Luke Jordan
20/02/2017
My aim is to explore the agency of the object and of active matter; the mythologising of matter in
the transformation, deformation or metamorphosis of material substances into experimental and
experiential hybrid assemblages of the human and non-human, particularly in relation to the liminal
figure or personae and the grotesque in and as art.
One of the most prominent examples of this in 'modern art' must be that of Joseph Beuys. In his
personal origin myth, Tartar (Crimean nomads) rescue him from a plane crash, cover his body with
animal fat and felt and nurture him back to health 1. These materials and fictional experiences
mythologised then become integral to his artistic identity; transforming him into a 'shamanic' figure,
and are recurring motifs in his 'body of work', becoming some of his many 'totems'. However as
analysis of the work of Joseph Beuys is a road well travelled I will look to a more contemporary
artist and the ways in which they have mythologised their creative processes, and the grotesque
1. Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (Guggenheim, 1979), pp. 16–17metamorphoses arising from them.
Prior to discussing their work, it is necessary to highlight the importance of Mircea Eliade's work on
the scared and profane, as this seems to be an important element in some way linked to the
beginning of these artistic processes and at the genesis of the artists myth-making.
“'Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly
different from the profane...the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that
does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world.”
This speaks of the artists fascination with active matter itself and perhaps points towards the urge to
'rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man.' However it also highlights concerns about
whether matter is to be sublimed or remain base. It also points towards the liminality of the creative
process, a space in which unconscious contents may rise into consciousness and be materialised.
“Do you remember her singing to you, when you were a little one afraid of the dark?
“She is singing to you now. She will gather you up with the warm arms of her voice and hold you as
quietly as sleep in the cave of her heart… She is listening now, the old one, the first and last of an
ancient race. Almost all have forgotten her, buried deep within our common soil, speaking in the
mother tongue, singing the root songs of formation and of nourishment.”
Breadwoman, the creation of Anna Holmer, started life In 1982, born out of the 1970s/80s LA
performance art scene and Holmer's education in anthropology and languages, but also intuitively
as Holmer states 'I wanted to wear bread — have that experience — of putting bread on my head
and being this other being, and at the same time I started researching the image of bread,
[wondering] was there a Breadwoman archetype?' 5
2 Mircea Eliade The Sacred and the Profane p11
3.Eliade The Sacred and the Profane p13
4.From the liner notes to the original Breadwoman cassette, 1985
5.http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2016/03/15/anna-homler-the-aquarium-drunkard-interview/This initial urge to experience wearing bread developed from walking through the street markets
with bread over her face to creating what she would later call 'Bread language'; performed
collaboratively and accompanied by electronic sounds within live performances and recordings. It
is an imagined language partially inspired by traditional indigenous songs from various cultures,
sung in rhythmic chants, incantations and glossolalia, and is therefore a 'language where the relation
between sound and meaning breaks down; it is the realm of pure sound...pure materiality...pure
expression.' 6
It is the manifestation of a grotesque language coinciding with the grotesque figure of Breadwoman,
having similarities with certain avant-garde developments such as the Russian Futurist Zaum
poetry, meaning 'beyond sense' in which ‘Poetry is not sign but magic spell’7. Holmer wishes to go
beyond cultural significance to a more primal and universal language and to communicate and
connect with people through a resonant connection to the sounds, image and movement. She states
'If there is a message, maybe it’s wholeness. Wholeness embraces the darkness, it embraces that
ambiguity, it embraces the grandmother and the elephant man, the familiar and the strange. Just to
be able to be in that ambiguous space, that’s wholeness. It’s not perfection, but it contains
everything.' 8
Although not paralleling the scatology of Bakhtin's grotesque body there are similarities to be
found in the desire for universality:
'the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private, egotistical form, severed from
the other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people as such it is
opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world.'9
Breadwoman is thus a liminal figure. An uncanny and fascinating grotesque. One which does not
mock or disrupt hierarchies of power to any affective degree, and does not delve into excremental
baseness but whose subtlety bypasses the radical and transgressive grotesque, seeking a
6.Allen S. Wiess, The Aesthetics of Excess p.118
7.Helen Palmer, Deleuze and Futurism p.3
8.http://annahomler.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/AH_JunoPlus.pdf
9.Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, The Grotesquecommunication beyond the individual towards a mythological and archetypal language, through
which we might be able to connect universally; united by the baseness of bread.
“This is what poetry is for me, and what performance art is for me...These intersections of where
the poetic can emerge from the Other, like flowers growing out of the cement… where a whole
nother living reality can come in daily life. Where something that is very ordinary can reveal its
secrets and mysteries.'10
Perhaps Deleuze's philosophy of becoming, especially 'becoming-other', can be of use to us in
exploring these issues further.
'Becoming-other is established via ‘diversity, multiplicity [and] the destruction of identity’
(Deleuze, 1995, p. 44); it presupposes breaking out of our old outlived habits and attitudes so as to
creatively ‘bring into being that which does not yet exist’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 147). Deleuze’s
philosophy is a sort of constructivism as an invention – construction or creation – of concepts. The
creative learning (not a contradiction in terms!) will have paid attention to places and spaces, to
retrospective as well as untimely memories of actual and potential actions, and to dynamic forces
that are capable of affecting and effecting changes, thus contesting the very identity of subjects
participating in the process.'11
The formations of grotesque or liminal figure and personae in art are important today as a way to
develop self individuation but also challenge certain political formations in a climate of political
instability, wall building, marginalisation of migrants and immigrants, and the proposed return to
'traditional values' implying fixed identities.
10.http://www.redefinemag.com/2016/anna-homler-artist-interview-the-mythology-behindbreadwoman/
11.Inna Semetsky, Becoming-Other: developing the ethics of integration Policy Futures in
Education, Volume 9 Number 1 2011
Luke Jordan
2017
The Order of Disorder: Bakhtin and Artaud
I seek to compare and contrast Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of carnival and
grotesque realism with French poet, playwright and artist Antonin Artaud’s ‘The Theatre and It’s
Double’ read alongside another of his books the imaginatively elaborated biography ‘Heliogabalus
or, The Crowned Anarchist.’
I focus within this essay on some key areas of comparison which are: collective experience, terror,
and laughter. By looking at the similarities and differences between the Bakhtin and Artaud’s ideas
we might formulate new concept of order surpassing both, which may help us to conceive of new
radical performative formations.
