are similarly unmomentous, between
Mother Courage closing her pocketbook on the life of her son and
Gogo pulling at his boot or Didi’s buttoning his ›y or Gogo later leav-
ing his boots neatly at the edge of the stage, for another who may come,
“just as . . . as . . . as me, but with smaller feet,” he gives to that gestus or
tableau the perhaps pathetic irony of a not unmoral sense, even through
what may seem to be the burlesqued jaundice of the following
exchange, about the boots being left behind:

vladimir: But you can’t go barefoot.

estragon: Christ did.
vladimir: Christ! What has Christ got to do with it? You’re not
going to compare yourself to Christ!
estragon: All my life I’ve compared myself to him.
vladimir: But where he lived it was warm, it was dry!
estragon: Yes. And they cruci‹ed quick.

Didi, after a silence, says there’s nothing more to do there of the

nothing already done, and Gogo quickly replies, “Nor anywhere else”
(Godot 34), which is not exactly promising for social change. But what
could be seen in the whole sequence about the boots is the sort of sly
paradox or cunning reversal you can also ‹nd in the capricious jurispru-

reality principles
176
dence of Azdak in The Caucasian Chalk Circle or in the water-seller
Wang’s opening remarks, while waiting to welcome the gods, in The
Good Person of Szechwan. As he sizes up passersby, he says of two gentle-
men, they “don’t strike me as gods, they have a brutal look, as if they
were in the habit of beating people, and gods have no need of that.”24
One might make the case that the moral sense, in subtle and nuanced
ways, suffuses the plays of Beckett, as it does through all the apparent
caprice, hyperbole, and gratuitous cruelty of Hamm when he says, at
one point in his narrative about the man who crawled toward him on his
belly and wanted bread for his brat, “In the end he asked me would I
consent to take in the child as well—if he were still alive. (Pause.) It was
the moment I was waiting for. (Pause.) Would I consent to take in the
child . . .” (Endgame 53). And the moment is suspended, with the moral
issue, as Hamm breaks off the narrative, until the end of the play, before
he puts on the stancher, when he comes back to the child, if, whoever
he is, “he could have his child with him”:

It was the moment I was waiting for.

(Pause.)
You don’t want to abandon him? You want him to bloom while
you are withering? Be there to solace your last million last
moments?
(Pause.)
He doesn’t realize, all he knows is hunger, and cold, and death to
crown it all. But you! You ought to know what the earth is like,
nowadays. Oh I put him before his responsibilities!

If that is not a moral distinction, at the sticking point of thought, I do

not know what is, though it is a disturbing moral. And there is nothing
here like what we might see elsewhere in the almost demonic eloquence
of Hamm, there at the nerve ends, going to the quick, an extraordinary
passion de›ated by irony. As for the moral sense in Epic theater, it may
be hard to work out the proportions of detachment and subjectivity,
through an always strategic irony, but in any case, as with the three cases
distinguished by the voice of . . . but the clouds . . . , or the “fourth case, or
case nought” (SP 261), Brecht might have been making a case for Beck-
ett when he said, “out of mistrust of the theater” which, whatever the
case, “theaters it all down, . . . [s]ome exercise in complex seeing is
needed.” When he adds, however, that “it is perhaps more important to
be able to think above the stream than to think in the stream,”25 it might
be hard for Beckett to imagine anything like that, for imagination dead

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177
imagine the stream is all there is. And if you cannot step into the same
river twice, as Heraclitus said, that is because you are always in it, even
in Come and Go. “May we not speak of the old days? [Silence.] Of what
came after?” But the after is more of the same and—“Holding hands
. . . that way. / Dreaming of . . . love” (SP 195)—you can somehow
never get out.
If the complex seeing occurs in other ways, Brecht nevertheless
also shares with Beckett, despite the rap about Verfremdung subduing
emotion by detachment, a “sensitivity to subjective differences,” while
there is a similar compulsion to differentiation that, as Adorno remarks
about Beckett, “glides into ideology” too. Which does not, as Adorno
also says, in countering Lukács’s charge that Beckett reduces humans to
animality, qualify Beckett to “testify as a key political witness . . . in the
struggle against atomic death.”26 For in Beckett’s writing the terror of
such death seems to be as it always was—the dreadful thing has already
happened, “a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap” (Endgame 1)—
inseparable from the ordeal of being human. If Beckett is not guilty, as
Lukács also charged, of “an abstract, subjectivist ontology” (Adorno
15), his view of the subject—or at least the subject of modernity—
might have been de‹ned by Brecht when, in his earliest de‹nition of
Epic theater, he said in no uncertain terms, “The continuity of the ego
is a myth. A man is an atom that perpetually breaks up and forms anew.
We have to show things as they are.”27 The new purpose, for Brecht, in
the era of “the petroleum complex” may have been “paedagogics,” as
he says in the essay “Form and Subject-Matter,” but the fact of the mat-
ter for the subject, in things being shown as they are, is that it can no
longer appear in the drama with the old features of character, nor with
the sort of motives imputed by Hebbel, Ibsen, or even Chekhov. In a
world where “fate is no longer a single coherent power,” but dispersed
into “‹elds of force” radiating in all directions, actions must be shown
as “pure phenomena” (BT 29–30), as they are with a motiveless
speci‹city in Baal and in In the Jungle of Cities, more devastatingly so there
than in the more rationalized epic of Galileo or in Mother Courage.
Yet, Courage pulling her wagon, after the death of Dumb Kattrin,
aimlessly at the end—“in‹nite emptiness” all around her, as Hamm says
apocalyptically in his warning to Clov, and imagination dead imagine
the resurrected dead of all the ages combining with those of the cease-
less war—is an even bleaker image of a pure phenomenon than the
dying Shlink asking for a cloth over his face, like Hamm, because “he
doesn’t want anyone to look at him” (Jungle, CP 7:161), or Garga in the
of‹ce of the late Shlink, saying in the ‹nal lines, “It’s a good thing to be

reality principles
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alone. The chaos is used up” (163). Or even the dying Baal, that pale
lump of fat, with no teeth left, crawling on all fours like an animal to the
door, for one last look at the stars. With the used-up chaos as the datum
of thought, or the ‹elds of force more entropic, this is all the more so in
Beckett as he encapsulates the gratuitous and baseless necessity of the
utterly negated subject, with its excruciating consciousness, or disjunc-
ture of it, from the hollow in the wall of Endgame or the seeds that will
never sprout to the diminishing returns or spastic brevity of the aphasic
later plays.
Moreover, what we appear to encounter in Beckett—even in the
plays with a more explicit political content, such as Catastrophe, and the
clownish cycle of torture (“give him the works until he confesses”) that
followed in What Where (SP 315)—is not merely “the nausea of satia-
tion” or “the tedium of spirit with itself,” which Adorno invoked in his
essay on Endgame (11), out of his own aversion to the politics of Lukács.
Never mind the abstract, subjectivist ontology that Lukács charged
Beckett with and Adorno rejected. Lukács may even be right, and there
may be something like that there, though abstractions live in Beckett,
like the pauses and silences extruded from Chekhovian realism, in the
lymph nodes and bloodstream of thought, where alienation is a re›ex
with illimitable affect that elides in the pure phenomena certain ‹gures
and gestures resembling the A-effect, as if the Brechtian arrest were in
the Beckettian moment(um) the subject of thought itself. As for the
subjectivist ontology, what may be most compelling or unnerving in
Beckett is his response to a certain harrowing stillness in the barest
rumor of being that is, all told, and told again, till the telling is intolera-
ble, thus further dispersed in thought, as with the ceaseless stirrings of
the equivocal word still (is it motion? or time? as endurance? or all of it
under duress?), the ontological ground, if ground there be, of the sub-
tlest, most seductive, imperceptible form of illusion, what in the living
end dying can never be seen, or seen as being, and therefore never told.
Still: “Something is taking its course.” Estrange it as we will, it still
seems passing strange, only the passing certain, as in the stasis of the
momentum and the plaintively quizzical moment of the waiting for
Godot, when Didi wonders, with Gogo falling asleep, and he not sure
he is awake, whether in the nothing that happened twice anything hap-
pened at all, “That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke
with us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?” (58). It was
precisely that, the apparently impotent subjectivity of a ubiquitous inde-
terminacy, all the more alluring for its teasing out of illusion—“They
make a noise like wings. / Like leaves. / Like sand. / Like leaves”

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179
(40)—which Brecht thought he might change when he considered
revising the play, linking its oddities and incapacities to material inter-
ests and the past that is disremembered (“a million years ago, in the
nineties” [7]), or not remembered at all (“What were you saying
when?”), surely not the beginning (“The very beginning of WHAT?”
[42]), bringing it in line with a more progressive sense of history. Yet,
for all the ideological pressure of recent years to historicize! historicize!
one is occasionally tempted to say with Gogo—who either forgets
immediately or never forgets, who knows only that “Everything oozes”
and that “It’s never the same pus from one second to the next” (39)—
“I’m not a historian” (42). And for the moment arrested, still in the time
of the now: the boots, the carrot, the tree, from one second to the next,
no time that time, and the waiting consigned to illusion.

notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (and The Genealogy of Morals), trans.
Francis Golf‹ng (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1956) 33.
2. Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theater Is the Epic Theater,” in Brecht on The-
ater: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1964) 34; this volume will be abbreviated as BT.
3. Samuel Beckett, Play, in Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove, 1984) 157,
160; this volume will be abbreviated as SP.
4. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip
Betichman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 1–79.
5. Guy Debord, “Separation Perfected,” in Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Red
and Black, 1983), item 34, n.p.
6. Jacques Derrida, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representa-
tion,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978) 234.
7. Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958) 13.
8. Frederic Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998) 8.
9. Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said, in Nohow On: Three Novels (New York: Grove, 1996)
56.
10. Beckett, That Time, in SP 229.
11. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Iluminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1955) 256–57.
12. Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954) 7.
13. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New
York: Routledge, 1993) 9, 12.
14. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso/NLB,
1982) 144.
15. Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove, n.d.) 4–5.
16. Beckett, Catastrophe, in SP 299.

reality principles
180
 17. Brecht, The Measures Taken, in The Jewish Wife and Other Short Plays, trans.
Eric Bentley (New York: Grove, 1965) 81, 83.
18. Brecht, Baal, trans. William E. Smith and Ralph Manheim, in Collected
Plays, ed. Manheim and John Willett (New York: Vintage, 1971–) 1:3; these editions
will be abbreviated as CP, with volume number.
19. Brecht, In the Jungle of Cities, trans. Gerhard Nellhaus, in CP 1:158.
20. Brecht, “On Looking Through My First Plays [ii],” in CP 1:345.
21. See, for instance, the preface to my Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beck-
ett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000) 4–5.
22. Sue-Ellen Case, “Brecht and Women: Homosexuality and the Mother,”
The Brecht Yearbook 12 (1983): 65–74.
23. Brecht, “The Modern Theater is Epic Theater,” BT 36n.
24. Brecht, The Good Person of Szechwan: A Parable Play, trans. Ralph Manheim,
in CP 6:3–4.
25. Brecht, “The Literarization of Theater (Notes to The Threepenny Opera),”
BT 43–44.
26. Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” New German Cri-
tique 26 (1982): 15.
27. Brecht, in an interview, “Conversation with Bert Brecht,” BT 15.

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181
 eleven

Apnea and True Illusion

Breath(less) in Beckett

Astride of a grave and a dif‹cult birth. Down in the hole,

lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have
time to grow old. The air is full of our cries.
—beckett, Waiting for Godot

3
And, even now, unrelieved by his winning a Nobel Prize, some of us
still hear them—although sometimes we’re not sure whose cries they
are.

Some years ago, that time, I was having a late lunch with my son Dick
and his partner Jane, fair food, good conversation, when I had a vague
sense of their staring at me, and looking puzzled at each other, as I kept
on talking, of I know not what, just talking and talking, with no sense of
what I was talking about, or for that matter, who I was, at what turned
out to be some logorrheia of incoherence, or a regressively aging
“dehiscence,” a word used by Beckett for coherence gone to pieces, but
otherwise made familiar through the Oedipal fractures in the mirror
stage of Lacan, with its drama of a specular ego, and the mirage of iden-
tity, still haunting the personal pronoun, I, not I, as we’ll certainly see in
Beckett, brought on by some primal discord, and subsequent paranoia,
at “a real speci‹c prematurity of birth.”1 When they took me to the emer-
gency room, babbling into a murmur, “infant languors in the end
sheets,” as in one of the Texts for Nothing,2 as if falling out of a dream, it
was diagnosed as a transient ischemic attack, or momentary stroke; yet
since I was not unable to talk, speech not blurred or impeded, but rather
accelerated, as from the Mouth of Not I, “but the brain still . . . still . . .
in a way,”3 it was more like a kind of psychogenic amnesia, what they
call a “fugue state,” or dissociative identity disorder. If there was any-
thing polyphonic in what I was saying, or somehow contrapuntal—
“From the word go. The word begone”4—I have no idea, but from
what I later heard from Dick and Jane, relieved when I came to myself,
not I, my self, whatever that may be, “Thought of nothing? . . . Forgot-
ten nothing? . . . You’re all right now, eh?”5 I was indeed saying things

182
over and over, to some indeterminate other, by way of anxious others,
who could hardly decipher anything in the disjointed repetitions.
“We have time to grow old.” But as you get older, and memory fails
you, forgetting a name or a face—or, as with me, more frequently now
in a class, you suddenly lose the lines of a poem long known by heart—
it’s hard not to think of Alzheimer’s, from the complications of which
my brother recently died, the last time I saw him not knowing who I
was. The fugue state, however, was apparently nothing like that, and for
all the repeats within it, they say it happens only once. But if I somehow
came to myself, it must be “painful to be no longer oneself, even more
painful if possible,” as Beckett wrote in First Love, “than when one is.
For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one
is not one is any old one irredeemably” (Prose 31). Still, depend upon age
to keep you guessing at the edge of consciousness, or for that matter,
deep down, in the identity disorder of the unconsciousness of sleep—
“But deep in what sleep, deep in what sleep already?” as Hamm says in
Endgame6—where even dream isn’t, at least for me, what it used to be.
And here Hamm elides with Hamlet, when he says, “O God, I could be
bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of in‹nite space, were it
not that I have bad dreams” (Hamlet 2.2.251–52)—in which, if our little
lives are rounded with a sleep, it’s far from in‹nite space, or even as he
waits to be whistled, staring at the wall, the “Nice dimensions, nice pro-
portions” of Clov’s sequestered kitchen, “ten feet by ten feet by ten
feet” (Endgame 2); indeed, in a nutshell, or, as from the Book of Revela-
tions, the length and breadth and height of it, Clov’s occluded cube, or
the root of it in the pyche, my dreaming’s claustrophobic. For in rather
distressing, anamorphic, eye-opening ways, I’m crawling through a tun-
nel, a shaft, or drainpipe, or in a cramped elevator, or with a pounding
heart in a windowless room, or smothered under a blanket, legs drawn
under, as if curled up still in a womb, that “god-forsaken hole” (Not I
216), or “some old grave I can’t tear myself away from,”7 then suddenly
I’m awake, panicked, wanting to speak but unable, or ready to wawl and
cry, as if I’d just been born, if not birth the death of me, as now and
again in Beckett, terribly short of breath.
Which turns out to be the title of his shortest play, Breath, about
thirty-seven seconds on stage: inspiration, expiration, with those
“instant[s] of recorded vagitus,” a wail or cry of distress, birthright,
death rite, out of this world, or in, with the stage directions insisting that
the “two cries be identical, switching on and off strictly synchronized
light and breath” (Plays 211), all timed exactly, all time, no time, through
the ‹nal silence, no light, no cry, no breath, an eternity, that time, no

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more than ‹ve seconds. Over the asphyxiating sensation, however, I
had no such control, nor did Beckett, actually, in the panic of similar
seizures, for him lifelong, and as he has described it—once in a conver-
sation, suddenly stuttering, when he was writing Comment c’est—even
more severe. They call it sleep apnea, a blockage of air in the windpipe,
which at its worst seems to be caused by the nervous system’s not get-
ting an expected signal from the brain, which otherwise never stops,
what leaves you breathless in Beckett. It’s as if he’d transposed the noc-
turnal attacks, the fear, the blood pressure rising until it was about to
burst, or the terror of expectation, the waiting, for the imminent suffo-
cation, heart racing, audible thumping, to the debraining volatility of his
most compulsive texts. Or to see it another way, it’s as if the speci‹c
prematurity could only become a subject, as through the mirror stage,
by ‹nding itself in words, but in the insurgency there (in the Imaginary,
not the Symbolic, but headlong toward the Real), spastic, aphasic, the
rush of words or “sudden ›ashes,” the elliptical “vain reasonings” (Not
I 217), with “the whole brain begging . . . something begging in the brain
. . . begging the mouth to stop,” but no stopping, the buzzing, “the brain
. . . ›ickering away on its own,” like mine in the ischemic attack, “now
this . . . this . . . quicker and quicker . . . the words . . . the brain,” as if
brainless, “›ickering away like mad”—and even when it wasn’t hap-
pening “this other awful thought” (219–22), some whisper in your head,
“Isn’t that what you said? . . . the whisper . . . the odd word” (Eh Joe
204), that it might be happening again, with “the words . . . everywhere,
inside me, outside me, . . . impossible to stop, I’m in words, made of
words, others’ words, what others,” as with Dick and Jane that day, “the
place too, the air, the walls, the ›oor, the ceiling, all words, the whole
world is here with me,”8 and then again the breathing stops.
Is it mere coincidence that these sensations of apnea appear to have
increased, with the memory of amnesia, as I was thinking of Beckett
again, as if his own history of tormented sleep, palpitations, spasms,
suffocations, and memories of forgetting, or the always egregious
aggregate of those he’d rather forget—not only sebaceous cysts on the
anus, eczema, or herpes on the face, but a life before birth, which he
always claimed to remember, his own sti›ing fetal existence, “curled up
worm in slime,”9 the intrauterine position, trapped there, imprisoned,
crying out to escape, nobody hearing, nobody listening—were respon-
sible for my symptoms? As for his symptoms, they appeared to be, as in
The Unnamable, the identity disorder of a nonidentity, or equivocal dubi-
ous being, referred to as I, that most pernicious pronoun in the semio-
sis of Beckett, I, not me, “it is not about me” (Unnamable 3), as it appears

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to be in Endgame, when Hamm removes the handkerchief from his face,
and announces, “Me—(he yawns)—to play” (2), in the objective case.
But in the preamble to The Unnamable that never comes to an end, per-
haps because it never begins, the “af‹rmations and negations invali-
dated as uttered, or sooner or later” (3), always return to the “I, of
whom I know nothing. I know my eyes are open because of the tears
that pour from them unceasingly. I know I am seated, my hands on my
knees, because of the pressure against my rump, against the soles of my
feet, against the palms of my hands, against my knees.” But what is this
pressure, that retrograde pressure, in which the hypertensive body may
not, with tears ›owing, really be sure which end is up? “I don’t know.
My spine is not supported. I mention these details to make sure I am
not lying on my back, my legs raised and bent, my eyes closed” (22)—
darkling there, forgotten, as if abandoned before birth.
If there’s long been, not only in the theater, but in my writings on
Beckett too, that virtual habit of thinking through him, his words my
words, or by means of the aporias in his own af›icted thought, ephec-
tic, solipsistic, and even masochistic, that occurs by something more
than the self-commiserating solace of sympathetic identi‹cation. What
drew me to Beckett to begin with, from the “Nothing to be done,” the
line that launches the waiting for the absence known as Godot, to the
traumatizing mathematics in his shorter plays and prose, was an activat-
ing exactitude about an encrypted void, what otherwise seemed hopeless,
or what if you really engaged it, through the temptations to laugh it off,
what Beckett himself provoked (but mostly overdone now in stagings
of his plays), was really unnerving too. That is, it was still disoriented,
even desperate, for all the going “On!” as when Pozzo takes off with
Lucky,10 to those late Variations on a “Still” Point, “he having been
dreamt away [letting] himself be dreamt away,”11 over the abyssal
depths, “Whence when back no knowing where no telling where been
how long how it was.”12 There is always that impasse in Beckett,
whether waiting, going or coming, the hopeless detour of an incessant
impasse, where you try to go on and you can’t go on, and the talking
seems to continue, call it the babble or drivel, “that’s what hell will be
like,” says Henry, in the long opening monologue of the radio play
Embers, which also begins with “On. . . . On!” (93), which “always went
on for ever” (94), like the stories he told himself, “Stories, stories, years
and years of stories, till the need came on me, for someone, to be with
me, anyone” (95), but Ada? hellish, a conversation with Ada, “that was
something, . . . small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old
days when we wished we were dead” (96).

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 One might say, not only with Pozzo’s coming and going, or the sto-
ries, stories, that Beckett gets a lot of mileage out of the vicissitudes of
despair, and when the measures are taken, the astringent mathematics,
with the abyss more or less at a parodistic distance. So with Rough for
Theater I, when B in his wheelchair asks the blind ‹ddler A, “why don’t
you let yourself die?” and A says he’s thought of it, whereupon B says in
irritation, “But you don’t do it!” To which A replies, and with some vio-
lence when B pursues it, “I am not unhappy enough!” (Plays 69). Now I
grant you that “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness. . . . Yes, yes, it’s
the most comical thing in the world,” as Nell says in her ashbin, before
she’s pushed down with no pulse, and the lid closed again, “we laugh,
we laugh,” but then, “like the funny story we have heard too often, we
still ‹nd it funny, but we don’t laugh anymore” (Endgame 19).
And so it must have been for Beckett, at the extremities of despair,
in letting you see what you wouldn’t, sometimes manic obsessively, if
the exactitude weren’t exacting, like the nothing to be done that had to be
done, to become the nothing that is, which would be the merest nothing,
without a psychic cost, inscribed on the body as well. And it could be,
like the “‹brous degeneration” in his play Catastrophe (Plays 298), felt at
considerable cost. One of the tumescent or edemic conditions from
which Beckett himself suffered—a thickening of deep tissue that passes
from palm to ‹ngers, causing the hands to claw—it was in›icted on the
character P, the barefoot protagonist up on a plinth who seems nothing
more than a prop—‹sts clenched, face down, black wide-brimmed hat,
black gown, not hooded or veiled, but like the now-notorious ‹gure at
Abu Ghraib, up on a pedestal too, with electric wires attached to his
hands. With D, the director as chief sadist, the torture is a performance,
or the performance tortuous, prepared by precise instructions to A, the
more than willing female assistant, with a “craze for explicitation! Every
i dotted to death!” (299), every element carefully staged, but as if for a
Broadway audience, or the French boulevards, in the composition of
pain.
Elsewhere it might be diagrammed or timed down to the second, or
as in the play Play, with “faces lost to age” (Plays 147), up to their necks
in the urns, not “just . . . play” (153), but “all out, all the pain” (148), with
a direction to “REPEAT” (160), the repetition for con‹rmation like an
experiment in a lab. For there is in Beckett, with his own explicitation, a
microphysics of misery or, as he once said about Proust, a “science of
af›iction,”13 in which at some self-punitive molecular extremity, or
ineluctable non sequitur rage, there’s a desire for atomization, as with
Mrs. Rooney in All That Fall, “never tranquil,” laughing wildly, “oh to

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be in atoms, in atoms! (Frenziedly.) ATOMS!” (Plays 17)—in the annihi-
lating wish of despair, subtextually, subatomically, an apotheosis of
dehiscence. Now, there’s not only a science here, with those words
behaving like quarks, a Beckettian string theory, but also an aesthetic: in
the birth that is the death of him, as it happens again, “no dif‹culty
there,” there happens to be an exception, “imagination not dead yet,
yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine”14—which, imagine, puts
the burden on you, and yes, dead, good, if you ever had imagination, the
question is whether you can, including, from “a thousand little signs too
long to imagine, . . . the in‹nitesimal shudder instantaneously sup-
pressed” (Imagination 185).
Meanwhile, with a philosophical disposition that Beckett often
denied (or was disturbed by in others when applied to his work) there is
an epistemology, too, in the tormented susurrus or superfetation of
words, that “sudden urge . . . to tell,” get it all out, if not a confessional,
“nearest lavatory . . . start pouring it out . . . steady stream . . . mad stuff
. . . half the vowels wrong . . . no one could follow” (Not I 222). I mean
the whole heart-breaking excremental glut, “That’s right, wordshit, bury
me, avalanche” (Text 9 137), if not then silence, words unspoken, errors
acknowledged, knowledge unknowing, “Thoughts, no, not thoughts,”
rather “profounds of mind. Buried in who knows what profounds of
mind. Or mindlessness”15—which, with no relief, deep in what sleep
already, brain still going, dream-thought, you have to bring to mind.
There is, of course, the minimalist side of Beckett, the parsimonious
aesthetic, the “mere-most minimum,”16 of those claustral plays and
prose, where “Words are few. Dying too” (Monologue 265). But when it
comes to thinking the worst, ill seen ill said, who was saying it better,
what where, and who would have thought that in the “accusative [of]
inexistence,” along with a rush of amnesia, “no notion who it was say-
ing what you were saying,” there is also a “Grand Apnea” (Text 8 134),
taking your breath away—what signal from the brain, what particle
physics, apnea with a grandeur? “whose skull you were clapped up in”
(That Time 231), where else would you ‹nd that but Beckett?
“Can there be misery,” says Hamm, yawning, “loftier than mine?
No doubt? Formerly. But now?” (Endgame 2). “What remains of all that
misery?” says Krapp (Plays 58), playing and replaying his tapes, as if it
were desired. “Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.)
Once wasn’t enough for you” (63). Better if only remembered, since
more than enough of it now, including the telling and retelling of what
forever escapes you because you can never forget, “those things you
kept making up to keep the void out just another of those old tales to

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keep the void from pouring in on you the shroud” (That Time 230).
Nothing personal, of course, or merely personal, never mind the
shrouding, the mess is universal, or as with Krapp, every new retro-
spect, moving between the two, the mess and those other “Moments.
Her moments, my moments,” even “The dog’s moments. (Pause.) . . . he
took it in his mouth, gently, gently. A small, old, black, hard, solid rub-
ber ball” (Krapp 60), what he might have kept, something solid in his life,
but he gave it to the dog. As for the mess, “Everything there, everything
on this old muckball, all the light and dark and famine and feasting of
. . . (hesitates) . . . the ages! (In a shout.) Yes! (Pause),” even the drifting
pleasure, “among the ›ags and stuck” (62–63), gently up and down with
her, be again, be again, some old chance of happiness, what all told,
rewound on spools, he “revelled in the word. . . . Spooool!” (62), you’d
still rather forget. And what is it there in Breath, that mimicry of a play,
with its two vagital cries, what is it being remembered, except remem-
bered being, being bygone, if it ever was, always nostalgia for it, or
something more than being, with nothing there on stage, except a litter
of rubbish, as if some token of the ruins of history, which gives another
dimension to the birth astride of a grave.

“Know minimum,” wrote Beckett, in Worstward Ho (91), but at mere-

most minimum that pitiful rubbish was proleptic about what, ideologi-
cally, we’ve since encountered in critical theory, most speci‹cally
through Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
For it suggests the wreckage of time accumulating before the “Angelus
Novus,” as described by Benjamin in a painting by Paul Klee. Wings
outspread, caught up in a violent storm from Paradise, the Angel is
being blown backward into the future, facing the catastrophe of the
past, the debris growing skyward before him,17 from which Beckett
might have gathered the litter, as a kind of bricolage, scraps and tatters
from those ruins of time, “no verticals, all scattered and lying” (Breath
211), not ›at-out, but at minima, if not Benjamin’s “chips of Messianic
time” (“Theses” 265), an ideographic suggestion of the Beckettian view
of history. Thus it is that the rubbish on stage might also be a corrective
to what Theodor Adorno wrote, in an essay on Endgame, with pro-
founds of mind (and the philosophical disposition, to which, when they
met, Beckett more than objected),18 about the play not meaning any-
thing becoming the only meaning, and with that certain certitudes about
Beckett’s indifference to history.
As if he were giving another contour to his well-known assertion
that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, Adorno insisted that

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Beckett actually excluded history, because “it itself has dehydrated the
power of consciousness to think history,” desiccating as well “the
power of remembrance.”19 For the most part rigorous in its focus on
Beckett, there is in the essay a passing vengeance on “totalitarians like
Lukács,” still serving their Stalinist bosses, while despising the deca-
dence that, from Baudelairean disgust to existential nausea, the “nausea
of satiation,” won’t follow the party line (“Trying to Understand” 11).
Yet, in countering Lukács’s judgment of Beckett as irresponsibly nihilis-
tic and politically irrelevant, with a “subjectivist ontology” that becomes
“the excavated index of degenerate art because of its worldlessness and
infantility” (15), Adorno is nevertheless still selling him short, because
he doesn’t think that Beckett has much to say about politics either.
Overtly, to be sure, no politics on stage, in any usual way, nor even as it
turned up in the theater of the Absurd—with which, misleadingly, in
Martin Esslin’s eponymous book, Beckett was identi‹ed. But in the past
I’ve made the case that when his plays ‹rst appeared on the scene, par-
ticularly in San Francisco, where various events ignited the dissidence of
the sixties, they had more political immediacy than the plays of Bertolt
Brecht, which I had also directed—and this despite Beckett’s denial,
though he served in the French Resistance, of bearing “political wit-
ness,” to use Adorno’s term (15).
“Yes, no more denials, all is false,” but the fact is—and “dupes” we
may be, “dupes of every time and tense, until it’s done, all past and
done” (Text 4 109)—that Beckett, like some of his characters, or not
quite characters, for all the lapsing remembrance, fact, I say, and not
factitiously, never seems to forget, like the voices of That Time or the
Mother in Footfalls or, back in the time of the waiting, in the frenzy of
Lucky’s speech, from the existence as uttered forth of a personal God
through the death of Bishop Berkeley to the skulls in Connemara, never
mind all the tennis or the quaquaquaqua, or paying attention to it, the
skulls the skulls, as to some cacophonic sounding of the calamity of
Western culture, echoed by Clov in Endgame, but anally, acidically, pars-
ing the horrors out, the inexplicable punishment, zero out the window,
the hollow in the wall, since he remembers everything, so appalling he
wants it ‹nished, “it must be nearly ‹nished,” even his walk impeded,
that “stiff, staggering walk,” with a sort of raging measure, six steps, three
steps, one step, brief laughs (1), why should he move at all? how can he
move at all? as if he had to will it, in a vertigo of stasis, thus the stiffness,
movement spastic, so much history on the brain. As for the subjectivity
in Beckett, sure it’s ontological, and no mere “subject position”
(de‹ned by race, class, gender, ethnicity), as in cultural studies today;

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and so far as there is, with imagination dead imagine, anything like the
vision that came from imagination, maybe only “The semblance. Faint,
though by no means invisible in a certain light,”20 it is no mere social
construction. It may resemble, however, the semblance, more than
faintly in a certain light, those sublimates of material life-process, what
Marx speaks of as phantoms of the brain—or be haunted there, as with
Marx himself, for all he tried to dispel it, by the future of illusion in the
catastrophe of the past, about which one may say (and I’ve said it, tak-
ing a cue from the later Freud, what accounts for his tragic view in Civ-
ilization and Its Discontents) there is no other future.
So much, for the illusory moment, of what Beckett saw of the sem-
blance. There was a time, there was a time, in his earliest story Assump-
tion, where he sublimated, in the anguish of a young man struggling to
be an artist, his own pretentious doubts and grievances “with the vulgar,
uncultivated, terribly clear and personal ideas of the unread intelligen-
zia” (Prose 3), who’d never understand his desire, inherited from Ger-
man romanticism, for “a wild rebellious surge” that, aspiring “violently
towards realization in sound,” would restore the “inexplicable bomb-
shell perfection” that came with Promethean ‹re. What he wanted—
perhaps to offset that other anguish, the palpitating terror, the rush of
blood in the body that kept him breathless at night—was another pain,
“the pain of Beauty” (4), which has been dismissed since deconstruc-
tion, along with Vision and Imagination, especially when the words are
capitalized, as transcendental signi‹ers. Back in the 1950s, before that
critique occurred, Beckett asked in a text for nothing, with nothing like
Promethean ‹re (and the usual absence of the question mark), “And
beauty, strength, intelligence”—of which he wrote in the same light as
the semblance, or “a kind of light, suf‹cient to see by”—simply more of
the same? “the latest, daily, action, poetry, all one price for one and all”?
Now the words embarrass him, they always did, but even more, the
mind slow, the words slow, the subject there dying in an unpredicated
clutter. “If only it could be wiped from knowledge. To have suffered
under that miserable light, what a blunder” (Text 2 106).
Still, with Beckett you never know, for in all “times and tenses,”
he’s surely blundered worse, like giving himself up “for dead all over the
place,” only to ‹nd that there’s “nothing like breathing your last to put
new life in you”—with, of course, the mutterings undiminished, “the
same old stories, the same old questions and answers” (Text 1 102–3),
but the same plus one, and therefore not the Same—as Nietzsche
declared, speaking of beauty, strength, intelligence, about the Eternal
Return. Be eternity what it may, “now here, what now here, one enor-