What is important within this essay is the concept of an unofficial order, which is itself a form of
disorder that seeks to undermine or overthrow an official order and ‘by "unofficial" is meant a
peculiar conception free from selfish interests, norms, and appreciations of "this world" (that is, the
established world, which it is always profitable to serve)’ (Bakhtin. 1984: 262)
In Bakhtin’s influential book ‘Rabelais and his World’ he seeks to apply the grotesque novel ‘The
Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel’ of French Renaissance writer François Rabelais, to the Soviet
order of the time, which he himself was the victim of. As such his concept of grotesque realism ‘is
a point-by-point inversion of categories used in the thirties to define Social Realism.’ particularly
the metaphor of ‘the folk.’ Bakhtin has a ‘utopian vision of the folk’ (Bakhtin. 1984: xvii) which is
the antithesis of the clean and proper folk of Soviet propoganda. (Bakhtin. 1984: xix)
Importantly ‘Bakhtin, like Rabelais, explores throughout his book the interface between a stasis
imposed from above and a desire for change from below, between old and new, official and
unofficial. In treating the specific ways Rabelais sought holes in the walls between what was held
to be possible and what unpunishable in the 1530s, Bakhtin seeks the gaps in those borders in the
1930s.’ (Bakhtin. 1984: xvi)
However his ideas are not strictly limited only to a radical critique of Stalinist Russia and more
widely seek to challenge authoritarian oppression in all its forms, seeking to ‘destroy the forces of
stasis an official ideology’(Bakhtin. 1984: xvi) Through his study of Rabelais’ book and his
performative interpretation of it, it can be interpreted as a call for a regressive return to the
unofficial culture of carnival, and to new forms and possibilities of collectivity, anarchism with a
‘Marxist gloss.’(Innes. 1993: 7)
In a basic terms Bakhtin’s carnival is a temporary disorder participated in by all people, and from
which new creative possibilities and cultural and social regeneration can occur. It ‘is not only an
impediment for revolutionary change, it is a revolution itself.’ (Bakhtin. 1984: xviii) Related to this
is the grotesque body, which is one that is open and therefore collective and subject to continuous
becoming, and as it is also open to the world it also constitutes a utopian and universal body.
(Bakhtin. 1984.)
However, because the carnival as it was in the middle ages has all but been wiped out, being
repressed during the renaissance, it only continues to exist within literature and art as the
carnivalesque. (Bakhtin. 1984.) As such the decline of carnival was also that of freedom which was
‘above all, political: the conflict of official versus unofficial forces is fought out not merely at the
level of symbols. Bakhtin leaves no doubt that the give-and-take between the medieval church/state
nexus on the one hand and the carnival on the other was a very real power struggle. The state had its
temporal and spatial borders as did carnival. Bakhtin's book describes the border clashes between
these two hostile countries. Carnival laughter "builds its own world in opposition to the official
world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state" (p. 88).’
(Bakhtin. 1984: xxi)
The medival carnival is a comic ritual of unofficial culture distinct from the serious cult of official
culture: ‘eclesiastical, feudal, and political’. He describes it as being ‘organized on the basis of
laughter’ and functioned as ‘people’s second life’ or a ‘second world’ which was that of a ‘world
inside out’, belonging ‘to the borderline between art and life.’ (Bakhtin. 1984: 5-11) For Bakhtin
folk laughter’s traits are universalism, freedom, and unofficial truth, it demystifies and unveils the
structures of power through degradation. (Bakhtin. 1984.)
In this idea of a double life, we find a direct connection with Artaud and his doubles; one of which
being his theatre ‘for if [traditional] theatre is a double of life, life is the double of true theatre’
(Artaud. 1936. quoted in Innes. 1993: 62. insert Innes) an intensification of life which in freeing
‘the repressed unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt.’ (Artaud. 1958: 28)
‘The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is
high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of the earth
and body in their indissoluble unity.’ (Bakhtin. 1984: 19)
The grotesque body can be viewed then as a metaphor or allegory of social and cultural forms, their
death and rebirth, as It can of historic human development, combining all possible forms and
formations within its ‘formless’ mass of hybridity. As such it is a constant becoming in space and
time, the ‘immortality of the ancestral body of man...the living sense that each man belongs to the
immortal people who create history.’ (Bakhtin. 1984: 367) although it does not seem to see the end
of man that is assured.
Artaud’s book ‘The Theater and Its Double’ was written in the interwar period between 1931 and
1938 when it was first published in France. (Barber. 2003: 57). Although the theatre itself has never
been fully realised, his book and his ideas have been highly influential on many areas not only
theatre, but also other forms of art, philosophy, politics and political action. Artaud’s theatre was a
reaction against the bourgeois, psychological and literary theatre of his time, which he opposed with
a viscerally affective one. It was also what he hope would be a cultural and spiritual revolution, if
not a directly political one. To what extent might the carnival as Bakhtin understands it be a double
of Artaud’s theatre?
In Artaud’s book within the essay ‘The Theatre and the Plague’ we find many examples of similar
conceptions as Bakhtin’s carnival and grotesque realism.
‘Beneath such a scourge, all social forms disintegrate. Order collapses. He observes every
infringement of morality, every psychological disaster; he hears his body fluids murmuring
within him; tom, failing in a dizzying collapse of tissue, his organs grow heavy and
gradually turn to carbon. But is it too late to avert the scourge? Even destroyed, even
annihilated, organically pulverized and consumed to his very marrow, he knows 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 the lies from which truth can be remade.’ (Artaud.
1958: 15)
The plague however is always something imposed from without, which draws out what is within.
This is the main difference between the carnival and Artaud’s theatre. Artaud as director-instigator
or ‘ and his theatre then act as a rabble-rouser of sorts, but his spectators still will remain in sense
uninvolved in a performance, in that they are subjected to disorder rather than generating one, such
as carnival, although it retains similar destructive and creative possibilities, in its ideas about death,
survival and rejuvenation. It also has a cathartic function to ‘drain accesses collectively’ (Artaud.
1958: 31)
Like the carnival Artaud’s theatre aims to be cosmic and universal, but it is not born as carnival
from European myths, instead Artaud looks to the ‘Oriental’ or non-Occidental sources. Its themes
‘interpreted according to the most ancient texts drawn from old Mexican, Hindu, Judaic, and Iranian
cosmogonies.’ (Artaud. 1958: 123)
Often overlooked is the ‘cruelty’ of the carnival imagery as Bakhtin would interpret from Rabalais’
novel, the ‘bodily harvest’ which to some extent doubles that most important concept of Artaud’s
theatre. The carnival is ‘gay and free play, but it is also full of deep meaning.’ but in the images that
he shows us there is certainly an unarguably dark and cruel side, ‘Its hero and author is time itself,
which uncrowns, covers with ridicule, kills the old world (the old authority and truth), and at the
same time gives birth to the new.’ In his imagery we find ‘bodies rent apart’, ‘torn flesh’(Bakhtin.
1984: 207) ‘Bloodshed, dismemberment, burning, death, beatings, blows, curses, and abuses-all
these elements are steeped in "merry time," time which kills and gives birth, which allows nothing
old to be perpetuated and never ceases to generate the new and the youthful.’ (Bakhtin. 1984: 201)
‘It is a mistake to give the word 'cruelty' a meaning of merciless bloodshed and disinterested,
gratuitous pursuit of physical suffering. The Ethiopian Ras who carts off vanquished princes
and makes them his slaves does not do so out of a desperate love of blood. Cruelty is not
synonymous with bloodshed, martyred flesh, crucified enemies. This identification of
cruelty with tortured victims is a very minor aspect of the question. In the practice of cruelty
there is a kind of higher determinism, to which the executioner-tormenter himself is
subjected and which he must be determined to endure when the time comes. Cruelty is
above all lucid, a kind of rigid control and submission to necessity.
There is no cruelty without consciousness and without the application of consciousness. It
is consciousness that gives to the exercise of every act of life its blood-red color, its cruel
nuance, since it is understood that life is always someone's death.’ (Artaud. 1958 : 102)
For Bakhtin,
‘popular-festive images became a powerful means of grasping reality; they served as a basis
for an authentic and deep realism. Popular imagery did not reflect the naturalistic, fleeting,
meaningless, and scattered aspect of reality but the very process of becoming, its meaning
and direction. Hence the universality and sober optimism of this system.’ (Bakhtin. 1984:
211-212)
This grotesque realism of universal and cosmic order we also find in Artaud’s concept of cruelty as
metamorphosis:
‘There is in life's flame, life's appetite, life's irrational impulsion, a kind of initial perversity:
the desire characteristic of Eros is cruelty since it feeds upon contingencies; death is cruelty,
resurrection is cruelty, transfiguration is cruelty, since nowhere in a circular and closed
world is there room for true death, since ascension is a rending, since closed space is fed
with lives, and each stronger life tramples down the others, consuming them in a massacre
which is a transfiguration and a bliss.’ (Artaud. 1958: 103)
Artaud uses cruelty to destroy, to overturn order through disorder, to liberate and unleash new
possibilities.
Another almost always overlooked concept in Artaud’s theatre that is deeply related to carnival is
that of laughter and its function. In critical accounts of the book, such as Kimberly Jannarone’s
‘Artaud and his Doubles’, it is barely mentioned or not mentioned at all. Artaud believed that:
‘The contemporary theater is decadent because it has lost the feeling on the one hand for
seriousness and on the other for laughter; because it has broken away from gravity, from
effects that are immediate and painful-in a word, from Danger.
Because it has lost a sense of real humor, a sense of laughter's power of physical and
anarchic dissociation. Because it has broken away from the spirit of profound anarchy
which is at the root of all poetry.’ (Artaud. 1958: 41)
For Artaud like Bakhtin, humour within the performative action is always related to a form of
anarchy, a destructive and degrading force, but unlike Bakhtin for Artaud it was terror and cruelty
themselves, experienced as reality as one experiences a dream, through the theatrical spectacle,
projected and imprinted ‘with the necessary violence.’ on the spectator that was true liberator.
(Artaud, 1958: 86)
Terror is a buzzword of our times and I believe that is important today to not only acknowledge and
understand true terror not mediated through government or news organisations, to collectively
laugh in the face of official fear-mongering and also true threat.
To explore and elaborate on Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism once more, he states:
the body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people's character; this is
not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of these words, because it is not individualized.
The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego,
but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily
becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable. (Bakhtin. 1984: 19)
Within this text there are some striking similarities with Artaud conceptions of a theatre that can go
beyond art. But do they lead to any form of political ideology? Certainly they share the ideal of the
collective over the individual. He is certainly both anti-communist/marxist and anti-capitalist.
(Artaud. 1988: 369) He also mentions ‘a kind of organized anarchy’ of which theatre and poetry are
born. (Artaud. 1958: 51)
‘This empiricism, randomness, individualism, and anarchy must cease. Enough of personal
poems, benefitting those who create them much more than those who read them. Once and
for all, enough of this closed, egoistic, and personal art. Our spiritual anarchy and
intellectual disorder is a function of the anarchy of everything else--or rather, everything else
is a function of this anarchy. I am not one of those who believe that civilization has to
change in order for the theater to change; but I do believe that the theater, utilized in the
highest and most difficult sense possible, has the power to influence the aspect and
formation of things.’ (Artaud. 1958: 79)
Here we uncover Artaud’s double of anarchy. It is certainly not the type of anarchy one might first
imagine, as his correspondence with Anne Manson, in a letter sent from his fateful voyage to
Ireland just before he would be incarcerated in the asylum of Rodez on his return to France, and
only a year before his book was published, makes clear:
‘What Spanish Anarchists are doing is quite unprecedented, but it is a human aberration.
These ration cards for loves of bread are the consecration of an inhuman disorder.
For what men today call human is the castration of the superhuman part of man.
It is an error in the absolute.
The Spanish Anarchists are trying to malefically fix the absolute terrestrial life. It is a lie
and it is a base idea. It is not a force of love, this idea. For what does the anarchist want?
To secure the ownership of his self in the world.
Anarchists are disgusting proprietors and pleasure-seeking egoists.
They deserve only to be massacred. They will be. For when one encounters the Lie-! One
does not argue with all the incarnations of the Lie. One destroys them to bring men back to
the Truth, and to Love, that is, to the Love of Truth!’ (Artaud. 1988: 404)
To fully attempt to understand Artaud’s ‘anarchy’ we must look to his interpretation of the life of
Heliogabalus, the fourtean year old anarchist king, who was for Artaud also a double of himself
(Artaud. 2003: 4) he sees ‘not as a madman but as a rebel’ (Artaud. 2003: 106) and also a ‘fanatic’
and ‘crazed individualist.’ (Artaud. 2003: 116) The book itself laid some of the foundations for his
theatre and his concept of ‘cruelty’.