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mous second, as in Paradise” (Text 2 106), within a page or so of the

shorter prose it’s possible to move, with nuances of disdain for each
nuance, from desolation to nostalgia to transcendental longing, for the
outside prospect of some otherness there, or maybe there on the inside,
“other others, invisible” (106), or from whatever it was in the sem-
blance to thoughts in a dry season, not quite like T. S. Eliot’s (whom
Beckett early admired), not quite the waste land either, but on a Sunday
morning, with no paradise to be lost.
“Dry, it’s possible, or wet, or slime, as before matter took ill.” And
then the familiar sensation, with slime, if that, the originary trace, as
when he was still unborn, some continuity with the womb. “Is this stuff
air that permits you to suffocate still, almost audibly at times, it’s possi-
ble, a kind of air,” says the voice of a text for nothing, turning to “one
more memory, one last memory, it may help, to abort again.” But will
memory never cease, for that aborting again suggests what Beckett
apparently said about himself to the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, about
an inadequate parturition, still unborn when he was born, and out of
breath, repeatedly. As for the dry season, however, there were signs of
renewal there, and if not Eternal, “it was none the less the return, to
what no matter, the return, unscathed, always a matter for wonder.
What happened? Is that the question? An encounter? Bang! No.” No
Big Bang either, nor creation myth that day, yet if something more than
a semblance, nothing more than “a glow, red, afar, at night, in winter,
that’s worth having, that must have been worth having” (107–8).
Sometimes you can maybe see it, sometimes you have to listen, and
keep what you hear in mind. “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imag-
ine.” After that opening line, from Company, triple space, section break,
aporetic silence. For the sake of imagining. “To one on his back in the
dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts,” the pronoun
This confounding, what can he tell? that he is in the dark? or that the
voice comes? and how do the hind parts certify that? or, if it is the voice,
by virtue of this or that, what exactly can he tell of it, or being in the dark
itself, “by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when
he opens them again”? Whatever we imagine, he, whoever he is, “must
acknowledge the truth of what is said. But by far the greater part of what
is said cannot be veri‹ed.”21 Which is, of course, the way with Beckett.
“For why or? Why in another dark or in the same? And whose voice is
asking this? Who asks, Whose voice is asking this?” (Company 16). Of
course, we’ll never know, but whatever is there to know or, as here, “a
certain mental activity” (7), high order, low order, or crawling “the mute
count. Grain by grain in the mind,” as at the beginning of Endgame, with

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the fugual desire to be ‹nished, Clov’s “impossible heap,” but the mute
count not so punishing, nor those grains so metaphysical, the futile
desire to be ‹nished, though of that we can’t be sure, in the arithmetical
introspection. “One two three four one. Knee hand knee hand two.
One foot. Till say after ‹ve he falls. Then sooner or later on from
nought anew. One two three four one” (36). I could go on, but I won’t
go on. I’ll keep him company.
Whatever it is that, “with no dead end for his pains,” might set his
mind in motion, his mind, mine, the mind needs company, “what if not
sound, . . . Sight? The temptation is strong to decree there is nothing to
see. But too late for the moment. For he sees a change of dark when he
opens or shuts his eyes.” And let there be light, the faintest light, should
they happen to be open, “no longer perceived than the time it takes the
lid to fall,” the seeing unseeing, and so with taste or touch, “The thrust
of the ground against his bones. All the way from calcaneum to philo-
progenitiveness,” ever failing, failing better, a consensus of the senses,
“Smell? His own?” or “a rat long dead. Or some other carrion. Yet to be
imagined” (37). Or maybe a sixth sense, or as if evolution were reversed,
crawling, eyelids stirring, “till the last thump” (29), stirring still, if not
“pure reason,” an awakening dehiscence, le déreglement du sens (Beckett
had lectured on Rimbaud), and it will be, you can be sure, as Artaud said
of the naked, sonorous realization of the essential theater, “as localized
and as precise as the circulation of the blood in the arteries or,” in the
impeccably ordered disorder that is a compulsion in Beckett, “the appar-
ently chaotic development of dream images in the brain”—what in his
manifesto for the theater of Cruelty, Artaud called “true illusion.”22 And
while there’s a far cry between them—not only Artaud’s actor signaling
through the ›ames, whom Beckett would never direct—there is in both
a rigorous intellectuality and, as Artaud saw it in the Balinese theater, a
“mathematical meticulousness” to the “inexhaustible mental ratiocina-
tion, like a mind ceaselessly taking its bearings in the maze of its uncon-
scious.”23 As for what they take to be “the truthful precipitates of
dreams” (Artaud, “Manifesto” 92), for the ratiocinative Beckett the pre-
cipitations are endless, “what vicissitudes within what changelessness”
(Text 9 137), yet if “Never but in passing dream the passing hour long
short,”24 there remains for him the semblance, shrouded perhaps, and
obscured by history—returning to which, as to the dreamscape of a
nightmare, there was surely much to remember, word unspoken, but
Auschwitz there, and a century of rational slaughter, or promiscuous
devastation, the Holocaust, Dresden, Hiroshima, and beyond the Gulag,
genocides yet to come; in short, a real theater of Cruelty.

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In this regard, speak as we wish, through the fetishism of writing in the-
ory, of the text as body in the body of the text—and Beckett’s writing
may be the exemplary model of that—I’m speaking now of his unde-
luded awareness of those corporeal bodies out there, or once there, but
incinerated, or buried too, some of them, not where death came with
birth, but where, dead, yes dead, imagine, they’ve never yet been found,
or in a mass grave, among the multitudinous dead. “Dying on. No more
no less. No. Less. Less to die. Ever less” (Monologue 266), because so
many wantonly dead, though in the dialectic of Beckett, if less is not
more, Lessness (the title of one of his stories) is no less than
never(the)less. Which, for all the syncopated changes, ever more, ever
less, are no mere contradictions, though sometimes too they come, as in
sundry stage directions, with the rage I mentioned before, if not an
eruptive virulence, then caustically ironic, seething, barely contained.
Thus, when Hamm moves from his taunting scorn for Clov’s stinking
to “The whole place stinks of corpses,” and Clov de›ates it or maybe
trumps it with “The whole universe” (46), that may seem a Beckettian
joke, as it may with the tramps in Godot, when to somehow reduce the
misery, they think they are maybe thinking, and suddenly realize, even
“in no danger of ever thinking any more,” that “What is terrible is to
have thought,” which leads to the question that, however we screen it
out, is always subliminally there: “Where are all these corpses from?”
And then, though they may be putting on the audience, as from the
edge of the stage, caught up in specularity, looking at those looking, at a
presumably safe distance, the spectators in their dark: “A charnel house!
A charnel house!” (41).
If not writing for the dead, as Heiner Müller claimed to be doing—
with his usual mordancy, because the dead are in the majority, and it’s
properly democratic to write for the majority—Beckett did say, even as
his plays were being canonized, that he was writing into a void. And that
goes, in its incriminating alienation, far beyond the Brechtian judgment
of the bourgeois audience, not to mention the universe, or with atroci-
ties unending on a global scale, the world as we know it today: not only
the spectacle of televised terrorism and the war against it, with the actu-
alities unseen, suicide bombings, death squads, beheadings, as well as
the fallout killings and scandals that, with the “doctrine of distinction”
and collateral damage, are the coef‹cient of invasive democracy, but
also the widespread torture of massive poverty, tribal murders, sectarian
cleansing, ears cut off, toes cut off, janjaweed rapes, then zina (women
punished for fornication), forced migration, labor camps, smuggling of
the unnamable, not only drugs and teenage girls, but an international

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trade of prostituted children, and then those other diseases, yard-long
Guinea worms in slime, AIDS, blinding trachoma, and other abysmal
plagues. Now, it would seem that this is not the kind of thing, for all his
laughable lists at which you couldn’t quite laugh, that Beckett would cat-
alogue. And there is certainly substance to the view that “the focus of
injustice in Beckett is almost never local, civil, or social, but cosmic, the
injustice of having been born.”25 But if his work didn’t seem to draw
upon what, page by miserable page, shows up every morning in my
reading of The New York Times, beside larger and larger ads for Tourneau
watches, Gucci bags, or Ferragamo shoes, he was very well aware, too,
of what—as he read of it in Le Monde or Libération (which he did read, a
French newspaper, though rumor was that he didn’t)—you can hardly
bear to read. When Clov said “The whole universe,” that was not
merely cosmic, and Beckett knew very well, as Clov said at the wall,
through the subjective ontology of that claustrophobic space, “Beyond
is the . . . other hell” (26), and if that still sounds cosmic, “Outside of
here it’s death” (70)—which is something other than the death of him,
something more brutally lethal, the untold numbers dead, not in a text,
no text for nothing, but in the brutal material world.
“There’s something dripping in my head. (Pause.) A heart, a heart in
my head,” says Hamm, in what would seem the introjected extremity of
his solipsistic mode (Endgame 18), but as Clov has his telescope, the
magni‹er, to liven up the deadliness, there is in Hamm’s heart and head,
“With prophetic relish,” another magnitude, where “there’ll be no wall any-
more,” and if not in‹nite space, Hamletic, “In‹nite emptiness,” which
“all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t ‹ll,” and if that, in
Hamm, still sounds magniloquent, what he goes on to say would be
merely vapid if there wasn’t in Beckett himself some unapocalyptic
sense of the unresurrected dead or the universe of suffering, the uncon-
soled reality of it, that Hamm takes upon himself: “Yes, one day you’ll
know what it is, you’ll be like me, except that you won’t have anyone
with you, because you won’t have pity on anyone and because there
won’t be anyone left to have pity on” (36). No doubt, as formerly, the
outburst will be de›ated and, what a pity, it seems walled in again, the
pity, “But you,” and this comes at the end of the play, “you ought to
know what the earth is like, nowadays” (83). No more no less.
And I knew him well enough to know that no more no less was, in
his “poor mind,”26 with all the brilliance of it, the equilibration of
human misery with something like in‹nite pain, which he could also
parody, mixing the personal with the abstract, as in Rough for Theater II,

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when A and B are summing up the reasons to let the suicidal ‹gure
jump: “Work, family, third fatherland, cunt, ‹nances, art and nature,
heart and conscience, health, housing conditions, God and man, so
many disasters” (Plays 78). If there seems no measure here, of what
comes together in pain, from the personal to the political, from the aes-
thetic to social disasters, there is in the story Enough, where the focus is
personal and the voice is that of a woman, whose mental calculations or
“›ight into arithmetic” are not unlike Beckett’s, who could be more
than uneasy about it: “The art of combining,” she says, “is not my fault.
It’s a curse from above. For the rest I would suggest not guilty” (Prose
187–88).
Which, peace to Sam Beckett, is at best a guilty plea, or like one of
his “Faux Départs” (from a novel called Fancy Dying), maybe a false
start, or pretext for starting again, “talking to himself the last person. /
Saying, Now where is he, no, Now he is here,”27 and in the Grand
Apnea, the elision of texts as I think them, “what . . . who? . . . no! . . .
she!” who, as the words pour out of the Mouth, that sliver of body on
stage, with a silent Auditor there, whose sex is undeterminable, comes
“out . . . into this world . . . this world,” out “before her time,” but is it
out of, or into, that “godforsaken hole,” where she “found herself in the
dark . . . and if not exactly . . . insentient . . . insentient,” remembers the
fetal position, as Beckett remembered it, or something much like it—
what it was “she did not know . . . what position she was in . . . imag-
ine!”—maybe because that’s the place, if it was, where you take on the
suffering, for what you can’t forget. And it starts all over again, “but the
brain—what?” the words coming on like mad, from the ‹rst awful
thought to another, each “dismissed as foolish,” like being punished for
her sins, “as she suddenly realized . . . gradually realized . . . she was not
suffering . . . imagine! . . . not suffering!” but with no steady state in
Beckett, or on the Möbius strip of misery, or just short on a Sigmoid
curve, “unless of course she was . . . meant to be suffering . . . ha! . . .
thought to be suffering” (Not I 216–17), as if thinking itself were the sin,
nothing more terrible than to have thought, that for the anxious
moment, and then again a “sudden ›ash . . . very foolish really but—
. . . what?” we’ll take a Beckettian (Pause), as from the causal of the
fugual or, there again (Pause), for all the truthful precipitates, the sub-
stance of a bad dream, but good or bad, “revolving it all?” and “Where
it began. (Pause.) It all began,” the absurdity of it, that It, “It all. (Pause.)
It all” (Footfalls 243, 240), never it all but the semblance, the shadow of
true illusion, or maybe a faux départ, another false start, taking thought,

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last thought, perhaps the thought that’s lasting, damn that sin! another
way of thinking—and even when breathless, the pity of it, the pity, the
revolving never stops.
But wait, wait! in all the despair, is there anything like hope, even if
true, something more to that illusion? You can be sure there’s a text for
that. “A pity hope is dead. No.” Yet, now and again, with the same old
cries, or moans and groans, from the cradle to the grave, even down
there when the grave-digger put on the forceps, “How one hoped
above, on and off. With what diversity” (Text 2 108). Diversity? Well, it’s
not exactly af‹rmative action, but speaking of moans and groans, even
short of breath, the cost of inspiration, why is it that the work of Beck-
ett, woeful, mournful, impossibly painful, or simply ready, as in Rockaby,
to say, “fuck life” (Plays 282), is more enlivening than other things we
encounter with a more sanguine, less grievous, funny not funny, fune-
real view of it all? One two three four one. “Better hope deferred than
none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken. Company too up to
a point. Better a sick heart than none. Till it starts to break.” Now, take
a breath. “For the time being leave it at that” (Company 18).

notes

1. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York : Norton,
1977) 4.
2. Texts for Nothing 13, in The Complete Shorter Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E.
Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1995) 154; abbreviated as Prose. After ‹rst citation
here, selections from this volume will be referred to only by their titles, sometimes
abbreviated, as with Text (and number) for Texts for Nothing.
3. Not I, in Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove, 1984) 217; abbreviated as
Plays. After ‹rst reference to a play here, or in the text, only its title will be given,
sometimes abbreviated.
4. A Piece of Monologue, in Plays 269.
5. Eh Joe, in Plays 202.
6. Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958) 53.
7. Embers, in Plays 98.
8. The Unnamable (New York: Grove, 1958) 130.
9. That Time, in Plays 230.
10. According to Beckett, the last word of his father on his deathbed, passed
on to Pozzo, as he leaves the stage with Lucky, in Waiting for Godot (57).
11. Sounds, appendix I: Variations on a “Still” Point, in Prose 267.
12. Still 3, appendix I, in Prose 269.
13. Proust (New York: Grove, n.d.) 4.
14. Imagination Dead Imagine, in Prose 182.
15. Ohio Impromptu, in Plays 288.

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 16. Worstward Ho, in Nohow On: Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York:
Grove, 1996) 91; the other two novels are Company and Ill Seen Ill Said.
17. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1968) 259.
18. About Beckett’s disdain for Adorno, see James Knowlson, Damned to
Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) 428.
19. Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Samuel Beckett’s
“Endgame,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988).
20. Footfalls, in Plays 242.
21. Company, in Nohow On 3.
22. Antonin Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto),” in The The-
ater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove, 1958) 92.
23. Artaud, “On Balinese Theater,” in Theater and Its Double 57, 63.
24. Lessness, in Prose 200.
25. S. E. Gontarski, in his introduction to Prose xxiii.
26. Footfalls 240.
27. Appendix II: “Faux Départs,” in Prose 272.

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 twelve

Art and Crisis

Homeland Security and the Noble Savage

3
Recently I was asked permission to reprint an essay that I was ‹rst
asked to write, over forty years ago, by the novelist Saul Bellow, long
before he became a Nobel laureate. It was for a periodical he once
coedited called The Noble Savage—with that other spelling of the word,
not the name of the munitions maker, who created a peace prize, too,
from the invention of dynamite. As for The Noble Savage, there was a
romantic irony in the appropriation of that romantic ‹gure, whose
mythic purity—according to Rousseau—was an innocence upheld by
natural law, while its possible resurrection, during the period of the cold
war, was little more than a Bellowish joke of a knowing wish ful‹llment.
Speaking of savagery, if not purity, I should say that the essay I wrote
was eventually absorbed into my ‹rst book, The Impossible Theater: A
Manifesto, which was described at the time as a savage indictment of the
American theater, with chapter titles drawn from the language of the
cold war: Fallout, The Iron Curtain, The Balance of Terror. The title of
the essay was “The Public Art of Crisis in the Suburbs of Hell,” which
was not exactly what John F. Kennedy had in mind when, at his inau-
guration, he spoke of New Frontiers.
Actually, the provocation for the essay’s title came from a some-
what remoter source, John Webster’s The Duchess of Mal‹, one of the
splendidly corrosive tragedies of the Jacobean age, in which, outdoing
Hamlet, there was not only reason in madness but, with madness being
reasoned, reason was going mad. And with a certain cacophony in the
music of the spheres—God in the expanding heavens already in jeop-
ardy—it was an age that, despite the colonizing reach of imperial power,
felt as we’ve come to do, in the new imperium of capitalism, that it was
losing control of a world going increasingly global; in our case, with the
return on investments abroad including a venomous hatred and, with
martyrdom in the madness, a fanatic will to destroy us. If the fall of the
Iron Curtain seemed for some years to open things up, Homeland Secu-
rity—for understandable reasons, beyond John Ashcroft’s vigilance or
Susan Sontag’s outrage—is closing things down. If we thought when
the Soviet Union was breaking up that the threat of nuclear holocaust

198
was over, what we’re hearing about now is the remarkable versatility of
“weapons of mass destruction” (the phrase a sort of litany), some of
them insidious, not merely the Big Bang or familiar mushroom cloud,
but anthrax, sarin, smallpox, and menaces unforeseen, like snipers in
the suburbs, or—in the imagining of the inevitable: is it merely para-
noia? or something more than fantasy?—bombs in a baby carriage
going off in a shopping mall.
“Security some men call the suburbs of hell, / Only a dead wall
between.”1 When I quoted that from The Duchess of Mal‹ those many
years ago, it was in a context where, with the Berlin Wall still standing,
the stalemate of détente seemed like the human condition, while the
sopori‹c passivity of our theater made it seem marginal or irrelevant to
everything that was urgent in our culture. Given our vulnerabilities
now—the circulation of terror in a limitless war, or the foreboding
in‹nity of the undeclared—the following passage from the essay may
seem like a melodrama of overstatement, though it was written when,
having thumped his shoe on a table at the UN, Khrushchev was still in
power, and with Kennedy concealing his osteoporosis, shot full of cor-
tico-steroids, up on amphetamines, during the year of the Cuban missile
crisis: “In public life a condition of insupportable tension . . . may be
made liveable by the illusions of greater production, more conspicuous
consumption, the strategy of controlled depression, and the whole Dis-
neyland of shelter programs and stockpiled weapons.” But in art, “real
art”—what most of our theater wasn’t—“the same condition of insup-
portable tension, felt in privacy and cutting to the brain, is brought to
even greater tension in the interest of truth, however unsayable, inde-
fensible, or unbearable” (89). If the theater’s status in our culture, with
the media and the Internet taking over performance, hasn’t changed all
that much, I still tend to think of it (when it is as it should be) as the
public art of crisis in a virtual state of crisis—all the more so in “a world
of Realpolitik, sneak attacks, and holy wars” (100), though I wasn’t think-
ing then, through the disappearance of bin Laden and the dispersal of
Al Qaeda, of the wider, more virulent network of a mostly invisible
jihad ‹nanced by charities, drug smuggling, bank robberies, laundered
money, and mandated in the madrassas—for a growing population of
otherwise futureless young people—by the hallowed verses of the
Koran.
As we put that in some impossible perspective, along with the faith-
based initiatives of our born-again president against the “axis of evil,” it
isn’t a question of cost accounting, even if we had an Arthur Anderson
for some of my liberal friends (whose politics I otherwise share). I mean

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those who say—as in the ‹rst email message I received the morning of
9/11—that “the chickens are coming home to roost,” and point to
years of exploitation by corporate America, from pumping oil to
agribusiness, and the brutalizing of dissidence by various dictators and
paramilitaries sponsored by the CIA. Add it all up as you will—includ-
ing our support of Saddam Hussein, who was an ally before he became
a monster—there’s no such thing as balancing terror, no more than
knowing in advance how, with Iraq, a policy of preemption would
work, either as a bluff to insure inspections, upping the ante on the UN,
or, expecting deceit from Saddam, the Predators in place, with smarter
bombs and Special Forces, going for broke on a change of regime.
What there’s no discounting, however, is the new reality principle,
immediate and, for any foreseeable future—with all the data-based
resources of asymmetrical might: from weather precision-guided muni-
tion (WX-PGMs) in a global positioning system (GPS) to new
microwave E-bombs that fry the computer circuits of any threatening
missiles—just about irreversible.
And how art assesses that is pretty indeterminable, and so, too, its
capacity to keep up with the impermeable stream of events around,
behind, or inaccessible to the instant mediatization that—with its
superfetation of commentary, the balanced equations of talk shows or
the bully pulpit of Hardball—anesthetizes attention. Nor is it always a
penchant of art, even the avant-garde, to keep itself up-to-date by being
dutiful to the headlines. Between Ezra Pound’s conviction that poetry is
the news that stays news and William Carlos Williams’s sense that “It is
dif‹cult / To get the news from poems,” there is the long-nurtured sus-
picion—and sometimes conviction too—that while the news may
prompt a poem, neither poetry nor any of the other arts, including the-
ater, is particularly concerned with that, as anything more than a pretext,
where the art most deeply exists. As for the use of the arts in a time of
crisis, one comes back to the paradox—despite Picasso’s Guernica
(1937) or Goya’s 3rd of May (1814), rare exceptions to the rule—that
their use or proleptic power is in their uselessness. And though that
ethos has been much debated, along with issues of art and politics, it
would seem inarguable in one respect: that while art may characterize
with harrowing accuracy a certain kind of terrorist, like the insidious
Verkhovensky in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, it hasn’t much to tell us,
at this baf›ing historical moment, about how to turn the others off,
averting among the martyrs, or the anonymous cadre of the enven-
omed, the rites of (dis)possession, or the long-smoldering animus of
“the wretched of the earth.”

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As we try to absorb that, we might turn back—though it may seem

anomalous now, if not unpatriotic—to Karl Marx, who gave us an
appropriate warning in the middle of the nineteenth century: “our
dif‹culties begin,” he wrote in The German Ideology, “only when we set
about the observation and the arrangement—the real depiction—of
our historical material, whether of the past epoch or of the present.”2
But for those who’ve been engaged, through the revisionist Marxism of
the last generation, in a ceaseless assault on “the ideology of the aes-
thetic,” that is, the legacy of high modernism, with its disposition to
form and its ethos of “dif‹culty,” this should be (though it won’t) a
chastening moment. For it should be apparent, too, that various terms
once associated with modernism in the arts, out of a critical warp of the
humanistic tradition, seem to have returned, after demysti‹cation, to
undeniable relevance. Here I’m using a term from the 1960s, that con-
tentious period which initiated deconstruction to begin with, and the
politicizing of the arts, along with the ideological matrix of cultural
studies, with its quadrivium of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. And
while these categories are by no means to be dismissed or minimized, all
the issues ‹ltered by a modi‹ed Marxism through feminism, psycho-
analysis, the new historicism, and queer theory, are out in a wider
transnational scene a sort of ironic double trouble, arising as they do
from the humanistic tradition, born of the Enlightenment, which, if
excoriated here by the ideological Left, and for other reasons by the
fundamentalist Right, is detested elsewhere, in the fanatic fundamental-
ism of the Islamic world, for its liberal attitudes toward behavior, dress,
sexuality, the status of women, freedom of speech, faith or nonfaith,
and an array of dubious practices at the extremities of what, before the
1960s, was not yet called “lifestyle.” What we see now, through the
immanence of globalization and the nervous cosmos of colliding cul-
tures, is “the shock of recognition” (a talismanic phrase from the old
New Criticism) that “tension,” “paradox,” and the “seven types of
ambiguity” are back—and maybe a few that we never knew existed,
while all the talk of “hybridity” and a radical “decentering” is a theoret-
ical indulgence, certainly in other parts of the world, where nationhood
is still a necessity, and identity up for grabs, or virtually nonexistent,
when not ‹ercely imposed by religious doctrine that despises—as if in
accordance with the theory now coming home to roost—“the hege-
mony of the West.”
About that, and its relation to impending disaster, if the arts have
been delinquent, now and again in the media we’re likely to hear more,
if not in the editorials, in letters to the editor or on the Internet. “We

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201

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will not make progress toward peace,” says a letter in TIME, “until we
treat the causes of terrorism, not just the symptoms, as we are doing
now.”3 Thus the voice of reason, and who can argue with that, though
even in its idealism, at some impasse of the real, there’s a certain jaun-
dice in art—no less, when the idealism isn’t there, a remorseless objec-
tivity that may at its most exacting, as in Beckett or Genet, refuse its
own desires, or, as in Brecht’s The Measures Taken, commit itself ideo-
logically to what seems almost inhumane. Meanwhile, we can ‹nd ver-
sions of that letter in other journals, from Newsweek or The Nation to The
New York Review of Books, or in newspapers all over the country, as well
as on CNN, not to mention countless classrooms in our universities.
But still the symptoms accumulate beyond the ameliorative pace of any
imaginable progress, and would, even if we altered our foreign policies
tomorrow, or Ralph Nader were to replace Paul Wolfowitz as brain
trust in the Pentagon or Jesse Jackson took over from Condi Rice as
national security advisor. The fact is that no immediate change of heart
will diminish the perilous threat of multitudinous others who look upon
us as a menace to what they believe (benighted as some of it seems), or
as a domineering power without the capacity—in the worldwide
dominion of suffering, for which 9/11 was only partial recompense—
to feel their pain or to remember the atrocities perpetrated, for strategic
or corporate or ethnocentric purposes, by the moral blindness of the
West. Nor will there be a change of heart in the bilious back streets of
the Muslim world, so long as the West is inseparable from the spread of
modernity, technology, electronically delivered imagery, and even the
tourist trade, and—as in Bali or Thailand—the morals that go with it,
some of them brought there through the Vietnam War or, by “the
greatest generation,” back in World War II.
Moral blindness, spiritual blindness: these are traditional concerns
of art, particularly tragic drama, where the crisis, if irreparable, is so
painfully explored as to bring wisdom from suffering, or so, in their
woeful lamentations, the ancient choruses say. But that implied a cul-
tural unity that—even if we wanted it, in this age of border crossings,
romanticized in the academy, but abysmal for many who cross—is only
to be remembered, and even then as something questionable or unob-
tainable, or, as Euripides saw the civilizing claims of the Athenian
Empire when it was about to go under, a worn-out ‹ction, delusional
too. It may be that ground zero is where our sense of the tragic revives,
as when references were made, during the memorials, to Bobby
Kennedy’s quoting, after his brother’s death, the Aeschylean chorus
about the pain that drips upon the heart. But drip as it may, wherever,

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beyond the warp of the messianic, if there’s anything that unites us, East
and West, it’s a common demoralization, though there’s now and then
a kind of blindness, morally obtuse, that has unexpected perceptual
bene‹ts. Thus, for the imperturbably conservative Dinesh D’Souza
(best known, perhaps, for his debates with Stanley Fish), the West can’t
conceivably be ethnocentric because it had come up—wouldn’t you
know?—with the concept of the noble savage, as a preface to the social
contract in which natural liberty led to civil liberty in a morally edifying
outcome. (With the approval of Jerry Falwall, who has his doubts about
Islam, God bless all Native Americans!) Yet it would also seem, in one
of the consummate mordancies of the dialectic of the Enlightenment,
that the concept of the noble savage bears rather, in its exalted image,
on Osama bin Laden (whose apparent innocence was enhanced by
wealth before he became a mastermind) and the new legions of suicide
bombers, who claim a certain nobility in the savagery that will be
rewarded—at least for the males among them—by forty houris in
heaven. It’s not yet clear what’s in it for the women.
Or is that remark, insensitive to cultural difference, another form of
Orientalism, also morally obtuse? If so, tell that to Salman Rushdie,
who recently—not wholly forgiving yet of the fatwa issued against
him—wrote with unsti›ed vituperation about the sharia court’s sen-
tence, in Nigeria, ordering that a woman be stoned to death for adul-
tery, as well as about other ominous or grisly punishments to be
in›icted on dissident Muslim females, and the “killing, looting and
burning” that occurred in Kaduna when it was said that the prophet
Mohammad might, if he were at the Miss World contest that has since
moved to London, want to marry one of the beauties competing.
“Where, after all,” Rushdie asked, with the intemperance of the artist
impelled by his own experience, “is the Muslim outrage at these events?
As their ancient, deeply civilized culture of love, art and philosophical
re›ection is hijacked by paranoiacs, racists, liars, male supremacists,
tyrants, fanatics and violence junkies, why are they not screaming?” For
Rushdie, this is not a matter of the hegemony of the West, but rather
that “the moderate voices of Islam cannot or will not insist on the mod-
ernization of their culture—and of their faith as well.”4 His faith is such
that his recent ‹ction and essays are caustic about all this, the satire
thicker (or maybe thinner) but not as impressive as his earlier ‹ction,
which is not to say that outrage can’t be the substance of art.
So far as our common outrage is concerned, not to mention our
views of Islam relative to 9/11, very little of that has found its way into
art, by no means to the extent that we’ve heard it in media politics, if

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muted, however, into a sort of subtext, though Donald Rumsfeld at his
sardonic best (like him, not like him) sounds like Rushdie, and I’m talk-
ing here of performance, against the grain of my own politics. As it
turns out, next to Rushdie’s article, in an op-ed column of the Times, the
liberal journalist Thomas Friedman, taking on the role of George W.
Bush, writing to the leaders of the Muslim world, repeats in a more tem-
perate voice just about what Rushdie had said, quoting at one point,
however, from the very conservative National Review, what both
Rushdie and Rumsfeld would have read with approval: “No faith will
make rote memorization of ancient texts, suppression of critical inquiry
and dissent, subjugation of women, and a servile deference to authority
the recipe for anything other than civilizational decline” (Times A23).
Whatever the politics woven through these voices, if they were orches-
trated in a play, I’d prefer it to the pretense of moderation about what’s
out there in the Muslim world, not to mention the political correctness
telling us what we know, that not all Arabs are alike.
Nor, for that matter, are we, including the Arabs among us, as if to
those who want to kill us that makes any difference. It was a conviction
about that, by the way, that caused a judge—just last week on the TV
series The Practice—to rule with disgust, because it seemed to violate the
Constitution (and he hoped his ruling would be overthrown in a higher
court), that an airline could nevertheless refuse to ›y Arab passengers.
Was it art? Not to be expected from television, though it was much
more strenuous around the moral issue than plays like Copenhagen or
Proof, which presumably brought into the theater what has been praised
there as higher intelligence. With the arguments made by the lawyers
and the reasoning of the judge, the episode was a piece of old-fashioned
realism redeemed through rather familiar emotions by unexpectedly
incisive re›ections on what—dismayed as they were by the prospect of
racial pro‹ling—was nevertheless, too, a justi‹able paranoia.
Up to 9/11, for most Americans, ground zero was middle ground,
and if at this still-destabilized moment—the devastation mainly psychic
with the debris cleared away—it has shifted more to the right, by way of
patriotism to militarism as the major response to terrorism, there’s not
altogether something senseless or insensitive in that, even if the long-
term planners of the now-globalized Manifest Destiny need to do a lot
of rethinking of how, empathically and ethically, we engage with the rest
of the world. And in this regard, I don’t mean the moral clarity that an
all-knowing pious blowhard like William Bennett wants, or Dick
Cheney’s wife when, as head of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, she resisted every major form of research in what we now

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call cultural studies, repudiating all political correctness except her own,
while deriding multiculturalism, and wanting not only to teach more
American history but as if, somehow, that were the end of history.
Which is not to say that cultural studies, which now dominates the cur-
riculum in our graduate schools, doesn’t have, as I’ve suggested, its own
ideological disposition with predictable readings of history, and dubious
attitudes toward what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and the seem-
ingly dissenting Powell ought to be doing, what not, at this con›icted
and dangerous fadeout of history when—even as I was writing this—
the audiotape with what is purportedly Osama bin Laden’s voice was
broadcast by satellite on Al-Jazeera, praising the bombings in Bali and
the Chechen hostage-taking in Moscow, and once again threatening we
know not what.
It’s precisely that, we know not what, that is the particular jurisdiction
of art, with a re›exive indisposition to any claims or semblance of cer-
titude, especially one’s own, in the myriad indeterminacies of the moral
morass of crisis. What one expects from art then—again, if it’s really
art, and I may be speaking only for myself—is a perceptual resilience
that is something more than a reductive view of it all, no less (though
for the harrowing moment they kept the advertisements off TV) the
eventual commodi‹cation, after 9/11, of the images of disaster, and
the memorials too. Whatever the unappeasable loss that some have
suffered, as with the atomized bodies in the toppling towers, there
were through the inevitable repetitions the persisting banalities,
though there were heroism and grief and mourning, about the heroism
and grief and mourning, and the “need for closure,” even among those
far away from any site of disaster, and “getting on with our lives,”
which most of us were doing in any case. Which is not to say that there
weren’t real feelings at a distance, including confused feelings about
what we were feeling or what we should feel or why, somehow, some
of us couldn’t feel anything at all—not even sure, if we felt it, about a
surreptitious feeling of dread.
Art arises from such sensations, in a web of inchoate emotions,
while somewhere in its emergence might be the possibility, out of self-
critical severity, that anything felt might be factitious, and the less said
about it the better, which—if inconceivable in our mediatized reality
today—is what Theodor Adorno apparently felt when he said that after
Auschwitz there could be no more poetry. Of course, that wasn’t so:
“The rest is silence”—but as with Shakespeare, who said it, or after the
Holocaust, Paul Celan, only poetry knows it, compelling attention to
what, in all perceptual vanity, is at the exhausted limit of words:

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 Do not read any more—look!
Do not look any more—go! . . .
The place where they lay, it has
a name—it has
none. They did not lie there. Something
lay between them. . . .
Spoke, spoke.
Was, was.5

And what now appals us in the age of terror—for all that is spoke,
spoke, was, was—is that it’s very likely to be, is, is, intolerably in the
present tense without any end in sight.
Yet, nevertheless, as if with a sanity out of the past, judicious
voices, like George McGovern’s, in a moving article in Harper’s, warn us
about an excessive pessimism that, pervading the Bush administration’s
obsession with evil powers, infects as well our sense of the future.
“There has been evil in the world,” McGovern reminds us, “at least
since Cain and Abel, and there will be evil after all of us are gone from
the earth. God might be able to change that, but not us mere humans. I
look into the future with far less fear and therefore far less cynicism.”6
Yet it wasn’t the downturn of an apocalyptic disposition that led his old
liberal colleague Gary Hart to say, when he and Warren Rudman issued
their report on domestic security, “The world is divided between those
who believe the worst is over and those who believe the worst is yet to
come.”7 If Hart is misleading in any way, in keeping the alarm going, it’s
in the implication of an even division, since there are very few, indeed,
even among the more sanguine, who are likely to feel that the worst is
over, or that our vulnerability has been safely diminished since the hor-
ror of the fatal day. As I dwell on the worst of it now, wondering why
I’m doing it, what seems at times to be diminished is the relevance of
art. But then we do what we must, and the way I’m thinking here is, for
better or worse, in the orbit of the impossible, turning things over and
over, which is what you do in rehearsal, turning them over again, as I’ve
always thought in the theater. If one wants anything at all from art in a
time of crisis (and I’m not always sure that we do) it is—at the nerve
ends of thought where thought escapes us, causing us to pursue it, thus
enlivening thought—the activity of perception that is something like
moral rigor, demanding from every brain cell even more thought,
acceding to the indisputable when it’s there, though it’s not very likely

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to be, and seeing with the utmost compassion, at the limit of endurance,
what we’d mostly rather not.
To be sure, art in a time of crisis will attempt to do other things,
though there was also likely to be, given the dimensions of 9/11, a sort
of moratorium, with a sense that anything art might do would only be
anticlimax. The same was true for the media and popular culture, but
just as we’ve recently heard that everything around lower Manhattan’s
Ground Zero was not exactly heroic—that there were those who
searched the names of the missing as a way of locating empty apart-
ments, and that even certain ‹remen going past an of‹ce up in a tower
ripped off a thing or two—so there was the episode of TV’s Law and
Order, in which a man who murdered his wife, who worked at the Trade
Center, cut off her hand and left it at the site. If this, as a plot complica-
tion in the series, was demonically artful, it is not exactly art, though it
may have been more so than any of the plays produced one September
evening at Town Hall in New York, commemorating 9/11 under the
overall title “Brave New World.” Well intended as they were, and a few
quite moving as testaments to those who died, almost all of them were
recognizable variations on the conventional forms of psychological
drama—about a troubled marriage or a strained reconciliation between
mother and daughter—that might very well have been written, with
some other provocation, before the world had changed.