Heliogabalus himself for Artaurd is duel natured taking on the roles of god and man, male and
female, whilst remaining male, ‘who is divisible while remaining ONE’. There is then a ‘duel
conflict’ within Heligabalus as within Artaud himself causing ‘struggle’ and torment. (Artaud. 2003:
87-88)
As he takes on the role and name of a god, and therefore is thus a living god. For Artaud this
‘provides a first proof of his magical monotheism, not only of word but deed.’ (Artaud. 2003: 41)
He proposes another double, his own concept of anarchy against the anarchy of the world.
The ‘Roman polytheistic anarchy’ which he sees as preventing unity and the monotheistic anarchy
of Heliogabalus, which attains this unity. (Artaud. 2003: 86)
‘monotheism, the universal unity, that obstructs mere impulse and the multiplicity of things,
which I call anarchy.
To have a profound unity of things is to have a sense of anarchy, - and of the effort required
to reduce things while restoring them to unity. Whoever has a sense of unity also has a
sense of the multiplicity of things, of that dust of appearances through which one must pass
in order to reduce and destroy them.’ (Artaud. 2003: 41)
This unity then must be restored through ‘blood, cruelty and war’. (Artaud. 2003: 41) Here then we
get an impression of the intense, excessive and ‘apocalyptic’ force which Artaud intends for his
theatre.
It is key to point out here the similarities between Bakhtin and Artaud, it is a matter of the official
order being degraded by the unofficial order, which is itself a disorder. Heliogabalus ‘this
marvellous adour for disorder which was merely the application of a metaphysical and superior idea
of order – of unity that is.’ (Artaud. 2003: 100)
In Heliogabalus we find another account of Artaud’s double, that of east bringing disorder to the
west, Orient against the Occident. The Orient here is used by Artaud in a similar fashion to
Bakhtin’s grotesque realism/grotesque body in that it degrades the official order, makes it porous as
does his oriental plague. We also encounter again the ‘bodily harvest’ of Bakhtin’s grotesque
carnival imagery.
Heliogabalus transgressed degraded and scandalized Roman society and government in a grotesque
fashion. Being Syrian by birth, he imposed upon the society his Oriental ritual transgressions of the
sun god, the ‘Crowned Anarchist.’ (Artaud. 2003: 100)
‘The anarchist says: Neither god nor master, I alone.’ (Artaud. 2003: 101)
But this is an ‘I’ that goes on to transgresses the self, intent on forging a unity between the multiple.
This sheds light on the problem of Artaud as the tyrant, the ‘a master of sacred ceremonies.’
(Artaud. 1958: 60) but also problems with the possibilities of Bakhtin’s ideas.
‘the Theater of Cruelty proposes to resort to a mass spectacle; to seek in the agitation of
tremendous masses, convulsed and hurled against each other, a little of that poetry of
festivals and crowds when, all too rarely nowadays, the people pour out into the streets.
The theater must give us everything that is in crime, love, war, or madness, if it wants to
recover its necessity.’ (Artaud. 1958: 85)
Because the carnival is eventually suppressed and eradicated by the official order, the spirit of the
carnival which exists as the carnivalesque is not entirely extinguished as it still arises in other forms
although not in the utopian universal form, and does not have the power to degrade hierarchies to
any great extent. The problem then is how to bring about a unification without the cultural
formation of the folk. Artaud’s theatre can be thought of as containing elements of the carnival as
the carnivalesque, but only in the theme of his plays, and his intended results; not in their execution.
In his theatre the folk is now the crowd, and it comes in the populist form of a mass spectacle, of
which Artaud may be the architect, leading the amoral crowd to his own ends. (Jannarone. 2010:
181)
‘The Theater of Cruelty is a hierarchical, fixed event that can be imposed on its spectators.
Because its goal is “redirection” and “reinstruction,” because it possesses all the authority in
the event, individual spectators must internalize restrictions on their behavior for the good of
the performance and for their own good—as conceived of by the performance.’ (Jannarone.
2010: 89)
In fact Artaud identified this problem himself when he states:
as soon as I have said "cruelty," everybody will at once take it to mean "blood." But "theater
of cruelty" means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of
performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's
bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of
human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible
and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can
still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all. (Artaud.
1958: 79)
‘Tyranny’ may perhaps have some feature within the imagined process and the execution, of the
theatre but not in the end result. The spectators or participants immersed within the affective
transmission of ‘cruelty’ and realising they are not free; a revelation that they may have it within
themselves to attain freedom, creating awareness and new possibilities. I believe he saw himself
and the theatre as but the instigator for this disorder and not as a tyrannical authoritarian force, it is
cruelty of poetry that is necessary for him not actual oppression.
Artaud’s book presents the possiblities of attaining a different order and the means he believed
could achieve it rather than a defined concept of what that order might be. However through
reading Artaud’s ‘The Conquest of Mexico.’ (Artaud. 1958: 126) we might attempt to approach
what might have been his utopian vision of a cultural order at that time.
By broaching the alarmingly immediate question of colonization and tie right one continent thinks it
has to enslave another, this subject questions the real superiority of certain races over others and
shows the inmost filiation that binds the genius of a race to particular forms of civilization. It
contrasts the tyrannical anarchy of the colonizers to the profound moral harmony of the as yet
uncolonized.
Further, by contrast with the disorder of the European monarchy of the time, based upon the
crudest and most unjust material principles, it illuminates the organic hierarchy of the Aztec
monarchy established on indisputable spiritual principles. From the social point of view, it shows
the peacefulness of a society which knew how to feed all its members and in which the Revolution
had been accomplished from the very beginnings. (Artaud. 1958: 126-127)
The problem of utopia to me is that a I do not believe that there can be a utopia for all people and
therefore there are questions about what freedom would mean in such a utopia. Perhaps Artaud in
saying that ‘we are not free’ (Artaud. 1958: 79) actually came to this conclusion at that time.
Bibliography
Artaud, A. (1958). The Theatre and its Double. New York: Grove Press.
Artaud. A. (1988). Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Artaud, A. (2003). Heliogabalus or The Crowned Anarchist. Creation Books.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his World. Bloomington. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Barber, S. (2003). Blows and Bombs, Antonin Artaud: The Biography. Creation Books.
Innes, C. (1993). Avant Garde Theatre 1892-1992. London: Routledge.
Jannarone, K. (2010). Artaud and his Doubles. The University of Michigan Press.
20/02/2017
My aim is to explore the agency of the object and of active matter; the mythologising of matter in
the transformation, deformation or metamorphosis of material substances into experimental and
experiential hybrid assemblages of the human and non-human, particularly in relation to the liminal
figure or personae and the grotesque in and as art.
One of the most prominent examples of this in 'modern art' must be that of Joseph Beuys. In his
personal origin myth, Tartar (Crimean nomads) rescue him from a plane crash, cover his body with
animal fat and felt and nurture him back to health 1. These materials and fictional experiences
mythologised then become integral to his artistic identity; transforming him into a 'shamanic' figure,
and are recurring motifs in his 'body of work', becoming some of his many 'totems'. However as
analysis of the work of Joseph Beuys is a road well travelled I will look to a more contemporary
artist and the ways in which they have mythologised their creative processes, and the grotesque
1. Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (Guggenheim, 1979), pp. 16–17metamorphoses arising from them.
Prior to discussing their work, it is necessary to highlight the importance of Mircea Eliade's work on
the scared and profane, as this seems to be an important element in some way linked to the
beginning of these artistic processes and at the genesis of the artists myth-making.
“'Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly
different from the profane...the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that
does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world.”
This speaks of the artists fascination with active matter itself and perhaps points towards the urge to
'rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man.' However it also highlights concerns about
whether matter is to be sublimed or remain base. It also points towards the liminality of the creative
process, a space in which unconscious contents may rise into consciousness and be materialised.
“Do you remember her singing to you, when you were a little one afraid of the dark?
“She is singing to you now. She will gather you up with the warm arms of her voice and hold you as
quietly as sleep in the cave of her heart… She is listening now, the old one, the first and last of an
ancient race. Almost all have forgotten her, buried deep within our common soil, speaking in the
mother tongue, singing the root songs of formation and of nourishment.”
Breadwoman, the creation of Anna Holmer, started life In 1982, born out of the 1970s/80s LA
performance art scene and Holmer's education in anthropology and languages, but also intuitively
as Holmer states 'I wanted to wear bread — have that experience — of putting bread on my head
and being this other being, and at the same time I started researching the image of bread,
[wondering] was there a Breadwoman archetype?' 5
2 Mircea Eliade The Sacred and the Profane p11
3.Eliade The Sacred and the Profane p13
4.From the liner notes to the original Breadwoman cassette, 1985
5.http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2016/03/15/anna-homler-the-aquarium-drunkard-interview/This initial urge to experience wearing bread developed from walking through the street markets
with bread over her face to creating what she would later call 'Bread language'; performed
collaboratively and accompanied by electronic sounds within live performances and recordings. It
is an imagined language partially inspired by traditional indigenous songs from various cultures,
sung in rhythmic chants, incantations and glossolalia, and is therefore a 'language where the relation
between sound and meaning breaks down; it is the realm of pure sound...pure materiality...pure
expression.' 6
It is the manifestation of a grotesque language coinciding with the grotesque figure of Breadwoman,
having similarities with certain avant-garde developments such as the Russian Futurist Zaum
poetry, meaning 'beyond sense' in which ‘Poetry is not sign but magic spell’7. Holmer wishes to go
beyond cultural significance to a more primal and universal language and to communicate and
connect with people through a resonant connection to the sounds, image and movement. She states
'If there is a message, maybe it’s wholeness. Wholeness embraces the darkness, it embraces that
ambiguity, it embraces the grandmother and the elephant man, the familiar and the strange. Just to
be able to be in that ambiguous space, that’s wholeness. It’s not perfection, but it contains
everything.' 8
Although not paralleling the scatology of Bakhtin's grotesque body there are similarities to be
found in the desire for universality:
'the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private, egotistical form, severed from
the other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people as such it is
opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world.'9
Breadwoman is thus a liminal figure. An uncanny and fascinating grotesque. One which does not
mock or disrupt hierarchies of power to any affective degree, and does not delve into excremental
baseness but whose subtlety bypasses the radical and transgressive grotesque, seeking a
6.Allen S. Wiess, The Aesthetics of Excess p.118
7.Helen Palmer, Deleuze and Futurism p.3
8.http://annahomler.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/AH_JunoPlus.pdf
9.Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, The Grotesquecommunication beyond the individual towards a mythological and archetypal language, through
which we might be able to connect universally; united by the baseness of bread.
“This is what poetry is for me, and what performance art is for me...These intersections of where
the poetic can emerge from the Other, like flowers growing out of the cement… where a whole
nother living reality can come in daily life. Where something that is very ordinary can reveal its
secrets and mysteries.'10
Perhaps Deleuze's philosophy of becoming, especially 'becoming-other', can be of use to us in
exploring these issues further.
'Becoming-other is established via ‘diversity, multiplicity [and] the destruction of identity’
(Deleuze, 1995, p. 44); it presupposes breaking out of our old outlived habits and attitudes so as to
creatively ‘bring into being that which does not yet exist’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 147). Deleuze’s
philosophy is a sort of constructivism as an invention – construction or creation – of concepts. The
creative learning (not a contradiction in terms!) will have paid attention to places and spaces, to
retrospective as well as untimely memories of actual and potential actions, and to dynamic forces
that are capable of affecting and effecting changes, thus contesting the very identity of subjects
participating in the process.'11
The formations of grotesque or liminal figure and personae in art are important today as a way to
develop self individuation but also challenge certain political formations in a climate of political
instability, wall building, marginalisation of migrants and immigrants, and the proposed return to
'traditional values' implying fixed identities.
10.http://www.redefinemag.com/2016/anna-homler-artist-interview-the-mythology-behindbreadwoman/
11.Inna Semetsky, Becoming-Other: developing the ethics of integration Policy Futures in
Education, Volume 9 Number 1 2011
Luke Jordan
2017
The Order of Disorder: Bakhtin and Artaud
I seek to compare and contrast Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of carnival and
grotesque realism with French poet, playwright and artist Antonin Artaud’s ‘The Theatre and It’s
Double’ read alongside another of his books the imaginatively elaborated biography ‘Heliogabalus
or, The Crowned Anarchist.’
I focus within this essay on some key areas of comparison which are: collective experience, terror,
and laughter. By looking at the similarities and differences between the Bakhtin and Artaud’s ideas
we might formulate new concept of order surpassing both, which may help us to conceive of new
radical performative formations.