If it was understandable that there might be something cautious about

what could be represented or done, the question in any event was
exactly how to do it. After initial circumspection about emotions to
which they did not feel privileged—whether the emotions of the bereft
or, if anything, more grievously, unimaginably, those falling out of win-
dows—it was also to be expected that somebody would, however ten-
tatively, try them on, at least those that, somehow, seemed to be acces-
sible. So it was with Michael Smuin, with the Dance Theater of Harlem,
when he choreographed Stabat Mater, to music by Dvorak, for the
“Evening Stars” series at Battery Park—a year to the day after a sched-
uled performance that never took place at the World Trade Center. The
crucial image in the ballet was prompted by Smuin’s seeing a woman
faint, falling back into a man’s arms at the televised funeral of a ‹reman.
The image was replicated over and over by four female dancers who fell
back into the arms of their male partners, while a single woman dashed
through the recurrently falling ensemble, with a vitality out of the past,
which was represented by a ghostly partner, perhaps the one who would

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never return. It’s hard to speak for what others feel about any image,
but however moving this may have been, it would seem to be even
more so, if seen as a pathetic gesture, incommensurate with the events,
and the complex of emotions, that induced the televised image from
which the choreography was derived.
For the composer John Adams it was, as he remarked, a matter of
coming to terms with complex feelings when he was called upon by the
New York Philharmonic to memorialize 9/11. In his operas, Nixon in
China and The Death of Klinghoffer—on the highjacking by Palestinians, in
1985, of the cruise liner Achille Lauro—Adams has focused before, with a
certain immediacy, on political and moral issues, but he was especially
aware this time that music, with its capacity to bypass rationality and
touch the emotions, could edify an audience by exploiting the remem-
bered anguish of that devastating day. He was aware, too, as he expressed
a rather conventional faith in the power of art to transcend the moment,
of the power of the media to debase it, in the incessant super›uity of their
own momentariness. If the woman fainting at the funeral of a ‹reman
was moving, “The ‹rst time you see a photograph of a ‹reman crying,”
said Adams, “you are shocked. But if you see the picture over and over
and then as an advertisement for a politician, it’s beginning to be cor-
rupted.” And then, if he was quoted correctly, he said, “What I am trying
to do is go back to the original emotions to create something out of time,
the way great art ought to.”8 What great art ought to only great art knows,
and even then, perhaps, when the artist is dead and gone. But putting
aside whether his new work quali‹es, Adams came up with an orchestral
score, featuring a violin ensemble, with electronic reverberations echoing
the live sound, over and around the audience, while adult and children’s
choruses intoned or chanted a spare text drawn from the posted mes-
sages around Ground Zero and the “Portraits of Grief” in The New York
Times, as well as a random collage of victims’ names and a phone call from
one of the highjacked airplanes. The intention was to create a ruminative
space as in a medieval cathedral, more as a sanctuary for the survivors
than a testament to those who were lost.
Whatever the affect of this musical event, and the restrained
grandeur of its conception, it still has to be measured, it seems, against
the conception of the event that, in the cunning imagination of its own
heinous aesthetic, was of inarguable magnitude—and so, too, the
recording of it, especially there in New York, the sunburst of egregious
›ame and then the dissolving towers, which will no doubt be canonized
among the infamous images. Which is not to overlook the elegant min-

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imalism of a picture in The New York Times, of a body from on high, stri-
ations of the building behind it, falling upside down; none like it after-
ward, as if in its awful sublimity it were far too much to bear. It may be
fortuitous or utterly germane that, as we re›ect on art in a time of crisis,
we might very well have begun with the aesthetics of terror itself, par-
ticularly as we encountered it in those devastating events, since the aes-
thetic was apparently there, within a pedagogical framework, in the per-
petrator’s conception. Or was it, rather, an egregious mockery that the
hijackers had code-named the Pentagon “the Faculty of Fine Arts,” and
the twin towers “the Faculty of Urban Planning.”
As to Ground Zero itself—the urban planning of it now—aside
from the persistent question as to what will ultimately replace the towers,
there is also the running debate as to how, aesthetically, the horror of
9/11 should be memorialized. In this regard, temporal distance is an
advantage—as with Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin,
impressive when empty (and wasn’t it meant to be so?), the no-exit acu-
ity of its unnerving space—and proximity a liability. This was apparent in
the intemperate argument, at the New York Historical Society, between
Libeskind and Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic and
author of Kaddish (about his father’s death) who, with Sherwin Nuland,
author of How We Die, wanted to protect mourning from the overbearing
presence of architecture. For Wieseltier, the burden is spiritual not archi-
tectural, which in the vanity of its advanced aesthetic, no less the idiosyn-
crasies of its antiaesthetics, would convert lower Manhattan, if not into a
theme park, into a sophisticated mausoleum. On this site, for him, empti-
ness is an option: “The void should be there to give a sense of ‹nality and
facticity,” yet with suf‹cient impartiality to accommodate both “godful-
ness and godlessness, certainty and doubt, anger and hope.”
If 9/11, as he thought, was also the death of architecture, mourn-
ing should be in the Judaic tradition, a matter of words and ritual not
buildings, statues, idols. In accord, but less combative, Nuland also
shared (with John Adams) a desire for a meditative space, which
Ground Zero already seemed to be, with people moving through it or
gazing at it, with respect for the “vanished bodies and their dreams,”
which might be consecrated there, as Nuland conceived it, in a garden
conducive to silent thought, a tribute to them and consoling to us.
Libeskind, however, would have none of this, no less a view of the
Judaic tradition as de‹ned by words alone; the Jews, after all, built syn-
agogues and cemeteries. Nor would he have anything to do with what
he saw as the specter of the philosopher Heidegger in “that kind of

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Nazi notion that language is the home of man. Language is not the
home. We are not at home in language. We are at home at home.” And
that means building, he said, stone and steel, the materiality of archi-
tecture. When Wieseltier accused Libeskind of precisely that, material-
ism, and said he was offended at the thought that architecture would
contaminate a site that should be reserved for spirit, Libeskind went
on to say that Wieseltier’s idea of architecture was a fascist one, com-
ing “straight from Ayn Rand.”9 If the argument appeared to be, at
times, about literature as opposed to architecture, it might also be
summed up this way: if Libeskind wanted, as with the Jewish Museum,
a building with a void, Wieseltier seemed to want nothing but a void.
Whatever or wherever the void, the intensity of the debate suggested,
if nothing de‹nitive about memorials, that while some artists, at a
moment of maximum disaster, think their art inconsequential, there
are others, like Libeskind, who think it unconscionable to abandon
their art, since there’s nothing else with the power to materialize an
adequate response.
In any case, it’s not only memorials that art has to respond to in a
time of crisis, especially when the crisis is drawn out, its parameters
indeterminable, and as potentially demoralizing as a war against terror,
a phantom war, if not a fantasy, in which the enemy is not a discernible
state with an army, or at times in any way discernible at all, its legions
transnational, underground, even disguised in our own cities, leading
normal lives, but with toxic substances, homemade explosives, ›ight
training, and multiple credit cards, in maybe Seattle or Lackawanna,
deployed in “sleeper cells.” If all of this is cunningly seditious, there are
also artists among us capable of thinking of it another way, as in perhaps
the most notorious incident of art about 9/11, by a ‹gure of some con-
sequence, indeed a poet laureate, not proceeding by image or indirec-
tion but taking it head on. Since there are stranger things in heaven and
earth than the conspiracy of nations, I won’t judge Amiri Baraka’s
poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” as the Anti-Defamation League
did, or Governor James E. McGreevy, who asked for Baraka’s resigna-
tion as New Jersey’s honori‹c poet. Not only did he refuse to resign,
but he wouldn’t in any way recant what he wrote of the attack:

Who knew the World Trade

Center was gonna get
Bombed
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers
at the Twin Towers

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 Free ebooks ==> www.Ebook777.com

To stay home that day

Why did Sharon stay away?

I’m not entirely sure, though I’m a Jew myself, why Sharon should have
been there, but then I’m not part of the Zionist plot. Nor, for that mat-
ter, part of George W’s inner circle, which was apparently in on it too.
“If you dont think President Bush knew, man, you are back,” said
Baraka, “in the cartoon days.”10 Well, despite my own misgivings about
Bush and his close advisors, I’ll have to concede that liability, as I pon-
der how, at times, art passing as art proceeds from outrage to outra-
geousness, though I suspect, however—returning to Ezra Pound’s dis-
tinction—this is the news that will not stay news, even if Baraka
remains, as I think he should, the poet laureate.

Meanwhile, there are some works that seem, adventitiously, to antici-

pate the news, as with Bill Viola’s recent video installation at the
Guggenheim Museum, which in turn seemed to acquire an unforeseen
depth from the fatal events of 9/11. In the cinematic fresco of Going
Forth by Day—actually indebted, despite its high-de‹nition video tech-
nology and digital compositing, to Giotto’s fourteenth-century Scov-
egni Chapel in Padua and Signorelli’s ‹fteenth-century fresco cycle in
the Orvieto Cathedral, it’s as if the images of ‹re and blood, or those of
exhausted rescue workers attending victims of a ›ash ›ood, were lami-
nated by emotions arising from the dust of the vanished towers. But if
the image of a woman waiting for news of a loved one seems touched
by prophecy in view of what did happen in lower New York, the epic
spectacle constructed on videotape from the Egyptian Book of the
Dead is perhaps, after all, mythicizing too much, thereby separating
itself from the grim materiality of what, truckful after truckful, was
removed from the pitiless site, not only the shattered concrete, glass,
and twisted steel, but bones, limbs, ‹ngers, not only the amputated but
atomized or disintegrated remains, and so the dust consigned to dust, as
maybe even the biblical prophets never quite imagined. In that regard,
Viola’s epic, with its images of a wounded humanity marching in end-
less procession on the path of life, along with a redemptive image of a
man, rising from a water hole, seems rather sentimental, even despite or
because of certain painterly images of classical restraint. If this quite
imaginative work is nevertheless a case where an aestheticizing of apoc-
alypse is merely out of its class, that would seem to be the provisional
fate of anything still too close to the dimensions of this catastrophe,
with its demoralizing temporal axis, unconscionable causes going back

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www.Ebook777.com
in time, and causes notwithstanding, the mortifying actuality of what,
until the ravaged Pentagon and the cataclysmic towers, we’d never seen
here, the repercussions of which are already happening there.
“Like you look at their face and you can’t make anything out;
there’s nothing left,” said a young vacationer from London, as he
described the screaming chaos of the blast in Bali, and the man who
appeared to be running toward him at one of the Kieta Beach dance
clubs, though he was not sure through the ›ames whether the man was
alive or already dead.11 We speak of people dealing “with unimaginable
horror,” as Fiona Shaw did in an interview about her performance in
that tragedy of atrocities, Medea, directed by Deborah Warner. But then,
as McGovern said of evil, we have always lived in a world of unimagin-
able horror, all the more unimaginable, of course, when it does happen
elsewhere in the world, as in Rwanda or Bosnia or Chechnya. And the
question is always how far away does the horror have to be so we can
then forget it, how close before we say, as Shaw did, when she spoke of
rehearsing a scene “where the messenger comes in and describes the
deaths of Creon and Glauke. It is like what people lived last year,” she
said, though she might have added that what tragedy records across all
cultural and historical difference is always being lived somewhere.
What she remarked about particularly is “people saying simple
things about a state of affairs that seems impossible to comprehend—
but we do have to comprehend it.” Warner went on to say that Medea
has an even more immediate relevance, given Tony Blair’s support for a
U.S. attack on Iraq, and therefore the need for debate when, as she feels,
democracy is wobbly, and Greek plays a model of what, by implication
from its aesthetic, it might otherwise be. “Greece was a very new demo-
cratic nation, and a barbaric world was not very far behind them. They
offered their plays as places of real debate. We can’t really say the the-
ater is a true place of debate anymore, but these plays remind us of what
it could be.”12 Maybe so, maybe not. We need the reminder, but the lia-
bility remains what it was when I wrote “The Public Art of Crisis in the
Suburbs of Hell,” that the debate would be no better than what we
already have on TV. Were that to change, it would be a testament, if
only for the theatrical moment, to the complexity with which the crisis
is seen, and I’m not sure that comes with people saying simple things.
What, for me, accounts for the power of performance is the depth
of apprehension, not merely its commitment—no less its ideological
disposition, the playing out or enactment of what’s pretty well known in
advance—but the conundrum of commitment itself, affect and disposi-
tion pulling in opposite ways, values intersecting and virtually canceling

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each other out, unanticipated con›icts between what we thought to be
so and what we may have imagined, especially when the imagining, fol-
lowing its disposition, is ready to take perception over the deep end,
where seeming and being struggle, invention and actuality, faith and
skepticism, what you believe to be true foundering in the desperation of
belief, as what you may have hoped for is suffused with the unavoidable
and palpable evidence of the unforeseeable, or indeed what may never
be seen, but only wished for or guessed, or hopefully never seen—but
there it is before you, undeniable now, too clear, demanding that you think
or do what you never dreamed before. If then you’re in the presence of
what will change the debate, it may be well to remember that it may not
change the world. If you want some solace about that, it may be well to
remember too, as W. H. Auden once said—as if he were speaking of
Beckett, oracular voice of ground zero—that art changes nothing, but it
at least changes that.

notes

1. The Duchess of Mal‹ (5.3.334–35), in Drama of the English Renaissance, vol. 2,

The Stuart Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York: Macmillan,
1976) 511.
2. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C.
Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978) 155.
3. Letters, Time, November 18, 2002, n.p.
4. Salman Rushdie, New York Times, November 27, 2002, A23. All references
to the Times are from the West Coast edition.
5. Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea, 1995)
141, 147.
6. George McGovern, “The Case for Liberalism: A Defense of the Future
against the Past,” Harper’s, December 2002, 38.
7. Gary Hart, New York Times, October 26, 2002, A1.
8. Quoted by John Rockwell, “Challenge of the Unthinkable,” New York
Times, September 17, 2002, online.
9. Sarah Boxer, “Debating Ground Zero: Architecture and the Value of the
Void,” New York Times, September 30, 2002, B3, 3.
10. Amiri Baraka, New York Times, November 18, 2002, A27.
11. New York Times, October 14, 2002, A1.
12. New York Times, September 29, 2002, Arts, 7.

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 thirteen

Ground Zero
The Original Vision (May 16, 2008)

3
My being here today is suffused with multiply raveled memories,
going back to a troubled time when, amid my reassessment of a long
career in the theater, I was confronted with the prospect of conceiving
CalArts, where in crossing the various disciplines all the world might be
a stage. If that seemed to begin with an illusory promise, if not the ghost
of a chance, so much happened in the performative dissidence of those
turbulent years, which I’ve written about before, that when Steven
Lavine asked me to speak, it occurred to me there wouldn’t be enough
time for it all—and you’d have to put off the graduation. But as with
certain kinds of art, if not quite minimalist, I’ll try to be restrained, as I
re›ect on what he asked me to talk about, and that, indeed, was “the
original vision” for CalArts.
As I thought it over, through what was happening then, relative to
what, who knows where, may be happening now, in the arts and what
affects them, something else intervened, with a maybe appalling, if ret-
rospective relevance, which on this otherwise jubilant day you’d proba-
bly rather forget. Fact is, however, that in an age of cultural explosion,
scienti‹c, political, even psychedelic, the original vision came, or ‹rst
intimations of it, from a premise of “ground zero.” And I even used
that phrase, attached now to the fatal morning, after which, in what
seemed a weird presumption, one of the world’s more innovative com-
posers challenged the powers, the signi‹cance, and dimensions of the
arts—which, in the conceptual documents, we appeared to be doing
ourselves. That Karlheinz Stockhausen (who died last December) had
some bearing on those dimensions may be recalled from one of his
operas, in which a string quartet performed in helicopters hovering over
a concert hall, where the audience listened; or by his image on the Bea-
tles’ album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; or by the resonant spec-
trum of those he in›uenced, from Frank Zappa and Pink Floyd to the
eccentric Björk, and even Miles Davis. But what others, nevertheless,
may unforgivably remember is what he said about 9/11, in remarks that
became a scandal—that the cataclysm produced, as through a cloud of
unknowing or an hallucinatory light, the most majestic work of art there

214
has ever been. Appalling, to be sure, but what he really had in mind was
some “cosmic spirit of rebellion, of anarchy,” with a high degree of
“perverse intelligence,” whose only mode of being, not knowing how to
live, is to create by destroying creation—and in attempting to do so, as
Stockhausen saw it, achieved in one nefarious act what those in music
or the other arts, or prophets of a Total Theater, could never or only
dream.
That may still, by no means, be a redeeming vision, but that there’s
been a destructive element in the arts—equivocally there, between the
creative and self-defeating—has long been known to artists, and indeed
that famous phrase, “In the destructive element, immerse” (from Con-
rad’s Heart of Darkness), was very much on the scene with the emergence
of modernism, or the extremities of it, wild, mad, insurrectionary, but
now canonical, taught in the universities—as in a course I’ve been giv-
ing, called Traditions of the Avant-Garde. Now, that’s an oxymoron:
futurist noise and riots, Dada as tradition. And when some of those tra-
ditions ‹rst materialized, provocatively, outrageously, as with
Duchamp’s urinal or Cage’s silence, or, without the unattainable ecstasy
of Artaud’s Plague, Waiting for Godot, with its “Nothing to be done”—
only you had to do it, that is, do nothing—there were always those around
to say, that’s not art. Or as with Pollock’s pouring of paint on an Action
‹eld, well, anybody can do that.
But putting those unregenerate, ineradicable know-nothings aside,
there are times when artists themselves are not entirely sure what
they’re doing, nor in an age of the antiaesthetic, that they ought to worry
about it; or if, for better or worse, what they’re doing is art. For the poet
W. H. Auden, struggling with religion to an awakening politics, the pur-
pose of art was “to tell the truth, to disenchant and deintoxicate,” which
he was well aware could be done in various enchanting or intoxicating
ways, even while certain kinds of art—from the conceptual to cold
abstraction, or Brechtian Alienation—were determined to subvert the
legacy of illusion. In recent years, moreover, with the advent of decon-
struction, Beauty was out, Imagination was out, as “transcendental
signi‹ers,” with the notion of artistic genius a merely elitist illusion.
As for the issues implicit here, and others I might rehearse, they
were already there at the founding of CalArts, with tendencies, too, for
diminishing the distance between art and life. So, too, between teachers
and students, who ideally taught each other, though in the secret agenda
of art, there are things you can’t quite teach, and—call it elitist, call it
illusion—an impasse more distressing: there you are, at some extremity
of desire or selvedge of perception, way way out where you’ve never

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been before, or darkling there within, and what you’re after seems
impossible—well, who gives a damn what they think, that’s all the more
reason to do it, you do it because it’s impossible. Which is what I wrote
about in my ‹rst book, called The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto. As it
happens, that also caused a scandal, beginning with its ‹rst paragraph,
where I said, when I look around and examine the state of the Ameri-
can theater (this from the early 1950s heading toward the 1960s), with
“the despicable behavior” of most of the people in it, complaining
about what it isn’t, but not wanting to venture to make it something
other, I felt like the lunatic King Lear on the heath, wanting to “kill, kill,
kill, kill, kill kill”—the liability, of course, being that there are those
who’ll want to kill you. So be it. Art is always in peril, that’s its virtue,
and reward; that is, if the one who presumes to be an artist is willing to
take the risk.
Presumption, assumption, all of that was challenged, including the
original vision, what it was, what it wasn’t, what it was meant to be. Yet,
whatever the challenge, what I will say in all vanity is that when CalArts
was conceived there was nothing like it anywhere in this country, and as
I told the board when they ‹rst interviewed me for the job as provost,
who’d be putting the thing together, there were only two precedents
elsewhere: the Bauhaus of the Weimar Republic, with the intellectual and
theoretical rigor behind its experimentalism; and (though the word
didn’t exist then) the countercultural Black Mountain, from whence
Cage, Cunningham, Olson, Tharpe, Rauschenberg, and others emerged.
I remember telling them that if we put the two ideas together—while
encouraging nevertheless what was never there before—the visionary
structure of CalArts would be unprecedented. And so it was, and so far
as I can see is still trying to be, at least from the President’s Message,
where the idea of risk is foregrounded, as it is in a brochure of REDCAT,
announcing a new season, as “a celebration of risk.”
The risk, of course, when you celebrate it, is that risk may be over
with, or taking off in another direction. For risk, too, is a function of
history, where you are, when, and the reality principle there, especially
when it came, as if genetic at CalArts, to the mixing of art and politics.
There were plenty of banalities then, in the uproar of the sixties, surging
from the Days of Love toward the Days of Rage, which in the warier
age of globalization remains an egregious problem, while assessing the
powers of art, and—with everything being commodi‹ed and terror in
the wings—still trying to ascertain how art can be empowering. While
there have always been certain artists whose passion on the outside, in
the form of political activism, was already there within, impelling it even

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more, there are others who, visually, poetically, acutely synesthetically,
may seem unpolitical, and yet they cause you to see what, or how,
you’ve never seen before, so that even the strictest formalism may, in
politics as in ethics, become a mode of judgment, hearing every nuance,
with a moral exactitude. There were debates about it, sure, but the man-
date to begin with was not to favor one artistic inclination over another.
And in the imagined coalescence of the various schools, assuming to
begin with a Tradition of the New, “what we will be after,” I wrote, “is
a discipline of the New, open to the unpredictable and taking energy
from doubt.”
As to where the action is today, as you’ve probably learned at
CalArts, it’s all over the landscape of vision, from installations to
metacreation, and even with transgenetics, still there out on the streets,
on-screen, off-screen, in the performative body or now in virtuality. Or
there it is in fashion, design, advertising (take a look at Artforum, where
it dominates the art), new soundscapes, digitality, and crossing the cor-
porate world, what’s now “the art of production,” with outsourced
labor, technocratics, and custom fabrication. So, along with the now
iconic, ballooning, polyurethaned Jeff Koons, there’s Olafur Eliasson
or Takashi Murikami, or the recent curatorial Truth of Choi Jeong Hwa,
who in his Gaseum Studio was already merging graphic design with
industrial, architecture and art. With Carlson and Company, one of the
major fabricators, right nearby in the San Fernando Valley, I’d suppose
that students at CalArts are familiar with the technological resources,
not to mention the funding, that are for the moment, probably, some-
what beyond their means. As for the ballooning technophilia, that could
hardly be imagined, even by the ›uorescent artist Dan Flavin, when he
described, just before the founding of CalArts, “the scented romance in
‹berglass or anodized aluminum,” or along with his own “neon lights
. . . , the very latest advance in Canal Street technology.” The neon may
seem antiquated, or the romance of ‹berglass, but the dialectic contin-
ues between the singular work of art and what, if not quite off the
assembly line, is by measures algorithmic meant to be reproduced.
Meanwhile, in an online, weblogged, curatorial world, with design-
ers, engineers, and globally teamworked art, there is still some loner in a
studio, over the bridge from Canal Street, even beyond Brooklyn, where
art never was before, or on the fringes of L.A., with some other obses-
sive introvert going about her business, which she’ll never think of as
such, or as if with cracked vision, still on canvas, or coming off the wall.
And so, too, there’s a composer, with synthesizers abounding, turning
out a score, for instruments, mind you, which nevertheless has some-

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thing of a destabilizing vision, so that if you think it over, listen, hear it,
you can somehow really see. Which is what, as we put CalArts together,
we thought the arts should be, however you did it, with electronics or
animation, whatever the apparatus, or intensive introspection, or in
those heady days of happenings, with Fluxus there too, out on the
meadows, in the canyons, the studios abandoned, and doing it there col-
lectively, with video or vegetation. As for performance art, body art,
with Woman House on the scene (and I gave them the money for it), it
might even cross genders with the utmost sexual fantasy—polymor-
phous perverse in a participatory mystique. Or in the method we called
“ghosting,” perverse but impeccable, developed with actors who, later,
were part of my KRAKEN group. And then there was Critical Studies,
unprecedented too, and though the source of a lot of trouble, with its
ideological activism, in those spaced-out days of the radical thinking
body, with plenty of argument and counterargument about where it
ought to be, and in the questioning of what to read, reading across dis-
ciplines, with competing ideas of history, in its incursion upon the arts.
Whatever the excesses and even absurdities, as I’ve said of it before,
I never expected in my lifetime to encounter a pedagogical situation
even remotely like that. All of this was taking place, in earthquake coun-
try, like a kind of culture shock, and while I left CalArts in a bitter con-
troversy—not giving up the ghost, but doubling up the shock—it was a
time I’ll never forget, which has carried over into the work, artistically,
theoretically, I’ve been doing ever since. For those graduating today,
whatever the art, however done, if some risk-taking semblance of that
original vision persists, it should be the same for you.

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 fourteen

Blessings to The Pope and the Witch

3
(The controversy over the production of Dario Fo’s play was initiated by
the Catholic Church, in January 2007, when its spokesman threatened the
University of Minnesota with withdrawal of promised funds for construc-
tion there, after protests by the Catholic League and the archbishop of
Minneapolis–St. Paul. The president of the university and the dean of Lib-
eral Arts held ‹rm, while rehearsals went ahead, and before the produc-
tion opened there was a sort of town hall meeting, on March 8, 2007, at
which I was invited to speak by Michal Kobialka, chair of the Department
of Theater. After my talk, I moderated a discussion, among faculty, stu-
dents, and people from the community. Among those who participated
were Catholics on both sides of the issue. The play opened that night to a
civil and positive reception.)

Over the years, including nearly forty in the theater, I’ve given talks,
and even done productions, in churches and schools of various denom-
inations, from the Unitarian to the Catholic to the Union Theological
Seminary, which published my talk there in Christianity and Crisis. And
more often than not I was invited by some informed, lively, and not
uncritical minister or priest who was quite aware of the avant-garde,
often near-scandalous, sometimes explicitly anticlerical plays I had
directed.
That was especially so at The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco,
where—and this developed over half a century ago—we had an excel-
lent relation with the Jesuits at the University of San Francisco. They
not only admired our production of King Lear, and its uncompromising
devastation of value, Lear’s “Never, never, never, never, never,” and
those grievous lines after the unconscionable, inexplicable, unjusti‹able
death of Cordelia—“Is this the promised end?” “Or image of that hor-
ror?”—about which one might think, in a post-Nietzschean way, that if
God is not dead He has a lot to be accountable for. The Jesuits were
very moved by that production, mortifyingly so, and in an entirely dif-
ferent mood, they were constrained to laugh against their holier judg-
ment when we did plays by the Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey, no less
those by Beckett, Pinter, and Genet—all of whom made it quite
dif‹cult to believe at all, no less in a good and just God.