What is important within this essay is the concept of an unofficial order, which is itself a form of
disorder that seeks to undermine or overthrow an official order and ‘by "unofficial" is meant a
peculiar conception free from selfish interests, norms, and appreciations of "this world" (that is, the
established world, which it is always profitable to serve)’ (Bakhtin. 1984: 262)
In Bakhtin’s influential book ‘Rabelais and his World’ he seeks to apply the grotesque novel ‘The
Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel’ of French Renaissance writer François Rabelais, to the Soviet
order of the time, which he himself was the victim of. As such his concept of grotesque realism ‘is
a point-by-point inversion of categories used in the thirties to define Social Realism.’ particularly
the metaphor of ‘the folk.’ Bakhtin has a ‘utopian vision of the folk’ (Bakhtin. 1984: xvii) which is
the antithesis of the clean and proper folk of Soviet propoganda. (Bakhtin. 1984: xix)
Importantly ‘Bakhtin, like Rabelais, explores throughout his book the interface between a stasis
imposed from above and a desire for change from below, between old and new, official and
unofficial. In treating the specific ways Rabelais sought holes in the walls between what was held
to be possible and what unpunishable in the 1530s, Bakhtin seeks the gaps in those borders in the
1930s.’ (Bakhtin. 1984: xvi)
However his ideas are not strictly limited only to a radical critique of Stalinist Russia and more
widely seek to challenge authoritarian oppression in all its forms, seeking to ‘destroy the forces of
stasis an official ideology’(Bakhtin. 1984: xvi) Through his study of Rabelais’ book and his
performative interpretation of it, it can be interpreted as a call for a regressive return to the
unofficial culture of carnival, and to new forms and possibilities of collectivity, anarchism with a
‘Marxist gloss.’(Innes. 1993: 7)
In a basic terms Bakhtin’s carnival is a temporary disorder participated in by all people, and from
which new creative possibilities and cultural and social regeneration can occur. It ‘is not only an
impediment for revolutionary change, it is a revolution itself.’ (Bakhtin. 1984: xviii) Related to this
is the grotesque body, which is one that is open and therefore collective and subject to continuous
becoming, and as it is also open to the world it also constitutes a utopian and universal body.
(Bakhtin. 1984.)
However, because the carnival as it was in the middle ages has all but been wiped out, being
repressed during the renaissance, it only continues to exist within literature and art as the
carnivalesque. (Bakhtin. 1984.) As such the decline of carnival was also that of freedom which was
‘above all, political: the conflict of official versus unofficial forces is fought out not merely at the
level of symbols. Bakhtin leaves no doubt that the give-and-take between the medieval church/state
nexus on the one hand and the carnival on the other was a very real power struggle. The state had its
temporal and spatial borders as did carnival. Bakhtin's book describes the border clashes between
these two hostile countries. Carnival laughter "builds its own world in opposition to the official
world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state" (p. 88).’
(Bakhtin. 1984: xxi)
The medival carnival is a comic ritual of unofficial culture distinct from the serious cult of official
culture: ‘eclesiastical, feudal, and political’. He describes it as being ‘organized on the basis of
laughter’ and functioned as ‘people’s second life’ or a ‘second world’ which was that of a ‘world
inside out’, belonging ‘to the borderline between art and life.’ (Bakhtin. 1984: 5-11) For Bakhtin
folk laughter’s traits are universalism, freedom, and unofficial truth, it demystifies and unveils the
structures of power through degradation. (Bakhtin. 1984.)
In this idea of a double life, we find a direct connection with Artaud and his doubles; one of which
being his theatre ‘for if [traditional] theatre is a double of life, life is the double of true theatre’
(Artaud. 1936. quoted in Innes. 1993: 62. insert Innes) an intensification of life which in freeing
‘the repressed unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt.’ (Artaud. 1958: 28)
‘The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is
high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of the earth
and body in their indissoluble unity.’ (Bakhtin. 1984: 19)
The grotesque body can be viewed then as a metaphor or allegory of social and cultural forms, their
death and rebirth, as It can of historic human development, combining all possible forms and
formations within its ‘formless’ mass of hybridity. As such it is a constant becoming in space and
time, the ‘immortality of the ancestral body of man...the living sense that each man belongs to the
immortal people who create history.’ (Bakhtin. 1984: 367) although it does not seem to see the end
of man that is assured.
Artaud’s book ‘The Theater and Its Double’ was written in the interwar period between 1931 and
1938 when it was first published in France. (Barber. 2003: 57). Although the theatre itself has never
been fully realised, his book and his ideas have been highly influential on many areas not only
theatre, but also other forms of art, philosophy, politics and political action. Artaud’s theatre was a
reaction against the bourgeois, psychological and literary theatre of his time, which he opposed with
a viscerally affective one. It was also what he hope would be a cultural and spiritual revolution, if
not a directly political one. To what extent might the carnival as Bakhtin understands it be a double
of Artaud’s theatre?
In Artaud’s book within the essay ‘The Theatre and the Plague’ we find many examples of similar
conceptions as Bakhtin’s carnival and grotesque realism.
‘Beneath such a scourge, all social forms disintegrate. Order collapses. He observes every
infringement of morality, every psychological disaster; he hears his body fluids murmuring
within him; tom, failing in a dizzying collapse of tissue, his organs grow heavy and
gradually turn to carbon. But is it too late to avert the scourge? Even destroyed, even
annihilated, organically pulverized and consumed to his very marrow, he knows 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 the lies from which truth can be remade.’ (Artaud.
1958: 15)
The plague however is always something imposed from without, which draws out what is within.
This is the main difference between the carnival and Artaud’s theatre. Artaud as director-instigator
or ‘ and his theatre then act as a rabble-rouser of sorts, but his spectators still will remain in sense
uninvolved in a performance, in that they are subjected to disorder rather than generating one, such
as carnival, although it retains similar destructive and creative possibilities, in its ideas about death,
survival and rejuvenation. It also has a cathartic function to ‘drain accesses collectively’ (Artaud.
1958: 31)
Like the carnival Artaud’s theatre aims to be cosmic and universal, but it is not born as carnival
from European myths, instead Artaud looks to the ‘Oriental’ or non-Occidental sources. Its themes
‘interpreted according to the most ancient texts drawn from old Mexican, Hindu, Judaic, and Iranian
cosmogonies.’ (Artaud. 1958: 123)
Often overlooked is the ‘cruelty’ of the carnival imagery as Bakhtin would interpret from Rabalais’
novel, the ‘bodily harvest’ which to some extent doubles that most important concept of Artaud’s
theatre. The carnival is ‘gay and free play, but it is also full of deep meaning.’ but in the images that
he shows us there is certainly an unarguably dark and cruel side, ‘Its hero and author is time itself,
which uncrowns, covers with ridicule, kills the old world (the old authority and truth), and at the
same time gives birth to the new.’ In his imagery we find ‘bodies rent apart’, ‘torn flesh’(Bakhtin.
1984: 207) ‘Bloodshed, dismemberment, burning, death, beatings, blows, curses, and abuses-all
these elements are steeped in "merry time," time which kills and gives birth, which allows nothing
old to be perpetuated and never ceases to generate the new and the youthful.’ (Bakhtin. 1984: 201)
‘It is a mistake to give the word 'cruelty' a meaning of merciless bloodshed and disinterested,
gratuitous pursuit of physical suffering. The Ethiopian Ras who carts off vanquished princes
and makes them his slaves does not do so out of a desperate love of blood. Cruelty is not
synonymous with bloodshed, martyred flesh, crucified enemies. This identification of
cruelty with tortured victims is a very minor aspect of the question. In the practice of cruelty
there is a kind of higher determinism, to which the executioner-tormenter himself is
subjected and which he must be determined to endure when the time comes. Cruelty is
above all lucid, a kind of rigid control and submission to necessity.
There is no cruelty without consciousness and without the application of consciousness. It
is consciousness that gives to the exercise of every act of life its blood-red color, its cruel
nuance, since it is understood that life is always someone's death.’ (Artaud. 1958 : 102)
For Bakhtin,
‘popular-festive images became a powerful means of grasping reality; they served as a basis
for an authentic and deep realism. Popular imagery did not reflect the naturalistic, fleeting,
meaningless, and scattered aspect of reality but the very process of becoming, its meaning
and direction. Hence the universality and sober optimism of this system.’ (Bakhtin. 1984:
211-212)
This grotesque realism of universal and cosmic order we also find in Artaud’s concept of cruelty as
metamorphosis:
‘There is in life's flame, life's appetite, life's irrational impulsion, a kind of initial perversity:
the desire characteristic of Eros is cruelty since it feeds upon contingencies; death is cruelty,
resurrection is cruelty, transfiguration is cruelty, since nowhere in a circular and closed
world is there room for true death, since ascension is a rending, since closed space is fed
with lives, and each stronger life tramples down the others, consuming them in a massacre
which is a transfiguration and a bliss.’ (Artaud. 1958: 103)
Artaud uses cruelty to destroy, to overturn order through disorder, to liberate and unleash new
possibilities.
Another almost always overlooked concept in Artaud’s theatre that is deeply related to carnival is
that of laughter and its function. In critical accounts of the book, such as Kimberly Jannarone’s
‘Artaud and his Doubles’, it is barely mentioned or not mentioned at all. Artaud believed that:
‘The contemporary theater is decadent because it has lost the feeling on the one hand for
seriousness and on the other for laughter; because it has broken away from gravity, from
effects that are immediate and painful-in a word, from Danger.
Because it has lost a sense of real humor, a sense of laughter's power of physical and
anarchic dissociation. Because it has broken away from the spirit of profound anarchy
which is at the root of all poetry.’ (Artaud. 1958: 41)
For Artaud like Bakhtin, humour within the performative action is always related to a form of
anarchy, a destructive and degrading force, but unlike Bakhtin for Artaud it was terror and cruelty
themselves, experienced as reality as one experiences a dream, through the theatrical spectacle,
projected and imprinted ‘with the necessary violence.’ on the spectator that was true liberator.
(Artaud, 1958: 86)
Terror is a buzzword of our times and I believe that is important today to not only acknowledge and
understand true terror not mediated through government or news organisations, to collectively
laugh in the face of official fear-mongering and also true threat.
To explore and elaborate on Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism once more, he states:
the body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people's character; this is
not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of these words, because it is not individualized.
The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego,
but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily
becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable. (Bakhtin. 1984: 19)
Within this text there are some striking similarities with Artaud conceptions of a theatre that can go
beyond art. But do they lead to any form of political ideology? Certainly they share the ideal of the
collective over the individual. He is certainly both anti-communist/marxist and anti-capitalist.
(Artaud. 1988: 369) He also mentions ‘a kind of organized anarchy’ of which theatre and poetry are
born. (Artaud. 1958: 51)
‘This empiricism, randomness, individualism, and anarchy must cease. Enough of personal
poems, benefitting those who create them much more than those who read them. Once and
for all, enough of this closed, egoistic, and personal art. Our spiritual anarchy and
intellectual disorder is a function of the anarchy of everything else--or rather, everything else
is a function of this anarchy. I am not one of those who believe that civilization has to
change in order for the theater to change; but I do believe that the theater, utilized in the
highest and most difficult sense possible, has the power to influence the aspect and
formation of things.’ (Artaud. 1958: 79)
Here we uncover Artaud’s double of anarchy. It is certainly not the type of anarchy one might first
imagine, as his correspondence with Anne Manson, in a letter sent from his fateful voyage to
Ireland just before he would be incarcerated in the asylum of Rodez on his return to France, and
only a year before his book was published, makes clear:
‘What Spanish Anarchists are doing is quite unprecedented, but it is a human aberration.
These ration cards for loves of bread are the consecration of an inhuman disorder.
For what men today call human is the castration of the superhuman part of man.
It is an error in the absolute.
The Spanish Anarchists are trying to malefically fix the absolute terrestrial life. It is a lie
and it is a base idea. It is not a force of love, this idea. For what does the anarchist want?
To secure the ownership of his self in the world.
Anarchists are disgusting proprietors and pleasure-seeking egoists.
They deserve only to be massacred. They will be. For when one encounters the Lie-! One
does not argue with all the incarnations of the Lie. One destroys them to bring men back to
the Truth, and to Love, that is, to the Love of Truth!’ (Artaud. 1988: 404)
To fully attempt to understand Artaud’s ‘anarchy’ we must look to his interpretation of the life of
Heliogabalus, the fourtean year old anarchist king, who was for Artaud also a double of himself
(Artaud. 2003: 4) he sees ‘not as a madman but as a rebel’ (Artaud. 2003: 106) and also a ‘fanatic’
and ‘crazed individualist.’ (Artaud. 2003: 116) The book itself laid some of the foundations for his
theatre and his concept of ‘cruelty’.