219
 Yet, when we were rehearsing a production of Bertolt Brecht’s
Galileo—and the Marxist Brecht, surely, no lover of the Lord—we
needed some help with a scene in which they were dressing the newly
elected pope, whom we had seen before as Cardinal Barberini, a fash-
ionable ‹gure, witty and intellectual, and sensuous too, in a setting with
resplendent ladies of pleasure, like a Renaissance version of la dolce vita.
Yet even there, he was by no means a proponent of Galileo’s Discorsi—
useful science, sure, but subservient to Scripture, and soon suppressed
under an edict of the Curial that kept Galileo for years under virtual
house arrest. As the worldly Barberini takes on the holiness of the pope,
of which the dressing was emblematic, I wanted it to be authentic, in
meticulous detail, as it might be at the Vatican; so I called my friends,
the Jesuits. They researched how it was done, and though they knew
they were in antipapist, near-blasphemous territory at The Actor’s
Workshop, they nevertheless came down to the theater to show us how
the dressing should be done: the order of garments, the binding, the
whole sartorial transformation a ritual in itself.
The scene was extraordinary, and they had my blessings for it, me
with a Jewish background, but utterly faithless as I am—which on one
or another occasion we also talked about. So I did one time, too, with
Jesuits right here in Minnesota, when I was giving a seminar at the Uni-
versity of St. Thomas, and after being put up ‹rst in the president’s
house, somebody else was scheduled to be there, and they asked if I
minded moving over to a housing cluster where the Jesuit faculty lived.
In the mornings, we went long-distance running together, my ungodli-
ness no deterrent, even when I described the kind of plays we were
doing, which I was alluding to in the seminar, and in lectures I was also
giving at the College of St. Catherine.
What those priests understood, I think, is that there are works of art
and certain artists—and Dario Fo was certainly one, long before the
Nobel Prize—whose most rudimentary honesty, down-to-earth, satiric,
ribald, presumptuous as it may seem, is ultimately more pious, more
dutiful to what one might think of as God’s will, even while exposing in
more than fantasy what may be an embarrassment to the church. Each
sin feels its own deformity (as a metaphysical poet once wrote), but to
work on behalf of justice, the poor, the dispossessed, some fundamen-
tal equity of being, may be closer to the originary Mystery upon which
the church was built. There are, to be sure, other mysteries, or secrecies,
and we have recently seen the papacy’s integrity threatened by priestly
indecencies that for years it ignored or tried to hide. As now and then a
diocese, after paying for desecrations, has to declare itself bankrupt, the

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church now talks of transparency. Far better, then, to see in the open, as
a moral obligation, what in the secrecy of the Vatican it may reprove
itself. As for the purported sacrilege or scandal of Dario Fo, if the
church doesn’t like it, or it has no substance, let the absurdity expose
itself. Far better to laugh it off, which itself might be a gesture of divine
patience.
Among the priests I have known, as well as Catholic friends and
colleagues—some of the most discerning also the most devout, and
with a wit enforced by faith—my guess is they would, if they saw The
Pope and the Witch, be prepared through laughter to have a go at Fo, exer-
cising a spirituality not only through forbearance, but awareness, and by
suggesting that even the pope, perhaps, in the avoidance of hypocrisy,
may be all the more infallible by laughing at himself. Or at least at the
person—a Catholic spokesman here, like Cardinal Pialli in the play—
who wrote about this production of The Pope and the Witches that it’s like
some follower of Hitler mocking Jews. I must confess, though Jewish,
that I have always been, since I ‹rst read St. Thomas Aquinas—whose
mode of reasoning I deeply admired: the ability to state the other posi-
tion even better than it had been stated, before attempting to refute it—
far too Thomistic to see anything but a pitiful, execrable, if not laugh-
able analogy there.
As for what Dario Fo represents, his long career attests to that, the
abundant sel›essness of it, acts of compassion and charity, which really
speak for themselves—though when he accepted the Nobel Prize, he
suggested the personal cost, to himself, but especially to his wife and
collaborator, Franca Rame. “We’ve had to endure abuse, assaults by the
police, insults from the right-thinking, and violence. And it is Franca
who has had to suffer the most atrocious aggression. She has had to pay
more dearly than any one of us, with her neck and limb in the balance,
for the solidarity with the humble and the beaten that has been our
premise.” What he didn’t say exactly is that she had been tortured and
raped, if not by Nazis, by fascists, those right-thinking zealots, for the
almost saintly things she and her husband did.
Birth control and abortion will be cultural issues, to be sure, for
some fundamental, in the course of our next election, as with appoint-
ments to the Supreme Court. But not to think of birth control, abor-
tion, and yes, condoms and contraception relative to the Third World’s
mind-bending poverty is irresponsible, really sacrilegious, and that’s
what the sometimes over-the-top, mind-blowing farce of The Pope and
the Witch is about. As for the pontiff’s own high-strung traumatic stress
disorders in the play, they suggest in judiciously overampli‹ed global-

Blessings to The Pope and the Witch

221

www.Ebook777.com
ized terms that there is some institutional, epistemological, theological,
maybe ontological, even linguistic ›aw in any social or religious organ-
ism, even the Vatican, that lets such suffering persist.
And who can argue with the ‹nal line of the play, which quotes St.
Augustine: “Woe to the man of power, who takes the side of those who
have no power.” So, too, with the artist who does, and not merely in
passing, as in the nomadic theater of Fo, but at the recurrent risk of his
life. As for banning the play on a college campus—where we may think
about whatever at the most disturbing extremities of thought—no
moral grounds for that.

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 fifteen

The Pathos of Dialogue

Unable to Speak a Word

3
It’s been quite a while that we’ve been aware, on stage, off stage, that
the appearance of dialogue may be misleading, and people talking to
each other may be talking past each other, putting each other on, or
really going nowhere with words, words, words—or sometimes search-
ing for the one word that will set things right, like that word in the
beginning that became, in T. S. Eliot’s Gerontion, “the word within a
word, unable to speak a word, / Swaddled with darkness.” And the
darkness was, if anything, augmented by deconstruction, and the theo-
retical obsession over the last generation with the ethos of suspicion
about the entire repertoire of slippery signi‹ers, about which Nietzsche
had warned us that since every word we speak is an insidious metaphor,
it is, all said and done, nothing but a lie. Such is the fate of dialogue, and
we didn’t have to wait for those politicians with their specious invita-
tions, “Let’s dialogue,” with each other, with the public—that spectral
vanity of television—to have some sense of the enormity of the lie.
As for the Society of the Spectacle or age of simulacra, where we
live through the high velocity of images in a mediated world, time itself
becoming speed would, if any remaining impulse, leave dialogue
behind. “The spectacle,” wrote Guy Debord, back in the Situationist
sixties, “is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its
laudatory monologue.” So, what are you talking about, what’s this about
dialogue? What we’re left with, it seems, is nothing but mere talk. Or in
the world of instantaneous communication, the dominion of the media,
merging with the Internet, the communication is, despite the chatter-
bots and weblogs, for the most part exchanged in a vacuous economy
of blather, where polling is community and, with Letterman, Trump-it,
Hardball, no less Limbaugh, and the O’Reilly Factor, dialogue a laugh.
Nor, if we had paid attention to what had been happening in the
theater, would we have been surprised. “What is there to keep me
here?” asks Clov in Endgame. “The dialogue,” says Hamm, well aware of
the “blathering,” as they call it in Waiting for Godot, “about nothing in
particular. That’s been going on now for half a century.” And that was,
when I staged the play in San Francisco, almost exactly another half a

223
century ago! But then, as Gogo says, when pestered by Didi to remem-
ber what happened a few moments before, “I’m not a historian.”
Adorno doesn’t have it entirely right about Beckett, when he says about
Endgame, that “history is excluded”—indeed, it’s rather impacted,
inescapable, mortifyingly so—but as one thinks back through the cen-
tury before the millennium (and if anything it’s worse since), Adorno
has reason for saying that history itself “has dehydrated the power of
consciousness to think history, the power of remembrance. Drama falls
silent and becomes gesture, frozen amid the dialogues.” Which is not
quite the gestural life, the concrete language of theater, or the “naked,
sonorous, streaming realization,” that Artaud had in mind when he said
that “dialogue—a thing written or spoken—does not belong
speci‹cally to the stage, it belongs to books.”
As for a perversely fractured play like Heiner Müller’s Hamletma-
chine, remembering with a jaundiced mordancy the super›uity of words,
there’s no pretense of dialogue, for, as he’s said, “no substance for dia-
logue exists anymore because there is no more history.” Whether that’s
so or not, if there’s anything like a dialogue, it takes place with the dead,
for “the dead are in the overwhelming majority when compared to the
living,” and “literature, as an instrument of democracy, while not sub-
mitting to, should nevertheless be respectful of majorities as well as
minorities.” There may be, in that view, some tongue in cheek, but it
causes you to wonder too, as we ponder the fate of dialogue, whether—
given the precarious state of the world, with global warming, nuclear
threats, jihads, suicide bombings, a century of rational slaughter dis-
placed by preemptive warfare, Third World genocides, appalling
poverty, AIDS—that’s now a privilege of the dead, and what, if so, they
may be saying about us.
But then, too, let’s not sentimentalize the dead. We may grieve for
them or forget them, or in imagination speak to them for relief—unless
we happen to be among those who, no mere minority now, born-again
and awaiting apocalypse, will have a dialogue with them. For the rest of
us: Anybody there? Listening? Care to talk?

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 sixteen

Thinking History, History Thinking

Of course, this complex process is all haunted by real

history. But everything cannot be said at once.
—louis althusser, For Marx

And if you can remember, it may be history

but it is not historical.
—gertrude stein, The Gradual Making of
the Making of Americans

3
Is there a real world out there? I’ll soon be moving the question to
other perceptual sites, but at bedrock, ground zero (now hallowed by
9/11), or when push comes to shove, making their peace with decon-
struction, few historians deny it—and come, let’s face it, none really can
(no Bishop Berkeleys among them), it’s real enough for them. With all
the signi‹ers shifting, and some of them under erasure, there may be
uncertainties in the referential structure, as out the window, through the
rain, across the lake from me now in Seattle, what should be the Cas-
cades is, with a hint of snowcaps above, mainly a minimalist gray
vaporous wall of clouds, nothing to be seen on the landscape of what I
am sure was there, but then for a moment the trees (from Berkeley’s
forest, perhaps?), but not as metahistory. And so it may be with the
recuperated vagaries of any historical context that, however obscured
by the years, somehow inhabited time, or survived the attritions of time,
to more than suggest, if not certify, that there was a there there. The
important thing, of course—no different in this millennium, but after
the collapsing towers suddenly a crazier world, with there all over, dis-
persed or even secreted—is to determine how to get there, with the
swift accrual of history affecting theater history.
This is complicated, too, by a very mixed sense of things as no
longer Eurocentric, though the euro increases in value, and cities in East
Asia are looking European, or euro-polyglot, with maybe Dutch hous-
ing or from the Côte d’Azur, while in the post- of postcolonial some are
talking empire (by no means always against it), and with English as lin-
gua franca the more than gradual making of the making by Americans—
not only with preemptive strikes, but shopping malls and Big Macs, and

225
naturally Disney Worlds. As for the critique of Eurocentricism, from the
academic Left, that had to be put in abeyance when France and Ger-
many united against Bush and Cheney on the war in Iraq, with ethno-
phobic Americanism now the villain of the peace, when now, too, there
is none, and inarguable that there are, if not an axis of evil, enemies out
there who—whatever we did to deserve it, and could we deserve it
enough?—really want to kill us. What’s more, it has dawned upon us,
there are generations of them, growing up in madrassas with another
view of the world, or of another world, this one unreal, the other with
houris in heaven, as promised to suicide bombers or those who, with
their own faith-based initiative, crashed into the towers.
And do I say all this at the risk of buying into Orientalism? Or is it
that the cunning of history is buying into the critique, as digitalized cap-
italism diversi‹es the world, a sort of corporate takeover of morpho-
logical ›ux, which (even through the fugitive terrorism, computerizing
its caves) might be seen as the apotheosis of multiplicity and hybridiza-
tion, incessant calls for which we’ve heard in cultural studies, from all
the border crossings to a thousand plateaus. From the Deleuzian to the
delusional, there has been a virtual litany about the “fragmenting, disso-
ciating, dislocating, and decentering” that would liberate us from the
self-validation endemic to a “universalizing historicism.”1 As for the
post-Derridean dissemination of an antiessentialism, it has rei‹ed the
question with which we started, about the reality of the world, and how
in the world we’d know it through the free trade of appearance, no less
how it came to be from what we remember of the past, with the seeds
of history spilled upon the ground. That’s how Walter Benjamin saw
them, with a historical materialism both compromised and redeemed by
a “weak Messianic power”; or, with an imagistic shift in the mythos, “a
secret heliotropism” that turns the past “toward that sun which is rising
in the sky of history.”2 If that skyey vision seems like William Blake’s,
there are not many historians who are likely to be blessed with the
heliotropism. And lest we forget, “vision” is a transcendental signi‹er;
despite Benjamin’s own leanings toward Leibnizian monads and the
Kabbalah, one might assume that, over the spectrum of Marxisms on
the scene today, history would have been purged of anything theologi-
cal. It seems, however, that in the essentialism of the materialism (e.g.,
Jameson’s “political unconscious”) it’s been turned upon its head, like
Marx with Hegel, now the other way around, merging in psychic shock
with reality and appearance, shadowing each other always, as if material
life-processes, too, were phantoms of the brain.
As for theater historians, on the initial question, they are and always

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have been, in a somewhat anomalous position, for what in the world of
theater—the strangeness of its emergence (derived from ritual, really? ask
the anthropologists, and anyhow, why theater?), doubling up on appear-
ance, making a fetish of it, or disavowing the fetish—are we to make of
the other world? We may think of the theater itself as the reality of
appearance that is the appearance of reality, but with insidious muta-
tions in the canonical drama (which probably wouldn’t exist if we could
really distinguish the two), is it the other way around, this world that
world, or some ghosting extension of it, the appearance of reality that is
the reality of appearance? “Seeming, seeming,” the impelling substance
of Shakespeare’s plays, suffuses Measure for Measure, but is that (by what
measure?) less so with reality itself? And having darkened the comedy
thus, what do we do with the old beguiling notion that all the world’s a
stage, and if not, what of “the society of the spectacle” and its “preces-
sion of simulacra”—all the men and woman still merely players, but in
somewhat lesser roles, and whatever the identity politics with an iden-
tity crisis too?
With the insubstantial pageant fading, on stage, off stage, or any
stage between (not to mention stage fright in the human condition
itself) there was always an identity crisis in the work I did in the theater,
exacerbated by the desire, unabating through the years, to know
through its genetic vanishings what the theater is. This led to a sort of
subatomic physics or ontology of the form, arising from an almost
manic obsession, passing from theater to theory, with precisely what
escapes us, the materialization of theater from whatever it is it is not:
life? reality? history? you name it. But as we lose our bearings in the
questions, it’s as if (the absence of) history were being replayed, not
through the Verfremdung of Brecht, but the reverse English of Slavoj
Z&iz&ek, always turning things around (a sort of heuristic put-on) in his
Lacanian mirror, where what is being staged appears to be, in the dialec-
tic of seemings we’ve been rehearsing here, one or another of Zeno’s
paradoxes. “How Real is Reality?” Z&iz&ek asks, in the ‹rst chapter of
Looking Awry, but however you look, and the more you look, the more
it looks like theater. And whatever the permutations, if it sometimes
seems, to all appearances, as if the long-familiar phrases in their baf›ing
orchestration have, among theater historians, screened the reality out,
that’s because it would—not mere singsong, the reversals taken seri-
ously—surely invalidate what we normally think of as history.
Which is why we have, too, an equally long history of an antithe-
atrical tradition that is either a way of protecting the other world, by
exposing the apparatus of reproduction (thus the A-effect) or, like Mal-

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227
larmé’s occulted theater, forgetting about it entirely, or there in the
closet drama at least pretending to. As to the archaeology of knowledge
in the order of things—reality of or appearance of, or just more of the
Same—like the future of illusion (or the illusion of a future), this is not
merely a matter of discourse. Nor is it when, radically widening the epis-
teme, we try to imagine human history not in archaeological but in
astronomical terms, in that in‹nitely expanding universe that, as Ein-
stein saw it, is in the curvature of the cosmos turning back upon itself—
thus following, it would seem, the retro›exive pattern of reality and
appearance. Or is that, too, the other way around, the pattern there in
the relativity, the gravity of it being (and the source of tragedy too?) that
entropy is in the system with E = mc2? Whatever the thermodynamic,
when the Bomb went off—the nuclear historical nightmare that Ein-
stein warned against—we really had to take the measure of the unavail-
able energy of the universe, what entropy used to be before redeemed by
chaos theory, bringing the random data into the order of things.
One wonders, indeed, how history deals with that, in an age of
information, appallingly supersaturated, but that, we’re told, only in its
redundancy overcomes the “noise,” thereby reducing entropy, which
otherwise inclines to the maximum. As we still try to take that in—stay-
ing moored in human history, seeds upon the ground, but with a rock-
eting boost to the heliotropism from President Bush’s visionary plan
for moving “forward into the universe,” preparing thus “for new jour-
neys to the worlds beyond our own”3—we also hear that newly per-
ceived old galaxies are undoing long-held theories around the Big Bang,
and that the universe was actually growing, moving toward where we
are, faster than anyone thought. Nor is it a movement, as veri‹ed
before, from the slight dumpiness in dark matter that, swollen by
hydrogen gas, then collapses into galactic clusters gathered in long
strings (in light years, 2,000 billion billion miles long), with gigantic,
almost stupefyingly empty voids between. What has been discovered
instead, through what is known as the Gemini Deep Deep Survey, is
that massive galaxies were forming, not through small clusters, but in
quick-time, that is, only a billion and a half years or so after the Big
Bang. Now this, to be sure, is still mind-blowing history, but as it
re›ects on theory, and how we think history, it’s germane to where we
are (and I don’t mean at all in a play by Michael Frayn). Chance and his-
tory may conspire, but as it turns out, there is in the cosmic indetermi-
nacies of reality and appearance, another sort of reversal, in that the
data concur better with how the astronomers saw it before the develop-
ment of the dark-matter models, when they theorized that the largest

reality principles
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galaxies did form ‹rst. “If we presented this to astronomers 25 years
ago,” said one of the principal investigators, “they wouldn’t have been
surprised.”4
So we might say, when looking again at the past, not billions of light
years away, but only since the chorus appeared at dawn at the theater of
Epidaurus, about ways of writing history that have been severely cri-
tiqued over the last generation: for residues of the theological or for
claiming to be teleological or refusing to concede that its narrative sta-
tus is not much different from ‹ction—which, one might guess, is more
than likely to con‹rm the established social and political order. Thus,
too, back in space: that the Hubble telescope con‹rmed, three days
before the Deep Deep announcement, what had been discovered, by
spotting a galactic cluster located earlier in time than anyone believed
possible, well, let us remember that the Hubble itself is a cultural artifact
of global, now spatial, capitalism—in‹nitely expanding, too, and curv-
ing back upon itself. What we want to question closely is the invisible
writing on the lens, with, no doubt, its hegemonic inclinations. But then
(just as I was writing this) NASA took care of the ideological problem.
Shifting resources now, as directed by the president, to those journeys
to other worlds, the agency stunned the scientists by announcing that
there’d be no more shuttle visits to the Hubble, for replacing batteries
and gyroscopes, thereby dooming it to death in orbit in a few sad years.
Scientists were dismayed, but no matter, historicists can turn their atten-
tion to the robotic machine named Spirit (humanoid, cyborgian), and
the equally suspect writing of what seems an impending imperialism on
the desert sands of Mars.
With the “ethos of suspicion” extending to outer space, what’s
more than apparent here is a re›ex of cultural theory, almost doxologi-
cal, with fallout into theater studies, not so much of performance events
doing the right thing (sexually, racially, multiculturally), but there in the
temporal distance, with the mimetic now problematic as a form of
af‹rmative action. If Artaud’s theater of Cruelty, as Derrida had to con-
cede, failed to abolish representation, grammatology still persists in
determining how the past manifests itself: if it’s no longer a dialectical
process in the Hegelian sense, a teleology arising from the absence of
static essences, history is never present to us in anything but a discursive
form. To what degree, however, is that a revelation? If the pressure felt
by historians from poststructuralism and “the linguistic turn” pushed
one or another to mockery or disdain for “discourse about discourse
about discourse,”5 even the most recidivist empiricist would acknowl-
edge that as the past is experienced, thought through, felt, then reexam-

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229
ined, not even cliometrics or microhistory can keep out subjectivity, or
the encroachment of language on how history is conceived. As for what
actually happened (wie es eigenlich gewesen), there are still historicists, in the
Rankean sense, who remain attached to some reasonable facsimile of a
scienti‹c hermeneutic, wanting to stay with the facts, but knowing at
the same time that the writing of history occurs through the questions
asked about it, with unavoidable special interests from contentious
points of view, from which—with documents, texts, archives, objects,
and objective commitment too—they know they’re not exempt.
Axiom: fact is fact, depending on how you look at it, or as mirrored
in the mind. If it wasn’t so once, or didn’t appear to be, that’s the history
of modernism, and its reality principle too—which doesn’t necessarily
invalidate the fact, or as Hemingway once put it, “the sequence of
motion and fact.” Nor does it invalidate, in the accrual of history, the
assiduously sought particulars, the “sum / by defective means,” which
is how William Carlos Williams put the issue in the historical bricolage
of Paterson, where “rigor of beauty is the quest.” True, beauty has not
had much status in the hegemony of critical theory, but as it seems to be
returning like the repressed, Williams could have been speaking prolep-
tically when he asked, “But how will you ‹nd beauty if it is locked in the
mind past all remonstrance?” And he might have been asking it, too, of
an eminent scholar who recently tried to purge himself of the suspicious
excess or paranoia about literary and dramatic “power” that, among the
new historicists, his work had previously nurtured.
But before we come to that, there are further complications, as the
speeding up of its scattering bewilders our sense of history, what’s com-
ing so fast it’s already past. If history to begin with has always been self-
re›exive, and with the spaced-out fractures of modernity polymorphi-
cally so, it is now all the more attenuated, dispersed, digitized, diffused,
not only by the media and its epidemic of image, but a globalized net-
work of electronic textualization that, with its circuitry of the immater-
ial, beyond simulacra, makes Baudrillard’s “end of the real” something
of a non sequitur. As for Fukuyama’s “end of history,” that would seem
to be a laughable legacy from the theater of the Absurd. With the
Enlightenment dimmed, or fuses blown, and progress a worn-out
notion—the mournful fallout, it seems, of “tomorrow and tomorrow
and tomorrow”—it’s as if, paradoxically, there’s the “future in the
instant,” as though Lady Macbeth, surfacing on the Internet, ‹nally had
her way. And how can there be an ending, with the future like that, an
incessancy of instants, but never the last instant, nothing but history, if
maybe a different kind. One can hardly speak of that as a context, but

reality principles
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given the cybernetic amplitude of symbolic exchange, with thought
being encroached upon by virtual reality, the important thing for theater
history—at this paranoid impasse of the millennium (with surveillance
exceeding the panopticon, but somehow more justi‹able through Al
Qaeda’s secreted presence in the Foucaultian spirals of power)—is how
to keep its bearings in the idea of history. And when I speak of the idea,
I mean as distinguished from metahistory or the otherwise suspect
‹ction that—given the ideological disposition behind variants of the
mandate, “Always historicize!”—history is taken to be.
The movement of truth through history can be, to say the least,
peculiar, even with science, no less ideology. To return again to the cos-
mos, that illimitable context, when it seemed less boundless and could
even be aesthetically ‹gured: when Copernicus threw the earth into
orbit around the sun, diminishing its stature in the universe, he intended
to preserve or rescue circularity in the heavens, without, however, the
complications of concentric spheres (was there friction producing the
music?) or what the new historicism went after in our time, the Great
Chain of Being. Abandoning the Ptolemaic view was a move toward
simplicity in the skies. When Tycho Brahe subsequently restored the
older order of things, with earth as the center of the system, he was not
only mathematically more sophisticated than Copernicus, but even
more accurate about the behavior of the stars. Yet, in the long historical
perspective, we live in a Copernican universe, that is, if history has it
right. That it’s hard to get it right might be thought about, however,
with the attitude of a more impeccable, but wary science than that
which determined the shaping of history in the nineteenth century. So,
back to the subatomic: in a recent experiment that tracked as exactingly
as could be the subtly wavering dance of particles called muons, alluring
evidence was found of a “vast shadow universe of normally unseen
matter existing side by side with ours.” Unfortunately, if tempting, the
evidence is also subject to the liability of mathematical error and the
actuality of theoretical disagreements by physicists around the world, all
of whom apparently agree that if the Su‹ whirl of the muons occurs as
it seems, the shadow not illusion, few discoveries in science would be
any greater. But as the associate director of nuclear physics at the
Brookhaven lab remarked, “The theory situation is still not under con-
trol. It’s just maddening to me.”6 And so it is to me, with history relative
to theory, as we now encounter it in theater studies.
Always historicize! But the question is how? in whose sense? Ben-
jamin’s, with his monads, shadowed by mysticism? Jameson’s, out of
the political unconscious, with Marxism there as a virtual transcenden-

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231
tal signi‹er? or the late or early Foucault (and to what degree Nietz-
schean?), or Deleuze and Guattari, whose pushing the libidinal econ-
omy to the extremity of the machinic seems, desiringly, to sneer at his-
tory. Actually, in the anti-Oedipal logic of an ecstatic excess, or what
Foucault called their theatrum philosophicum, they would seem to be the
theorists of the electronic wide world dreaming on things to come:
cheap and effortless affect, free-›oating sexuality, a promiscuous com-
plex of graduated thrills, in a virtual “body without organs” that, in its
queer way, consumes (performatively, of course) whatever appears to
be marketed on the computer screen. How to decipher through all this
what we mean by history should, I’d think, be up front in the curricu-
lum, perhaps its primary question, since whatever it once was, it is now
something more or other than the past, or even its pastness, proceeding
now as it seems with unstinting (Virilio) speed, “the location and the
law, the world’s destiny and its destination.”7
If there’s anything in the destiny that is residually teleological, that
may not so much mean a faith in progress, or conviction about causa-
tion, but rather an admission that, conceive it as you will, history will
always be written, through its recurrently seeming ending, with an inex-
pungeable trace of an intended end, that is, teleologically. And that
seems inevitable to the extent that any historical perspective is deter-
mined by desire, informed as that may be by what we know and assume,
how we came to know it, and even if we are conscious of potential faults
in our assumptions—and, to be sure, we should be, before turning as
readily as critical theory to the suspect assumptions of others. It’s
through my work in the theater that I’ve come to believe this: it’s when
inquiry is grounded, methodologically, in a kind of conscientious
ungrounding that there’s a vertiginous sense of history maybe thinking
us. But if we’re to think historically at all, there remains the recurring
question of how much, if ineliminable, teleology is admissible; so it is
with theater history in its encounter with the past, however it seems to
be moving, and at whatever speed.
If here, now, is a dubious moment, already past as I think it, no won-
der, then, that historical context at a temporal distance is increasingly an
issue—and precisely the issue that theater history has insistently to keep
in mind, that is, how to think history when it appears through all the evi-
dence that, even back then in the slowdown, history is thinking itself, in
the years, the years (as Virginia Woolf felt them too, when not in the room
of her own). If beyond individual will and below the workings of power,
and with whatever differential purposiveness coming from who knows
where, history occurs by accretions, as if inscribed on time, it is thus his-

reality principles
232
toriographic, ambiguous perhaps, elusive, nevertheless graphically so.
But in the hegemony of the historicism that, out of the revisionist Marx-
ism, dominates cultural studies, including the theater too, everybody is
talking of “social construction.” That there is such construction seems
self-evident, and it should be recognized that—from the emergence of
historical consciousness in the nineteenth century through la longue durée
of the Annales school to those today resisting deconstruction—most
historians take it for granted. Moreover, it would seem apparent that if
history is being written, the writing is overdetermined, by social struc-
tures, economics, progressive intentions or polemical purposes, as now
by identity politics, and by way of psychoanalysis, feminism, queer the-
ory, partisan attention to the marginal, in the now ubiquitous categories
of race, class, gender, ethnicity, which in the process of correction (not
to mention correctness) are indeed historicizing, which often means
parsing out history in certain predictable ways.
What’s not so surprising is that even the best of the new historicists
are becoming wary of that, and particularly in historicizing the theater
(mainly Elizabethan and Jacobean) where they were focused to begin
with, though not upon the aesthetic where rigor of beauty was the
quest. What they were concerned with, anecdotally, but implacably, in
the anthropological vein of Clifford Geertz, and as demysti‹ed by Terry
Eagleton, was “the ideology of the aesthetic.” But like Eagleton’s own
recent shamefaced attitude to the love and longing, sense of evil, death
and suffering, morality and metaphysics, the essences, universals, and
objectivity mostly discounted or ignored by theory, that’s now radically
changing, as we can see in the current work of Stephen Greenblatt, as if
he were the one who, unlike Hamlet, had made his way through purga-
tory. Beyond what is intimated in the rather defensive book with
Catherine Gallagher, Practicing the New Historicism, there is a quite differ-
ent ethos in Hamlet in Purgatory, with a reaestheticized sense of theater
history. And here it’s as if thinking history is more like history thinking
(which is what I felt with my KRAKEN group where we were “ghost-
ing” the text of Hamlet in what became a work called Elsinore).8 What
we’ll get then from theater history, if at all the truth of the past, is what
there was in the theater then that made it worth remembering, as some-
thing more or other than another document of the past, so far as it is a
document that, like a Shakespearean text, gives us access to it, in often
uncertain, undecidable, or maybe inscrutable ways—the very inscruta-
bility telling us more than less.
So far, too, as theater history is concerned with something mes-
meric in Hamlet that, however much socially constructed, seems to

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233
exceed it or escape it, then the activity of thinking history by the writing
of it, will in some way be charged by what it would seem to be charged
with, that is, responsible for, as a register in the present of what was hap-
pening then. What was happening then, however, couldn’t be seen now
unless it was, with more or less immediacy, being reimagined. Here the
injunction to historicize takes quite another form. When Greenblatt
decided to write “a book about Shakespeare as a Renaissance conjurer,”
with a capacity to summon up through words “those things—voices,
faces, bodies, and spirits—that are absent,” he found himself drawn
again (as we were in our ghosting) to that spirit which haunts the night,
“the weird, compelling ghost in Hamlet,” whereupon the newer histori-
cist felt his own compulsion to immerse himself “in the tragedy’s mag-
ical intensity.”
There was, indeed, a blushing realization of some betrayal of the
sort of theater history to which Greenblatt had been committed,
though he had actually equivocated about that before. He nevertheless
felt obliged—if he was to write with any acuity at all about what was
there, historically there—to return to the palpable substance and cir-
cumstances of Shakespeare’s conception (no death of the author here),
which, exciting his own imagination, induced thus “a powerful gravita-
tional pull that [made] it feel almost wrenching to turn back to the thing
that was the original focus of interest.” As for the notion of a “magical
intensity,” he wrote: “It seems absurd to bear witness to the intensity of
Hamlet, but my profession has become too oddly dif‹dent and even
phobic about literary power, so suspicious and tense, that it risks losing
sight of—or at least failing to articulate—the whole reason anyone
bothers with the enterprise. The ghost in Hamlet is like none other—not
only in Shakespeare but in any literary or historical text that I have ever
read. . . . I wanted to let this vividness wash over me, and I wanted to
understand how it was achieved.”9
If this is a historian speaking, it is likely to be better history for that.
What needs scrutiny and deciphering then, on the basis of the evidence,
from whatever sources, and this time mainly the text, is what persists
through history, irrefutably so, in that apprehension of the past, not
only what happened then, but as it’s happening still, which is not saying this
is that. But so it goes, the appearance of reality or the reality of appear-
ance, in the temporal form of disappearance, whose aesthetic is a mat-
ter of time, where whatever is coming in is always leaking out, the seem-
ing, seeming, all of which causes us to think, as I once wrote, “that
theater is the world when it’s more like the thought of history. It is,
however, a form whose signifying power, like that of language, far

reality principles
234
exceeds what the world in its opacity offers to be signi‹ed.”10 Whatever
else it is that s/he does—and even that slash is a problem now, con-
tributing to the opacity, as we think of “other histories”—the historian
is responsible to that, especially if it’s beautiful, the particulars, the sum,
by whatever defective means. If that seems strange, reality or appear-
ance, what we mustn’t forget, too, is that we’re talking of theater history,
and if memory serves, the theater was once an art, as was the writing of
history.

notes

1. Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Re›ections in Exile and Other

Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) 211.
2. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1968) 256–57.
3. Quoted in New York Times, January 15, 2004, A1; all references to the Times
are to the national edition.
4. New York Times, January 8, 2004, A19.
5. David Hollinger, “Discourse About Discourse About Discourse About
Discourse? A Response to Dominick LaCapra,” Intellectual History Newsletter 13
(1991): 18.
6. New York Times, January 9, 2004, A15.
7. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1986) 151.
8. For a sense of the ghosting and the text of Elsinore, see my book The Dubi-
ous Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002) 70–117.
9. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2001) 3–4.
10. Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1982) 199.

Thinking History, History Thinking

235
 seventeen

Why “WHAT History?”

History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it,

only if we look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be
excluded from it. As a living soul, I am the very contrary of
History, I am what belies it, destroys it for the sake of
my own history.
—roland barthes, Camera Lucida

What, are thou mad? art thou mad?

is not the truth the truth?
—falstaff, in Henry IV, Part I (2.4.221–22)

3
My presiding over this conference is a sort of presumption, if not
of historical dimensions, about the substance of history, since as Gogo
says in exasperation in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, when Didi keeps
pressing him as to where they are and how they got there, “At the very
beginning. The very beginning of WHAT?” the boots, the tree, what
happened a minute ago, “I’m not a historian”1—though I bring some
history to the thought of performance, having ‹rst staged that play only
a few days short of half a century ago, on February 28, 1957. And now,
as aging comes, and goes, while I’m writing an autobiography, that line
remains with me, memory failing, or maybe retrieving what I’d some-
times rather forget, as a chastening refrain, which might be juxtaposed,
however, to the equally chastening view of Marx, that “men make their
own history, but they do not make it just as they please.”2
If Marx’s view of the matter came with a certain economic deter-
minism, to which one wants to be attentive, there is something in the
movement of time, or so it seems, in the seeming itself—the appari-
tional substance of theater, like Marx’s phantoms of the brain—which
escapes all materialist scruple. Those phantoms may indeed be “subli-
mates of their material life-process,” but whether or not “empirically
veri‹able,” as Marx contends, quite another matter, and in the sorting
out of the process and its “material premises”3—social, political, cul-
tural, over that economic base—you may ‹nd yourself scrupling over
the varieties of materialist history, even those profoundly historicist,

236
that qualify, ramify, or contest each other, while trying to understand
the past wie es eigentlich gewesen, as it really was. That phrase and the man-
date came in the nineteenth century from Leopold von Ranke, with his
focus on nation and state, but as the scale of history changed, big his-
tory, small history, by whatever hermeneutic, the phantoms are still
there, maybe ineliminable and virtually immeasurable, the appearance
of reality that is the reality of appearance—as if the nature of theater, its
ontological base, were the problematic of history.
If history is what happened, it cannot be made to happen again, but
can only be rehearsed, what’s there not there, ghosted by (dis)appear-
ance. Or if it does repeat itelf, as Marx amended Hegel, ‹rst as tragedy,
then as farce, those who endure the second time may not consider it
funny at all—which, not at all incidentally, may remind those who work
in the theater about what the laughs disguise, what in recent theater his-
tory Beckett understood, passing it on to Pinter, funny, no longer
funny, what they knew in the ancient world, as if extruded from the
tragic, the painful nature of farce. Or so it was in Aristophanes, a con-
servative but not compassionate, with the Peloponnesian War, its end-
less absurdity, even Iraq far short of that.
It may be, indeed, that people make their own history, but when
you pick up the morning paper, as I compulsively do, and encounter
unceasing reports on atrocities in the world, from the familial to the
global, the multiplicity of things so irreversibly hideous that—if not
pure evil, some teleological hysteria or monstrous farce—history seems
deranged. And perhaps to assuage the pain, with a certain wish
ful‹llment, there’s been talk of “the end of history.” But, of course, it’s
always that history. As we have seen, too, in a range of theorists, Carl
Schorske, Gianni Vattimo, Jean-François Lyotard, we have moved into
a world, or “world picture” (Heidegger’s phrase) in which, as the “grand
narratives” have receded, so has the pastness of the past, a disinclina-
tion to history in modernism itself—or existing still, as before the
winged creature in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”
blown back into the future, the seeds of history spilled upon the
ground, postmodernism there in the haunted bricolage.
But as we ‹nd ourselves now in the post-post, there are, pitiful and
pitiless, the soundings of history, too, and as it continues to echo through
the “ideological re›exes . . . of living individuals” (the term Marx used,4
not Barthes’s “living soul,” though early on he was Marxist) there are
the tremors of psychohistory, and another chastening view, with some
nostalgia for the soul, in a founding document of modernist poetry:

Why “ WHAT History?”

237
 Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives. Gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion.5

Which doesn’t preclude at all a continuing passion for the empirical,

which you could see not only in microhistory, but even in the magni-
tudes of the French Annales historians, like Ferdinand Braudel, who
viewed history as the sum of all possible histories.
In his two-volume study of the Mediterranean, with its vast geo-
graphical scale, Braudel’s Gesamtkunstwerk or total history purported to
go deeper than an economic base, taking into account what Marx dis-
claimed, “natural conditions in which man ‹nds himself—geological,
orohydrographical, climatic,”6 or global warming today, which would
have had to be considered, according to Annales history, over “la longue
durée.”7 That the long duration, and its demographics, might include the
eating habits of peasants in the Languedoc, could be seen in the work of
Le Roy Ladurie, who also changed the scale, and in a book on the struc-
tural history of climate actually showed—back in the 1960s, long before
the current alarm—how global warming affected the lives of human
beings.8 Ladurie expanded the scope of history with reference to tree
rings, harvest dates, glaciers, but back in the cunning passages, con-
trived corridors and issues—what the Annales school might think of as
mentalités—one may ask whether or not history should be construed in
the feminine, as T. S. Eliot does in those extraordinary lines from Geron-
tion (perhaps the best he ever wrote).
I’ll put that in abeyance, though in our current historicisms it may
now be a matter of subject position or identity politics. And the great
liability of writing history today is the immanent question: who are you
writing it for? and the corollary question (for those prepared to ask it),
is there anything about history that for the de‹nitive moment crosses
any divide, thus canceling difference? And I mean something other than
the hybridity of Homi Bhabha, that “negotiation” rather than “nega-
tion,” but with a partisanship of its own—what for all the amorphous
prospects is a pretty well ‹xed position, its own “rationality smoothly
developed, its identity as socialist or materialist (as opposed to neoim-

reality principles
238
perialist or humanist) consistently con‹rmed in each oppositional stage
of the argument,” as Bhabha writes of others in “The Commitment to
Theory.”9
Committed to theory myself, with whatever whispering ambitions,
“I would,” as Eliot said, “meet you upon this honestly,” confessing
“after a thousand small deliberations” in the writing of my own life that
it seems to be “a wilderness of mirrors,”10 all the more with archives,
letters, journals, promptbooks, program notes, often con‹rming
remembrance, or so far as memory serves, bringing a nuance to it, or
“assured of certain certainties,”11 then suffused with contradictions. If
this has somehow determined how I’ve been thinking history, or what
I’ve written about recently as “history thinking,”12 it may also have
prompted this conference, its conception or thematic, or maybe guided
by vanities the possible bias of it. For even if I were a historian, I did nev-
ertheless presume, when inviting our distinguished group of speakers,
all informed by historical research, to send on what was not quite a
prospectus, but my own view of what was occurring not only in the
study of theater and performance, but in the displacement of literary
studies by cultural studies in the curriculum of our graduate schools. I
was aware that what I wrote to them might be re›ecting my own dispo-
sition, ideological or otherwise, and that what I was saying might be
construed as a critique of what one or another of them has been doing
in her/his theoretical or scholarly work.
So be it. Through whatever supple confusions, let me read a slightly
edited version of what I wrote to them, explaining the italics in the sub-
title of the conference, or that big red-lettered WHAT? in the poster for
it, that colorful emphasis borrowed from the visual art of Barbara
Kruger, with its always verbal/political challenge, while echoing, too,
“The very beginning of WHAT?”—capitalized in the text of the non
sequitur history of the waiting for Godot. It was gratifying that all those
invited responded quickly, and it seemed positively, although they may
address the issues, having thought them over, in diverse, elliptical, or
maybe contentious ways. Here, then, is what I wrote:
“When it’s not being anthropological (or a facsimile of it), there is
much talk of history in performance studies today, though most of us
still read at a distance and, with a wary eye on the past, for the most part
hopelessly so. For the historical fact is that most of us are not historians.
And even for those who are—since the incursion of ‘metahistory’ turned
history into ‹ction, when it’s not bourgeois discourse or mere ‘social
construction’—the history that has always escaped us, at the selvedge of
the real, with traces of actuality, seems to escape now into illusions of

Why “ WHAT History?”

239
historicity. Historicize, historicize, ‘Always historicize!’ we were
exhorted by Fredric Jameson, and if, as Foucault remarked, ‘History has
become the unavoidable element in our thought,’13 among the ironies of
that thought is that it has become increasingly predictable, since the his-
toricizing has been largely done through a revisionist or quasi-Marxism,
as if it were in perpetuity the only defensible idea of history.
“This is not to put it down, but even Stephen Greenblatt has, in an
apologetic rethinking of Hamlet, brought the New Historicism back into
Purgatory. Still, that’s a subtlety not yet widespread in literary or cultural
studies, nor in performance studies, with its anthropological disposi-
tion, which keeps it from thinking theater in ontological terms, that is,
as an emergence in reality—if maybe before ritual, initiating history—with
the materialization into performance of whatever it is it is not. Is it not
precisely that which has always been distrusted in the canonical
drama—the appearance of reality in the reality of appearance? Or is it
the other way around, the reality of appearance in the appearance of
reality, with all the world a stage or life as a dream? Such questions are
not high on the agenda of those still historicizing today, and still pretty
much dominant on the academic scene, approaching the theater in
institutional terms, as an apparatus of reproduction that reproduces
itself, thus sustaining established power. Which hardly does justice to
the history of the mimetic.” No less to what Greenblatt speaks of as
“magic,” which draws him “again and again to the weird, compelling
ghost in Hamlet.” But since I’m interjecting here, let me quote further
what he said of that in his prologue: “My only goal was to immerse
myself in the tragedy’s magical intensity. It seems a bit absurd to bear
witness to the intensity of Hamlet, but my profession has become so
oddly dif‹dent and even phobic about literary power, that it risks losing
sight of—or at least failing to articulate—the whole reason anyone
bothers with the enterprise in the ‹rst place.”14
Which may or may not be true of everybody here. “In any case—
with attentiveness to the quadrivium of race, class, gender, ethnicity—
we now think ‘subject positions,’ while the Marxism has been ‹ltered
through psychoanalysis, feminism, or more recently, queer theory, with
Foucault recycled (on the panopticon and sexuality) like his recyclings
of power, and Walter Benjamin still a venerated source (with little atten-
tion to his interests in the Kabbalah, Leibnizian monads, and the surre-
alist avant-garde). What we’ve seemed to have forgotten in all this, or
discredited ideologically, are those alternative views of history of which
various historians—having assimilated by now over a generation of
deconstruction, as it critiqued their discipline—are once again remind-

reality principles
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 Free ebooks ==> www.Ebook777.com

ing us, while defending the sort of inquiry that has rarely suffered the
hubris of pretending to an absolute capacity for an objective knowledge
of the past.
“In recent years, there have been any number of books published
by historians (I mean history historians, not those of theater/perfor-
mance) with new perspectives on historical writing, but informed by
reassessments of major historians from the past—and maybe even
picking up again, against the grain of literary or social construction,
everything being discourse, on J. B. Bury’s Regius Professor Lecture (in
1903), in which he declared, ‘History is not a branch of literature.’
Meanwhile, so insuf‹ciently informed are our programs in the humani-
ties about variant ideas of history that if one course were to be
absolutely required at the graduate level it ought to be in historiogra-
phy.” And, as I’ve said, it is in this context that this conference, “Per-
formance and History: What History?” has been conceived.
If I’ve had any second thoughts about that, I’ll keep them in
abeyance too. But one thing more, about history not being a branch of
literature. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, my own bias here being
toward the quality of the literature. That there is, if not a ‹ctive, an aes-
thetic element to history was certainly recognized through the emer-
gence of history as a form of inquiry by the great historians, including
von Ranke, who thought of history as a science, but inseparable from
art. This appears to be conceded now by Greenblatt, whose historicity
always appeared to have had an aesthetic. And we might remember,
too, that the second Nobel Prize for literature, awarded in 1902, went to
Theodor Mommsen. If there is, as various novelists and playwrights
have thought—from Tolstoy, Woolf, and Faulkner to Brecht and
Genet—a testamentary quotient to art that exceeds what we ‹nd in his-
tory, we must remember, too, that what happens on a stage or off a
stage, in various kinds of performance art, may provide a quite different
kind of testament. In saying that, I’m remembering what Henry James
thought when he approached the American scene on his return from
Europe, that it was putting out “interrogatory feelers.” So far as histori-
cizing it was concerned, he took courage “from the remembrance that
history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of what ‘hap-
pens,’ but the much ‹ner complexity of what we read into it and think
of in connection with it.”15 James is speaking, of course, of the writing
of history, and one may think of the writing too, as theorists have in our
time, as performance. But one last thing to remember: the crudity
remains, things happen, sometimes appallingly happen, that brutal bur-
den of history.

Why “ WHAT History?”

241

www.Ebook777.com
 Think now. Think now . . . And welcome all, whatever your disposi-
tion, as history keeps us thinking, over the short durée of these two
promising days.

notes

1. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954) 42.
2. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Karl Marx and Fred-
erick Engels, Selected Works, trans. unnamed (New York: International Publishers,
1968) 97.
3. Karl Marx, The German Ideology: Part I, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. and
trans. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978) 154.
4. Ibid.
5. T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion,” in Selected Poems (New York: Harvest/HJB, 1964)
32.
6. Marx-Engels Reader 149–50.
7. Ferdinand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of
Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972,
1973).
8. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); and Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A
History of Climate since the Year 1000 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988).
9. Homi Bhaba, “The Commitment to Theory,” in The Norton Anthology of The-
ory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001) 2385.
10. Eliot, “Gerontion” 33.
11. Eliot, “Preludes: IV,” in Selected Poems 23.
12. Herbert Blau, “Thinking History, History Thinking,” Theater Survey 45.2
(2004): 253–62.
13. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(New York: Routledge, 2001) 238.
14. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2001) 4.
15. Henry James, The American Scene, ed. John F. Sears (Hammondsworth:
Penguin, 1994) 136–37.

reality principles
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 eighteen

The Human Nature of the Bot

3
The issue of liveness—which Philip Auslander, in “Live from Cyber-
space,” has moved to center stage, where we thought it had always
been—has various levels and phases, reimaginable now, indeed, in
cyberspatial terms. There was a time, however, when it seemed per-
fectly understandable to speak of “live” or “living” theater as distinct
from acting on ‹lm or even, with the closing down of the screen, the
immediacy of television. Yet, long before the Internet, it might seem a
failing distinction. For there were times within that time when I’d be
tempted to say—in disenchantment with what I was seeing in the main-
stream of American theater—that the presence of live actors made no
real difference: stage or screen, the effect and/or affect was very much
the same.
What I meant was that everything was so unenlivening in its pre-
dictability, so insusceptible to the unexpected, so invariable once
staged, that it seemed (to use an image from another era) like a carbon
copy of itself. As for the text, when the play was the thing, it might have
done better in a reading without any actors at all. And of course there
was the tradition, from Kleist through Gordon Craig to Roland Barthes
on the Bunraku, in which puppets were preferred to actors whose
impoverished subjectivity only got in the way, except that the acting I
am talking about seemed, in its empty sameness, to be without any sub-
jectivity. Whatever the ontological distinction between the one-dimen-
sional ‹gures on the screen and the presumably rounded ‹gures in per-
spective on a proscenium stage, the felt actuality was such, in various
productions I saw, that the quotient of liveness seemed more in the
transparency of ‹lm. Indeed, it was apparent that the factitious reality of
the ‹gures on a screen could have considerably more vitality, as if they
were truly alive, than the ›esh-and-blood actors up there on the stage,
whose behavior was so thoroughly coded and familiar it might as well
have been canned.
That has by no means changed entirely in the contemporary the-
ater. But shifting contexts altogether, Auslander writes about the pro-
grammed responses in text-based digital environments, in which words
and word patterns are picked up so that “it is now possible to be
engaged in conversation with a chatterbot without knowing it.” When

243
you’re on an email list, he adds, or in a chat room on the Internet, “it can
be impossible to know whether you are conversing with a human being
or a piece of software.” But sometimes, too—it may be chastening to
remember—you may be conversing with a human being and feel the
same way, as if the person were programmed. Which may suggest that
liveness is variable in de‹nition, with in›ections of value through a
spectrum of meaning from being alive to being lively. In shifting the
notion of liveness from the ontological to the temporal, “a relationship
of simultaneity,” an event in real time that can be watched as it occurs,
Auslander refers to a passage in Blooded Thought, in which I wrote that
the ontology of theater may be predicated on the existential fact that the
person performing is dying in front of your eyes. This is not to deny,
however, that the substance of that insidious truth may be more or less
diminished by the dubious presence of the actor in a facsimile of per-
formance that, if occurring in real time, nevertheless feels like a rerun or
rather embalmed in advance; without the stink of mortality that, as in
the irrefutable testimony on the heath of King Lear, is the appalling truth
of theater.
If bots are virtual entities that, because they are without biological
presence or corporeality, are virtually immortal too, subverting “the
centrality of the live, organic presence of human beings to the experi-
ence of live performance,” they’d hardly have any presence at all, any
sense of liveness whatever, were it not for the omnipresent shadow of
the apparently vanished being, who, dead or alive, endows the notion of
liveness with meaning or substance to begin with. Auslander says that
the chatterbot “casts into doubt the existential signi‹cance attributed to
live performance,” but I’m not quite sure what sort of doubt he has in
mind. We’re obviously engaged with a technology of production capa-
ble of making of performance something other than “a speci‹cally
human activity,” but it is the speci‹cally human activity that—if not
reproduced by the bot, which draws its material from databases—
remains the inalienable referent around which the data’s collected, just
as the human conversation is the datum from which, by whatever
ambiguous means, the chatterbot proceeds.
It’s certainly imaginable to me that a bot may chat not merely with
humans but with other bots, or that at some millennial moment of
simultaneity there may be in real time a performance without any
human participants at all, even to be mistaken about what’s real, what’s
not. But then it would seem that the question of liveness would have
been not merely reopened and reframed, as Auslander says it is by the
existence of chatterbots, but something of a non sequitur. It may be

reality principles
244
de‹ned as live, but what can liveness really mean in the absence of a
subject for whom what’s real, what’s not, is of inarguable consequence
on existential grounds. As for the performer, one wonders what
accrues, or doesn’t, to the growing immanence of the bot in the absence
of those liabilities—stage fright, lapses of memory, a stomach ache on
stage, a coughing ‹t, unscripted laughter—that give a local habitation,
in the body, to the succinct and apposite admission of imperfection that
no bot will move us by—“We are all frail”—no less the myriad in›ec-
tions of a performance that, intended or unintended, really make it live.
What we have through the digital technology is the invisible appearance
of liveness, but not what—at the sticking point of performance, rarely
to be sure—is its inarguable manifestation.

note

These remarks are a response to Philip Auslander, “Live from Cyberspace, or, I
Was Sitting at My Computer This Guy Appeared He Thought I Was a Bot,” in
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 70, 24.1 (January 2002): 16–21.

The Human Nature of the Bot

245
 nineteen

Virtually Yours
Presence, Liveness, Lessness

THE ACTUAL HUMAN BODY BECOMES OF

LESS IMPORTANCE EVERY DAY.
—wyndham lewis, “The New Egos,” in BLAST 1

I began to wonder at about this time what one saw when

one looked at anything really looked at anything.
—gertrude stein, “Portraits and Repetition”

Little body little block heart beating ash gray only upright.
Little body ash gray locked rigid heart beating face
to endlessness.
—samuel beckett, “Lessness”

3
Before the opening of the Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in
New York, as we were ‹nishing up the lights for the ‹rst preview of
Danton’s Death, what was then (in 1965) the world’s most advanced
switchboard couldn’t quite control the “ghosting” on stage—that is, the
trace of lights after dimming, the aura here or halo there, the stubborn
residue of illumination that wouldn’t, for all the electronics, go entirely
dark. Designed by George Izenour, the computerized system was
something remarkably new, though the technology still worked at the
time not through the mysteries of software but—as with the archetypal
Colossus, the vacuum-tubed ‹rst electronic computer—by means of a
quite hefty pack of punch cards. We shuf›ed the cards, or read them
like Tarot, but when the ghosting persisted, we called Izenour, reputed
sage of techno-theater, down from Yale to see what he could do. That
didn’t quite solve the problem. Each time we’d set up the lights and turn
them down, he’d look at the luminous trace that everybody could see
and give us a theoretical explanation as to why it couldn’t be. Even then,
I had no indisposition to theory, “But George,” I’d say, “look again!”
and again he’d look and explain why it couldn’t be, as if we were some-
how hallucinating. As it turned out, our technical director José Sevilla
managed to operate the switchboard without the computer, running the
entire show—the preview not canceled—by taking the dimmers

246
between his ‹ngers and moving them up and down the otherwise hap-
less console with exquisite precision on cue. The technology was prim-
itive, but the ghosting had disappeared.
Or at least as it was in the lighting. What I’d overlooked then, how-
ever, in the urgencies of the moment, is what remains a crucial distinc-
tion in the ontology of performance, as we think of it now through the
media and the prospects of cyberculture. For once you look in the the-
ater, no less look again! (as the Furies chant in the Oresteia, seeming to ini-
tiate specularity as the theater’s compulsive tradition) then with or with-
out lighting, the ghosts are already there, and once the lights are up
(over the mountaintops from Troy or, lights, lights, lights! as on the play
within the play, or in the movement from Plato’s Cave to the dialectic
of enlightenment, or even with Clov in Endgame, who sees his light
dying), no matter what’s there, or not, it’s with the look of being looked at.
Which is, in performance, the anxious datum of “liveness.”
As for liveness in the theater, which seemed to be its distinction,
that’s been complicated in recent years not merely by the hyperbolic
computerization of Broadway scenic effects, escalated at Las Vegas, but
by widening magnitudes of performance that seem to be leaving the the-
ater behind. After the carnivals, festivals, pageants, and ritual forms of
other cultures, performance seems to be moving beyond the ethno-
graphic, with its residuum of the aesthetic, through technology and cor-
porate management into outer space. I’m not merely referring to media
events circling the globe by satellite transmission, but in the ever-
increasing panoptic vision of performance studies, to everything from
the operations of the Hubble telescope to some nomadic or dysfunc-
tional rocket in the ionosphere, or some years back, the atomization of
the Challenger, the radiant image of which, played over and over on tele-
vision, virtually trans‹gured disaster like, in those brain-draining bursts,
before they became a sepulcher, the resplendent aureoles of the collaps-
ing towers. Yet remote from Ground Zero, even spaced out, through
the “strange loop” phenomenon of missile guidance systems,1 if there is
anything theatricalized, it requires a site of performance; and if the scale
is reduced again, down to what’s basic in theater, not the old two boards
for a passion or, for that matter, what Peter Brook had in mind when he
said theater begins with an empty space, luring the actor in.
“There’s no such thing as an empty space,” said John Cage, “or an
empty time.”2 That was the premise of an early essay on experimental
music as the becoming of theater, which “is continually becoming that it is
becoming” (Silence 14), which is to say, a space of performance, subject to
the look, which for more than a generation has been, as folded into “the

Virtually Yours
247
gaze,” the subject of deconstruction. But with the obduracy of the gaze
in mind—and a sense of its gradations, as with presence itself—I’ve writ-
ten elsewhere that in the apparently empty space you don’t even need
the actor, the space no longer empty so long as there is someone see-
ing.3 As for the semblance of time in space, we may not have been see-
ing the same, since the same can never be seen, not in a temporal form,
but what Cage didn’t say, looking through music to theater, is that it’s
the seeming in the becoming that invites and escapes the look, which in
the consciousness of looking, as at the substance of seeming itself, suf-
fuses time with thought—which is what theater does, even when trou-
bled by it.
For the liability in the suffusion is a metaphysics of seeming, per-
petuating in appearance the future of illusion. Less disturbed by that
than the theater tends to be—or at least its canonical drama, in its
congenital distrust of theater—the minimalist aesthetic of conceptual
art, and the installations that followed, evolved in theatricality, which
for an unregenerate formalist (speci‹cally, Michael Fried) seemed to
be the end of art.4 The beginning of the end could be said to have
occurred in that ur-setting of theatricality, the anechoic chamber at
Berkeley, in which, through the absence of other sound, Cage listened
to his nerves and heart, then thought of himself listening, out of
which came the performance, itself canonical now, of 4′33′′ of
silence. Some years after, there were repercussions of this silence,
in›ected visually, in a primitive manifestation of media art: Nam June
Paik’s prototypical Fluxus ‹lm, made in the early 1960s, picking up on
Cage’s Zen. Paik’s later video installations were, with a sometimes
monumental array of monitors and his usual visual cunning, extrava-
gant displays, baroque, but back then, if the aesthetic was minimal, it
was somewhat out of necessity because of minimal cost: no actors, no
expensive effects, optical or otherwise, no ‹lm stock to edit either.
What Paik projected, inside a TV set, was nothing more than a thou-
sand feet of unprocessed 16-millimeter leader, which ran imagelessly
on a screen for thirty minutes, the effect on the viewer being—if not
a sense of malfunction or unre›ective indifference—a participatory
impulse.
That was, in any Fluxus event, the performative prospect at least,
presumably canceling the inertia of the passive observer, with con-
sciousness itself emerging as the sine qua non of performance. As if
Baudelaire’s boredom, recycled, had been activated on the screen, the
(seeming) tabula rasa of the illuminated space was, in subsequent view-
ings, complicated and enlivened, minuscule as they were, by dust and

reality principles
248
scratches on the leader stock. The liveness there, of course, was in the
consciousness solicited by those chance “events,” though it’s possible
to argue that the events themselves were symptoms of liveness, even in
the absence of any human image on ‹lm, just as the “miscellaneous rub-
bish,” the rising and falling lights, the sounds of inspiration and expira-
tion, and the faint cries, each “instant of recorded vagitus,” convey a
more poignant absence—the liveness of it, no actors there on stage—in
the performance of Beckett’s Breath.5
On a larger scale, the notion of liveness entered the agenda of per-
formance theory through ‹lm and (even more) the televisual, and the
“remediation” that Philip Auslander has tracked from stage to screen to
stage, and through the recording industry: from the lip-synch scandal of
Milli Vanilli to CDs, DVDs, and back through rock concerts, where the
performance of Madonna, U2, or Eminem, the truth of liveness there,
is determined and authenticated by what’s been seen on MTV. If this
merely updates, according to Auslander, what we should have known all
along, “that the live can exist only within an economy of reproduction,”
what’s all the more true in the technological versatility of the dominion
of reproduction, the fantasy-making apparatus itself, “is that, like live-
ness itself, the desire for live experiences is a product of mediatization.”6
Meanwhile, as the vacuum tubes were miniaturized, ‹rst by transistors,
then integrated circuits, and afterwards silicon chips, with ‹ber-optic
bundles enabling globalization, it was to be expected that the question
of liveness would extend to virtual reality, as well as to futurological fan-
tasies of a digitized human race that, with whatever forms of intelli-
gence in a dematerialized body, would certainly alter our thinking about
the meaning of presence in liveness.
Until that millennarian day, however, we’ll still be contending with
the banalities about “living theater,” which attribute to real bodies on a
stage more presence than some of those bodies may actually have in
performance, no less anything like a charismatic wholeness, which this
or that body may appear to have, if nothing more than appearance. Yet,
if there was no point to stressing liveness before the advent of photog-
raphy and the phonograph—though even the Festival of Dionysus or a
chorus at Epidaurus was part of an economy of reproduction—the
notion of living theater also has to be historicized. When we used to
speak of living theater, before the insurrection of (what the French call)
the Living—with “polymorphous perverse” bodies proclaiming Paradise
Now—what we had in mind, by contrast, was the appearance of theater
on ‹lm, though the incursion of the Living, in the dissidence of the
1960s, was also a claim to liveness as opposed to the dehumanized. And

Virtually Yours
249
that was a condition just as possible in the theater as it was on ‹lm, or
later television, not to mention the prospect that dehumanization will
be, in the apotheosis of virtual reality, the (im)material condition of live-
ness. Relieved or distraught by the absence of presence, relentlessly
demysti‹ed in theory, some who see liveness alive and well in the
media—which mediatize themselves in remediation—are essentially
making a defense of another kind of presence, an electronic presence, as
we pass to the Internet, where, instead of metaphysics coming in
through the pores, as Freud and Artaud thought, it comes in, rather, in
bytes.

When we think of the age of information, and digital traf‹c around the
globe, there’s a tendency to imagine the networks as a rami‹cation of
the “superhighway” of image culture, or as the hypertrophy of image, its
proliferous rei‹cation, from the age of mechanical reproduction (Ben-
jamin) to the society of the spectacle (Debord), with its investment in,
or investiture of, the precession of simulacra (Baudrillard). But the vir-
tual realities of information are something else again. While the photo-
graphic, ‹lmic, or televisual image is still attached to the material site of
representation in a legacy of realism (however the image is produced,
indexically or analogically), the substance of the virtual, digitally pro-
duced as it is through the wobble of one and zero, may appear to be
three-dimensional, but in the electroluminescence of the apparency of a
stage, there is only an “empty display,”7 nothing to feel, nothing to
touch, only the phosphorescent presence of what—unlike the object of
the camera, however abstracted—was never there to begin with. In
some interactive continuum of the cyberized space itself, the sensation
may be that of a body virtually there, but that’s it, virtual, maybe quick-
ening apprehension in its shimmering subjunctivity, with a certain
charm or enchantment, perhaps, like an alibi of the spectral wishing it
could be more, maybe even mortal, but with evacuated gravity, never
meant to be.
The space is interactive, and the virtual is a lure, but the real agency
is the arti‹cial intelligence, the prior programming, that creates the vir-
tual scene. If, through the resourcefulness of a database, that scene is
analogous to the real, one can be immersed in the analogy, which is
cyberspace, without the visceral sensation of being there, since there is
no there there—not even, as things are, the appearance of it, which is
with all its impediments, however unaccommodated, the vexing thing
itself. With all the promise of digitality, there is also something
poignant: the subtext of the virtual is that it really wants to be real.8 And what-

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ever that may be, the index of its truth—as with any manifestation in
whatever performative mode, across any stylization or cultural practice,
ritualized or mimed, masked or mediated, even performed with pup-
pets—will always be subject to that, the real, as the body of information
will be referred to the body itself, that body, the real body, and I don’t
mean a social construction, no less what they’re calling a bot.
Still, somewhere in all this, there seems to be a new reality, as the
seemingly manipulable but abstracted world of data, supradiaphanous,
immaterial as it is, bears upon life as we’ve known it, material as it is, and
unlikely to go away, unless the genetic codes are somehow added to the
data, ending life as we’ve known it in a life without end. Which, how-
ever that may be, may vex us even more—if performance theory sur-
vives—by making liveness moot. Be that as it may, this is certainly a
view of the future that Bertolt Brecht didn’t anticipate when, after the
bomb on Hiroshima, he revised his Epic theory in the Short Organum, to
take cognizance of nuclear power, beyond the “petroleum complex,”
even before which he had thought, “Some exercise in complex seeing is
needed.”9 In the world of feedback loops accelerated by microcomput-
ers, and with cyborgs on the scene about to take over performance (or
even, since queerer than queer, what is called “performativity”),
Brecht’s critique of “culinary theater” would seem to be arrested in his-
tory, without any object at all, since the disappearance of an organic
body with conventional subjectivity makes the culinary a non sequitur:
out in cyberspace, nothing to cook and nothing to eat. But if the audi-
ence in the bourgeois theater is there to digest its dinner, so it might all
the more in front of a computer. Still, if what’s programmed there is in
a postculinary world, immersed in virtuality, there’s no guarantee what-
ever that its values are improved by the data with which, in the absence
of anything else, we may identify in performance. Meanwhile, for cyber-
nauts and cybernerds, and all us foreseeable cyborgs, there seems to
be—except for incompetence on the computer—no digital equivalent
of the Alienation-effect. Which is to say, we’re no better than ever,
through all the information, in the complex seeing we need, when time
must have a stop, for a re›ective look, wherever we are in the virtual, at
the reality passing by, susceptible to illusion, maybe nothing but appear-
ance, all the more in the paranoia of a world besieged by terror, with
“weapons of mass destruction,” once a refrain on the evening news,
now only in abeyance.
There are also certain factors that make seeing at all complex. Thus,
when performance occurs at a digital distance, out there in cyberspace,
where power is a function of remote control—in a world inconceivable

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without its image, or in the unstoppable seeming, an obscenity of
image—remoteness itself is the sticking point, hardly reducible to a
Brechtian gestus. As with the smart bombs of the Gulf War or in the
Shah-i-Kot Valley after Al Qaeda, in or out of the caves, or even the
scandal of Enron with the shreddings at Anderson, for all we see, we
don’t see it, though we may be watching all the time. As opposed to the
theater, or even ‹lm, what we have on television is a virtual allegory of
the remote. What we see there, as we move from channel to channel, is
the liquidity of culture, both in the sense of gathered, processed, edited,
and collaged images, screened as they are from the cathode tube, and in
the sense of commodi‹cation, with the illusion of liquidity there, the
images presumably at our disposal, the remote like a magic wand or
scepter, giving access to the Imaginary. Yet, for all that imperial remote-
ness—programs on and off at will—it’s an illusion of power out of
hand, a lot more feeble than fabulous, more like impotency after all.
Nobody forces anybody to watch television, but very few resist, and
putting aside what’s brainless, or what we know we’ve seen before, no
matter how new it appears, it’s hard to watch for any length of time
without feeling the saturation of apparent news, the ad nauseam of the
commentary, and even if the screen is small, a frustrating diffusion of
thought. Not only in sur‹ng channels, but in what we do when we
watch, the experience is that of modernity in the Eliotic sense, dis-
tracted from distraction by distraction.
In this regard, the mediatizing of culture is not only a matter of how
it is represented, or who represents it, but how that is factored into a vir-
tual ontology of distraction, which bears upon what we think and how
we see ourselves in time. Or for that matter, out of time, because our
sense of temporality is increasingly preempted by the allure of the tele-
visual, and with it telepresence,10 which may encounter time in its
occurrence, but not in any perceptible cycle of duration, stasis, motion,
or decay. Time on television—where we rarely see the process of
time—is processed, and what just happened will move instantly into the
archive, to be reprocessed, even images of the past susceptible, as Mar-
garet Morse points out, to a sort of digital updating or “electronic revi-
sion to meet today’s expectations,” so that the grainier black-and-white
documentations of the past are not preserved as access “to ›ickering
shadows in the cave,” but are rather shaped up to the “spatiotemporal
and psychic relations [of] the realities it constitutes” (110). Which are, as
they now impinge on performance, realities of distraction.
At the same time, there is a certain tactility in the mediatizing of cul-
ture that has not so much to do, as we tend to think, with the formation

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of attitudes or the maneuvering of public opinion—the commentary on
the polling that inevitably determines the polls—but rather with the
activity of perception at the heart of representation; or in reverse, the
activity of representation that forms perception, and therefore, indeed,
the way things are thought. Thus, in the operations of television graph-
ics, as in the close-ups of a television interview, we may have the sensa-
tion of proximity to an object, seeing it closer—in the case of virtual
images, as if they were, in extreme nearness, eliciting our sense of touch,
as with fabrics on home-shopping channels or the bombshell rapper
Eve, or lovely breasts on forensic detectives, or in the magic world of
the Law, the receding older Order, sexy legs on Ally McBeal. If what is
called “blue-screen technology” can create virtual sets that make small-
market studios, and their unknown anchor people, look prime-time, so
complex motion design, enhanced by the computer, makes it possible
not only to de‹ne but to move around an object in discursive space,
with diverse angles and points of entry, the sort of topology that de‹es
the burdensome laws of gravity in the cinema as we know it, no less on
the theater’s stage. Sometimes the sense of motion is such, in comput-
erized graphics on the screen, especially in fantasies of outer space
(transposed to selling the Lexus), that the ground of representation
itself seems to be taken from under us. Yet the fantasies of weightless-
ness are competing, as they did way back in Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea,
with the deadweight actuality of our actual bodies. It may be that virtual
worlds are preparing us psychically for the zero gravity of outer space or
some virtual interior life, but for the time being or, irreversibly, the real-
ity of being in time, our bodies inhabit a space (even ›oating out there
in a capsule) that is irreparably down to earth. And I didn’t intend a pun
on the Columbia disaster.
In Datek ads or Hellomoto, Motorola’s Datamoto, it might seem it
could be reversed, and every now and then we hear that either bio-
genetics or some high-tech implant is going to bring it about. Actually,
there is considerable speculation, and some ponti‹cation, more or less
idealistic, about the out-of-body promise of digital worlds, and the sta-
tus of the virtual in the reality that remains, what—according to theo-
rists from Benjamin to Baudrillard—may only be a remainder amid the
ruins of time. Given that ruinous context, seeds of history upon the
ground, what is virtual reality? The truth is that, psychically and other-
wise, no less realistically, we know very little about its cultural substance
and prospects, its possibilities for performance, or its eventual effect on
what we take to be human. And when we advance through electronic
culture to this impasse, we’re somewhere beyond the horizon of per-

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formance in the media, even those ‹lms they’re now trying to make,
with actors replaced by the ingenious animation of digital tech, leaving
us with the question: is the increasing likeness to be thought of as live-
ness? And by what criteria do we determine that?