Heliogabalus himself for Artaurd is duel natured taking on the roles of god and man, male and
female, whilst remaining male, ‘who is divisible while remaining ONE’. There is then a ‘duel
conflict’ within Heligabalus as within Artaud himself causing ‘struggle’ and torment. (Artaud. 2003:
87-88)
As he takes on the role and name of a god, and therefore is thus a living god. For Artaud this
‘provides a first proof of his magical monotheism, not only of word but deed.’ (Artaud. 2003: 41)
He proposes another double, his own concept of anarchy against the anarchy of the world.
The ‘Roman polytheistic anarchy’ which he sees as preventing unity and the monotheistic anarchy
of Heliogabalus, which attains this unity. (Artaud. 2003: 86)
‘monotheism, the universal unity, that obstructs mere impulse and the multiplicity of things,
which I call anarchy.
To have a profound unity of things is to have a sense of anarchy, - and of the effort required
to reduce things while restoring them to unity. Whoever has a sense of unity also has a
sense of the multiplicity of things, of that dust of appearances through which one must pass
in order to reduce and destroy them.’ (Artaud. 2003: 41)
This unity then must be restored through ‘blood, cruelty and war’. (Artaud. 2003: 41) Here then we
get an impression of the intense, excessive and ‘apocalyptic’ force which Artaud intends for his
theatre.
It is key to point out here the similarities between Bakhtin and Artaud, it is a matter of the official
order being degraded by the unofficial order, which is itself a disorder. Heliogabalus ‘this
marvellous adour for disorder which was merely the application of a metaphysical and superior idea
of order – of unity that is.’ (Artaud. 2003: 100)
In Heliogabalus we find another account of Artaud’s double, that of east bringing disorder to the
west, Orient against the Occident. The Orient here is used by Artaud in a similar fashion to
Bakhtin’s grotesque realism/grotesque body in that it degrades the official order, makes it porous as
does his oriental plague. We also encounter again the ‘bodily harvest’ of Bakhtin’s grotesque
carnival imagery.
Heliogabalus transgressed degraded and scandalized Roman society and government in a grotesque
fashion. Being Syrian by birth, he imposed upon the society his Oriental ritual transgressions of the
sun god, the ‘Crowned Anarchist.’ (Artaud. 2003: 100)
‘The anarchist says: Neither god nor master, I alone.’ (Artaud. 2003: 101)
But this is an ‘I’ that goes on to transgresses the self, intent on forging a unity between the multiple.
This sheds light on the problem of Artaud as the tyrant, the ‘a master of sacred ceremonies.’
(Artaud. 1958: 60) but also problems with the possibilities of Bakhtin’s ideas.
‘the Theater of Cruelty proposes to resort to a mass spectacle; to seek in the agitation of
tremendous masses, convulsed and hurled against each other, a little of that poetry of
festivals and crowds when, all too rarely nowadays, the people pour out into the streets.
The theater must give us everything that is in crime, love, war, or madness, if it wants to
recover its necessity.’ (Artaud. 1958: 85)
Because the carnival is eventually suppressed and eradicated by the official order, the spirit of the
carnival which exists as the carnivalesque is not entirely extinguished as it still arises in other forms
although not in the utopian universal form, and does not have the power to degrade hierarchies to
any great extent. The problem then is how to bring about a unification without the cultural
formation of the folk. Artaud’s theatre can be thought of as containing elements of the carnival as
the carnivalesque, but only in the theme of his plays, and his intended results; not in their execution.
In his theatre the folk is now the crowd, and it comes in the populist form of a mass spectacle, of
which Artaud may be the architect, leading the amoral crowd to his own ends. (Jannarone. 2010:
181)
‘The Theater of Cruelty is a hierarchical, fixed event that can be imposed on its spectators.
Because its goal is “redirection” and “reinstruction,” because it possesses all the authority in
the event, individual spectators must internalize restrictions on their behavior for the good of
the performance and for their own good—as conceived of by the performance.’ (Jannarone.
2010: 89)
In fact Artaud identified this problem himself when he states:
as soon as I have said "cruelty," everybody will at once take it to mean "blood." But "theater
of cruelty" means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of
performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's
bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of
human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible
and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can
still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all. (Artaud.
1958: 79)
‘Tyranny’ may perhaps have some feature within the imagined process and the execution, of the
theatre but not in the end result. The spectators or participants immersed within the affective
transmission of ‘cruelty’ and realising they are not free; a revelation that they may have it within
themselves to attain freedom, creating awareness and new possibilities. I believe he saw himself
and the theatre as but the instigator for this disorder and not as a tyrannical authoritarian force, it is
cruelty of poetry that is necessary for him not actual oppression.
Artaud’s book presents the possiblities of attaining a different order and the means he believed
could achieve it rather than a defined concept of what that order might be. However through
reading Artaud’s ‘The Conquest of Mexico.’ (Artaud. 1958: 126) we might attempt to approach
what might have been his utopian vision of a cultural order at that time.
By broaching the alarmingly immediate question of colonization and tie right one continent thinks it
has to enslave another, this subject questions the real superiority of certain races over others and
shows the inmost filiation that binds the genius of a race to particular forms of civilization. It
contrasts the tyrannical anarchy of the colonizers to the profound moral harmony of the as yet
uncolonized.
Further, by contrast with the disorder of the European monarchy of the time, based upon the
crudest and most unjust material principles, it illuminates the organic hierarchy of the Aztec
monarchy established on indisputable spiritual principles. From the social point of view, it shows
the peacefulness of a society which knew how to feed all its members and in which the Revolution
had been accomplished from the very beginnings. (Artaud. 1958: 126-127)
The problem of utopia to me is that a I do not believe that there can be a utopia for all people and
therefore there are questions about what freedom would mean in such a utopia. Perhaps Artaud in
saying that ‘we are not free’ (Artaud. 1958: 79) actually came to this conclusion at that time.
Bibliography
Artaud, A. (1958). The Theatre and its Double. New York: Grove Press.
Artaud. A. (1988). Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Artaud, A. (2003). Heliogabalus or The Crowned Anarchist. Creation Books.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his World. Bloomington. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Barber, S. (2003). Blows and Bombs, Antonin Artaud: The Biography. Creation Books.
Innes, C. (1993). Avant Garde Theatre 1892-1992. London: Routledge.
Jannarone, K. (2010). Artaud and his Doubles. The University of Michigan Press.