To be sure, it was the escalation of mediatization that appeared to bring

into the theater itself, and to the live bodies there, re›exes and habits of
mind that seemed less natural or organic than mechanically repro-
duced—not by some postmodern offshoot of Meyerhold’s biomechan-
ics (which was actually derived from Taylorism) or by some recidivist
sign of passion from the repertoire of Delsarte. If we’ve long been
aware of the stale predictability of Broadway’s assembly line, and of
actors repeating themselves, that was because, as in digital culture, it
was possible to process behavior and homogenize it as code. This is all
the more so today in the precession of simulacra, where it’s possible to
think of liveness as playing roles on screen, precoded parts written for
us in advance, so that we’re signs of what we appear to be, not even rep-
resentations but their merest facsimile. And if this is so, then the actor
who appears on stage is the redundancy of a redundancy, performing an
otherness that only pretends to be, so well known has it been that it can
only be rehearsed, the image of an image of something that, coded to
begin with, has otherwise never been. That, I suppose, is the worst-case
scenario. As for actors repeating themselves, that was in any case to be
expected, despite all versatility, from those who achieve stardom on
stage or screen. As for any appearance in the ›esh, whatever the quo-
tient of liveness, it may of course be augmented, as well as credibilized,
by previous celebrity in the media, which function in visual culture by
their long-belabored expertise, whatever else they may be doing, in
commodifying the look—not quite that of being looked at, in the sense
I’ve been talking about, which seems brought into being by another
liveness, the liveness overlooked, that of perception itself, as it makes its
way through appearance.
If that’s not always what it appears to be (or even if it is), that’s also
due to perception, which in abrading upon reality also makes it theater.
As if he were enunciating Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy,
William Blake said that the eye altering alters all. And any way you look
at it, the body on stage is suffused with the vicissitudes of appearance,
which complicate the question of liveness, all the more because you
look, off stage, on stage, with more or less reciprocity during the course
of performance—the irony being here that sometimes less is more.
Which is to say that the quality of liveness, the felt sensation of it, may

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not necessarily diminish as it moves from the interactive or participatory
to a more contemplative mode. What mediatizes culture there, beyond
any previous accretions, is the activity of perception, however rigorous
or involuntary, or intently voyeuristic, “lawful espials” or “seeing
unseen” (Hamlet 3.1.32–33) or, with one or another mode of alienating
distance, the seeing or unseeing in an impersonal or clinical look. “Am I
as much as . . . being seen?” says one of the ‹gures in the urns of Beck-
ett’s Play, which wouldn’t be as much of a question—being seen or being
seen? (how should the actor say it? and how much is she being seen?
depending on how he says it?)—were you to see the ‹gure on ‹lm.
As we re›ect on the difference in being, as Heidegger might have
seen it, from being as being-seen, it would seem that the affectivity of
presence—its liveness, so to speak—might better be thought of,
through the undeniable palpability of its metaphysical absence, as grada-
tions of presence escaping itself in a sort of microphysics. About which
you can say, as the greatest of dramas do, you can only see so much—
even if you put it on ‹lm, or with a video monitor, or by storing it as
information in a computer’s memory bank. If the theater, as I said in
Take Up the Bodies, “is the body’s long initiation in the mystery of its van-
ishings,”11 I wouldn’t count on computer memory, ready for instant mes-
saging, to keep track of where it went, or even to serve for cultural mem-
ory, since in the mysteries of digitization it somehow erases the
difference between where we were and where we are, as well as now and
then. There are those, to be sure, who are hardly disturbed by that, and
some of them, who have grown up with or into cyberspace, are develop-
ing modes of performance that have already gone online, like the Cre-
ative Outlaw Visionaries or Law and Order Practitioners or, mobilizing
micronetworks for an agit-prop agenda, Ricardo Dominguez and the
Electronic Disturbance Theater. If Dominguez prefers the Internet to
the stage because of the subversive possibilities, on quite another scale,
one can imagine computer types who might indeed prefer the protocols
of digital exchange, whether anonymously or otherwise, to the regimens
of performance as we’ve known it through the impediments of ›esh and
blood. One of the capacities of digitality is not only to speed up exchange
across unconscionable distances, but, as if it were some new outreach of
ritual drama, to occult it once again. It may very well be enticing to a per-
former who could, in the theater, only imagine shadows, doubles, and
the traces of ghostliness, to dematerialize online and resurface in code
and image in a new Theater of the World, where liveness came from else-
where than being born astride of a grave.
If then, coming back to earth, liveness comes as well with a certain

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paranoia, that’s because—mediated or remediated as the theater might
be, not only in the recyclings from ‹lm or television, but in the in‹nity
of its repetitions (what drove Artaud mad) from whenever the theater
began—there is in all the remediation something irremediable, the dis-
ease of time in a time-serving form. It can be put in various ways, more
or less anodyne or evasive, but there are times when liveness itself is
exalted by its most disheartening truth: it stinks of mortality, which may
be the ultimate subtext of stage fright—no virtual reality that, but ine-
liminably there, however disguised, or (as actors may say) made use of
in performance, in any case encroaching on or reshaping presence, and
even if it doesn’t stink, bringing us back to what, as reality principle,
ghosts us after all. Even on the cybernetic threshold of a cyborgian age,
“we really do die,” which is what, in simple truth, Donna Haraway said
when she stopped short on the utopian prospects and warned against
“denying mortality.”12
What is, then, the material condition of liveness, its inevitable “less-
ness,” will continue to be so until our nanotechnology produces—as K.
Eric Drexler promised when he started manipulating materials that are
utterly out of sight—self-replicating subatomic engines that will not
only remove diseased DNA from our perishing bodies, but also repair
our aging cells, making us (nearly) immortal. Which is not to mention
the visions of robotic bodies of a postbiological age into which, as into
computer memory, we can download the forms of thought and desire
that once went into our drama. As we might have guessed, the media—
as in AT&T’s “YOU WILL” campaign13—are encouraging these
prospects as something more than fantasy, not dreamt of in our philos-
ophy, maybe, but in the more numinous spinoff from Blade Runner, the
techno-transcendentalism or epiphanic redemption of entropy (not to
mention social justice)14 that comes with being Wired. Whatever the
liveness dreamt of, it’s not quite that which the newspapers were con-
scious of in NBC’s prime-time coverage of the Winter Olympics in
Utah. The relative reality there was “live live” (designated “Live” in the
upper left corner of the screen) or “nearly live” (a skeleton, skateboard,
or bobsled event that happened, say, an hour before) or the “live that
looks like live, yet is not” (Bob Costas in the studio chatting with Jim
McKay) or the “nonlive, which does not mean dead, just taped.”15 Or,
as we’ve seen it in Afghanistan, on tape, maybe alive, maybe dead, and
if no “Live” up in the corner, maybe a ticker of news at the bottom,
keeping the options alive, or announcing a vote on Osama bin Laden’s
liveness, as they’ve done on CNN.com.
If there is, whatever the vote, something simply obtuse or a bad

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puerile joke in that, the suffusion of our reality by the media, live live,
nearly live, nonlive, is such that, even when you turn it off, it seems
somehow to be on, as if there were channels in our heads, which at some
devastating moment of history we might wish would simply go blank. Or
give us a moment’s respite. But, as if the media were itself a function of
our manic obsession with image that in its stupefying excess is the matrix
of the real, that isn’t meant to be. Nor can we separate the superfetation
of image from the mesmeric redundancy of the noise that passes as
information, which is not what Lionel Trilling once meant by “the hum
and buzz of implication,” to which, judiciously, you might turn an atten-
tive ear. Nor is it even the noise that John Cage talked about, and
deployed, as early as 1937, “The sound of a truck at ‹fty miles an hour.
Static between the stations. Rain”—about which he said, “Wherever we
are what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When
we later listen to it, we ‹nd it fascinating.” And with electronic control of
amplitude and frequency, it is possible to take “any one of these sounds
and to give it rhythms within or beyond the reach of imagination” (Silence
3). This is not the noise we hear on the media every day.
Thus, for all the depth of grief and mourning after the disasters of
September 11, the one inconceivable testament to its unspeakability
would have been, at ground zero of sensation, darkened TV screens
and, for one unmediated day of quiet re›ection, no anchors, no talk
shows, no Imus in the morning or O’Reilly Factor at night, no Leno, no
Letterman, no Cross‹re or Hardball, or speaking of liveness, Larry King
Live, no profusion of replays: silence. Which is, perhaps, when history
hurts, the only reliable echo of liveness. That the media, however, satu-
rate culture, both inducing and preempting what we feel, is by now,
even when on their best behavior—the relief of absent commercials
after the towers collapsed—an inarguable fact of life, as it is of the the-
ater, which even before Pirandello could no longer think of art imitat-
ing life, for life is no longer the referent, but only life as mediated, as if
theatricality were appropriated on its own terms, as the pure Imaginary.
If it’s long been apparent that anything which goes on in our minds,
almost very gesture we make, what passes as love or longing, just about
every instinct, has either been determined, foreseen, programmed, or
mimicked by the media, so it seems, too, that in an age of information
virtually everything to be known is out there on the Net for the asking,
and with the savvy of software accessible on the computer. Yet the
more we ask the more demoralized we may be.
Meanwhile, the World Wide Web is the global space of perfor-
mance, where the notion of living theater seems the merest anachro-

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nism, if nothing more than because the intensities and energies pro-
ducible (never mind reproducible) on ‹lm, video, CDs, and DVDs
exceed in their cumulative affect or outright sensation anything achiev-
able by ›esh and blood on a stage, except insofar as the body’s vulner-
ability, the weak ›esh itself, becomes in its mortality the literal issue. For
all the recycling of liveness, or the remediation (carrying rather insensi-
bly the notion of a remedy), it’s hard to imagine any image on the
screen, however violent, lustful, demonic, barbaric, no less intimate or
lyrical, that could match the close-up effect upon spectators of an actor
who, as in the extremities of performance art—Gina Pane up a ladder
of razors, Chris Burden having himself shot, Fakir Musaphar’s self-
impalings, Orlan’s cosmetic surgeries, Schwarzkogler’s bandaged suffo-
cations, with live wires exposed, on the edge of suicide (which came
when he went over the edge, by throwing himself out of a window)—
actually cuts his wrist or slits another’s throat or (as a friend of mine did)
swallows a bottle of pins, or a scene in which the lovemaking or fucking
is not merely simulated, but nakedly there, cock into cunt, right there
before your eyes, not garrulously so as in The Vagina Monologues, making
up for lost time and the carnal by merely talking about it, in the vacuity
of a voice. I’ve seen people wince at pictures of Stelarc suspending him-
self by ‹shhooks, as they do with some of the more perilous things on
Survivor, or recently on Fear Factor, when certain minor celebrities were
crawled over by worms, roaches, and snakes. But suppose that were
done close up, live, as in a gallery space or intimate theater, and you
were sitting right there. Never mind the factitious violence as it comes
with popcorn-boggling credibility from Hollywood’s editing rooms—if
what they apparently do in “snuff ‹lms” were done on a stage there’d
be no doubt whatever about the difference in liveness, dead or alive, to use
our president’s words about the evildoer hiding out, no doubt applica-
ble now to those in Kashmir or Pakistan who beheaded Daniel Pearl.
As for the videotape not yet on the networks (and quite unlikely to be),
that would be dif‹cult to see if they showed it, but imagine it done on a
stage, where what’s not done may be done with a valence that, formed as
it is by the media (and reducing the level of sensation), is something else
again, like the nothing to be done in Waiting for Godot that, in its most
elemental liveness, cannot not be done. Which is where, if only with the
illusion of the unmediated, the most complex performance exists.

The issue remains, however, as performance extends beyond theater or

performance art to fashion, politics, pedagogy, corporate management,
polymeric composites, rocket boosters or missile defense, whether the

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narrow circumference of a stage, and human presence, can continue to
hold attention in ways the other media can’t. For the theater, as already
suggested, is mediatized too, that is, something other than raw experi-
ence, not at all immediate, which in its corporeality we sometimes tend
to forget. The mediatizing of culture was surely rami‹ed and accelerated
from photography and cinema through television to analog/digital
technology, but its effect upon performance was already registered
before the end of the nineteenth century, in the preface to Strindberg’s
Miss Julie, which went beyond the relatively conservative dramaturgy of
naturalism—purporting to focus on the documentable evidence of an
external reality, its facts and material circumstances—to the multiplicity
of “the soul-complex,” which is something like the Freudian notion of
overdetermination, a subjectivity so estranged that it cannot ‹t into the
inherited conception of character.
Thus the notion of a “characterless” character. “Instead of the
‘ready-made,’ in which the bourgeois concept of the immobility of the
soul was transferred to the stage,” Strindberg insists on the richness of
the soul-complex, which—if derived from his conception of Darwinian
naturalism—re›ects “an age of transition more compulsively hysteri-
cal” than the one preceding it, while anticipating the age of postmod-
ernism, with its utterly mediated and deconstructed self, so that when
we think of identity as social construction, it occurs as well as a sort of
bricolage: “My souls (characters),” Strindberg writes in that proleptic
preface, “are conglomerates of past and present cultural phases, bits
from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, pieces torn from ‹ne
clothes and become rags, patched together as is the human soul.”16 And
one of the patches is from the theater itself, as it is with the valet Jean,
who says, to account for the knowingness beyond his station, that he’s
been to the theater often. Unfortunately, if that brings a certain medi-
ated presence to his pretensions, of the sort we might acquire today
from ‹lm or television, it wilts before the voice of the Count coming
down the speaking tube. All through the play, actually, the tube itself is
a presence, as that other tube is today: the medium is the message, and
it’s still a message of power.
As we move, however, toward virtual worlds, the claims of the body
to presence—or attributing presence to the body, as con‹rmation or
af‹rmation—may appear to be disrupted by the reformative ›ow of
postlinear devices and systems: fast forward, rewind, stop, eject, play,
and the whole array of recorders, tapes, CDs and CD-ROMs, as well as
the chat rooms and chatterbots on the Internet. And we have seen per-
formance events with more or less impacted technology that seems to

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parse the body, with real-time digitized contours that seem to be ›oating
in infraspace, as in the work of Matthew Barney, that is, a performance
space of image projectors that may also seem, through computer pro-
gramming, to be spuming or liqui‹ed, itself ›oating or hyperextended,
with its payload of partial bodies, spindrifting to cyberspace. Here, cor-
poreal identity may appear to warp, reform, dissolve, be re‹gured there
online, but however the body is thus deconstituted and/or restored, its
image persists through it all, along with—if not there in actuality—the
desire to have it so. If cyberspace itself is the consensual hallucination
that is the consummation of virtual technologies, the hallucinatory con-
sensus extends to notions of performance disassociated from the mun-
dane gravity of the corporeal body. But just as cyberspace is unthinkable
without the alphabetic and mathematical system of representation that
supports and sustains the logocentricism presumably displaced, so the
dematerialized ‹gures are unthinkable without the bodily presence pre-
sumably vanished, nothing occurring in cyberspace that isn’t contingent
on that which, seemingly, it made obsolete.
Whatever the circularity—the looping of liveness through the
space of reproduction—there is no escaping in remediation the reduc-
tio ad absurdum, which is to say, bereft, forlorn, alienated, replicated by
technology, the nevertheless refractory body to which, unavoidably, we
refer anything on a screen, in the ghostliness of three dimensions or in
the wraithlike space of the virtual. That live presence has been devalued
in mediatized culture, and that the degradation of the live has been
compensated for in large-scale live performance, rock concerts or
sporting events, by “videation” or Diamondvision and instant replays
(Auslander 35), still leaves us the lamentable body in its dispossession,
and given the scale of the media, “little body little block heart ash gray
only upright,” which has been from whatever beginnings the carnal
datum of theater. As to what passes through liveness when truly alive,
no videation or instant replay can ever get at that, what’s there indu-
bitably but invisible, right there before your eyes. Merely the thought of
it is suf‹cient to make theater, in the scenic site of the mind, what beats
there, as in the incipient madness of King Lear. Which is not to say that
it’s realized in the theater as we mostly know it, or even in performance
art. Or that the theater as an institution will ever again have the presence
of the other media in our lives.
It is only to say that there’s not much substance to theater that
doesn’t occur in the space of indeterminacy between what’s tangibly
there, or appears to be, and whatever images of mediatized representa-
tion are there as a supplement to (the absence of) the real. It may be that

reality principles
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we’ll eventually encounter some protovirtual version of what Richard
Schechner calls Rasaesthetics, opening up performance to the whole
sensorium; as if inspired by the Natyasastra,17 the technological virtuos-
ity of virtual reality may, in the desideratum of embracing cultures,
eventually program synesthetically some aromatic and emotional fusion
of proprioceptive experience, bringing it instantly across continents to
the entire world. But since—however and wherever the sensorium is
expanded—it will still be occurring in anthropocentric terms, the
ancient problems of knowing remain, with issues of identity and other-
ness too. And a major question still to be responded to is the one asked
years ago by my KRAKEN group, in a work called Crooked Eclipses
(derived from Shakespeare’s sonnets), its initiatory image of a sus-
pended gaze, mirrored in the moment: “What is your substance,
whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you
tend?” (Sonnet 53). What, for all the resources, doesn’t exist on ‹lm or
the electronic media is anything like those shadows, the ghostings,
which exist all the more in performance when—whether or not
encroached upon by ‹lmic or video images with more seeming pres-
ence than the bodies on stage—their presence seems most suspect.
Long before our consciousness of the media, or of mediated con-
sciousness, this paradox was apparent at the outset of Büchner’s
Woyzeck, which dramatizes what was, in Leipzig in 1821, the equivalent
of a media event: “What a murder! A good, genuine, beautiful murder!”
as the Policeman says at the end about what started as a strange sensa-
tion: “Quiet! . . . Can you hear it? Something moving! . . . It’s moving
behind me! Under me! . . . Listen! Hollow! It’s all hollow down there!”18
And so it is in Beckett’s Endgame, when Hamm is pushed by Clov to the
wall, something dripping in his head (“A heart, a heart in my head”)19
that, when push comes to shove, you can never get on ‹lm—even the
‹lm of Beckett’s Endgame. As for the liveness in that drip, or the hollow,
whatever it is that’s moving, it can’t be remediated (or, as we used to say,
represented) because, moment by moment, right before your eyes in the
becoming of theater (even if you could hear the heartbeat), it’s
inevitably something less.

notes

1. See Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York:
Routledge, 2001).
2. John Cage, “Experimental Music,” in Silence: Lectures and Writing (Middle-
town, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1974) 8.

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 3. Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990) 218.
4. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimalist Art: A Critical Anthol-
ogy, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968) 116–47. “The success, even the
survival of the arts,” Fried wrote in 1967, “has come increasingly to depend on their ability to
defeat theater” (139). While disdaining Cage as well (in quality, relative to Elliott
Carter, no comparison) Fried’s animus was directed mainly against visual artists
(Donald Judd, Robert Morris) who were undoing the epiphanic “presentness” or
“single in‹nitely brief instant” that—for Fried, to this day—is grace (146–47).
5. Samuel Beckett, “Breath,” in Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove, 1984)
211.
6. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Rout-
ledge, 1999) 54–55.
7. Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1998) 196. Of the various books proliferating in
this hyperactive scene, this is the most sophisticated that I’ve come across—and
the most evocatively written—in its own mediation between what media artists are
doing, from “telematic dreaming” to virtualizing physical space, and the shadowy
means required to do it, the “algorithms and abstract symbols in an imperceptible
realm of data” (5). To negotiate its seemingly endless prospects, cyberculture
demands a lot of imagination, and Morse respects it when it’s there, while keeping
a jaundiced eye on its transcendent ‹ctions and not losing sight of those who, in the
globalized here-and-now, still have next to no access to the profusion of worlds
online.
8. Quite recently we’ve seen the equivalent of this in the universe of video
games, which are deploying their newest technology for an increasing realism,
while warding off abstraction and its arbitrary rules. It may be that the credibilizing
effects are achieved by numerous buttons, triggers, and toggling switches, and the
computer keyboard, but the irony is that the most sophisticated technology, by
Xbox or Nintendo today, is drawn upon for games with an animus against tech-
nology or with a sort of primitive re›ex, as if before technology, which—in the reg-
ulated intricacy of its puzzling or fantastical worlds—departed too much from the
real, with its muscular sensations or plain old blood and guts.
9. Bertolt Brecht, “The Literarization of the Theater,” in Brecht on Theater: The
Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang,
1964) 44.
10. Alice Rayner is especially perceptive on the rhetoric of telepresence that,
promoting it, fails to recognize that it usually occurs in the language of theatricality
(“Everywhere and Nowhere: Theater in Cyberspace,” in Of Borders and Thresholds:
Theater History, Practice, and Theory, ed. Michal Kobialka [Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999] 278–302). Thus, while the community of telepresence is all
over the place, or could be, in a global culture, the desideratum is a sense of here
and now, the materiality associated with an actual theater space, which remains just
that, a “place for seeing,” even when the enveloped space of wings and ›ies, and
the binary of stage and audience, is ampli‹ed or otherwise transformed by slides,
‹lms, video clips, whether for purposes largely scenic or caption-like, or as a kind
of dialectical image-source for the actors or the drama. Whatever the apparent dis-
persal of the event, through the media or, prospectively now, by way of the Inter-

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net, most of what presumably occurs in cyberspace is there with an institutional
referent and in the “language of dimensionality” (281).
11. Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1982) 299.
12. “Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway,” in Technoculture, ed.
Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991) 16.
13. See Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (New
York: Grove, 1996) 11–12.
14. For many artists and social theorists, if sluggishly so in the theater, the
emergence of a global economy, projecting itself on the Web, requires a radical and
unprecedented “upheaval in our historical perceptions of society and the subject. If
behavior at local levels has not quite caught up with the revolutionary prospects of
a net-based economy, much of what’s happening in the art world seems to be
focused there. “Net art, from physical local installations to world-wide network
computer games, has become the forum in which many of the emancipatory hopes
of the historical avant-gardes are being rephrased. Web art is a form of art to which
great political hopes are linked” (Peter Weibel, “The Project,” in net_condition: art
and global media, ed. Weibel and Timothy Druckrey [Cambridge: ZKM Center for
Art and Media / MIT Press, 2001] 19).
15. Richard Sandomir, “In These ‘Live’ Olympic Games, It’s a Matter of
Timing,” New York Times, February 22, 2002, C20.
16. August Strindberg, “Author’s Preface” to Miss Julie, in Strindberg: Five Plays,
trans. Harry G. Carlson (New York: Signet, 1984) 53–54.
17. Richard Schechner, “Rasaesthetics,” The Drama Review (T71) 45.3 (2001):
27–50.
18. Georg Büchner, Woyzeck, in Georg Büchner: Complete Plays and Prose, trans.
Carl Richard Mueller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989) 111, 137–38.
19. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958) 18.

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 twenty

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3
Memory seems to be doing double duty these days, since I’ve been
working on an autobiography, and quite recently, for a conference in St.
Petersburg, I gave a keynote on “The Emotional Memory of Direct-
ing.” The conference was held at Meyerhold’s theater, the Alexandrin-
sky, but if the title defers to Stanislavski, by way of An Actor Prepares, the
emotional memory was mine—or, with irrepressible subtexts, a com-
posite of mixed emotions—about having worked with actors for just
about half my life. Adventitiously, just before St. Petersburg, I was in
Dublin, having been invited to re›ect, for the Abbey Theater’s centen-
nial, on “Memory and Repertoire,” the memory again mine, as reassess-
ing the Abbey’s history summoned up from my own what, years ago in
the theater, seemed a vain ambition. What I talked about, in cultural
contrast, was trying to evolve a repertoire, and a company with conti-
nuity, in a vaster, diverse country, where there was only what used to be
called (by the old yellow-covered Theater Arts) “Tributary Theater,” with
everything coming from Broadway, as if in rivulets to the outland, and
with everybody paying tribute, the actors dreaming of it. Nor was there
anything even remotely like the conditions for a national theater, nei-
ther the semblance of a burgeoning unity nor an apparent mythic tradi-
tion—whatever the illusions there—that William Butler Yeats invoked
when he founded the Abbey Theater.
While those who invited me had particularly in mind The Actor’s
Workshop of San Francisco, which Jules Irving and I founded in 1952,
they were unaware that Yeats was one of the two major ‹gures (the
other T. S. Eliot) in my doctoral dissertation, which I was writing as our
theater started for the English Department at Stanford. Nor did they
know that the ‹rst play I ever directed—in our loft above a judo acad-
emy (with rat shit below the stairs that I’d clean up before rehearsal)—
was Playboy of the Western World. But that was a relatively conventional
choice in what became, quite radically at the time, an innovative reper-
toire, the ‹rst or early productions of now canonical playwrights:
Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Whiting, Arden, Dürrenmatt, Frisch,
and, among those utterly unknown, Maria Irene Fornes. Moreover, out
of a discouraging context, the Workshop did manage to develop and
sustain a company, from eight actors in that loft to (including the tech-

264
nical staff) considerably more than a hundred, performing in two or
three theaters simultaneously. With our theater a major force in the San
Francisco Renaissance, it was a shock to the city when, in 1965, some of
us went to New York, as Jules and I took over the directorship of the
Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, replacing Robert Whitehead and
Elia Kazan. That, sadder to say, was hardly a major success, and I’ve
re›ected on it before, as I have on much of this, in one or another book.
As my dear friend Ruby Cohn said, in her characteristic way, when I
told her I was working on an autobiography: “What are you doing that
for, you’re always writing autobiography.” Well, maybe so. But if mem-
oirs are now in, that was—and compellingly long before—more like a
habit of mind that, not unlike performance, exists at the nerve ends of
thought.
As to how it all came to be, my initiation in the theater and the per-
spective emerging from it, I’ve not yet dealt with in the autobiography,
no less the radically altered vision in the work of my KRAKEN group.
But if you were to look at the ‹rst chapter, about my growing up in
Brooklyn, on the streets of Brownsville (now pre‹xed with Ocean Hill,
with or without the pre‹x as bad as a neighborhood gets), you’d see that
the prospect of my being in the theater, no less writing about it theoret-
ically, was about as inconceivable as my eventually being a dean. The
fact is I wanted nothing more than to be a ballplayer. That was my real
ambition, all through high school and even into college, but as it turned
out I was a dean, twice, and a provost, though even more anomalously
in over half a century of teaching (still unretired), I did have that paral-
lel career in the theater, but outside the university. And when I’ve taught,
it’s not been in drama departments, but—except for CalArts, which I
mostly conceived as founding provost, while also dean of the School of
Theater—in English and comparative literature. There were periods
when, exhilarated beyond exhaustion, I was working full-time directing
and full-time teaching (four courses per semester, two in freshman
comp), all the more anomalously because my ‹rst degree was in chemi-
cal engineering, which I really liked, was very good at, and intended to
pursue—having ‹nished at NYU, going on to MIT.
And I might very well have done that had it been more theoretical
at the time. But in those days, gearing up for the war effort—and par-
ticularly the Manhattan Project, for which chemical engineers did the
›uid mechanics—the stress was on problem solving. I had no trouble
with that, though there was another kind of problem. In thermodynam-
ics, for instance, I could work with the function of entropy, dS = dQ/T,
but I never quite knew what it meant until, as I wrote in The Impossible

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Theater (a chapter called “Growing Up with Entropy”), I began to think
seriously of certain dramatic ‹gures like Orestes or Hamlet, who in his
“ratiocinative meditativeness” (as Coleridge called it) is a measure of the
unavailable energy of the universe. Which, of course, along with the
post-Brechtian critique of tragedy (see Derrida on Artaud and the fate
of representation, which remains, despite all desire for closure, the rep-
resentation of fate), they’re now trying to ameliorate or redeem in terms
of chaos theory. Speaking of chaos, however, my veering into the the-
ater was, to begin with, far more accidental than theoretical, and had
much to do with my realization that I was not going to make it as a
ballplayer, not at the highest levels, in either basketball or football (my
two best sports). While I was shifty, tricky, heads-up, smart, I was not
big enough or fast enough to compete.

Before saying what came, however, from what nearly drove me crazy,
let me re›ect for a moment on what I still owe to sports and—however
perverse or overreaching, hopefully heads-up, smart—that abiding
desire to compete, or perhaps I should say excel. For it had the residual
virtue of bringing into my theater work, as to my writing and teaching
as well, an impatience with imperfection, excuses, bullshit, faking it or
goo‹ng off, which you can’t get away with in sports (all doping scandals
aside) at “The Limits of Performance.” That’s the title of an essay in my
most recent book, The Dubious Spectacle, and those limits were the theme
of a conference at Stanford, perhaps the best I’ve ever attended, with
Olympic medalists, Olympic prospects, Jim Ryun (who ‹rst ran a four-
minute mile), Bill Walsh (with three wins in the Super Bowl), most of
the Stanford coaches, as well as a Nobel Prize surgeon, a clinician who
monitors the marathon runners from Kenya, and a world-class oph-
thalmologist. I was the only one speaking of performance in theater, but
they knew what I was talking about, not only the coaches, when I
remembered those moments at some threatening edge of inquiry,
where in a sort of double vision I’ve seen what I was doing as next to
immoral, urging the actor toward some physical or psychic danger—I
mean s/he could really get hurt!—though with a certainty of revelation,
eliciting the extraordinary, a performance beyond itself, if I didn’t back
off or relent. The ophthalmologist remarked at breakfast, relative to
what I’d said, that with doubt at the sticking point, wanting to withdraw,
if he wavered a millimeter he could easily ruin an eye.
The subtitle of The Dubious Spectacle is Extremities of Theater, which are
still linked, no doubt, in my own eye to what—in that early, notorious
book, subtitled A Manifesto, with its assault on the American theater—I

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had called the impossible. And since I began to see the theater as noth-
ing but (the) impossible, or nothing much without it, the extremity led
inevitably, not only to certain productions at The Actor’s Workshop,
their spectacular excess, about which I’d say we were “risking the
baroque,” but then, with the self-regarding scruple of a solipsistic con-
traction, the unnerving “ghostings” and “burrowings” in the methodol-
ogy of KRAKEN, which became the heuristic datum of all my subse-
quent theory. “This book is the remembering of a theory”: thus, the
opening of Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point, in which, as
KRAKEN itself was vanishing (impossible to continue, for ‹nancial
reasons), I tried to transfer its performative energy, psychophysical but
cerebral, elliptical as it was, to the written page—where I said, in
describing what we did, that if the work never existed, if I were simply
making it up as I went along, the theory derived from it would be no less
true. I can’t rehearse the process here, its ideographic complexity in an
almost manic obsessive, ceaseless movement of thought, but when I say
that the work was cerebral, I mean just that, not only that the actors
could perform standing on their heads (and they could), but more
importantly, that it was a matter of taking thought, and with similar per-
mutations also taking time.
“Take thought,” I’d say to the actors, “take thought”—and they,
whatever their other talents, had to be willing to think. (You might oth-
erwise be a ‹ne actor, and by then I’d directed many, some famous,
some not, but if you didn’t like ideas, forget it, this was not for you.)
And if during the course of inquiry—into which without cessation
every impulse was absorbed, and with hieroglyphic siftings turned over
again in thought—there was some inhibiting re›ex of psychological act-
ing, like “I can’t do this, I don’t feel it,” I might erupt into what, as the-
orized, was itself a re›ex of method: “I don’t give a damn what you feel! feel-
ings are cheap, I only care what you think! What we’re doing here is thinking,
we’re trying to understand”—that is, whatever the investigation, under-
standing what, without impassioned thought, we probably never would,
and even then remembering, “whatever way you turn you have not even
started thinking.” (That’s an epigraph from Artaud to my book called
Blooded Thought.) As for the actors’ other talents, they were considerable,
in a group that included Bill Irwin, Julie Taymor, and others like Linda
Gregerson, a superb actor, who refused to continue in theater, how-
ever, when that work unfortunately stopped. (She started to write
poetry instead, took a Ph.D., teaches Milton and Spenser, and recently
won, for a new book of poems, the biggest prize in the country.) That
the thinking assumed feeling, powerful feeling, which accrued in the

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process of thought—over our years together, they brilliantly under-
stood that. “But, ah, thought kills me that I am not thought. . . .” They
also had to deal with that, which comes from the best manual of acting
I know, Shakespeare’s sonnets, from which we made a theater piece,
with a teasing specularity, the impacted Crooked Eclipses.
Speaking of which, back now to the unexpected deviations that
brought me into the theater. The School of Engineering at NYU was up
at University Heights in the Bronx, with a liberal arts college adjacent
(much better then than the one in Greenwich Village). As a way of sub-
limating my thwarted passion for ball-playing, I went over to the Heights
Daily News and soon became its sports editor. This was the ‹rst time any
engineering student had been on its editorial staff, and that’s really
when I started to do some writing. I should say that with the advent of
World War II, in order to expedite the training of engineers, they dis-
continued all courses in the humanities, and had I not gone to Boys
High, one of the elite schools in New York, I’d have graduated virtually
illiterate, and as it was I was hardly well read. I continued writing, how-
ever, when I went into the army and became, after volunteering for the
paratroops, one of the editors of the Fort Benning newspaper, which
had the double bene‹t of keeping me alive, since it was the 82nd Air-
borne, my out‹t, that having jumped behind the lines in Normandy for
the D-Day invasion, was still endangered till war’s end. I jumped out of
planes and had my trooper’s wings, but otherwise I was writing, some-
times about jumping, and that was it, except that it made me realize
even more that I could write, and about things other than sports. When
I left the army, I went back to NYU, and while ‹nishing up my degree
I worked again on the newspaper, and became its editor-in-chief.
As it happened then, the previous editor, Leonard Heideman—
who later became a fairly successful screenwriter, though better known
for the TV series Bonanza—was about to go into the playwriting pro-
gram at the Yale Drama School. Up to this time I’d never gone to the
theater in my life. Going to see a play was a nonexistent reality for any-
body in my family, or any of my friends. One day, however, Lenny
showed me the play he’d written that got him accepted at Yale, and after
reading it, I said to myself, I can do that. So I wrote a couple of short
plays (one actually in verse, called When Death Is Dead), and showed
them to Lenny, who was impressed. And he urged me to send them, as
he’d done with his, to Yale and Stanford (the two major drama schools
at the time), on the good chance, he thought, that one or the other
would offer me a fellowship. So I sent the plays, for kicks. Sure enough,
both of them offered me fellowships, and it then occurred to me, why

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not? I’ve just been in the army, I’ll be getting my degree, I can do that
for a year, and then use the GI Bill to go to MIT. But which one mean-
while, Yale or Stanford?
As it happened, too, Jules Irving, who eventually became my part-
ner for over twenty years, was the head of the Green Room Players at
the liberal arts college, and I knew him slightly because he’d come over
to the newspaper to ask for publicity. I’d also heard that he’d been a
child actor on Broadway, and indeed he had, in The American Way, with
Frederic March. As I was thinking where to go, I met Jules one day on
the steps of Gould Hall, the library, and asked him what he thought—
whereupon another coincidence: he had been at Stanford during the
war, in a language training program, studying Russian, and was going
back there, into the Drama Department. “Why don’t you go to Stan-
ford,” he said, “it’s like a country club.” And indeed it was when I went,
those golden hills behind the campus, the groves of eucalyptus on Palm
Drive, and for a mile each side of the entrance, before El Camino Real
was developed, rows of fruit and vegetable stands (I’d never seen an
avocado or artichoke before) in front of a fence of roses. For me,
except for the Borscht Circuit, never out of New York, it was utopia.
But before I actually went, as the prospect came upon me, I was sud-
denly frightened. I’d still not seen a play, nor had I read any plays I could
remember, except Lennie’s, and Julius Caesar in high school. So I went
quickly, ‹rst on campus, to see Jules in The Hasty Heart, then to a show
on Broadway, The Moon Is Blue, with Barbara Bel Geddes, and next—
because Burgess Meredith was in it, and I’d seen him in the movies—
Playboy of the Western World, which some years after was the ‹rst play I
ever directed.
Meanwhile, too, during my ‹nal semester at NYU, I asked every-
body who might know what I should be reading, and that’s when I
started on Shakespeare, the Greeks, much of Ibsen, Chekhov, O’Neill,
and others like Clifford Odets and Elmer Rice, while pretty much ignor-
ing my courses, which I managed to get through without studying. Still
feeling unprepared when I did get to Stanford, and in the graduate pro-
gram, it took a while to realize it, but I’d read more—since I kept read-
ing, and about the drama too, Barrett H. Clark, John Gassner, Joseph
Wood Krutch—than most of the students there who’d presumably
been majoring in drama, though many were there for acting. And some
of them, indeed, were very talented, with a certain maturity among the
men, those back from the war on the GI Bill. Aside from the course in
playwriting—taught by Hubert Heffner, godfather of the American
Theater Association (now the ATHE)—I was fascinated by Develop-

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ment of Dramatic Art, my ‹rst course in theater history, though I soon
found myself puzzling over curious things, like the Romans invented
the curtain, which they called the auleum. That was it. As to why they
developed the curtain, a rather strange phenomenon when you think of
it, or the open-air theater at Epidaurus, with nothing hiding the stage—
why in the world, by what accretion or perversion of value, would you
want to separate the seers from what’s to be seen, when it hadn’t been
done before? But when I’d pose a question like that, it made me feel a
little peculiar, because nobody wanted to talk about it.
Nor did they want to talk about a book like Eric Bentley’s Playwright
as Thinker, which went against the grain of what they taught about the
drama of modernism, though modernism itself as a concept was not, as
I remember, talked about at all, no less anything like the modernist
avant-garde. (Nor did I ever hear of Ubu Roi, which caused Yeats to say
when he saw it, “After us, the savage gods.”) And while I loved watch-
ing rehearsals or even the technical setups in the theater, and was much
enamored of actors (and the lovely women among them), sometimes
seeing them in a production over and over again, I was perplexed when
I tried to discuss the play itself that I was getting little by way of
response. And it soon became apparent that Bentley was onto some
instructional fault when he wrote about a production of Ibsen at Yale,
in which the students there would talk about the lighting, the costumes,
the sets, the acting—everything except what the play was about.
And then, there at Stanford, this included my own plays, which
were soon on the stage of the Little Theater, where a few years ago Mar-
tin Esslin and I, just before he died, gave talks in a retrospective on the
theater of the Absurd. Had any of the playwrights Martin had included
in his seminal book, Ionesco or Adamov, or even Beckett, come on the
scene at Stanford when I was there, most of the faculty and students
wouldn’t have known what to say—the more likely thing being that the
plays wouldn’t have been produced. As it was, when we ‹rst did such
things at The Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco, Stanford—like other
university theater departments, which one would have thought should
be leading the way (as in medicine or physics)—was still doing a con-
ventional “season”: a Shakespeare, a Shaw, a musical, and maybe a
(safe) new play or a Chekhov, who was (would you believe it?) still con-
sidered avant-garde. As to when and whether the absurdists were being
discussed, and to what extent (no less distinctions between them and
Beckett or Genet, also in Esslin’s book), I can’t say; it was certainly true,
however, that by the time theory surfaced—preempting the idea of per-
formance, or colluding with performance art—the department was still

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behind, though I’ve talked again there recently, and surely there’s been
a change.
I was so disenchanted at one point, even after I’d won the Margery
Bailey Playwriting Prize, that I left Stanford and went back to live with
my parents in Brooklyn, still intending anyhow to return to engineering.
There had been, however, one major contribution that the Drama
Department had made to my life and career, for it was at Stanford that
I met Beatrice Manley, who eventually became my ‹rst wife. She was
there as a visiting actor from Broadway in what was, as I recall, the ‹rst
artist-in-residence program in any university. Glamorous as she was,
‹ve years older, experienced in more than theater, I could only fantasize
dating her then, while I ran the lights on As You Like It, in which she
played Rosalind. But she was very gracious to me when I’d ask her a
question, and seemed to think I was bright. And so I dared to call, when
I was back in Brooklyn, and she had returned to her apartment in
Greenwich Village (next door to W. H. Auden), driving over the bridge
to see her in my father’s car.
It was she who, in New York, introduced me to various theater
people, like Teddy Post, who with Sidney Lumet headed a group of
actors that at the time rivaled the Actors Studio. I went to plays with
Bea, and through her eyes, began to see more in the acting. It was Teddy
who showed one of my plays to Erwin Piscator, who critiqued it at his
Dramatic Workshop, where I ‹rst encountered the ideas of Brecht, as
well as one of his Lehrstücke. Meanwhile, they were still doing my plays
at Stanford, and when Heffner induced me to return, to complete an
M.A. (I refused to take any more courses, and they virtually gave it to
me), Bea and I kept in touch, and soon she came out too, giving up her
career in New York. She was there when they did my thesis play
(designed by O. J. Brockett), by which time I had already gone over to
the English Department to take a course in poetry.
The curmudgeonly man teaching it stood behind a lectern and lit-
erally read his own essays, with some mumbled metacommentary, but it
was the ‹rst time I’d ever felt in a classroom that this was a matter of life
and death. Each idea was a moral issue, and you found yourself at risk if
you didn’t take it seriously. I hadn’t the faintest notion who he was, but
it turned out to be Yvor Winters, one of the great New Critics, with
whom I did my dissertation, after the head of the department, Richard
Foster Jones—with whom I took a seminar in (of all things, and I’m not
sure why) Ciceronian rhetoric—came up to me one day on the quad,
and said, “Mr. Blau, would you like to teach?” How he become aware of
my background in engineering, I don’t know, but he wanted me to do a

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freshman course in Scienti‹c Writing, which I did, with the very best
students at Stanford, in chemistry, physics, neurology, some preparing
for medical school. As for a Ph.D., I didn’t even know what that was
until I started teaching.
When I decided to go ahead with it, it was because of Winters and
Wallace Stegner, with whom I ‹rst studied Henry James. We had to do
a paper every week, and for the one on James, by an accident of what
was on the shelf in the library, the book I chose to write about was The
Golden Bowl. It dazzled as it baf›ed, and I’m still most drawn to things
that arouse me by confounding. What’s more, if there’s any notable
in›uence on the way I’ve come to write (some speak of it as “density,”
others “opacity,” in my various books) it’s the prose of “darkest James,”
where nothing is but what materializes in a sort of perceptual slippage,
with its dilatory, circuitous, parenthetical (have I really said it? or even
vaguely seen it?) delaying of predication, requiring an interjection,
because you want to say it all, in a syntactical anamnesis, before you
come to it (what it? “it all, it all,” as Beckett would later say) though it
wouldn’t be what it is (it wouldn’t even exist) if I didn’t say it as I did. Or
as Wallace Stevens would say, in the highest modernist vein, poetry is
words about things that wouldn’t exist without the words, a notion I
found exhilarating, as with other new directions. While sorting out an
aesthetic in the reading I was doing—hardly able to believe to this day
that they pay me money to teach it (all those good books!)—I chanced
upon a job in the Language Arts Department at San Francisco State,
with Jules already there in the Theater Department, and his wife
Priscilla Pointer (they had performed together abroad, entertaining the
troops) also on the scene.
When Bea and I moved up to the city, she became almost immedi-
ately the most desirable actor there, but while there were various “little
theaters” around (that movement still alive), there was no professional
work except with a poorly directed, so-called Repertory Theater, in
which she became the star, though in short order very dissatis‹ed with
that. Whereupon, fearful that she was getting restive, and I might lose
her, I suggested to Jules that we start our own theater, and when he, and
Bea, and Priscilla, were skeptical—they were all, and how not?, still ori-
ented to Broadway—I would naively draw upon my reading of theater
history and literally say things like: two guys sit down over a tacky table
in Moscow, talk for nineteen hours, and create the Moscow Art The-
ater—why can’t we do that? They may have laughed or condescended
but eventually went along, at least with the idea of a workshop for
actors, and I’ll abbreviate this archive now by saying the rest is history.

reality principles
272
 I didn’t direct at ‹rst, Jules did, and I was a sort of undesignated dra-
maturg, gradually commenting on what was done, or not, which some-
times troubled me—choice of plays, absence of method. If ignorance is
not exactly bliss, it does have certain advantages, and that was certainly
so in the theater, and in our own theater as much as any. Had I known
what some there thought they knew, because they’d been in the theater
a good deal longer, we’d have never done what, when it was celebrated,
they forgot they had resisted. And they resisted, some of them, almost
every innovation, not only the audacious plays in the repertoire, or even
the idea of a repertoire—the constitution of meaning as we moved from
play to play, and the stylistic implications—but also experimental ten-
dencies in the staging, the collaboration with other artists, formed by
abstract expressionism or happenings or the Action events of the time,
or the anticipatory genres of installation art. After learning all I could
about the theater, seeing everything around, I realized there was far
more to learn from the other arts about what might be done in the the-
ater. And even today, when I do go to the theater, it still tends to
con‹rm that, belated as it mostly is, even when experimental.
One last word about resistance: what was true in the theater was
also so in theater studies, as one can see in the history of Theater Journal
itself (to which I may very well be the oldest living contributor, having
published my ‹rst essay there, “The Education of the Playwright,” in
1952, the same year the Workshop started). When poststructuralism
‹rst came on the scene—appropriating as it did, in the opacity of its
prose, the idea of performance—it was not among theater scholars. As
for the emergence of performance studies, that came, if theoretical at
all, out of an anthropological inclination, differing from my own, which
(in memoriam) tends to be ontological, trying to see in what’s forgot-
ten—the actor dying in front of your eyes—the materialization of the-
ater from whatever it is it is not, life? the Real? or, in its (dis)appearance,
is it life as a dream? “What is the theater,” I wrote in Take Up the Bodies,
“but the body’s long initiation in the mystery of its vanishings.” But
here I am on autopilot, obsessed even more with the vanishings, while
aging into the mystery, with an archival habit of mind.

Auto Archive
273
 Publication History

“Relevance: The Shadow of a Magnitude,” Daedalus 98.3 (1969): 654–76.

“The Faith-Based Initiative of the Theater of the Absurd,” Journal of Dramatic The-
ory and Criticism 16.1 (2001): 3–13.
“The Soul-Complex of Strindberg: Suffocation, Scopophilia, and the Seer,” Assaph:
Studies in Theater 16 (2002): 1–12.
“From the Dreamwork of Secession to Orgies Mysteries Theater,” Modern Drama
52.3 (2009): 259–78; also in Modern Austrian Literature 42.3 (2009): 1–18.
“Performing in the Chaosmos: Farts, Follicles, Mathematics, and Delirium in
Deleuze,” in Deleuze and Performance, ed. Laura Cull (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-
versity Press, 2009) 22–34.
“Seeming, Seeming: The Illusion of Enough,” in Against Theater: Creative Destructions
on the Modernist Stage, ed. Martin Puchner and Alan Ackerman (New York: Pal-
grave/Macmillan, 2006) 231–47.
“Who’s There?—Community of the Question,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and
Art 83, 28.2 (2006): 1–12.
“The Emotional Memory of Directing,” Theater Research International 30.1 (2005):
1–12.
“The Commodius Vicus of Beckett: Vicissitudes of the Arts in the Science of
Af›iction,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 18.2 (2004): 5–19; also in Beckett
after Beckett, ed. S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Ullmann (Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2006) 22–38.
“Among the Deepening Shades: The Beckettian Moment(um) and the Brechtian
Arrest,” in Where Extremes Meet: Rereading Brecht and Beckett (Brecht Yearbook) 27
[2007]: 65–81.
“Apnea and True Illusion: Breath(less) in Beckett,” Modern Drama 49.4 (2006):
452–68; also in Beckett at 100: Revolving It All, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moor-
jani (London: Oxford University Press, 2008) 35–53.
“Art and Crisis: Homeland Security and the Noble Savage,” PAJ: A Journal of Per-
formance and Art 75, 25.3 (2003): 6–19.
“Thinking History, History Thinking,” Theater Survey 45.2 (2004): 253–62.
“Why WHAT History?” Modern Language Quarterly 70.1 (2009): 3–10.
“Auto Archive: Herbert Blau,” Theater Journal 56 (2004): 253–62.

275
 Index

Abbey Theater, the, 264 Death of Klinghoffer, The, 208

abortion, 18, 82, 221 Nixon in China, 208
Abramović, Marina, 80, 159–60 Adorno, Theodor, 15, 188, 205
Breathing In / Breathing Out, 159–60 and “Trying to Understand
impetus toward dissolution, 159 Endgame,” 178, 179, 188–89,
with Ulay, Relation Works, 159–60 224
Absurd, the, 2, 3, 4, 28, 33, 44–55, 128, Aeschylus
189, 230, 270 initiating specularity, 247
and chaos theory, 4 and Oresteia, 124
longing for the supernal, 54 with Prometheus, testing moral per-
method in the madness, 46 ception, 108
Abu Ghraib, 186 aesthetic, the, 103, 133, 152, 158, 233,
Ackerman, James, 1 247, 272
acting, 9, 13, 14, 78, 113, 116, 117, 135, and antiaesthetic, 49, 112
136, 137–39, 141–42, 243, 267, of apocalypse, 211
268, 271 and history, 241
the A-effect, 95 of 9/11, a perverse sublime, 15,
and anxiety, 137–38 22n25, 111, 203, 205, 209,
best manual of, 117, 268 207–11, 214–15 (see also Stock-
dying in front of your eyes, 114, 244, hausen, Karlheinz)
273 and Viennese Secession, 69, 72
enough of, 115–16 affective memory, 13, 14, 116, 133–47,
as immoral, 14, 137, 266 264
signaling through the ›ames, 192 and Stanislavski, 13, 134, 141, 264
what constitutes truth in, 14 Afghanistan, 16, 20, 256
where? why? how? for whom?, 14, Agamben, Georgio, and Means without
113, 145 End, 134
Actors Studio, the, 117, 138–39, age of terror, the, 115, 206
271 Alain-Bois, Yves, 162
Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco, Alienation-effect (A-effect), the, 59, 95,
The, 3, 19, 45, 135, 155, 219, 264, 140, 171, 174, 179, 227, 251
267, 270, 272–73 baf›ed by the nothing that is, 113
and Beckett, 3, 155, 219 in Brecht’s Baal, 174
blessings from and to the Jesuits, 19, pauses and gestures in Beckett, 179
219–20 and theatricalization of theory, 104
and Brecht’s Galileo, 220 Ally McBeal, 253
risking the baroque, 267 Al Qaeda, 115, 199, 231, 252
Adams, John, 208–9 Althusser, Louis, and For Marx, 169,
Works 225

277
Americanism, 226 theatricality as the end of, 248,
See also Orientalism 262n4
Anderson, Arthur, 199 Artaud, Antonin, 82, 97, 99, 100, 250,
Angels in America (Tony Kushner), 57 256, 267
Anschluss, 74 and alchemical theater, 9, 50, 61, 63,
antiaesthetic, the, 49, 112, 119, 154, 209 93, 96, 224
age of, 215 and Balinese theater, 13, 91, 192
and performance, 90 and closure of representation, 112,
Antigone, 36, 38 118n16, 166, 229, 266 (see also
anti-Semitism, 72, 87 Derrida, Jacques)
antitheater, 9, 70, 103–17 in the Deleuzean chaosmos, 90, 91
in Artaud, with incantations, 100, theater of Cruelty, 50, 58, 90, 91,
110 160, 192, 229
with death dying, becoming obso- and true illusion, 192
lete, 9, 114 Works
and dispassion in Brecht, 109 Spurt of Blood, 77
and the fate of psychoanalysis, 110, “Theater and the Plague, The,”
114 61, 110, 215
increasing quotient of theater, 103 Art Brut, 84
as scourge of falsehood and lies, Arte Povera, 84, 157
111–12 Artforum, 217
antitheatrical prejudice, the, 103, 112, Art Informel, 84
113, 117 Art Nouveau, 77
appearance, 2, 9, 20, 21, 56, 103, 104, Ashbery, John, 123
107, 109, 112, 117, 124, 130, 249, and “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mir-
254 ror,” 125
and reality, 110, 113, 126, 128, 226, Ashcroft, John, 198
227, 228, 234, 237, 240 Asmus, Walter, 140
as seeming, or illusion, 227, 248 assemblage, 42, 44, 52, 53, 111, 157
in Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata, 63 Auden, W. H., 151, 213, 215, 271
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 221 on Freud, 42–43
Aristophanes, 237 audience, the, 6, 10–12, 29, 52, 63, 69,
Aristotle, 40 78, 97, 107, 113, 116, 123–24, 140,
and On the Soul, 133 158, 171, 173, 186, 208, 214
art, 14, 15, 31, 37, 48, 49, 74, 75, 77, 78, becoming actors, 10, 11
81, 84, 105–6, 111, 114, 119, 135, as bourgeois, 50, 58, 126, 193, 251
136, 151, 154, 156–57, 161, a charnel house (in Godot), 158, 193
214–18 as a community or a public, 3, 44,
always in peril, 216 120–23, 125, 126–27
after Beckett, 162 with exhausted illusions, 11, 126
as commodi‹ed, 84, 86 and participation mystique, 10, 83,
and crisis, 198–213 97, 109, 127, 218
as de‹ned by Ionesco, 51–52 watching and being watched, 107
in emerging global economy, Augustine, St., 222
263n14 Auslander, Philip, and remediation,
and history, 241 249, 260
life in, 13–14, 30, 134 Works
and politics, 83, 200–201 “Live from Cyberspace,” 243–45

index
278
 Liveness: Performance in Mediated Bauhaus, the, 2, 216
Culture, 21n5 Beatles, the, 37, 214
Austin, J. L., 104 Beaumont Theater (at Lincoln Center),
Austria, 6–7, 68–88 145, 246
authenticity, 46, 47 Beckett, Samuel, 5, 20, 27, 48, 94, 103,
avant-garde, the, 2, 95, 96, 114, 128–29, 111, 124, 129, 139–40, 148–64,
144, 154, 173, 200, 219, 270 165–81, 182–97, 202, 213, 219,
tradition of, 111, 136, 215 237, 264, 270
and Adorno, 178, 179, 188, 189, 224
Badiou, Alain, and Handbook of Inaes- bearing political witness, 178, 189,
thetics, 126 194
Bahr, Hermann, and Ver Sacrum, and dehiscence, coherence gone to
74–75, 85 pieces, 182, 187, 192
Balinese theater, 13, 91, 192 and Eliot, 191
See also Artaud, Antonin the injustice of having been born,
Baraka, Amiri, and “Somebody Blew 194
Up America,” 210–11 and the mirror stage of Lacan, 182
Barberini, Cardinal Maffeo, in Brecht’s Nobel Prize, the, 4, 124, 157, 182
Galileo, 220 and the nothing to be done, 47, 53,
Barney, Matthew, 260 113, 124, 150, 151, 168, 185,
and Viral Infection: The Body and Its 186, 215, 258
Discontents, 111 and the (Pause), 153, 177, 195
Barthes, Roland, 11, 116, 117, 121, 161, the pensum, 175
174, 176, 237, 243 the pronoun it, it all, 94, 117, 149,
and the Bunraku, 116, 243 195, 272
and history as hysterical, 236 and seizures of sleep apnea, 184
pregnant moment in Brecht, the, Works—Act without Words, 156; All
174 That Fall, 186; “Assumption,”
on sense and emotional memory, 162; Breath, 3, 73, 100, 110, 129,
116–17 135, 153, 157, 165, 166, 183,
and the tyranny of meaning, 51, 109 188, 249; “The Calmative,”
Works 149, 158; Catastrophe, 170–71,
Camera Lucida, 236 179, 186; Come and Go, 178;
“Death of the Author, The,” 52 Comment c’est, 184; Company,
“Grain of the Voice, The,” 11, 51, 150, 191–92, 196; Eh Joe, 184;
109 Embers, 185; “The End,” 162;
Baudrillard, Jean, 8, 127–28, 165, 230, Endgame, 6, 14, 53, 56, 66, 112,
250, 253 117, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154,
black hole of the social, 127 157, 158–59, 166, 168, 172,
on ›oating theories, ›oating money, 175–76, 177, 178, 179, 183,
8 185–89, 191–94, 223, 224, 247,
and precession of simulacra, 128, 261; “Enough,” 155, 195;
165, 230, 250 “Faux Départs,” 150, 162, 195;
Works Film, 156, 169, 170; “First
Amérique, 127 Love,” 161, 183; “Fizzle 5,” 3,
“Ecstasy,” 130, 131 151, 152; Footfalls, 94, 117, 149,
Silent Majorities, 127 158, 189, 195, 272; Ghost Trio,
Simulations, 128, 165, 230, 250 154; Happy Days, 152; How It Is,

Index
279
Beckett, Samuel Bentley, Eric, and The Playwright as
Works (continued ) Thinker, 270
172; Imagination Dead Imagine, Berg, Alban, 75
107, 187; Krapp’s Last Tape, 157, Bergson, Henri, and Bergsonian durée,
187, 188; “Lessness,” 3, 153, 106, 130
155, 193, 246; “The Lost Berkeley, Bishop George, 189, 225
Ones,” 152, 157; Molloy, 160; Berliner Ensemble, the, 165
Nacht und Träume, 170; Not I, Bernhard, Thomas, 69, 74
97, 123, 129, 172, 182, 183, 184, and The Hunting Party, 68
187, 195; Ohio Impromptu, 159, Beuys, Joseph, 84, 155, 157, 174
187; A Piece of Monologue, 182, Bhabha, Homi, and “The Commit-
187, 193; Play, 160, 165, 170, ment to Theory,” 238–39
186; Proust, 149, 151, 153, 170, bin Laden, Osama, 15, 199, 203, 205,
186; Quad, 159; Rockaby, 159, 256
169, 196; Rough for Theater I, Bion, Wilfred, 191
186; Rough for Theater II, 194; birth control, 221
“Stirrings Still,” 148, 149; Texts Bishop, Elizabeth, 119
for Nothing, 3, 156, 161, 182; Björk, 214
That Time, 123, 167, 172, 187, Black Mountain College, 2, 216
188, 189; The Unnamable, 92, Blade Runner, 256
161, 184, 185; “Variations on a Blair, Tony, 212
‘Still’ Point,” 148, 149, 185; Blake, William, 25, 37, 226, 254
Waiting for Godot, 3, 4, 6, 47, 49, Blau, Herbert, 133, 215, 150
124, 151, 154, 157–59, 165, 171, differing with Baudrillard, 127, 131
172–73, 176, 179–80, 182, 193, and failing memory, 21
215, 223–24, 236, 258; What at Howl trial, 98
Where, 179; Worstward Ho, 163, and ischemic attack, 13, 182, 184
187, 188 Jewish heritage of, 220, 221
Bel, Jérôme, 119 methodical indeterminacy, 14, 144
Belafonte, Harry, 18 and sleep apnea, 4, 184
Bel Geddes, Barbara, 269 Works
Bellow, Saul, 15, 198 Audience, The, 9, 10, 11, 69, 126,
Bene, Carmelo, 9, 94–96, 98 248
Benjamin, Walter, 81, 172, 226, 240, Blooded Thought, 244, 267
253 Dubious Spectacle, The, 7, 10, 266
and Kraus, his incorruptible assur- “Education of the Playwright,
ance, 81 The,” 273
and monads shadowed by mysti- Impossible Theater, The, 2, 10, 69,
cism, 231, 240 114–15, 198, 216
and seeds of history in Beckett’s “Public Art of Crisis in the Sub-
Breath, 73 urbs of Hell, The,” 15, 198,
Works 212
Re›ections: Essays, Aphorisms, Auto- Take Up the Bodies, 2, 102n56,
biographical Writings, 81, 87 118n18, 144, 234–35, 255,
“Theses on the Philosophy of 267, 273
History,” 73, 167, 168, 172–75, When Death Is Dead, 268
188, 226, 237 Boccioni, Umberto, and The Body
Bennett, William, 87n4, 204 Ascending, 48

index
280
Böcklin, Arnold, and The Island of the 59, 81, 90, 95, 97, 98, 104, 107,
Dead, 59 109, 110, 122, 139, 148, 165–81,
body, the, 2, 12, 39, 51, 84, 89, 100, 189, 220, 241, 264, 266, 271
104, 111, 119–20, 129, 136, 139, actions as pure phenomena, 178
159, 169, 251, 254, 258–60 A-effect (and gestus), 2, 13, 38, 113,
as all-knowing, 98 138, 141, 154, 165, 170, 174
attributing presence to, 259–60 and Althusser, 169
and Barthes, 51, 116 and Beckett, 165–81
in Beckett, 162, 172, 186, 190 and Benjamin, 167
in Brecht, 170 on Chinese acting, 174
cannibalized, 90 and culinary theater, 50, 140, 176,
and Deleuze, 89–100 251
as discourse, 168 debates with Lukács, 171
as encumbrance, 9, 114 in defense of reason, 98
grammar of, 41 estranging estrangement, 109
as immaterial, 2, 251 indebted to Kraus, 81
the mystery of its vanishings, 2, 255, re‹guring representation, 166, 175
273 rejecting tragic drama, 52, 165
without organs, 9, 96, 100, 142, 163, Works
232 Baal, 97, 171–74, 175, 178, 179
performative risks with, 14 Caucasian Chalk Circle, The, 174,
as theater’s generic substance, 114 177
thinking with, 99 “Form and Subject-Matter,” 178
and vicissitudes of appearance, 254 Galileo, 98, 139, 169, 174, 178, 220
body art, 7, 14, 80, 86, 111, 114, 135, Good Person of Szechwan, 172, 177
160, 218 Jungle of Cities, The, 173, 174, 178
Boltanski, Christian, 158 Measures Taken, The, 122, 171, 175,
and Reserve, 158 202
Bond, Edward, and The Worlds, 122 Short Organum, 140, 165, 176,
Bosse, Harriet, 61 251
bots, 2, 94, 128, 223, 244, 259 Brenton, Howard, and Magni‹cence,
Boulez, Pierre, 91 122
bourgeois theater, the, 9, 90, 104, 106, Breton, André, 27, 111
108, 109, 119–20, 251 Brisley, Stuart, 160
Bourne, Matthew, 120, 121 Brockett, O. J. (Oscar), 271
and Play without Words, 120 Brook, Peter, 115, 129, 135, 151, 247
Brahe, Tycho, 231 Brown, Trisha, 119
brain, the, 2, 13, 65, 68, 91, 97, 98, 99, Brus, Günter, 77, 85, 86
107, 110, 113, 143, 172, 176, 184, and The Vienna Walk, 85
190, 206, 226, 236 Büchner, Georg, 122, 261
in Beckett, 13, 97, 107, 172, 182, Works
187, 192, 195 Danton’s Death, 122
in Brecht, 98, 176 Woyzeck, 261
of untold magnitude, the best stage Burden, Chris, 135, 160, 258
of all, 108 Burgtheater, the, 70, 71
Brando, Marlon, 117, 138 Bury, J. B. (John Bagnell), 241
Braudel, Ferdinand, 238 Bush, George W., 122, 130, 174, 204,
Brecht, Bertolt, 5, 14, 45–46, 52–54, 205, 211, 226, 228

Index
281
Butler, Judith, 59 Cubism, 106
Works cultural studies, 2, 12, 19, 48, 52, 105,
Bodies That Matter, 104, 105 162, 189, 201, 205, 226, 233, 239,
Gender Trouble, 104 240
Cunningham, Merce, 216
Cage, John, 91, 119, 153, 154, 215, 216,
248, 257, 262n4 Dada, 18, 27, 96, 111, 215
Works Daedalus, 1, 21nn1–2
433, 91, 248 dance, 119–21
Silence, 247 Dance Theater of Harlem, 207
Caldéron, Pedro, and Life Is a Dream, Darwinism, 57, 58, 108
73 Davar, Katya, and Remote Host, 151
California Institute of the Arts Davis, Joe, 114
(CalArts), 2, 17, 214–18 Davis, Miles, 214
Camus, Albert, 93 Debord, Guy, and Society of the Spectacle,
and The Myth of Sisyphus, 36 10, 120, 165, 223, 250
capitalism, 8, 16, 20, 46, 55, 120, 198, deconstruction, 47, 69, 112, 120, 130,
229 152, 165, 201, 223, 233, 240, 248
Carrà, Carlo, 111 Decou›é, Philippe, and Iris, 128
Case, Sue-Ellen, 22n22, 173 de Kooning, Willem, 153
Catholic Church, the, 86–87, 219, Deleuze, Gilles, 7, 8, 9, 12, 22n22, 49,
220–21 51, 89–102, 121, 141
Celan, Paul, 205 and Artaud, 9, 51, 90, 93, 96, 97, 99,
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, and Journey to 100
the End of Night, 32 and Nietzsche, 92–93
Cézanne, Paul, 105, 106 and randomness, 93–94
Challenger (space shuttle), 247 rhizomatics of theatricality, 7, 93
Chekhov, Anton, 134, 140, 178, 179, and subtraction stagings of Bene, 9,
269, 270 94–96, 98
Works Works
Cherry Orchard, The, 139, 140 Anti-Oedipus (with Guattari), 89
Three Sisters, The, 140 Essays Critical and Clinical, 90
Chekhov, Michael, 139 “One Less Manifesto,” 95, 96
Cheney, Dick, 16, 204, 205, 226 Thousand Plateaus, A, 7, 52, 53, 91,
Cheney, Lynne, 204 93, 96, 97, 98
Clark, Barrett H., 269 “What Children Say,” 90, 96
Cohn, Ruby, 265 Delsarte, François, 254
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 142, 266 demysti‹cation, 49, 54, 59, 76
community, 11, 39, 40, 122, 125–27, Derrida, Jacques, 22n22, 47, 49, 112,
223 166, 266
Copernicus, Nicholas, 231 and history in discursive form, 229
Cousteau, Jacques, 41 Works
Craig, Gordon, 116, 243 Glas, 112
Crane, Hart, and The Bridge, 30 “Theater of Cruelty and Closure
critical theory, 8, 41, 45, 46, 106, of Representation, The,”
130–31, 133, 166, 188, 201, 230, 112, 166, 229, 266
232 Dialog, 19
Crow, Thomas, 161 Dif‹e, Whit‹eld, 114

index
282
digital humanities, 1 Eurocentrism, 225
Dine, Jim, 157 critique of, 226
Dionysus in 69, 50, 97, 109 Eve (rapper), 253
Discourse, 7 existentialism, 3, 25, 84, 93, 149, 156,
Disney, Walt, 17 189, 244, 245
and Disney World, 2, 226 and emergence of the Absurd, 45
Divine, 104 and performance subject to chance,
Dominguez, Ricardo, 255 125–26
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 134 as site of Instant Theater, 32
and The Possessed, 200 and stage fright, 135, 227
doyouQ, 11 Ex Machina, 128
dramaturgy, 3, 46 Export, Valie, 7, 80
of Beckett, 153
of Ibsen’s realism, 110 Facebook, 11
and the naturalistic tradition, 58, 259 faith, 23, 43, 45, 46, 65, 174, 201, 204,
of perpetually renewing crisis, 36 213, 220, 221
of the unconscious, 78, 90, 114 adoration and secret skepticism, 23
of the West, 61 and American politics, 45
Drexler, K. Eric, 256 in folly of the wrong Ideal, 91
D’Souza, Dinesh, 203 and illusion, 169
Duchamp, Marcel, 215 as myth and masquerade, 32
DV8 Physical Theater, the, 120, 121 in the power of art, 208
Dvorak, Antonin, 207 and Rushdie on Islam, 203
Falwell, Jerry, 203
Eagleton, Terry, 233 Faulkner, William, 52, 241
Einstein, Albert, 93 Fear Factor, 258
Eliasson, Olafur, 217 Feldman, Morton, 154, 161
Eliot, T. S., 30, 75, 98, 122, 150, 175, and String Quartet II, 161
191, 264 Fish, Stanley, 203
Works Flavin, Dan, 155, 217
Gerontion, 151, 223, 238 Fluxus, 84, 218, 248
Waste Land, The, 48, 64 Fo, Dario, 18, 96
Elizabeth of Bavaria, and performance and The Pope and the Witch, 18,
art, 79–81, 87n5 219–22
Enlightenment, the, 49, 55, 68, 105, Foreman, Richard, 104
108, 201, 203, 230 Fornes, Maria Irene, 264
and the proscenium stage, 123 Foucault, Michel, 51, 52, 65, 121, 161,
entropy, 4, 55, 228, 256, 265–66 231, 240
Epic theater, 81, 171, 177, 178 and cycles of power on a thousand
erotic, the, 72, 77 plateaus, 121
and the autoerotic, 8, 89, 90, 99 on Deleuze, 89–90, 94, 96–100, 232
and sociopolitical realities, 71 and the epidermic play of perversity,
Esslin, Martin, 3, 4, 270 51, 96
death of, 4 recycled, 240
and The Theater of the Absurd, 3, 53, Fox, Terry, 157
189, 270 Frayn, Michael, 228
Euripides, 202 and Copenhagen, 204
and Children of Herakles, 125 Freedom Party (Jörg Haider), 74

Index
283
Freud, Sigmund, 8, 13, 42, 58, 59, 63, Graham, Martha, 119
65, 71, 78, 81, 87n5, 89, 112, 116, Greenberg, Clement, 155
129, 138, 142, 150, 162, 165, 174, Greenblatt, Stephen, 233, 240, 241
259 and Hamlet in Purgatory, 233, 234, 240
and Artaud, 250 Gregerson, Linda, 267
in Beckett’s Endgame, 149 Grotowski, Jerzy, 50, 97
and House of Atonement, 72 ground zero, 15, 18, 113
and Kraus, 72, 78 theater at, 204, 207–9, 213, 214, 225,
and mise-en-scène of the uncon- 247
scious, 73, 90, 110
and Nestroy, 71, 72 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 175
Works Habermas, Jürgen, 122
Civilization and Its Discontents, 110, Hakim, Taw‹k al-, and Fate of a Cock-
126, 190 roach, 154
Interpretation of Dreams, The, 62, Haldeman, H. R. (Harry Robbins), 17
72–73 Halley, Peter, 156
Project for a Scienti‹c Psychology, 62, Hamilton, Richard, 155
110 Handke, Peter, and Offending the Audi-
Totem and Taboo, 107 ence, 6, 69–70
Fried, Michael, and “Art and Object- Hanging Man, The, 114
hood,” 105, 155, 248, 262n4 happenings, 2, 14, 40, 84, 136, 157, 218,
Friedman, Thomas, 204 273
Fukuyama, Francis, 230 Haraway, Donna, 256
Hardball, 200, 223, 257
Galileo, and Discorsi, 220 Hart, Gary, 206
Gallagher, Catherine, and Practicing the Hawking, Stephen, and A Brief History
New Historicism, 233 of Time, 91
Gassner, John, 269 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 144
Geertz, Clifford, 233 Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad), 215
Gemini Deep Deep Survey, 228 Hebbel, Friedrich, 74, 178
Genet, Jean, 30, 103, 112, 202, 219, Heffner, Hubert, 269, 271
241, 264, 270 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 70,
expertise in appearance, 124 229
an irreverent Will that throws the and Marx, 6, 110, 226, 237
dice, 94 Heidegger, Martin, 103, 209, 237, 255
and scenarios ending in death, 124, Heideman, Leonard, 268
137 Heights Daily News, NYU, 268
Works Hemingway, Ernest, 230
Balcony, The, 28, 30, 94, 112, 124, Hess, Myra, 15
131, 137 Hesse, Herman, and Steppenwolf, 31
Screens, The, 122 hip-hop, 120, 121
Gerz, Jochem, 160 historical materialism, 107, 226
gestus. See Alienation-effect history, 19, 20, 26, 27, 32, 34, 52, 62,
Giotto, 211 105, 106, 108, 133, 134, 135, 136,
Globe Theater, the, 123 167–69, 180, 188, 205, 218, 224,
Godard, Jean-Luc, 41 225–35, 236–42, 253
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 82, 108 in Beckett, 73, 167–68, 188, 189,
Goya, Francisco, and 3rd of May, 200 224

index
284
 in Benjamin, 167–68, 173, 188, 226, Information, age of, 94, 99, 105, 122,
237 141, 228, 250, 257
as bourgeois discourse/social con- and history, blurred, and sprawling
struction, 239 behind, 9, 42
in Eliot, 237–38 in›ating pseudoimage, 32–33
and excess of information, 9, 42 moving with speed of light, 105
in Marx, 19, 27, 31, 109, 110, 167, needing an A-effect, 251
226, 236, 237, 238 Instant Theater, and militancy of the
and metahistory, 19, 225, 231, 239 sixties, 32
and the New Historicism, 233, Intiman Theater, 11
240 Ionesco, Eugène, 3, 45–55, 270
as teleological, 20, 229, 232, 237 and antiplay, its metonymic limit, 49
as thinking, 9, 19, 225–35, 239, 242 in a mimicry of chaotic absence, 46,
tragedy of, in Ionesco, 48 47
wie es eigentlich gewesen, 230, 237 and the political, 53
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 73 and protocols of disorder, 46
and The Tower, 6, 73 and reality that is incurable, 53
Homeland Security, 16, 115 the totality of inconsequence, 47
House/Lights, 127 Works
House of Hapsburg, 7 Amédée or How to Get Rid of It, 3,
and censorship, 70–71 48, 53, 54
humanities, the, 25, 27, 32, 34, 35, Chairs, The, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52
38–42, 268 Jack or the Submission, 44
Hussein, Saddam, 200 Lesson, The, 49, 51
Hwa, Choi Jeong, and Truth, 217 Notes and Counternotes, 53
“Why Do I Write? A Summing
Ibsen, Henrik, 57, 64, 76, 109, 110, 178, Up,” 48, 53, 54
269, 270 Iraq, 16, 200, 212, 226, 237
Works Iron Curtain, 198
Ghosts, 108 Irving, Jules, 264, 269
Hedda Gabler, 76 Irwin, Bill, 267
Lady from the Sea, 253 Islam, 15, 16, 20, 201, 202, 203–4
Peer Gynt, 108 Italian Futurism, 96, 111
illusion, 34, 55, 62, 76, 104, 117, 148, Izenour, George, 246
165, 169, 171, 180, 215
in Artaud, 192 Jackson, Jesse, 202
in Beckett, 149, 168, 179, 192, James, Henry, 12, 272
195–96, 258 Works
in Brecht, 148, 165, 171, 175 American Scene, The, 241
in Eliot, 75, 175 Golden Bowl, The, 272
the future of, 9, 59, 75, 110, 115, Jameson, Frederic, 57, 166, 240
126, 148, 149, 165, 167, 190, and Brecht and Method, 166, 167
228, 248 and the political unconscious, 226,
in Nietzsche, 165 231
and reality, 30, 61, 165, 166 Jesurun, John, and Deep Sleep, 157
in Strindberg, 57, 59, 61, 62 Jewish Museum, the, 209, 210
and theater, 11, 33, 46, 57, 59 jihad, 15, 20, 115, 199, 224
Improbable Theater, The, 114 Johns, Jasper, 84, 155

Index
285
Jones, Richard Foster, 271 Works
Jonson, Ben, 103 Art as Idea as Idea, 151
Judson Memorial Church, 119–20 Matter in General, 152
Jugendstil, 27, 77 Kounellis, Jannis, 157
Junge Generation Gallery, 85 KRAKEN, 11, 143, 218, 265
Jungen, dei, 69, 79 and blooded thought, 143
Jung-Wien, 70 and burrowing, 98, 99, 267
and ghosting, 2, 12, 14, 98, 99,
Kafka, Franz, 39, 64, 124 118n18, 218, 233–34, 235n8,
and The Trial, 25, 64 261, 267
Kane, Sarah, 128, 154 method of, 14, 143, 267
Kantor, Istvan, and Machine Sex name of, 144–45
Action Group, 111 and synesthesia, 98
Kaplan, Robert, and The Nothing That and thinking, 109
Is, 113 Works
Kaprow, Allan, 157 Crooked Eclipses, 261
Kaul, Paras, and That Brainwave Chick, Elsinore, 233, 235n8
151 Kraus, Karl, 6, 74, 78, 81, 82, 83, 86
Kazan, Elia, 265 against aestheticizing of instinct, 70
Keaton, Buster, 156 dramatic texts de‹led by staging, 70,
Keats, John, and “Ode on a Grecian 82
Urn,” 47, 48 and Freud, 72
Kennedy, President John F., 198, 199 and Hegel’s Geist, 70
Kennedy, Robert (Bobby), 202 his ethical mastery of the Word, 70
Khrushchev, Nikita, 199 and Jewishness in Vienna, 72, 81
Kierkegaard, Søren, 92–93 and The Last Days of Mankind, 6,
Klee, Paul, 188 81–82
Klimt, Gustav, 72, 77–78 and Nestroy, 6, 7, 70, 72
Klocker, Hubert, 86 on psychoanalysis as mental illness,
and Wiener Aktionisme / Viennese 72
Actionism, 88 public readings by, 82
Kobialka, Michal, 18, 219 Kruger, Barbara, 239
Kokoschka, Oskar, 7, 74, 77, 78, 82 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 269
and actors painted, soaked with Kundschau garden, the, 78
blood, 78
performative madness, proto-punk, Lacan, Jacques, 182, 227
79 Ladurie, Le Roy, 238
and the Schrei (the scream), 82 Lamb, Charles, on Shakespeare, 108
Works Lavine, Steven (president of CalArts),
Murderer, Hope for Women, 7, 78, 79 17–18, 214
Sphinx and Strawman, 68 Law and Order, 207
Koolhaas, Rem, 130 Lepage, Robert, 128
Koons, Jeff, 157–58, 217 Letterman, David, 223, 257
emptiness glamorized, even the void Levine, Sherrie, 156
sold, 156 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 30, 41
Koran, the, 199 Lewis, Wyndham, 57
Kosuth, Joseph, on conceptual art, and “The New Egos,” 246
then site speci‹c, 151–52 Libeskind, Daniel, 209–10

index
286
libidinal economy, 8, 71, 90, 109, 232 226, 231, 240
Limbaugh, Rush, 223 and phantoms of the human brain,
liveness, 2, 9, 123, 141, 243–45, 246–62 110, 190, 226, 236–37
and Auslander, 21, 243–44, 249 revisionism of, 31, 46, 107, 201, 233,
as lessness, 256, 261 240
in mediatized representation, or a ruthless criticism of everything
remediation, 249, 250, 256, 258, existing, 6, 110
260 and senses as direct theoreticians,
from ontology to the temporal, 244 109
and presence, 249, 255 Works
and September 11, 257 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
Living Theater, the, 95, 120 of 1844, 109
and Paradise Now, 109 German Ideology, The, 110, 201,
Losey, Joseph, and The Servant, 120 236
Lukács, György May ’68, and the Living at Avignon, 95,
and Beckett, 178, 179, 189 120
and Brecht, 171 utopian anarchy of, 8
Lumet, Sidney, 139, 271 McGovern, George, on liberalism,
Lunberry, Clark, 161 213n6
Lyotard, Jean-François, 45–46, 237 and excessive pessimism, 206, 212
McGreevy, James E., 210
Machine Sex Action Group, 111 Medea, 212
MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), melodrama, 33, 34, 79
5 Melville, Herman, 144
Maeterlinck, Maurice, and The Intruder, and Bartleby the Scrivener, 103
64 Meredith, Burgess, 269
Magic Theater, the, 35 Merz, Mario, 157
Mahler-Werfel, Alma, 79 metaphysics, 65, 91, 93, 104, 175, 233,
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 31, 116 248, 250
Mamet, David, 145 become impossible, 166
Manhattan Project, the, 265 in bytes, 250
Manifest Destiny, 204 in Deleuze’s theater of phantasms,
Manley, Beatrice, 139, 271 51, 93
and My Breath in Art, 139 in Dostoyevsky, 134
Manzoni, Piero, 157 of the dream, in Strindberg, 61
March, Frederic, 269 under erasure, in Derrida, 47
Marcuse, Herbert, 27, 39 by indrafts of air, or through the
Marden, Brice, 154 pores, in Artaud, 51, 91
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 96, 111 in Ionesco, 47, 53–54
Marx, Karl, 6, 27, 31, 33, 110, 190, 226, of Marxist utopianism, 167–68
236–38 residual in Beckett, 155
amending/reversing Hegel, 110, Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 13, 134, 139,
226, 237 254, 264
and Barthes, 237 Milton, John, 43, 267
and Brecht, 46, 220 mimesis, 2, 75, 92, 116, 117, 128, 129
and history, 19, 27, 31, 201, 236, 237, mise-en-scène, of the unconscious, 13,
240 58, 73, 90, 110, 149
and Marxism, 19, 95, 107, 167, 201, as virulent critique of theater, 170

Index
287
modernism, 64, 98, 105, 106, 111, 123, Nuland, Sherwin, 209
155, 161, 162, 201, 215, 230, 237, and How We Die, 209
270, 272
Mohammad, 203 Obama, President Barack, 16, 17
Mohammed, Khalid Shaihk, 20 O’Casey, Sean, 219
Mommsen, Theodor, 241 Odets, Clifford, 269
Monroe, Marilyn, 138 Oldenburg, Claes, 157
Montaigne, Michele de, 9 Olivier, Laurence, 138
Morse, Margaret, 252, 262n7 Olson, Charles, 216
Mugabe, Robert, 121 Ono, Yoko, and Painting to Be Stepped
Mühl, Otto, 77, 83, 86 On, 157
Müller, Heiner, and writing for the ontology, 75, 178, 179, 189, 194, 227,
dead, 193 252
Works of theater, 9, 244, 247
Hamletmachine, 130, 224 O’Reilly Factor, 223, 257
Task, The, 122 Orghast, at Persepolis, 50
Murikami, Takashi, 217 Orgies Mysteries Theater, the, 68, 83,
Musaphar, Fakir, 258 86
Musil, Robert, and The Man without Orientalism, 20, 115, 203, 226
Qualities, 75 Orlan, 7, 136, 258
otherness, 40, 123, 131, 191, 254
Nader, Ralph, 202
Natyasastra, the, 261 P. Diddy (Sean Combs), in Raisin in the
Nauman, Bruce, 156–57 Sun, 120–21, 138
Works Paik, Nam June, 248
Clown Torture, 156 Pane, Gina, 80, 160, 258
Slow Angle Walk: Beckett Walk, 156 Pearl, Daniel, 258
negative capability, 34 performance, 9, 12, 31, 51, 70, 79, 80,
Nestroy, Johann, 6, 68–79 83, 104, 107, 109, 110, 113, 117,
and The Talisman, 68, 75, 76 124, 127, 133, 135, 151, 154, 175,
New Criticism, the, 114, 201 186, 204, 244, 245, 251, 252, 255,
New Historicism, the, 19, 52, 107, 133, 258, 260, 261, 265, 266, 273
166, 201, 231, 233, 240 and consciousness as sine qua non,
Newman, Barnett, 161 248
New Masses, The, 150 and the delirium of Deleuze, 8, 51,
Newson, Lloyd, 120 89–102
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 47, 58, 59, 79, 92, extremities of, 7, 14, 15, 80, 83, 85,
93, 99, 160, 165, 190, 219, 223, 89, 265–66
232 and history, 19, 52, 236–42
Works on the Internet, in cyberspace, and
Birth of Tragedy, The, 165 digital worlds, 199, 251–60
Genealogy of Morals, The, 30, 160 and the KRAKEN group, 144
Nitsch, Hermann, 77, 83, 86–87 and liveness, 247, 249, 254
Nixon, President Richard, 17, 24 and performativity, 46, 59, 92, 104,
No-Art, 84 114, 163, 168, 251
Noble Savage, The (journal), 198 the power of, 212
Noh theater, 14, 141 and the Real, 2, 110, 117
Nouveau Realisme, 84 and thinking, 213, 265

index
288
 in visual, mediatized, and hybrid Rainer, Yvonne, 119
arts, 119, 151, 154, 248 Rame, Franca, and Dario Fo, 221
as a way of life, 75, 111 Rauschenberg, Robert, 119, 216
performance art, 49, 111, 128, 218, 241, and Trophy III (for Jean Tingueley), 157
258, 260, 270 Rayner, Alice, 262n10
Perloff, Marjorie, and Jewishness in Reagan, President Ronald, 16, 17
Vienna, 87n1 Realpolitik, 199
Picasso, Pablo, and Guernica, 200 REDCAT (CalArts), 216
Pink Floyd, 214 Reinhardt, Max, 7, 82
Pinter, Harold, 154, 219, 237, 264 relevance, 1, 5, 8, 23–43, 201, 206, 214
Works and Antigone’s case, 38
No Man’s Land, 122 of Black Power, Student Power,
Servant, The, 120 Flower Power, 24, 39
Pirandello, Luigi, 29, 110–11, 257 as if an explosion of critical theory, 41
Piscator, Erwin, 82, 271 between fallout and dropout of stu-
Pistoletto, Michelangelo, 157 dents, 27
Platel, Alain, 119 and the future of the humanities, 1,
Plato, 25, 47, 91, 93, 96, 103, 115 25, 27
and allegory of the cave, 39, 84, 247 and hypocrisy in the academy, 1
Playboy of the Western World (John in protests of the sixties, 24–43
Millington Synge), 264, 269 with students as children of dark-
Pointer, Priscilla, 272 ness, 42
Polanyi, Michael, 25 and vertigo of the Absurd, 28
Pollock, Jackson, 77, 84, 128, 153, 215 Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center,
polymorphous perversity, 28, 89, 103, 265, 272
249 repetition, 92, 142, 183, 205, 256
in acting exercises, 50 in Beckett, 186
and Brecht’s Baal, 173 in Deleuze, 93, 99
in performance and body art, 218 in Nietzsche, 92
and student protests of the sixties, and Strindberg, 62
28 as a virtual condition of life, 59
Pop Art, 84, 155 representation, 22n22, 60, 62, 66, 69,
Pora (Ukranian dissident group), 121 70, 112, 122, 129, 131, 250, 253,
Post, Teddy, 271 260
Pound, Ezra, 175, 200, 211 and acting, 116, 144
Powell, Colin, 205 and the body, 89, 98, 99–100, 129,
Practice, The, 204 166, 260
Proof (David Auburn), 204 and bourgeois value, 120
proscenium, the, 106, 107, 243 the closure of, 69, 112, 166, 229, 266
and the Enlightenment, 123 and death, 64, 100, 129, 166
and scopophilia, 92 and the human sciences, 148
Przbyszewska, Stanislawa, and The and reality/illusion, 161, 175
Danton Case, 122 and theater, 61, 73, 93, 95, 110, 114,
Pythagoras, 91 131
revolution, 27, 29, 54, 76, 82, 134, 171
Rabelais, François, 23, 25 and drama, 122
and Peterborough Cathedral, 23 and The Impossible Theater, 69, 134
Rainer, Arnulf, 84 as a performance, 31–32

Index
289
Rice, Condoleeza, 202 119, 123, 124, 168, 183, 194,
Rice, Elmer, 269 198, 233, 234, 240, 255, 266
Riley, Terry, 18, 154 Henry IV, Part I, 236
Rilke, Rainer Maria, and The Notebooks Henry IV, Part II, 174
of Malte Laurids Brigge, 30 King Lear, 7, 14, 100, 108, 112,
Rimbaud, Arthur, 31, 37, 192 113, 116, 135, 136, 151, 216,
Rosenberg, Harold, 155 219, 244, 260
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 127 Macbeth, 105, 230
and the Noble Savage, 15, 198 Measure for Measure, 124, 227
on state of Nature, State of Society, Sharon, Ariel, 211
41 Shaw, Fiona, and Medea, 212
Rudman, Warren, 206 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 27, 108–9
Rumsfeld, Donald, 204, 205 Shepard, Sam, and True West, 103
Rushdie, Salman, 203–43 Signorelli, Luca, 231
on Islam, 203–4 simulacrum, 9, 104, 105, 127, 254
Ryman, Robert, 154 and Baudrillard, 128, 165, 227, 230,
Ryun, Jim, 266 250
and Debord, 223
Salzburg Seminar, 7 and Deleuze, 96
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15, 25, 33, 93, 103 reality in the age of, 126
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 152 sixties, the, 1, 50, 83, 90, 97, 119, 127,
Schechner, Richard, 261 165, 173, 189, 216, 249
Schneider, Alan, 140 and relevance, 23–43
Schnitzler, Arthur, 71–72, 80 spilling into the seventies, 1, 161
Works Smithson, Robert, 153–55
Green Cockatoo, The, 77 Works
Reigen (La Ronde), 74 Cryosphere, 153
Schoenberg, Arnold, 75 “Entropy and the New Monu-
Schorske, Carl, 237 ments,” 154, 155
Schwarzkogler, Rudolf, 77, 83, 160, “Quasi-In‹nities and the Waning
258 of Space,” 153
scopophilia, 70, 92 Spiral Jetty, 153
Seattle Repertory Theater, 11 Smuin, Michael, and Stabat Mater, 207
Secessionists, the, 68, 85 social construction, 133, 233
Sellars, Peter, 125, and Children of Her- and appearance, 129
akles, 125 and art, 52
Sevilla, José, 246 in Beckett, 189–90
Shakespeare, William, 12, 95, 108, 139, of the body, 251
205, 233, 234, 269 and history, 19, 239, 241
and acting, 117, 268 of identity, 259
in Brecht, 165 and illusion, 169
and Greenblatt, 234 socialist realism, 171
Sonnets—23: 117; 44: 134; 46: 146; Socrates, 24, 115
53: 261; 77: 146; 113: 105; 150: 9 Sontag, Susan, 198
sonnets and Crooked Eclipses Spinoza, Benedict (or Baruch), 92
(KRAKEN), 146, 261, 268 Stanford, 55n1, 264, 266–72
Works and Esslin, 4
Hamlet, 12, 71, 98, 104, 107, 110, and Foster Jones, 271

index
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and Heffner, 269, 271 Miss Julie, 58, 59, 110, 259
and Irving, 269 Survivor, 111, 258
Little Theater, 4, 270
and Manley, 271 Taaffe, Philip, 156
and Margery Bailey Prize in Play- Taymor, Julie, 267
writing, 271 Tea and Sympathy (Robert Anderson), 57
and Stegner, 272 Teatre Nacional, 128
as utopia, 269 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 144
and Winters, 271–72 terrorism, 15, 193, 202, 204, 226
Stanislavski, Constantin, 13, 14, 137, Theater Journal, 2
141 Theater Survey, 19
and An Actor Prepares, 13, 134, 138, theatricality, 32, 94, 103, 108, 112, 113,
264 115, 116, 117, 148, 155, 248, 257,
in Brecht, 174 262n10
and Chekhov, 140–41 as the pure Imaginary, 257
and emotional memory, 13, 14, 141, rhizomatics of in Deleuze, 7, 93
264 in video games, 123
and the Method, 92, 134, 135, 138 Theodore Roethke Memorial Reading,
Stegner, Wallace, 272 143
Stein, Gertrude, 108 Tolstoy, Leo, 26, 241
Works Total Theater, 215
Gradual Making of the Making of tragedy, 112, 228
Americans, The, 225 and Antigone, 38
“Plays,” 111 in Brecht, 48
“Portraits and Repetition,” 246 in Greenblatt, 234, 240
Steinbach, Haim, 156, 157–58 and Ionesco, 52, 54
Stelarc, 7, 86, 136, 258 and Kraus, 82
and the obsolete body, 136 in Medea, 212
Stevens, Wallace, 272 post-Brechtian critique of, 166, 266
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 15, 214 transcendental signi‹ers, 46, 108, 130,
and 9/11 as a work of art, 15, 190, 215, 226
214–15 Trilling, Lionel, 257
Strindberg, August, 5, 56–67, 78, 110, Twitter, 11
128 Tzara, Tristan, 96
and Freud, 62
and gender/feminism, 57 Ulay, 136, 159–60
and illusion, 59 See also Abramović, Marina
and image of suffocation, 60 Ungar, Frederick, 87n7
madness in, 58 utopianism, 131
the soul-complex of, 57, 58, 63, 66, in Haraway, 256
259 and Marx, 110, 167
and Swedenborg, 5, 56, 57 and May ’68, 8
Works and revolution, 76
Dance of Death, The, 56, 62
Dream Play, A, 56, 58, 59–62, Vagina Monologues, The, 258
64–66 Vakhtangov, Yevgeny, 134
Father, The, 62 Vanitzky, Franz, 85
Ghost Sonata, The, 59, 63–64, 100 Vattimo, Gianni, 237

Index
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Vauthier, Ben, 157 Works

Verfremdungseffekt, 59, 95, 104, 113, 139, “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower,”
140, 170, 171, 173, 174, 178, 179, 200
227, 251 Paterson, 35, 230
See also Alienation-effect Wilson, Robert, 97, 116
Viennese Actionism, 7, 68, 74, 83–87 Works
Viola, Bill, and Going Forth by Day, Deafman’s Glance, 141
211 Einstein on the Beach, 141
Virilio, Paul, 75, 105, 106, 114, 128, 232 Winters, Yvor, 271
virtual, the, 2, 6, 12, 19, 90, 106, 110, Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy, 128
115, 151, 199, 217, 246–63 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 36–37, 78, 151
and the body, 244, 250 Wolfowitz, Paul, 202
as reality, 62, 231, 249, 250, 253, 256, Woman House, 218
261 Woolf, Virginia, 232, 241
Voigt, Deborah, 116 Wooster Group, the, 128
von Ranke, Leopold, 237 words, 3, 6, 12, 19, 44, 56, 69–70, 93,
Vorstadt, the, 71, 77 119, 120, 175, 205, 223, 224, 234
in Beckett, 97, 129, 157, 168, 185,
Wagner, Richard, 108, 109 187, 190, 195
Waldheim, Kurt, 74 in ischemic attack, 184
Walsh, Bill, 266 and Judaism, 209
Warhol, Andy, 155 and the KRAKEN group, 98–99
Warner, Deborah, and Medea, 212 and poetry, 272
Waters, John, 104 in Strindberg, 57, 57–58, 64, 66
Webster, John, and The Duchess of Mal‹, in theater of the Absurd, 49–51
198 World Wide Web, the, and global
Wedekind, Franz, 140 space of performance, 257
Weininger, Otto, 78, 79, 87n5
and Sex and Character, 78 Xingjian, Gao, 154
Weiss, Peter, 28
Whitehead, Robert, 265 Yeats, William Butler, 30, 31–32, 61,
Whitelaw, Billy, 140 168, 172, 264, 270
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Edward and Abbey Theater, 264
Albee), 126
Wieseltier, Leon, 209 Zappa, Frank, 214
Williams, C. K., 143 Zô iz&ek, Slavoj, 227
and Poetry and Consciousness, 143 Works
Williams, Tennessee, and The Red Devil Looking Awry, 227
Battery Sign, 130 Welcome to the Desert of the Real,
Williams, William Carlos, 230 111

index
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